Iannuccilli: Plants Taste like Beef? So What?

Iannuccilli: Plants Taste like Beef? So What?

So what’s the big deal with a plant that tastes like a hamburger?

Will you be eating plant-based beef soon? You might be interested in an article, Value Meal, by Tad Friend in the September 30 issue of The New Yorker. There, he discusses a potential move to eating more plant-based food, beef replicas in particular. That’s right, a beef-tasting burger that’s not beef but looks and tastes like it because of the use of heme (a genetically modified yeast that imparts the color and the taste to the creation), wheat, coconut oil, and potatoes. Little of this is new. The Impossible Whopper is already available at Burger King.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Corn Flakes fame, invented and sold Protose, a tasteless, flat mixture of nuts and gluten which he claimed resembled chicken, or veal. Bland food was important to Kellogg, but it was the bowel that got his undivided medical attention. Dr. Kellogg was an eccentric physician, considered a quack by many because of his whacky beliefs that the colon might be the basis of all ills, including psychiatric. Believing the colon to be a sewer of autointoxication, he recommended colonic cleansing (see the movie Road to Wellville). In some cases, he even recommended a total colectomy. Snap, cracked and popped he was.

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This is all so very interesting because of our naïve belief that we live in an age of disruption where so much has changed like no other era. I say naïve because change has been prevalent in every era, at the turn of every century, not just ours.

Would someone transported through time from one hundred years ago believe what they were seeing; television, the internet, space travel, jet planes. Would someone from two hundred years ago believe that there might be railroads, guns that fired more than one shot at a time, enough to kill scores of people in a moment? That there would be steamships, wireless communication, vis a vis Marconi’s inventions, the telephone in the following century? Was it not only 500 or so years ago that Copernicus and Galileo put forward the theory that the earth revolved around the sun?

There is more to the disruptive idea. I think of The Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi. Simplistically, he believed that with so many planets in The Milky Way and so many similar to earth, there must be life out there as in “Where is Everybody?”  There are billions of stars in the galaxy, maybe two million just like earth. There must be, or there is about to be, interplanetary travel not originating on our earth.

Railroads, steamships, jet planes, life on other planets ….  innovation, invention, forward-thinking; nothing new.  We have lived with disruptive forever.

So what’s the big deal about plants that taste like beef? When the plant burger made with heme is slapped on the grill, it turns from red to brown. It also looks, sizzles and tastes like meat.

So what’s the issue?

 

 

Ed Iannuccilli is the author of "Growing up Italian" and "What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner?" and "My Story Continues"  can be found here.