I've tried plant based burgers multiple times and it's just not the same. The first time I had an "impossible burger", I didn't actually know it was fake meat, I just assumed it was the name of the burger at the time, I thought it was horrible. I had a different shops "impossible" burger few years later and it was far from horrible, but just doesn't have the same impact as a good burger.
Edit: Either it's juicy and the texture isn't right, or the texture is right but it isn't juicy, or the flavour isn't there. It just doesn't taste real enough, in some ways its SO close... /end edit.
Wife and I tried some of the beyond meat from the super market and that was once... never again, it was not good, any of it. Its sometimes /very/ salty, even if I don't add salt...
(as a side note I donno if it's changed but it's more expensive to buy beyond meat than it is to buy real meat)
Huh, tried the impossible burger and a normal one side by side, and I preferred the impossible burger. I still think it's the best thing on their menu.
So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.
Then you're discussing pretty minor differences. Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers. This seems like just bragging about having really good taste.
Which was why it was amusing how much marketing dollars were spent getting it into fast food locations (where it inevitably was a “buy once and never again” for the vast majority of those who even bothered to try it).
>Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers.
Whoa there. "Enjoy" might be a bit generous. I might suggest endure. A lot of people eating fast food burgers are not doing it because they enjoy it, but at their cheap prices it is just something they can afford. Yes, there is a large portion of people that "like" fast food burgers, and that might be a number that reaches "plenty". But I would imagine that enjoyment is similar to when I was a broke ass college age person that could only afford ramen and enjoyed it as being better than nothing.
Lol this is kinda crazy: I’m a skinny person that still had to overcome a fast food phase/mild addiction, and my favorite order was 4 junior bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. They are so good I’d love one right now.
And I love well prepared burgers. I love steak. And I love goldfish. I disagree strongly with your comment.
Foodie gatekeepers are among the most hilarious of all gatekeepers. Everyone has different tastebuds and just because you don't like fast food doesn't mean the whole world doesn't like fast food. I love the fanciest restaurants, but I can still admit the Big Mac is one of the greatest burgers ever created.
There's a massive difference between a McDonald's burger and the kind of burger you'd make fresh (or order at a non-fast-food restaurant). It's not a subtle issue of taste. They're just completely different dishes.
Fast food burgers don’t taste much worse than frozen or even just refrigerated store-bought patties. Neither are tasty.
I guess the pre-made plant burgers will be close to pre-made meat burgers.
I wonder if you can make your own burger out of soy granules, which I found to be the closest to ground beef when properly spiced during rehydration. I should try that some time.
Tanget: Americans in Germany often say our McD tastes better. I find that fascinating, as McD here tastes absolutely horrible to me.
I've never seen anything wrong with grocery store patties. I think the problem with fast food burgers is the bad bread, weird sauces, missing/sparse toppings, and most of all the sloppy half-assed construction. If you make the burger at home with the same patty, it will almost certainly come out much better.
There's nothing wrong with the meat quality per se, but if you're cooking a frozen premade patty you're not properly seasoning it and it's not going to have a good taste.
You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?
Ngl I don't even know what seasoning I would put on a burger patty. A burger patty to me is just a disc of ground beef, I don't expect anything else from it.
In my experience, if the beef is fresh, high quality, and the right cut, grind and fat content, all it needs is salt on the surface at the time of cooking.
The salt mixed into many pre-made patties makes them increasingly rubbery the longer they sit in the supermarket. The seasonings are usually a crapshoot.
I suspected as much, but I didn't want to be rude. A lot of people are unaware of seasoning and don't really think about why food from one place taste so much better than food from another.
There's a whole lot of seasoning going on with well cooked ground beef. When you go to a restaurant and the burgers pop -- this is why.
The most basic seasoning is salt. Unseasoned beef doesn't taste great and when it's cooked less than ideally often excess condiments are used to make up for the lack of seasoning.
When I cook burgers at home I often mix in diced garlic, a tiny bit of soy sauce, cayenne, msg, and rosemary.
Nothing rude about it, it's the way I prefer burgers. I've never considered restaurant burger special or 'pop'ish, mostly just convenient. I do put lots of raw onions on the burger though, the refreshing crunch of freshly sliced onion goes well with the greasy meat. Restaurant burgers rarely have much onion, and when they do it's usually cooked or limp and sad. A lot of restaurant burgers go heavy on lettuce instead, but lettuce is bland compared to onions.
I know some people prefer unseasoned food, but I think you probably shouldn't be surprised when people complain about lack of seasoning.
One of my kids went through a phase of eating burgers with no toppings at all. Another, noodles with no sauce. It's a preference, but - if the topic is quality of cuisine it shouldn't be surprising that people have higher expectations.
And you probably buy good meat, or even mince it yourself and make your own right?
The vegetarian equivalent isn't anything you can buy (in a supermarket anyway), they're all crap, it's making your own with good (non-meat) ingredients.
I'm assuming it is because of the lower volume of alternative burgers. Looking at my supermarket, they have probably 150-200 linear feet dedicated to meat and maybe 5-10 for alternatives.
Ecological engineer Howard Odum developed a system for tracing back the energy inputs into something back to sunlight which revolved around ‘embodied energy’ or emergy.
When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy.
A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.
One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it.
Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other.
Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences.
The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS?
There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently.
(It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)
Ground meat in a sauce is actually the only situation where it is easily distinguishable for me. The texture doesn’t feel right. It ends up rubbery, kind of like overcooked fish. And it doesn’t impart the same kind of umami depth of flavor. I end up having to supplement with bouillon instead, but then it gets a little too salty.
You don't have to use bouillon, though. There are lots of ways to increase umami: Soy sauce, tomato paste, and ground mushroom powder all work out well, and the last two are low-to-no salt.
The plant based meat alternatives are more expensive. It's a newer, smaller scale manufacturing process and regular meat benefits from US agricultural subsidies.
I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back.
General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.
I’ve yet to try an impossible burger but one of the best burgers I’ve ever had was a veggie burger patty made in house at a little brewery near me. Seasonings and texture etc were perfect. Wasn’t trying to be a burger but trying to be a very good veggie patty and succeeded.
I once accidentally ordered a veggie burger. It was called a "garden burger" on the menu and I naively assumed it was a regular burger with vegetables on it. When I got it I immediately recognized my error, but ate it anyway and it was fine. Not what I wanted, but wholly inoffensive.
Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen.
Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
The first time I had a good vegetarian burger was when it wasn't trying to imitate the real thing. As others already commented, I also think trying to engineer a schnitzel from tofu and whatnot that tastes and feels like the original is just the wrong approach. Vegan cheese, like wtf, I was curious and tried it once; that was so bad I had to throw away that stuff. But I digress. The burger I liked had a patty made from broccoli and just had its own distinct texture and taste.
Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.
I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.
I had the same experience. I have tried both the impossible and beyond meat burgers and ended up not being able to finish them as I really didn't like the taste.
I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.
Sorry if I come across as a little rude here, but, it's never going to be the same. Never, ever. The problem is people keep using it as an excuse now, "well I'd be vegan if there was fake meat that tasted like the real deal".
At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more.
Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat.
Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.
I remember Boca burgers, Quorn, and similar products being acceptable in the 1990s. If people are impressed by Impossible Burgers they have a short memory and/or allergic to history.
For me, they taste nearly identical with a different texture. There's a bitterness that they share which overwhelms everything. Most people don't seem to notice it, but I've met a few with the same experience.
Bitterness… Are you a cilantro-soap taster as well? I too notice that things are usually more bitter for me than others find them. Like the lightly flavored carbonated beverages.
The ones in the 90s were nowhere near as close to beef burgers as these new ones. Quorn has come on leaps and bounds since then, and is a vaguely good chicken substitute, but nothing like impossible or beyond.
mcdonald's plant-based burger is tasteless. size is very small.
on the other hand, burger king's rebel whooper is very good. problem I experienced was that staff takes too much time to make it.
I have no developed taste for "real" burgers and I still wouldn't eat plant-based ones regularly. at least the pricing is normal, compared to burgers in vegan restaurants that cost 3-5 times more.
is meat consumption in fast-food chain the majority of meat consumption? if not, why the need to discuss the global meat consumption in the context of fast-food chains.
You have to come at it from a very particular angle to be funny.
Otherwise it's just "this neither satisfied my tongue nor my stomach". You don't want a subpar meal to also be small unless you have the spare time and money to get a replacement.
I'm not bullish on plant-based meat taking over the market from real meat; I don't think that's going to happen. But I can see plant-based meat substitutes taking a place as a now-and-then substitute. The Boca Burger is a good example, because it's not meat, it doesn't really pretend to be meat, but it's good food in its own right, and it can serve the same function as meat in a meal despite fooling absolutely nobody. I serve them to my kids and eat them myself when we're in the mood for something that fills the gap of meat but want a lower-calorie choice.
My hottest take has been that fast-food restaurants in the US will be 100% plant-based in my lifetime. Whether it’s economics, politics, ethics, or health that drives the decision, something is going to make it happen.
