Just a quick note for those of you aware and thinking about Impossible Foods new Impossible Burger. Firstly, when I first heard about this burger that supposedly “bleeds” like a real burger, I was kinda put off.
Additionally, they’ve (Impossible Foods) genetically engineered yeast to produce heme iron from a soy gene.
I’m not totally against GMO as food, but creating franken-foods for profit and not necessarily to feed a majority of people is not something I’m going to jump at.
Additionally, check out what they say about their Impossible Burger:
A delicious burger made entirely from plants for people who love meat.
With these sorts of statements it should have been apparent that this company has very little to do with veganism. They want to hop on the plant based bandwagon and profit from people’s move towards such diets, but they’re certainly not vegan.
There’s this too:
We discovered that heme is what makes meat smell, sizzle, bleed, and taste gloriously meaty. Consider it the “magic ingredient” that makes our burger a carnivore’s dream.
Now, I’m usually eager to support vegan companies, hell, even companies that are making more plant based products, even if they’re not really interested in veganism per se. I figure the more we can get plant based products out there the more there’ll be and the quicker the world will become vegan. At least that’s my utopian dream.
But the Impossible Burger was not something that I was particularly interested in trying, primarily for one reason, which is this. Just because I happen to enjoy a fake meat product every so often, doesn’t mean I want it to taste exactly the same as the animal based version.
In fact, I’d prefer it didn’t. We vegans enjoy such foods because they’re easy to prepare, easy to socialize with and quite often, similar to what we grew up with. I’m NOT looking for the perfect animal replacement.
And I especially don’t want it if it tastes identical. I’d like to be fairly certain that although my veggie burger tastes good, it’s not the muscle of a ground up cow.
Anyway, that was me thinking to myself about the Impossible Burger. However, I recently learned that these assholes have decided to test their burger on animals. You can read their proud declaration here.
Here it is again from their FAQs:
We’ve conducted rigorous testing, including a stringent rat feeding study that found no adverse effects even at consumption levels of leghemoglobin 200 times higher [per day] than a human would be likely to consume.
Let’s imagine a human would likely consume 1 burger. That means they’ve forced these poor rats to eat the human equivalent of 200 burgers worth of leghemoglobin every fucking day. Fucking assholes.
And then they’ve killed the rats to poke around their innards to make this conclusion.
Worst of all, this was unnecessary! There is NO law that requires this sort of animal testing for food ingredient products.
So, to make a long story short, if there was any doubt that I might at some point have tried the Impossible Burger, I certainly won’t now. I encourage you to not support them either. This is a company with antagonistic views towards the vegan ethic.