> Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?
I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).
Which brands have you tried? There's a wild diversity, and I suspect even with dairy cheeses you could try many kinds and think it's "missing" something (compared to another type of cheese, or even the same cheese from a different producer)
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
Agree. However a homemade “cashew cheese” (flavor from nutritional yeast, cayenne, and turmeric) can be yummier than cheese, if not totally realistic. Why the store brands can’t meet that quality I don’t know.
Cashew cheese is so freaking food. It's got the perfect texture for nacho cheese dip and buffalo chicken dip. I honestly think it's better than dairy as the base for creamy soups.
Cashew cheese is really good, but it isn't at all cheese. It can be used in a few applications where cheese is normally used, but not in the vast majority of them.
Anything that tries to be like actual cheese fails miserably and trends to be mostly fat (coconut) and starch with flavour added. Nutritionally terrible, usually very low protein compared with real cheese. At least with cashew cheese you are eating (mostly) cashews with some flavour added. Still higher in fat and lower in protein than a low fat cheese, but at least it isn't just starch and fat.
I use the liquid from sauerkraut or picked gherkins, garlic, onion powder and some salt, with the obligatory nutritional yeast. Just think of it as a nice pate.
Yes, and the lack of protein is horrible. When you are vegetarian, you partially substitute meat with cheese --- no way with these vegan look-like-cheese-somewhat products.
it's like 1.3g of protein per 100g (pseudo pasta 'cheese') vs 32g per 100g (Parmigiano-Reggiano) or 23g per 100g for Emmental cheese.
Depends a little on how puritanical you are - Trader Joe's makes a decent 'Mozarella Style' shredded cheese that's mostly almonds, but has casein from real cheese (to make it melt) and some flavor from parmesan. 40g of protein in a bag, not terrible, but not vegan, just less-dairy.
I find Violife feta cheese to be more delicious than real feta for snacking, and can devour a pack in one sitting if I'm not paying attention. It's a bit different from real feta, in that it's a lot less briny. Thus in recipes like Greek salad real feta is still better.
Sorry if this sounds too grumpy, but if you're outside the EU then you don't know what "real feta" tastes like because you've only tasted imitation feta from cow's milk. Real feta is made in Greece with sheep and optionally up to 20% goat's milk and even a lot of the feta that is exported from Greece with the PDO symbol on it is awful and tasteless, like a block of watery, salted gypsum. So I can understand why you'd say you think Violife "feta cheese" is more delicious than "real" feta. Because that's not real feta, either.
It might be a matter of taste and also certain kind of cheese might be harder to replicate. My partner and I also tried a lot of vegan brands, and while we disliked most (they were fine but not comparable), we both found the "original" Violife line to be really good.
Mrrweelll... to be fair, the kind of mass-produced cheese most people recognise as "cheese" these days is not that great either. And most commercial cheese basically tastes the same, no matter what it says it is. That's because it's made with the same industriallly produced lyophilised lactic acid bacteria cultures. The job of those cultures is to give cheese its tastes and flavours and since everyone buys the same brands from the same few makers, everybody's cheese tastes the same.
What's worse, outside the EU you can find cheese with names like "feta", "parmesan", "mozzarella", "camembert" etc, that are nothing like the real deal (pet peeve: feta sold in the US is made with cow's milk). So most people who eat cheeses with these names outside the EU are eating substitutes of very inferior quality. From there, to eating plant-based "cheese" and feeling like you eat the real deal it's not such a big distance.
>For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
(partner is also vegan) - Miyoko Garlic Herb is the only one I've ever had that is "good" in my opinion.
It's definitely not cheese, but as a picnic cheese/crackers situation I actually might like it more than a cheese version.
Yeah I don't think any substitute foods will fare well when eaten on their own but they shine when they're part of a larger dish. And if you're only eating real cheese when its by itself like on a charcuterie board that's already a huge improvement!
I have eaten some that will easily surpass anything you will find in an American convenience store. Sure they aren’t for aficionados but that pass for accompaniment on wraps etc.
Maybe give it another try, at least in some contexts. These days it's gotten into fast food, and IMO? I can tell the difference between an Impossible Whopper and a regular one, but both are about as good to me. I wouldn't miss it if the regular one went away.
I didn't care for the first iteration of the Impossible burger either. I thought it tasted just like a Morning Star Farms Grillers Prime, making it nothing special in veggie-burger land.
However, it seems to have improved significantly, to the point that twice now I've thought they accidentally gave me real beef, had a meet-eating friend confirm, and after talking to the waiter and cook and taking a much closer look decided I was wrong.
I love Beyond burgers too, but they are more distinct from real beef as far as my >10yr vegetarian tongue can tell.
In a blind taste test put on for friends people thought the Impossible was actually the real deal and the beef burger was the fake "meat" product.
Both burgers were made with the same spices and were grilled on a charcoal grill.
People are happier to replace their hamburger meat with Impossible instead. Beyond Meat has slightly different flavor that people were able to pick out as "fake meat".
What were you using for the "real deal" though? If it was a frozen patty that included textured vegetable protein and other things alongside beef, as so many do, I can understand. I can't understand mixing up an Impossible burger with a decently cooked 100% beef patty.
It depends what you are comparing it against. I've had the Burger King meatless Whopper and found it was no worse than the normal Whopper. If you didn't tell me and I wasn't paying attention might not even notice. But eaten 'naked' side by side with a real high quality meat patty, there is no way you can confuse one for the other.
> The answer is no, it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
I’m also all in on the fake veggie meats but have not had a good cheese experience even in vegan restaurants. It’s always some strange bean sludge/mat.
Wanted to make pizza with my two year old daughter a couple of weeks ago. Picked up some mozzarella at the store and when I went to use it noticed the well hidden plant logo and "plant based" text that was almost the same color as the packaging. Figured I'd give it a shot. It was inedible, completely ruined the pizza. My daughter took a bite and said "no, dad" I agreed and we threw it away and got a happy meal.
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
i am not liking the way many of this is packaged. any other product and hackernews would be angry for the "deceptive packaging", but because the hackernews like this product, they are give it a freepass.
I'll chime in as liking it. Or at least, I like the ones that are made from fermented nuts. So, brands like Miyoko's and Treeline. I even make my own fake cheese in that genre at home sometimes.
Others, like Daiya, I won't object to if someone else wants to put it on whatever we're cooking. I'm pretty lactose intolerant, so I can't speak to how it compares to dairy cheese; my personal take from the few times where I'll pop a Lactaid in order to participate in a pizza party is that, while Daiya fake mozzarella is meh, the stuff it's intended to mimic is even worse. I occasionally wonder if there is something to that casomorphin theory that the article mentions, and people who regularly consume dairy largely like it for approximately the same reason smokers like the taste of tobacco smoke.
And then there are some brands, generally of more of a 1990s vintage, that are legitimately gross. Unfortunately, those seem to be the ones that are most commonly stocked in grocery stores, for Heaven knows what reason.
I'm curious, which brand was it? Can you find a picture of the packaging? I'm morbidly curious to see what this alleged train wreck looks like. I've honestly never noticed a brand that I thought was hard to identify. They usually prominently feature language like "alternative" or "-style shreds" or whatever.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
The one I had that plant based logo was a quarter of the size and it did not have leaves like that on the front. Also that white plant based text was a few shades lighter than the background (that was previously sky blue) making it hard to read. Admittedly I should've seen the "style" part and looked further, also I should've questioned why it was the one of the only shredded cheese left in the fridge. It isn't like I was defrauded but that certainly wasn't what I intended to buy, good on them for fixing it.
Leave it to Wal-Mart to screw that up. I bet they were so focused on sticking to the "Great Value" graphic design manual that they ended up deciding that clearly conveying all the critical information on the label would have ruined their branding consistency.
For what it's worth, I can tell just by the ingredients label that that stuff is gross. Potato starch, coconut oil, and some unspecified "natural flavor" that's somehow more than 2% of the ingredient bill? No thanks.
Given that the product is vegan, either plants or fungi. Beyond that, I have no idea how you'd know. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration defines it thusly:
The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
Finding vegan cheeses that work well on pizza is a monumentally difficult task. Miyoko is one of few I've liked for pizza use. I generally don't eat much store bought vegan cheese as I don't love the Kraft singles-type ones my vegan wife has nostalgia for, and buying the nice vegan ones is usually pretty expensive.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
Non-vegan vegetarian here and I agree. The flip side of it is, the dairy cheeses next to the vegan cheeses don't pass my taste test either.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
I recommend buying plain yoghurt and adding to it whatever you actually like. It's less waste usually, cheaper and exactly what you actually want to eat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
So my wife and I are vegetarian and I love certain vegan cheese, the naturally cultured ones where you essentially have a plant product that is cultured with cheese bacteria.
My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
>Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
We can also wait (not so long, either) for increasingly severe heat waves and droughts to harm the viability of the dairy industry in the US. That way scarcity and cost will take care of the job in a less gentle way, but there were be a lot of other incidental problems to cope with.
I bet it would just cause a change in production conditions which would be poor for the animals. It would be far better to find sustainable ways to use the livestock to sequester carbon (c.f. Allan Savory TED talk) and limit their environmental impact instead of giving up good eating.
Your objective is terrible. The ability to eat as much animal products as you desire is synonymous with living in a first world country. A future where we can no longer do that is backwards.
Your ability to eat as much food as you desire is synonymous with living in a first world country.
The ability murder as many animals as you want is not the desired state I look for when thinking about the world in which my child to grow up. A future in which that is synonymous with status is backwards - to me.
This squeamishness is a product of the infantilization western culture seems to be going through recently. Hopefully immigration from 2/3-world countries (e.g. me) helps fix it.
It’s a perfectly legit use of the word. Words are not defined by God; they get their meaning though use, and Merriam-Webster records one such use is “to slaughter wantonly”.
A 'squeamishness' that comes from the reality that we don't need to kill animals to live comfortably anymore. The morality of a rich society is naturally different from the morality of poor country.
Not at all. I live next to a tiny shop in Mexico that sells fruits, vegetables, and some extras like oatmeal and beans and olive oil. I eat healthier (according to research reviewed by NutritionFacts.org) and more cheaply than anyone I know once I decided to limit my diet to only the things they have, incidentally vegan.
I spend almost nothing on food in this shop. Same for all the poor Mexicans who live in the area.
It’s quite obvious that ubiquitous access to cheap animal products is a first world thing.
Let me introduce you to South Indian cuisine... yes, it's not actually 100% vegan, but it goes to show that you don't need to be a Marin County millionaire to eat healthy plant-based food most of your life.
Well, you can choose to not contribute to animal-based agriculture. Similarly, I do not want mine to grow up in a world with forced veganism. Who wins in this conflict? I would say you keep your morals in your court for such contentious issues, to do otherwise is maliciously aggressive.
I don’t know if cows can suffer like humans can or not, so I am content to not get in your way.
That said, I invite you to consider what you would and would not allow others to do given a hypothetical: if you genuinely believed that cows were just as capable of suffering as humans — especially given that cows lactate only after giving birth, and dairy cows live only for so long as their milk is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive.
Most functioning adults can keep quiet about a simple preference (for Star Trek when around Star Wars fans, or whatever) but morals don’t work the same.
> Most functioning adults can keep quiet about a simple preference but morals don’t work the same.
Handling difficult feelings without acting out is one of the definitions of being a functional adult. You may have that backwards, though it is very consistent with the pop culture moral / philosophical (behavioral?) flavor of late.
Counterpoints: every religious war ever. The “war” on drugs. Prohibition. Moral crusades for censorship or elimination of porn. Rules against sex work in general. Sections 64, 65, 69, 70 and 71 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The religious affiliation requirements in the rules of succession of the British Crown. Forbidden foods in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and others. Western prohibition on multiple spouses.
The level of enforcement and punishment varies form instance to instance, from culture to culture, and from year to year, but there are cases even today where religious morality leads to extreme use of force: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/hindu-mob...
If you choose to describe majority of the electorate in multiple elections in a row as “not meeting the definition of ‘being a functional adult’”, then whatever definition you used for those words are not useful ones — and that’s just Prohibition.
Disagreeing with the requirements of sections 64, 65, and 70? Outside of philosophical discussions, most normal people find them sufficiently repulsive that even suggesting they might not be things that ought to be illegal is enough to make you a social pariah. (I’m not sure exactly how 69 or 71 are seen, but the actions they outlaw are demonstrably frowned on enough for the sections to survive multiple elections).
