++The brand-new Beyond Chicken tenders taste almost identical to the real thing. +
++If you’ve ever had a Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger, you know that plant-based food companies have figured out how to make fake beef that tastes pretty beefy. Their success is reflected in the fact that many foodies now consider their products not only tolerable but trendy. +
++Yet when it comes to chicken, plant-based meat companies have really struggled to make a convincing substitute. That’s largely because replicating the structure of chicken muscle — which has a fibrous quality, with strands that pull apart — is much harder than creating a ground meat lookalike. Beyond Meat has tried to mimic chicken in the past, releasing chicken strips back in 2012. But reviews were mixed, and the company pulled the product a few years later. +
++Now, Beyond Meat is ready to try again with a new product: Beyond Chicken tenders. Hundreds of restaurants across the US — mostly small regional chains — launched the product on their menus starting July 8 (you can go to this locator to see if it’s available near you). And this time, the company may have finally cracked the code. +
++Their team of 200 scientists examined different plant candidates — soy beans, peas, mung beans, fava beans, and so on — to figure out which would be the best plant to supply the protein in their tenders. They found that when they isolated protein from fava beans, they could use heating, cooling, and pressure to reshape it into a structure that mimics chicken muscle. +
++Fava beans were also able to mimic the taste and even smell of chicken. In the lab, the scientists used an “e-nose” — an electronic nose that sniffs out the aroma molecules that come out of real chicken and then sniffs out the aroma molecules that come from various plants, to find the right match. +
++The result: new faux-chicken tenders that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. +
++The breaded tenders work well on their own or as part of a sandwich or wrap, which is how some restaurants are serving them. (You won’t be able to find the tenders in grocery stores yet, but Beyond says it’ll soon expand into hotels, college campuses, and stadiums.) +
++And the taste is only one of the benefits. There are health benefits to be reaped, too: Beyond Chicken tenders have 40 percent less saturated fat than a typical restaurant tender, they have no cholesterol, and they’re made with no antibiotics. (Though, like regular chicken tenders, Beyond’s are high in sodium.) +
++Plus, when you opt for chickenless chicken, you know that you’re reducing the demand for chickens raised in horrible conditions on factory farms. Those giant, industrialized farms also damage the environment and ratchet up the risk of emerging pandemics and antibiotic resistance — so you can feel good knowing you’re not supporting that system. +
++“We call it hedonistic altruism,” Ethan Brown, the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, told me. “If we can provide a delicious sensory experience for the consumer and they can also feel really great about what they’re doing for the Earth — it’s a win.” +
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Courtesy of Beyond Meat
++Okay, but does it actually taste like real chicken? +
++Although the tenders are mainly made from fava beans, I honestly wouldn’t have suspected that they come from a plant if I hadn’t known that before I took a bite. They tasted almost identical to real chicken, and the breading on them made them look convincingly chickenesque. +
++When I stripped off the breading to see what was under the hood, I found that the texture inside didn’t 100 percent match chicken (it was a bit denser), though I’d say it was 90 percent of the way there. It replicated the texture of traditional chicken nuggets a bit better than the top competitors in the freezer aisle, like Gardein’s vegan tenders. +
++I actually tried pulling the Beyond Chicken tender apart, and it did have a bit of fibrousness reminiscent of the strands in chicken muscle. Again, not 100 percent true to life, but I only noticed the difference because I was surgically dissecting my lunch. Normally, diners don’t do that — so, I thought, who even cares about these tiny differences? +
++I found myself questioning the whole premise that a faux-chicken product needs to be exactly like chicken. If I have something that’s 90 percent similar to this thing I like to eat, and it’s much better for animals and the environment and human health, why wouldn’t I go for that? Why should I be so fanatically fixated on its metaphysical chickenness? I just care that it tastes good. +
