Best Food Writing 2015 (3 page)

For Brown, gluten was out. Also becoming less popular with consumers was phytoestrogen-heavy soy, the other mainstay of both veggie burgers and Beyond Chicken. But top food scientists had labored for years to come up with palatable soy- and gluten-free meat substitutes, with no luck. Plants just didn't want to be meat.

It was time for a paradigm shift. In the fall of 2013, Brown hired Tim Geistlinger, a biotech rock star who had been working with the Gates Foundation to develop antimalarial drugs and a yeast that makes clean jet fuel out of sugar. Geistlinger fits the Beyond Meat mold: brainiac science geek who bikes on the beach every night and recently completed his first Tough Mudder. (“I was one of the only non-meat-eaters on my team,” Geistlinger says, “but with access to compounds like these, it's a no-brainer.”)

Geistlinger, chef Dave Anderson, and the other Beyond Meat scientists began a series of marathon sessions in the lab, trying to do what cattle do: transform short plant proteins into long, succulent fibers. Their legume of choice was the yellow pea, whose protein is readily available—both to the body and in the marketplace. Pea starch is used by the food industry as a natural thickener for everything from sauces to deli meats. In the past, after the starch was isolated, the protein was discarded. Win-win.

Pea protein is the new darling of the no-soy health-food set, but it has a powdery mouthfeel and no structural integrity, so it has never starred in its own production. “Without fibers you can have something that's hard and dry or mushy and wet,” Geistlinger says. “They're fairly mutually exclusive.” Early last year, Beyond Meat released a pea-based
product, Beyond Beef Crumble, that approximated the look and feel of cooked ground beef and made a decent taco filling, but it wouldn't hold together and had no chew. Geistlinger decided he had to create fibers from the material—that is, do something to make them line up and link together to mimic muscle.

For a while the team got nowhere. Geistlinger kept tweaking the chemistry—“taking shots on goal in a constructive way,” as he puts it—and Anderson kept playing around with the results. Nothing. “Early on we thought we were close,” Anderson remembers. “So I brought in an In-N-Out burger. We tried the In-N-Out and it was just chew, chew, chew, and then we tried ours. I was like, ‘Wow, we're not even close.'”

Eventually, Geistlinger suggested trying something radical—the big Beast Burger secret, which involves a certain combination of temperature, pressure, timing, and chemistry that he could tell me about only in veiled terms. “The food scientists had been arguing to go in one direction, because that's how things had always been done,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, this is a different protein. I think we should push this in the opposite direction.' They were like, ‘Why would you do that? You can't do that.' And I said, ‘Well, let's just give it a shot.' And sure enough, boom. It was immediately apparent. We tasted it right when it came out, and we just went, ‘Wow! We've never had that before.' It was awesome. You could see the fibers. You could feel them. And it didn't get dry in your mouth! All these problems that we'd had just went away. Later that day, we met with our CFO and I said, ‘Here, try this,' and he said, ‘Holy shit! What is that?' And I said, ‘That's the same stuff. We just changed two things.' It turned out much, much better than we ever thought it was going to be.”

To perfect the nutritional formulation, they worked with Brendan Brazier, a two-time Canadian ultramarathon champion who created the Vega line of vegan performance foods. After playing around with the burger, Brazier became a convert. He liked the taste, but he loved the 24 grams of protein, 4 grams of fiber, and 0 milligrams of cholesterol in every burger, which left beef (19 grams of protein, 0 grams of fiber, and 80 milligrams of cholesterol) far behind.

“It's so nutrient dense,” Brazier told me. “I plan on using several per week.”

The Beast Burger will have its coming-out party in select Whole Foods in January. Is it as delicious as a quarter-pound of well-marbled, inch-thick USDA Choice? Hell no. Good ground beef, lovingly grilled at home and served piping hot, packs a juicy succulence that this Beast lacks. In flavor and texture, the current Beast reminds me of the Salisbury steak of my youth—not exactly something to celebrate, but not terrible, either. “It's a different kind of chew,” Anderson admits. “To me it's a better chew. A beef burger is very gristly.”

The prototype Beast was so packed with micronutrients that it smelled like a Vitamin Shoppe kiosk. Taste testers made it clear that they'd gladly sacrifice a soupçon of supplement for a blast of beefiness. The new iteration is good enough that New York Mets captain David Wright, who stopped eating red meat years ago after noticing that it made him feel sluggish, will endorse it—part of Beyond Meat's aim to woo red-blooded athletes—and it's only going to get better.

“Why just look at soy and pea protein?” Brown says. “Why not look at every plant and see what has the best amino acid profiles and what can be produced the most cost-effectively? It turns out there are a lot of things you can get protein from.”

“What's exciting to me is that we now have a completely different set of proteins that we can tune,” says Geistlinger. “We're looking at yeasts and algae, which both have amino acid profiles that are superior to beef. We made something that used yeast from the brewery across the street. It came out like bratwurst!”

