The Press Box - Ep. 269: Food Week Profiles — The Impossible Burger and Guelaguetza

Episode Date: March 1, 2017

The Ringer celebrates Last Meal on Earth Week with two unique audio stories. First, Danny Chau reports on an ambitious new product attempting to solve one of the food industry's biggest dilemmas (0:10). Then, Katie Baker introduces us to the Lopez siblings and their critically acclaimed family-run Oaxacan restaurant, located in Los Angeles's Koreatown (11:10). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Channel 33 podcast. My name is Danny Chow. I am a writer and editor at Theringer.com. And joining me is Katie Baker, a staff writer at The Ringer. Hello, Katie. Hi, Danny. How are you?

I'm great. It's Food Week at the Ringer, and the reason why Katie and I are here is because we've written two huge stories on the ringer.com. My story is up right now, and Katie's will be up later in the week. So we've put together special audio treatment of our stories, and Katie's took a more micro approach, and I took a more macro approach. Yeah, I sat down with the four Lopez siblings that own Gilly Getsa restaurant in Korea town here in L.A. And I think you'll definitely be able to feel as if you're in the room with these funny and really interesting family. Yeah. And I talked to Stanford professor, who now runs company trying to.

to save the entire planet from food crisis and a couple of chefs as well. Danny's out there hanging out with the mad scientists. Anyway, here's my story. What would it take for you to give up meat entirely? It's a question I think about from time to time. You know, my family is a house divided. My dad and my brother are carnivores, and my mom, for religious reasons, is vegetarian. I've heard my dad say recently that he'd never be able to take on the lifestyle my mom's

chosen. I tell myself that I'd be able to go vegan for me. months at a time, but I'm not really sure. You know, some of my strongest memories in life revolve around meat one way or another. For instance, when I was four years old, I was walking through a grocery store parking lot when I suddenly realized I wasn't holding my mom's hand. And in that moment of realization, I was sid swiped by a car. I don't remember much about the incident, or the ambulance ride, or the hospital visit, for that matter. But I do remember exactly where my mom took me as soon as I got out. We made a B-line for Burger

where I got a kid's meal and a hamburger. And somehow, eating that burger seemed to make everything else feel okay. But you know what? Other than the whole I got hit by a car thing, I don't think my story is all that unique. We as Americans tend to prescribe burgers for every occasion,

especially for kids. They're the most quintessential American food. In fact, we eat billions of burgers each a year. The late food writer, Josh Ozerski, once called it, the most powerful food object in the industrialized world. But as we grow older and more perceptive, the downsides of eating all those burgers become harder and harder to ignore.

We know about how it contributes to heart disease. We know about the unethical nature of the meat industry, but what we might not fully grasp is how large a role it plays in the biggest crisis of our time, the health of our planet. For example, it takes about three and a half gallons of water to produce roughly a pound of lettuce. it takes nearly 450 gallons to produce a pound of beef.

That's over 125 times as much. Look, we have a lot of cows on our planet, over a billion at any given time. These cows need a lot of room to graze and a lot of grass to feed on, and all those cows are burping and farting, and they're releasing a whole lot of methane into the atmosphere, and that all of that contributes a lot to climate change.

When all those problems come together, it can just be really easy to tune it all out, follow our bliss and watch the world burn. But doing so comes with a side order of guilt. No one wants to think about how the burger they just ate played a role in destroying the planet. Luckily, as things tend to go nowadays, there's a Silicon Valley-based startup

called Impossible Foods trying to change the way we think about meat. Our mission is to completely replace animals in the global food system by making all the foods that we get today from animals in a much more sustainable way directly from plant ingredients. That's Pat Brown. He's the founder and CEO of Impossible Foods,

who is in the midst of reverse engineering the meats we love without harming any animal. Actually, without any animals at all. About six years ago, during a sabbatical from his job as a biochemistry professor at Stanford, he realized that the way our food system works is simply unsustainable. He says that the writing was on the wall.

What I saw and many other people who have looked at it have come to the same conclusion is that the way that we're producing meat is the most destructive technology on earth today by a wide margin. Despite this, Brown says the problem is being completely overlooked. People are talking about how to address the major environmental problems in the world. They will kind of grudgingly acknowledge that animal farming is at the top of the list. And yet it's just not part of the discussion when we're talking about solution. So how does Brown intend on solving the problem?

With a veggie burger. No, seriously. The company calls it The Impossible Burger. You may have already heard about it as the vegan burger that bleeds. But what specifically sets the Impossible Burger apart from other plant-based burgers is not just that it looks like meat. It's that it's scientifically engineered to behave like meat, too. The Impossible Burger is packaged raw and can be cooked as rare or well done as you want.

