I'm delighted to see any and all advances on technologies that satiate our desire for meat without the ecological impact of meat. That said, oysters are probably the meat least in need of a plant based substitute.
Oysters don't really have a nervous system to speak of. Being roughly equivalent to a carrot in terms of capacity to suffer means there isn't really an ethical reason not to eat oysters, unless someone just doesn't like the idea of eating something that is taxonomically in kingdom animalia.
And oysters improve the environment where they are farmed. As such, I've been told that oysters are something of a virtue good. That is, the more you buy and eat, the more the environment is improved in the areas where they are grown.
Lastly, I don't know about the nutrition of real oysters, but I'd imagine they're pretty healthy—high in protein, low in the kinds of fats that you wouldn't want. They mention potential for food-borne illness with real oysters, so I guess there's that.
Kudos for for making this, but their upcoming squid and scallops would seem to have better ecological / ethical comparative advantage for the target audience.
If these can be made more cheaply / improve geographic distribution for landlocked people who want fresh oysters, those are real wins. Especially if cheap foyster takeout is used as a substitute for more ecologically intensive goods like cheap beef takeout.
In what way are these going to be anything like real oysters? They are not real oysters. They will never substitute for real oysters. Do you have any idea of the nutrient value of real oysters? So we satisfy their taste, but deprive them nutritionally?
According to the article, the problems are that "Conventional oysters are known to carry risks of foodborne illness and are currently threatened by overharvesting and pollution."
I buy the foodborne illness argument, but I'm not sure I agree with where they're going with overharvest and pollution.
Pollution is certainly bad FOR oysters, but synthetic oysters neither mitigate pollution, nor does reduced oyster farming lead to more wild oysters in the environment, as far as I know. Oysters can (and I gather often are) grown on structures that facilitate harvest, rather than necessarily competing for space with the wild ones. Plus, seeding oyster growing areas pretty much ensures more propagation of oysters in where they are farmed. And since oysters filter the water, growing fewer oysters (farmed or otherwise) would just increase pollution.
Since oysters are pretty easily cultivated, the solution to overharvest is to build more oyster growing structures and increase production... which leads to better water quality, which leads to healthier oyster populations. A virtuous cycle as I understand it.
EDIT: I must also confess here that I don't particularly love eating oysters. The irony of my positivity towards oyster farming is not lost on me :-)
Yes, oysters and similar molluscs filter the water column and hence improve water clarity... but they're the filter. They may accumulate a wide variety of interesting materials and compounds, such as microplastics, heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides and herbicides... and then people eat this equivalent of a swimming pool filter? No thanks.
For example:
(2008) "Contamination profiles of heavy metals, organochlorine pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alkylphenols in sediment and oyster collected from marsh/estuarine Savannah GA, USA", Kumar et al.
Many formerly-polluted environments are used to produce food after bioremediation. Farming oysters that are then not used for human consumption until the environment can support farmed oysters that are fit for human consumption is possible. Also, not all the toxins that oysters filter from the water stay in the oyster. Much of what they filter ends up sequestered in the sediment layer.
"What are the symptoms of illnesses that can result from eating contaminated raw oysters or clams?
The illnesses of most concern from eating raw or undercooked oysters or clams are Vibrio infection, norovirus infection, and hepatitis A. See fact sheets for those diseases for more details.
Symptoms can include vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, stomach pains, severe weakness. Vibrio infections can also cause skin rashes and blisters, shaking chills, and high fever. Hepatitis A can cause yellowing of the skin or whites of the eyes. Some of the illnesses can be quite serious and require quick medical attention."
Maybe if we stopped dumping sewage into the oceans we wouldn’t have to worry about these contaminated oysters. So instead of making fake oysters, why not clean up the environment?
Complexity, life, spirit ...
Absence of pain is never a sufficent base, otherwise killing as much people as you can (painlessly) would be the highest good.
The oyster thing is a bit of a meme at this point, considering I've seen the same thing about 5 times in the last month.
For vegans, avoiding eating any animal is easier than trying to discern which animals can truly feel pain. There are always updates to our understanding about what animals feel, and it's vastly easier to draw a line between kingdoms than to create some fractal border of which animals are ok to eat.
Also, people thought newborns didn't feel anything decades ago and performed circumcisions without anesthetic. There isn't a final word on how awareness and pain work and the nature and location of the seat of consciousness, so it's better to be conservative on this.
