I've been vegan for 35 years and the thought of eating a burger that tastes like meat turns my stomache. If you're a meat eater that wants to reduce consumption of animals then do that in the other (healthier) meals and have a decent animal burger once a week/fortnight. If you're eating burgers much more regularly then you're probably better off getting more variation into your diet and than eating highly processed vegetable patties that aren't as satisfying.
Hmm.. I'm a vegatarian, once vegan, since let me count.. oh why does that matter at all?
Taste like meat? Not at all, likely, don't remember, but I usually find them taste just nice, pea protein with spices, so what's the problem? Also what does thst have to do with how regular?
I hope they don't go out of business, being concerned for animals and environment I think every alternative that some people enjoy is great.
There are millions of vegatarians that like meat like products. See the 100s of products made from things like wheat gluten that Buddhist monks have been eating for 1000s of years
I don't know a source on the history of all of it but I've been to several restaurants in Asia that specialize in dishes that taste like they're made with meat but aren't
I've been vegetarian for 12 years now. I used to dislike replacement products, but what Rügenwalder and Beyond produced in recent years is so good, I now eat some kind of meat replacement every week.
I too make my own patties most of the time, instead of ready-mase fake meat. Just mash whatever beans/tofu I have. Maybe some dry falafel mix. Half an egg and some potato starch will help with keeping it together. A splash of soy sauce for colour. Just make sure that the mixture does not get too wet.
Turns out to be true tbh.
I've tasted all kinds of fake meat and sausages and some is pretty good. But at the end tofu (pulled is the best) and saitan (not satan) is the easiest and most versatile. You can do almost anything with it.
Chickpeas, beans and bean-cheese (aka tofu) and except from spices and herbs nothing more is needed.
Seitan* you can actually make it at home easily, same for tempeh, reducing the amount of unknown things you eat even more since you control every step of the process
The weird Silicon Valley aesthetic of it all is severely unattractive to me. I don't need a version number, a slick website, Twitter fanboys and angling for more VC funding in my diet.
If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.
I read somewhere you would need 25 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef, ergo one could potentially produce 25 times the amount of substitute.
Obviously that isn't true and such a patty is a specialized product of various highly processed plant matter.
It is around 2-4 times the price of meat equivalent and to me it is no surprise, that people aren't willing to pay more for an inferior product.
Now people say, well if we all had bought it, mass production would already reduced the price significantly.
I don't think people are paying new cooking methods and food processing reactors here.
There are more people involved, more complex ingredients, more processes, more shipping and more energy.
That is why it is much more expensive.
Depends on your metrics. If you consider land and water use as a factor they are very inefficient. In terms of nitrogen (for fertilizer etc.) we get most of from the air these days (via the Haber-Bosh process). Manure also has a cost as a source of water pollution and food contaminate. The CO2/NOX emissions are a downstream cost. We are paying for these as externalities and subsidizing the industry via our taxes in turn.
If your story is true, it is remarkable it is not universally true.
E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned. [0] The vegetarian equivalent has been cheaper there than the real meat thing, although the process for both is not very different in the EU than in the US.
No, the article I linked mentions it's a comparison between equivalents. So burgers vs burgers and chicken pieces vs chicken pieces.
Unless you mean the vegetarian chicken pieces don't taste like chicken but like cardboard, that is fair. Then again, supermarket chicken also tastes like chicken flavoured cardboard. It's not a premium product either.
> If your story is true, it is remarkable it is not universally true.
Not really.
> E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned.
Meat prices relative to non-meat food prices are much higher than in the US (taxation on a lot of the things that drive the additional costs of meat play a role here.) So, yes, it stands to reason that plant-based meat substitutes, using similar process that adds similar (proportional) cost to the raw materials (actual production costs and margins) would remain more competitive with real meat than it is in the US.
And with a number of EU countries (and I think there are EU-wide proposals, as well) discussing “meat taxes” as part of climate efforts, that’s quite possibly going to get more pronounced.
It's hard to beat the efficiency of a biological machine that turns grass into meat all by itself. Meat is the most nutrient dense (and unsurprisingly, most delicious) food there is, since we're basically made out of the stuff and it has pretty much everything a human being needs to eat right there. Fake meat, electric cars, "green" energy, it's all good and "cost effective" as long as not too many people decide to switch to it and the government keeps subsidizing the upper echelon of the population that wants to indulge in such virtue signaling behaviour. Good ridance to all those chemical infused "meat" alternatives.
If you factor in beef subsidies, then plant-based "meat" is already at or nearly competitive...
> The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5
I think the problem with those calculations is that the grain fed to cattle can be incredibly low quality and efficiently grown/harvested (not to mention subsidized). So it's probably a much lower ratio than 1:25 if you factor in plants that are actually high in protein and calories.
A lot of the grain fed to cows is distillers grain [1] and brewer's spent grain [2], which is basically industrial waste that would otherwise go to compost.
Plant based alternatives are very price competitive where I live (in Denmark). They’re more expensive than the cheapest ground beef, but more affordable than grass fed or organic.
> it is no surprise, that people aren't willing to pay more for an inferior product
You hit the nail on its head. I think there's still hope for meat substitutes if they can improve their flavor while also lowering their price. But I'm not holding out hope for that.
US livestock subsidies are in dozens of billions. Whole sector seems to have revenue in lower hundreds of billions (harder to get exact data, please correct me).
Even without premiums target audience is willing to accept, subsidies of 10-20% of sector revenue are pretty hard to beat.
Same in the E.U. we have billions of subsidies for milk and meat. Many countries like germany also have a tiered VAT system, where basic foods are taxed lower, there is a base line tax and some luxury items are taxed higher.
Thanks to lobbying meat and cow-milk are taxed as basic foods, while vegan alternatives are taxed as luxury items.
Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history and still is in most parts of the world.
Given the environmental impact of Meat and Diary in terms of CO2, Methane, Water usage, and Deforestation we should heavily reconsider our nonchalant view of them as a cheap commodity.
Dairy is much less of an environmental concern than beef (not sure about chicken). If the concern is animal welfare, then yes it's still a horror story in many ways, but not everyone who is pushing away from meat has the same reasons.
> Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history
And nobody want's to return to those dark ages.
This devil's alliance between veganism and environmentalism is what put me off environmentalism. Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.
If you care about environmentalism then you should resonate with the fact that 68% of the Amazon is Burnt for pastures for Cattle Farming. 28% is Burnt for Agriculture, of which 60% is for soybeans, of which 77% are shipped overseas for livestock feed.
That means at least 80% is burned for livestock or livestock feed. Since part of the palm oil and other plant produced is also used for livestock feed that number probably closer to 85%.
Your proposed solutions simply don't add up. Air Travel makes up 2.5-3.5% of all GHG emissions, Air Conditioning makes up 3.94%.
Livestock makes up a whopping 18%.
So even banning all air travel and air conditioning, would only give you the same reduction on GHG emissions as eating 40% less dairy and meat.
So cutting meat and dairy from your diet is one of the easiest ways to cut your CO2 footprint massively. And it's actually just a minor inconvenience once you get used to plant based cooking, calling vegan cooking "dark ages" is ridiculously overdramatic, considering that e.g. indian food is often vegan and delicious.
If we can't eat all the meat we want without destroying the planet, that tells me we need to manage down the population, not the standard of living. I'm not willing to give up one single shred of my standard of living to this braindead cram as many people as possible on the planet challenge.
If meat is causing people to burn down the amazon, then don't eat meat produced from the Amazon. There is a reason why for example here in Sweden the price of imported beef from Brazil tend to be about half the price of locally produced beef. Local producers has to follow regulations and laws that Brazil producers do not.
I will generally advise that people avoid buying any products from countries who has a history of burning rain forests to produce (or we can call it subsidize) cheap exports. Similar for cheap products created from child labors, military conflicts, sweatshops, or forced labor camps.
I think you missed the bit where 77% of farmland is used for feed export. Your beef might be produced locally, but the feed for that beef, was produced on deforrested land.
While I don't expect a lot of feed is exported to Sweden, the same rule applies. Don't buy products which use imports from Brazil if those imports are created from burning down the Amazon. It would be the same as buying a locally produced shirt created from cotton that child labor picked (which was a scandal with a major Swedish clothing company).
> Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.
you mean softened by removing things you dont use.
Look at the moment no one is banning meat. There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers. I'm not vegan, and like most people I really wish vegans weren't the noisy shouty face of environmentalism.
But, if you want change, people have to, well change. There are a few routes to that, one is price change (inflation is helping with that, stuff that requires a lot of energy to produce, ie feedlot meat and greenhouse based veg) are rising in price more than less refined or forced food stuffs.
Subsidies could be re-directed to different parts of the farming ecosystem (but that's politically challenging)
or you can outright ban things, but again thats also challenging.
Eating meat is essential but airplanes and AC aren't?
There are parts of the world that are uninhabitable without AC, and I know tons of people who don't eat meat, but virtually everybody in developed countries flies. My partner's family lives at the other side of the planet so banning airplanes means she would never get to see her sisters again.
Almost every human civilization is extremely environmentally damaging in some way. Much of the global North would be uninhabitable without heating for a proportion of the year.
Limiting ourselves to places we can occupy (and actually work/produce) year round without environmental control would mean basically killing off a significant chunk of the planet's population and telling loads of whoever is left that they need to leave behind their homes and move.
Compared to eating less meat, that seems to be a much bigger ask.
Around 60% of people in germany fly less than once a year. A third never flies. I expect that to be similar in other european countries. A lot more people eat meat.
Same goes for vegetables. That being said, animal milk drinking is not something new at all. And in "traditional" setup, milk availability is massive improvement nutritionally/health wise over no milk.
That's a false dichotomy.
These days we put so many nutrients artificially into the feed of livestock, e.g. B12, that we might as well skip the whole livestock step and just take a vitamin pill every morning.
Most people have a vitamin-D deficiency, most vegans that I know of at least take care of making sure that they get enough supplements.
Meat wasn't a staple food 100 years ago, it was too expensive for regular people. Same with milk, if you didn't own a cow, you just didn't drink it. You drank some sort of ale.
My grandfather was a kid at the end of the Great Depression. One of the stories which blew my mind growing up was that he ate beef basically twice a year, when his cousins on a small dairy farm culled the herd.
His mother kept chickens, so they had eggs - to the point that as an adult he never eats them because he got sick of them by the time he graduated from high school.
Yep, (western) people are acting like meat is a human right and a staple day to day food.
My grandparents were the first generation in my country who started to have regular access to meat after WW2. Before that it was either a rare thing and much of the "meat" they ate was offal.
Pea soup was 99% peas and a small chunk of smoked meat added for flavour.
Meanwhile billions of people live perfectly normal lives eating legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts) for protein.
I think some people misconstrue traditional with today's sensationalized Food TV marketing. Which tradition are we even talking about? The world has never had this much access to food. We eat like almost every culture's royal family every night of the week, and pretend like it always been this way.
There are huge non-livestock farming subsidies as well, both in the US and in the EU. Farming is not directly driven by supply, demand and price the people are willing to pay (because without food people riot).
Well meat profits most from subsedies since it is the last in the chain.
