Pulling Out Burger Flavor With A Magnet

If you’re vegetarian or don’t eat beef, you are probably already familiar with Impossible. Impossible meat tastes like beef and cooks like beef while being plant-based. They achieved this with significant R&D and a few special patents. But if you don’t want to pay Impossible prices, [Sauce Stash] has been trying to recreate some of the tricks that Impossible uses. (Video, embedded below.)

[Sauce Stash] starts with the ingredients list and tries to reason what would be suitable substitutes. However, even following the ingredients list, adding iron is one crucial trick that takes your vegetarian beef much closer to tasting like proper beef. Impossible has a special patent process for creating leghemoglobin (or heme), the iron molecule we associate with red meat’s taste. It makes the meat seem to bleed as it cooks and dramatically changes the flavor. Impossible genetically engineered yeast to produce the compound to get heme on an industrial scale. But they state on their website that the molecule can be found in many plants, including soy. With a magnet and soy in hand, he tried to pull the iron out overnight but didn’t get anything substantial. Unfortunately, the heme is in the root of the soy plant, not in the milk, so it was back to the drawing board.

There are a few other sources: breakfast cereals, black olives (often treated with iron gluconate), and the roots of other legumes. However, [Sauce Stash] took a more leisurely route and crushed a soy-based iron tablet. However, being a supplement, there were other ingredients that he didn’t want in his burger. So he used the magnet to extract the iron to include. After that, it was easy sailing, and he was very proud of the vegan burger he had created.

Creating something that tastes and feels like something else is a complex and tricky endeavor, and hacks like these are always interesting to think about. We’d take texture pea protein over an insect burger, but perhaps that is just something we need to get over. Video after the break.

91 thoughts on “Pulling Out Burger Flavor With A Magnet

      1. I’m not sure the explanation, but I assure you people getting MRIs do not have their blood magnetically ripped out of their body. I would massively speculate that either a) it isn’t magnetic (ferro or otherwise) or maybe b) the mass is too low to generate any significant force or some other biological / physics reason. I’m sure Google can sort it out but eh. Too lazy.

  1. A lot more engineering is needed in this department so that we can finally displace various types of animal husbandry. I don’t say this out of concern for the animals but due to the fact that animal husbandry (on an industrial scale) is bad for the environment and deeply subsidized by the U.S. government. I’m not against subsidizing things that are good for society but given everything we’ve learned about it, animal husbandry is not good for society.

      1. Because the industrial torture of animals sucks, and because it is wrecking the planet if done on the scale we’re doing it today.
        Furthermore, engineered food can be much more healthy than unprocessed foods that sometimes contain a ton of saturated fats, or contain not enough vitamins when eaten in the amounts we typically eat them.

        Don’t fall into the ‘but it’s unnatural’ trap.

        1. But it’s natural. Sure some animals live a tortured life but most places have animal welfare standards so the meat lives a happy life and ‘suffers’ a quick death.

          1. Indeed, most places have animal welfare requirements, some of them pretty good, others so bad you wonder how the folks that live there and knowingly eat those animals can live with it…

            I also think Gravis is a little bit off in that animal husbandry isn’t all that much of an environmental problem even at large scale done correctly (but that is the important word there). However if you cut out the huge amounts of food waste you likely don’t need to do anything to change farming practice on environmental grounds – not saying you shouldn’t, as farming practices most definitely should improve, but ultimately the mindbogglingly huge % of various foods that go to waste is the lowest hanging fruit there – reduce the waste and less needs to be farmed so the farmland can be somewhat more wild, with less chemical junk, fewer animals with better care etc – even if its still a rather managed form of ‘wild’ that is more like proper crop rotations that real rewilding.

            NB I have nothing against these sort of ideas, but for me trying desperately to pretend to be meat is the wrong approach, its almost always massively disappointing and you can have some really fantastic flavours with the beans, peas, mushrooms that usually make up the faux-meats raw ingredients when they are playing themselves…

        2. People are entitled to their own believes and morals, however what they are NOT entitled to do is guilt trip and manipulate others out of what is NATURAL to them!

