Speaker 1: A company out of California, is using biochemistry and tech
Speaker 1: to transform the hamburger by taking the meat out of it.
Speaker 1: I'm Johnson Strickling, and this is tech stuff Daily. There
Speaker 1: are about fifty restaurants in the United States that carry
Speaker 1: a special item on their menu. It's a burger from
Speaker 1: the company Impossible Foods, and it doesn't have any meat
Speaker 1: in it at all. Instead, the burger consists of plant proteins,
Speaker 1: with the active ingredient being soy leg hemoglobin. That's the
Speaker 1: ingredient that contains hemi, a substance that makes the Impossible
Speaker 1: Burger smell and taste like meat. Some other ingredients include,
Speaker 1: but are not limited to, coconut oil and wheat and
Speaker 1: potato protein. The company held a round of venture capital
Speaker 1: fundraising not long ago, and some big players jumped into
Speaker 1: contribute to the seventy five million dollars in investments. Among
Speaker 1: those parties were Bill Gates and also Alphabet, the parent
Speaker 1: company for Google. So what's the big deal and how
Speaker 1: do these burgers match up with the real thing? The
Speaker 1: big deal is that it takes a lot of resources
Speaker 1: to produce meat. According to National Geographic it takes about
Speaker 1: six hundred sixty gallons of water to produce a single
Speaker 1: one third pound burger. That's not to say that if
Speaker 1: you squeeze a burger you could fill six hundred sixty
Speaker 1: gallon jugs with the water that came out. That would
Speaker 1: be gross. The water was used mainly in the raising
Speaker 1: of beef. Livestock need a lot of drinking water, which
Speaker 1: is a precious resource. Livestock also require lots of space,
Speaker 1: and it takes time to raise them. There are many
Speaker 1: resources required to procure, raise, slaughter, and ship beef, and
Speaker 1: while you also need resources to switch to plants. With
Speaker 1: the right agricultural approach, you can make the change, produce
Speaker 1: more food and use fewer resources per unit. In this case,
Speaker 1: the unit is per hamburger. According to the company, their
Speaker 1: approach requires one of the land you need to raise
Speaker 1: livestock to make the same amount of food. It also
Speaker 1: requires one quarter of the water and produces one eighth
Speaker 1: of the greenhouse gases. In other words, it's kinder both
Speaker 1: to animals and to the environment, at least by those metrics.
Speaker 1: To achieve this, the company had to overcome a big problem.
Speaker 1: HEMI is found in organic material, but it's far more
Speaker 1: abundant in animal muscle tissue than in say, plant fibers.
Speaker 1: Soy leg Hemoglobin contains hemi, but in levels so low
Speaker 1: that it would take an entire acre of soybeans to
Speaker 1: produce a single kilogram of soy leg hemoglobin. That's not
Speaker 1: a sustainable strategy. Impossible Foods turned to genetic engineering for
Speaker 1: the solution to this problem. Scientists remove the genes responsible
Speaker 1: for the soy leg hemoglobin protein. They then transferred those
Speaker 1: genes into a type of yeast. They fed the yeast
Speaker 1: minerals and sugars to encourage it to grow and replicate.
Speaker 1: The yeast began churning out he mei like gang Busters,
Speaker 1: far outperforming natural soybeans and reducing the amount of resources
Speaker 1: in real estate needed to make the stuff that makes
Speaker 1: the fake burgers taste like real ones. Producing the raw
Speaker 1: materials is really just the first step. There's a whole
Speaker 1: lot more tech and science needed to turn various proteins
Speaker 1: and oils into something that can pass for an actual
Speaker 1: burger made of meat. To do that, the team had
Speaker 1: to scientifically analyze beef so that they could find a
Speaker 1: way to replicate the aroma, texture and taste. This included
Speaker 1: throwing some meat into a gas chromatography and mass spectrometry system.
Speaker 1: The system heats up beef so that it gives off aromas,
Speaker 1: which have a specific chemical fingerprint. The team would then
Speaker 1: attempt to match this fingerprint as closely as possible with
Speaker 1: their mixture of plant based ingredients. To get the texture right,
Speaker 1: researchers look for plant proteins that most closely resembled those
Speaker 1: found in beef. Then they had to tweak those proteins
Speaker 1: because of their effect on the taste of the burger.
Speaker 1: Several people who have tried the burger and spoiler Alert
Speaker 1: Times Sadly not one of those people have said that
Speaker 1: it does taste more like real meat than other meat alternatives.
Speaker 1: Speaking as someone who hasn't eaten meat for more than
Speaker 1: twenty years, I'd be really curious to try one of
Speaker 1: these burgers. Sadly, none of the restaurants that serve Impossible
Speaker 1: Burgers are anywhere near where I live. But maybe I
Speaker 1: shouldn't be too sad about it. The food isn't without controversy.
Speaker 1: Some people object to any food that includes genetically modified
Speaker 1: components in it. I wouldn't go so far myself. Genetic
Speaker 1: modification is really just an extremely precise version of something
Speaker 1: humans have been doing using more primitive methods for thousands
Speaker 1: of years. The foods we eat today don't resemble their
Speaker 1: ancestors because we humans have taken a direct role in
Speaker 1: shaping their evolution through domestication, cross breeding, and other techniques.
Speaker 1: Genetic engineering is an extension of this same trend, only
Speaker 1: it gets down to the genetic level. The bigger objections
Speaker 1: stem from the materials Impossible Foods uses to produce their burgers.
Speaker 1: The soy leg hemoglobin comes from soy roots. Typically, humans
Speaker 1: don't eat soy roots. This means the soy root is
Speaker 1: effectively a new food item or ingredient, which has led
Speaker 1: the FDA to criticize Impossible Foods. According to the FDA,
Speaker 1: the company hasn't dedicated enough time and effort to test
Speaker 1: the ingredient to make certain it is safe for consumption.
Speaker 1: This had little to do with the genetic modification and
Speaker 1: more to do with the fact that there just wasn't
Speaker 1: enough scientific data about soy leg hemoglobin in general. Impossible
Speaker 1: Food submitted their product to the FDA for a g
Speaker 1: R A S notice back in two thousand and fourteen.
Speaker 1: G R A S stands for generally recognized as safe.
Speaker 1: It's a way of getting a new food products stamped
Speaker 1: with FDA approval without going through extensive testing, based on
Speaker 1: the notion that this new food item contains ingredients that
Speaker 1: have already been proven to be safe to eat. The
Speaker 1: FDA didn't see eye to eye with Impossible Foods, which
Speaker 1: eventually withdrew its submission in November in order to conduct
Speaker 1: some new studies. Controversy aside, Impossible Foods is producing a
Speaker 1: million pounds of their fake meat every month. The company
Speaker 1: only sells their burgers through existing restaurant establishments. You can't
Speaker 1: buy them in grocery stores or online. If you live
Speaker 1: near one of the restaurants serving up Impossible Burgers, you
Speaker 1: can try one for yourself, and if you do, you
Speaker 1: have to tell me what it was like. To learn
Speaker 1: more about food, tech and every other type of tech
Speaker 1: for that matter, subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast. I
Speaker 1: do a deep dive on a tech subject with every episode.
Speaker 1: That's all to me for now, See you next time.