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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fascinating how all these fast-food chains are jumping on artificial meat. It makes perfect sense: meat is expensive and difficult to work with, so low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.

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.

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Can you make a clearer, better-cited case for "low cost chains serve meat that could barely even be called meat"? KFC serves (primarily) whole muscle chicken†, and the general US appetite for "dark meat" chicken is so low that we've been accused of "dumping" it on other countries and messing up their markets --- KFC seems to have no trouble sourcing its inputs effectively. KFC's suppliers include all the major chicken producers; the same firms that put chicken breasts on the shelves at grocery stores. KFC's biggest competitor is going antibiotic-free this year; at least one of KFC's suppliers already has. That's a step past supermarket chicken.

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.

It's been setting the standard for shitty meat though. Try a Tyson breast and one from a local farm and you don't even need to taste it to know it's different.

I've invested money in a local butcher in Chicago and source pretty much all of my protein from another one closer to me. I'm familiar with the locavore argument and agree that the quality is higher. There are still higher levels of quality to be reached by sourcing heritage birds, and you can optimize for flavor even more by sourcing game birds. Where do you draw the line? I'd rather eat a local farm chicken than a Tyson breast, just like I'd rather eat a dry-aged ribeye than a wet-packed eye of round. That doesn't make the eye of round somehow inedible or "barely meat".

The term "barely meat" as used in the parent was definitely talking about the ground beef you get at fast food restaraunts. Which has been shown in lots of cases to contain additives, notably taco bell etc. You brought up chicken because it's harder to call it barely meat, but fast food chicken is still shittier.

"Shittier" how? Chick-Fil-A's fast-food chicken is likely better than the median supermarket chicken (it's all supposedly antibiotic-free now). I'd like to see a better grounded argument, one that doesn't depend entirely on the premise that "fast food meat must be shitty because we disdain fast food".

All chicken in the US is technically antibiotic-free. [1]

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/overuse-of-antibiotics/what-...

Here I think we’re referring to the “raised without antibiotics” standard.

(Point of order: tptacek probably brought up chicken because TFA is about KFC, a purveyor of ... chicken.)

The article is about plant-based meat replacements. I think it's ludicrous how everyone in this thread seems to think it's oh so important to argue whether their real meat is actually really good or not.

I'm only speaking anecdotally, but I have in mind Taco Bell's ground beef and McNuggets, for example. Cane's chicken, by contrast, always seems surprisingly high-quality.

McNuggets are just ground chicken (ground white mean and skin). There are loads of videos available online that dispute the whole 'pink slime' myth, at least when it comes to chicken mcnuggets.

Do you know why people think it's bad meat compared to the supermarket? Is it just the general attitude society has developed towards fast-food and big business?

I don't mind KFC but Taco Bell meat always seemed a bit...off and low quality.

Because the meat you buy in the grocery store goes bad after a few days, and (here is where I think parent is being slightly intellectually dishonest) while it is true that the fast food companies certainly source their meats from authentic, standard-holding institutions, that's only the beginning. That isn't to say the rounds of processing and preservation that occurs afterwards. You can't just buy a McDonalds chicken nugget off the shelf. Sure the inputs are the same, but the outputs are vastly different, and that's where the perceived difference in quality comes from. Fast food optimizes for longentivity, ease of cooking so they can reduce the labor costs associated in preparing that meat, and eliminating sanitation issues so they reduce their total liability and loss around food borne illnesses so they can reduce the labor costs associated in preparing that meat for you. That is why McDonalds undergoes the painstaking process of sanitizing their meat with an ammonia wash (prompted by the 90's nationwide beef e-coli outbreaks that resulted in serious litigation against popular burger joints), then adding in artificial flavorings back in to make it taste like a burger again (furthermore this is how McDonalds achieves that "miraculous" feat often described here when this topic comes up of having their burgers taste the same and have the same consistent product everywhere for over 20 years).

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)

I appreciate you have some first hand experience here, but this is a very HN-style axiomatic argument --- "restaurants must have issues with meat going bad that ordinary people don't, ergo their meat must somehow be mummified with preservatives". Isn't it in fact the case that fast food restaurants have, relative to supermarket consumers as an entire cohort, extremely high and predictable turnover?

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.

> I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.

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.

AFAIK this is specific to tuna and done by places like fish markets, that publicly display it. A restaurant would most likely be getting it frozen and vac packed.

That is why McDonalds undergoes the painstaking process of sanitizing their meat with an ammonia wash (prompted by the 90's nationwide beef e-coli outbreaks that resulted in serious litigation against popular burger joints), then adding in artificial flavorings back in to make it taste like a burger again (furthermore this is how McDonalds achieves that "miraculous" feat often described here when this topic comes up of having their burgers taste the same and have the same consistent product everywhere for over 20 years).

