With beef production accounting for nearly half of all land use and greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, the World Resources Institute is pushing what it calls a better burger — one made not from plant protein but from mushrooms mixed with hamburger meat, which would reduce the environmental impact of the approximately 10 billion burgers Americans eat each year.
By replacing 30 percent of hamburger meat with mushrooms, agricultural production-related greenhouse gas emissions would fall by “10.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year, equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars (and their annual tailpipe emissions) off the road. That’s like the entire county of San Diego going carless,” said the WRI. It would also reduce the demand for irrigation water by 83 billion gallons, the amount used by 2.6 million homes annually, and it would reduce land needs by 14,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Maryland, the group said.
Mushrooms, it pointed out, have a meat-like texture, retain moisture, and can enhance favor. Beef-mushroom burgers can also be lower in calories and saturated fat than all-beef burgers, and allow for lower use of salt. “Across a variety of important consumer attributes — including flavor, texture, appearance, and the ability to make a consumer feel full at the end of the meal — the beef-mushroom blended burger stacks up favorably to a conventional all-beef burger,” it said.
The burgers also don’t appear to cost more to produce. “A 2014-15 trial in a Baltimore public school suggested that the blended burger could be at least cost-neutral compared to traditional beef burgers. Over time, if meat producers and distributors sell pre-prepared blended burgers, economies of scale could make the blended burger an even more attractive business proposition to food service,” the WRI said.