I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.)
One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."
The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.
> Some say the slowdown in sales is a product of food inflation, as consumers trade pricier plant-based meat for less-expensive animal meat.
Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.
I’m vegan, converted about four years ago so I ate meat for decades. I ate impossible burgers for a while after Burger King got them, because there is some nostalgia/novelty in going to a fast food joint.
But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger or a garden burger. Those taste light and yummy and don’t leave a weird feeling in my stomach.
"Here’s a pesky little chemical called hexanal. If you’ve ever eaten a beyond burger, or any of these plant based products 2.0 (though to be honest, it’s more like they’re on V.46.6.2) and burped 10 or 15 minutes afterwards, and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, wow, ok I definitely just had a meat alternative” you were probably regurgitating this aerosol. Some people think it’s fruity, like green apple, others like mulched grass. At the lab, we had to walk outside to get wafts of it in its pure form, but the minute I opened the cap I knew exactly what this flavour was…. “OLD FRYER OIL, 100%”. It’s metabolized in all manners of organisms through the oxidation of fatty acids, and is… kind of unpleasant?! The point is that while this molecule exists in fava beans, peas, and soy, (the three kings of texturized vegetable protein) when you have a WHOLE FOOD, its there in harmony among all sorts of other volatile compounds, while also being locked away deep inside the beans fibres. It’s the act of processing that concentrated and heightens the presence of off-flavours like these, making the processed foods made from them taste, well, processed. Good with the bad. You can’t concentrate for protein without concentrating other aspects of a plant. There’s always a cost.
Now, I will always be a huge proponent for whole foods, made with care, prepared simply. But the realities of grocery store shelves dictate a different truth. People opt for convenience, and sometimes, you’ve got to meet them where they are.
My current work at CH has me doggedly hunting down an effect of fermentation I’ve long known intuitively through practice. Certain lactic acid bacteria fermenting their way through legumes don’t just mask, but dismantle this and other problematic molecules. I’m still after the mode of action, but it’s also enough for me to know that age old techniques of fermentation (like soaking ones legumes or grains days in advance of their cooking) can still put to shame the greatest technological “advances” of food science of the past 40 years.
Nature is, after all, cleverer than you are. "
Once you start paying attention, you can find bad tasting details in almost everything. For example, steak can taste metallic. People don't mind or even notice such things because they are used to it.
I see you are being downvoted, but I know exactly what you mean. When I eat Impossible and especially Beyond burgers, my stomach feels slightly off. A bit of indigestion. I don't get this with typical veggie patties.
Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.
To each their own. I greatly enjoy the flavor of meat, but feel like a serial killer when I think about the animal suffering and to a lesser extend carbon emissions. While I also get a slightly odd feeling in my stomach from Impossible beef (doesn't happen with their cyber chicken), it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger without feeling like I just tortured a puppy.
If you have the money, buy meat directly from a regenerative ag farm you can go visit personally. You'll see animals with plenty of space, given healthcare and protection from predators, and contributing to soil growth and biodiversity.
The thing is... this is not a solved problem, by far.
You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted.
Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out any and all dairy products: cheeses (all 100 million of them), yogurt, regular milk, sour milk, sour cream, whey, etc.
The entire western market isn't going to simultaneously and instantly stop eating meat. There won't suddenly be a day when all the herds are culled because everyone finally stopped eating meat at once. If it ever happens (I'm hopeful but not optimistic), it will be a gradual process, and industries will have lots of time to adapt.
But even that aside, it's not our duty as consumers to keep eating animals to keep industry able to make shoes and cheese.
My point is, what are we going to replace those with? Especially leather & co. They have real life applications, they're not just fads. Plus, will those replacement products be sustainable? Vegan leather is just rebranded plastic, for example.
I'm equally curious, but I don't know the numbers, if replacing plastic packaging with paper/cardboard is environmentally sound. I remember back in the day efforts to reduce paper consumption, I think our sustainable paper production capacity was near its limits.
Cactus leather is a new trend. I don't own any cactus leather products so I can't say how good it is, but surely it's possible to replace cowhide with something.
Even vegan (plastic) leather is significantly better from an environmental and emissions perspective than cowhide leather. The tanning process is not exactly eco-friendly, and neither is raising cows.
My old boss was vegan (or rather his wife was and he was very accommodating of her diet, he would still eat meat outside the home). He would always mention that the fanciest, most expensive vegan cheese option out there set itself apart from the rest with the tagline "It melts!" on the packaging. Vegan cheese has to come a long way to be anywhere comparable to real cheese. The same applies to synthetic leather, by the way.
There are several products lined up to come out next year that use casein produced by genetically modified plants. There are already products with similar whey protein from plants on the market. For example I've been loving Brave Robot ice cream.
It depends on what you are looking for with the vegan cheese. If you want something to go with a charcuterie plate, there are really good cultured cashew milk cheeses. They are more akin to cheese spreads though, something like this [0]
But if you are looking for something like a slice of cheddar or vegan mac-n-cheese the options are really pretty terrible and all have an aftertaste like you just ate a spoonful of Crisco.
Not knowing anything about vegan cheeses, are there options that would be something similar to say brie, camembert, emmental, fontina, gruyère, havarti, manchego, parmigiano reggiano, or roquefort?
There might be some I'm not really sure for the specific varieties you have listed above. A vegan gouda seems to be a pretty standard thing for some of the manufacturers. So there are definitely some trying to make things outside the typical cheddar, swiss, mozzarella.
I don't think I have ever seen something trying to imitate any really soft (brie) or blue (roquefort) cheeses.
It doesn't have to, Alcantara is extremely robust and a great replacement for leather, just as one example.
But the synthetic leather in cheap products aiming to look like real smooth leather, I think this is the one you mean, time and time again is so inferior it's almost a scam. Shoes will fall apart quickly, sofas, clothing will peel off after 2-3 years when the softener has gassed out.
>it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger
You're not getting the flavour of a burger, no matter how hard you try to fool yourself (or make yourself sick). That's why these companies are flailing.
There are qualities in a fake burgers that emulate parts of a burger someone might enjoy without having an exact replica. In the same way Turkey Bacon is acceptable to some and not others.
I think the purists are trying to hold a parity argument but the substitute enjoyers are cool with experimentation and want something similar even if it's not 1:1.
Sorry, I prefix plant-based/meat-substitute products with "cyber" instead of one of the more boring options because it makes me giggle. I shouldn't have used it with people not familiar with my in-joke.
I, uh, thought that the beyond meat pseudo-ground-beef I ate tasted almost exactly like beef, cooked like beef, looked like beef, etc... just without the killing of a cow. I liked it and will buy it the next time I want ground beef.
You'd be surprised how many animals die in the process of scaled agriculture and displacement that occurs to create these replacement goods. But they're not the big fluffy animals we anthropomorphise, so it's easy to accept.
It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed.
Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other creatures than non-animal agriculture simply due to the additional land requirements. It is far easier to accept the less harmful industry.
I don't think they were suggesting that. More something along the lines of "you're likely to be killing animals either way, so just accept that nature is cruel and don't feel guilty about it".
There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering:
- Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought
- Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers.
- Only eat meat you have personally killed in the most humane way possible
It's kind of bad either way tbh. Imagine going to the funeral for someone else's mother and saying something to the tune of "The old hag was going to die anyway, so don't be sad".
Telling people that their principles or feelings are wrong is rarely a great way to convince people, it just makes you look obnoxious in debates.
On the second point, I agree, if in person I wouldn't make such a statement in that way because reactions are immediate and you're within immediate awkwardness. But on the internet, you read a statement and then you will emotionally react, but can then go research more, ponder, deliberate and choose whether you respond emotionally, matter-of-factly, not at all, etc. I think that's great and in a sense encourages some more provocative honesty that we dance around in the flesh.
Most humans can live deeply fulfilling and joyful lives without causing as much suffering as they do now. They don't need to feel guilty about what they are doing now so much as strive to cause less suffering.
Maybe you must eat factory farmed meat, fine, it's not for me to say. But that's not most people. Most people can do with reducing their meat intake, and it isn't hard. It's not like you are in the wilderness hunting or anything. You just go to the grocery store and buy veggies and beans and stuff.
Furthermore, for some people, eating meat from a factory farm is orders of magnitude more difficult than eating a strict plant based diet. Maybe that's easy for you - not for me.
Finally, while nature may indeed be cruel, we do not need to be.
Curious about deer: if deer aren’t hunted, they overpopulate and starve. It would be cruel not to hunt them. Wild pigs are another significant environmental nuisance. They reproduce rapidly and cause massive destruction wherever they go. Seems like managing those populations without eating the meet is worse ethically.
The idea that killing animals is more cruel than not is to ignore ecology.
Factory farms and industrial meat is certainly another story. But I wanted to point out that cruelty is not so black and white. It’s similar to the cat people that feed strays — makes them feel good, but it makes the problem worse which is more cruel than simply not feeding the strays.
> Curious about deer: if deer aren’t hunted, they overpopulate and starve. It would be cruel not to hunt them.
I strongly disagree with this. If there were no humans participating, and deer ended up overpopulated, and then starved, would there be any issue? Of course not, this is just how nature balances itself.
That "killing an animal directly via hunting" is more cruel than "letting the populate self-correct via natural processes" is not a matter of common sense - it's not something we all agree on. There is an implication that we know better than the universe and I'm not convinced that is the case.
> Wild pigs are another significant environmental nuisance. They reproduce rapidly and cause massive destruction wherever they go. Seems like managing those populations without eating the meet is worse ethically.
I assume you are referring to feral pigs, which are not wild in the sense that a native creature is. They are domesticated pigs which have ended up in foreign environments. Whether hunting them is appropriate or not, I'm not sure.
Nowadays, though, we have gotten ourselves in a pickle, by eliminating the natural predators in many environments in which deer thrive naturally, or have adapted to. Via our own lack of foresight, consideration for the planet as a whole, or even some degree of self-serving malice, we have created a really tricky problem.
I do agree we ought to work on this issue. Hunting is probably the best, most practical solution we have, but only because I believe we should try to fix what we have broken, not because it is somehow less cruel. A less practical but far less cruel solution may be a sterilization program for the invasive populations.
Two factors: 1) Humanely raised 2) Efficiently killed (done quickly with limited/no pain).
One can argue the cruelty of eating animals regardless - but there very much is a difference between tightly caged factory farming, pumping animals with medicine constantly because the conditions keep them sick all the time, and raising animals in a healthy environment.
> Is the humane way to kill an animal the same way one would humanely kill a toddler without consent of the parents or child?
Interesting wording.
> If not why not, when we consider animal have at least the intelligence, will to live, social connections and capacity for suffering as children?
When we will be able to ask for that kind of a contest?
PS. I know, animals has some signs of intelligence. But for me this measure of intelligence is not enough for not willing to eat it. And referring to parent poster, I really think there is some ethics in eating only those meat which has been killed by me, but I only have a chicken farm when I want to eat not only chicken.
Halal slaughter is certainly not the most humane way to kill animals; it optimizes for religious taboos on consumption of blood more so than lack of suffering. For the latter, you really want to target the brain directly if at all possible.
I think they are simply pointing out that you must kill other animals in order to live. There's no way around it.
If your interested in killing the least amount of animals, why not go hunting and fishing, that almost assuredly kills fewer than industrialized agriculture. I've replaced almoat all beef all year round in our family with deer venison kept year round in a chest freezer.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that veganism or vegetarianism for most people is very emotional action. Most of the pop media around it focuses on the cuteness of the animal not on the total number of animals killed. and it's ignoring that like in hunting or ethical farming, the animals have a very full happy life.
As a hunter it's interesting seeing this article on HN and seeing no mention of hunting. Also not a bad thing, it's not part of the culture here, but it's interesting to see that bias in the HN culture.
> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.
> Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore.
This is just silly. I can't imagine an internally consistent worldview that would assert something like this. Of course natural biomes are valuable regardless of the presence of cattle. Besides, modern cattle are domesticated creatures and don't even really have a native (i.e. not man-made or facilitated) environment.
The assertion regarding soy fields is at best a misunderstanding of the actual data regarding land use, or at worse, a meaningless tautology.
For those who don't have time to click and read the link in the other reply by user vnorilo, I'll just quote the relevant paragraph:
> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.
This is quite a red herring. The bulk of soy production is waste, that we have managed to use for cattle feed, because they can upcycle it into consumable nutrients.
If we got rid of all cattle, we would not reduce the amount of soybeans grown by 77%, just our utilization of what is grown.
77% of soy beans are used as feed in animal fattening. The basic biology and ecology of trying to push calories through a lossy (25x!) step in the food cycle doesn't work out.
Yes but before feeding the cow the bean we press it for soybean oil, which now accounts for a significant portion of calories consumed globally (somewhere around 10%, a quick search did not yield the study and I can't recall it exactly).
What do you imagine we would do with the soy pucks that are produced after extruding the oil?
Also, ruminants need non starchy, fibrous plant materials. I can't speak toward chicken and pork but I don't advocate people eat those.
It doesn't reflect well on your argument that your quote doesn't appear in the source.
"Results estimate that livestock consume 6 billion tonnes of feed (dry matter) annually – including one third of global cereal production – of which 86% is made of materials that are currently not eaten by humans. In addition, soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake. Producing 1 kg of boneless meat requires an average of 2.8 kg human-edible feed in ruminant systems and 3.2 kg in monogastric systems. While livestock is estimated to use 2.5 billion ha of land, modest improvements in feed use efficiency can reduce further expansion."
Even the source you are citing agrees that after massaging the numbers as much as possible it's still 3x less efficient to produce calories for human consumption by feeling animals.
I was quoting Diana Rogers, who provided a source for her statements, so I thought I would include it.
I cannot access the full article, but from the abstract that seems to not be congruent with what the study is suggest. Perhaps you are confusing kg for kcal? It could indeed be the fact that it is 3x less efficient by weight.
Given that the article is pointing out that 86% of the feed for animals is not edible by humans, claiming that meat is 3x less efficient calorie wise with these numbers is also making the claim that we are growing plants 2x more calorically dense by meat than weight.
30-70% of their food - depending on the region and local industry - is distillers grains [1]. That’s the waste from ethanol production, including biofuels and alcohol.
Of that last 14% of human edible food, the vast majority is used at the end to fatten up the animals for slaughter.
Is easy to understand even without bibliography. Soy is an annual herb. It grows all the summer, invest everything on producing fruits in fall and then die in winter.
Beans are the crop. Everything else must wait until they are ready, and by then it will be basically dry matter. Therefore all except the beans is a residual.
Can still be recycled into more human food by herbivores, but we couldn't do it directly. We can't feed on dry stems, withered flowers or brown leaves.
I would highly recommend the book Sacred Cow. It has links to hundreds of studies within for further research. The authors, Diana rogers and Robb Wolf have been on many podcasts since it's release to discuss the topic.
If you want specific studies I can go look up in the book but it sounds like your asking for further reading, not cited sources.
How much of the meat we consume do you really think are grazing in meadows? Even most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil. However you turn it, it’s impossible to claim that cattle raising is a net gain for biodiversity.
You are moving the goalposts. The parent post was comparing non-animal agriculture with animal agriculture in terms of biodiversity. I'll copy it here for you.
> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture is better for biodiversity than crop monocultures. I understand that the truth can be shocking for some people, but there are dozens of ecological studies pointing to the environmental value of pastures and meadows, specially as ecotones.
As the initial plan to demonize cattle failed, now you are silently replacing "non-animal agriculture" by "rainforests" as a straw man to attack the original claim. Sorry, but this was not the point that we were discussing.
"Non-animal agriculture", also known as "Agriculture", has replaced happily as many rainforest hectares as cattle, if not more. Take a look to the fate of Indonesian rainforests
No, no goalposts have been moved. It is worse for the environment, in all aspects, including biodiversity, to raise animals to eat than to eat the crops directly.
The reason is simple: to produce the same amount of energy (and protein) with livestock as you would with crops, you have to use orders of magnitude more resources and you affect the environment orders of magnitude more: you use more fuel, release more greenhouse gases, use more water, use more land area, destroy more soil, et.c.
And while it might be true that one hectare used for grazing might be more biodiverse than one hectare used for, your example, soybeans. But 85 percent of the world's soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.
I think you need to look up the meaning of the expression "straw man". And about the rainforests: Tropical rainforests are the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems in the world, and right now, huge areas of that rainforests are destroyed for the land to be used to raise cattle.
>> most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil
> Evidence for that rather large claim?
While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:
"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]
"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]
See also:
How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:
> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:
> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
Cattle do not eat solely from a meadow. Even if cows are free range, that's generally only a spring to fall state, in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).
For factory farmed cattle (which is the most common) the situation is far worse.
An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?
> in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).
To have hay in winter you still need a meadow of high grass that will burst with life in spring, and cattle is excluded from this areas. Hay don't require pesticides or weedkillers. Traditional farming areas double its purpose as small natural reserves, even in winter. (Not all is nice, we could have a forest there instead, but is still better than modern agriculture for a mile).
