This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Are Plant- and Fungus-Based Fake Meats Really Better Than the Real Thing?, first released on November 24, 2021. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

AYMANN ISMAIL: I actually can’t wait to try it right. This is the weird part. I’m a Muslim. I never had pork, I never had, like, pork barbecue. But I love watching, like pork barbecue shows on TV. You know, there’s the—so many different, like, barbecue challenges on Netflix or Hulu, and I love them. I can’t get enough.

CYNTHIA GRABER: What Aymann is super excited to try—what he’s never had in his life—is, yes, pork, but not the real thing. It’s pork made from plants!

NICOLA TWILLEY: Aymann Ismail is just one of our guests this episode as we figure out the science and history of plant-based meat. Because we are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and this episode, we’re going into the labs and test kitchens where the meat analogs of the future are now being invented.

TWILLEY: We have so many questions. Starting with, will all these Impossible burgers, and fungus-based chicken cutlets ever really replace meat?

GRABER: Are they actually better than meat, are they better for the environment, do they have a smaller climate change footprint, are they better for you?

TWILLEY: Equally important, to be honest: do they taste good? Do they actually taste like the real thing—and if so, how? What magical science can turn a plant into a bleeding burger?

GRABER: And will plant-based pork live up to Aymann’s dreams?

TWILLEY: This episode is supported by the Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, and by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So where you are right now is our R&D lab. And what we try to do here is really understand meat at a molecular level, understand each of the components that drive each sensory experience.

[MACHINES WHIRRING FAINTLY]

GRABER: Celeste Holt-Schietinger is the director of research at Impossible Foods. We visited Celeste at the Impossible labs in Redwood City in California, and because it’s still a pandemic she obviously was masked.

TWILLEY: We masked up too, and we put on gowns and goggles, and then Celeste showed us a room that basically just looked like a science lab—I mean, it was a science lab, full of weird looking machines and test tubes and beakers.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So all around us are the analytical instruments to be able to ask molecularly what is in meat and be able to identify that.

TWILLEY: Impossible Foods was founded a decade ago by a Stanford University professor called Pat Brown. His research was focused on genes and cancer cells, but he had been a vegetarian since the 1970s and he was really bothered by how harmful to the environment industrial meat production is.

GRABER: Celeste told us this is still central to the company’s mission. As you’ll hear, we also met with her before the pandemic, and she wasn’t masked.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So how we began was really with the vision that meat is not sustainable and it’s the most destructive industry on the planet. The reason we eat it is not because of that destruction, it’s because it’s delicious. And so can we make meat without compromise?

GRABER: We’ve talked about this before on Gastropod, but conventional meat in general, and frankly cows in particular, are a source of a lot of environmental problems. Locally they use a lot of water and cause a lot of pollution, they also contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and to deforestation around the world.

TWILLEY: Scientists pretty much agree that we cannot consume as much animal-based food as we do right now and stay within our planetary boundaries. We need to cut back, pretty radically. And so back in 2009, Pat Brown decided to take some time off from his regular research, and try to figure out a solution to this livestock problem.

GRABER: Remember, Pat is a distinguished scientist, and so he went about this quite scientifically. The first thing he had to do, and that he hired people like Celeste to help him do, was figure out what makes meat meat.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So some of the key aspects of meat is, one, how delicious humans think it is. It’s cravable, it’s juicy, it’s fatty. There’s those kind of roasted caramely notes.And one of the key aspects also is how meat changes upon cooking and how you handle it. So in the raw state will be red in color, and upon cooking it will change to brown, will be soft and malleable. And as you cook it, it firms up and becomes chewy and juicy. And the flavor is a kind of subtle metallic flavor. And upon cooking, it has that explosion of meaty characteristics. So those are some of the key aspects of meat

TWILLEY: So that’s the challenge: how do you reverse engineer all of that?

GRABER: To start with, Celeste showed us a machine that basically smells meat and helps her team figure out what chemicals are making all those mouthwatering flavors.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: It is very complex, there are hundreds of molecules. And then of those molecules, we can actually identify which ones are odor active, and what that different smell is. And there’s probably around 300 that have different unique sensory experiences. None of them specifically smell like beef or chicken. The combination is what gives you that sensory experience.

GRABER: The same machine can also find those odor molecules in plants. The plant might not smell like that one particular odor molecule but it contains it, and then Celeste and her team can extract that molecule from the plants and then combine a whole bunch together to smell like meat, and so taste like meat.

TWILLEY: But even once they’d figured that out, they weren’t done. So much of the deliciousness of meat is also texture—how it feels in your mouth.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: And so again, we look at meat at the molecular level and actually ask: What are those components driving the texture? What are those specific proteins? How do they change upon cooking, they’re really denaturing and changing their forms. Can we measure those, and then have that as a reference point? And then go and screen and look at many different plant proteins and look at what their properties are.

GRABER: Celeste showed us a machine that can test texture, too—they can hook up a bunch of different types of things that can press down and cut through the meat in different ways.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: And we could have even human teeth, or we have razor blades, and each of those measurements, we can get different parameters. And we’ll screen lots of them.

TWILLEY: Yes, they really do have human teeth on this machine.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: We have someone who had a dentist as a father, and so we got some teeth.

GRABER: Getting it all just right isn’t easy, it’s taken Impossible years and many iterations before they released their first product, they did the first trials at Momofuku in New York in 2016. It was a burger—but it wasn’t quite there yet. Celeste says for one, it just kind of fell apart on a grill.

TWILLEY: Which the new and improved Impossible Burger does not. And that’s what’s now available at supermarkets and restaurants around the country, alongside ground Impossible beef. And then just this autumn, they debuted an Impossible chicken nugget.

