I hold the burger with both hands and bring it, somewhat trepidatiously, to my mouth. I commit myself to at least one bite. As I close my eyes and chew, some long dormant receptor in my mind comes alive and for a split second it’s 1986 again and I am eating a hamburger at a family cookout in Chicago.

This is the first time I’ve eaten meat in 30 years – except, this is not meat.

I open my eyes and remember that I am standing in a wine bar in San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, surrounded by other reporters, all of us sampling our first Impossible Foods plant-based burger, which is making its West Coast debut. I’m far from the only person convinced that this mixture of potato and wheat, coconut fat, Japanese yam, vegetable broth, xanthan gum, sugars and amino acids and a key protein called leghemoglobin is a dead ringer for the dead animal version of a hamburger. Three renowned chefs – Chris Cosentino, Traci Des Jardins and Tal Ronnen – are also convinced, and are here to announce that they are bringing the Impossible Burger to some of their respective eateries in California. (Chef David Chang became the first in the country to serve it this summer at New York City’s Momofuku Nishi.)

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Impossible Foods is one of many companies that are inventing meat substitutes in an effort to disrupt animal agriculture and its significant environmental footprint. Unlike the veggie burger of yore, made from lentils or beans, Impossible Foods has developed a burger that can fool even meat connoisseurs.

According to the company, the Impossible Burger uses 95% less land and 74% less water than a conventional burger. The greenhouse gas emissions generated in creating an Impossible Burger is 13% of that of a beef burger.

I’ve been reading about Impossible Foods for months and am fascinated by what its founder Pat Brown has accomplished since 2011. Brown, a long time vegan, left his dream job as a biochemistry professor at Stanford to start the company because he is so convinced that climate change cannot be mitigated unless the world cuts its reliance on animal agriculture. Brown considers animal agriculture, which accounts not just for livestock but all of the feed, land, water, transportation and energy needed to produce it, the single biggest threat to our climate. More importantly, he knew that the meat alternatives that existed at that time would never convince omnivorous diehards (like chef Cosentino, who equates most veggie burgers with hockey pucks but calls the Impossible Burger a “cravable” product) to give up the real thing.

To have a shot at converting the masses, Brown knew his burger needed authenticity. Its texture needed to closely mimic the connective tissue of beef. But more importantly, it needed, quite literally, to bleed – or at least, emit a blood-like substance. To do that, it needed heme.

Heme is the molecule in hemoglobin which carries oxygen in blood and also happens to make beef taste like beef. The good news is that the roots of soy or other legumes contain a protein called leghemoglobin that serves a similar role to that of hemoglobin in mammals (it pulls nitrogen or oxygen from the soil). The bad news is that harvesting that protein from legume roots by farming them would have been energy- and resource-intensive. So Brown and his team of scientists, engineers and chefs have figured out how to take, as journalist Rowan Jacobsen describes, “the snippet of soy DNA that codes for heme and inserting it into a standard yeast strain”.

Impossible Foods then ferments that yeast to make heme, which is what makes the Impossible Burger bleed. It’s what thrusted my taste buds back in time, convincing them that they were once again consuming the all-American food icon.

Some people get freaked out by this notion that scientists can make fake blood. If I were a meat eater, I’d be far more concerned with what comes with that bonafide cow heme. Consumer Reports recently analyzed raw meat in 300 store-bought burgers (both from conventionally-raised grain-fed cattle and grass-fed cattle) and looked for fecal-derived bacteria. And there it was, in every single sample. Even putting aside the environmental impact and ethical implications of the industrial meat complex, do you want a fake burger with fake blood or a real burger with real poop?

As I took my second and third bites, I started to wonder if eating this Impossible Burger would flip some long repressed caveman switch in my brain, making me crave meat again. But that didn’t happen. In fact, eating such a convincing imposter just made me feel weird. Not guilty. Not nauseous. Just disconcerted. I asked Pat Brown if he had a similar reaction, and he said it was a bit like the experience of drinking out of a water fountain made from a toilet.

That might sound insane, but it is an experience that he and I and millions of others who have visited San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum have all had, because he was referring to an exhibit meant to explore human perception. The water is perfectly clean tap water, but the conveyance seems wrong. Likewise, eating something that is not meat but really seems like meat, seems wrong.

It’s possible that in the near future, Impossible Foods will end up on the menu of a restaurant that I frequent, or on the shelves of my local grocer. I’d eat it, but only if I did not see more compelling options.

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But who cares if I’m ambivalent? It really doesn’t matter what I, or Pat Brown, or any other consumer who has already eschewed meat, thinks about the Impossible Burger – because we make up just 3.2% of American eaters. The eating habits of the 317 million other Americans is what Brown is targeting. To reach its mission – which venture capitalists have backed to the tune of more than $175m – Impossible Foods needs to convert not just a handful of gourmet chefs in coastal cities.

It needs to convert the line cook at your favorite greasy spoon diner, and the food services company that sells to your office cafeteria, and eventually McDonald’s, with its 36,538 outlets serving 68 million customers daily in 119 countries.

I, for one, am bullish that the meat-eating public can be sold on the Impossible Burger. The endorsement of big name chefs carries a lot of weight in our food-obsessed culture, so if this trend continues and the Impossible Burger makes its way into more marquee menus, it’s only a matter of time before it lands in the mainstream American diet.

If it happened with kale, why can’t it happen with a fake burger? Of course, unlike simply converting more land to growing a trendy leafy green, scaling production of the Impossible Burger – and getting it into grocery stores at a price point that the average consumer is willing to pay – is going to be a challenge. Even if that happens, Brown’s mission will not be accomplished. Around half of the beef produced in the US is turned into ground chuck. So even if real meat burgers were to disappear, feedlots, other cuts of meat, and all of the environmental and ethical implications that come with them, may not.

But it’s a start. And even if Impossible Foods falls short, there are other startups busy at work in the lab, also focused on disrupting the industrialization of animals. As the global population swells towards the 10 billion by mid-century there simply are not many other options.