A burger made with impossible meat (photo:Beck Diefenbach/ REUTERS)

The first question I ask when I’m offered a vegan meat product is ‘but does this bleed? Like an animal would?’

If it doesn’t then, frankly, I don’t want to know.

Thankfully, California-based food company Impossible have already achieved great success by appealing to people who don’t like hurting animals but do like blood.

And now they’re developing a fish product, which hopefully means we’ll soon be able to tuck into our favourite seafood without having to feel so guilty about the degradation of the world’s oceans, and our complicity in that, our shameful apathy.




Impossible’s products are based around the molecule heme, which is found in both human and animal blood, and is apparently what makes meat taste like meat. Impossible extract heme from a soy plant then ferment it with ‘genetically engineered yeast’. You spoil us, ambassador!

According to Burger King, one of the chains which stocks Impossible products, ‘virtually no-one can tell the difference’.

A couple of times, when I was younger, my mum would try to trick my brothers and I by feeding us Linda McCartney burgers, then demanding, with a mischievous grin and a twinkle in the eye, ‘notice anything different?’

To her bitter disappointment, we would clock the difference literally immediately and jeer at her efforts to deceive us – so I’m sceptical about Burger King’s claim.

Having already succeeded in making an ‘anchovy-flavoured broth’ from plants, Impossible is now working on make fish.

‘The only way we can succeed,’ Pat Brown, the company’s chief executive, told the New York Times, ‘is to make fish from plants that is more delicious than the fish that’s strip mined from the ocean.’

An actual, real fish from the sea. Not a weird, heme-based alternative. (photo: FabioBalbi/ Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The depletion of the world’s fish resources, partly driven by overfishing, is one of the most pressing environmental concerns we face. Any attempt at reducing demand and improving this situation is to be applauded, but whether consumer’s will embrace Impossible’s fake fish remains to seen.

On the strength of their beef products, Impossible have already achieved an astronomical degree of success in the US – they’re valued at $2 billion and their products are stocked by a range of outlets including Burger King, Applebee’s and Cheesecake Factory. Here in the UK, it’s very likely that their burgers will soon be finding their way to a Burger King near you.

Impossible aside, there are a range of similar fake-meat products you can try in the UK right now to help you satisfy your ethical, vegan blood-lust. US company Beyond Meat has a beetroot burger on sale in Tesco, while restaurant chain TGI Friday has also added a ‘bleeding’ vegan burger to its menu.

One critic has suggested that appeasing people’s desire to eat flesh with fake blood alternatives is ‘like offering sex dolls to paedophiles.’ How seriously you want to take that critique is entirely up to you.



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