30 thoughts on “The “Impossible” Burger”

    1. I have zero motivation to eat that crap.
      Can it be used to make a perfectly square sandwich?

      1. You mean like the sandwiches without bread crust filled with genuine mystery meat that Heywood Floyd and his colleagues in the Moon Bus were joking about during the trip to the excavation site of the Tycho Crater Monolith?

        Because in the mid 1960s, we all knew that by the dawn of the 21st century that we would all be eating sandwiches on white bread with the crust cut off to make what we eat look like “space food.”

        1. Exactly. I’m sorely disappointed that I can’t push a button on something that looks like a microwave oven and out pops my white-bread square.

          “What’s that, chicken?”
          “Something like that. Tastes the same anyway…”

          When working hard to excavate alien artifacts on the moon, it’s important to get one’s three squares a day…

  2. Looking at Mr. Gates these days with his gynecomastia and swollen, kwashiorkor-appearing belly, does not bode well for his health and dietary advice.

  3. I only eat ethically sourced, vegan meals. My beef is made from plants and processed in a natural bioreactor – not some man made ‘factory’.

    And my beef has only one ingredient: 100% beef.

    1. I eat far more chicken, pork, tuna and cheese than beef. But Gag me, to paraphrase Yoda “Eat real meat or do not, there is no ‘Impossible’ !”

      1. Probably.

        I drink a premier protein (30g) and eat some kind of protein bar (20g) in the early afternoon and then eat about a similar amount of meat based protein for dinner. I’d cook more meals but I don’t have time.

        My dietary problems are chips and chocolate.

  5. Have been growing more food in the homer garden and occasionally obtaining meat from home-kill sources (ie friends who graze animals traditionally).
    And it noticeably tastes better, besides avoiding whatever crap the big industry does to theirs.

    1. I grow some vegetables every summer…If you want to know what a tomato tastes like, grow it yourself…

  6. Moving from TX to TN to open a new store for the company, one of the first things I noticed was that the steaks are nowhere near as good. Nor the BBQ.

    Never tried the fake stuff nor am I inclined to.

    1. It’s hard to beat Texas beef, though barbeque is so varied throughout the country that it would be difficult to find a “best” version. I love Texas barbeque, but also Kansas City and St. Louis. When it comes to beef, my absolute favorite barbeque is Santa Maria, from California. It’s tri-tip, seasoned only with garlic salt and pepper, and cooked over a smokey red oak fire pit. It became my staple whenever I was at Vandenberg for an ICBM shot, which was frequent during the 1980s. Santa Maria bbq was Ronald Reagan’s favorite, too, and he used to bring the Santa Ynez Valley’s premiere pitmaster, Bob Herdman, to both his Santa Barbara Ranch and the White House a few times a year to put on Santa Maria bbq banquets.

      As for the beef, my wife and I have a retirement farm in TN, and will soon start raising wagyu black angus beef cattle. I’m sure they would meet with your approval.

      1. Texas BBQ is different than BBQ anywhere else in the US – and each regional variety has good examples. None are Texas smoked brisket, though. Tn BBQ is mostly pork, smoked over hardwood charcoal (Texas uses post oak and mesquite) and only sauces wet ribs – and also have ‘dry’ ribs that are seasoned with a rub.

        KC and Carolina have their own versions (usually sauced), and there is Santa Maria style BBQ in the California central coast (no sauce, salsa, green salad and beans)

        1. Yeah, never been big on pork. I’ll usually get any other kind of meat available before pork product. Nothing religious, just that my body doesn’t have any real desire for it. Turkey, sure. Even venison, which I find a bit dry but nevertheless tasty. Even my sausage is beef sausage.
          What has amazed me of late is that I can pick up a steak for $10-12, a pouch of potatoes for $1.50, and a can of veggies for less than a dollar, and prepare a tasty and filling meal of steak, for crying out loud, for less than a fast food meal. Which I barely consider to even be food anymore.
          I need to dig out my old cookbook…

      2. I have thought about doing something similar but my concept of retirement includes being able to come and go as I please. Have you found a way to both operate the ranch and travel for business or pleasure?

  7. The super processed plant-based proteins have nowhere near the bioavailability for human digestion compared to eating beef. The addition of Omega-6 fatty acids from seed oils are highly inflammatory for joints and tissues. There likely are other highly processed additives that interfere with satiety hormones. Heck, the carbon footprint of manufacturing the ingredients and sending them overseas to processing plants, then back to the US for sale easily outstrip locally grown and processed livestock. There is a good documentary on YouTube that I recommend called “Beyond Impossible” that covers this industry pretty thoroughly.

  8. The beef in Texas grocery stores is processed in plants run by the same few outfits that do it everywhere else. I doubt it’s much better or worse than anywhere else. All the cows spend the last 90 plus or minus days in a feed yard that may or may not be part of some conglomerate or other. But the economics of getting weight gains that were better than 2.5 pounds a day on 100,000, some++ cattle doesn’t allow a lot of variety. By the way, “grain fed” works out to about 4 pounds a day of grain in a ration of around 24 pounds. You can be sure at least one PhD or DVM has determined exactly how much. The last feed lot mill I was in had about 30 different formulas they mixed and delivered to particular pens on any given day.

    On the other hand, the last slaughter facility I was in killed about 8-12 head a day and catered to ranchers and restaurants. The next to the last did 5,000 an hour and catered to Walmart. If I was running a BBQ joint, I wouldn’t be buying anything except the bread from Walmart. As always, having a supplier that cares about anything besides volume matters.

    2. Had a look at the “bread” ingredients? I was a great fan of bread until my wife decided we should go low carb. Before that the bread was German black bread. Never found anything like that in the US. All the bread we encountered there seemed to have heaps of added sugar and consisted largely of air.

  9. Grocery store steak is slowly becoming inedible, with a grassy flavor at best. I still eat fatty ribeyes when I can find them, plus some ground beef, when I don’t grind my own from chuck.

    50 years ago, I liked to eat canned brown bread with a filling made from some kind of canned fake meat and sliced onions, all of it fried in leftover bacon grease. They still sell the B&M brown bread, but I don’t remember what the fake meat was. Bacon makes all things new again. I used to have a vegan gf who about had a stroke when she caught me frying tofu in back grease.

    1. I buy whole boneless ribeye rounds from Costco and cut my own. Very tasty on the hardwood charcoal grill.

      1. I’ve been getting the three packs of prime Ribeye but they don’t have as good of flavor as what I get from Yokes or Fred Myer. They also have a lot of water weight.

        Maybe I should try cutting my own and see if there is a difference

        1. I cut them about 1 1/2″ thick, get 8-10 per round, and the round is $100-110, so it’s much cheaper.

          And the scraps go into the freezer for spaghetti sauce and chili.

          1. Grilled one tonight, as a matter of fact – rare, with a green salad and baked potato.

          2. I do the same, though they’ve deteriorated in quality since Covid times. The rounds are still better than what’s in the 3-packs. I have a chest freezer and a fridge freezer for what’s “up.” I also have a commercial fridge that’s all fridge and no freezer. I eat a lot of weird crap that comes frozen (CostCo sells big bags of Bibigo mandu bulgogi, frex). I buy pork for the slow cooker mainly from Whole Foods, as the local stuff from Red & White is acorn fed, which makes it bitter.

Comments are closed.