Today, Explained - Bovine intervention

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

Burger King announced it's going nationwide with a meatless Whopper that tastes like the real thing. Is this the end for Big Meat? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Today Explained comes from KiwiCo. Their projects are designed to spark creativity, tinkering, and learning in kids of all ages, and they're offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects, go to kiwico.com slash explained. A couple years ago, a friend of mine who has this rare red meat allergy was like, Hey, Sean, you want to get lunch? And she never really asked me to go to lunch. So I was like, of course, like, sure.

And then she was like, Come on, we're going to get Impossible Burgers. And I, of course, said, Amy, what's an Impossible Burger? And she told me, It's this burger that tastes just like meat. But it isn't. It's totally made from plants. And we went. And Amy was right. It was this totally novel experience. The meatless meat tasted like meat. It was a very satisfying burger. And then I didn't really think about it again until last year when I was in Chicago for a weekend and heard that the White

Castle a few blocks away from our hotel was now serving the Impossible Burgers. And I was with Today Explained engineer Afim the Dream Shapiro at like two in the morning. And I said, Afim, you want to go get the Impossible Burgers at White Castle? And Afim was like, sure. And we went. And that's about when I realized, damn, this meatless meat thing is really becoming a thing. And it is. It's White Castle, but also Red Robin, Carl's Jr., Del Taco. Then on Monday, Burger King announced plans to have every one of its locations across the country serving Impossible Burgers by the end of the year. And Beyond Meat, the maker of the other big meatless meat out there, is expected to go public tomorrow. Its likely valuation? Over $1 billion.

Tamar Haspel has been on the meat beat for The Washington Post. We started with The Impossible. The Impossible Burger is made by a company called Impossible Foods. It comes shrink-wrapped, and it looks like raw meat. There's a chain here called Dave & Buster's that tends to sort of load things up. Cheese and special sauce. I think it had over 1,300 calories, whereas at other chains, it's more geared toward a health-conscious customer and not so loaded up. It has vegetables on it, and it doesn't come with

French fries. And this other company, Beyond Meat, with like the over a billion dollar IPO, are they doing things differently? Do they have any advantages over Impossible Foods? Sure, they do. I don't believe Impossible Foods is available at retail for you and me to buy and cook at home, but Beyond Burger is, and you can get it at Whole Foods and a number of other places. I've had that one too, and I will say that I think that the Impossible Burger is a more convincing substitute, but I think they're both reasonable substitutes once you put them on a bun with accoutrement and put it on a plate. I think it's high time we establish how exactly this

stuff is made. I think when my friend first told me like, hey, we got to go try this Impossible Burger, she said it's like they figured out how to make like beets bleed. I don't know if that's accurate, but I'd love to find out. The Impossible Burger bleeds, and I've seen it bleed on video. I will tell you the two that I tried did not bleed. But one of the ways they accomplished this, and this has been somewhat controversial, is with a soy-based heme. The stuff that comes out of meat when you cook it is myoglobin, which is very closely related to hemoglobin. So this is imitating hemoglobin, but they're using a genetically modified yeast to make that. And of course, that has made the antennae go up on people

who are suspicious about genetic modification in general. And that carries connotations that a lot of people are not really comfortable with. To be clear, this is not like lab-grown meat that you've heard about. Like meat that was grown in a lab that didn't hurt an animal but is still animal-based? Yeah, they're two very different things. So what we see on the market right now is actually plants that have been processed into something beef-like. The thing that they're working on, lab-grown meat, actually starts with animal cells and gets cultured in the lab in a growth medium that mimics an animal. And those cells do what cells do, which is reproduce. It's not available anywhere yet. It's a very challenging technical process. There are some things that make it really difficult to do at any kind of reasonable price point. Right now, you know, you're looking at thousands of dollars a pound.

But yes, that is going to be indistinguishable from meat because it's going to be actual meat. It just won't involve animals except for those few cells that you begin with. Do you remember the first time you bit into an Impossible Burger, Tamar? Sure, because it was like last week. There's this local chain called Not Your Average Joe's. My husband and I went up to one near us, and it was served with mozzarella cheese and sort of a pesto, and it was delicious. It was a bona fide burger experience. Now, if you take a little piece of it off and eat it just by itself, you can definitely detect planty flavors.

