The Column: Impossible Burger could help us break bread together

Have you heard of the Impossible Burger?

This would be the beef substitute that tastes like, well, beef.

I am not getting into a deep philosophical discussion about the tricky implications of:

1) Not eating meat; but

2) Running home breathlessly to announce that you just had an Impossible Burger; and

3) Hooray, it tastes just like meat!

 We will leave that sort of vexing debate for another time and place — perhaps at some vegan summer seminar in the Berkshires while enjoying oat milk smoothies and cauliflower crust pizza, heavy on the flaxseed topping.

In regard to the Impossible Burger, there are sure to be purists who say, nope, sorry, if you don’t eat meat — and I haven’t for nearly a half-century, longer than I haven’t done most anything else — you are doing no favors to the veggie crusade by celebrating a substitute that tastes, feels and chews like the real thing.

OK, I get that.

But, still.

I don’t want to come off like a food industry PR man, but the Impossible Burger and a competitor called Beyond Burger, though using separate methods, have achieved a major meatless, plant-based breakthrough.

“This is big,” exclaimed a friend, his mouth full of an Impossible Burger at an upscale North Shore restaurant where you might have expected diners to be attacking porterhouse steaks.

My friend, a former editor back in the newspaper days, was famous for being able to spot before most anyone else what was going to be “big.” Early on, he knew subscribers would be reading news on little lighted pads and that the printed paper would be severely threatened; oh, how we laughed — and he’s done it again.

“Try it,” he insisted.

“Zowie,” I agreed after a bite. “Amazing, all right.”

This might be a good place to briefly note my years in the Vegetarian Cavalry.

My mother, Winnie, was a terrific cook except when it came to big cuts of meat. Somehow, Mom never got the idea of letting stuff stew. While I was crazy about her eggplant parmigiana, crabmeat au gratin and summertime cherry soup, I was inclined to dive under the table like an A-bomb drill when she announced: “Pot roast tonight.”

You know that part in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 movie, “The Gold Rush,” where Charlie boils a shoe and presents it with great flourish to a dinner guest? The shoe — that was Mom’s pot roast.

So I had a head start.

As a kid, my aversion to meat was indulged but treated as a curiosity.

“Why doesn’t Freddie eat right?” adults would ask.

“I don’t know. Odd, don’t you think?”

The almighty hamburger — that was the exception.

So burger-centric was I as a pudgy little Brooklyn boy that Mom used to carry a quarter-pound of chopped chuck when visiting friends to make sure I wouldn’t make a scene if our hosts served brisket or veal shank.

I ate meat in my 20s but without much enthusiasm. By 30, I had quit beef and pork — lamb and chicken were entirely out of the question — and only occasionally forced myself to order fish in pursuit of miraculous omega-3 fatty acids and, accordingly, eternal life.

Sometimes I still am tempted by grilled shrimp and fried bay scallops but, mostly, I’m on a strict diet of spaghetti, rice, beans, apples, oatmeal, green tea, granola cookies and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Veggie burgers? I’ve tried dozens — frozen and fresh.

Some are decent enough, others remind you of what it might be like if, say, you decided to make a lunch of your driver’s license.

So Impossible and Beyond are welcome newcomers, to say the least.

And they are catching on.

Work took me to Phoenix recently and I ended up at the fabulous Heard Museum, which is dedicated to Native American art and culture.

In the courtyard was a little bistro — a sweet place with Dean Martin on the sound system and, yup, Impossible Burgers on the menu.

I had mine with Cheddar, lettuce and tomato. Into the bun was stuck a little paper flag that rejoiced: Impossible.

Here’s the great thing.

While Impossible Burgers are showing up at swell restaurants and pubs on Long Island and elegant museum cafes in Arizona, they also have debuted at … White Castle. And Burger King is test marketing Impossibles — successfully — in several spots around the country.

Somehow, this strikes me as encouraging in a world split by discord and division.

Beef eaters and vegetarians finding common ground at White Castle and Burger King?

Could be big.