New plant-based pork ribs to feature edible vegan bones (theguardian.com)

well still better than both ruining the planet and health with animal based processed food.

This is a good one :)

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We're particularly trying to avoid ideological battle here, regardless of which ideology people are battling for or against.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I personally have a soft spot for halliumi. Best burger I've ever had was from a street market in Glasgow.

Does the veggie burger in your town fit inside a bun and stay inside the bun or does it fall apart immediately when you start eating it?

I’ve had thousands of veggie burgers and most lack stability unfortunately

there's a market for both

For people who are considering vegetarianism for environmental or health reasons, it's important to be able to say "You don't have to go without."

Yes, there are a billion lovely things you can do with vegetables, but sometimes people are looking for a specific known quantity. Maybe it's a "food as a nostalgia/cultural heritage" thing-- you always had a hot dog when you went to the baseball game, now you can still get a Beyond Sausage. Maybe it's not yet being adventurous enough to try a meatless dish that stands on its own. Maybe it's trying to cater to an entire family, where other family members are eating meat and you want to provide something they'll be comfortable with.

Even outside of the attempt to emulate meat, I give them credit for experimenting, because it expands the culinary vocabulary. Maybe those "realistic bones" can be used as part of an entirely novel dish to add texture or change how the cooking cycle progresses.

Meat eaters won’t eat less meat unless it is without much sacrifice. This product is intended for meat eaters trying to be vegetarian.

Agreed. I'm an unapologetic meat eater, and I'll never eat faux meat crap, especially when it's just some inferior copy of the real thing. But there are plenty of things that don't have meat in them that are good to eat- someone else mentioned halloumi, lots of Indian food and Japanese food, etc. It's the perennial "running for the leader of the opposition" problem. Focus on making something good, not on an inferior substitute for something that's already there.

This ignores the reality that many people are attached to eating meat and all of the familiar things that come along with it. For many, the realistic simulations of meat are the first step toward adopting plant-based alternatives. It's also likely that cultivated ("lab-grown") meat is going to be more popular than plant-based when it reaches a similar price point to conventionally grown meat.

I would say that the primary goal is to reduce the animal suffering and environmental damages caused by animal agriculture. Healthier varieties of plant-based products are a good thing too, but it's less important which products people are switching to, as long as they're switching away from factory farming.

We already have.

https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

Same - I see that quite a lot around traditional Polish restaurants. Polish cousine already has a lot of meat-free dishes, a lot of it borne from the times of difficulty and learning to make do with very little, so it's completely normal to order a dish that just doesn't happen to have any meat in it, and no one would even think of it as specifically vegetarian/vegan(even though it is). But now those dishes are being pushed out for specific vegetarian/vegan dishes where a traditional dish with meat is being replaced with a meat-imitation. It's like......why? If you want vegetarian dumplings(pierogi), there are literally dozens of different options already, we've been making them literally for centuries, but you'd rather have pierogi with meat-imitation pork mince? I mean suit yourself, but it's just weird.

I don't think a lot of health claims are made about these, it's either an ecological argument, a moral (killing animals is bad) argument, or both. After all I think we all understand that it's more than possible to reduce or eliminate meat without having to eat highly processed frankenfood recreations of meat. I'd be much happier eating foods that make the best of non-meat ingredients without trying to imitate the taste and texture of something it just... isn't.

A black bean "burger" can be a joy, a greasy Beyond Burger is never a good time. If I really want the experience of a hamburger, no amount of TVP and coconut oil is going to replicate that experience anyway.

I wouldn't really call this completely processes. It's just soy flour mechanically processed with some seasoning. I'd put it into the same category as fish sticks or chicken nuggets. Not something I would eat every day, but if someone wants to do it, they'll be fine.

A lot of plant-based meat substitutes are effectively a very dense/high-protein (gluten) bread loaf. Not excessively exotic or processed compared to other common foods.

It also doesn’t make sense because meat eaters don’t eat the pork bones, so it’s not as if anyone feels like they are missing out on edible bones and want to substitute for this.

> Nobody wants this crap.

That remains to be seen. In my view the more vegetarian options and ease of access, the better.