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I think the problem here is that "vegan" is used to describe two different things:

1. A product that has been changed to not use any animal products.

2. A product that already fits within those constraints.

Products in the former group have a history of being noticeably worse than their non-vegan counterpart, so "vegan" carries the stigma of "tastes worse than it looks". That stigma then wafts over to products in the second category.

Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.

I think there's room for a third category, "things that need to be changed inconsequentially". Many recipes have egg or gelatine in them for functional purposes; usually as "glue" to hold things together, like in pancakes, where you aren't including the eggs for their flavour. You can easily replace them with vegan alternatives like ground flax. As a bonus it is usually cheaper and as dry ingredients they keep forever.

Btw the liquid in a can of garbanzo beans works great as a plant derived eeg replacement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquafaba

That's a great point. I wonder if there's an elegant/clean way to denote that something is vegan but not changed to be vegan. "Naturally fat-free" is good, and the sort of plant logo that some restaurants use at least avoid the word "vegan" which may help.

Sometimes plant-based is used as a more socially acceptable word for "vegan". I think there's also a difference between titling a product "vegan" and specifying that it is vegan. "Vegan donuts" isn't as appealing to non-vegans as "Donuts (vegan)". Likewise I'd be discouraged to get something labeled "Gluten free cookies", but if I saw "Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (gluten-free)" I wouldn't hold it against them.

On a related note: When I was vegan, I said I exclusively ate things made from plants. It was better received and understood. Also I would antagonize friends by giving them vegan pb&js, vegan pickles, vegan French fries, vegan Coke, etc.

No mushrooms or fermented products for you?

(I know you were just trying to give people a simplified model.)

Are you just giving random examples or is regular Coke not vegan?

Regular coke is about as vegan as regular pickles.

Interestingly, if it's 'throwback' coke with white/processed sugar in it, it's NOT vegan, as animal products (mostly bone/etc.) are used in the production of that sugar. HFCS modern coke is generally considered vegan.

Pretty terrible analogy. I have no idea if pickles are vegan or not. I would assume they are but I'm not steeped in the vegan ethos and many things have surprised me in the past as being non-vegan.

Animal products are constantly snuck into processed, preserved and packaged foods. I'd find it funny, but wouldn't be surprised, to find that something derived from an animal found its way into a jar of pickles 'for flavor'.

Vegan french fries is the stand out here. Many commercially available ones are flavored and/or cooked with non-vegan ingredients.

> I wonder if there's an elegant/clean way to denote that something is vegan but not changed to be vegan.

Naturally free of animal products?

"naturally vegan" seems most appropriate, no?

"Low carbon"?

Labeling products with "natural" has resulted in 40 billion in food sales for times with that have the label. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/24/the-w...

It is purely marketing.

>Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.

Are you sure marketing didn't just want to include another buzz word to attract sales? 90% of the food that got labeled fat-free 10 years ago (Before fat was good again...) was always fat free.

You've also got the issues with processed food: Butchering a critter and cooking it up is a lot more natural than a highly engineered mixture from a group of chemical engineers.

It may be that all the processing involved in making the plant compounds look/smell/taste/feel like meat are harmless, even beneficial, but it's perfectly reasonable to withhold trust for some time - especially to those of us who grew up with "Margarine is so much healthier than butter!"

The chemicals they use to keep the animals foodstuffs free of pests and weeds, along with the antibiotics pumped into them to keep them healthy while in packed conditions?

Its all chemical engineered now, unless you can afford to buy a piece of land and DIY.

-Avid Meat Eater.

The sheer scale of industrialisation of livestock is an American thing, especially with beef.

Most Beef in the world is grass fed, and not pumped full of antibiotics. Generally animals are more or less left in a field until they're old enough, then taken in a slaughtered.

Yeah right, "in the field". Nowadays you can do old-style animal farming if you have three cows and want to sustain you own family. Otherwise, if you want to sell it, it's just not cost effective.

- http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/belly-beast-meat-factory...

- https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/9031-Ch...

Counter argument for that with regard to the UK:

http://assurance.redtractor.org.uk/

Most quality beef sold in UK is governed by the Red Tractor food standards and welfare scheme.

Its similar in Ireland. The cows here are all grass fed (I grew up in the country, lots of farming friends) and the health standards don't allow the "pumping full of antibiotics" that we keep hearing about.

Don't worry, TTIP will bring all of that to us in Europe, too.