> An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?
This is a false equivalence.
The correct question would be: "how much soy consume the number of people that could be feed with this cow".
The error is understandable because many of this movements are focused in the individual, and equality among individuals. This is just one way to study ecology, but not the more interesting or rewarding one, and sometimes leads to plain wrong conclusions.
A cow can produce until 88lbs of milk a day. Having 12000 L of milk by cow in a lactating season is not uncommon, and some can reach 20000 L of milk. And this without talking about the meat and the leather.
No, it's not a good point. Cows are rarely grown in "meadows". Free-range beef is a minority, and most cow feed comes from monoculture fields. And it takes more monoculture grain to grow a pound of beef versus a pound of vegetables, and it's not even close.
No, I'm suggesting it is not a good/bad dichotomy and people should make sure large decisions are not made on what they think are simple moral choices.
I mean if you determine that animals dying for your diet is no good, then make sure you consider the people that might be dying to bring you the goods you haven't checked the source of, or for the stadium you enjoy watching events at, etc.
Quit meat if you feel you need to, but don't pretend it makes you a morally better person because 'animal murder,' it's not that simple.
Which would be very compelling if your body only needed calories to survive. Meat is the most efficient way to deliver proteins and essential amino acids. You should also dig into the concept of bioavailability.
This is debunked. Tofu is incredibly protein dense - on par or surpassing chicken breast. Without looking it up and subjectively, tofu also seems to be digested very easily. There’s also seitan and the beans. Nuts also exist but have fat/protein ratios that tend toward uncomfortably high. (If what your eating has macros that approach the fat content in nuts to other nutrients that’s pretty high and should be noted.)
Taken from wikipedia entry on Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score [1]:
- Chicken has a PDCAAS of 0.95
- Soy has a PDCAAS of 0.92
- Black beans have a PDCAAS of 0.74 (highest legume)
- Other beans and legumes have a PDCAAS of 0.70
- Wheat (seitan) has a PDCAAS of 0.42
Facts:
Soy has good enough nutrients to make a valid claims for it without throwing away valid science.
Soy is not surpassing chicken breast in PDCAAS, or red meat.
Eggs and dairy literally break the scale and are by far the highest ranking whole foods on a PDCAAS basis.
Seitan and beans are terrible in comparison in terms of PDCAAS, with you needing to consume nearly 2x the amount of protein from the former to compete with the later.
Opinions:
As far as fat goes, keep in mind tofu has a 1:2 fat:protein ratio. Chicken breast is 1:20+. This reason is the reason a lot of people herald chicken breast
Overconsumption of soy can lead to health implications
Soy does not have enough leucine to trigger the MTOR pathways to build muscle. If you are having soy post workout, you need to consume 45-60g of protein, vs just 20-30g of protein from animal products
Red meat has literally everything you need to live. Throw in a little carbs and fiber too and you can run at peak performance without worrying about anything in your diet.
Biases:
I've been relentless about my diet for 10 years and have tried everything. This includes vegan, vegetarian, keto, carb cycling, protein sparring modified fasts, you name it.
This year I started eating an animal based diet and not only do I feel great, my TDEE went from 2400 to over 3700. This means while I used to eat 2400kCal to maintain my weight, I now have to eat 3700 to maintain my weight, and I feel fantastic while doing so.
I don't disagree that it's comparable - in fact that's half my point. That was the first 'fact' I listed. It's pointless to claim bioavailability is 'debunked', because soy stands on it's own in the bioavailability data.
However, it's also misleading to claim it's debunked then point to seitan and beans as viable alternatives, or warn against fat content immediately after comparing tofu to chicken.
> How do you feel great knowing you are harming other sentient beings?
Because I wake up refreshed, have steady energy throughout the day, and can focus on solving complicated tasks throughout the day. I'm happier and healthy than I've ever been.
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
Almost every area of my life is at the expense of other sentient beings. I use energy that probably comes from coal that is fueling the war. I use an iPhone that has a battery that was probably made from slaves in china, built from materials sourced from slaves in mines in Africa. If you're checking hacker news, I'm assuming you are optimizing for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings.
I'd like to change some of that. The are more effective ways of doing so than just opting out of society.
> Are there areas where you don’t?
Chicken and pork are actually my favorite foods. I don't eat them because I think as livestock they're a net harm to the environment.
I don't kill spiders in my house, they're happy to cohabitate.
I have a dog, I sacrifice hours a day to make sure he is happy and healthy.
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
I think the answer must be yes for everyone here. We are choosing to use (and pay for) the internet and electricity when we could instead be buying food for people who have none. We participate in Western economies which prey on the economies of the developing world.
I think it's important to also think about the definition here of 'sentient' and the definition of 'harm'. Is it 'harmful' to build houses, when otherwise animals would live in the fields/forests? Is it 'harmful' to burn fossil fuels for energy? Do you refuse to use electricity which has come from fossil fuel sources?
Is 'sentience' the right point to draw the line? How would you respond to findings like this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.13065, which comes to the conclusion that the assumption that plants are not sentient may be flawed?
I just spent the last month learning to build EarthShip homes from the human waste stream. Not perfect but heading in the right direction as they generate all their own power.
You make great points about exploitation that we all benefit from.
As for plants, I think it’s possible, however raising animals requires even more plants to be killed.
And I’m not sure plants experience pain the way animals do. And if I had to choose, it seems animals are more capable of experiencing pain and suffering.
Honestly, from a poorly philosophical standpoint I struggle finding a reason not to conclude that the best solution as a human is to remove oneself entirely from the equation. As humans we are practically a walking Holocaust no matter what we do. The point about plants only drives this home further. There are even reasonable arguments for panpsychism which might mean even more unavoidable cause for suffering from one's existence
In my opinion this is the weakest argument for veganism. Are Lions bad because they eat deer? Are Sharks good because they eat fish that eat other fish that eat plants? Are cats demons...maybe?
The philosophy makes no sense even if you start with the assumption that animals are on the same moral plane as people that does not preclude or discount eating them out of preference because animals already do that. If you want to argue for veganism use a less combative prideful argument. For example I'm not vegan or vegetarian but I heavily reduce my meat consumption for environment and health reasons, less than 2 times a month and I want to go lower. Talking about the nuance and difficulty that comes with eating less meat and overcoming them should be inline with the, moral pride based better than you attitude you have. And it should be something you are seeking not trying to derail because your goal is to get people to eat less meat.
You seem to place humans and animals in the same moral category w.r.t. violence, specifically predation, due to your usage of "other sentient beings" in the above comment.
In your view, if a lion and a hunter both kill a gazelle, have they both committed the same moral violation?
Knew I was leaving things out. Thanks for including peas!
I don’t want to know how anybody gets actual, non-supplemented B12 nowadays. Many foods add a B12 in the form of cyanocobalamin. We evolved in a world where bacteria left B12 on nearly every surface left out long enough. But nowadays we clean our food and it shouldn’t be present. People will say they get it from the organ meat of certain animals - because that’s where those animals collect the B12 in their environment.
Notably, I avoid cyanocobalamin like the plague. It releases small amounts of cyanide into your liver upon processing. It’s also not particularly bioavailable. There are better B12s and I wish food would leave me to choose it myself.
Peas are a complete protein, but in their natural form they suffer from poor digestability compared to animal proteins. (Split peas have a PDCAAS score of around 0.5 - 0.6. Pea protein isolates can get up to 0.9, or comparable to chicken.)
It’s not all about bioavailability. Fiber might not be digested by us but the microbes that do fill the role of an organ. Giving the body something to work on offers benefits like leveled out blood sugars. This pdcaas metric needs a high quality reference.
Peas (gen Pisum) are very close to gen Lathyrus. Many of this wild flowers use a chemical defense to protect their seeds that is accumulative and can lead to serious and permanent neurodegenerative consequences at long term.
Lathyrism is one of the oldest diseases known in the history. Was observed in people with irreversible damages on their spinal cord after eating big amounts of the plant Lathyrus sativus, today known as Pisum sativum or "pea".
The disease develops after heavy consumption of peas for over two months so, to include an unlimited amount of Pisum sativum in the diet as your main source of protein is a terrible idea. Another case of wrong solutions and dangerous advice provided by veganism. If you are doing it, please stop right now and read this:
Just because 2 things are related does not mean they are equally dangerous. Potatoes, tomatos, eggplants, and most peppers are in the Solanaceae family, same as deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), which is extremely poisonous. Yet potatoes are a staple crop.
The commonly consumed pea types (yellow, sweet, snap, snow) have no risk of causing Lathyrism. Only wild peas pose a risk and those are outright banned in most nations. (notable exception, india, where it is part of several common dishes).
You have been warned. Plants are unsafe to eat by default
The fact that wild peas are much more dangerous does not remove the danger from common sweet peas (of any kind or color, Is the same species). Is a matter of how much of it you eat, and if you allow enough days between meals to detox.
It depends also in "how" you eat it. If you mix it with cereals or not (hint, you should) and even in "where" you cook it.
By common sweet pea, I mean the green common edible one. Pisum sativum = Lathyrus sativus a species that is known to cause the disease if eaten in large amounts. Lathyrism is happening still today in a few parts of the planet like India, and is a serious irreversible condition, not much unlike paraplegia. This is not FUD, is a proven medical fact. Maybe the vegetable has a different name in English. Dunno, but we are talking about the same species all the time.
Lathyrus odoratus, is the Fragrant sweet pea, a small species with huge flowers that smell really well. It has tiny peas that are not really edible -in big amounts- (all are "edible" in very small quantities but it does not worth the risk) and of course, as most Lathyrus it causes lathyrism. is just that is a different case of Lathyrism, affecting bones instead nerves if I remember correctly.
Pisum sativum and Lathyrus sativus are not the same plant. Pisum sativum’s Lathyrus name is “Lathyrus oleraceus”
Lathyrus sativus is also referred to as the “white pea”. Because it’s white.
I know sativus and sativum look the same but that doesn’t mean they are the same plant.
Here’s an article with photos of Lathyrus sativus. [1]
If I may inquire, are you from india? If so, then yes, you probably do have to be more aware of the peas you are eating. From the articles I can find it sounds like Lathyrus sativus is banned in india but still somewhat commonly sold. That’s not the case where I’m at in the US. You cannot accidentally get Lathyrus sativus here because nobody is selling it.
Yep. The International Plant Names lists 33 synonims for Pisum sativum L. and 16 for Lathyrus sativus L. and none of them coincide. Botanical names are changing all the time, and is not straightforward sometimes.
So you were right and I was wrong. I stand corrected. Thank you for getting me out of my mistake.
Tofu is not digested easily, it has a lot of ingredients our omnivore stomachs cannot digest, so the bacteria gets to it. It's made out of soy beans, so yes, it will cause gas and bloating.
Your comment is obviously (to me) someone who hasn't explored any other diet except meat eating (feel free to dispute). There are many people thriving on a vegan diet.
There are, but everyone has different dietary needs too. Some studies found a genetic sequence evolved in asia that confers better utilization of legume protein. Western Europe and eastern Africa evolved lactose tolerance to get protein instead. Up north people got bigger livers to handle more meat consumption.
I have tried vegan (whole foods only) for months, and I have real trouble with legumes, not just normal gas, and my blood work went crazy. Triglycerides shot up for one.
The healthiest I have ever felt, and the best my blood work has ever been, was eating 1.5lbs of grassfed beef every day (with lots of roots and leaves too).
I can do vegetarian pretty easily, I process eggs and dairy well, but both of those foods are designed to trigger rapid growth in young organisms. I'm not growing anymore so I tend to pack on fat with them.
My chosen middle ground is to get my protein from fish (Cobain said they don't have feelings) and dinosaurs(they had their time). I feel little kinship to cows, grew up around them, but it isn't efficient, even if I feel physically better eating them.
I was vegetarian for six years. But my personal diet has nothing to do with debunking the myth that humans are not omnivores by necessity.
There are plenty of studies showing large populations of vegetarians suffering vitamin deficiencies, so thriving is quite a stretch. Here is one example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29446340/
We could cut down on oxygen use by not breathing too. Ultimately you have to ground these abstract vectors of comparison in some fundamental purpose. For me, the only possible ground is humanity.
If humanity is the ground of your analysis, meat consumption will fail to present itself as the decisive factor for any vector of comparison. The decisive factor will generally be the elevation of capital or oligarchic social ends over general social interest.
It would allow nature to begin to recover from the damage we've been doing to it for thousands of years. Besides increased biodiversity being an inherently good thing, it would also reduce flooding and erosion, stabilise weather systems, preserve topsoil, etc. etc.
I've seen a number of reports of large farms being planned in places like the middle east.
Dubai opened one about 6 months ago capable of producing over a million kg of leafy greens a year, the largest vertical farm in the world by some margin, and that's just a pilot project.
A million kg of the most calorie dense leafy green (parsnip or kale at 50-60 kcal/100 grams) would be equivalent to about 167,000 kg of wheat (~360 kcal/100 grams). A bushel of wheat is about 27kg and the US produces about 50 bushels per acre [1] or 1,350 kg of wheat per acre. To produce the caloric equivalent of a million kg of leafy greens you would need about 130 acres (167,000/1350) of wheat. The average farm in the US is over 400 acres in size [2]. There are over two million farms in the US alone.
The “largest vertical farm in the world by some margin” produces less calories than a tiny family farm that can barely afford its own tractor. The largest wheat farm in Canada is over 35,000 acres which means it produces just as much food per day as the largest vertical farm produces per year. That wheat farm isn’t even in the list of top 10 largest farms in North America.
Edit: I made a slight mistake in my math. A 60 lbs bushel of wheat when processed doesn’t yield exactly 60 pounds of usable food, but it doesn’t change the overall picture (360 kcal => 240 kcal, 130 acres => 180 acres)
Edit 2: That vertical farm cost $40 million to build. Our hypothetical wheat farm would cost under $2 million for the land, fertilizer, seeds, and machines.
Wheat was first grown in Mesopotamia, literally in the middle of the Middle East!
> The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.
Pure fantasy. We’ve had vertical farming for thousands of years already - first built by the same Babylonians that grew wheat in Mesopotamia! When’s it going to start snowballing?
There will still be a relation, `more vertical farms => more use of water and pesticides`. Now, the factor between those might change. But I fail to see why vertical farming would change the dynamics fundamentally.
Not to say this is your moral prerogative but it's pretty simple: Eat only hand-picked fruit. It's by far the least death-causing food out there and it's offered to you by the tree to eat.
I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.
If you did that you would become extremely unhealthy. Veganism has the caveat "as far as is practicable", and a fruitarian diet is not practicable for extended periods of time as you will become malnourished.
Fair enough. Swap "only fruit@ for "as much fruit as possible without becoming malnourished" if you would value your own wellbeing above another animals' (which I would as well).
I know a guy who was promoting frutarian lifestyle. He was a previous world champion kayaker and works in the outdoor industry. I saw him recently and he was still in the top 15-20 in the world in his even. I need to check with him if he's still doing it. He looks like a model, superfit and full of energy. He had an interesting blog on the amount of fruit he was having to eat, most of which he picked up for free or cheap at markets as it was approaching use by date.
Look up how olives are harvested. There are big machines that go over rhe tree and vacuum off all the olives. Too bad theres a lot of birds living in there that get sucked in and die. Why don't they fly away? The noise must be a fair warning ahead of time! Well, the harvest is at night because of lower temperatures. The birds freeze in shock when the noise and bright lights get turned on and don't move.
I don't think any organic certifications regulate the method of slaughter. If you go to a local farmer, maybe there's a more humane method of slaughter (although the vast, vast majority of even local farmers will contract out slaughter and butchery), but organic at Walmart is probably going to be processed more or less identically to other meat.
Really..
Is that what you are doing, seems more like you just want to be violent toward others and have built yourself a causi belli to engage that way.
> wanting to reduce suffering
Bullshit, you don't give 2 shits about that, you want to increase suffering in actual sentient beings.
Which a cow is not. Hence you are in a cult because what else would you call that position??
You are not a moral agent and you don't get to define what others can and can't do when it comes to food production.
Organics is a fantastic way to go, it just shows how full of shit you are to go against that.
We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat.
What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground.
Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several years running now). We are controlling for exercise patterns too. He’s just replaced his frequent burgers with an impossible patty instead.
This comment is just a wild claim with no evidence and falsely equates “processed” with “unhealthy”
I think you mean we have studies of dubious quality blaming red meat. And scores of people repeating the same trite arguments.
It's the same people that brought to you salt causes high blood pressure and saturated fat causes atherosclerosis, pushing the low fat craze and the obesity epidemic.
Sure, meat is bad, go eat hyper processed fake meat.
not the OP, but this was covered a fair bit in a book I read recently called "genghis khan and the making of the modern world" which was a pretty good read.
