Worse, the demand for meat keeps growing. Worldwide, it has nearly doubled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by 2050. Already, the single greatest cause of deforestation in the Amazon is cattle ranching, accounting for 80 percent of newly lost forest. “Razing forests to graze cattle,” writes Tad Friend in a brilliant piece for The New Yorker, “turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.”

Clearly, any food that can disrupt this planet-threatening trend is a welcome development, but are the new meat substitutes truly feasible replacements for meat? At my house, reports have been varied. The Beyond Burger and the Pure Farmland breakfast sausage were a hit all the way around: All three generations at the table pronounced them delicious. (“This is a good piece of meat,” my father-in-law remarked, unprovoked, before learning his burger’s true provenance.) Beyond’s bratwurst and Pure Farmland’s meatballs earned family scores that ranged from zero to 10. Pure’s “plant-based protein starters” crumbled nicely during browning but remained a disconcerting shade of red. Even so, the casserole I made with it tasted no different from the same casserole made with regular breakfast sausage. Beyond’s “beefy crumbles,” by contrast, were truly enjoyed by no one in my house, although the college junior ate the leftover casserole for lunch at least twice, apparently preferring even unappealing leftovers to cooking something for himself.

The Impossible Burger cannot be distinguished from a real hamburger by half the people who eat it in a taste test, according to Mr. Friend, but they are not yet sold in grocery stores here, so I took the college junior and a 12-year-old family friend to Burger King for a true taste test. The 12-year-old ordered her burgers the same way she eats all burgers: just bread and “meat.” The college student ordered his with the works. After blindfolding them, I gave each one a bite of both a regular Whopper and an Impossible Whopper. Neither one was fooled. After only one bite, they both correctly identified which burger was which. Then they both ate both burgers. The Impossible Whopper might not taste exactly like a traditional Whopper, it turns out, but it tasted perfectly good to them.

Most recently my whole family tried the Impossible Burger at Hopdoddy, a local burger bar where the bun and toppings — and the price — are several steps up from fast food. My husband and his father chose the Impossible Cheesesteak, while everyone else got a regular Impossible Burger. We all enjoyed our meal, but my future daughter-in-law, a vegetarian, pointed out something that the rest of the family, none of whom are regular consumers of old-school vegetarian burgers, had noticed: The Impossible Burger doesn’t fall apart in your hands. “I almost always end up finishing a veggie burger with a fork,” she said.

But my elderly father-in-law’s assessment of the new foods is what has most inspired me. In the beginning of this experiment he was always astonished when I’d tell him what he’d just eaten for dinner: “Really? But it’s so good!” By now, two months in, there’s nothing remarkable about the news that what he’s eating is something he’s never eaten before. It tastes good, and to him that’s all that matters.