How is the presence of vegan cheese forced veganism ? Let us incorporate the true environmental cost of animal products into the price at the supermarket and have them compete fairly.
It's sad how this whole discourse so often boils down to the two extreme choices of "No animal products at all, you murderer!" vs "So much animal products as I want, you dictator!".
When imho a pretty sensible middle ground could very well be found between these two. But that would involve some moderation, rediscovering animal products as something special, and not just a mass commodity, something neither of the two extreme camps would ever agree with.
> stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
Where I live in the EU, a product cannot legally be labeled as cheese if it does not meet the official definition of cheese, which includes being made from milk.
We also have lots of vegan "cheese" type products with funny names like "Keese" and "Cheez" and some are pretty good.
I like keeping the names clear because no one gets confused and buys the wrong thing.
"The European Parliament has voted in favour of an amendment (no.171) which would place further restrictions on the use of dairy food labels for plant-based products. The use of dairy terms, such as "cheese", "yoghurt" and "milk", for non-dairy products is already banned within the EU, following a decision by the CJEU in 2017, however, under the new amendment, these restrictions would go one step further by also prohibiting terms that liken plant-based products to dairy, eg "yoghurt-style", "butter alternative" or "cheese substitute"."[0]
Apologies that’s a new one on me I guess it hasn’t made it to my neck of the woods yet! I don’t think the similar effort around meats has gone so well ...
In the US it's the same, the FDA has regulations and all the (not real cheese) items have either a funny name ("cheeze") or have something like "imitation cheese product" or "cheese food product" (I've seen a number of different labels over my life) to indicate it's not real (milk) cheese.
it's a good point, and one I broadly agree with. These products do exist, however, like seitan and tempeh. If you making something sufficiently delicious, however, it should be easier to sell than those (IMO).
I broadly agree, certainly so with all the vegan cheese approximations I've tried, but I don't think it applies to cakes. The cake recipe I grew up eating (in a non-vegetarian, lower middle class, US household) was "accidentally vegan". It absolutely passes the test of "if you didn't know you wouldn't know". Incidentally I think impossible burgers pass that test too, and beyond burgers only barely don't.
The main exception I would grant to this is when you have ingredients in a recipe that you need to figure out vegan substitutions for. In this case you do want something marketed as the vegan version of it.
Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.
I don't mind people calling something "vegan cheese" or "vegan milk" or "milk alternative" etc. But I do mind people calling it "cheese" or "milk" intentionally when it's a vegan alternative, revelling in the confusion, just to give the impression that they're interchangeable and it's really no big deal if you get the vegan version instead.
Like, wtf is almond milk? When I was a kid, almond milk was super tasty, and it was basically normal milk mixed in with sweet almond sherbet. What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk? If you asked me for almond milk and I gave you actual "almond milk" (i.e. the dairy kind) and it turned out you were vegan, you'd be pissed off, right?
Well, admittedly, I'm thinking in my native language, which is Greek, and where "almond milk" was basically milk mixed in with "Soumada" [1]. Whereas if you say "almond milk" now even in greek, it'll probably refer to the vegan stuff, and you'll have to literally say "milk with the taste of almond" for the other one.
Soumada is very tasty, a bit like amaretto but without the alcohol. I haven't had it in years ...
A similar and very popular drink along similar lines is "rose milk", which is stirring up some rose sherbet in milk.
It was a popular way of getting kids to drink milk back in my day (slightly less popular these days).
But I admit, if a vegan "rose milk" comes out as some milky alternative made of rose petals and I have to repurpose "rose milk" as well, I'm going to be quite upset :p
In Greek you don't tend to say that, you'd say Γάλα Αμύγδαλο instead (similarly Γάλα Σοκολάτα for chocolate milk, and Γάλα Τριαντάφυλλο for rose milk).
> What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk?
Because that would be crippling for an advertising perspective. It sounds like something out of a satirical sci-fi dystopian environment. The goal is to encourage people to choose it as an alternative to dairy milk, not to use the most precise label.
Lactose-free dairy milk is milk with added lactase, an enzyme that is used by mammals to digest lactose in milk. Now, children, remember from dairy science class: lactose is a complex sugar made of two siple sugars, glucose and galactose. Lactase breaks lactose down to its constituent simple sugars so that they can more easily be absorbed by picky mammalian guts.
Fun fact: lactose-free milk still has all the sugars that made up its original lactose content (you could even argue it still has all its lactose, if you wanted to be really obstinate). Glucose in particular registers as sweeter than lactose and for this reason many "lactose-free" milks have messages on the packaging informing consumers that they have "no sweetener added".
Lactose-free milks also tend to be Ultra Heat Treated, which enhances the sweet taste by means of the Maillard reaction. See wikipedia.
Food is very highly regulated. And for good reason.
It seems totally feasible to require a new product to have a new name, even if it's kind of like an existing product. Think: ice cream. Ice cream is a regulated product with a formal legal definition. Places making cheaper ice cream substitutes were forced to come up with names to distinguish their products: soft serve, Frosty, FroYo, etc.
It takes the consumer all of 10 seconds to get the gist.
Everyone should be okay with truth in food. Especially vegan, who certainly would NOT be okay with products that mislead them into believing a product is vegan when it is not.
Im sure there is a happy middle ground here where nut juice could be called something both attractive and accurate, but not all foods are protected like that. Milk chocolate is not really chocolate, lots of things with "pie" in the name aren't really pie, lemon "bars" are not really bars, choco tacos are not really tacos, peanuts are not actually nuts, and numerous other examples. If they made it illegal to label nut juices as milk, it would due to lobbying from dairy and not from a general protection of accurate food labeling.
Chocolate, is in fact "protected like that." The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) contains a section on Cocao, and foods must meet the legal requirements to be called milk chocolate, otherwise, they'd have to be called something generic a "confectionery" or given a brand name, like "Meelk-Shock-o-Lock®".
Lots of foods are regulated by the FDA or USDA. Mayo, yoghurt, butter, bread, etc, etc. If you search the FDA or USDA site, you'll find the requirements that must be met for a company to use such terms. That's why Miracle Whip is called a "dressing," in the USA instead of Mayonnaise.
The CFR contains a subsection specifically for frozen pies (though, one of the Trump administrations last acts was to gut this). Lemon bars must contain lemons, per food labeling regulations. Peanuts have a section too.
And yeah, industry lobbyists are largely the creators of legal definitions for foods. If you're a beef producer, you certainly don't want other companies to be able to sell ground up bugs as "ground beef" and undercut your prices or give consumers a bad impression of your product.
Don't go there. E.g. Olive oil is considered an animal product for Lent purposes because it used to be carried in flasks made from animal hide. And whether to use almond milk ot not depends on permission from your priest, if they think you are simply mimicking the forbidden stuff it "imitates", and thus still worth avoiding.
This has little to do with the stop confusing the names of things argument.
I concede that almond milk was a bad example, but if anything that strengthens the point.
I bet even back then people had the same discussion in fact :p
What makes that the actual version? Almond milk as an animal milk substitute made from almonds dates back to the 1300s[0]. It's not new.
I hear where you're coming from, but I also question what does and doesn't count as an "authentic" name, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to people thinking that the names they used growing up or the names they ran into first are the "real" ones and everything else is a new fad.
When people are arguing about confusion I'm a little bit sympathetic (although I'm doubtful consumer confusion is actually the serious problem they make it out to be). But when people start to argue about needing to use proper words, I usually check out, because usually they have a very narrow view of what word origins count as proper. They're rarely tracing the etymology of the word, they're usually just saying that everyone should adopt the same definitions that their specific parents used.
So let me flip your question around on you: almond sherbet already traditionally contains milk. What would be wrong with calling almond sherbet... almond sherbet, or an almond milkshake if the balance of milk is increased. That would be helpful anyway, because you could make vegan almond sherbet using a vegan milk as a base, and then what are you going to call it under your system?
My take on this is that vegan cheese/milk is substitutable in nearly every single recipe I make. Many people dislike the taste of vegan cheese, which I understand and think is completely valid, but many people also dislike the taste of brie and I don't see a general campaign to classify brie as a non-cheese. So part of why I call those products vegan milk/cheese instead of "cheeze" is because I think if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and if I can use it in all of my duck recipes often without any additional thought or research, then for all practical purposes it's a duck.
Proper mincemeat pies contain suet and have a very different taste from the vegetarian ones. So yes, in that case it is a problematic name that conflates two usefully distinct things.
Almond sherbet is the sherbet itself, not the milk drink, but I take the point. And I guess almond milk wasn't the best example to focus on, but I was referring more generally to the trend of intentional misnaming that I have observed.
So, e.g., given your 'quacks like a duck' theory, I could happily cook a "mushroom risotto" with mushroomy chicken instead of actual mushroom, and that would still be a perfectly fine mushroom risotto, right? Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass, and all linguistic subtleties of what constitutes 'mushroominess' in chicken would probably fly out the window.
Note I'm not arguing about what ingredients are substitutable for others and thus comparable. I'm arguing about naming, and specifically about naming intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing. So while I partly agree with the 'quacks like a duck' thing, I think a big part of why it's fine to have non-dairy 'cheese', but not fine to have chicken-based 'mushrooms' comes down to which direction of duck-quacking feels more 'defendable' than what constitutes acceptable substitutes in terms of flavour.
Cheese and milk products made from allergens (cashews and other nuts) are pretty careful with their labeling, because people die from nut allergies every day. Your hidden-chicken risotto would make me very ill for a day or two. I always ask before ordering risotto, just in case the restaurant is being careless.
How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.
Honestly? Yes, if you made a mushroom risotto with chicken, and it was genuinely designed to imitate a mushroom risotto, then that's what I would call it: a mushroom risotto with chicken. What would you call it? Would you come up with an entirely new name?
> Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass
To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based".
If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients.
> intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing
I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do.
But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan.
Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using.
An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".
Yes that's what I meant by 'defendable direction'. Feeding 'actual' fried chicken to a person expecting "vegan fried chicken" is a dick move, because they're vegan. But the reverse would probably just be seen as a 'harmless "educational" joke', even though it's still equally dickish. But this perceived defensibility imbalance is partly what creates this confusion-inducing cavalier appropriation of food names.
I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.
Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going.
I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences.
My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well.
> It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument:
First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling.
Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling.
I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/egg...
Huh? Almond milk goes back 500 years and has always, always been made of only almonds. It would be very strange to rename it after 200 generations and several civilizations have come and gone.
Bah! I think you may be right. A quick google corroborates it was referenced in english as early as the 14th century. I’ve been annoyed at the term milk for non lactose based liquids for a while now. I’d assumed it was modern marketing usurping the term. Now I have to find some other thing to be mildly annoyed at.
Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.
As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.
They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.
Much simpler to assume that selling to omnivores opens a much larger market than selling only to vegans. Omnivores want to eat cheese, and are not looking for "fermented cashew cubes", but might try "cashew cheese" if it was with the cheese and (cheaper/healthier/prettier/recommended by a friend).
I wish vegan cheese would be more specific as to what it's imitating. "Cashew cheese" is less helpful than "cashew paneer (great in curries!)" or "melty cashew mozzarella" or something that describes what facet of real cheese they've managed to get right.
Fun factoid: in Chinese, there are different terms for soy juice (豆浆 doujiang), freshly made from soy and meant to taste like it, and Western-style soy milk (豆奶 dounai), which adds in all sorts of weird additives, particularly oil, and ends up tasting like neither. The latter did not exist in China until the concept was imported from the West, and remains far more niche (coffee shops, packaged drinks) than the original.
We don't need to invent new anything. So many great vegan dishes have existed for centuries and survived against meat on their own merits. Proper falafel with tabouleh and tahini is amazing. Chana or brinjal masala are a treat. Pasta with a simple 4 ingredient Napoli is the ultimate comfort food. Don't even get me started on dosa. Hell, fucking bread dipped in olive oil is good.
Yet, for God knows what reason, whenever some vegan is trying to convince me of the merits of their diet, they hand me some godawful dry sausage made of hydrolysed soy protein and say "see, it's just like a real sausage. Did you know she's Paul McCartney's daughter?". Or some fermented cashew nuts smeared on a piece of bread that they think is anything remotely like cheese. I have never understood this and have since reached the conclusion that most vegans are closer to paleo, gluten-free (not coeliac) and other alternative diet folk in that they just don't "get" people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food.