It bleeds and it even smells like meat. Impossible Foods isn't just trying to make the best meat substitute. It's trying to redefine meat entirely. Okay, you may be wondering, how does a burger made up of a mash of wheat, potato, and coconut oil add up to meat? Well, the Impossible Burger has a secret ingredient. It's called heem, a molecule precedent in all living things, but especially abundant in meat.

It's what allows blood to carry oxygen, it's what gives blood its metallic flavor, and it's what makes blood red. Scientists have known all of this for a while. But what Brown and Impossible Foods have discovered is that heem is also what makes meat taste and smell like meat when it's cooked. That was the game changer. Because Impossible Foods isn't in the food business just to cater to vegetarians and vegans.

The company's real target is the carnivores, the kind of meat eaters who might otherwise turn their nose at even the thought of eating something vegan. Getting the world to see that animals aren't the only source of meaty flavor is the key. The power of heem could be what makes Impossible Foods' mission a success. And so there it is. The magic ingredient that will save the world was inside all of us all along. But before we talk about saving the world, let's talk about how these burgers actually taste. Because I fall directly into the demographic, brown and Impossible Foods are trying to win over.

I'm just a guy who loves eating a good hamburger. But getting your hands on these things is not easy. The Impossible Burger isn't available in grocery stores, and you can only find it in seven restaurants across the country. Fortunately, three of them are in California, and as an L.A. native, I figured making the trek, wouldn't be that difficult. My first stop was at Crossroads Kitchen in West Hollywood,

where they model their burger after In-N-N-Out, the quintessential West Coast-style burger. If it weren't for how the meat tended to fall apart, it wouldn't be that hard to convince yourself that this was an actual beef burger. From there, I took a short trip to San Francisco to see what their restaurants had to offer. At Coxcomb, a meat-centric restaurant,

their version creates a high-end pub burger experience with a thicker, medium-rare burger. The sear on the outside of the burger was so intense that it created a crispy crust on the exterior, which I'd never really experienced on a beef burger before. It didn't quite taste like meat, but I can't say I minded much. For my last stop, I went to Jardinare, where they cooked the burger much differently. There, the chef cooks the patty until it reaches medium well, so it doesn't get that kind of tender richness of a medium rare patty,

but they do make up for it with smashed avocado and caramelized onions. The most incredible thing about Jardinera might be how they've managed the hype. They have a ticketing system. You have to show up at the restaurant right when they open to secure a voucher, but you can't actually order it until a couple hours later. That hype extends to both coasts. At David Chang's Momufuku Nishi in New York, lines wrap around the block before the restaurant even opens for lunch.

Nishi was one of the first restaurants to serve the Impossible Burger last summer, which might seem a little strange. Chang is a guy who loves meat. I mean, the guy has an entire burger manifesto published online, and his Instagram account is full of sensual state carving videos that are barely safe for work. So why is he promoting a veggie burger? I'm sure myself and people that have been following Momofuku would find it a little bit odd that we would champion such a thing. But the reality is, is there's a bottleneck of really good meat, whether it be chicken or beef. it would be foolish if we didn't worry about that.

And that bottleneck of meat is exactly what is driven Chang to search for alternatives. In a way, it shows how his life has come around full circle. He's lorded over the Momu Fuku line of restaurants for the last 13 years, but his embrace of the Impossible Burger is something that would have happened even in his younger days. See, veggie burgers aren't new to Chang. They're practically all he ate while he was studying abroad in London. He remembers those days well. That was during a era where there was mad cow disease.

There was like no beef anywhere. So I remember my mom actually sending me beef jerky. It's like just like, because like beef was just so expensive. It wasn't like I wanted to eat veggie burgers, but it just was like the only thing that was available. And the veggie burgers there were like really good because of Hindu culture that's been assimilated in the British food scene. So you could get a pretty good veggie burger at McDonald's or just about anywhere. And in the flat where we're living, that's pretty much what everyone ate. It had nothing to do with other than mad cow disease.

Chang knows what it's like to live a life without beef, and it's something maybe all of humanity will have to reckon with one day. And so Impossible Foods offers a solution to break from the cycle of beef before it's too late. It's an imperfect product, but one that's good enough to give some open-minded meat eaters an alternative. It might not be perfect, but it's also not a finished product either. The science is constantly improving. and one day it might be close to impossible to distinguish from actual ground beef. Chang describes this as its touring test.

At one point, does AI fool a human being that it's not a computer? At what point can a human being not be able to distinguish that this is not real beef? It's enough to wonder. If Impossible Foods accomplishes the mission it's set out on, at what point do we give it a real chance? And at what point do we give up on animal meat entirely? Hey guys, welcome back. We just heard from Danny Chow about the Impossible Burger. And we're going to switch gears now and hear a little bit about the Lopez family.