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. "

Full disclaimer: Info coming from a variety of sources: some documentaries which I know have their own inaccuracies, some my own personal experience in food service, and specifically working at McDonalds, and some having an ex-girlfriend of 3 years who was the district manager of another international large fast food burger chain, so by chance that gleaned me a lot of insight into the inner workings of fast food burger chains (he was previously a DM of several Golden Arches)

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.

McDonalds does in fact use 100% USDA-inspected beef, with "no fillers, additives, or preservatives", and explicitly does not use mechanically separated meat. It's not "organic", but then, most beef isn't.

Then I am happy to say I am happy for their recent changes, this certainly wasn’t the case a few years ago when I wrote them off, and even more not the case 10 years ago when I was still in the industry. I think it should be promoted as an example that consumer pressure and expectations can cause companies to change for the better.

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.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write them off. McDonalds fries are solid, but everything else there is terrible. And fast food is in general bad, and I don't want to be coming off like I'm saying that people should eat more of it.

McDonalds is great. Especially the breakfast menu items: egg McMuffin, chicken biscuit, etc. nuggets are solid too.

They haven't used ammonia wash or "lean beef trimmings" since around 2011.

The ammonia is a bad scene, but the idea of using TG to repurpose "trimmings" isn't something we should be demonizing; if you're going to kill animals to feed people, you should be maximizing the yield (of muscle protein, that is). This is just an extension of the idea that if you're going to eat pork chops, you shouldn't be grossed out by the idea of eating offal; however ecologically irresponsible it is to eat meat at all, it must be more irresponsible to waste it because it squicks you out to eat anything but a loin chop.

(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.)

I am totally with you on this one. I feel similar about GMOs. The business behind GMOs isn't always the greatest, but we need all the help we can get.

Only the quarter pounder is fresh beef. The rest is frozen. If you look at places that review fast food, they unanimously applauded the fresh beef quarter pounder - they did have a discernible difference in quality.

The ammonia (when it was present) was present in such small amounts that it couldn't conceivably have altered the flavor, and they were never using "chemical food flavoring." The only change they've made recently is using fresh instead of frozen for a few products. It has always been just beef.

On their ingredients page ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html ) it says that the patty consists of:

"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.

USDA has a pretty wide definition for what constitutes as ground beef[1]:

> 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...

McDonald's even did a promotional video with Grant from MythBusters about their chicken nuggets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X1K9YukRlg

My favorite thing was when Wendy's did its "never frozen" campaign. As if freezing was the problem. It's not going to magically last just as long if you don't freeze it, you have to close that gap with more preservatives.

Meat can last a long time without rotting, it just loses flavor faster compared to other foods.

If you're trying to minimize cost, you're better off buying the right quantity of meat to begin with rather than buying preservatives.

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.

Isn't is possible that the cost of preservatives could be less than the cost associated with splitting your orders into more deliveries?

Isn't it possible that someone could just do research and work this out, rather than trying to derive it axiomatically?

Taco Bell's "ground beef" is listed as "fit for human consumption" in the back-end systems.

[Former Yum! engineer]

The boxes in which the steaks were delivered to the moderately-high-priced steakhouse (so higher price than your usual family restaurant but lower price than That One Fancy Place Where All Of The Business People Go) in which I worked as a teenager also read "fit for human consumption." We would write "not" on them with a Sharpie as we unloaded the truck because 17-year-olds are soooo clever.

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.

Arby's

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/02/01/mcdonalds-ann...

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.

I know subway chicken is already a mashup of chicken and soy based fillers.

This[1] paper has nothing to do with KFC or their chicken per-se, but it did make me steer clear of fast food burgers for a long time.

[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%)."

50% of it was water though so that’s not so bad I guess.

"The purpose of this study is to assess the content of 8 fast food hamburger brands"

It is unclear from the abstract whether they were measuring the entire hamburger, including the bun and other condiments, or just the burger portion.

That's kind of misleading though, because they're counting water and "meat" separately. Water is itself a major component of cow musculature (50-75% percent, depending on the type of muscle), so this method would conclude that a slab of steak is mostly not-meat.

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.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/42a903e2-451d-40ea...

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.

Intensively reared supermarket poultry is hardly a standard. Not in the UK anyway. Various respected media outlets have done undercover investigations in to the poultry supply chain. High-profile chefs have done campaigns to increase welfare and change buying habits. The RSPCA have serious concerns about intensively reared birds.

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...

Just anecdotal, but I was once chatting on a plane with a guy working as a meat buyer for a major dog food brand. He told me his work was to negotiate the cheapest thing that would pass legally as meat as possible, in the biggest quantity as possible. He then mentioned in passing that his toughest competition was Mc Donald's.

McDonalds is the toughest competition for literally anyone in the US that buys beef.

I've heard very similar tales. A local lad who works at a very large meat processing factory, McDonalds buy the cheapest meat possible. Other chains buy middle of the range meat.