Besides - feeling pain is not the only reason people are vegan. I was vegan for about 15 years and it had nothing to do with how animals are kept or killed.
I was vegan from when I was about 11 to 25. My family decided to try out vegan eating as a healthy choice, in part due to my dad's high cholesterol. We all felt more healthy and enjoyed the food we were eating.
I gave it up when I started traveling to China. I decided that it was more important to me to be able to enjoy the rich culinary traditions and be a part of the communal culture than keep to my diet at the time.
LOL I was a vegetarian for 6 years then I moved to China and gave that up quickly. I'm now vegan, and I think I could go to China and make it happen now. But I lived there for a while so no longer have a desire to try everything.
While plant-based beef and chicken offerings can genuinely claim to reduce the cruelty experienced by those animals, is it really such a bane to the animal world that oysters are harvested for food. I mean, do they scream out in pain when dislodged from their rocky habitats? Still can’t wait to try this product, though.
It’s more prevalent in North America to imitate, while in EU there are many good vegetarian food options that don’t just try to imitate the meat version. Also generally have not found the “meat replacements” in the US and CA to be that good.
But the reason they try to imitate it (presumably) because it is easier to get people to try it.
I was under the impression that locally harvested oysters are basically carbon neutral. Same for mussels and clams. Why would you need a plant-based version of those? Surely it can't for animal welfare.
I also can't imagine most vegetarians or vegans having a strong hankering for oysters.
When I first tried an Impossible Burger, I thought it was awesome because it really replicated the taste and experience of a hamburger for me, and, most importantly, it satiated my cravings for meat. I'm struggling to thing of vegetarians that say "I'd really like to go all the way vegetarian but I just can't give up these oysters."
I looked up the company behind this. The info on their site is thin and leaves me wondering, but it implies they do both plant-based and cell-culture alternatives to growing and harvesting mollusks.
Cell-based mollusk substitutes makes a lot more sense. The market for plant-based mollusk substitutes seems awfully small and the task to make an adequate substitute seems daunting. I have had oysters from different oyster beds that are within sight of each other and every dimension of texture and flavor were different. It's hard to think of a more complex thing to try to imitate. A convincing burger is waaay easier, and the market for a non-cow burger vastly larger.
There's a certain tone to this whole story that makes me chuckle. Far more people are eating pizza and hot dogs and box mac and cheese, but the news story is about making one of the most expensive, elitist, niche foods vegan, like it's some sort of necessary triumph on the path forward for humanity.
With respect to the item they have chosen to create, I think there's a solid rationale. Oysters are considered a delicacy, not to mention their fame of being (supposedly) and aphrodesiac.
So the oyster is a good showpiece to replace, if you can do it successfully.
I still think the whole fake meat business is misguided, but I ranted about that in another comment.
Trying to sell people a knockoff food 'delicacy' seems akin to trying to get people to buy cubic zirconia instead of diamonds or pyrite instead of gold. That is, the knockoff could be almost indistinguishable from the real thing but people are going to prefer the genuine article anyway.
I personally enjoy the oysters at my local fish shop, when i happen to be there on their 'oyster day' and they have them laid out on ice. If it weren't for that, oysters would never enter my psyche; I've never been at the supermarket thinking damn I'm really craving oysters. And if I did happen to see a bag of oysters next to a bag of foysters in the freezer section, you can bet I'm not buying either. I cant be alone on this.
I think in this case it has some value because of the ritual or the mystique of oysters. There is something about their presentation, their distinctive texture and flavor, and of course the ancient belief that they increase sexual virility.
In a supermarket, oysters don't fit. There is nothing exclusive or sexy about most grocery stores.
But when you're at a nice restaurant terrace hanging out over the ocean, and you receive a large sculptured platter of ice with 6-12 oysters on the half shell, garnished nicely, it is a special thing. Coke vs champagne.
What's next, plant-based fugu based on the reasoning that it 100% eliminates the possibility of tetrodotoxin poisoning? Part of the reason puffer is considered a delicacy is there's a non-zero chance it could kill you. Not because it is so yummy.
Oysters are fleshy slime balls, and I'm able to get past the texture and actually enjoy the taste because of some je ne sais quoi. Slime grown in a lab and artificially flavored does not share the same mystique.