So, Katie, what was your inspiration behind bringing this Gilagetza family up? Well, when I started looking into the restaurant, I saw that there was a very vibrant and interesting family behind it, a family that came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1994 and has been running this restaurant in the same place in Korea, ever since. So wanted to meet the people behind it and hear their story. Beautiful. So without further ado, here's the Lopez family of Galgetsa. Hi, my name is Paulina Lopez. My name is Fernando Lopez. I am Elizabeth Lopez. My name is Brisa Lopez and I am the co-owner of Galie Geza Restaurant. We were founded in 1994 by my father and mother Maria and Fernando Lopez and all the businesses now are run by myself and my three-season.

siblings. It's a family restaurant. We like people to believe that when they're sitting in the middle of this place, they feel like they're in the street in the Sokolow and have the flavors and the smell that what you would get when if you were in a market in Oaxaca. We're famous for our molas, for our mezcal selection. Molle is a lot of cultures have this really big flavor dish, you know, like curry or like barbecue where it's just bold flavor. But Molle, it just has so many flavors and a good mola is very well balanced. We don't really eat mollay in an everyday thing in mohaka. It's all about being together because you only eat mollay traditionally in big events.

So you would only have mollay if like in a funeral or a wedding or something very big. Every time you go in mohaka, like he said, they give you so much food that they actually give you buckets. So you can take the mole home with you. So I remember always my grandma would maybe carry the bucket of mole every day. And then we would have to eat mole for like three or four day after the wedding or whatever it was. It's everything from plantains, bread and nuts, seeds, a bunch of chilas, and every chula is prepared differently. These are recipes you can find if you go to Oaxaca in any town, anywhere you go visit your grandma, your aunt. This is what she will be cooking for you.

You sit down and you're a little kid and they give you a basket of bread and like a really small cup of chocolate. And then they gave you the first dish and the second dish and they bring out the mall. Once you're already full and then you start digging in and then you just a party all around you. There's live music. There's your whole family's around telling stories and laughing. I think that the feeling of eating mola is what we want to replicate here at the restaurant. That's what mescalis too. You make it for the people around you to share, to celebrate.

You know, and that is Galegeza. You know, Miskal doesn't really get aged and bared and gets aged in the seven to 20 years that it's been growing through different seasons, through different weather, through different people walking by, you know, and being able to be part of people's conversations and seeing in like the plant seeing kids grow around and all those feelings go inside and all that's what gives the Miskala deep flavor it has.

Miskala is part of who we are. I just love it so much. I mean, the plant, the Gavi plant, it's a female plant. It's got reproductive parts. It has children. And it's a plant that grows for anywhere from up to 20 years before it's sacrificed to make this liquid.

And the tremendous amount of research, The spec that goes behind the craft is incredible. My father was a miscal maker, and my grandpa was a mescal maker. Several of my uncles are miscal makers. Several friends that I have are miscal makers. I mean, I got drunk about mezcal the first time when I was seven years old, no joke. We were one of the first restaurants in L.A. to carry a mescal. So it's like, yeah, I like Ms. Colley, for it was cool.

I think because we have such a deep-rooted love for family and such a deep connection to what that means, to us, it transcends when you walk into this place and it transcends in the food and the way it's served and the environment surrounding it. I think that just comes from our hearts. Galigeta has several meanings. It's such a huge word, you know, that has. It's just as complex as a definition. So to the court, you know, it's a Zapotech word. And if you had a Zapotech dictionary, it would mean to share at Reprosity to give and receive on the secondary level. It's Also a festival that is celebrated every year, the last Mondays of July, in the city. And it's a way for all the communities to come to the city and share their culture and love through dance and through food.

And it's the biggest cultural festival in the country in Mexico. This is the least we can give. You know, we can give part of our culture. We can give back our food. we can give back our traditions, and it's our Galegeza to Los Angeles. Okay, that was the Lopez family of Gelligetsa restaurant, and we can't thank them enough for letting us barge into their place and eat all their molay and maybe drank a little bit of their Muskell.

Yes, and I would like to thank Pat Brown of Impossible Foods, David Chang for taking them time to talk, and Scott Jones for showing us around the kitchen. You can find Danny's story on the Impossible Burger up on the ringer. come right now. My story on Gelligetsa will be up later this week. And for our food week, we'll have new stories going up all week long. These particular stories were written and reported by Danny Chow and myself, Katie Baker, and with the wonderful production work of Zach Mack. Thanks, Zach. Check out all of our stories at the ringer.com and we'll see you next time.

Today's episode is brought to you by Achievement Oriented, the ringer's gaming podcast hosted by Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion. You can listen to new episodes every Friday by subscribing to the Channel 33 podcasts on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts.