When the meaty meatless burgers were still new a few years ago, they were filled with mystery. As they slowly crept onto the food scene, chef Paul Canales became curious about these mysterious burgers. Back then, products like the Impossible Burger were harder to acquire. Canales, however, managed to secure 20 pounds of the goods which he can play with at Duende, the Spanish restaurant he runs in Oakland, California.
“I wasn’t happy with it as a burger, so I came up with this idea of making a meatball,” Canales recalls. He added cumin, garlic, and parsley and fried the “meat” into something resembling Spanish-style meatballs, calling his creation albondigas improbables (improbable meatballs).
The people loved Canales’s creation, and according to him, “they’d get two or three orders at a time.” But despite his sucess in his creation, something still bothered Canales: he didn’t know what exactly he was serving.
“You can’t really identify vegetables in it at all,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m selling a ton, but am I really providing nutrition to people?’”
Canales isn’t the only one wondering about the nutritional value of products like the Impossible and Beyond burgers, which have officially gone mainstream now that McDonald’s and Burger King have added them to their menus. While advocates for a plant-based diet welcome such products as a way to reduce meat consumption, dietitians are asking: Are they actually good for you?
“‘Good for you’ is a subjective question,” says Jill Edwards, director of education for the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. “What are we comparing it to? Is it healthier than the comparative beef burger? Absolutely.”
Know more about this meaty meatless topic over at Medium.
(Image Credit: Impossible Foods/ Twitter)
https://www.consumerreports.org/nutrition-healthy-eating/meat-gets-a-makeover/