I don't understand how can those companies afford to put those fake meat sections on all supermarkets across the globe. At least in my european country all supermarkets seem to have this section and from what I've been told most of the products just end up being thrown away because nobody is buying them.
I assume they expect to lose a lot of money now but then to make it big at some point in the future. But those companies seem to be global multinationals and rely on global supply chains to create their products. And if the future requires decarbonization and reducing energy consumption, wouldn't that mean that complex global supply chains will be drastically reduced, and food production will move back to a more local level?
You can be 100% sure aldi, or lidl wouldn't put it out there if it wasn't massively profitable. The margins on these products are probably big so even if it doesn't sell well in one region, other regions make up for it.
Also, there are items that may not themselves generate lots of profit but do attract customers who spend a lot as well. Like if you have the plant based meats, I can probably pick up the plant based milks, and the produce, and maybe some snacks, etc.
tbf the selection of artificial meats tends to be very limited in Aldi or Lidl. But that's largely for a different reason: in the more upmarket supermarkets which devote large displays to "meatless meat", it tends to be priced at equal or higher prices than the "premium" processed meat it competes with, even when it's just sausages made of vegetables, not lab-grown stuff with tricky textures. They're not pitching it at those prices because it doesn't sell...
> And if the future requires decarbonization and reducing energy consumption, wouldn't that mean that complex global supply chains will be drastically reduced, and food production will move back to a more local level?
Food production won't move back to a more local level, you lose the economies of scale. You get more expensive products and more pollution, not exactly what we want.
It's possible that the supermarkets did some market research that misled them about how popular these products would be, but there is another option.
Supermarkets can arrange all sorts of deals with suppliers. In some cases, the supplier will pay the supermarket to stock a new product, hoping that high margin sales or even just market penetration make it worth it.
Not necessarily, supermarkets have a built in expectation of some loss to spoilage already. A lot of those fake meat products have a pretty long shelf life since they are highly processed/frozen products and tend to be marketed in a very small footprint within the store. They are also priced to counter any spoilage expectation. So low stock requirements, small footprint, and consumer expectation that it’s an expensive product doesn’t really make that a false claim. They also could be considered a loss leader to attract vegan and vegetarians to buy the other vegetarian friendly foods they sell.
> most of the products just end up being thrown away because nobody is buying them
There's also a problem with discovery: If the meat alternative section is directly adjacent to the real meat, vegetarians and vegans are a lot less likely to discover it.
This just isn't true. It is actually really common to have this section near the meats.
Vegetarian meats are usually (but not always) either kept chilled or frozen, so it simply gets put somewhere around dairy and meat. For refrigerated sections, it is usually but not always in its own section. For the freezers, it is just kept in a section with space.
Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes it is just mixed in with regular product. Vegan cheese with the cheeses and ground "meat" with the other ground meat.
Most vegetarians and vegans I know seek the stuff out and learn where to look for it - including myself (not quite vegetarian, but a pescetarian that leans very heavily towards veggie)
Looking at Beyond Meat you are probably right - their shares are in tatters, they are bleeding money without any prospects to break even. Maybe only second generation of meatless companies will make it.
This is a tangent, but so much of the supermarket nowadays is junk.
Go to the protein section, and there is literally no product that is just protein, everything has added artificial sweetener or some lab concoction with god knows what.
Go to the frozen food section. 80% junk. Ice cream, frozen potato chips, frozen pizzas. Oh look, some frozen fruit in the corner.
Go to the cereals section. 80% junk. If you look really hard, you can find some wholegrain cereal without added sugar.
Is this the equivalent of when social media companies optimize heavily around taking advantage of dopamine spikes in their customers, instead of doing things in their customer's actual best interests?
Speaking to an older relative, things were not like this in the mid 20th century.
How much cheaper would food be if the healthy staples could be bought in bulk, and our supply chains and packaging were optimized around that?
Frozen fruit is usually in its own section and isn't often mixed in with the vegetables. I'm more used to seeing it near desserts. It is, believe it or not, super common.
I promise it is common, though: I could find it in pretty much every grocery store I visited in the US (Including aldi) and can find it in most stores here in Norway as well. Some folks seek out frozen peaches and frozen mixed fruit for fruit salad as well - at least they did where I grew up in the Midwest.
Genuinely not. Maybe the really big shops have it somewhere and I did not noticed. It is not shocking it exists, but it is genuinely far from dominating stores. It is vegetables and ice scream dominating here.
In Sweden you get frozen raspberries, strawberries, cherries, passion fruit, mango, lingon, black berries plus other unusual berries. Frozen avocado too!
I can't help but wonder if it's some evil organisation like the UN or the WEF subsidising these sections... or even blackmailing supermarkets to have them.
For now I think it's primarily down to economies of scale, not to mention the subsidies supporting the meat industry and its feed crops.
For an example data point on subsidies, this article mention that subsidization reduces the cost of a Big Mac from $13 to $5, and the cost of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to $5.
Any plant based meat must start with the extraction of proteins from some plant product.
