Food For Thought: Impossible Dream

Want people to eat less meat? Tasty soy patties probably won’t cut it.

- By Charlie Mitchell

SPRING WAS A BAD SEASON for carnivores: Popular cooking website Epicurious committed publicly to leaving beef out of all of its recipes, and one of the world’s most famous fine dining restaurants, Eleven Madison Park, announced that it was nixing all meat from its menu. Both moves were made in the name of environmental sustainability—meat production is thought to be responsible for around 15 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

While the news may have put ranchers on the defensive, entrepreneurs in another industry were jumping for joy. For the past few years, companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have been betting that their plant-based replicas of burgers and sausages will encourage people to ditch meat en masse.