Depends on country, I guess? Argentina and Australia might have enough land to pull it off.

Yeah, I've worked next to a lunch place that describes itself as "plant inspired" rather than "vegan." It turns out that everything they serve is vegan, and they'll confirm it if you ask, but by taking the word "vegan" out of anything public-facing, it's a lot easier to get people to be interested in eating there.

I personally eat a low-meat diet (no more than 3 servings of meat a week), but don't generally feel the need to eat any kind of meat-substitutes; there are plenty of delicious, already vegetarian or already vegan foods. It does help eating only vegetarian and not fully vegan; cheese and eggs are good sources of both flavor and protein, and make a good "center" of a dish or "main course" of a meal that is sometimes hard to do with purely vegan food without substitutes, but I've also had plenty of delicious fully vegan meals without meat substitutes.

And even when getting closer to meat base dishes, I'm personally more likely to order a "black bean burger" or "chickpea burger" than a generic "veggie burger"; it helps to know what I'm getting, while a lot of the meat substitutes are complicated and processed. And for those processed items that do more often act as a stand in for meat, I generally prefer the more minimally processed ones like seitan, tempeh, or tofu, rather than a "tofu burger" that has a whole bunch of other things in it to make it more similar to a hamburger.

I am similar. I eat a 60-70% plant-based diet, but am also a fan of burgers and the occasional steak. I am really not that interested in an artificially created burger or steak. It is just not appetizing. If I am having something vegetarian, I prefer any of the excellent options you can prepare in your kitchen.

Yes, but there are many reasons to be vegetarian. I can easily imagine a lot of people that would like to skip meat for ethical reasons (including me, to a certain extent), but do not want to give up the flavor palette that meat offers.

It's not just taste. These alternatives are loaded with carbs and just aren't practical for a low carb diet. This is coming from someone who eats a ton of fiber loaded vegetables. It's really hard to find a reasonable substitute for meat proteins that is as efficient and delicious as meat. Protein is not a huge portion of my diet, but it is very important.

Seitan does a really good job of heavier texture, low carb, high protein (so long as you're not celiac).

That's not true anymore. Beyond Meat has a Beast Burger with 7g carbs and 23g protein (vegan, no soy, gluten-free, no gmo).

7g is much more than 0g, especially for a keto diet (as an extreme example)

The number of people who need to be on a keto diet is incredibly tiny though. Most people who are on them do not need to be, all evidence shows low carb diets are equally effective regardless of ketosis or not.

Hi. I have Type 2 diabetes and PCOS. 3 months of a ketogenic diet lowered my A1c from 6.8 ("you have diabetes") to 5.6 ("normal range"). I've also lost 25 lbs in that 3 months without feeling hungry or deprived.

I use to crave carbs, and would wind up binging on them. Now most of them do not even register as 'food' to my brain. However, on days when I eat maybe a few too many berries instead of sticking to green veggies, I can feel those cravings trying to come back. We're talking an amount that maybe pushes my daily net carb intake to the 50-60g range instead of the 20-30g range, not something that would push me over 100g. A ketogenic diet is definitely best for my health. I would rather eat a ketogenic diet than suffer the eventual consequences of diabetes - blindness, amputation, dialysis, and death.

>3 months of a ketogenic diet lowered my A1c from 6.8 ("you have diabetes") to 5.6 ("normal range"). I've also lost 25 lbs in that 3 months without feeling hungry or deprived.

All of which would be true on a low carb diet without ketosis. Which you may very well have been doing since you don't know if you were in ketosis or not.

> A ketogenic diet is definitely best for my health

Your completely unsupported anecdote of a single person claiming so does not counter the overwhelming scientific evidence consisting of actual studies, with multiple participants, proper measures, and control groups.

Okay let me just put it this way. When I consistently eat under ~30g net carbs a day, not only does my blood glucose remain at non-organ-damaging levels, but I can effortlessly resist the temptation to eat things like bread, pizza, and pasta.

When I start eating more than 50g net carbs a day, suddenly I want to shove all the pizza in the world in my mouth. Given that pizza will absolutely kill me, a diabetic, via kidney damage, a "very low carb, high fat" diet (which is much easier to explain/abbreviate as "ketogenic") diet is best for me, personally.

I know it's an anecdote, and it certainly doesn't mean a VLCHF diet is right for anyone else, but it's working for me.

Now go back and read the post you replied to in the first place. The entire point was low carb diets work regardless of ketosis.

