Sorry Silicon Valley. We already have the perfect meat extender. It's called the mushroom. Mix diced mushrooms into your next burger and you will reduce your meat footprint by 33%.
Mushrooms are rich in glutamate, giving them umami, one of the five important tastes that we appreciate.
Famous restauranteur, Kimball Musk, serves a mushroom-beef burger, here in Boulder at one of his restaurants.
Sonic joined the mushroom burger party in 2018, and the video above gives a short summary of their story.
The irony in this for me, as a child of the 70's, is that I remember what a bad rap McDonald's used to get because people questioned what the true contents of their "beef" burgers were back then -- they were believed to use fillers such as soy. (Back then, this was considered to be a bad thing.)