I think it is not as simple, we would throw a lot more food away without our animals.
Sure there is room to optimize and improvement. The city of Wien has an overproduction of fresh baking good that exceeds three times the needed amout.
It is then reprocessed to animal food instead of being thrown away, which is a good thing but keeps prices down.
From the first google search on US farmland subsidies:
" Who Benefits Most From Farm Subsidies?
Farm subsidies don't benefit all farms equally. According to the Cato Institute, farmers of corn, soybeans, and wheat receive more than 70% of farm subsidies. These are also usually the largest farms.
From an other source:
"Corn growers received the most product-specific assistance with $2.2 billion in subsidies. That was only about 4.4% of the $50.4 billion in total corn production that year. Soybeans rank second in subsidies. While the US soybean industry produced $41.3 billion worth of products in 2017, it received $1.6 billion in subsidies in 2016, representing 3.9% of production.
The US sugar industry produced $2.5 billion worth of product in 2017 and received $1.6 billion in subsidies, according to the report. The support amounted to 63.5% of the value of total production."
If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.
That would only be true if the cost of the patty was only thing that impacted the price to the consumer, but everything else like transporting the thing to a store, paying the store staff to sell it, paying for marketing, branding, etc, paying taxes on it, are essentially the same regardless of whether the patty is made of cows or plants. A patty that costs 0.25c to make could be reduced to 0.01c to make, which would reduce the price in the market from 5.99 to 5.74...
"If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land.
Of all the land we use for agriculture, 77% of it is used for livestock."
These 77% are only responsible for 18% of the produced calories and 37% of the produced proteins.
So, if you leave out water consumption and most importantly animal walfare, eating meat is the worst thing you can to for the environment (when talking about food).
Nothing said here refutes the parent comment. It turns out that a lot of land is really shitty for growing stuff that isn't a weed (without adding a ton of chemicals to the environment), and humans don't eat weeds. Cows, sheep, pigs, and chicken do.
I doubt that 86% of that 77% is truly unsuitable for farming human food, but I wouldn't be surprised if 30-50% of it was.
The whole point is that you need way more crops in general to "produce" the same amount of calories & proteins. That's because feeding the animals with crops instead of eating them is highly inefficient in comparison to eating them directly.
"As an example: beef has an energy efficiency of about 2%. This means that for every 100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back."
With how much meat is eaten right now, there is just no way we have enough grazing land to produce enough meat. 99% of meat comes from factory farms. [1] These animals are always fed with crops, so there will always be land usage to product food for animals. And it is way more inefficient.
The implicit assumption that you are making is that all cropland is fungible and that the 43% used for animal food can be converted directly to human food. That is almost certainly not the case. Also, the original comment's 86% doesn't imply that it is necessarily "cropland" - just that it is land that grows animal feed.
You see this with human crops too - Why do people grow corn when almonds are much higher dollar value per acre? Why not wine grapes? The reason is because not every patch of land is suitable for high-value cash crops. Going down the quality scale, not every patch of land is suitable for food for human consumption either. The reason why is that "cropland" is not fungible - soil has particular characteristics, nutrients, contaminants, and microorganisms, all of which affect which crops you can grow.
> If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.
Products can fail even if everything promised is delivered. This is why the supermarket Tesco gave up on trying to enter the USA market.
Or why I can't get Quorn here in Germany even though I personally think it's a much better taste and texture than any of the Rügenwalder Mühle brands.
Or why I can get Sauerkraut juice here, but not in the UK.
Fake meat isn't just inferior to real meat. It's inferior to just plain old vegetables.
It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits.
They're not trying to cook the best vegetable dishes. They're not trying to cook dishes that use less meat. They're not trying to expand your palettes and reintroducing liver, sweetbreads or other weird cuts.
All these "green" products convince you to not do the most important things: REDUCE and REUSE.
Never thought about it but you’re spot on. A big roasted field mushroom with a dash of balsamic and perhaps some feta cheese is 1000% tastier than a weird processed vegetable patty.
A real good way to do it is to saute some thin-sliced shiitakes and creminis in a pan with salt, pepper, and a shallot; once you get a good fond, put the shrooms in between two slices of bread with a bit of cheese (fresh mozzarella is a good one here, so is gruyere), deglaze the pan with butter, and then throw the sandwich in the pan until it's done the way you like your grilled cheese.
Completely agree with this. As a vegetarian I'd really prefer to eat meat over the synthetic meats. The reason being the texture, flavour and nutritional value isn't there. They're also expensive, covered in horrible packaging, don't keep very well and are difficult to cook.
99% of the important bits of a dish don't come from making something meat-like but cooking something that isn't bland and uninteresting. And you don't need fake meat to work around that.
I have been a pescatarian (eat fish, no meat) since 2018. For me, this has almost nothing todo with being healthy and all about the animal welfare (yes I eat fish but to me, a fish and a pig are two very different things). But, sometimes I just fancy a McDonalds Big Mac (McPlant), or chili nachos (Quorn, Meatless Farm) , or a dirty burger (Impossible, Beyond). I know its not healthy, I know its not good for me but it just satisfy my meat eating days craving every now and then. The rest of the time I eat delicious unprocessed veggies, rice, beans etc.
There is a place for these meat substitutes but should they be eaten all of the time; no. Education around veggies is the key for solving the meat production issues.
Fake meat isn't for vegans who want to eat meat-like products.
It's supposed to be a gateway product that will eventually entice hardcore meat eaters to first try fake meat and then maybe dare to try a non-fake meat vegan product.
The best vegan products aren't "meat thing but vegan", they're all just gateway stuff.
The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine. The protein doesn't really matter, 99% of the taste is in the sauce.
It's supposed to be a gateway product that will eventually entice hardcore meat eaters to first try fake meat
I agree, but I don't think it's a gateway. They want to replace all those beef burgers with Impossible meat burgers. However things like Impossible meat, while very impressive, cost more than the real thing and don't taste right. It's the uncanny valley of meat.
The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine.
That's my point. There's plenty of good meat free or meat reduced food. But we're not running campaigns to encourage less meat consumption or promoting the cuisines of other cultures. Instead they created a company to make and sell hyper realistic fake meat. If you were really concerned about your meat consumption and it's impact on the environment, you'd just eat less meat. It's 100% actionable without these companies and tastes better.
> It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits.
Expand your research a little bit. Fake meat has been very popular in buddhism countries for very long time, often to entice people to switching to non animal food.
I don’t want to point out specific cultures. But that article is not the counter point you think it is:
To compensate for her homesickness, Ng decided to sell her own line of vegetarian imitation meats, and partnered with manufacturers in Taiwan to develop and import many of the dishes that she grew up with. In 1994, she opened up May Wah Vegetarian Market in New York City's Chinatown, and stocked it full with packets of imitation steak, spare ribs, shrimp, mutton, and grilled eel—all made some sort of combination of soy, seaweed, wheat gluten, or mushrooms.
It didn't land well. "Unfortunately it was not a good beginning for us. People were hesitant about trying these products," Lily says. "They wanted to stick to tofu and beans, and it was very hard for us to get people to try it. We ended up giving a lot of stuff away.
You can get the Chinese fake meat as snacks from your local Asian supermarket. I have Weilong brand fish tofu and barbeque gluten right now. These are meaty, but no where near as convincing as impossible meat. My fish tofu and barbeque gluten snacks have a fish cake like texture and are full of MSG. They appear to be vegan though.
We’re pointing to a culture that is used to a wide range of flavours and textures every day. They don’t needed that much convincing to try a not meat product, but it’s also easier to fake certain meat products. (Their existing fake meats are way cheaper than impossible meat though.)
But Impossible meat wasn’t designed for the Chinese. Or even Asians in general.
For me at least, these fake meats are to get more protein heavy texture options into a dish. Vegetable are way too low in that regard, and there's only so many things I can do with tofu or beans.
Except, despite all the hate because it's not "unprocessed" (a stupid categorization), it does REDUCE: No more need to stuff a meat machine with plant based products for a 10% or worse ROI. BAM. REDUCTION.
I do not want to pretend that it is not part of the equation in US, but I am genuinely unsure how big a factor it is and if the argument makes sense.
Anecdotally, people in my social circle go for food that is socially acceptable in that circle. If 'low impact' food became a thing, price would have less influence on it ( kinda like every teen has to have an Iphone -- I am exaggerating a little - or when driving a small sedan in US means you are poor ).
There are all sorts of minor dynamics that are underexplored in that arena.
(Disliking and thus moving away from those practices is a goal some people have, but they are the dominate method of meat production at the moment, so it's the reasonable comparison)
I raise cattle (one day for a living, but now a side job and for my enjoyment). Your read on the feed is very true for the feedlots, not trying to discredit that, because if you buy your beef from a feedlot than this is very much the case -- chances are if you don't know where you beef came from, then it came from a feed lot. If your packing says "Grass Fed" than it just means they spent most of their lives in a pasture before being shipped to a feedlot for a miserable last three months of life, so chances are you probably don't know where your cattle came from, even if you're going on the packaging in a grocery store, and it's actually grained to some extent.
There are a few exceptions to this, even in stores. If you buy from Whole Food and get their brand beef, it's grass-only. I know the largest rancher selling to WF, we're friends -- my teeball team beat his teeball team in the season finals last summer.
I mostly raise dairy cows, but if you're going to go through the effort to raise one sort of breed of cattle, it's trivial to add in an even lower maintenance cattle as well. As a result I have three or four animals in my pasture right now who are getting ready for freezer camp. My neighbors are all beef ranchers, I am the exception. But none of us are feeding grain to our cattle. My area sells a massive amount of grass-only beef. We have the luxury of this being basically free for us to do and then having found a niche market willing to accept a lot more money for their beef if it was raised right and fed right. I don't sell my beef the way most folks do, so unless you know me personally, you've never eaten my animals or had our farm's dairy products.
All that to say, there are very good alternatives to feedlots. My beef cattle only need supplemental food (aka more than the green grass in my pastures) between December and April. I did the math, it costs me $140 / year to feed out cattle and it takes two or three years for an Angus to be butcher-weight. That's $420 on the high end for a grass-only steer that'll dress to like 600lbs of beef.
I'd get by with even fewer days feeding except I also own and breed Appaloosas and horses are much harder on the pastures than cattle. If I ran two herds my cattle would keep the pastures in grass until about January -- and with this warm weather I know folks who have YET to feed hay! But with my horses mixed into the herd it means that the grass is killed if I keep them on it -- horses have top and bottom teeth, they can cut grass clear to the dirt but cattle only have bottom teeth and they'll leave about 1/2" of grass on each blade, meaning the grass can continue to regenerate all winter if it's wet and warm enough.
It doesn’t taste that good, it smells weird when cooked, it isn’t actually healthier, it’s typically more expensive than real meat as it’s “premium”, the nutritional value is suspect… the list goes on and on
I think Impossible is fine as a casual ground beef substitute. It tastes okay (not amazing) in burgers and would be fine in any sauce.
The problem is its price is eponymous: Impossible for consumers to, pun intended, stomach it. Sell it for 75% of 80/20 ground beef’s price and it will fly off the shelves. At 250-400%, nope.