Why would you think Paleo food choices aren't appreciated by people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food? Paleo/Primal foods are the most satisfying, tastey and healthy foods. The feelings around food are evolutionarily rooted. We are always going to be most satisfied by the foods that are best for us, it's by design.
There is an epidemiological experiment that has been going on for over a million years. It resulted in a population of 8 billion homo sapiens. That is not actually good for the Earth, but if you want to know what to eat, to maximize your health as an individual, look that way.
>Why would you think Paleo food choices aren't appreciated by people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food?
Mainly it's the language that is used by people who adhere to diets such as this. There is more reference to the health properties of various ingredients than there is the art of cooking, and this feels alien to people like myself. Of course, there are paleo foodies (just as there are vegans), but they are in the minority.
I'm not saying the way you see things is wrong (if anything, the fact that you're almost certainly healthier than me is strong evidence to the contrary), but for evangelists of alternative diets there is a cultural barrier to overcome that vegans especially seem to just not be aware of.
> We are always going to be most satisfied by the foods that are best for us, it's by design.
Not with modern food science. A lot of people consider cornsyrupy sugar water to be satisfying because companies have collectively spent billions and decades in R&D and marketing to make it taste and look as satisfying as possible.
It works because our sense are not infallible, they can be tricked and purposefully mislead. Just like taste expectations are often built from childhood on.
Agreed. I explained benevolent bacon to someone as “you’re not going to think ‘wow it’s like I just ate bacon’ but you might think ‘ok I don’t need to eat bacon when I’ve had that’.” For me, anyway, certain key flavors and textures are there, but it’s still a new experience itself.
I tend to agree with this. I'm not a vegetarian, but if I were, I'd wouldn't eat imitation animal products anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer.
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
I agree completely but one exception for me is using Boca burger as a sub for ground beef. If I chop them up, season them and then use the result in chili or something it really does give it, to me anyway, the "taste" and "texture" of ground beef.
I know I'm tasting the seasoning I used and the infusion of other flavors from the chili more than the taste of the soy burger but my stomach doesn't care, to me it's just as satisfying as chili (or stew, etc.) made with beef.
Thank you! I'll have to try this. weird that it uses a less chili powder than I usually use in my meat chili (roughly 3 tbs for 2lbs of meat and a can of beans). Maybe I'm just used to a ton more spice. I could have been amping it up after going away from red meat
That could be because the chili molecule has polarity and clumps together in fatty environments, like meat sauces and yoghurt. Conversely it gets dispersed by water. That recipe probably has a bit less fat than what your usual meaty one has, so less chili goes further :)
I hear this sort of thing a lot but don't quite understand it.
I've been a vegetarian for eight years, but I eat meat substitute products. I have ethical issues with eating meat and I feel considerably better physically when I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean that meat doesn't taste good.
I'm quite happy to be able to pop some Quorn mycoprotein into a casserole and eat comfort foods of my childhood without having to kill an animal to do it.
(I have to agree about Tofurky though. I'll generally go hungry voluntarily if that's the vegetarian option.)
It comes down to personal preference. I'm with the GP comment for the exact reasons: I don't like vegan/vegetarian products that imitate animal products because they never actually hit the mark.
This attitude isn't limited to animal products either, almost every ersatz product is worse than what it is trying to imitate. People generally don't like chicory & roasted rye in place of coffee, or teas made from roasted barley & catnip. Some people do, but it's not the norm.
However, if you make a product which is intended to stand on its own, rather than imitate something else, then you can often create something pretty good. Think Nutella, which was designed to stretch cocoa, not replace it.
As someone who had been a vegetarian since birth, I almost never like foods that attempt to imitate meat simply because they don't usually taste better good. I'm not trying to replace something I used to eat, and I'm also not disgusted by meat so if like to think this is an unbiased opinion...
For me most imitation meats just don't hit the same notes. One of the mainstays of my childhood was a lamb and leek stew called cawl. I've tried different meat substitutes but none get the right flavour there. Ironically, the closest I've gotten is to skip meat replacements and just put some butter in, it produces the same creamy, fatty taste lamb meat does.
I think lamb is also one that is particularly hard to substitute, IMO.
I feel like you can get a good portion of the texture of beef with some good seitan, for instance. Otherwise, most of them are only really approximate substitutes, in the sense that they substitute what you would use meat for in the meal, not that they substitute directly for a given meat.
I’ll chime in as a long time vegetarian and former meat eater. The more realistic an imitation meat product is, the more it creeps me out. I lost the taste for meat, and I’m no longer used to the texture, and I find it disgusting.
Imagine my disappointment when all the restaurants in my area replaced their excellent vegetable burgers with things like Beyond and Impossible. To each their own, but it’s not just a rational issue of “is this an animal”, but also a subjective question of taste.
I’d bet that anyone decrying imitation meat - or, at least, anyone who generally likes real meat decrying imitation meat - hasn’t had good imitation meat.
If you’ve never tried an Impossible burger, it’s an order of magnitude better than anything that came before. It’s a good burger. It does taste and feel like meat. It doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not.
Quorn I’d also put in the “doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not” category. It’s been around for a long time, but has been curiously unsuccessful in the US. Amazon Fresh sells it. The ground variety makes a good chili. The nuggets are a reasonable facsimile of white meat chicken nuggets.
Quorn’s no Impossible burger though. What Impossible has accomplished really is astounding.
> I wouldn't eat imitation animal products anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer.
And nor shall I drink anything with corn syrup as that's simply an imitation sugar product, nor do I eat chipotle burritos since they're a pale imitation of actual burritos. I eschew Cavendish bananas entirely since, just like a boca-burger tries to mimic a real burger, the Cavendish banana tries to mimic the real banana. You can taste the difference.
My point here is that "imitation" is very poorly defined. Is a boca burger an imitation? Is a black bean burger? What if the black bean burger uses spices similar to what you use on meat patties?
I think that taking inspiration from another food and trying to mimic it (as chipotle does with real burritos) is a valid way to make a new food, and that food should be judged on its own merits. I don't like "imitation meats" that are just pure saitan for the most part, but I'm fine with other imitation meats. It's not the imitation bit that matters, it's the quality of the thing itself, taken standalone.
> I eschew Cavendish bananas entirely since, just like a boca-burger tries to mimic a real burger, the Cavendish banana tries to mimic the real banana.
That's a strange analogy. Cavendish bananas are a type of "real" banana already. They're not "trying to mimic" anything, and are not at all like Boca burgers in that regard.
We drink a lot of non alcoholic beer. I want something more exiting than water even on work day lunches and I don’t like sweet drinks and I’m trying to reduce my caffeine intake. Not that much left to choose from then.
There's a product called Hop Water that hits a perfect spot for me. No alcohol or calories in it, and it is refreshing and hoppy enough to drink either by itself or to cut the oilyness of many bar-type foods.
As someone who has drank 3,000+ different commercial beers, and has brewed a few hundred gallons of homebrew (alcoholic) beer, I'd highly recommend giving athletic brewing companies non-alcoholic beers a shot.
Seconded. Just finished one less than half an hour ago, in fact, because I'm abstaining for a bit after my second Pfizer shot (apparently alcohol is not ideal for the process). Sometimes low-calorie and/or no-alcohol are desirable traits. When I can I'll still go for a Southern Tier or Allagash product, but Athletic makes some thoroughly decent drinkable beers for a different set of occasions.
Members of my family are dry and drink NA beer. I buy it to have it around for them, but honestly it's great for having a beer with lunch, or wanting to drink something that isn't sugar. Even going over to a friends place while I'm planning on driving, go every other beer real vs NA.
Non-alcoholic beer seems more popular in Germany (yes, Germany, where beer is very serious business) than in the US.
I like it a lot, because it's a refreshing drink with good taste and no alcohol, well suitable if you want to drive or just don't feel like drinking alcohol right now.
I wish it was more common in the US (where I live now).
Or ultra-processed junk food in general. Being a vegetarian is a good "excuse" (or side effect if you prefer) to avoid that kind of food but all those surrogates are basically following the trails of junk food. I understand their "gateway drug" behavior but still...
Our local way-overpriced health grocery story, which is always packed with people, is completely stuffed with health potato chips and health dessert items and health pre-made stuff with long ingredient lists.
Maybe it's just the beauty of a free market, you can always make money on social behavior.
Yeah don't get me wrong prepackaged food can be a big list of what!? On the other hand some of it really does seem reasonably made. At least until the Big Evil Food Co buys them out.
This. As a flexitarian trying to increase veg protein to decrease my footprint I find I enjoy cooking with tofu, dried soy crumbs, chicpeas and home made seitan the most. They are also very versatile and do not introduce seven conflicting flavors and colors out of the box. Simple and been on the shelves since forever. Fake meats can be impressive as engineering but before long tend to feel weird, off and/or boring.
Impossible does a great job of imitating meat, primarily the flavor of blood. But as I'm eating less meat, I'm tasting the blood more distinctly and find I actually don't enjoy it at all.
>I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
Where I think the imitations are a bit more useful than home cooking (besides the fact that we do like to have some easy imitation meals sometimes), is levelling the playing field with stuff like fast food, BBQs, restaurants whose cuisine isn't typically vegan. Substituting the only meat part of, say, a burger is easy when there's, well, a substitute.
While I also like black bean burgers, veggie patties, etc (though I can't personally handle portobello mushrooms as a patty, I know tons of people also love that), it's clear that people like having the pseudo-meat option.
I know I do like having the option, especially for cooking when I don't want to make seitan or grounds or something from scratch, which involves following a whole other recipe just to reach my "base protein" that I then cook with.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
It's because people are working with existing recipes they know and dishes they grew up on and have fond memories of. Thus having a good vegan version of those recipes often relies on having a reasonable ingredient substitution.
> I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
I suggest looking up the process for making mozzarella at home. Then then process for making tofu at home. Your instructor was accurate on more than a purely nutritional level.
Is there a tofu equivalent of something like parmesan or brie? I can see how tofu relates to mozzarella or ricotta and I've reached that conclusion myself before, but there is a wide variety of cheeses.
Apparently vegan-cheese varieties of those exist, but I'm curious if anyone took tofu there.
The instructor claimed that there are a wide variety of textures and flavors of tofu, including soft and hard kinds. I cannot personally attest to this.
There are several varieties of stinky tofu[0] that feature both a hard rind and soft center like brie.
Some varieties of 豆腐乳 (Wikipedia translates this as fermented bean curd[1]) have strong flavor and creamy texture like blue cheese.
I'm not sure there's anything quite as hard as parmesan (I assume you mean Parmigiano-Reggiano), but there are several smoked tofu varieties that taste similar to smoked gouda.
Sadly in the west most shops only sell silky tofu and firm tofu, which are perhaps the most culinarily flexible, but they are far from the most texturally interesting or flavorful varieties.
Yeah, furu is shockingly close to cheese in flavor. It's very pungent and salty, so you can't just just chop off a huge slice and eat it like you would cheese, but you could probably blend it with creamier tofu/soy milk to make something similar to normal cheese.
One is protein congealed from milk and one is protein congealed from soybeans. This is pretty much what I meant by "nutritionally equivalent". (Though cheese contains a lot more fat than tofu does.)
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
I'm tired of this laziness. I don't care about vegan cheese - I am vegan because it's better for me, the planet, and animals. Boohoo if I can't find some cheese that tastes exactly like cultured milk from a suffering animal.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
Be careful thinking just going vegan is better for the planet.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
From your link, asparagus "the largest environmental footprint of any of the 56 vegetables they looked at, including its land use and water use", with 5.3kg of CO2 per kg of Asparagus. According to [0], "The average footprint of beef, excluding methane, is 36 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram" - so even the worst vegetable imported from the farthest part of the world is 10x better per kg than beef.
Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.
Who the hell eats asparagus for its caloric density? You get plenty of calories from the hollandaise sauce and the potatoes. Given our sedentary lifestyle, low caloric density seems like an advantage, if anything.
And yet you have merely restated that caloric density is relevant, not explained why it would be. (Nutrient density wasn't your original point.) Asparagus is not grown or eaten for it's calories.
