Last week, the fourth and fifth graders explored the science behind regenerative agriculture, which has roots in ancient, Indigenous practices. This week, we explored the new science behind one of the most high-profile companies trying to solve the climate crisis through food, Bay Area-based Impossible Foods.
In the classroom, students watched a short film produced by Impossible Foods called For the Love of Meat. In it, founder and CEO Pat Brown talks about how the Impossible team isolated the components of what makes meat smell and taste like meat and found a way to derive those sensory imprints from plants instead of from animals. We talked about what a company tries to impart when they market their work (e.g. images of happy people relaxing together while floating on cartoon burgers under sunny skies) and what we still didn’t know after watching the film (e.g. how is Impossible meat made, what are the ingredients, and how much does it cost?).
After the film, we read the ingredients of the Impossible burger aloud. They include methylcellulose, mixed tocopherols, zinc gluconate, and cultured dextrose. Several students remembered a phrase they learned from their first grade teacher: “If you can’t read it, don’t eat it,” which sparked a discussion about processed foods and why everyone is generally told to avoid them. And I shared with them that even though the price point of the Impossible burger meat I purchased for class was similar to the average price of a pound of ground beef, it turned out the Impossible meat was sold in a 12-ounce package (or 3/4 of a pound), meaning the cost is actually significantly more because the consumer gets less food for the same amount of money.
In the kitchen, we seasoned Impossible burger meat with salt and pepper, shaped the meat into patties, cooked them on a skillet, and served our own Impossible sliders with ketchup and mustard, shredded lettuce, onion, tomato, and toasted pretzel buns. They were a hit! A few students who are vegetarians found the burgers to be too similar to meat and therefore unappetizing. Others proclaimed they would absolutely switch to eating Impossible burgers instead of hamburgers. Still others said they liked the flavor, but were skeptical of highly processed foods. No matter where we landed, I think we all deepened our understanding of how complex the climate crisis is, and how complex some of the solutions are as well.
