The meat alternatives will only get better as time goes on and market demand grows. A burger or nugget is really not an impossible (lol) to recreate item; most of the meat texture is lost by the processing involved.

A burger is obviously ground and a nugget is usually chicken that’s ground to almost a paste then shaped and breaded. At that point it’s finding something that can approximate the texture of the mushed up meat goo and then finding something that can convincingly flavor it. That’s why impossible was so adamant to get leghemoglobin cleared by the fda, it really is by far the best option. If not that your other options are basically trying to recreate a “meaty flavor” with spice blends and msg which is how the older meat alternatives worked

The much bigger challenge is finding something that can texturally approximate intact muscle (eg wings or steak). As you’ve said there are decent soy wings and there are steak strip things and such but these are generally passable. They taste good and are fine as a meal but they aren’t the same in the way an impossible burger is reallllly close to a burger. Lots of people trying though! Jackfruit, tvp, seitan, pea and soy protein, etc. but none of them come close to the mouth feel and texture of a wing or steak. Someday, maybe. I hope someone figures it out; I haven’t had meat in like 20 years or so but I do miss the texture of steak from time to time and wish I had something that could recreate that

Honestly I think Beyond Meat/Impossible style burgers are aimed at meat eaters who want to reduce animal cruelty/their carbon footprint. It's actually kind of annoying they're so popular now, as restaurants that used to have creative vegan options now sell Beyond Meat as the only choice.

Vegans don't tend to care if a veggie burger is "realistic". Some find the idea of meat gross and don't want to roleplay eating it (my wife says they make her feel sick). Even if you don't mind, the longer you give up meat the less interesting it is as a flavor. I'd take one of those shitty frozen veggie burgers that are 90% potato over an Impossible burger.

It’s probably from the yeast extract which is part of the heme

To be clear tho it still doesn’t have all that much salt. It’s more that raw beef just barely has any. Both impossible meat and raw beef pale in comparison to the salt content of the final burger, where the sodium content skyrockets from things like ketchup, pickles, seasoning the patty during cooking, the salt content of the bun, etc

And imo you should still salt/pepper an impossible patty after formation. As mentioned, while the salt content is higher, it’s still not terribly high, and imo it benefits from a bit more. In my experience it’s not like meat and you can salt whenever you want (whereas with beef you generally want to salt patties absolutely last minute to avoid giving the meat a lightly cured texture)

They still use the burger parts for burger. They’re not taking a ribeye and grinding it up and selling it at a loss.

Is it a dumb thing for dumb people? Maybe. You would think the extra fat would just cook off and it wouldn’t go very far vs uncooked weight.

I wouldn’t buy one but I wouldn’t want that meat to go to waste either.

100% agree. The imitation methods used in all of the vegan "meat" products just are not near good enough. My ex made me try a bunch, they varied from a little off to just plain gross. Even though I approached each one with an open mind, not a single one was enjoyable. It was actually really hard to keep an open mind after a while, having been either disappointed or disgusted 100% of the time in the past.

However, chickpea patties? Delicious. Black bean burgers? They're usually pretty decent too. There was one veggie burger we tried that had portobello mushrooms as the main ingredient, and it was the most delicious veggie burger I've ever had, hands down. It was so savory and juicy, and the texture was excellent.

I just wish these companies would just focus on plant based products with great taste as their main goal rather than trying to imitate meat, because they're just so astonishingly terrible at it.

Impossible taste is nearly a replica of beef. And when you surround it in burger toppings, it could trick me