Beyond Meat and KFC partner to test fried plant-based ‘chicken’
theverge.com
theverge.com
Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper and less gross at the same time, and it might help them cut down on calories and improve their health image.
I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.
Contrast this with Chick-Fil-A's nuggets, which are 100% chicken breast meat (with thinner breading to boot).
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/10/whats-chicken-nugge...
> Our tender, juicy Chicken McNuggets are made with 100% white meat chicken and no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.
Made WITH not made OF. Meaning all the meat within a McDonalds nugget is 100% white chicken meat, not that ALL of a McDonald's nugget is 100% chicken. It is designed to be misread/misunderstood.
McNuggets still don't contain 100% chicken or even close, and the fact that 100% of the meat they do contain is "white meat chicken" isn't a significant change.
Go taste a whole-chicken nugget (like Chick-Fil-A's) next to a McDonalds nugget. Heck go look inside them, at the filler. It is night and day.
> White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning [autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil,dextrose, citric acid], sodium phosphates, natural flavor (botanical source).
The only real space in that list for fillers to be found is the food starch, but it's less abundant than water, so if there were a bunch of fillers, it'd be pretty soupy. (Its typical use is as a binder, and it'd make sense for it to serve that purpose in a nugget - you're not going to manage to make a white-meat nugget without some.)
There is certainly a texture difference between a whole-chunk nugget and one made from pureed meat, but you'd see the same sort of texture difference if you ground up a filet steak, too.
McD's used to sell chicken nuggets that were a mix of dark meat and white meat. Some were a piece of dark, other's were made of breast meat chunks. But consumers being the a-holes that they are (rant mode on)...
(this whole thing really bothers me - the "American Consumer" has pretty much single handedly ruined meat products in the United States by insisting that such products not remind them of live animals - so first "breast meat" then "white meat" and might as well be "bland meat" - then they went after pork "the other white meat" - making it so damn lean it's flavorless - you can't get any good fat anymore on your pork chops - with ground beef you have to look for the 70/30 mixture to have any real flavor in your patties. Steaks and ribs they trim off a ton of the fat, and for most supermarket briskets the Point is "gone" - so no burnt ends for you. All its done is make meat - at least from the supermarket - almost flavorless. You have to either buy commercial meat which hasn't been trimmed, or you have to go to a real butcher - either way, you end up spending a ton more money just to get the flavor back...
(ok rant off) ...where was I? Oh, as I was saying, consumers decided that all they wanted was "white breast meat", but McDs knew that dark meat is cheaper. So this food scientist at some USC university (IIRC) came up with a method to bleach the dark meat, then blend it with the white, and you get this "ground chicken" like product that can be molded into perfect nugget shapes - all shaped consistently, all fry consistently. Win for the restaurant.
But I remember real nuggets - there were two different shapes that were the dark meat; flavorful, tender, wonderful. Then one shape (that was "round") that was a disk of white meat (tasted good, but dryer, and less tender). Today, they are all a uniform shape, flavor, and texture profile, all "white meat" - and the texture is somewhere between that of dark meat, and breast meat.
I just don't get people. I love dark meat, I love flavor. Give me the fat, give me well marbled beef and pork. Nothing like a well-smoked brisket, or pulled pork shoulder, or a wonder slab of pork belly. People who say otherwise - I don't know what to think about them.
Oh - here we go - UGA, not USC:
https://phys.org/news/2005-08-uga-scientist-dark-chicken-mea...
I mean they're good -- don't get me wrong but I don't see anything wrong with nuggets made by grinding up some of the ugly parts of the chicken. I basically consider them two separate things. I thought it was actually kind of silly for them to grind up the good bits of the chicken just for a marketing push.
There's wide variability within the US anyway. I've noticed that affluent suburbs tend to have great fast food, while urban and rural environments have awful fast food.
Many other first-world countries (thinking of EU, etc.) have much stricter rules about food additives, etc. So the bread, for example, tastes significantly less cardboard-ey.
EDIT: I mean the restaurant chain, I'm not sure of the root beer itself.
So we can't eat them and people who liked the tallow-fried ones don't enjoy them as much (?)
Seems like as of a bit earlier this year, they still contained animal products, but this is in the US (in Canada, for example, it's vegan ingredients only).
They weren't “flavoring them with beef juice”, they were frying them in tallow. And AFAIK they didn't stop because of a lawsuit by vegetarians, but because of nutrition (saturated fat) concerns, and they now use other flavorings to attempt to simulate the flavor imparted by tallow:
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/whats-inside-mcdonalds-french-...
They actually did both.
https://www.thoughtco.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-still-not-v...
> But when they switched to vegetable oil, the fries were no longer as tasty. The solution was to add natural beef flavor to the spuds.
> Admitting that the fries were coated in beef flavoring, McDonald's settled for $10 million, with $6 million going to vegetarian organizations.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-settles-beef-over-fri...
> The vegetable oil used to prepare the fries and hash browns was not pure, but contained essence of beef for flavoring purposes. Many Hindus consider cows sacred and do not eat beef.
If you go to McDonalds and all your friends get a meal, you're not going to be all that satisfied with just fries and soda.
Which is “less gross” is highly objective.
> I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.
Would be a nice longbet, “McDonald’s will stop selling beef burgers by 20XY”. I’d be on the “no” side of that bet.
At least, I think that's about when it's likely to happen.
Somewhat amusingly, I first had an Impossible Burger not knowing that it was not real "meat." I didn't find out until a few months later. It tasted like a perfectly good burger to me.
[ADDED: Lab-grown is apparently more accurately used to specifically refer to food made from animal cells. I guess "plant-based" meat is the more common term with "meat" distinguishing from traditional vegi-burgers in the grocery freezer.]
https://www.cnet.com/news/meet-impossible-foods-lab-grown-ve...
http://www.makery.info/en/2018/05/07/jai-teste-limpossible-b...
I expect with actual lab-grown meat substitutes starting to get attention, people are more precise to distinguish between the substitutes today.
But I acknowledge that just because this is completely obvious to me and I've never met someone who was confused about the difference doesn't mean they don't exist.
Yes, I understand that there is a difference between grown from meat cells and made from plants with components that make it look and taste more like meat.
I've seen plant-based burger, plant-based sausage, etc.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22plant-based+meat%22&oq=%2...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat/
I, too, used to confuse Memphis Meats with Impossible Food / Beyond Meat.
