Plant-based “meat” is so tasty that Europe’s meat industry has to bite back | Hacker News Reader

Plant-based “meat” is so tasty that Europe’s meat industry has to bite back

economist.com

43 pointsjkuria51 comments

So this guy has cracked the secret to mouthwatering meaty goodness, where others have failed?

Excuse me if I seem extremely skeptical. I'm sure his products are tasty, but they're not fooling anyone.

"Indistinguishable from the real thing!"? Yeah, no. Maybe for overly-processed charcuterie products that are mostly potato starch anyway. But absolutely not when it comes to actual cuts of meat.

It's basically all soy, and I'm sorry, but I've tried a ton of soy "meat substitutes", and they don't even come close.

In the Netherlands, the pastry section in Albert Heijn features "sausage rolls", and I tell you, the meat-substitues ones taste good, and very close to the ones that contain actual animal protein.

It's not because their product is incredibly meat-like, it's because the meat product doesn't taste much like meat. If there's not much difference, why not opt for a more environmentally friendly option?

The veggie butcher's chicken nuggets, hot dog sausages and mince taste delicious. It's hard to tell the difference between actual meat based chilli beans and the ones based on meat substitute mince.

I can't vouch for other meat alternative products. Most of them taste like crap. Heavily spiced carbs that only slightly resemble the product they try to imitate. The veggie butcher's produce is nutritionally (at least macros) very close to meat. Around 20% of protein. Carb heavy meat substitutes is my pet peeve and if it's not high in protein, it's not entering my body.

Agree

Most people tend to overestimate the quality of the majority of meat consumed - it's not filet steak

It's ground beef, sausages, pressed shredded chicken, thin strips, etc, etc

I'm sure it's perfectly adequate for processed meat, where you're not really tasting the meat itself as much as the salt, sugar and other spices added to it.

If they can make a schawarma meat substitute that tastes the same as actual schawarma meat and has similar mouthfeel, I'm perfectly OK with that.

Sure, for processed meat products, substitutes can be just as satisfying and rather close in taste. I have to say that visually some of their products are pretty much indistinguishable, especially the chicken.

So why is 'just like ground up pig' the gold standard? There's a good chance they've upped the bar, and come up with something better than meat? Which sausage is by the way - better than meat for many folks, but not really meat (not all meat anyway). And we love our sausage.

Because a meat substitute is supposed to be like meat. And if it's not, sure, it can still be good - but that's irrelevant when crafting a meat substitute.

Your point about sausage is actually proof of this. Sausage is good and tasty - but not a substitute for a cut of meat. No one is going to have a sausage burger, and suggest they're equivalent.

I'd disagree on every point. Sausage burgers are very, very good, and a superior product to a regular one in every way.

Maybe agree on the 'market as meat substitute' part. Time for 'new foods' to quit bragging about being the same as anything.

> No one would have a sausage burger and suggest they're equivalent

> I'd disagree on every point. Sausage burgers are very, very good, and a superior product to a regular one in every way.

Alright, but that's my point. You enjoy a sausage burger, that's fine, my point wasn't that they're worse. It actually sounds quite tasty. But just not equivalent. Sausage tastes entirely different from ground beef. And the same goes for plant-based-pork-flavored-foods.

If they're going to be a substitute, they have to be a substitute, in the sense that they can be used in the same way, with a goal of limiting the difference you notice between them.

Totally in agreement.

We need a word other than 'substitute' that means 'can be used in cooking like'. Vs 'tastes exactly like'. That would help the dialog tremendously.

"Meat analog"? "Meat equivalent"?

I'm not sure those terms are palatable to customers, though.

As a Texan with a long history of eating high quality steaks, and later a discerning consumer of many other forms of animal protein, I can attest to the very satisfying results that the Vegetarian Butcher gets.

I haven't tried most of their products, but I have used a few of them (many times). Some of their products are amazingly similar (indistinguishable in some cases) from the "real thing".

Keep in mind that animal meat quality and characteristics vary widely, especially if you unwisely choose factory farmed animals. There are some chickens that are chicken only in DNA, but otherwise are sad diseased balls of chemicals that end up as really untextured, nasty meat. Meanwhile, the veggie (dark meat) pulled chicken this company makes is really good! It cooks like chicken, has a nice flavor, absorbs seasonings the same, and has a texture that would fool most people.