It's not going to compete with, like, the burger at the Corner Bistro in New York, the big, medium, rare burger where the beef flavor is really what it's about. But in fast food burgers and in a lot of fast casual restaurant burgers, the flavor of the beef is not nearly as important as the fact that you have this charred, meaty substance with delicious things piled on. It absolutely passes that bar. I remember thinking the same thing. Like, this isn't like the juiciest, most flavorful burger I've ever had in my life. But if you compare it to like a Big Mac

or something, this is at least as good as that, if not better. Right. I want to go try this because I'm really interested how this works on a fast food menu and what it tastes like. But on the other hand, it makes me a really crappy assessor of how good it is because you really have to ask the people who eat these things frequently. And so have you asked people who eat these things frequently? I have asked a couple of people who eat these things frequently. People who eat these things all the time and are given the Whopper with an impossible burger have no idea that they're not eating the standard issue Whopper. It's a very, very good facsimile.

And who is like the market for these? Because I mean, I don't imagine there's a ton of vegetarians pulling up to a Burger King on a daily basis anyway. Well, that's the crux of the biscuit here, because whether this is going to have a positive impact on the environment depends entirely on what people are eating the Impossible Burger instead of. My husband and I went out for a burger when we would have been very unlikely to go out for a burger under other circumstances. We went out specifically to try this, and I think a lot of people are in that same boat. They're very curious about this.

You know, vegetarians are trying it because a lot of them have a soft spot for the taste of a burger, and this gives them that taste and that experience without actually eating meat. But for this to do the thing that it's being touted as a substitute for something that is ecologically questionable, people who have to eat it instead of meat. And I don't know that we know yet whether people are doing that. Right now, it's a complete novelty.

And I think it's too early to say who's eating it and what they're eating it instead of. I also think that it'll change as this goes more and more mainstream and people become accustomed to seeing a plant-based alternative that tastes good in standard issue burger clothing. I kind of want to go to Not Your Average Joe's now. When you went,

did you ask the owner or the manager or whatever when you were there, like, who's been ordering this thing? I did, actually. Not at Not Your Average Joe's, but when I was in Miami. There's a local chain there called Carrot Express. Of course, Carrot Express caters to a health-oriented clientele, so they're not probably going to get big old carnivores coming in on a regular basis. And I said, you know, are people doing it for their own health? Are they doing it for environmental reasons? And she said to me, this is Miami.

Nobody cares about the environment. Oh, Florida. How much does it cost? I remember it being pretty cheap at White Castle. At one restaurant I saw, and I can't remember which one it was, there was like a dollar surcharge above the other burger price. And there are a couple places where it's quite pricey. But as this becomes more mainstream, I expect that to change. Do you have any sense of why like fast food restaurants might be adding it if they might have to charge a surcharge? It might not be the most gangbusters business initiative. menu, which could bring in a clientele that you didn't have before, why wouldn't you do it?

We should make a date to talk a year from now and see what's happened, because it's going to be super interesting to see the kind of acceptance this gets among, you know, everyday meat eaters. I'm putting it in the calendar now. All right. All right, good. Mayday 2020. No matter what goes down that day, you and I are going to talk. We're going to talk meat.

Or we're going to talk the absence of meat. That's right, one or the other. After the break, the main course. Can meatless meat make the world a better place? This is Today Explained. So here's the deal. The last time kiwi co was sponsoring the show i told you guys a story of this whale project they sent me and i was thinking who would be great for this whale project and i gave it to my six-year-old neighbor jackson around his birthday i left it on his stoop and then i never heard anything about it ever again.