        3. Humans contain a ton of saturated fats. in fact around 65% of self-made fat is saturated.
          So even if you eat no saturated fat, your body makes it out of carbs. Ad worse – it’s inside you!
          Maybe we should get gene therapy from geese, whose fat is quite healthy in comparison?

        1. Evs a temporary bandaid, there’s zoneing and city planning that needs to get fixed as well. Because everyone really shouldn’t be using cars. This channel brings up a lot of good points about why manny citys are so flawed https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI The short of it is we design city for “the car” not to move people effectively.

          1. yea thats a whole other can of worms. and by worms i mean transmission lines, from coal fire plants to your car charger. i think there is still efficiency to be had by keeping the fossil fuel consumption at the power plant. exhaust can be better scrubbed and you might get higher efficiencies, recoup waste heat, etc. and when you do bring renewables, nuclear, etc online, you have your infrastructure online already.

          2. Don’t we all love it when our ‘betters’ tell us to live in Russian style commie blocks?

            The internet has made cities obsolete.
            Yeah cars!
            Yeah TCP/IP!
            Boo Neighbors close enough to hear!

            But you do you.

        1. Only if you’re driving a bus around as personal transport. Get 10+ people on there and you’re doing better than vegan cyclists.

          https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-biking-vs-driving

          Not to mention new hybrid or fully electric buses are doing as good or better than the Prius comparitively (considering consumption/emission about 3x that of car)

          Health improvement, maybe, if you do it in moderation, if you’re gonna be obsessive about it you’ll blow out your heart in 4 decades like numerous footballers and athletes.

    1. thats sort of a misnomer. the way modern husbandry works, it relies heavily on industrial nitrogen. if we actually maintain wildlife sanctuaries and properly cull herds, we can feed a ton more people with healthier meat and negate any perceived environmental cost. hell if we just move our farms away from rivers and streams, we can negate algae bloom and get back a massive source of seafood in the gulf.

      case in point, the massive buffalo heards of the midwest, cultivated and cared for by our indigenous people. putting wolves back on the land so our waterways are not destroyed by hooved animals.

      if you want to take the easiest path to personal responsibility, hunt wild boar if you are able. those things are a plague right now, and most of the meat goes to waste as they are murdered en masse from helicopters. as of now, you can find them in almost any state, and everyone wants them off the land.

      there are a lot of ways to improve our impacts, but trading beef for soy is not one of them, as soy has a list of its own problems, not to mention the fact that soy has detrimental hormonal effects in our bodies. pesticide use, and monoculture just is just as big of a problem, if not worse than cattle grazing in open fields. but alas, we grow mono crops to feed animals and we have basically a single company that dominates the market. couple that with billionaires buying literally all of our farm land and squeezing farmers to well below poverty levels, and you get the dystopian food market we currently sit in when the some 300 million indigenous peoples of north america had a much better system already in place.

      1. 300m Americans hunting for wild boar, yeah that’s going to work. I don’t think you appreciate the enormous scale required to feed nearly 8 billion people.

        People are going to have to give up real meat as a daily expectation. It will still be available from hobby and artisanal farms, at a high price for special occasions. Everything else will be lad-grown meat or plant substitute.

        1. Yah, don’t think the Europeans would be too happy, 300m Americans charging around the ancient European forests for wild boar.

          Unless you’re confusing wild boar with the introduced invasive species of feral hog in North America, that in historic times, were not here.

          but pray, continue, enlighten us with your extensive knowledge of North American ecosystems.

        2. i think you missed the part where there were 300 million americans already here… doing just that. and i am surprised at your lack of logistics when it comes to wild game. there are much easier ways than “every single person must hunt” its absoloutly absurd and you say it just to back up your incorrect belief that the land, when properly handled, can maintain food sources much better than modern agriculture.

          and yes. there were roughly 300m americans here before the plagues wiped out almost all of them. most of your sources only started counting long after nearly everyone was killed.

          1. Natives where early bronze age at best, some where stone age.

            The two contents COULDN’T have supported more than a few million at that technology level.

            Your post is oft repeated derp, remains fiction. They counted every failed city in the western hemisphere at it’s peak population, then extrapolated up. Those cities typically lasted only a short while before destroying the environment that sustained them.

            There are more ‘native americans’ alive today then when Columbus landed. Face facts.