Iirc it was that the figting forces of the various northern chinese states were comprised of conscript peasants whose diet consisted of grain and not much else, which stunted their growth among other things, meaning the mongols were significantly larger and stronger than them leading to certain mythologizing in the centuries afterwards. It probably also didn't help that the conscripted peasants were, well, conscript foot soldiers, wheras the mongols were willing participants on horseback
Bang on, same thing with the Dutch and the Brits when the empire flourished.
Dietary changes drive a lot of these things, more than I think is generally understood and credited.
The Mongols are a very famous example and extreme as you stated the Chinese peasant and soliders mostly had a grain based diet and poor health that came with it.
Epidemiologic nutritional studies are proven to be totally useless. They literally are a questionnaire asking people what do they eat, take some health markers and drawing conclusions. I spent the morning reading through the data of that "plant-based diets reduce colorectal cancer" on the front-page of the Guardian [1], and it's yet another pile of cherry picked inconclusive crap people will keep sharing on social media.
From just 2 minutes with your paper: "Higher heme iron intake appeared to be
significantly associated with a 31 % (95 % CI 4–67 %)
elevated risk of developing CHD" --- lmao, loving that 95% confidence interval between 4 and 67%.
Passing those out as proof of real science keeps the disinformation and terrible practice alive. If I had a dime every time a random commenter gave me a link to an epidemiologic nutritional study, I could fund a double blind randomized one myself.
I'm curious how one gets a 95% confidence on such a wide margin. I'm having trouble visualizing data that would give such a result. Is this just a result of a very wide distribution of data? Or is this done with shady statistics. The 95% seems to imply that there's data on either side of their chosen bounds. To my understanding, the real "beef" with the article is the choice of representing the data as "31%" when there's such a wide distribution. A more accurate statement would be that, "nearly everyone experienced some heightened risk of CHD with the actual risk varying largely, but firmly positive". Thoughts?
Consuming a lot of TMAO is proven to be bad for the heart. Cod contains TMAO in great amounts.
Yet white fish is one of the most recommended heart healthy foods.
You have to be careful when talking about specific mechanisms in terms of Whole Foods. Nutrition can't be reduced down to single mechanisms to provide confident recommendations, and often times results are the opposite of what we would expect mechanistically.
First we have lot of studies based on statistics.
There are also simple statistics which show than vegetarian live longer then meat eaters.
Then we have the five blue zone where people do not eat meat and most of them are centenarians.
But some people do not support their habits to be changed and are ready to believe anything that confort their opinions.
Even if their habits destroy the planet.
It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy.
Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy.
Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can find 10 studies proving the opposite side.
For one thing, the high level of saturated fats in beyond meat patties (25% of max daily recommended intake) could be considered unhealthy. On some other aspects it seems pretty decent, with good protein content and some added vitamins as well.
Not exclusively, of course, but the degree of processing of food greatly influences our body’s insulin response, which can over time have huge impacts on health (leading to fatty liver disease / metabolic syndrome / obesity / diabetes). This is why, for instance, fruit juice is so much worse for us than the whole fruit — most of the fiber is removed which would otherwise slow down digestion and temper insulin response. For more info I’d highly recommend Jason Fung’s Obesity Code book — he’s a nephrologist specializing in diabetes treatment.
Some kinds of processing increase insulin impact, others don't. If your goal is controlling sugars, a diet premised solely on minimizing processing isn't a great strategy; "processing" isn't the high-order bit of that problem.
Theoretically, you are right, of course. In practice though, to apply this, you would need to know how the processing exactly works, and how the body responds to that processing. Given that you can not really determine this easily, it is in practice just simpler to stick to unprocessed foods as much as possible, and just apply the sugar limit to those.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. Cheese is cooked, fermented, emulsified, and aged. It has a lower glycemic impact than milk, its primary unprocessed input.
Mostly, I think the "processed" vs. "unprocessed" debate is an appeal to tradition, not science; if it's a kind of processing we were doing 200 years ago, it's OK; otherwise, it's unhealthful.
I would say that Cheese, at least its classic variants, fall exactly under the category where you have fairly good knowledge of the nature of its processing and its effects on the body. I'd say your example supports my argument.
But as humans we can't read every study for every ingredient. We have to use heuristics to guesstimate a healthy diet. Reducing (not eliminating) processed foods is a decent one. Same goes for including protein, increasing fiber (so whole wheat instead of the cake americans call "bread"), including veggies.
For some reason there is no reply button on the other replies.
Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.
Your references seem to back me up, and not the person I was replying to? Eg:
"There is evidence showing an association with certain types of food processing and poor health outcomes (especially highly- or ultra-processed foods). This association applies mainly to ultra-processed foods that contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthful fats."
From the second one. Maybe you confused my position?
That's mostly related to the curing salts and their reaction with heme iron. Curing salts are not used when processing vegetables; heme iron is not added either (I hope), so this should not apply in this case.
What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programming languages, only slow implementations" type of argument about the absence of strict logical necessity?
Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like?
Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc).
None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms).
But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it.
For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?
Saying there's necessarily a causal relationship is probably not well supported, but there's absolutely a correlation, and as a rule of thumb, if you choose whole foods over processed foods it will tend to net out as more healthy.
Nutrition pretty much by definition requires a lot of simplification to allow people to make quick decisions on food choices, and so broad rules that are mostly right are pretty useful (and pretty much the basis of how most diets work).
I agree in so far that I believe that the observation of "more processing > less health" is not caused directly by the amount of processing, but by the way those highly processed products are designed to match as many "appetites" as possible. I use the term "appetites" in the sense of a low intensity craving, the feedback signal the body sends to fill some nutrient deficit. But our taste buds can't really identify most of the nutrients in question, we just have is a set of complicated heuristics taking an educated guess. And many of those highly processed foods, in their quest to maximise desire, will fool those heuristics, matching the "appetite" without fulfilling the deficit. Perhaps not by deliberate design, but by market selection.
On one hand, the faux meats sound quite risky, but in the other hand they are under extreme scrutiny like no highly processed food before them, so they might not actually be bad at all.
Tell me that raw, uncooked wheat is just as healthy as processed and cooked wheat. I'll wait.
Cooking makes some things edible that weren't before. Just because it doesn't work on an apple in the way you are imagining doesn't mean much.
I'll also note that many folks think of baked apples as sugar-laden desserts and fresh apples as eaten plain. Nevermind that folks add apples to savory rice dishes and nevermind that folks dip fresh apples in caramel sauce. You need more than the descriptions of "baked" and "raw" to denote health.
Depends on fruit/vegetable. Some have nutrients that are easily destroyed by heat, but some have nutrients that are easier absorbed after light heating, or problematic compounds removed during cooking.
You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health.
Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad.
Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vitamins) is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.
Cooking meat allows your digestive system to ingest more proteins, for example.
This is why fire was such an unprecedented step in our evolution.
For example:
Raw egg: 3g of protein at most.
Cooked egg: 6g of protein.
Not just heating, even simple cutting/mincing of the food promotes oxidation that can significantly influence the composition of food.
On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.
Eating heated food is a staple of human diets for hundreds of thousands of years - ever since fire was invented. I wouldn't worry about that part so much.
Unless you're on a paleo diet, heating to cook is considered minimally processed. So that's more evidence that looking for "processing" isn't a good metric.
Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.
I disagree. Depending on the prep, I could have been fooled into thinking it was a real patty at Hopdoddys. Saying it is unhealthy sounds ideological. The point of making this imitation meat is to over time, get better and better until it is truly indistinguishable. It is premised on the idea that many people don't want to give up their meat foods, and that mass meat production is unethical and environmentally negative.
Beyond/impossible aren't trying to be healthy. They're trying to be meat replacements and have similar healthiness to red meat, which they do. I prefer them to previous generation meat substitutes. They work great as ground beef replacement, much better than any vegetables.
I'm a heavy meat eater, and I actually kinda liked the impossible whopper.
More importantly, while I like the taste of meat too much to give up on it, I would also very much prefer that it could be had without killing animals. I don't think plant-based meat is going to be the ultimate solution to this - more likely, it'll be the lab-grown stuff. But, either way, it requires investments from the food industry to reach maturity, and those won't happen unless there's a real customer interest. Buying fake-meat burger is a way to express that interest.
I’m not positive but I have a feeling it’s the methylcellulose. In my own home experimentation, none of the ingredients seem to cause issues except for that.
It seems fairly benign, but it can’t be digested and it isn’t clear to me if we have gut flora which can break it down efficiently.
I enjoy throwing together little experiments in a similar vein to beyond meat or impossible burger products, but it feels too much like a lab experiment to eat regularly. My kids like “meat balls” with spaghetti, so I tend to make that and otherwise I’m gravitating back towards whole food-based garden burgers.
A weird thing about beyond/impossible is that while they appear moderately healthier than real meat from some perspectives… They are still pretty trashy. I can’t not feel like I’m making a bad choice, even if it’s home made, and at the end of the day I just want to feel good (mentally and physically) about my food.
This is a qualitative/irrational assessment and not a quantitative/rational one, especially considering that fat consumption got a wrongfully-deserved bad rap for decades thanks to unethical lobbying by the sugar industry.
For years I’ve spent a lot of time (probably more than I should) crawling through research about exactly this, which is precisely why I use the term trashy. Relatively speaking I suppose it’s better than many other options, which is relevant to some people. In the broader scope, this is still junk food.
I’d argue (based on the best dietary research the world has produced) that saturated fats do deserve a bad rap, and most refined fats are also worth minimizing in a diet. Are all fats bad? Not at all, we should eat them. We’d die without them. Are saturated fats and refined plant fats worth including in our diet? Arguably no, not at all. Incidental consumption of them is more than enough and intentional consumption becomes problematic quite quickly.
I’m not aware of any outcomes-based studies spanning the globe which indicate that a high fat diet serves most people well as far as long term quality and quantity of life. On the other hand, there are several, and more all the time, showing the opposite.
The valid “fat is actually okay!” data almost exclusively comes from whole-food based studies. However, those which position saturated fats as safe or healthy are typically of poor designs. One example off the top of my head is one which put vegetarians on an extremely high coconut oil diet and meat eaters on a lean meat diet. The results? Eating meat is better for your cholesterol! Surprise?
I couldn’t make this stuff up. In fact, someone likely paid people a lot of money to make it up. The irony is that it uses the truth (saturated fat raises blood lipids) to indicate that this truth is actually false. If saturated fat was bad, wouldn’t the intersection of meat eaters and vegetarians look different? It must be okay. Makes a great headline!
I agree that the sugar lobbying is absurd and harmful to society, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice to believe there isn’t a massive and busy lobby behind fats as well. Why wouldn’t there be? Look at how many studies around animal products and fat are funded by associates of the food processing industry.
And yet the best studies we have clearly have no commercial agenda behind them, they typically took years or decades of work, yet they’re hastily discounted by all kinds of people.
diet is a fairly complex topic and it's a shame that most doctors don't get more than a single course in nutrition. I read a paper like this (which is related to our discussion) and the raw complexity is just... difficult to boil down into a variety of good food choices sometimes: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000871
I can't touch 'vegan cheese' made with coconout oils for this reason - for some reason it leaves me feeling like I have a film of oil down the back of my gullet that I can't shake off for an hour or two afterwards. It's a weird, unlikeable and thoroughly unwanted sensation.
You might have a touch of legume allergy (if only have a touch is possible). Beyond has pea protein and Impossible has soy protein. What's in your veggie patties?
Hmm not to say that’s not it (because people vary) but my wife and I both get this feeling with these Beyond/Impossible meats but we otherwise eat a lot of legumes which don’t give us that feeling
I think they both contain methylcellulose, which is considered benign but not digestible. In my experience it doesn’t cause major discomfort, but a mildly off putting sensation in my GI tract for a few hours. It might be something else, but it seems likely after narrowing things down for a while.
If you dig a little deeper you’ll find that methylcellulose has some interesting culinary properties, making it well suited to adding structure and firm texture to soft foods.
When mixed with water it transforms into a firm gel after heating, or it can be used to create extremely resilient emulsifications.
It’s practically flavourless, so it works well. I’m not convinced it passes through the GI tract with no impact whatsoever, but it appears so far to be relatively benign.
It’s nothing like sawdust or a filler, though. It’s also somewhat expensive so it wouldn’t be a good option for filler. My 500g bag was around $25, but if you wanted to use actual sawdust, well I think you could get that for close to nothing.
Thank you for your eloquent and well reasoned refutation! Getting early 90s internet vibes, where prople actually typed out their disagreement in an informative way instead of just downvoting.
I take that as a huge compliment! I find myself dreaming of Old Internet quite often these days, so thank you very much. Maybe we can restore the old ways one comment at a time.
I know exactly what you mean and I get this a lot too. I always thought it was in my head but recently I tried a Drunken Noodle recipe from FreshPrep which used Beyond Meat Burgers and I felt nothing. It was actually delicious. I guess the prep method somehow affects it?
100% in agreement. It’s not even in the fast food places I struggle to find a plain bean burger now… it’s the supermarkets too.
The odd peculiar taste of these kinds of new plant based burgers can be pretty foul. For me and my partner, the Burger King veggie burger now tastes similar to dish soap.
Bring back the delicious bean burgers and actual normal veggie burgers.
I used to love the Morning Star Chipotle Black Bean burger. Then they changed the recipe and now it tastes horrible. It's lost the fresh, garden flavor and now it may as well be burnt bean paste or mush. At this point I'm moving on to my own patties.
"delicious" and "bean burger" never have gone together in my experience. To each their own, I understand. Maybe it's because I only had a bean burger at Chili's .
It might be, but it's not that particular genetic marker. I have it (confirmed by testing) and, while I hate Impossible Burgers, they definitely don't taste like soap to me. More like a bean that's developed a "funk". And not like tasty cheese funk, more like meat that's gone off funk.
i don't know about anyone else, but the second I eat a portabello burger, I'm racing to the bathroom. unless they are washing extensively, whatever those spores are just hit me the wrong way and i'm off to the races. don't get me wrong though, they taste amazing, i just have to be selective of where i'm eating them at.
I'm an omnivore but still like to have the odd non-meat option, and I'm the same. I find the impossible (etc) burgers are just.. weird. I really prefer having a felafel if it's available!
I've not eaten a real burger or sausage since the 80's and I've only had two of these impossible burgers but they tasted quite nice when I had them and no adverse reactions, but at NZ$14 (US$8.50) for two frozen burgers at my local supermarket, they wont be on my menu often.
Public service announcement from the vegan community: Cutting out meat doesn't mean you have to eat bugs, or any other gross animal byproducts. Plants are plenty nutritious.
Hypothetically, would this still be the case if eating bugs was better on environmental and animal welfare/displacement metrics over plant agriculture, and those considerations were motivations for someone being vegan?
I also had this thought once, but then looked it up, and found that it is completely wrong. It's basically like saying "we already eat plenty of fish... We just call em things like beef, pork, and bird meat".
Except that fish are much more closely related to mammals than crustaceans are to insects (same phylum, different class). Here is an example of an animal that is as closely related to a cow as a grasshopper is to a lobster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp
Edit: Even more, dietary preferences tend to focus on a single species. Plenty of people eat chicken but not turkey, or eat pork but not boar. There are even people who eat lamb but not adult sheep. And no one eats wolf or eagle meat. To then come and say "hey, you already eat one arthropod, why not another" is pretty absurd.
I'm not at all against eating insects, I'm just pointing out that the fact we eat shrimp has 0 to do with it.
That's still at best relating insects and crustaceans at the level of (most) fish and mammals. I'm also unclear on where this pancrustacea clade comes in, as most Wikipedia articles for specific species don't even list the clade, just the phylum and class - and fish are still the same class as mammals, while insects and shellfish are not.
Either way, while we eat some mammals and birds, we still don't eat the vast majority of mammals or birds, and we barely eat any reptiles or amphibians or fish.
We also eat plenty of other bugs and insects which just get into the way of processing plants ;=)
(crustaceans are a good example as traces of them tend to get included into algal based food, but less pleasant sounding examples are e.g. from time to time small worms being in fruited pressed for juice, sound terrible but isn't really that terrible and impossible to avoid without using pesticides which are worse then that by far)
I'm someone from far away, reading this unfold with curiosity. My country's variety is NotCo, who in all fairness makes damn good patties without any of the downsides told here (the fakeness sensation, the heavy stomach after eating, that strange waft when burping). NotCo uses AI for their processes, combining strange things like chicory, pineapple juice & cabbage to create milk that even froths like the real one; or strawberries, chickpeas, cocoa, beetroot & bamboo to make very passable "meat". They simply taste good, to the point sometimes I prefer to buy them instead of regular burgers. It helps that we have a healthy market of real veggie (ie. no meat-replacement) products to choose too.
Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
I assume Beyond, Impossible etc use another, more crude/unrefined approach.
