It’d be great if a burger-a-day diet was healthy. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not the worst. You’ve got protein in there and hopefully some veggies on top (and on the side) , and even some fiber from the roll (you used whole grain, right?). Unfortunately, study after study shows that meat as a protein source just isn’t that healthy. It’s far better to get that necessary protein from plants. But why?

If you’ve been hankering to try one of the cutting-edge meatless burgers people are talking about but haven’t been able to get your hands on one yet, you’re in luck: Burger King’s Impossible Whopper — a patty made with 0 percent meat — will soon be available nationwide. It’s been barely a month since the fast-food chain announced it was giving the new Impossible Whopper a trial run in 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area. Already, the results are so promising that Burger King now plans to make the product available in all its 7,200 branches across the US by the end of this year.

It was past midnight when Maria Bahruth suddenly decided something that could make or break her small Downtown Boise restaurant. The High Note Cafe’s owner had gotten 15 minutes into watching “Dominion,” a graphic animal-rights documentary available on YouTube. Bahruth, who calls the 2018 Australian film “heartbreaking,” suddenly found herself baring her soul on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

Impossible Foods, the alternative meat company that makes the Impossible Burger, announced today that it has raised an additional $300 million to take plant-based meat mainstream. The new round of funding was first reported by Reuters. It’s a big fundraising haul, one that reflects the intense investor demand right now for alternatives to conventional meat. The new round of funding values the company at $2 billion, insiders told Reuters.

2019 has been an incredible year for a niche industry: alternative meats. First, Impossible Foods, a leading creator of plant-based meatlike burgers, announced the Impossible Burger 2.0, an improved recipe over previous meat substitutes that tastes, well, a lot meatier. In April, Burger King announced the launch of the Impossible Whopper, Qdoba said it would make Impossible Meat bowls and tacos available at all of its US locations, and Del Taco announced it would offer Beyond Meat’s beef alternative.

Starting this week, Beyond Meat is selling a new “meatier” version of its Beyond Burger that the company says is a source of complete protein and both looks and tastes more like real meat. The new burger uses a combination of coconut oil and cocoa to imitate the look and taste of “marbling,” the white, fatty specks you get in meat that contribute to its rich flavor. The burger also new uses apple extract so that it browns more as it’s cooking.

Is "free-range" or "pasture-fed" better? Now you can cut through the mess of marketing claims and take responsibility for the meat you eat.

Hollywood film-maker James Cameron tells Tom Heap why his whole family is now vegan because of climate change. First broadcast on Farming Today, 1 December 2015.

As TransCanada files a NAFTA claim for $15 billion against the U.S. government over the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, we turn to another case in which massive trade agreements have infringed on the U.S. government’s ability to pass legislation...Amy Goodman speaks with Lori Wallach.

A Danish city has ordered pork to be mandatory on municipal menus, including for schools and daycare centers, with politicians insisting the move is necessary for preserving the country's food traditions and is not an attack on Muslims. Frank Noergaard, a member of the council in Randers that narrowly approved the decision earlier this week, says it was made to ensure that pork remains "a central part of Denmark's food culture."

Get ready for the “second domestication.” Memphis Meats wants to completely reinvent meat production by bringing it into the lab. The company, founded by three scientists, wants to be the first to sell meat grown from stem cells. They have already grown small amounts using cells harvested from cows, pigs, and chickens, and they expect their products will be ready to enter the market within the next five years. Competitors...

The hamburger is a nearly complete reflection of America through the 20th century. Popularized by White Castle and McDonald's, burgers only became the cheap, fast food we know and love in concert with improvements in food preservation, mass production lines, long-distance freight, and agricultural yields. This efficiency led to excess: Red meat consumption rose through the mid-1900s until it was overtaken by America’s love affair with chicken over the last few decades.

Meat, eggs and milk could be produced in lab without killing or harming animals thanks to microbe cultures. The future of food as we know it may be forever changed, allowing even vegetarians and vegans to eat hamburgers and milkshakes again.

American protein fiends who want a break from yogurt cups and Clif bars will soon have another option: meat bars. Starting this summer, Hershey’s will introduce a souped up version of jerky from its Krave Pure Foods division, which the company acquired last year. If the concept is a bit bizarre, so are the flavors: black cherry barbecue, basil citrus and pineapple orange. Meat snacks are a tiny category in the US, said Marcel Nahm, the vice president of US snacks for Hershey’s.

Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef? In August 2013, a team of Dutch scientists showed off their lab-grown burger (cost: $330,000) and even provided a taste test. Two months ago, the American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball (cost: $18,000 per pound).

Traditional food industry lobbying groups in Washington have for years been dubbed “The DC Barnyard,” but a fresh face is about to bring a new flavor of foodie influence to the US capital. The Good Food Institute represents the interests of the clean (think burgers made without slaughtering cows) and plant-based food industries, many of which are working on the cutting edge of food technology. Its mission, it says, is to help sustainably feed the more than 9 billion people who will live on the planet in 2050.

In Seth Goldman’s vision of the supermarket meat case of the future, he doesn’t see a meat case at all. He sees a protein case. And only some of the proteins in it will come from animals. “I want to see chicken protein, plant protein, beef protein,” he says. “Just like what has happened in the dairy case.” Goldman, who founded Honest Tea, last year became executive chairman of the board of Beyond Meat, the California company whose high-tech approach to plant-based meat substitutes has attracted such investors as Biz Stone and Bill Gates.

