I have the opposite reaction. In the old McDonald’s veggie burger, the main ingredients are peas, carrots, onions and potatoes. In an Impossible Burger the main ingredient is “textured wheat protein”. I would much rather have the old-school veggie burger which has the virtue of being made of stuff that sounds like real food.
For health reasons I've spent the past year trying to give up meat and other animal products, to eat whole food plant based, and I've found every approximation of meat to just be blah and have just given up trying to recreate meat and instead have just found other things to make, but you can make a pretty good sandwich out of a bean-based pattie.
These franken-creations like the impossible buger just seem like a bad idea. They use a lot of extracts/refined stuff, which means you've got some amount of waste, and all the added cost of refining the ingredients and processing the patties and you still don't come close to re-creating a good seasoned beef patty.
A lot of people simply want to switch due to the environmental impact but take the first four impossible burger ingredients list :
- Water
- Textured Wheat Protein -
- Coconut Oil
- Potato Protein
3 of the 4 ingredients require a lot of processing, two of those are made from crops that are able to be farmed in a fairly sustainable fashion. The coconut oil however, at a scale required to replace beef, would likely quickly become unsustainable like palm oil is.
A single coconut only provides about 2 ounces of oil... it might be better than raising cattle but just eating beans, or whole wheat, would probably be orders of magnitude better.
Beef is BY FAR one of the least sustainable sources of food we eat. Lamb, to my knowledge, is the only thing worse, and the two are so much worse than everything else, nothing is even close.
Coconuts would be literally 100 times better than beef. Not to mention, coconut oil makes up less than 8% of the total burger. So, even if it was hypothetically worse (which it's not even close) the other 92% being exponentially better would far outweigh it.
>Coconuts would be literally 100 times better than beef.
And having something other than beef or fake-beef is better yet... which is what my comment is... finding alternatives to hamburgers instead of trying to recreate a hamburger by playing Doctor Frankenstein.
