WHOA! You Can Help Take the Equivalent of 11 Million Cars Off the Road for a Year By Eating This Burger

Still skeptical about how much of a change adopting a plant-based diet can REALLY make for the environment? When you consider the findings highlighted in Mission: Earth, the 2018 sustainability report from plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, it’s … well, impossible to go on pretending that eating plants instead of animals doesn’t have the power to improve the world!

This recent memo features the results of a study done by researchers at Denmark Technical University on what would occur if Americans replaced 50 percent of the cow-sourced ground beef we currently consume with plant-based beef from Impossible Foods. Turns out, the impacts of this simple switch would be absolutely huge, as it would:

• Keep at least 45 million metric tons of carbon from being released into the air, which would be like taking around 11 million cars off the road in the U.S. for an entire year.
• Free up at least 190,000 square kilometers of the land currently devoted to raising livestock and their feed (an area the size of New England!), thereby restoring healthy wildlife habitat and cutting down even further on atmospheric carbon.
• Conserve at least 3.2 trillion gallons of water (around how much 90 million Americans use in a full year).

Pretty crazy, right? And that’s merely what would happen if we reduced conventional beef production by half, so just imagine the enormous environmental good that would come from getting the entire U.S. population to skip out on meat!

Wondering how eating Impossible Burgers instead of regular burgers can possibly be so much more sustainable? It’s all about the process that Impossible Foods uses to make their explosively popular vegan burgers. Specifically, the company genetically engineers and ferments yeast in a way that creates soy leghemoglobin, a heme (or molecule) that occurs naturally in plants. This ingenious process requires around 75 percent less water and 95 percent less land than producing conventional ground beef from cows. Not to mention it generates around 87 percent fewer greenhouse gases!

But what about the taste? Does the Impossible Burger satisfy like a beef burger? Believe it or not, it does! After all, the heme protein used to create this plant-based burger is virtually indistinguishable from an essential heme that humans have been consuming in meat for thousands of years, making it equally flavorful in addition to being a whole lot less resource intensive!

Given how all-around awesome the Impossible Burger is, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this alternative protein has caught consumers’ attention and is now available in at least 3,000 restaurants around the world. White Castle, a classic American burger chain, has even added the Impossible Slider to the menu at 140 of its locations!

We’re absolutely ecstatic that the planet-saving Impossible Burger is taking off! To find out more about this amazing burger, head over to the Impossible Foods website.

And if you’d like to learn more about how opting to eat plant-based foods can help bring about a better future for everyone on Earth, check out the #EatForThePlanet book!

Image Source: Impossible Foods/Facebook