Look at the beautiful skillet to your left. What do you see? Soft scrambled eggs, a seared sausage patty, roasted tomatoes. Add some beans and black pudding and you’d have a full English breakfast.
Only, those aren’t eggs. And that’s not sausage. Those, my friends, are plants. That golden scramble is made with mung beans, that crispy patty is fashioned from potato protein and coconut oil. Is your mind as blown as mine?
It’s crazy to see how far the world of alternative protein has come since the early days of Boca burgers and Tofurky. Once upon a time, it was considered a neat trick to form soybeans into a vaguely turkey-looking shape for a vegetarian Thanksgiving. Or to build bacon strips out of tempeh and liquid smoke. I know many vegetarians cherish alternative proteins that look like meat but taste nothing like it, but those ingredients didn’t do much for me or any of my nonvegetarian friends.
I’m an unabashed omnivore. I love meat as much as anyone, but I know that I don’t need more of it in my life. Same goes for just about everyone in the United States. Less than 10 percent of us eat our daily recommended dose of vegetables, but on average we consume nearly twice as much animal protein as the USDA says we need to. What’s even more shocking is the toll the production of meat exacts on the planet: Livestock alone account for more greenhouse gases than all cars, boats, and airplanes combined.
By 2050 there will be 9 billion mouths to feed on this planet. It’s clear that we need new solutions to the age-old question of how to feed a world of hungry humans. The good news is that the past decade has seen an incredible surge in the amount of money and research going into tackling these very large issues. The difference between now and ten years ago is that suddenly people see this as more than just a question of satisfying vegetarians. We need to find a sustainable solution to one of the largest challenges of human history: how to feed a rapidly expanding world without destroying this beautiful planet we inhabit.
This convergence of challenges and opportunities— how to satisfy vegetarian desires, how to feed a rapidly expanding world, how to help humans eat more vegetables and less meat—has made this a much more important problem to solve than making tofu look like turkey. Suddenly the same minds thinking about how to put a man on Mars are the ones thinking about how to make a delicious burger from isolated plant proteins.
Impossible Foods, producer of the skillet “sausage” patty, became famous as the creator of the “burger that bleeds.” (It also became famous as the maker of the burger that inspired $400 million in investment from people like Bill Gates.) But there are others out there doing big things in the same space—Epic Burger Inc., Beyond Meat, Just Scramble, which makes vegetarian eggs that my family eats from time to time. (Those same fluffy eggs you see in the skillet.) The one brilliant thing they have in common is that they don’t just want to give vegetarians a new form of protein; they want to help meat eaters move more toward a plant-based diet. That means making products that don’t just look like animal protein but have the taste and the texture as well.
Nearly as impossible as the creation of these newfangled foods is predicting where all of this is going. Playing with our food at a molecular level is serious business, and we’ll need to be extravigilant about the way these technologies affect our diets. But every time I tuck into a skillet of sausage and eggs like this one, I feel like I’m biting into the future, and I like what I’m tasting.