So when KiwiCo was last sponsoring the show, I finally asked his parents, hey, did you ever get that KiwiCo project I left on your stoop for Jackson? And they were like, no, never saw it. Which made me believe, whoa, KiwiCo projects are so desirable that like within minutes of me leaving this on my neighbor's stoop at 7 a.m., someone stole it. But what I found out later from my neighbors is that they already had a KiwiCo subscription, and they did in fact get the whale project. They just didn't realize it was a gift from me, and Jackson loved it. KiwiCo is offering today, Explained listeners, the chance to try them out

for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects for kids of all ages, visit kiwico.com slash explained. That is K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained. Tamar, I feel like there are three reasons why people might want to eat this stuff. There's nutrition, there's environmental impact, and then, of course, animal welfare. Can we start with nutrition? Is the meatless meat healthier? Nah. So I looked at the nutritional profile of the Impossible Burger versus beef.

The Impossible Burger has somewhat less saturated fat, and the people who are in the saturated fat is important camp will say, well, that's a win. It has somewhat less protein, and the people who are in the protein is important camp will say, well, that's a loss. But all in all, I would say there's not enough to choose between them to say that this is going to have any impact on human health. What it can do, however, is it can be like the chicken Caesar salad. It has the word salad in it, so people think it's good for you. But when you look at the stats, it's got, you know, 1,400 calories and all this saturated fat from the dressing, not to mention tons of salt. Because, of course, all the calories come from dressing and croutons.

And everybody knows you can't eat dressing and croutons for lunch, you know, that health halo can extend to the cheese, the special sauce, the french fries, even the milkshake. It's easy to get a sense that this is better for you when it's not really. How about the environment? Does it actually do a better job there? I was told initially when I tried this that it took a ton of time in the lab to produce these burgers. I wonder if that outweighs the environmental impact of harvesting meat. Yeah, it took a lot. And I don't know how they amortize the R&D into the environmental cost of the burger itself.

But I've seen one life cycle analysis of greenhouse gases done for the Beyond Burger. It was done by researchers, I believe, at Michigan. And they found that the Beyond Burger had 10% of the greenhouse gas impact of beef. Now, this will bring the beef people out to point out that all of the life cycle analyses of beef don't include the ecosystem services that cattle can perform if they're grazed properly. So we can go down the rabbit hole of enteric methane and sequestered carbon in grasslands. Or we can say that it's probably a significant greenhouse gas win. It's going to be a probably for now because we have not seen an evaluation of the Impossible Burger. Technically, the jury's out. But enteric methane from cattle is a really big hit.

Chicken and pork have a much, much lower greenhouse gas impact than beef because neither chickens nor pigs have that enteric methane. My guess is that these burgers are going to be someplace in the same, certainly, order of magnitude as chicken and pork. They might be a little better, but it's kind of an important point to make that from a strictly environmental perspective, chicken and pork are way better than beef. So substituting chicken or pork for beef is nearly as meaningful a greenhouse gas impact as substituting one of these veg-based burgers. And then I guess the most obvious argument in favor of the impossible burger or beyond meat and meatless meat broadly is that no animals had to

die to make your sandwich. That's right. I think that the way animals are treated in our industrialized agricultural system has rightly caused a great deal of concern, especially pigs. It's certainly reasonable to be concerned about the welfare of animals in our system. It's reasonable, but do you think enough people actually care about animals in that way to stop eating meat? I think people do care, but again, there's a difference between compassion that is genuine and being willing to pay more for something. If you're a working mom and you're trying to feed your family something that doesn't take an hour and a half to make, that your kids are going to eat, and that fits into your budget, you might not have the luxury to care about these things. I've also heard from a lot of people who say, I want everything in

the grocery store to be okay for me to buy, and I want our regulatory system and our agricultural system to make sure that that's the case. And I get that perspective also because, I mean, who has the bandwidth to try and understand how this pig versus that pig was treated in the supermarket and tried to decode these labels? I mean, I do it for a living and sometimes I can't tell. You can't expect people to have the bandwidth for this. So we've got, you know, Del Taco, which, you know, for my money is the superior

of the two major fast food Mexican restaurants. You had to get that in. I had to. We got Burger King. We got the White Castle. Will it be just like a huge game changer

if a company like McDonald's signs up for this? I would be willing to bet that McDonald's is going to sign up for some kind of plant-based meat substitute, and I'll even put a time on it within the next six months. You want to take that bet? Sure. What are we betting? An Impossible Burger? Yeah, Impossible Burger when we're both in the same place at the same time. Deal. Let's do it. Loser buys. Six months. Yeah. And I have no insider information. This is a wild ass guess.

