What do fake-meat burgers taste like?
Plus vaccine breakthrough infections, climate change, Arctic virus redux, Marburg virus resurgence, sneaky carnivorous plants, charging phones with jackfruit, and the lyin' oil industry.
Hello! How are you?
I have a lot I want to talk about this week including COVID-19 breakthrough infections with Delta and the taste of “fake” plant-based meat (vegetarians, rest assured all photos in this newsletter are plant-based).
Last week, shortly after I wrote a column about the risk of diseases from melting ice and permafrost in Hindustan Times, I spoke to a reporter with The Daily Star (UK).
That story kind of exploded this week and got covered by Al-Arabiya in English, and also in the press in Spain, Hungary, Italy, and Indonesia. And just like gossip getting distorted with every retelling, my point that viruses and bacteria might emerge from thawing ice got translated to “the next pandemic is definitely coming from the Arctic!”
;-)
Now more on, climate change.
This week, an influential climate report came out and got extensive coverage. If the IPCC report made you mad or sad, then that's good. It is always better to know than the alternative. Process your emotions. Let others know. Then, roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Earlier this week, I asked many of you what you thought about the climate crisis on Twitter—
It is easy and natural to feel disheartened, but one aspect of the IPCC report is that there are solutions that can be implemented now. None of them are easy and life as we know might change, but this leads me to an observation.
Climate change is not mainly a scientific or technological problem. Solutions already exist that can mitigate it.
It is a problem of unchecked greed and unregulated capitalism. It is a problem of political will and societal expectations. It is a problem of inequality in class, race, and gender. And usually addressing those problems is harder.
Over the next few weeks, I will be covering the scale of the climate crisis and some of the solutions we already have.
The number you need to remember is that we need to keep temperature rise below 1.5-2.0 degree Celsius as set forward in the Paris Agreement.
To be on track to do this we need to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade and to net zero by 2050. Why net zero? Because we will not go back to the Stone Age: there will always be some carbon emissions from human activities. But by that point through carbon capture and storage (a process by which we take carbon from the air and stick it into the ground) or tree-planting, we will take out more carbon than we emit.
The climate crisis is not the third wave. It is the permanent flood.
First, a word about the scale of the problem. I’m one of those people who believes that we have to analyze a situation before we can fully try to dissect all the things we can do that have the most impact.
We cannot simply rely on offsets yet. We must reduce emissions.
This week I wrote a column for Hindustan Times on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and what they mean for the climate crisis. You can read it here—
Some sobering points on why we need to act now:
The climate crisis is not like a pandemic wave that recedes once there are no longer people to be infected. Greenhouse gases will remain in the air even after we stop emitting them — their effects felt for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
There is no equivalent of masking or getting vaccinated for the climate crisis, partly because of the ubiquitous nature of industrial activities that led to our modern society. We spent trillions in creating extractive societies without sparing a thought about consequences. We urgently need a change in development models, values, and behaviours.
The climate crisis is simply not a priority for most citizens or elected officials. Even when acknowledged, it proceeds on a longer timeframe than a news-cycle or election term. In the light of this, there is little incentive to make difficult decisions.
Rich countries which contributed the most greenhouse gas emissions will shut their borders to climate migrants. Because of their geography, they will also weather the effects relatively better than countries in the equatorial belt. Already, with the currently pandemic, we are seeing these countries seek third booster shots for their citizens while most of the poor world remains completely unvaccinated. This does not bode well for the climate crisis.
How the Oil Industry Lied to Us About Climate Change.
If you only ever read one thing about how the oil industry knew about climate change and pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, you should read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt. But if you are pressed for time, this is an excellent article.
Prof. Oreskes is also interviewed in this short, brilliant video on this topic too.
Plant-based meat. What is it? How does it taste?
First off, I want to reiterate that all photos in this post are completely vegetarian, even though they look like meat.
Second, I kind of know that you already have a strong opinion on this topic even if I don’t know you personally. This is because everyone has an opinion on food. Everytime I post a photo of something I’ve cooked or eaten on Twitter I get comments from people I don’t know. You may not care about viruses or climate change, but you certainly care about food. Everyone eats.
And our life-long relationship with food is complicated.
Food is politics, history, culture, religion, privilege, caste, status, globalization, industrialization, biotechnology, colonialism, subjugation, climate change, ethics, and patriarchy. But often it is just about personal preference or well being.
You may be approaching this part of the newsletter with one of two views.
Why does anyone need to create fake plant-based meat? Why can’t people just eat normal vegetarian food without needing to dress it up like something else?