GRABER: And they’re not the only ones trying to replace beef burgers and chicken nuggets in our hearts and on our plates. Another huge one in the market is Beyond Meat, they’re even bigger than Impossible these days, they sell hamburgers and ground meat and sausages and chicken tenders.

TWILLEY: This plant-based meat business is hot right now.

[GUITAR]

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Meatless meats are on a meteoric rise. And is projected to become a US $1.2 billion dollar industry by 2022.

MALE VOICE: Fake meat is turning into real profit!

FEMALE JOURNALIST: The stock market debut for beyond Meat went beyond.

MALE FINANCE GUY: The hottest IP of 2019 so far.

MALE VOICE 2: This stock has a cult-like following.

MALE VOICE 3: it’s going to sweep over the world.

MALE VOICE 4: Our mission is very simple. it’s to completely replace animals as a food technology.

GRABER: But as regular listeners to Gastropod will not be surprised to hear, this whole fake meat business is not actually a new movement.

MALTE RODL: Meat alternatives are not new at all. So in my research, I found that they have been basically a thing ever since people have stopped to eat meat for whatever reason, and ever since they’re sort of thinking of not eating meat, there’s ideas of having something that is like meat.

TWILLEY: This is Malte Rodl, he’s a researcher in environmental communication at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and he studies the history of plant-based meat replacements. He told us that these alt-meats have gone through distinct phases of popularity and innovation, based on why people were eating them.

GRABER: As we talked about in our recent tofu episode, China has a really long history of cooking up foods that are meant to be meat-ish. For thousands of years they’ve made meat replacements out of tofu and out of wheat gluten, which is called seitan, and seitan has a kind of meat-like chewy texture.

TWILLEY: These plant-based proteins weren’t necessarily always used as a meat analogue, but they could be a replacement for people who didn’t eat meat, which was mostly for religious reasons.

RODL: So there are certain streams of Buddhism that reject the idea of eating animals. And so there’s always this tension between if we can’t eat animals, we need to have something similar especially to wean oneself off.

GRABER: Soy-based foods were slow to catch on in America, as we mentioned in our episode, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s a whole bunch of new fake meat products sprouted onto the scene.

RODL: When we see commercialization of, of meat replacements, meat alternatives, through a person called John Harvey Kellogg. That’s the brother of the person who made the Kellogg’s company.

TWILLEY: This time, the motivation was health. And yes, regular listeners will have already encountered our old friend John Harvey, Mr Cornflake’s brother. He had a very unusual health philosophy and he ended up running a sanatorium founded by 7th day adventists in Michigan. Part of his whole thing was that people should eat bland grain based foods, not fatty or sweet things. Or meat.

GRABER: So then that left a question for him: what should they serve at the sanatorium?

TWILLEY: No problemo. John Harvey invented some exciting new meat replacements.

RODL: So when we look at these different products, then they’re usually made of nuts or of oats, and actually, nuts were not popularly eaten before this time. So nuts were actually popularized in within this food movement as something legitimate and nice to eat.

TWILLEY: It’s not that nobody had ever eaten nuts before, but they weren’t actually popular in Anglo cuisine in the 1800s—they had fallen out of fashion during the Renaissance, and didn’t come back into vogue till Kellogg gave them a boost.

RODL: And these products then have fancy names like nut cream, Meatose, Viola, nut vago, nut meat, or nutin, and some of these explicitly refer to sort of what they’re made of, like nuts others refer more explicitly to what they’re supposed to do, like nutton is sort of, you know, is a fake to mutton.

GRABER: These nut and oat concoctions actually and surprisingly became somewhat popular within a relatively limited community but these enthusiasts bought protose and nuttin to people around the world. The foods became particularly popular in England in the early 1900s, because people were going through a health craze there, too.

TWILLEY: Nuttose and Protose were described in their marketing materials as quote vegetable meats. In one ad, a Nuttose fan said “It tastes like all the naughty things, but has the advantage of being digestible and wholesome.” According to Malte, people at the time would braise Protose, mash it into a cutlet, bake it with macaroni, and even sub it in a jambalaya.

GRABER: But even as popular and delicious as Nicky just made these vegetable meats sound—they were really only eaten by a very niche group. At least that was true until the first world war in the UK. That’s when vegetable meat found an even bigger market.

RODL: Meat alternatives were seen as a vital way to support the wider population. Especially in the UK, this was a much larger problem than in the US.

TWILLEY: Meat was really tightly rationed—especially in the UK.

MALE VOICEOVER: Meat, a perishable commodity, long term in production, is one of the hardest food contracts to fill.

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Bill must get along on odds and ends of meat substitutes in his sandwiches. But he doesn’t grumble if he gets plenty of tea, strong enough for a mouse to trot on.

TWILLEY: Before, plant-based meat substitutes had been eaten mostly by people who didn’t want to eat meat for ethical, religious, or health reasons, but during both world wars, plant-based protein found a new audience—people who would have rather eaten real meat, but there just wasn’t enough. These protein substitutes were either mixed in to make real meat stretch further, or shaped into a straight up replacement, like the soy sausages that were notorious in World War 2.

GRABER: Even though we didn’t have the same rationing that the UK did, apparently soy sausage was a thing here, too, during world war ii. It was called soysage. And the New York Times at the time suggested serving it with quote an appetizing tomato or parsley sauce.

TWILLEY: After the second world war, there was a little bit of a protein panic. The World Health organization put together a protein advisory group in the 50s, and in the late 60s, they came out with a report on how to avert the coming protein crisis. There was a real fear that there wasn’t going to be enough protein to feed the world, which is what led to the next wave in plant-based meat innovation.

