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Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see if the company actually shifts it's culture.

My wife is vegetarian so I'm exposed to quite a bit of different sources of veggie protein. My concern is that the fake meat stuff is actually kind of expensive compared to meat. If it was cheaper I can see more folks move in that direction.

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It also doesn't taste like meat. I will happily eat a vegan meal that tastes good. I'll eat meat that tastes good. But I just don't see a point in buying a "soy chicken schnitzel" which does not taste like chicken at all. Why should I be interested in that product in the first place?

Hopefully one day we'll get to actually replicating the taste properly. Or growing meat synthetically. I'm happy to move to either.

Replicating the taste is the wrong way to go about it. Vegan food can taste just as good as meat and cheese, but it will never taste like meat and cheese because it's not meat and cheese.

Agreed. People should stop going for a veggie burger that tastes like a beef burger. Instead, compare a beef burger to completely different, high quality, vegan meal like a veggie green curry, tikka masala, or burrito.

(note: I'm a chef of a fine dining restaurant, so take this how you will).

Telling people to change won't work. But at the same time, people in my position(available to influence flavours of a region), should do our part in not restricting ourselves to animal products.

This I have seen happen over the past 10 years, the amount of reduced meat or no meat items on my menus has increased, as well as doing more to use sustainable products.

On a side note about these types of foods: don't look at the bottom of the restaurant chains to see the future trends. They will only cater to the safe bets(huge cheap steaks and battery style farming practices), due to their low margins.

It took me a long time to get to a position where - as the head chef - I could experiment with a large portion of my menu being more land friendly(which for me is reduced meat based portions, higher quality locally sourced ingredients and more renewable products).

Thanks for sharing your experience - and for looking out for the environment!

Well, we do all live here. And I want my children's children to have somewhere to live as well.

I'm hesitant to believe you've had modern, high quality (or even moderate quality) meat-replacements. My girlfriend is vegan so I've been exposed to an array of options, and there are plenty that I would have never even guessed weren't meat had I not already known. There are members of the vegan community that won't even eat some meat-replacements because it tastes and feels too much like flesh and it grosses them out. Granted, part of that effect likely comes from not exposing oneself to meat for extended periods of time, but the technology really is making rapid progress. Getting some big, mainstream money behind it is only going to accelerate that process.

It doesn't always even come down to technology either, you just have to know some of the methods. Prepare a jackfruit the right way and it becomes delicious seasoned shredded chicken. Textured vegetable protein can become seasoned ground beef just as easily. Yeah, the flavoring plays a big role in those cases (which it often does for meat-replacements, to be fair), but it does in many situations with meat preparation too e.g. adding cumin to make taco meat, marinading your meats, slathering them in BBQ sauce, etc.

The question here is whether that "modern, high quality meat-replacement" is equally as affordable as meat (within reason). If so, show me where I can get it. If not, I likely won't reallocate my budget.

Gardein Breakfast Patties[1][2] retail for $3 at my grocery store and regularly have $1-off in-store coupons. Even the macros are solid. Everything else I've tried from Gardein has been excellent as well, and this is far from the best stuff out there.

[1] https://gardein.com/products/breakfast-patties/

[2] http://imgur.com/XUodQQv

I'd be willing to give this a try. Out of curiosity, what would you consider the best (or at least respectably high)?

I wish I had an answer for you, I'm really honestly not too educated on the subject. I just know that there are more expensive and better reviewed meat-replacements out there than what I've personally bought in the store. That being said, Gardein is no slouch. I've also been to The Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Twin Cities Veg Fest and the quality of meat-replacements (and cheese-replacements) at both those places were on a whole other level.

I'm willing to bet that this is for two reasons:

1. It's expensive because people with more money are more likely to be vegetarian. 2. We don't pay for the true cost of meat, i.e. green house gas emissions, water usage, transportation costs, etc....

How is water and transportation not paid for?

In a lot of the Western US, water usage is based on decades-old interstate compacts, where future water rights are based on a use-it-or-lose-it system. I'm not necessarily in favor of the extreme unregulated end of the free market either, but the system as it stands seems to me to be a market distortion that incentivizes people towards heavy water-usage activities (ranching, raising of water-heavy feed crops like alfalfa), rather than what a purely free market would apportion.

See, for example, https://projects.propublica.org/killing-the-colorado/story/w...

Massive government subsidies and tax breaks.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it does make the playing field unfair.

What isn't paid for is the cost of feed. Corn is the major foodstuff of both birds and, sadly, commercial cows. Corn is subsidized to below the cost of production by the US government.

Transportation is not paid for, really, because the highways are maintained without usage fees.

I'm a vegetarian and I buy fake meats ('cause I miss meat). My theory about why they are relatively expensive is that vegetarianism is seen as "healthy" and people think that healthy things need to cost more than non-healthy things. Kind of "If it's cheap, it can't be healthy".

And that's a win-win for the companies producing it, and why I think there has recently been a surge in startups making fake meat!

Just to add to this, there's also #3: lack of scale. IIRC Beyond Meat has also stated that with comparable scale they could match the price of similar beef products. Marketing speak or not, I'm inclined to believe it since it's clearly a niche market right now, and vegan products like Just Mayo that have achieved scale like Just Mayo are very cheap -- enough to convince low-end, mass market establishments like 7-11 to default to it.

More evidence: price of tofu is more comparable to meat in places with more Asian and international cuisines. E.g. tofu is cheaper here in at my Manhattan Whole Foods than in my southern hometown's supermarkets, despite most foods being more expensive. Even cheaper in Asian supermarkets.

I'd worry about phytoestrogens as well. There are compounds in plant based foods that must be consumed in moderation (as all things). A vegetarian diet is superior in many ways to the modern western diet, but not without its own risks/disadvantages.

The evidence for soy phytoestrogens affecting us is weak.

Dairy has a substantial amount of estrogen as well: http://www.livestrong.com/article/554285-does-milk-raise-est...

Although, the evidence that it affects men is also weak.

Anecdotally, my vegetarian friend was growing breasts and the doctor told him to stop eating as much soy which seemed to work.

This problem has nothing to do with vegan foods. The problem is that meat and dairy benefit from government subsidies. This might be because of lobbyists, but that's none of my business.

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