The food industry has made great strides in recent years. Thanks to the work of scientists from all over the world, almost any product can already be synthesized. The only thing that cannot be done at the moment is to create inexpensive artificial meat. It turns out either cheap and tasteless, or delicious, but expensive. Perhaps Impossible Foods has come close to creating "real" artificial meat. According to the authors, their meat "tastes as good as the present."
Experts from Impossible Foods are sure that the uniqueness of the "meat" taste lies in a special set of proteins, the main of which is heme. It gives meat its unique color, taste, and can also be found in the blood as part of hemoglobin (oxygen carrier) and in muscle fibers as a component of myoglobin. Moreover, heme is contained not only in animals, but also in plant organisms, from where it can be successfully isolated. However, there is one problem: the percentage of heme in plants is several thousand times lower than in animal tissues. But scientists at Impossible Foods found a solution: the gene responsible for the production of heme in plants was extracted and "transplanted" into a yeast culture of pichia pastoris, which can successfully synthesize it in the required quantities. But that's not all!Impossible Foods also managed to synthesize the smell of meat.
“We use gas mass spectrometry to create the smell. We fry a piece of real meat and capture the smell. It then analyzes all of the molecules responsible for that flavor. Thus, we get a kind of "casts of odors" of different types of meat."
And the last thing you need to create artificial meat is the correct structure. For this, a number of plant proteins are also used. For example, wheat protein gives the necessary viscosity and density to meat, and thanks to the starch, the meat hardens during frying. Now the company Impossible Foods has already opened a plant in the United States and plans to produce about a million units of finished products per year.
Vladimir Kuznetsov