Written by: Kimberly White
Digital Trends announced its top tech picks for CES 2019, a consumer electronics expo that brings together leaders, developers, and tech enthusiasts.
Bringing home the gold was the Impossible Burger 2.0. The Impossible Burger began making headlines in 2016 as the bloodiest vegan burger on the market. It looks, tastes, and even “bleeds” like the traditional beef-based burger.
Impossible Burger 2.0
Image Credit: Impossible Foods
The new Impossible Burger features 30% less sodium and 40% less saturated fat than their original recipe. The new recipe also has as much protein as 80/20 ground beef.
“By shrinking the flavor gap between real meat and fake meat, Impossible is making it easier for everyone to make more environmentally conscious food choices — and that’s a big deal,” explains Drew Prindle, emerging tech editor at Digital Trends. “Animal agriculture is the number one cause of environmental destruction in the world, so reducing humanity’s consumption and cultivation of meat is arguably one of the most effective ways that we can combat climate change.”
Animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change, emitting approximately 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2 each year. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the emissions from global livestock farming account for 14.5% of all human-produced greenhouse gas emissions.
Beef and cattle milk production account for the majority of those emissions with the primary sources being feed production and processing, enteric fermentation from ruminants (aka cow burps), and manure decomposition.
A 2016 study by the University of Oxford found that 5.1 million deaths per year could be avoided if more people adopted global dietary guidelines. Approximately half of the avoided deaths were due to a reduction in red meat consumption.
Dr. Marco Springmann, of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and lead author of the study, stated, “What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment. Imbalanced diets, such as diets low in fruits and vegetables, and high in red and processed meat, are responsible for the greatest health burden globally and in most regions. At the same time the food system is also responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore a major driver of climate change.”
Impossible Burger 2.0 winning top tech of CES 2019 is part of a growing trend which Digital Trends Editor-in-Chief describes as the “Tech for Good” movement.
“We’ve seen and heard a lot of tough news around tech recently. What we want to bring more attention to are the ways that scientific thinking and advances in connectivity are going to have a true impact on the way we live,” he said.
The Impossible Burger 2.0 will begin hitting restaurants throughout the U.S. this year. By mid-March, nearly all Impossible Foods restaurant partners will carry it.
For those who prefer dining in, fear not. The Impossible Burger 2.0 will also be hitting grocery stores by the end of this year.
Header image and video courtesy of Impossible Foods