++But I know that some people do care about eating something that tastes exactly like chicken, so I took Beyond Chicken tenders to the toughest food critic I know: my 87-year-old grandmother. She’s been cooking incredible chicken dishes for decades, and I wanted to see if she’d sniff out the difference if I didn’t tell her that what she was being served was not real chicken. So I simply told her I’d brought us a treat to share. After taking a few bites, she said it tasted “very good.” +
++Then I revealed to her that this was not real chicken; it was made from plants. +
++She stared at me for a second. Then she said, “I don’t mind, as long as it tastes like chicken. And it does! It’s a bit heavier, but if you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have noticed.” +
+ ++Is this the future of chicken consumption? +
++So far, Beyond Chicken tenders are only available in about 400 restaurant locations. But if more restaurants add the tenders to their menus — and if KFC, after evaluating its 2020 Beyond Fried Chicken trial run, moves forward with a national rollout — it could help us step away from our deeply problematic current system of raising real chickens. +
++About 99 percent of all chickens we eat come from factory farms. These aren’t the idyllic, pastoral farms we’re taught to picture as children, with birds free to wander around in the greenery. Instead, chickens are raised in gigantic, noisy, overcrowded warehouses filled with ammonia fumes. Due to genetic selection for larger size, they grow so fast that their legs can’t support their weight. After six weeks of misery, they’re killed. +
++And as my colleague Kelsey Piper has explained, each year the average American eats about 23 chickens, compared to just over one-tenth of one cow. That’s because chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat. Chicken has also become extremely popular; Americans eat twice as much of it now as they did in the 1970s. +
++All this bothers Brown, the Beyond Meat CEO, a lot. +
++“Animal welfare is a really important consideration,” he said. “In terms of just the number of sentient beings — the sheer number of captive beings — chickens are up there. It’s a different thing than beef, for sure.” +
++But plant-based companies are not yet able to mimic chicken in all its forms. Making a breaded tender is one thing — the breading can act as camouflage. Creating a convincing chicken breast is a whole other dream, and Brown suggested we shouldn’t expect it to come true anytime soon. +
++“We have some projects that we consider a holy grail, and chicken breast is one of those. It’s very distinct-looking,” he said. “That’s going to take time.” +
++Meanwhile, the chicken tenders are a good start. +
+
++The coming battle to expand Supplemental Security Income, explained. +
++In a couple of weeks, the US will start sending monthly checks to the vast majority of American parents. Most other rich countries have policies similar to this (known as a child allowance). If these expanded child tax credit (CTC) checks get to everyone who’s eligible, they could slash child poverty in America by about 40 percent. +
++But it could also be only the first of several improvements to America’s social-safety net. An array of powerful Democrats in Congress, as well as advocates for the elderly and people with disabilities (like AARP), have been championing another major change as part of this fall’s legislative push: boosting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. +
++SSI is not one of the better-known safety net programs in the US. It was passed into law in 1972 after Richard Nixon tried and failed to get Congress to adopt his “guaranteed annual income” plan, essentially a kind of unconditional basic income that would have given the poorest households in America a guaranteed cash benefit. +
++That plan ran into conservative opposition, but its opponents acceded to two more modest proposals. +
++One was the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives working adults (especially those with children) a bigger tax break — and potentially a bigger refund — tied to how much they’ve worked. +
++The other was SSI, meant to help those the EITC didn’t capture: disabled, blind (a different category than “disabled” for legal purposes), and elder Americans living in poverty. +
++Many people in those categories qualify for Social Security payments because they’ve paid into the OASDI (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) program throughout their working lives via payroll tax. +
++But many other people — those under 18, or adults who are never able to work — don’t qualify for Social Security. Even many who do qualify for Social Security still earn a low-enough income to receive additional payments from SSI: About one-third of the 7.8 million SSI recipients are also on Social Security. +
++The point of SSI, in theory, is to make sure that no American who is permanently and totally disabled, blind, or over the age of 65 lives in poverty. +
++In practice, though, the program helps a lot but has yet to meet that goal. +
