From the Field How Can A Bean Burger Help Tackle Hidden Hunger?

The following interview has been translated from Spanish and edited for length and content. 

Andrew Wight: So where did the idea of this vegan burger come from?

Leonardo: I really love hamburgers and when I became a vegan later in life, burgers were one of the last things I switched over. Since I opened Dulcinea a few years ago, I have been on the quest for ingredients to make a vegan hamburger that was nutritious and tasted good that no one could say 'I don't like this'. Then one day the solution literally walked in the door: some CIAT researchers came in for a meal, talking about the biofortified bean they were working on and I realized it had the potential to perfect our vegan burger!

Andrew Wight: So Sonia, I understand that this special bean is the product of your work on biofortification. How is this different, from say, flour that has extra vitamins added into it?

Sonia Gallego: Fortification is a process where food industries might add micronutrients to foods during processing, to make up for a lack of these nutrients in the local diet or to restore something lost during processing.

But biofortification is when you selectively breed a crop, like a bean, until you get seeds that already have high levels of the nutrients you want contained in the plant. From then on, you just plant the seed and the crops have more iron and zinc in its grain, which means people who eat them get more of those minerals in their diet. In the case of biofortified beans, the iron content is maintained during processing, so wherever you use those beans, for example, in a vegan hamburger, that iron remains intact from beginning to end.

Andrew Wight: What’s the end goal of these biofortified foods?

Sonia Gallego: One big aim of our program is to strengthen the nutritional outcomes for farmers and their families in rural areas. So we have to reach them with products that are from their daily staples: we have biofortified beans, rice, yucca (cassava) and corn. The burger is another way to demonstrate how our products can get from the field to the plate and seeing people here eating burgers made from our beans is very satisfying, like seeing your kids all grown up! 

Leonardo: With that, let’s eat!

Andrew: So, it has a dark, meaty color, a juiciness like a beef patty and the burger has a texture closer to meat than I was expecting. All around, this is delicious!