You totally misread the person you are replying to. They are speaking about fast-food chains general. In fact they only mention one chain by name and it's not KFC.

>Can you make a clearer, better-cited case for "low cost chains serve meat that could barely even be called meat"?

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...

Unless McDonalds is committing fraud by listing chicken breast fillet (and no other proteins) in the ingredients for its grilled chicken sandwich, this is likely measurement error.

I have no idea what Subway is selling. Subway squicks me out, as does Taco Bell.

Little known secret: Subway's Cold Cut Combo is all turkey

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.

>Parmesan (cheese byproduct and sawdust)

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.

I can only speak for myself but I strongly prefer zero sawdust in my parmesan.

Unless you're grating it from a block every time you use it --- which, yes, is what you should do --- you probably shouldn't worry too much about which anti-caking agents are being used.

>> Little known secret:

(turkey based) is all over their signs, menus, etc in the fine print.

Exactly why would anyone care that there are "California Port wines"? That's a good thing. The Portuguese make "ports" out of all sorts of grape varietals, and California has excellent grapes.

As pointed out elsewhere, taco beef shouldn't be expected to be near 100% beef. Adding various seasonings and spices is what makes it "taco."

Your linked article makes the point that other chains hit the expected values for prepared chicken, Subway was an outlier.

You’re conflating two different things. One is the meat used in the Taco Bell filling, which is 100% beef. Two is the overall composition of the filling, which you’d obviously not expect to be 100% beef. (If you put onions in your taco filling, by that same math, your taco filling isn’t 100% beef either.)

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.)

High end restaurants aren't skimping on ingredients to survive on razor thin margins in a cut-throat value-driven market segment.

What difference does that make?

The outcome is going to be different if a chef uses an unusual ingredient to create an experience, vs a chain using that same ingredient to cut costs, because they have different incentives. The chain has an incentive to buy from the cheapest source, and using more of a filler ingredient can help them cut costs. These factors aren't relevant for a high-end restaurant where the cost of ingredients is less significant to the bottom line.

I'm pretty certain the quality control for taco bell meat sourcing is leaps and bounds better than most boutique restaurants.

Leaps and bounds better, or just a much more complicated process? Because I'd put a butcher that I know and trust, and my own judgement in food preparation, ahead of any fast food supply chain process, and the same goes for any well-regarded restaurant with a basically competent chef.

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.

Ever look at powdered Parmesan cheese shakers? Cellulose is added to prevent clumping and I suppose as filler too. You're eating pretty much something very close to sawdust in the cheese.

I've presumed that the reason Taco Bell uses the word beefy was because they can't legally call it beef. Much like cheap "cheese" is a processed dairy product and not actually labeled as cheese.

They call it "seasoned beef", because it's seasoned. As a taco should be.

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

It's usually labelled processed cheese product, and there's really nothing scary about it. It's cheese (actual, normal cheese) emulsified with some form of milk.

I occasionally make my own (with tastier cheeses than you get in commercial products) for its melting characteristics.

For those who don't know various feed conversion ratios offhand:

{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...

I had to look it up, but FCR is "Feed Conversion Rate", or "food in over product out", so lower is better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

> and the general US appetite for "dark meat" chicken is so low

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.

Agreed. The fried thigh meat here in the fancy-recreations-of-blue-collar NYC restaurants is delicious, decadent even. I wonder how long until folks catch on.

I agree on the flavor but I think part of it is that it's a lot of hassle and just doesn't look as appealing as breast meat. There's a higher chance of biting into gristle/something hard, the meat can be "slimy", and I find that at chains that do "fried chicken", at least, they do a generally poorer job of breading the meat. It's not crunchy and battered like a "chicken tender". Thighs are a different matter since you can pick/scrape off the bone with a knife and fork, but they're also larger so the batter to chicken ratio is sub-optimal.

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.

"Boneless wings" are just pieces of breast shaped vaguely like wings. Or processed meat, like nuggets.

I don't think meat should be optimized for how easily you can mindlessly stuff it down your throat without paying attention, though.

"Boneless wings" are nothing more than chicken nuggets with a fancy name.

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.

> Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.

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.)

Kenji Alt debunked this, and did a test to confirm; the bone insulates the meat and evens out cooking, but doesn't add flavor.

Is this really the thing you want to pick and argue about? About whether it is hyperbole or not to call the stuff that is NOT the subject of this article, low quality?

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.

> low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.

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.

You seem to be in the know. What on earth is in a Jack In The Box taco?

It's not really about being in the know, it's common sense. Could McDonald's survive if they were selling garbage meat? I mean,it's possible. But why not just serve 100% ground beef exactly like you say you do, and charge consumers accordingly and make billions of dollars over many decades.

> Could McDonald's survive if they were selling garbage meat?

