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Meat-free 'Beyond Burger' hits UK restaurants and supermarkets
The Beyond Burger -- a meatless alternative that oozes beetroot-red "blood" -- has overcome supply shortages to land on UK supermarket shelves. Leading retailer Tescos is stocking the product at £5.50 for a pack of two and you can also order it at the Honest Burger restaurant chain and All Bar One pubs, according to The Guardian.
Lab-grown meat is not meat, Missouri state rules
What's the definition of "meat"? Once upon a time that would have been an easy enough question to answer, but the advent of meat-substitute products such as the Impossible Burger and the arrival of cultured meat -- aka lab-grown meat -- has given regulators in Missouri pause for thought. On Tuesday, it became the first state in the US to enact a law stating that the word "meat" cannot be used to sell anything that "is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry."
Bloody, meatless Impossible Burger will soon be easier to find
The so-called Impossible Burger debuted last year, but it's still pretty difficult to get you hands on one. Although it looks, smells and even bleeds like the real thing, the burger's patty contains no beef, but rather "meat" that's made from plant proteins. Unfortunately, you can only get one at 10 restaurants in the US -- and that's after more were added this week. Impossible Foods, the company that makes the lab-developed beef substitute, is in the middle of a big expansion that should make the burger more accessible.
The 'Beyond Burger' probably won't make you give up beef
Meat alternatives are becoming a holy grail for food producers -- not just to tap the growing vegetarian and vegan market, but also because animal farming is resource intensive. Even so, people who would prefer something that hews close to the taste, texture and smell of meat don't have a lot of options. The Impossible Burger, which uses plant proteins to create a "meaty" patty, remains exclusive to only four restaurants in New York and California. However, Beyond Meat is taking its own plant-based protein straight to your home, with a burger you can buy in supermarkets.
The Impossible Burger is a lab-made meatless treat for carnivores
Every October, two vegetarian friends of mine from Michigan spend a week at my place while they attend New York Comic Con. Because I take my hosting duties very seriously, I always try to find good places for them to eat here in New York. It's not too hard, as you can find vegetarian and vegan restaurants for pretty much every major cuisine here. But one thing that I haven't been able to locate is a good meat substitute. That changed last week when a restaurant here in the city became the first and (so far) only location to offer the Impossible Burger, a lab-developed patty that claims to replicate the taste and texture of real beef using the similar proteins found in plants. I dropped by for lunch to test this assertion -- and to scope it out for my friends, of course.
Google reportedly tried to buy a veggie burger company
Google has explored at least a few fields that have precious little to do with internet searches, but sources for The Information claim that it nearly went in a very unusual direction: the fast food business. The folks in Mountain View reportedly tried to buy Impossible Foods, a startup developing plant-based alternatives to meat and cheese, for between $200 million to $300 million. The young firm's crowning achievement so far is a veggie cheeseburger (you're looking at it above) that should taste like the real deal when it arrives later this year. If the rumor is accurate, Google only balked because Impossible wanted a higher sale price.
The Road to Mordor: Entitled
A few days ago I asked the Massively community members what in-game titles they loved the most. Titles have been on my brain for the past week, as I've started to realize just how many -- how bogglingly, terrifyingly many -- exist in Lord of the Rings Online. I hadn't really given them a lot of thought before, because who really stops to read every small paragraph that magically floats above people's heads? "Frodo, Ring-bearer of the One Ring of Power, Fellowship of the Ring, Formerly of Bag End, The Shire." Yeah, we get it. You're Mr. Fancy Pants. But really, titles are kind of neat, if only for the player who puts one on like a fine three-piece suit before an evening on the town. A title tells the world not only of your great (or not-so-great) accomplishments, but also a little about your personality -- after all, you chose that particular title to wear above all the others. A title can tell me if a player is really proud of his crafting achievements, or if he's a raider, or if he has a decent sense of humor. While I'd say that -- like LotRO's hats -- a good bulk of the titles in the game are cosmetically useless, there exists quite a few that are worth procuring if you're into titular collection. Today we're going to look at some of my favorite titles in the game, as well as how to nab them. Please don't pee your pants in excitement.
