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I had the impossible burger at Momofuku and... it's just nothing like a burger, the two big differences being in flavor and in texture. (It looks the same as a regular burger.) In flavor, it just doesn't have it. It has the same char flavor that a burger has... but without any meat flavor behind it, which is of course most of the flavor of a hamburger. Which makes sense, of course, because there's no meat. It's like…
Is it really better to make something "like" a meat product instead of just making a good vegan/vegetarian product? Since going lacto-ovo vegetarian myself, I just want tasty food, doesn't matter if it's "like" a meat product.
In the US, I'm guessing the biggest items are burgers, dogs and sandwich meats.
> Burger King’s chief marketing officer, Fernando Machado, said that in the company’s testing so far, customers and even employees had not been able to tell the difference between the old meaty Whopper and the new one. Ugh. First: The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb. Second: When I tasted an Impossible Burger, it was awful. It…
In terms of resources used in their production, a $6 burger expends more resources than a $3 burger. For those worried about the ethics of eating animals, I can understand the extra $3. For those just worried about other wastes (eg: losing 90% of the food value by feeding it to cattle), this isn’t a magic bullet, for now. Those extra $3 went into something else, whether it was a complicated energy-intense process, or…
You really cannot strictly equate price with "resources" like this. Does a $10,000 designer shirt require 1,000 times the resources of a $10 t-shirt to produce? I imagine they are charging a premium for the impossible burger because it's a novelty and they think they can get it. Time will tell if that pricing model is sustainable in the long run.
Ie: cost + profit = price.
The $10000 shirt may pay for a lot of “designers” to tour the world about how great their shirt is, or for a celebrity to build a bigger house in exchange for an endorsement.
Or it could pay for $9990 in subsidizing reforestation, but doubtful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In terms of resources used in their production, a $6 burger expends more resources than a $3 burger. The meat/dairy industry in the US is subsidized to the tune of $38 billion, there's a little more to it than "Costs more at the store so it must cost more resources to make."
Sounds like you’ve identified the real problem. Though the other plant inputs in this burger are probably subsidized too. Either we need to subsidize the impossible burger, or properly tax/desubsidize agriculture.
Health-wise, it makes all the wrong things cheaper.
I tried the impossible burger and personally didn't notice a difference. The boyfriend tried a bite, and liked it, but could taste something off. I'm kinda excited to see where both the impossible burger goes, and where other restaurants take this. Also for the price to come down, it was like $3 more than the boyfriend's burger
That makes sense because I reckon you're not actually tasting much meat in the real Whopper. It's just salt and flavours from the other ingredients.
When people say that the beefless 'Impossible Burger' is problematic because it's fully processed ... I say, so what's the difference?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you’ve identified the real problem. Though the other plant inputs in this burger are probably subsidized too. Either we need to subsidize the impossible burger, or properly tax/desubsidize agriculture.
There's not a lot of hard data I can find on where the money goes, but the table on Wikipedia (2004) indicates that we mostly subsidize livestock feed grains, then cotton, wheat, and rice. Those four added up to 64%. Soybeans and products come in 5th at 7.6%. Fruits and vegetables, pretty much zero. Health-wise, it makes all the wrong things cheaper.
My guess is that the retail price impact would be tiny. Kinda like the calculations where Walmart could double associate salaries by raising prices by 6%.
Are we talking about a $5 steak becoming $5.09 or becoming $10?
Whatever your feelings on this particular product, it seems that the perhaps-inevitable decline of the traditional meat industry is going to take place on many fronts (clean meats, plant hemes, alternative proteins, locavore provider networks, increased availability of traditional vegetarian cuisines).
I'll 100% be giving it a try (I'm already a long time vegetarian though). I like that it's BK doing this because BK has served a veggie burger (Morningstar Farms Patty) for around ~14 years, so they should be familiar with the demand for meatless products. I remember when they first introduced a veggie burger, I wasn't sure the demand would be there, but it seems to have worked out. So it remains to be seen if they'l…
Carl's also has the beyond burger, which I personally think is superior. My wife disagrees, and prefers your standard veggie burgers (we are vegans of 15 years).
It's pretty clear that it's not beef if you're looking for it, but not nearly as distinct as your standard veggie burgers. Most vegans, though, aren't especially craving meat simulacra. I think of them more as transitional for meat eaters rather than as targeting vegans.