    2. Absolutely agreed. A quick search suggests producing 1kg of beef emits 36kg of CO2. That doesn’t seem like good value when I could burn 3+ litres of petrol or get 100+kwh of electricity for the same output.

      1. A “quick search” also reveals that the internet uses 140 gigawatts of electricity…. a good portion of which carries nothing but memes, cat photos on Imgur, fake news, social posturing on Twitter, porn videos, SPAM, dating sites, and “social media”—which kind of rolls all of the previous categories into one big turd–not to mention opinions on Hackaday about what people shouldn’t be allowed to eat so that we can collectively “save the earth.” How many kilograms of CO2 emission does that represent?

        I just read an industry white paper that says the switch to 5G on cellular networks is going to increase energy consumption there by 61 times. How much of cell network traffic is is related to something demonstrably important–911 emergency or medical calls, for example–and how much of that bandwidth is people trying to get laid, complaining about relatives, locating a restaurant, or using Alexa to settle innane bar bets about what the point-spread was in some past Superbowl? Like the internet, if 5% of the traffic on the cell phone network had any substance whatsoever, I’d be shocked.

        So, as long as we’re now negotiating who/what gets to exhale, how ’bout we get rid of Facebook, Alphabet, and Twitter and I get to keep my steaks?

        A cow, by the way, adds no more CO2 to the atmosphere than was removed by the grasses she ate. It’s a zero-sum game, and unlike the tech oligarchs, the crap produced by the cow has demonstrable fertilizer value.

        1. You really do prefer steaks to the Internet, do you ? The problems of cows isn’t the CO2, it’s the methane. However, I’m sure that the decentralization of data would do quite reduce the Internet emissions. Moreover, I do read your angry comments using a cellular network.

          1. I’m not angry, I couldn’t care less what technology you use to read/post. I’m not the one whining about your carbon footprint, and I’ve never suggested that you are ruining the earth. I don’t care if you are vegan, and have nothing disrespectful to say if that’s your chosen lifestyle.

            On the other hand, I do find the routinely selective indignation on this topic and social posturing masquerading as science literacy pretty funny.

            There is no “problem” with cows. Swamps and marshlands, for example (now recognized to be an essential part of the fresh water cycle and which are now being reclaimed and reestablished precisely because of that importance) also emit huge amounts of methane. A lot of bacterial action on this planet does. So what do you propose to do about these emissions?

            Are you aware of a recent University of Montana study that showed that leaf-cutter ants produce staggering amounts of nitrous oxide emissions, another potent “greenhouse gas” said to be on the rise? What’s the plan to combat that? Ban Reddi-Wip and dentists?

            If there is any “problem,” it those people who, after mocking and marginalizing every other form of traditional religion, turned around and constructed their own—scientism–complete with it’s own dogma, priests, clergy, zealots, and an inquisition to root out and punish heretics.

            Its priests claim to know what environmental conditions and global temperatures will be 100 years from now (climate) when they can’t even predict with accuracy whether or not it will rain tomorrow (simple weather).

            They’ve convinced adherents to believe that eating soylent green and forcing them to drive electric vehicles (a fleet of which will require 10x the electrical production of the existing grid), will absolve them of their sins and allow us to reset Earth’s thermostat to the value THEY think is appropriate. Talk about hubris.

            Science is the cornerstone on which my profession is based. You will find no greater champion for science. But I don’t worship at its altar and I don’t trust self-proclaimed messiahs. I do prefer a nice charred steak to being burned at the steak, however.

          2. You can train cows to poo in a lavatory (it’s already being done…) and biodigest the faeces and use the captured methane to power stuff… maybe it could power the internet…

      1. I hear maggot protein is supposedly going to become the dominant ingredient in future burgers (FDA currently allows 3.5 larva per package). Also, as a male red-meat-eater one should be donating blood regularly unless you want to end up with elevated iron issues (ironically causes anemia symptoms). Also, avoid high intake of lentils due to copper being hard on the liver, skip non-fermented soy products like “sports shakes” which in excess can give men tender boobs due to the natural hormone content, and cut out pork if your family has a history of heart disease.
        Lean chicken, fresh water fish , prawns, and squid are the healthiest meats.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdld7SqnIxE

      2. LN, if you can taste its fear, you’re doing it wrong. It’s supposed to be dead before you eat it.

        Unless you are talking about vegetables, which are still alive when we eat them…

        1. Your lawns emits ultrasonic screams every time you mow. Including the parts not yet mowed.

          Deer that died slowly taste bad. You can taste the lactic acid.

