The creators of the Impossible Burger just came out with another machine-made meat alternative, the Impossible Nuggets. Produced from a combination of every expeller-pressed seed oil in the books and “natural flavor,” the catchall that leaves a disturbing amount of the faux meat’s actual makeup to your imagination, this vegan protein is, supposedly, better than the real thing. Hence the name.
A review in the San Francisco Chronicle says the engineered nuggets are slightly better than McDonald’s, which, as she points out, is not saying much. The burgers have been lauded as the most meat-like meat alternative, which is also not high praise, in a market saturated with bad options. That doesn’t seem to make a difference for Impossible Foods and its biggest investor, Bill Gates, however, who made headlines earlier this year for calling on rich nations to switch entirely to synthetic beef. He hardly needed to demand it: a flood of burger joints, from midlevel Wahlburgers and Red Robin all the way down to Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, White Castle, and even Starbucks had already added the Impossible patty to their menus the moment they hit the market. The fact that there is significantly less demand for these products than for real meat, as McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski attests, did not seem to matter. (For its own part, McDonald’s added the “McPlant,” which features a Beyond Meat patty, a slightly older vegetable offering.)--
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