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)

last i checked, soy, oats, etc were not spices

I don't see any oats, and the soy is soy lecithin, which is an emulsifier for the beef and fat.

https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien...

Soy is an emulsifier, and oats are used for texture. Last thing I'm going to complain about eating in fast food is oats, though.

> I wish this urban legend would die.

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.

Look at the fat, salt and sugar content of what you're eating from McDonald's

It's no closer to food than Doritos or Coke are.

Fries and Coke are fries and Coke.

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.

The yellow, sugary bun is nothing I would ever bring into my own home. Not being American I'm always shocked by how low-quality the bread in the US is. Neither is the cheese, or the ground beef which would be the lowest quality possible meat in existence. What exactly did they feed those cows, and what antibiotics were they given?

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.

Fast food buns don't tend to be particularly yellow or sugary. That's brioche, or called brioche-style at least, and comes with a price premium.

A typical meal from McDonald's would be much higher in protein than a meal of doritos and/or coke. Probably better micro-nutrient profile too, although my no means would it be good.

The fat and salt content of the meal I’d get at a fancy restaurant is also very high, but nobody would call that “not real food.” Yuppies only fixate about the nutritional content of fast food because the proles eat it. It’s a species of virtue signaling.

Of course you could choose to buy that - but that's like saying I'll fly to Cancun and stay in the worst possible $1/night hotel... obviously you're going to have a bad time.

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.

You've missed his point. People are apt to call fast food not-food supposedly because of its lack of nutritional value, but don't respond in the same way to something like an expensive steak with Bearnaise sauce and buttery mashed potatoes.

It makes perfect sense: meat is expensive and difficult to work with, so low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.

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.

> When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte.

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?!”

However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad.

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.

I realize that sourcing wikipedia is kind of lazy but I lack the time to read entire books full of every sort of misinformation that happens to be going around.

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.

Every book taking a stance on a controversial subject is going to have those kinds of criticisms from the opposite side. It doesn't make those criticisms true.

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.

The criticism doesn't appear to merely come from some "opposing side" but also from disinterested observers without a particular dog in the fight.

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.

>I think our present trajectory is obviously unsustainable

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.

I think technology and science inherently empowers a smaller and smaller number to a greater and greater degree while the size of the playing field remains the same.

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.

Instead of debating a bad book or whether meat is good or bad for you which I don't know enough about would you like to talk about the ethics? I eat meat myself.

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?

> 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.

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.

For what values of XY?

Those aren't variables, it's a common-era year in Base 36, so in base 10, that's A.D. 94,534.

At least, I think that's about when it's likely to happen.

They will eventually stop selling beef burgers made from real cows. Lab grown meat will replace them. I don't know enough about the current state of lab grown meat to give an estimate for XY, but it seems inevitable to me.

Ground meat is almost certainly the lowest bar for substituting. I'd argue the artificial meat is already pretty close (although probably at a higher cost, at least at the low end). There are probably gourmet burgers that are still better--though high-end meat cuts are at least somewhat of a waste in a burger.

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.]

Impossible Burger isn't lab-grown meat

What would you consider Impossible Burger, if not lab-grown meat?

A plant-based burger. Lab-grown meat is made from animal cells

The "lab-grown" term is [EDIT: sometimes and apparently incorrectly] used for plant-based meat substitutes like Impossible Burger. It probably shouldn't be, but it is.

I honestly don’t think there can be any argument there. Plant-based meat substitutes have been around for a long time, are emphatically not “lab grown meat”, and I have never heard anybody refer to them as such. That’s a distinct category which has also been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years.

For example:

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.

These say "lab-grown veggie burger" and "lab-grown Impossible Burger" but never "lab-grown meat"

I have never heard anyone so confused that they can't tell the difference between "animal that was never alive" and "made from vegetable products". This isn't confusing, and I will need evidence to believe that it is "widely used". I don't think I've ever even heard someone attempt to conflate the two before you.

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.

I honestly don't care what people call the different types of meat substitutes. Plant-based meat seems a bit odd to me because it's not, you know, meat. But it seems to be the term in use.

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 haven't seen many offerings saying plant-based meat.

I've seen plant-based burger, plant-based sausage, etc.

There are only 579,000 results for that phrase from a Google search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22plant-based+meat%22&oq=%2...

102,000 of those are "plant-based meat alternatives". 46,700 are for "plant-based meat substitutes". I'd imagine there are quite a few other synonyms that continue to winnow it down.

I guarantee you that people are only doing this by accident when you see it.

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.

There is no meat in it, lab-grown or otherwise. It is made of plants and chemicals. It just tastes similar and cooks similar and gets used similarly.

I suppose you could call falafel a lab-grown kibbeh or kofta ball? But nobody does.

