Impossible burger will upgrade itself like an app until you quit beef
The promise of the world's best plant-based meat product continues to sizzle. Soon -- sooner than you think -- it will taste like steak.
After its surprise announcement at CES this week, Impossible Foods is now rolling out what has been hailed as a juicier, tastier, 100% more gluten-free version of the Impossible Burger, which was already judged the best fake beef available (but used to include wheat). We put it on our best of CES list.
The thousands of U.S. restaurants currently serving it (including White Castle, purveyors of the $1.99 Impossible Slider), will make the switch by the end of February. Impossible says a retail version of the burger is coming to supermarkets sometime in 2019.
'We're going to replace animals by 2035'
And this is just the beginning for a Silicon Valley food sciences company that plans to scale up faster than any of the tech giants surrounding it did. Upgrades will be rolled out at places like CES; every user will quickly switch to the new version (no legacy problems here!) And then it's straight back to the drawing board on how to tweak the proteins and other plant-based ingredients to make the next version even juicier, even more meat-like.
In the same way Apple and Android cast a snooty eye at each other, Dr. Pat Brown, the Stanford biochemistry scientist who became Impossible's CEO, likes to say his competition is cows. And they aren't iterating.
"Our cycle of innovation is likely to be faster than once a year," Brown told me as he exited CES when I compared Impossible's roll-outs to iPhone launches. "As soon as we feel we've got something decisively better, something that will accelerate our mission, we're not going to wait around."
The scale of Brown's mission makes companies like Uber or Amazon look modest. "We're going to replace animals by 2035," he says. It's hard not to be infected by his enthusiasm about what would happen next: food production occupies almost half of Earth's land area, so "if you could snap your fingers and make the animal industry go away, vegetation growing back on that land would bring CO2 levels down every year by itself" no matter what kinds of cars we drive.
The jury is out on whether such a scheme would work, and of course we should replace gas guzzlers with electric cars regardless. But the vegetation we currently have on Earth absorbs 50 percent of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All that wild green stuff is no slouch when it comes to decarbonization, and it would loveto go to town on the millions of acres currently occupied by nothing but cattle.
Indistinguishably fake meat, savior of the planet.Credit: impossible foodsBrown may be impossibly ambitious, but he's not wrong. Fundamentally, the cattle industry is like the coal industry: It is dirty, messy, a nightmare for everyone involved, profoundly poisonous to the planet, and a leading cause of climate change.
The people who make your burgers don't want to deal with all that noise if they can serve you a product that is cheaper (as Impossible intends to be at scale), more consistently tasty, and doesn't have fecal matter on it.
There's a lot to this long-term vision. Brown and his 300-strong team in Redwood City, California have thought through it all, including which ingredients will be the most resistant to climate change effects themselves, so the company can keep scaling up its use of them. And how to license the recipe, because Brown is aware that one company can't save the planet all on its own.
Oh yes, and what the next low-hanging food is. Brown boasts that the company already has a plant milk recipe that he claims is better than any other plant milk currently out there, but it's too focused on the beef side of things right now. "If it was up to replacing what was in my diet, we'd make cheese before anything else," he says.
But "meat technology is by a humungous margin the most disruptive technology on Earth," he says. So next up is producing iterative versions of steak, which the company will only release when it's ready to take on the real thing.
If and when that happens, it's game over, cows.
Featured Video For You
These gorgeous 3D-printed snacks are made from food waste
(责任编辑:新闻中心)
- 热浪来袭 科学应对防中暑
- 历时6个多小时 大熊猫“郡主”顺利产下一仔
- The worst 'Game of Thrones' villain is heading to the Marvel universe
- Bus turns over on highway, kills 4
- Against All Odds: How Netflix Made It
- [Online Predators] Deepfake pornography haunts S. Korea
- 小区有个养狗“专业户”周边邻里不胜其烦
- 芦山县工商局:城乡环境综合治理见成效
- The Pope is still enjoying a one
- I Deleted All My Social Accounts: Three Weeks Without Social Media
- 让群众零距离了解检察工作
- What we can learn from books about deadly pandemics like 'The Stand'
- Brazil's Ronaldo backing France for World Cup
-
A Barbie flip phone is here from HMD
This summer was Brat summer. We're approaching demure fall, which may transition into a season with ...[详细] -
Everyone's regretting their '2020 will be better' tweets now
We really thought the shit show was over when 2019 ended. The last decade was rough. When New Year's ...[详细] -
本报讯 日前,中国长安汽车集团股份有限公司四川建安车桥分公司以下简称“建安公司”)召开制造信息化项目阶段总结会,会议总结了项目实施的总体情况,提出了下一步系统运行维护的重点和工作要求。建安公司总经理龙 ...[详细]
-
Discriminatory questions rampant in recruitment
Over 98 percent of job application forms from public institutions and private enterprises contain pr ...[详细] -
Ocean Energy has deployed its 826-tonne wave energy converter buoy OE-35 at the US Navy's Wave Energ ...[详细]
-
Zelensky wants 'isolation' for Russia
PARIS:Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday Russian athletes should face "complet ...[详细] -
What we can learn from books about deadly pandemics like 'The Stand'
Novel-writing may be the weirdest occupation on the planet. While public health officials are out th ...[详细] -
Venus Williams accepts wildcards
WELLINGTON:Venus Williams will roll back the years next month, with the 42-year-old accepting wildca ...[详细] -
The Weird, Wonderful World of Water Towers
These behemoths of steel, iron, or concrete can often be seen for miles around. They’re fixtur ...[详细] -
Chernobyl fires back up as a solar power plant
More than 30 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the Chernobyl area is once again pro ...[详细]
20 Places to Eat Dumplings and Noodles for Lunar New Year
Please enjoy these dogs singing along to the ‘Law & Order’ theme song
- 雅安公安接连破获两起汉源湖非法捕捞案
- Microsoft's Bing blocked in China
- 确保强农惠农专项清理检查工作见实效
- Instead of a suitcase just put everything in this jacket
- Eng name ODI, T20I squads for Aus series
- US envoy hopes for continued cooperation with Korea on denuclearization
- Sit back and let the #NoBallChallenge take over your timeline