The maker of the Impossible Burger tested its secret sauce in rats. Then PETA went on the attack

Is the death of 188 lab rats justifiable if it spares the lives of millions of cows?That’s the question animating a heated war of words between two organizations that share a core value: saving the lives of animals.On one side is Impossible Foods, the Silicon Valley company behind the Impossible Burger and other meatless products that actually taste like meat. The company wants to get more people to eat its burger instead of the usual kind, and, in so doing, spare the lives of countless cows that would otherwise be slaughtered for beef.PETA takes issue with several rat experiments that Impossible Foods conducted to test an ingredient in its products.Part of the reason that the Impossible Burger tastes like beef is because of the secret sauce used to make it: an ingredient called soy leghemoglobin. It’s a protein that contains the molecule heme, which is found in actual meat. By synthesizing heme from the roots of soybean plants, Impossible Foods aims to trick the palate and emulate that burger flavor.The company determined that it would have to test its special ingredient in animal models in order to get the stamp of approval it wanted from the FDA. So it did so, on a total of 188 rats in three separate experiments. As is typical in medical research, the rats were sacrificed.