GRABER: This protein panic inspired the rediscovery of tofu in the US, which is a story we tell in our tofu episode.

TWILLEY: But this worry over protein wasn’t just a hippie thing. Big ag and industry were investing in plant-based proteins too.

GRABER: In 1960 a big food processing company called Archer Daniels Midland invented something I used to see in health food stores called TVP.

RODL: So there’s lots of different names that pop up, especially in the late 50s, early 60s, of technologies that are able to make this protein isolate into strings. And these strings then are supposed to resemble the actual texture of meat as opposed to merely being a nutritious thing. So what we’ve seen until then was more remaking the nutritious content, maybe making remaking the savoriness of what meats was like. And now from the 60s onwards, we see more of a shift towards this stringiness, the texture of meats.

TWILLEY: TVP was brown and looked like sort of freeze dried granules. It was something vegetarians put into tomato sauce as, like, a bolognese sort of thing when I was a kid. And to be honest, I thought it was pretty grim back then.

RODL: Yeah, so TVP was, in the beginning, I think, faced with a lot of skepticism and sort of, it’s a bit weird right to have these dry chunks of something that you then boil a bit, hydrate, and then they become a bit stringy, but don’t taste like much. They always have this, they still do, I think, have this bit of an off taste.

GRABER: But over the next few decades, companies that were marketing meat substitutes—mostly to vegetarians—they invented products that were an improvement over TVP and that you can still find today. They were supposed to taste like meat – there’s boca burgers, and chik’n, and morningstar farms sausage patties and lots of others.

TWILLEY: These meat replacements were not bad, but I say as someone who has tried them but who also eats meat—you wouldn’t mistake them for meat. They were really for vegetarians—they weren’t a replacement for a burger if you actually ate meat. But the new wave—today’s Impossible and Beyond burgers—that’s different.

RODL: So the new boom we’re seeing in the last couple of years is related to what some academics and some industry people would describe as high moisture meat alternatives.

GRABER: High-moisture meat alternatives sounds so delicious. But strangely these new products are delicious, if you ignore the name.

TWILLEY: High moisture is not on the label.

GRABER: No. My frozen package of ground Impossible says quite proudly in bold, “All Flavor. No Cow.” And it continues: Burgers, tacos, lasagna…use like ground beef in your favorite recipes!

TWILLEY: So what is this big breakthrough? How have these companies managed to create a convincingly meaty thing from planty things? Coming up, after this break.

[BREAK]

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: The first time we had a sensory panel, consumer panel of us versus ground beef, it was like a 90 percent preference for the ground beef from cows. Our current product is about equal. So some people, they can tell the difference. But on a preference based and liking base, it’s very at parity. And we’re just early stages. The cow is not really evolving. We are.

GRABER: What’s allowed companies like Impossible to evolve is advances in science, particularly in the field of high-moisture extrusion, as Malte mentioned. This kind of extrusion is the process of taking proteins and heating them up and applying pressure to them and pushing them through a particular form. There was a lot of innovation in extrusion tech in the 80s.

TWILLEY: And those advances meant better texture in your alt meat. But it’s not just tech improvements driving this new boom. In the past, people innovated in alt meat for religious reasons or health reasons or out of a panic about protein. Today, the motivation is climate panic. That’s what’s driving this new wave.

GRABER: That’s what motivated the folks at Impossible, and Celeste says that they hope to convert meat eaters with their new high-moisture burgers that use new extrusion technology. She says these can satisfy any and all eaters, not just vegetarians.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: 24:10
So in terms of our protein toolbox, we studied a couple hundred different proteins and characterized them. We have our potato protein which is really, it gels upon cooking and allows for that firming. And then we have soy protein,

GRABER: Which gets elongated and transformed in the extruder and it becomes chewy and a little porous so it can become juicy.

TWILLEY: Version 1.0 used a wheat based protein which they liked, but it didn’t have the same nutritional values as meat meat, so they swapped it out for the soy protein.

GRABER: But making Impossible burgers isn’t like making tofu. They aren’t using soy as soy.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: A lot of times we think of just different proteins, does that mean pea and soy, but actually soy has hundreds of different proteins. And if you fractionate them, each of them have different properties.

GRABER: They basically just chemically break soy apart into its different protein molecules. They figure out which ones are stretchy and which ones are chewy, and so on.

TWILLEY: And with all these different protein molecules all individually isolated, they can then recombine just the ones they want in the exact ratios they want.

GRABER: Over the development process, they also swapped out the fat that they use—at first it was all coconut oil, because that’s solid at room temperature like beef fat is, but they changed that to a mixture of coconut and sunflower oil to get just the right meat-like nutrition profile.

TWILLEY: OK so there’s fat, there’s protein, there’s the right combination of hundreds of flavor molecules, and there’s additives like xanthan gum and methyl cellulose holding it all together. But the real star of the show?

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: I want to get you at least a spoon. I think it’s important that you at least taste the heme.

GRABER: Celeste took out a small mason jar of a deep burgundy-colored liquid. It looked pretty much like it was full of blood.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: Basically dip your spoon in. Don’t really need to take much.

TWILLEY: Cheers.

GRABER: Cheers. Salty and metallic.

TWILLEY: It’s actually surprisingly much better than I was prepared for.

GRABER: Yeah.

TWILLEY: I don’t mind it.

GRABER: It leaves a pretty bad aftertaste in your mouth, though.

TWILLEY: It’s more metallic on the aftertaste, I think. I don’t know why.

GRABER: Yeah, I have to say, now It tastes a lot grosser. Now it tastes like blood in my mouth.

TWILLEY: After I had gum surgery, this is what my mouth tasted like.