++How SSI has fallen short +
++In 2021, the maximum SSI benefit for an individual is $9,530.12 per year. The poverty line for a single person is $12,880 — meaning that SSI, at most, brings recipients up to less than three-quarters of the poverty line. +
++It gets worse, though. Let’s say you’re an SSI recipient married to another recipient, which makes you an “eligible couple.” You could both be retirees in your 70s, or disabled/blind people earlier in life. +
++You don’t get to add your benefit amounts together. Instead, you have to share a maximum benefit of $14,293.61, only 50 percent more than the individual benefit. The effect is a really dramatic marriage penalty: Two SSI recipients receive a large income boost if they get divorced, but those who marry take a big cut in benefits. +
++In late May 2020, Joe Biden announced his campaign’s disability policy platform, which included major expansions of SSI benefits. The plan set the maximum benefit at 100 percent of the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in benefits over the status quo. The proposal would also eliminate both the marriage penalty — letting couples keep their full benefits — and the complex “in-kind assistance” provisions that result in reduced SSI checks for some people who, say, live for free in a family member’s home. +
++There’s more. SSI is currently limited to people with assets of less than $2,000, or $3,000 for couples. That means many seniors who have even a small amount of retirement savings, as well as disabled people with nest eggs, aren’t eligible. +
++Biden would more than double the asset limit for individuals and nearly triple it for couples. I’d personally prefer getting rid of the asset test altogether, as it can encourage people to spend every bit of savings they have to qualify for the benefit; that said, raising it is an improvement. +
++Biden has recently faced a strong push from his allies in Congress to include these changes in the huge $6 trillion spending package Democrats plan to pass later this summer or in the fall. +
++Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a freshman congressman from New York, and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown are leading the charge, with figures including Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders and Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden on board. +
++The group in April sent a letter to Biden, signed by a total of 18 senators and 33 members of the House, urging him to make expanded SSI a priority. +
++Major parts of the Democratic coalition, like the AFL-CIO union federation, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, and the AARP, are on board. The changes have overwhelming public support — as have other recent programs designed to simply give people money, like the stimulus checks and the previously mentioned CTC checks. +
++And like the CTC checks, these changes could have a major impact on poverty in America. The Urban Institute estimates that the combination of SSI changes and other Social Security reforms Biden has proposed would lift 1.4 million elderly or disabled people out of poverty in 2021. While increasing SSI alone would do less, it would still be a significant step forward for the people impacted. +
++And if SSI improvements happen alongside the child checks, they’d cement Biden’s first term as a period that saw some of the biggest changes to the American social-safety net in decades. +
++The scene sets the table for Florence Pugh to play a bigger role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. +
++Spoiler alert: This story includes details about the plot and post-credits scene of Black Widow. +
++Can a movie that’s set years before Avengers: Endgame really push the Marvel Cinematic Universe forward? No, but Black Widow’s post-credits scene surely tries. +
++The long-awaited film centered on the Avengers’ Natasha Romanoff — Marvel’s longest-tenured female superhero — is finally in theaters. I liked a lot of things about it, but even if the pandemic hadn’t delayed the film’s release by more than a year, its story would still feel long overdue. +
++Black Widow is a prequel whose chronology in the MCU falls years before Endgame, where the character ultimately dies a dramatic (and controversial) death. Unlike a lot of Marvel’s other solo Avengers films, it doesn’t really advance her individual story forward; instead, it fills in the gaps of a life we’ve previously heard about but rarely seen in the MCU. +