My original belief was that one big prion disease outbreak in the US would be the tipping point, but post-COVID I don’t think that’ll do it.
Now, I think it’s going to be climate change. I honestly don’t see how animal meat is sustainable for more than another generation or two.
it was kind of funny to see the PR campaigns ramp up - placement in news articles, podcast interviews with the founder, partnerships with fast food chains.
after the smoke cleared there was never any real demand, just hype. a bunch of people made money, rinse repeat.
That's what you get when you have over a decade of near zero interest rates and easy money. A lot of hyped products and companies that mysteriously don't make any money. We're paying the price now.
There was also a lot of cool and important shit that was made due to the same conditions. I hope things turn around asap. Cheap money is good for fake progress as much as it is for real progress.
Or we could just produce less crap to be wasted, and have healthier work-life balances to boot. It takes an especially foolish kind of monetary environment to manufacture perfectly good e-scooters just to dump them into rivers and onto sidewalks, hoping that enough people tripping over them will create a recurring revenue stream from the coins falling out of their pocket. Plus that whole disenfranchisement of individuals further into renters rather than distributed capital owners.
I was impressed by the impossible whopper. It was 70% as good as the meat version. If it was half the price, I might order it again. Instead, it’s a premium. Unless you have ethical or religious reasons, why would you pay more for an inferior product? My first purchase was for novelty reasons, but I haven’t been able to justify a second.
I mean why isn't ethical enough? Meat processing is one of the single worst industries for climate change, a surprising amount of the energy production field.
There probably is enough economic reason if the externalities were properly accounted. If it’s not in the price (and worse-subsidized) there’s no hope of the market reaching a suitable equilibrium.
I'm in no way a vegetarian. And I'm too set in my childhood-established food biases to make huge changes. (I tried for a year or two. It didn't take.) But the Impossible and Beyond burgers are close enough for me. Could I tell them apart in a patty taste test? Probably. But once it's on a bun with cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot, I don't notice a difference.
So at that point, I'm like, "Cows are nice animals." I have made the acquaintance of a few and I like them. For an equivalent experience, I can either kill the cow or not. So we've been gradually shifting toward the high-grade fake meats. I look forward to further improvements on this front.
Ah, reality. As defined by somebody so unable to function in it that he can't make it 24 hours here without getting 3 flagged/dead comments and a negative karma score.
But thank you for the comment. It's nice to know that the people opposed to crazy things like human rights are this dysfunctional. You give me hope for the future.
I don’t like the push to define humanity as a thing somehow separate from the Earth and all that entails. Cows wouldn’t exist at all if humanity didn’t depend on them. The most pro-cow stance is to raise them with love and respect and use all they offer us without wasting.
I have grazed steers on my property and they didn't make such a positive impression on me. If they didn't produce beef I'd much rather not have them around.
Not to go down this annoying rabbit hole, but if you and others didn’t eat it, wouldn’t it not exist in the first place due to lack of market demand? Is a short life with a quick end worse than no life at all. Would it be acceptable if they were sufficiently happy or cared for? Is this a form of slavery and therefore bad? Where do we draw the line? How much freedom and life is a worthy trade off vs no life at all?
It seems to me that this argument isn’t sufficiently strong. The global warming argument seems strong.
Buddy, I'm not making an "argument". I'm explaining my thought process. If I can live my life in ways that are equivalent except one has less unnecessary killing, I'm going to pick that one. If that doesn't matter to you, that's fine by me.
Tax meat, then, and get the prices into parity. I know it's literally violence to have to pay for your externalities, but that's a couple of the main things that governments are for: to do violence and tax externalities.
That is great since a carbon tax is not a meat tax. Taxing the natural gas that goes into artificial fertilizers would increase the cost of a particular method of maximizing the growth speed and weight just before slaughter, but its not a method that farming must employ. They could just let the animals graze land that have vegetation naturally grow without artificial fertilizers, avoiding the tax and accepting a slower growth speed.
Any food that require artificial fertilizers would have to pay the carbon tax, making carbon-neutral food better in comparison.
"a couple of the main things that goverments are for: to do violence and tax externalities"
huh? Maybe in authoritarian countries, but not in countries whose constitutions are geared for individual liberty. Your fascist tendencies are showing.
A country with a constitution that is geared like this is still using violence or the implied threat of it to guarantee these rights or even private property in general.
Why do you think the tax system should be used for this?
The tax system should have a single purpose - Raise funds for government expenses.
This is why the tax system is the mess it currently is. Everyone thinks the solution to their personal "social change" is to "tax whatever they disagree with".
You dont like carbonated drinks, advocate for a "soft drink tax".
You dont like people eating meats, advocate for a "meat tax".
Should we increase the fuel taxes to account for all the diesel used to produce a vegan diet? Besides the farming, there is the water and transportation to account for. Some produce (nuts, avocados) are very damaging on the environment, should we tax them?
Would you care to source that claim? All of the research I've encountered suggests agriculture in toto contributes around 8% of total GHG emissions, with meat production responsible for at most 60% of that number. Even if meat production was eliminated that would not in yield a 5% reduction in GHG as additional plant-based food production would be required to pick up this slack. Given the current state of play of arable land globally (near maximum utilization, available land shrinking rapidly, unrecoverable topsoil depletion rampant globally) one wonders where proponents of this idea think all of this extra agricultural output is supposed to come from.
Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories. See the source for a list of nations with globally unsustainable diets in terms of land.
Irrelevant. You can get a full amino acid profile by combining plant based sources. It is basic high school biology that there’s less energy available the higher up on the food pyramid you go.
Farming Lions for meat would be less economical than farming cows. Farming cows is less economical than farming wheat.
These numbers don't really translate to meaningful information.
Livestock eats bulk commodities like corn and grain, which modern mechanized farming has made incredibly efficient. Those staples are grown in regions that don't require irrigation (iowa, kansas, etc). Wheat and corn are already so cheap that they're almost free in the US. Humans get their fill.
It's not like little Johnny can't have broccoli this week because the fat cats are eating burgers.
Look at it from this perspective: Shipping corn and wheat is a relatively efficient way of moving "water" from places that rain a lot to places where it doesn't.
Given the frequency with which livestock is grazed on land that is utterly unsuitable for any other agricultural purpose that 80% is substantially less meaningful than it may appear at first glance.
Is it ethical to eat dogs? Some societies do, some don't.
Should we judge lions for eating meats? Perhaps convince them to move to a vegan diet?
What you are advocating is forcing your views on others, and that "price" should be the factor.
What if others don't want you do to do something, would you enjoy having it priced out of your reach?
Why do you "have to convince them" in the first place? wouldn't it be easier to do what makes you happy and keep your opinions to yourself and your like-minded friends?
I'd likely to have to do more research before I'm confident to address everything you've said. However, I have issues with the way things are categorized because meat production is more than just livestock. It uses a lot of energy and transportation both of which are huge categories on your source. I spoke to a climate scientist I'm friends with a while back and it's my memory of the conversation that gave me the anecdote above. I'll have to do more research before weighing in any further than that.
To be clear I am 100% in agreement that the meat industry is both unsustainable and unethical. However, specifically on GHG it really is not the worst offender.
Effectively if you would stop commuting with a car, reduced AC/Heating to bare minimum and simply bought less 'stuff' (non-essential goods), you would be doing more for the environment than not eating meat.
The unconfortable truth is that once we start discussing these things very few people are willing to curb their 'standard of living', in reality it is a first world luxury not a given right.
Nevertheless if you tell me that we need to curb meat consumption to avoid animal suffering than I am equally on board with you. But the environmental angle in my view is a distraction from the other elephants in the room.
The better question is whether or not meat can be produced sustainably. Humans have been raising livestock for millennia, and climate change only seemed to start after the Industrial Revolution, so meat isn’t obviously necessarily causative of climate change.
To my understanding, the climate problem is basically one of not having closed loops. For instance, burning fossil fuels is a problem because you’re taking carbon that’s buried underground and pumping it into the atmosphere. So to the degree that meat is a problem, there’s probably a loop we need to close. Energy and transportation are instances of the same burning-fossil-fuels problem that we need to solve anyway.
As for the livestock themselves, I know they produce methane as a byproduct of digestion, but that seems like a potentially closed loop to me. Wasn’t it a closed loop during all the centuries that humans raised livestock before the Industrial Revolution? If so, what changed? The way we produce fertilizer, for one. But we also need fertilizer to grow vegetables, so we need to solve the fertilizer problem anyway. Plus, livestock are also the primary source of organic fertilizer, so maybe they’re part of the closed loop. They sure used to be.
Did you finish your research? Everything I've ever read confirms what u/DoingIsLearning said, which is that coal is a far, far bigger concern for GHG than the meat industry, despite the propaganda here in the west to make one think otherwise.
Totally agree. I think the fake meat people are too worried about the taste, not enough about the cost.
