The Quorn revolution: the rise of ultra-processed fake meat | Hacker News Reader

The Quorn revolution: the rise of ultra-processed fake meat

theguardian.com

The article uses words 'natural' and 'processed' in a very superstitious way that implies always bad or negative.

Just saying natural without explanation can imply: natural as obviously better or healthier, natural as in way it has been always done, natural as with non-modified biological growth process, natural as no processing or raw. Same for the word processed.

In fact, beer is “ultra-processed” in the way this article describes quorn. Quorn is product from common and unmodified mold found in earth's soil. It is grown in tanks where they add required nutrients, mostly sugars. I fail to see how it is unnatural. Is yeast unnatural? If the protein growing process involves continuous fermentation, flash drying, filtration etc. Is the processing somehow bad and unnatural? Allergy concerns are of course real, but the same thing applies to peanuts and most foods. Mycoprotein seems to cause much less allergic reactions than most 'natural' foods.

If the process that produces mucoprotein contains less chemical processing than the processed meat that most people eat, isn't that natural? World Health Organization classifies nitrite processed meat as a Group 1 - carcinogenic to humans.

If it's mostly a mold, then isn't it essentially a whole food? It's not like molds have to be spun up in a vat from inorganic compounds. It's mold - a whole organism like any other.

Whole foods are plant foods that are unprocessed and unrefined. The process extracts proteins, so it's not whole food.

Again, the assumption that whole food is automatically better is not true. There are good reasons why whole foods are generally healthier (good mix of nutrients, micronutrient, fibers, water), but there is no reason to assume that they have some kind of magical quality in them.

> magical quality

Taste, cravings, satiety etc. are based on evolved heuristics. Heavily processed food can fool those heuristics (and is engineered to do just that), while whole foods can't.

The "magic" therefore is that it's a lot safer to eat whole foods.

> The "magic" therefore is that it's a lot safer to eat whole foods.

Only 'in generally speaking' or 'on average'. There is magical thinking in health food business where generic statements replace knowledge.

Take for example seeds like pumpkin seed, sunflowers etc. Many vegetarians and health conscious people eat lots of these. What they are not aware is that they accumulate heavy metals, especially cadmium. If you are not aware of the heavy metal content of the foods you ingest you should consume them only in moderation.

You should probably check everything out for heavy metals. Municipal water sources can carry heavy metals as well.

Right. Outside of fresh fruit and (some, not all) vegetables, there are very few foods that aren't "processed" in some way. For instance, virtually all grains and legumes are eaten cooked, often being ground into flour or meal before cooking.

Someone mentioned soybeans below. Raw soybeans are actually toxic to humans (though not to ruminants like cattle).

I came away from the article with a similar feeling. The whole article is stuffed with cheap shots. From the equivocation on processed foods, to reliance on impossible to refute claims that don't even seem to say anything: "it's different from what 'plant food' would seem to denote" and suggesting gullibility of people who "will take it at face value."

First of all, would they really take it as a face value substitute for a familiar food? Secondly, what exactly is the problem? Is it that the ingredients are bad? If so shouldn't you just say that?

Is it that they aren't bad but people might be tricked into thinking they are the real thing? Because that doesn't seem representative of the average experience and wouldn't even be a problem if it actually was happening.

But none of that is unpacked. It's left there as a vague allusion to a criticism, in a form you can't respond to because the criticism isn't clear.

The article mainly denounces Quorn and similar products as being heavily processed, and further denounces any vegetarians or vegans who would eat it. It strongly implies that any actual vegetarian would of course eat only whole foods, which is blatant elitism.

Many people enjoy Quorn and similar products, and preferring not to eat animals doesn't mean denouncing processed foods. They're orthogonal concerns.

Sure, there are a bunch of people who eat crap, so why should we forbid vegans to eat crap too?!

How are Quorn and other mycoproteins crap? What specifically is it about them that is seen as bad?

I don't really know what the point of this article is. Like is meanders a lot. It seems awfully surprised that synthetic meat products would be heavily processed, but is...I don't know, maybe it's actually trying to take a dig at vegans?

I think the article's just against vegetarians & vegans. It's trying to say that since "so many" vegetarians & vegans endorse meat-substitutes they are all 'frauds' - claiming to eat plants for health purposes when they're eating highly processed meat-analogs.

I think that's a pretty awful way to treat people. Why do you care what vegetarians/vegans eat? Why attack them?