Sweet potato is ~30% the calorie density of beef, and causes 0.01kg co2 per kg according to [0]. I didn't ignore the calorie density,I used the worst case comparison from the article the parent shared, and compared it against the worst case of meat.
They get 5.3 kg CO2eq for asparagus because they are looking at asparagus air shipped from Peru. Of course that's terrible. Don't buy fruits and vegetables shipped via air.
If you buy locally grown asparagus -- where I live, that means around four weeks every year -- it's fine.
Stuff that gets put on a boat is in-between; no idea if that's viable for asparagus, it never occured to me to buy it out of season.
The links I shared have a chart breaking down the co2 cost by land usage, transport, feeding and even the worst vegetables transported the farthest have an order of magnitude less of an impact than local beef.
Great, but for lots of people that are lactose intolerant or allergic, it can be good enough. Some are better than others. I am not fond of Daiya, and prefer Violife. You also want to use less of it, and choose or modify recipes accordingly.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
I tried a sample of Vegan Cheese once and it immediately brought to mind Arthur Dent trying to get Tea out of the Nutrimatic. It was something almost but not quite completely unlike cheese. It made me wonder if the person who invented it had ever tasted cheese before or had just read about it in a book or something.
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
We suspected my 2 y/o son had a dairy allergy, so we started buying pizzas with vegan cheese to see if that relieved any of his symptoms. I thought the flavor was horrid, but my son happily devoured the pizza.
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
I find the meltiness is really what kills it for me, in most cases. If you're wanting something to add to a charcuterie board or to put out with your appetizers, there are a lot of great cashew-based cheeses that do a pretty good job at mimicking softer cheeses. They're a bit pricey, but probably close to the price you'd spend on a quality dairy cheese.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
> If you're wanting something to add to a charcuterie board or to put out with your appetizers, there are a lot of great cashew-based cheeses that do a pretty good job at mimicking softer cheeses.
Not a fan of the substitutes either. Vegan meat is okay-ish, but it's obviously not meat and it doesn't have animal fats so it's never gonna be meat really. Also your just fooling your sense of taste, it will adjust eventually, and it seems the more fake meat you eat, the less tasty it becomes.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
Vegan cheese is junk food. When you bake it into mac & cheese or melt it on a hamburger it does a great job. When you want to actually enjoy some cheese it's not even close to equivalent.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
How do you define junk food? Most animal-based products are more “junky” than vegan alternatives. No vegan meat substitute will have cholesterol, for instance.
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
I think what they're saying is that, unlike real cheese, there's always something wrong with the taste of dairy-free cheese. FWIW my experience has been the same.
On the contrary to most of these opinions, there's one vegan shredded cheese out there that makes delicious nachos. I can't recall the brand but it takes just like the gooey nacho cheese of my youth. Probably low-end nacho cheese didn't have any dairy to begin with :)
Nacho cheese is dairy. It's processed cheese so it's made with bits and pieces of real cheese mixed together, and with emulsifiers, colourings and flavourings to cover the fact that you're eating melted cheese scraps.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
I am not vegan, but lactose intolerant. Vegan cheese has changed my life. Mind you that I was not lactose intolerant till about 18yrs. So I have certainly tried most versions of dairy cheese. I love them both. Sometimes Vegan cheese' flavor and texture is suited and in other cases I would have preferred regular cheese. The fail case happens for me when I try to compare these new vegan X with original X at every single detail instead of judging each of them on their own merit.
I think saying it's "not even close to ready" is way over the top. I've been vegan for two years and was a cheese lover prior to that, and I'm happy with the selection there is for doing things like mac and cheese, pizza, a slice on sandwiches etc.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
Indeed good cheese is hard to find as much American cheese has a plasticky texture and bland taste. I've only had success with small dairy farms and stuff imported from Europe. Mount Tam is good.
Have either of you tried Pleese? I believe they're mostly selling to pizzerias now [1] and not supermarkets. They aren't able to scale up mass-production quickly because they use a different approach/ingredients - "proprietary blend of bean and potato proteins" [2].
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
This does not sound like my experience at all. I'm also vegetarian and lean towards being vegan when it's easy enough. And I can't remember the last time I actually bought dairy cheese at the market that wasn't on a prepared item. I do have a bunch of vegan cheeses in my fridge though. In fact I have frequently remarked recently how amazing all the new cheeses are that I've tried.
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
I would say one who says vegan cheese might pass for an alternative to regular cheese has never tasted something that passes as actual cheese [in Switzerland/France].
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
Have you tried Spero sunflower cream cheese? I would say it is less like a cream cheese exactly and more like a new food on its own (like hummus or guacamole, but neutral and pair-able in taste like cheese or butter). The Goat on some toast with a dollop of jam will kill any cheese pastry envy. It is very good, even special. Vegan food is best when it draws inspiration without exact imitation and Spero really created something unique.
Hmm, we changed the title to "The Vegan Cheese Renaissance" (a phrase from the article) in keeping with the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". But "renaissance" seems to be baity in its own right, so I've taken another crack at it above - now using language from the subheading.
I have dairy allergy and all I can say is that I am so happy that these products are getting better and better.
Where I live (Europe) there are a lot of different ones available and quite a few are on the level of a cheap normal cheese.
Same. For me, dairy increase respiratory mucus production which makes me feel a little congested and increases the frequency amd severity of upper respiratory tract infections.
It also hurts my digestive system.
Both are subtle initially and ramp up with continued dairy consumption, so I can tolerate small infrequent amounts.
I suspect many more people have similar issues but don't realise.
Yeah I have exactly this. I tolerate small amounts but I avoid it on a daily basis. And I do love cheese but ain’t worth it. Lactose-free (aka adding lactase) helps sligthly but it seems it’s not the only thing causing trouble to me. All in all, we’re lucky we have alternatives.
Me three. I used to get colds that would regularly ripen into sinus and ear infections, and I haven't experience a single such infection in several years since switching to about 95% plant-based eating.
I'd be vegan if not for cheese, so I hope they can catch up with the beef replacements (which I am 100% happy with at this point). IMO they're not there yet, but are getting closer.
Leaving aside for a moment the morality of eating meat and dairy - is there actually any (health) benefit to the heavily (and I mean heavily) processed dairy alternatives compared to just eating regular cheese?
Not all vegan cheeses are heavily processed, the cashew based type mentioned in the article tends to be not processed more than a normal cheese would be.
With a cashew cream & agar agar base its not so hard to make a cheese approximation by yourself. Really not a lot of advanced processing needed. It gets harder if you want a more accurate emulation though
I'm vegan, and probably not. I've heard that most vegan substitutes are processed heavily so not really more healthy (and probably less healthy than non-vegan options).
However, I do still eat them on occasion. Sometimes after a 30km run, all I think about is burgers so when I get home and sit and have vegan burger with vegan cheese.
It may not be as good as the 'real thing' but it hits the spot :)
After 2 years or so of eating vegetarian I don't think that meat burgers are actually better. First of all, a burger is all about toppings and condiments. And vegetarian patties have come such a long way, texture and flavor wise, it blows my mind. Compared to the boring and ever the same taste of meat it doesn't even come close for me.
Agreed. I've accidentally gotten a few beef burgers since I stopped intentionally eating meat, and at this point I prefer impossible burgers over beef. I still haven't found a sufficiently satisfying ham (always just tastes like bologna) or breakfast sausage (too dry) yet though.
This is also true for buffalo wings. They aren't actually good, they are just a vehicle for buffalo sauce. Fried cauliflower with buffalo sauce is just as good if not better than wings.
My standard workday lunch used to be a chicken salad sandwich with all the toppings. When I replaced that with a mushroom melt I realized I didn't actually care that much about the chicken itself.
A lot of the meat I was consuming was just a matter of treating meat as the default option, not because it was actually adding significant value. That style of eating comprised at least 75%-90% of my meat consumption, and cutting that out turned out to be extremely easy.
The last 10%-25% has been much harder though, especially when my wife and most of my friends like eating meat so much.
Which vegan cheeses have higher protein? In my experience they're all lower. Philadelphia lightest has 11% protein, 2.5% fat, 4.9% carbs. Violife slices are 0% protein, 23% fat (20% saturated) and 20% carbs. Pure trash.
Sugar content without regard to glycemic index [0] is meaningless. Cow milk contains lactose, which has a very low glycemic index. Most milk replacements use maltose, which has almost double the glycemic load, making them significantly less healthy than actual milk (since they are all basically sugar and canola oil [1]).
Animal fat and protein cause inflammation, while plant-based fat and protein don't. Dairy contains all sorts of hormones and other stuff (e.g. real estrogen, antibiotics) that people should not consume regularly.
Milk alternatives on the other hand can actually be anti-inflammatory because they contain antioxidants. Whether that still holds true for processed versions of it... probably depends!
The other big risk factor in cheese is saturated fat. I don't know if plant-based cheese is generally healthier in that respect.
The first paragraph is just things you’ll hear on NutritionFacts.org with some research papers you can review for yourself. Which was weird to hear in a culture where meat and even dairy are heralded for their supposed nutritional (like protein) superiority. I think his “Evidence Based Weight Loss” video touches on these points all in one place if you are interested. There might be an accompanying article with simpler links to the papers he cites, but too lazy to check on mobile.
Edit: Also keep in mind that cheese is a processed food too. I think it's somewhat subjective whether oil mixed with starch and yeast is more processed than milk coagulated with an enzyme (rennet, usually from mold), strained, and fermented. Processed food isn't inherently unhealthy, but both cheese and vegan cheese definitely are.
I had some bad experiences early on with vegan cheese substitutes, so I wrote them off years ago.
Recently I was eating my "standard" sandwich order from a local restaurant. It actually tasted so much better than normal that I asked if they had changed anything, only to find out that they had used their vegan cheese substitute by mistake.
I'll be giving these cheese substitutes another shot in the future!
The food science has been coming leaps and bounds year over year. I've only been vegan ~2 years and in that span Daiya released a new recipe that really closed the gap for great meltability
Just before the pandemic, I was thinking about how cheese was made from milk and how soy milk could (with the right extras) be a pretty decent milk substitute, and wondered if you could make a cheese alternative by applying the milk-to-cheese process to soy milk.
Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”.
The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard cheeses, and works in sandwiches. I’ve not even considered trying it on pizza though.
I think that's because it's got the wrong melting profile. Cashew cheese with either gelatin (if you're okay with that) or tapioca starch compares a lot better. And once it sets you can smoke it too!
I really like Miyokos “artisan vegan cheese, smoked English farmhouse.” It comes as a little round. Ingredients list is all recognizable names, too. Does not even attempt to melt though. It’ll kind of crisp up.
Rügenwalder Mühle makes vegetarian/vegan cheeses in Germany that are quite good when eaten cold, but probably don't melt well.
I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.
I eat a number of different vegan meat substitutes and they're all fine but vegan cheese is still much, much further from the real thing. That said, I Don't think cheese needs to be a huge part of anyone's diet, so simply reducing your intake is fine.
There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle, resulting in the development of more and more advanced food processing technologies designed to synthesize the experience of foods being excluded from the diet.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
This is something I've noticed as well. Sometimes ingredient lists are a mile long. Less so here in Europe than what I've seen in America, but nevertheless it is shockingly less natural. I have always though that it makes more sense to just create vegan foods from what you have rather than recreating the things you are choosing not to eat.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
The ingredient list of an apple is also miles long if you are forced to write it out, you just aren't.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
But, as an example, the Impossible Burger notably has more fat and significantly more salt than its meat-based brethren. Sure, it may be purchased due to a perceived variety of other benefits (sustainability, animal rights, etc) totally unrelated to the healthiness of the product, but it's objectively not a healthier option.
The Impossible Burger has about 12% fat which is quite lean. As far as I understand, the meat in most burgers is around 20% fat. Adding things like breadcrumbs, eggs or onions to the patties will of course change the amount.
> The Impossible Burger has about 12% fat which is quite lean. As far as I understand, the meat in most burgers is around 20% fat.
Depends on the beef. I looked the numbers up before I commented, and a simple beef burger made with lean ground beef weighs in at 11% fat, slightly less than the Impossible version (though yup, I admit, basically equivalent, which is what I should've said).
I'm vegan but I do agree. However, myself and other vegans I know do only use these alternatives on occasion. They're definitely not a part of our daily diet. I probably have vegan cheese once a month at most.