Most vegetable products have a content of protein so low that the cost per protein mass is higher than for the cheaper kinds of meat, e.g. chicken meat.
The main exceptions, which can provide cheap-enough proteins, are various cereals and legumes.
While the proteins from plants are cheaper than those from meat, the difference is not huge. Where I live, in Europe, the ratio between price and protein content for wheat floor is only 3 times less than for chicken breast, while for lentils is only 2 times less than for chicken breast. For other cereals or legumes, the costs are even higher.
So, to remain cheaper than meat, the cost of protein extraction and of its further processing to make its taste and texture similar to meat must not increase the cost more than 2 or 3 times. This is not at all easy, because even bread is usually at least 2 times more expensive than the wheat floor used for it, and bread requires much simpler processing than artificial meat.
Protein extraction is simpler for the gluten of wheat, because gluten is insoluble in water, while starch is made of loosely-attached grains that can be washed away. Even so, extracting the proteins from wheat requires a lot of water and time.
Extracting the proteins from other plants is more complex and it may require the addition of various salts or solvents to the plant source, to create conditions where the proteins can be separated from the substances they are mixed with, and whatever is added must then be removed in another step of the process.
So besides the cost of the plant source, extracting the proteins has additional costs for water, chemicals and energy.
Similar additional costs are needed for transforming the proteins to have a meat-like texture and taste.
The cost of the plant source of the proteins ends being a very small fraction of the cost.
Then there is, as the other commentators have mentioned, the inefficiency of small-scale production.
The result is that I have not seen yet not only any meat substitute that is not many times more expensive than meat, but not even any kind of raw protein extracts from plants that are not many times more expensive than meat.
The only way that I have seen in which is possible to make a meat substitute that is cheaper than real meat (in Europe, i.e. where soy is too expensive as a protein source) is too make at home gluten from wheat floor (i.e. not accounting costs for water, energy and work time). Any kind of commercial product would be more expensive than real meat.
Subsidies. Meat is INCREDIBLY well subsidized (at least in the US). Most or all animal agriculture is.
It’s maddening when people use the myth that “veganism is classist because it’s much more expensive” to justify their penchant for animal abuse because they couldn’t be more wrong.
It's a Veblen good - right now a lot of people aren't vegetarian due to cost issues but rather as a social statement. As such, the more you spend on the meatless meat, the louder that statement is.
After all, if you're buying the cheapest meat substitute, you're not being vegan/vegetarian for moral reasons, are you? It's for cost reasons.
Saying this as a vegetarian who doesn't really like most meatless meat products anyways. For me they're basically just to fill cultural expectations in social situations.
Personally, I can't wait to taste it. There has been a lot of hype surrounding lab-grown meat replacements, but I think it's going to be a good few years until the legal framework, and economies of scale will be there.
What I mean by that is that I will only do so if it will be available as a ready product in my local supermarket.
But they are not FDA-approved at this time, let alone available anywhere in the EU.
The article is behind a paywall so not really sure what's it exactly about. New or not, they're definitely gaining popularity down here in Australia. I'm seeing more and more of those on the supermarket shelves. I treat them as processed food and occasionally have some just to understand where exactly they stand. Some of them are good but mostly utter rubbish.
The ones at Woolies/Coles etc are usually shit. I remember having Impossible burger once at Grill'd and it was quite good. The stuff from Ikea are usually good even though they don't taste like meat.
As a meat eater, I love mushrooms and I think they are so much better as a healthy food than those weird Beyond meats. I also love vegan patties made with various kind of nuts, beans and veggies.
I don’t get this appeal of turning goos and veggies into ‘meat’. Just make them their own thing. You don’t rly have to compete with meat.
Eh, as a vegan I prefer Beyond burgers to mushroom burgers or those healthier vegan patties made out of various veggies/beans.
I'm a meat eater at heart, and the junky meat and cheese substitutes really scratch an itch that the healthier options can't.
Given the huge year over year rise in consumption of these substitutes it seems like a lot of people similarly are more down to have the occasional Impossible or Beyond burger from a fast food chain than the old school veggie/bean patties.
"I don’t get this appeal of turning goos and veggies into ‘meat’. Just make them their own thing. You don’t rly have to compete with meat."
So, people are supposed to go without the comfort food of childhood completely and are supposed to never get some of the textures of these products?
I'm not personally a fan of the beyond meat most of the time, but I do use other fake meat from time to time (Quorn, for example, or ground meat made from soy). I can make bean burgers - and do, usually chickpeas and brown rice - but if I'm buying, I'm buying stuff with a nice chewy texture that I can't quite get at home. I make some childhood comfort food, too, and sometimes it just gives and easy protein.
And I don't look at it as a competition. I don't care that it tastes of meat and I wouldn't really know anyway - it has been too long. I care that it tastes good enough and has a good texture. Making it taste (or 'bleed') like meat isn't a gimmick for me, but for meat eaters.
People are free to do whatever they want of course. As a consumer (and investor having lost a significant amount on Beyond Meat), I think this is a pretty bad differentiator as the product always going to be compared to meat instead of being allowed to be its own thing.