Every now and then it's fun to have a quorn "buffalo patty." It satisfies a desire of mine for something like that. But I don't have to eat healthy in order to be a vegetarian or vegan. I don't have to make health food my choice to be either vegetarian or vegan. I can simply be grossed out by animal products, or any other reason that results in me not eating/using animal products. My reasons for the way I live my life are mine, and yours are yours. I don't ask this person to explain their life nor dietary choices, so they shouldn't bother with mine.

Take a look at this (Finnish language) Facebook group. It's for "chips/crisps and beer vegans". I really like this approach of "owning it" as a response to the kind of muddled attacks in the article.

(I meant to include a link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1701571030062709/ )

I was wondering the same. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a submarine PR campaign [1] spreading FUD about meat replacements.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I don't give a damn if I get downvoted for this one, but that's The Guardian in a nutshell.

The general format is about picking a subject (person, brand, company, political party, country) that they are ideologically hostile to, and then picking bits and pieces from the Internet that show that it is baaaaaad. Not that it has a particular downside, but it's baaaad because maybe A, looks like B, I think C, and I heard that D. In this particular piece: the base is not a mushroom (who cares?), Quorn is successful (get'em!!!), I don't like how it tastes (good for you?), and it's owned by a big corporation (see, told you they're evil!). Also, other companies selling fake meat use very complex recipes (you don't say...).

None of that involves actually talking to people or scouting publicly unavailable documents, which is what I perceive as journalism. And they have the guts to claim that "The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce."

This is a reasonable summary of the guardian, IMO. I think it largely has the stature that it does because it is in accord with the cultural and political tastes of a large swathe of the UK, and articulates itself better than The Daily Mail. If you consider yourself a moderately liberal intellectual, it affirms your sense of self and world.

It’s a warm blanket and a bottle of milk, not great journalism.

This article is absolutely rubbish. It is using "processed" as a pejorative, without any explanation as to why processed is bad or why this fake meat movement is so bad. It seems to pander mostly to hard-core vegetarians/vegans for them to feel superior.

Processed foods can be very bad because too much salt and sugar and the removal of fibers, but afaik Quorn and similar fake meats don't suffer from that problem.

This is exactly what I was wondering also. It says Quorn is "processed," and in general I understand that processed means bad in the context of starchy foods. But... Is that what Quorn is? Is the argument being put forward that it has the same negative traits as other processed foods? I honestly don't know if that's intended as the explicit argument or if it's just being used as a weasel word.

I enjoy quorn now and again, as does most of my family. We're all vegetarian, and it provides a nice change once in a while (I make a pretty nice Indian curry with their chicken style pieces). I've never really felt unhealthy eating it an and appreciate the variety it adds to my diet. If I ate meat, I would probably be more suspicious of meat products after the recent scandals around horsemeat and intensive farming practices...

Not to mention the conditions that Chickens are often raised in.

It’s simply the synthetic meat version of the ultra-processed everything else at the grocery store. It doesn’t reflect traditional hippie style vegetarian or vegan values because the consumers don’t have those values.

This is a good point. It’s like a vegetarian hot dog.

seems to be on the right side of the prevailing food paradigm, which holds that eating meat, fish, dairy and eggs is a redneck habit that has had its day

Where does the author live that they think the “prevailing food paradigm” is vegan?

It's awful that truly everything is being turned into identity politics including food. It turns out there are people who identity as "rednecks" and now the food shaming goes so far that association with them is being used to food shame people who want to be part of a different tribe (hyper liberals???) out of eating a new type of food but stick with the tribe's version of kosher.

The entire identity politics direction we are going on is incredibly scary and this highlights the extent to which is happening. What makes it even scarier is how hard it is not to fall for identity politics myself. I would argue that identity politics also was what drove Naziisim, larger parts of Leniism and the awful culture revolution. This one might be the sneakiest incarnation yet. I hope the train will stop a long time before we get to Hitler station.

Edit: Maybe this is even a natural end state of the two party system?

> Where does the author live that they think the “prevailing food paradigm” is vegan?

It's easy to think so. Try this very comment thread. Try talking about meat eating at your next big-city cocktail party. Yes, vegetarian/vegan evangelists are probably just a lot louder than everybody else, but that doesn't mean it isn't working for them.

> Try this very comment thread.

OK, I'll bite. Links to concrete comments in this thread presenting veganism as the "prevailing food paradigm", please.

At the time I wrote this, there were 23 comments here. The majority was from self-declared vegetarians/vegans. That means that either that's the prevailing food paradigm among HN readers, or they're more vocal about it than non-vegans.