          But industrial animals were in cow heaven (aka a feed lot), eating lots of tasty corn in the largest safest heard of their life, until surprise, ‘No Country for Old Cows’ instant death.

          Prime is the good stuff, ‘Grass Fed’ are typically downer cows that were salvaged.

      1. that’s exactly why i think veganism is the stupidest thing humans ever “invented”. instead of eating healthy natural ingredients most vegans tend to buy super refined products like these meat substitute (but still think they do something nice for their bodies and the environment). health apart do you have any idea how all these exotic oils and ingredients and chemicals impact the environment? hint hint its not a good thing for sure.
        if i have to choose between real food and a chemistry set its not a hard choice to make.

        1. Vegans who eat a 100% natural plant diet with no supplements risk brain damage because there’s no edible plant that contains enough of the proper forms of B12 and some other vital chemical compounds which omnivores, like humans, easily get from meat from herbivores. Herbivore biochemistry is able to convert and concentrate those compounds from plants.

          Years ago I read an article in a medical journal about a Dr. in Florida who was one of those 100% “pure” vegans. Suddenly he began showing signs of what was diagnosed as early onset dementia. Fortunately a new resident at the hospital recognized the signs of vitamin deficiency. Medical students get instruction on vitamin deficiencies but as doctors most forget about it because those are conditions extremely rare in the USA. The Dr’s blood was checked and he had almost zero B vitamins. He was given a B-Complex shot and mostly recovered but had suffered permanent damage and had to retire from being a Dr. Any Dr. that’s a vegan or vegetarian is one I’d want to stay away from because they ought to know better. Did they fail human biochemistry?

          B12 is stored in muscle tissue, whether made within the body of an herbivore or taken from herbivore flesh by carnivores and omnivores. It’s vital to the function of brains and nerves. A human can store up enough B12 to last for quite a while without ingesting more, but it will deplete, as that unfortunate doctor found out.

          Vitamin B12 is cobalamin, specifically the form called methylcobalamin. It’s primarily found in the muscle tissue of herbivores. In vitamin supplements the most common form is cyanocobalamin. Human biochemistry can only convert about 5% of that from a pill before the rest is excreted.

          It’s a similar thing with other synthetic vitamins in supplements. They use the lowest cost form there is, which has very low bioavailability. Then the pills are overloaded just to get enough that the minimal % the human body can use equals what it needs and could much more easily get by eating an orange or a hamburger or whatever natural source is the best source for the high bioavailablity version.

          Another one is iron. Total cereal claims 100% of the USDA recommendation for iron but it’s a fraud since what’s in it is very finely ground metallic iron. Almost all that iron in Total cereal will pass right through, completely unchanged. Like with B12 the best source of the form of iron humans need is found in herbivore muscle tissue. They take the low-available forms that are in small quantities in plants and convert and concentrate it into the form that’s best for carnivores and omnivores.

          If vitamin supplements had the amounts of the best forms in them as are listed on their labels, they could be deadly or at least harmful. The amounts required of high bioavailable forms of vitamins, iron etc are far lower than the thousands of units of the cheap forms in most supplements.

          1. That’s why they add B12 to nutritional yeast. A bit of extra protein, and you B12.

            This was basic stuff in books about becoming vegetarian forty and fifty years ago.

            Wny does it matter so much to you about the health of vegans and vegetarians? No skin offyiur nose if they get sick or die.

  2. If vegetarians reject meat, why are they constantly trying to make food that isn’t meat look and taste like meat? I don’t understand.

    I get that good meat-like not-meat might get meat-eaters to reduce animal farming. But I don’t get why vegetarians, when strictly among themselves, or in “vegetarian” restaurants, serve so many imitation-meat foods (which are almost universally awful in my experience).

    1. It’s incredibly easy: it’s not about the taste, it’s about suffering.
      If you wouldn’t someone to do it to your pet or toddler, we don’t want it to be done to a random animal with a similar capability of suffering.

