OPINION: Fake food, synthetic food, plant-based food – call it what you like – is sending a frisson of fear through the farming world. No one knows quite what its effect will be, but they know it can't be good for the industries that underpin our national wealth.

We are warned not to be blasé, to remember what happened to wool, to beef up (literally) our international meat marketing, to go organic, that the tide is turning against farming livestock on health, environmental and welfare grounds, and to take note of powerful synthetic food investors as Richard Branson and Bill Gates – even our own Peter Jackson has been mentioned.

The makers of such meat claim it is better for our health, isn't contaminated, is better for the environment and doesn't mean an animal has to die. It sounds formidable. I must admit I was a tad concerned.

But then I came across an article by British food writer and healthy food researcher Joanna Blythman. She has investigated the ingredients of the Impossible Burger, the first fake food product to be launched in the US.

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Here's what's in the burger's synthetic meat: water, textured wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, natural flavors, leghemoglobin (soy), yeast extract, salt, soy protein isolate, konjac gum, xanthan gum, vitamins and zinc.

This is what Blythman says: "Let's start with its first ingredient by weight: water. Suffice it to say that no quality product uses it as a bulk ingredient.

"Textured wheat protein, potato protein and soya protein isolate are all powdery derivatives, extracted from their eponymous food using hi-tech chemical and physical methods that are veiled in commercial secrecy. Coconut oil has a trendy 'superfood' ring to it, except that here it isn't raw, so the inherent nutrition of the nut has been heavily compromised by the harsh industrial refining process to which it has been subjected.

Konjac and xanthan are industrial hydrocolloid gums. (The latter was designed to thicken the drilling mud in the oil industry.) Their role here is to absorb all that water and glue together ingredients that wouldn't naturally bond.

"Then we come to the flavourings. My research has left me unconvinced that any man-made flavourings merit the epithet 'natural'. Companies use man-made flavourings to replace true flavours that have been destroyed by the rigours of the manufacturing process, and also to mask unpleasant flavours. Yeast extract and salt have long been used to improve the lamentable taste profile of 'vegetarian meats'. "While a health-enhancing spectrum of vitamins naturally occurs in real beef, this product is 'fortified' with the synthetic versions that are added to nutrient-light breakfast cereals to make them seem healthier than they really are.

"And what of the most arcane ingredient in this faux meat? Soy leghemoglobin (SLH) is a vat-grown, genetically engineered form of the heme iron found in the root nodules of soybean plants. We're told that it gives the fake meat a 'bloody', meat-like taste and colour. US Food and Drug Administration's view is 'the current arguments at hand. individually and collectively, were not enough to establish the safety of SLH for consumption'."

Blythman sums up: "So that's the Impossible Burger: water, protein powders, glues, factory flavourings, flavour enhancers, synthetic vitamins – all signifiers of low-grade, ultra-processed food – and a novel ingredient that has no proven track record of safety."

Have we anything to fear? Not yet.

Jon Morgan is the editor of NZ Farmer.