A plant based substitute...? They aren't growing meat, have never claimed to be meat, and are marketing specifically to those who don't eat meat

When they do that it will take most american farmers down with them, along with all the people working in the meat plants. The environment is not good, but of course the alternative is unemployment, especially when most of the farms also go under.

I would prefer we help transition those people to new careers than continue to destroy the environment with beef production.

That would be nice. How many else are going to be focusing on that transition?

I'm not sure what you're getting at with this question.

it's a matter of volume. i don't expect beef to go away but the volume sold will massively decrease. there will always be the "real deal" crowd who will pay higher prices for it.

Always? What if the other stuff is just better? It’s not like cow is some platonic ideal for a burger patty, and other ingredients can only approach but never surpass it.

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.

Shark fin soup is actually not that tasty (or so I've heard), yet people eat it and pay a lot for it.

The texture is nifty, the taste is whatever soup it's in. Its the kind of food with no taste of its own, but it speaks up whatever it touches.

> It’s not like cow is some platonic ideal for a burger patty

Well, no, that's lamb.

"Gross" being defined as amount of chemicals, likelihood to be spoiled and/or make you sick, etc.

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.

"Gross" should also include treatment of the animals. Animals raised in CAFOs, for example, are treated in a way that's pretty gross.

I don't like this definition of gross. If it were true, then cooking something would serve to make it far more gross. Hundreds, if not thousands of new chemical compounds are created via the Maillard reaction.

Food that can make you sick isn't necessarily gross tasting.

Spoiled food is definitely gross, though.

Pedantry isn't helpful. You knew what I meant by "chemicals": flavor additives, preservatives, antibiotics, etc.

None of which are generally present in fast food beef.

No, I didn't know that when you said "chemicals" you meant "food additives that are recognized as safe but I dislike".

Thank you for clearing that up, much appreciated.

> Spoiled food is definitely gross, though.

There are probably more than a few foods you eat that are technically "spoiled" - it's just termed differently, like "fermented" or "aged".

Fast-food beef is retired dairy cows and flavorings made in a lab. Gross. Many people don't know or don't care. There are enough people that do care to significantly impact their bottom line though. For better or worse.

I think the conditions most animals are raised in would be considered gross by virtually any observer who took a close look. Subjective, sure, but the same way that emergency room surgery is only subjectively gross.

If you’ve ever made the trip to Auschwitz, you’ll be able to find many parallels to modern dairy farms and factory farms.

> Which is “less gross” is highly objective.

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.

> ... can be both cheaper ...

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US heavily subsidize meat costs?

yes. and corn and soy production is also subsidized which is fed to livestock.

Unless I missed it in TFA, it doesn't say that the raw materials (the meat) are more expensive but rather that the product is more expensive. If a fast food chain can charge more for cheaper materials, that's a double win for them.

I imagine that that difference is going mostly to recoup R&D costs at e.g. Impossible right now, who is making the patties.

for now I expect you're correct. But in the long run it should ideally have really nice margins. Once Beyond and Impossible get a version that is as close as it needs to be, they can start focusing on supply chain and stuff like that.

Agree w/ you & GP, and I suspect that the parent of my reply is actually correct. I just didn't think the linked article supported the claim.

Could also be due to scaling costs and farming subsidies on meat vs the plants used in Impossible Burgers.

For now. But as more people start selecting the plant based substitute, the cost will come down because of volume.

I would assume the margins are really high. It's a premium product right now because they're still building out a market and because there was a big up-front research investment, but the fundamental sustainability of the raw materials and process must be miles better than raising cattle.

On the other hand, Swedish fast food chain Max has a pretty good "plant beef" burger made of wheat and soy protein, and it costs the same as the meat version.

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).

Watch when it has zero impact on climate change because the extensive ingredient list on the beyond meat burger which requires a huge supply chain shipping products all around the country along with a complicated manufacturing process requiring energy ends up having a similar environmental impact to simple animal farming.

Even if the environmental impact is nil, I'm fine with the reduction in suffering imposed on tens of billions of animals a year. The scale of suffering created by the meat industry is unfathomable so I think this is a step in the right direction regardless.

Here's just one thing our ag industry does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_u0jxi_v-w (male chick maceration). Nice video to enjoy with your factory farmed eggs.

Your local want ads will have home raised eggs at below store prices in most areas. I suggest supporting your local farmers and ranchers as the best offset against factory farms.

That'll soon be a thing of the past.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...

The supply chain on meat is pretty extensive. Modern animal farming is basically an industrial process that happens to use flesh-and-blood as host organisms for meat.

No doubt. But until we quantify it throwing out baseless assumptions is ridiculous either way. It can't just be said "Beyond Meat" is better for the environment without any numbers or data to back that up.

Livestock contributes around 15% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Produce fundamentally has a smaller impact, in part due to its relative simplicity. I don't know how much processing is required for these products after-the-fact, but I know that at least one of the recent pivotal innovations was in genetic engineering, not processing.

