I don't like vegan meat. Vegans are often stringy and tasteless. I would prefer eating corn fed Iowans whenever I am involved in a plane crash in the Andes
What do you mean by "meant to"? I suppose humans are also "meant to" be eaten by bears or die from minor infections, but I'm not exactly eager to sign up for that, are you?
I think one (not being a prey for a bear) takes no biological re-adjustment (well, except provisions to live longer, I suppose). On the other hand, getting used to a radically different diet would take many generations to adjust to. For example, after a few thousand years, some people are not yet used to cow's milk, or used to wheat. Long term, yes, nature should take care of that.
Huh? I've been a vegetarian for 16 years, and a vegan for one year, and I'm quite adjusted. I don't remember any generations passing in that time, but I might not have been paying attention.
I meant adjusting naturally to the different source of nutrition. If you're a vegan, you would normally need to be very careful of your diet so that you do not introduce nutritional deficiencies into your system, or you would need to subsidize your nutrition with vitamins. Long term, the body could find a way to bypass the nutritional subsidies --it could take a very long time (cows had to develop additional stomachs to adjust to eating primarily grass, for example).
Ahhh... you have to be pretty careful with what you eat if you eat meat as well to. Just walk down the street for examples. Generally, the length of our digestive system is sited as one of the main reasons we are so poorly adapted at eating meat.
Our ancestors generally weren't eating massive portions of heavily processed, heavily spiced meat. Taco Bell gives you the shits because it's Taco Bell, not because it's meat.
In fact, many of our ancestors were often eating so little meat as to be nutritionally insignificant, which is the other major hole in the "eating meat is natural" argument.
But I really don't know why you added "heavily spiced" in there. Spices are usually more or less nutritionally neutral.
It's not really any more difficult to keep your nutrition balanced as a vegan than as a carnivore. Either way, you have to pay a bit of attention to what you eat, not eat too much of this, and not eat too little of that.
And what's wrong with taking supplements? You keep invoking the concept of "natural", but there is nothing intrinsically superior about nature. Humans are in control now, and we're doing a lot better for ourselves than nature ever did.
I'm not a vegetarian, because I love my meat, but if you can give me a meat replacement that's indistinguishable in nutrition, texture, and flavour, what's wrong with that?
It's not that hard to find a meat-free diet that supplies all the nutrition that you require. Meat-heavy diets come with their own problems, and there's no point in replicating those with something "indistinguishable".
Can you site some proof that we are physically meant to eat meat that doesn't use observation as the main reasoning? We are usually characterized as omnivores because of a vast amount of observation of people eating meat, however our bodies aren't exactly designed for it.
For starters, the small intestine of carnivores is much shorter than non-carnivores and has a higher level of acidity in the stomach. This is because the nutrients need to be extracted and the waste expelled before the meat rots inside the body(which it partially does in a human body since our intestine is much longer by comparison than other carnivores).
There's also the issue of short, dull, canines and much smaller temporalis muscle that powers the jaw. This is why we have to spend more time chewing and grinding meat down into smaller pieces instead of just tearing off chunks and swallowing it whole like most carnivores. We wouldn't be able very easily bite through hide and tear chunks of meat off nor would we be able to digest (most)raw meat without getting sick.
Most of our carnivorous traits are remnants from evolution that were never replaced. We more closely resemble a herbivore that has maintained some basic primal ability to process meat than we do a carnivore that has adapted to process vegetation.
We're omnivores, not carnivores. Hence the teeth and intestines. Cecil Adams had this to say in 1990, I'd be interested if others would provide an update:
"Like the hard-core carnivores, we have fairly simple digestive systems well suited to the consumption of animal protein, which breaks down quickly. Contrary to what your magazine article says, the human small intestine, at 23 feet, is a little under eight times body length (assuming a mouth-to-anus "body length" of three feet). This is about midway between cats (three times body length), dogs (3-1/2 times), and other well-known meat eaters on the one hand and plant eaters such as cattle (20 to 1) and horses (12 to 1) on the other. This tends to support the idea that we are omnivores.
