Meet the Founder of Impossible Foods, Whose Meat-Free Burgers Could Transform the Way We Eat

On an otherwise unadorned table at an event space overlooking Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, glass bowls displayed the constituent parts of the Impossible Burger. One contained a B-vitamin-laced potato protein paste, another wheat protein, a third a globule of coconut oil. In a fourth, shimmering crimson under the ceiling lights, was the secret sauce: heme (or haem), a component of many proteins, including hemoglobin — the pigment that gives blood its color. It’s also found in the roots of the soybean plant, which is where Impossible Foods extracts it from.

This unassuming display formed a sideshow at Thursday’s international launch of Impossible Foods’ eponymous meat-free burger, which, due to the use of heme, sears, smells, and even bleeds like its animal equivalent. Since the California company begun experimenting with a synthesis of these ingredients in 2011, founder Dr. Pat Brown has attracted over $300 million in funding, drawn an opening salvo from a powerful cattle industry lobby, and has had to rebut suggestions his product is unsafe as he sets about solving what he says is the “most important and urgent problem in the world.”

Now he’s in Hong Kong, making Impossible Foods’ first international foray. The semi-autonomous Chinese city consumes more meat per capita than anywhere else in Asia, and Brown has partnered with well known local chefs May Chow, who runs the trendy Little Bao restaurant, and Uwe Opocensky, of the Beef & Liberty burger chain, to spread the plant-based message.

Brown says he’s not interested in offering vegans another option; instead, he wants to win over omnivores with plant-derived products that are so delicious, nutritious, and affordable they completely replace meat from animals by 2035. Back in the U.S., Impossible Foods has spread to over 1,400 outlets, including the no-frills White Castle burger chain, where a slider sells for $1.99. But gaining a firm foothold in Asia, the world’s largest meat producer and the continent where demand for meat is growing the fastest, will be critical if Brown is to fulfill his mission.TIME sat down with the Stanford biochemist to talk about food security, climate change, and what it would mean if the world stopped eating meat.

Source: time.com