This, ladies, gentlemen, and such non-binary creatures as may happen by, is one of those “hamburger” things that is made out of plants. At the time I wrote this, the plan was that I would grill these things, after which we would attempt to eat them. We did this freely as pioneers, knowing that we could well end up with arrows in our backs.

The good news during cooking was that — unlike Buffalo burgers — these hold together well enough to stay on the grill and not slip through to join the ashes.

The product here is the “Impossible Burger.” I assume this is the same vendor that supplies BK with their ‘Impossible Whopper’ but I don’t know that for a fact. I bought this at the grocery store, in the meat department. It comes as a kind of one-pound slab. I broke it in half and fashioned it into patties, taking care to use nitrile gloves to make sure that no plant matter came into actual contact with my skin. It felt kind of ‘gnarly,’ as if there were little lumps of something in there. Beef is not gnarly.

I slightly overcooked them. I had no idea how long to cook a veggie-burger, so I just put them on the grill and watched them like a hawk. You can’t press on them with the spatula to see if you get blood or juice; that might produce sap but I didn’t try it.

I ate the whole thing. It wasn’t bad. If you ordered a hamburger at McDonalds and they slipped you one of these, you would probably send it back, saying there was something wrong with it. I knew there was something wrong with these from the get-go, so I just plowed ahead. I took the first two bites without benefit of any condiments, and then, as a first approximation to reality, brought in some mustard-based BBQ sauce from South Carolina.

Would I eat another one? Yes, but not as a substitute hamburger. It’s not a hamburger. It’s a different thing, and good on its own merits. If the space aliens came and beamed up all the cattle, we could get by with these.

Finally, no test of a would-be hamburger would be complete without breaking off a piece and offering it to Bennie the Dog. Gingerbelle is a garbage scow and will eat anything, but Bennie is actually quite particular about what he will put in his mouth. He gobbled this right up and wanted more. That’s amazing, because it is not easy to fool a dog’s nose. But these guys got Bennie to eat vegetables… no mean feat.

I will award these four stars, ****, without having any idea what that means.