Herbivores also have a variety of specialized digestive organs capable of breaking down cellulose, the main component of plant tissue. Humans find cellulose totally indigestible, and even plant eaters have to take their time with it. If you were a ruminant (cud eater), for instance, you might have a stomach with four compartments, enabling you to cough up last night's alfalfa and chew on it all over again.
Or you might have an enlarged cecum, a sac attached to the intestines, where rabbits and such store food until their intestinal bacteria have time to do their stuff. Digestion in such cases takes place by a process of fermentation — bacteria actually "eat" the cellulose and the host animal consumes what results, namely bacteria dung.
The story is roughly the same with teeth. We're equipped with an all-purpose set of ivories equally suited to liver and onions."
Yes. Believe it or not, despite what certain faddists would have you believe, the "lots of saturated fat is actually really good for you" position is still contradicted by the vast preponderance of evidence.
The evidence that shows that saturated fat is bad for you is based on large-scale population surveys that only demonstrate that most Americans who eat lots of saturated fat are unhealthy. They don't demonstrate a causal link between saturated fat and heart disease.
On the other hand, there are plentiful clinical experimental studies which show health benefits from switching to a diet heavier in saturated fats, including favorable changes in cholesterol levels and body composition. Peruse these articles when you get a chance:
In particular, it's important to note that Americans have decreased their saturated fat intake since the government told them to in the 70s, and heart disease rates have gone up:
It's a complex topic, and I'm no expert. But based on all of the contradictory studies out there, I don't think it's quite as simple as you're making it sound.
For example, a new study done in Sweden was in the press recently which sounds to run counter to the ones you've linked to.
I'm looking forward to the schadenfreude I get as Americans continue to reduce their saturated fat intake and continue to suffer from more diabetes and heart disease.
I love when people use "there's no good evidence" to mean "there is a tiny amount of evidence to the contrary, and that's the only evidence I am choosing to pay attention to". People are silly.
> Even the most devout vegans and vegetarians have to admit that today’s meat substitutes are no substitute for the real thing. Some of them are tasty, but none actually have the same taste and texture of a piece of chicken, a burger, or a steak.
So what? Vegetarianism doesn't work that way. I don't walk into the supermarket thinking "what's the meatiest meat substitute that I can find today?", I think "lets get some fresh fruit and veg, and yoghurt and cheese".
Also, if you are looking for a meat substitute, have you tried Quorn? ( http://www.quorn.co.uk/ )
Since fungi have been around for a very, very long time they have a lot of genetic variation - it's not that close to mushrooms, not even the same phylum as the common mushrooms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus ).
To be more specific, quorn is a mushroom in the same sense that a human being is an octopus - to pick two well-known animal species that are in different phyla.
Many folks are vegetarian for ethical reasons, and many of those people still really liked the taste of meat. Letting them experience the tasty without the ethical issues seems win-win.
And some of us meat eaters wouldn't mind healthier alternatives in our meat dishes if they 1) were in fact likely to be healthier, and 2) still tasted good.
I know plenty of vegetarians who like bacon or meat-flavoured potato chips/crisps[1]. That doesn't mean that every vegetarian should or does like such things, just that there are lots of different types of people out there.
have you tried Quorn
Admittedly, I'm a meat-eater, but I have always found Quorn profoundly disappointing, and very expensive for what it is. When cooking, say, a vegetarian curry, I usually substitute sweet potato in its place.
[1] I hasten to add that the chips/crisps in question are, as far as chemistry is concerned, 100% vegetarian ;)
I completely agree. I do love veggie burgers, but the last thing I want them to remind me of or taste like is meat -- that would be just repulsive. In my experience this is the norm for vegetarians and is why many companies that make meat analogues purposely don't make them like meat. These companies have done their market research and know what their customers want
However, the founders might be going after a different market than vegetarians like ourselves. They are going after the unwashed masses who aren't vegetarian. Providing meat analogues that are meat-ie might get people who are vegetarian to slowly cut out real meat from their diets. This is exactly what we need for the environment.