It's just that news of lab-grown meat and outfits like Impossible Food kinda sprung up at the same time in the news within the last 5 years and it's easy to confuse the endeavors. In fact, I see this misconception enough that I think IF/BM benefit from the confusion.
Of course, some people will want to taste dead cows similarly to how exotic meats have an audience today. But McDonald’s would not be the venue for something like that.
Well, no, that's lamb.
Beef won't go away completely in 20XY; maybe not ever, which is fine. But at the scale and quality standards of fast-food, and with the recent progress in the meatless space, I would bet McDonald's will stop selling it in my lifetime.
Food that can make you sick isn't necessarily gross tasting.
Spoiled food is definitely gross, though.
Thank you for clearing that up, much appreciated.
There are probably more than a few foods you eat that are technically "spoiled" - it's just termed differently, like "fermented" or "aged".
As soon as they proudly put pictures of the animals and their living conditions on the packaging. You can put a field of corn or beans on packaging.
You can even put an image of the big machine with giant blades in the field.
Try that with meat and tell me again which is less gross.
One of my friends from India was quite surprised when he moved to the US that McDonald's doesn't have many vegetarian options like it does in India.
as soon as the economic-taste-weirdness function reaches a certain point, i'll expect you'll see these cheap fast food options convert more and more fractions of their products (right now many use fillers already) to fake meat, eventually replacing it entirely alongside offering reduced prices for these products, while leaving meat generally as a higher priced option signaling disposable income (sort of like Argentinian beef or w/e is today)
Could conceivably cut out all the work of growing bones, feeding/watering, animal healthcare, breeding & transport with labgrown meat. And the fixed cost of maintaining farmland. The cost saving potential is huge.
Not even considering the benefits of being able to quickly adjust production to what can be sold, as opposed to waiting however long it takes for a calf to grow up.
That's for the solar panels!
On the other hand I’d like to see studies on the healthiness of consuming these products long term. Intuitively they’d seem healthier, but I’d like to see that proven given their synthetic nature.
"limited time is mostly marketing trying to create a buzz. If people buy it, they will continue to offer it. Simple as that. Otherwise it really was limited.
Replacing questionable meat with hype pseudo-meat is a straight win all around. I'm as carnivore as they come, but if I have to hit a Burger King, I'm just going to get an impossible whooper: if i'm going to be getting a shitty burger either way, I'll take the one that didn't require all the logistics around cows.
This KFC one is just the next step. Replace all the questionable meat with pseudo-meat that is (hopefully) more sustainable, and leave the "real" stuff in caviar territory where people actually care.
Propaganda by people trying to sell the same thing as "healthier" has convinced a lot of people that it is true. It helps that the idea of a large corporation selling sawdust as meat is incredibly believable though.
I don't eat a ton of fast food anymore, and when I do its usually McDonalds, but I have always enjoyed the Whopper. I had one a few months ago at an airport and tried the Impossible Whopper last week. It's close, but the beef version is still better in my opinion.
When I have a whooper most of the taste is the sauce/bun/toppings with the patty only being responsible for a small portion of the taste, which makes it perfect for a substitute. I've had impossible whoopers a few time, and while eating the whole thing, it's basically the exact same taste. If I eat a piece of the patty with nothing else then there's a noticeable difference though.
I'm not saying Tyson chicken is good; it's CAFO meat, which is not great for the environment or for flavor. But it's not "barely meat"; it's meat that basically sets the standard for meat quality in one of the meat-eatingest countries in the world, and has set that standard for over 50 years.
† Don't get me started on how irresponsible the public interest campaign against transglutaminase franken-meat is.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/overuse-of-antibiotics/what-...
I don't mind KFC but Taco Bell meat always seemed a bit...off and low quality.
Tl:dr; yes it is true, inputs are the same as what you get in the store, but the outputs are vastly different. You have to factor in additives and preservation process. There really is a simple "sniff" test/heuristic I have developed after my decades in food service, and it's not really a secret, but seems like some aren't in on it, and it goes like this: If it goes bad, it's good, if it doesn't go bad, it isn't good. (Good is obviously subjective here, so my criteria is obviously "real" food in the sense that it is minimally processed and preserved and minimal chemical additives)
A neighborhood sushi place has an even bigger problem with spoilage than a friend chicken shack, but, for pretty intuitive reasons (I think?), I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.
Further: while fast food input costs are the highest single line item in their cost breakdowns, they don't come close to dominating, and labor plus rent dwarfs inputs even before you factor in franchise fees, marketing, and other expenses.
FYI, in the US it is common to mummify fish with carbon monoxide. It preserves the fish's color despite age. The best way to stop oxidation is to add a reducing agent!
I don't think CO is a problem, but it is a hack restaurants use that consumers are unlikely to be aware of which masks the visual indications of freshness.
For what it is worth, McDonald's says on their web site that this is not true. So either you are mistaken or McDonald's is committing fraud. Do you have a source for your claim?
From the McD's web site ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y... ):
"Every one of our burgers is made with 100% pure beef and cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else—no fillers, no additives, no preservatives."
"Do you use so-called 'pink slime' in your burgers or beef treated with ammonia?"
"Nope. Our beef patties are made from 100% pure beef. Nothing else is added. No fillers, no additives and no preservatives.
"Some consumers may be familiar with the practice of using lean, finely textured beef sometimes treated with ammonia, which is referred to by some as “pink slime.” We do not use this. "
I haven't read this page recently (it certainly has changed much), but on skimming through, none of the terminology McDonalds uses on their website are meaningful in the sense that the standards there is no official definition and could not be distinguished between similar competitors that make similar claims besides simply what they say, and, more importantly, there is no regulated term between what constitutes beef being “pure” or “not pure” or otherwise put. It’s just some “thing” they say about their beef and we have to take them up on their word. Now if they said “we use USDA organic ground beef” that might have some teeth. It’s the same thing between a bag of candy telling you they no longer use artificial flavors and now use “natural” flavors.
Now the question of do I believe they have changed? Possibly. Do the burgers taste different? No, so common sense tells me you don’t drastically change your process like this and still get the same tasting burger from 20 years ago.
But I will actually do something uncommon here and admit I could be wrong, and have an outdated understanding of their process.
I will say I remain skeptical on exactly how they can go from the ammonia wash + chemical food flavoring process to using fresh beef and not have any discernible difference in taste or food safety, but kudos to them.
(TG'd meat was a faddish fine dining trend a few years back, and it's pretty neat; for instance, you can make a solid, ribeye-like slab of skirt steak by "gluing" layers of skirt together, which is pretty delicious. It's also a technique that's been used in sausagemaking for a long time.)
