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‘Bread, Yogurt, Apple Pie and Impossible™ Burger’ ∞

November 4, 2019

Impossible has been running a new campaign that responds to the beef industry’s focus on Impossible being quote-unquote processed. I found this bit that Impossible wrote on their Medium page that expands a bit more on the idea that the Impossible is only as processed as many products in our lives:

Bread, yogurt, apple pie and Impossible Burger
Some critics imply that people want only simple food with few ingredients. This flies in the face of thousands of years of increasingly complex food preparation rituals and cuisine. And the number of ingredients is completely irrelevant to health and nutritional value.
Consider bread — the seemingly simple staple of Western cuisine: People selectively breed wheat or other plants; they wash, soak and grind wheat seeds; they harvest and crystallize salt; they carefully select yeast and other microbes and add these to a complex mix; they knead the mixture to unfold and align the gluten proteins to make an elastic dough; they ferment and finally subject the mixture to high heat in a specifically engineered oven (otherwise known as baking). Mechanical processing, diverse and carefully isolated ingredients, and natural chemistry are required — and it took our ancestors years of trial and error to get the choice of ingredients and processes right. Yet the result of all this sophisticated research and experimentation is a “simple” processed food — a loaf of bread, desired and consumed by billions of people every day.

I’ve yet to see any scientists or dieticians weigh in on these ideas, but I’m interested in seeing how it develops. Processed is a nebulous term. Unless you’re eating raw ingredients, they’re processed in some capacity. Even blending produce to make a smoothie is a form of processing.

I think calling Impossible processed is a bit of a misnomer. For me, processed foods are ones that can sit outside of a fridge or freezer for years and taste about the same—even though they should spoil.

This is Impossible’s ingredients list, and the italicized bits in parenthesis are my notes:

Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose (cellulose is fiber from plants), Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose (sugar from corn), Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin (plant-derived heme which is similar to heme from animals), Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much to be afraid of here.

‘A Billion Vegans by 2030?’ ∞

November 4, 2019

An interesting little video from Bloomberg about a new app called ABillionVeg that helps people find vegan options. Obviously, the current king is Happy Cow, but the competition will improve both.

I love that they give a dollar for every review and photo that someone posts, but it’s a shame that stops after 10 reviews. It’s a good hook though.

‘A startup just announced the world’s first fake-meat “steaks” made from fungi. Are we ready?’ ∞

October 31, 2019

Joe Fassler for the New Food Economy:

A Boulder, Colorado-based startup has opened a new frontier in the world of vegan meat replacements. The company, Emergy Foods, announced on Tuesday morning the imminent launch of a brand called Meati Foods—the world’s first line of fungi-based steaks.

The whole piece and photos are interesting, but this bit about language and description follows after he gets to try the product:

That allowed doubt to creep in. The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to classify my experience, scribbling phrases in my notebook, reaching for descriptions that made sense. That strangely unsettled feeling helps explain why Emergy used the term “plant-based” in its press release, even knowing the label doesn’t quite fit. It wants to provide customers with a comforting reference point, a way to make its product not feel quite so unfamiliar and new.
In our email interview, Nicole Civita explained further.
“Unfortunately, such foods are notoriously hard to market—‘fungal foods’ doesn’t sound terribly appetizing! And it’s not accurate to describe the protein rich foods made from mycelium as ‘mushroom-based’ either, because they are made from the precursor to mushrooms, not mushrooms themselves,” she wrote. “So, companies in this space have struggled to describe their products in ways that are both accurate and appealing. And sustainable food advocates have favored the less accurate and insufficiently encompassing “plant-based” vernacular. While this drives biologists crazy and could run afoul of food labeling regulations, lumping myco-foods in with the plant-based alts is a reasonable shorthand.”

Time will iron these things out, but for now we’re all enveloped by slang, jargon, and an evolving language.

‘Proposed Bill Wants All Plant-Based Beef Labeled ‘Imitation’’ ∞

October 31, 2019

Jenny G. Zhang for Eater:

A new bipartisan bill requiring beef that’s not derived from cows (i.e., plant-based beef like Impossible Burgers) to be labeled “imitation” was proposed in Congress on Monday, Food Dive reports. The legislation, called the Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully Act (or the Real MEAT Act), was introduced by Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a Democrat whose district covers a rural part of New York, and Rep. Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas.
[…]
The proposed bill, as currently written, suggests that slapping a prominent “imitation” label on plant-based beef would prevent “confusion” and “ensure that consumers can make informed decisions in choosing between meat products such as beef and imitation meat products.” Brindisi, in a statement by the United States Cattlemen’s Association obtained by Food Dive, emphasized this line of thinking: “American families have a right to know what’s in their food … Accurate labeling helps consumers make informed decisions and helps ensure families have access to a safe, abundant, affordable food supply.”
However, there’s little evidence that consumers are actually confused about the difference between plant-based and animal-based meat. In the dairy world, where the use of the word “milk” has similarly been a source of contention, the majority of consumers know that plant-based milk doesn’t contain dairy, per a survey from the International Food Information Council.