As a vegetarian, I admit that certain meat dishes do taste good (at least from what I remember) and that I do miss meat occasionally. However, I think what I most miss is not the taste of meat (which can be substituted as mentioned in many comments here), but the texture of meat...having something to chew.
As far as meatless products go, they all start to taste the same after a while. However, Gardein does make some great food.
Sweet breads vs tiramisu? Is there a competition between fried thymus and pancreas and a cake made out of cookies and marscapone cheese?
BTW my great grandmother would recognize the blood pudding, sweet breads and tripe. She was Irish. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of great gran's who'd recognize the others.
Yes that was rather my point to the glib "don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise"!
My dear old grandmother never saw Tiramasu, Sushi or a Lobster (at least on a plate) and wouldn't recognise it as food. However some of the stuff she did eat - urgghhhh !
It should be possible to dramatically lower the cost of protein produced this way.
It is just so much more efficient to grow corn, soy and pea protein and then consume it directly, rather than feeding it to cattle first, to harvest a fraction of the input protein as meat.
For whom? Certainly not for me, I'm quite willing to pay a cost premium for real meat.
For poor third-world villagers, then? I have my doubts. I mean, so many cultures in the world attach so much cultural significance to eating meat, and the less often you get to eat it the more significant it is.
As far as point-missing innovations go, this reminds me of the Fleshlight more than anything else. You'd think that "feels just like a real vagina, only much cheaper and less trouble" would be a selling point, but it turns out that they're significantly less popular than the real thing.
Oh, I'm sure they'll sell some of this stuff, there's a whole freezerful of gross-looking fake-meat products at my local supermarket. But it's not going to change the habits of any genuine omnivores.
Would a real meat eater rather eat a $5 burger made from (well you really don't want to know what burger meat is made from) or a $5 fake-steak sandwich that looks and tastes like steak?
The initial market is going be fashionable fake meat for Wholefoods/Trader-Joes consumers. But assuming this is eventually cheaper than meat, keeps longer, has less problems with bugs/contamination/spoilage, is quicker easier to shape into burgers plus lower fat and healthier then fast food chains are going to offer it.
"Would a real meat eater rather eat a $5 burger made from (well you really don't want to know what burger meat is made from)"
Umm, yes please? Y'know what burger meat is made from? It's made from cow. Don't be squeamish, your ancestors ate far grosser bits of animals than you're gonna get in your hamburger.
For whom? Certainly not for me, I'm quite willing to pay a cost premium for real meat.
For poor third-world villagers, then? I have my doubts. I mean, so many cultures in the world attach so much cultural significance to eating meat, and the less often you get to eat it the more significant it is.
That is a pretty weird false dichotomy there, and I don't know if you intended it, but you basically just divided the world into "people who can afford and are willing to pay extra for real meat" and "third-world villagers". Also, meat substitutes are already winning on price in some Asian cultures.
You'd think that "feels just like a real vagina, only much cheaper and less trouble" would be a selling point, but it turns out that they're significantly less popular than the real thing.
And then you followed it up with one of the worst, and most sexist analogies I've ever seen.
First of all, why it's sexist: for your analogy to work, you must assume that the difference between a fleshlight and a real vagina is less than (or at least comparable to) the difference between meat and meat substitutes. One of the principal differences between fleshlights and real vaginas is that real vaginas have women attached to them. So if your analogy is to work at all, we must accept that the significance of a woman is less than the significance of the difference between fake and real meat. Preposterous.
Secondly, why the analogy fails anyway: I think you'll find that if it were a contest to see what's rubbing penises the most, men's hands would be winning by a landslide.
