Vegans sue Burger King over meat contamination of Impossible Burger Whopper

The texture is pretty amazing though. It’s like super lean perfectly non grisly ground beef in texture.

Agree on flavor though. It’s mildly meaty, but doesn’t taste like real beef.

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but it’ll take only a day or two to recover your meat-digesting ability entirely.

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And a religious objection is different from a dietary preference because? See how that argument doesn’t hold up?

If you say it’s vegan, then you should be making it to the common standards accepted by vegans. Meat not touching food is about as broad and basic as it gets.

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Putting “kosher” or “halal” on a food item or sign is in fact advertising. How else would people know to eat there besides word of mouth?

Well fine, but veganism is a choice! And the other one is – um, wait a minute.

/s

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It’s not marketed as vegan. It’s advertised as “not meat” and “plant based”. They specifically said it wasn’t vegan.

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True. And I still occasionally eat at fast food joints. The difference is, every time I think of Burger King, my mind’s eye flashes back to the actual vermin I saw way back then when I was working there.

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This was never vegan food. It was plant based food. To some that’s sufficient. Not to others.

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Signalling an increase of consumer preferences towards meatless options is crucial to the growth of the industry. BK pays a lot for the impossible patties, and keeping such an option around at an easily accessible restaurant is good for people in food deserts where good meatless alternatives are hard to come by. Like BK or not, they keep track of where our money is going. If it’s towards impossible Whoppers, the impossible Whoppers will grow and so will their competitors.

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There’s also the possibility that some marketing wag at BK corporate is trying to exploit that publicity in order to advertise it…

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Pretty much all the ingredients used in cooking contains some trace meat elements; see the FDA’s Food Defect Levels Handbook for some numbers. For example, in tomato paste you can have 30 fly eggs or 2 maggots per 100 grams of paste. I don’t know how the levels of meat remaining on the broiler belt compare, but I think broiler belt scrapings are probably less icky than many (uncooked) raw ingredients.

Ah, but advertising not a guarantee of strict kosher or halal. Especially since there are different interpretations. If strict adherence actually matters to you, you look for the certification that matches your requirements. Something Purplecat addressed above. If not, then you eat there and take your chances.

I like eating at Muslim restaurants in China. They are “halal” which implies higher food quality standards. But they also serve hard alcohol. Obviously, if true halal were important for my soul, I’d make some extra inquiries about my meal. But halal-ish is good enough for most folks there. If a vegan at BK, which serves beef, is truly concerned, they should make some extra inquries. Otherwise, “made from plants” is good enough for most folks here.

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My spouse is not a vegan, but he has not eaten red meat in quite a while. Guess what happens if he eats red meat. So, yes, people who avoid meat can be sickened by cross-contamination.

I think that’s what should be noted at the very least. It’s not hard to be honest about possible contaminants.

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I think that’s fair enough, but the company also has a responsibility to disclose possible cross-contamination.

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Yes, very good point. Though I’d argue that unlike existing in society without say a computer or phone (because, you know, they are basically made by slaves), not eating at Burger King is pretty damn easy. The vegans I know make a lot bigger sacrifices to avoid animal products and supporting animal cruelty. But yes, folks are free to have their priorities, and there is pretty much no way to live in our society without having a negative impact on other people (or animals) unless you kill yourself.

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I find it a cinch and I’m not even a vegan.

As others have noted, the sound strategy of some is to encourage BK to sell less meat and more impossible burgers. For others, a personal ethical objection to doing something may not extend to an ethical objection for others doing it. I have a number of ethical guidelines for myself which I literally couldn’t care less if others shared.

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Oh… I can see burger joints now, getting little metal dams welded to their grill surfaces!

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I wonder how much of the soy used in meatless meat is contaminated with meat due to all manner of animals being killed by combines during harvest. It’s damn near impossible to mechanically harvest without the combine ingesting small to even mid-sized animals (mice, snakes, racoons, etc). Unless your soy (corn, etc) is hand harvested it’s production probably resulted in an animal dying.

I disagree, if your veggie burger is coated in beef tallow, it’s no longer a veggie burger. They shouldn’t advertise it as meat free or vegetarian if it isn’t. If someone had the alpha-gal allergy they would probably have a reaction too, so it’s both an ethical issue and a health issue. And, for the record, I’m a meat eater.

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There’s no “beef tallow” involved in cooking an Impossible Burger at BK. They’re on a moving grill. There’s almost no way to prevent a small amount of cross-contamination, but per the BK employees in this thread, they aren’t getting coated, or even significantly touching, beef fat.

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