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Comment by 2pointsomone | Hacker News Reader

That makes sense, but the Impossible brand is not for us vegetarians and vegans. So evaluating it or calling it a failure on a measure that is not its objective isn't fair :/

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I think I'm more of the target market, rather than current vegetarians. Meat is my primary source of protein, and the main source of flavor in meals that I cook. I have some ethical issues involving meat, primarily in terms of how energy-inefficient it is to produce meat. Impossible Meats are exactly what I want long-term, because they will let me make the meals that I enjoy at a lower environmental cost.

Right; the reduction of intensive animal farming is the primary benefit of this stuff. Replacement sourcing for people who eat meat and would like to continue doing so. As noted in another thread, it's not at all clear that there's much of a difference personal-health-wise: even if Impossible Meat avoids some of the dietary negatives of animal meat, it probably comes with its own. You still don't want to be eating cheeseburgers three meals a day. Rather, if you were going to eat meat anyways, substitute this.

I know some vegans who have been for over 5 years and some still miss meat.

Great point too! I have been meat-"sober" for 19 years, but dang chicken booty calls me once in a while.

Which is honestly a great way to do it. Treating it as a religion will only make people "fail" and feel bad and quit. I'm doing (vegetarianism) for environmental reasons so 80%ing it is a big improvement. It'll be much easier to convince most people to replace meat with an alternative half the time than converting people to full true-believer veganism.

I'm going to sound pedantic but it sounds like they are plant-based. Veganism is a belief system not to exploit animals - you simply don't see animals as food anymore. Been plant based for a year myself but I'd consider myself vegan the second half as I did more research. I get asked a lot "does being around meat at the holidays tempt you?" and my answer is along the lines of "as tempted as I am to eat the family dog".

I see this said a lot but I'm not clear who else it could possibly be for besides people who like trying novel things. People who care about quality aren't going to eat impossible brand because its strongest quality is tasting like average meat within a specific format. To the same end, it's not superior in price either in my area (and that includes fast food). So who is it for besides people who want to ride the hype train?

Economies of scale will take care of price pretty quickly when there's that huge of a difference in raw material cost.

Beef will never be able to optimize past feed conversion ratio.

Plant-based meat still has a large chunk of the price in processing.

I am a person who would eat these (and am a meat eater). I care about reducing my carbon footprint, have concerns about our food supply, and also the treatment of animals to some degree. I still eat meat, but as these products improve (and they are improving very quickly), I will have them more and more often as a change from meat. My wife is also vegetarian so it also means we can share more food together.

There is definitely a use case for this, I've had impossible stuff with a lot of non vegetarians. In fact most vegetarians don't care about this product.

If I can get a burger that tastes just like a regular meat burger, but didn't require a cow to die, that's a win in my book, and I'll even happily pay a small premium for that. So there's the ethical perspective of it.

In the long term, plant-based meat substitutes should be cheaper to produce than actual meat, and if you can get a burger that tastes just like a regular meat burger, but is cheaper, that's also a win. Burger King already features the Impossible Whopper, but at a premium. If that becomes cheaper than a regular meat Whopper, a lot of people, and a lot of other fast food chains will follow. So that's the economical perspective of it.

It will be cheaper eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later. The only reason meat is as cheap as it is at the moment is because government subsidies on corn keep it that way. If we really paid the true cost including all of the water used to produce the grain and all that, it would be far more prohibitively expensive.

There are millions of people who don't eat meat. Calling this a "hype" is like calling EVs a hype because you grew up in a house with no electricity.

I’m a meat eater but will switch to these at least part of the time of they are convincing enough. So probably people like me.

Speak for yourself, I rather liked the taste and texture of meat and do want to eat products that replicate it.

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