>all evidence shows low carb diets are equally effective regardless of ketosis or not.

Well I will take my anecdotic evidence (and my girlfriend's, and two friends') over your scientific studies. Fat and protein make me feel full well below my caloric needs for maintaining the same weight; I am hardly ever full with carbs, and even when my stomach feel fulls, my brain keeps wanting me to eat.

How does this contradict GP? All you've said is "carbs don't help me feel full", which is a far cry from "I must have a ketogenic diet".

As it turns out, if a person doesn't feel full, it usually tends to compensate the feeling by eating.

More than one should.

Which again, does not in any way contradict anything I said.

I don't understand low-carb/keto diets, outside of treating an actual disease. A person can eat 5-10 lbs. of "wet" (i.e. not grains and starches) fruits and vegetables a day and stay well below 2,000 calories, rounding it off with some fish, nuts, etc. for protein and oils. It's physically difficult to eat 1,000 calories of salad at 100-200 calories/pound. The problem is it also costs about 5 times as much as a classic junk food diet (but not much if any more than a beef and bacon and cheese diet).

> A person can eat 5-10 lbs. of "wet" (i.e. not grains and starches) fruits and vegetables a day and stay well below 2,000 calories

Sure, I can too. And I will stay hungry or get into depression again because I wouldn't be getting enough fat.

Depends on what you see as a disease.

For some people, it's the only thing that loses some them weight. (Obesity is a disease?)

I am currently giving it a try to see whether it has any benefits for my concentration. (Inattentiveness is a disease?)

Plants are fun. I still eat lots of non-starchy ones.

Bag of chips, $2. Head of romaine 99¢. I can eat a bag of chips. I doubt I can eat that whole head of lettuce. By the time I add sunflower seeds, tomato, bit of goat or parmesan cheese, chopped olives I still think it's less or about the same price as chips.

Exactly, and the bag of chips is at least 1,000 calories. Up to 2,500 calories if we're talking about those generic ripple chips. The lettuce is 50-100 calories. If you're getting most of your daily calories from the likes of lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, broccoli, etc., you can eat steadily all day and still have a hard time hitting 2,000 due to the sheer bulk. But it's gonna cost.

I think the person you're replying to is talking about the difference between maintaining a low-carb diet, and ketosis, which requires you to maintain a low-carb diet but specifically IIRC forces your body to break down fats instead of sugars in your body for energy.

What you quoted from MustardTiger doesn't contradict what you said..

I'm implying that non-low carb diets aren't as effective in my experience as they make me feel hungrier, thus making me want to always eat more than I should to lose weight.

Sure. But what you quoted was a statement that the effect of low-carb didn't depend on ketosis. Which is a very different statement---though I don't know if it's true.

(I am very sympathetic to low-carb eating, and am trying a ketogenic diet right now.)

Just to be clear 4g of that are fiber making it 3g net carbs (in keto terms).

Also, sugar is listed in the ingredients list, while the nutrition facts list it at 0 (might be rounding?)

GMO or not, even the wikipage of carrageenan (e407) says:

"Some animal studies indicate tumor promotion or initiation by carrageenan.[22][23][24][25] In an industry-funded study, Cohen & Ito discuss methodological problems with four such studies, along with several evaluations of genotoxic activity, and state that there is no credible evidence that carrageenan contributes to tumor promotion or colon cancer."

Which might be FUD but better safe than sorry.

Carrageenan by itself isn't dangerous. It becomes dangerous if you heat it.

It's usually possible to maintain ketosis with about 50g of carbohydrates per day, so 7g shouldn't be a huge deal.

But if you're spending nearly half of your carb allowance on the "protein" parts of your meals (1 serving/3 meals a day = 21g), how many fresh vegetables are you now not eating to stay under your 50g allowance?

Huge problem with the vegan meat replacements is that they're a lot more expensive than beef, around $7/lb vs ground beef at $3/lb. Like with coal vs solar, for imitation meat to win the market it needs to get less expensive than real meat (and taste as good).

Or the subsidies that hide the facts. Beef is very expensive in the sense of TCO, but not that expensive at the grocery store. See: http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/the-high-price-of-cheap-fo... for a good read on the matter.

a snip:

"The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket,” replies Pollan, “but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic."