TWILLEY: Celeste told us that this heme stuff we were sipping—this was Impossible’s key breakthrough, and it’s where she’s devoted most of her efforts. It all started because they realized that one important element of meat flavor is something called a heme protein.

GRABER: Heme and the iron in heme is what makes blood bright red, the molecule transports oxygen and helps us breathe and actually it’s key to all plant life, too.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So we discovered that that was essential and that actually upon cooking, reacts with simple nutrients, amino acids, the building blocks to proteins, sugars and vitamins, and that creates that explosion of flavor. So without the heme, you have a kind of just subtle savory flavor, bit more bland in characteristics. And you don’t have those essential, meaty, beefy, roasted notes.

GRABER: So heme makes animals taste meaty, but all forms of life have heme. So Celeste and her colleagues had to find a good plant source.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: Our very first projects was actually pulling out root nodules, because that’s where it was in the soybean, and extracting that out. We quickly learned that was not efficient and actually releases lots of carbon in that process. So is there a more efficient way to do that? So what we’re using is yeast.

TWILLEY: These yeast are genetically engineered to make the heme in vast vats.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: So they start white. And then when they start producing the heme, they turn bright red in color.

GRABER: These vats of heme-producing yeast have caused Impossible to get a little bit of flak—they’re the only ones who use heme, and some consumers have been turned off by the fact that Impossible uses a genetically-modified yeast to make that heme. It’s true that the yeasts have been modified. But this is super common. Most cheeses, even the really high end ones, they’re made with enzymes that are produced by genetically modified yeasts. A lot of vitamins are made by GM yeasts, medicines are too. And anyway, you’re not even eating the yeast, you’re eating the heme it makes.

TWILLEY: The version of heme that the yeasts produce ends up working exactly like the meat version of heme. It reacts with all the other carbohydrates and proteins and fats in the burger to create those meaty flavors. And it changes color the same way meat does too — from red and bloody to well done and browned.

GRABER: Impossible and a lot of their competitors took their first stab at replacing meat by making a perfect hamburger. Because Americans eat a lot of hamburgers.

TWILLEY: Which is why it smells like a burger joint when you walk into the Impossible test kitchen.

TWILLEY: It’s incredible how quickly it gets your saliva, like your juices flowing to smell meat.

TWILLEY: In the kitchen, they have equipment for every different way you could cook meat, so they can see how their Impossible version stacks up. They have steam ovens and skillets and backyard grills

GRABER: They’d made us some burger sliders on a mini pretzel bun, those were delicious. But they particularly wanted to show off a new product they were just getting ready to introduce—

GRABER: Smells like pork!

TWILLEY: It’s amazing.

TWILLEY: This is Impossible’s brand new product—right now it’s only available in Starbucks, at Momofuku in New York, and in Hong Kong, although it’s rolling out more widely soon.

GRABER: Hamburger and ground beef was first. Then for pork they had to tweak the heme and also the texture proteins, they got rid of the potato for the pork so it could be a little bouncier. And they tweaked the fat content, basically a lot of tweaking.

TWILLEY: In the test kitchen, one of the chefs, Nathan, had encased some seasoned Impossible pork in pastry, like a sausage roll. He gave us each one, served with a spicy tomato sauce. And we dug in.

[EATING NOISES]

GRABER: What’s—so I don’t have as much experience with a pork sausage roll you do. It’s very tasty. How would you say it’s different?

TWILLEY: I would say right now the texture is not—it’s a little softer than pork still. And a little more… I don’t want to say mush, like, because that sounds bad. But it’s a little softer than than actual pork. The flavor, when you’re, is perfect.

GRABER: The flavor is amazing.

TWILLEY: The flavor is perfect. The texture is very close, but not quite.

GRABER: As I mentioned, I don’t have a lot of experience with sausage rolls, and a big reason for that is that I’m Jewish, and I grew up keeping kosher at home, and I never ate much pork at all growing up. Which is pretty common for Jews and Muslims.

ISMAIL: No pork ever. Unknowingly! I may have unknowingly had it. You know, I grew up in America, grew up on the East Coast. You know, I’ve had pizza that had like, pepperoni on it that I like peeled off. And if I like, missed a piece, maybe, I don’t know, but I’m going to say no.

TWILLEY: This is Aymann Ismail again. He is a staff writer at Slate, he’s a Muslim, and, like he says, he has never knowingly consumed pork.

ISMAIL: It’s, it’s so taboo, more than anything else. You know, you could meet a Muslim who will drink and have sex before marriage and break a lot of the rules. But pork is the one thing that I think so many Muslims, no matter where you go in the world, would be off the table, off the menu, out of their minds.

GRABER: We talked about this in our pig episode—both Jews and Muslims have a lot of laws that we follow, but not eating pork for many historical reasons has become one of the most important laws of all. If you want to hear more about it do listen to The Whole Hog. But basically, eating pig is super taboo.

TWILLEY: But what about Impossible Pork? Is that taboo?

GRABER: This is a tough question to answer. Jewish perspective? frankly probably for a lot of Jews, sure, as long as there’s no actual pork, no problem. But. Probably the biggest Orthodox group that certifies food as kosher, they’ve called fake bacon bits kosher, they’ve even certified impossible sausage as kosher, but impossible pork went weirdly to me a step too far for them. I guess it’s because bacon and sausage are ways of preparing meats, like I’ve had duck bacon and turkey sausage. But pork is pig. And so to that Orthodox group, the word pork, Impossible Pork, made it not kosher.

ISMAIL: I’m like, I get that because of the social, the social weight that some of these products have just the names. You know, pork isn’t just a meat product for a lot of Muslims. It’s been this, this tool that was used to shove in our faces that people hate us. You know, there’s been how many different accounts where people have thrown bacon at Muslims or left it on the door handles of mosques or even left pig heads.