Veggie burgers don't grow on trees - they are highly advanced industrial end products with million-mile supply chains. I don't get why people can't just eat vegetables if they want to be vegetarians. Instead of being unhealthy from eating too many grams of well-understood macronutrients (where dieting is easy, just eat less), we're all going to be unhealthy from eating to many micrograms of beef simulating molecules.

at this point most vegetables are highly advanced industrial products with million-mile supply chains, at least if you shop at your average American grocery.

These vegetarian burgers aren't particularly healthy, but it's because of their salt content.

I've never heard of a veggie burger with chemical flavoring. Most of them aren't intended to simulate beef; they're a combination of various savory, protein-rich plants and some seasoning. I'm not a vegetarian, but sometimes I enjoy a bean patty anyway.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Foods

There have been studies. Here is one done by the University of Michigan (I believe specifically about Beyond, since they commissioned the research or something like that). http://css.umich.edu/publication/beyond-meats-beyond-burger-...

It's been a while, but I remember findings signalling something like 30% less emissions?

Yea I saw that one, and I agree it's a good starting point and far better than nothing. The results are interesting, although it should be noted it was directly commissioned by Beyond Meat themselves.

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).

I hope that's not the case. I'm much more concerned that although these might help the environment they might not be great for the health of the people eating them. These "plant-based" foods aren't exactly food that humans or animals have ever eaten in their diet. IMO the better thing is if you want to cut back on meat, eat a salad. These meat replacements aren't anything you can cook up at home so be wary.

I’ve shared this a few times on this site but this BBC article [0] is pretty clear - red meat (beef in particular) is vastly worse than veg alternatives. [1] breaks it down a bit farther and shoes that the transport and processing associated with foods is a minuscule part of their impact (mostly) - the impact of processing/transporting beef is more than the entire impact of any other vegetable on the chart.

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...

[1]

> a complicated manufacturing process requiring energy ends up having a similar environmental impact to simple animal farming.

"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.

the economic argument has always been the strongest in my eyes, and it's unstoppable. animals are a huge liability health wise, pollution wise, environment wise, activism wise, logistic wise, etc. most companies don't care about all that stuff at the surface level, but it all translates into dollar signs, which they do care about.

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)

You were probably thinking it, but you didn't explicitly mention the No. 1 cost - raising the cattle. An animal that large is probably both delicate and expensive as it grows to maturity.

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.

I'm not sure the environmental arguments support entirely eliminating cattle agriculture. Factory farming with cows kept indoors and fed purpose grown feed, certainly. But there's a lot of scrubland out there that doesn't have enough water for agriculture but which can still support grazing. That can't support anything like our current beef consumption but it could support a fair amount

> a lot of scrubland out there that doesn't have enough water for agriculture

That's for the solar panels!

Why do you think plant-based meats are lower calories than regular meat? IIRC they are pretty similar as far as calories go.

There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier. Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?

1. Because I don't eat meat outside of fish. This is both a lifestyle choice and a health thing: I don't have a gall bladder and my digestive track is much happier if I stay away from greasy foods, especially animal fats. I'll occasionally get an upset stomach from fish or fried eggs still, but it isn't an everyday thing.

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.

The OP that the person was responding to used the phrase "Plant-based meat" which to me at least sounds specific to these type of imitation meat burgers like impossible/Beyond Meat, not just a normal veggie burger.

In terms of Impossible/Beyond Meat, health seems kind of a wash.

> filled with carbs

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.

> And that's bad?

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.

> And that's bad?

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.

> Why do you think plant-based meats are lower calories than regular meat?

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.

Take beef vs. Impossible Burger as an example. These articles have some detailed info:

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.

Meat has been highly produced because the gov’t of Nixon’s era and today’s era has been buying up tons of bushels of grain(1). The gov’t bought grain to help support & subsidize farmers and ranchers. Grain is convenient to offload as cattle feed. Cheap cattle feed encourages raising cattle. Cow farts contribute over 40% of the world’s methane(2). Methane contributes 34 times more towards global warming per unit than carbon dioxide.

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

> Cow farts contribute over 40% of the world’s methane. Methane contributes 34 times more towards global warming per unit than carbon dioxide.

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.

I used to link to the EPA but I learned this week that they might be a captured agency(1). They used to have a website section devoted to methane, it’s sources, and it’s contribution but it’s either been taken down or I simply can’t find it.

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!

> Plant-based meat, on the other hand, can be both cheaper

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.

it actually is cheaper. its just the govt subsidizes meat and livestock feed so real meat is artificially cheaper.

The one for $1.49 probably didn't have much more meat than the other one. Sorry! Sorry.... Had to do it....

I think you're absolutely right! And they even have been offering vegetarian options in other countries for some time.

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.

