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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. As somebody who is not at all familiar with the "alternative meat" industry, my first question is, why not use real cow blood?

You wouldn't need to kill the animal to use its blood and you could extract more blood from an animal than meat. Presumably the environmental impact of a blood only farm would be substantially lower than that of a meat farm. Or is that not the case?

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Because the target group for this is product like this is virtually non existent.

If you don't eat meat for health reason blood or meat doesn't make the difference, if you don't eat meat for the animals, why would you support a gruesome vampire farm.

Also this sounds ridiculously impractical if you can just simulate the stuff by using ketchup for the color and iron for the taste.

Blood is not the unhealthy part of red meat. Couldn't you market these "blood steaks" to health and environmentally conscious people who want something that tastes a bit more like meat than a soy patty?

Although I agree that selling blood at scale would need clever marketing. It seems like the blood imitation in the article would have similar problems, since it looks and tastes like blood.

It narrows the market, it requires explaining and justification, and it's unappetizing. It sounds like they've figured out a good approach to heme, why bother using actual blood?

I was thinking a similar thing about "veganic" farming: http://www.veganic.com/veganic-defined

>Yet although organic crops are grown without the use of chemicals, an organic certification does allow farmers to use animal waste, including blood meal and bone meal, to fertilize fields. Some organic farms purchase these animal by-products from slaughterhouses and other non-organic sources. The animals have been given antibiotics and hormones throughout their lives, and exposed to pesticides and other chemicals.

So why isn't there an organic+ that only uses organic animal waste? My guess is that it's because it's not worth advertising. Most people probably don't want to think about what kind of waste their produce grew in, and hearing that these potatoes grew in hormone free blood meal doesn't really make you more inclined to buy them. Whereas veganic can explain it's advantages without making you think it's gross. Plus the potential audience for veganic is all inclusive.

The red stuff in beef and other red meat isn't blood, it's myoglobin. "Bloody" is a common way to describe meat cooked rare, but it's not an accurate term there.

The product would not be marketable to vegans if real cow blood were used.

(Granted, the article says the company is not marketing to vegans.)

I'm guessing the real reason the company's not marketing to vegans because there's essentially zero need to market to vegans, and good reasons not to.

Vegans are a relatively night-knit lot. As long as it contains no animal products and tastes good, all they'll need to do is pass out a few free samples at a single vegan meetup and then sit back and wait. Every strict vegetarian on the continent will be talking about it within a week.

Meanwhile, if they do spend much money on marketing it to vegans then they risk locking themselves into niche product status as a result of the public perceiving it as being all covered in vegan cooties.

I know of at least one fairly popular cafe that only serves vegan baked goods, but does not publicly label them as such for that reason.

Great points. There is a restaurant in my city that serves exclusively vegan food, from lunch and dinner entrees to bakery sweets.

It's actually one of my favorite restaurants (despite not being vegan) but it's very difficult to convince my non-vegetarian/non-vegan friends to go try it with me.

There seems to be a weird mental block for a lot of people. I've seen non-vegetarians be genuinely surprised to be informed that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are vegan.

As someone with a mental hesitation (not quite a block) on food advertised as vegan, my reasoning is due to the type of food I'd expect. If it's advertised as vegan, I'm expecting food that would otherwise not be vegan that has been compromised to make the vegan version. If it's not advertised as vegan, I'm expecting food that just happens to be vegan, but is not the intended goal of the food. It's good food compared to all food vs good only compared to vegan food.

Take veggie burger patties. I've had some that were not made to resemble meat, but were just vegan ingredients in patty form, that are on par with some of the best meat burgers I've had. I've never had a veggie patty that was supposed to taste like meat that I could finish a bite of.

Better yet, why not use real human blood? It's probably cheaper.

I think draining an animal of blood over and over is also pretty cruel.

It could be done in a way that isn't cruel. Just take a little at a time, like we do with humans. It might not even be less efficient if the rate of blood production is fairly constant. (I don't know enough biology to speculate.)

What for though? Cant you spice something in a particular way instead of bleeding an animal?

Maybe it's not necessary. My point is just that it would be possible.

It's cruel to take a human's blood without their consent, even if done painlessly.

I don't think it would be cruel for animals, because once you remove pain as a factor, the only suffering left for humans exists on a psychological level that I don't believe animals would experience.

Okay, I don't believe you would suffer at a psychological level either, does that give me the right to take your blood without your consent?

It's not much different from what we're doing to them already.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Indoor-or-outdoor-calf...

The whole point of these products are to move away from stuff like that. Adding beef blood is like taking a step backwards.

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