"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."
That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.
> After a months-long evaluation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) determined in December that BPI’s signature product—the offering famously called “pink slime” in an ABC News exposé that got the network in a lot of trouble—can be labeled “ground beef.” Legally speaking, it’s now no different from ordinary hamburger, and could even be sold directly to the public.
[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...
Freezing is hugely deleterious to ground beef quality. It changes the texture irrevocably. The two major differences between fast food burgers and fast casual burgers are frozen/fresh and cooked in advance/cooked to order. All the more expensive, more lauded burgers like Five Guys, Shake Shack, In 'n' Out, etc are fresh beef. McDonald's launched a fresh beef quarter pounder to universally positive reviews.
[Former Yum! engineer]
It's a food-safety and labeling term, not indicative of the relative quality of what's inside and doesn't, alone, mean that the ground beef sold by Taco Bell is or isn't excellent or crappy.
I believe the big "Pink Slime" news story halted some of this, or at least led to many fast food companies publicly decrying it. But there was definitely a point when this ammonium hydroxide treated slurry was used to cut the real stuff.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18995204
TLDR: "Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%)."
It is unclear from the abstract whether they were measuring the entire hamburger, including the bun and other condiments, or just the burger portion.
From a more culinary perspective, you do probably want some fat in your burger. Depending on your tastes, I'm not sure the presence of 'plant matter' is particularly sinister either; I, for one, like a few onions in mine.
Those numbers should be right about what you'd expect.
> Meat and poultry are composed of naturally occurring water, muscle, connective tissue, fat, and bone. People eat meat for the muscle. The muscle is approximately 75% water (although different cuts may have more or less water) and 20% protein, with the remaining 5% representing a combination of fat, carbohydrate, and minerals.
The protein/fat balance should be expected to be a bit off from straight muscle cuts, as it's typical for a burger to have fat added to the mix in.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/whatwedo/latest/details/-/articleNa...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chicken-supe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/-sp-revealed-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...
Taco bell famously admit a few years ago that their beef filling was only 88% beef.
CBC did an investigative report in Canada recently that revealed subway's chicken was only 50% chicken. [0] The rest being a smörgåsbord of fillers. The 4 other chains studied in the tests didn't do much better.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-fo...
I have no idea what Subway is selling. Subway squicks me out, as does Taco Bell.
COLD CUT COMBO: Turkey Bologna: Mechanically separated turkey, water, contains less than 2% of: salt, corn syrup solids, potassium lactate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, flavorings. Turkey Ham: Cured turkey thigh meat, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, brown sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite, water. Turkey Salami: Dark turkey, mechanically separated turkey, water, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, spice and flavorings, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite
So plant based milks can't be called milk, plant based proteins can't be called meats, but hot dogs can be called hot dogs and have no dog meat in them, riced cauliflower is under attack, Parmesan (cheese byproduct and sawdust) in a can is considered not misleading, a California Port wine is impossible but nobody cares, etc
Subway's Salami, Ham, and Bologna can be made with turkey instead of the cuts you'd expect because money.
It's always about money. They want consumers buying their products in stores and if you buy enough product for your restaurants you can call it anything you want.
America.
Nitpicky, but this is itself misleading. Canned parm is mostly actual cheese, it's just... not very good. "Sawdust" is there in small amounts for anti-caking purposes, not bulking.
(turkey based) is all over their signs, menus, etc in the fine print.
Your linked article makes the point that other chains hit the expected values for prepared chicken, Subway was an outlier.
There is also nothing “gross” about the additives used in the filling, which are primarily there to improve texture. They are widely used and perfectly safe: https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien.... (For some reason people go “eww” when soy lecithin is used at Taco Bell, but don’t utter a peep when it’s used in some fancy foam in a high end restaurant. It’s all in peoples’ heads, and there is also a large amount of classism involved.)
So... do they have a way crazier quality control process? Absolutely. Will the result be better food safety than the Michelin-starred place down the street? Not a chance.
https://www.tacobell.com/ingredients
> Seasoned Beef: Beef, water, seasoning [cellulose, chili pepper, maltodextrin, salt, oats (contains wheat), soy lecithin, spices, tomato powder, sugar, onion powder, citric acid, natural flavors (including smoke flavor), torula yeast, cocoa, disodium inosinate & guanylate, dextrose, lactic acid, modified corn starch], salt, sodium phosphates. Contains: Soy, Wheat
I occasionally make my own (with tastier cheeses than you get in commercial products) for its melting characteristics.
{Type of meat} - {FCR, Edible Weight} - {Conversion efficiency %, caloric} - {Conversion efficiency %, protein}
Beef - 36 - 2.9% - 2.5%
Pork - 6 - 9% - 9%
Chicken - 4.2 - 13% - 21%
(specifics vary according to method, but cross species comparisons remain similar)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
Which is sad, IMO.
"All white meat chicken breast" is a bug, not a feature, IMO. Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.
Wings are tolerated because they're small and predictable, but I've been seeing the rise of "boneless wings" too. People generally don't have a problem with the thighs and legs of the chicken if it's served differently or just as "chicken" in another product. But on the bone it's messy.
When I cook any recipe with chicken, I replace the chicken breast with boneless thighs (Which actually is thigh meat with the bones removed), and it comes out so much better.
It's only “much more juicy” if you prepare or cook the breast meat wrong. Of course, you often do that if you you cook them together since dark meat needs to be cooked to a higher temperature for food safety reasons.
But, yeah, dark meat has a lot more flavor (and dark meat cooked on the bone has the best.)
Why do you even care. They can "quality" up their meat all they want but in the end they are still a fast food chain that primarily sells buckets of meat. I don't need a citation to think that is disgusting, and if you don't then go take that argument somewhere where it's on topic. Jeez.
So they're actually doing the right thing in 2019 and replacing part of their product with non-meat. I hope it goes all the way, or at least make meat be the expensive "special occasion" option.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
These vegetarian burgers aren't particularly healthy, but it's because of their salt content.
As for this new wave that is intended to simulate real meat, the flavor is completely natural, just found in an unusual source outside of actual meat:
> Impossible Foods' scientists discovered that heme is a key factor in how meat behaves.[15] Heme is the molecule that gives blood its red color and helps carry oxygen in living organisms.[16] Heme is abundant in animal muscle tissue and is also found naturally in all living organisms.[17] Plants, particularly nitrogen-fixing plants and legumes, also contain heme.[18] The plant-based heme molecule is identical to the heme molecule found in meat.[19][20]
> To produce heme protein from non-animal sources, Impossible Foods selected the leghemoglobin molecule found naturally in the roots of soy plants.[21] To make it in large quantities, the company's scientists genetically engineered a yeast and used a fermentation process very similar to the brewing process used to make some types of beer.