What would that be? Something grown in a laboratory is never going to be its own thing in the way that seitan, mushrooms, chickpeas, tofu, etc. are their own thing. Beyond Meat made it difficult for themselves by marketing to mainstream carnivores, who aren't going to be happy with something that isn't at least as good or better. Vegetarians, on the other hand, will be super happy and grateful for anything that comes close.
Flexitarian trying to eat less meat here.
- Mushrooms are awesome, but they are trash were it comes to nutiotion values. Not bad, just empty.
- Protein-rich vegetables (legumes and beans) are not so easy to make into tasty dish, if you are not used to them. Meat alternatives often have high protein content and they don't requiere... Anything.
- I don't have time to discover whole, new world of vegan cuisine, tips and tricks about lentils, fava bean caseroles and other things. I want a normal dinner, just without animals in it.
May I suggest visiting a Middle Eastern grocery and trying a tin of ful medames, (there are numerous spellings) a rich and optionally spicy fava bean stew. I’m sure I once read it’s possibly the most consumed dish in human history.
You should find regional variants right there on the shelf — more or less garlic, spice, chickpeas, tahini, parsley, etc. It’s also very easy to make, whether with tinned favas or dried. Simmer with garlic and olive oil, add tahini, lemon juice, parsley, salt/pepper/chili to taste.
If you eat eggs and dairy, it’s an epic breakfast. An Ethiopian place I used to know in SF served it very spicy with a poached egg, plain yogurt/labneh, a fresh baguette and amazing tangy coffee. Memorable.
Dolmades, the stuffed grape leaves, are also satisfying in a vaguely meatlike way. Caution, while most are veg, some have actual meat.
From a vegetarian perspective, turning meat into sausage, paste (pate) and other goo is also pretty weird. So weird, in fact, that it gets compared to legislating and the trope is: no one needs to see either made because it’s just too unsettling.
Some meat-eaters get bored of meat in its original form so process it into something else tasty - and likewise some vegetarians.
>Anyone who cares about the environment including ecosystem breakdown and climate change will go meatless one way or another.
I "care about the environment" and I will not "go meatless". I have stopped eating beef entirely and have switched to chicken and fish, with the occasional pork steak.
1 pound of beef has the carbon footprint of ~8 pounds of chicken. Especially in the States, the best thing to do is switch your meats.
How do you arrive at the conclusion that the best thing to do in the US is switch your meats?
Every form from animal protein is going to be less efficient than plant protein and result in more emissions [1]. There are some amazing Kurzgesagt videos exposing how and why that is true [2].
So since we know that eating animals is not required to be healthy at any stage of life [3] (assuming basic access to required nutrients and what not which is very easy in developed countries) how did you arrive to conclusion that eating chicken is better than eating lentils, beans, etc?
I don’t think what you’re saying is based in fact. I’d love if you tried to prove me wrong though.
>how did you arrive to conclusion that eating chicken is better than eating lentils, beans, etc
I haven't made such a claim (here "better" would be solely in terms of emissions). What was implied was that the delta of the emissions from switching from beef to chicken/fish is (far) larger than the delta from switching from them to veganism (it's important to note that per grams of protein, dairy is comparable in emmissions to non-beef meats - so really veganism (or veganism + eggs) is required).
Also, this claim "we know that eating animals is not required to be healthy at any stage of life" is most likely false at the margin.
If switching from beef to chicken is an option, and switching from beef to lentils is an option, and you say that switching from beef to chickens is the best option then you are indeed implying that switching from beef to chicken is better than switching from beef to lentils. You need not explicitly state exactly that; it logically follows from what you said.
Also you refute the general scientific consensus among all major nutrition and dietetic institutions worldwide that animal products are not required to be healthy at any stage of life by saying “that’s probably not true”. You’ve got to admit how silly that is, right? Unless the “at the margin” part of what you said means something I don’t understand?
I would advise you to read up on the history of the advice ADA has been giving throughout the years (spoiler alert: they were wrong about fats and complex carbohydrates) before putting your money in that basket that this is the "general scientific consensus". But this is a topic I don't want (or need) to argue about.
Well I hope you find it within yourself to consider the arguments you and I have both made and continue your research. I can’t recommend those Kurzgesagt videos enough. They are chock full of peer reviewed research!
But even if we concede that the ADA is entirely untrustworthy, they are only one of many nutrition and dietetic institutions who have officially stated the same thing. That’s why it’s the general consensus, not just the theories of the ADA
The point is that it’s wrong, particularly for type 2 diabetics, and not just a little wrong, it’s dangerously wrong for type 2 diabetics to eat the way the organization that the medical establishment was relying on for providing sound diabetes advice was actually distributing dangerous advice. The general consensus for years relied on an assumption and confirmation bias driven by marketing rather than any actual science.
The claim I made wasn’t about saying what everyone needs to eat, though, so your point doesn’t make sense in the context of the discussion. The point that I was making is that these dietetic institutions state that animal products aren’t necessary. Not that diabetics are required to eat things that risk their lives…
If you believe that diabetics cannot be vegan, then that’s a separate and equally untrue argument.