True, but they say in the article that "Pricing, which has already come down, could match beef as early as the end of the year, [Impossible's CEO] says, as his costs continue to improve with increased efficiency.“
That suggests to me that certainly by sometime in '24 we ought to see Impossible Beef down to cost parity with 80/20 (so ~$5/lb or so) which I think would really start to drive a transition. I'd certainly not buy animal beef anymore I don't think, unless it was some crazy good stuff for a special occasion.
I can regularly buy 80/20 ground beef at $3/lb at the retail level (family pack, on sale) and I’m sure commercial food service is buying it cheaper than I’m buying it at retail.
The transition acceleration happens closer to $2.50/lb than $5/lb, IMO. Even matching beef price would be significantly welcome progress though, as one of my kids eats vegetarian.
It doesn’t taste “better” to most people, so the transition has to be driven by a non-taste metric. That leaves price or ethics, and I know which way I’m betting on the US consumer, especially in a high-inflation, likely recession environment.
IMHO, this sort of thing is not really going to be a consumer-driven change.
If the commercials for meat alternatives are compelling enough even in the face of lobbies and subsidies, capitalism will drive the big fast food chains to market these more aggressively at more attractive price points and nudge consumer preferences in that direction.
The taste and smell was the killer for me. I wanted to like it and tried the burger patties, but they taste really weird. I'm not even sure if it's the beef itself or the seasoning. Maybe I should try the "ground beef".
But the burger patties just taste really weird to me, not good at all.
Guess I'll be waiting for lab-grown real meat.
In that case, you may have gotten actual beef. Burger King Germany recently had a scandal where it turned out for quite a while they didn't stock enough vegan patties and served regular beef patties while pretending they were vegan.
I’m vegetarian (several years now) and I agree with you. Meat has its problems, but our bodies make very good use of it.
Long list of chemicals with unproven value? We have a bad track record with trying to engineer our own ‘healthy’ food. See: margarine for example.
Impossible/beyond is great as a vegetarian as a rare treat (different flavors than normal veggies, loaded with umami — I don’t love them or anything but there are some recipes they work well with). I might have it once every couple months or so, often when a thoughtful friend invites me to their bbq and brings some impossible patties so I’m not left out...
But to actually use it as a meat replacement, like for several meals per week? It feels like we’re going to look back on that in 30 years like we do now for margarine.
PS: there are a million delicious vegetarian dishes that don’t need any fake meat, you kind of stop wanting the impossible/beyond stuff after you’re vegetarian for a little while
> natural food we've been eating since the dawn of time.
I don't know if you seen the factory farms that produce chicken and beef? There is nothing natural from the dawn of time from that. They are loaded with antibiotics, and they are naturally selected for maximum meat production. Deli meats and hotdogs sure are natural products made of some amalgamation of random animal parts.
Some people speak as if everyone procures their meat from Eden's organic farm in New Zealand where the animals are hugged to death. It really is not the case for most people.
Beef is not factory-farmed. All cows are raised grazing on grass and are taken to feedlots for fattening only just prior to slaughter. Cows don't go through the torture that chickens and pigs go through.
Cows spend about a few months to a year on a feed lot which is most likely a concentrated feed lot (CAFO is a factory farm). Veal seems to be especially cruel. Dairy cows seem to have it pretty bad for around five years from start to finish.
I know -- common knowledge on this subject is atrocious. Also, being fed on a lot is not the same as being "factory farmed". It sounds like you just equate "raising cattle" with "factory farming".
I guess a lot of people who reduce meat do so for health reasons, eg to reduce cholesterol, increase vitamins, etc. Changing to a heavily processed veggie burger seems against that especially when they're so expensive.
I think you're on to something here... the target audience of this product is the hardcore meat-eaters, hoping they'll just do a drop-in replacement. But I think the actual target should be the people who are meat-eaters considering quitting.
Those people are more likely looking at health benefits, and would probably be willing to tolerate some small issues here and there if it was definitely healthier. It looks like they prioritized taste over health concerns, meaning those 'early adopters' rejected the product, so it never makes it to their core segment.
In a way processed food is a scary boogey man - whether animal or plant based, processed foods are bad at providing nutrients to our bodies and can be packed with excessive amounts of salt and other substances.
Agreed: "made from processed ingredients such as pea protein, potato starch and potassium chloride"
Since when is potassium chloride a processed ingredient? I think the author just doesn't know enough chemistry. And you can make potato starch by shredding a potato and drying the resulting water - that's not really what I think of by "processed".
Agreed. The pea protein though. All the food chemistry technology that enables such proteins to make deep fried nuggets, or vegan ice cream, and so on, that fits the definition of processed food. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399967/
"Processed" as in, this food has been altered from its original state. i.e. Peas = not processed, pea protein = processed. The exact cutoff of how much processing is allowed is kinda up to the individual, but generally when you hear people talking about processed foods being bad, they are talking about almost anything that isn't a "whole" food, i.e. vegetables, whole grains, etc... So things like homemade pasta sauce, even if made with simple ingredients, would be a processed food.
The advice to avoid processed foods isn't necessarily to avoid nasty chemicals, it is to avoid high calorie, high salt, high fat foods that often strip out the healthiest parts of the constituent components during processing. For example, the healthiest part of a potato is the skin, but very few "processed" foods made from potatoes will keep the skin on as part of the processing. You can make a pretty healthy french fry by using organic potatoes and air frying instead of deep frying, but at the end of the day, you would have been better off just eating the whole potato. That is the argument that is generally being made when people talk about processed foods.
I personally like the new plant-based meats and hope they succeed, but I definitely consider them processed food and limit my consumption to every once in a while. But I also consider normal burgers to be processed food, because of the bun and sauces, and in many cases the patty. Using really good pasture raised meat to make a burger patty is way more expensive than any of the plant-based patties. And the cheap meat based patties are probably made from factory farmed animals full of antibiotics. So I am fine paying a little more for a non-meat patty that kinda mimics the real thing. Even if I consider it a processed food, I think I would rank it above the cheap meat patties in terms of health risks.
There are many millions of people who believe that, generally, the less processed, ie the closer to it's natural state any food item is, the better it is for you (or the less bad it is for you). Are you not aware of this?
We are meat-eaters and have been trying lots of plant-based products. I was never sold as them being health products, but I liked the (presumed) environmental benefits. Plus, I could make a single meal for me and my Vegan friends.
Plant-based meats were supposed to be cheaper. But it never happened. So now we've mostly moved back to normal meat products. (It doesn't help that my vegan friends never stopped thumbing their nose down at the products).
Exactly. Most burger chains don't use high quality meat for their burgers. You go to McDonald's, Burger King, or whatever and you are getting a greasy grey slab of ground "meat" (let's not think to long about where that comes from) that is 1) very thin 2) a bit rubbery 3) not that tasty 4) has some filler content in addition to meat and fat. To cover that up, most burger chains use lots of sauce, salt, and spices. It's called fast food for a reason. You eat it and you walk away mildly disappointed with the whole experience. Not that hard to compete with with a vegan option of any kind. It will taste different, and probably better by any objective standard. But when the baseline is kind of bland and boring to begin with, the benchmark for good enough isn't that high.
The beyond burger is actually fine for that segment. I've had a few. They are alright. But I don't crave a beyond burger any more than I do a big mac. It's just bland fast food to me. I'll munch it away if I'm hungry and there's nothing else but it's not particularly good or excellent.
It's miles apart from a good quality premium burger that is made of ground meat from a good cut of meat. You grill it medium, medium rare. Grease dripping all over the place when you eat it, etc. Much harder to compete with that. Now that's something I enjoy eating once in a while.
The problem is that things like the beyond burger are somewhat better than a cheap fast food burger but not really in the same league as a really premium burger. But they are priced like one. So that narrows down the audience to people that actually like meat but feel guilty about it and want to pay more to eat less of it. These people exist of course but it's a relatively small group of people. I just try to eat other things than meat to cut down on meat consumption. Works fine for me.
It comes from a normal farm and they are actually quite thorough in validating the cow was healthy. Source: Parents had a farm in europe and mc donalds inspected it.
I'm very disappointed in the cost as well. It hasn't come down at all. Not just the fake meat, but even tofu. But the cost isn't the main issue to me anymore, over the years I've come to realize I don't want to support the meat industry where profits rule everything. So I grudgingly pay the higher price of Beyond Meat.
And to be honest, it's not that much more expensive, for my particular budget. Two Beyond Meat burgers cost € 3.93, and two beef burgers cost € 2.75.
That's an important part of the answer (if not the answer) and should have been highlighted in OP. We've had a bit of inflation lately. Food in particular has become more expensive. Maybe this doesn't affect the average HNer much, but it absolutely does affect a lot of others. At the margins, which is where markets are made, quite a lot of people who might have bought plant-based meats won't at these prices.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but for me, best plant based patties are those that do not try to replicate meat taste. I much prefer patties made from actual plants&vegetables/mushrooms/chickpeas/beans like potato, carrot, some spices and so on. They have like actual 'natural' flavor, almost like something homemade.
Those that add a ton of additives often taste awful, even beyond/moving mountains...
Water, soy protein concentrate, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors, 2% or less of potato protein, methylcellulose, yeast extract, cultured dextrose, food starch modified, soy leghemoglobin, salt, mixed tocopherols (antioxidant), soy protein isolate, zinc gluconate, thiamine hydrochloride (vitamin B1), niacin, pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6), riboflavin (vitamin B2), and vitamin B12.
This is the list of ingredients in an impossible burger. Just so it can somewhat (barely) mimic the taste and texture of actual meat, for what? Shoving myself full of GMO produce and preservatives? It's much more fulfilling and better for your own health to buy fresh produce, make your own umami rich, organic blends and eat them and not strive to mimic something it cannot be.
What looks reasonable to you might not look reasonable to someone else, like someone that strives to avoid seed oils and other industrial products and live above 90 years of age.
Haha, do you believe that olive oil isn't made on a large ("industrial") scale? Or lard, or tallow, for that matter. Man, this is just more FUD, scientists aren't arguing about this, shitty fitness influencers are. But hey, I do hope that you live to 90 or above, cool goal. I just hope you don't waste too much time listening to Joe Rogan. I'm not gonna waste more of my precious (and I guess to you very short) life on this. For science based fitness advice I like Stronger by Science, but I've also heard that Barbell Medicine is good.
Large scale is not the same as industrial product. Nearly all food sold is made in large scale. But industrial means going one or more steps further. Processing food changes it. If you sell an apple, even if you harvest a million of them, means you still have an apple. But taking the apple, processing it in some oil, juice, jam and what else, means you have industrialized it, and made something new, with new problems.
Put another way treating meat with ammonia or chlorine and whatever else to turn it into a salable whole chicken or pink slime comes with its own problems.
Anytime someone says "scientists arent arguing about popular topic x", a new Einstein gets aborted.
"Cooked vegetable oil worsened inflammation in the colon, enhanced tumor growth, promoted gut leakage, and caused harmful bacterial products to leak."
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/s/dtqdmb
Avoiding "seed oils" is a mania made up by internet grifters; if you cared about science you'd want to replace animal fats with (non-tropic) vegetable oils!
