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Tech

Forget Lab Beef, Impossible Foods’ 100% Plant-Based Cheeseburger Is Our Future

Eat your heart out, Sergey Brin.
Image: Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods, the makers of a wholly plant-based cheeseburger, isn't just making a veggie burger. And that distinction is enough for a party of fairly powerful backers including Bill Gates and Swiss bank UBS, to funnel $108 million into making that burger an accessible reality.

The company says the burger will have no cholesterol, antibiotics, or hormones, but will boast the taste of real meat, due to the fats, proteins, and nutrients separated and drawn from various plants, grains, and legumes combined with amino acids to make it as close to meat as possible. The company plans to have these patties out on the market by 2016.

After Sergey Brin donated over $300,000 from his personal coffers in 2013 to invest in lab-cultivated beef, a decision he says was for animal welfare reasons, tech giants and venture capitalists have been trying to wiggle into what's currently a largely unsustainable meat industry. Aside from the quandary of contributing to the factory farming cycle, buying cheap meat simply isn't efficient.

And with a veggie burger that actually tastes like meat, meat apologists might have to come up with a more compelling reason to wreak havoc on the environment and use up an irresponsible amount of pasture for their next burger.

VICE is covering the launch of the Global Goals for sustainable development. In the next fifteen years, the UN wants to achieve three massive tasks: end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice and fix climate change. For more information on the Global Goals go to collectively.org.