Tried to eat a NotBurger last night. I couldn't finish it... because my meat-eating girlfriend took it for herself. Their milk is pretty good too. The patent for the ML approach they use is kind of interesting as well, I honestly expected their "AI" to be a lot dumber: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10915818B1/
> Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
Here they recently partnered with Kraft to make Not versions of their cheese singles (although some would say they weren't really cheese to begin with) and eventually other products. NotChicken is supposed to also make it here relatively soon, but sadly only as patties.
Haven't heard of it here in Australia yet. Australia has a few brands of its own (Buds and Veef are two popular ones) as well as some of the more global brands, so it's quite a saturated market.
I agree with you, and I think it’s the soya protein. I don’t have any problems with pea protein, but the soya protein makes me feel queasy.
I think those meat replacements are good for people who have just become vegan as they give you a sense of familiarity, but after a while you realise that it’s possible to eat a delicious vegan diet that doesn’t consist of mega-processed things trying to be meat.
Photos and internal documents from a Beyond Meat plant in Pennsylvania show apparent mold, Listeria and other food-safety issues, compounding problems at a factory the company had expected to play a major role in its future https://trib.al/q1SAHYO
To be honest I don't know too much about it, but as I understand it tofu is the curd made from soya milk, and soya protein is some form of the processed whole bean. My thinking that it's soya protein is just from the fact that I've tried a few different brands' soya fake burgers and they all give me the same discomfort.
The fake stuff usually lists “textured vegetable protein” or “soy protein isolate” or things like that. Those are much more processed than tofu. Tofu is more like a curd in so far as the tofu gets minced then settled out of the water. I think it sometimes gets calcium carbon added.
Not a vegan, but I went to several places that served some veg patties that I really enjoyed. It didn't attempt to taste like meat, but it was just as enjoyable.
After this I tried several of these alternatives just to look for different flavors. Beyond meat really smelled weird when cooking, and while somewhat acceptable in taste I can totally share the stomach weirdness.
This didn't prevent me to keep trying other stuff. "Impossible meat" I was never able to find yet. But as other have said, the major issue is that all the alternative options cost _more_ than actual beef where I live. This makes it a luxury option.
I find that Beyond Meat is 'okay' in a burger when it's got all the other flavours going on, but I was recently playing around with using it in other dishes like meatballs and wasn't nearly as happy with it. It has a weird aftertaste that I can't quite identify, and whilst not awful, isn't terribly pleasant.
I bought a pound of the "ground beef" to try it out. Pretty sure it was Beyond beef, but I'll be goddamned if it didn't smell and taste like cat food when I opened up the package. It was fucking revolting, and totally ruined the dish I was making.
There must be some special way to prepare it to make it taste good. There's no way I'll take this stuff and make burger patties out of it just like I would regular ground beef.
I'm not the only one either, do a search for "beyond smells like..." and look at the autocomplete results.
My favorite of all of these products are the various Impossible Sausages, probably for exactly the reason that sausage is way more flavor and texture than just the meat or “meat” itself. Seriously love the bratwurst alternatives. The burgers from either brand? I completely agree with you, there’s something just slightly off about them.
The Beyond meat we've had from the grocery store has too much smoke flavor added in. It's fine if you're making burgers, and maybe chili, but anything else is a non-starter. I think they make sausage and meatballs that don't have this flavor, but whatever generic 'ground meat' we got was suitable only for making food on a grill.
They're really good with no awful side effects or tastes. I like some vegetarian options, but honestly, most of it either tastes nasty or has poor texture.
My girlfriend dislikes some meats and seems to want to be a low-meat household, she loves morningstar nuggets of most kinds. Another good one is Quorn. They are a cultured fungus protein and it just makes a much more meaty tasting and feeling product, and you could easily forget it's not chicken.
Big problem though is the required level of processing to take a vague protein slurry and turn it into a glued together nugget means it's only really comparable to the absolute lowest quality, bulk batch, school lunch grade nuggets.
Quorn is a fermented slime mold, the fungi label is a marketing trick.
This said, I used to like Quorn before they started stuffing egg (mostly eggwhite) into everything. The real slime mold is great, but where I live it's near impossible to get Quorn products without the egg. They taste as bad as impossible/beyond with their clearly chemical taste.
Going beyond this, mosr vegetarians/vegans find over time that it is much cheaper and actually nicer to go simple, not with the replacements. tofu, seitan or simply vegetable dishes without any of these things. E.g. in a well flavoured bolognese/ragout no one can taste a difference between meat, fake meat or simple hard tofu (mouth feel/texture are clearly different though). And anyone should really try making seitan, it's super fun and easy - basically you just wash a bag of flour repeatedly with warm water.
I realize they are processed food but I really like Morning Star ~~Farms~~ Laboratories products. No one is going to mistake their products for meat but they are still delicious.
And I doubt their business is struggling, or that Beyond Meats's fate has them worried.
I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but I like certain black bean and garden burgers. I don't eat them with a bun though, I cook them and then top with a little cheese.
There's a good chance that your gut microbiome forgot about meat which is why you have the problem.
It's a well known story I've heard of vegetarians going back to eating meat and then getting sick from the meat for some time. This is also why eating foods you're not used to can often make you sick even if they're fine. Your gut microbiome adapts to your diet, and if you suddenly change what you eat you can get indigestion.
From my understanding the beyond/etc "meat" acts like real meat to your body microbiome because it's so similiar.
Interesting I've experienced this too though interestingly it is way more noticeable for me with beyond than impossible. I get a weird after taste for hours and my stomach feels off. Not bad enough to never eat again but noticeable enough that I tend to avoid beyond in particular now. Some people have suggested it is so close to meat that your stomach just isn't used to it but I'm pescatarian and eat fish fairly regularly so I doubt it is that simple.
It’s cheap and people who avoid soy might buy pea instead. Almond protein might work better for ice cream from a taste perspective, but that’s super expensive. We have a great almond & coconut based ice cream in our region but it costs 2x as much as the milk based one.
One thing both Impossible and Beyond do is add artificial smoke flavoring/aromatics to their product to more closely resemble a flame broiled burger. I find them to be somewhat offputting personally, and it also makes the product useless for anything other than a burger. You can't do a hot dish with the Beyond meat because the smoke flavor will overwhelm everything else in the dish.
I agree the naming/labeling thing is tricky. We have a friend who brings round 'vegan cheese' when she visits; living in the EU, I'm surprised this labeling is allowed. Is it OK to label vegetarian things as 'beef'?
On the other hand, 'beef substitute' doesn't sound terribly appetising.
But we are all familiar with 'peanut butter'; I'm sure someone more knowledgeable can explain what is and is not allowed.
I live in the EU. The thing that makes cheese cheese is arguably the mix of fungi and bacteria growing in it. We have some excellent cheeses here that are traditional except for the substitution of nut milk for mammal milk. They are currently specialty items, but that may change. We may have to give up meat and dairy to get through the energy transition, but fortunately the same mold and bacteria responsible for blue cheese grow on plant milk too!
The etymology doesn't really matter, but the french word for cheese refer to how milk is ~processed... "Fromage" -> "Formage" -> "putting stuff in forms". If you think "peanut butter" is confusing... it is called "pinda kaas" in dutch... directly translates to "peanut cheese"!
I'm in the UK so I might have trouble getting them, most of the vegan cheese I have access to is basically the same flavour just in different shapes and forms.
I have celiac and often feel the same way about gluten free foods. Please stop trying to feed me gluten free versions of things that rely on gluten to be good. Just give me a rice bowl or tacos on corn tortillas. With Veganism/Vegetarianism it makes even less sense to me. Not eating gluten is not a choice for me, but Vegans and Vegetarians chose this lifestyle because they don't want to eat meat, why make fake things that resemble meat?
Yeah I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I get a weird aftertaste that lingers when I've tried the impossible burgers. Closest thing I can compare it to is the aftertaste I get after eating chicken thighs. I know that's not exactly a useful comparison, but it's what I've got to work with. Definitely not an aftertaste I've ever associated with beef.
We haven’t had issues with stomach upset, but I’ve found that cooking impossible burgers leaves an oder lingering in the house for days. It smells good while cooking but over time becomes off putting and I loose my appetite to cook the rest of the pack through the week.
It's could be the high amount of fat / saturated fat. This happens to me with a lot of high fat products. When I was consuming a lot of coconut milk / cream with curry dishes it happened too.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.
You are not the target group for these products!
The whole point of these products is to replace meat for habitual meat eaters. If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper, we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption. That's the value. That's the target.
This is about replacing the meat in gas station hot dogs and fast food burgers and food court lunches, and if these alternatives can be made good enough and cheap enough, we can reduce the total meat consumption in society to a fraction of what it is today, without having to ideologically convert people to vegetarianism.
These products are for all the people who don't think vegetarian products are incredible, but actually don't care whether or not their burger is made of cow or plants, as long as it tastes the same. But the traditional veggie burgers that you prefer don't cut it, so these products are a step further on the way to a product that will. They're not there yet, though.
> You are not the target group for these products!
It's not a choice for me. When I go to _restaurants_, they are replacing their only vegetarian options with these impossible/beyond meats, and they're charging $2 more while they're at it.
These goals and target markets sound great on paper, but feels like the exact opposite in practice. The goal for reducing waste is great, but why are vegetarians paying that cost when they go out.
Probably because the beyond/impossible offerings sell more and they're only willing to put a limited number of vegetarian items on the menu so the others are crowded out.
> If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper, we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption.
Habitual meat eater here. I will never ever trust these products to be right for my body the way meat is. Humans haven’t nailed it in the past with heavily processed foods, why would it suddenly work now? I understand the noble dream, I really do. But the fact is, unless I find myself in near poverty or poverty and (no added sugar) peanut butter is unavailable, imitation meat will never be a go-to for me.
Hell, not to mention the disgust I’d feel eating it while knowing my betters are certainly dining on the real thing.
It's not like meat is free from controversy, to play devil's advocate a little. We had beef that turned out to be horse for a moment in the UK.
Not to mention mad cow disease and similar issues.
What risks are you thinking of with plant based or lab grown? If anything it seems the lab environment would catch anything significant before it got out of the building.
I'm not arguing with you, honestly curious. I've not thought about this much.
HFCS wasn't last decade. Trans-fats wasn't last decade. We've known they were bad more than a decade ago.
Many more decades ago they marketed these artificial food alternatives without any evidence of long term health effects, and the process of "proving" them bad took many years (funny how the onus lies on the potential victims), and only recently we've been able to mostly contain the damage of HFCS and trans fats.
It seems every once a while this process restarts again. Americans sure love to play with their food. (I'm not American)
This seems like a bonkers thing to claim. You're suggesting that if someone gave you two burgers that tasted identical, one that was real meat and costs £5, and the other that was fake and costs £2, if they were other than that TOTALLY IDENTICAL (other than the fake one being better for the planet), you'd still feel the need to eat the real one? For some sense of perceived...offence?
100% Have we forgotten trans fats in margarine? By all accounts, it was butter but cheaper and "healthier". 70 years later, we realized it was worse for us that natural fats.
I would. I try to only eat fresh things that I could prepare at home. Why would I willingly eat 100 grams of refined coconut oil with yeast, potassium chloride, methylcellulose (a laxative) and a whole bunch of other stuff?
I'd rather eat less meat than replace it with this crap.
No added sugar peanut butter is not really a high quality protein source that can substitute for meat, not to mention there are doubts about the health of seed oils (peanuts may or may not be included here) and high omega 6.
You're right, but I can put up with eating a lot of it for long periods on end and it gets me through. I'm open to other suggestions of similar price/effort/tastiness with a better protein & nutrition profile. As long as it's not crazy processed.
Buy whole chicken when it’s on sale, if you have a freezer you can stock up and break it down into pieces in advance.
A 4oz piece of chicken probably gives a better combination of amino acids than many servings of peanut butter.
Edit: actually I looked it up and peanuts are a decent source of protein, the issues are possibly omega6 and getting peanut butter without added sugar or oil, you should be able to find peanut butter with just peanuts and salt as ingredients.
Humans weren't originally growing meat to eat, either. We were catching it - which puts an upper limit on both the amount of the meat eaten, and on how fatty that meat it.
So the target market for these products is people that want to eat real meat and actively seek it out? And they're catering to them by... replacing existing vegetarian options? They must not have read your comment. Sounds like a bad market fit.
The number of people who eat meat and don't care if their meat is made of meat has got to be in the 7 figure range worldwide. The number of people that don't eat meat and want their vegetables to taste like meat is probably larger, though still miniscule. It's failing because there's no market for it.
I don’t know if anyone should even be targeting the second group.
I don’t think a significant number of people who “start” with beyond meat are going to end up vegetarians.
In fact I think it’s more likely that they go back to eating meat the same amount once they’re done with the substitutes. And maybe if they’re as (rigid? closed-off?) as we’re implying (since they are not already actively eating less meat), they might even walk away with the mindset of “vegetarian food is not as good as meat” and therefore in future avoid the wide variety of delicious vegetarian food.
If people truly want to eat less meat, just throw in some of the most delicious off-the-shelf replacements (like veggie patties) once a week or once a month. The water’s fine, as they say.
> So the target market for these products is people that want to eat real meat
No!!!
The target market is habitual meat eaters. People who grab a hot dog as a snack. Eat a burger for lunch. Make pasta bolognese for dinner. Get chicken nuggets for the kids.
The vast majority of meat consumption is done without a strong craving for meat. People are just buying and eating dishes they like. Asking that all of these people consciously substitute those meals with vegetarian meals is not going to happen in a million years.
But if the cheapest hot dog is fake meat, and taste the same, they'll switch. If the cheapest burger is fake meat, and taste the same, they'll switch.
It's not as impossible as you make it sound IMO, I would guess it's more a matter of pricing. If plantburgers and plantdogs where considerable cheaper than meatburgers and hotdogs I would guess people would follow the money and shift to consuming the plant based alternative if they were otherwise close enough.
Well, we're running that experiment right now with soaring meat prices and it looks like you're wrong. Turns out if you make one type of meat more expensive then people just switch to a different kind of meat. If you make all meat more expensive, people buy cheaper cuts and get creative with how they prepare it. My bet is that if you make it prohibitively expensive then people will get creative about sourcing their meat instead so rather than go to the grocery store they'll put in a group order direct from CSA or a small independent meat producer and just store a years supply in a deep freeze.
It turns out a lot of people just prefer eating meat over other options regardless of price. I'm not really surprised.
I think your comment acknowledges that we're not running this experiment. These "fake meat" products are still way more expensive than actual meat. If fake meat actually drops substantially below the cost of meat, we can see what happens, but as you suggest there's really no sign they can compete on price yet.
I do think that if the target market for Beyond really was meat eaters, they've been deluding themselves. Maybe they can shave off a few meat eaters due to the ethical issues, but how many? Ultimately, I have to assume the only way to win many over is on cost, which would have to be a high volume low margin business (if it's even possible to get the prices that low).
I'm not 100% sure it's a product issue and not a market positioning issue. Current gen "new fake meat" veggie brands try to position themselves at premium, which looks like the wrong place to be in. At premium fake meats loose to meat, hands down.
It's like you are trying to position fish sticks on the same slot as fresh salmon.
Huge marketing campaign, target low price segment - that would be the market experiment I would be really interested in.
Maybe. Maybe not. Poor people are pissed off these days and boy that sends the message “we’re taking meat away too now! For a hundred years you knew at least you had meat on the table, but we’re going back to the good ‘ol days of serfdom. Enjoy the slop!”
I have already seen this sentiment among poor people.
Well, it's about marketing and positioning isn't it. Veggie based diets are plausibly healthier due to higher content of fiber - and health is generally considered an admirable trait. So the marketing should not be about selling a cheap offering, but something like Coca-Cola (everyone likes it!) and celebrities enjoying the product and so on. A campaign that draws everyone to the product basically (like cigarettes in olden times). I'm not sure if you can achieve something like that today though. But at least US food industry used to be really great at selling a cheap product to the masses if they put their marketing muscle behind it :)
I'm a meat eater and I really prefer no meat over fake meat. A good vegetable curry, ratatouille, stew, pasta or a portobello mushroom burger really beats all of the fake meat substitutes for me. If meat becomes too expensive, I'll just cut it out completely... Until lab grown meat becomes a viable alternative. All these fake meat substitutes are just awful, to me.
I'm definitely a habitual meat eater. I don't have a vegetarian bone in my body. Yet I'd prefer a vegetarian burger to have beans and carrots, to having one with an uncanny valley meat texture and meat taste.
That is, while I'm happy to eat a perfect meat substitute, I'm also don't have a problem with vegetables and I'd rather have a totally-not-meat burger than a not-quite-meat burger.
> one with an uncanny valley meat texture and meat taste.
I mean, honestly, aren’t most cheap burger meat patties in that uncanny valley?
I love meat but eat it rarely. And I like burgers, even the cheap McDonald’s stuff. But burger patties are basically entirely their own texture, which is only loosely related to beef meat.
Now a burger with lightly cooked and well seasoned, real fresh ground beef? It’s a different product altogether. But it’s also less popular and I don’t think it’s what beyond meat tries to replace.
