I LOVE meat. I love the smell of it cooking, the sound of the sizzle. I love the fat dropping onto the coals beneath a barbecue, the deep-pink “give” of a medium-rare steak, the smoke, the blood. I particularly love eating burgers in the US, where the act of griddling meat is an art form that has been perfected into juicy, salty, fatty heaven.
So, let’s just say I wasn’t straining at the leash when asked to go and try a new vegan burger while in Texas. I was in the home of the barbecue, after all, where steaks are as big as your head. The thought of choosing a veggie burger made me feel weak.
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Not for much longer, perhaps. I wasn’t off to sample a bog-standard bean burger, but to try an Impossible Burger, one of a new brand of plant-based meat analogues created using the latest in biochemistry and technology. These aren’t your standard meat substitutes such as tofu, Quorn and soya mince; nor are they the much-hyped but still experimental meats grown in the lab from stem cells (see “Growth industry”). They are plant products processed to look, smell, taste and feel like meat. And they are aimed squarely at diehard meat-eaters like me.
That could be useful, because I am painfully aware that I should reduce how much meat I consume. According to the UN’s , livestock graze on a quarter of our planet’s ice-free land is used to grow fodder. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with the industry are vast, around 15 per cent of the total from human activity. Raising animals for meat also guzzles water and energy.
With a growing global population, this isn’t a sustainable way to live. “Quite frankly, if China eats as much meat as America, we’re screwed,” says Tim Lang at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. “We have to recalibrate our diets.” There are also animal welfare issues to consider.
I know all this, of course. The problem is I like meat too much. Could meat-free substitutes really help me reduce my intake while still enjoying my favourite foods?
“This is the best fake burger I’ve ever had. The flavour is like liquid smoke”
, maker of the eponymous burger, is the brightest star in the artificial meat world. Based in San Francisco and founded by former Stanford University biochemist Pat Brown, its products are on sale in more than 1000 restaurants in the US. Bill Gates was one of a number of high-profile early investors. Impossible doesn’t just want to create a passable burger for vegetarians and vegans. It wants to give carnivores-with-a-conscience a way to reduce their meat consumption without having to sacrifice the pleasures of the flesh.
“We’re not going to be able to just talk people into a plant-based diet,” says Impossible’s chief scientist David Lipman. “We need to create foods that are so delicious that people choose them instead of animal-based foods.”
That is a big challenge. The first step is getting to the heart of what makes meat so delicious. When meat is cooked, it exudes a complex mixture of volatile compounds that give it that unmistakable aroma. This is what we mean when we talk about the flavour of a steak or burger, because so much of what we experience as flavour is actually aroma tickling the olfactory receptors lining the top of our nasal cavity. For Lipman, recreating this signature aroma of cooked meat is vital.
Impossible is going through the painstaking process of trying to identify all of those compounds, deciding which are the most important, and then finding plant analogues. Lipman’s team uses tools such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify exactly which volatile molecules are released when meat is cooked. “People have never tried to do this before with all the latest technologies,” says Lipman.
His team realised early on that the key ingredient in meat’s flavour is haem, an iron-containing compound found in blood and muscle tissue. This oxygen-carrying compound is what gives meat its colour and metallic tang. In living tissue, it is bound up with proteins to form haemoglobin in blood and myoglobin in muscle. These give meat its rich umami depth.
But haem isn’t only found in animals. Brown realised that some plants also contain an identical molecule bundled up in a different protein, leghaemoglobin, which has the same rich flavour and colour as animal haem. One source is the roots of legumes like soy, but pulling up plants to harvest it would be a costly and difficult process. So Brown genetically engineered yeast to produce leghaemoglobin. The protein can then be extracted, purified and added to the meat.
With haem cracked, Impossible moved on to other elements of the meat experience. Its burger gets its sizzle and char from small flecks of coconut oil scattered throughout the mix. This fat is solid at room temperature, melts in the right way and has a neutral flavour. Wheat and potato protein add texture, while yeast extract and soy protein impart more umami flavours. The whole edifice is held together with plant gums, with spices and seasoning adding the finishing touches. The team is constantly running taste tests and the burger’s composition is always changing. Early versions weren’t always a huge success. “One of them was described as tasting like rancid polenta,” says Lipman.
Proof of the patty
What about their latest incarnation? When it arrived at our table, the burger certainly looked good. The top and bottom were charred and crispy like a well-griddled beef burger. Inside, the colour was pretty much spot on. The texture was pleasingly authentic; only a close inspection of its innards highlighted a hint of stringiness that didn’t ring 100 per cent true.
I had hauled along a colleague who recently returned to veganism. She was impressed. “This is the best fake burger I’ve ever had,” she said. “The flavour is kind of like liquid smoke.” But while I was pleasantly surprised at the flavour and texture, which were closer to meat than I imagined possible, it still wasn’t the real thing. Lipman concedes that there is still room for improvement. “We’re just a few percentage points off our target burger,” he says.