It's been a while, but I remember findings signalling something like 30% less emissions?
There are however a lot of assumptions in that study. For example, a cow is not 100% 1/4 lb beef patties. So how do you go about distributing emissions that relate directly to the beef patty vs. those for steaks, brisket, or numerous other cuts? Since beyond meat does not currently provide substitues for those. They use an "economic model" which isn't entirely clear to me.
Or the lighting thing. They make all these assumptions about light energy consumption based on lumens and size of facilities - but there is no justification of the accuracy of these assumptions. Also how much of that energy is coming from renewable sources? It could favor either way but without figuring this out it makes a lot of it questionable.
There are other assumptions in there that raise questions and I think a lot more study needs to be done (ideally not funded by either industry).
[0] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...
[1]
"Simple animal farming" is slightly disingenuous. It's not like the animal is slaughtered on the farm, cut up into steaks and sent directly to supermarkets. There's tons of complicated processing and handling going on after the animal is finished growing. And that's on top of the energy losses from feeding and raising the animal.
Impossible Burger patties are actually more expensive. For example, Burger King:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meatless-fast-food-burgers...
> The meatless burger is $5.99, around a dollar more than the regular Whopper with meat.
I guess with Beyond and Impossible you pay a hefty price for their marketing. Or for irrelevant features: Didn't one of them put a lot of research into making a "bleeding" plant burger? Bleeding may be relevant in some settings, but not at Burger King where you always get your burger well done (AFAIK).
Definitely not the case at the moment. Last week I went to Del Taco and tried their Beyond Taco. It was $2.49 each compared to the meat one which was $1.49. If I recall correctly, you can switch to an Incredible burger patty at Red Robin for $3 extra.
There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier. Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?
2. While they do have carbs, they also have protein. And a bunch of other stuff the burgers don't have. Oh, and less fat in most cases. I'm guessing many are lower in calories, but I'm not sure about these particular products.
3. Not all of them are super processed. I've literally made different sorts at home, though I'm just as likely to buy a soy option. (obviously not Beyond Meat or Impossible Burgers. I actually am not impressed with these options).
4. They are an easy meal.
In terms of Impossible/Beyond Meat, health seems kind of a wash.
And that's bad? After working on my property cutting down weeds and dead trees carbs are super healthy. Carbs are only not healthy if you live a sedentary lifestyle. Carbs are our main short-term fuel source.
And yes i do intermittent fasting.
Yes, because carbs are a non-essential nutrient.
Protein and fats are both required.
Most non-meat products are low on protein and high in either fat or carbs. Very few products actually replace the nutrients of meat.
Yes, we have an over abundance of carbs and anyone that has to go out of their way to eat more is living an extreme exercise heavy lifestyle. This is especially true in the case of places like KFC, your getting a load of carbs in the bun and the fries on the side, the actual chicken is the only healthy part.
It's totally possible they aren't; just a reasonable guess.
> There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier.
There's plenty of evidence that eating red meat on a regular basis is bad for you. Chicken is admittedly a different story.
> Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?
Many veggie patties are filled with fiber and most are filled with protein (from beans, soy, etc.). I don't know the nutritional details of the Impossible Burger or the meatless chicken featured in the article, but generally meat substitutes are not just carbs.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/impossible-burger#nutri... https://www.cookinglight.com/news/is-the-impossible-burger-h...
It's not a clear win for either side. Impossible Burger has more carbs and less protein, so it's inferior in that way. But it also has more fiber (beef has none), which is good. Impossible also (surprisingly) has more saturated fat than beef, but it has no cholesterol.
As one of the articles points out, Impossible's main goal isn't making healthy food. It's other stuff like saving the planet. So it is possible that another fake-meat company could prioritize health more.
The formula for beef isn't going to change, but the formula for fake meat will, so fake meat might gain ground when it comes to health.
Consumer advocates in the past few years have actually done a pretty good job at pressuring the top fast food chains to not dilute their beef with additives.
McD's, Burger King, and Wendy's all advertise their hamburger patties as being nothing but 100% USDA inspected ground beef, salt, and pepper. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html https://menu.wendys.com/en_US/product/daves-double/ https://www.bk.com/food-quality/our-burgers https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y...
It's all the other stuff (the bun, the fries, etc. ) that have preservatives, fillers, and shady additives.
(When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte. Tasty, nutritious and very filling).
This "impossible burger" trend basically reverses the work of consumer advocates. The one element of fast food that is actually an all-natural, nutritionally complex whole food is replaced with a patty that is nothing but processed food and additives -- https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189374... The fast food restaurant will likely save money -- but because of how fashionable vegetarianism has become, instead of being condemned, they will be actually praised as being eco and health conscious.
o_O
> how fashionable vegetarianism has become
I don’t think it’s a question of fashion. However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad. Whether it’s in 50 or 500 years’ time, one day our descendants will look back at us and wonder: “they ate corpses?!”
I disagree entirely, but there is no need to relitigate this debate here. If by any chance you have never read the pro-meat argument, the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is a pretty good primer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vegetarian_Myth
From the article:
---------------------------------------------------------
For the earth to survive, Keith thinks, the human population needs to be reduced by more than 90 percent. She also argues that the human food-supply needs to come mainly from hunting and small-scale animal husbandry.[4]
Criticism:
Sami Grover, referencing "Jason V", says Keith's book is filled with "factual errors and fallacious thinking". Furthermore, Jason V writes that Keith fallaciously uses her ex-vegan status in an attempt to depict herself as an authority on the subject.[11]
Patrick Nicholson writes that the book misinterprets scientific articles, cherry-picks facts, uses strawman arguments and relies heavily on anecdotes and faulty generalisations.[5] Ian Sinclair writes that Keith's arguments are "full of lazy thinking, willfully ignorant logic and glaring omissions".[12]
---------------------------------------------------------
My thoughts:
I think its meaningful or even sane to suggest that virtually everyone stops having babies or dies and all the survivors go play hunter gatherers in the woods.
I think our present trajectory is obviously unsustainable but that doesn't make any alternative suggestion reasonable.