TWILLEY: But even though Aymann can definitely understand not wanting to eat even plant-based pork, he’s personally pretty stoked to try the Impossible version.

ISMAIL: And it almost feels like a loophole. It’s like cool now I get to try pork without it actually being pork so God is not going to have a problem with it because I’m not eating that same meat that God told us not to eat. So you know there there are going to be people who are going to say, ‘no like if you’re eating it, you it’s like it, so you’re you’re it’s as if you are eating it.’ I don’t know man, I think God is very specific in Islam and in the Quran about, don’t eat pig. And this isn’t pig. It’s not! It just isn’t! Right? And on their website, by the way, they say it’s even better. So who knows? Who knows.

GRABER: Aymann wrote about his excitement and the debate within the Muslim community for Slate, and as a result, even though Impossible Pork isn’t available yet in grocery stores, when we talked to him, he told us the company was sending over a package for him to try at home with a Jewish friend of his.

TWILLEY: And if you listen through the credits, we actually checked in with Aymann to see what he thought of this very exciting first pork-like experience.

GRABER: So, so far all these new products we’ve been talking about are made from plants. But during the protein panic of the 60s, people started looking at all sorts of ways to create new forms of edible protein. They were looking at making it from algae, or from fungi, or from bacteria, basically single-cell creatures.

RODL: Some bacteria, some single celled organisms that feed on some matter. And then in this process, they obviously grow, they they procreate, and they become more biomass. And the idea behind single celled proteins is that this biomass becomes edible.

TWILLEY: Sounds delicious, right? Who doesn’t love bacterial biomass? But actually, one of the best known alt meats came out of this line of research. Quorn. That story, next.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: This all started with one of the UK’s biggest food companies, Rank Hovis McDougall—they make very iconic British brands like Hovis and Mother’s Pride bread and Mr. Kipling cakes.

RODL: So what happened in this company was that they were making bread, and they had a lot of byproducts from breadmaking. And they were looking for bacteria, or fungi, or something that would transform the starches that were a byproduct of their manufacturing process into biomass. And so they went to lots of different places around the UK, and took soil samples. And after a couple of years, they decided that there was one fungi that they had found somewhere that grew really well on the starches.

GRABER: The fungi is called Fusarium venenatum, it’s closely related to a fungus that is a huge problem for wheat, and at first they thought it was in fact this very wheat disease. But turns out the fungus they found was an entirely new species that nobody had ever identified before.

TWILLEY: Back at the lab, they grew this fungus in tanks. And when they harvested it, it apparently looked like uncooked pastry, and had a quote “very mild, almost bland” wheaty mushroom flavor. And best of all, it was kind of stringy.

GRABER: Initially, they were going to chop it up and make it into like granules of alt-meat, kind of like TVP, but people at the company realized it had a good texture on its own for things like fake chicken patties.

TWILLEY: All this makes it sound super easy, find a novel random soil fungus, grow it, form it into patties, hey presto. But it wasn’t like that at all.

RODL: And to make something—to make some genuinely new food item, like they did out of fungi, is something really difficult. That overall took them I think almost 10 years from the first idea in the—in the late 60s towards sort of having a product, and then it took them another 10 years to get the, to get the approval as a food item.

TWILLEY: A 20-year overnight success story.

GRABER: At first, the company sold Quorn to supermarkets. It was used in Sainsbury savory pies, one was a chicken-style quorn and mushroom puff pastry pie, and the other was a potato-topped veggie and beef-style quorn pie.

TWILLEY: This was in the 1980s, I remember it launching. For the first few years, while people got used to it, you could only buy it in ready meals. But then they launched quorn cubes and ground quorn in the 90s, and then in the 2000s, quorn finally made it stateside. Like me!

GRABER: We actually buy Quorn regularly, my partner Tim loves to have Quorn fake chicken patties as a sandwich for lunch. In a patty, it works well, it’s a little mushy compared to chicken, but it’s good.

TWILLEY: But still, Quorn isn’t making juicy ribeyes. It can only do chopped steak bits. And Beyond and Impossible are also stuck with ground meat for now. But that’s not all of meat. Whole cuts are still a challenge.

HOLT-SCHIETINGER: Ground is part of the way, but we need entire muscle tissue. And so there are new challenges to be able to do that on the, especially on the texture side.

TWILLEY: Basically, they haven’t figured out how to make their protein strands long enough and stiff enough to mimic the fibers in a whole cut of muscle meat. Yet.

GRABER: But there’s a company that thinks it’s met this challenge.

TYLER HUGGINS: Here in the near term we’ll be coming out with a cutlet, a crispy cutlet and a steak product, a whole cut steak product. But then after that, I mean, really, the options are endless. We can produce things like pork products, like fish. Jerky.

TWILLEY: This is Tyler Huggins, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Meati Foods. M-E-A-T-I.

HUGGINS: Well, Meati is a type of meat made out of mushroom roots. Simple as that.

GRABER: Like Pat at Impossible, Tyler wants to save the environment. He started working in forestry, but then he went back to school for a PhD and he decided wanted to use fungi to try to solve major environmental problems. He realized that a big environmental problem he could try to fix was the meat one. He checked out Quorn of course—

HUGGINS: You know, honestly, I think it’s one of the better alternative meats that are out there. And but we just wanted to use modern approaches, more simple processing, higher nutrition in order to make, you know, sort of the version 2.0, if you will.

TWILLEY: Just because this British company had figured out how to grow Quorn at scale doesn’t mean it was easy. Which is why they didn’t really have any rivals in the fungal meat space till recently.

