Better Burgers

We hope everyone had a safe and fun Halloween on Monday night … it’s really hard to believe that it’s November, which promises to be as fun and busy!   Also, we’d like to share that our Morris Market location is up and running, and was well-received during its first week of operations.  

We hope to see all our friends and neighbors at Pathfinder Produce this week; please help us spread the word about our well-stocked and competitively-priced markets.  If you know of others who would like to get onto our regular weekly produce price email list, please just let me know at lgrace@pathfindervillage.org.
As usual, our Edmeston market will be open on Thursday afternoons, at Pathfinder’s Village Commons, from 1 to 5 p.m.; the Friday market is at the United Methodist Church, 17 Church Street, Morris, and goes from 1 to 4 p.m.

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Like everyone else, I get some crazy stuff in my Facebook newsfeed.  Now that we are in the last week before the general election, I expect some of this will go away.  But one recent item I saw was quite remarkable and relevant to those of us who would like to increase the amount of plant-based foods we eat.

One of the Impossible Food burgers, from their website.

NPR put out a story about a new veggie burger that has been developed by Impossible Foods of the Silicon Valley.  Although it’s 100% vegetable-derived, it looks, smells, feels, tastes and even oozes like a beef burger as its being cooked, according to stories.  After years of research, the company’s product was well received during restaurant tests over the summer.

The CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, Patrick Brown, a former biochemist at Stanford, wanted to develop a more eco-friendly way to satisfy our nation’s love of burgers. Growing livestock for consumption is land and water intensive, and given forecasts for our climate and groundwater resources, not sustainable for the long-term.  A 2003 paper by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Researchers David and Marcia Pimmentel states, “The meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet (milk, eggs and plants). In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet.”

Brown’s team started their work to develop a better burger by studying heme, an iron-containing compound which carries oxygen in the bloodstreams of animals (think hemoglobin).  However, heme is also produced by plants; Brown’s team used bioengineering to adapt yeast to churn out large quantities of a soybean version of heme. They also determined another part of the ‘burger experience’ is the fat content; so they mixed in coconut oil into the ground meat (pea, wheat and potato proteins) to replicate the sizzle of beef fat.

Another company searching for the holy grail of veggie burgers, Beyond Meat, is starting stampede’s in Whole Foods stores in the Boulder, Colorado area.  On their website, they offer four key points on why they are developing plant-based meats: To improve human health; positively impact climate change; address global resource constraints; and improve animal welfare.

This all relates to the impact that livestock has on our environment: According to a 2006 UN report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, livestock production is among “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”  Although the meat industry has questioned that study’s methodology, subsequent articles have also implicated livestock as a major contributor to rising CO2 and methane levels, deforestation, and the draining of our aquifers. 

As one would expect, these plant-based burgers are expensive, but as these companies increase production, expand facilities, and grow their markets, these products could one day compete with regularly priced burgers.  And, who knows, maybe if we all cut back on meat consumption, we can improve our own health and that of the planet at the same time.

Eat and be well!

Lori