I think it's fascinating how all these fast-food chains are jumping on artificial meat. It makes perfect sense: meat is expensive and difficult to work with, so low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.
Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper and less gross at the same time, and it might help them cut down on calories and improve their health image.
I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.
Can you make a clearer, better-cited case for "low cost chains serve meat that could barely even be called meat"? KFC serves (primarily) whole muscle chicken†, and the general US appetite for "dark meat" chicken is so low that we've been accused of "dumping" it on other countries and messing up their markets --- KFC seems to have no trouble sourcing its inputs effectively. KFC's suppliers include all the major chicken producers; the same firms that put chicken breasts on the shelves at grocery stores. KFC's biggest competitor is going antibiotic-free this year; at least one of KFC's suppliers already has. That's a step past supermarket chicken.
I'm not saying Tyson chicken is good; it's CAFO meat, which is not great for the environment or for flavor. But it's not "barely meat"; it's meat that basically sets the standard for meat quality in one of the meat-eatingest countries in the world, and has set that standard for over 50 years.
† Don't get me started on how irresponsible the public interest campaign against transglutaminase franken-meat is.
Just anecdotal, but I was once chatting on a plane with a guy working as a meat buyer for a major dog food brand. He told me his work was to negotiate the cheapest thing that would pass legally as meat as possible, in the biggest quantity as possible. He then mentioned in passing that his toughest competition was Mc Donald's.
I've heard very similar tales. A local lad who works at a very large meat processing factory, McDonalds buy the cheapest meat possible. Other chains buy middle of the range meat.
>Can you make a clearer, better-cited case for "low cost chains serve meat that could barely even be called meat"?
Taco bell famously admit a few years ago that their beef filling was only 88% beef.
CBC did an investigative report in Canada recently that revealed subway's chicken was only 50% chicken. [0] The rest being a smörgåsbord of fillers. The 4 other chains studied in the tests didn't do much better.
You’re conflating two different things. One is the meat used in the Taco Bell filling, which is 100% beef. Two is the overall composition of the filling, which you’d obviously not expect to be 100% beef. (If you put onions in your taco filling, by that same math, your taco filling isn’t 100% beef either.)
There is also nothing “gross” about the additives used in the filling, which are primarily there to improve texture. They are widely used and perfectly safe: https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien.... (For some reason people go “eww” when soy lecithin is used at Taco Bell, but don’t utter a peep when it’s used in some fancy foam in a high end restaurant. It’s all in peoples’ heads, and there is also a large amount of classism involved.)
The outcome is going to be different if a chef uses an unusual ingredient to create an experience, vs a chain using that same ingredient to cut costs, because they have different incentives. The chain has an incentive to buy from the cheapest source, and using more of a filler ingredient can help them cut costs. These factors aren't relevant for a high-end restaurant where the cost of ingredients is less significant to the bottom line.
Leaps and bounds better, or just a much more complicated process? Because I'd put a butcher that I know and trust, and my own judgement in food preparation, ahead of any fast food supply chain process, and the same goes for any well-regarded restaurant with a basically competent chef.
So... do they have a way crazier quality control process? Absolutely. Will the result be better food safety than the Michelin-starred place down the street? Not a chance.
Unless McDonalds is committing fraud by listing chicken breast fillet (and no other proteins) in the ingredients for its grilled chicken sandwich, this is likely measurement error.
I have no idea what Subway is selling. Subway squicks me out, as does Taco Bell.
Little known secret: Subway's Cold Cut Combo is all turkey
COLD CUT COMBO: Turkey Bologna: Mechanically separated turkey, water, contains less than 2% of: salt, corn syrup solids, potassium lactate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, flavorings. Turkey Ham: Cured turkey thigh meat, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, brown sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite, water. Turkey Salami: Dark turkey, mechanically separated turkey, water, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, spice and flavorings, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite
So plant based milks can't be called milk, plant based proteins can't be called meats, but hot dogs can be called hot dogs and have no dog meat in them, riced cauliflower is under attack, Parmesan (cheese byproduct and sawdust) in a can is considered not misleading, a California Port wine is impossible but nobody cares, etc
Subway's Salami, Ham, and Bologna can be made with turkey instead of the cuts you'd expect because money.
It's always about money. They want consumers buying their products in stores and if you buy enough product for your restaurants you can call it anything you want.
Nitpicky, but this is itself misleading. Canned parm is mostly actual cheese, it's just... not very good. "Sawdust" is there in small amounts for anti-caking purposes, not bulking.
Unless you're grating it from a block every time you use it --- which, yes, is what you should do --- you probably shouldn't worry too much about which anti-caking agents are being used.
Exactly why would anyone care that there are "California Port wines"? That's a good thing. The Portuguese make "ports" out of all sorts of grape varietals, and California has excellent grapes.
Ever look at powdered Parmesan cheese shakers? Cellulose is added to prevent clumping and I suppose as filler too. You're eating pretty much something very close to sawdust in the cheese.
I agree on the flavor but I think part of it is that it's a lot of hassle and just doesn't look as appealing as breast meat. There's a higher chance of biting into gristle/something hard, the meat can be "slimy", and I find that at chains that do "fried chicken", at least, they do a generally poorer job of breading the meat. It's not crunchy and battered like a "chicken tender". Thighs are a different matter since you can pick/scrape off the bone with a knife and fork, but they're also larger so the batter to chicken ratio is sub-optimal.
Wings are tolerated because they're small and predictable, but I've been seeing the rise of "boneless wings" too. People generally don't have a problem with the thighs and legs of the chicken if it's served differently or just as "chicken" in another product. But on the bone it's messy.
"Boneless wings" are nothing more than chicken nuggets with a fancy name.
When I cook any recipe with chicken, I replace the chicken breast with boneless thighs (Which actually is thigh meat with the bones removed), and it comes out so much better.
Agreed. The fried thigh meat here in the fancy-recreations-of-blue-collar NYC restaurants is delicious, decadent even. I wonder how long until folks catch on.
> Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.
It's only “much more juicy” if you prepare or cook the breast meat wrong. Of course, you often do that if you you cook them together since dark meat needs to be cooked to a higher temperature for food safety reasons.
But, yeah, dark meat has a lot more flavor (and dark meat cooked on the bone has the best.)
Do you know why people think it's bad meat compared to the supermarket? Is it just the general attitude society has developed towards fast-food and big business?
I don't mind KFC but Taco Bell meat always seemed a bit...off and low quality.
Because the meat you buy in the grocery store goes bad after a few days, and (here is where I think parent is being slightly intellectually dishonest) while it is true that the fast food companies certainly source their meats from authentic, standard-holding institutions, that's only the beginning. That isn't to say the rounds of processing and preservation that occurs afterwards. You can't just buy a McDonalds chicken nugget off the shelf. Sure the inputs are the same, but the outputs are vastly different, and that's where the perceived difference in quality comes from. Fast food optimizes for longentivity, ease of cooking so they can reduce the labor costs associated in preparing that meat, and eliminating sanitation issues so they reduce their total liability and loss around food borne illnesses so they can reduce the labor costs associated in preparing that meat for you. That is why McDonalds undergoes the painstaking process of sanitizing their meat with an ammonia wash (prompted by the 90's nationwide beef e-coli outbreaks that resulted in serious litigation against popular burger joints), then adding in artificial flavorings back in to make it taste like a burger again (furthermore this is how McDonalds achieves that "miraculous" feat often described here when this topic comes up of having their burgers taste the same and have the same consistent product everywhere for over 20 years).
Tl:dr; yes it is true, inputs are the same as what you get in the store, but the outputs are vastly different. You have to factor in additives and preservation process. There really is a simple "sniff" test/heuristic I have developed after my decades in food service, and it's not really a secret, but seems like some aren't in on it, and it goes like this: If it goes bad, it's good, if it doesn't go bad, it isn't good. (Good is obviously subjective here, so my criteria is obviously "real" food in the sense that it is minimally processed and preserved and minimal chemical additives)
That is why McDonalds undergoes the painstaking process of sanitizing their meat with an ammonia wash (prompted by the 90's nationwide beef e-coli outbreaks that resulted in serious litigation against popular burger joints), then adding in artificial flavorings back in to make it taste like a burger again (furthermore this is how McDonalds achieves that "miraculous" feat often described here when this topic comes up of having their burgers taste the same and have the same consistent product everywhere for over 20 years).
For what it is worth, McDonald's says on their web site that this is not true. So either you are mistaken or McDonald's is committing fraud. Do you have a source for your claim?
"Every one of our burgers is made with 100% pure beef and cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else—no fillers, no additives, no preservatives."
"Do you use so-called 'pink slime' in your burgers or beef treated with ammonia?"
"Nope. Our beef patties are made from 100% pure beef. Nothing else is added. No fillers, no additives and no preservatives.
"Some consumers may be familiar with the practice of using lean, finely textured beef sometimes treated with ammonia, which is referred to by some as “pink slime.” We do not use this. "
Full disclaimer: Info coming from a variety of sources: some documentaries which I know have their own inaccuracies, some my own personal experience in food service, and specifically working at McDonalds, and some having an ex-girlfriend of 3 years who was the district manager of another international large fast food burger chain, so by chance that gleaned me a lot of insight into the inner workings of fast food burger chains (he was previously a DM of several Golden Arches)
I haven't read this page recently (it certainly has changed much), but on skimming through, none of the terminology McDonalds uses on their website are meaningful in the sense that the standards there is no official definition and could not be distinguished between similar competitors that make similar claims besides simply what they say, and, more importantly, there is no regulated term between what constitutes beef being “pure” or “not pure” or otherwise put. It’s just some “thing” they say about their beef and we have to take them up on their word. Now if they said “we use USDA organic ground beef” that might have some teeth. It’s the same thing between a bag of candy telling you they no longer use artificial flavors and now use “natural” flavors.
Now the question of do I believe they have changed? Possibly. Do the burgers taste different? No, so common sense tells me you don’t drastically change your process like this and still get the same tasting burger from 20 years ago.
But I will actually do something uncommon here and admit I could be wrong, and have an outdated understanding of their process.
"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."
That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.
USDA has a pretty wide definition for what constitutes as ground beef[1]:
> After a months-long evaluation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) determined in December that BPI’s signature product—the offering famously called “pink slime” in an ABC News exposé that got the network in a lot of trouble—can be labeled “ground beef.” Legally speaking, it’s now no different from ordinary hamburger, and could even be sold directly to the public.
McDonalds does in fact use 100% USDA-inspected beef, with "no fillers, additives, or preservatives", and explicitly does not use mechanically separated meat. It's not "organic", but then, most beef isn't.
Then I am happy to say I am happy for their recent changes, this certainly wasn’t the case a few years ago when I wrote them off, and even more not the case 10 years ago when I was still in the industry. I think it should be promoted as an example that consumer pressure and expectations can cause companies to change for the better.
I will say I remain skeptical on exactly how they can go from the ammonia wash + chemical food flavoring process to using fresh beef and not have any discernible difference in taste or food safety, but kudos to them.
I'm not saying you shouldn't write them off. McDonalds fries are solid, but everything else there is terrible. And fast food is in general bad, and I don't want to be coming off like I'm saying that people should eat more of it.
The ammonia (when it was present) was present in such small amounts that it couldn't conceivably have altered the flavor, and they were never using "chemical food flavoring." The only change they've made recently is using fresh instead of frozen for a few products. It has always been just beef.
Only the quarter pounder is fresh beef. The rest is frozen. If you look at places that review fast food, they unanimously applauded the fresh beef quarter pounder - they did have a discernible difference in quality.
