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From Wired:
WIRED wants to take you on the deepest dive yet into the science behind the Impossible Burger.
Biting into an Impossible Burger is to bite into a future in which humanity has to somehow feed an exploding population and not further imperil the planet with ever more livestock. Because livestock, and cows in particular, go through unfathomable amounts of food and water (up to 11,000 gallons a year per cow) and take up vast stretches of land. And their gastrointestinal methane emissions aren't doing the fight against global warming any favors either (cattle gas makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide).
This is the inside story of the engineering of the Impossible Burger, the fake meat on a mission to change the world with one part soy plant, one part genetically engineered yeast—and one part activism. As it happens, though, you can't raise hell in the food supply without first raising a few eyebrows.
[...] Technicians take genes that code for the soy leghemoglobin protein and insert them into a species of yeast called Pichia pastoris. They then feed the modified yeast sugar and minerals, prompting it to grow and replicate and manufacture heme with a fraction of the footprint of field-grown soy. With this process, Impossible Foods claims it produces a fake burger that uses a 20th of the land required for feeding and raising livestock and uses a quarter of the water, while producing an eighth of the greenhouse gases (based on a metric called a life cycle assessment).
Now, engineering a "beef" burger from scratch is of course about more than just heme, which Impossible Foods bills as its essential ingredient. Ground beef features a galaxy of different compounds that interact with each other, transforming as the meat cooks. To piece together a plant-based burger that's indistinguishable from the real thing, you need to identify and recreate as many of those flavors as possible.
To do this, Impossible Foods is using what's known as a gas chromatography mass spectrometry system. This heats a sample of beef, releasing aromas that bind to a piece of fiber. The machine then isolates and identifies the individual compounds responsible for those aromas. "So we will now have kind of a fingerprint of every single aroma that is in beef," says Celeste Holz-Schietinger, principal scientist at Impossible Foods. "Then we can say, How close is the Impossible Burger? Where can we make improvements and iterate to identify how to make each of those particular flavor compounds?"
This sort of deconstruction is common in food science, a way to understand exactly how different compounds produce different flavors and aromas. "In theory, if you knew everything that was there in the right proportions, you could recreate from the chemicals themselves that specific flavor or fragrance," says Staci Simonich, a chemist at Oregon State University.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:16AM (6 children)
Probably not. You're assuming a lot with that statement. Who handed it to me? When and where? How hungry am I? Is there a real restaurant nearby? And, what you don't know about me is, I can go a long time without eating. I know from experience that a person doesn't drop dead if he misses a meal. And, don't try to sneak it into my menu. Your chances are nil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:43AM (3 children)
Who the hell are you!? Why do you have that kind of power!?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:15AM (2 children)
I reckon he's owning a ranch of some sort.
I may try it too, I hear they are cheap in some areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @10:20AM
There are no "ranches" in Arkansas, only hillbilly homesteads. But they grow no meat, so if someone handed this to Runaway, it would probably be at the local national drive through of a chain fast food franchise. He would never even know what he was eating, and that is not even going into what the "minimum wage" guys in the back room were doing in the way of "value adding" to his "burger".
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:03PM
I certainly wouldn't use the term "ranch", although I've seen the term used for little farms smaller than my 15 acres.
But, yes, there is meat on the hoof all around me, some of which I buy feed for.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:12AM (1 child)
The pittance services
Then and there, on an everyday basis
Objectively, you are maintained in a very lean state, so probably bordering starvation.
Subjectively, very little through the fog of tranqs - no, you are no longer mean, you can't.
Yes, it is. But your D¡ck Niggεrs masters don't eat an old pussy like you - and there's no way a scum can be allowed in a restaurant - common sense, sanitation and hygiene.
But not for years.
It can happen, you know it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:01PM
Really DN, that's all the fight you can muster? Sad. Could at least have made a beef joke.