They probably see a coming PR storm of anti-meat sentiment as our environment and collective health goes down the drain. And going a more veggie heavy route just doesn't work well for fast food except in the form of heavily processed stuff like meat substitutes.

I worked at KFC for several years in Australia, the chicken was quite fresh.

All of the fastfood chains based in united states have much better quality abroad.

That's definitely not true. McDonald's and Burger King were both markedly worse in my experience. A shame in-n-out isn't abroad, and haven't found a Taco Bell or Wendy's yet. Not that I would really go out of my way to eat fast food overseas now that I'm an adult... I don't even eat these things in the US.

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.

I mean, where are you comparing to? Anecdotally, in Sweden, I have a friend who used to work for a huge slaughterhouse/meat distributor (pardon me if there is a better term). According to him, the beef that was sold to McDonalds was only high quality. This was around ten years ago, mind you.

depends where you were abroad, i would rank most above USA and a few slightly below.

I should have said almost.

I agree this is generally true, but it definitely depends on the country you're talking about.

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.

A&W Rootbeer is much better in Canada - I think they use sugar instead of corn syrup - something - it's really good there

Strangely enough A&W in Canada is now a completely different company than A&W in the US. Their logos are even slightly different.

EDIT: I mean the restaurant chain, I'm not sure of the root beer itself.

A&W restaurants was/is a completely different company than the drink company. I worked for Yum! Brands when they bought the A&W brand and we all thought we would get some good root beer out of the deal. Nope, the soda didn't come with the restaurant.

Also they've been completely left out of the vegetarian market other than for snacks.

French fries and soda are vegetarian.

Depends what they've been fried in and how picky you are.

There was a lawsuit a few years back when vegetarians discovered that McDonald's was flavoring their fries with beef juice. I do think they've since stopped the practice.

I'm still fucking mad about that. Frying in beef juice made them taste so much better.

Well, no one wins since they no longer use beef tallow, but do add beef flavoring to the spuds.

So we can't eat them and people who liked the tallow-fried ones don't enjoy them as much (?)

The “natural beef flavor” doesn't, AFAIK, have beef in it (except insofar as hydrolyzed milk protein, originating as it does in a cow, is “beef”.) The construction “natural X flavor” in an ingredient list means “flavorings that can legally be described as natural which are intended to simulate X”.

https://www.thoughtco.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-still-not-v...

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).

So is this to say that McDonalds' fries are lacto-ovo-vegetarian, but not vegan? I'm not vegan myself, but I find this a strange category for fried potatoes to end up in.

McD's fries died the day they stopped using tallow.

I'm still saddened that Pringles aren't cooked in peanut oil any longer - they tasted so much better before; now they're fairly bland (regular version).

Nope, they still cook them in beef juice.

In the US they use flavorings derived from milk and wheat.

And natural beef flavors...

> There was a lawsuit a few years back when vegetarians discovered that McDonald's was flavoring their fries with beef juice.

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 weren't “flavoring them with beef juice”, they were frying them in tallow.

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.

Malcolm Gladwell did an entire podcast episode on this. It wasn't a few years ago, it was like the early 90s. And it wasn't that vegetarians were pissed, it was because someone had a heart attack from eating terribly, and then made it his mission to run a campaign against the "dangerously" unhealthy fries made from beef tallow. Eventually McDonalds caved for PR purposes.

> other than for snacks

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.

…in the US. They’ve been doing vegetarian options in Europe for at least 20 years.

Maybe at McDonalds but KFC are usually meat only besides the side salads.

Haven’t been to one in a while, but my local one apparently has a halloumi burger: http://kfc.nu/var-meny/burgers/halloumi-burger/

kfc.nu ? Why that TLD?

Sweden has a big history with .nu (“now” in Swedish) and .se seems to be taken by a local business. Doesn’t seem to have stopped kfc.com from trying to redirect to kfc.se though when clicking on the “take me to my local site” button, oops.

Good catch, it must be hard to keep track of all of the global business's different domain names in a giant company like that.

Not where I am. Now, I've only been to a McDonald's once since I moved here (Norway), but if I didn't eat fish, I'd have nothing but fries.

They do offer three vegetarian burgers (apparently variations on the same patty), vegan nuggets, and a vegan salad.[1] It’s not as good as the vegan burger they have in Sweden, but it’s a start.

[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/no/nb-no/meny/vegetar.html

They do sell salads

It makes sense the same way it makes sense for KFC to replace honey with "honey sauce", (main ingredient corn syrup). I personally have no interest in eating plant-based substitutes for my food.

The verdict is not yet in on whether Beyond Meat's products are actually healthier for you than real meat. Beyond Meat certainly makes this claim, but there exists debate[1].

[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/beyond-meat-burger-beef-hea...

Funny thing that I heard recently. McDonalds is the greats buyer of chicken in the US. Quite surprising, considering they don't even have that much chicken in their menu.