But I think that so many other chains are jumping on this that you know McDonald's has to be looking very, very hard at it. And if that were to happen, do you think it would get people to care more? No. No, I don't think it'll get people to care more. But what it does do is demonstrate, I think, the way we get a better food system because changes aren't going to necessarily be consumer driven. We've seen that with McDonald's on cage-free eggs, for example. A lot of these big corporations don't want to be the bad guy in this scenario. They don't want to be the lowest common denominator beef and eggs and chicken. And so they step up their game. If, say, McDonald's introduces this in six months, like you said, and then I have to buy you an Impossible Burger.

That's right. If they introduce it at the exact same price point as, say, whatever their quarter pounder is right now, let's say it's $3.50. And you can just say quarter pounder Impossible. Would people still choose the meat option or would they choose the meatless option? So you want me to haul out my crystal ball, don't you? Billy Crystal. I would suspect that as soon as they rolled out the Impossible Burger, they would see a big bump in Impossible Burgers that did not cannibalize their beef sales. And then after we get past the novelty phase of this, McDonald's will probably bring in a few

new customers, and some of their customers will opt for the Impossible Burger for a variety of reasons. It might not be the environment. It might be that they have the perception that it's better for them. So if you are an animal rights activist who also really cares about the environment and looks at Impossible Meat as like the last bastion of hope for saving the cows of America and the world, what you're really hoping for isn't that McDonald's introduces the Impossible Burger in six months, but that McDonald's takes the initiative to replace its entire meat menu, its beef-based menu, with Impossible Meat.

And I think we're a long way away from that. But I don't think that it's out of the question. I don't think it's impossible. It could certainly happen. You know, we're looking at time horizons that are basically blips as far as, you know, climate change is concerned. And when my kids are my age, it may be that we have meat substitutes that replace almost all of the beef that we're eating. I certainly wouldn't bet against it. Tamara Haspel writes a monthly food column called Unearthed for the Washington Post.

When she's not doing that, she farms oysters on Cape Cod, which I guess gives the rest of us something to aspire to. I'm Sean Ramos-Viram. This is Today Explained. My favorite burger is the stuffed portobello mushroom situation over at Shake Shack. Watch out for the exploding cheese. Irene Noguchi is the show's executive producer. My favorite burger is the fried chicken sandwich from Naked Lunch in San Francisco, which when you bite

into the acme bread, the buttermilk coleslaw just drips down over the chicken and into your mouth and it's just so good. Noam Hassenfeld makes the show. Love my mom's homemade turkey burgers. So does Amina Alsadi.

Any burger that's so smothered in toppings, I don't have to actually taste the beef. And Bridget McCarthy. Well, I can't eat hamburgers with a clear conscience anymore because my husband said, the single biggest thing we can do to fight climate change is to stop eating beef. Thanks, Dan.

Britt Hansen's been helping out this week. Five guys, but I also love a fancy burger. Siona Petros is our intrepid intern. Buffalo Bella from Hip City Veg in D.C. Why? Because it's amazing. It's all vegan and spicy, and it doesn't feel like it's vegan. And as you heard up top, Afim Shapiro's the engineer.

My favorite burger is the Kirkland Signature Quarter Pound Ground Beef Hamburger Patty. Frozen. Thanks to my pal Amy Pearl for bringing our past conversation back to life today. Let's see. It's been so long since I've had a burger. Amy makes a show at WNYC called 10 Things That Scare Me. Check it out. Burgers scare the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, but he makes music for our show anyway. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

There's got to be one place that's like still serving up the meat, right? Arby's, we have the meat. Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today. KiwiCo is on a mission to empower kids to not just make a project, but to make a difference. KiwiCo is offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects for kids of all ages, go to kiwico.com slash explained.