A company out of California, is using biochemistry and tech to transform the hamburger by taking the meat out of it. I'm Johnson Strickling, and this is tech stuff Daily. There are about fifty restaurants in the United States that carry a special item on their menu. It's a burger from the company Impossible Foods, and it doesn't have any meat in it at all. Instead, the burger consists of plant proteins,
with the active ingredient being soy leg hemoglobin. That's the ingredient that contains hemi, a substance that makes the Impossible Burger smell and taste like meat. Some other ingredients include, but are not limited to, coconut oil and wheat and potato protein. The company held a round of venture capital fundraising not long ago, and some big players jumped into contribute to the seventy five million dollars in investments. Among those parties were Bill Gates and also Alphabet, the parent
company for Google. So what's the big deal and how do these burgers match up with the real thing? The big deal is that it takes a lot of resources to produce meat. According to National Geographic it takes about six hundred sixty gallons of water to produce a single one third pound burger. That's not to say that if you squeeze a burger you could fill six hundred sixty gallon jugs with the water that came out. That would be gross. The water was used mainly in the raising
of beef. Livestock need a lot of drinking water, which is a precious resource. Livestock also require lots of space, and it takes time to raise them. There are many resources required to procure, raise, slaughter, and ship beef, and while you also need resources to switch to plants. With the right agricultural approach, you can make the change, produce more food and use fewer resources per unit. In this case,
the unit is per hamburger. According to the company, their approach requires one of the land you need to raise livestock to make the same amount of food. It also requires one quarter of the water and produces one eighth of the greenhouse gases. In other words, it's kinder both to animals and to the environment, at least by those metrics. To achieve this, the company had to overcome a big problem.
HEMI is found in organic material, but it's far more abundant in animal muscle tissue than in say, plant fibers. Soy leg Hemoglobin contains hemi, but in levels so low that it would take an entire acre of soybeans to produce a single kilogram of soy leg hemoglobin. That's not a sustainable strategy. Impossible Foods turned to genetic engineering for the solution to this problem. Scientists remove the genes responsible for the soy leg hemoglobin protein. They then transferred those
genes into a type of yeast. They fed the yeast minerals and sugars to encourage it to grow and replicate. The yeast began churning out he mei like gang Busters, far outperforming natural soybeans and reducing the amount of resources in real estate needed to make the stuff that makes the fake burgers taste like real ones. Producing the raw
materials is really just the first step. There's a whole lot more tech and science needed to turn various proteins and oils into something that can pass for an actual burger made of meat. To do that, the team had to scientifically analyze beef so that they could find a way to replicate the aroma, texture and taste. This included throwing some meat into a gas chromatography and mass spectrometry system. The system heats up beef so that it gives off aromas,
which have a specific chemical fingerprint. The team would then attempt to match this fingerprint as closely as possible with their mixture of plant based ingredients. To get the texture right, researchers look for plant proteins that most closely resembled those found in beef. Then they had to tweak those proteins because of their effect on the taste of the burger.
Several people who have tried the burger and spoiler Alert Times Sadly not one of those people have said that it does taste more like real meat than other meat alternatives. Speaking as someone who hasn't eaten meat for more than twenty years, I'd be really curious to try one of these burgers. Sadly, none of the restaurants that serve Impossible Burgers are anywhere near where I live. But maybe I shouldn't be too sad about it. The food isn't without controversy.
Some people object to any food that includes genetically modified components in it. I wouldn't go so far myself. Genetic modification is really just an extremely precise version of something humans have been doing using more primitive methods for thousands of years. The foods we eat today don't resemble their ancestors because we humans have taken a direct role in shaping their evolution through domestication, cross breeding, and other techniques.
Genetic engineering is an extension of this same trend, only it gets down to the genetic level. The bigger objections stem from the materials Impossible Foods uses to produce their burgers. The soy leg hemoglobin comes from soy roots. Typically, humans don't eat soy roots. This means the soy root is effectively a new food item or ingredient, which has led
the FDA to criticize Impossible Foods. According to the FDA, the company hasn't dedicated enough time and effort to test the ingredient to make certain it is safe for consumption. This had little to do with the genetic modification and more to do with the fact that there just wasn't enough scientific data about soy leg hemoglobin in general. Impossible Food submitted their product to the FDA for a g R A S notice back in two thousand and fourteen. G R A S stands for generally recognized as safe.
It's a way of getting a new food products stamped with FDA approval without going through extensive testing, based on the notion that this new food item contains ingredients that have already been proven to be safe to eat. The FDA didn't see eye to eye with Impossible Foods, which eventually withdrew its submission in November in order to conduct some new studies. Controversy aside, Impossible Foods is producing a million pounds of their fake meat every month. The company
only sells their burgers through existing restaurant establishments. You can't buy them in grocery stores or online. If you live near one of the restaurants serving up Impossible Burgers, you can try one for yourself, and if you do, you have to tell me what it was like. To learn more about food, tech and every other type of tech for that matter, subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast. I do a deep dive on a tech subject with every episode. That's all to me for now, See you next time.