Another US brand, , has a similar burger for sale in shops such as Whole Foods. Beyond has also been a darling of the Silicon Valley venture capital scene, slurping up funding from tech luminaries such as Bill Gates (again), Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. The technology to create its texture involves state-of-the-art protein extrusion, which forces mixtures of vegetable proteins through a narrow aperture to create meat-like fibres. But when my colleague cooked one of Beyond Meat’s burgers at home she was less than impressed, complaining of a “pungent” smell and a strange “beaniness” to its flavour. “It looks a lot like meat. But it doesn’t taste, smell, feel or sizzle like meat,” she told me. “They got one of the four senses right, and it’s not the one I would have focused on.”
Other brands are trying different approaches. Moving Mountains, based in the UK, launched its in February in London. Its main ingredient is mushroom, long a staple in vegetarian meat substitutes, alongside wheat and pea proteins. “We first analysed how beef was structured and spent weeks in a lab dissecting strands of fibres and how the fat and blood is retained,” says founder Simeon Van der Molen. Beetroot is included for juiciness and the pleasing deep red flavour it imparts when cooked (it was marketed as the first “bleeding” vegetable burger). Van der Molen says the goal is to get it as realistic as possible “without the torture and the cholesterol”.
I tried it at veggie mecca Mildreds in east London, the only UK restaurant that serves it thus far. While it was tasty on its own terms, there was little chance of me being fooled. The ineffable “meatiness” of a real burger – and indeed, an Impossible one – was missing.
Nonetheless, zero cholesterol is a selling point that I hadn’t thought about. But even though vegan diets are known to be healthier than meat-heavy ones, it seems unlikely that the new meat substitutes will advance that cause any further. An 85 gram (3 ounce) Impossible Burger will give you 220 calories, 13 grams of fat and just over a gram of salt. In terms of nutritional sins, that is . In fact, the Impossible Burger is actually heavier on the salt and saturated fat – as you might expect for something so processed.
Despite the drawbacks, some restaurants are impressed enough to serve the products. As well as the burgers, chefs use Impossible meat in tacos, pizzas and meatless meatballs. US burger chain has become the first fast-food joint to sell an Impossible Burger. But all of these products are substitutes for ground meat. Recreating the sensory experience of an intact cut, say a prime piece of rib-eye steak, is another story.
That is where texture comes in. Flavour might seem like the most important quality to get right, but if a food feels wrong in your mouth then the eating experience will be ruined. Texture gives us clues as to how we should react to flavours as we eat: studies have shown that we struggle to identify common vegetables once they have been pureed, for example. That is why, for many in the artificial meat industry, getting the texture right is absolutely key to broadening the appeal.
“Texture is more important than we think,” says Charles Spence, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. “There’s been far less research into this than other aspects of food such as colour and flavour.” Another important aspect is a mouthfeel, the sensation as fats and other ingredients coat the inside of the mouth as you eat.
Feel the texture
To produce the authentic ground beef texture needed for meat-free burgers, many researchers use extrusion. But there are other ways of adding more complex textures to meat substitutes. Atze Jan van der Goot at Wageningen University in the Netherlands has been trying to crack this for years. His lab is pioneering the use of a technique known as shear cell to create plant-based products that have a texture as close to meat as possible.
“This isn’t aimed at vegans,” says van der Goot. “Meat analogues are meant for meat-eating people who feel they should do something but don’t know how. It’s easier if you have a product to help.”
Really winning over carnivores will require something that splits and breaks apart like a prime cut of meat. His technique starts with the usual suspects: soy and gluten protein powders, to which food colouring is added to give them a more appealing hue. This mixture is then pumped with water into a specialised piece of equipment called a Couette cell, consisting of two cylinders, one of which rotates inside the other under slight pressure. This exerts a shear force on the proteins that causes them to elongate into fibres and wrap around one another.
“We can control the fibrousness,” says van der Goot. “We hope that our technology will be able to mimic more types of meat than currently meat analogue products do.”
His team, in collaboration with engineers at Delft University, is also experimenting with other sources of plant protein in the shear cell device, including from rapeseed, sunflowers and rice, and constantly tweaking the parameters to produce structures that resemble the muscle fibres in pork and beef. After about 20 or 30 minutes in the machine, a emerges. It tears in the hand much like a chunk of slow-cooked meat but – it has to be said – isn’t the most appetising-looking product.
To turn this vaguely stomach-churning substance into something we might want to actually eat, the lab works with one of fake meat’s pioneers, . The firm has shops in The Hague and Berlin and exports its products across the globe. It sells a spectacular range of “meats” including mince, meatballs, sliced charcuterie and sausages, alongside larger pieces resembling chicken, beef and ham, all made principally from soy and wheat protein. The hardest quality to mimic is mouthfeel, says operational director, Loes Moor-Hulshof. “To get the water released in a really meat-like way is difficult.”