As a small incremental expense, a veg burger has to be a lot cheaper than a meat burger for people to choose it consistently. The taste is a minor issue once you load it up with ketchup, pickles, special sauce, etc.
Whereas more expensive things like solar panels or electric cars, only have to be a little cheaper to make a meaningful marginal economic difference to most people.
I'm sure they know that. But I think they're following the well-trodden approach for tech products: find an initial market that will pay a premium, use that to get in the black, and keep investing in R&D to bring the cost down.
I'm definitely in their target market. I'm willing to pay a modest premium for what they're offering. And at cost parity, I'll buy their product a lot.
What’s the mass market business model for “pretty good, minimally processed, reasonably healthy, low cost burger alternative”? Institutional? Workplace? Schools? Prisons? Dollar store frozen food section? Food cart?
Sorry, I don't understand the question. It seems to imply that there's some sort of limit on the number of people who can try finding a new thing for people to eat. This is one of the ways and they are doing it. I don't see how "should" enters into it.
Isn’t it their stated goal to “solve” the major “problem” of the environmental impact of meat production?
In a way, it’s like the debunked story of the expensive NASA space pen versus the cheap cosmonaut pencil.
Of course, the facts of that story are that private investment, not government spending, came up with an advanced solution, and that pencils really were a potential problem in spacecraft due to fragmentation and flammability. In popular perception, though, the original false story remains very convincing.
Not many of us are going to space regularly. Cheap pencils and pens own the market that matters.
If a fake meat company wants to make a meaningful difference on the environment, they need to cut the cost sharply and make something that can take the mass market.
Similarly, there were people in the 1970s and 1980s who wanted computing to be available to the masses. That now exists, but the road that led to it wasn't a direct one. The original Macintosh was the equivalent of $6500 bucks today. Was that the right price? In one sense no, because most people couldn't afford to spend good-used-car kinds of money on a computer. But it was the right price in that it was enough money to sell a bunch of units, establish a market, and help fund their R&D going forward. Which over time led to today's world of ubiquitous cheap computing power.
What’s the mass market business model for “pretty good low cost noodle soup alternative”? Turns out the answer is “everywhere and everyone” - I WFH and love cooking yet I still eat instant noodles pretty regularly.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a plant based meat company to hope they can accomplish something similar. Wikipedia tells me (I’ve made no effort to verify this) that instant noodles were also originally sold above the price point of the normal noodles they were replacing.
> Totally agree. I think the fake meat people are too worried about the taste, not enough about the cost.
Every few years a lawsuit or accusation about the absence of meat comes up in the media cycle, Taco Bell and Subway are favorite targets. If I hear that Taco Bell is selling non-meat tacos as meat tacos and people are enjoying them, to me that's good news and they should be encouraged to share their tactics.
Food that is cheap, nutritious, palatable, and doesn't cause a lot of damage in its production is good. We should use whatever tactics we can. Compromising any of these too much is not good.
> If it was half the price, I might order it again. Instead, it’s a premium.
This is a common issue for all things vegan, organic, etc. they are always - and I am not exaggerating here - a premium. The issue I think is partially scale and partially subsidies. The only way to get the cost down is if the government stops subsidizing the stuff that’s bad for the environment, starts forcing the externalities to be priced and internalized in their costs, and maybe even uses some tax revenue on these things to subsidize the alternative stuff that’s good for the environment to get the scale up.
I found the Impossible Whopper has one major flaw: it's just a bit too dry. Taste and everything else is pretty good. The Beyond at A&W is good, but it's definitely not a meat patty. Price for both is on the high side.
Reading about the unsustainability of the plant based fake meats was all it required for every single person I know who cares about such things to never even try them.
I hate our SEO'd world: trying to locate the sources again, there is a full on propaganda war taking place on this issue. It has become full time work to locate reputable sources at this time. Searches give pages and pages of marketing.
Yeah, there's not a chance. You have to save them when you find them. That's the real benefit of the actual source over the pop science article or press release summarizing it: the real source is going to be typeset into a pdf that you can keep, instead of being a link that changes or rots, or a memory of something that was dropped from search engines or out-SEO'd.
I am sympathetic to your ideological worldview, but simply claiming that something is common knowledge and being unable to come up with sources is concerning, even in the context of an SEO war.
Okay come on. I believe you saw something credible at some point, but to post "it's common knowledge" two minutes after saying you can't find a source is a really weak argument and doesn't justify "who are you".
Back when the Impossible Burger first came out, there was quite a bit of interest in vegetarian circles. That interest turned sour very quickly as the sustainability of their process was investigated. This was about 2 years ago? Today the vegetarians I know have entirely moved on and the idea of plant based meats is just yet another meat culture noise to be ignored.
But the article doesn't really support the argument. Complaining that many soy farms are currently using bad practices doesn't make soy inherently unsustainable. Neither does an argument that cow farming preserves certain grasslands. And even if CO2 is a "limited" metric it's one that's pretty relevant to sustainability.
So I'm open to being convinced, but this article ain't it.
Even if this is true (and I've never been able to find credible evidence it is), what we're seeing now is just the upper bound of sustainable plant-based food production. As they scale it up and take advantage of technologies like precision fermentation, all evidence suggests this will continue to improve even further. Compare that to animal agriculture, where thermodynamic limitations on increased efficiency are strong, and most of the options to increase sustainability come at the cost of terribly inhumane practices.
I noticed that plant based burgers are less filling, i think because they contain less protein - 19g vs 26g according to Google. I don't mind the taste though
Since we had grasped the implications of this graph[0] a few months back, the wife and I finally managed to actually make the jump to drastically reduce our meat consumption, and also mostly replaced dairy products with soy- and oats-based alternatives. I've even had the McDonald's "McPlant" three or so times since then, and must say that it tastes about the same as I recall other burgers' taste with similar toppings. Turns out I'm totally fine with "fake" meat, and I would encourage everyone to give it a shot.
After scrolling a bit it shows that "Energy" accounts for 73%+ of greenhouse gas emissions. Seems like 100% of effort should be going to energy production for the highest yield, most efficient outcome - and while not increasing the cost of food for everyone which disproportionately causes suffering for the poor; increasing energy cost does the same of course, so it has to be done carefully.
I disagree. All of our effort should go towards all (relatively) easily attainable reductions of emissions in parallel. Substituting consuming meat with consuming plants is such a thing for me, so I readily do it.
So you're 100% for adding 3% of seaweed to cow's diets for an 80%+ reduction, or assuming that ~5% of reductions from livestock (from the chart on the URL you shared) are mostly from cows, bringing that 5% of total global emissions from cows down to just 1%?
And then buying meat, from producers who use seaweed in their diets, will accelerate the adoption of that practice as the benefits economies of scale occur - bringing down the price of quality and very low emissions beef; and more money available for other goods or to invest in green energy, as plant-based are more expensive overall.
The seaweed diet is just the result from a single study that has yet to be widely replicated. I'd caution against putting the fate of the planet into the hands of miracle cures until the scientific process can do its thing.
Even if the seaweed diet does help, the fundamentals of thermodynamics dictate that eating animals will never come close to the efficiency of eating plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Cows, chicken, and fish spend most of their energy living (to whatever extent spending every hour of your day in a windowless cage can be called living).
You do understand that's because it's not meant to - and it's not actually a valid comparison?
That's the point: the animals do the work of the processing and concentrating protein, fat, and nutrients/amino acids into a source that is arguably a perfect single food source for human consumption (high fat red meat, in this case); yes, your gut biome has to adapt for it, and yes, some lineages of humans will not have evolved with access to meat or benefit the same from having some or mostly meat in their diet like some other lineages of evolution.
It'd be more efficient to just consume sunlight, if possible, rather than waste it to the plants too - if maximizing for pure efficiency is the answer.
And let's also not be blindly virtuous about plants when looking at the primary and harmful method of agriculture also of monocultures. The Sacred Cow documentary also presents a good case for the benefit and need of cows, not in factory farms, for being a necessary part of the ecosystem/life cycle for soil health - healthy soil that is needed for plants; or do we ignore some facts and wait 50-200 years to see what disastrous problems we encounter because we don't include all arguments, perspectives, to manage from an all encompassing holistic view point?
Two problems with plant based meat: It costs 2-3x more than the real thing at the grocery store and it is higher in carbohydrate. The carbs are a problem to insulin resistant type 2 diabetics and people in a keto diet.
So the current harm that is used as the primary reason [allegedly] for the push to reducing meat consumption (global climate change) becomes a moot point and actually a relatively very low added cost if needed to start mass producing and farming seaweed to add to a cow's feed; if this isn't part of the conversation of those pushing for beef alternatives, then realize they are ideological and not critically thinking - and may have ulterior motive, even if that's simply trying to generate/drive profit for their own industry of plant-based products.
If it's so easy to adopt that food additive, and it's so effective, we can also do that while trying to go meatless. If the additive works well, and livestock emissions (and runoff) become not a big issue, I'm sure people will happily return to meat (unless the alternatives have become too comfortable.)