$20 billion comes up under $100 per person per year in the US. Even giving it a generous x4 multiplier to account for the people subsidizing the industry without being consumers, at $400 per year, given the $3 and $7 prices by parent, you would need to eat under 100 pounds of meat for meat replacements to be viable. The average American allegedly consumes close to 200 pounds of meat[0] per year, so it ends up still being quote economical.

[0] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-(per...

You're making the incorrect assumption that vegetarians are replacing whatever meat they were eating with the more-expensive meat substitutes. As I noted in my comment above, there are plenty of meat substitutes and alternatives that are much cheaper than $7/lb.

Sure if you're willing to exclude the externalities. What's the societal cost of antibiotic resistant escherichia coli?

The US is fixing that problem. Starting December 2016, a vet must examine and prescribe antibiotics for each animal; it will no longer be allowable to preemptively dose an entire herd just to enhance production.

http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/DevelopmentApprovalProce...

Obviously it doesn't fix it for China though, which is where a lot of the drug-resistant bugs are coming from...

That's encouraging. I hope that regulation will have teeth.

Which is also the case for coal, which makes the original comparison very apt, though I'm not sure if that was intended.

You can't just compare to ground beef though. Plenty of meat and cheese products are the same price or more than equivalent meat alternatives.

[Aside: Actually, it's kind of interesting to consider that meat alternatives top out at a relatively low price point, whereas meat, fish, etc can get really expensive.]

Just like in the meat market, there are cheaper and more expensive meat alternatives. Compare tofu at ~$2/lb vs Field Roast at ~$6/lb, where Field Roast is more toward the gourmet end of the non-meat spectrum.

I would think that if you're not a meat eater, tofu is your ground beef equivalent. Or maybe beans, lentils, quinoa, etc, which are also pretty cheap.

Also, home made seitan is super cheap and much easier to produce than home made meat.

Cheese also has no upper price limit.

You can pay a lot for plant-based food, but that's much more of a niche interest.

Pork is even cheaper, for some reason. I've been buying boneless pork chops for something like $1 - $1.50 /pound for years from Market Basket stores.

Pigs are very cheap to raise, they'll happily get to slaughter weight quickly on "waste" foods. They don't need lots of land and they provide lots of meat for their relative size.

With the surge of popularity of bacon, there are a lot of pigs being brought to market. Any part of the pig that isn't bacon ends up being cheap because supply/demand.

History lesson: lard pigs used to be much more popular to raise than meat pigs. I wonder whether they'll see a comeback.

(After only half a minute of Googling: http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2015/06/11/lard-vs-bacon-pigs/ )

I wonder if Asia might be a good target market. Beef (particularly imported beef) costs a lot more in Asia.

Yes, but AFAIK being able to afford meat products (or whole animals for food) is more prestigious esp. in China than in the Western world.

agree with what your saying and these burgers would probably sell fine if they didn't get labeled as vegan. but yeah there must be a specific market that does want this, because we've been seeing fake meats for years.

personally I'm in a different camp. I've been vegan for a while now. I pretty much never buy fake meat or fake cheese. I don't really understand it. I just eat food I make from the bulk section of the grocery store. I don't see a need to have a "boody plant burger that smells like meat" or a boca burger, that just tastes like a...boca burger. honestly I rather just have a patty made out of blackbeans and lentils that doesn't taste anything like meat. seems way simpler to me.

Carnivore here.

I like vegetarianism in concept, and would like to eat less meat, but I like meat, A LOT. If alternatives were more meatlike (fingers crossed for indistinguishable) I'd gladly eat that regardless of label. Some reservations about macro contents.

I understand where you're coming from, but some people don't want to change a habit, but are fine with substitutes.

From a marketing perspective, I'd suggest the way to shift perceptions would be to run taste test challenges similar to the ones Pepsi ran back in the day. If the burgers are as close to meat versions as they say then it could be good to have people who are reluctant to try it to at least give it a go. Even if they can still tell the difference, the difficulty in telling them apart may be enough to change the perception of the product.

ones Pepsi ran back in the day

Werent those shown to be flawed? My source is Gladwells books, but the pepsi vs coke taste test favoured pepsi because it was sweeter. But in drinking the full can people found pepsi overwhelmingly sweet and coke was more popular. My guess would be a similar thing would happen. You could optimise to appeal to low-quantity taste tests. but as a full proper meal a lot needs to be done (imo)

What's funny about those is I always chose the coke, and the employees would always be awkward about it.

I think they're flawed in the sense that they were put on by the company itself.