The great war of vegans on meat-eaters is approaching its inevitable end: vegetable meat, indistinguishable from animal, has entered the market. Gone are the days when eating carrot fries and veggie sausages seemed like something between feat and absurdity. The cutlets grown in the garden go to meat restaurants and cafes: these imitations are so perfect that they can “bleed” after being lightly roasted.
No matter what hotheads say, our species has evolved as a meat eater. Animal flesh is nutritious and contains almost all essential substances. Even after the simplest heat treatment, it becomes much easier to chew and digest than tough plant fibers. Most likely, it was a sufficient amount of easily digestible meat food that allowed our ancestors to reduce the mass of the jaws and their muscles, making room for the development of the large brain, and subsequently helped to nourish this voracious organ. Until now, the most popular resting place is near the grill or barbecue, where chunks of delicious meat sizzle, crackle and smoke.
In an effort to satisfy their eternal cravings, humans have tamed animals, and over thousands of years have turned them into living factories that produce a third of the proteins we consume. Pastures occupy more than a quarter of the land area. In 2018, when the world's population exceeded 7.5 billion people, the number of cattle amounted to almost a billion. Add to this 769 million pigs and at least 50 billion chickens - the biosphere is given such a hard load. As of 2010, these activities led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 8.1 billion tons in CO2-equivalent, which is 20% of all artificial emissions.
Meat substitutes
In such circumstances, giving up meat does not seem like an eccentricity, but a responsible attitude towards the future *. Fortunately, there are already plenty of opportunities for good nutrition without the use of animals. This is also indicated by statistics: in 2018, the market for traditional meat products in the United States, amounting to about $ 30 billion, practically did not grow. But the still rather narrow (1.4 billion) niche of "artificial meat" has increased by almost a quarter. Serious investment groups and wealthy stars are investing in the development of such technologies, including Bill Gates, Serena Williams and Leonardo DiCaprio. And there are also quite a few companies working on such projects.
Daiya Foods makes soft pea-based cheeses, Good Catch makes tuna from legume proteins, Beyond Meat sells chicken, pork sausages and beef steaks mimicking a complex blend of plant-based foods. However, the real breakthrough was the technology of the Californian company Impossible Foods. Work on it began back in 2011, in 2016 the first "vegetable meat" hamburger patty was presented, and in 2019 the new version of Impossible Burger 2.0 became the main sensation of the CES in Las Vegas. But first, the developers, led by the founder of the company Pat Brown, had to figure out what makes meat meat. “After a long search, we were able to find out that the main role in this is played by a single molecule, heme,” said the head of Impossible Foods.
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Main molecule
Hemes are complex organic compounds, in the center of the structure of which an atom of iron is suspended on four nitrogen atoms, as if on springs. It easily changes the oxidation state and serves as a convenient tool for carrying out redox reactions in all known living organisms. Heme is armed with hemoglobin - a protein that carries oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout our body. In the meat - after the animal's carcass has been drained of blood - it almost does not remain. However, muscle cells are full of myoglobin, which provides them with a quick supply of oxygen. Myoglobin also contains heme, which gives the meat its pink color and characteristic odor.
The task of making a plant product "meaty" was reduced to filling it with the required amount of heme. Fortunately, many plant proteins contain this group, and scientists were able to conduct a "wide web" search. In the end, they settled on leghemoglobin, which stains legume nodules red. In their roots, it plays essentially the same role as myoglobin in muscles, providing a rapid supply of oxygen. True, its consumers are symbiotic bacteria living right there, which give legumes the ability, which is rare for plants, to use nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, and not from dissolved minerals.
Exact copy
The scientists did the first tasting themselves: "We mixed leg hemoglobin with vegetable proteins, fats and other common ingredients, and he turned a typical boring veggie burger into … regular meat," Brown recalls. A common legume such as soy could be used to obtain leg hemoglobin. However, scientists have found a more efficient "living factory" by transferring the desired gene into yeast cells. Clinical safety studies have not been forgotten either. In one experiment, rats were fed a hundred times more leg hemoglobin than anything that even the most active veggie hamburger consumer could swallow - and no dangerous effects were found. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared the product safe,and in 2016 it appeared in US stores.
Vegetarian burgers began to be offered by Momofuku restaurants, and since 2017 they can also be found in Michelin-starred restaurants. In California, launched a production with a capacity of up to 4.5 tons of finished product per month. The new Impossible Burger 2.0 recipe is more balanced and nutritious: Wheat proteins are replaced by soy proteins, the increased content of sunflower oil allowed to put in less saturated fat from coconut. But the main thing is that the product has already become indistinguishable in taste from real meat. Particularly impressive is the ability to make cutlets of varying degrees of roast from it, with a pink "bloody" center. Since April 2019, a new plant-based whopper has started appearing on Burger King's menus, and Impossible Foods has set its sights on the main meat shrine.
In 2018, Impossible Burger received Halal and Kosher certifications.
Sacred steak
The head of the company, Pat Brown, recognizes that this product has a special, symbolic meaning. However, it is not easy to imitate it: steak is not only about taste and smell, but also a special structure and texture. How exactly Impossible Foods is going to achieve this, scientists have not disclosed yet. For example, their competitors at Beyond Meat use a complex sequence of operations with plant proteins, drying, heating, stirring them to achieve fibrous structures. The Aleph Farms startup came even closer to the cherished goal: in 2018, its developers demonstrated a “prototype” of a steak made from artificial meat.
These products are no longer plant-based - but you can't call them animals either. Tissue samples were taken from cows, in the laboratory cells of different types (muscle, fat, vascular, etc.) were grown from them, and from these “blanks” the meat structure was reproduced using a 3D printer. It looks complicated, but the developers note that the production took only about three weeks - versus a couple of years required for raising the animal - and are confident that in a few years they will be able to bring the technology to the stage of industrial application. This approach is considered particularly promising for the creation of complete substitutes for conventional meat.
Cell farms
Artificially grown cell cultures today are no surprise. The first sample of such "meat" was demonstrated by Dutch biologists back in 2013 and cost $ 300 thousand. It is not surprising that the Aleph Farms developers boast of great prospects: the cost of their product has already been brought to $ 50 for standard steak sizes. However, the most important barriers to meat "from a test tube" remain unresolved here as well. Firstly, the largest of the existing cell reactors can accommodate no more than a couple of tens of tons of biomass, and for real mass production they will need to be scaled up by an order of magnitude. Secondly, the nutrient medium for cells is a complex cocktail of amino acids, sugars and animal blood serum, which must also be somehow disposed of.
But the main obstacle in the way of "in vitro" meat may be the meat-eaters themselves. According to surveys, only about half of buyers agree to try artificial products - and those who are ready to replace regular meat with them are even fewer. From this perspective, the success of Impossible Foods is of particular importance. The company may not yet boast of full-fledged imitations of steaks, but its cutlets and sausages are already practically indistinguishable from real ones and are quickly becoming fashionable. And fashion is a powerful incentive to move to something new. Moreover, you won't have to give up your favorite taste.
* Note that some purely plant-based diets for the same number of calories emit even more greenhouse gases than livestock, require more water and deplete land resources faster. Fruitarianism is considered especially harmful from this point of view.
Roman Fishman