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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-no-words dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by jmorris on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:33AM (9 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:33AM (#571951)

    These idiots think they can produce something that is indistinguishable from beef in a lab AND sell it cheaper? To get beef you mostly just put some cows in a field and let them act like cows for a bit, keep a vet on standby in case one gets sick and at the end put them in a feedlot and bulk up a bit before you turn it into patties and steaks. Hard to beat nature at Her own game.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:35AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:35AM (#571954)

    The free market will surely produce results.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:52AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:52AM (#572011)

      Until it encounters our Religious Freedom(tm) to dominate the Earth and the animals.

      • (Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday September 25 2017, @06:43AM

        by marcello_dl (2685) on Monday September 25 2017, @06:43AM (#572566)

        Wow just imagine the destruction when religion was blindly followed, compared to secular states. Oh wait.
        It is strange that mindless destruction of natural resources temporally coincides with post declaration-of-rights, post french revolution governments.

        Maybe the explanation is that to be put in charge of something means also to care for it, instead of having all the other precepts suspended so you can do whatever you want. Logically it would made no sense too. But OK you came with that, I rate you as a particularly good troll.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by driven on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:51AM (5 children)

    by driven (6295) on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:51AM (#572009)

    The point isn't to beat nature at her own game:

    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).

    It's to create a more sustainable "meat" product, since it's pretty clear most people aren't willing to become a vegetarian.
    I'm disappointed [thedeliciousrevolution.com] they're using soy, though.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by jmorris on Saturday September 23 2017, @06:09AM (4 children)

      by jmorris (4844) on Saturday September 23 2017, @06:09AM (#572021)

      All that is stupid though. Pasture land is generally land that is not suited to high intensity agriculture anyway, water is not nearly the problem the chicken little types believe (although water distribution is) and unless the cows are eating fossil fuels their net carbon impact is zero. So those are distractions, the point is to force us all to pay more for the dubious honor of becoming vegan. And make no mistake, force it will be; if guilt tripping doesn't work expect calls for the guns of The State to enforce their 'obviously superior morality' on those of us less enlightened.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Saturday September 23 2017, @06:40AM (1 child)

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Saturday September 23 2017, @06:40AM (#572028) Journal

        Pasture land is generally land that is not suited to high intensity agriculture anyway

        Modern beef production doesn't use pastures.

        It's all feedyard these days. [beefusa.org]

        • (Score: 2) by qzm on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:32AM

          by qzm (3260) on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:32AM (#572268)

          Only in America...

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by driven on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:28PM

        by driven (6295) on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:28PM (#572090)

        Pasture land is generally land that is not suited to high intensity agriculture anyway

        "Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% [yale.edu] of current deforestation rates... Cattle ranching in the Amazon region is a low yield activity, where densities often average just one cattle per hectare... Because cattle use energy to convert grass into protein, several times the amount of land is needed to produce an equal amount of beef as poultry, and about 10 times the amount of land than needed to produce grain. In Brazil, pasture land outweighs planted cropland by about 5 times."

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:36PM (#572091)

        unless the cows are eating fossil fuels their net carbon impact is zero

        Unfortunately this isn't quite true. Cows emit methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than the CO2 that the plants the cows ate consumed. Methane turns into CO2 in the atmosphere, but it takes a few years and during that time the methane is more damaging.

        It's also overlooking the emissions coming from the farming operations but not the cows themselves - which is fair, because this is hard to measure and the vat operations will have their own, so determining the actual impact here is hard.

        In the end, this is no different from solar power or electric cars. The environmentalists can cluck and finger-point all they want, but nothing will change until the cost and quality is competitive. There's no real need to oppose the research, let's just wait and see.