> So the oyster is a good showpiece to replace, if you can do it successfully.
But the whole reason that these niche "delicacies" are expensive and sought after in the first place is pretty much solely due to their uniqueness and rarity, not because they have some intrinsic amazing flavor. It's like I can replace diamonds with cubic zirconia, but that ignores the reasons people buy diamonds in the first place.
As for flavor, I can attest that good oysters have a distinctly nice (if acquired) flavor. Two to three chews, then a swallow. Served chilled.
Diamonds, on the other hand, only have a legitimate industrial use. As a "precious stone" they are not legitimate and only appear as such because of marketing and lots of terrible tactics. And for industrial uses, manufactured diamonds are superior. So this isn't really the same as oysters or other consumables.
Well, a lot of new processes start where you can make money at small scale. Then you improve on it as you scale and address bigger markets, where you need larger scale to be profitable.
they're cheap in FL unless you're ordering some variety that requires shipping - but that's in the same vein as non-local seafood. elitist? your bias is showing - oysters are harvested and eaten by all walks of coastal inhabitants. if fancy restaurants are your only point of reference I'd suggest expanding your experiences.
Depends on whether you live next to oyster shoals, in which case they might well be what poor people eat, or in South Dakota, where every oyster needs to be shipped live at least a thousand miles.
In addition to the points brought up by other commenters, have you had vegan pizza or hot dogs?
Vegan hotdogs are honestly fine and good enough. Thinking back to when I ate meat, I'd rather have a vegan hotdog than a budget one made from who knows what.
And pizza and pasta are quite amendable to being vegan without substitutions if one wishes- don't add cheese and you're done?
I don’t see what’s interesting or intellectually gratifying about this at all. It reads like an advertisement for that startup company. What did they technically achieve here?
Oysters seem difficult to replicate, and an unusual food to create. I had no idea anyone was working on this, and it's interesting to see such a positive result.
Fair enough. But to be fair, the article mentions mushrooms are one of the main ingredients, and I can’t think of a better analogue than that. Even unprocessed, if you took the right species of mushroom, and injected some ‘seafood’ flavor from seaweed, and served it in a half shell, you’d be pretty darn close.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer here, but I don’t see how this is very interesting except to try to pump the ‘stock’ of this company that’s marketing said product.
On top of that, I don’t understand why folks who swore themselves off of meat products (vegetarians & vegans) insist on this never ending quest to better simulate animal based products?
Why is it even something a person who doesn’t eat animal products care about?
I used to enjoy oysters in the past, before I learned about the significant health risks that come from eating them raw. If you're unlucky, you can be in for a seriously bad health trip.
Also knowing that oysters are essentially water filters, it seems strange to "eat the filter". I cannot even fathom eating Gulf coast oysters...
Having fake alternatives is nice. However, like the recent topic of the robotic industrial farming weed sprayer, I think it is engineering effort directed to the wrong place.
The #1 problem with transitioning from an animal based diet to plant based is the misunderstanding of what plant based diets can be. Ask a traditional meat eater what a vegetarian meal looks like, and they probably envision taking their steak away from the plate and just leaving some broccoli and potatoes. Indeed that's not very enticing.
Good vegetarian meals are practically art in terms of their combinations of textures and flavors, not to mention colors. But they take a lot more skill to make, so people rarely encounter them.
Instead, everyone is busy trying to replicate meat without meat - namely to replace that steak that was taken off their plate with something that is close to it.
Until we reach scale with lab grown meat (which even then I have doubts about long term downsides), no fake meat replacement is really good. They are manufactured, which means there are extra ingredients (or quantities of) that are not good for you. I think the reason for all this effort is that this is business. Companies want to sell you a thing; but a well made vegetarian meal is really just good plant ingredients and skilled preparation. It's hard to package that into a box which can be sold in the grocery store.
too much soy, too many seed oils in fake meat for my liking. but if you haven't tried char broiled oysters, that don't carry the same risks, then you're missing out.
Nah, you’re just regurgitating tired unproven pseudo science for health discussions. Both soy and seed oils are by and large fine, and have both been demonized by dubious PR campaigns.
The plant based meat replacements won't substitute for a steak, but they can do pretty well treated as done in some Asian cuisines, as a flavoring element rather than by themselves.