If it turns out to be hard, we'll be glad that people were pushed toward meatless. If it's easy, it won't ultimately matter that people were pushed toward meatless.
I like Impossible meat quite a lot, but best in ground beef scenarios. If you're putting it into sloppy joes, hamburger helpers, and the like, it's really hard to even notice the difference. The texture is right and most of the flavor is coming from the other ingredients.
It's less flavorful than cow meat as a burger patty, and it's enough of the flavor profile to notice.
I'm bullish on these products becoming the default restaurant vegetarian option, topping the last generation of plant-based burger brands. And for them to find success in less meat-forward recipes. I'm bearish on there being some sort of cultural or ethical revolution. That won't happen until it's cheaper than meat.
I agree 100%. I remember joking with a friend that the less meat is in your meat, the cheaper it is until 0 where it's suddenly the most expensive options.
That doesn't count, then. I specifically mean half or even larger amounts.
The point is, the place you go as filler takes over is very different from these products. I'm not saying anything at all about small amounts of additive.
For heavily seasoned stuff like tacos, I find ground turkey to be much closer to ground beef (and easier to prepare) than impossible meat.
Impossible doesn't audit or disclose their carbon footprint, but it has been estimated to be a 90% reduction from beef. It turns out switching to turkey also produces a 90% reduction, and is much cheaper:
The article I just linked is excellent. It also has data on climate emissions from transportation and refrigeration for different food types (transportation is a tiny factor for most foods; refrigeration is a larger factor than I realized) and data on emissions from food waste.
Tl;Dr: buy rapidly perishable goods locally; don't bother with things that have a long shelf life. Avoid beef and other ruminants. Don't waste food.
That last point is a big deal for us, as we feed scraps to the chickens, and doing so reduces our emissions way more than I realized (rotting food has very high emissions).
Maybe people are starting to see through the "plant-based" marketing when they see the 20 industrially produced ingredients on the back of the pack. I for one have been steering clear of seed oils and foods high in linoleic acid that have been linked to a plethora of modern health problems, and most of these products are stuffed full of them and are not remotely natural - no thanks.
If you think humans are going to start eating a more boring, simplified diet, you are missing a major plot line of human civilization, which continues to give us an ever-increasing array of foods in every possible configuration.
You assumed that eating plants over processed corn/pea protein/soy isolate/canola oil blocks = a bowl of raw spinach. There are endless delicious cultural cuisines which are made of only plants, not ultra processed, and certainly not boring.
I am fairly certain the seed oils talking bit can be traced back to a quack doc interviewed on Rogan’s podcast, which people then ran with.
It’s the soy meme version 2.0, just grounded in even less reality.
McDonald's did a lot of things wrong with their plant-based meat burger. If you want to see it done right, just take a look at Burger King. In Germany, you can now substitute animal meat for plant-based meat in every burger, and on top of that they have very tasty plant-based burgers like the long chicken and vegan chicken nuggets. In Vienna, they've opened their first 100% plant-based location.
And yes, Beyond Meat's stock is not doing well, but this doesn't mean plant-based meats in general aren't doing well.
McDonald’s Netherlands did the most idiotic approach. They started offering vegetarian burgers that were made of like 80% dairy. So incredibly stupid I still can’t believe it.
I see you are just another vegan who cares more about feeling morally superior over reducing the most animal suffering. I can only assume you haven't been vegan long or else I feel very doubtful of our movement to change many more peoples minds.
From a sustainability POV, using living beings for milk production is vastly worse than a plant based alternative.
From a animal friendliness perspective, it abuses the same animals that would be slaughtered for meat, for long periods of time in cruel ways.
From a business and consumer POV, this limits your burger to only Omni and vegetarians, excluding the entire market of vegans, and people with dairy intolerances who would opt for this option instead.
All around a PR inspired, stupid half measure that is insulting at best.
Most stocks have been taking a massive hit and valuations are down near 2020s lows for the first time. Reads like opportunism to knock on new market entrants through a bit piece.
Are they going to claim EVs are failing next, too? How about solar? Why not go all out.
Maybe they aren't as messianic as the marketing copy proclaimed (what ever is?) but impossible mince makes a lot of difference to my life - I'm an unrepentant carnivore that lives with a vegetarian.
We cook meals several evenings a week and without a half-decent mince substitute there are a lot of dishes that would feel too much like a compromise to be enjoyable. I enjoy making and eating vegetarian food as well, I think I make a great dahl for instance, but my diet would be less fulfilling without it. Or we'd end up doing more "I have a fish steak, she has a quorn fillet' nights.
So I hope that these newer, closer recreations of beef don't disappear. But at the same time none of them is exactly on the mark, so I'm also not that surprised they haven't taken the world by storm.
I never ate one as the idea of fake bleeding meat is grotesque. Meat eating friends who tried it all said that it was either mediocre or gross. Vegan friends didn't care for it at all. So it comes as no surprise to me that eating fake bleeding meat is not popular.
> Meat eating friends who tried it all said that it was either mediocre or gross.
Mediocre is good. I eat a lot of mediocre meat. If a little bit of msg will get me over the line to "alright American comfort food", I'm in a good place. Vegetarian comfort food usually doesn't get me anywhere. I don't like avocado that much.
I'd rather eat a falafel pita wrap, or a Indian spicy potato burger, or a bean burrito. There's plenty of great vegetarian food, no need to torture plants to become something else.
Exactly. I'm not a vegetarian, and I won't even consider buying an impossible burger or whatever, but I would love to eat some meat free meals like you described.
I'm also really picky about meat and I love vegetables.
Mostly I think the same way. Except sometimes when I go with my friends to McDonalds or Burger King, then it's nice to not be excluded, and have this meaty textures. As I am a vegetarian since 14, now with 37 I really was shocked by the first Beyond Meat burger, I thought they mixed up my order.
Just wrote a wall of text about it in another comment, but I used to flip burgers at a place that offered both black-bean veggie burgers and Impossible burgers. The veggie burgers sold better, by more than 2:1. I suspect it was because of the price, not the flavor.
I'm not a vegetarian but the first time I went to Indonesia and tried tempeh I thought it was fantastic and could be used as a substitute protein in so many western dishes.
I sent a few years in India. I found the vegetarian emulations of western dishes all pretty unsatisfying vs an impossible or beyond meat version (note: actual Indian food is great, I’m just saying I don’t love McPaneers and even higher end restaurants vegetarian burgers). I did recently see that beyond meat or impossible was looking at offering some products in India and I bet if they get their prices and branding right, they’d do really well there
My thought exactly. When I was in college, I flipped burgers (real and fake). We sold regular burgers, Impossible burgers, veggie burgers, and turkey burgers. I'd say turkey made up about 1/20 of the burgers I made. Veggie was probably 1/30. Impossible burgers... 1/100? Maybe?
It was right next to campus. Vegans were everywhere. My guess is that, as a vegan, you probably don't think to go to a fast-casual place with the word "Burger" in the name, when there's two falafel joints around the corner. Another guess is that, as a college student, you would rather not spend way more to get an imitation, when you could just get the real thing.
As a line cook, Impossible burgers are a pain in the ass. You have to handle them with more finesse than normal burgers, or they crumble. We had to run the second flat-top at a lower temperature for them, because they would sear horribly if you ran them at the normal birger/turkey burger temperature. As a result of the lower temperature, they cook slower. Any niche ingredient that rarely gets used inherently causes hiccups in the process, slowing down the kitchen.
I tried an Impossible burger on a meal break once. It didn't really taste like a burger, more like "someone mixed some bison with a bunch of black beans and salt," but it still tasted great. The thing is, the normal burgers also tasted great, and they cost less (to the business and the customer).
If I wanted to eat plants, I'd go eat plants. I don't feel the urge to eat plants that are pretending to not be plants. That said, if Impossible could undercut ground beef prices, then they might be onto something. Good luck undercutting ground beef prices in the Midwest, though.
If I'm going to eat vegetables, I want to eat real vegetables, not an assortment of pea protein and flavorers slathered in preservatives that doesn't even taste as good as the thing it's imitating!
I prefer to eat the vegan whoppers. I’m not vegan but don’t like eating trash meat of bad quality. Hadn’t been to BK in years, now it’s a regular option for me because I’m not disgusted by the bad quality meat and enjoy the occasional easy fast food burger.
I also buy Beyond Burgers for at home. I prefer them to many many other real meat burger patties from the super market. Beyond meat is delicious.
I certainly don’t think I’m the target audience for plant meat. As a vegetarian, I don’t actually want my burger to look it taste like meat. I like to know that what I’m eating isn’t meat, and I see no need to blur the lines and enable someone to accidentally serve it to me.
I just don’t see any future where I won’t be eating meat.
My grandparents and cousins raise farm animals; I’ve helped raise farm animals: horses, oxen, cows, chickens, pigs, goats…
What stops a family from raising their own hamburgers? In my vision, it’s a lot cleaner and easier to understand than lab grown meat.
