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Impossible Foods: the 2.0 hamburger

Delicious beef finely minced, solid and grilled. Smoked bacon, crunchy as a cookie taken out of the oven. Stringy cedar cheese. Hamburger is the king of street food that becomes gourmet, the delicious sandwich that conquered the entire western world. Delicious, juicy, unique. Or not? Try to imagine the same sandwich, with the same taste, same smell, but 100% vegetal. Impossible Foods made it.

Impossible Foods: a hamburger to save the environment and your health

Impossible foods is a startup born in 2012 in the capital of innovation, the Silicon Valley. Its CEO and founder, Patrick Brown, physicist and biologist, raised 75 million dollars to fund his project. The goal? Create a hamburger completely made out of veggies, identical to the original one.

 “We love meat. We love cheese, and for thousands of years we have relied on animals to make them. Impossible Foods found a better way. We use plant to make the best meats and cheeses you’ll ever eat”.

Why? Two main reasons: meat is not sustainable nor healthy. The amount of water and cultivations used to maintain these livestock are impressive, as the emissions of monoxide caused by animals, one of the biggest cause of air pollution. The environmental impact is too big. With regards to the second reason, Umberto Veronesi has been saying this for a very long time, and the OMS confirmed it: red meat is dangerous for our organism, even more if it is full of antibiotics used in intensive livestock. We need to protect the Earth and our body.

Impossible Hamburger? We’re already craving

After three years of attempts and research (it seems like one of the prototypes tasted like polenta) the final result finally came to life. There it is: same shape, color, and above all, same taste of the original hamburger. Even the calories are the same, while the quantity of nutrients is higher in the veggies one. Impossible Foods managed to create sustainable meat and cheese, catching the attention of many journalistic giants as «Wall Street Journal», «Financial Times», «The Economist» and more. And everyone who talked about it after testing the product had the same thought: no trick, no cheat, the taste is incredible as the consistency and the look. A revolution. The intention was to conquer the most addicted carnivorous, not to create something like soya or seitan hamburger, and they made it.

The Impossible Hamburger is still not available, and the idea is to place it on  the market by the end of 2016. They are fighting against manufacturing costs, still too high to be truly competitive

The food 2.0 era: when innovation and sustainability meet each other

We are in the food 2.0 era, where technological efforts are focused also to improve our diet and the products we buy at the supermarket. Impossible foods is the perfect allegory of this era, that combines innovation and sustainability. Because the time to evolve has come, starting from natural products, making good use of what tradition taught us. Just by doing so we can be able to have a long future ahead, by respecting the environment and ourselves too.  

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