The issue of Frankenfoods raises its head. When I told Geistlinger that I was skeptical of processed foods, especially ones produced by novel techniques, he pointed out that Beyond Meat uses no artificial ingredients and employs the most time-tested of cooking methods (heat and pressure). “Our process is gentler than making pretzels,” he said. “Getting that browning on a pretzel requires chemically changing the bonds in the molecules. That's more harsh than what we do.”

Grilling meat also involves chemical changes, of course, but ones that have been tested for many generations. Mark Bittman, for one, is going to stay off the faux-meat bandwagon for now. “I think we have to evaluate each of these products individually,” he told me. “Some fake meats can easily pass for ‘real' meat, but in many cases that's because
‘real' meat has been so degraded by the industrial production of animals. Still: the best direction for most of us is to eat unprocessed food of all types; fake meat hardly qualifies.”

Health aside, some of my friends were just weirded out. Why turn plant proteins into burgers and dogs? Why not just eat them as peas and soybeans and seeds? To which I say: taco, chimichanga, empanada, crepe, pierogi, wonton, gyoza, stuffed roti, pupusa, pastie, pig in a blanket, croque monsieur, pastrami on rye. Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you'd better make it convenient.

You're still wondering about that shit-burger, aren't you? Here's what I know. Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teams up with the FDA to check for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the meat sold in American retail outlets. In 2010, the most recent year for which data has been released, they purchased 5,280 samples across 11 states and tested four states' for fecal bacteria. They found it in 90 percent of ground beef and ground turkey, 88 percent of pork chops, and 95 percent of chicken breasts.

If this shocks you, then clearly you haven't been watching YouTube videos of slaughterhouses in action, where the high-speed slicing and dicing of 300 to 400 head of cattle an hour saturates the air with a fine fecal mist. Really, the amazing thing is that 10 percent of our ground beef—even the organic stuff, which is largely processed in the same manner—manages to escape contamination, and that anyone eats it at all.

The part that really terrifies Meatworld? Millennials are already bailing on beef.

Every generation skews toward vegetarianism in high school and college, only to regress as life gets more complicated. But the newest graduates aren't coming back. “We've definitely seen interest in vegetarian as well as vegan food rising steadily on college and corporate campuses, but so has interest in eating less meat in general,” says Maisie Ganzler, VP of strategy for Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides food services to many top universities and corporations, including Duke, Johns Hopkins, Yahoo, and Google. If you want to know
what America's next generation of thinkers is eating, just ask Bon Appétit. “For us, vegan isn't about niche appeal,” Ganzler says. “We try to offer a lot of vegan options in the cafés for our high-tech clients. Millennials are more meat conscious, and vegan appeals to a variety of growing populations.”

As vegetarianism goes mainstream, factory meat's one advantage—that it's cheap—disappears. “There aren't any obstacles to us underpricing beef as we scale up,” Brown says. “The industry is large and established, yet it's facing huge cost challenges. The price slope for beef since 2010 has been pretty steep. We're already competitive with certain grades.”

There's no reason that Beyond Meat can't have extruders all over the world churning out affordable protein patties and even a plant-based “raw” ground beef that's red, pliable, and designed for cooking. Once that happens, Brown won't let U.S. supermarkets slot him into the hippie aisle anymore. “As soon as we have our ground beef ready, they need to put it next to the animal protein.”

He'll have to catch Impossible Foods, founded by Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown and also backed by Bill Gates, which in October revealed a raw “ground beef” featuring bioengineered “plant blood” designed to approximate hemoglobin. The patty turns brown and savory as it cooks. Although the costs are not yet competitive and the flavor is a work in progress, Impossible Foods expects to have its meat going head-to-head with ground beef next year. “Livestock is an outdated technology,” says Patrick Brown.

Considering the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem, and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. It will be a textbook case of disruptive technology: overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast. Our grandchildren will look back on our practice of using caged animals to assemble proteins with the same incredulousness that we apply to our ancestors' habit of slaughtering whales to light their homes.

I was thinking about that on the kind of crackling fall day when absolutely anything feels possible, back at my neighbor's farm, eyeing my
four-legged friend. The leaves on the Vermont hills were a shimmering metallic curtain of bronze and rust, the sky limitless, the pasture speckled with goldenrod. A week of daily Beast Burgers had left me wildly energized and clearheaded, and I liked the feeling. “I don't know what I ever saw in you,” I told him. He blinked back at me and uncorked a fragrant burp.

Growing a $30 Million Egg
Growing a $30 Million Egg

B
Y
E
MILY
K
AISER
T
HELIN

From
Food & Wine

          
Writing about another high-tech food solution that seems straight out of science fiction, food writer/editor Emily Thelin, who's also a trained chef, spins a narrative that bridges her vegan-friendly home base in Berkeley, California, with the futuristic wonks of nearby Silicon Valley.

When I first met my husband, Josh, at a July 4th potluck barbecue in 2009, I had a strict rule against dating vegetarians—too much time spent defending my carnivorous ways. So I was crestfallen when the dashing stranger with whom I had been getting on so well suddenly plopped a veggie dog on the grill. I sighed and pulled out my bone-in rib eye. But as that steak cooked, with smoke swirling and fat spattering, Josh never flinched. When I carved into the medium-rare meat, he even asked how it tasted.