Our future is the stars or extinction. In between we have to find a sustainable reasonable way to live civilized lives. This probably isn't horrifically complicated we don't have to reduce our population by 90% we just have to not keep increasing it and make do with simpler and less.
I don't endorse the book or her particular worldview 100% but I believe she does bring some true evidence to light about the good aspects of meat.
Her only stated expertise outside of a high school education is that she spent multiple decades unhealthy because she decided to adopt a lifestyle choice and didn't bother to simultaneously read about how to eat a healthy diet without eating meat. Instead of figuring out how to eat vegetarian without being unhealthy or simply returning to a balanced diet she has decided that we ought to somehow get rid of almost all people and go back to being hunter gathers.
The problem is that she is a writer who writes about a broad range of topics she has no understanding of. Knowing how to put words together effectively can grant one an audience but it doesn't grant one any sort of expertise. She is a crank.
Curious what makes you think that, with some real hard numbers, etc.
I think we've become very good as a culture at brainwashing ourselves into a doomsday attitude when it comes to planetary resources...yet we've actually done quite well at getting rid of or minimizing bad practices as we learn they are damaging. Nukes, CFCs, noxious smokestacks...sure not 100%, but getting better over decades.
Yes I'm an optimist...I think the Earth is all we need, and based on scientific advancements and slow learning over decades (we barely even use the [deserts|seas|tundra]!), we could easily live well and without abject poverty at 100 BN+ in centuries to come.
What will kill us off...I think it more likely to be external [asteroid|aliens|supernova] or inescapable [Yellowstone|Krakatoa|Earthquakes|virus|new apex species]
It would have been virtually impossible for virtually any percentage of hunter gathers to wipe out humanity let alone the biosphere. Eventually one person crazy enough may engineer all of our doom. This could even be so without malice aforethought.
Once you get to the stage of a planetary civilization expanding further gets fantastically harder. It's entirely possible that most intelligent species go extinct between getting big enough to destroy the requirements for their continued existence and actually escaping their planets.
The more obvious answer of ecological catastrophe is actually a lot harder. We could actually be well on our way to crashing and burning and still not be able to predict well enough that far ahead.
Where do you draw the line as far as ethical behavior towards animals? I think even most who eat meat don't think things need suffer right? After you admit animals CAN suffer and that such suffering ought to be minimized the logical minimum suffering is not raising animals for food save to the degree that is required for the health of human beings. Essentially balancing the 2 factors.
I'm personally hoping that particularly knot can be untangled by artificial meat. If we can ultimately cheaply produce fake meat that is identical insofar as utility there remains zero reason at that point to justify killing animals.
Do you disagree?
I wish this urban legend would die.
Fast-food beef and chicken at major chains is no different in quality from what you buy at the supermarket.
A McDonald's burger is 100% ground beef and salt, no "additives" or "fillers". And Taco Bell ground beef is ~90% beef, because the rest is ~10% spices (cumin, etc.) because... that's what taco meat is supposed to be, like when you make it at home.
Spreading rumors that it's somehow worse doesn't help anybody. I get that it's entertaining to believe -- but it's simply false.
It seems like they could, since it appears many commenters here think so (there is no PR cost to serving bad meat if everyone thinks you are)
https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien...
It won’t die because it makes yuppies feel superior to the plebes who eat at McDonalds. My wife once encountered a lawyer at a prominent DC firm who literally sneered at the idea of eating McDonalds. I think of her every time we drive through to get an Egg McMuffin.
It's no closer to food than Doritos or Coke are.
But the burger is certainly food according to anyone's definition. Get a quarter pounder with cheese and tell me how that's nutritionally any different from a burger you make at home with standard supermarket ingredients -- ground beef, hamburger bun, american cheese, ketchup, pickles, onions. Yet nobody complains about that at a neighborhood, family or church cookout.
You are correct that I could buy and eat that stuff at home, but like I said, I could also buy Doritos, coke, sugar rolls, candy, etc. etc.
I personally would choose grass fed beef or bison or chicken, multiple steamed or roasted vegetables and I would not add salt, ketchup or salad dressing. And no soda.
In that case, the food is of much higher quality than anything I can buy at McDonalds.
[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/beyond-meat-burger-beef-hea...
Thus if we want to tackle climate change, we should rethink our Cold War era grain subsidies and ultimately reduce our dependence on cattle.
Sources:
(1) Freakonomics Radio Podcast
(2) Earth and Space Science Honors course
How many total units of methane are there vs. total units of CO2? Otherwise, I can’t make a value judgement about the impact of cows on global warming.
However, Bill Gates writes in his blog that Agriculture contributes towards 24% of the world’s climate change and that “Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases!”(2). His blog post that I link to below is admittedly a secondary source but I think he does a pretty good job at showing the big picture.
Sources:
(1)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
(2)https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
If you go on to find a good (hopefully primary) source, please reply with it here!
A non meat dish is still going to taste like a non-meat dish. Perhaps your colleagues were just being polite and avoiding treading into politically charged territory after you brought up the Amazon.
Personally I'm a picky eater and vegan/vegetarian dishes simply do not compare to meat. I'm sure others feel similarly. Though for one meal I suppose it isn't a huge deal - but acting like it's just as good simply isn't true for the majority of people - that's your personal taste.
They ain't cheap (and if you buy one, they are daunting to cook - because you know if you screw it up, you've just wasted $100-200.00).
Ground beef, or chicken, or pork - those are all still very inexpensive; though pork can get pricier for certain cuts - mostly it's still very inexpensive.
But damn - if you've ever smoked a pork shoulder and made homemade pulled-pork sandwiches - you know there's no substitute for that.
Society wide change is always hard, and meat is way too cheap (considering its environmental impact) to provide the economic stimulus for reducing the amount of meat in ones diet. Learning to cook vegetarian dishes is also non-trivial (although not too hard of course, but a barrier nonetheless).
For people over fifty meat is also an indicator of welfare. Especially for people whose parents didn't have the luxury of eating meat on a daily basis.
Fortunately, the shift to less meat is unmistakably happening, and has been gaining speed in the last few years.
> vegans and vegetarians are substantially more likely to be thin and, well, less traditionally manly, both in appearance and in values
I can point you to many fat vegans, and I've heard this 'need meat' BS from guys who were literally 135 lbs, soaking wet, so.... exactly this kind of attitude that 'meat makes you manly'.
Who said that I disagreed with those values, that is a poor assumption on your part.
What are you eating, and how are you comparing it? If you're trying to treat a salad as a meat replacement, well, it's not going to do all that well. But there's a lot of meals designed to be complete without meat that might work for you, as long as you're not expecting them to taste like beef.