HUGGINS: It’s very rare to actually grow mycelium for its biomass, and that’s something, you know, there was no books written on how to do this, and we had to invent the process from the from the ground up.

GRABER: Tyler spent his PhD working on this problem and then years after his PhD, too. He and his cofounder had to figure out the process, of course, but they also had to find the right microbe. So they held some auditions for quite a few of them —

HUGGINS: I mean, thousands. It was really a matter of setting the guardrails that we were looking for. So, you know, scalability, high yields, speed of growth, bland flavor, no color, really good, carbon conversion efficiency and then ultimately, nutrition and safety.

TWILLEY: The winning fungus has a super high protein content—and it’s what nutritionists call a complete protein, with all the amino acids humans need. This particular fungus also doesn’t make any chemicals that could be toxic—a lot of fungi make poisons in order to compete with other organisms in their environment.

HUGGINS: Our particular strain, its way it lived in the environment, is to grow super fast after fires, and so it didn’t need to. It actually does even have the capability of producing mycotoxins.

That’s something very sort of unique to our particular, our strain. And then because of that, we can keep the whole biomass. You can consume the whole biomass and it takes minimal post-processing. So essentially, we just harvest it, gently form it, flavor it. And that’s it.

GRABER: The fact that it grows so fast is incredibly important for how quickly they can make their alt meat—

HUGGINS: Well, when I say fast growing, it’s actually one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet. Essentially we get like a seed, a starter. You can think of it just in, like, a small glass. Once we get it growing, we add it into our tank, which—it looks like a beer brewing tank. Literally overnight, 16 to 12 hours, the whole thing’s full. It nearly doubles its biomass under about every hour to two hours, which is just extremely fast.

GRABER: Doubling its biomass just means literally doubling itself—the biomass is just the mass of fungi growing like a goop, Tyler told us it looks like apple sauce.

TWILLEY: Tyler wouldn’t tell us what this fabulous fungus’s scientific name is, but he did tell us what they call it in house.

HUGGINS: We like to call it Rosita. Because another cool feature is under certain conditions, it smells like roses.

GRABER: The fact that Rosita grows as a kind of stringy biomass is what makes it so useful as a meat replacement.

HUGGINS: You know, the huge advantage is We already have this physical structure, right? Already very, very similar to animal based muscle structure. So for us, we don’t have to add a lot of complex ingredients like many of our competitors. So you have these like 3-D microscopic hair strands that are growing in every dimension. Then essentially you realign those fibers in different orientations in order to mimic the different muscle structures.

HUGGINS: And that’s how we’re able to mimic things like steak and chicken and fish and pork, all from the same ingredient.

TWILLEY: Again, the details were secret, but Tyler says the processing is pretty minimal—it’s not extruded, he doesn’t have to break it down—in fact, Rosita is alive till right at the end, even through the marination step.

GRABER: Tyler says at that stage, even on its own, even not trying to make it taste like chicken or steak, it tastes pretty good.

HUGGINS: Oh it’s great. You know, when we first started, you know, some of the people that we were hiring were like, What are we doing again? Is this really good? And so I would literally just pull it out of the tank, squeeze the water out of it, throw in a pan with butter, and it is delicious. And it’s kind of like calamari at that point.

TWILLEY: Right now, Rosita feeds on sugar and salts. Tyler says they have already done a bunch of research on feeding it on the starchy waste from brewing, for example, but for simplicity’s sake, to start getting Meati on the market as soon as possible, they’re rolling with table sugar for now

HUGGINS: You know, we have a current ranch, we call it, that’s working right now and that’ll produce the meat equivalent of a cow essentially overnight. And then we already broke ground on what we’re calling the Mega Ranch. And that will produce somewhere upwards of 35 million pounds of product a year. But ultimately, again, that’s that’s not even that, you know, that much—a drop in the bucket.So we’re hoping to get our giga-ranch off the ground sometime or at least start it early next year. And that’ll produce hundreds of millions of pounds. And these are all custom designed, basically like big breweries.

GRABER: Meati isn’t on my local grocery shelf yet, but they’re going to be launching their crispy chicken cutlet this year, and they sent us each two cutlets to try. Tim and I cooked them up and tasted them before we got more elaborate and turned them into chicken parm.

GRABER: [EATING] Oh, it smells like chicken!

TIM BUNTEL: Smells like chicken. Yeah. Really uncanny.

GRABER: [EATING] Wow. Oh my god. That’s really good!

BUNTEL: [LAUGHS] That’s—that’s frighteningly realistic. [LAUGHS] I haven’t eaten chicken in so many years, but that’s like, yeah. That’s the, that’s the thing!

TWILLEY: Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Geoff and I sat down for a fungus cutlet and some green salad.

GEOFF MANAUGH: Well, yeah, it’s funny. I mean, when you say fungus based meat, uh, instantly there’s a certain skepticism that comes into the picture, but it looks like a large breaded chicken McNugget that I would have had at public school.

[CUTTING]

MANAUGH: [EATING] If you didn’t tell me what it was, I would’ve thought it was kind of a slightly soft, very tender chicken cutlet. And I wouldn’t definitely would not have guessed that it was made from fungus. And it doesn’t taste bad.

GRABER: That’s pretty nice. It tastes like chicken nugget. Honestly. I can get behind that.

TWILLEY: So yeah, on the flavor and texture side of things, team alt-meat seems to be doing pretty well. But that’s not the only area for comparison. Beyond taste, how do these plant patties and fungus cutlets stack up to their real meat analogs? Are they really better for the environment? Better for your health? The best of all?