Even in something as simple as a burger, they can do very well -- because a fast food burger is often loaded with sauces and other add-ons that you barely notice that there's a patty in there at all. They could substitute chicken or fish and you'd barely notice.
The best thing is to learn cuisines that feature vegetables cooked with strong flavors. Indian, Korean, and Chinese are notable examples. Doing that it's easy to extend that and add protein with either meat in small quantities, or substitutes, or non-meats like tofu or mushrooms. All very delicious, nutritious, and environmentally sound.
Indeed. I can't help but think a lot of the "plant based" products now are about erecting new toll booths around vegetable products that in a more natural form people could be growing themselves. We should be moving further towards people growing at least some of their own food where possible, not further away from it.
When I first tried the now notorious Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll - which I have to admit are very good - I happened to meet a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and stopped for a chat. His dog was begging for some of the food - and it occurred to me that I had no clue if it was safe for the dog to eat.
> Good vegetarian meals are practically art in terms of their combinations of textures and flavors, not to mention colors. But they take a lot more skill to make, so people rarely encounter them.
Indian food is vegetarian almost by default, has a spectacular variety, and doesn't rely on meat substitutes at all. This, of course, is after having developed and iterated a culture of vegetarianism over almost four millennia (the Ṛgveda mentions abstention from meat consumption, and was likely composed in 1900 BCE – 1700 BCE).
This vegetarianism is a result of the Indian religions' tenet of ahiṃsā, or non-violence.
From pani puri to paneer, and from sambar to sarson ka saag, I feel like everyone should look at Indian food to see exactly what 'vegetarian food variety' is.
There's something for everyone: sweets, spicy (no, not all Indian food is diarrhoea-inducingly piquant), sour, savoury, bitter, stews (also called 'curries' in Anglosphere countries), stir-fried dishes, rice dishes, snacks—the sheer diversity is endless.
Honourable mention to Chinese and South-East Asian cuisine, which do use meat analogues, and developed a breathtaking variety of 'mock meats' centuries ago, and developed their own vegetarian cultures from Buddhism (an offshoot of Hinduism anyway, and therefore an export of Indian culture).
It's a very Western thing to eat so much meat, every meal of every day. More than one-third the population in India calls themselves 'vegetarian' (that's more vegetarians than the rest of the world, combined); the proportion of meals that are vegetarian anyway is significantly higher, approaching 80% or so[1].
Note that in India, 'vegetarian' typically means 'lacto-vegetarian and stricter' (includes veganism and Jain vegetarianism[2], which excludes root vegetables and the alliums).
Replicating meat is important for cultural reasons: people don’t want to reinvent dishes or have them taste different, they want what feels right. Vegetarian substitutes work in many - but most importantly - not all dishes.
Effectively growing steaks/chicken from mushroom root. I’ve tried their stuff over the past day and it’s pretty damn close, and overall feels much simpler than the other fake meats. It’s pretty cool stuff.
I would imagine they mean "could be served in a restaurant as a very close substitute to oysters". Mushrooms and seaweed are perfectly edible as-is and can be served in a restaurant, but people would not confuse them for oysters.
As someone who depends on oysters to stay functional in this world, I think this is abhorrent, and against all that nature intended.
Are they going to add all the zinc, copper, and manganese that are in oysters? Or the omega 3’s?
You all think there’s no consequences to just shifting the world population to plants instead of meat. Well there is. Especially with seafood. There is a genetic basis for some people to eat more long chain PUFAs.
Plant based as a term gets conflated with veganism, but veganism is it’s own thing: a plant based world means we just depend less on those other sources, not that they go away entirely.
Bluntly: your comment is entirely complaining about yourself, or at best people in your situation. Not everyone derives their entire health and wellness from oysters, and they're certainly not critical - I've known people who have gone their entire lives without consuming them.
The problem is not so much the consequences themselves, but that the consequences may never be apparent to the average person. It's a cultural change that is occurring very slowly, and consequences to one's health usually don't manifest until later in life. You don't eat a Beyond Booger and suddenly experience systemic inflammation in a noticeable way. Even when a person's health is gradually failing, they can become accustomed to being obese, lethargic, diabetic, and so on. Even if they go to a doctor, that doctor is unlikely to know anything about nutrition, so they will recommend a combination of contraindicated plant material and pills.