      The modern meat industry is torturing animals, there literally is no other word for it. Pigs are often castrated and have their tails cut off without anaesthesia. When their time has come, they are in many cases suffocated in CO2 gas which is conveniently non flamable and sinks to the bottom of a tank. But it triggers the suffocation reflex in all mammals (the feeling you get when you hold your breath for minutes) making it an absolutely awful death.

      Chickens are typically electrocuted, but some of them pull in their heads when they see the electrocution bath they’re dipped in coming, and then don’t make proper contact with the water. In that case, they’re either half electrocuted, or fully alive when they end up in the scalding bath (hot water) that makes their feathers come off, essentially scalding them to death.

      Fish are often ‘stripped’, cut open and having their entrails while still alive. While pain research on fish is very hard, it is generally accepted that at the very least they experience it as a Very Bad Thing to be cut open while alive. After stripping, many fish still show a swimming reflex when put back into water showing they still have a level of conciousness afterwards. Cold blooded animals can survive for a surprisingly long time while bleeding out.

      Not eating meat is the easiest way to prevent those kinds of suffering. The good taste of meat doesn’t weigh up to the disgusting idea of contributing to the suffering.

      1. Gassing pigs with carbon monoxide instead of dioxide would make their deaths a lot softer. Lots of people die of carbon monoxide exposure without even noticing it.
        There are more killing gases that are a lot less tortuous, but carbon dioxide is cheap, non flamable and convenient so fuck making it a soft death, let ’em suffer while we’re raking in the dollars!

        Of course, that only solves the suffering while dieing issue. The suffering while being alive issues, such as being without food and water for hours in a hot cattle truck, never seeing the light of day, being held on metal grates instead of normal soil etc etc is a whole other set of problems.

      2. So do vegans advocate for the banning of circumcision or is the human race fair game?

        Ever been suffocated by CO2? You get light headed then pass out. Suffocating as you imply is like holding a bag over someone’s head or drowning – that you would notice and get distresed from.

        As someone else says here, carbon monoxide poisoning leads to a subtle unconciousness usually followed by death. Are all the carbon monoxide victims trying to die or were thet simpl unaware of their impending death hence they didn’t try to get to some clean air.

        1. “Ever been suffocated by CO2? You get light headed then pass out.”

          This isn’t accurate. Early on you’ll start to have labored breathing and start sweating like you’ve been over exerting yourself physically for a longtime (like you’d just ran a marathon, too fast), a little later massive headaches will kick in, your gag reflex will try to stop you from inhaling, cramps, and convulsions, pass out, then death.

          If you want to more humane, nitrogen narcosis is a much better way to die – in fact possibly enjoyable (feel good, happy, hallucinate a bit, then die).

          This is why I always design my life support systems to run out of O2 before they run out of CO2 scrubber medium. Go peacefully…..

          1. +1 on the nitrogen, I have seen video of it tested on pigs – they had a trough of apples, and a sort of enclosed “hood” with a flap over the trough – the pig eats until it passes out, lies on the floor until it recovers, then goes right back to the apples… A similar setup with CO2 sees the pig quit and not go back to the apples.

        2. “So do vegans advocate for the banning of circumcision or is the human race fair game?”

          This has to be one of the best examples of Whataboutery that I have ever seen, unless you are suggesting vegans are looking for a highly dubious loophole…

          1. The only modern form of cannibalism I am aware of is the fad for eating your own/partners placenta. Not sure if so called “freegans” who are up for expired meat and roadkill are into that.

      3. Death in the wild is quite often even nastier. Chunks bitten off while still fully alive, etc.
        I suppose the logical conclusion is to (humanely) kill all wild animals to save them the suffering when they ultimately meet their fate.

      4. I doubt their wild counterparts die any better deaths, being ripped to shreds by african wild dogs is about as bad a way to go as there is. Zebras partially disemboweled by crocs and then running their guts out over the savannah is no nice way to go either. Fish in the wild is often partially devoured leaving them suffering. Nature is full of suffering, thus has it always been, thus it shall always be, until the sun burns red and bloated. You can´t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. I bet that throughout the history of life on this planet, the suffering has been far greater than the now dominant life form introduces in animal husbandry.