> Avoiding "seed oils" is a mania made up by internet grifters
Yes, a big FU to those guys. They are akin to conspiracy theorists that will cherry-pick quotes from studies they don't understand and don't cite (how to you even cite something on Instagram?) and spread BS opinions for clicks.
Because of that crap, the <1.8% sunflower oil in your favourite milk substitute becomes a substantial health risk overnight, and you have to hold debates with your partner/family to debunk their falsehoods.
"Cooked vegetable oil worsened inflammation in the colon, enhanced tumor growth, promoted gut leakage, and caused harmful bacterial products to leak into the bloodstream in mice.
This study used canola oil which is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) as are other vegetable oils such as soy and corn. PUFAs are prone to oxidation which was shown to be the mechanism causing damage in this study.
Other cooking oils and fats that are not high in PUFAs such as avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, and butter are not likely to have the same effect. One thing to keep in mind is that olive oil has a low smoke point so when frying things at very high temperatures avocado oil may be a better option since it has a high smoke point."
“Natural flavors” frequently used to mean, “this product has a small amount of MSG in it, but we don’t want to list that”. At least in the US. I am not sure if the FDA regulations still allow that though.
Not in EU it doesn't, you cannot omit an E list substance.
But Impossible still has "natural flavors" on the ingredients list.
This happens to be mostly apple juice. Caramelizes and produces the right amount of tangy taste.
It fits the definition of ultraprocessed food since fats and proteins are modified (that's sort of the whole point, to create a new texture).
Which to me is the downside of a lot of the "replacement" foods. Industrial, processed food, that is pretty far away from whole foods. I'd prefer to just eat whole foods instead, vegetarian or not.
Do you have anything at all to back up the claim that modified proteins and fats as found in fake meat products are unhealthy? I can't find anything. This seems like superstition.
So you're claiming GMO is bad for your health? Wow. And preservatives? Can you point out the preservatives in the ingredient list? I can't see any. Except maybe salt...
I'm a meat-eater, but those "classic" plant-based patties often taste perfectly fine. Not like meat at all, but they don't have to, that's okay.
It's not like I only eat meat.
But the new breed of patties that claim to be meat taste really awful, definitely.
They sometimes smell really weird, too.
Beyond burger or what was the one that was hyped 3 years ago was really good in my opinion. Especially on a burger with some sauce and other taste things.
The only thing you really shouldn't do is mix real meat and fake meat. A natural thing to do is order two burgers, and compare them. Whatever you eat first will taste fine, whatever you eat second is extremely gross.
I did get a rather funny look one time when I ordered an Impossible Burger, with bacon on top. I wanted to try it out, and to see whether it could replace some of my meat consumption. However, this didn’t fit into the usual categories of “vegetarian” or “non-vegetarian”.
Sounds like the same kind of look I get when I eat one of the aforementioned "classic" plant-based patties or other veggie-stuff around people who know I eat meat.
Somehow they assume that only vegetarians would eat that.
also found out that during this years, some 'local' businesses have changed the 'formula' of their burgers, so even if I liked what they made in the beginning, due to less chemicals maybe, they became awful to my taste
I find ground beef smells worse than any of the plant-based alternatives, personally. Give me the impossible or beyond burgers any day over a real burger if we're judging by smell or mouth-feel. In taste, I'd say they're equal. The planty patties lose out and mouth-feel, usually, but some of them are ok in taste, and usually smell good. The planty patties tend to crumble and fall apart which makes them hard to eat as burgers.
You can do up a portobello burger in a thousand different ways and they all taste amazing. I do not understand the fascination with replicating meat for environmental good when nature herself provides plenty of delicious alternatives.
Ever had a deep-fried cheese-stuffed portobello? Mama mia...
It's precisely because the alternatives, delicious as they are, do not replicate the experience of eating meat. People like the taste of meat and they want to have it, that's really all it is. If you want to satisfy those people without incurring the environmental and ethical costs associated with raising and killing animals, you have few options besides replicating meat.
I'm not sure what the need is for the fake confusion. People like these items because they enjoy the taste and/or they are familiar. It's not at all hard to understand.
I've been a vegetarian for well over two decades. Growing up I was always completely grossed out by the concept of meat, so I almost never ate it before I went vegetarian, and didn't AT ALL enjoy it when I did eat it. For many years I didn't want anything "meaty." It was still obvious why people would want meat analogues, even if I wasn't one of them. I don't believe that these "I don't get it" comments are in good faith.
Around 5 years ago I started dabbling in fake meat. Turns out enough time had passed that I got over the icky-ness of a "meaty" product. Now I really enjoy a large variety of fake meats even though there's ALSO a large variety of vegetarian dishes I enjoy.
I want a burger, I don't want a mushroom sandwich. How is that so hard to understand? When I want mushrooms I will eat mushrooms. If random replacement was a viable alternative, I would just eat a fish sandwich.
Yes, I agree. I'm not vegetarian but I don't like meat patties so I used to buy the vegetarian option, which was like mashed up actual veg. Always pretty good I thought. Now these meat alternatives have actually ruined my social burger eating because I don't like anything on the menu. Lucky for me I don't really have that kind of social life anymore.
I agree. I dont think this should be unpopular option.
Most of actually vegetarian food I tried tasted fine. It did not tasted like meat, but I don't even understand why I should want it to taste like a meat. It tasted like its own thing and it was made from actual fresh vegetables plus cheese, nuts and what not. I like eating meat, when I want meat I eat that. I do not need vegetarian meat that tries to pretend to be meat.
I share the same opinion. With plant based meats you're trying to fit a round peg through a square hole. It just isn't meat and doesn't get close enough for me. I would much prefer a good well prepared and thought out vegetarian style dish full of flavor. Maybe it's possible with more time and effort to get close enough but it's not there for me.
The issue in the West is that we have fairly limited time and experience in preparing good vegetable dishes. Most are traditionally quite bland and off putting (for me, at least). Don't get me wrong some are quite good but usually as sides and very rarely can I visit some random person or resturaunt and expect a decently prepared vegetable dish compared to a meat dish.
In contrast, when I eat at Indian resturaunts, it's not uncommon that I prefer some vegetarian dishes over ithers. I don't even feel "cheated" like I often do with poorly made vegetarian dishes because the food is usually quite satisfying and flavorful.
That! I do not want meat substitute for my burger. I want a veggie burger. One that has it's own taste profile. If I want a meat burger I'll have a meat burger. Sell me something else with a sane list of ingredients and I'm there.
I was a vegetarian for years, and I totally agree. People always recommended me these awful veggie/vegan alternatives to meat, and they were all disgusting. Fake bacon, fake meat, fake sausage, fake ham, baloney, all ended up being stomach turning.
Interestingly, only people who recommended me these still ate meat, never vegetarians. The thing is that there are many alternatives (falafel, all kinds of different cheese, beans, etc) that are delicious but not trying to replicate meat taste, and they are all great. I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy.
I'm convinced that the push for these plant-based meat products are purely economical: if you can make a good enough vegan ground beef, bacon, cheese, it will be hard to copy so you can make a ton of money with that.
Recommending people to eat beans, carrots and zucchini? That's just good old vegetables sale, so you can't hype up your VC-backed company to billion dollars of estimated value with a handful of real consumers.
Interestingly, only people who recommended me these still ate meat, never vegetarians.
Some people have a near religious connection with their burgers & nuggets. I'm not so naive as to believe this isn't in some way motivated by "winning" the fake meat market like McDonald's more or less "won" fast food, but by getting omnivores to remember that they aren't carnivores, and getting them to just cut down their meat intake a little bit will do wonders for the sustainability of our planet and help move away from factory farming animals. That's enough for me.
If this stuff acts as the gateway drug to actual carrots and zucchini? Even better...
> The thing is that there are many alternatives (falafel, all kinds of different cheese, beans, etc) that are delicious but not trying to replicate meat taste
And not a one of them is available at a common fast food joint, but I can get an Impossible Whopper anywhere there is a Burger King, which is a lot of places. This is enormously convenient for me when I have to go on a road trip.
> I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy
Cooking is a time investment and many of these dishes are pretty heavy on the time investment.
How about this: I'll eat what I want and you eat what you want, ok?
oh god, i adore falafel. I found some frozen falafel made in my town that didn't have additives at all and it was just .... I can finish a 400g package at once))
I don't get falafel. Chickpea tastes like sand. It always seemed to me like the kind of food you create when you don't have an alternative source of basic plant bulk for certain foods, like cornmeal or wheat flour or soybean.
Why not fill tofu with the same spices and deep fry that? To my palate that would be strictly better. Or alternatively like a hashbrown sandwich with indian spices in the hash brown seems like it would create the same result without leaving you with a mouthful of sand. Of course, I'm about as white man as you get so...
It's a matter of taste. If you're accustomed to meat, or even industrial meat-products, then they taste quite good. But if you're from a different taste-realm, it can be indeed very disgusting. This is similar to all the diet-products. People always want the taste, but not the guilt.
well, I was implying that at least for me, those alternatives tasted worse compared to 'classic' meat burgers back when I wasn't vegetarian. I'll even put it another way> I liked the taste at first for some brands, but I suspect they changed the formula in an attempt to 'improve' the taste or maybe cut some cost, but that change in additives ruined the experience for me
I think the way this shakes out is that the plant-based meats like impossible burger and beyond burger marketed to people who don't eat plant focused diets to pull them away from meats whereas vegetarians typically don't like the high processed component and prefer the vegetable based patties.
Seems to be the common thread that I hear when I talk to people who are vegetarian. I myself am omni but prefer the vegetable based burgers. To your point though the vegetarian 'natural' nutty flavor is for the most part a learned palette through exposure.
I dont understand the obsession with reproducing meat out of plants. There are many plant based meals that are excellent without pretending to be bacon or steak or burgers.
There is not, and should not be an industry trying to making pasta-based lettuce or potato-based lemons.
Because meat (particularly beef and lamb) is environmentally disastrous and ethically problematic, but a majority of people really like the taste and wouldn’t want to give it up.
Hence the desire to make a product that tastes like meat but is less environmentally damaging and doesn’t have the same ethical concerns.
You may not like the implications (as someone who really enjoys meat, I don’t) but the environmental arguments against red meat are pretty compelling.
I think that is the eventual evolution of someone who becomes vegan or vegetarian. But those fake meat products definitely help someone who's been eating meat their whole life and never really had to think about how you prepare a meal that where vegetables are the centrepiece.
I still buy some frozen whatever-the-fuck that I can just whack in the air fryer and have ready in 10 minutes when I can't be bothered cooking, but now that I've been vegan for like eight months most of my diet is whole vegetables and grains, and if I've been out cycling that day I'll have some tofu or beans for protein.
The fake meat definitely helped me ease into it, and if I'm eating with my meat-eating mother and it's her turn to cook then it's easy to have something she doesn't have to think about.