> If you believe that diabetics cannot be vegan, then that’s a separate and equally untrue argument.
Where did I say that? I didn’t. I was referring specifically to the ADA incorrect suggestion for decades that high carbohydrate foods are ok and encouraged for type 2 diabetics. I did not make a meat vs non-meat absolutist statement. It was more a high carb vs low carb absolutist statement. If you are a vegan T2 diabetic who only eats avocados, cabbage, broccoli, and olives…good for you.
My comments were actually specific the commenter who expressed concern about relying on “general consensus” as an argument for reliability of dietary advice and used the ADA example. I backed them up and it’s completely appropriate to this little thread in the discussion.
Honestly, the climate deniers have got their wish. What's with this dogmatic bullshit? Do I have to dance to your tune if I do not want to be called a heretic?
I care about climate change and I will continue eating meat. My carbon footprint is probably still lower than yours.
Well you are completely wrong. Meat consumption is a very crucial part of my life and I am not willing compromise on that. The decrease in quality of life is just not worth it for me.
First of all it is really arrogant of you to presume these are "irrational life style choices". Who are you to tell me what I should put inside my body, and what is best for me? I deliberated talking about my reasons, mostly health related, but then I decided against it because I do not want to hear from a stranger what actually works well for me as a diet, as if I am not the one living with my own body. That is none of your business. And for your information, I am also no Texas American on a cattle ranch eating beef steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Secondly the whole of consumerist culture is "irrational lifestyle choices". This stupid line in the sand drawn arbitrarily around meat consumption is just self serving bullshit. It is very convenient how others are the ones who have to do the sacrifice and others are always at fault, isn't it?
As I said already I bet my carbon footprint is still lower than yours.
I am in general fed up of close minded people like you. You cannot understand why other people live their life another way, so you decide they are stupid to do so, and you know better how they should instead live their life? Can you be any more arrogant than that?
If you were intellectually honest and really cared about environmental effects there could be many ways forward. For example as another poster has mentioned, not all meat has the same carbon footprint. And there are ways of farming/ranching that might even be carbon positive. Say goats/sheep in the highlands are more adding to the ecosystem than taking away. No veggies are going to be grown up there anyway. And in general I do agree with lowering meat consumption intake in cases were it is excessive.
But instead you went with the dogmatic bullshit approach typical of people who think they are doing something by being annoying pricks in the faces of other people.
The whole enviromentalist movement will always remain sidelined because you seek to force people to adopt your lifestyle, rather than trying to find common ground and make progress.
> It is since meat consumption largely affects the life of other people, some by death
Sheesh. Why is it that every damned belief system that demands some level of moral absolutism always ends the same way—advocating some form of totalitarianism to manage their intolerance.
Still, the authors of the report make clear, humans are not powerless. Repairing damaged ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gas emissions dramatically and immediately would spare billions of people from illness, poverty, displacement and death.
Sorry…I don’t buy into the “if everyone would just do this…the earth will be a utopia” fantasies.
If everyone suddenly became vegan overnight, solved every climate issue, eliminated (fill in whatever other blank you think is important enough to foist your morality on the rest of us)…there would still be billions of people suffering from illness, poverty, displacement, and death. Those four things are not because of meat eating, fossil fuels, or (fill in the blank), its because it is human nature and dumb luck for some to have success and others to not have success. There is no such thing as equity when 7B people are competing for limited resources.
We are not masters of our domain, we are semi-successful species that over the lifespan of this earth are going to last about as long as the stink from a gnat fart in a hurricane.
And during that tiny amount of time that I occupy that gnat fart, I’m going to eat meat and enjoy every bite.
Yes, yes…us meat eaters are at the root of all the worlds problems. Funny how the human race managed to achieve any success at all considering our penchant for consuming animals throughout our entire existence.
> And for what? As if it would impact your life significantly to remove meat from the ingredients of meals
I am 90% carnivore for a specifically health reason, it allows me to manage diabetes without extraneous insulin. So yes, eliminating meat would dramatically impact my life. Most non-meat foodstuffs whether processed or whole cannot provide to me the lack of impact to my blood glucose that meat does.
In Germany the Rügenwalder brand was, at least for me, always associated with sausages. Since they changed to also produce meatless vegan products, they become almost omnipresent in every supermarket with vegan and vegetarian products.
I personally like them and, in my opinion, the initial change of the direction was brave.
My personal perception is, that Rügenwalder and LikeMeat (with some exceptions) do a great job. I think, the target customer isn't always the established vegan who also has sympathies for PETA work but the interested and health aware consumer who wants to reduce the overall meat consumption or the meat lover who is open to just try it out (because of interest).
I'm aware that this products are always creatures of food laboratories ... well done but somewhat artificial.
But if you got an invitation to some BBQ event and don't have your own DIY sausages at hand, this products are convenient (yes I know peppers, zucchini and other vegetables are just fine to put it on a grill and taste good but the BBQ master must have some experience with it and it's sometimes a bit of a struggle to be well fed with that only ... for a man).