    2. Meat is very easy to create meals with. Technically a burger patty and some bread is a meal, but swap that patty for a carrot and it isn’t as fulfilling. If you wanted to make a meal you’d need some other vegetables, creativity and time. On laziness grounds I eat meat substitutes.

      This might be a duplicate comment, something went wrong the first time.

    3. There are two main categories of “vegetarian”. Those who want to cut down on animal products for health, and those who do it for ethical reasons. The ones who want to do it for health, I think are the ones who buy fake meat. I am in the other category, the ethical vegetarian (vegan). I want nothing to do with eating animal flesh or wearing their skins– for me, it would be like eating a corpse from the morgue in terms of revulsion. And, I want nothing to do with anything that tries to provide that corpse from the morgue eating experience, so don’t want fake meat. But, non-human animal suffering is reduced by “for health” vegetarians cutting down their meat intake, so I’m glad these options exist for them.

      1. why does everyone seem to gloss over the fact that to have your vegan diet, billions of acres of land have to be devoid of all life except your soy or carrot. a deer or wild boar, or buffalo, or turkey, can produce food while supporting a full and thriving ecosystem with billions of individual lives, while any given farm, simply murders everything to grow your soy.

        ie: in order to have your soy or carrots, nothing may live to begin with. where as i can walk out back, bag a turkey and feed my family for days on end… and EVERYTHING ELSE STILL GETS TO LIVE.

        oh did i mention the algae bloom murdering almost all life in the gulf of mexico from… you guessed it. nitrogen from your vegan fueled farms. good job on following the logic all the way through to the end, vegans.

    4. I think it is also a bit about culture, and that i like to prepare meals that is often done in the society without having to invent the wheel every time. But i do agree a “proper” vegetarian meal is way better than the immitaations. Often there is also a easy good alternative to meatz that does not always end up feeling like an alternative, like portebello mushroom in the burger bread with other stuff, and you have a good mushroom sandwich. Or just not replying on meat and have the good taste of different vegetables.

  3. I think people would like to have what they like to eat without harming animals. Except in the case of religious law, where we have things like synthetic bacon because the original is not kosher or halal.

    Be careful with iron, though. It’s toxic at high levels and especially dangerous for small children.

      1. Well you took aim at the target, but a wild deer bolted across the range and took the arrow, because that’s what’s been pissing and crapping on salad stuffs causing all those e-coli recalls.

  4. As a vegetarian, I agree that most meat-free restaurant offerings are terrible. In my opinion, those dishes are there for people who want lower fat, lower calorie, or healthier alternatives to meat. They are also an easy and convenient way for restaurants to offer meat-free options. A processed “veggie patty” doesn’t upset the normal menu and workflow at a burger joint. Any cook can thaw and heat one on the grill, where a plant-based burger alternative (portobello mushroom, eggplant, etc.) would be more expensive, take longer to prepare, and require more experienced cooks. “Real” vegetarian dishes (and restaurants) don’t use imitation meat products or recipes that were originally created to showcase the flavors of meat.

  5. I swear there used to be a decent textured ground meat substitute in the 90s, and vegans railing against it because of using yeast extracts killed it off.

  6. I haven’t eaten meat since 1979, two months after I got my first computer.

    There are lots of burgers. I started with grainburgers, ground up grain that you added hot water to, let it sit, then form patties and fry. Tofuburgers have been around for decades. You can flavor tempeh and fry it. You can make slabs of seitan and put it in a bun. Thereare various commercial black bean burgers. You can buy burgers made from processed soy.

    A lot of this is not expensive, or processed much. But it gives something to put in a bun with condiments and pickles.

    The wave of burgers that “bleed” are a new thing. They seem aimed at meat eaters, the ones who think they should give up meat, but don’t want to. Big inroads in fast food, but I wouodn’t eat there muxed in with real meat. They are willing to spend money onthis very fake meat.