> I mean, honestly, aren’t most cheap burger meat patties in that uncanny valley?
Yeah what they need to imitate faithfully is the fastfood variety. I'm sure that's slightly easier than imitating the "proper" thing. What they have now is the not-quite-a-fastfood-thing even.
Which is why OP complains about "One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus".
As a meat-eater, these products have been great as an option for sharing a meal with my vegetarian friends. I don't really know good vegetarian recipes, but I know how to cook a burger.
I mostly don't eat meat now, but actually started for this reason alone - I wanted to level up my vegetarian cooking skills, so gave myself a challenge of not eating/cooking any meat for a month.
The thing is, this stuff is more expensive than normal meat, and if you go by bio availability of the nutrients, a fraction of the same nutritional value as actual meat. And if they replace meat consumption then it puts even more stress on the agricultural land that can actually grow vegetable crops, which is only about a quarter of all farm land.
So either way, it wont work that well in it's current state.
> The thing is, this stuff is more expensive than normal meat
That's only because we are "subsidising" meat production cost through immense animal suffering. Once you have regulations that make the animals we keep in captivity have a somewhat good life, then meat price goes through the roof and those alternatives are the only reasonable option for the non-rich.
> And if they replace meat consumption then it puts even more stress on the agricultural land that can actually grow vegetable crops, which is only about a quarter of all farm land.
And where do you think the animal food is grown? Instead of feeding it to animals, make veggy dishes out of it.
It's true that some land can't be reasonably used for growing and harvesting crops, and keeping animals there which turn this into high quality protein is the best option, but that's only for certain regions on the planet.
I buy ethically raised %100 pasture raised ground beef at ~$6/lbs from whole foods, and a 1 lb packet of "beyond burger" is even more expensive than that at $11/lbs (!) at the same shop. There is barely any profit margin in beef, while beyond burger does have relatively healthy one at that price looking at the ingredient list and price. I can also buy a quarter cow for $8/lbs locally raised similarly. %100 pasture raised is how you think it is, eating grass in some field for %100 of it's life, protected from predators, which is pretty much the type of life it would have in the wild with less stress. Not to mention it's better nutritionally than the standard %75 pasture raised / %25 grain finished beef you buy at a costco.
Impossible burgers take an order of magnitude less land to produce than beef. They're not made of vegetables. Beef fat clogs your arteries and causes heart disease. Putting soy in a veggie burger results in way more nutrition than putting soy in a cow.
Vegetable or edible plant food is a bit of splitting hairs, they require the same kind of agricultural land that can sustain vegetable crops. Looking at the ingredient list of beyond burger, it's mostly grain and vegetable based, and of that the bulk of it is rice & peas along with 3 kinds of plant oil:
"Ingredients: Water, Pea Protein†, Expeller-pressed Canola Oil, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Protein, Natural Flavors, Dried Yeast, Cocoa Butter, Methylcellulose" (there are a bunch of ingredients that are less than %1 that I'm excluding)
On top of that, there is a vast amount of land you will never be able to use for vegetable crops, and the ONLY way you will get food out of it is ruminant grazing. Removing that from the food supply is going to create price shocks and even more soil depletion as food demand concentrates on that %25 of land left. On top of that, animal food production takes a lot of uneditable plant material and turns it into something human edible, which subsidizes vegetable prices. Without that either plant prices will go up.
This focus on plant only nutrition reminds me of 'environmentalists' shunning nuclear power, and in the end cause more damage to the earth via increased coal power production in the end, like Germany. While the actual answer is nuclear and solar power. Cows and other ruminants are the nuclear power of food.
> Beef fat clogs your arteries and causes heart disease.
That is fairly outdated science, it's quite the opposite actually! In 10 to 20 years, your doctor is going to start singing the praises of saturated fat and it's going to be quite hilarious. You can look up research papers today.
It is all magical and ideological driven thinking that ignores scale.
Solve one problem and pretend the solution that works at a micro scale has no issues scaling up.
I am completely down to eat bugs even but eating bugs at a scale anything close to meat in general is a laughable amount of bugs. We would probably need 10 times the long haul trucking to ship that many bugs around.
No, in ground-up form you can ship much more bug protein than meat because you are transporting a lot of water (and refridgeration tech) with that meat. Not to even speak of transporting animals, especially live ones, which is a suffering desaster in and of itself.
If water weight is the case, you can dehydrate the meat already? Beyond / impossible burger is shipped wet, and most unprocessed raw plant food is shipped wet too.
There's the kicker; the "meat replacement" industry is not in it for the good of humanity or whatever, they're in it for the money. They know there's a demographic of people who feel guilty and who are willing to pay extra to soothe their conscience.
I'm going to sound like a gatekeeper here, but Real Vegetarians know how to cook without something that looks or tastes like meat. Meat replacement patties are just... uninspired and lazy conscience comforting food products. IMO and such.
I wouldn't object to better stimulus from up above, that is, make vegetable options more available, diverse, and affordable. Frozen is fine.
Cheaper doesn't seem feasible, at least not without essentially duplicating the meat production process (maybe lab grown meat will get us there someday). Human grade food is more expensive, often considerably so. Animals essentially get the leftovers that we can't eat so they are afforded a huge price advantage and it is not clear how that is to be overcome sustainably.
Circumstances – widespread disease, for example – could see the price of meat exceed these products for periods of time. At which point these products could become contenders on factors of price, but as soon as the market starts to shift the price of meat will fall on the decrease in demand, and you're back to square one. Especially as meat has lag time to market so the price will fall further than you might expect before meat producers are able to pull back on production. There is nothing to keep people eating these products if there is nothing to differentiate them in the market.
The real value proposition is that it is different. A new food option to choose from. If it can be made great, where it is craved as much as meat, then they might have something. Until then, I can see why they are struggling.
You are missing the core technology point that drives the underlying thesis here - ‘every manufactured good, gets cheaper per unit as you make more and more of it’.
Whether this is from the lab, a recipe of plant inputs, or some other currently unknown thing - if you are able to develop and commercialize a product around a ‘specific technology’, you can drive the cost of that down through experience and scale.
Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).
By taking a technology with a much higher theoretical efficiency, and then scaling that up - creates the classic technology disruption scenario. ->‘It’s the cheaper version of X commodity, why wouldn’t I choose that?’
> Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’.
That would be pertinent if they were eating the same foods, but they don't eat the same foods. They eat the stuff we won't eat, produced largely either as a byproduct of the production of the foods we do eat or produced on lands that cannot support the foods we eat.
The more efficient we get in producing plants to eat, the more efficient byproducts there are for animals to eat, so you get a continuous relationship of meat becoming cheaper as other foods become cheaper. Economies of scale can only get you so far when the raw material inputs are your main cost centre.
The industry will have to move towards using those 'waste' products in order to be competitive, but at that point you're essentially just replicating animal processes and you're up against a 'machine' doing the same that has had millions of years to develop itself.
> Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).
This really is such a cool take on it that it bums me out to say…
>why wouldn’t I choose that?
…because I just[0] don’t wanna eat fake meat.
[0] On a very deep, perhaps primal level. I can feel it rooted so far in my brain it’s hard to convey. Rather eat peanut butter at every meal.
> Cheaper doesn't seem feasible, at least not without essentially duplicating the meat production process
I'd say cheaper doesn't seem feasible without duplicating the subsidies received by the meat industry (including farming of animal feed). Give similar subsidies to the plant-based-meat industry, and I'd bet that meat replacements will be much cheaper than meat.
But there's a political risk at that: Meat industry has huge political influence. If their profits are hurt, they would probably demand even more subsidies for covering their "loss". Or you can expect farmers on the streets, and your political oposition taking advantage of the situation.
I'll grant you poultry (chicken, turkey) producers with their sweet, sweet supply management deal. But producers of other meat products? I'd say they are essentially ignored in political circles. If they actually had huge political influence they'd be all over supply management like the poultry producers are afforded. If you venture out into the backroads it's painfully obvious how much richer the poultry producers are compared to their beef and pork producing neighbours, and it is downright sad when you look at those producing less common meats.
The government pays 40% of the insurance premiums for crop insurance (insurance against mother nature) which is a subsidy to plant growers, and is sometimes claimed to by a subsidy to animal producers by extension, but the program doesn't factor in where the product goes. Navy beans grown for humans are very bit as eligible for those subsidies as corn grown for cattle. While it is fair to call it a subsidy, it would be quite disingenuous to claim that is a meat subsidy but not a 'meat alternative' subsidy as well.
Exact opposite. I ask them to please not bring me a mashed vegetables patty and call it a burger. It is not.
The idea of a lettuce tomato onion burger stack on a bun is that there's a taste and texture contrast between the stack of vegetables and something that's not another stack of vegetables but mashed. (Doesn't mean it has to be Beyond or Impossible, see last para.)
I suspect displacement happened because folks paying $25 for a "burger" when out are less interested in the garden mash, want something a little edgier. FWIW, before Beyond and Impossible, at any restaurant or diner where I took time to explain the difference in alt-burger types, they were willing to try ones I mention below, and they reported customers preferred it. In many, someone had just told them "have a vegetarian burger" and they just got the mashed veggies patty or mashed beans cake since that's what most products are. Not being vegetarian themselves, they weren't aware of other availability. By contrast, Impossible and Beyond essentially went door to door "educating" them, so they switched.
While Impossible and Beyond displaced the meat alternatives, that doesn't mean you have to go meat in a vat at home, you can do products such as Morningstar Farms Grillers Original, or maybe Boca All-American Flame-Grilled Burger. Those taste stack more reasonably with what goes on a burger than the mashed vegetables patties, without the weirdness (fake blood look, why?) of Impossible or Beyond. Your local diner will probably be happy to stock them as they're simple frozen goods.
> Exact opposite. I ask them to please not bring me a mashed vegetables patty and call it a burger. It is not.
I can agree that "mashed vegetables" does not describe a good veggie patty. I don't agree that a good veggie patty fails in "burger" format.
I can easily imagine that some people have simply never tasted a good veggie patty in "burger" format, because they are rare.
This is the root of most "meat alternatives" in average restaurants -- much of the restaurant world hasn't figured out that providing vegetarian options isn't about finding equivalent "meat replacements" but instead about cooking up options that stand on their own and taste great.
> While Impossible and Beyond displaced the meat alternatives
In my experience the "meat alternative" patties have not displaced the good veggie patties in the restaurants that had good veggie patties to begin with.
> ...that doesn't mean you have to go meat in a vat at home, you can do products such as Morningstar Farms Grillers Original, or maybe Boca All-American Flame-Grilled Burger. Those taste stack more reasonably with what goes on a burger than the mashed vegetables patties, without the weirdness (fake blood look, why?) of Impossible or Beyond. Your local diner will probably be happy to stock them as they're simple frozen goods.
A beef burger patty has the wonderful property that it is simply made of meat -- a good beef patty has no ingredient lists because it isn't a packaged food.
A good veggie patty is also made on site of simple whole foods, in the same way a good burger is and in the same way any other good meal is.
Any frozen puck taken from a bag and slapped on a grill fails the test, be it comprised mostly of beef, soy, beans, "beyond beef", wheat, or whatever. Those things are about convenience, not taste.
FWIW, to each their own, but I have the complete opposite experience and opinion:
1. First off, the vast majority of restaurants that I've been to that offer Impossible or Beyond Burgers still offer at least one traditional veggie burger. In fact I don't know if I've ever seen a restaurant that will only offer a faux meat burger but not offer a veggie burger.
2. I love a good Impossible Burger, fundamentally because it satisfies my cravings for meat in a way veggie burgers never do. Faux meat burgers have very similar protein/fat/carb ratios to real meat, while veggie burgers are nearly always a ton of carbs. I can eat an Impossible Burger and feel full for hours. I eat a veggie burger and I'm hungry again really quickly.
Complete opposite experience on both counts, anecdotally. I've been vegetarian for years, and the texture of meat (and substitutes) creeps me out. My town has like 10 restaurants that dropped their veggie burgers for beyond/impossible.
I'm not a vegetarian but I used to sometimes enjoy eating the old style veggie burgers that didn't try to taste like meat. I can't find them anymore and I absolutely loath beyond meat and impossible.
I lean vegetarian/vegan these days and have echoed on this very forum that Beyond/Impossible have crowded out any form of unique approaches. It's led to everything at restaurants tasting way too similar.
I'm a vegetarian but I very much agree and I'm surprised to see the dislike of these product on this thread from both camps.
I want the full fat, greasy, meaty nostalgia of my very American-diet childhood and Impossible/Beyond have finally gotten 95% to achieving that. I definitely do not want some bean/vegetable patty with low fat, low salt, and weird texture.
Additionally, my Midwestern-diet wife happily eat Impossible (not Beyond) burgers with me which is a pleasant surprise.
I agree with OP.
Fake patties taste like... erm...
But a nice veggie patty with peas, corn and stuff is great.
Maybe I agree, that this modern crappy fake food is make by meat eaters for people who try to not eat so much meat, but they forgot that a normal veggie patty doesn't need to taste like meat.
I love Beyond Sausages for that very reason. they cook up like a sausage, they even have a sausage like skin. I think its pretty great, although highly processed and not suitable for staple food IMMO.
> a nice veggie patty with peas, corn and stuff is great.
That's irrelevant - someone who is in the mood for a meat patty burger won't be happy with a veggie patty no matter how great it tastes, unless it tastes like meat.
There's tons of comments here saying how nice veggie patties can be[1], but none of the posters saying this have the self-awareness to realise that the taste of veggie patties are irrelevant if they don't taste like meat to people who want a meaty taste.
[1] I agree, they can be very nice, and when I'm in the mood for one, I choose it.
Yeah, I agree, but most fake meat doesn't taste like meat. It tastes like made out of grain and stuff. Sure, there are some brands who can mimik the taste quite good, but this stuff will never ever really taste and feel like meat, because it isn't. And some people might try it, think that it nearly is meat maybe, but not 100% and then never try it again. Like me :D
I would always prefer a true veggie patty, but maybe I'm not the target audience. But I should, because I often tried to not eat so much meat but failed because of bad tastes.
I hate veggie patties and feel like they were always the frost-bitten-back-of-the-freezer-kept-around-in-case-a-vegetarian-one-day-visits option that a restaurant falls back on. Not a vegetarian any more, but I don't think in the years that I was that I ever ate an enjoyable veggie pattie. As you said, it's 100% matter of taste so there's no right or wrong, but the opposing viewpoints are fascinating...
Same here. I’ve tried many veggy patties at restaurants and only ever had one that I liked, and even going back to that same restaurant is hit or miss. It is rare to find one that isn’t either very dry and flavorless or soggy, mushy and impossible to bite without squeezing out of the patty.
Beyond and Impossible aren’t amazing but they are decent and consistent.
Same here, I don't care either way whether it's trying to taste like meat or not - I've had too many tasteless, dry bean burgers that any alternative is welcome
I much prefer Beyond Burgers as well, and the sausages. I even invested in the company, and it's surprising to me the negative press and Wall St shorting action.
>One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."
Veggie burgers are in a weird position because it's hit or miss on whether they are made with eggs. So it alienates vegans. I don't even bother checking at restaurants if the veggie burgers are vegan anymore. But with Beyond and Impossible, the name recognition is there. Vegetarians and vegans alike know they can eat it. It alienates fewer people. That said, I want as many choices as possible when I go out to eat, so being able to choose a (vegan) veggie burger would be great.
I used to go to Dos Toros once a month or so. They used to have a burrito option where the protein was replaced with a vegetable selection. I’m sure that it varied by region, but around me it was usually a roasted variety of squashes. When combined with all the other burrito toppings, it was hands-down the best thing on their menu.
Then they replaced that with beyond/impossible at a higher price. I tried it once, and it basically killed the aura. Now it’s just another burrito shop, no different than any other.
It's very sad that so much veggie food is now with egg. A horrible rancid flavour that meat eaters and veggies alike don't like. But it's cheap and heavily subsidised so goes into everything as a filler.
The thing is BM (and others) aren't trying to create vega/vegetarian meat. They are trying to make meat in a sustainable way, so it has to taste more like beef/pork than chickpeas or tofu if they want to get the main market.
As a pretty hardcore meat-lover (we had sous-vide filets tonight at home), I think Impossible is close enough on the taste and feel side for a lot of dishes that use beef (including hamburgers).
They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.
Economies of scale will push the cost down over time. Meanwhile, meat continues to receive significant government subsidies. If we had to pay the actual cost of meat (not even including a tax on the externalities from its environmental costs), it would be a lot less affordable to regular people.
>Economies of scale will push the cost down over time.
This is, of course, true, but as a business proposition it's a bit daunting.
When you're competing with industrial agriculture, you're competing with a technology stack that's tens of thousands of years old, spans the globe, and employs literal billions of people. It's not quite the same as accepting a couple years of unprofitability when scaling up a social network. What if it takes centuries?
"The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today."
Those numbers don't make sense. If you follow the chain of references, they seem to be made up.