None of it is as good as great vegetarian food. Sure the top top top shelf stuff is probably as good. But the average meat at a restaurant or someone’s home is no better than great veggie food.
That said average veggie food sucks. If you are eating in the average-or-below segment then yes meat is probably better. In the good-to-great segment it’s not.
Veg food does require more work, which is a big part of why a lot of people/chefs don’t bother. Meat is basically perfect as-is. You just have to not fuck it up. Veggies require you do some chef work.
Also, a lot of farmland is used to grow feed for cattle and other livestock, and it's much less efficient than using the land to grow crops for people instead.
Pasta con pesto/pomodoro/grilled veges/spinach/cheeses..
Aubergine Parmigiana
Pizza/Calzone..
Minestrone/Zuppa de../Ciammotta
I mean, that's without even looking at a cookbook.
I find Italy itself (particularly more southern) far more accommodating to my diet than Italian restaurants outside of Italy.
Pasta I agree but that’s primo
Aubergine Parmigiana is not very common, but indeed would fit
Pizza in a pizzeria yes, but not a restaurant
Soups indeed, but they would also be primo. And many will have chicken stock
I agree that southern Italy will be easier, more Mediterranean
The Amazon burns every year.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/24/world/america...
Which is it? Vegetarian would hardly be worth complaining about, but I'm really struggling to come up with a vegan Italian menu that sounds appetizing.
-A mixed antipasto (olives, sun dried tomatoes, bruschetta, breaded garlic mushrooms, griller artichokes, dolmades etc.) to graze on before the meal.
-Panelle Palermitane to start, which are these crescent shaped fitters made with chickpea flour, parsley and pepper. They're a popular street food in northern Sicily. Highly recommend with a little drizzle of lemon juice.
-I can think of 10 odd pasta dishes that could be had for main but a favourite of mine would probably be a puttanesca; a pasta dish with olives, capers, eggplant and red pepper flakes. Proper rustic food and very filling.
-For desert you could have a Castagnaccio which is a chestnut cake with fruits. No milk or egg involved. Great with a shot of espresso!
-Sorbets throughout to cleanse the palate.
That's just 1 option for each part, but you could probably build a dish for each course for each day of the week if needed - all varied in ingredients and flavours.
Honestly, I'd say close to 30% of my diet is Italian - all of it vegan. There are plenty of options. Unfortunately most of the food people think of when they think Italy is something lathered with cheese and cured meats, but when I travelled through there most of the diet consisted of legume based stews, casseroles and soups, and plenty of bread and salads.
Indian food doesn’t have some weird mystery replacement I find on almost every vegan or veggie dish. I had a conversation with and Indian colleague who lives in the states and she agreed a lot of veggie/vegan food is just plain weird.
It’s not ready yet, and phase 1 was the really weird stuff. I think Beyond Meat is like phase 2 of “pretty close”. In the near future, you won’t be able to tell the difference
most of the interest i'm guessing is coming from what was previously thought to be "unthinkable": that is, fast food chains whose core business revolves around animal flesh introducing something else that isn't animal flesh. there are tons of consequences for this outside of American vegetarians wanting to replace meat or whatever.
Great for you that you don't miss meat in your diet, but is it so hard to imagine others do, especially if they've grown up in places were it is a big part of the typical diet?
Another reason is that red meat is known to be carcinogenic and hard on lipids and while their isn't sufficient data on plant based meats the going assumption that it is at least modestly better is probably a reasonable one.
But yes, non-processed plant based food is terrific and probably the best for you.
Italian food is a perfect example, it's so easy to be vegetarian eating Italian (the original version, not the one covered in meat and cheese you find in the US).
Same goes for almost every other culinary tradition in the world, meat used to be expensive.
Our food cravings adapt to what our bodies identify as having the nutrients we need. Most people who eat a plant based diet for 5-10 years rarely eat meat replacements. But in the beginning, these replacements are great for people that are still learning meal planning. Outside of that, some people have health issues, like cholesterol, where replacing some of their meat intake with immitation meats can be beneficial. Others like to reduce their carbon footprint by eating occassional plant based meals. These individuals do not experience the change in cravings and taste so they still appreciate the taste and texture of something similar to the meat they still consume at other meals.
To put some quantitative analysis on that, while sales of immitation meat products have increased significantly, we are not seeing significant increases in the number of US residents identifying as vegan(strict vegetarian) and only modest increases in those identifying as vegetarian. This means that much of the immitation meat consuption is done by those that are still eating an animal protein based diet.
Anecdotally, I am not a huge fan of those products and also find most traditional bean and root vegetable based meals more satisfying. But please keep in mind that many people are navigating their way towards a different way of eating and they can be very sensitive to harse words about their choices.
Especially it would be great to evolve the current US food culture to be vegetarian as well. There is a lot of culture around food that is not just purely about it being tasty food. As a teen, we'd make dumb late night runs to the drive through. We grilled burgers and dogs on Memorial Day. We'd order Pizza and Wings while watching football.
A lot of these traditions were manufactured to begin with and could be wholesale replaced by other food cultures, sure. A lot of people want to change their impact on animal suffering/the environment without 100% swapping out these cultural memories too. I think that's perfectly fair.
Sure I eat Indian food weekly, but it's comforting to feel part of your broader food culture and connected to your childhood rather than needing to avoid all the places your peers frequent.
The market for these products is really omnivores who enjoy meat yet would prefer it to be made without the animal suffering and ecological footprint of meat if such a thing were available. You're never going to get the sort of market share these companies are looking for with only vegans and vegetarians - there simply isn't enough of them.
The vegetarian-curious also really don't need people bullying them about their food choices, that's unnecessary
> I hated vegan and vegetarian food ... it was always the meat replacements like veggie patties and tofurkey type products that turned me away... weird mystery replacement I find on almost every vegan or veggie dish
Completely unfair characterization of "vegan and vegetarian food." I've been a (western) vegetarian for close to two decades and commercial meat replacements are not an have never been a large part of my diet. I eat them MAYBE a few times a year, pretty much exclusively at cookouts.
That being said, that seems to have changed with the Impossible Whopper - that tastes pretty good and has a nice texture, I can see myself ordering that again.
Kebab/Döner without veggie-meat just doesn't do anything for me, for example.
I don't get why people are confused about this. You've grown up with certain expectations of how food is being prepared so it should be obvious that you're interested in supplementing the parts that you don't want to eat anymore with something that's compatible with the way you've been preparing food your whole life.