I think honesty is a good practice if there is confusion, but I don’t think anyone is confused by plant-based products.

If we’re open to discussing clear labeling, meat could be better too. I’d love to see meats labeled about their: antibiotics the animal received, square-footage allotted to each animal in their lifetime, percentage of time spent outside per day, whether the animal was at any point maimed without anesthesia, and if this product contains fecal matter. It’d also be nice to see a reversal on the ag-gag laws that were passed to ban videos from being recorded in slaughterhouses. Is that not the kind of honesty they like?

‘How to Eat Less Meat Without Losing Your Mind’ ∞

October 31, 2019

Marie Franklin writes some nice advice for people trying to eat less meat, and many of her tips are often what I tell folks who ask me a similar question:

1. Don’t think about it as all or nothing.
2. Start small (and easy)
3. Find something meatless that you can genuinely enjoy as a main dish […]
5. Try a meat substitute (yes, I’m serious)
6. Don’t care so much about what other people think

I first advice is usually start small. One meal a week. If that goes well, the following week do two meals. And onward.

Converting meals to vegan is usually fairly easy. There are pretty good replacements, but it’s all about knowing what replacement to use.

Many products work as 1:1 replacements in recipes, and, if they don’t, most answers are a simple web search away.

‘Beyond Meat Brings in Coca-Cola Veteran to Head Marketing’ ∞

October 29, 2019

Beyond Meat Inc will bring in Coca-Cola Co veteran Stuart Kronauge as its chief marketing officer, the vegan patty maker said on Thursday, as it looks to boost its presence in retail and restaurants.
Beyond Meat last month named former Tesla Inc executive Sanjay Shah as its chief operating officer.
Kronauge, who has been with Atlanta-based Coca-Cola for over 20 years, headed the company’s sparkling business unit in North America.
She is credited for the resurgence of soda brands such as Coca-Cola, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, Sprite and Fanta. The beverage maker has been able to grow sales with the launch of smaller-sized cans of its sodas, in tune to a change in consumer tastes.

Beyond Meat is expanding sale of its plant-based meat burgers in retail stores and partnering with more restaurants as it builds on the recent hype for vegan patties that taste, cook and look like real meat.

I honestly am never quite sure how to interpret news like this. I think it’s a good thing that someone with experience for a global brand is being brought in, but Coca-Cola is (I hope) a very different kind of company than Beyond Meat. Whereas Coca-Cola sold sugar drinks, I think Beyond wants to be thought of as doing something better for the landscape of food.

Full disclosure: I love Coke. Roy Rogers are one of my favorite small pleasures.

‘McDonald’s Misses Profit Target as Competition Delivers Breakfast, Plant Burgers’ ∞

October 29, 2019

McDonald’s Corp missed Wall Street estimates for profit for the first time in two years on Tuesday as more investment to spruce up U.S. restaurants and speed up service weighed on the world’s biggest fast food chain, sending its shares down 4%.
Rival fast-food chains in the United States have challenged its dominance with value meals and new menu items, including plant-based burgers and meat substitutes launched by rivals including Restaurant Brands International Inc’s Burger King and Yum Brands Inc’s KFC.

Calling it: T-minus 6 months before we see the first vegan sandwich at Mickey D’s.

‘Why do People Hate Vegans?’ ∞

October 28, 2019

George Reynolds has a thorough and thoughtful piece for the Guardian about where veganism started, currently is, and it’s future. I liked this bit that shows that vegans have always been dreamers:

Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.

In a universal setting, veganism has to be plausible. It’s easy to dream that nothing and no one will suffer for a meal, but controlling those conditions is nearly impossible. It doesn’t mean that shouldn’t be an ambition. It means there needs to be a realistic understanding of what can be done. Being vegan can never exist under perfect conditions. Heaven has to meet earth at some point.

One thing that veganism rarely approaches is what meat means to the people who consume it and where that approach came from:

There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.
It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.

And it’s been interesting to see how meat-eating has become a part of politics and in some ways performative:

But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.

With the massive inroads that veganism has made in the last few years, it’s important to recognize it still has a long way to go:

Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism.

Emotional flexitarianism is a beautiful turn of phrase and absolutely the way we all must approach each other.

‘Anthony Bourdain Doc in the Works From CNN, ’20 Feet From Stardom’ Director’ ∞

October 27, 2019

A feature documentary about the late television star and chef Anthony Bourdain is in the works from Focus Features, CNN Films and HBO Max, to be directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville.
[…]
“Anthony Bourdain did more to help us understand each other than just about anyone in the history of television. He connected with people not in spite of his flaws, but because of them. To have the opportunity to tell his story is humbling. CNN is in the DNA of Tony’s work, and the perfect partners in this journey. I’m thrilled to be reteaming with Focus Features after our journey on Won’t You Be My Neighbor?.”

I’m really looking forward to this, and Morgan Neville is one of my favorite documentary filmmakers. This is good news.

cwmoss

✏️ by C. W. Moss