Novelty food item still existing after a few years is a groundbreaking success, not a flop. The real mistake is treating food as a tech startup. People are understandably cautious about what they put in their bodies and also associate food with their cultural identity. Widespread acceptance would require patient cultivation of each segment of the market and tweaking product to suit different needs and sensibilities. Now that burger composition can be altered rather than being whatever comes out of the cow, diet burger that still tastes meaty / fatty would not be a bad start, that's where people will overlook preservatives so long as they get results. Next, consider if plant burgers can fulfil various religious restrictions when real meat would not. Create ads and mascots for different cultures. Then wait a decade and you might be getting somewhere.
I recall when I was in the states budget king was doing an impossible whopper for the same price as a standard whopper.
And the taste was pretty equivalent. Obviously a Burger King beef patty is not a premium product, so that’s not an impressive feat from a taste perspective. But as a replacement for mediocre quality beef, it seemed like a winner.
I assumed at the time tho that the price was subsidised. And I’m not sure if Burger King still offers this.
Another anecdote, a year or so back, in Australia, the meat alternatives were being heavily discounted in Cole’s (major supermarket), which I assumed was due to poor sales. At 50% off it was an easy buy. But when the cost is significantly higher than meat I’m less interested.
Trying to discuss diets is always controversial, and I hope I don't sound like I'm on a high horse. Everyone has different motivations for their diets. It could be health, ethics, taste preference, etc..
I try to be a "flexitarian", because personally I find it gives me a good balance between nutrition, environmental impact, taste and ethical animal treatment (I try to animals seldomly and eat every single bit of the animal, offal, intestines, ears, tails, feet, etc).
I'm also probably in the minority that actually likes the taste of "fake meat". I have them every now and then, but I'm fully aware that it's not "healthy food" and it's expensive and I'm not sure about the enviromental impact. When I have it, it's mostly to fulfill req #4 (eating fewer animals).
Having tried it a number of times it's not really there yet. It clearly has an odd texture and tastes unpleasant. They may have jumped the gun a bit. I think vat grown meat is a better bet.
I like it, I'm a meat eater with a vegetarian partner, it works great as a compromise for us, to use every so often (not every day).
Some vegetarians (my partner included) sometimes want food that tastes and has texture like dishes they used to eat as a meat eater. So it works great for them. For her it's bolognese-style pasta sauces, bacon, sandwich meats like pastrami and a few other things.
Artificial meat has a niche.
Was it going to change the whole world and revolutionise fucking everything? Well, no, that was overblown hype.
I don't follow. Why do meat eaters want vegans to eat this instead of soy meat?
I am mostly vegetarian, and I quite like Impossible Burgers. Sadly they're not really available in Europe.
They might be an idea with a small market. But in my mind this is a lot like if Silicon Valley got really pumped up about, like, unpasteurized cheeses or nutritional shakes. (Oh, wait, that last one happened.) The problem isn't with unpasteurized cheeses--there is a small but reasonable market for such things--but with Silicon Valley.
Are you just projecting your own preference on others maybe? Both me and my wife are meat eaters and we happily get "meat-like" burger patties and sausages at least once a week - it makes for a nice break from having meat all the time, even though we both like meat. And the options nowadays are pretty good, so why not eat them?
If artificial meat would taste like the real thing and cost less, everyone would want to eat it: Meat eaters and poor people because it costs less, vegans because it tastes good and does not harm anyone and rich people because they feel good when saving the earth.
Like many startups it got hyped to make those exiting at the right time rich, but remove the hype and the product folds as cannot deliver (yet?) on such lofty expectations. Even if technology can be made to work eventually, it will struggle to overcome this feeling of a letdown. My 2c.
I think that’s the issue isn’t it, the sales aren’t living up the hype.
We’ll, no shit, it was sold as the answer to everything and it turns out that it’s just another addition to the food market with some appeal to some people.
I hope that it doesn’t disappear, basically because it make my life easier. But the takeaway from this should probably be along the lines of being skeptic all of the hype, always.
It's not the taste i have a problem with but the nutritional value. Most meat replacement products taste decent to me but they're high in fat (seed oils) and lower in protein than meat (and lower quality protein).
> non-processed food (meat) and ultra—high-processed food (fake meat), the former is the much healthier option.
I mean sure if you are comparing a chop from grass fed sheep from somewhere like wales (or good quality horse meat) to something like a vegan burger, then yeah.
but comparing a mystery meat burger to fake meat, no.
> Vegans wants meat eaters to eat this thing to prevent animal harm.
I’m a vegan of nearly 25 years. My reasons are my own. I don’t care what others eat. Eat a pig, a horse, a dog, cotton candy, pomegranate. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But I’m doubtful there are other vegans out there who want carnivores to switch to eating processed foods like this. For my family and most vegans I know, these artificial meats are useful primarily in social situations where vegans and omnivores gather.
I like the convenience of a protein substitute on the rare occasion that I eat outside my home and am sorry to see these businesses floundering. But if they went away tomorrow, I wouldn’t rue the failure of a grand conspiracy to force alternative food choices on the unsuspecting masses.
There are in fact a lot of vegans who do want meat eaters to consume less meat, for the same ethical or environmental reasons we don’t eat meat ourselves. Doesn’t require being an activist to want these products to see more mainstream adoption.
This is a hilarious comment and definitely worthy of being flagged for starting a flame war, but I'm totally behind the fact that you've laid bare these questions and opened them to debate.
My own response would be: Is it possible that if every version of schadenfreude and psychopathic antipathy toward other humans is deeply embedded in the fake-meat-making process and it still can be commercially successful and serve several purposes ethically/environmentally/economically if it's popularized, do the impure individual motives outweigh the greater good?
Because the poor will eat it if it's cheaper; the rich will eat it if it's more ethical or if it's dolled up more expensively; the outcomes touted by the environmentalists will be the same whether they do it out of love for cows or hatred for mankind, won't they?
Well much like a suspiciously cheap sausage, this opinion is clearly a load of old bollocks.
We often choose to eat meat substitutes. We like the texture and the taste.
Since the supermarkets in the UK are full of meat substitutes from the likes of Quorn, What The Cluck, etc. and have been for years, we can't be the only family of omnivores to enjoy it.
Meat alternatives don't have to 100% replicate meat to be enjoyable, they just have to be tasty.
aye, so I really like the fake kebab meat that's full of spice. I like it because unlike real kebab meat, its not going to give me TB, Scrapie or monstershits.
slap it in a microwave, dump it in a pita bread, add hot sauce, done. 4 mins tops.
I want to eat artificial meat. Meat is tasty and many great dishes require something meat-like. In my experience artificial meat has only replaced the bottom-of-the-barrel burgers/sausages/chicken slabs, though. The expensive brands have nearly nailed down the texture of semi-processed beef, but the taste relies too much on "add salt until tasty".
That said, I've cooked myself some decent fast food with fake meat instead of cheap €1 burgers. The cheapest, shittiest meat is just a protein source drenched in fat, plants can easily substitute that.
If you're going vegetarian, fake meat isn't the way to go. There are great dishes built around vegetables, mushrooms, and all other kinds of non-meat products that you can eat instead. You won't ever find an artificial steak that's any good, but you may find something even better if you try exploring other meals instead.
I don't care what anyone else eats, as long as you let me know of your dietary restrictions if we're planning on eating together.
I don't see the point of eating meat unless you're willing to work on your bow skills and can hunt and clean an animal yourself. I like the discipline that it takes to be a vegitarian and I think the disconnect that the US public has with their food and where it comes from is weird. Everybody just lives with their heads up their asses while they eat pink-slime that came from chickens that lived their lives strapped down in a cage.
I do find it disturbing that Vegans are doing the same thing though. When I eat a heavily processed bleeding vegan burger I feel like I've been poisoned. Consuming industrial seed oil and Omega6 at the level seen in these vegan foods cannot be good.
I love Impossible meat. Wish it was available in my EU country! Various brands of fake meat have been at Whole Foods for a long time now. Not sure things are failing.
Also I wonder how much of this negative sentiment is macroeconomic and tech-related? The stock prices of many tech/bio companies have come down. Is that what caused this article?
This is purely my own subjective experience, but there is just something off-putting about the more accurate forms of plant-based meat.
I think it's because meat actually has some quite disgusting and off-putting qualities. Qualities that humans are only used to within the context of meat. For example, recently we had some pea-protein based burgers, and they had three bizarre qualities in their attempt to recreate the beef burger. First, they were quite red inside. Second, they had an almost acrid, rancid acidity to them which really did taste quite similar to beef. Finally, they had a very burger-like texture, even with pieces of simulated unwanted gristle.
So, what we get is a meat-eating experience recontextualised into the realm of vegetables. And, as vegetables, these qualities are bizarre, alien, and unexpected. We don't expect an acrid kind of acidity from vegetables, we don't expect strange chewy textures or inconceivable red juice in the absence of beetroot. So with the accurate plant-based meats the only choice is to try and forget that you're not eating meat.
Of course this doesn't happen to everyone, but it is true for me. Plant-based meat is fundamentally revolting in a way that actual meat is not, and that's kind of ironic, considering the infinitely more pleasant production of the former over the latter.
For that reason I generally prefer meat replacements that don't try to be exactly like meat: fake chicken nuggets and fish fingers are generally good, soy mince is fine, etc. Those things are far cheaper too
All supermarket chains, at least in the cities, now have a considerate selection of plant based meat and it sells like bread. Yes, it is sadly more expensive than real meat for now.
Still -- vegan burger patties are regularly sold out.
Can confirm, but would add that "more expensive" depends on the exact brand and what kind of meat you compare it to. Even the more expensive faux meat products are often cheaper or very comparable to their organic counterparts.
But if you take for example the supermarket brand version of the products, they are often around 33% cheaper than products from gourmet garden oder beyond.
Protip: Ikea sells frozen meat ball alternatives. They are SO good and pretty cheap.
With the amount of vegan stuff I see advertised I'd assume the meat replacement industry has grown remarkably.
Is this talking about specific VC backed brands, or specific subproducts?
> Impossible has spun up new products such as animal-shaped faux chicken nuggets and blitzed supermarkets, leading to more than 50% retail sales growth in the US in 2022.
The article seems to be mostly talking about Beyond Meat not living up to their "we'll replace the meat industry overnight" pitch. But the wider market seems to be doing fine.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadTaste like meat? Not at all, likely, don't remember, but I usually find them taste just nice, pea protein with spices, so what's the problem? Also what does thst have to do with how regular?
I hope they don't go out of business, being concerned for animals and environment I think every alternative that some people enjoy is great.
I don't know a source on the history of all of it but I've been to several restaurants in Asia that specialize in dishes that taste like they're made with meat but aren't
this came up resently tho
https://youtu.be/lrrmysxnTdA
Tastes great, is simple and you can throw in things you like, such as onions and garlic. Pretty sure it’s nutritious as well.
I read somewhere you would need 25 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef, ergo one could potentially produce 25 times the amount of substitute. Obviously that isn't true and such a patty is a specialized product of various highly processed plant matter. It is around 2-4 times the price of meat equivalent and to me it is no surprise, that people aren't willing to pay more for an inferior product.
Now people say, well if we all had bought it, mass production would already reduced the price significantly. I don't think people are paying new cooking methods and food processing reactors here.
There are more people involved, more complex ingredients, more processes, more shipping and more energy. That is why it is much more expensive.