  7. I got in a discussion with one of my in-laws who was considering going vegan. My take was that I was pretty sure you could live off meat but not vegetables. There have been a plethora of vegans on the video website that after garnering millions of followers started to develop health problems. E.G. a 29 year old female that went into menopause. A 27 year old male that was no longer ejaculating. The problems of a vegan diet are well documented. After a little research I determined that the Inuit indians (eskimo) eat only meat in their diets. They live north of the arctic circle where hardly any vegetation grows. The Inuit herd reindeer and fish that’s the food they get. They have no high cholesterol nor suffer gout or have scurvy. Scientists believe it has to due with their diet being almost all raw and the eating of the organs of the animals. The moral is you can live off meat not so much veggies. I’ll stick with real meat thanks. BTW study up on iron as it poisons the liver of men. Women naturally give blood once a month so it does not effect them as much.

      1. My sister-in-law is a nurse who was working in an emergency room and afterwords in a I.C.U. heart department. She has numerous stories of working on people from India. She tells that the Indian vegan diet results in tiny blood vessels that are nearly impossible to work with. They were trying to stint an Indian person and the smallest stint would not fit through the blod vessels. She also commented that the western diet results in “blobs” of plaque in the arteries that can be removed. However the Indian vegan patients have plaque that runs the length of the arteries making it very difficult to remove and they often suffer repeated heart attacks because the doctor will clear one spot only to have another close up later. I am a firm believer in each to his own so if you want to live off plants feel free. Just remember plants have feelings too.

        1. Is it heresay? I have hard to find veins, it’s an ongoing joke. But nobody has blamed vegetarianism. But, my mother had hard to find veins.

          It’s amusing the extent some people will go to dismiss vegetarianism. We aren’t all campaigning to eradicate meat eating.

        2. If we’re gonna go anecdotal, it should be noted that back when The Royal Navy was the scourge of the seven seas and had “Wooden ships and Iron men” they were vegetarian 3 days a week, Monday Wednesday and Friday. These were known as banyan/banian/panyan days.

          1. Even worse before that, most of human history people got most of their calories from grain gruel.

            Is hard tack crawling with weevils really vegetarian?

            Recall also that in that same era many many sailors died of scurvy, they had a rum ration and the most common medical procedure was bleeding. Only the rum is a good idea.

    1. A little more research may show how questionable the whole Inuits don’t get cardiovascular disease thing is, how they have a shorter life expectancy, worse aging bone loss and other things. I guess the moral should be more along the lines of: You can live off meat and it might not be that great for you just like living off veggies.

  8. Getting back to the subject of iron for a moment, Impossible Foods has been pretty upfront that the magic ingredient that makes their products taste like meat is heme, the stuff that makes blood taste vaguely metallic.

    It’s a compound all animals use for making hemoglobin, but it’s also available in some plants.

    Impossible was thrilled to find out that soybean roots are full of the stuff – to the point that if you grind them up they weep a red liquid.

    Soybean roots are also, conveniently, a low-value waste product that’s left over from the millions upon millions of tons of soybean we grow each year.

    So — win/win for a change. The world gets a meat substitute while using up agricultural waste.

    1. Not entirely sure its a real ‘win/win’, though its certainly not entirely awful in and of itself and the effort is definitely worth respecting.

      However soy has a great many problems in how and where its farmed. A substitute is only of real benefit on the global ‘green’ scale if the infrastructure required to process and ship it, the spoilage and the way its produced as a whole work out better – so many food miles on SOY products and its often farmed in about as destructive a way as you can get, which vs the friendly farmer next door farming in a sustainable (as in not really destroying the land and so needing ever more chemical goop or land clearance (etc) to get the yield, even if its not the ‘greenest’ possible product they could farm) way…

      I hope you can see its not exactly cut and dried.

  9. My entire household of 7 is vegetarian but we still think this whole meat is bad for the atmosphere thing is complete rubbish, red meat is bad for YOU for multiple reasons including the fact that if you use up your calorie quota on meat you don’t have “room” for all of the other things you need to eat if you want to live a long and healthy life. If you are interested in such things take a look at Greger, M., & Stone, G. (2016). How Not To Die. Macmillan.

    1. Humans being omnivores really should consume a varied diet, including meat and vegetables with emphasis on the veggie side. Throw in occational nuts+fish and some proteinrich plant produce and you are golden ( unless you are allergic ). Cant live on meat alone, nor on vegetables alone for a lifetime, unless one wants it to be shorter than average.

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