By the way ... I think the marketing of this traditional meat based sausage company Rugenwalder is just interesting.
I think this model can also work for established fast-fashion brands which want to change to sustainable, fair paying product model ... not to change the world but to make it right and because the market wants it so
I enjoy quality meat. I'm all for consuming much less meat. In fact, that's already what I do day to day. I enjoy vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, cereals, everything. I can have delicious meals without meat, no need to disguise these as meat, they're fine as-is. And maybe once a week I'll have a delicious piece of cow from my local butcher.
But eating some fake industrially processed junk ? No, thanks, not even once.
I feel the same about these products, if I slice a steak that’s what I’m getting. A one ingredient meal. These products have a different vibe, a lab-like vibe.
I do enjoy other vegan products like bean-based burgers and the like. In fact I like those a lot.
Maybe you should see this from a marketing POV. If you want to sell "Proteins easy to fry" you will probably fail.
But if you sell "Vegan Steak" with the texture and like taste of a steak out of meat, you will have your customers.
So the alternatives have no established name and naming it "meat" will make sense.
And yes ... it's processed and no I think it's not healthy for day to day consumption (like coke) but once a week or month ... why not? Smoking (even passive) so most probably more dangerous ;)
Why not ? There are certainly a lot of reasons. But I'd like to pin this as a missed opportunity. Missed opportunity to educate taste, missed opportunity to have more "agro" and less "industry", missed opportunity to consume locally, missed opportunity to discover new varieties and so on...
the "meat" in "meatless meat" describes a texture and taste profile, not an ingredient. It is easier to communicate than, say, "chewy but soft, fibrous proteins which taste is usually determined by umami and maillard reaction flavors".
compared to the logistics (animal farming and slaughter pipelines), artificial inseminations, medical interventions (antibiotics), storage and food safety concerns around meat, plus the incredible daily amount of animal suffering caused by this consumption, I don't see meat as a "natural" product. all the steps in the "production" process can introduce factors that can degrade the quality and be risky to health (e.g. not cooled at appropriate temperature, antibiotics treatments to animals etc), while with plant proteins, you have far less processing steps between field and table. to vegans and people concerned with reducing global warming, the benefits outweigh the different composition by far.
Comparing the best-grown plant protein with the worst-grown animal protein is a bit disingenuous. I can easily source you an animal carcasse that was 100% pasture-grown and pasture-fed where I know everyone involved in its supply chain, from insemination to distribution. Moreover, that same animal will have been net-positive to its ecossystem through foraging etc etc. It won't be cheap, but health-positive and planet-positive meat exists.
this hypothetical best case is an exception to the reality of factory farming and animal "products" included in most dishes ("1% milk powder"). And in even then it would still include animal suffering. For those not too set on their habits, considering the arguments in https://veganspeak.info/ (e.g. #29) might be inspiring.
It is a personal decision in the end, our society allows for mass-producing and killing living beings despite better alternatives. As with other personal choices that are harmful and arbitraty, this is not something I see as worthy of further appreciation, or beneficial for further discussion.
Beyond & Impossible are somehow seen as meat competitors, not Quorn & Linda whatsit (I can't even recall the name! Says something itself) competitors. Which of course they are, but somehow the latter are seen as 'for vegetarians/vegans', bought I assume mostly by people who are cooking meat but also have vegetarians coming and have no idea what to do. While somehow the former has the same meat-eating cooks going 'cor I want to try one of those new ...'.
Linda McCartney I assume is what you are referring to. Oddly easy to remember for me once I found out that it is, indeed, made by Paul McCartney's wife.
Earlier this year I tried some of Burger King's plant-based (vegetarian) alternatives and I'd rate them as "meh".
They looked and felt like flatter, drier versions of the regular patties and the flavor wasn't bad but it also lacked something that you just can't really get without real meat.
Also IMHO products and companies should be banned from advertising using terms that are directly opposed to the product, like "Meatless Meat", "Fischstäbchen ohne Fisch" ("fish sticks without fish", a slogan by "iglo" for what's essentially just breaded veggie sticks). Just honestly call those products what they are, "meat alternatives", "meat replacements", "vegetarian/vegan alternatives", etc.
These would all be perfectly fine and in time people will get the idea.
And I say this all as someone who really likes meat and is curious about trying things like insect-based protein in the future but also really likes purely vegetarian or even vegan dishes.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadI assume they expect to lose a lot of money now but then to make it big at some point in the future. But those companies seem to be global multinationals and rely on global supply chains to create their products. And if the future requires decarbonization and reducing energy consumption, wouldn't that mean that complex global supply chains will be drastically reduced, and food production will move back to a more local level?
Food production won't move back to a more local level, you lose the economies of scale. You get more expensive products and more pollution, not exactly what we want.
Who told you, and why do you consider them a reliable indicator, for what you imply are all supermarkets across the globe?
some is the key word here. You can bet that anyone who's managing a supermarket is optimizing to reduce this kind of loss.