The ammonia is a bad scene, but the idea of using TG to repurpose "trimmings" isn't something we should be demonizing; if you're going to kill animals to feed people, you should be maximizing the yield (of muscle protein, that is). This is just an extension of the idea that if you're going to eat pork chops, you shouldn't be grossed out by the idea of eating offal; however ecologically irresponsible it is to eat meat at all, it must be more irresponsible to waste it because it squicks you out to eat anything but a loin chop.
(TG'd meat was a faddish fine dining trend a few years back, and it's pretty neat; for instance, you can make a solid, ribeye-like slab of skirt steak by "gluing" layers of skirt together, which is pretty delicious. It's also a technique that's been used in sausagemaking for a long time.)
I appreciate you have some first hand experience here, but this is a very HN-style axiomatic argument --- "restaurants must have issues with meat going bad that ordinary people don't, ergo their meat must somehow be mummified with preservatives". Isn't it in fact the case that fast food restaurants have, relative to supermarket consumers as an entire cohort, extremely high and predictable turnover?
A neighborhood sushi place has an even bigger problem with spoilage than a friend chicken shack, but, for pretty intuitive reasons (I think?), I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.
Further: while fast food input costs are the highest single line item in their cost breakdowns, they don't come close to dominating, and labor plus rent dwarfs inputs even before you factor in franchise fees, marketing, and other expenses.
> I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.
FYI, in the US it is common to mummify fish with carbon monoxide. It preserves the fish's color despite age. The best way to stop oxidation is to add a reducing agent!
I don't think CO is a problem, but it is a hack restaurants use that consumers are unlikely to be aware of which masks the visual indications of freshness.
AFAIK this is specific to tuna and done by places like fish markets, that publicly display it. A restaurant would most likely be getting it frozen and vac packed.
My favorite thing was when Wendy's did its "never frozen" campaign. As if freezing was the problem. It's not going to magically last just as long if you don't freeze it, you have to close that gap with more preservatives.
If you're trying to minimize cost, you're better off buying the right quantity of meat to begin with rather than buying preservatives.
Freezing is hugely deleterious to ground beef quality. It changes the texture irrevocably. The two major differences between fast food burgers and fast casual burgers are frozen/fresh and cooked in advance/cooked to order. All the more expensive, more lauded burgers like Five Guys, Shake Shack, In 'n' Out, etc are fresh beef. McDonald's launched a fresh beef quarter pounder to universally positive reviews.
The boxes in which the steaks were delivered to the moderately-high-priced steakhouse (so higher price than your usual family restaurant but lower price than That One Fancy Place Where All Of The Business People Go) in which I worked as a teenager also read "fit for human consumption." We would write "not" on them with a Sharpie as we unloaded the truck because 17-year-olds are soooo clever.
It's a food-safety and labeling term, not indicative of the relative quality of what's inside and doesn't, alone, mean that the ground beef sold by Taco Bell is or isn't excellent or crappy.
That's kind of misleading though, because they're counting water and "meat" separately. Water is itself a major component of cow musculature (50-75% percent, depending on the type of muscle), so this method would conclude that a slab of steak is mostly not-meat.
From a more culinary perspective, you do probably want some fat in your burger. Depending on your tastes, I'm not sure the presence of 'plant matter' is particularly sinister either; I, for one, like a few onions in mine.
Those numbers should be right about what you'd expect.
> Meat and poultry are composed of naturally occurring water, muscle, connective tissue, fat, and bone. People eat meat for the muscle. The muscle is approximately 75% water (although different cuts may have more or less water) and 20% protein, with the remaining 5% representing a combination of fat, carbohydrate, and minerals.
The protein/fat balance should be expected to be a bit off from straight muscle cuts, as it's typical for a burger to have fat added to the mix in.
It's been setting the standard for shitty meat though. Try a Tyson breast and one from a local farm and you don't even need to taste it to know it's different.
I've invested money in a local butcher in Chicago and source pretty much all of my protein from another one closer to me. I'm familiar with the locavore argument and agree that the quality is higher. There are still higher levels of quality to be reached by sourcing heritage birds, and you can optimize for flavor even more by sourcing game birds. Where do you draw the line? I'd rather eat a local farm chicken than a Tyson breast, just like I'd rather eat a dry-aged ribeye than a wet-packed eye of round. That doesn't make the eye of round somehow inedible or "barely meat".
The term "barely meat" as used in the parent was definitely talking about the ground beef you get at fast food restaraunts. Which has been shown in lots of cases to contain additives, notably taco bell etc. You brought up chicken because it's harder to call it barely meat, but fast food chicken is still shittier.
"Shittier" how? Chick-Fil-A's fast-food chicken is likely better than the median supermarket chicken (it's all supposedly antibiotic-free now). I'd like to see a better grounded argument, one that doesn't depend entirely on the premise that "fast food meat must be shitty because we disdain fast food".
Did you read the first half of that comment and not the second? Local chicken is generally "better" than supermarket chicken. That doesn't make supermarket chicken "shitty"; supermarket-grade chicken is necessarily what most people are going to eat, most of the time. It has for more than half a century been our standard, and our standard is better than what preceded it.
You can always do better. But I'd like to see a well-grounded argument that KFC-grade chicken is somehow "shitty". I think it's possible that there is one (I think the argument that all fast-food chicken is necessarily shitty is much harder to defend) --- but I haven't seen it yet.
Not arguing about the quality of meat, but how these organizations source their meats are also an important differentiation. Sure, maybe it is 100% chicken meat, but I don't particularly want to eat meat from animals that were essentially tortured and abused their entire lives, and I imagine that has some kind of negative affect on the quality/healthfulness. KFC has been accused of animal cruelty multiple times, and the videos of the factory farms they source meats from are pretty disgustingly shocking.
> You can always do better. But I'd like to see a well-grounded argument that KFC-grade chicken is somehow "shitty".
I'd say if you buy your meat from a local butcher and you know the actual source of the meat, then you'd likely say that raising chickens in high capacity growth sheds doesn't put out what many would define as quality birds. [0] The chicken is likely fine for consumption, agreed. But if you were born, pumped full of feed to make you as fat as fast as possible, and barely had room to move during that time - would you qualify yourself as healthy? Just as an athlete vs a couch potato have significantly different body composition one could assert this is also true for chickens. In the grand scheme you get what you pay for. In a race to the bottom of cheap meat you need scale and it's much easier to throw lots of chickens in a small place than it is to free-range them.
Finally, while subjective, it's a common pattern to leverage MSG in products that are of generally low quality. I don't know anyone who puts MSG in recipes using pricier butcher cuts, I know I never have. KFC has Monosodium Glutamate in most things they sell.
I guess if you want to stand on a soap box and call out that KFC meat quality isn't "shitty" just because nobody has proven it to you, then more power to you. But, it's hard to argue that there isn't a difference of quality by a mass producer of chicken vs non-mass producing vendors. I mean, it's why people pay more for a friendlier and healthier growth environment for said meats. "Shitty" in the sense of this argument seems rather subjective anyway. But I will say it's hard to argue mass produced chicken isn't "shitty" for the environment. [1][2]
I'm a little lost here. I agree: heritage birds that are free to roam uncrowded pastures will taste better than CAFO chicken. What's your point? A dry-aged ribeye also tastes better than a bottom round steak. If you're eating dry-aged ribeyes (or heritage chicken) every day, you're wealthy. Congrats, but most people don't have that option.
Let's not jump to conclusions - I never said anything about tasting better. What I said was that the quality of the bird with regard to health is likely very different. I also never said I'm eating any of those things. In fact I don't eat red or white meat at all anymore. And that's my point. Why eat sub-par quality meats when there are better alternatives that are cheaper or similarly priced? If I did still eat meat I surely wouldn't be wasting money on eating low quality meat on a daily basis and instead eat it less often but buy better.
Your request doesn't have an objective answer, so I'm not sure what you were looking for other than to present something indefensible. But, you also gloss over the main points of how "shitty" this practice is for the environment and instead you try to deflect with a backhanded "you're wealthy" comment.
At least I presented some points to the conversation.
Not familiar with the advice given in Cooks Illustrated over the last 20 years is it related to sport's illustrated where they show you cooks wearing swimsuits.
Brining if you can call it that is only step 2. Here's the steps they use to prepare.
Those are generally the steps for deep frying chicken, yes. Obviously you'd use home utensils and appliances, but brine -> bread -> fry is basically the only way you're going to get fried chicken.
I'm not exactly sure what you were trying to do with that link, but I'm pretty sure your intended outcome wasn't to show that KFC fried chicken is just like any other fried chicken, but with stricter recipes and industrial machines.
So, from the very first paragraph of the article you linked to: "It's basically like how your grandma would do it—except they use an infernal magic machine called a 'pressure frier.'"
Thanks! I feel a lot better about KFC chicken now!
- Unless you are in the SLT of KFC, you have absolutely no way to know what's in their spice blend. It is one of the most closely guarded recipes in the world.
- There's famously 11 spices in the original recipe. So not only could you not possibly know what's in it (and therefore what's questionable), but you didn't even get the number of ingredients right to criticize.
- Based on all the various copycat recipes out there, I highly doubt that 10 out of the 11 ingredients (same proportion that you used, just adjusted for accuracy) are questionable. You know, unless "salt", "flour", "thyme", "garlic salt", etc. are all questionable. There's only so much that can go in a spice blend after all.
> on the 29 ingredients not to be confused with spices.
> and 26 questionable substances out of 29 for the spices.
Maybe you should take your own advice there, buddy. I was specifically replying to what you said in your comment.
Furthermore, you can very well guess what's in the spice blend, but you still have no way to actually confirm it, nor any way to confirm it's the current recipe, or if the recipe diverged from the first one used (which was indeed leaked).
The article is about plant-based meat replacements. I think it's ludicrous how everyone in this thread seems to think it's oh so important to argue whether their real meat is actually really good or not.
I believe the big "Pink Slime" news story halted some of this, or at least led to many fast food companies publicly decrying it. But there was definitely a point when this ammonium hydroxide treated slurry was used to cut the real stuff.
Intensively reared supermarket poultry is hardly a standard. Not in the UK anyway. Various respected media outlets have done undercover investigations in to the poultry supply chain. High-profile chefs have done campaigns to increase welfare and change buying habits. The RSPCA have serious concerns about intensively reared birds.
Is this really the thing you want to pick and argue about? About whether it is hyperbole or not to call the stuff that is NOT the subject of this article, low quality?
Why do you even care. They can "quality" up their meat all they want but in the end they are still a fast food chain that primarily sells buckets of meat. I don't need a citation to think that is disgusting, and if you don't then go take that argument somewhere where it's on topic. Jeez.
So they're actually doing the right thing in 2019 and replacing part of their product with non-meat. I hope it goes all the way, or at least make meat be the expensive "special occasion" option.
You totally misread the person you are replying to. They are speaking about fast-food chains general. In fact they only mention one chain by name and it's not KFC.
I've presumed that the reason Taco Bell uses the word beefy was because they can't legally call it beef. Much like cheap "cheese" is a processed dairy product and not actually labeled as cheese.
It's usually labelled processed cheese product, and there's really nothing scary about it. It's cheese (actual, normal cheese) emulsified with some form of milk.
I occasionally make my own (with tastier cheeses than you get in commercial products) for its melting characteristics.
I'm only speaking anecdotally, but I have in mind Taco Bell's ground beef and McNuggets, for example. Cane's chicken, by contrast, always seems surprisingly high-quality.
McNuggets are just ground chicken (ground white mean and skin). There are loads of videos available online that dispute the whole 'pink slime' myth, at least when it comes to chicken mcnuggets.
> low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.
I wish this urban legend would die.
Fast-food beef and chicken at major chains is no different in quality from what you buy at the supermarket.