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
To some extent, it's an attempt to partake in the wider food culture while still following stricter ethical guidelines than those food cultures developed in.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
Though I have no evidence to back it up, I get the impression that the popular justification for new adherents to veganism has shifted from ethical to health. Its original definition certainly points to the ethical concern:
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
>There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle, resulting in the development of more and more advanced food processing technologies designed to synthesize the experience of foods being excluded from the diet.
not particularly - would love to see where you get those numbers. many vegans make the choice because it's one of the few things an individual can do to make a (very small) impact on factory farming and a complete waste of resources. in my experience, very few but the uninformed do it for "health reasons" (save for having health problems processing meat or dairy).
"processed foods" isn't always a bad thing. overprocessing certainly is, but adding nutrients to food that would otherwise be left out of a diet is pretty important. there are plenty of vegans with malnutrition and plenty that just "eat vegan" which happens to be a steady diet of oreos.
> In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
That's because your argument is that "vegan means healthy and not processed"
It's basically abusing the single metric. You can put "Vegan" on your label if you follow very specific rules and anything outside of those rules is far game. The folks that consume these products have mostly that label and marketing to go by.
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
The justification is that they are temporary/bridging foods while transitioning to a whole foods diet.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
> There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle ...
I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
That's why I said "often embraced", not "always embraced". :)
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
Sure, plenty have done it for health reasons, but your comment implied that it was the majority reason. Maybe it is, but I don't know of any good statistics on this.
As to whether the plant-based substitutes are healthier, they probably are when compared to the thing they're replacing in nearly all cases. But if you want to optimize your health I'd expect a plant-based diet based on less processed foods would be much better.
I totally get ethical vegetarianism, and appreciate that much animal abuse can occur within the dairy industry, but I don't think that's inherent. Of course, believing that and shopping ethically requires a great deal more selectivity and research (and willingness to pay more for food whose provenance can be trusted).
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
Using an example of something that exists in nature like aphids/ants to justify human behavior is a fundamentally flawed argument because quite simply: ants aren't humans, we're quite a bit more sophisticated and have far more reach/impact which comes with greater responsibility and consequences.
Putting that aside for the moment because it is a rabbit hole, there is a continuum of what people think constitutes animal abuse.
One the worst side of the spectrum (IMHO), are CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are the first things you read about when you research animal cruelty. They're the videos of hundreds of thousands of cows standing kneed deep in their shit their whole lives and pumped full of antibiotics. And yet, some people look at this and go, "Yeah, I'm cool with that."
On the other side of the spectrum, we have vegans who do not use any products derived from animals.
In between we see efforts to mitigate the cruelty, such as: free range vs. constricted cages where movement is impossible; feeding them diets of foods they would find in nature (instead of feeding cows ground up chickens); not forcing them to grow so much meat they cannot move (chicken breasts; growth hormones in cows); not forcing them to produce so much milk their udders tear and become infected so they are injected with antibiotics, etc.
For example, there is a cattle farm 10 miles from my house that has about 20 head of cattle, and you can purchase one as part of a co-op a year in advance. You can go visit the cow. You can see how it is raised and its conditions. This makes me feel a lot better than buying plastic-wrapped package from a Save-Rite supermarket. But that's me: some people might laugh at me for being "fancy pants liberal simp" other's think I'm still keeping animals from doing what they would do in nature if we weren't harvesting them.
My point is: this is not an easy answer, and in my opinion how we treat animals that we capture and cage matters. Why? Since reason is a social construct, I can go deeper if you push, but it is my choice to not make animals suffer more than they have to.
I've not really encountered the idea that it's unnatural exploitation, to be honest, and I completely agree with your point there. The core ethical argument that I generally see presented for veganism is that once you've advanced past the point of requiring animal products to live a healthy life, consuming them becomes entirely a matter of convenience, taste, and preference. The argument follows, then, that it may not be ethical to subject animals to the realities of modern husbandry simply on account of these reasons.
The question of whether abuse is inherent is largely academic at this point. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the animal products we consume are the result of optimized industrial processes that result in shortened, low-quality lives for those put through them. Whether an animal could, under the right circumstances, be humanely raised for resource extraction or slaughter doesn't really apply in modern consumption.
> I totally get ethical vegetarianism, and appreciate that much animal abuse can occur within the dairy industry, but I don't think that's inherent.
It's inherent. Cows, like all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk. This means dairy cows are impregnated and give birth roughly yearly. It's entirely uneconomical to raise all of the calves, since it would effectively triple or more the cost of producing milk, which is already barely profitable, even with government subsidies. So the calves are killed and sold as veal.
Not a vegan or vegetarian but it's very hard to get past this point. It's definitely insane that we have to impregnate cows over and over to keep them producing milk.
>...all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk.
Wrong. Humans don't need to be pregnant or give birth to produce milk. Lactation can happen with medication or stimulation, which becomes easier as women age. If a woman is not inducing lactation with hormones, she must stimulate the breasts several times a day using hand compression or a breast pump. This is how adoptive and foster mothers breastfeed their babies. Lactation can also occur in men because they have milk glands, which is the reason they too can get breast cancer.
How, then, do you consider forcing medication or stimulation on a sentient being, without their consent? Obviously if this took place with a human, it’d violate several kinds of rights.
Now extend that train of thought towards other beings.
Where in my reply did I mention forcing lactation on cows? My comments were directed at the statement that all mammals need to give birth to lactate, which is incorrect.
If you are having difficulty ascertaining this point, you definitely need remedial reading comprehension.
> animal abuse can occur within the dairy industry, but I don't think that's inherent
There is no economical way to do it otherwise. I honestly don't care that much about animal abuse (I do think that animal agriculture is often environmentally unsustainable), but you can't really play pretend about "some milk not involving abuse"
Milk production involves separating calves from their mothers on a yearly basis. Most are slaughtered shortly after, their stomach lining is taken as it contains an enzyme used for cheese production.
Personally, I am fine with it as long as no extra, unnecessary suffering is caused, but some activists may call it inherent animal abuse.
There is a wing of the ethical-vegan community who disapprove of meat substitutes, arguing that we will never truly do justice to our animal brothers and sisters until we have lost the very appetite for their flesh. So, it is not just those who eat vegan out of health concerns, who are concerned about meat substitutes.
Whoa, I'm an ethical vegan and pretty steeped in theory, and I've never encountered this wing before. I doubt I'll agree with them, but I'd be curious to read if you have anything you can link or cite.
Yea I don't really get the whole 'health food tech' industry. When I want to feel good or lose weight: Chicken breast, vegetables, water, nuts, rice. It's the same old story, people want to be healthy and diet without actually doing any of that or give up the idea that every meal is supposed to be a treat.
There are ethical vegans and health vegans. The distinction can matter and it's unfortunate, but not unexpected, how much people from both camps deal with the contradictions involved between the 2.
I think critiques about what's required to make substitutes is warranted and good for the industry. I also think that increased sales and attention will drive these products towards much better versions in all aspects. So let me thank all the non-vegetarian/vegans who are willing to dabble in these foods once in a while. I truly appreciate any contribution to the reduction of meat intake, regardless of the motivation.
As with anything, all people have different priorities. Some people prioritize taste in their food. Some health. Some ethics. Though usually it’s some combination of many different priorities. Indeed there are different types of Vegans as well, who don’t like to eat processed foods.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
Note that the The China Study book a few years ago (and its accompanying cookbooks) brought some people to adopt a solely plant-based diet, but without necessarily referring to themselves as "vegans". Of course, people following such movements may still be a minority of all plant-based-diet eaters, but they are out there if you search beyond fora calling themselves specifically vegan fora.
I'd love for vegetable products to be processed skillfully enough that I wouldn't miss animal products. It's not the amount of processing that bothers me, it's the types of processing (and the types of additives.) Processed foods are on average terrible, but any particular heavily processed food might be wonderful for you.
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
I don't think "natural" is not a very good metric or goal to begin with.
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
A related question I always had is why many vegan people are pushing so hard for a substitute product just to simulate the flavor of flesh —- many Asian food like Tofu are vegan and natural. Why not embracing and inventing more types of naturally plant based recipes rather than pushing for fake meat?
Cheese is a 'processed' food. It's a long article, so I'm not surprised that nearly no-one in the comments has read it, but it goes into a lot of detail about the many small home-made cheese shops that are springing up with processes that more or less match that of the artisanal cheese making process.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
There has been countless times when I've reached for some cheese on the shelf and then finally noticed the words "cheese product" on the packaging and realize that I didn't actually grab what I intended to... so I put it back and look for one with the correct labeling.
So perhaps deceptive marketing/packaging is how it's gaining in sales?
I strongly doubt that. If the product was inferior, you'd maybe see one purchase from someone accidentally buying it, but it wouldn't be sustained.
People want this stuff. We've transitioned our house to vegan milks because, quite frankly, we like them better and they don't have the same awful externalities that milk production has.
We still use some butter and cheese, and some vegan butter/cheese. There are definitely recipes where it doesn't matter which cheese/butter you use, and some where it does.
"Cheese product" doesn’t necessary mean vegan. It could be that it contains cow milk, just not to an extent required to legally be sold as "cheese" according to the given country’s legislation.
As someone allergic to dairy, just being able to find more vegan products at my local grocery store is wonderful. Dairy-free chocolate is a lot easier to find.
Sadly, vegan replacements for dairy products generally don't hold up, but having something close is better than nothing.
Here [0] is a series of nine short videos (with text transcripts and links to all scientific sources) on plant-based meat substitutes' health and environmental impact. The reported findings go against your claim.
Nutritionfacts is ideologically driven[1], advocating a plant-based diet. What exactly did you expect?
Actual "nutrition facts" are few and far between. I could selectively cite all kinds of studies that go for or against veganism. They're all flawed in some way, so people can just dismiss what they don't want to hear.
They advocate a whole-foods plant-based diet. Meats/cheeses made out of plants aren't whole foods though. Generally we have to think critically and scrutinize sources cited and if they back up claims made. Do you have some such specific objection in this case?
On the topic of grocery store real estate. It blows my mind how much space meat products take up. Huge shelves of beef, pork, chicken in all forms and stages of processing. It's crazy to me the degree of reliance and attachment to animal products we've been coerced into.
We sure are. But there is no reason to keep eating meat other than personal preference. We don't have to eat meat and given the environmental impact, maybe we shouldn't anymore. Sure things taste different but who cares, we've enjoyed the privilege for a long time, so let's move on.
What I mean is that there is huge amounts of money out there working hard on preventing us to move on through commercials and lobbying, things like that. Recently, right wing conservatism even started using meat consumption as a signal to show that you're not a liberal.
One thing I really don't like about a lot of these meat / dairy alternatives is how they use cheap PUFA oils with their bad health effects vs something better like coconut or avocado oil. I would also put butter / ghee / tallow to the list, but then it's not vegan.
No, not yet. Most of the vegan cheeses target shreds/singles. I would bet someone is working on it, but that it's probably a niche product at best.
I think there are other food items that have that funky, umami tang that those cheeses have though. Plenty of cultures have built up some interesting flavors in vegan food stuffs with lactobacillus.
> Given McAthy’s expertise and scholarship on the subject, it’s not surprising that Blue Heron has been producing the vegan cheese world’s most dairy-esque products since 2016: its dried herb- and wine-powdered rounds look nearly indistinguishable on a cheese board from dairy. But that’s not actually McAthy’s intention.
> “My personal goal has always been that I really want to try to create or expand the boundaries of cheese-making, period,” she says. “So that means I’m happy to use the analogous term that people have a reference point for” — some of her cheeses resemble blues and Camembert — “but I’m just trying to create new cheeses.” This brings up the question of what cheese really is, exactly, and what vegan cheesemakers might be proving is that it’s simply fermented milk. Could be cow’s or goat’s milk, or it could be cashew.
The article talks a lot about artisanal cheese makers applying traditional dairy processes to nut-based cheeses
Much like vegetarian meat alternatives, I find it depends on how critical of a component it is to the meal. Meat substitute burgers are pretty good! But you can’t fake a steak. Similarly, a vegan cheese pizza just isn’t up to scratch.
The EU has protections these sort of brand dilutions. You can't call it cheese if it doesn't come from milk and you can't call it milk if it doesn't come from a teat.