I am myself not a big fan of those fake meat products, but you have a source for that.
I'd assume economies of scale matter, because economies of scale matter everywhere?
Cows look basically like processing plants. They produce food, fertilizer and energy (biogas).
E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned. [0] The vegetarian equivalent has been cheaper there than the real meat thing, although the process for both is not very different in the EU than in the US.
[0] https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/07/26/plant-based...
Soy/tofu/cardboard Patties bring the average down but the recent products that try to replicate the taste of meat are still a premium product.
Unless you mean the vegetarian chicken pieces don't taste like chicken but like cardboard, that is fair. Then again, supermarket chicken also tastes like chicken flavoured cardboard. It's not a premium product either.
Basic legumes and veggies are much cheaper.
Not really.
> E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned.
Meat prices relative to non-meat food prices are much higher than in the US (taxation on a lot of the things that drive the additional costs of meat play a role here.) So, yes, it stands to reason that plant-based meat substitutes, using similar process that adds similar (proportional) cost to the raw materials (actual production costs and margins) would remain more competitive with real meat than it is in the US.
And with a number of EU countries (and I think there are EU-wide proposals, as well) discussing “meat taxes” as part of climate efforts, that’s quite possibly going to get more pronounced.
> The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer%27s_spent_grain
You hit the nail on its head. I think there's still hope for meat substitutes if they can improve their flavor while also lowering their price. But I'm not holding out hope for that.
https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-plant-menu-ultimate-no-...
https://www.trolley.co.uk/product/linda-mccartneys-2-vegetar...
They taste delicious and are absolutely competitive with meat burger prices.
If you go for lean mince then you're at exactly the same price range: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-ashfields-british-extra...
That's lower calorie than the veggie burger, but you still have to do the prep yourself.
Or you can go for the quorn mince which is much leaner than all the above and costs less than the lean beef mince: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-quorn-mince-500g/501950...
They're not exactly like chicken but if you treat them as their own thing then they're a perfectly good substitute in things like stir fries.
Quorn bacon substitute rashers are also pretty good in a fry up. Again, they're not bacon but if you treat them as their own thing, very enjoyable.
Not sure anything substitutes for a good steak or nice bit of cod yet but that's only an occasional treat for us anyway.
Even without premiums target audience is willing to accept, subsidies of 10-20% of sector revenue are pretty hard to beat.
Thanks to lobbying meat and cow-milk are taxed as basic foods, while vegan alternatives are taxed as luxury items.
Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history and still is in most parts of the world. Given the environmental impact of Meat and Diary in terms of CO2, Methane, Water usage, and Deforestation we should heavily reconsider our nonchalant view of them as a cheap commodity.
And nobody want's to return to those dark ages.
This devil's alliance between veganism and environmentalism is what put me off environmentalism. Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.
That means at least 80% is burned for livestock or livestock feed. Since part of the palm oil and other plant produced is also used for livestock feed that number probably closer to 85%.
See:
https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Fern%2...
Your proposed solutions simply don't add up. Air Travel makes up 2.5-3.5% of all GHG emissions, Air Conditioning makes up 3.94%. Livestock makes up a whopping 18%.
So even banning all air travel and air conditioning, would only give you the same reduction on GHG emissions as eating 40% less dairy and meat.
So cutting meat and dairy from your diet is one of the easiest ways to cut your CO2 footprint massively. And it's actually just a minor inconvenience once you get used to plant based cooking, calling vegan cooking "dark ages" is ridiculously overdramatic, considering that e.g. indian food is often vegan and delicious.
See:
https://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf
https://academic.oup.com/af/article/1/1/19/4638592
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2022/nrel-shows-impact-of-co....
I will generally advise that people avoid buying any products from countries who has a history of burning rain forests to produce (or we can call it subsidize) cheap exports. Similar for cheap products created from child labors, military conflicts, sweatshops, or forced labor camps.
you mean softened by removing things you dont use.
Look at the moment no one is banning meat. There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers. I'm not vegan, and like most people I really wish vegans weren't the noisy shouty face of environmentalism.
But, if you want change, people have to, well change. There are a few routes to that, one is price change (inflation is helping with that, stuff that requires a lot of energy to produce, ie feedlot meat and greenhouse based veg) are rising in price more than less refined or forced food stuffs.
Subsidies could be re-directed to different parts of the farming ecosystem (but that's politically challenging)
or you can outright ban things, but again thats also challenging.
No, there isn't any reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that. Vegans get cancer at the same rate as non-Vegans.
Lung cancer however, you are right.
I'm not vegan by the way, I really like salami. just less now.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30850575/
There are parts of the world that are uninhabitable without AC, and I know tons of people who don't eat meat, but virtually everybody in developed countries flies. My partner's family lives at the other side of the planet so banning airplanes means she would never get to see her sisters again.
Limiting ourselves to places we can occupy (and actually work/produce) year round without environmental control would mean basically killing off a significant chunk of the planet's population and telling loads of whoever is left that they need to leave behind their homes and move.
Compared to eating less meat, that seems to be a much bigger ask.
Keep your hands off my AC. I’ll go vegan before I sleep in a pool of my sweat nightly.
Most people have a vitamin-D deficiency, most vegans that I know of at least take care of making sure that they get enough supplements.
only if you can process lactose. A large amount of people can't. Plus, "traditional" farming is highly dependent on location.
Meat wasn't a staple food 100 years ago, it was too expensive for regular people. Same with milk, if you didn't own a cow, you just didn't drink it. You drank some sort of ale.
His mother kept chickens, so they had eggs - to the point that as an adult he never eats them because he got sick of them by the time he graduated from high school.
My grandparents were the first generation in my country who started to have regular access to meat after WW2. Before that it was either a rare thing and much of the "meat" they ate was offal.
Pea soup was 99% peas and a small chunk of smoked meat added for flavour.
Meanwhile billions of people live perfectly normal lives eating legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts) for protein.
So not as simple as one would think...
" Who Benefits Most From Farm Subsidies?
Farm subsidies don't benefit all farms equally. According to the Cato Institute, farmers of corn, soybeans, and wheat receive more than 70% of farm subsidies. These are also usually the largest farms.
From an other source:
"Corn growers received the most product-specific assistance with $2.2 billion in subsidies. That was only about 4.4% of the $50.4 billion in total corn production that year. Soybeans rank second in subsidies. While the US soybean industry produced $41.3 billion worth of products in 2017, it received $1.6 billion in subsidies in 2016, representing 3.9% of production.
The US sugar industry produced $2.5 billion worth of product in 2017 and received $1.6 billion in subsidies, according to the report. The support amounted to 63.5% of the value of total production."
- https://www.thoughtco.com/us-farm-subsidies-3325162
- https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
That would only be true if the cost of the patty was only thing that impacted the price to the consumer, but everything else like transporting the thing to a store, paying the store staff to sell it, paying for marketing, branding, etc, paying taxes on it, are essentially the same regardless of whether the patty is made of cows or plants. A patty that costs 0.25c to make could be reduced to 0.01c to make, which would reduce the price in the market from 5.99 to 5.74...
[1]: https://www.agfoundation.org/common-questions/view/could-mor...
Do you have reputable sources for that statement being "plain false"?
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...
"If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. Of all the land we use for agriculture, 77% of it is used for livestock."
These 77% are only responsible for 18% of the produced calories and 37% of the produced proteins.
So, if you leave out water consumption and most importantly animal walfare, eating meat is the worst thing you can to for the environment (when talking about food).
I doubt that 86% of that 77% is truly unsuitable for farming human food, but I wouldn't be surprised if 30-50% of it was.
Of all the cropland we have, 57% is used to produce human food and 43% is used to produce animal food.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...
The whole point is that you need way more crops in general to "produce" the same amount of calories & proteins. That's because feeding the animals with crops instead of eating them is highly inefficient in comparison to eating them directly. "As an example: beef has an energy efficiency of about 2%. This means that for every 100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back."
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#livestock-waste-a-...
With how much meat is eaten right now, there is just no way we have enough grazing land to produce enough meat. 99% of meat comes from factory farms. [1] These animals are always fed with crops, so there will always be land usage to product food for animals. And it is way more inefficient.
[1]: https://www.livekindly.com/99-animal-products-factory-farms/
You see this with human crops too - Why do people grow corn when almonds are much higher dollar value per acre? Why not wine grapes? The reason is because not every patch of land is suitable for high-value cash crops. Going down the quality scale, not every patch of land is suitable for food for human consumption either. The reason why is that "cropland" is not fungible - soil has particular characteristics, nutrients, contaminants, and microorganisms, all of which affect which crops you can grow.
Products can fail even if everything promised is delivered. This is why the supermarket Tesco gave up on trying to enter the USA market.
Or why I can't get Quorn here in Germany even though I personally think it's a much better taste and texture than any of the Rügenwalder Mühle brands.
Or why I can get Sauerkraut juice here, but not in the UK.
It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits.
They're not trying to cook the best vegetable dishes. They're not trying to cook dishes that use less meat. They're not trying to expand your palettes and reintroducing liver, sweetbreads or other weird cuts.
All these "green" products convince you to not do the most important things: REDUCE and REUSE.
I call it "beyond beyond meat."
99% of the important bits of a dish don't come from making something meat-like but cooking something that isn't bland and uninteresting. And you don't need fake meat to work around that.
There is a place for these meat substitutes but should they be eaten all of the time; no. Education around veggies is the key for solving the meat production issues.
It's supposed to be a gateway product that will eventually entice hardcore meat eaters to first try fake meat and then maybe dare to try a non-fake meat vegan product.
The best vegan products aren't "meat thing but vegan", they're all just gateway stuff.
The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine. The protein doesn't really matter, 99% of the taste is in the sauce.
I agree, but I don't think it's a gateway. They want to replace all those beef burgers with Impossible meat burgers. However things like Impossible meat, while very impressive, cost more than the real thing and don't taste right. It's the uncanny valley of meat.
The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine.
That's my point. There's plenty of good meat free or meat reduced food. But we're not running campaigns to encourage less meat consumption or promoting the cuisines of other cultures. Instead they created a company to make and sell hyper realistic fake meat. If you were really concerned about your meat consumption and it's impact on the environment, you'd just eat less meat. It's 100% actionable without these companies and tastes better.
I like vegetables too, obviously, but sometimes I just want a burger.
Expand your research a little bit. Fake meat has been very popular in buddhism countries for very long time, often to entice people to switching to non animal food.
https://www.foodandwine.com/cooking-techniques/plant-based-m...
To compensate for her homesickness, Ng decided to sell her own line of vegetarian imitation meats, and partnered with manufacturers in Taiwan to develop and import many of the dishes that she grew up with. In 1994, she opened up May Wah Vegetarian Market in New York City's Chinatown, and stocked it full with packets of imitation steak, spare ribs, shrimp, mutton, and grilled eel—all made some sort of combination of soy, seaweed, wheat gluten, or mushrooms.
It didn't land well. "Unfortunately it was not a good beginning for us. People were hesitant about trying these products," Lily says. "They wanted to stick to tofu and beans, and it was very hard for us to get people to try it. We ended up giving a lot of stuff away.