A McDonald's burger is 100% ground beef and salt, no "additives" or "fillers". And Taco Bell ground beef is ~90% beef, because the rest is ~10% spices (cumin, etc.) because... that's what taco meat is supposed to be, like when you make it at home.
Spreading rumors that it's somehow worse doesn't help anybody. I get that it's entertaining to believe -- but it's simply false.
It won’t die because it makes yuppies feel superior to the plebes who eat at McDonalds. My wife once encountered a lawyer at a prominent DC firm who literally sneered at the idea of eating McDonalds. I think of her every time we drive through to get an Egg McMuffin.
The fat and salt content of the meal I’d get at a fancy restaurant is also very high, but nobody would call that “not real food.” Yuppies only fixate about the nutritional content of fast food because the proles eat it. It’s a species of virtue signaling.
Of course you could choose to buy that - but that's like saying I'll fly to Cancun and stay in the worst possible $1/night hotel... obviously you're going to have a bad time.
I personally would choose grass fed beef or bison or chicken, multiple steamed or roasted vegetables and I would not add salt, ketchup or salad dressing. And no soda.
In that case, the food is of much higher quality than anything I can buy at McDonalds.
You've missed his point. People are apt to call fast food not-food supposedly because of its lack of nutritional value, but don't respond in the same way to something like an expensive steak with Bearnaise sauce and buttery mashed potatoes.
But the burger is certainly food according to anyone's definition. Get a quarter pounder with cheese and tell me how that's nutritionally any different from a burger you make at home with standard supermarket ingredients -- ground beef, hamburger bun, american cheese, ketchup, pickles, onions. Yet nobody complains about that at a neighborhood, family or church cookout.
The yellow, sugary bun is nothing I would ever bring into my own home. Not being American I'm always shocked by how low-quality the bread in the US is.
Neither is the cheese, or the ground beef which would be the lowest quality possible meat in existence. What exactly did they feed those cows, and what antibiotics were they given?
You are correct that I could buy and eat that stuff at home, but like I said, I could also buy Doritos, coke, sugar rolls, candy, etc. etc.
A typical meal from McDonald's would be much higher in protein than a meal of doritos and/or coke. Probably better micro-nutrient profile too, although my no means would it be good.
It's not really about being in the know, it's common sense. Could McDonald's survive if they were selling garbage meat? I mean,it's possible. But why not just serve 100% ground beef exactly like you say you do, and charge consumers accordingly and make billions of dollars over many decades.
It makes perfect sense: meat is expensive and difficult to work with, so low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.
Consumer advocates in the past few years have actually done a pretty good job at pressuring the top fast food chains to not dilute their beef with additives.
It's all the other stuff (the bun, the fries, etc. ) that have preservatives, fillers, and shady additives.
(When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte. Tasty, nutritious and very filling).
This "impossible burger" trend basically reverses the work of consumer advocates. The one element of fast food that is actually an all-natural, nutritionally complex whole food is replaced with a patty that is nothing but processed food and additives -- https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189374... The fast food restaurant will likely save money -- but because of how fashionable vegetarianism has become, instead of being condemned, they will be actually praised as being eco and health conscious.
> When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte.
o_O
> how fashionable vegetarianism has become
I don’t think it’s a question of fashion. However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad. Whether it’s in 50 or 500 years’ time, one day our descendants will look back at us and wonder: “they ate corpses?!”
However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad.
I disagree entirely, but there is no need to relitigate this debate here. If by any chance you have never read the pro-meat argument, the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is a pretty good primer.
Instead of debating a bad book or whether meat is good or bad for you which I don't know enough about would you like to talk about the ethics? I eat meat myself.
Where do you draw the line as far as ethical behavior towards animals? I think even most who eat meat don't think things need suffer right? After you admit animals CAN suffer and that such suffering ought to be minimized the logical minimum suffering is not raising animals for food save to the degree that is required for the health of human beings. Essentially balancing the 2 factors.
I'm personally hoping that particularly knot can be untangled by artificial meat. If we can ultimately cheaply produce fake meat that is identical insofar as utility there remains zero reason at that point to justify killing animals.
I realize that sourcing wikipedia is kind of lazy but I lack the time to read entire books full of every sort of misinformation that happens to be going around.
For the earth to survive, Keith thinks, the human population needs to be reduced by more than 90 percent. She also argues that the human food-supply needs to come mainly from hunting and small-scale animal husbandry.[4]
Criticism:
Sami Grover, referencing "Jason V", says Keith's book is filled with "factual errors and fallacious thinking". Furthermore, Jason V writes that Keith fallaciously uses her ex-vegan status in an attempt to depict herself as an authority on the subject.[11]
Patrick Nicholson writes that the book misinterprets scientific articles, cherry-picks facts, uses strawman arguments and relies heavily on anecdotes and faulty generalisations.[5] Ian Sinclair writes that Keith's arguments are "full of lazy thinking, willfully ignorant logic and glaring omissions".[12]
I think its meaningful or even sane to suggest that virtually everyone stops having babies or dies and all the survivors go play hunter gatherers in the woods.
I think our present trajectory is obviously unsustainable but that doesn't make any alternative suggestion reasonable.
Our future is the stars or extinction. In between we have to find a sustainable reasonable way to live civilized lives. This probably isn't horrifically complicated we don't have to reduce our population by 90% we just have to not keep increasing it and make do with simpler and less.
>I think our present trajectory is obviously unsustainable
Curious what makes you think that, with some real hard numbers, etc.
I think we've become very good as a culture at brainwashing ourselves into a doomsday attitude when it comes to planetary resources...yet we've actually done quite well at getting rid of or minimizing bad practices as we learn they are damaging. Nukes, CFCs, noxious smokestacks...sure not 100%, but getting better over decades.
Yes I'm an optimist...I think the Earth is all we need, and based on scientific advancements and slow learning over decades (we barely even use the [deserts|seas|tundra]!), we could easily live well and without abject poverty at 100 BN+ in centuries to come.
What will kill us off...I think it more likely to be external [asteroid|aliens|supernova] or inescapable [Yellowstone|Krakatoa|Earthquakes|virus|new apex species]
I think technology and science inherently empowers a smaller and smaller number to a greater and greater degree while the size of the playing field remains the same.
It would have been virtually impossible for virtually any percentage of hunter gathers to wipe out humanity let alone the biosphere. Eventually one person crazy enough may engineer all of our doom. This could even be so without malice aforethought.
Once you get to the stage of a planetary civilization expanding further gets fantastically harder. It's entirely possible that most intelligent species go extinct between getting big enough to destroy the requirements for their continued existence and actually escaping their planets.
The more obvious answer of ecological catastrophe is actually a lot harder. We could actually be well on our way to crashing and burning and still not be able to predict well enough that far ahead.
Every book taking a stance on a controversial subject is going to have those kinds of criticisms from the opposite side. It doesn't make those criticisms true.
I don't endorse the book or her particular worldview 100% but I believe she does bring some true evidence to light about the good aspects of meat.
The criticism doesn't appear to merely come from some "opposing side" but also from disinterested observers without a particular dog in the fight.
Her only stated expertise outside of a high school education is that she spent multiple decades unhealthy because she decided to adopt a lifestyle choice and didn't bother to simultaneously read about how to eat a healthy diet without eating meat. Instead of figuring out how to eat vegetarian without being unhealthy or simply returning to a balanced diet she has decided that we ought to somehow get rid of almost all people and go back to being hunter gathers.
The problem is that she is a writer who writes about a broad range of topics she has no understanding of. Knowing how to put words together effectively can grant one an audience but it doesn't grant one any sort of expertise. She is a crank.
> Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper and less gross at the same time, and it might help them cut down on calories and improve their health image.
Which is “less gross” is highly objective.
> I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.
Would be a nice longbet, “McDonald’s will stop selling beef burgers by 20XY”. I’d be on the “no” side of that bet.
They will eventually stop selling beef burgers made from real cows. Lab grown meat will replace them. I don't know enough about the current state of lab grown meat to give an estimate for XY, but it seems inevitable to me.
When they do that it will take most american farmers down with them, along with all the people working in the meat plants. The environment is not good, but of course the alternative is unemployment, especially when most of the farms also go under.
Ground meat is almost certainly the lowest bar for substituting. I'd argue the artificial meat is already pretty close (although probably at a higher cost, at least at the low end). There are probably gourmet burgers that are still better--though high-end meat cuts are at least somewhat of a waste in a burger.
Somewhat amusingly, I first had an Impossible Burger not knowing that it was not real "meat." I didn't find out until a few months later. It tasted like a perfectly good burger to me.
[ADDED: Lab-grown is apparently more accurately used to specifically refer to food made from animal cells. I guess "plant-based" meat is the more common term with "meat" distinguishing from traditional vegi-burgers in the grocery freezer.]
The "lab-grown" term is [EDIT: sometimes and apparently incorrectly] used for plant-based meat substitutes like Impossible Burger. It probably shouldn't be, but it is.
I honestly don’t think there can be any argument there. Plant-based meat substitutes have been around for a long time, are emphatically not “lab grown meat”, and I have never heard anybody refer to them as such. That’s a distinct category which has also been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years.
I, too, used to confuse Memphis Meats with Impossible Food / Beyond Meat.
It's just that news of lab-grown meat and outfits like Impossible Food kinda sprung up at the same time in the news within the last 5 years and it's easy to confuse the endeavors. In fact, I see this misconception enough that I think IF/BM benefit from the confusion.
I have never heard anyone so confused that they can't tell the difference between "animal that was never alive" and "made from vegetable products". This isn't confusing, and I will need evidence to believe that it is "widely used". I don't think I've ever even heard someone attempt to conflate the two before you.
But I acknowledge that just because this is completely obvious to me and I've never met someone who was confused about the difference doesn't mean they don't exist.
I honestly don't care what people call the different types of meat substitutes. Plant-based meat seems a bit odd to me because it's not, you know, meat. But it seems to be the term in use.
Yes, I understand that there is a difference between grown from meat cells and made from plants with components that make it look and taste more like meat.
102,000 of those are "plant-based meat alternatives". 46,700 are for "plant-based meat substitutes". I'd imagine there are quite a few other synonyms that continue to winnow it down.
I think the conditions most animals are raised in would be considered gross by virtually any observer who took a close look. Subjective, sure, but the same way that emergency room surgery is only subjectively gross.
it's a matter of volume. i don't expect beef to go away but the volume sold will massively decrease. there will always be the "real deal" crowd who will pay higher prices for it.
Always? What if the other stuff is just better? It’s not like cow is some platonic ideal for a burger patty, and other ingredients can only approach but never surpass it.
Of course, some people will want to taste dead cows similarly to how exotic meats have an audience today. But McDonald’s would not be the venue for something like that.
"Gross" being defined as amount of chemicals, likelihood to be spoiled and/or make you sick, etc.
Beef won't go away completely in 20XY; maybe not ever, which is fine. But at the scale and quality standards of fast-food, and with the recent progress in the meatless space, I would bet McDonald's will stop selling it in my lifetime.
I don't like this definition of gross. If it were true, then cooking something would serve to make it far more gross. Hundreds, if not thousands of new chemical compounds are created via the Maillard reaction.
Food that can make you sick isn't necessarily gross tasting.
Fast-food beef is retired dairy cows and flavorings made in a lab.
Gross.
Many people don't know or don't care.
There are enough people that do care to significantly impact their bottom line though. For better or worse.
Unless I missed it in TFA, it doesn't say that the raw materials (the meat) are more expensive but rather that the product is more expensive. If a fast food chain can charge more for cheaper materials, that's a double win for them.
for now I expect you're correct. But in the long run it should ideally have really nice margins. Once Beyond and Impossible get a version that is as close as it needs to be, they can start focusing on supply chain and stuff like that.
