In “Pays Imaginaire,” the French electro-pop duo Polo & Pan paint a sunny, pristine, imaginary world where everything is bounteous and everybody is happy. People can fly; there are banquets of blueberries and wine; things seem to sparkle. An optimistic series of open chords embody that sense of no-worries perfection, and the end result is like if LCD Soundsystem reinterpreted Debussy’s Clair de Lune (and indeed, the band lists these two as their main influences): romantic, robust, and dreamily charged. But, as we learn at the song’s end, it was all just a dream.
Impossible Foods is looking to achieve the Impossible yet again: they’re working on no-fish fish. The initiative is, of course, a direct response to overfishing, attempting to satisfy consumers with a simulated version of the real thing. It’s also a bid at making more $ after they crush it with fake beef. That’s valiant and all, but is anyone trying to cut back on their fish consumption for health reasons? We all know cows are bad for the world (at least the way we use them now), but the reason people really eat Impossible burgers is that they think they’re healthier than meat. Fish is healthy already, so will anyone care to make the swap?
Maybe Impossible will learn from the other companies who beat them to the punch: you can already buy Good Catch’s fish-free tuna, made of mostly legume flour, at Whole Foods, and another company, Wild Type, is working on lab-grown salmon. Yum.
Not to be outdone by the Impossible folks or, for that matter, Howard Schultz, a couple of scientists in Seattle have been formulating a beanless coffee– that is, a synthetic compilation of the compounds that compose coffee flavor. You’ll be able to buy it under the label, Atomo, starting in 2020. To be honest, these chemists just took this on as an experiment because they were interested, but they’re getting snaps for providing an alternative to resource-intensive coffee farming. So, let us ask: at what point do we consume our way out of access to actual food that the earth has grown? What if, when we realized we had abused our coffee resources, we drank less coffee? Or instead of funneling hundreds of millions in venture capital toward developing a food simulacrum, we redirected those funds toward environmental conservation and sustainability? Maybe if consumers felt an effect of their greed, we’d, I dunno, act differently?
Borne of actual demand for oat milk, dairy-free products, and protein-laden breakfast foods, oat yogurt is proliferating on grocery shelves. Obviously Oatly is leading the pack, with another Scandinavian brand, Hälsa, not far behind. How long until dairy companies catch on?