A historical exception isn't an acceptable excuse to muddy the otherwise precisely defined definition further. But that's just my opinion. I'd even wager that coconut liquid may lose its privilege in the near future. Good
Almond milk predates coconut milk by several hundred years even. I remember reading an account by a European man stranded in North America of almond milk but I couldn't find the source again.
If plant-based cheese is ever going to gain mainstream acceptance, it will be necessary to fall under the "cheese" category alongside cow, goat, and other animal-based cheeses. The founder of Impossible Foods has a great framing on this about targeting meat-eaters with a substitute, rather than going after the much smaller group of highly incentivized vegetarians/vegans.
There are multiple legal fights by animal agriculture lobbying groups to exclude plant-based products from using the meat/cheese/egg terms, specifically (IMO) to try to maintain the status quo and prevent these products from gaining traction.
Ultimately there are no natural laws governing language, and given the above acceptance of plant-based products under these terms is a fight worth fighting for anyone hoping to see them gain traction and mainstream acceptance.
I don't deny it, and Vegan cheese aspires to bring processed cheese to those who otherwise wouldn't go near it for containing animal products, rejoice!
More products for the grocery aisles best ignored.
I have tried all the easily available vegan cheeses and have found them tolerable at best, except for one occasion where a food truck served a plant-based burger with smoked vegan cheese. I don’t know which type of vegan cheese it started as or how they smoked it, but they did achieve something that was more than tolerable. Just.
Until the tech improves I will prefer to stick to burger toppings like sliced tomato, avocado and onion. Much, much better. And for pizzas, it’s better just to go without.
In Colorado, there is a local company making small batches of vegan cheese that they also mail out for large enough orders. It's not going to melt like normal cheese, but it does a much better job than the other ones I have tried. Their cheddar is really good. It seems like a hard recipe to crack and this company is the closest to it so far in my opinion. https://www.peacefulrebelvegancheese.com/
Prehistoric humans made cheese (and beer). This helped society to grow. To call these things 'processed' when they have been made by humans using simple things (and have been for ages) is disingenuous at best and ideologically driven at worst.
There's certainly a trope of "...but I can't give up cheese" and as someone who went from vegetarian to vegan: Yeah, cheese is hard to replicate. But also: your body and tastes adapt.
After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.
There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].
This is a great point. My evidence is anecdotal but I became a vegetarian about 5 years ago. I used to hate all of the meat substitutes as the tasted "off". Now, after a few years of not eating meat, I could not tell you what chicken or meat would taste like and I have grown fond of some of the alternatives.
We have blood sausages, why wouldn't we drink some animals milk. Humans have been also eating entrails and brains for a long time, so milk is just another ingredient in the omnivorous diet of humans.
You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.
Ok, I can grant dairy should not be subsidized. It would make it more expensive but that would be fair, and eating cheese would be something a bit more special, as it should.
Yeah, I've found moving to new foods to be relatively painless if done incrementally. Took just two weeks to convert my toddler son from cow's milk to soy milk (Silk brand, for the curious).
First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow.
Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.
You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.
A note for anyone coming across this: soy milk is nutritionally comparable to cow's milk, but other milk alternative are not. Children who receive much of their nutrition from milk should not transition directly to almond or oat milk without considering other parts of their diet as well.
Side-stepping how humans don't need milk after nursing, do you have any concerns with phytoestrogens? The closest thing to a consensus I've found with soy is small to medium amounts are probably fine, but there have been cases of funny things happening with large amounts.
I'm happy some people want to be vegan and I try to be careful and buy cage-free eggs and stuff because the way animals tend to be abused on farms can be pretty upsetting.
Please don't lie when you're selling me food though (or play games to trick me into buying your stuff.) I tried amazon fresh a couple times and accidentally bought the plant based "meat" which was pretty much inedible (if I wanted a vegetarian diet I would just eat vegetables not some crazy processed garbage.) I no longer buy food from Amazon because of this.
Here in the UK there’s a number of small companies making some really delicious vegan cheeses, and some of them are starting to show up in organic supermarkets. Anyone based in London who’s interested in exploring what’s available should make a visit to La Fauxmagerie in Shoreditch - they have all the best stuff. Otherwise, some brands to try are Honestly Tasty, I Am Nut OK, Kinda Co, and Tyne Chease, all of whom I believe have online stores.
These companies are all getting extremely close in terms of flavour, but I’ve not personally tried anything that replicates a stringy melty mozzarella to top a pizza. That’s the holy grail for me.
I am not a vegan but I do eat vegan meals from time to time ...
I would prefer that we develop and maintain true vegan foodstuffs and recipes rather than create vegan versions of animal products.
I am interested in eating an interesting new dish that was designed to showcase vegan ingredients. I have no interest in eating fake cheese pizzas and fake hamburgers.
Exactly. Fried onion rings will beat fake-mozzarella sticks every single time, simply because that dish was designed and intended to be vegetable-based from the beginning. Want to make classic onion rings full vegan? Substituting vegetable oil for lard is far less drastic than trying to come up with a substitute for cheese. Pizza? There are many pizza recipes that do not involve cheese at all! Try a no-cheese pesto or something.
It makes little sense to me. But I suppose I have relatively few food cravings. If you're trying to avoid dairy and and every week you just need cheese sticks or pizza, then I guess that's the market this is aimed at?
491 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
More than I could possibly recall. Violife, chao, follow your heart, miyokos, daiya, parmellas, go veggie, kite hill, Trader Joe’s brand
> For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions
Not a chance that I believe this. Maybe as a minor ingredient in a larger meal but certainly not as a main ingredient or on its own.
I use the liquid from sauerkraut or picked gherkins, garlic, onion powder and some salt, with the obligatory nutritional yeast. Just think of it as a nice pate.
it's like 1.3g of protein per 100g (pseudo pasta 'cheese') vs 32g per 100g (Parmigiano-Reggiano) or 23g per 100g for Emmental cheese.
What's worse, outside the EU you can find cheese with names like "feta", "parmesan", "mozzarella", "camembert" etc, that are nothing like the real deal (pet peeve: feta sold in the US is made with cow's milk). So most people who eat cheeses with these names outside the EU are eating substitutes of very inferior quality. From there, to eating plant-based "cheese" and feeling like you eat the real deal it's not such a big distance.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
Or maybe it's more like beer, most don't like it the first time but after a while you can start appreciating it?
There is no such thing when it comes to cheese. Cheese is love, cheese is life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casomorphin
Orders of magnitude worse than Beyond Beef* / Impossible* (as compared to actual meat).
*just to be clear, I actually love both Beyond & Impossible's products. Extremely close to real meat IMO.
However, it seems to have improved significantly, to the point that twice now I've thought they accidentally gave me real beef, had a meet-eating friend confirm, and after talking to the waiter and cook and taking a much closer look decided I was wrong.
I love Beyond burgers too, but they are more distinct from real beef as far as my >10yr vegetarian tongue can tell.
Both burgers were made with the same spices and were grilled on a charcoal grill.
People are happier to replace their hamburger meat with Impossible instead. Beyond Meat has slightly different flavor that people were able to pick out as "fake meat".
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
Agreed. I eat meat but love veggie burgers.
Would love to be proven wrong!
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
Others, like Daiya, I won't object to if someone else wants to put it on whatever we're cooking. I'm pretty lactose intolerant, so I can't speak to how it compares to dairy cheese; my personal take from the few times where I'll pop a Lactaid in order to participate in a pizza party is that, while Daiya fake mozzarella is meh, the stuff it's intended to mimic is even worse. I occasionally wonder if there is something to that casomorphin theory that the article mentions, and people who regularly consume dairy largely like it for approximately the same reason smokers like the taste of tobacco smoke.
And then there are some brands, generally of more of a 1990s vintage, that are legitimately gross. Unfortunately, those seem to be the ones that are most commonly stocked in grocery stores, for Heaven knows what reason.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
The one I had that plant based logo was a quarter of the size and it did not have leaves like that on the front. Also that white plant based text was a few shades lighter than the background (that was previously sky blue) making it hard to read. Admittedly I should've seen the "style" part and looked further, also I should've questioned why it was the one of the only shredded cheese left in the fridge. It isn't like I was defrauded but that certainly wasn't what I intended to buy, good on them for fixing it.
Leave it to Wal-Mart to screw that up. I bet they were so focused on sticking to the "Great Value" graphic design manual that they ended up deciding that clearly conveying all the critical information on the label would have ruined their branding consistency.
For what it's worth, I can tell just by the ingredients label that that stuff is gross. Potato starch, coconut oil, and some unspecified "natural flavor" that's somehow more than 2% of the ingredient bill? No thanks.
The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
(https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...)
Much cheaper to make. Maybe their target market is "people who buy it by accident and throw it away".
https://www.vitam.gr/proionta
And I was very annoyed. Mostly at myself.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
The ability murder as many animals as you want is not the desired state I look for when thinking about the world in which my child to grow up. A future in which that is synonymous with status is backwards - to me.
Please show me the law.
This squeamishness is a product of the infantilization western culture seems to be going through recently. Hopefully immigration from 2/3-world countries (e.g. me) helps fix it.
I spend almost nothing on food in this shop. Same for all the poor Mexicans who live in the area.
It’s quite obvious that ubiquitous access to cheap animal products is a first world thing.
That said, I invite you to consider what you would and would not allow others to do given a hypothetical: if you genuinely believed that cows were just as capable of suffering as humans — especially given that cows lactate only after giving birth, and dairy cows live only for so long as their milk is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive.
Most functioning adults can keep quiet about a simple preference (for Star Trek when around Star Wars fans, or whatever) but morals don’t work the same.
Handling difficult feelings without acting out is one of the definitions of being a functional adult. You may have that backwards, though it is very consistent with the pop culture moral / philosophical (behavioral?) flavor of late.
The level of enforcement and punishment varies form instance to instance, from culture to culture, and from year to year, but there are cases even today where religious morality leads to extreme use of force: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/hindu-mob...
Disagreeing with the requirements of sections 64, 65, and 70? Outside of philosophical discussions, most normal people find them sufficiently repulsive that even suggesting they might not be things that ought to be illegal is enough to make you a social pariah. (I’m not sure exactly how 69 or 71 are seen, but the actions they outlaw are demonstrably frowned on enough for the sections to survive multiple elections).
When imho a pretty sensible middle ground could very well be found between these two. But that would involve some moderation, rediscovering animal products as something special, and not just a mass commodity, something neither of the two extreme camps would ever agree with.
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
We also have lots of vegan "cheese" type products with funny names like "Keese" and "Cheez" and some are pretty good.
I like keeping the names clear because no one gets confused and buys the wrong thing.
Maybe it’s the case in Your Country but it’s far from being a pan European thing.
"The European Parliament has voted in favour of an amendment (no.171) which would place further restrictions on the use of dairy food labels for plant-based products. The use of dairy terms, such as "cheese", "yoghurt" and "milk", for non-dairy products is already banned within the EU, following a decision by the CJEU in 2017, however, under the new amendment, these restrictions would go one step further by also prohibiting terms that liken plant-based products to dairy, eg "yoghurt-style", "butter alternative" or "cheese substitute"."[0]
0. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=588638a6-879c...
EDIT still ongoing and not yet legislated you can still buy “vegan cheese” for now https://m.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/amendment-171-34-pol...
It’s interesting that your jurisdiction is so proactive in this area!
Between that title, and it having been posted on April the 1st, I find it difficult to take that article serious.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.
Like, wtf is almond milk? When I was a kid, almond milk was super tasty, and it was basically normal milk mixed in with sweet almond sherbet. What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk? If you asked me for almond milk and I gave you actual "almond milk" (i.e. the dairy kind) and it turned out you were vegan, you'd be pissed off, right?
Obviously searching for the various possible terms gives results mostly from recent times, about the vegan almond milk.
Soumada is very tasty, a bit like amaretto but without the alcohol. I haven't had it in years ...
A similar and very popular drink along similar lines is "rose milk", which is stirring up some rose sherbet in milk.
It was a popular way of getting kids to drink milk back in my day (slightly less popular these days).
But I admit, if a vegan "rose milk" comes out as some milky alternative made of rose petals and I have to repurpose "rose milk" as well, I'm going to be quite upset :p
[1] https://www.mycretangoods.com/article/16856/Soumada-traditio...
