54 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
“Hey, I just got my thousandth follower!”• •
to increase the buttery flavor and car-
amelization 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 increas-
ing 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 re-
plenish; he now runs MarsBio, an ac-
celerator for companies working on bio-
reactors 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 pos-
sible. We could choose a meat flavor
better than beef or chicken or pork, and
call it a brontosaurus burger—or any-
thing 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 ofthe ratios and ingredients, it’s not that
hard to get fish or pork or chicken.”
Next up was Impossible Steak Fla-
vor—a beaker full of red juice. A sci-
entist 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 suffi-
ciently recapitulated the multiple chem-
istries 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 dou-
ble 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 be-
ginning to return to his preferred mode
of swashbuckling inquiry. He yearns to
pursue a project that gripped him early
in Impossible’s development: using Ru-
BisCo, the most abundant protein in
the world, as his staple ingredient. Ru-
BisCo is an enzyme used for photo-
synthesis 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 en-