While the Impossible Burger is still trying to match the flavor of beef, in certain respects it’s begun to improve upon the original. Celeste Holz-Schietinger, one of the company’s top scientists, told me, “Our burger is already more savory and umami than beef, and in our next version”—a 3.0 burger will be released in a few months—“we want to increase the buttery flavor and caramelization over real beef.”

Richard Brown said, “Early on, we had two goals that were fully aligned: to be identical to a burger from a cow, and to be much better than a burger from a cow. Now they’re somewhat at odds, and we talk about the chocolate-doughnut problem. What if what people really like in a burger is what makes it taste like a chocolate doughnut, so you keep increasing those qualities—and suddenly you’re not making a burger at all?”

Rob Rhinehart thinks that Brown should double down on doughnut. Five years ago, Rhinehart created Soylent, a wan, nutritive sludge that allows you to keep playing Mortal Kombat as you replenish; he now runs MarsBio, an accelerator for companies working on bioreactors and engineered microalgae. “There’s all these comical efforts to make new food look like the old food,” he said. “I want Impossible Foods to do something totally new. Alien meat! Or a burger that tastes like a human—a brain burger!”

Brown is drawn to such flights of fancy. He told me, “There’s reason to doubt that the handful of animals we domesticated thousands of years ago provide the most delicious meats possible. We could choose a meat flavor better than beef or chicken or pork, and call it a brontosaurus burger—or anything you like. It would be super fun to make übermeat!” He added, regretfully, “But it has to be a side project, for now, because the more sure way to crush the chicken producers is to make the best version of chicken.”

One morning in June, Impossible’s chief science officer, David Lipman, took me through the test kitchen. As nine scientists in lab coats and hairnets looked on, I drank a glass of Impossible Milk, which had the consistency, color, fat, and calcium content of dairy milk. The only issue was that it tasted like water. “We have to do more work to give it dairy flavor,” Lipman said, optimistically.

The flavor scientist Laura Kliman made me a tasty fish paella. The recipe for Impossible’s anchovy-flavored broth is about eighty per cent similar to its recipe for the Impossible Burger. “Once we cracked the code on meat flavor,” Kliman said, “if you change a few of the ratios and ingredients, it’s not that hard to get fish or pork or chicken.”

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Next up was Impossible Steak Flavor—a beaker full of red juice. A scientist named Ian Ronningen poured it into a saucepan, turned on the gas, and began swirling the juice with a metal spatula. As it reduced and turned brown, he said, “Now you’re getting a change of flavor.”

His colleague Allen Henderson softly confided, “We feel that we have sufficiently recapitulated the multiple chemistries of cooked beef.”

Ronningen bent over the bubbling goo, wafted the steam toward his nose, and said, “I’m starting to get that really wonderful fat note.”

“Ah, yes,” Lipman said, doing some wafting. “There’s an animalic quality. It’s more musky than a burger.”

“And we get these grizzled pieces, just like a steak,” Ronningen said. “If we have a deflavored protein, which we’re good at, we can take this flavor and put it on a textured protein base.” He took the pan off the heat and we dipped pieces of bread into the gritty juice. It was literally the sizzle, not the steak—but it was delicious.

Brown told me it was “time to double down on steak, for mission reasons.” He planned to use another chunk of the three hundred million dollars he’d just raised to accelerate his R. & D., hiring ninety more scientists. Small teams would immediately begin work on chicken nuggets and melty cheese for pizza. He also planned projects to spin proteins into structural fibres, and to pursue a general methodology for stripping plant proteins of their off-colors and off-flavors.

After years of focus, Brown was beginning to return to his preferred mode of swashbuckling inquiry. He yearns to pursue a project that gripped him early in Impossible’s development: using RuBisCo, the most abundant protein in the world, as his staple ingredient. RuBisCo is an enzyme used for photosynthesis that’s found in the leaves of plants like soy and alfalfa; by Brown’s calculations, it would enable him to meet the world’s protein requirements using just three per cent of the earth’s land. But no one produces RuBisCo at scale: to do so requires processing huge quantities of leaves, which tend to rot in storage, and then isolating the enzyme from indigestible cellulose. However, Brown said, “for a year, our prototype burgers used RuBisCo, and it worked functionally better than any other protein, making a juicy burger.” He folded a napkin smaller and smaller. “We will build a system for producing protein from leaves.”

Though Brown longs to transmute leaves into loaves and fishes, the more immediate concern is the drive-through at fast-food restaurants. Chipotle and Arby’s have declared that they have no plans to serve plant-based meats, and Arby’s went so far as to develop a mocking rejoinder: the “marrot,” a carrot made out of turkey. Other chains have lingering concerns. One is price: Impossible’s burgers, like Beyond Meat’s products, cost about a dollar more than the meats they’re intended to replace. At White Castle, the Impossible Slider sells for a dollar ninety-nine, one of the highest prices on the menu. “Honestly, that’s the biggest barrier to the new product for college kids, and for our customers who can only afford to pay three dollars for a meal,” Kim Bartley, White Castle’s chief marketing officer, said.

Early on, Brown believed that his burger would be cheaper than ground beef by 2017. His original pitch claimed, in a hand-waving sort of way, that because wheat and soy cost about seven cents a pound, while ground beef cost a dollar-fifty, “plant based alternatives can provide the nutritional equivalent of ground beef at less than 5% of the cost.” But establishing a novel supply chain, particularly for heme, proved expensive. The company has increased its yield of the molecule more than sevenfold in four years, and, Brown said, “we’re no longer agonizing over the impact of heme on our cost.” He now hopes to equal the price of ground beef by 2022.

Plant-based meat won’t become a shopping-cart staple unless it achieves price parity, and some observers worry about how long that’s taking. Dave Friedberg, the founder of the Production Board, an incubator for alternative-protein companies, noted the expense of heme and texturized soy protein. “I’m concerned that we’re never going to get to the price of ground beef,” Friedberg told me. “And to sell people a product that’s not meat, and charge more for it, won’t shift the world to a new agricultural system.”

Shifting the world to a new agricultural system is not part of a fast-food chain’s business model. So the chains question whether plant-based will prove to be a trend, like spicy food, or merely a fad, like rice bowls. Lisa Ingram, the White Castle C.E.O., told me she was agnostic on animal ag. Eradicating it by 2035 “is Pat’s view of the world,” she said, “and every customer gets to decide if they agree. If they do, then in 2035 we’ll sell the Impossible Slider and the Impossible Chicken Slider and the Impossible Fish Slider. If they don’t, then we’re going to sell the Impossible Slider as part of our menu just as long as people want to buy it.”