I think it’s great that these substitutes are being seriously developed because even though they may not be good replications today, they eventually will be, and this will allow meat to stars to have their cake and eat it too when going vegetarian.
Answer: Because taste isn't universal.
Similarly, "gluten-free" is associated with breads, pastas, etc. Not rice or other non-imitation products.
Vegetarians do not want to replace meat. (I mean, they are already vegetarian). Anecdotally, I haven't met a single vegetarian/vegan who is interested in Impossible or Beyond Meat substitutes. Such products are instead very helpful for those who want to reduce read meat in their diet.
Now you've met one.
That's a ridiculous generalisation; it totally depends why they're vegetarian.
Yeah, if it's the taste or the concept of eating meat, they're not going to want a substitute.
But if it's animal cruelty or environmental concerns, those are ameliorated by even lab-grown meats, nevermind the plant-based taste-alikes.
It's dangerous to make blanket statements about what all vegetarians think. For example, on the question of why someone has chosen to be a vegetarian, I've heard a long list of different reasons, including: animal welfare, environment, their own health/longevity/energy, not liking the taste of meat, not enjoying the idea of eating an animal's flesh (even if it were ethical), their religion encourages it, and/or it's their default because they were brought up that way and have never tasted meat.
I'm from NC, so to me "BBQ" means something very specific and that meaning is a point of cultural pride. We like to trash talk our neighbors based on the sauce they use (eastern NC is vinegar-base, Western is ketchup-base, and South Carolina is mustard-based) but we still all agree that the meat is pulled or chopped pork. In Texas and Kansas City they call brisket and ribs "BBQ", and in other places, "BBQ" can just mean a outdoor get-together with anything grilled!
All that is to say that, becoming vegan or vegetarian in NC means losing a fun part of your culture if you throw out meat alternatives. Luckily, there are enterprising folks making amazing meat-free alternatives that still feel authentic to NC-style BBQ (I highly recommend "Fiction Kitchen" in Raleigh for eastern-style).
It's honestly great, if nothing else simply because it makes it easier to be vegan - a huge blocker is often the fact that whilst you're on a road trip or similar your options may well be "eat chips or a cold premade sandwich" otherwise.
Though (as I posted in the other thread) I wish it were easier to source decent food on the go.
McD at CDG had only one non-meat item that wasn't a snack and that was their egg wrap. Even the salads had some kind of cold cuts in there.
Reminds me of old school dinners.
The taste has been fairly ok for a while. It's the nutritional value that's the problem.
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a21566428/beyond-meat-b...
20 g fat, 5 g carb, 20 g protein in a four-ounce Beyond Burger patty.
23 g fat, 0 g carb, 19 g protein in a four-ounce 80/20 beef patty.
Same amount of protein, plenty of fat, only a few carbs added.
The article also says it's full of canola oil which is bad
https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/healthy-eating/what-is-cano...
Initially it's celebrated as a feat of engineering and as the healthy alternative to meat.
After about 10 to 20 years however, we'll see cancer and heart disease rates going up.
And then the billions of dollars spent in health care will pile up, but nobody will readily admit it, because the fuck up will be even bigger than with Margarine.
After all, Margarine is still on the shelves of super markets everywhere, maybe with slightly less trans fats, but it's still there, still advertised as the healthier alternative to butter.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Given fake meat is new and I'm not seeing it in stores nearby yet, I'm going to assume a fair comparison will take another decade, after the studies and the meta analysis show up.
Until then the burden of proof is not on me ;-)
I expect more from HN :-)
It will exactly go the way dessert corn flake breakfast has gone over the decades. A highly taste engineered food, loaded with chemicals and macro nutrient stuff which will give you a lot of diseases on the longer run.
Eating processed food with seed oils in factories is not.
The market is manipulated because of status games using bad science... it will unravel itself soon.
The problem is you are selling processed vegetable mash with salts, chemical preservatives, conditioners and oil as meat.
It's not meat. It is, what it is. Processed vegetable trash. Sell it that way, and its perfectly fine. People can eat it if they want. Let's not signal this as some healthier alternative.
For more information read: Ship Of Theseus.
We could do the same with plant based meat or whatever processed garbage gets sold in its name. We can let millions of people eat that day in and out and watch if they die out of heart disease and cancer over the next decades.
Feel free to sign up.
Personally not going to turn myself or my family into lab rats for these grandiose world changing goals.
No.
> high trans-fat margarines were bad
There's no such thing as "high trans-fats". Industrial trans fats, like from margarine or other ultra-processed products, is unsafe in any quantity, low or high. There is indeed a principle of toxicology that "the dose makes the poison", however in case of trans fats that dose is really, really low.
Also trans fats are indeed contained, in small doses, in natural foods as well. But it's not the same thing: https://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy/
> Red meat is not very hard to beat in terms of negative health outcomes
There is in fact no tangible proof that red meat has negative health outcomes. All you have are surrogate markers and some poor and old observational studies that can't be reproduced in randomized controlled trails.
Also see:
https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/
https://examine.com/nutrition/scientists-just-found-that-red...
To me this seems like the idea that things thought to be much more benign (like cigarettes) are shown to cause cancer so cell phones must cause cancer too, without understanding any fundamentals of that sort of claim.
Looking at the ingredients list, it's pretty obvious that cancer/heart disease will go up.
I've already got a long-term Put Option on $BYND because not even the CEO or big celebrity investors believe it is a good long-term bet -- cashing out at its peak a few weeks back.
Given the relative ease of spreading information about its deleterious health effects of their products, I think it's a house of cards that will fail, the sooner, the better...
What's long-term? I haven't accepted the necessary terms anywhere to see the options (excuse the pun) - but whenever I've seen others' elsewhere the term's not long enough that I'm comfortable enough with it to be interested.
Like I might think 'X is over-valued, that won't last', but I could never confidently say how many Y months it will last.
I, personally, don't like it because my wife has allergy issues with legumes, and they're putting soy and pea protein in _everything_ now (e.g. was surprised to see it in some random almond milk the other day). I know it's a niche concern and it's on us to watch out for, but it's annoying and sort of surprising where it all is now.
I like meat. I don't eat it in large quantities or too often, and I don't think I'll ever go for this product. If I want meat, I'll have it like we've evolved to have it over millenia. YMMV.
I'd recommend checking out Miyoko's recipe for stuff like unribs, if you want some fancier Seitan-based recipes.
Krowarzywa offers Beyond burgers.