There's also a problem with discovery: If the meat alternative section is directly adjacent to the real meat, vegetarians and vegans are a lot less likely to discover it.
Vegetarian meats are usually (but not always) either kept chilled or frozen, so it simply gets put somewhere around dairy and meat. For refrigerated sections, it is usually but not always in its own section. For the freezers, it is just kept in a section with space.
Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes it is just mixed in with regular product. Vegan cheese with the cheeses and ground "meat" with the other ground meat.
Most vegetarians and vegans I know seek the stuff out and learn where to look for it - including myself (not quite vegetarian, but a pescetarian that leans very heavily towards veggie)
Go to the protein section, and there is literally no product that is just protein, everything has added artificial sweetener or some lab concoction with god knows what.
Go to the frozen food section. 80% junk. Ice cream, frozen potato chips, frozen pizzas. Oh look, some frozen fruit in the corner.
Go to the cereals section. 80% junk. If you look really hard, you can find some wholegrain cereal without added sugar.
Is this the equivalent of when social media companies optimize heavily around taking advantage of dopamine spikes in their customers, instead of doing things in their customer's actual best interests?
Speaking to an older relative, things were not like this in the mid 20th century.
How much cheaper would food be if the healthy staples could be bought in bulk, and our supply chains and packaging were optimized around that?
I promise it is common, though: I could find it in pretty much every grocery store I visited in the US (Including aldi) and can find it in most stores here in Norway as well. Some folks seek out frozen peaches and frozen mixed fruit for fruit salad as well - at least they did where I grew up in the Midwest.
Never seen a bag of frozen berries?
For an example data point on subsidies, this article mention that subsidization reduces the cost of a Big Mac from $13 to $5, and the cost of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to $5.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
The fact that its a dietary choice typically made by those who are more affluent and they are willing to pay for it.
Most vegetable products have a content of protein so low that the cost per protein mass is higher than for the cheaper kinds of meat, e.g. chicken meat.
The main exceptions, which can provide cheap-enough proteins, are various cereals and legumes.
While the proteins from plants are cheaper than those from meat, the difference is not huge. Where I live, in Europe, the ratio between price and protein content for wheat floor is only 3 times less than for chicken breast, while for lentils is only 2 times less than for chicken breast. For other cereals or legumes, the costs are even higher.
So, to remain cheaper than meat, the cost of protein extraction and of its further processing to make its taste and texture similar to meat must not increase the cost more than 2 or 3 times. This is not at all easy, because even bread is usually at least 2 times more expensive than the wheat floor used for it, and bread requires much simpler processing than artificial meat.
Protein extraction is simpler for the gluten of wheat, because gluten is insoluble in water, while starch is made of loosely-attached grains that can be washed away. Even so, extracting the proteins from wheat requires a lot of water and time.
Extracting the proteins from other plants is more complex and it may require the addition of various salts or solvents to the plant source, to create conditions where the proteins can be separated from the substances they are mixed with, and whatever is added must then be removed in another step of the process.
So besides the cost of the plant source, extracting the proteins has additional costs for water, chemicals and energy.
Similar additional costs are needed for transforming the proteins to have a meat-like texture and taste.
The cost of the plant source of the proteins ends being a very small fraction of the cost.
Then there is, as the other commentators have mentioned, the inefficiency of small-scale production.
The result is that I have not seen yet not only any meat substitute that is not many times more expensive than meat, but not even any kind of raw protein extracts from plants that are not many times more expensive than meat.
The only way that I have seen in which is possible to make a meat substitute that is cheaper than real meat (in Europe, i.e. where soy is too expensive as a protein source) is too make at home gluten from wheat floor (i.e. not accounting costs for water, energy and work time). Any kind of commercial product would be more expensive than real meat.
It’s maddening when people use the myth that “veganism is classist because it’s much more expensive” to justify their penchant for animal abuse because they couldn’t be more wrong.
After all, if you're buying the cheapest meat substitute, you're not being vegan/vegetarian for moral reasons, are you? It's for cost reasons.
Saying this as a vegetarian who doesn't really like most meatless meat products anyways. For me they're basically just to fill cultural expectations in social situations.
I have and frankly it doesn't taste like meat. Sadly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220814083831/https://www.econo...
I don’t get this appeal of turning goos and veggies into ‘meat’. Just make them their own thing. You don’t rly have to compete with meat.
I'm a meat eater at heart, and the junky meat and cheese substitutes really scratch an itch that the healthier options can't.
Given the huge year over year rise in consumption of these substitutes it seems like a lot of people similarly are more down to have the occasional Impossible or Beyond burger from a fast food chain than the old school veggie/bean patties.
So, people are supposed to go without the comfort food of childhood completely and are supposed to never get some of the textures of these products?
I'm not personally a fan of the beyond meat most of the time, but I do use other fake meat from time to time (Quorn, for example, or ground meat made from soy). I can make bean burgers - and do, usually chickpeas and brown rice - but if I'm buying, I'm buying stuff with a nice chewy texture that I can't quite get at home. I make some childhood comfort food, too, and sometimes it just gives and easy protein.
