Arby’s Needs You to Know It Will Never Serve Fake Meat

Sir, this is an Arby’s (and not a vegan restaurant)

Sandwich slingers Arby’s know how much you love their Big Beef ‘n’ Cheddar: The chain is promising that, unlike many others, it won’t adopt any plant-based faux-meatstuffs for its menu. The company issued a statement saying that it was not working with Impossible Foods (one of the big two plant-meat producers, alongside Beyond Meat), calling it “absolutely impossible” that the company would get into the fake-meat game. That statement came after a website inaccurately suggested that Arby’s was considering some kind of partnership with Impossible Foods.

As Food & Wine rightfully points out, it’s mystifying as to why Arby’s felt the need to put out such a categorically blunt statement. It could be that the chain is trying to court attention from the types of people who shoehorn “eating meat” into a core element of their personality. Which, fine, you do you. Arby’s, but don’t come crying when there’s a spike in the number of “Sir, this is an Arby’s” moments because the people are demanding plant protein.

And in other news…

• 62,000 pounds of ready-to-barbecue raw meat have been recalled due to the risk of E.coli: happy Memorial Day weekend! [CNN]
• Famed French chef Hélène Darroze dishes on reopening her flagship restaurant in Paris, which is to be re-named Marsan. [World’s 50 Best]
• Three decades after it tanked, it looks like New Coke may actually be a success: Coca-Cola is reviving it as a tie-in with Netflix’s Stranger Things, and the website to order it quickly went down due to high demand. [Twitter]
• It’s well known that “use by” or “sell by” dates are not terribly accurate (and are more about food quality than actual safety), so the FDA is now encouraging food manufacturers to use one standard term: “Best if used by”. [NPR]
• Meet Moving Mountains, the company that wants to make a really good vegan hot dog by smoking sunflower seeds, onion, and carrots. [WaPo]
• Taco Bell really wants India to live más: it plans to open 600 restaurants in the country, which would make it the second most Taco Bell’d-out country after the U.S. [WSJ]
• Finally, some apolitical Chick-fil-A news: the chicken chain has figured out a way to mine social media posts to detect foodborne illnesses with a reasonably high level of accuracy. [Venture Beat]
• Take a look inside Bojangles’ intensely competitive intra-company biscuit-making competition. [Vice]
• Bill de Blasio and his presidential campaign team are boycotting McDonald’s until it raises wages. [NY Post]
• Here are all the Memorial Day discounts and free food offerings that chains are offering to veterans and military personnel. [USA Today]
• Check out these college notebook-themed plates. [Twitter]

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