You can get the Chinese fake meat as snacks from your local Asian supermarket. I have Weilong brand fish tofu and barbeque gluten right now. These are meaty, but no where near as convincing as impossible meat. My fish tofu and barbeque gluten snacks have a fish cake like texture and are full of MSG. They appear to be vegan though.
We’re pointing to a culture that is used to a wide range of flavours and textures every day. They don’t needed that much convincing to try a not meat product, but it’s also easier to fake certain meat products. (Their existing fake meats are way cheaper than impossible meat though.)
But Impossible meat wasn’t designed for the Chinese. Or even Asians in general.
Anecdotally, people in my social circle go for food that is socially acceptable in that circle. If 'low impact' food became a thing, price would have less influence on it ( kinda like every teen has to have an Iphone -- I am exaggerating a little - or when driving a small sedan in US means you are poor ).
There are all sorts of minor dynamics that are underexplored in that arena.
25 times of cattle feed, sure. But there's a lot of selection and mixing of various plants for taste. It's not a simple replacement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi...
(Disliking and thus moving away from those practices is a goal some people have, but they are the dominate method of meat production at the moment, so it's the reasonable comparison)
There are a few exceptions to this, even in stores. If you buy from Whole Food and get their brand beef, it's grass-only. I know the largest rancher selling to WF, we're friends -- my teeball team beat his teeball team in the season finals last summer.
I mostly raise dairy cows, but if you're going to go through the effort to raise one sort of breed of cattle, it's trivial to add in an even lower maintenance cattle as well. As a result I have three or four animals in my pasture right now who are getting ready for freezer camp. My neighbors are all beef ranchers, I am the exception. But none of us are feeding grain to our cattle. My area sells a massive amount of grass-only beef. We have the luxury of this being basically free for us to do and then having found a niche market willing to accept a lot more money for their beef if it was raised right and fed right. I don't sell my beef the way most folks do, so unless you know me personally, you've never eaten my animals or had our farm's dairy products.
All that to say, there are very good alternatives to feedlots. My beef cattle only need supplemental food (aka more than the green grass in my pastures) between December and April. I did the math, it costs me $140 / year to feed out cattle and it takes two or three years for an Angus to be butcher-weight. That's $420 on the high end for a grass-only steer that'll dress to like 600lbs of beef.
I'd get by with even fewer days feeding except I also own and breed Appaloosas and horses are much harder on the pastures than cattle. If I ran two herds my cattle would keep the pastures in grass until about January -- and with this warm weather I know folks who have YET to feed hay! But with my horses mixed into the herd it means that the grass is killed if I keep them on it -- horses have top and bottom teeth, they can cut grass clear to the dirt but cattle only have bottom teeth and they'll leave about 1/2" of grass on each blade, meaning the grass can continue to regenerate all winter if it's wet and warm enough.
The problem is its price is eponymous: Impossible for consumers to, pun intended, stomach it. Sell it for 75% of 80/20 ground beef’s price and it will fly off the shelves. At 250-400%, nope.
That suggests to me that certainly by sometime in '24 we ought to see Impossible Beef down to cost parity with 80/20 (so ~$5/lb or so) which I think would really start to drive a transition. I'd certainly not buy animal beef anymore I don't think, unless it was some crazy good stuff for a special occasion.
The transition acceleration happens closer to $2.50/lb than $5/lb, IMO. Even matching beef price would be significantly welcome progress though, as one of my kids eats vegetarian.
It doesn’t taste “better” to most people, so the transition has to be driven by a non-taste metric. That leaves price or ethics, and I know which way I’m betting on the US consumer, especially in a high-inflation, likely recession environment.
If the commercials for meat alternatives are compelling enough even in the face of lobbies and subsidies, capitalism will drive the big fast food chains to market these more aggressively at more attractive price points and nudge consumer preferences in that direction.
Weird goo that was grown in a lab by people that have no idea what they're doing OR natural food we've been eating since the dawn of time.
Long list of chemicals with unproven value? We have a bad track record with trying to engineer our own ‘healthy’ food. See: margarine for example.
Impossible/beyond is great as a vegetarian as a rare treat (different flavors than normal veggies, loaded with umami — I don’t love them or anything but there are some recipes they work well with). I might have it once every couple months or so, often when a thoughtful friend invites me to their bbq and brings some impossible patties so I’m not left out...
But to actually use it as a meat replacement, like for several meals per week? It feels like we’re going to look back on that in 30 years like we do now for margarine.
PS: there are a million delicious vegetarian dishes that don’t need any fake meat, you kind of stop wanting the impossible/beyond stuff after you’re vegetarian for a little while
What's wrong with it for reducing cholesterol intake? Butter has gotten very expensive, too.
I don't know if you seen the factory farms that produce chicken and beef? There is nothing natural from the dawn of time from that. They are loaded with antibiotics, and they are naturally selected for maximum meat production. Deli meats and hotdogs sure are natural products made of some amalgamation of random animal parts.
Some people speak as if everyone procures their meat from Eden's organic farm in New Zealand where the animals are hugged to death. It really is not the case for most people.
Entirely untrue.
That seems to go against common knowledge.
Cows spend about a few months to a year on a feed lot which is most likely a concentrated feed lot (CAFO is a factory farm). Veal seems to be especially cruel. Dairy cows seem to have it pretty bad for around five years from start to finish.
Those people are more likely looking at health benefits, and would probably be willing to tolerate some small issues here and there if it was definitely healthier. It looks like they prioritized taste over health concerns, meaning those 'early adopters' rejected the product, so it never makes it to their core segment.
It's like the article trying to keep repeating the words "processed", "ultra-processed", "hyper-processed" as if it's some scary boogey man.
In a way processed food is a scary boogey man - whether animal or plant based, processed foods are bad at providing nutrients to our bodies and can be packed with excessive amounts of salt and other substances.
https://www.lhsfna.org/the-many-health-risks-of-processed-fo...
Since when is potassium chloride a processed ingredient? I think the author just doesn't know enough chemistry. And you can make potato starch by shredding a potato and drying the resulting water - that's not really what I think of by "processed".
The advice to avoid processed foods isn't necessarily to avoid nasty chemicals, it is to avoid high calorie, high salt, high fat foods that often strip out the healthiest parts of the constituent components during processing. For example, the healthiest part of a potato is the skin, but very few "processed" foods made from potatoes will keep the skin on as part of the processing. You can make a pretty healthy french fry by using organic potatoes and air frying instead of deep frying, but at the end of the day, you would have been better off just eating the whole potato. That is the argument that is generally being made when people talk about processed foods.
I personally like the new plant-based meats and hope they succeed, but I definitely consider them processed food and limit my consumption to every once in a while. But I also consider normal burgers to be processed food, because of the bun and sauces, and in many cases the patty. Using really good pasture raised meat to make a burger patty is way more expensive than any of the plant-based patties. And the cheap meat based patties are probably made from factory farmed animals full of antibiotics. So I am fine paying a little more for a non-meat patty that kinda mimics the real thing. Even if I consider it a processed food, I think I would rank it above the cheap meat patties in terms of health risks.
We are meat-eaters and have been trying lots of plant-based products. I was never sold as them being health products, but I liked the (presumed) environmental benefits. Plus, I could make a single meal for me and my Vegan friends.
Plant-based meats were supposed to be cheaper. But it never happened. So now we've mostly moved back to normal meat products. (It doesn't help that my vegan friends never stopped thumbing their nose down at the products).
The beyond burger is actually fine for that segment. I've had a few. They are alright. But I don't crave a beyond burger any more than I do a big mac. It's just bland fast food to me. I'll munch it away if I'm hungry and there's nothing else but it's not particularly good or excellent.
It's miles apart from a good quality premium burger that is made of ground meat from a good cut of meat. You grill it medium, medium rare. Grease dripping all over the place when you eat it, etc. Much harder to compete with that. Now that's something I enjoy eating once in a while.
The problem is that things like the beyond burger are somewhat better than a cheap fast food burger but not really in the same league as a really premium burger. But they are priced like one. So that narrows down the audience to people that actually like meat but feel guilty about it and want to pay more to eat less of it. These people exist of course but it's a relatively small group of people. I just try to eat other things than meat to cut down on meat consumption. Works fine for me.
I never understand when people get riled up about that kind of stuff. What do you THINK ground up meat looks like?
And to be honest, it's not that much more expensive, for my particular budget. Two Beyond Meat burgers cost € 3.93, and two beef burgers cost € 2.75.
BM is largely driven by the profit motive too
Cheers.
"Cooked vegetable oil worsened inflammation in the colon, enhanced tumor growth, promoted gut leakage, and caused harmful bacterial products to leak." https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/s/dtqdmb
Yes, a big FU to those guys. They are akin to conspiracy theorists that will cherry-pick quotes from studies they don't understand and don't cite (how to you even cite something on Instagram?) and spread BS opinions for clicks.
Because of that crap, the <1.8% sunflower oil in your favourite milk substitute becomes a substantial health risk overnight, and you have to hold debates with your partner/family to debunk their falsehoods.
"Cooked vegetable oil worsened inflammation in the colon, enhanced tumor growth, promoted gut leakage, and caused harmful bacterial products to leak into the bloodstream in mice.
This study used canola oil which is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) as are other vegetable oils such as soy and corn. PUFAs are prone to oxidation which was shown to be the mechanism causing damage in this study.
Other cooking oils and fats that are not high in PUFAs such as avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, and butter are not likely to have the same effect. One thing to keep in mind is that olive oil has a low smoke point so when frying things at very high temperatures avocado oil may be a better option since it has a high smoke point."
22 ingredients in a steak is not reasonable, whatever the ingredients are.
But Impossible still has "natural flavors" on the ingredients list. This happens to be mostly apple juice. Caramelizes and produces the right amount of tangy taste.
Which to me is the downside of a lot of the "replacement" foods. Industrial, processed food, that is pretty far away from whole foods. I'd prefer to just eat whole foods instead, vegetarian or not.
Even sunflower oil gets a bad rap bc it's assoc w proc foods but it's fine just don't get it too hot or overconsume:
https://www.webmd.com/diet/sunflower-oil-good-for-you
Coconut oil's sat fat is highly contested and mixed. Very hard to untangle its effects but it seems to be nonlinear: A little seems okay.
Really not convinced at all.
The only thing you really shouldn't do is mix real meat and fake meat. A natural thing to do is order two burgers, and compare them. Whatever you eat first will taste fine, whatever you eat second is extremely gross.
My comparison method so far was the Whopper.
Ever had a deep-fried cheese-stuffed portobello? Mama mia...
I've been a vegetarian for well over two decades. Growing up I was always completely grossed out by the concept of meat, so I almost never ate it before I went vegetarian, and didn't AT ALL enjoy it when I did eat it. For many years I didn't want anything "meaty." It was still obvious why people would want meat analogues, even if I wasn't one of them. I don't believe that these "I don't get it" comments are in good faith.
Around 5 years ago I started dabbling in fake meat. Turns out enough time had passed that I got over the icky-ness of a "meaty" product. Now I really enjoy a large variety of fake meats even though there's ALSO a large variety of vegetarian dishes I enjoy.
