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Comment by skidd0 | Hacker News Reader

Not disagreeing, but providing a different perspective. By maintaining labels that associate lab-grown or plant-based with the "real-deal" (not a "fake" or new/different) meats, perhaps more people would be willing to try the alternatives. People are resistant to change and many stick to what they "know". It's part of why the milk industry is fighting for nut-milks to not be labeled as "real" milk. If the alternative has that "other"/"outsider" label, there's more resistance from the customers.

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That milk issue is ridiculous. Nut milk has been referred to as such since the middle ages or earlier.

In France you can't label nut milk as such, so they call it "nut based drink".

It doesn't matter. Customers call it nut milk. Recipes call it that. Restaurant menus as well.

It will be the same with burgers. It doesn't matter, and it's just a waste of time and resources.

When Napster came out with an alternative to the CD, the industry mocked it, then attacked it, but never tried to learn from it. As a result, GAFAM arrived and took the whole market.

When youtube came out, TV did the same. As a result, the Valley arrived an took the whole market.

The meat industry is doing the same with vege alternatives. They first mocked it. Now they are in the fighting phase. But these products are already as tasty as the average meat (not speaking of high end steaks, but that's not what people eats every week). The difference is that IF and BB can provide consistent quality across the entire production. And since it's made from plants, it will scale way better than real meat, from sourcing to production, so it will get cheaper. Because of the green trend we currently got, not to mention the ethics surrounding the topic, it will be an easy way to get a guilty pleasure while feeling you are doing the right thing.

I understand why Gates has invested in it.

Your different perspective boils down to "it's ok to lie and mislead people with food labeling if its in a good cause".

So you would like corporate interests to just say whatever they want about the contents just because you THINK it might be better for OTHER people to not know what they are eating?

I would put people mislead by the "nut milk" label in the same box as the people putting their dog in the micro-wave to dry it.

We should not thrive to protect those people from their own stupidity. We are short in resources, I'd rather see those invested in schools to provide education to their children.

So if you look at my other comments maybe you'll see a theme.

Nut milk can be made at home, so can peanut butter.

This is highly processed fake food thats designed to trick you into thinking it "feels" like meat. A process that is not designed to make it actually healthier for you in all the processing.

This is the English language so yes there is nuance in how we use it.

It's important to me that we not start to label industrial food pastes as X when they are still just industrial food pastes.

What's the "veggie" in "veggie burger"? It's not ground chickpeas anymore, don't conflate the two very different things.

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