I was just talking to my grandpa, in Europe, he was laughing at the news about needing to eat insects in the future, he also mentioned no one he knows would have trouble sourcing meat in any vision of the future.
(Edit: downvote me all you want with no comment but this is a part of reality no matter how much you ignore it; good luck convincing generational farmers, that grow their own food, to start getting pre-frozen insect meat or meat alternatives, delivered to them from god knows where.)
I don't think people realize how low emissions are for poultry. Also, adding supplements like seaweed to cow diets reduces their emissions substantially.
Ultimately, we have to do direct air carbon capture anyway at this point (the climate is already unacceptably screwed up), and doing that will be far more economical and scalable than eliminating long tail carbon emissions.
After all, meat production is only a bit over 5% of global emissions. Carbon capture will dwarf that: we're committed to capturing > 100% of current emissions for many years, whether we like it or not. Estimates say carbon capture will cost about a dollar per gallon of gasoline-equivalent emissions.
Would people rather give up beef, or pay $0.10-0.05 more per gallon of gasoline?
> What stops a family from raising their own hamburgers?
Mostly that they take a lot of space or a lot of feed or both. I borrowed two cows (or loaned a pasture) for a couple of weeks once, and they cleaned it out real fast. A lot of people in single family homes could keep chickens or maybe even goats, but cows are right out.
It's the same line of argument as "well my dad was a chain smoker and he died at 92 and it wasn't lung cancer!"
It's undisputable that producing meat requires way more land and resources than any plant or vegetable. Sure, nobody cares about the farmer and his five cows he keeps for himself, what's rather the problem is giant animal farms with questionable hygiene, sick animals, bad treatment of them, and the general expectation of more and more parts of the world population to eat meat every day instead of once or twice a week.
“But the consumer environment is tough, and this stuff is not cheap,” he added. “It’s going to take time to change cultural practices. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
There's a hint of authoritarianism in that statement. 'change cultural practices' confers a sense of social engineering to the intent here. People don't like to be told what to eat. It has to be significantly better than the standard option.
I've been vegan for nearly a quarter century. Part of the problem is that deliberately positioning the fake meat products as, well, "fake meat" will forever create unreasonable expectations by way of comparisons. I have only the faintest recollection of what a hamburger, or steak, or fried chicken tastes like but if my experience were more recent, then I would probably reject the vegetarian alternatives if they were positioned as comparable in the market.
But I think fast-food places have few alternatives to this practice. Outside of the fast food world, it's easier because restaurants are at greater liberty to not be constrained by the typical ways that animal flesh is shaped and used.
It's a shame, because occasionally, those who don't eat animal products end up in social situations where they have to eat at fast-food places and are often left eating nothing.
As a vegan, agree. I once described benevolent bacon as “you’re not going to think ‘oh wow I totally just ate bacon’ but you might think ‘oh wow I don’t need bacon after that.”
And it’s a recipe thing. Just need to get a little creative perhaps.
Also when I made my own vegan bbq out of seitan (gluten) I can mix the smoke flavor right into the wheat flour mixture. It doesn’t take the 14-18 hours to coax smoke flavor into a bit of meat. Can dial it all right to whatever I want from the get go.
But ultimately finding recipes that people want to eat without meat should be a better goal. Feels like a false premise.
> But I think fast-food places have few alternatives to this practice
Yup. Your practice is certainly a great one and it works for some things and gradual changes, but it probably won't work very well for people who are not very fond of change when they notice it, which is likely most of them.
> Part of the problem is that deliberately positioning the fake meat products as, well, "fake meat" will forever create unreasonable expectations by way of comparisons.
I've always thought that was strange. Naming products they consume after the very things a lot of vegans are against. Like if a meat eater made something that looked like lettuce out of meat and called it a salad.
Beyond Meat, for example, has the goal of reducing the ecological impact of meat consumption. It's not for seasoned vegan vets. It's for nascent, plant-curious folk who just need a little push in the right direction.
The company's goal is to make money, full stop. The way to make money, is to tell a story about reduced ecological impact, which is (like any marketing pitch) heavily biased and short on unintended consequences or contradictory facts. It's an effective marketing plan, because so many people seem to a) believe it without much checking and b) want to believe it, that is, have a healthy conscious by "doing their part" about the environment.
Not a vegan here, but to bolster your point somewhat, there's this huge assortment of South Indian food that is completely meat-free, it's grain and plant based, and it is ancient cuisine that mastered being delicious. It has no pretense around fake chicken or fake this or that.
It does contain a lot of ghee, so it isn't vegan, but my point remains. Once I was taken to a vegan sushi place, and I was given some sort of "vegan salmon roll" that was made with mango slices. It wasn't bad - but the fact that you said it was salmon, and it wasn't, is a turn-off. They'd be better off just saying, we're a vegan restaurant, here's our food to try, rather than calling it something fake.
People don't like to play pretend, it feels odd, and it doesn't convert the non-vegans like myself.
I’ve had the opposite experience. I’m not vegan, but my diet has trended that way lately - and I’m totally fine and prefer when restaurants liken foods to salmon/tuna/etc. I want the point of comparison.
Indeed, I am a meat lover but most of my South Indian meals during the week are meat-free. Our family historically and usually only eats meat on the weekends because meat used to be expensive back in the day in the old country.
South Indian cuisine is da bomb. Here in the PNW it's picking up steam and I like that trend very much. Stout patriot here, but American cuisine is loathsome. Indian, French, Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Szehchuan, Canton, so many cultures do so much better that the good old US of A it's embarrassing.
My Chinese wife finds this bemusing and jokes that I was a Szechuan farmer in another life.
I was going to post a similar comment to yours. I'm not vegetarian/vegan but I've been very keen on testing alternatives to meat and dairy and I completely agree with your statement:
>Part of the problem is that deliberately positioning the fake meat products as, well, "fake meat" will forever create unreasonable expectations by way of comparisons.
Look, I have eaten some patties which were made of very tasty vegetarian/vegan combinations (lentils, beans, carrots, etc) and I do enjoy these a lot. Now if you call them a replacement for meat patties it's just not gonna work out. Even the ones that really try hard to imitate meat just don't cut it in my opinion (plus all the processing and ingredients they use to imitate meat is worrying to me). Are they bad? No they aren't, they're delicious and I can take them anyday as long as they're somewhat healthy and nutritious but please don't call them "fake meat", they're not and they must not be marketed that way because it'll make people reject them, which is probably part of the failure we're seeing now.
I’ve been a vegetarian for similar length of time (30 years give or take) and have also always wondered why fast food places only seem to do “fake meat”. My local Subway did a trial of falafels and it was amazing. After about 6 months they went back to the (imo) gross soy protein veggie pattie’s. Anyways, I always thought most fast food places could basically replace their meat with falafel’s and 80% of vegetarians would love it, but none seem to have ever done it. I’m sure they do focus groups and have figured out the fake stuff sells better, but I think with a bit of marketing about it not being “fake” it could do as well, if not better, than the imitation meat stuff.
I think you do have a good point but want to provide a small counter argument:
The alternative meat offerings are providing food in a package which is easier to turn in a dish than other vegetarian / vegan ingredients. You get lots of things that can just be fried in a pan: fake meat balls, fake schnitzel, fake chicken nuggets, etc. These things don't need to taste like meat, they just need to taste good to succeed. The manufacturers are piggybacking on form factors and taste-signatures which have a name for consumers to recognize.
I think you’re correct in fact, but have the wrong conclusion.
I’m vegetarian and my partner (who I live with) is not.
Those meat-fakes and vegetarian chicken nuggets and shit are sad. They just don’t taste as good as the originals. If you take a could-be-vegetarian person and say “it’s easy to try out being vegetarian, just swap meat for fake meat” then you’ll disappoint them. It’s just worse and they won’t stick with it. Those products are for people who are committed to being vegetarian but haven’t yet discovered new ways to eat or people catering to vegetarians who are meat eaters. I’ve been to friends house where someone made a meat dish and made me a few fake-meat nuggets to be nice. It was a kind gesture. “Real” vegetarian don’t eat like that though, they find recipes designed to be enjoyed as is.
If you’re trying to go vegetarian, eat Indian or éthiopien food. Explore real Mediterranean food. Don’t try to make steak and potatoes vegetarian. Yogurts or smoothies are good snacks. Etc.
Disclaimer: I love a good hamburger and fake hamburger meat I’ll tolerate. If you’re American you may not want to give up burgers entirely.
I remember during the peak hype I was super eager to try it. People were saying it's indistinguishable from real meat and will cause a revolution! Even as a meat lover, I was honestly super excited when [either "Impossible" or "Beyond", don't remember which] burger came to my country. It was the first (and only) time in my life when I was excited to try a vegan burger. This will change everything!
I had it at a very nice restaurant. And it was... extremely underwhelming. I remember thinking to myself "really? that's it?". It tasted exactly like those supermarket veggie burgers my vegetarian sister used to microwave in the early to mid 90s. You know, those veggie patties that are obviously not meat, and have too much spices on them to try to mask it and pretend to be something else. Not gross, just meh. An ok side dish at most.