As a matter of fact, it already sometimes does. For example, Texas Pete canned chili sauce contains soy grits instead of meat, yet makes no attempt on its packaging to advertise that it is vegetarian.
I also wouldn't be surprised, given the incredibly low cost of textured gluten, if there were a fair number of Chinese restaurants out there passing it off as "duck" in their dishes.
So far, vegetarian meat substitutes have been treated as a niche luxury good and made very expensive for western markets, but this is an artificial effect caused by demographics on the demand side, not a matter of supply costs. You can see proof of this by shopping for fake meat at Asian markets and comparing the prices to those in the hippie section of their local supermarket. A bag of dried soy protein that will turn into the equivalent of several pounds of ground beef can easily be found for under $3.
This is great (I'm a big proponent of synthetic meat, which is similar, and the potential of engineered foods in general) but I'm not so sure Biz is the best judge of what real meat tastes and feels like if he has been a long time vegan.
Also it will be extremely difficult to get Americans to switch to fake meat, no matter how cheap/tasty/nutritious it is. We are a pretty superstitious culture.
Superstitious but there's also a lot of identity from eating meats. Especially for men. Eating muscle meats like Steak is a big deal, and we as men are somehow less macho and manly if we don't eat these. It might sound ludicrous, but when I became vegetarian it was amazing the comments I got from friends all around not being a man from the decision. A wife of one friend piped up "I dunno, I think it's more manly to stick to something you believe in, than do something just cause it'd be 'Manly'."
As a long-time vegetarian, I'm really excited about this. I just hope they're able to get distribution here in Austin soon, although with the Whole Foods group HQed here, I expect that won't take too long.
> "They were coming at it from this big science, super practical, scalable angle. They were saying, 'We want to get into the multi-billion-dollar meat industry with a plant-based meat.'
show us the science. (anyone who fucking links me to documentaries, and non-cited articles/studies, i'll fucking punch them in the face)
60 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadBut I really don't know why you added "heavily spiced" in there. Spices are usually more or less nutritionally neutral.
Nutritionally neutral, but not gastrointestinally, as folks sensitive to spicy food can attest.
And what's wrong with taking supplements? You keep invoking the concept of "natural", but there is nothing intrinsically superior about nature. Humans are in control now, and we're doing a lot better for ourselves than nature ever did.
It is full of phytoestrogen-supplying soy, industrially-processed plant fillers from peas and barley, and other chemicals like titanium dioxide.
I would rather eat a steak with a bowl of pea-barley porridge on the side.
I'm not a vegetarian, because I love my meat, but if you can give me a meat replacement that's indistinguishable in nutrition, texture, and flavour, what's wrong with that?
For starters, the small intestine of carnivores is much shorter than non-carnivores and has a higher level of acidity in the stomach. This is because the nutrients need to be extracted and the waste expelled before the meat rots inside the body(which it partially does in a human body since our intestine is much longer by comparison than other carnivores).
There's also the issue of short, dull, canines and much smaller temporalis muscle that powers the jaw. This is why we have to spend more time chewing and grinding meat down into smaller pieces instead of just tearing off chunks and swallowing it whole like most carnivores. We wouldn't be able very easily bite through hide and tear chunks of meat off nor would we be able to digest (most)raw meat without getting sick.
Most of our carnivorous traits are remnants from evolution that were never replaced. We more closely resemble a herbivore that has maintained some basic primal ability to process meat than we do a carnivore that has adapted to process vegetation.
"Like the hard-core carnivores, we have fairly simple digestive systems well suited to the consumption of animal protein, which breaks down quickly. Contrary to what your magazine article says, the human small intestine, at 23 feet, is a little under eight times body length (assuming a mouth-to-anus "body length" of three feet). This is about midway between cats (three times body length), dogs (3-1/2 times), and other well-known meat eaters on the one hand and plant eaters such as cattle (20 to 1) and horses (12 to 1) on the other. This tends to support the idea that we are omnivores.