Lately I've been enjoying their pre-made spicy tuna wraps. Lekker! And they don't contribute to the decline of tuna fish, nor do they give me more mercury than I've already consumed from years of loving my tuna sushi.

I'll moderate my attitude a bit. I'm sure these products are adequate substitutes for processed/minced products, especially generic products such as nuggets and strips.

But I like good quality chicken complete with skin and bone, I like pork chops, I like texture. I'm not sure how processed soy can replace that.

Hopefully lab grown meat will become viable soon, because then we can have the best of both worlds.

I think it's a long way off. We can grow proteins, but there's a long damn way from that to actual muscle. Current lab-grown "meat" is completely bland and textureless, because it was never an actual muscle.

You'd be wrong. The latest generation of veggie burgers are incredibly good. I actually got a taste of the Beyond Burger from a promotional Economist truck and it was really, really good. It's not perfect, but I'd say it's an 80-90% match in terms of flavor and texture to a real, grilled juicy hamburger. Instantly superior to generic fast-food burgers. Not yet competition for high-end stuff. And I'm not sure they have produced a credible steak. But veggie burgers are now a solved problem.

I'm perfectly OK with the idea of replacing processed/minced meats with plant-based products. You're mostly tasting the spices and cooking process at that point anyway.

And the impossible burger seems pretty awesome. I'm just a very skeptical and discerning person when it comes to food (of all kinds).

I got to try an Impossible burger when they had a giveaway event in SF last week and I'd mostly echo tootie's comments about his Beyond burger. It's good, both tastier and more realistic than any other veggie burger I've tried, but the texture is still a tiny bit off. Better than most fast food for sure, I'd say it tasted the most similar to an In n Out burger patty of all the burgers I could compare it to.

If you have a discerning palette, you'll probably notice the differences more than I did, but if someone were to hand me one of these after I'd had a couple beers at some concert/festival/sporting event, I probably wouldn't notice that it wasn't actually meat.

If it were really better, they wouldn't have to give it a deceptive name to get people to eat it.

In the case of an analog, is that not as descriptive as it is deceptive?

As long as it is also clearly marked meat-free I can't see there being a huge consumer confusion problem.

Maybe sane people should fight back by marketing a new and very special kind of "veggie burger." Should be smooth sailing as long as they are listing those advanced meat recovery byproducts on the label, right?

Is that what this guy is doing, though? Are hardline carnivores actually being duped into buying products containing ingredients they actively avoid, by burying it in packaging smallprint?

He seems pretty clear about the whole vegetarian thing tbh.

Full disclosure: I like meat.

I know at least one person (not me) who accidentally bought some veggie crap that was labeled "Chick'n" thinking that it was actually chicken. Google turns up many instances of similar names being used for real chicken.

"better" is a vague word and depends on your goals. Is a 3-wheeled car still a car? It does pretty much the same thing. Will people be confused as to whether it's a "real car" like the 4-wheel cars? No.

Likewise, nobody is being fooled by this vegetarian meat. And seriously, given that it is more expensive than meat, the "average" person isn't going to accidentally buy vegetarian meat without realizing it.

This is the usual protectionism a desperate industry that is already headed for (self) destruction. Whether it's a bird flu that causes the culling of millions of chickens (happens here in NL every few years), or the problem of having nowhere to put the enormous amounts of manure from the dairy and cow industry, or the problem of antibiotic restrictions, or so on and so on, the change is inevitable.

True vegetarians don't really care too much about these products. They're quite expensive, and many of us have a particular love of good vegetables and cooking techniques. The meat is not really missed. But for new vegetarians or people who have been told by their doctors to shift their diets to less meat, these products are nice to have around.

> True vegetarians don't really care too much about these products.

That's not necessarily true. I've been vegetarian my entire life, and I'd be interested in such products. Probably not as an everyday thing like some eat meat, but certainly as an option to choose sometimes.

"True vegetarians don't really care too much about these products. They're quite expensive, and many of us have a particular love of good vegetables and cooking techniques. The meat is not really missed."

Just because you've chosen to willfully deny yourself the flavor and texture of meaty goodness, that doesn't mean that other people don't still crave it, whether animal- or vegetable-sourced.

And no, I do cook a lot of veggie dishes (my girlfriend is a strong proponent of traditional German veggie dishes) and every single one that has been touted as "so meaty and satisfying" has definitely been found lacking in that area.