I would assume the margins are really high. It's a premium product right now because they're still building out a market and because there was a big up-front research investment, but the fundamental sustainability of the raw materials and process must be miles better than raising cattle.
On the other hand, Swedish fast food chain Max has a pretty good "plant beef" burger made of wheat and soy protein, and it costs the same as the meat version.
I guess with Beyond and Impossible you pay a hefty price for their marketing. Or for irrelevant features: Didn't one of them put a lot of research into making a "bleeding" plant burger? Bleeding may be relevant in some settings, but not at Burger King where you always get your burger well done (AFAIK).
Watch when it has zero impact on climate change because the extensive ingredient list on the beyond meat burger which requires a huge supply chain shipping products all around the country along with a complicated manufacturing process requiring energy ends up having a similar environmental impact to simple animal farming.
Even if the environmental impact is nil, I'm fine with the reduction in suffering imposed on tens of billions of animals a year. The scale of suffering created by the meat industry is unfathomable so I think this is a step in the right direction regardless.
Your local want ads will have home raised eggs at below store prices in most areas. I suggest supporting your local farmers and ranchers as the best offset against factory farms.
The supply chain on meat is pretty extensive. Modern animal farming is basically an industrial process that happens to use flesh-and-blood as host organisms for meat.
No doubt. But until we quantify it throwing out baseless assumptions is ridiculous either way. It can't just be said "Beyond Meat" is better for the environment without any numbers or data to back that up.
Yea I saw that one, and I agree it's a good starting point and far better than nothing. The results are interesting, although it should be noted it was directly commissioned by Beyond Meat themselves.
There are however a lot of assumptions in that study. For example, a cow is not 100% 1/4 lb beef patties. So how do you go about distributing emissions that relate directly to the beef patty vs. those for steaks, brisket, or numerous other cuts? Since beyond meat does not currently provide substitues for those. They use an "economic model" which isn't entirely clear to me.
Or the lighting thing. They make all these assumptions about light energy consumption based on lumens and size of facilities - but there is no justification of the accuracy of these assumptions. Also how much of that energy is coming from renewable sources? It could favor either way but without figuring this out it makes a lot of it questionable.
There are other assumptions in there that raise questions and I think a lot more study needs to be done (ideally not funded by either industry).
Livestock contributes around 15% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Produce fundamentally has a smaller impact, in part due to its relative simplicity. I don't know how much processing is required for these products after-the-fact, but I know that at least one of the recent pivotal innovations was in genetic engineering, not processing.
Veggie burgers don't grow on trees - they are highly advanced industrial end products with million-mile supply chains. I don't get why people can't just eat vegetables if they want to be vegetarians. Instead of being unhealthy from eating too many grams of well-understood macronutrients (where dieting is easy, just eat less), we're all going to be unhealthy from eating to many micrograms of beef simulating molecules.
I've never heard of a veggie burger with chemical flavoring. Most of them aren't intended to simulate beef; they're a combination of various savory, protein-rich plants and some seasoning. I'm not a vegetarian, but sometimes I enjoy a bean patty anyway.
As for this new wave that is intended to simulate real meat, the flavor is completely natural, just found in an unusual source outside of actual meat:
> Impossible Foods' scientists discovered that heme is a key factor in how meat behaves.[15] Heme is the molecule that gives blood its red color and helps carry oxygen in living organisms.[16] Heme is abundant in animal muscle tissue and is also found naturally in all living organisms.[17] Plants, particularly nitrogen-fixing plants and legumes, also contain heme.[18] The plant-based heme molecule is identical to the heme molecule found in meat.[19][20]
> To produce heme protein from non-animal sources, Impossible Foods selected the leghemoglobin molecule found naturally in the roots of soy plants.[21] To make it in large quantities, the company's scientists genetically engineered a yeast and used a fermentation process very similar to the brewing process used to make some types of beer.
at this point most vegetables are highly advanced industrial products with million-mile supply chains, at least if you shop at your average American grocery.
These vegetarian burgers aren't particularly healthy, but it's because of their salt content.
I’ve shared this a few times on this site but this BBC article [0] is pretty clear - red meat (beef in particular) is vastly worse than veg alternatives. [1] breaks it down a bit farther and shoes that the transport and processing associated with foods is a minuscule part of their impact (mostly) - the impact of processing/transporting beef is more than the entire impact of any other vegetable on the chart.
I hope that's not the case. I'm much more concerned that although these might help the environment they might not be great for the health of the people eating them. These "plant-based" foods aren't exactly food that humans or animals have ever eaten in their diet. IMO the better thing is if you want to cut back on meat, eat a salad. These meat replacements aren't anything you can cook up at home so be wary.
> a complicated manufacturing process requiring energy ends up having a similar environmental impact to simple animal farming.
"Simple animal farming" is slightly disingenuous. It's not like the animal is slaughtered on the farm, cut up into steaks and sent directly to supermarkets. There's tons of complicated processing and handling going on after the animal is finished growing. And that's on top of the energy losses from feeding and raising the animal.
the economic argument has always been the strongest in my eyes, and it's unstoppable. animals are a huge liability health wise, pollution wise, environment wise, activism wise, logistic wise, etc. most companies don't care about all that stuff at the surface level, but it all translates into dollar signs, which they do care about.
as soon as the economic-taste-weirdness function reaches a certain point, i'll expect you'll see these cheap fast food options convert more and more fractions of their products (right now many use fillers already) to fake meat, eventually replacing it entirely alongside offering reduced prices for these products, while leaving meat generally as a higher priced option signaling disposable income (sort of like Argentinian beef or w/e is today)
You were probably thinking it, but you didn't explicitly mention the No. 1 cost - raising the cattle. An animal that large is probably both delicate and expensive as it grows to maturity.
Could conceivably cut out all the work of growing bones, feeding/watering, animal healthcare, breeding & transport with labgrown meat. And the fixed cost of maintaining farmland. The cost saving potential is huge.
Not even considering the benefits of being able to quickly adjust production to what can be sold, as opposed to waiting however long it takes for a calf to grow up.
I'm not sure the environmental arguments support entirely eliminating cattle agriculture. Factory farming with cows kept indoors and fed purpose grown feed, certainly. But there's a lot of scrubland out there that doesn't have enough water for agriculture but which can still support grazing. That can't support anything like our current beef consumption but it could support a fair amount
It's not a clear win for either side. Impossible Burger has more carbs and less protein, so it's inferior in that way. But it also has more fiber (beef has none), which is good. Impossible also (surprisingly) has more saturated fat than beef, but it has no cholesterol.
As one of the articles points out, Impossible's main goal isn't making healthy food. It's other stuff like saving the planet. So it is possible that another fake-meat company could prioritize health more.
The formula for beef isn't going to change, but the formula for fake meat will, so fake meat might gain ground when it comes to health.
And that's bad? After working on my property cutting down weeds and dead trees carbs are super healthy. Carbs are only not healthy if you live a sedentary lifestyle. Carbs are our main short-term fuel source.
Yes, we have an over abundance of carbs and anyone that has to go out of their way to eat more is living an extreme exercise heavy lifestyle. This is especially true in the case of places like KFC, your getting a load of carbs in the bun and the fries on the side, the actual chicken is the only healthy part.
> Why do you think plant-based meats are lower calories than regular meat?
It's totally possible they aren't; just a reasonable guess.
> There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier.
There's plenty of evidence that eating red meat on a regular basis is bad for you. Chicken is admittedly a different story.
> Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?
Many veggie patties are filled with fiber and most are filled with protein (from beans, soy, etc.). I don't know the nutritional details of the Impossible Burger or the meatless chicken featured in the article, but generally meat substitutes are not just carbs.
1. Because I don't eat meat outside of fish. This is both a lifestyle choice and a health thing: I don't have a gall bladder and my digestive track is much happier if I stay away from greasy foods, especially animal fats. I'll occasionally get an upset stomach from fish or fried eggs still, but it isn't an everyday thing.
2. While they do have carbs, they also have protein. And a bunch of other stuff the burgers don't have. Oh, and less fat in most cases. I'm guessing many are lower in calories, but I'm not sure about these particular products.
3. Not all of them are super processed. I've literally made different sorts at home, though I'm just as likely to buy a soy option. (obviously not Beyond Meat or Impossible Burgers. I actually am not impressed with these options).
The OP that the person was responding to used the phrase "Plant-based meat" which to me at least sounds specific to these type of imitation meat burgers like impossible/Beyond Meat, not just a normal veggie burger.
In terms of Impossible/Beyond Meat, health seems kind of a wash.
Meat has been highly produced because the gov’t of Nixon’s era and today’s era has been buying up tons of bushels of grain(1). The gov’t bought grain to help support & subsidize farmers and ranchers. Grain is convenient to offload as cattle feed. Cheap cattle feed encourages raising cattle. Cow farts contribute over 40% of the world’s methane(2). Methane contributes 34 times more towards global warming per unit than carbon dioxide.
Thus if we want to tackle climate change, we should rethink our Cold War era grain subsidies and ultimately reduce our dependence on cattle.
> Cow farts contribute over 40% of the world’s methane. Methane contributes 34 times more towards global warming per unit than carbon dioxide.
How many total units of methane are there vs. total units of CO2? Otherwise, I can’t make a value judgement about the impact of cows on global warming.
I used to link to the EPA but I learned this week that they might be a captured agency(1). They used to have a website section devoted to methane, it’s sources, and it’s contribution but it’s either been taken down or I simply can’t find it.
However, Bill Gates writes in his blog that Agriculture contributes towards 24% of the world’s climate change and that “Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases!”(2). His blog post that I link to below is admittedly a secondary source but I think he does a pretty good job at showing the big picture.
> Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper
Definitely not the case at the moment. Last week I went to Del Taco and tried their Beyond Taco. It was $2.49 each compared to the meat one which was $1.49. If I recall correctly, you can switch to an Incredible burger patty at Red Robin for $3 extra.
They probably see a coming PR storm of anti-meat sentiment as our environment and collective health goes down the drain. And going a more veggie heavy route just doesn't work well for fast food except in the form of heavily processed stuff like meat substitutes.
That's definitely not true. McDonald's and Burger King were both markedly worse in my experience. A shame in-n-out isn't abroad, and haven't found a Taco Bell or Wendy's yet. Not that I would really go out of my way to eat fast food overseas now that I'm an adult... I don't even eat these things in the US.
There's wide variability within the US anyway. I've noticed that affluent suburbs tend to have great fast food, while urban and rural environments have awful fast food.
I mean, where are you comparing to? Anecdotally, in Sweden, I have a friend who used to work for a huge slaughterhouse/meat distributor (pardon me if there is a better term). According to him, the beef that was sold to McDonalds was only high quality. This was around ten years ago, mind you.
A&W restaurants was/is a completely different company than the drink company. I worked for Yum! Brands when they bought the A&W brand and we all thought we would get some good root beer out of the deal. Nope, the soda didn't come with the restaurant.
I agree this is generally true, but it definitely depends on the country you're talking about.
Many other first-world countries (thinking of EU, etc.) have much stricter rules about food additives, etc. So the bread, for example, tastes significantly less cardboard-ey.
There was a lawsuit a few years back when vegetarians discovered that McDonald's was flavoring their fries with beef juice. I do think they've since stopped the practice.
> There was a lawsuit a few years back when vegetarians discovered that McDonald's was flavoring their fries with beef juice.
They weren't “flavoring them with beef juice”, they were frying them in tallow. And AFAIK they didn't stop because of a lawsuit by vegetarians, but because of nutrition (saturated fat) concerns, and they now use other flavorings to attempt to simulate the flavor imparted by tallow:
> The vegetable oil used to prepare the fries and hash browns was not pure, but contained essence of beef for flavoring purposes. Many Hindus consider cows sacred and do not eat beef.