++Still, in the grand tradition of nearly every other Marvel movie to date, Black Widow has a post-credits scene. The studio has long used end-credits scenes to tease future movies and future MCU storylines. Despite Black Widow’s status as a somewhat static “backstory” chapter, its credits scene manages to hint at a possible future storyline and the emergence of a villain we’re just getting to know. It also further cements and strengthens the links between Marvel’s movies and TV series within the MCU. Rather than focusing on Natasha, however, it pivots a bit to tease how Florence Pugh — who plays fellow assassin Yelena — may carry on the title of Black Widow in the MCU’s future. +
++What happens in Black Widow’s credits scene +
++Black Widow’s credits scene opens with Yelena driving down a dirt road with an adorable dog. She finally reaches her destination, which is revealed to be Nat’s gravesite. The headstone is adorned with flowers, indicating Nat’s sacrifice and tenure as an Avenger didn’t go unnoticed. +
++The scene places us in the present day, sometime after Nat’s death in Endgame. That means the last time we saw Yelena in the MCU chronology was right after Civil War and years before Thanos’s invasion in Infinity War, when Yelena and Nat parted ways and Yelena set out to save the many women who’d been brainwashed into becoming Black Widows just like them. +
++Yelena is visiting Natasha’s grave to pay respect to someone who had become a sister to her. Suddenly, she is joined by the Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who asks Yelena if she wants to avenge Nat’s death. Yelena says yes. Valentina shows Yelena a photo of a man whom she says is responsible for Nat dying. The camera, accompanied by a suspenseful music drop, reveals that the pictured individual is Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). That’s when the scene abruptly ends. +
++What this credits scene means for the future of the MCU +
++Technically speaking, Valentina isn’t completely wrong when she tells Yelena that Clint is responsible for Nat’s death. In Endgame, Clint and Natasha were tasked with retrieving the Soul Stone to complete the Infinity Gauntlet and reverse Thanos’s snap. The tricky part is that to obtain the Soul Stone, you need to sacrifice a soul. +
++Both Clint and Nat fought to be the one who sacrificed themselves, but it was Nat — declaring that she should be the one to die, in large part because Clint had a family to look after — who ultimately exchanged her life for the Soul Stone. So, sure, in a very loose interpretation, Clint and his family are the reason Nat is dead. If he didn’t have a family, and if Nat had not been close with them, she might not have been so compelled to throw herself off a cliff and save the world. +
++But from what we know about Valentina in Marvel’s comic books, she’s a nefarious player and mastermind. Also, in her recent appearance on Marvel’s Disney+ TV series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier — which marked her official on-screen introduction to the MCU — she seemed to be planting seeds of doubt and subterfuge in her recruitment of Captain America II, John Walker. +
++Thus, with Valentina not giving Yelena the full story in Black Widow’s credits scene, it appears she is setting up a clash between Yelena and Clint. +
++The inevitable face-off between Yelena and Clint probably won’t happen in one of Marvel’s upcoming movies; the next few titles on the studio’s schedule are The Eternals, Shang Chi, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, none of which will prominently feature Clint or Yelena. Enter Hawkeye, the forthcoming TV series on Disney+ that doesn’t yet have a specific release date but is expected to premiere later in 2021. +
++Few details are known about Hawkeye, except that Renner will reprise his role as the title character and Hailee Steinfeld will play Kate Bishop, a young markswoman who takes on the title of Hawkeye in Marvel’s comic books. +
++Should Yelena show up on Hawkeye and butt heads with Clint and Kate, there may eventually be a time when she learns the full extent of Clint and Nat’s deep friendship. If Yelena comes to realize that Nat loved Clint and his family so much, and that she wanted to do anything she could to help her team, she’d have the complete story rather than the half-truth Valentina told her. +
++Such a reveal would be an opportunity to set up Yelena as part of whatever the next version of the Avengers looks like — and open the door to her (and Pugh’s) future in the MCU. +
++There’s also a potential parallel between the Nat/Yelena and Clint/Kate duos, in that it seems as though Marvel intends to pass on the titles of Black Widow and Hawkeye to new people. In Black Widow, Nat and Yelena acknowledge they are sisters, even if they’re not related by blood. Clint and Kate have sort of an older-brother-younger-sister dynamic in the comic books, and it’s likely the same dynamic will carry over to Hawkeye. There will be a lot of nifty symmetry to future MCU storylines should Pugh and Steinfeld ultimately become the next iterations of Black Widow and Hawkeye, staying true to the characters’ histories and continuing their legacies. +