Hate It: The Grateful Burger

Despite its appearance and name, a Grateful Burger does not taste like a regular burger. It tastes like beef pumped with chalk, which I suppose is the idea.

The meat-to-mushroom ratio is so terrifyingly off—50% too much mushroom, to be precise—that the aftertaste demands you right the wrong. You need to pick up another burger, a real one, to chase it down. Grateful Burger’s cardinal sin is that it makes you want to eat more meat.

Still, you can also imagine Grateful Burger as a transitional vegetarian plot to abolish burgers forever. It starts with a 50-50 meat-to-mushroom ratio, which sounds almost reasonable. Next, it’s 25-75. You want to stop global warming, so you go for it. (Cattle flatulence releases 4.6 gigatonnes of methane a year.)

Then, it’s 10-90, but the livestock industry is dead, global warming is still marching on, and you have no source of meat besides Grateful Burger. And when the ratio hits 0-100, a giant shiitake cap is on your plate, wilting between two sad slices of bread, a ketchup smiley face. Some call it a burger. Others tell legends of the braver, more honorable, authentic burgers that once were.