"Αμυγδαλόγαλα"; I confess I've never heard that word but maybe it's just an old word?
Because that would be crippling for an advertising perspective. It sounds like something out of a satirical sci-fi dystopian environment. The goal is to encourage people to choose it as an alternative to dairy milk, not to use the most precise label.
E.g. lactose-free dairy milk is marketed as 'delac'. It's not that hard.
Fun fact: lactose-free milk still has all the sugars that made up its original lactose content (you could even argue it still has all its lactose, if you wanted to be really obstinate). Glucose in particular registers as sweeter than lactose and for this reason many "lactose-free" milks have messages on the packaging informing consumers that they have "no sweetener added".
Lactose-free milks also tend to be Ultra Heat Treated, which enhances the sweet taste by means of the Maillard reaction. See wikipedia.
It seems totally feasible to require a new product to have a new name, even if it's kind of like an existing product. Think: ice cream. Ice cream is a regulated product with a formal legal definition. Places making cheaper ice cream substitutes were forced to come up with names to distinguish their products: soft serve, Frosty, FroYo, etc.
It takes the consumer all of 10 seconds to get the gist.
Everyone should be okay with truth in food. Especially vegan, who certainly would NOT be okay with products that mislead them into believing a product is vegan when it is not.
Lots of foods are regulated by the FDA or USDA. Mayo, yoghurt, butter, bread, etc, etc. If you search the FDA or USDA site, you'll find the requirements that must be met for a company to use such terms. That's why Miracle Whip is called a "dressing," in the USA instead of Mayonnaise.
The CFR contains a subsection specifically for frozen pies (though, one of the Trump administrations last acts was to gut this). Lemon bars must contain lemons, per food labeling regulations. Peanuts have a section too.
And yeah, industry lobbyists are largely the creators of legal definitions for foods. If you're a beef producer, you certainly don't want other companies to be able to sell ground up bugs as "ground beef" and undercut your prices or give consumers a bad impression of your product.
I will concede, tacos are not regulated.
This has little to do with the stop confusing the names of things argument.
I concede that almond milk was a bad example, but if anything that strengthens the point.
I bet even back then people had the same discussion in fact :p
What makes that the actual version? Almond milk as an animal milk substitute made from almonds dates back to the 1300s[0]. It's not new.
I hear where you're coming from, but I also question what does and doesn't count as an "authentic" name, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to people thinking that the names they used growing up or the names they ran into first are the "real" ones and everything else is a new fad.
When people are arguing about confusion I'm a little bit sympathetic (although I'm doubtful consumer confusion is actually the serious problem they make it out to be). But when people start to argue about needing to use proper words, I usually check out, because usually they have a very narrow view of what word origins count as proper. They're rarely tracing the etymology of the word, they're usually just saying that everyone should adopt the same definitions that their specific parents used.
So let me flip your question around on you: almond sherbet already traditionally contains milk. What would be wrong with calling almond sherbet... almond sherbet, or an almond milkshake if the balance of milk is increased. That would be helpful anyway, because you could make vegan almond sherbet using a vegan milk as a base, and then what are you going to call it under your system?
My take on this is that vegan cheese/milk is substitutable in nearly every single recipe I make. Many people dislike the taste of vegan cheese, which I understand and think is completely valid, but many people also dislike the taste of brie and I don't see a general campaign to classify brie as a non-cheese. So part of why I call those products vegan milk/cheese instead of "cheeze" is because I think if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and if I can use it in all of my duck recipes often without any additional thought or research, then for all practical purposes it's a duck.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_milk
That it's milk with almond. Like "chocolate milk" is milk with chocolate and "milk coffee" is coffee with milk.
From medieval and Renaissance-era recipes, religious rules appears to be the main reason almond milk is used. Because it's not dairy.
So, e.g., given your 'quacks like a duck' theory, I could happily cook a "mushroom risotto" with mushroomy chicken instead of actual mushroom, and that would still be a perfectly fine mushroom risotto, right? Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass, and all linguistic subtleties of what constitutes 'mushroominess' in chicken would probably fly out the window.
Note I'm not arguing about what ingredients are substitutable for others and thus comparable. I'm arguing about naming, and specifically about naming intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing. So while I partly agree with the 'quacks like a duck' thing, I think a big part of why it's fine to have non-dairy 'cheese', but not fine to have chicken-based 'mushrooms' comes down to which direction of duck-quacking feels more 'defendable' than what constitutes acceptable substitutes in terms of flavour.
How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.
> Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass
To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based".
If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients.
> intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing
I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do.
But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan.
Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using.
An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".
I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.
Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going.
I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences.
My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well.
> It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument:
First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling.
Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling.
I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/egg...
Costco does this. They don't call it almond milk but "Almond beverage". I think they do similar with other vegan products.
Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.
As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.
They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.
Yet, for God knows what reason, whenever some vegan is trying to convince me of the merits of their diet, they hand me some godawful dry sausage made of hydrolysed soy protein and say "see, it's just like a real sausage. Did you know she's Paul McCartney's daughter?". Or some fermented cashew nuts smeared on a piece of bread that they think is anything remotely like cheese. I have never understood this and have since reached the conclusion that most vegans are closer to paleo, gluten-free (not coeliac) and other alternative diet folk in that they just don't "get" people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food.
There is an epidemiological experiment that has been going on for over a million years. It resulted in a population of 8 billion homo sapiens. That is not actually good for the Earth, but if you want to know what to eat, to maximize your health as an individual, look that way.
Mainly it's the language that is used by people who adhere to diets such as this. There is more reference to the health properties of various ingredients than there is the art of cooking, and this feels alien to people like myself. Of course, there are paleo foodies (just as there are vegans), but they are in the minority.
I'm not saying the way you see things is wrong (if anything, the fact that you're almost certainly healthier than me is strong evidence to the contrary), but for evangelists of alternative diets there is a cultural barrier to overcome that vegans especially seem to just not be aware of.
Not with modern food science. A lot of people consider cornsyrupy sugar water to be satisfying because companies have collectively spent billions and decades in R&D and marketing to make it taste and look as satisfying as possible.
It works because our sense are not infallible, they can be tricked and purposefully mislead. Just like taste expectations are often built from childhood on.
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
I know I'm tasting the seasoning I used and the infusion of other flavors from the chili more than the taste of the soy burger but my stomach doesn't care, to me it's just as satisfying as chili (or stew, etc.) made with beef.
https://pastebin.com/84cwiJ02
I've been a vegetarian for eight years, but I eat meat substitute products. I have ethical issues with eating meat and I feel considerably better physically when I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean that meat doesn't taste good.
I'm quite happy to be able to pop some Quorn mycoprotein into a casserole and eat comfort foods of my childhood without having to kill an animal to do it.
(I have to agree about Tofurky though. I'll generally go hungry voluntarily if that's the vegetarian option.)
This attitude isn't limited to animal products either, almost every ersatz product is worse than what it is trying to imitate. People generally don't like chicory & roasted rye in place of coffee, or teas made from roasted barley & catnip. Some people do, but it's not the norm.
However, if you make a product which is intended to stand on its own, rather than imitate something else, then you can often create something pretty good. Think Nutella, which was designed to stretch cocoa, not replace it.
I feel like you can get a good portion of the texture of beef with some good seitan, for instance. Otherwise, most of them are only really approximate substitutes, in the sense that they substitute what you would use meat for in the meal, not that they substitute directly for a given meat.
Imagine my disappointment when all the restaurants in my area replaced their excellent vegetable burgers with things like Beyond and Impossible. To each their own, but it’s not just a rational issue of “is this an animal”, but also a subjective question of taste.
If you’ve never tried an Impossible burger, it’s an order of magnitude better than anything that came before. It’s a good burger. It does taste and feel like meat. It doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not.
Quorn I’d also put in the “doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not” category. It’s been around for a long time, but has been curiously unsuccessful in the US. Amazon Fresh sells it. The ground variety makes a good chili. The nuggets are a reasonable facsimile of white meat chicken nuggets.
Quorn’s no Impossible burger though. What Impossible has accomplished really is astounding.
And nor shall I drink anything with corn syrup as that's simply an imitation sugar product, nor do I eat chipotle burritos since they're a pale imitation of actual burritos. I eschew Cavendish bananas entirely since, just like a boca-burger tries to mimic a real burger, the Cavendish banana tries to mimic the real banana. You can taste the difference.
My point here is that "imitation" is very poorly defined. Is a boca burger an imitation? Is a black bean burger? What if the black bean burger uses spices similar to what you use on meat patties?
I think that taking inspiration from another food and trying to mimic it (as chipotle does with real burritos) is a valid way to make a new food, and that food should be judged on its own merits. I don't like "imitation meats" that are just pure saitan for the most part, but I'm fine with other imitation meats. It's not the imitation bit that matters, it's the quality of the thing itself, taken standalone.
That's a strange analogy. Cavendish bananas are a type of "real" banana already. They're not "trying to mimic" anything, and are not at all like Boca burgers in that regard.
If you are happy with non alcoholic beer, stay with that, but have you heard of - Tea?
There are lots and lots of different tea's around, as you can make tea out of allmost anything. So plenty of caffeine-free choices there.
This beer is better than the median alcoholic coffee porter. https://athleticbrewing.com/products/first-ride-coffee-porte...
Their IPAs aren't as good as say, Founder's All Day IPA, but they aren't substantially worse, and they have 1/10th the alcohol.
If you want to drink something for 100 calories, these compare favorably in taste to just about everything, IMO.
Non-alcoholic beer seems more popular in Germany (yes, Germany, where beer is very serious business) than in the US.
I like it a lot, because it's a refreshing drink with good taste and no alcohol, well suitable if you want to drive or just don't feel like drinking alcohol right now.
I wish it was more common in the US (where I live now).
Goya Malta and O'Doul's are the brands I'm most familiar with.
I love that place. From the decor, to their f* you set of rules, to their food.
Great place. Makes me miss ATl :(
Personally I would love a list of animal product ingredients and their suitable vegan replacements when trying to cook after some recipe.
Exactly. Maybe the main problem is that it's hard to market 'Soylent Yellow'.
If I were to become a vegetarian, I think I'd just buy a bunch of Indian cookbooks and stay away from IncrediblyMeatyPlantBasedBurger(tm).
Our local way-overpriced health grocery story, which is always packed with people, is completely stuffed with health potato chips and health dessert items and health pre-made stuff with long ingredient lists.
Maybe it's just the beauty of a free market, you can always make money on social behavior.
Impossible does a great job of imitating meat, primarily the flavor of blood. But as I'm eating less meat, I'm tasting the blood more distinctly and find I actually don't enjoy it at all.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
While I also like black bean burgers, veggie patties, etc (though I can't personally handle portobello mushrooms as a patty, I know tons of people also love that), it's clear that people like having the pseudo-meat option.
I know I do like having the option, especially for cooking when I don't want to make seitan or grounds or something from scratch, which involves following a whole other recipe just to reach my "base protein" that I then cook with.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
Apparently vegan-cheese varieties of those exist, but I'm curious if anyone took tofu there.
Some varieties of 豆腐乳 (Wikipedia translates this as fermented bean curd[1]) have strong flavor and creamy texture like blue cheese.
I'm not sure there's anything quite as hard as parmesan (I assume you mean Parmigiano-Reggiano), but there are several smoked tofu varieties that taste similar to smoked gouda.
Sadly in the west most shops only sell silky tofu and firm tofu, which are perhaps the most culinarily flexible, but they are far from the most texturally interesting or flavorful varieties.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_bean_curd
You can do this with feta, which is soaked in brine. How salty is furu?
I do have a jar of red Chinese fermented bean curd in my fridge, but have only mixed it into sauces per recipes. I should probably try it by itself.
Smoked tofu sounds really interesting.
Indonesians have tempeh which is a bit like haloumi I guess when pan fried, so that's another one.
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...
Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
You've thrown that basis out the window by adding additional foods and reframing the argument.
[0] https://cigrjournal.org/index.php/Ejounral/article/view/3461
If you buy locally grown asparagus -- where I live, that means around four weeks every year -- it's fine.
Stuff that gets put on a boat is in-between; no idea if that's viable for asparagus, it never occured to me to buy it out of season.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
Agreed! They are different but equally delicious.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
I'll say it then - it's all terrible. There's so many great vegan foods out there, fake cheese is not one of them.