Malcolm Gladwell did an entire podcast episode on this. It wasn't a few years ago, it was like the early 90s. And it wasn't that vegetarians were pissed, it was because someone had a heart attack from eating terribly, and then made it his mission to run a campaign against the "dangerously" unhealthy fries made from beef tallow. Eventually McDonalds caved for PR purposes.
The “natural beef flavor” doesn't, AFAIK, have beef in it (except insofar as hydrolyzed milk protein, originating as it does in a cow, is “beef”.) The construction “natural X flavor” in an ingredient list means “flavorings that can legally be described as natural which are intended to simulate X”.
Seems like as of a bit earlier this year, they still contained animal products, but this is in the US (in Canada, for example, it's vegan ingredients only).
So is this to say that McDonalds' fries are lacto-ovo-vegetarian, but not vegan? I'm not vegan myself, but I find this a strange category for fried potatoes to end up in.
I'm still saddened that Pringles aren't cooked in peanut oil any longer - they tasted so much better before; now they're fairly bland (regular version).
They do offer three vegetarian burgers (apparently variations on the same patty), vegan nuggets, and a vegan salad.[1] It’s not as good as the vegan burger they have in Sweden, but it’s a start.
Sweden has a big history with .nu (“now” in Swedish) and .se seems to be taken by a local business. Doesn’t seem to have stopped kfc.com from trying to redirect to kfc.se though when clicking on the “take me to my local site” button, oops.
It makes sense the same way it makes sense for KFC to replace honey with "honey sauce", (main ingredient corn syrup). I personally have no interest in eating plant-based substitutes for my food.
The verdict is not yet in on whether Beyond Meat's products are actually healthier for you than real meat. Beyond Meat certainly makes this claim, but there exists debate[1].
Funny thing that I heard recently. McDonalds is the greats buyer of chicken in the US. Quite surprising, considering they don't even have that much chicken in their menu.
They are, but they don't contain much chicken meat. 40% of the filler is meat and the rest is "other"[0] (fat, tissue, spicule, etc). Including the breading the majority of the weight of a chicken nugget isn't chicken meat.
Contrast this with Chick-Fil-A's nuggets, which are 100% chicken breast meat (with thinner breading to boot).
Even if they don't contain much chicken meat, just 40% of meat takes up a significant part of the chicken supply chain. I'd say if McDonald's does decide to one day use 100% of chicken meat in their nuggets, the entire world chicken market would not be able to supply them (and the world chicken market would need to start more farms than exists today to make up that 60% shortfall).
This is hopefully a stupid question but doesn't that make Chick-Fil-A's nuggets "wings" or "chicken breast chunks."
I mean they're good -- don't get me wrong but I don't see anything wrong with nuggets made by grinding up some of the ugly parts of the chicken. I basically consider them two separate things. I thought it was actually kind of silly for them to grind up the good bits of the chicken just for a marketing push.
That was a misleading marketing push. Here is their exact wording:
> Our tender, juicy Chicken McNuggets are made with 100% white meat chicken and no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.
Made WITH not made OF. Meaning all the meat within a McDonalds nugget is 100% white chicken meat, not that ALL of a McDonald's nugget is 100% chicken. It is designed to be misread/misunderstood.
McNuggets still don't contain 100% chicken or even close, and the fact that 100% of the meat they do contain is "white meat chicken" isn't a significant change.
Go taste a whole-chicken nugget (like Chick-Fil-A's) next to a McDonalds nugget. Heck go look inside them, at the filler. It is night and day.
The only real space in that list for fillers to be found is the food starch, but it's less abundant than water, so if there were a bunch of fillers, it'd be pretty soupy. (Its typical use is as a binder, and it'd make sense for it to serve that purpose in a nugget - you're not going to manage to make a white-meat nugget without some.)
There is certainly a texture difference between a whole-chunk nugget and one made from pureed meat, but you'd see the same sort of texture difference if you ground up a filet steak, too.
Also - that "white meat" is actually a form of bleached dark meat.
McD's used to sell chicken nuggets that were a mix of dark meat and white meat. Some were a piece of dark, other's were made of breast meat chunks. But consumers being the a-holes that they are (rant mode on)...
(this whole thing really bothers me - the "American Consumer" has pretty much single handedly ruined meat products in the United States by insisting that such products not remind them of live animals - so first "breast meat" then "white meat" and might as well be "bland meat" - then they went after pork "the other white meat" - making it so damn lean it's flavorless - you can't get any good fat anymore on your pork chops - with ground beef you have to look for the 70/30 mixture to have any real flavor in your patties. Steaks and ribs they trim off a ton of the fat, and for most supermarket briskets the Point is "gone" - so no burnt ends for you. All its done is make meat - at least from the supermarket - almost flavorless. You have to either buy commercial meat which hasn't been trimmed, or you have to go to a real butcher - either way, you end up spending a ton more money just to get the flavor back...
(ok rant off) ...where was I? Oh, as I was saying, consumers decided that all they wanted was "white breast meat", but McDs knew that dark meat is cheaper. So this food scientist at some USC university (IIRC) came up with a method to bleach the dark meat, then blend it with the white, and you get this "ground chicken" like product that can be molded into perfect nugget shapes - all shaped consistently, all fry consistently. Win for the restaurant.
But I remember real nuggets - there were two different shapes that were the dark meat; flavorful, tender, wonderful. Then one shape (that was "round") that was a disk of white meat (tasted good, but dryer, and less tender). Today, they are all a uniform shape, flavor, and texture profile, all "white meat" - and the texture is somewhere between that of dark meat, and breast meat.
I just don't get people. I love dark meat, I love flavor. Give me the fat, give me well marbled beef and pork. Nothing like a well-smoked brisket, or pulled pork shoulder, or a wonder slab of pork belly. People who say otherwise - I don't know what to think about them.
This is one of the big points of the Food Inc documentary. It doesn't matter if you eat at McDonalds or not— if you eat anything they serve (beef, chicken, potatoes, whatever), you're eating food made to their specifications, as they're the single biggest buyer of all of that stuff.
Another advantage could be less susceptibility as a host for bacterial and other undesirable growth. Fewer recalls means willing consumers.
On the other hand I’d like to see studies on the healthiness of consuming these products long term. Intuitively they’d seem healthier, but I’d like to see that proven given their synthetic nature.
I don't normally eat KFC but visited the "original" "restaurant" in Kentucky a few weeks ago. We thought the chicken was very decent and comparable with any southern-style smaller restaurants we hit in the South.
It is not just that, growth in fast food has been stagnant for a while now. Anything new they are looking to adopt in a hope to change that. And they will all jump in in case that new thing does have a big growth effect.
The impossible whooper was inevitable and brilliant. As you mentioned, the meats served were often already low quality, with fillers, and it was arguable if it was even meat. Some fast food chains served "100% beef", but it didn't taste very different from the other crap. So the bar is low.
Replacing questionable meat with hype pseudo-meat is a straight win all around. I'm as carnivore as they come, but if I have to hit a Burger King, I'm just going to get an impossible whooper: if i'm going to be getting a shitty burger either way, I'll take the one that didn't require all the logistics around cows.
This KFC one is just the next step. Replace all the questionable meat with pseudo-meat that is (hopefully) more sustainable, and leave the "real" stuff in caviar territory where people actually care.
Fast food chains almost universally serve all-and-nothing-but beef patties, and always have. I don't understand the confusion over this. You can immediately tell from the texture.
Propaganda by people trying to sell the same thing as "healthier" has convinced a lot of people that it is true. It helps that the idea of a large corporation selling sawdust as meat is incredibly believable though.
I agree with others, get with the times. I am pretty sure all the major national fast food burgers are 100% beef, no fillers, no preservatives.
I don't eat a ton of fast food anymore, and when I do its usually McDonalds, but I have always enjoyed the Whopper. I had one a few months ago at an airport and tried the Impossible Whopper last week. It's close, but the beef version is still better in my opinion.
Fair enough, I shouldn't have put the "with filler" part. I still stand by the "low quality" (or at least very mediocre flavor) bit though, which still makes the point stand.
When I have a whooper most of the taste is the sauce/bun/toppings with the patty only being responsible for a small portion of the taste, which makes it perfect for a substitute. I've had impossible whoopers a few time, and while eating the whole thing, it's basically the exact same taste. If I eat a piece of the patty with nothing else then there's a noticeable difference though.
I won't argue with flavor, but again, its cheap fast food, you aren't going to find brisket or short rib blend in a McDonalds burger. The new McDonalds quarter pounder is decent too for what it is.
I just hope it isn't half-assed and they don't give up. I've noticed the newer Burger King commercials say the meatless Whopper is only available for a limited time.
"meatless Whopper is only available for a limited time"
"limited time is mostly marketing trying to create a buzz. If people buy it, they will continue to offer it. Simple as that. Otherwise it really was limited.
Plant based meats is what the chains have been wanting to do all along. Plant is cheap, doesn't matter how disgusting it is at the processing plant, because they make it look like meat anyway. And now the public has decided that plant based meats are healthy(?!?) and not loaded with salt and void of real nutrition.
I'm sorry, is there some kind of simulated nutrition I'm not aware of? Say, something that can legally be labeled as protein which is not, in fact, protein?
You made a distinction between 'real nutrition' and what these foods are. Processing is irrelevant. Food has nutritional qualities regardless of how it became what it is. So I'm asking you to explain your reasoning that these foods do not have 'real nutrition'.
...are you incapable of explaining your reasoning yourself in less than, what is this, 5 pages of ad-filled text? I find it very difficult to take someone seriously who responds in this fashion.
You will be surprised how much less healthy cheap plant based food can be than meat... Now you get human pesticides (the ones sprayed on plants), GMO and plant pesticides (the one plants have developed against mammals) on top of the low quality crap that was previously called meat.
I'm preparing a large dinner for an organisation at the moment and decided that we'd make the menu vegan/vegetarian (we use a wonderful Italian caterer, so flavour isn't going to be missed). When I mentioned it to some omnivore colleagues, they asked why and I shrugged and said "the Amazon is burning". They shrugged back and said, makes sense. It's not many years since I would have expected complaints at not catering a meat option. I feel progress is being made.
I cook vegetarian Italian food myself often but honestly find that the cuisine is still very much meat based. Good luck finding a vegetarian main dish ("secondo") in Italy (outside of Milano).
> Scientists studying satellite image data from the fires in the Amazon rain forest said that most of the fires are burning on agricultural land where the forest had already been cleared.
I think it's a little less direct than that, in this case. The Amazon Rainforest is a big source of cleaning CO2 out of the air (lots of trees). It's burning, which means our CO2 footprint matters even more than before. So, anything to reduce that is then good.
Also, a lot of farmland is used to grow feed for cattle and other livestock, and it's much less efficient than using the land to grow crops for people instead.
You would definitely still get that with the people I work with, though perhaps they wouldn't bother arguing with you on it, instead writing you of completely (nothing I personally do will have any influence the Amazon burning or not).
>we use a wonderful Italian caterer, so flavour isn't going to be missed
A non meat dish is still going to taste like a non-meat dish. Perhaps your colleagues were just being polite and avoiding treading into politically charged territory after you brought up the Amazon.
Personally I'm a picky eater and vegan/vegetarian dishes simply do not compare to meat. I'm sure others feel similarly. Though for one meal I suppose it isn't a huge deal - but acting like it's just as good simply isn't true for the majority of people - that's your personal taste.