RAYCHEL SANTO: Yeah, I mean, some of the language is, I find it quite shocking, or, you know, they’re going for that wow factor is, you know, this is this is the solution for our future, this is going to solve a big portion of our climate change problem or completely overhaul the need for industrial animal farming.

GRABER: Raychel Santo is a researcher at Johns Hopkins and she’s one of the authors of a paper that takes a full lifecycle look at meat versus these new alternative meats on the market. She also was on our Dig for Victory episode about urban farming.

TWILLEY: Obviously, there’s a lot of nuance in a comparison like this, and one thing to know is that Raychel and her colleagues used industrially raised meat as their benchmark on the health comparison because that is 99 percent of the meat consumed in America.

GRABER: Rachel also created kind of an average of these meat alternatives, because there aren’t enough studies to tease out major differences between soy or pea or fungus based meat yet. She says more research is needed, but there’s enough out there that she can make some generalizations.

SANTO: From a nutritional perspective, most plant based substitutes are pretty similar in terms of the amount of calories, protein and iron that they have in comparison to the meat products they’re intended to substitute. They tend to include more sodium compared to unprocessed meats. There might be slight differences or increases in certain types of nutrients or breakdowns of nutrient profiles. The overall implications of that for health outcomes is less clear.

TWILLEY: One thing that plant based meats would seem to have going for them is they are based on plants, so you would think that they would have all the known health benefits of plants, and none of known health issues that come with eating red and processed meats. But Raychel said that’s not necessarily the case. Take heme—Impossible is so excited about how heme makes their plant patty taste…

SANTO: But it’s processed in the body virtually identically as heme protein that’s found in red and processed meat. And that is actually one of the ingredients that’s linked to a lot of the health outcomes, the negative health outcomes associated with red and processed meat.

GRABER: That said, animal heme is the most bioavailable form of iron, and so this plant-based animal-like version might be good for people who are anemic or for pregnant women.

TWILLEY: When it comes to the potato and soy parts of the patty—we know that eating those plants is good for you. But Rachel said what we don’t know is whether those benefits still apply after Impossible has broken down all these plants and processed them to isolate out and recombine all the different proteins.

SANTO: We do know that highly processed foods or ultra processed foods are associated with, you know, increased weight gain and obesity. And so there are concerns that, are these similar to other highly processed foods? Or is there something different about them that would make them more nutritious or potentially still beneficial, even if they are highly processed? So there’s a lot to tease out there.

GRABER: What companies like Impossible say is they’ve basically matched the nutrition profile of meat, but even if the nutritional panel on the side of the box looks the same, a lot more research is needed to know if our bodies digest those nutrients the same way and how healthy these foods really are.

TWILLEY: OK, so the health question is complicated, there’s a lot we don’t know. At the moment, we can’t say for sure that these alt meats are better, or worse, or the same for you as actual meat. But when it comes to the environment, that should be simpler, right?

SANTO: Conventionally farmed beef has the highest environmental impacts on almost every metric you look at. So if that’s your point of reference, almost any alternative is going to look sustainable, or more sustainable by comparison.

GRABER: If you compare these alt meats to other meat meats, the benefit isn’t as dramatic. Basically, the greenhouse gas reduction and land and water use reduction when you eat an alt-meat burger is a huge improvement over industrial beef, but it’s a slightly less dramatic improvement compared to industrial chicken.

TWILLEY: For this part of the paper, Raychel and her colleagues did compare the full range of meat production systems, and their research suggests even the lowest emissions beef is still higher than the highest emissions plant-based substitute. Other studies suggest that beef raised on well-managed pastures might have a smaller footprint than some plant-based meats. Again, we can’t say for sure right now for every specific situation. But definitely, pretty much anything and everything is better than industrial beef, which, just to repeat myself, accounts for 99 percent of the vast quantities of beef that Americans are eating.

GRABER: One concern that’s been raised is that these alt-meat products are still using monocultures of soy and peas and sugar that are based in industrial agriculture. Like soy uses a lot of herbicides and pesticides and is generally not the greatest crop from an environmental perspective, but Raychel still says that even taking that into consideration, these products overall are an environmental improvement.

TWILLEY: And there are other benefits of plant and fungus meats that are harder to quantify but very real. The jobs making these meat substitutes are better and safer than jobs in slaughterhouses. When you aren’t dealing with live animals, then you aren’t dealing with e coli that can cause outbreaks of food poisoning and kill people or make them sick. And you aren’t giving animals antibiotics and contributing to the big antibiotic resistance problem we have right now.

GRABER: Okay, so overall, these alternatives seem pretty clearly like an improvement over industrial meat in a lot of ways. But now for one of our big questions: are these companies doing what they set out to do? Are they convincing meat eaters to eat less meat?

SANTO: I mean, right now, to be honest, from the data that I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like there has been a substantial substitution effect happening.

TWILLEY: In America, at least, meat sales aren’t going down. In fact, the exact opposite. Even in the past few years, while all these new alt meats have been launching, per capita meat consumption has increased every single year.

GRABER: Celeste told us that Impossible has done a number of surveys of their consumers, and about 90 percent of them have eaten meat in the past month. But it doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily replacing a meat hamburger with a plant-based burger—both alt meat and meat meat consumption is up, so maybe they’re just choosing an Impossible burger when otherwise they might have eaten a salad.

TWILLEY: That said, these alt meats are still new. Meati hasn’t even launched. So maybe meat eaters will end up reducing their meat meat consumption in favor of alt meat. Right now, it’s too soon to tell—there’s no real evidence that’s happening yet.

GRABER: But the growth of both markets shows that people just love meat. Malte says that’s obvious even just from the advertising.