He explained that he'd never renounced meat—he'd just never eaten it. Ever. Since before he was born, his parents have eschewed meat and eggs. His father, Jay Thelin, cofounded the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street in San Francisco in 1966. Jay was a rigorous idealist (he hoped LSD could expand the collective consciousness and end the war in Vietnam). Later, he discovered a spiritual path that convinced him that meat and eggs (and drugs and alcohol) hindered access to the divine. Out of a mix of habit, loyalty and pride, Josh has remained a vegetarian his entire life. He's always been curious about omelets and steaks—just not enough to try them.

When we started dating, it felt good to eat more vegetarian meals. If I was missing meat, I ordered a roast chicken or braised pork shoulder when Josh and I ate out. Eggs became our only point of contention. On weekend mornings and at the end of a long day, I crave an omelet. Josh valiantly tries to win me over with his scrambled tofu, but, well, come on. Maybe I've succumbed to Francophile propaganda, but omelets, soufflés and other classics of egg cookery have always represented the ne plus ultra of independent adult living to me. And I make good omelets. When we got married, we joked that our lives would be perfect if only someone would build us a plant-based egg.

Last year, we learned that our absurdist fantasy was coming true. Big investors in Silicon Valley put $30 million into a start-up called Hampton Creek, where R&D scientists are building a vast database of legumes and grains (including often-overlooked ones like the Canadian yellow pea and sorghum) to determine which plant proteins can mimic—indeed, outperform—the properties of eggs.

The fact that the company's founder, Josh Tetrick, is vegan has nothing to do with it. A former lawyer who'd worked in international development, Tetrick started Hampton Creek in 2011 to make sustainable food choices easy. “I fully support free-range eggs,” he says. “But my dad won't buy them because they cost more. We're looking for better and cheaper alternatives.” Industrially produced eggs seemed an obvious first target, he said, because of their many inefficiencies: food-safety scares, animal cruelty, high production costs.

But how do you top an egg? As Auguste Escoffier wrote in
Le Guide Culinaire
“Of all the products put to use by the art of cookery, not one is so fruitful of variety, so universally liked, and so complete in itself as the egg.” Eggs poach, scramble and fry. They emulsify dressings, structure cakes, even clarify wine. There are vegan substitutes that can replicate certain facets, but can plant proteins mimic them all?

Just Scramble, Hampton Creek's whole-egg alternative, is the company's most ambitious project. As food scientist Harold McGee explains in
On Food and Cooking
, when raw, a real egg's proteins float like tiny coiled ropes in watery suspension. When cooked (or whipped), the coils unwind and collide with one another to form a three-dimensional web. This web traps the air in a soufflé, thickens the milk in a custard, or suspends the egg's own water in the curds of scrambled eggs. For
a proper scramble, a plant-egg needs to create identically elastic and moist curds at the same pace.

Hampton Creek has hired three former chefs from Chicago's avantgarde restaurant Moto who collaborate with its scientists on prototype after prototype. Their goal is to create something finer than an actual egg, with better flavor, more protein and less environmental impact. Recently, they found an iteration close to the real thing; it consists of a half-dozen ingredients, but contains no gums or hydrocolloids and nothing genetically modified. I wrangled an invitation to the facility so I could cook my husband his first omelet.

I was nervous: What if my husband just didn't like eggs? I heated an omelet pan with a dab of oil, then poured in the liquid plant-egg. It looked just like a beaten whole egg, pale yellow and perfectly smooth (it's only a coincidence—the plant strains are naturally yellow). I missed cracking egg shells one-handed, but didn't miss cleaning a whisk and bowl.

As it cooked, the plant-egg gently and slowly transformed from liquid to solid, just like a real egg. I nudged aside the cooked curds with a spatula, and the uncooked parts pooled right in. A few curds on the bottom lightly caramelized but never turned rubbery or dry. I took the pan off the heat when the omelet's center was just this side of runny. I added mushrooms I'd sautéed with garlic and white wine, shook the eggs to the edge of the pan, and then upended the omelet. Airy and elastic, it folded in on itself and slid onto the plate, a perfect package. “I can't believe how quickly it cooks,” Josh said. “Scrambled tofu takes an age.”

I took a bite. Texturally, the omelet was spot-on. Flavor-wise, it tasted a bit grassy, like olive oil. If I was judging it as an egg substitute, I might have given it a 7 or 8 out of 10.

“We'd probably give this a 5 out of 10,” one of the chefs said. “Ours will have to be better than an egg.”

One thing I've learned about tofu scramble: It's always better with cheese. I sprinkled grated cheddar on the omelet—the grassiness vanished. Now it tasted fantastic.

It may be months before Just Scramble is ready for market, but I'm happy to pass the time brushing up on omelet recipes: Escoffier's
Le Guide Culinaire
has 31 pages of egg dishes, 11 for omelets and (real) scrambles alone.