The only hope we have is that future generations become hip to things like PUFAs and antinutrients, and that preceding generations stuck believing that meat is bad will become less relevant. Maybe that can happen, but then younger generations still have to contend with the corporate-globalist charlatan complex telling them pure bullshit like meat being bad for the climate and enacting "meatless Mondays."
I literally can die happy knowing that someone else sees this as I do.
I will add that it all started with capitalism and exploration moving countless peoples around the globe to place that were not genetically suited for them. Like the African Americans and it suddenly being appreciated that their Vitamin D levels are crushed by living in places like Detroit.
Or with increased understand of what happens when the Inuit are subjected to a western diet adn how their genetics play a role. Yes, they woudl probably tell an Inuit to become vegan to protect their heart!
Safe bivalve consumption is so water quality sensitive it seems like a no-brainer that we'd want to maximize regulated levels of harvesting+consumption.
If nobody's eating them nobody cares when their waters become too polluted to try.
I think I read somewhere that early vegan literature was actually fine with bivalves, and it only changed because some were loud enough about the uncertainty at the time of whether they felt pain or not.
Someone should feel free to prove me wrong on the above, but in general vegan or plant based replacements of oysters/scallops/etc make no sense to me. They’re like the mushrooms of the sea.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadOysters don't really have a nervous system to speak of. Being roughly equivalent to a carrot in terms of capacity to suffer means there isn't really an ethical reason not to eat oysters, unless someone just doesn't like the idea of eating something that is taxonomically in kingdom animalia.
And oysters improve the environment where they are farmed. As such, I've been told that oysters are something of a virtue good. That is, the more you buy and eat, the more the environment is improved in the areas where they are grown.
Lastly, I don't know about the nutrition of real oysters, but I'd imagine they're pretty healthy—high in protein, low in the kinds of fats that you wouldn't want. They mention potential for food-borne illness with real oysters, so I guess there's that.
Kudos for for making this, but their upcoming squid and scallops would seem to have better ecological / ethical comparative advantage for the target audience.
They don't link to any source though.
Pollution is certainly bad FOR oysters, but synthetic oysters neither mitigate pollution, nor does reduced oyster farming lead to more wild oysters in the environment, as far as I know. Oysters can (and I gather often are) grown on structures that facilitate harvest, rather than necessarily competing for space with the wild ones. Plus, seeding oyster growing areas pretty much ensures more propagation of oysters in where they are farmed. And since oysters filter the water, growing fewer oysters (farmed or otherwise) would just increase pollution.
Since oysters are pretty easily cultivated, the solution to overharvest is to build more oyster growing structures and increase production... which leads to better water quality, which leads to healthier oyster populations. A virtuous cycle as I understand it.
EDIT: I must also confess here that I don't particularly love eating oysters. The irony of my positivity towards oyster farming is not lost on me :-)
For example:
(2008) "Contamination profiles of heavy metals, organochlorine pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alkylphenols in sediment and oyster collected from marsh/estuarine Savannah GA, USA", Kumar et al.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2007.08.011
"What are the symptoms of illnesses that can result from eating contaminated raw oysters or clams?
The illnesses of most concern from eating raw or undercooked oysters or clams are Vibrio infection, norovirus infection, and hepatitis A. See fact sheets for those diseases for more details.
Symptoms can include vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, stomach pains, severe weakness. Vibrio infections can also cause skin rashes and blisters, shaking chills, and high fever. Hepatitis A can cause yellowing of the skin or whites of the eyes. Some of the illnesses can be quite serious and require quick medical attention."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sewage-shell...
One friend of mine who loves beef cackled with glee when he heard that salad greens were being recalled because of some microbe.
You may like these new oysters for other reasons, but it seems like microbes are everywhere.
How about them absorbing microplastics/PFAS?
For vegans, avoiding eating any animal is easier than trying to discern which animals can truly feel pain. There are always updates to our understanding about what animals feel, and it's vastly easier to draw a line between kingdoms than to create some fractal border of which animals are ok to eat.
Also, people thought newborns didn't feel anything decades ago and performed circumcisions without anesthetic. There isn't a final word on how awareness and pain work and the nature and location of the seat of consciousness, so it's better to be conservative on this.
I gave it up when I started traveling to China. I decided that it was more important to me to be able to enjoy the rich culinary traditions and be a part of the communal culture than keep to my diet at the time.