(Why do I say the numbers don't make sense? a) That subsidy works out to about 35 cents per person per day. How could that possibly reduce the price of a pound of hamburger by a factor of 6? b) In other countries, a Big Mac costs at most $6.71. The $13 figure seems to be nonsense.)
I agree the reference is weak and there is most likely a large amount of conjecture behind that number, but the numbers don't a priori not make sense.
Subsidies can have both > 1 multiplier impacts and non-linear impacts. For example, subsidies allow for artificial economies of scale to kick in that can then bring the price down significantly. However, were those subsidies to dry up, then certain thresholds may no longer be met and you may see again a non-unitary and non-linear rise in price.
Indeed this is the main theoretical reason why a society would be interested in subsidies: they can get back more benefit than what they pay for in the form of the subsidy.
AFAIK there is no subsidizing of the beef industry in the US directly. There is subsidies for the sales of common feed plant crops and that's an indirect subsidy for growing beef, but that also applies burgers made directly from plants.
This is dwarfed by feed subsidies. Feed subsidies don't convert directly to edible-food subsidies; the 'big five' staple crops are subsidized independent of 'specialty' crops, and the vast majority of corn is grown for feed and ethanol in the US, and is of a variety not used for any kind of human food production.
The corn for feed is just used as a protein source though. I'm not sure why you couldn't grind it up for use as a protein source in say a plant-based burger.
Isn't most of the meat subsidy via the feed? Shouldn't competing plant-based products be able to benefit from the same subsidy? Buy a ton of corn, extract the zein (protein), make a burger, use the excess carbohydrates for ethanol (fuel or liquor).
Agreed. The first time I had an Impossible burger, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was just the weird name the hotel bar in SF I was at gave its burgers. Loved it, they made a great burger. I had no idea it was nonmeat until weeks later when I learned what Impossible was.
Now, if I'd known to look out for it, I'm sure I could have picked and found out. But since I wasn't looking for a difference, I didn't notice one. And that's coming from someone who eats a ton of (real) burgers.
I’m surprised by this… they’re possibly 20% more expensive in the grocery store here in the UK, but not 3x. More like on the order of what you’d pay for a meat product that was particularly high quality.
I don't understand how you can say this. The Beyond/Incredible meat is not close enough. It's not even close at all. The texture is wrong, the feel chewing it is wrong, the taste is wrong unless you slather it with enough condiments that you can't taste it anyway. It is exactly the sort of highly processed industrially-created food that health experts tell us to avoid.
I’ve seen huge improvement, from what felt like a lump of shredded beetroot and corn 18 months ago and made me swear off veggie patties, to being a patty that will permanently replace beef burgers in my diet (not a huge component anyway, maybe 1 /2 a month).
In general I’d rather eat vegetarian than fake chicken or sausages, but beyond meat’s current product makes me feel optimistic about a future without methane emissions.
I had seen a family of 8 people by accident grab our order of impossible burgers from BK by accident and consuming them, while we were waiting for our order. When we figured out what happened and tried to explain to them that they just ate meatless burgers, they couldn’t understand what we’re talking about. It was believable enough for them, I guess.
That’s the issue here, veggie folks think meat tastes gross and everyone who eats it is evil and carnivores think vegetables taste gross and vegans are just NPC henchmen for the Illuminati
Non-animal protein has two main traditions that are quite different: on the one hand you have the tradition that since antiquity has avoided animal protein and don't try to imitate texture or flavor (say South India) and the other tradition which does not completely avoid animal protein and often complements animal protein with plant analogues ("temple food" with origin in China) These offerings sometimes try to come as close as possible to animal and fish protein in texture look and taste. It's the difference between your veggie burger and your impossible burger. One is not trying to be anything but itself the other one is attempting to pass for the other.
Sometimes it seems these BM and IF, etc., are trying to simultaneously cater to both customers at once. That will likely not work as they are different customers.
> They are trying to make meat in a sustainable way
I mean, isn’t meat sustainable? As it’s renewable. Factory farming isn’t sustainable, but there’s plenty of pasture raised organic beef ranchers who grow meat in a sustainable way. If the goal is sustainability, then there are other ways that are likely healthier.
I thought the benefit was for ethical vegetarians who like the taste of beef but don’t want to harm animals.
Densely-quartered urban dwellers eating like sparsely-populated pastoralists is not sustainable. A theory behind the sanctification of cows in India is because a cow kept for its meat feeds far fewer people than one kept for its milk. The same would apply to some of the climate effects, such as the feed crops, although I don't know if it would change the cow-emitted methane.
Not sure what your point is, but agriculture needs to change dramatically in the next couple of decades.
Human civilization/all life that wants to keep existing also needs to change dramatically in the next five billion years but I think that is to be expected.
Water usage is heavily region dependent - grass fed beef from a region which does not depend on well irrigation essentially has net zero water usage. The cows eat grass and drink water, which they then piss out watering the grass. This is for sure a problem in an arid region dependent on aquifers to raise livestock, but for instance the midwest has plentiful rain (sometimes far too much in fact) and "water usage" isn't a meaningful limitation. Often times the water usage numbers quoted include all the rain that fell to grow the silage that the cows eat, which still ends up in the same aquifers and rivers eventually whether it passes through a cow or not. There are concerns if there is a poorly managed high point source concentration of manure which causes nutrient runoff into waterways, but that's a far different conversation.
Methane is a better example, but ironically factory farming has the answer there. Collecting manure in a waste pool and turning it into biogas turns it from a negative to a net positive.
"We find irrigation of cattle-feed crops to be the greatest consumer of river water in the western United States, implicating beef and dairy consumption as the leading driver of water shortages and fish imperilment in the region. We assess opportunities for alleviating water scarcity by reducing cattle-feed production, finding that temporary, rotational fallowing of irrigated feed crops can markedly reduce water shortage risks and improve ecological sustainability. Long-term water security and river ecosystem health will ultimately require Americans to consume less beef that depends on irrigated feed crops."
It's probably sustainable for everyone to eat a large fraction of a pound of meat per week. The average American eats over 4lbs. of meat per week. This is not sustainable.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.
I love meat, and the best non-meat burgers I've eaten that I would absolute eat again and again, didn't try to be non-meat. They were just really tasty vegetable burgers.
Me too (regarding the best veggie burgers) — the best I’ve had were nothing like meat burgers, but were awesome nonetheless.
One is in a cookbook called “the vegan Korean”, and it’s a legitimately memorable food experience. I’d much rather find that at a restaurant than some kind of run-of-the-mill faux meat burger.
I think what companies who want to cater to vegetarians and vegans should do is focus more on providing plant based foods that AREN'T pretending to be meat. I'm not a vegan, never have been, but I quite like a lot of vegetarian foods. But I tried a beyond burger once just out of curiosity and it just... smelled wrong. There was something about it that put me off immediately on a primal level. My guess is that sales surged initially as curious non-vegans tried the fake meat, only for most to realize that it wasn't nearly as tasty and go back to actual meat, leaving the main customer base as vegans trying their best to convince themselves that no it tastes good actually. Providing options such as grilled vegetables that are actually super tasty is a way better idea than just trying to mold weird processed plant matter into a vague approximation of "meat".
> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
This is literally the whole point of the Food Chain and why species counts generally decrease as you go up the chain. Plants make up the vast majority of biomass on the planet. Animals that eat plants make up the next largest chunk. Animals that eat those animals make up the next largest. Etc.
I eat meat, but it's undeniable that vegetation is far more economic than meat on sheer scale.
I have eaten land-based predator meat before, and it's usually very oily and not good for you at all. I wouldn't recommend them. Fish that eat other fish, like Tuna, can be tasty but are still not very nutritious.
Understood that you dont;
But before Beyond/Impossible came, there used to be veggie patty that vegetarians enjoyed. And many of them have never tasted meat, and don't want to eat something that tastes like meat.
OP's point is that Beyond/Impossible replaced the veggie patty with a non-meat version of meat patty, instead of adding a new item in the menu.
And, honestly, as a meat-eater I really enjoy certain veggie patties. It's not meat, but it shouldn't be. They're their own delicious thing.
When I'm in the mood for a veggie burger, I don't want a hamburger. Restaurants shouldn't replace veggie patties with imitation meat -- they should have both.
The thing some vegetarians do not understand is that traditional cuisine from all over the World is basically 90% vegetarian, because poor people had to survive too.
I'm Italian, I could eat vegetarian meals everyday for a month without ever eating the same thing twice.
Same goes for all of Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa or South America.
Vegetable dishes are the foundation of every established culinary tradition.
There's absolutely no need for incredible|magical|impossible|whatever meat.
> The thing some vegetarians do not understand is that traditional cuisine from all over the World is basically 90% vegetarian, because poor people had to survive too.
Sure, some people of every ilk are likely to be uninformed about some aspect of the world or the other. How does that apply in the current context? Most meals for most people worldwide are essentially vegetarian, even if the people are not obligate vegetarians. Are there some vegetarians unfamiliar with the reality of practically all world cuisines? Sure - and? Impossible meats aren't directed towards these people, and they aren't looking to substitute the taste of a burger. They're likely not averse to it, for what it's worth.
> Sure, some people of every ilk are likely to be uninformed about some aspect of the world or the other
I am absolutely not claiming that, I am absolutely claiming that beliefs based on feelings and not hard truths tend to reject rational arguments, hence their members are usually not the most curious people around and it's common they ignore things that are obvious to the rest of us.
Take a western vegetarian, we all know a few of them and some vegan too.
Most vegetarians/vegan inform themselves in vegetarian communities, which are based on the same western principles where they were born, mainly North America.
Most vegetarian communities are based on spurious correlations, like the fact that 80% of people from India are Hinduists, a religion that promotes a lacto-vegetarian diet letting people believe that 80% of Indians are vegetarians, which is obviously completely false.
Christianity promotes a mostly vegetarian diet too, there's a list of food that you should not consume on certain days, nobody follows those prescriptions anymore, they are thousands years old and come from the Jewish traditions.
But if I say that 30% of the World population is Christian, a religion that promotes a mostly vegetarian diet, things sound completely different.
Don't also forget that in vegetarian circles meat is the root cause of everything bad: from cancer[1] to diabetes[2], deforestation[3], being overweight [4], depression[5] and even infertility[6] (yes, you heard right!)
All these claims have been either debunked, highly exaggerated or correlated when there is no factual evidence. Yet they resist in the narrative of these communities, like the idea that Christ died on a cross and then came back to life 3 days later. It's false, we know it is, but people still believe it and there's nothing we can do about it.
It's easy to understand the stigma that these manipulatory lies can create around "traditional food", these people often think of themselves as revolutionary going against the status quo, so their enemy are their local traditions, not just the meat (everyone eats some meat around them, so it must be "the others their ways and they do not see it").
So they end up eating a lot of food that is not local nor traditional (tradition equals bad, remember?), such as tofu, that in Italy is totally not traditional nor commonly used, yet most vegetarians and vegans rely on it.
The reason why?
Vegetarianism in the west is a business, if you can sell the dirty cheap tofu at 5-10 euros/kg (that's the price in Italy) while poultry costs 3-5 euros/kg (raw, raised on the ground and antibiotic free) you can understand how convenient it is to sell people the idea that you need to eat tofu instead of pasta with tomato sauce (1-1.5 euros/kg), you are in for the big bucks.
Don't dismiss what I say just because you disagree, I've researched the topic a lot, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
> Most meals for most people worldwide are essentially vegetarian, even if the people are not obligate vegetarians
Sooner or later people in the west will understand that there are people among us priding themselves for not eating meat while our pets, for example cats, every year eat 10 times the meat an average central African person has to eat, suffering the horrendous consequences of malnutrition, like watching their children die of hunger or curable disease that their bodies weakened by the forced plant based diet hadn't the strength to fight, and we don't see a problem with that.
The irony is that those people are in developing countries, they are developing, they will eventually eat more meat, no way they will keep dying for a made up belief, for those who care about animal suffering I have an advice: renounce to pets. They eat too much meat, they kill too many animals, they are not sustainable.
I think you're conflating the median North American vegetarian with the median vegan. Your comment makes a lot more sense if I substitute "vegan" for wherever you've used "vegetarian". If you do indeed mean "vegetarian", then I think it makes much less sense in contemporary America, for example.
Yes, almost every vegan I've known is optimizing to minimize animal "cruelty", defined on their own ideological terms. Meanwhile, almost every vegetarian I've known is either one for religious reasons (and have their tradition's cultural cuisines to draw from) or simply don't like meat. I also know many Muslims who avoid meat at restaurants since it's not halal. I am struggling to recall any vegetarians that eat an average American diet by simply replacing meat with something like tofu.
If your intent is indeed to refer to vegetarians, I think that hasn't been the case in the US since perhaps the 90s. American vegetarianism really took off in the cultural context of the 60s and 70s, where Eastern ideas & sensibilities were imported but not the people or their cuisines. If a median American in the 70s wanted to maintain a meat free diet, their options were genuinely restricted. That's certainly not the case now, where the median American vegetarian is likely of recent immigrant descent, and has their heritage cuisine to inspire vegetarian meals. Changes to American immigration policy and the segment of countries where immigrants have come from have changed American vegetarianism. I also think something like Impossible burgers have very little appeal to the median vegetarian, since they're not interested in the taste of meat to begin with.
Yes, unlike the median American vegetarian, the median American vegan tends to appear spontaneously among families that are not themselves vegan. Unlike vegetarians, they don't have a rich family tradition to draw from, and plenty learn to just wing it. That said, I do think even this is likely not the case anymore. Today, in any big city, good vegan/vegetarian food is easy to find. As an illustrative example, I asked a relative who's lived in NYC for 40 years what his favorite restaurant meal has been (he absolutely loves steak). His favorite restaurant is a vegan Korean BBQ. Similarly, I've been informed by Mexicans of an amazing Mexican vegan place in Brooklyn.
I love a good veggie patty burger. I also like the Impossible burger. I'd love to see both on a menu so I can choose the one I want. And heck I'll eat a meatburger on special occasions as well. There are a couple of local restaurants that had really nicely done veggie patties that have been displaced by Beyond/Impossible burgers, and it's a shame.
> But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals
so basically you want a veggie patty disguised as an hamburger.
but there's a catch: agriculture kills as many animals than we do to eat them.
You might not see them, but billions of insects, worms, small rodents etc are killed in the process of making agriculture a viable business.
Pesticides are not exactly environmental friendly.
But then the crops need to be protected from their natural predators: herbivores!
You might have asked yourself sometimes why we don't see deers, boars, jackrabbits, cows, goats (the list is endless) roaming free close to crop fields and the answer is simple: they eat the crops, so they have been killed in the past and are now kept away, maybe not shooting them directly, but not asking gently either.
That causes massive repercussions on natural fauna too: coyotes, wolves, bears, cougars, bobcats etc cannot survive in absence of preys.
So basically veggie patties are not made of dead animals, but a lot of animals died so that we could eat them.
I appreciate the very good points you are making, however I do not consider these morally equivalent. Specifically the indirect affects of agriculture on local wildlife vs direct and largely unnecessary killing and suffering of animals.
I am aware of the objections coming from vegans, I really have nothing to say to them other than I am in favour of freedom of worship, but I am also an atheist who tries to stand on the side of the scientific method as much as my abilities allow me, so I think National Geographic and PNAS are a more reliable source of information.
Most importantly: loss of vegetable specie due to mono cultures farmed specifically for humans (tomatoes for burgers, for example - McDonald's is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, purchaser in the world of potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes - or avocados for fancy sandwiches, that consume 300 liters of water to produce a single fruit) is not be underestimated.
As an example, this sentence
> vegans are inflicting far less damage because most of the cereal crops that are mono-cropped (wheat, corn, soy, etc.) are fed to the animals people consume.
is almost completely made up and numbers are greatly exaggerated for propagandistic purpose.
The reason why original Parmigiano cheese is so worshipped by Italians and it's so expensive abroad, is exactly because cows are not fed with crops, bu with natural grass.
The reason why in USA many animals are fed with farmed crops is because crops are subsidized by the govt, making them cheaper than the alternatives.
Another reason why herbivores are fed with crops is because they can eat the remains we can't eat, which is around 85% of the whole plant
According to FAO (United Nations Agency for food) "only 13% of global animal feed (all animals for food, including chickens, pigs and cattle) is comprised of grain crops"
Crops are also heavily subsidized to produce bio fuel, which is not great, I agree, but that has nothing to do with feeding animals or eating their meat.
I don't think any of the sources you mentioned here actually justify animal agriculture on the grounds of causing less death, though. The first two sources aren't specific to agriculture specific to human consumption, just agriculture in general. Also, whether or not global livestock is primarily fed on human consumable crops isn't the issue. For example, a very large portion of the feed mentioned in one of your sources (the third one) is still coming from farmed crops, so even if it isn't human consumable that doesn't mean we don't consider deaths coming from it. The last source is just unrelated, as you acknowledge.