Not really, it just means that vegans/vegetarians are more likely to post comments on an article about Quorn, which makes complete sense. You won't see many top level comments from meat eaters because most of us don't eat Quorn.

That's the prevailing food paradigm among HN readers who have something to add to this topic, which is about a product that is mainly consumed by vegetarians and vegans.

Eh, I lived in SF and NYC and I knew few vegetarians, let alone vegans. Cocktail parties definitely weren’t hotbeds of any kind of meat-shunning discussion. Almost the opposite, I’m fact. The #1 hobby for big city people seems to be exploring new hip restaurants, almost all of which serve animal products. I’m sure it depends on your circle, but if you look at any list of the most popular restaurants in NYC, there will be very few vegan ones.

> I’m sure it depends on your circle

Agreed, social bubbles are a thing. That's why I think it's credible that the Guardian author comes across a lot of vocal vegan evangelism and might honestly come to think of it as the "prevalent food paradigm" in some ("non-redneck") circles.

Columnists in certain British media tend to take a lofty, pretentious tone when writing, I've noticed, and it creates an inauthentic kind of intellectualism.

The articles themselves can often come across as quite elitist and judgmental, and the authors can seem incredibly out of touch. Referring to non-Vegan people as rednecks is one such example, as is the term 'prevailing food paradigm', but you'll see this happens in practically every opinion piece published by a British newspaper.

The author most likely has their head stuck up their own ass so all this nonsense about rednecks and prevailing paradigms is just fluff to big up their ego.

Where does the author live that they think the “prevailing food paradigm” is vegan?

Obviously not the U.S.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-02/have-a-me...

I'm really not sure what's supposed to be so bad about quorn.

Yeah, it's a fungus. So what? We eat lots of different kinds of fungi. Mushrooms, obviously. Yeast. The mold on various types of cheese. Asian comestibles like sake, soy sauce, tempeh...miso. The list goes on.

I agree that it shouldn't be marketed as a "plant food" -- fungi are not plants. They're their own kingdom entirely.

> I agree that it shouldn't be marketed as a "plant food"

It isn't, though. It's only this article's author that harps on and on about plants.

> fungi are not plants.

Exactly. The same author who harps on about plants in the context of Quorn also accuses the public of being scientifically illiterate.

I eat Quorn on a weekly basis (my family except me is vegetarian). Frankly it's not so bad. I find it reasonably good actually.

So yeah, it's "processed", but if it can make a subset of vegetarians eat healthier (some don't want to bother counting amino-acids; which is important if you are 100% vegetarian), then…

First time I had quorn, I was still ate meat. It was well prepared and served with chicken sauce. I noticed the unfamiliar texture and complemented the cook that this is either incredibly tender chicken breast or most amazing tuna fish I have ever had.

As with many other frozen foods, the preparation is important. When I make quorn food myself, it's just OK, but when a good cook makes a meal, it can be amazing.

Saying that it was difficult to understand if the Quorn you ate was chicken or tuna steak makes me wonder what kind of food you were used to eat... Seriously, probably even with the mouth full of Carolina reaper I can tell the difference between tuna and chicken..

The idea that vegetarians/vegans need to be "counting amino acids" is a myth - any reasonable diet containing grains and legumes will give sufficient protein. For example rice and beans, chickpeas and bread, lentils and pasta. They don't even need to be consumed at the same time, the body doesn't care as long as grains and legumes are consumed at some point. Even better if you throw in some vegetables and nuts, you've got a balanced healthy diet without needing to count anything.

As a life long vegetarian, quorn is okay for weaning off meat but agreed it is processed and if you want to get off meat your end goal is lentil, legumes etc

+1, much tastier than quorn - and meat.

Why is it so bad if someone wants to get off meat and their end goal is Quorn?

if you want to get off meat, your end goal is anything else you can feed on besides meat, no matter how processed it might be.

if you would want to also get off processed foods, then of course your end goal would be non processed foods.

The Guardian used to have much higher quality journalism before they decided to avoid a paywall and instead produce traffic generating articles like this one which are light on sources and facts but heavy on hand wringing and outrage.

I say this AS a Guardian subscriber but I think this will be my last year subscribing - at the rate they’re heading towards click baity articles they’ll be the left wing equivalent of the Daily Mail. The Independent is another formerly stellar paper now pumping out filler and relying on their name to sell it. Damn shame what’s happening to so many previously decent journalistic outlets in the UK.

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