Pretty sure their nuggets are a huge seller

They are, but they don't contain much chicken meat. 40% of the filler is meat and the rest is "other"[0] (fat, tissue, spicule, etc). Including the breading the majority of the weight of a chicken nugget isn't chicken meat.

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...

McDonalds changed it to use white boneless chicken a few years back.

That was a misleading marketing push. Here is their exact wording:

> 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.

I find the Chick-Fil-A stuff tends to have way to much sodium. I just can't tolerate that saltiness.

They do have roughly 30% more salt (122.5mg/per nugget of sodium vs. 85mg/per nugget at McDonalds).

The ingredients list (by law, in order of abundance) is available at http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutrition1/ingredientslist.pd....

> 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.

Also - that "white meat" is actually a form of bleached dark meat.

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...

What animal do you suppose "fat, tissue, spicule, etc" comes from? They could still be driving a huge amount of chickens purchased merely from that

This is hopefully a stupid question but doesn't that make Chick-Fil-A's nuggets "wings" or "chicken breast chunks."

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.

Even if they don't contain much chicken meat, just 40% of meat takes up a significant part of the chicken supply chain. I'd say if McDonald's does decide to one day use 100% of chicken meat in their nuggets, the entire world chicken market would not be able to supply them (and the world chicken market would need to start more farms than exists today to make up that 60% shortfall).

Looks like 9 menu items: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/chicken-and-san...

Nothing about the scale of McDonalds should suprise you. It is one of the top agrifood supply chain businesses on the planet.

This is one of the big points of the Food Inc documentary. It doesn't matter if you eat at McDonalds or not— if you eat anything they serve (beef, chicken, potatoes, whatever), you're eating food made to their specifications, as they're the single biggest buyer of all of that stuff.

Also, they are the largest consumer of apples.

More like they don't want groups of people to exclude KFC from their choices simply because there isn't a vegetarian option.

Another advantage could be less susceptibility as a host for bacterial and other undesirable growth. Fewer recalls means willing consumers.

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.

I don't normally eat KFC but visited the "original" "restaurant" in Kentucky a few weeks ago. We thought the chicken was very decent and comparable with any southern-style smaller restaurants we hit in the South.

It is not just that, growth in fast food has been stagnant for a while now. Anything new they are looking to adopt in a hope to change that. And they will all jump in in case that new thing does have a big growth effect.

The impossible whooper was inevitable and brilliant. As you mentioned, the meats served were often already low quality, with fillers, and it was arguable if it was even meat. Some fast food chains served "100% beef", but it didn't taste very different from the other crap. So the bar is low.

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.

Fast food chains almost universally serve all-and-nothing-but beef patties, and always have. I don't understand the confusion over this. You can immediately tell from the texture.

> I don't understand the confusion over this.

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 agree with others, get with the times. I am pretty sure all the major national fast food burgers are 100% beef, no fillers, no preservatives.

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.

Fair enough, I shouldn't have put the "with filler" part. I still stand by the "low quality" (or at least very mediocre flavor) bit though, which still makes the point stand.

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 won't argue with flavor, but again, its cheap fast food, you aren't going to find brisket or short rib blend in a McDonalds burger. The new McDonalds quarter pounder is decent too for what it is.

I just hope it isn't half-assed and they don't give up. I've noticed the newer Burger King commercials say the meatless Whopper is only available for a limited time.

"meatless Whopper is only available for a limited time"

"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.

Plant based meats is what the chains have been wanting to do all along. Plant is cheap, doesn't matter how disgusting it is at the processing plant, because they make it look like meat anyway. And now the public has decided that plant based meats are healthy(?!?) and not loaded with salt and void of real nutrition.

I'm sorry, is there some kind of simulated nutrition I'm not aware of? Say, something that can legally be labeled as protein which is not, in fact, protein?

I guess people are only offended by heavily processed foods when those foods aren't veggie burgers with large advertising budgets.

You made a distinction between 'real nutrition' and what these foods are. Processing is irrelevant. Food has nutritional qualities regardless of how it became what it is. So I'm asking you to explain your reasoning that these foods do not have 'real nutrition'.

https://health.usnews.com/wellness/food/articles/2017-05-11/...

...are you incapable of explaining your reasoning yourself in less than, what is this, 5 pages of ad-filled text? I find it very difficult to take someone seriously who responds in this fashion.

You will be surprised how much less healthy cheap plant based food can be than meat... Now you get human pesticides (the ones sprayed on plants), GMO and plant pesticides (the one plants have developed against mammals) on top of the low quality crap that was previously called meat.

Meat can be full of antibiotics so I disagree with your assertion that plants have all these extras that meat somehow avoids.

Also, these animals eat plants with even lower quality standards.

GMO isn't a problem. Anyone who says it is is trying to sell you something.

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