But the reason they try to imitate it (presumably) because it is easier to get people to try it.
When I first tried an Impossible Burger, I thought it was awesome because it really replicated the taste and experience of a hamburger for me, and, most importantly, it satiated my cravings for meat. I'm struggling to thing of vegetarians that say "I'd really like to go all the way vegetarian but I just can't give up these oysters."
just an observation..
Cell-based mollusk substitutes makes a lot more sense. The market for plant-based mollusk substitutes seems awfully small and the task to make an adequate substitute seems daunting. I have had oysters from different oyster beds that are within sight of each other and every dimension of texture and flavor were different. It's hard to think of a more complex thing to try to imitate. A convincing burger is waaay easier, and the market for a non-cow burger vastly larger.
So the oyster is a good showpiece to replace, if you can do it successfully.
I still think the whole fake meat business is misguided, but I ranted about that in another comment.
I personally enjoy the oysters at my local fish shop, when i happen to be there on their 'oyster day' and they have them laid out on ice. If it weren't for that, oysters would never enter my psyche; I've never been at the supermarket thinking damn I'm really craving oysters. And if I did happen to see a bag of oysters next to a bag of foysters in the freezer section, you can bet I'm not buying either. I cant be alone on this.
In a supermarket, oysters don't fit. There is nothing exclusive or sexy about most grocery stores.
But when you're at a nice restaurant terrace hanging out over the ocean, and you receive a large sculptured platter of ice with 6-12 oysters on the half shell, garnished nicely, it is a special thing. Coke vs champagne.
What's next, plant-based fugu based on the reasoning that it 100% eliminates the possibility of tetrodotoxin poisoning? Part of the reason puffer is considered a delicacy is there's a non-zero chance it could kill you. Not because it is so yummy.
Oysters are fleshy slime balls, and I'm able to get past the texture and actually enjoy the taste because of some je ne sais quoi. Slime grown in a lab and artificially flavored does not share the same mystique.
But the whole reason that these niche "delicacies" are expensive and sought after in the first place is pretty much solely due to their uniqueness and rarity, not because they have some intrinsic amazing flavor. It's like I can replace diamonds with cubic zirconia, but that ignores the reasons people buy diamonds in the first place.
As for flavor, I can attest that good oysters have a distinctly nice (if acquired) flavor. Two to three chews, then a swallow. Served chilled.
Diamonds, on the other hand, only have a legitimate industrial use. As a "precious stone" they are not legitimate and only appear as such because of marketing and lots of terrible tactics. And for industrial uses, manufactured diamonds are superior. So this isn't really the same as oysters or other consumables.
Vegan hotdogs are honestly fine and good enough. Thinking back to when I ate meat, I'd rather have a vegan hotdog than a budget one made from who knows what.
And pizza and pasta are quite amendable to being vegan without substitutions if one wishes- don't add cheese and you're done?
I hate to be a Debbie Downer here, but I don’t see how this is very interesting except to try to pump the ‘stock’ of this company that’s marketing said product.
On top of that, I don’t understand why folks who swore themselves off of meat products (vegetarians & vegans) insist on this never ending quest to better simulate animal based products?
Why is it even something a person who doesn’t eat animal products care about?
Also knowing that oysters are essentially water filters, it seems strange to "eat the filter". I cannot even fathom eating Gulf coast oysters...
Having fake alternatives is nice. However, like the recent topic of the robotic industrial farming weed sprayer, I think it is engineering effort directed to the wrong place.
The #1 problem with transitioning from an animal based diet to plant based is the misunderstanding of what plant based diets can be. Ask a traditional meat eater what a vegetarian meal looks like, and they probably envision taking their steak away from the plate and just leaving some broccoli and potatoes. Indeed that's not very enticing.
Good vegetarian meals are practically art in terms of their combinations of textures and flavors, not to mention colors. But they take a lot more skill to make, so people rarely encounter them.
Instead, everyone is busy trying to replicate meat without meat - namely to replace that steak that was taken off their plate with something that is close to it.
Until we reach scale with lab grown meat (which even then I have doubts about long term downsides), no fake meat replacement is really good. They are manufactured, which means there are extra ingredients (or quantities of) that are not good for you. I think the reason for all this effort is that this is business. Companies want to sell you a thing; but a well made vegetarian meal is really just good plant ingredients and skilled preparation. It's hard to package that into a box which can be sold in the grocery store.
