Free Republic

Some of fast food’s splashiest plant-based chicken rollouts have seriously impressed us in the past. First, there was the debut of Impossible Chicken Nuggets in 2021, a product that managed to capture the brothy flavor of real cooked poultry and deliver both crunch and chew without tasting springy or spongy. (Burger King tested these nuggets at various locations last fall.) Then, KFC released Beyond Fried Chicken in January 2022; these were essentially nuggets as well, and tasted “pretty spectacular,” according to our taste test. Both of these, however, were small-format chick’n products. The Impossible Original Chick’n Sandwich at Burger King...

Vegetarian food-maker Tofurky filed a lawsuit in Missouri on Monday seeking to defend its right to describe its products with meat terminology such as "sausage" and "hot dogs," as long as the packaging makes clear what the ingredients are. The Hood River, Oregon-based company and The Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based diets, say a Missouri law set to take effect Tuesday that bars companies from "misrepresenting" products as meat if they're not from "harvested livestock or poultry" is too vague and could be used to go after a range of vegetarian products that use such terminology. Tofurky says...

Meat grown artificially in a laboratory could offer a viable solution for environmentalists who want to cut their carbon footprint but cannot face going vegetarian, research suggests. An Oxford-led study found that cultured tissue could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from food production by as much as 96 per cent. The process would use up to 45 per cent less energy than conventional meat, only one per cent of the land and a tiny fraction of the water required, according to a study to be published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Meat production is responsible for about 18...