I guess it was all about having really, really good PR.
Still excited for lab-made meat, though. Maybe some day.
Yes, anyone who has been around for awhile should be able to recognize it as nothing more than a soy burger or veggie pattie. It shows the power of marketing to create novelty out of the ordinary.
> Yes, anyone who has been around for awhile should be able to recognize it as nothing more than a soy burger or veggie pattie.
Out of curiosity: Have you eaten one in a restaurant setting? They're credible ground beef analogs (and are judged harshly since the bar is higher), where soy/veggie patties don't even pretend to be beef.
In any case, it was all over once Big Beef's (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Marfrig) P.R. machines established "fake meat" as the name for beef alternatives.
Modern fake meats (Beyond, Impossible etc) are unmistakeably superior to legacy fake meat. I don’t know what you were served, or how it was prepared, but if it was indistinguishable from 90s microwave “meat”, it wasn’t representative.
You should try a Beyond Meat burger from one of the many restaurants who regularly serve them. I wouldn’t say it’s indistinguishable from meat — and it’s totally fair to hate it — but it’s in a different league to the fake meat of the 90s.
I recommend the McDonald’s McPlant, it’s a great representation.
Eh, if you don't like it, you don't like it. No need to force it. :)
That all said, I found the v1 formula really didn't work for me - something just tasted... off. v2 is good enough to pass for me, though I still prefer to just east standard veggie burgers if they're on the menu. I would be curious for your take if you tried v2!
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadenough said
Edit: Either it's juicy and the texture isn't right, or the texture is right but it isn't juicy, or the flavour isn't there. It just doesn't taste real enough, in some ways its SO close... /end edit.
Wife and I tried some of the beyond meat from the super market and that was once... never again, it was not good, any of it. Its sometimes /very/ salty, even if I don't add salt...
(as a side note I donno if it's changed but it's more expensive to buy beyond meat than it is to buy real meat)
So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.
If you compare it to garbage fast food, then of course the impossible burger will be better.
One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.
Whoa there. "Enjoy" might be a bit generous. I might suggest endure. A lot of people eating fast food burgers are not doing it because they enjoy it, but at their cheap prices it is just something they can afford. Yes, there is a large portion of people that "like" fast food burgers, and that might be a number that reaches "plenty". But I would imagine that enjoyment is similar to when I was a broke ass college age person that could only afford ramen and enjoyed it as being better than nothing.
And I love well prepared burgers. I love steak. And I love goldfish. I disagree strongly with your comment.
There's a massive difference between a McDonald's burger and the kind of burger you'd make fresh (or order at a non-fast-food restaurant). It's not a subtle issue of taste. They're just completely different dishes.
I guess the pre-made plant burgers will be close to pre-made meat burgers.
I wonder if you can make your own burger out of soy granules, which I found to be the closest to ground beef when properly spiced during rehydration. I should try that some time.
Tanget: Americans in Germany often say our McD tastes better. I find that fascinating, as McD here tastes absolutely horrible to me.
You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?
The salt mixed into many pre-made patties makes them increasingly rubbery the longer they sit in the supermarket. The seasonings are usually a crapshoot.
Toppings are a separate matter. Go to town.
There's a whole lot of seasoning going on with well cooked ground beef. When you go to a restaurant and the burgers pop -- this is why.
The most basic seasoning is salt. Unseasoned beef doesn't taste great and when it's cooked less than ideally often excess condiments are used to make up for the lack of seasoning.
When I cook burgers at home I often mix in diced garlic, a tiny bit of soy sauce, cayenne, msg, and rosemary.
One of my kids went through a phase of eating burgers with no toppings at all. Another, noodles with no sauce. It's a preference, but - if the topic is quality of cuisine it shouldn't be surprising that people have higher expectations.
The vegetarian equivalent isn't anything you can buy (in a supermarket anyway), they're all crap, it's making your own with good (non-meat) ingredients.
100x better than fast food "burgers"
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32964298
When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy.
A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.
One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it.
Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other.
Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences.
The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS?
There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently.
(It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)
I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back.
General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.
I’ll admit tho if we compare fast food then I don’t really mind impossible meat. Fast food burgers are very soso.
I agree, I’d just like a good veggie burger sometime. Doesn’t need ultra processing.
Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen.
Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.
I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.
At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more.
Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat.
Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.
on the other hand, burger king's rebel whooper is very good. problem I experienced was that staff takes too much time to make it.
I have no developed taste for "real" burgers and I still wouldn't eat plant-based ones regularly. at least the pricing is normal, compared to burgers in vegan restaurants that cost 3-5 times more.
is meat consumption in fast-food chain the majority of meat consumption? if not, why the need to discuss the global meat consumption in the context of fast-food chains.
That sounds like a Woody Allen quote.
Otherwise it's just "this neither satisfied my tongue nor my stomach". You don't want a subpar meal to also be small unless you have the spare time and money to get a replacement.
My original belief was that one big prion disease outbreak in the US would be the tipping point, but post-COVID I don’t think that’ll do it.
Now, I think it’s going to be climate change. I honestly don’t see how animal meat is sustainable for more than another generation or two.
it was kind of funny to see the PR campaigns ramp up - placement in news articles, podcast interviews with the founder, partnerships with fast food chains.
after the smoke cleared there was never any real demand, just hype. a bunch of people made money, rinse repeat.
There needs to be an economic reason and it doesn’t make sense that an impossible whopper costs more than a whopper.
For that price, I’d rather have a sustainably raised, organic whopper that tastes the same or better.
I think veggie food is cheaper (rice and beans) it’s just this synthetic fake meat stuff that costs more.
It is. GP is just saying that different people have different ethics.
I'm in no way a vegetarian. And I'm too set in my childhood-established food biases to make huge changes. (I tried for a year or two. It didn't take.) But the Impossible and Beyond burgers are close enough for me. Could I tell them apart in a patty taste test? Probably. But once it's on a bun with cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot, I don't notice a difference.
So at that point, I'm like, "Cows are nice animals." I have made the acquaintance of a few and I like them. For an equivalent experience, I can either kill the cow or not. So we've been gradually shifting toward the high-grade fake meats. I look forward to further improvements on this front.
Wouldn't be one for much longer.
But thank you for the comment. It's nice to know that the people opposed to crazy things like human rights are this dysfunctional. You give me hope for the future.
It seems to me that this argument isn’t sufficiently strong. The global warming argument seems strong.
Any food that require artificial fertilizers would have to pay the carbon tax, making carbon-neutral food better in comparison.
huh? Maybe in authoritarian countries, but not in countries whose constitutions are geared for individual liberty. Your fascist tendencies are showing.
I definitely don't. Taxing externalities is great and not fascist.
The tax system should have a single purpose - Raise funds for government expenses.
This is why the tax system is the mess it currently is. Everyone thinks the solution to their personal "social change" is to "tax whatever they disagree with".
You dont like carbonated drinks, advocate for a "soft drink tax".
You dont like people eating meats, advocate for a "meat tax".
Should we increase the fuel taxes to account for all the diesel used to produce a vegan diet? Besides the farming, there is the water and transportation to account for. Some produce (nuts, avocados) are very damaging on the environment, should we tax them?
Or, is this a "bad tax" because it impacts you?
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
36% of crops globally are used for animal feed. This climbs to 67% in the USA.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
How does it compare to other sources of proteins with full amino acid profiles?
Farming Lions for meat would be less economical than farming cows. Farming cows is less economical than farming wheat.
Well, yeah, that's why I'm asking how meat compares to those rather than pure calories sources like corn or sugar cane.
Livestock eats bulk commodities like corn and grain, which modern mechanized farming has made incredibly efficient. Those staples are grown in regions that don't require irrigation (iowa, kansas, etc). Wheat and corn are already so cheap that they're almost free in the US. Humans get their fill.
It's not like little Johnny can't have broccoli this week because the fat cats are eating burgers.
Look at it from this perspective: Shipping corn and wheat is a relatively efficient way of moving "water" from places that rain a lot to places where it doesn't.
Or the unused manure, nitrogen runoff, methane from cows
Is it ethical to eat dogs? Some societies do, some don't.
Should we judge lions for eating meats? Perhaps convince them to move to a vegan diet?
What you are advocating is forcing your views on others, and that "price" should be the factor.
What if others don't want you do to do something, would you enjoy having it priced out of your reach?
Why do you "have to convince them" in the first place? wouldn't it be easier to do what makes you happy and keep your opinions to yourself and your like-minded friends?
Wild claim!
Despite all the media coverage on farming/meat industry, coal-powered power plants remain the single most polluting industry in terms of GHG.
Followed by all the hydrocarbon fuel based Transportation and (by a large step margin) the steel industry.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
Effectively if you would stop commuting with a car, reduced AC/Heating to bare minimum and simply bought less 'stuff' (non-essential goods), you would be doing more for the environment than not eating meat.
