Hamburger with fake meat by Impossible Food
A juicy hamburger, the typical taste of grilled meat, intriguing smell, what’s wrong with that? No traces of meat: anything in this sandwich has animal origin, even if the taste, the appearance and the perfume are the same of a traditional hamburger. But this meatball is 100% produced in a lab.
It is not a joke or a utopia of vegetarians and vegan, rather an experiment of an innovative American start up in the food sector. It is experimenting for years to create vegetable foods, and it isn’t a coincidence if its name is Impossible food. Patrick O.Brown has founded it in 2011 and its aims are important and concrete. The world population is increasing and the intensive breeding farms are becoming a real problem for the health of the planet, the environment and the resources at a global level. They, in fact, consume lots of vegetable resources and dedicated agriculture; they produce lots of pollution and the plenty of waste to dispose.
This start up is committed to the issue with a team of biochemical and experts to create completely vegetable foods that have a similar taste and appearance of the animal-origin food with the aim to offer a valid alternative to substitute and limit this kind of product and the problems connected to the intensive breeding farms.
Vegetable meat and cheese
Impossible food, thanks to the investments of important entrepreneurs among which Bill Gates, started experimenting and looking for a real hamburger without meat, besides cheeses that do not come form milk: this food is completely produced in a laboratory or from vegetable sources. Steaks, cheese, ricotta and stuffing for first courses: Impossible Food is revolutionizing the world food sector with its experiments and it shows that it is possible to eat without intensive animal sources.
In this experiments this start up has good company, there are in fact in United States, other similar experiences with Real Vegan Cheese about which we talked here.
The aim of Impossible Food is to present its hamburger completely produced in a lab, so as similar to the meat that it seems a juicy and tasty meatball.
But how this fake hamburgers are made?
Four steps in a lab: for first a non-invasive biopsy extracts some stamina cells from the muscle of a cow. This cells has the ability to become other cells and in a second steps they experience an incubation period in a vegetable broth that allow them to multiply for countless times creating a threading and sticky textile.
The secret is the Eme, a molecule in haemoglobin protein that is extracted from vegetable sources like spinach or beans. Eme has the characteristic to have a red blood colour because of the high percentage of iron and if it comes into contact with sugars and amino acids it changes its taste becomes similar to the animal proteins.
The third phase of the process foresees that the laboratory techniques bloat and stretch the mass that Eme has created. Finally the meat fibres are grinded and worked together with other ingredients to create a burger: dusted eggs, breadcrumbs, natural food colouring and aromas.
Here you can find the video published by Wall Street Journal:
Even Google is attracted by the impossible burger
The start up has attracted the attention of big industries and entrepreneurs, among which Google that make a proposal to buy the futuristic company. The English newspaper Dailymail has recently published, in the middle of the summer, the news that the giant of Mountain View wanted to buy the start up for 300 millions of euros, but this offer, surprisingly, has been rejected.
