Part of the allure in opting for such a model is that much of nature ’s abundance remains unknown. Collectively comprising 8 billion proteins, 108 million fats and 4 million carbohydrates, the composition of most of the world’s 353,000 plant species remains little understood. From the perspective of Impossible Foods these are nothing less than nature ’s tools in eliminating processed sugar, salt and – yes – even meat from our diets.
Leading this revolution in re-engineering our food is ‘heme ’, the secret ingredient in the Impossible Burger. Heme is the molecule that gives blood its colour and helps carry oxygen in living organisms, but more importantly for Impossible it accounts for the rich, iron-like taste we associate with juicy medium-rare beef.
While heme is abundant in animal muscle tissue it can also be found elsewhere in nature, particularly nitrogen-fixing plants and legumes. The only problem is that if you wanted to substitute plant sources for animal ones you would need approximately an acre of soybeans to yield a single kilogram of soy leghaemoglobin. That’s where Impossible Foods have found a solution. They took genes that code for the protein and inserted them into a species of yeast called Pichia pastoris which they then fed with sugars and minerals, prompting it to grow and replicate. This, again, is ‘growing’ food – in this case a specific ingredient – in a manner not dissimilar to making beer.
176
n e w t r av e l l e r s