29-34PLN - depends on the location.
Also if you're in Warsaw then "Restauracja Zielona" in Arkadia has them as well.
I will prefer to wait for the labgrown meat anyway.
The me from 2 years ago would be overjoyed about this "progress", from an ethical standpoint and from believing that meat is bad for you.
Present me sees this as what it is: another unhealthy product in an already oversaturated marketplace to dupe suckers.
And I am not sure meat consumption is the problem.
Factory farming and industrialized agriculture are the big issues: the greed of the majority of the food supply causes death, destruction, and misery on beings regardless if you are eating kale or cow.
Eat pasture-raised & local if you care about the environment and your own health...
That is in contradiction to every major health organization in the US and abroad. Well balanced vegan and vegetarian diets are healthy and appropriate for every stage of life.
If you care about the environment and want to make food choices that minimize your impact, don't eat animal products, especially beef.
Having low testosterone, constant pain, mental health problems, etc. before and during my vegetarian/vegan experiment seemed like it was "NORMAL".
I read a little bit about the foods I was eating causing inflammation, which has a high impact on all of this, and how keto & carnivore diets were low inflammation, and affected biomarkers that I do not even understand.
I switched to low carb vegetarian, but this did not help much. And it was not satiating. And it's expensive. And, from what I've read from the authorities I somewhat trust, it is not as healthy.
I then switch to all meat (literally steak, eggs, butter, and salt) for a couple of weeks and my mood and body composition improved immensely. I wouldn't recommend that diet long-term, but it made me realize that life did not have to be as miserable as it was on the vegetarian diet...
Tastes are different. Surprise surprise.
Unrelated - anyone wanna invest in my new startup? We're gonna cross DNA from a spider with a chicken to produce 8 legged chickens to disrupt the chicken market. Hopefully we don't get spiders with wings.
I found the bit about Heinz more or less inventing the assembly line to be fascinating.
It’s called meat because it tastes and feels like meat. It’s a perfectly cromulent word to use because it describes what the product is.
Soy beans don't have nipples.
Once the difference between real meat and artificial meat is closed in terms of flavor and texture (to the point where most meat eaters will not have a huge preference) then the framing being taken now will pay dividends.
But, do all these anti-meat people not care about all the cows and chickens that got to exist because people love eating their tasty flesh?
There are millions of vegans around the world who can "survive" without meat: they just get their protein from other places.
> A healthy vegan diet can meet all your nutrient needs at any stage of life including when you are pregnant, breastfeeding or for older adults. https://www.dietitians.ca/Downloads/Factsheets/Guidlines-for...
"fried plant-based ‘chicken’" it makes no sense at all
A lot of it is egged on by the vegan/vegetarians and is the definition of false advertising.
I saw "vegan" mince in the meat section the other day. I feel sorry for the elderly or learning impaired who might be accidentally buying soy substitutes when their bodies are craving meat.
For example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074YGZ77H/
I only can interpret that label because I'm now cynically familiar with the deceptive advertising practices currently used. But, to someone not used to how advertisers try to make one thing seem to be another, saying 'beyond meat' is 'plant based' does not communicate this thing is just a bunch of vegetables.
This is a bad-faith argument.
I also suspect people who deem beef burgers "plant-based" on a colloquial level are few and far between.
What does 'beyond meat' tell me? 'beyond' tells me we are going somewhere with 'meat' as our starting point and destination unknown.
The one thing this does not communicate is that the contents are not meat.
As for the wording, I don't see why its any different from veggie burger, or diet soda. Consumers associate these products with certain properties, which can be emulated in the substitutes.
Do you feel the same way about soy milk or almond milk?
Quotes and asterisks are as you said not always sufficiently visible differentiators, but misspellings like "Chikken" or the like will usually be trademarked by a particular organization and not be available for widespread usage.
The real crime is that we are gonna have to think of a different name for non-euclidean chicken products.
Secondly, language doesn't work that way so we end up soy milk, grasshopper pie, sweetbread, head cheese, cocoa butter, Bombay duck, Rocky Mountain oysters, coconut meat, Welsh rabbit, Mississippi caviar, chicken fingers, ladyfingers, Jerusalem artichokes, and Grapenuts.
To further illustrate your point, imagine trying to replicate carrots using only veal and calling it something like "calf-rots", it absolutely makes no sense. Your issue is primarily with the false representation, my issue is that we're intentionally making it harder to sell vegan/vegetarian alternatives by trying to replicate something unachievable instead of coming up with entirely new products. For example, I highly suspect there's an entire food category like bread that we haven't discovered yet.
Except they are achieving it. I've eaten Beyond Meat patties and they are close enough and good enough. As a 'vegan-curious' eater, products like Beyond Meat are a halfway point which eases the transition to a vegan diet (or at least a diet more balanced towards non-meat products).
As more people become more comfortable moving from 7-days a week meat-eating to something less, that is only going to help the vegan market.
Beyond Meat will do more to shift a portion of consumers across to vegan diets (at this point in history) than making new 'pure' vegan products.
Very few people eat sirloin steak everyday and so Beyond Meat isn't going to do much for the in terms of transitioning people who primarily eat cheaper meats.
On the other hand, Margarine (invented in the 1800's) converted tons of people from a purely animal product to one that doesn't need animal products without marketing it as "plant based".
That's not really their target market at the moment though. They are aiming their product at 'vegan-curious' people. People who are not adverse to eating more vegetarian products, frequently want to because of environmental/animal welfare reasons, but don't want to cos they like the taste of meat.
Also, it's still very early days though - Beyond Meat can barely keep up with demand and haven't optimised their production at all. I see no reason their price curve wouldn't follow the traditional curve of almost any product where the early premium prices drop as production process matures and output ramps up.
Veal carrots are not a thing only because there's no market for veal eaters who enjoy eating carrots yet have ethical and environmental concerns about it.
I'm a meat eater who's never opted for a meat substitute in my life until these options. They absolutely have started to achieve being a replacement. I don't need it to reliably pass as beef in a blind taste test, I just need it to be good while being essentially a burger. (Or whatever.)
I was never going to try a chunk of tofu no matter how many people insist that it can be great. I tried this because people say it tastes like a burger. Some people want a new experience and some people want a familiar one.
Maybe this will be a gateway item that will demystify plant-based food for me and others and make me more likely to try future products that don't mimic meat.
I don't consider myself problematic for eating meat. However, clinging to meat on principle, to the point of getting triggered like this with accusations and insults, is just shitty.