Herbivores also have a variety of specialized digestive organs capable of breaking down cellulose, the main component of plant tissue. Humans find cellulose totally indigestible, and even plant eaters have to take their time with it. If you were a ruminant (cud eater), for instance, you might have a stomach with four compartments, enabling you to cough up last night's alfalfa and chew on it all over again.
Or you might have an enlarged cecum, a sac attached to the intestines, where rabbits and such store food until their intestinal bacteria have time to do their stuff. Digestion in such cases takes place by a process of fermentation — bacteria actually "eat" the cellulose and the host animal consumes what results, namely bacteria dung.
The story is roughly the same with teeth. We're equipped with an all-purpose set of ivories equally suited to liver and onions."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/674/are-humans-meat...
So we're still hung up on that.
On the other hand, there are plentiful clinical experimental studies which show health benefits from switching to a diet heavier in saturated fats, including favorable changes in cholesterol levels and body composition. Peruse these articles when you get a chance:
http://www.nmsociety.org/low-carb-research.html
In particular, it's important to note that Americans have decreased their saturated fat intake since the government told them to in the 70s, and heart disease rates have gone up:
http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/08...
For example, a new study done in Sweden was in the press recently which sounds to run counter to the ones you've linked to.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2157532/Atkins-die...
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/06/time-to-re...
http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/saturated-fat-0
I'm looking forward to the schadenfreude I get as Americans continue to reduce their saturated fat intake and continue to suffer from more diabetes and heart disease.
Plenty of saturated fat in coconut oil, chocolate, etc.
>There's no good evidence of that
I love when people use "there's no good evidence" to mean "there is a tiny amount of evidence to the contrary, and that's the only evidence I am choosing to pay attention to". People are silly.
So what? Vegetarianism doesn't work that way. I don't walk into the supermarket thinking "what's the meatiest meat substitute that I can find today?", I think "lets get some fresh fruit and veg, and yoghurt and cheese".
Also, if you are looking for a meat substitute, have you tried Quorn? ( http://www.quorn.co.uk/ )
The weirdest thing about it is that some people are seriously allergic to it so it's got a heck of a warning label.
I heard that. Of course, you could say the same thing about peanuts and mushrooms.
Since fungi have been around for a very, very long time they have a lot of genetic variation - it's not that close to mushrooms, not even the same phylum as the common mushrooms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus ).
Yours doesn't, perhaps.
Many folks are vegetarian for ethical reasons, and many of those people still really liked the taste of meat. Letting them experience the tasty without the ethical issues seems win-win.
I know plenty of vegetarians who like bacon or meat-flavoured potato chips/crisps[1]. That doesn't mean that every vegetarian should or does like such things, just that there are lots of different types of people out there.
have you tried Quorn
Admittedly, I'm a meat-eater, but I have always found Quorn profoundly disappointing, and very expensive for what it is. When cooking, say, a vegetarian curry, I usually substitute sweet potato in its place.
[1] I hasten to add that the chips/crisps in question are, as far as chemistry is concerned, 100% vegetarian ;)
However, the founders might be going after a different market than vegetarians like ourselves. They are going after the unwashed masses who aren't vegetarian. Providing meat analogues that are meat-ie might get people who are vegetarian to slowly cut out real meat from their diets. This is exactly what we need for the environment.
As far as meatless products go, they all start to taste the same after a while. However, Gardein does make some great food.
Their chicken strips contain titanium dioxide. I'm no expert, but wikipedia says we probably shouldn't be eating that. What am I missing?
I think you answered your own question there.
Oh by the way you've already put TiO2 several times in your mouth
Erm, Tripe, blood pudding, sweet breads VS Tiramasu, Sushi, Lobster
Sorry Gran!
BTW my great grandmother would recognize the blood pudding, sweet breads and tripe. She was Irish. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of great gran's who'd recognize the others.
