Two thumbs up for Beyond Meat Beast Burger

[Robin Garr]

I seared a Beyond Meat Beast Burger for lunch. In my opinion, no veggie burger yet has come this close to replicating the real thing. Eat a bite by itself, the texture is right on, and the flavor is close. Put it on a bun (or as I did, English muffin) with mustard and mayo, lettuce and tomato, and it's very hard to tell it from beef. Okay, not rare beef, but still.

Beast-burger.jpg

Beyond Meat is a fascinating company. With some very serious backers including higher-ups at Twitter and Google, they're not just trying to fascinate vegetarians and vegans but hope to come up with a credible meat alternative that just about anyone could enjoy, hoping to carve out a niche for a more sustainable popular protein. Who knows? It might happen.

It's an interesting calculus: I've read that it's very expensive, in ecological terms, to raise a cow but relatively cheap to raise the protein equivalent in plants. Those proteins are in different distributions, different volumes, etc etc etc, but nevertheless.

It reminds me why there are always potatoes on the grave of Frederick the Great: by endorsing the new-at-the-time potato he gave his people a crop that grew enough calories per acre to survive famine. [Fact check: Potatoes take half as long to grow as wheat and generate 2x-4x the calories in the same acreage.]