George van Hal, a science writer based in The Hague, is a fan. “The likeness to actual meat really is quite remarkable,” he says. “With some of their stuff, I’m not sure I could pick it out in a blind taste test.” He has also served it at dinner parties without telling guests. “Most were surprised when they found out they didn’t eat meat,” he says.
The Vegetarian Butcher is also leading the way in replacing another foodstuff that comes with a side of environmental and ethical guilt: fish. Its smoked “eel” salad won a Taste of the Netherlands award, beating some real fish and meat dishes. One of its latest products is fishless tuna, which I try mashed up as a salad as per the serving suggestion. It is good enough, with a firm and pleasing texture and distinct fishy tang. I am not fooled, but I know what I am eating and wonder how it would fare in a blind test against real tuna.
For the sheer amount of it that is consumed every year, the market to crack is probably chicken. Worldwide, about 60 billion birds are killed for food every year. I asked leading vegan blogger and author Sean O’Callaghan, who writes under the name , where I could try London’s best fake chicken and he told me to go to .
“These products are catering to omnivores who are looking for more options”
On a cold Wednesday lunchtime, I find myself back in east London in pursuit of yet more meat-free meat. Sandwiched between an old-fashioned greasy spoon cafe and a halal butchers is the Hackney branch of The Temple, which opened in 2015 and is now a fixture on London’s growing vegan fast-food scene.
The Temple serves up fried “chicken” made from seitan, a venerable vegan meat substitute made by washing the starch out of wheat flour to leave gluten. The Temple mixes seitan with spices and soy and then deep-fries it in batter. I order the wings in BBQ sauce and a small bucket of popcorn bites. The flavour and texture of the coating are authentic but what is inside is less so. If the slightly spongy substance mimics chicken at all, it is of the bargain basement nugget variety.
Spence says that my experience with seitan is a risk all meat substitutes face: tipping into the food equivalent of the uncanny valley. This uncomfortable sensation is normally created by humanoid figures that look almost, but not exactly, like real humans. “Improving the similarity between the fake product and the one that you’re trying to replicate may dig you into a hole,” he says.
Overall, the goal of making foods that are so delicious that carnivores like me would choose them over meat seems a way off. Nonetheless, demand for meat from plants is rising. The market for these products is about to explode, claims Liz Specht, a senior scientist at the non-profit , which works with entrepreneurs and the food industry to stimulate the market for plant-based meats. She sees them following the trajectory of plant-based dairy products such as soya milk, which are moving out of specialist shops and supermarket aisles and into the mainstream. “The vegan market is growing, but that’s not what is driving this trend,” she says. “These products are now catering to true omnivores, who enjoy the taste of meat and are just looking for more options. That’s what’s spurring innovation.”
The Vegetarian Butcher is finding the same. The company has just opened its first restaurant. Its 50 per cent year-on-year growth is driven by its popularity “among meat eaters and flexitarians”, says Moor-Hulshof.
Not everyone is so gung-ho about Silicon Valley’s latest attempt to save the world. Meat analogues have a place, but they’re not the whole story, says Lang. “I’m wary of technical fixes when we have a fundamental food system that is out of control,” he says. “I think there is room for them, but I don’t think they are any replacement for the need to tackle the social norms.”
That rather throws the ball back into my court – and my culinary experience so far has been mixed. The Impossible Burger was probably closest in terms of texture and moreishness, but it didn’t come close to the finest meat experiences out there. But, for the sake of my conscience, that is probably a compromise I would be prepared to make, at least some of the time. I won’t quit meat but I will stop eating it so regularly – and enjoy every bloody steak like it might be my last.
Growth industry
Why go the effort of trying to force plant cells to act like meat when you can get animal cells to do it? That is the rationale behind cultured meat – growing muscle tissue from animal stem cells in a dish.
The concept has come some way from the $250,000 cultured meat burger cooked up in front of journalists in London in 2013. The Dutch scientist behind that stunt, Mark Post, now works at MosaMeat, a start-up in Maastricht. It has claimed it will have a cultured meat product in supermarkets in 10 to 20 years, although many are sceptical.
Memphis Meats, a Californian start-up, has managed to get the price of its cultured meatballs down to about $2500 for 500 grams and has created a fully lab-grown chicken product. SuperMeat, based in Israel, has also raised venture-capital money to produce its own version. And Finless Foods in San Francisco wants to make cultured fish meat. However, none of the companies seems close to a commercial launch of a product.
“There may be a lot of attention on lab meat from stem cells, but that won’t be the future of food,” says Loes Moor-Hulshof of The Vegetarian Butcher, a Dutch company that makes plant-based meat substitutes.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Where’s the beef?”