My dear old grandmother never saw Tiramasu, Sushi or a Lobster (at least on a plate) and wouldn't recognise it as food. However some of the stuff she did eat - urgghhhh !
To list a few: Chlorine dioxide, Lauramide arginine ethyl ester, Potassium diacetate, Sodium hypochlorite, Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, Ammonium hydroxide, Sodium tripolyphosphate, Bacteriophage preparation, Cetylpyridinium chloride
It is just so much more efficient to grow corn, soy and pea protein and then consume it directly, rather than feeding it to cattle first, to harvest a fraction of the input protein as meat.
This stuff could win on cost alone.
For whom? Certainly not for me, I'm quite willing to pay a cost premium for real meat.
For poor third-world villagers, then? I have my doubts. I mean, so many cultures in the world attach so much cultural significance to eating meat, and the less often you get to eat it the more significant it is.
As far as point-missing innovations go, this reminds me of the Fleshlight more than anything else. You'd think that "feels just like a real vagina, only much cheaper and less trouble" would be a selling point, but it turns out that they're significantly less popular than the real thing.
Oh, I'm sure they'll sell some of this stuff, there's a whole freezerful of gross-looking fake-meat products at my local supermarket. But it's not going to change the habits of any genuine omnivores.
Would a real meat eater rather eat a $5 burger made from (well you really don't want to know what burger meat is made from) or a $5 fake-steak sandwich that looks and tastes like steak?
The initial market is going be fashionable fake meat for Wholefoods/Trader-Joes consumers. But assuming this is eventually cheaper than meat, keeps longer, has less problems with bugs/contamination/spoilage, is quicker easier to shape into burgers plus lower fat and healthier then fast food chains are going to offer it.
Umm, yes please? Y'know what burger meat is made from? It's made from cow. Don't be squeamish, your ancestors ate far grosser bits of animals than you're gonna get in your hamburger.
Because there is no part of a pig left over after you make sausages to put in the cat food!
It's far more of an point being made, than just being squeamish. But somehow I don't think me re-listing what's been said will make a difference.
For poor third-world villagers, then? I have my doubts. I mean, so many cultures in the world attach so much cultural significance to eating meat, and the less often you get to eat it the more significant it is.
That is a pretty weird false dichotomy there, and I don't know if you intended it, but you basically just divided the world into "people who can afford and are willing to pay extra for real meat" and "third-world villagers". Also, meat substitutes are already winning on price in some Asian cultures.
You'd think that "feels just like a real vagina, only much cheaper and less trouble" would be a selling point, but it turns out that they're significantly less popular than the real thing.
And then you followed it up with one of the worst, and most sexist analogies I've ever seen.
First of all, why it's sexist: for your analogy to work, you must assume that the difference between a fleshlight and a real vagina is less than (or at least comparable to) the difference between meat and meat substitutes. One of the principal differences between fleshlights and real vaginas is that real vaginas have women attached to them. So if your analogy is to work at all, we must accept that the significance of a woman is less than the significance of the difference between fake and real meat. Preposterous.
Secondly, why the analogy fails anyway: I think you'll find that if it were a contest to see what's rubbing penises the most, men's hands would be winning by a landslide.
I also wouldn't be surprised, given the incredibly low cost of textured gluten, if there were a fair number of Chinese restaurants out there passing it off as "duck" in their dishes.
So far, vegetarian meat substitutes have been treated as a niche luxury good and made very expensive for western markets, but this is an artificial effect caused by demographics on the demand side, not a matter of supply costs. You can see proof of this by shopping for fake meat at Asian markets and comparing the prices to those in the hippie section of their local supermarket. A bag of dried soy protein that will turn into the equivalent of several pounds of ground beef can easily be found for under $3.
Also it will be extremely difficult to get Americans to switch to fake meat, no matter how cheap/tasty/nutritious it is. We are a pretty superstitious culture.
show us the science. (anyone who fucking links me to documentaries, and non-cited articles/studies, i'll fucking punch them in the face)