I think you'd need to have sources that prove that specifically crops grown for human consumption result in more deaths, or that we'd have to grow more of those crops to feed humans compared to the crops grown to feed animals.
Again, just to clarify, the third source you mention has categories for things like "by-products", "Other non-edible", "Oil seed cakes", etc. Whether or not humans can eat those is irrelevant. The point is that all those things could still be coming from crops grown in the same general way as the crops grown for human consumption. Does that make sense, or am I being too religious for your logical atheistic brain?
> I think you'd need to have sources that prove that specifically crops grown for human consumption
I think you don't understand the issue.
Vegetarians (and vegans) don't kill less animals, they simply don't eat them (or at least that's what they say...)
> The point is that all those things could still be coming from crops
The point is that eating meat, unless you are from the US, does not mean you're killing billions of animals for fun.
American domestic cats kill billion of birds and other small animals every year.
Why are vegetarians obsessed only with non vegetarian people and not with domestic cats, which they love?
Because it's a religious fight, not an ethical one.
They want to blame someone and found this.
Anyway: scientific method implies that if you say "vegetarians kill less animals" you should prove it with numbers, as humans their activities kill billion of animals every year all over the World.
Vegetarians are not outside of the human realm, they live in societies as we all do and the major source of animal killing and suffering is not eating some meat, that's only selection bias at work.
It would be the same as saying: plants produce oxygen, if you only eat plants you're robbing our planet of breathable air, you should replant every plant you eat.
But every normal well functioning human knows that it's stupid to divide people into good and bad.
That's exactly what vegetarians do.
If you believe in veganism, it's OK, religions are allowed in our societies.
If you believe "vegan facts" from a vegan website is the truth, I don't know what to say to you, you can't fight made up beliefs, I got the Pope in front of my house, I know you can't beat blind faith.
But, the claim has always been that vegetarians don't kill less animals, not that they kill more. Which is arguably true. You won't find vegans in poor countries, you'll find denutrished children starving to death, they'd eat some meat if they could, just to survive. Veganism is a first World problem and as many other first World problems it's completely disconnected from reality.
When you'll eat an entire plant of wheat from roots to the top, we can talk about eating only vegetables.
Until that day you are only wasting resources, as any of us western humans do so well.
On average each year every American eats 3 chickens. Are you sure vegetarians on average don't cause the death of 3 birds each year? Can you prove it? Can you prove the industry you rely on for food is more ethical and kills less animals?
If your objection is "but I don't eat chicken so I kill 3 chickens less than the average" remember that other people could reply "I don't eat vegetables as much as you, so the damages produced by the agriculture industry are much more on you than on me"
Waiting for the data, please refrain if you wanna answer with more propaganda.
> Vegetarians (and vegans) don't kill less animals
Source? Your claim, thus the onus is on you to prove this, which you haven't.
> American domestic cats kill billion of birds and other small animals every year.
Completely irrelevant whataboutism. Like, that's a textbook example of the fallacy.
> Vegetarians are not outside of the human realm, they live in societies as we all do and the major source of animal killing and suffering is not eating some meat, that's only selection bias at work.
> It would be the same as saying: plants produce oxygen, if you only eat plants you're robbing our planet of breathable air, you should replant every plant you eat.
I don't even know how to respond to this. If we include fish, then _trillions_ of animals are killed every year for their meat and body parts. How is that not the greatest source of animal suffering?
> If you believe in veganism, it's OK, religions are allowed in our societies.
This is such a lazy insult. Why do you insist on acting like you argue in good faith, yet say nonsense like this? Genuinely, why?
> You won't find vegans in poor countries, you'll find denutrished children starving to death, they'd eat some meat if they could, just to survive. Veganism is a first World problem and as many other first World problems it's completely disconnected from reality.
What is the point you're making here, exactly? Because some people in the world have limited access to non-animal based sources of nutrition then veganism as an ethical framework is entirely debunked. How on Earth does that follow?
Your style of debate is _not_ working, my guy. Your comment history in other threads seems to paint a picture of you not really arguing in good faith. If you want to continue this discussion, I'll only do it on a video call. My email is in my profile if you'd like to set that up.
>One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus.
This upsets me because as a vegetarian the last thing I want is to be reminded of what meat tastes like. Who exactly is this for? Because the last I heard it was being marketed primarily at meat eaters.
I’m a meat eater and I would love to find a faux ground beef or faux ground pork that I can use in the kitchen exactly the way I use beef/pork in my recipes. I would prefer such a food if it was similarly priced to animal, but more sustainable, because I would rather be vegetarian but not to the degree that I need to give up my favorite recipes. I need it to provide essential umami, salt, fat, flavor. Often vegetarian recipes suggest minced mushrooms for this purpose but maillard browned pork bits hit different. My favorite recipe uses something like 80g of ground pork and 540g of soft tofu. Clearly I’m not eating the pork because I prefer meat protein! But making the dish without the pork leaves it tasting a bit hollow. Adding a bit more MSG helps sometimes but isn’t a general fix.
(Note that beyond or impossible might fit the bill, but availability has been so inconsistent here for the more “raw” ground-X products versus patties/sausages that I haven’t gotten to try it. I don’t care much about burgers.)
I am omnivorous, but I have a sibling who is vegan. When we were both in the Bay Area, Golden Era ( https://www.goldeneravegan.com ) was a place that we found that... wasn't bad.
This was quite a while back but the first time we went in and looked at the menu the question of "is all of this vegan except for these two items with an asterisk?" (It was the 'classic' Chinese style menu with about 200 things on it with numbers to identify them).
I found the "drumsticks" and the pot stickers to be quite good. For an entree, I would have the Mongolian (now the 'Spicy Mongolian Delight') which was again quite good. The only problem with eating there is on the drive back home I'd have a hankering for some beef jerky.
We encountered that with a vegetarian restaurant in Mountain View (or was it Palo Alto? somewhere on El Camino Real) that had vegetarian food... but it was entirely boring without much flavor, texture, or... spirit. It was a bowl of bland vegetarian chili... with kale. No spices from onions, or garlic or anything really interesting. It was brown and green.
And so, that's what made Golden Era somehow different - it had flavor and did a lot of work with the sauces to make them interesting and desirable.
This is interesting. There's a few successful "vegetarian/vegan" places in my area, but they're all basically some variant of Chinese food and are from moderately to pretty good. There's also a few Indian places, but they don't really seem to register with the local vegetarian population as such, but at least can be quite good if you know where to look and have the usual amounts of flavor that Indian food tends to have.
However, there's a couple "Western" vegetarian/vegan joints in my immediate area that I've tried a couple of times. To be fair you get lots of food for the money, but both places produce a product that really is quite flavorless -- even with pretty different menus. Things like extra spicy vegan chili go down with the flavor profile of water, other dishes taste like salad baked in an oven, it's really dreadful shit. Yelp reviews for both places? 4+ stars. shrug
They make fake ground beef in a number of brands now and they all taste pretty similar once you season it to what the dish would be with meat. Imo the hard part is actually cooking the stuff. Theres no fat to render out to keep it from sticking to the pan really so you have to add your own, which it absorbs like a sponge because its so dry. In the end theres no way the nutrition facts are reflecting the final meal with it taking on so much oil in the pan.
Where I live in Australia, Coles has a vegan mince option that is pretty excellent. It requires longer to cook though, but it works brilliantly in chilli and pasta. $7.50 AUD for half a kilogram (and $4-5 on special), which is close enough to the price (and sometimes cheaper!) for real beef mince that I'm happy to use it regularly (as a vegan). It doesn't taste identical, but its close enough that my vegan partner who has been vegan for over a decade dislikes the smell haha
The trick is you must add a fair bit of olive oil to the pan, as it does not have the same fat content actual mince does. Once you do, it tastes brilliant in the dishes I'd use it for, with the seasoning and such we use.
Everything is of course flavour preference but I found that liquid smoke is a great add-on that makes much veggie food taste good to meat eaters; it takes care of the smokey/charred flavour that you get using ham or frying your meat before you add other things.
And for umami tomato (fresh/canned & condensed) works wonders.
Try tempah or mushrooms. (You might want to pan fry the mushroom first.) You could also try shelled edamame.
They aren't a one-to-one replacement for meat, but even when I've tried the impossible or beyond meat replacements, I find they taste like tofu instead of real meat.
Seitan is also nice for a ground sausage type texture.
It’s unfortunately not as appealing to many because seitan is wheat gluten. But it’s definitely worth trying; Chinese Buddhists haven’t been eating it since the sixth century on a whim.
The only tempeh I like personally is when we make our own using the Okara left over from making our own tofu -- that tastes fantastic fresh. I've never enjoyed eating the store bought stuff, even from the amazing Asian grocery stores here.
Meat from all kinds of animals is delicious. I'm a die-hard omnivore, but don't mind going sans meat for a few meals if the food tastes good -- think more "bear" diet than obligate carnivorous "T-Rex".
Intersect those two sets of food products and you get exactly who this is for.
Actually even more particularly, it's for food products where the absolute quality of the meat, and the way in which it is cooked, doesn't really matter all that much ... burgers, sausages, chicken nuggets, etc.
The problem really with these products is that the prices are absolutely hilariously ridiculous. If I could walk into a Burger King tomorrow, have no meat-based burgers and only Impossible burgers, but all the prices were 20% lower, I would eat...at least 20% more Burger King. Maybe more.
But right now the prices for an Impossible Whopper can be 20% more than the one made from an animal raised at great expense.
Beyond Meat's real problem is that it's not as convincing of a meat substitute as an Impossible Burger, leaving it deep in the uncanny valley while an Impossible product can often times be imperceptibly the same as a low quality fast food burger patty.
Fake meat is a replacement for meat, not for existing vegetarian food.
It is a common misconception that vegetarians want food that looks and taste like meat, but is vegetarian or vegan.
Most vegetarians already know what to eat.
Fake meat is for the carnivores who don't want to go cold turkey and have no idea what to eat otherwise.
Interesting you should mention that. I used to really like the spicy beanburger at McDonald's. There was no reason to make something that pretended to be meat with even more additives, except to drive the marketing of the non-meat meat industry. I'm happy to eat rice and beans, I don't need no pretend meat. Although I do eat meat about half the time.
Interesting I'm reading Michel Pollan's book the Omnivore's Dilemma, about large scale agriculture, it's quite worrying, although I don't feel the UK is quite at the stage of the US yet. I see quite a lot of animals roaming and diversity when I'm out walking, but it's definitely going in that direction.
> aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus
I've found a similar trend in the supermarket frozen aisles. I used to be able to reliably find "veggie crumbles" at most largeish stores, perfect for pizza, chili, or mapo tofu. My favorite brand was Quorn (not quite vegan, includes egg whites) but there were often several decent options. Now it's rare to find anything other than Beyond or Impossible, packaged to look and feel like ground meat, very fussy. They taste okay, but I prefer both the crumbles' flavors and form factors. I've gone back to using TVP. (I'm not vegetarian -- I'll happily brown my TVP in bacon grease.)
Honestly, the best approach is not making “fake” anything—black bean burgers and other home-made options not only taste way better, but they are not highly processed.
The more stages in processing a food undergoes, the worse it is for people. It’s really that simple.
People are trying to over-science food in my opinion. Sticking to good, wholesome ingredients is the way to go. Support local farmers not some large conglomerate factory.
If you have a home-made option that is built-to-taste, how can anything else be better? It’s tailor made for each individual. Hence “… and other home-made options.”
Whereas, a factory made thing is mass-produced and has to target the lowest-common-denominator.
As a rule, the animals from which meat is derived do not eat vegetables.
(...) livestock consume 6 billion tonnes of feed (dry matter) annually – including one third of global cereal production – of which 86% is made of materials that are currently not eaten by humans [1]
In particular, much of meat consumed by us is that of ruminants, which depend on eating foods which must be fermented internally to be assimilated, such as grass.
The global livestock sector ingested an estimated 6.0 billion tonnes of feed (DM) in 2010. The three major feed materials were grass and leaves (46% or 2.7 million tonnes, Fig. 2 and Table SI 2 in Supplementary Information), followed by crop residues such as straws, stover or sugar-cane tops (19% or 1.1 billion tonnes DM). At global level, human-edible feed materials represented about 14% of the global livestock feed ration. [1]
Livestock eat quite a bit of corn / maize, which we think of as both a vegetable (fresh) and a grain (dried). I took the original comment to be tongue in cheek though, and to just mean that eating plants is more efficient than eating plant eaters.
I'm with you and a lot of people apparently. I became a vegetarian a few decades ago. I'm of the opinion that there are plenty of vegetarian dishes that feature the vegetables, and I don't seek out dishes that are vegetables pretending to be meat. Probably the most well-known example is ToFurkey. I mean, I've had it, it's OK, but it's a salty processed food product. Just give me something featuring vegetables, no faux meat.
My conclusion is that we are not the target audience for fake burgers, because we are not missing what it's presumably giving some people. I'm pretty sure these patties are meant to assuage meat cravings in psychologically-obligate carnivores. Because otherwise, you're right. Almost all meat substitute dishes are missing the point; just cook vegetarian cuisine from the start. There are all manners of unhealthy deep fried deliciousness with plants, that don't involve heavily processing the plants to look and vaguely taste meaty first. And most of them, frankly, taste better than fake meat. But if you're in burger withdrawal, no onion rings or curry will help. Only meat, or perhaps, fake-meat, will sate that desire.
Been a vegetarian and enjoying veggie burgers for over 30 years now. The Beyond Meat patties taste too much like actual meat - that is, awful. The meat eaters don't like it because it's close, but not quite, like meat. The vegetarians don't like it because it tastes too much like meat and we have other, better tasting, options.
They've kind of hit an uncanny valley of food. As such, I say good riddance!
This resonates though. A lot of restaurants have vegetarian dishes prepared to taste sort of like meat (e.g. paneer tikka instead of chicken tikka etc.). It was telling that the reverse was never there. I never liked the trend but understood it since the vegetarians would like to enjoy the taste of the other food and this was a compromise. This seems to be next step in that evolution but from what I've read, the stuff is highly processed and has a ton of chemicals added for flavour, stability etc. There are several vegetarian dishes that I enjoy for the vegetarian taste and the last thing I want is for them to pushed aside for these highly processed products that try to approximate meat.
Ive been a vegetarian for nine years. I very quickly learned that you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the type of vegetation dishes it has. 'meat substitution' is lazy and generally means a poor chef.
As a note - many traditional curries are vegetarian, which isn't surprising as India has a long history of vegetarianism. Paneer curries have been around for at least a few hundred years with reasonable evidence for a few thousand. Whilst it may be a substitute for meat in a westernised 'x tikka masala', and half decent Indian restaurant should have some established dishes designed around the paneer.
Ten years ago, I found that the good-tasting veggie burgers invariably consisted of mostly carbs. The rare high-protein soy burger wasn’t very pleasant.
Most restaurants have plenty of tasty ways to deliver vegetarian carbs, but protein is harder to find. The Beyond and Impossible burgers aren’t perfect, but they do allow me to meet my macronutrient needs while satisfying a burger craving. Old-school veggie burgers don’t do the job.
> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus
I'm not vegan, but I've grown to always take the veggie burgers, unless they're beyond meat or black beans-based. They tend to be better than that dry-tasting overcooked patty (in my opinion). Makes me sad when they replace their veggie options with beyond meat
I tried being a vegan for several months. I developed all sorts of aches and pains. As an experiment, I ate a steak. It was the best tasting thing I ever ate. I even licked the plate. I felt great the next day.
I eat and like to eat meat, lots of it, as well as other foods. I am completely stumped by this push for hyper-processed "substitutes". I regularly ordered vegetarian dishes, and often enjoyed a decent bean or beet based burger. Those things can be delicious. I can only hope this fad of beyond meat bull-crap goes bankrupt and dies, sooner rather than later.
> It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables!
Not exactly. In pastoral agriculture, animals eat grasses that humans cannot, on land that is not easily farmable (infertile, rocky, hilly, etc). A nice side effect of this is that the animals make the land more farmable by fertilizing it with their poops.
I'm not a vegan but a 5-day vegetarian and I've been enjoying all plant-based meat brands over the last few years.
One problem I find with a lot of their products is that their marketing seems off - it is often hard for me to locate plant based nuggets or tenders or patties or just anything. They often say "Chickn", "Pork" or beef in large font with graphics but only write "plant-based" in small text at a location on the packaging which you really have to pay attention to notice. It's not hence, easy to distinguish these things from actual meat by simply glancing at the packaging through the glass.
I don't know whether they want people looking for actual chicken to buy these and give up on returning them later, or whether they're reluctant to highlight the plant-based part of the label as they're often in a small corner in a store.
I’ve been vegan for many years now, and I hate those bean burgers, to the point that I’d rather have nothing than them. I love impossible meat and have no problems with it. I eat it almost every day for years now. I’m almost 40 now and my blood work is better than when I was 30.