I don't want my previous comment to seem like I'm 100% against this, but there are some significant issues. The biggest one is availability, closely followed by price. I live in Denmark, not the Netherlands, so can I even buy these products? I've tried Quorn and a number of other meat substitute products available here, and I'm sorry, but they're simply bland or even downright repulsive.

Secondly, what is the price difference when compared to actual meat? And I don't mean the absolute cheapest possible meat option, I want to compare with good quality organic meat, something where at least some significant steps have been taken to improve conditions for the animals.

I've heard Quorn has gotten better since I last tried it a decade or two ago...

It's acceptable in something like a lasagna, but the "chicken" fillets leave a lot to be desired.

There's a big increase in other vegetarian alternatives too in store selections. Even in microwave meals. Even MacDonalds.

While a case can be made for whether the products taste equivalent to real meat, the controversy is on whether a non-meat substitute can actually use a meat name. I personally think if they are famous for what they do, then there is no deception. In which case the Dutch politicians are acting foolish.

This has happened before. When the herbal crowd started putting 'tea' in the name, but there was no actual tea in the product, there was some politicking. But the relevant committee decided that herbals were helping people buy more hot-water-based products across the board, so they relented.

Of late it's been said that one of the most detrimental things to ingest, from a healthy eating perspective, is highly processed foods, things like most flour, canned goods, etc.

Would this be considered a "highly processed" industrial food? If so, would people consider it a healthy alternative?

I’ve recently switched to a mostly-vegetarian diet and have been enjoying Beyond Meat and Gardein products. The only thing that worries me is the “closed source” nature of such products. Tasty plant based protein is a tough problem to solve and people are doing that these days with a lot of hard work and investment but i think for something as basic as food the process of making them should be more open.

I know that the companies need to make money and the investors need to get their returns but maybe we should have more oversight/openness in how these products are made.

I preferred to eat meat every day since I remember. I tried once lately for a couple of days to not eat meat. Mainly eating tofu as a substitute with some lentil.

On third day of such a diet I was feeling very bad. I was feeling weak, nauseous and a bit shaky. I tried to eat sugar in form of candy bars. It passed after I have eaten a few sandwiches with lots of meat.

Was it wrong what I did? Is my body programmed to digest meat and can't easily switch to other sources of protein? When I'm not eating meat I feel weaker.

That's rather strange. It really depends on what your original diet consisted of. You might have done a complete 180 without giving your body time to adjust. This is not the typical experience of cutting meat out of your diet as you should have gotten more energy and less fatigue after a meal.

Great. So someone figured out how to make a product that looks like and tastes like meat, and it likely is hydrolized soy protein with a nice mixture of artificial flavors and colors. Yeah, why not harm humans instead of animals.

I think a better approach to the problems that come with our “out of control meat consumption” is to drastically reduce meat consumption and eat it consciously. Much better than getting lost in the artificial flavors of frankenfoods .. No one really needs to eat meat more than once or twice a week.

Have you got any sources to back up your claims of deleterious effects on human health? Any at all? I will remind you that the claims of phytoestrogen interfering with human reproductive ability have not been proven, despite rigerous study.

No, nothing other than my personal experience (and of my partner) while eating a vegetarian and later exclusively vegan diet for almost 2 years. We ate a lot of fake foods, highly processed "health foods", most of them soy based and looking back at that time I can't say that we felt very good and healthy.

I believe we, as humans, do best with foods, which ingredients we can pronounce and source ourselves and put together without a lab and complicated checmical processes.

If you are ok with consuming foods of questionable "nature" because nobody could yet prove to you that they can be bad for human health, go for it. But I am going with my guts here, because that works for me.

That is probably more a case of bad nutritional choices, and not the fault of the soy products themselves. Most highly processed "health foods" are anything but. They're usually loaded with sugar.

Instead of trying to replicate an omnivorous diet by substituting all the meat you ate with substitutes, you should try branching out into an actual primarily vegetarian diet instead. Instead of substitute beef in your hamburger, try a portobello mushroom instead.

You sound like one of those paranoiacs who rail on about "chemicals in food!", without actually knowing what you're talking about.

I can assure you that the highly processed health foods I ate back then, were not loaded with sugar, because I consciously tried to eat as little sugar as necessary.

