Mendocino Farms have recently released the ‘Rescued Vegetable Burger’, and it might be the most sustainable burger you’ve ever eaten. The plant based burger is made from repurposed juice pulp. The Mendocino team got their inspiration for the product from Blue Hill’s.
Blue Hill’s in London, run a the WastED initiative which aims to cut down on food waste by partnering with chefs, farmers and distributors across the city and find ways of using food that would normally go to waste.
Mendocino, far away from London in the warmer climes of California, have partnered with Pressed Juicery to use the waste from creating juices and make it into a burger. Currently Pressed Juicery uses the majority of the juice pulp it creates as compost for farmland. However, a lot of this waste will soon end up in a Mendocino burger.
For anybody skeptical about what a pulp burger might taste like, the culinary experts at Menodicno have worked to create a winning recipe which won’t leave consumers feeling like they’ve been cheated out of their burger experience. The pulp part of the burger comes from beets, carrots, spinach, kale, romaine and turmeric which all have the makings of a great burger. The patty is completed by combing onion, shiitake mushrooms, brown rice, tamari and nutritional yeast.
Plant-based burgers are already much more sustainable than burgers that contain animal products. With animal agriculture being one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gases. However, food waste is a huge problem in the western world, with roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption being wasted every year. This is a huge 1.3 billion tonnes of food annually.
Initiatives like this not only provide people with delicious alternatives to animal products, but may also begin to solve food waste problems in America. If other companies were to introduce methods like this on a large scale, it would revolutionise the food industry.
Image credit: Mendocino Farms