And I don't look at it as a competition. I don't care that it tastes of meat and I wouldn't really know anyway - it has been too long. I care that it tastes good enough and has a good texture. Making it taste (or 'bleed') like meat isn't a gimmick for me, but for meat eaters.
- Protein-rich vegetables (legumes and beans) are not so easy to make into tasty dish, if you are not used to them. Meat alternatives often have high protein content and they don't requiere... Anything.
- I don't have time to discover whole, new world of vegan cuisine, tips and tricks about lentils, fava bean caseroles and other things. I want a normal dinner, just without animals in it.
You should find regional variants right there on the shelf — more or less garlic, spice, chickpeas, tahini, parsley, etc. It’s also very easy to make, whether with tinned favas or dried. Simmer with garlic and olive oil, add tahini, lemon juice, parsley, salt/pepper/chili to taste.
If you eat eggs and dairy, it’s an epic breakfast. An Ethiopian place I used to know in SF served it very spicy with a poached egg, plain yogurt/labneh, a fresh baguette and amazing tangy coffee. Memorable.
Dolmades, the stuffed grape leaves, are also satisfying in a vaguely meatlike way. Caution, while most are veg, some have actual meat.
Some meat-eaters get bored of meat in its original form so process it into something else tasty - and likewise some vegetarians.
Anyone who cares about the environment including ecosystem breakdown and climate change will go meatless one way or another.
I "care about the environment" and I will not "go meatless". I have stopped eating beef entirely and have switched to chicken and fish, with the occasional pork steak. 1 pound of beef has the carbon footprint of ~8 pounds of chicken. Especially in the States, the best thing to do is switch your meats.
Every form from animal protein is going to be less efficient than plant protein and result in more emissions [1]. There are some amazing Kurzgesagt videos exposing how and why that is true [2].
So since we know that eating animals is not required to be healthy at any stage of life [3] (assuming basic access to required nutrients and what not which is very easy in developed countries) how did you arrive to conclusion that eating chicken is better than eating lentils, beans, etc?
I don’t think what you’re saying is based in fact. I’d love if you tried to prove me wrong though.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
2. https://youtu.be/F1Hq8eVOMHs
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/
I haven't made such a claim (here "better" would be solely in terms of emissions). What was implied was that the delta of the emissions from switching from beef to chicken/fish is (far) larger than the delta from switching from them to veganism (it's important to note that per grams of protein, dairy is comparable in emmissions to non-beef meats - so really veganism (or veganism + eggs) is required).
Also, this claim "we know that eating animals is not required to be healthy at any stage of life" is most likely false at the margin.
Also you refute the general scientific consensus among all major nutrition and dietetic institutions worldwide that animal products are not required to be healthy at any stage of life by saying “that’s probably not true”. You’ve got to admit how silly that is, right? Unless the “at the margin” part of what you said means something I don’t understand?
I would advise you to read up on the history of the advice ADA has been giving throughout the years (spoiler alert: they were wrong about fats and complex carbohydrates) before putting your money in that basket that this is the "general scientific consensus". But this is a topic I don't want (or need) to argue about.
If you believe that diabetics cannot be vegan, then that’s a separate and equally untrue argument.
Where did I say that? I didn’t. I was referring specifically to the ADA incorrect suggestion for decades that high carbohydrate foods are ok and encouraged for type 2 diabetics. I did not make a meat vs non-meat absolutist statement. It was more a high carb vs low carb absolutist statement. If you are a vegan T2 diabetic who only eats avocados, cabbage, broccoli, and olives…good for you.
My comments were actually specific the commenter who expressed concern about relying on “general consensus” as an argument for reliability of dietary advice and used the ADA example. I backed them up and it’s completely appropriate to this little thread in the discussion.
Switching meats was my first step
I care about climate change and I will continue eating meat. My carbon footprint is probably still lower than yours.
It's obvious what you are trying to do: Make other people seem worse than you are such that you still have your excuse for meat consumption.
And for what? As if it would impact your life significantly to remove meat from the ingredients of meals
I don't know where you live, but here you don't need to starve without meat even if you don't cook for yourself at all.
Too bad we all have to pay for peoples irrational life style choices whose quality of life seems to be determined by meat consumption.
Here, we have a butcher that went vegan years ago - and now creates vegan alternatives to offer in his shop
Secondly the whole of consumerist culture is "irrational lifestyle choices". This stupid line in the sand drawn arbitrarily around meat consumption is just self serving bullshit. It is very convenient how others are the ones who have to do the sacrifice and others are always at fault, isn't it?
As I said already I bet my carbon footprint is still lower than yours.
I am in general fed up of close minded people like you. You cannot understand why other people live their life another way, so you decide they are stupid to do so, and you know better how they should instead live their life? Can you be any more arrogant than that?