It’s funny to hear how a person who eats meat thinks that I should be satisfied with a sausage made out of a carrot. I eat enough of veggies in their original form, but they do not make a great burger or sausages. I also really don’t think that meat alternatives are pushing out anything – it’s the consumers that prefer them. I know I am.
I would like to clarify that for me eating healthy was not the reason I became vegan. We need to stop the torture and extermination of sentient beings for the sake of pleasing our tastebuds.
> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. . . The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.
”Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
> I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day
The reason you don’t see the value prop of beyond burgers is that you’re eating the real thing regularly. As a pescitarian who loves meat, I would bet the farm that if you went vegetarian, you would think Beyond is a godsend.
> IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach.
Similar to how nuclear fusion is better than fission, and self-driving cars are preferable to human-controlled, etc etc.
> IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.
for taste yes, for vegan and vegetarians it depends. that audience is so heavily diluted by a dozen different goals they want to represent or embody.
some don't like the inflammation (according to their sources) that a meat diet causes within humans, in which case this wouldn't satisfy them
some don't like harm to animals, in which case this would satisfy them
some don't like the environment impact, in which case, who knows? sustainability study and audits needed
I see alot of Vegans / vegetarians responding in support but let me say as a carnivore that will never go Vegan / vegetarian I agree 100%,
I have eaten vegan dishes that were excellent, I am not opposed to them at all. One of the best Tikka Masla's I have ever had was vegan. However I can not stand when they attempt to make be believe X is Y meat, no, it is not and no amount of marketing will get me to believe they taste the same. They do not.
Just like Cauliflower Mash does not taste like potatoes, it tastes like puréed Cauliflower...
Exactly, these things are all analogous to eatint something called 'meat pie' to me - Well ok but what is it?
I make vegetarian burgers sometimes, either something grilled(broiled)/griddled stacked up like halloumi & aubergine, or a patty of shredded jackfruit or something. Why would I want to eat nondescript 'vegetarian patty'?
It's not just burgers, 'vegetarian lasagne' etc. is (aside from not being good appealing marketing) a reliable negative signal for a menu.
I wasn't referring to that, so apologies if that sounded offensive, I thought I was making something up.
Elsewhere though, unless presented as intending to be a specific thing from down under, 'meat pie' is a lot less appetising than 'steak and kidney pie' or whatever, because who wants mystery meat (implicitly perhaps the cheapest odds and ends available).
Similarly though to be fair 'fish pie' in the UK & France at least is a slightly flexible mixed fish fare.
For a vegetarian burger option, nothing beats a potato patty burger done to perfection. It's incredibly simple, essentially just mashed potatoes formed into a patty, breaded and fried. It can be seasoned to your liking with herbs, garlic, salt, etc. and the traditional burger toppings nicely compliment it. You can somewhat emulate it by replacing a burger patty with the fries that often come with an order but it's not the same as a purpose made one.
One of the reasons that the vegetian options are more expensive is because the margins are higher. People compare supermarkets based on meat prices, so they accept lower margins on meat to attract more customers.
Another thing is that people don't typically buy brand name meat, which allows supermarkets to more aggressively negotiate on price.
At least this is how it is in the Netherlands (according to a newspaper article I can't find right now).
Completely agree, I hate it when products attempt simulate meat. There are so many delicious vegetarian recipes! I could eat Indian food everyday for the rest of my life.
That's also my experience. Not a vegan but (before covid and wfh) I used to like eating 1-2 times a week in certain vegan restaurants because the food was good and very well prepared and seasoned. The stuff that tries to imitate meat however is nasty at best. Not only it tastes horrible but what's the point of choosing a supposedly healthier diet if you eat that industrial sludge?
I'm not a vegetarian. I recently bought packaged sliced baloney for a sandwich, as well as sliced sharp cheddar. The baloney I accidentally bought was fake baloney. (No meat.) I didn't notice until I was making my sandwich. It tasted absolutely disgusting, like chemicals. I am not a picky eater and I think it is the only disgusting food item I've ever bought in a grocery store. As I tried to finish eating it, I kept thinking, how can my grocery store sell something that tastes so disgusting? I mean aren't there taste tests during product development? My sandwich literally tastes better without it. And not just because of the cheddar - I nearly bought hummus and it also would have tasted great. Hell, a single leaf of lettuce would taste better in my sandwich than that. It was horrible.
The thing is, I think the only criteria it was judged by is that it has to look completely like baloney. It did, it had me fooled. But tasted disgusting.
> how can my grocery store sell something that tastes so disgusting?
Earnestly answering your question, it's because every person perceives taste differently (eg to some people, cilantro tastes like soap!). The complexity of vegan substitutes is high, because they're trying to simulate a completely different flavor. So likely you're just sensitized to whatever happens to be in that particular product. If you tried a different fake baloney, you'd likely have a completely different experience (not saying a good experience necessarily, depending on your expectations, but at least different).
>One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus.
The homogenization of veggie burgers into one particular type of patty is the reason I don't even try Burger places anymore. It used to be that if you had 5 Burger places near you, you'd get 5 very different veggie burgers (e.g. black bean, quinoa, mixed veggies, all with a different mix of spices). Now you basically get the same veggie burger at every place, just with different dressings/sauces.
I suspect it's better in big cities (e.g. NYC) where there's enough of a customer base for a veggie patty and a engineered meat patty on the menu. But in other places, I think the customers numbers are just too small. So I understand the logic from a business perspective, but for some customers it just sucks to have lost the veggie patty.
The point being made was that these fake meat patties are more expensive, whereas the old vegetarian options were cheaper or bottom priced.
I've been a vegetarian for nine years. It becomes noticeable when your meal jumps 50% in price and goes from being the cheapest in a group to the most expensive.
But in the UK the burgers made of veg are at least as expensive as their meat counterparts. On the menu I posted the bean burger is 50p more expensive than beef.
I have had exactly one good veggie patty at a restaurant. The recurring problem is a complete lack of structure so that 90% of the patty squishes out the sides when you try to take a bite. And the restaurant with the good one closed last year, so I might never have a good veggie patty again.
Veggie patties mostly taste fine, but the entire point of a sandwich is that I can pick it up with my hands and take a bite out of it. If the patty can’t stay on the sandwich, it’s not a good sandwich. Just put it on a plate and call it a veggie loaf or something that I can eat with a fork.
Even the older products you get at the grocery store from Boca and Morningstar Farms could be structurally acceptable, but whenever a restaurant tries to make a veggie patty I swear they’re just sticking some vegetables in a blender, putting it in a round shape, and hoping it stays that way. I’ve eaten soups with more structure.
I've been vegetarian for 40years and prefer my food to not be like meat. I also know plenty of people that avoid if too like real meat. Not sure what market they go for. People that dont want meat but miss it I guess. The idea of the latest lab grown meat I also find disturbing
I don't eat much meat outside of the occasional fish but I did welcome the fake meat fad.
It's not that I enjoy eating the product, it's that I need to find protein somehow when I'm at "American food" restaurants (fast food or otherwise). In most of these places there's no veggie protein options other than the "veggie burger" - and the fake meats have made these a little more ubiquitous.
I've been asking myself ever since this beyond/incredible/whatever fad got started: Why spend all the time and energy trying to make something taste like beef that isn't beef? Why not spend that same time and energy creating a new, appealing of its own (and then market that)?
Perhaps to cater to people who love meat but won't eat it? What's hard to understand about that? There are plenty of great tasting vegetarian options, now there are plenty of faux meat options as well. The more the merrier in my opinion.
I think the idea was to disrupt the... looks like $3 billion dollar a year[1] hamburger patty market. This is a market that already exists. Presumably there's room for two main competitors, so pretty decent market, plus vegetarian meat is a premium product which makes it a good investment vehicle. On paper it's a convincing argument. I think the pizza market is pretty well mined-out at this point and the major players are well entrenched since the mid-1990s with tombstone red barron and digornio. There is no national level alternative meat product yet and most americans who eat pizza will eat a cheeseburger. Like the article says though, it looks like they took the inital interest as tremendous growth, and it's mostly plateaued. I personally have zero interest in even trying the product as a novelty.
Meat is a lot more nutrient dense. You would have to eat 4x the veggies to get the same nutrition. Better to let the farm animals concentrate that energy for us. They also eat a lot of grass, which is great for carbon capture. So just eat a balanced meal and be done with it.
> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
Actually, as far as I recall, a counter argument to this, is that fresh vegetables are more expensive since their shelf lives are a lot shorter. I can buy most types of meats (chicken, beef, etc.), freeze them for weeks and the taste would still be great, while fresh vegetables will normally only last for a few days.
Of course you can go for frozen vegetables, but this is only limited to some vegetables, and in my opinion, don't taste as good as fresh vegetables.
"fresh vegetables are more expensive since their shelf lives are a lot shorter"
Certainly if you have sufficient storage, it's possible to buy meat in bulk quite cheaply, some of which might even be cheaper per kg (or per calorie?) than many vegetables, but if you stick to in-season vegies and cook them sensibly (into dishes that last a while), on average they're still going to be cheaper than meat.
Plenty are in the order of $1-$2/kg in Aus. (potatoes, onions, pumpkin etc.) - I don't know any meat that cheap.
I'm no dietitian but how much nutrition there actually is per 1kg of beef compared to 1kg of potatoes/pumpkin/onions, etc.?
My sister is vegan, and whenever we have a vegan meal, I'm already hungry 2 hours after the meal. On the other hand, if I eat a burger for lunch, I might not be even hungry by dinner time. Again, I'm not a dietitian so I'm pretty ignorant about these things, but if it has to do with proteins, I think the ROI for meat proteins is going to be a lot higher compared to vegetables.
I realize this gets complicated, but just another counter argument for ROI of meat compared to vegetables.
Certainly meat tends to have much higher fat and protein density, and hence calorific density than vegetables, but the latter invariably have higher carbohydrate content (meat is essentially 0). Multigrain bread can have much the same calorific density as beef, and nuts are often considerably higher (admittedly, they're typically quite pricey per kg, though not more so than quality cuts of meat).
I've personally not observed any significant difference in the quantity of food I eat between vegan/ vegetarian/meat-based meals, though I very rarely eat meals that meat makes up more than a small percentage of. It's actually the micronutrients you need to be more aware of if you're on a strictly vegan diet, which are unlikely to make a difference in food cost (e.g. B12 supplements are about $9 for a gram, but that can last you months).
Beyond the taste, most Beyond Meat meals also tend to contain more calories than the meat-based equivalent. I am better off to eat an occasional burger when I fancy it, and go for more healthy vegetarian dishes on other days.
One Beyond Burger has 260 calories. There are claims that these are healthier alternatives to beef, but to what end? Calories is certainly not it because this is compared to 230 calories in a same size beef patty.
But what does your spouse think? I'm an omnivore and agree with you. But if I went a year without eating a real burger I'm sure I'd prefer a Beyond Meat burger over the nice black bean burger I'd currently prefer.
I don't think the complaint is that, per se. I'm happy to have these products coexist.
But Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers and suchlike have been actively displacing the existing options in restaurants and grocery stores. To my palate and that of nearly all my longtime vegetarian friends, those pre-existing options were much more palatable. My (pesca) kids won't even eat these meat analogue products; they think they're disgusting. I do appreciate that these products might be making it easier for other people to cut back on their meat consumption, but I also think it's fair to miss a reduction in the already meager selection of convenience foods that I liked.
Maybe, but it really shouldn't come as a surprise that there is a correlation between people who don't really like meat and people who choose to become vegitarian.
It doesn't even have to look like a burger patty. The best burger I've ever had was a portobello burger with blue cheese. Just the head of the portobello, blue cheese melted over it, in a bun with all the works.
Exactly. Even if I was a vegan I would not touch heavily processed food like beyond meat. The distinction between processed vs non-processed is much more important to me than the vegan vs non-vegan.
I eat meat, but I’d replace all my meat consumption with plant based options if it was a similar substitute and matched the price.
But I also want the black-bean burger option, because, as you said, it’s a different taste.
So I think (I hope anyway) that there’s room for both the vegetarian options that are their own thing, and vegetarian options that aim to be a 1:1 replacement.
Maybe they shouldn't just imitate meat. Go beyond or extend the traditional meat, meaning make it more tasteful with better texture. Create new flavors, play with chewiness etc.
As a vegetarian since childhood in the 80s it’s incredibly sad to have seen all the progress made in both shops and restaurants thrown away. Even before meat alternatives, menus were getting blander with a focus on dairy-free options (to be clear, vegan food can and should be extremely tasty, decadent even, but it’s also the dumping ground for healthy options in most menus). That the main options are now explicitly meat flavoured is adding insult to injury.
Veggie burgers can be quite delicious with all the traditional burger toppings, and I'm a pretty big traditional burger fan. The beyond ones always taste kind of dry to me.
>A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."
So much, this, I have been vegetarian my whole life and quite honestly the idea of eating something that tastes like meat is almost as unappealing as the idea of eating meat. I get that it helps people give up, but it's not for me.
Moreover, I dont think vegetables even need to replace meat in position — vegetables allow for other forms of food formats.. so utilize it. Every time I go to vegan restaurants I get the feeling they don’t actually like vegetables; everything is vegetable-replacements for meat-based dishes. And the tofu crafting is just baffling, with the whole chickin and bacin and whatnot
Agreed, I haven't had meat in a few years now but the key to cooking vegan and vegetarian is to let it be its own thing and not try to make it taste like some specific 'meat' flavor.
Unless the cook has a flame grill or knows their business very well I also find beyond/impossible 'meat' to taste worse than a decently prepared seitan or bean based patty.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.
This is something I always have to highlight to folks. In Australia, personally speaking, the best veggie burger is call the 'Not burger'. It doesn't taste like Meat, it just tastes good! There is a reason why they haven't changed it in almost 20 years I have known about it.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.
I'm not a vegan nor a vegetarian. I just sometimes think I eat too much meat and check out vegetarian restaurants. They all have 100 kinds of fake burgers and little else.
There are thousands of good food recipes without meat. Why are you trying to sell me burgers?
Because in the American society, food == burgers. If you don't want to eat meat, you need to replace the meat bit from a burger.
In many other cuisines, there are naturally non meat dishes, just look at the Indian cuisine. Heck, even my own country cuisine, Romania, has plenty of meat free dishes that taste very good.
I really don't understand why people want to simulate the taste of meat. It seems like a completely uninteresting problem to solve, plant foods are already perfectly fine.
The availability of "perfect substitutes" for meat wouldn't affect my food choices at all and this is likely true for a lot of people.
The other very annoying trend is to remove the vegetarian option and only have a vegan one. My wife is a vegetarian and obviously the food can be far better if you can have butter, milk, cheese, and eggs, but they often insist on only having either meat options or vegan options
Most westerners are not calorie starved. You can get cheap calories everywhere (e.g. calorie-bombs of expiring chicken covered in oil and salt, roasted and sold super cheap to get rid of them ASAP). Reductio ad absurdum - just eat palm oil. I would argue it's not a good metric.
Same. I ate plenty of vegetarian or vegan stuff that's just tasty food.
I'm already picky for burger meat, I'd rather have plain sandwich than burger with mediocre meat, and at best those emulate that, mediocre burger meat, at cost of way more processing.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.
Sure, you are married to a vegan and learned to appreciate the taste. In the same way, I enjoy a level of Indian spices that would make an average American's eyes bulge out. But for habitual meat eaters there is nothing that really replaces the texture, the feeling of substantial satiety, reality of not being hungry again for 8 hours... To each their own?
> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
We have herds of goats eating dry brush to prevent wildfires around here. I don't suppose you would enjoy THAT vegan dish? :-)
I can't understand why some entrepreneur saw vegetarian food existing, and decided to make a startup about ultraprocessed vegetarian food. It's as if they thought ideology was more important than health or environmental benefits.
> can't understand why some entrepreneur saw vegetarian food existing, and decided to make a startup about ultraprocessed vegetarian food
I'm a fan of real meat. But isn't the environmental impact of Beyond Meat lower than that of meat meat? Sure, a vegetarian meal would be even lower. But that's not the competition. Those folks are already eating vegetarian, or so the thinking goes.
It seems fairly apparent to me that vegetarian != minimally-processed. Definitely a lot of "junk-food vegans" who eat lots of chips and other heavily processed food. Processed also != bad for the environment or for health.
Don't get me wrong -- I think there can totally be some questions around health and environmental impacts of vegetarian/vegan foods entering the market! But I think the mapping between "there are preservatives in it" and "it's bad" is, uhh, not necessarily strong.
Thank you for sharing your personal anecdotes and opinions. However true they may be, I'm kinda concerned that this sort of post is at the top of a highly commented Hacker News thread.
I don't like beans, peas and lentils. I do however love plant-based meat. There is a market for people like me but I don't know if it justifies the valuation of these companies.
One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."
The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.
> Some say the slowdown in sales is a product of food inflation, as consumers trade pricier plant-based meat for less-expensive animal meat.
Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.