The New Yorker recently ran a great profile on Impossible Foods entitled Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?. The piece talks about the mysterious heme ingredient that makes their Impossible Burger have a texture that's more like real meat but it largely focuses on the companies desire to transition to plant-based alternatives as a means of solving climate change (as you'd guess from the title). There's a passage early in the article that I can't stop thinking about:

Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.

...

When the world’s one and a half billion beef and dairy cows ruminate, the microbes in their bathtub-size stomachs generate methane as a by-product. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. emissions. (In the popular imagination, the culprit is cow farts, but it’s mostly cow burps.) Steven Chu, a former Secretary of Energy who often gives talks on climate change, tells audiences that if cows were a country their emissions “would be greater than all of the E.U., and behind only China and America.” Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London - and the average American eats that much each month.

The TLDR of it all is that American's consume a ton of meat and raising livestock is a massive burden on the environment in a lot of different arenas. This is the impetus behind founder Pat Brown's mission to get Impossible Foods everywhere.

I've only been a vegetarian for a few years myself, so I'm certainly not casting any stones; I understand the transition could be hard. However, I can't shake the notion that if you're a "woke" individual that is concerned about climate change and saving the planet's environment, you just shouldn't eat meat. There doesn't seem to be a rationale for doing so aside from personal indulgence.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think saving the environmental is based on a single factor. Corporations are obnoxiously irresponsible and our government is beyond complacent in holding them to standards. There are lots of things that need to be fixed but, just like buying an electric or hybrid car, this seems like one of those things that can be directly acted upon by individuals. Why are people so averse to doing so?

The article does a good job of covering the history of the company, the arguments around locally raised cattle (honestly, not better), the "productizing" of cattle and all of the nuances you'd hope would be covered. It's a New Yorker piece, it's long. Internet time doesn't really allow for immersing in long profiles like this but I highly recommend it. It's an educational read and one worth further contemplation.