Even in something as simple as a burger, they can do very well -- because a fast food burger is often loaded with sauces and other add-ons that you barely notice that there's a patty in there at all. They could substitute chicken or fish and you'd barely notice.
The best thing is to learn cuisines that feature vegetables cooked with strong flavors. Indian, Korean, and Chinese are notable examples. Doing that it's easy to extend that and add protein with either meat in small quantities, or substitutes, or non-meats like tofu or mushrooms. All very delicious, nutritious, and environmentally sound.
When I first tried the now notorious Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll - which I have to admit are very good - I happened to meet a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and stopped for a chat. His dog was begging for some of the food - and it occurred to me that I had no clue if it was safe for the dog to eat.
Indian food is vegetarian almost by default, has a spectacular variety, and doesn't rely on meat substitutes at all. This, of course, is after having developed and iterated a culture of vegetarianism over almost four millennia (the Ṛgveda mentions abstention from meat consumption, and was likely composed in 1900 BCE – 1700 BCE).
This vegetarianism is a result of the Indian religions' tenet of ahiṃsā, or non-violence.
From pani puri to paneer, and from sambar to sarson ka saag, I feel like everyone should look at Indian food to see exactly what 'vegetarian food variety' is.
There's something for everyone: sweets, spicy (no, not all Indian food is diarrhoea-inducingly piquant), sour, savoury, bitter, stews (also called 'curries' in Anglosphere countries), stir-fried dishes, rice dishes, snacks—the sheer diversity is endless.
Honourable mention to Chinese and South-East Asian cuisine, which do use meat analogues, and developed a breathtaking variety of 'mock meats' centuries ago, and developed their own vegetarian cultures from Buddhism (an offshoot of Hinduism anyway, and therefore an export of Indian culture).
It's a very Western thing to eat so much meat, every meal of every day. More than one-third the population in India calls themselves 'vegetarian' (that's more vegetarians than the rest of the world, combined); the proportion of meals that are vegetarian anyway is significantly higher, approaching 80% or so[1].
Note that in India, 'vegetarian' typically means 'lacto-vegetarian and stricter' (includes veganism and Jain vegetarianism[2], which excludes root vegetables and the alliums).
Seriously, Western people: make Indian food.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/08/eight-in-te...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
Anyway, an interesting company in this space is Meati: https://www.meati.com
Effectively growing steaks/chicken from mushroom root. I’ve tried their stuff over the past day and it’s pretty damn close, and overall feels much simpler than the other fake meats. It’s pretty cool stuff.
Counter point - most people didn't think they met the quality bar to serve in a restaurant, which is worrying.
Are they going to add all the zinc, copper, and manganese that are in oysters? Or the omega 3’s?
You all think there’s no consequences to just shifting the world population to plants instead of meat. Well there is. Especially with seafood. There is a genetic basis for some people to eat more long chain PUFAs.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mnfr.202200351
So how many people are they actually making sicker and pretending like you’re making them healthier by eating this garbage you call food?
Plant based as a term gets conflated with veganism, but veganism is it’s own thing: a plant based world means we just depend less on those other sources, not that they go away entirely.
Yeah, I mean why think about anyone else but myself, right?
People will believe these plant based oysters are "better for them" when in all likelihood they will be worse for their health.
The only hope we have is that future generations become hip to things like PUFAs and antinutrients, and that preceding generations stuck believing that meat is bad will become less relevant. Maybe that can happen, but then younger generations still have to contend with the corporate-globalist charlatan complex telling them pure bullshit like meat being bad for the climate and enacting "meatless Mondays."
I will add that it all started with capitalism and exploration moving countless peoples around the globe to place that were not genetically suited for them. Like the African Americans and it suddenly being appreciated that their Vitamin D levels are crushed by living in places like Detroit.
Or with increased understand of what happens when the Inuit are subjected to a western diet adn how their genetics play a role. Yes, they woudl probably tell an Inuit to become vegan to protect their heart!
If nobody's eating them nobody cares when their waters become too polluted to try.
Someone should feel free to prove me wrong on the above, but in general vegan or plant based replacements of oysters/scallops/etc make no sense to me. They’re like the mushrooms of the sea.