The Meat Industry is famously horrible. Conscious animals contribute to climate change and pollute water—increasingly with antibiotic-resistant bugs—and industrial slaughter could qualify as torture. Plus, there’s the fecal soup. But meat remains delicious. Yeah, meat substitutes exist, but what guilt-ridden omnivores really want is exactly what they enjoy now, without all the downsides. The answer, hopefully, is lab-grown meat, built from cell samples that grow into the same tissue you chow down on.

The rapid growth of the world's human population raises the issue of more efficient food production; one solution to the problem is "clean meat," which is produced in the equivalent of meat fermenters, Bruce Friedrich, Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, told Radio Sputnik. The world's human population reached 7.4 billion in March 2016, having reached 7 billion in October 2011. In 2050, it is expected to reach 9.7 billion, raising the question of how to produce enough food for everybody.

Fire up the grill and invite me over, friend. Today, we feast in celebration. The latest USDA meat production projections are out, and they predict that, after years of domination by chicken, beef will become the fastest growing meat category over the course of the next decade. Beef isn’t just going to be more available, though. It’s also going to be cheaper than it’s been in years.

Millennials! They’re not having sex! Or are they? They’re hated by other generations but beloved by thinkpiece headlines across the internet. And according to McDonald’s, they’re not eating Big Macs. According to a memo from a top McDonald’s franchisee, only one in five millennials have tried a Big

A plant meat and a traditional meat company have announced an investment agreement whereby Springdale, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods Inc. will own a five percent stake in Beyond Meat. The undisclosed dollar value was raised through an initiative of El Segundo, California-based Beyond Meat, which brands itself as “The Future of Protein.” Other investors in the company include The Humane Society of the United States, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and venture capital company Kleiner Perkins.

We have all heard the perpetual argument about the meat industry. On one side, unwavering pro-meat eaters assert that some animals were put on this earth for our consumption, as a means for our survival. On the other side, vegan individuals claim that eating animals is not only cruel but evolutionarily outdated. Regardless of one’s moral compass or core beliefs, finding the facts can be difficult. Beyond “he said/she said,” there are some very tangible things happening around the globe that are a detriment to our health and to our planet.

If you like hamburgers, maybe don't watch this video.

As a greater number of people enter the middle class around the globe, many will turn away from plant-based diets in favor of meat-based diets. This could be a cause for concern, as meat production requires the input of substantially more resources, such as water and energy. The question of how to feed a growing world in a time when wealth is spreading and personal tastes are changing is the subject of some sustainability research.

“The meatball that changed the world.” That was the enthusiastic prediction early last year from Uma Valeti, a cardiologist and now CEO of Memphis Meats, as he admired the freshly cooked meatball arranged gourmet-style on a plate. As a meatball, it definitely had a lot going for it. It was made by specialty chef Dave Anderson, using an Italian recipe. As it cooked in the frying pan, (click here to watch the video) it sizzled and smelled the way a meatball should. And the taste-tester gave it a thumbs-up.

It tastes like chicken. So how is this chicken made? Memphis Meats’ in-house senior scientist Eric Schulze explained the process to Eater in broad strokes. “We start by harvesting sells from high-quality, living chickens that might otherwise go into conventional meat,” he says. “The chickens are not killed in the process. We look for cells that have potential to renew, put them in environment where they can grow and feed them water and nutrients — vitamins, minerals, proteins, sugars — and let them grow.”

San Francisco-based startup Memphis Meats says it has made the world's first lab-grown chicken strips from animal cells. On March 14, Memphis Meats invited a handful of taste-testers to their kitchen to try it. And according to the company, they said it tastes just like chicken. "It is thrilling to introduce the first chicken and duck that didn’t require raising animals. This is a historic moment for the clean meat movement," Memphis Meats' cofounder and CEO, Uma Valeti, said in a press release.

The environment doesn't appreciate our meat obsession. The average meat-eater in the U.S. is responsible for almost twice as much global warming as the average vegetarian, and close to three times that of the average vegan, according to a study (pdf) published this month in the journal Climatic Change.

We can produce the food that people crave without using livestock, pledges Pat Brown founder of the ‘veggie burger that bleeds’.

Australian meat sales plunged 15 per cent due to public "revulsion" over animal cruelty in Indonesian abattoirs, a court has been told. Former agriculture minister Joe Ludwig's lawyers have argued their client's decision to suspend live cattle exports to Indonesia was necessary to protect the wider industry's reputation. Mr Ludwig ordered the suspension in 2011, following a Four Corners investigation.

“Every vegan seems to have their own lightbulb moment when something clicked and they stopped eating animal products,” says Cambridge University archaeologist Dr Pía Spry-Marqués, who committed to a plant-only diet two years ago as she researched the history of pork. “My son was born three years ago and I was nursing him. People looked at me funny for breastfeeding my child, and yet it was fine to drink lattes with cow’s milk, or eat chocolate spread,” she recalls to The Independent.

“What the Health” is the most recent documentary making waves from duo Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, who made “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret” in 2014 — another emotionally charged behind the scenes look at the food industry of today. “What the Health” was released in March 2017 and came to Netflix in June where it has been quickly gaining viewers.

The largest supermarket in the U.S. has a new name in the meat aisle. It just so happens that it’s not made of meat. The plant-based Beyond Burger, made by startup Beyond Meat, began rolling out in more than 600 Kroger-owned (KR, +0.33%) stores in June—a move that has more than tripled the burger's distribution within two months.

Burgers made from plants instead of animals are capturing more space on U.S. barbecue grills this summer, fueling sales in the niche products that could reach $5 billion globally by 2020. Plant-based meat foods are now available that include beet juice for color and canola oil to simulate fat. These changes are not only pulling in consumers but also one of the powerhouses in traditional meat production, Tyson Foods Inc.