The unconfortable truth is that once we start discussing these things very few people are willing to curb their 'standard of living', in reality it is a first world luxury not a given right.
Nevertheless if you tell me that we need to curb meat consumption to avoid animal suffering than I am equally on board with you. But the environmental angle in my view is a distraction from the other elephants in the room.
To my understanding, the climate problem is basically one of not having closed loops. For instance, burning fossil fuels is a problem because you’re taking carbon that’s buried underground and pumping it into the atmosphere. So to the degree that meat is a problem, there’s probably a loop we need to close. Energy and transportation are instances of the same burning-fossil-fuels problem that we need to solve anyway.
As for the livestock themselves, I know they produce methane as a byproduct of digestion, but that seems like a potentially closed loop to me. Wasn’t it a closed loop during all the centuries that humans raised livestock before the Industrial Revolution? If so, what changed? The way we produce fertilizer, for one. But we also need fertilizer to grow vegetables, so we need to solve the fertilizer problem anyway. Plus, livestock are also the primary source of organic fertilizer, so maybe they’re part of the closed loop. They sure used to be.
As a small incremental expense, a veg burger has to be a lot cheaper than a meat burger for people to choose it consistently. The taste is a minor issue once you load it up with ketchup, pickles, special sauce, etc.
Whereas more expensive things like solar panels or electric cars, only have to be a little cheaper to make a meaningful marginal economic difference to most people.
I'm definitely in their target market. I'm willing to pay a modest premium for what they're offering. And at cost parity, I'll buy their product a lot.
What’s the mass market business model for “pretty good, minimally processed, reasonably healthy, low cost burger alternative”? Institutional? Workplace? Schools? Prisons? Dollar store frozen food section? Food cart?
In a way, it’s like the debunked story of the expensive NASA space pen versus the cheap cosmonaut pencil.
Of course, the facts of that story are that private investment, not government spending, came up with an advanced solution, and that pencils really were a potential problem in spacecraft due to fragmentation and flammability. In popular perception, though, the original false story remains very convincing.
Not many of us are going to space regularly. Cheap pencils and pens own the market that matters.
If a fake meat company wants to make a meaningful difference on the environment, they need to cut the cost sharply and make something that can take the mass market.
Similarly, there were people in the 1970s and 1980s who wanted computing to be available to the masses. That now exists, but the road that led to it wasn't a direct one. The original Macintosh was the equivalent of $6500 bucks today. Was that the right price? In one sense no, because most people couldn't afford to spend good-used-car kinds of money on a computer. But it was the right price in that it was enough money to sell a bunch of units, establish a market, and help fund their R&D going forward. Which over time led to today's world of ubiquitous cheap computing power.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a plant based meat company to hope they can accomplish something similar. Wikipedia tells me (I’ve made no effort to verify this) that instant noodles were also originally sold above the price point of the normal noodles they were replacing.
Every few years a lawsuit or accusation about the absence of meat comes up in the media cycle, Taco Bell and Subway are favorite targets. If I hear that Taco Bell is selling non-meat tacos as meat tacos and people are enjoying them, to me that's good news and they should be encouraged to share their tactics.
Food that is cheap, nutritious, palatable, and doesn't cause a lot of damage in its production is good. We should use whatever tactics we can. Compromising any of these too much is not good.
This is a common issue for all things vegan, organic, etc. they are always - and I am not exaggerating here - a premium. The issue I think is partially scale and partially subsidies. The only way to get the cost down is if the government stops subsidizing the stuff that’s bad for the environment, starts forcing the externalities to be priced and internalized in their costs, and maybe even uses some tax revenue on these things to subsidize the alternative stuff that’s good for the environment to get the scale up.
But the article doesn't really support the argument. Complaining that many soy farms are currently using bad practices doesn't make soy inherently unsustainable. Neither does an argument that cow farming preserves certain grasslands. And even if CO2 is a "limited" metric it's one that's pretty relevant to sustainability.
So I'm open to being convinced, but this article ain't it.
[0]: https://coloss.us.to/food_co2.jpg
After scrolling a bit it shows that "Energy" accounts for 73%+ of greenhouse gas emissions. Seems like 100% of effort should be going to energy production for the highest yield, most efficient outcome - and while not increasing the cost of food for everyone which disproportionately causes suffering for the poor; increasing energy cost does the same of course, so it has to be done carefully.
And then buying meat, from producers who use seaweed in their diets, will accelerate the adoption of that practice as the benefits economies of scale occur - bringing down the price of quality and very low emissions beef; and more money available for other goods or to invest in green energy, as plant-based are more expensive overall.
That's a win-win-win scenario/strategy, no?
https://bdnews24.com/environment/plant-based-food-companies-...
They're probably not providing more than a 90% reduction in emissions vs beef.
Even if the seaweed diet does help, the fundamentals of thermodynamics dictate that eating animals will never come close to the efficiency of eating plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Cows, chicken, and fish spend most of their energy living (to whatever extent spending every hour of your day in a windowless cage can be called living).
That's the point: the animals do the work of the processing and concentrating protein, fat, and nutrients/amino acids into a source that is arguably a perfect single food source for human consumption (high fat red meat, in this case); yes, your gut biome has to adapt for it, and yes, some lineages of humans will not have evolved with access to meat or benefit the same from having some or mostly meat in their diet like some other lineages of evolution.
It'd be more efficient to just consume sunlight, if possible, rather than waste it to the plants too - if maximizing for pure efficiency is the answer.
And let's also not be blindly virtuous about plants when looking at the primary and harmful method of agriculture also of monocultures. The Sacred Cow documentary also presents a good case for the benefit and need of cows, not in factory farms, for being a necessary part of the ecosystem/life cycle for soil health - healthy soil that is needed for plants; or do we ignore some facts and wait 50-200 years to see what disastrous problems we encounter because we don't include all arguments, perspectives, to manage from an all encompassing holistic view point?
"New Long-Term Study Could Mean More Sustainable Burgers" - https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces...
So the current harm that is used as the primary reason [allegedly] for the push to reducing meat consumption (global climate change) becomes a moot point and actually a relatively very low added cost if needed to start mass producing and farming seaweed to add to a cow's feed; if this isn't part of the conversation of those pushing for beef alternatives, then realize they are ideological and not critically thinking - and may have ulterior motive, even if that's simply trying to generate/drive profit for their own industry of plant-based products.
If it turns out to be hard, we'll be glad that people were pushed toward meatless. If it's easy, it won't ultimately matter that people were pushed toward meatless.
It's less flavorful than cow meat as a burger patty, and it's enough of the flavor profile to notice.
I'm bullish on these products becoming the default restaurant vegetarian option, topping the last generation of plant-based burger brands. And for them to find success in less meat-forward recipes. I'm bearish on there being some sort of cultural or ethical revolution. That won't happen until it's cheaper than meat.
That doesn't count, then. I specifically mean half or even larger amounts.
The point is, the place you go as filler takes over is very different from these products. I'm not saying anything at all about small amounts of additive.
Impossible doesn't audit or disclose their carbon footprint, but it has been estimated to be a 90% reduction from beef. It turns out switching to turkey also produces a 90% reduction, and is much cheaper:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
The article I just linked is excellent. It also has data on climate emissions from transportation and refrigeration for different food types (transportation is a tiny factor for most foods; refrigeration is a larger factor than I realized) and data on emissions from food waste.
Tl;Dr: buy rapidly perishable goods locally; don't bother with things that have a long shelf life. Avoid beef and other ruminants. Don't waste food.
That last point is a big deal for us, as we feed scraps to the chickens, and doing so reduces our emissions way more than I realized (rotting food has very high emissions).
The best evidence we have does not support what are usually low-carb talking points
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/fo/c7fo0...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7524638/
And yes, Beyond Meat's stock is not doing well, but this doesn't mean plant-based meats in general aren't doing well.
this is a clear indicator you are a "lost cause" social justice warrior type. Equating slavery and eating meats.. OMG.
Have you considered taking an African safari and encouraging lions to stop eating meats?
Why do people like you use "be on the right side of history" and other catch buzzword type sayings?
From a sustainability POV, using living beings for milk production is vastly worse than a plant based alternative.
From a animal friendliness perspective, it abuses the same animals that would be slaughtered for meat, for long periods of time in cruel ways.
From a business and consumer POV, this limits your burger to only Omni and vegetarians, excluding the entire market of vegans, and people with dairy intolerances who would opt for this option instead.
All around a PR inspired, stupid half measure that is insulting at best.
Are they going to claim EVs are failing next, too? How about solar? Why not go all out.
We cook meals several evenings a week and without a half-decent mince substitute there are a lot of dishes that would feel too much like a compromise to be enjoyable. I enjoy making and eating vegetarian food as well, I think I make a great dahl for instance, but my diet would be less fulfilling without it. Or we'd end up doing more "I have a fish steak, she has a quorn fillet' nights.
So I hope that these newer, closer recreations of beef don't disappear. But at the same time none of them is exactly on the mark, so I'm also not that surprised they haven't taken the world by storm.