These are both true of dairy cheeses too.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
https://youtu.be/4CVzqJWkodA?t=834
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
But cheese? Half the Miyoko's products taste like a finely ground nut paste mixed with mold and spoiled milk.
vegan cheese just doesnt have the same fat and sugar properties that normal cheese does.
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
[1] https://www.pleesefoods.com/availabilty
[2] https://www.pleesefoods.com/products
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
https://sperofoods.co/
But in the end: at least it’s something.
It also hurts my digestive system.
Both are subtle initially and ramp up with continued dairy consumption, so I can tolerate small infrequent amounts.
I suspect many more people have similar issues but don't realise.
However, I do still eat them on occasion. Sometimes after a 30km run, all I think about is burgers so when I get home and sit and have vegan burger with vegan cheese.
It may not be as good as the 'real thing' but it hits the spot :)
A lot of the meat I was consuming was just a matter of treating meat as the default option, not because it was actually adding significant value. That style of eating comprised at least 75%-90% of my meat consumption, and cutting that out turned out to be extremely easy.
The last 10%-25% has been much harder though, especially when my wife and most of my friends like eating meat so much.
Also, I like the flavor and mouthfeel of things like oatmilk.
I'm also not convinced that milk is not a 'heavily processed' commodity. You are just using a pregnant cow to do a lot of the processing.
Sugar content without regard to glycemic index [0] is meaningless. Cow milk contains lactose, which has a very low glycemic index. Most milk replacements use maltose, which has almost double the glycemic load, making them significantly less healthy than actual milk (since they are all basically sugar and canola oil [1]).
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mnfr.201901082
[1]: https://every.to/almanack/oatly-the-new-coke-821556
Milk alternatives on the other hand can actually be anti-inflammatory because they contain antioxidants. Whether that still holds true for processed versions of it... probably depends!
The other big risk factor in cheese is saturated fat. I don't know if plant-based cheese is generally healthier in that respect.
Edit: Also keep in mind that cheese is a processed food too. I think it's somewhat subjective whether oil mixed with starch and yeast is more processed than milk coagulated with an enzyme (rennet, usually from mold), strained, and fermented. Processed food isn't inherently unhealthy, but both cheese and vegan cheese definitely are.
Recently I was eating my "standard" sandwich order from a local restaurant. It actually tasted so much better than normal that I asked if they had changed anything, only to find out that they had used their vegan cheese substitute by mistake.
I'll be giving these cheese substitutes another shot in the future!
Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”.
The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard cheeses, and works in sandwiches. I’ve not even considered trying it on pizza though.
I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.
https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte
The closest brand in the U.K. (and, I think, the USA) is Quorn, which I’ve missed since moving here.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
But, as an example, the Impossible Burger notably has more fat and significantly more salt than its meat-based brethren. Sure, it may be purchased due to a perceived variety of other benefits (sustainability, animal rights, etc) totally unrelated to the healthiness of the product, but it's objectively not a healthier option.
I am not saying you are wrong, but there is a whole lot more to "healthiness" than amount of fat and salt.
Depends on the beef. I looked the numbers up before I commented, and a simple beef burger made with lean ground beef weighs in at 11% fat, slightly less than the Impossible version (though yup, I admit, basically equivalent, which is what I should've said).
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
not particularly - would love to see where you get those numbers. many vegans make the choice because it's one of the few things an individual can do to make a (very small) impact on factory farming and a complete waste of resources. in my experience, very few but the uninformed do it for "health reasons" (save for having health problems processing meat or dairy).
"processed foods" isn't always a bad thing. overprocessing certainly is, but adding nutrients to food that would otherwise be left out of a diet is pretty important. there are plenty of vegans with malnutrition and plenty that just "eat vegan" which happens to be a steady diet of oreos.
> In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
That's because your argument is that "vegan means healthy and not processed"
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
As to whether the plant-based substitutes are healthier, they probably are when compared to the thing they're replacing in nearly all cases. But if you want to optimize your health I'd expect a plant-based diet based on less processed foods would be much better.
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
Putting that aside for the moment because it is a rabbit hole, there is a continuum of what people think constitutes animal abuse.
One the worst side of the spectrum (IMHO), are CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are the first things you read about when you research animal cruelty. They're the videos of hundreds of thousands of cows standing kneed deep in their shit their whole lives and pumped full of antibiotics. And yet, some people look at this and go, "Yeah, I'm cool with that."
On the other side of the spectrum, we have vegans who do not use any products derived from animals.
In between we see efforts to mitigate the cruelty, such as: free range vs. constricted cages where movement is impossible; feeding them diets of foods they would find in nature (instead of feeding cows ground up chickens); not forcing them to grow so much meat they cannot move (chicken breasts; growth hormones in cows); not forcing them to produce so much milk their udders tear and become infected so they are injected with antibiotics, etc.
For example, there is a cattle farm 10 miles from my house that has about 20 head of cattle, and you can purchase one as part of a co-op a year in advance. You can go visit the cow. You can see how it is raised and its conditions. This makes me feel a lot better than buying plastic-wrapped package from a Save-Rite supermarket. But that's me: some people might laugh at me for being "fancy pants liberal simp" other's think I'm still keeping animals from doing what they would do in nature if we weren't harvesting them.
My point is: this is not an easy answer, and in my opinion how we treat animals that we capture and cage matters. Why? Since reason is a social construct, I can go deeper if you push, but it is my choice to not make animals suffer more than they have to.
The question of whether abuse is inherent is largely academic at this point. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the animal products we consume are the result of optimized industrial processes that result in shortened, low-quality lives for those put through them. Whether an animal could, under the right circumstances, be humanely raised for resource extraction or slaughter doesn't really apply in modern consumption.
It's inherent. Cows, like all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk. This means dairy cows are impregnated and give birth roughly yearly. It's entirely uneconomical to raise all of the calves, since it would effectively triple or more the cost of producing milk, which is already barely profitable, even with government subsidies. So the calves are killed and sold as veal.
Wrong. Humans don't need to be pregnant or give birth to produce milk. Lactation can happen with medication or stimulation, which becomes easier as women age. If a woman is not inducing lactation with hormones, she must stimulate the breasts several times a day using hand compression or a breast pump. This is how adoptive and foster mothers breastfeed their babies. Lactation can also occur in men because they have milk glands, which is the reason they too can get breast cancer.
Now extend that train of thought towards other beings.
Perhaps you need some remedial reading comprehension.
If you are having difficulty ascertaining this point, you definitely need remedial reading comprehension.
FYI, I am Gen X.
There is no economical way to do it otherwise. I honestly don't care that much about animal abuse (I do think that animal agriculture is often environmentally unsustainable), but you can't really play pretend about "some milk not involving abuse"
Personally, I am fine with it as long as no extra, unnecessary suffering is caused, but some activists may call it inherent animal abuse.
I think critiques about what's required to make substitutes is warranted and good for the industry. I also think that increased sales and attention will drive these products towards much better versions in all aspects. So let me thank all the non-vegetarian/vegans who are willing to dabble in these foods once in a while. I truly appreciate any contribution to the reduction of meat intake, regardless of the motivation.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan
Doing a quick search seems to support that, but perhaps the trends / reasons are changing as veganism in general becomes more mainstream.
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
Is less processing always more healthy? It's often touted as such but adding some processing can unlock nutrients vs eating raw, right?
Spinach for example, when eaten raw, has less bioavailable iron than if it were "processed" by steaming.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
So perhaps deceptive marketing/packaging is how it's gaining in sales?
People want this stuff. We've transitioned our house to vegan milks because, quite frankly, we like them better and they don't have the same awful externalities that milk production has.
We still use some butter and cheese, and some vegan butter/cheese. There are definitely recipes where it doesn't matter which cheese/butter you use, and some where it does.
Vegan cheese products also tend to be pretty upfront about not actually being cheese too, because they're marketing to people who don't want cheese.
Sadly, vegan replacements for dairy products generally don't hold up, but having something close is better than nothing.
fake meak was proven to be non-healhtly, and now fake cheese
if i want cheese i'll buy cheese, stop trying to sell me fake things as X, because it clearly is not the same thing
meat and cheese are what they are because the animals eat plenty of things and they are living creatures, you can't replicate this
can we stop promoting pseudo VC startups, they clearly are only interested in making money, STOP
also only americans will use "cheese" as a universal word
what kind of cheese? do they know it's not yellow and it doesn't come from an aluminum tube?
> meat and cheese are what they are because the animals eat plenty of things and they are living creatures, you can't replicate this
I mean, you certainly can. Look at the companies making 'clean' meat and fish.
Here [0] is a series of nine short videos (with text transcripts and links to all scientific sources) on plant-based meat substitutes' health and environmental impact. The reported findings go against your claim.
[0] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-environmental-impacts-o...
Actual "nutrition facts" are few and far between. I could selectively cite all kinds of studies that go for or against veganism. They're all flawed in some way, so people can just dismiss what they don't want to hear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Greger
Vegan cheese simply appears: "we've been INFILTRATED"
On the topic of grocery store real estate. It blows my mind how much space meat products take up. Huge shelves of beef, pork, chicken in all forms and stages of processing. It's crazy to me the degree of reliance and attachment to animal products we've been coerced into.
What I mean is that there is huge amounts of money out there working hard on preventing us to move on through commercials and lobbying, things like that. Recently, right wing conservatism even started using meat consumption as a signal to show that you're not a liberal.
I've never seen anything that comes even remotely close.
I think there are other food items that have that funky, umami tang that those cheeses have though. Plenty of cultures have built up some interesting flavors in vegan food stuffs with lactobacillus.
> Given McAthy’s expertise and scholarship on the subject, it’s not surprising that Blue Heron has been producing the vegan cheese world’s most dairy-esque products since 2016: its dried herb- and wine-powdered rounds look nearly indistinguishable on a cheese board from dairy. But that’s not actually McAthy’s intention.
> “My personal goal has always been that I really want to try to create or expand the boundaries of cheese-making, period,” she says. “So that means I’m happy to use the analogous term that people have a reference point for” — some of her cheeses resemble blues and Camembert — “but I’m just trying to create new cheeses.” This brings up the question of what cheese really is, exactly, and what vegan cheesemakers might be proving is that it’s simply fermented milk. Could be cow’s or goat’s milk, or it could be cashew.
The article talks a lot about artisanal cheese makers applying traditional dairy processes to nut-based cheeses
Certainly there’s a lot of debate about “cheese” even before getting into vegan
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coconut%20milk
Milk is already used for non animal milks as coconut shows, so I don't see this doing anything pro-consumer.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/almond%20milk https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/almond-milk-obsession-...
There are multiple legal fights by animal agriculture lobbying groups to exclude plant-based products from using the meat/cheese/egg terms, specifically (IMO) to try to maintain the status quo and prevent these products from gaining traction.
Ultimately there are no natural laws governing language, and given the above acceptance of plant-based products under these terms is a fight worth fighting for anyone hoping to see them gain traction and mainstream acceptance.
More products for the grocery aisles best ignored.
Until the tech improves I will prefer to stick to burger toppings like sliced tomato, avocado and onion. Much, much better. And for pizzas, it’s better just to go without.
After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.
There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpellmanrowland/2017/06/2...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8447883/milk-health-benefit
You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.
The fact that demand for dairy was "manufactured" is somewhat orthogonal to whether or not it is for-profit.
Vegan cheeses aren't subsidized at 73 cents on the dollar, dairy is.
First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow. Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.
You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.
Please don't lie when you're selling me food though (or play games to trick me into buying your stuff.) I tried amazon fresh a couple times and accidentally bought the plant based "meat" which was pretty much inedible (if I wanted a vegetarian diet I would just eat vegetables not some crazy processed garbage.) I no longer buy food from Amazon because of this.
These companies are all getting extremely close in terms of flavour, but I’ve not personally tried anything that replicates a stringy melty mozzarella to top a pizza. That’s the holy grail for me.
I would prefer that we develop and maintain true vegan foodstuffs and recipes rather than create vegan versions of animal products.
I am interested in eating an interesting new dish that was designed to showcase vegan ingredients. I have no interest in eating fake cheese pizzas and fake hamburgers.
It makes little sense to me. But I suppose I have relatively few food cravings. If you're trying to avoid dairy and and every week you just need cheese sticks or pizza, then I guess that's the market this is aimed at?