EATR robots claim to be vegetarian... sure
Usually when we freak out about the coming of killer robots, nobody bothers to disagree with our histrionics, which is in itself a comforting sign that we're overreacting. On the other hand, if the makers of a chainsaw-wielding robot take the time to point out that it is not a flesh-eating harbinger of the apocalypse, well... Cyclone Power and Robotic Technologies, the companies behind the weaponized EATR drone, have put together a joint press release to comfort us all that the biomass-harvesting machine will be exclusively vegetarian, meaning it would only feed on "renewable plant matter" and not the bodies littering the battlefield. There's no reason not to believe them, though you should remember that in the eyes of a robot, humans are renewable too. [Via Wired]
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Skinner
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirtieth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. I should say at the outset of this article that I am a vegetarian, and I generally think of animals as cute and fuzzy friends of the human race. I have no moral objection against hunting animals and using their bodies for food or clothing, however. Logically, it makes sense that people have needed this to survive, but emotionally speaking, I find skinning and eating animals rather distasteful. Things would have been different for me if I had been raised on a farm or in a hunting community instead of a city thoroughly saturated with the culture of Disney movies about cute animals singing songs and having adventures, but... anyways, you are what you are. Hunting enthusiasts should feel free to write their own articles on the topic if they have different points of view.So, anyway, as my vegetarian brain started churning around this idea of how skinning can be roleplayed in World of Warcraft, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I don't have so much real life experience of the topic. In fact, my first google search of "Skinning" turned up none other than WoWwiki's page on skinning in WoW, and I realized most people living in cities probably haven't got the first clue of what skinning animals is really like.So I searched again for "skinning animals," and this time I found various articles about how to skin an animal for people who are interested in surviving in the wilderness, or just into hunting in general. One site even had simple hand-drawn animations of the proper way to kill and skin a rabbit, and I was struck by how very different this was from my experience of skinning in WoW. In the animation, we see the head and feet get cut off, a slice go down the middle of the animal's body, and the skin slowly peeling away to reveal all the flesh underneath... while in WoW we just right-click on a dead animal, loot its hide, and poof -- it disappears before our eyes.
First Look: VegOut, for your vegetarian dining needs
"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens." --Isaac Bashevis Singer I've been a vegetarian for over a decade now, and I'm very familiar with the predicament of being in a new city and not having the foggiest idea where to look for a restaurant which caters to my particular lifestyle choices. When I heard about VegOut, I was immediately hopeful that my iPhone would, once again, provide a solution to a real-life problem. I was not disappointed. VegOut is powered by happycow.net, an community aggregator for reviews and locations of vegan, vegetarian and veg-friendly restaurants. VegOut provides location awareness, touch navigation and a great-looking front end for this very useful service. It provides ratings, contact info, maps and can filter by your specific vegan/vegetarian preferences. If you're going out with a group of omnivores, or trying to please a vegan in the group but still keep the rest of the carnivores well-fed, VegOut can help. In addition to "current location" search, it can also search any location you specify. Reviews of a restaurant can be loaded from happycow.net in VegOut's internal browser, and you can easily jump from there to Mobile Safari to add your own reviews, email the page, etc.. I'm discovering new restaurants across the country, and all of my current favorite restaurants have shown up. My newest culinary crush (Soul Vegetarian East in Chicago) came up with a 5-star rating, and I found some reviews of dishes I can't wait to go back and try. VegOut is available in the App Store (iTunes link) for $4.99US. Champ Bennett, author of VegOut, has announced a 24-hour sale for TUAW readers, dropping the price to $3.99US. You can follow @VegOutApp on Twitter for updates. I don't know how many TUAW readers have sworn off the meat for one reason or another, but this is one handy application for the traveling vegetarian.
Mama responds to PETA
Mama, lovable cook and Majesco mascot, wants us all to know that her latest game, Cooking Mama: World Kitchen, isn't all about killing animals and preparing them as tasty dishes. No, the Mama has a bunch of vegetarian recipes, as well, evidenced by the press release sent over to GoNintendo. What kind of veggie dishes can be prepared in Cooking Mama: World Kitchen? Well, there's miso soup and rice cakes, just to name a few. "I would never put rat in my Ratatouille," said Mama, wrist-deep in her latest recipe. "Like any accomplished cook, I create my recipes to appeal to a broad range of tastes and preferences. My only goal is to ensure you leave the table well fed." We imagine PETA's next step is a Flash game where Mama viciously murders piles and piles of octopi for their ink so she can write out a press release. %Gallery-28210%
Cruelty-free web gaming with PETA's Super Chick Sisters
"Colonel Sanders and his minions have kidnapped Pamela Anderson for revealing to the world that KFC's secret recipe is cruelty to chickens." So begins PETA's trippy Super Chick Sisters, a web-based Flash platformer that pushes allegations of mistreated chickens as you play.Vegetarians will like the game for its message, but gamers will like the surprisingly decent controls and level design in this quick, five-level game. They'll also appreciate infringement-tastic cut scenes featuring Mario and Luigi sidelined with Wii-related injuries and beat up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Turtles. Oh, and did we mention the final boss: A robotic spider Colonel Sanders wearing a Bowser mask? Spoiler alert!