Mediocre is good. I eat a lot of mediocre meat. If a little bit of msg will get me over the line to "alright American comfort food", I'm in a good place. Vegetarian comfort food usually doesn't get me anywhere. I don't like avocado that much.
I'm also really picky about meat and I love vegetables.
It was right next to campus. Vegans were everywhere. My guess is that, as a vegan, you probably don't think to go to a fast-casual place with the word "Burger" in the name, when there's two falafel joints around the corner. Another guess is that, as a college student, you would rather not spend way more to get an imitation, when you could just get the real thing.
As a line cook, Impossible burgers are a pain in the ass. You have to handle them with more finesse than normal burgers, or they crumble. We had to run the second flat-top at a lower temperature for them, because they would sear horribly if you ran them at the normal birger/turkey burger temperature. As a result of the lower temperature, they cook slower. Any niche ingredient that rarely gets used inherently causes hiccups in the process, slowing down the kitchen.
I tried an Impossible burger on a meal break once. It didn't really taste like a burger, more like "someone mixed some bison with a bunch of black beans and salt," but it still tasted great. The thing is, the normal burgers also tasted great, and they cost less (to the business and the customer).
If I wanted to eat plants, I'd go eat plants. I don't feel the urge to eat plants that are pretending to not be plants. That said, if Impossible could undercut ground beef prices, then they might be onto something. Good luck undercutting ground beef prices in the Midwest, though.
I also buy Beyond Burgers for at home. I prefer them to many many other real meat burger patties from the super market. Beyond meat is delicious.
My grandparents and cousins raise farm animals; I’ve helped raise farm animals: horses, oxen, cows, chickens, pigs, goats…
What stops a family from raising their own hamburgers? In my vision, it’s a lot cleaner and easier to understand than lab grown meat.
I was just talking to my grandpa, in Europe, he was laughing at the news about needing to eat insects in the future, he also mentioned no one he knows would have trouble sourcing meat in any vision of the future.
(Edit: downvote me all you want with no comment but this is a part of reality no matter how much you ignore it; good luck convincing generational farmers, that grow their own food, to start getting pre-frozen insect meat or meat alternatives, delivered to them from god knows where.)
But also it's silly of you to equate "lab grown meat" to stuff that's just different plants processed and mixed.
Ultimately, we have to do direct air carbon capture anyway at this point (the climate is already unacceptably screwed up), and doing that will be far more economical and scalable than eliminating long tail carbon emissions.
After all, meat production is only a bit over 5% of global emissions. Carbon capture will dwarf that: we're committed to capturing > 100% of current emissions for many years, whether we like it or not. Estimates say carbon capture will cost about a dollar per gallon of gasoline-equivalent emissions.
Would people rather give up beef, or pay $0.10-0.05 more per gallon of gasoline?
Mostly that they take a lot of space or a lot of feed or both. I borrowed two cows (or loaned a pasture) for a couple of weeks once, and they cleaned it out real fast. A lot of people in single family homes could keep chickens or maybe even goats, but cows are right out.
It's undisputable that producing meat requires way more land and resources than any plant or vegetable. Sure, nobody cares about the farmer and his five cows he keeps for himself, what's rather the problem is giant animal farms with questionable hygiene, sick animals, bad treatment of them, and the general expectation of more and more parts of the world population to eat meat every day instead of once or twice a week.
There's a hint of authoritarianism in that statement. 'change cultural practices' confers a sense of social engineering to the intent here. People don't like to be told what to eat. It has to be significantly better than the standard option.
But I think fast-food places have few alternatives to this practice. Outside of the fast food world, it's easier because restaurants are at greater liberty to not be constrained by the typical ways that animal flesh is shaped and used.
It's a shame, because occasionally, those who don't eat animal products end up in social situations where they have to eat at fast-food places and are often left eating nothing.
And it’s a recipe thing. Just need to get a little creative perhaps.
But ultimately finding recipes that people want to eat without meat should be a better goal. Feels like a false premise.
Yup. Your practice is certainly a great one and it works for some things and gradual changes, but it probably won't work very well for people who are not very fond of change when they notice it, which is likely most of them.
I've always thought that was strange. Naming products they consume after the very things a lot of vegans are against. Like if a meat eater made something that looked like lettuce out of meat and called it a salad.
Yes, they want to make money. Yes, it's a great way to get people started on the journey to meat-free diets. What's your problem with that?
It does contain a lot of ghee, so it isn't vegan, but my point remains. Once I was taken to a vegan sushi place, and I was given some sort of "vegan salmon roll" that was made with mango slices. It wasn't bad - but the fact that you said it was salmon, and it wasn't, is a turn-off. They'd be better off just saying, we're a vegan restaurant, here's our food to try, rather than calling it something fake.
People don't like to play pretend, it feels odd, and it doesn't convert the non-vegans like myself.
I’ve had the opposite experience. I’m not vegan, but my diet has trended that way lately - and I’m totally fine and prefer when restaurants liken foods to salmon/tuna/etc. I want the point of comparison.
Indeed, I am a meat lover but most of my South Indian meals during the week are meat-free. Our family historically and usually only eats meat on the weekends because meat used to be expensive back in the day in the old country.
My Chinese wife finds this bemusing and jokes that I was a Szechuan farmer in another life.
South Indian dishes would be Dosas, Uttapam, Idli, Sambar, Vada. Most of it is vegan, if it's vegetarian.
>Part of the problem is that deliberately positioning the fake meat products as, well, "fake meat" will forever create unreasonable expectations by way of comparisons.
Look, I have eaten some patties which were made of very tasty vegetarian/vegan combinations (lentils, beans, carrots, etc) and I do enjoy these a lot. Now if you call them a replacement for meat patties it's just not gonna work out. Even the ones that really try hard to imitate meat just don't cut it in my opinion (plus all the processing and ingredients they use to imitate meat is worrying to me). Are they bad? No they aren't, they're delicious and I can take them anyday as long as they're somewhat healthy and nutritious but please don't call them "fake meat", they're not and they must not be marketed that way because it'll make people reject them, which is probably part of the failure we're seeing now.
The alternative meat offerings are providing food in a package which is easier to turn in a dish than other vegetarian / vegan ingredients. You get lots of things that can just be fried in a pan: fake meat balls, fake schnitzel, fake chicken nuggets, etc. These things don't need to taste like meat, they just need to taste good to succeed. The manufacturers are piggybacking on form factors and taste-signatures which have a name for consumers to recognize.
I’m vegetarian and my partner (who I live with) is not.
Those meat-fakes and vegetarian chicken nuggets and shit are sad. They just don’t taste as good as the originals. If you take a could-be-vegetarian person and say “it’s easy to try out being vegetarian, just swap meat for fake meat” then you’ll disappoint them. It’s just worse and they won’t stick with it. Those products are for people who are committed to being vegetarian but haven’t yet discovered new ways to eat or people catering to vegetarians who are meat eaters. I’ve been to friends house where someone made a meat dish and made me a few fake-meat nuggets to be nice. It was a kind gesture. “Real” vegetarian don’t eat like that though, they find recipes designed to be enjoyed as is.
If you’re trying to go vegetarian, eat Indian or éthiopien food. Explore real Mediterranean food. Don’t try to make steak and potatoes vegetarian. Yogurts or smoothies are good snacks. Etc.
Disclaimer: I love a good hamburger and fake hamburger meat I’ll tolerate. If you’re American you may not want to give up burgers entirely.
I remember during the peak hype I was super eager to try it. People were saying it's indistinguishable from real meat and will cause a revolution! Even as a meat lover, I was honestly super excited when [either "Impossible" or "Beyond", don't remember which] burger came to my country. It was the first (and only) time in my life when I was excited to try a vegan burger. This will change everything!
I had it at a very nice restaurant. And it was... extremely underwhelming. I remember thinking to myself "really? that's it?". It tasted exactly like those supermarket veggie burgers my vegetarian sister used to microwave in the early to mid 90s. You know, those veggie patties that are obviously not meat, and have too much spices on them to try to mask it and pretend to be something else. Not gross, just meh. An ok side dish at most.
I guess it was all about having really, really good PR.
Still excited for lab-made meat, though. Maybe some day.
Out of curiosity: Have you eaten one in a restaurant setting? They're credible ground beef analogs (and are judged harshly since the bar is higher), where soy/veggie patties don't even pretend to be beef.
In any case, it was all over once Big Beef's (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Marfrig) P.R. machines established "fake meat" as the name for beef alternatives.
You should try a Beyond Meat burger from one of the many restaurants who regularly serve them. I wouldn’t say it’s indistinguishable from meat — and it’s totally fair to hate it — but it’s in a different league to the fake meat of the 90s.
I recommend the McDonald’s McPlant, it’s a great representation.
That all said, I found the v1 formula really didn't work for me - something just tasted... off. v2 is good enough to pass for me, though I still prefer to just east standard veggie burgers if they're on the menu. I would be curious for your take if you tried v2!