(Photo from BeyondMeat on Instagram – believe it was taken for the Outside magazine).

Outside Magazine is running a great article online and in the January edition of the magazine on the latest offering from Beyond Meat – the Beast Burger: “The Top-Secret Food That Will Change the Way You Eat.”

Loved this from the opening:

By then I knew that with every burger I consumed, I was helping to suck America’s rivers dry, munching on a fecal casserole seasoned liberally with E. coli, passively condoning an orgy of torture that would make Hannibal Lecter blanch, and accelerating global warming as surely as if I’d plowed my Hummer into a solar installation. We all needed to kick the meat habit, starting with me.

Most of the focus of the article is on the process Beyond Meat uses, and the notion that what they’ve done is create a process that removes the need for the animal in the chain between the human consumer and the plant-based raw ingredients:

plant stuff goes in one end, gets pulled apart, and is then reassembled into fibrous bundles of protein. A steer does this to build muscle. The extruder in the Beyond Meat lab does it to make meat. Not meat-like substances, Brown will tell you. Meat. Meat from plants. Because what is meat but a tasty, toothy hunk of protein? Do we really need animals to assemble it for us, or have we reached a stage of enlightenment where we can build machines to do the dirty work for us?

The burger is due to “select Whole Foods stores” in January – here’s hoping they select a few in the Boston area.

Also check out this four minute Bloomberg media segment on much the same approach:

What I wanted to know watching the video was, where can I get one of these “Real Meat from Plants Tastes Like Freedom” shirts? Then I found them. 😉

There’s also a signup form at the Beast Burger site to get more information.