You are quick to judge, calling me a "paranoiac" that doesn not know what he's talking about, based on a handful of sentences I wrote. I studied nutrition and I have experienced my body on many different diets. What I can say for myself, is that there is one important factor, that matters way more than the food taken in.

> Instead of trying to replicate an omnivorous diet by substituting all the meat you ate with substitutes, you should try branching out into an actual primarily vegetarian diet instead. Instead of substitute beef in your hamburger, try a portobello mushroom instead.

Ehm. So you are writing this as a response to me saying, that replicating an omnivorous diet with some secret mixture which resembles real meat so closely that it is difficult to distinguish from it, might be a bad idea? Maybe should have told me 10 years ago when it mattered and not after I just said the same thing.

ground meat needs to fight back.

I don't think "meat" is at the level that can replicate ribs, roasts, bone-in steaks, barbecue brisket and burnt ends yet.

when they do, then real meat better start fighting hard.

The amount of farming land destroyed for plants is far worse than grazing land however.

care to back that up with some facts? Off the top of my memory a beef cow requires at least 2 acres of land and an average of about 60 litres of water a day. Granted plants require more water per acre but 2 acres grows a lot more food per acre than any cow.

looking at your post in another way, the reason more land is used for plants is because of feed for the cattle such as soy and corn, not for human consumption.

Yeah, even an arbitrary ten-second glance at google will let you know that it's substantially worse to have grazing land for cattle than it is to have cropping land.

Beef, on average, requires 16726m^3 per ton of product, whereas wheat requires 1437m^3/ton

http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report12.pdf

Not to mention that to successfully raise cattle year-round, you need to rotate feed crops for them as well. So you require not only land and resources for the cattle themselves, but also for their feed.

Not to disagree, but raw tonnage of food product is only one measure of food value. Nutritional composition and density is at least as important if not more so.

Meat and wheat serve different nutritional roles.

Very true.

I'm pretty far from a vegetarian and this doesn't pass the "sounds like nonsense" test.

It is quite simply objectively false.

However, there are some factors that need to be taken into account. Farmland and crops that can be used for grazing are not necessarily capable of producing anything fit for human consumption. Livestock can eat cellulose-heavy plants (grasses and shrubs and so on) and convert them to meat and milk, which we can then eat.

The biggest problem then turns out to be cattle. We are eating way too much of it, it's an ineffective process and needlessly resource intensive. We should obviously grow food crops fit for humans where it's possible, but we should also convert to primarily chickens, pigs and other animals that are hardier than cattle and significantly less resource intensive to keep.

Beef has an undeserved reputation for being fancy and higher class than other meats. Add this to the deleterious health effects of a diet high in red meat (generally specified as meat from ruminant animals), and I've personally cut beef almost entirely out of my diet. I prefer chicken, anyway.

Found the guy who has never had a backyard garden. A small 20x20 plot will produce an astonishing amount of veggies for a surprisingly little amount of water — if you’re in the northwest you might get away with no watering, depending on the weather patterns

> The amount of farming land destroyed for plants is far worse than grazing land however.

What do you mean by "destroyed" and "grazing land"?

The only way I can understand your comment to make sense is to assume that you believe corn, soy, and wheat fields to be destroyed by farming activities, but grazing land to not be destroyed.

It's true that crop fields are often devoid of ecological diversity, require significant artificial fertilization and watering, and do contribute to topsoil loss. And some cows graze on huge ranches with little human management, walking through federal land in the open West among the sagebrush, evoking images of ancient herds of buffalo and a pristine ecological paradise: simply replace the buffalo with beef cattle, and skim a little off the top of that ecological system, rather than plowing it all under and growing row crops, right? Wrong.

In reality, the vast majority of cows are, if not raised entirely, finished on feed lots: Small plots of mud and dust that cannot support a tenth of the plant life which would be required to grow the cattle that tread on them. The cows are fed grains like corn, hay, and alfalfa, soybean meal, and protein concentrates, which are grown off-site. A human with a tractor and fertilizer is able to get a lot more calories per acre with which to grow cattle than a cow grazing in and 'managing' its own field of grass with all the agricultural knowledge in its cow brain and the limited tools - its mouth and hooves - available to it. More at [1].

Furthermore, a cattle grazing operation - insofar is far from an ecological paradise. The cows destroy natural habitats, and human breeding of this herd and culling of its outputs is far, far greater than what a natural ecosystem would produce. More at [2].

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/feedlots-...

[2]: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/gra...

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