Most of actually vegetarian food I tried tasted fine. It did not tasted like meat, but I don't even understand why I should want it to taste like a meat. It tasted like its own thing and it was made from actual fresh vegetables plus cheese, nuts and what not. I like eating meat, when I want meat I eat that. I do not need vegetarian meat that tries to pretend to be meat.
The issue in the West is that we have fairly limited time and experience in preparing good vegetable dishes. Most are traditionally quite bland and off putting (for me, at least). Don't get me wrong some are quite good but usually as sides and very rarely can I visit some random person or resturaunt and expect a decently prepared vegetable dish compared to a meat dish.
In contrast, when I eat at Indian resturaunts, it's not uncommon that I prefer some vegetarian dishes over ithers. I don't even feel "cheated" like I often do with poorly made vegetarian dishes because the food is usually quite satisfying and flavorful.
Interestingly, only people who recommended me these still ate meat, never vegetarians. The thing is that there are many alternatives (falafel, all kinds of different cheese, beans, etc) that are delicious but not trying to replicate meat taste, and they are all great. I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy.
I'm convinced that the push for these plant-based meat products are purely economical: if you can make a good enough vegan ground beef, bacon, cheese, it will be hard to copy so you can make a ton of money with that.
Recommending people to eat beans, carrots and zucchini? That's just good old vegetables sale, so you can't hype up your VC-backed company to billion dollars of estimated value with a handful of real consumers.
Some people have a near religious connection with their burgers & nuggets. I'm not so naive as to believe this isn't in some way motivated by "winning" the fake meat market like McDonald's more or less "won" fast food, but by getting omnivores to remember that they aren't carnivores, and getting them to just cut down their meat intake a little bit will do wonders for the sustainability of our planet and help move away from factory farming animals. That's enough for me.
If this stuff acts as the gateway drug to actual carrots and zucchini? Even better...
And not a one of them is available at a common fast food joint, but I can get an Impossible Whopper anywhere there is a Burger King, which is a lot of places. This is enormously convenient for me when I have to go on a road trip.
> I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy
Cooking is a time investment and many of these dishes are pretty heavy on the time investment.
How about this: I'll eat what I want and you eat what you want, ok?
Why not fill tofu with the same spices and deep fry that? To my palate that would be strictly better. Or alternatively like a hashbrown sandwich with indian spices in the hash brown seems like it would create the same result without leaving you with a mouthful of sand. Of course, I'm about as white man as you get so...
Seems to be the common thread that I hear when I talk to people who are vegetarian. I myself am omni but prefer the vegetable based burgers. To your point though the vegetarian 'natural' nutty flavor is for the most part a learned palette through exposure.
There is not, and should not be an industry trying to making pasta-based lettuce or potato-based lemons.
Hence the desire to make a product that tastes like meat but is less environmentally damaging and doesn’t have the same ethical concerns.
You may not like the implications (as someone who really enjoys meat, I don’t) but the environmental arguments against red meat are pretty compelling.
I don't understand why someone has to bring this up every. single. time.
People like meat. Those same people may want to become vegetarian for ethical reasons. They still like meat though.
Oh look, a product that can fit in that "I like meat" slot without killing animals. Sounds tasty.
What else is there to understand?
I like the consequence of murder; the texture, the taste, the blood, the everything ... but not the bit where something actually dies.
I still buy some frozen whatever-the-fuck that I can just whack in the air fryer and have ready in 10 minutes when I can't be bothered cooking, but now that I've been vegan for like eight months most of my diet is whole vegetables and grains, and if I've been out cycling that day I'll have some tofu or beans for protein.
The fake meat definitely helped me ease into it, and if I'm eating with my meat-eating mother and it's her turn to cook then it's easy to have something she doesn't have to think about.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb8wmx/arbys-has-invented-a-...
Is it healthy? Probably not. It is juicy though.
And the taste was pretty equivalent. Obviously a Burger King beef patty is not a premium product, so that’s not an impressive feat from a taste perspective. But as a replacement for mediocre quality beef, it seemed like a winner.
I assumed at the time tho that the price was subsidised. And I’m not sure if Burger King still offers this.
Another anecdote, a year or so back, in Australia, the meat alternatives were being heavily discounted in Cole’s (major supermarket), which I assumed was due to poor sales. At 50% off it was an easy buy. But when the cost is significantly higher than meat I’m less interested.
I try to be a "flexitarian", because personally I find it gives me a good balance between nutrition, environmental impact, taste and ethical animal treatment (I try to animals seldomly and eat every single bit of the animal, offal, intestines, ears, tails, feet, etc).
I'm also probably in the minority that actually likes the taste of "fake meat". I have them every now and then, but I'm fully aware that it's not "healthy food" and it's expensive and I'm not sure about the enviromental impact. When I have it, it's mostly to fulfill req #4 (eating fewer animals).
I like it, I'm a meat eater with a vegetarian partner, it works great as a compromise for us, to use every so often (not every day).
Some vegetarians (my partner included) sometimes want food that tastes and has texture like dishes they used to eat as a meat eater. So it works great for them. For her it's bolognese-style pasta sauces, bacon, sandwich meats like pastrami and a few other things.
Artificial meat has a niche.
Was it going to change the whole world and revolutionise fucking everything? Well, no, that was overblown hype.
I am mostly vegetarian, and I quite like Impossible Burgers. Sadly they're not really available in Europe.
They might be an idea with a small market. But in my mind this is a lot like if Silicon Valley got really pumped up about, like, unpasteurized cheeses or nutritional shakes. (Oh, wait, that last one happened.) The problem isn't with unpasteurized cheeses--there is a small but reasonable market for such things--but with Silicon Valley.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_boy
Are you just projecting your own preference on others maybe? Both me and my wife are meat eaters and we happily get "meat-like" burger patties and sausages at least once a week - it makes for a nice break from having meat all the time, even though we both like meat. And the options nowadays are pretty good, so why not eat them?
Also - "nobody" doesn't mean "most people don't". It literally means 0 people.
>It literally means 0 people.
Not everything is literal.
We’ll, no shit, it was sold as the answer to everything and it turns out that it’s just another addition to the food market with some appeal to some people.
I hope that it doesn’t disappear, basically because it make my life easier. But the takeaway from this should probably be along the lines of being skeptic all of the hype, always.
Fake meat's best outcome would be for it to be enjoyed as much as meat, but it couldn't replace it. It would just be another thing to experience.
We're used to eating meat and most have been eating it their entire lives. It's unrealistic to think that most would switch in a few years.
Swapping to fake meats, even meat grown in a lab will probably takes decades at the minimum.
I mean sure if you are comparing a chop from grass fed sheep from somewhere like wales (or good quality horse meat) to something like a vegan burger, then yeah.
but comparing a mystery meat burger to fake meat, no.
I’m a vegan of nearly 25 years. My reasons are my own. I don’t care what others eat. Eat a pig, a horse, a dog, cotton candy, pomegranate. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But I’m doubtful there are other vegans out there who want carnivores to switch to eating processed foods like this. For my family and most vegans I know, these artificial meats are useful primarily in social situations where vegans and omnivores gather.
I like the convenience of a protein substitute on the rare occasion that I eat outside my home and am sorry to see these businesses floundering. But if they went away tomorrow, I wouldn’t rue the failure of a grand conspiracy to force alternative food choices on the unsuspecting masses.
> stupid idea
Economically unsustainable, maybe, but stupid?
My own response would be: Is it possible that if every version of schadenfreude and psychopathic antipathy toward other humans is deeply embedded in the fake-meat-making process and it still can be commercially successful and serve several purposes ethically/environmentally/economically if it's popularized, do the impure individual motives outweigh the greater good?
Because the poor will eat it if it's cheaper; the rich will eat it if it's more ethical or if it's dolled up more expensively; the outcomes touted by the environmentalists will be the same whether they do it out of love for cows or hatred for mankind, won't they?
We often choose to eat meat substitutes. We like the texture and the taste.
Since the supermarkets in the UK are full of meat substitutes from the likes of Quorn, What The Cluck, etc. and have been for years, we can't be the only family of omnivores to enjoy it.
Meat alternatives don't have to 100% replicate meat to be enjoyable, they just have to be tasty.
aye, so I really like the fake kebab meat that's full of spice. I like it because unlike real kebab meat, its not going to give me TB, Scrapie or monstershits.
slap it in a microwave, dump it in a pita bread, add hot sauce, done. 4 mins tops.
The chicken burger is still superiors though.
However I'm not threatened by food, so if people want to eat it, I'm not going to slighted, I don't have enough energy to project politics into food.
That said, I've cooked myself some decent fast food with fake meat instead of cheap €1 burgers. The cheapest, shittiest meat is just a protein source drenched in fat, plants can easily substitute that.
If you're going vegetarian, fake meat isn't the way to go. There are great dishes built around vegetables, mushrooms, and all other kinds of non-meat products that you can eat instead. You won't ever find an artificial steak that's any good, but you may find something even better if you try exploring other meals instead.
I don't care what anyone else eats, as long as you let me know of your dietary restrictions if we're planning on eating together.
I do find it disturbing that Vegans are doing the same thing though. When I eat a heavily processed bleeding vegan burger I feel like I've been poisoned. Consuming industrial seed oil and Omega6 at the level seen in these vegan foods cannot be good.
Also I wonder how much of this negative sentiment is macroeconomic and tech-related? The stock prices of many tech/bio companies have come down. Is that what caused this article?
I think it's because meat actually has some quite disgusting and off-putting qualities. Qualities that humans are only used to within the context of meat. For example, recently we had some pea-protein based burgers, and they had three bizarre qualities in their attempt to recreate the beef burger. First, they were quite red inside. Second, they had an almost acrid, rancid acidity to them which really did taste quite similar to beef. Finally, they had a very burger-like texture, even with pieces of simulated unwanted gristle.
So, what we get is a meat-eating experience recontextualised into the realm of vegetables. And, as vegetables, these qualities are bizarre, alien, and unexpected. We don't expect an acrid kind of acidity from vegetables, we don't expect strange chewy textures or inconceivable red juice in the absence of beetroot. So with the accurate plant-based meats the only choice is to try and forget that you're not eating meat.
Of course this doesn't happen to everyone, but it is true for me. Plant-based meat is fundamentally revolting in a way that actual meat is not, and that's kind of ironic, considering the infinitely more pleasant production of the former over the latter.
For that reason I generally prefer meat replacements that don't try to be exactly like meat: fake chicken nuggets and fish fingers are generally good, soy mince is fine, etc. Those things are far cheaper too
All supermarket chains, at least in the cities, now have a considerate selection of plant based meat and it sells like bread. Yes, it is sadly more expensive than real meat for now.
Still -- vegan burger patties are regularly sold out.
With the amount of vegan stuff I see advertised I'd assume the meat replacement industry has grown remarkably.
Is this talking about specific VC backed brands, or specific subproducts?
> Impossible has spun up new products such as animal-shaped faux chicken nuggets and blitzed supermarkets, leading to more than 50% retail sales growth in the US in 2022.
The article seems to be mostly talking about Beyond Meat not living up to their "we'll replace the meat industry overnight" pitch. But the wider market seems to be doing fine.