Burger King claims its new Impossible Whopper is indistinguishable from traditional burgers.
Credit: The Washington Post/Getty
Plant-based meat just went mainstream.
Starting April 1, Burger King is selling a new kind of Whopper that it claims is identical in taste to its traditional beef patty, with just one difference: It contains zero beef.
No, that’s not an April Fools’ joke (though some people, including in the Vox newsroom, wondered if it might be).
The new beefless burger is a partnership with the startup company Impossible Foods, which will supply patties made with heme, a protein cultivated from soybean roots that mimics the texture of meat — convincingly, by the sounds of it.
“People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which,” Fernando Machado, Burger King’s chief marketing officer, told the New York Times.
This is a huge deal for those who want to see meat alternatives replace actual meat because of concerns over animal cruelty or climate change. If […]
While on many levels this is good news there is a major problem with the source of the soy mock meat replacement. Soybeans are GMO heavy fertilized and sprayed with roundup. I am sure they will not use organic soy. Also how will our bodies metabolize this new non-natural food? For some time conventional soy products have been marketed as a healthful alternative to dairy and meat though unrelated in taste but soy products as sold are not good for the body and is hard to properly digest unless fermented.
You are right Will, and the bread dough they use is probably full of GMO’s, too. What’s the sense of being a vegetarian if you expose yourself to genetically modified organisms? All the vegetarians I know eat only organic vegetables, and use only organic dough to make their own bread. That is the only way to be safe from the toxic Monsanto and Bayer products, and to stay healthy.