Fake meat is not meat and eating meat is part of my identity. I will never give it up.
At various times in my life, I have subscribed to both views, so you have my full sympathy. Plant-based meat is not health food- it contains a lot of saturated fat and salt and it the ingredients are processed till the cows come home.
Why eat it then? Well, for one, it is marketed to people who like the taste of meat. I’m certainly a person in this category- having been a voracious omnivore my entire life.
But the bigger point is that our current levels of consumption are not sustainable. Cultivating large animals for eating is contributing to the climate crisis. Beef cattle and palm oil are the two main drivers of tropical deforestation (followed by soy production).
Half of the habitable land on this planet is used for agriculture, of which less than a quarter is actually used to grow human crops. Most of it is for livestock.
A half pound burger is equivalent to running a window A.C. for 24 hours.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t eat more whole grains, fresh fruits, and sustainably farmed seafood or dairy (for those who are not vegetarians). But we can occasionally also treat ourselves to plant-based meats.
Should we eat give up on meat? That’s a personal decision. Should we eat less of it? Also a personal decision, but I’d argue that we should. If we eat meat for it’s taste and there are similar alternatives, then we have a choice.
So, what are the choices? A few years ago, there were brands like MorningStar, which is delicious, but kind of like eating chickpea falafels or tofu: it won’t fool anyone that it is meat. Now there are brands like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Quorn, and Gardein which have gotten a lot better. I’m going to cover a few other brands in subsequent newsletters, but today I want to focus on what I think is the most impressive one- Impossible’s burger.
I’ve had Impossible Foods in a meat-based casserole before (and it was pretty damn convincing), but I decided to go to the grocery store and cook up a plant-based burger myself.
Impossible sells ground plant-based meat. They also sell preshaped burger patties for two for around 6 dollars and 6 for 13 dollars. I quickly did the math in my head and decided on getting six.
I decided to cook them in an air-fryer with no dressing-up. I want to be able to taste the product.
The patties are pink, but look like a little like ground chicken or turkey. They are also about an inch thick. So far so good.
Halfway through cooking them, I noticed that the burgers were “bleeding”. This is Impossible’s proprietary masterstroke. Heme is a molecule found in animals, carried by hemoglobin and myoglobin. Impossible found that this what is responsible for the meaty taste of meat.
But a version of it is found in legumes too. Leghemoglobin from plants was genetically engineered into yeast to make product that tastes like meat. Or so Impossible claims.
High-tech food. But how does it taste? I taste-tested each burger on a regular bun with a slice of cheese. No masking condiments.
It certainly looks like meat. They’ve gotten the texture mostly right. I cooked the first few burgers to medium-well. I’ve also cooked a few to well done. Definitely prefer a slightly lower temperature.
But is the flavor like meat?
Mostly, but not completely. Flavor consists of both taste and aroma. While I was cooking the burgers, my home didn’t smell of meat. It smelled of roasted peanuts. And the juice and fat that drips from a burger was missing.
The plant-based burgers didn’t shink in size at all something you would find with a burger or a seekh kebab.
So, no it isn’t meat. Not by a long shot. But it is still delicious, and I could get used to eating it.
If you’re vegetarian, will you like it? Well, that depends.
I’ve got vegetarian friends who loved it and other vegan friends who were creeped out by it, because (to them) it is too much like meat.
What else I’ve read:
COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases are very rare in US states.
“The rate of breakthrough cases reported among those fully vaccinated ranges from 0.01% in Connecticut to 0.29% in Alaska.”
West Africa’s first-ever case of Marburg virus disease has been confirmed in Guinea.
Marburg is in the same family of viruses as Ebola. The patient is now deceased.
Well-known plant turns out to be a closet carnivore.
This flowering plant is found in the American Northwest.
Fossil fuels can be used to decarbonize the economy.
Here’s an interesting idea that’s funded by the fossil fuel industry. We can extract oil and gas and split up the molecules. Then the hydrogen we get can be used for clean fuel, and the carbon (in the form of graphene and carbon nanotubes) as materials.
The world’s worst fruits are being put to some use, finally.
Vincent Gomes, a chemical engineer at the University of Sydney, and his team, including Labna Shabnam, are turning waste from the world’s smelliest fruit, durian, and the world’s largest fruit, jackfruit, into a supercapacitor that can charge mobile phones, tablets and laptops within minutes.
The stench got too much Gomes’ wife, who removed all remnants of the foul-smelling fruit from the freezer after just one night