I honestly don't understand why it's such a big deal that so many people insist meat must be part of a meal? To the degree that in Argentina they say "si no hay carne, no hay comida" (if there is no meat, it is not a meal). It feels like if I insisted on having bread at every table sitting. Clearly, it can be seen as just a habit and not a requirement?
Meat is not just a matter of taste, but also of habit and identity. In general, the lower the socio-economic class, the higher the resistance to vegetarian and vegan cooking.
Society wide change is always hard, and meat is way too cheap (considering its environmental impact) to provide the economic stimulus for reducing the amount of meat in ones diet. Learning to cook vegetarian dishes is also non-trivial (although not too hard of course, but a barrier nonetheless).
For people over fifty meat is also an indicator of welfare. Especially for people whose parents didn't have the luxury of eating meat on a daily basis.
Fortunately, the shift to less meat is unmistakably happening, and has been gaining speed in the last few years.
Perhaps because vegans and vegetarians are substantially more likely to be thin and, well, less traditionally manly, both in appearance and in values. It's a different set of cultural values and it isn't invalid just because it differs from yours.
Having a meal with no meat doesn't make one vegan/vegetarian.
> vegans and vegetarians are substantially more likely to be thin and, well, less traditionally manly, both in appearance and in values
I can point you to many fat vegans, and I've heard this 'need meat' BS from guys who were literally 135 lbs, soaking wet, so.... exactly this kind of attitude that 'meat makes you manly'.
Who said that I disagreed with those values, that is a poor assumption on your part.
Meat still does equal wealth to a certain extent - have you priced a whole rib-eye roast, or a full-sized beef brisket lately?
They ain't cheap (and if you buy one, they are daunting to cook - because you know if you screw it up, you've just wasted $100-200.00).
Ground beef, or chicken, or pork - those are all still very inexpensive; though pork can get pricier for certain cuts - mostly it's still very inexpensive.
But damn - if you've ever smoked a pork shoulder and made homemade pulled-pork sandwiches - you know there's no substitute for that.
I’m vegetarian and I take a bite of meat all the time, especially if it’s something special.
None of it is as good as great vegetarian food. Sure the top top top shelf stuff is probably as good. But the average meat at a restaurant or someone’s home is no better than great veggie food.
That said average veggie food sucks. If you are eating in the average-or-below segment then yes meat is probably better. In the good-to-great segment it’s not.
Veg food does require more work, which is a big part of why a lot of people/chefs don’t bother. Meat is basically perfect as-is. You just have to not fuck it up. Veggies require you do some chef work.
> Personally I'm a picky eater and vegan/vegetarian dishes simply do not compare to meat.
What are you eating, and how are you comparing it? If you're trying to treat a salad as a meat replacement, well, it's not going to do all that well. But there's a lot of meals designed to be complete without meat that might work for you, as long as you're not expecting them to taste like beef.
Which is it? Vegetarian would hardly be worth complaining about, but I'm really struggling to come up with a vegan Italian menu that sounds appetizing.
-A mixed antipasto (olives, sun dried tomatoes, bruschetta, breaded garlic mushrooms, griller artichokes, dolmades etc.) to graze on before the meal.
-Panelle Palermitane to start, which are these crescent shaped fitters made with chickpea flour, parsley and pepper. They're a popular street food in northern Sicily. Highly recommend with a little drizzle of lemon juice.
-I can think of 10 odd pasta dishes that could be had for main but a favourite of mine would probably be a puttanesca; a pasta dish with olives, capers, eggplant and red pepper flakes. Proper rustic food and very filling.
-For desert you could have a Castagnaccio which is a chestnut cake with fruits. No milk or egg involved. Great with a shot of espresso!
-Sorbets throughout to cleanse the palate.
That's just 1 option for each part, but you could probably build a dish for each course for each day of the week if needed - all varied in ingredients and flavours.
Honestly, I'd say close to 30% of my diet is Italian - all of it vegan. There are plenty of options. Unfortunately most of the food people think of when they think Italy is something lathered with cheese and cured meats, but when I travelled through there most of the diet consisted of legume based stews, casseroles and soups, and plenty of bread and salads.
Why do American (and presumably westerners) vegetarians want to replace meat? I hated vegan and vegetarian food for song long until I ate meat free Indian food. It was always the meat replacements like veggie patties and tofurkey type products that turned me away.
Indian food doesn’t have some weird mystery replacement I find on almost every vegan or veggie dish. I had a conversation with and Indian colleague who lives in the states and she agreed a lot of veggie/vegan food is just plain weird.
I'm sure this is unintentional, but be aware that denigradting immitation meat products is a common source of bullying directed at people transitioning towards plant based diets.
Our food cravings adapt to what our bodies identify as having the nutrients we need. Most people who eat a plant based diet for 5-10 years rarely eat meat replacements. But in the beginning, these replacements are great for people that are still learning meal planning. Outside of that, some people have health issues, like cholesterol, where replacing some of their meat intake with immitation meats can be beneficial. Others like to reduce their carbon footprint by eating occassional plant based meals. These individuals do not experience the change in cravings and taste so they still appreciate the taste and texture of something similar to the meat they still consume at other meals.
To put some quantitative analysis on that, while sales of immitation meat products have increased significantly, we are not seeing significant increases in the number of US residents identifying as vegan(strict vegetarian) and only modest increases in those identifying as vegetarian. This means that much of the immitation meat consuption is done by those that are still eating an animal protein based diet.
Anecdotally, I am not a huge fan of those products and also find most traditional bean and root vegetable based meals more satisfying. But please keep in mind that many people are navigating their way towards a different way of eating and they can be very sensitive to harse words about their choices.
Vegans and vegetarians aren't as much of the target market for these products as you think.
The market for these products is really omnivores who enjoy meat yet would prefer it to be made without the animal suffering and ecological footprint of meat if such a thing were available. You're never going to get the sort of market share these companies are looking for with only vegans and vegetarians - there simply isn't enough of them.
The vegetarian-curious also really don't need people bullying them about their food choices, that's unnecessary
> I hated vegan and vegetarian food ... it was always the meat replacements like veggie patties and tofurkey type products that turned me away... weird mystery replacement I find on almost every vegan or veggie dish
Completely unfair characterization of "vegan and vegetarian food." I've been a (western) vegetarian for close to two decades and commercial meat replacements are not an have never been a large part of my diet. I eat them MAYBE a few times a year, pretty much exclusively at cookouts.
That being said, that seems to have changed with the Impossible Whopper - that tastes pretty good and has a nice texture, I can see myself ordering that again.
I love Indian food, Thai food, Ethiopian food, various Mediterranean options, etc already. That doesn't mean I don't want even more options.
Especially it would be great to evolve the current US food culture to be vegetarian as well. There is a lot of culture around food that is not just purely about it being tasty food. As a teen, we'd make dumb late night runs to the drive through. We grilled burgers and dogs on Memorial Day. We'd order Pizza and Wings while watching football.
A lot of these traditions were manufactured to begin with and could be wholesale replaced by other food cultures, sure. A lot of people want to change their impact on animal suffering/the environment without 100% swapping out these cultural memories too. I think that's perfectly fair.
Sure I eat Indian food weekly, but it's comforting to feel part of your broader food culture and connected to your childhood rather than needing to avoid all the places your peers frequent.
Because meat-products are inseperable from our food culture in many places.
I'm from NC, so to me "BBQ" means something very specific and that meaning is a point of cultural pride. We like to trash talk our neighbors based on the sauce they use (eastern NC is vinegar-base, Western is ketchup-base, and South Carolina is mustard-based) but we still all agree that the meat is pulled or chopped pork. In Texas and Kansas City they call brisket and ribs "BBQ", and in other places, "BBQ" can just mean a outdoor get-together with anything grilled!
All that is to say that, becoming vegan or vegetarian in NC means losing a fun part of your culture if you throw out meat alternatives. Luckily, there are enterprising folks making amazing meat-free alternatives that still feel authentic to NC-style BBQ (I highly recommend "Fiction Kitchen" in Raleigh for eastern-style).
I can't wait for more Carolina BBQ vegan options. Fiction Kitchen's is good, though more chopped than pulled, while my preference is the latter. Still amazing though!
Because it's a great way to transport taste, whether it's tofu, Seitan or something like Beyond Meat/Impossible Burger. Yes, you can prepare awesome veggie food without it, but it's a great way to get people started without having to miss anything.
Kebab/Döner without veggie-meat just doesn't do anything for me, for example.
I don't get why people are confused about this. You've grown up with certain expectations of how food is being prepared so it should be obvious that you're interested in supplementing the parts that you don't want to eat anymore with something that's compatible with the way you've been preparing food your whole life.
Because American have a very poor culinary tradition (it's improving) so they can't think of plates prepared with different "principles". Most cuisines around the world use a lot less meat if they use it at all, and manage to do that while being delicious.
Italian food is a perfect example, it's so easy to be vegetarian eating Italian (the original version, not the one covered in meat and cheese you find in the US).
Same goes for almost every other culinary tradition in the world, meat used to be expensive.
I’m a meat eater and want to replace meat. It’s not just vegetarians. The factory farming of animals doesn’t sit well ethically with me, but meat has been a staple of my diet my entire life. If there were a viable plant based alternative that’s indistinguishable, factory farming can die out.
It’s not ready yet, and phase 1 was the really weird stuff. I think Beyond Meat is like phase 2 of “pretty close”. In the near future, you won’t be able to tell the difference
KFC isn't rolling out thai/indian curries, garlic chinese broccoli, or cheese gorditas any time soon so in this context it seems odd to somehow demonize fake meat while suggesting foreign cuisines are superior. what's the point?
most of the interest i'm guessing is coming from what was previously thought to be "unthinkable": that is, fast food chains whose core business revolves around animal flesh introducing something else that isn't animal flesh. there are tons of consequences for this outside of American vegetarians wanting to replace meat or whatever.
Personally I’d rather just eat the sides at KFC than have fake over processed chicken. I just don’t get the need for fake meat. Everyone seems to be against over processed foods and fake meats seem more processed than anything else.
If "everyone" were against over-processed food it wouldn't as popular as it evidently is.
Great for you that you don't miss meat in your diet, but is it so hard to imagine others do, especially if they've grown up in places were it is a big part of the typical diet?
> Why do American (and presumably westerners) vegetarians want to replace meat
Vegetarians do not want to replace meat. (I mean, they are already vegetarian). Anecdotally, I haven't met a single vegetarian/vegan who is interested in Impossible or Beyond Meat substitutes. Such products are instead very helpful for those who want to reduce read meat in their diet.
I've personally dined with three vegetarians at the meals where they went to try the Impossible Burger for the first time.
It's dangerous to make blanket statements about what all vegetarians think. For example, on the question of why someone has chosen to be a vegetarian, I've heard a long list of different reasons, including: animal welfare, environment, their own health/longevity/energy, not liking the taste of meat, not enjoying the idea of eating an animal's flesh (even if it were ethical), their religion encourages it, and/or it's their default because they were brought up that way and have never tasted meat.
Because "red curry with tofu" is just called "red curry with tofu", not "vegan red curry with tofu". Same with chana masala, hummus and veggie sandwich, pasta marinara, etc. But a hamburger, "chicken nuggets", etc very much needs the "vegan" prefix to make it clear what it is, so you end up associating the word with the meat substitutes. But that doesn't mean American vegetarians only eat things that have the word vegan/vegetarian in the label.
Similarly, "gluten-free" is associated with breads, pastas, etc. Not rice or other non-imitation products.
Indian food is amazing, but I also don’t want to give up the experience that is a good burger. In an ideal world, taking up a vegetarian diet wouldn’t restrict me to traditionally vegetarian foods, but would also have close analogues to the meat dishes I enjoyed before. That’s where the substitutes come in.