If you were intellectually honest and really cared about environmental effects there could be many ways forward. For example as another poster has mentioned, not all meat has the same carbon footprint. And there are ways of farming/ranching that might even be carbon positive. Say goats/sheep in the highlands are more adding to the ecosystem than taking away. No veggies are going to be grown up there anyway. And in general I do agree with lowering meat consumption intake in cases were it is excessive.
But instead you went with the dogmatic bullshit approach typical of people who think they are doing something by being annoying pricks in the faces of other people.
The whole enviromentalist movement will always remain sidelined because you seek to force people to adopt your lifestyle, rather than trying to find common ground and make progress.
People post lots of BS when they have time
> That is none of your business.
It is since meat consumption largely affects the life of other people, some by death.
Sheesh. Why is it that every damned belief system that demands some level of moral absolutism always ends the same way—advocating some form of totalitarianism to manage their intolerance.
Ignorance is a bliss
Still, the authors of the report make clear, humans are not powerless. Repairing damaged ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gas emissions dramatically and immediately would spare billions of people from illness, poverty, displacement and death.
If everyone suddenly became vegan overnight, solved every climate issue, eliminated (fill in whatever other blank you think is important enough to foist your morality on the rest of us)…there would still be billions of people suffering from illness, poverty, displacement, and death. Those four things are not because of meat eating, fossil fuels, or (fill in the blank), its because it is human nature and dumb luck for some to have success and others to not have success. There is no such thing as equity when 7B people are competing for limited resources.
We are not masters of our domain, we are semi-successful species that over the lifespan of this earth are going to last about as long as the stink from a gnat fart in a hurricane.
And during that tiny amount of time that I occupy that gnat fart, I’m going to eat meat and enjoy every bite.
But it doesn't happen because of people like you
> And for what? As if it would impact your life significantly to remove meat from the ingredients of meals
I am 90% carnivore for a specifically health reason, it allows me to manage diabetes without extraneous insulin. So yes, eliminating meat would dramatically impact my life. Most non-meat foodstuffs whether processed or whole cannot provide to me the lack of impact to my blood glucose that meat does.
Also, I slept with the AC on last night.
I'm aware that this products are always creatures of food laboratories ... well done but somewhat artificial. But if you got an invitation to some BBQ event and don't have your own DIY sausages at hand, this products are convenient (yes I know peppers, zucchini and other vegetables are just fine to put it on a grill and taste good but the BBQ master must have some experience with it and it's sometimes a bit of a struggle to be well fed with that only ... for a man).
By the way ... I think the marketing of this traditional meat based sausage company Rugenwalder is just interesting. I think this model can also work for established fast-fashion brands which want to change to sustainable, fair paying product model ... not to change the world but to make it right and because the market wants it so
I enjoy quality meat. I'm all for consuming much less meat. In fact, that's already what I do day to day. I enjoy vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, cereals, everything. I can have delicious meals without meat, no need to disguise these as meat, they're fine as-is. And maybe once a week I'll have a delicious piece of cow from my local butcher.
But eating some fake industrially processed junk ? No, thanks, not even once.
I do enjoy other vegan products like bean-based burgers and the like. In fact I like those a lot.
There is a large community around new recipes for this taste profile, e.g. https://seitansociety.com/ .
compared to the logistics (animal farming and slaughter pipelines), artificial inseminations, medical interventions (antibiotics), storage and food safety concerns around meat, plus the incredible daily amount of animal suffering caused by this consumption, I don't see meat as a "natural" product. all the steps in the "production" process can introduce factors that can degrade the quality and be risky to health (e.g. not cooled at appropriate temperature, antibiotics treatments to animals etc), while with plant proteins, you have far less processing steps between field and table. to vegans and people concerned with reducing global warming, the benefits outweigh the different composition by far.
Compare the best meat against the worst plant based food and its still plant based>meat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Hq8eVOMHs
It is a personal decision in the end, our society allows for mass-producing and killing living beings despite better alternatives. As with other personal choices that are harmful and arbitraty, this is not something I see as worthy of further appreciation, or beneficial for further discussion.
Beyond & Impossible are somehow seen as meat competitors, not Quorn & Linda whatsit (I can't even recall the name! Says something itself) competitors. Which of course they are, but somehow the latter are seen as 'for vegetarians/vegans', bought I assume mostly by people who are cooking meat but also have vegetarians coming and have no idea what to do. While somehow the former has the same meat-eating cooks going 'cor I want to try one of those new ...'.
They looked and felt like flatter, drier versions of the regular patties and the flavor wasn't bad but it also lacked something that you just can't really get without real meat.
Also IMHO products and companies should be banned from advertising using terms that are directly opposed to the product, like "Meatless Meat", "Fischstäbchen ohne Fisch" ("fish sticks without fish", a slogan by "iglo" for what's essentially just breaded veggie sticks). Just honestly call those products what they are, "meat alternatives", "meat replacements", "vegetarian/vegan alternatives", etc. These would all be perfectly fine and in time people will get the idea.
And I say this all as someone who really likes meat and is curious about trying things like insect-based protein in the future but also really likes purely vegetarian or even vegan dishes.