TWILLEY: The very idea of a meat substitute sort of has the idea that meat is essential built in. Meat must be super important, otherwise why would you need a substitute for it?

RODL: So what what all this talk about meat alternatives in this way does is that it firstly, reproduces ideas that meat eating is an essential thing in society, and that we should all do it to sort of keep a happy life together. On the other hand, what this does to vegetarian food, is sort of it diminishes it a bit. It says, this is second-class food. It’s not the same thing to cut up a cauliflower and roast it, but you need to make it cauliflower wings so that it becomes socially acceptable to eat them. So I think of it in some ways as as a colonization of the vegetarian space of vegetarian eating practices

GRABER: But what about cauliflower? Cauliflower on its own, especially if you roast it, it is pretty great. So is lots of vegetarian food.

SANTO: But we’re not limited to a choice between conventional meats and plant based substitutes. They’re also less processed legumes. You can eat soy beans, and lentils and beans directly. And those have even clearer health benefits and environmental benefits, too. So while we focus this paper on comparing the particular meat and meat substitutes, it’s important to not forget the bigger picture that you can also just eat whole legumes and you’ll be, you’ll be healthier and be protecting the environment more with that choice as well.

TWILLEY: In fact, when Raychel and her colleagues did their analysis, eating beans and veggies worked out better for the environment than any of the alt meats, and we already know they’re great for your health.

GRABER: But also maybe these meat substitutes don’t need to be meat substitutes. Tyler at Meati thinks his company’s new product can and maybe should be its own thing. The Meati fungus Rosita is super efficient at creating protein from sugars and salts, even more efficient than plants—and Tyler would love us to just buy and eat Rosita.

HUGGINS: I think for now, we’ll have to give customers some sort of association, so whether it’s the Meati crispy cutlet, the Meati steak, so they have — they kind of already know what experience they’re going to have. And I imagine we do that for a few years. But ultimately, I think the goal is to be a whole new category of protein. So when you go to get your burrito, your taco or whatever it is, they ask you, you know, you want your beef, your chicken or your Meati.

TWILLEY: To Tyler, this version of Meati, where it’s pretending to be a chicken cutlet—that’s just 1.0. The future is wide open.

HUGGINS: I feel like this is like when wine was first invented. It’s like, that was pretty good, right? But now look at how many wines we have and the complexity and the science and the brilliance of what’s created. I think we’re just getting started. There’s different types of umami and flavor and textures and, you know, being able to blend it with different things. I mean, this is just the start of something. I think, you know, when my daughter is older, we’ll just be blown away that we lived without this sort of, you know, type of food in our diet.

GRABER: I look forward to having these new protein sources as regular options alongside even meat. Because frankly, Nicky and I and Tyler all think that there is a place for meat in our agricultural system – not industrial meat, and certainly not nearly as much meat as we eat today, but we don’t think meat and dairy will ever totally go away, and maybe they shouldn’t.

HUGGINS: You know, my dad has a bison ranch. I grew up, you know, in cattle country. So I have a very high bar for good quality protein and more and more of an emphasis on, you know, ethically produced protein. And so that’s never been my goal of trying to replace, you know, regenerative ranching and good practices. But just understanding that we’re trying to feed 10 billion people, we’re going to need as many sources as we can and those that are done, you know, sustainably and ultimately at a price point that is accessible to everybody is what’s most important to me.

TWILLEY: This global view, Raychel says it’s important when we think about the future of protein. Because we’re not just talking about hamburger loving Americans needing to cut back here. That’s only part of the story. The more wealthy a country becomes, the more meat it typically eats.

SANTO: There are some people that have actually argued that, that’s the value of the role of meat substitutes is really to serve as the filler for that increased demand that we know is coming from other countries seeking to increase their meat consumption for individual consumers. or having growing populations. And so some people say that’s what this is, is to fill that gap so we don’t increase our overall impacts as much.

TWILLEY: Obviously, there’s some issues with saying that as people in developing countries become wealthier, they can have fake meat instead of real meat. In fact, it’s arguably much more fair for developed nations to give up meat. But Raychel’s point is that the demand is growing, and if we don’t do anything about it, our appetite for meat will destroy the planet.

GRABER: No matter who they’re marketed to and how they’re supposed to save the planet, I have to admit that I do actually also really like to eat these alt meats. I’m not giving up lentils or cauliflower but I kind of think there’s a place for these foods too. Maybe they can also help serve as a transition to more vegetable- and bean-based meals—especially if we do what we should be doing, and create a lot more regulations around industrial meat production.

TWILLEY: Yeah, it’s great having a consumer-based solution to the meat problem, but we actually need government to step up too, so that the true environmental cost of meat is part of its price. But stepping off my soapbox for a minute, I agree—I’m all about having more fungus in my diet, for sure. Rosita, I’m into you.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: And now for the big reveal—

TWILLEY: But first, thanks this episode to the folks at Impossible Foods and Meati, and to Malte Rodl and Raychel Santo. We have links to their products and their publications on our website at gastropod dot com. Thanks also to producer Sonja Swanson for all her work on this episode.

GRABER: And thanks to Aymann Ismail, we have a link to his Slate article. And finally, Aymann and his Jewish friend Leah made pork gyoza and pork kofte, which is usually made with lamb. And maybe Aymann had built up a little too much anticipation around pork.

ISMAIL: I mean, I’ve heard from many people that pork is like the best meat. And now that I know that I’ve, that I’ve tasted it, I can kind of come back and say, I don’t really think that’s true. Like, have you had lamb, like, have you had goat? Have you had any of these, like, incredible things that we’re like we love and we’re used to making in all of our different Arabic and Jewish dishes, like, I don’t know, like I think we, we, we won’t miss pork.