I think it’s great that these substitutes are being seriously developed because even though they may not be good replications today, they eventually will be, and this will allow meat to stars to have their cake and eat it too when going vegetarian.
I used to eat veggie burgers and fake chicken tenders, but you are right going with a true vegetarian recipe is always better than just taking a meat dish and using fake meat!
Because people want to keep eating things like burgers, hotdogs, tacos, etc. And not everyone knows how to replace the "meat" part. Basically not everyone knows or has the patience to build things from scratch. I'm fortunate that my family has time to cook things from scratch but I do see the market for all those replacements, some of them are good some others are yes weird.
Primarily because sometimes people want a burger and not have to have a cow die to get it.
Another reason is that red meat is known to be carcinogenic and hard on lipids and while their isn't sufficient data on plant based meats the going assumption that it is at least modestly better is probably a reasonable one.
But yes, non-processed plant based food is terrific and probably the best for you.
Here in Sweden, pretty much every fast food outlet has a vegan option.
It's honestly great, if nothing else simply because it makes it easier to be vegan - a huge blocker is often the fact that whilst you're on a road trip or similar your options may well be "eat chips or a cold premade sandwich" otherwise.
Though (as I posted in the other thread) I wish it were easier to source decent food on the go.
A year ago my wife started eating a whole lot less meat (she has experienced a lot less allergies due to this) and this year when we went to France, it was clear that "veggie/vegan" options at restaurants are often missing (we ate mostly at friend/family houses, so it was mainly an annoyance).
McD at CDG had only one non-meat item that wasn't a snack and that was their egg wrap. Even the salads had some kind of cold cuts in there.
Yes France is terrible for vegetarians (apart from major city centres obviously). Trad French cuisine is very fixated on protein+jus+carb, and the French are not as open to other cuisines (maybe because theirs is very good?)
I tried a few different varieties of chick'n nuggets, 90% of the taste is just breading and whatever the sauce so its really not a difficult as you'd imagine to have a substitute
Nuggets, patties, and sausages are going to be the first things to reach "perfect" when it comes to replacing meat because so much of their identity is in the processing and other ingredients involved. It'll be the things like a fried chicken breast sandwich that will be a lot harder to replaces because the natural meat structure matters a lot more.
The A&W beyond meat burger stands up as well as it does for the same reasons - all the other sauces they add hides the weirdness, and you just taste burger.
I care about the nutritional value of food deeply, and I eat fast food occasionally. A McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese and a medium fries has really good macronutrient ratios. And a burger from Mickey D's is one of the most cost effective sources of protein you can find.
Because this is worse than fast food. With a burger you get protein and fat. With those meat replacement you get processed carbohydrates and little protein which is worse.
I'm on a low carb diet, I'd rather avoid carbs when I can and actually enjoy my carbs in other tasty ingredients (avocado, nuts etc) so I can have more divers diet.
The article also says it's full of canola oil which is bad
Exactly. We buy meatless ones from the grocery store to eat at home and it's really not all that different when the "real thing" has been shaped from a paste.
Those plant based protein patties often have too much salt but I just checked and the beyond meat seems reasonable with 390mg sodium and 300mg potassium all while using pea protein which has a pdcaas of 0.78.
Quite impressive.
If they can achieve the same with the chicken patties it'll be good!
I think the fake meat movement will go the way of Margarine.
Initially it's celebrated as a feat of engineering and as the healthy alternative to meat.
After about 10 to 20 years however, we'll see cancer and heart disease rates going up.
And then the billions of dollars spent in health care will pile up, but nobody will readily admit it, because the fuck up will be even bigger than with Margarine.
After all, Margarine is still on the shelves of super markets everywhere, maybe with slightly less trans fats, but it's still there, still advertised as the healthier alternative to butter.
We could do the same with plant based meat or whatever processed garbage gets sold in its name. We can let millions of people eat that day in and out and watch if they die out of heart disease and cancer over the next decades.
Feel free to sign up.
Personally not going to turn myself or my family into lab rats for these grandiose world changing goals.
The number one reason is that we've eaten red meat for millions of years, literally.
Given fake meat is new and I'm not seeing it in stores nearby yet, I'm going to assume a fair comparison will take another decade, after the studies and the meta analysis show up.
When you say something brand new and made from vegetables must cause cancer I think the burden of proof is absolutely on you, and so far you haven't given a single reason why that might be true.
Well if you want vegetables, you might as well skip this whole ceremony and straight away eat real vegetables. It's not that hard to make a vegetable sandwich.
The problem is you are selling processed vegetable mash with salts, chemical preservatives, conditioners and oil as meat.
It's not meat. It is, what it is. Processed vegetable trash. Sell it that way, and its perfectly fine. People can eat it if they want. Let's not signal this as some healthier alternative.
The person I replied to was saying that it likely to cause cancer. What are they putting in specifically that you think will cause cancer? It seems like people saying this are full of vague handwaving and won't give any specific reason or ingredient for why they think that.
Plant meat is not sold as an alternative to fast food meat, it's sold as an alternative to meat.
It will exactly go the way dessert corn flake breakfast has gone over the decades. A highly taste engineered food, loaded with chemicals and macro nutrient stuff which will give you a lot of diseases on the longer run.
There are tons of plants that are not healthy to eat at all. Or can be processed in a way that makes them unhealthy, or even dangerous to eat. See: tobacco.
What makes you say that other than extrapolating from a single sample? Partially hydrogenated fats are a preservative and harm from butter and fat in general has been shown to be an abuse of statistics to avoid blaming sugar (fructose).
To me this seems like the idea that things thought to be much more benign (like cigarettes) are shown to cause cancer so cell phones must cause cancer too, without understanding any fundamentals of that sort of claim.
Margarine without trans fats is readily available and can be a healthier fat than butter though. But I agree the initial, high trans-fat margarines were bad.
Red meat is not very hard to beat in terms of negative health outcomes, so I doubt plant-based meats will be as horrid as the initial margarine put to market.
> Margarine without trans fats is readily available and can be a healthier fat than butter though
No.
> high trans-fat margarines were bad
There's no such thing as "high trans-fats". Industrial trans fats, like from margarine or other ultra-processed products, is unsafe in any quantity, low or high. There is indeed a principle of toxicology that "the dose makes the poison", however in case of trans fats that dose is really, really low.
> Red meat is not very hard to beat in terms of negative health outcomes
There is in fact no tangible proof that red meat has negative health outcomes. All you have are surrogate markers and some poor and old observational studies that can't be reproduced in randomized controlled trails.
The fake meat movement is just a cash grab for those who want to eat like crap but feel good about themselves.
Looking at the ingredients list, it's pretty obvious that cancer/heart disease will go up.
I've already got a long-term Put Option on $BYND because not even the CEO or big celebrity investors believe it is a good long-term bet -- cashing out at its peak a few weeks back.
Given the relative ease of spreading information about its deleterious health effects of their products, I think it's a house of cards that will fail, the sooner, the better...
> I've already got a long-term Put Option on $BYND
What's long-term? I haven't accepted the necessary terms anywhere to see the options (excuse the pun) - but whenever I've seen others' elsewhere the term's not long enough that I'm comfortable enough with it to be interested.
Like I might think 'X is over-valued, that won't last', but I could never confidently say how many Y months it will last.
It's odd. Most of my friends are aboard the "eat real food, not too much, mostly plants" train, and generally avoid highly processed stuff in favor of simple ingredients. But they make an exception for this weird industrial concoction.
I, personally, don't like it because my wife has allergy issues with legumes, and they're putting soy and pea protein in _everything_ now (e.g. was surprised to see it in some random almond milk the other day). I know it's a niche concern and it's on us to watch out for, but it's annoying and sort of surprising where it all is now.
I like meat. I don't eat it in large quantities or too often, and I don't think I'll ever go for this product. If I want meat, I'll have it like we've evolved to have it over millenia. YMMV.
As someone who recently transitioned to a >=95% vegetarian diet (I still consume dairy and eggs), the growing number of fast food places offering plant-based options has been a godsend, but lacking for variety - you can only eat so many plant-based burgers. I'm excited to have a mainstream meat-free "chicken" option, because most "chicken"s that I've tried at more niche restaurants have been really good!
We've been eating plant-based meats at home for a while now, but I'm contemplating going back to meats after reading various packaging. I'm seeing a lot of food additives which I don't want my kids to take in. I'm all up for plant-based foods, but it should be healthier than the meat alternative.
Have you considered making some basic meat substitutes at home? We make Seitan a lot, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with Tofu. You can also make stuff like falafel or bean patties/meatballs.
I'd recommend checking out Miyoko's recipe for stuff like unribs, if you want some fancier Seitan-based recipes.
And, in the weirdest product add-on in a while, beyond meat burgers, because when I think of Tim Horton's I think of imitation burgers. They don't even sell real burgers.
They Just IPO'd in part to get money to expand their production volume and drive down cost. I expect within the next few years it will go much wider. Also it's great that there are two main entities fighting each other with several large companies jumping in. All this competition means reduced prices and more volume.
I can buy either that or the other similar product at my local discount grocer, but it is twice the cost of the real thing, I have no idea what is in it, or how to work with it, so I opted not to purchase it.
I will prefer to wait for the labgrown meat anyway.
I've not tried any yet, but I have a couple of friends who have been reviewing various meat-alternatives here in Helsinki, and reviews seem largely positive.
I have a hard time understanding how a proponent of vegetarianism, presuming you are one, could be so dismissive of a technological advancement that will almost certainly lead to reduced meat consumption.
I am as health and environmentally conscious now as I ever was, only aware that vegetarian & vegan diets in America are atrociously unhealthy. Offering cheap, low quality, fake food is not a technological advancement.
And I am not sure meat consumption is the problem.
Factory farming and industrialized agriculture are the big issues: the greed of the majority of the food supply causes death, destruction, and misery on beings regardless if you are eating kale or cow.
Eat pasture-raised & local if you care about the environment and your own health...
> only aware that vegetarian & vegan diets in America are atrociously unhealthy
That is in contradiction to every major health organization in the US and abroad. Well balanced vegan and vegetarian diets are healthy and appropriate for every stage of life.
If you care about the environment and want to make food choices that minimize your impact, don't eat animal products, especially beef.
Yes... but large organizations (“major”) are bureaucratic, political organizations predominately funded by, not healthy consumers or scientists, but governments and food/pharma/tech industries. Follow the money, check the biases, and see that the existence of the organization would be jeopardized by biting the hand that feeds it...
I learned more about human biology, how to read research studies, and to self-experiment rather than just "reason".
Having low testosterone, constant pain, mental health problems, etc. before and during my vegetarian/vegan experiment seemed like it was "NORMAL".
I read a little bit about the foods I was eating causing inflammation, which has a high impact on all of this, and how keto & carnivore diets were low inflammation, and affected biomarkers that I do not even understand.
I switched to low carb vegetarian, but this did not help much. And it was not satiating. And it's expensive. And, from what I've read from the authorities I somewhat trust, it is not as healthy.
I then switch to all meat (literally steak, eggs, butter, and salt) for a couple of weeks and my mood and body composition improved immensely. I wouldn't recommend that diet long-term, but it made me realize that life did not have to be as miserable as it was on the vegetarian diet...
I've tried Beyond Meat sausages a couple of weeks ago. They suck compared to the real thing and cost twice as much. I don't know what all the hoopla is about. They're edible, but that's about the highest compliment I can offer at this time. Back to the drawing board, BM.
Wonder how storing and transporting artificial meat compares to the real thing.
Unrelated - anyone wanna invest in my new startup? We're gonna cross DNA from a spider with a chicken to produce 8 legged chickens to disrupt the chicken market. Hopefully we don't get spiders with wings.
Not to get off topic but the History Channel's three-part mini-series The Food That Made America is fascinating. You get to see where we were, what changed, as well as what hasn't changed.
I found the bit about Heinz more or less inventing the assembly line to be fascinating.
What does the Paleo community think of Beyond Meat? I think they would highly object to the canola oil in Beyond Beef, which is not considered a good vegetable oil.
I think they should not call it meat anything. They should just create a new thing, so people can appreciate it for what it is, rather than expect meat and get an uncanny valley effect.
When you give it a name that alludes to it being meat you're setting the product up for failure because people will ofcourse compare it to meat and since its not meat they will judge it as "worse."
I imagine it's easier to compare it to a burger than it is to spend marketing dollars on a new plant-based sandwich. I also imagine that because it's comparable to a burger, you're not alienating those who are on the margin that still like meat, but are open to trying a plant-based "burger".
I think "burger" is diversified enough that people can accept it not being meat and not compare it directly to meat. When you name a specific meat though like "plant based chicken" you can't think of anything else.
Soy milk is an entirely different product than animal milk and they don't taste at all similar, yet I'm ok with it being called "soy milk" because "soy-based beverage that looks similar to milk" just doesn't roll off the tongue.
The use of "milk" for e.g. almond milk dates back to the medieval era. Despite big dairy's current propaganda run, the term doesn't belong to cow juice.
This would be a sure fire way to ensure failure of any attempt to transition society off of meat. The framing of impossible meat as meat is very intentional and key to the persuasion/marketing strategy towards transitioning meat eaters to it. If you think of it as a vegetarian option, not “meat that doesn’t hurt animals”, you will see less people choosing it because you are making it less appealing to them, since people who eat meat associate vegetarian food as less enjoyable (since otherwise they’d be preferring it.)
Once the difference between real meat and artificial meat is closed in terms of flavor and texture (to the point where most meat eaters will not have a huge preference) then the framing being taken now will pay dividends.
I can't understand how people enjoy this fake food. It just can't match the original taste. This sort of food is extremely unhealthy, and vegans will never be able to get the protein they need to survive. We should not encourage the appeasing of certain niche markets, the radicals must be made to realize that normal KFC is just a fact of life.
They may occasionally need certain vitamins that are rare in plants, but it's inaccurate to classify vegans as unable to satisfy their protein requirements. (And FWIW, there are natural vegetarian cultures that have survived without supplements.)
They mentioned protein in particular, which isn't really that big of a deal (as opposed to certain other nutrients like Vitamin B-12, which can often be a problem).
They will not literally die but they will not be healthy at all, many of them will likely live less than non-vegans. It is a dangerous lifestyle motivated by poor reasoning.
Okay, so not death. But other health issues? Can you point me to a relevant meta-analysis on PubMed or something? Because all I'm seeing from national dietetic organizations is support for the diet.
I'm not a vegan, if that's what you're asking: I'm vegetarian. But I assure you that vegans are not sickly due to protein deficiencies; they simply get it from other places.
I think it is a rather toxic movement that we are continuing to label things that which they are not.
"fried plant-based ‘chicken’" it makes no sense at all
A lot of it is egged on by the vegan/vegetarians and is the definition of false advertising.
I saw "vegan" mince in the meat section the other day. I feel sorry for the elderly or learning impaired who might be accidentally buying soy substitutes when their bodies are craving meat.
Sweetmeat and coconut meat are both not animal muscle, while fish, which is animal muscle, is not meat. Distinctions like 'meat' and 'milk' (and pretty much any culinary term) take on meaning according to our conventions and dietary norms, and if plant-based meat grows to fit the same dietary niche as animal meat, people will call them the same thing.
I'm not sure what parallels you're trying to suggest but they're probably not valid ones. 'Meat' being used strictly in reference to animal flesh is a relatively recent development. It's shorthand, in fact, so those truly concerned for linguistic integrity might opt to use the original term, "flesh meat."
Basically, they are using the connotations of common venacular usage of 'meat' to market something that is the opposite of the venacular 'meat'. Newspeak is all about naming one thing by its opposite, and using the connotations of the latter to hide the real meaning, like 1984's ministry of truth.
So, it leaves me with the impression that this is not merely normal advertising by association, but a more agenda driven marketing move to modify people's consumption of meat by modifying language. For some reason, that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If eating meat is really so objectively bad, why do you have to try and trick people into not eating it? The more someone has to rely on tricks and deception to achieve their goal, the less likely their goal is actually in everyone's best interest.
A Beyond Burger is not the opposite of a hamburger. They are the same category of product, much like turkey sausages and pork sausages. I think you need to reevaluate your worldview if you think it's a more sound business model to try to trick unwitting people into buying a plant-based product than to just appeal to the base of people already interested in buying it.
If they were only doing the latter, then their packaging would be much more straightforward. You can find other commentators in this set of comments that see the social agenda I'm identifying, although they are in favor of it.
Ah, exactly what I want as a consumer. Believing I'm purchasing one thing when reading the product name, and finding out it is something else entirely when reading the ingredients list (which I rarely do).
A quick Google search for "beyond meat" reveals lots of photos of their packaging. Every single one of them has large, all-caps, bright green "PLANT BASED" on the front of the package. They're not hiding anything, and anyone confused by it probably has themselves to blame.
I only can interpret that label because I'm now cynically familiar with the deceptive advertising practices currently used. But, to someone not used to how advertisers try to make one thing seem to be another, saying 'beyond meat' is 'plant based' does not communicate this thing is just a bunch of vegetables.
"Beyond Meat" is the brand name, and I suspect that's perfectly clear to people. No one buying "Land O'Lakes" butter expects to open the box and find a diorama of Minnesota inside.
I also suspect people who deem beef burgers "plant-based" on a colloquial level are few and far between.
You're concerned enough about what you're feeding yourself to complain about what's on the label, but not concerned enough to find out what's on the label?
Don't know why you are being down voted. As a vegan, one of my biggest gripes with the recent movement is the marketing of new products and the obsession of replacing meat with vegetables.
To further illustrate your point, imagine trying to replicate carrots using only veal and calling it something like "calf-rots", it absolutely makes no sense. Your issue is primarily with the false representation, my issue is that we're intentionally making it harder to sell vegan/vegetarian alternatives by trying to replicate something unachievable instead of coming up with entirely new products. For example, I highly suspect there's an entire food category like bread that we haven't discovered yet.
Vegans (especially long-time/lifetime vegans) aren't so much the target market of these new products, the target market is more flexitarians and omnivores who are open to the idea of reducing their meat intake yet don't want to give up familiar textures and flavors.
Veal carrots are not a thing only because there's no market for veal eaters who enjoy eating carrots yet have ethical and environmental concerns about it.
> my issue is that we're intentionally making it harder to sell vegan/vegetarian alternatives by trying to replicate something unachievable
I'm a meat eater who's never opted for a meat substitute in my life until these options. They absolutely have started to achieve being a replacement. I don't need it to reliably pass as beef in a blind taste test, I just need it to be good while being essentially a burger. (Or whatever.)
I was never going to try a chunk of tofu no matter how many people insist that it can be great. I tried this because people say it tastes like a burger. Some people want a new experience and some people want a familiar one.
Maybe this will be a gateway item that will demystify plant-based food for me and others and make me more likely to try future products that don't mimic meat.
> my issue is that we're intentionally making it harder to sell vegan/vegetarian alternatives by trying to replicate something unachievable instead of coming up with entirely new products.
Except they are achieving it. I've eaten Beyond Meat patties and they are close enough and good enough. As a 'vegan-curious' eater, products like Beyond Meat are a halfway point which eases the transition to a vegan diet (or at least a diet more balanced towards non-meat products).
As more people become more comfortable moving from 7-days a week meat-eating to something less, that is only going to help the vegan market.
Beyond Meat will do more to shift a portion of consumers across to vegan diets (at this point in history) than making new 'pure' vegan products.
That's the general line of reasoning. I don't really buy it since a well cooked meat burger is going to be better than the beyond meat at a much lower cost. For perspective, the price per lb is more than a sirloin steak.
Very few people eat sirloin steak everyday and so Beyond Meat isn't going to do much for the in terms of transitioning people who primarily eat cheaper meats.
On the other hand, Margarine (invented in the 1800's) converted tons of people from a purely animal product to one that doesn't need animal products without marketing it as "plant based".
> Beyond Meat isn't going to do much for the in terms of transitioning people who primarily eat cheaper meats.
That's not really their target market at the moment though. They are aiming their product at 'vegan-curious' people. People who are not adverse to eating more vegetarian products, frequently want to because of environmental/animal welfare reasons, but don't want to cos they like the taste of meat.
Also, it's still very early days though - Beyond Meat can barely keep up with demand and haven't optimised their production at all. I see no reason their price curve wouldn't follow the traditional curve of almost any product where the early premium prices drop as production process matures and output ramps up.
It seems like the makers of these products have a dilemma between trying to describe a product in relative terms to meat in which they set themselves up for an unfair comparison or describing their product with no reference to meat ("texturized vegetable protein") and have the customer not have any idea what it is or balk at the phrasing.
It certainly is a dilemma but I feel choosing the first option is myopic (I want my customers to know "today" what this is) as opposed to long term strategy. If tofu was invented today, would we market it as soy cheese?
I think plant-based is actually a selling point currently, so they would be doing themselves a disservice by not making it explicit on the product. I don't expect people to buy it accidentally.
As for the wording, I don't see why its any different from veggie burger, or diet soda. Consumers associate these products with certain properties, which can be emulated in the substitutes.
I've never been a vegetarian and never been tempted by it. However, if meat can be approximated very well then I'm excited by the idea of displacing much of the environmental impact of producing meat. Even if real meat never goes away fully.
I don't consider myself problematic for eating meat. However, clinging to meat on principle, to the point of getting triggered like this with accusations and insults, is just shitty.
How would you propose describing something that has the consistency and flavor of chicken, and which doesn't denigrate the non-chicken product?
Quotes and asterisks are as you said not always sufficiently visible differentiators, but misspellings like "Chikken" or the like will usually be trademarked by a particular organization and not be available for widespread usage.
Chicken-flavored _X_, where _X_ is either a brand name or some generic name for the category. At the end of the day, a chicken is an animal, and chicken is the name for the meat that comes from that animal - and hence, probably shouldn't be used for products that aren't derived from that animal.
First off, "chicken-flavored" is confusing, it usually means "flavored with chicken".
Secondly, language doesn't work that way so we end up soy milk, grasshopper pie, sweetbread, head cheese, cocoa butter, Bombay duck, Rocky Mountain oysters, coconut meat, Welsh rabbit, Mississippi caviar, chicken fingers, ladyfingers, Jerusalem artichokes, and Grapenuts.
The milk industrial complex feels very strongly about it, and has litigated ruthlessly to prevent non-mammal produced milk from having the word milk in it
... and that's despite the fact that non-cow milks have been around and called "milk" for many centuries. For example, almond milk has been used in Western European cooking on Fridays and during Lent.
Almond milk also was a staple of European baking for centuries before pasteurization, because you couldn't always know that you would have fresh milk on hand when you needed it for baking.
Except they are confused; they just ignore it. I don't think many almond milk buyers have a clue as to how it is made. They chuckle at "Never seen no titties on no almond" and buy it because it is apparently healthier.
Most of the vegan meat subs are more expensive, so it's not likely they'll buy it by mistake when normal products are right next it for half the price.
Yeah, just like there are thousands of people mistakenly pouring milk of magnesia on their cereal? Absolutely nobody is confused by this outside of the fantasy land inhabited by terrified meat and dairy farmers.
Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper and less gross at the same time, and it might help them cut down on calories and improve their health image.
I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.