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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I wish the focus were more on new appetizing vegetarian recipes and not on creating Frankenfood that's grown in a lab. I'd rather real meat just be an expensive, rare treat than eat something like this.

India, for example, as a pretty long history of great vegetarian recipes. Why not take a similar approach, instead of coming up with better ways to make fake things appear real?

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Personally, I feel like my superior views should be adopted by everybody, because this is the way and I am the righteous.

Well, it isn't. I've spent half a year backpacking around India being mostly vegetarian, because most of the meat food in dhabas was so full of bones (more than actual meat) and mutton so chewy, that vegetarian recipes were better (and safer) meals.

Its not for everybody, and not for all the time. This is very valid approach since billions people can't be forced out of meat. We can iterate on it, make it better, cheaper, more eco/animal-friendly. But go ahead and live by your words, nobody stopping you.

> I wish the focus were more on new appetizing vegetarian recipes

This exists, and continues happen, all around the world. People didnt stop cooking vegetarian/vegan meals to make way for lab grown meat.

"We" can do more than one thing at once!!

Of course, but my experience is that the Western world and America especially still hasn't quite grasped the idea of vegetarian meals being a default and not an alternative. The model seems to be, "How do we recreate a hamburger without it actually being a hamburger?" and not, "What great recipes are vegetarian without obviously intending to be?"

I think you are referencing two different things. Expecting vegitarian meals to be the default wont happen for a long time. People like meat for a lot of reasons.

However, lots of wonderful resturants and chefs are creating vegitarian and vegan food that in no way immitates meat based food.

I also think, though, that if we can create lab grown meat that is identical to meat but doesn't involve suffering or enviornmental harm, that's a win. Most vegans I have polled would eat it, as long as their stomach could handle it.

> I think you are referencing two different things. Expecting vegitarian meals to be the default wont happen for a long time.

All I'm saying is that I wish this were the primary focus, as I think it's far more fruitful long-term.

This is the primary focus for many restaurants. Go eat at better restaurants.

Well, recreating a hamburger without an animal having to suffer and die for it. People enjoy hamburgers. They just don't want to think about cows while they do.

It might be better for their health and the environment if they learned to eat a wider variety of foods. Vegetarian food is incredibly diverse; more so than the fake diversity of putting 20 toppings in 2^20 different combinations on top of ground beef. But that's not nearly as strong as cognitive dissonance people have to sustain around knowing that animals suffer and die for their dinner.

new appetizing vegetarian recipes

I personally don't see what is lacking in this area, can you elaborate on what you think is missing?

Do you have vegetarian or vegan cookbooks? Just like there meaty counterparts, they usualy have more recipes than you can try in a year or so. Very appetizing, and there are local ones (focusing more on the typical ingredients from where I live) as well as more global ones. That's why I don't fully understand what you mean. Only when I just switched to not buying meat it was a bit of a problem to find meals, but that's completely logical if you have no experience and only books with meat in the recipes.

Wrt India: I just bought a really nice Indian cookbook half a year ago, only vegetarian meals, and only the 'real' Indian food i.e. what indian people actually eat at home which depending on where you live is quite different from what restaurants offer as Indian.

I mean that the common "mental model" of a meal, if you can call it that, is still very much [meat] + [vegetables]. Most people conceive of it this way, hence the rise of "fake meats" to fill the [meat] slot.

What I am suggesting is a cultural effort to remake this mental model, rather than simply make better "meats".

Ok fair enough, but that's not really what I understood when I read 'new appetizing vegetarian recipes', that's almost orthogonal :)

It’s a cultural thing, and changing cultural habits takes generations. A meat replacement is something that can be done now.

I’m got a huge meat eater, but I crave burgers every once in a while. Unless you have some way to codify that out of me, an impossible burger is the next best thing.

Because people have different preferences than you?

I mean, I want lab grown meat. That sounds great.

The first word of my comment is personally.

Sure, but then there's no real answer to "why not X?" Why X? Why not Y? Let's just do both.

> the focus

The focus of...whom?

The focus of economic and cultural forces pushing for meat alternatives, whether that be vegans, environmentalists, or anyone else.

Those forces lack any sort of central Executive Function. Expecting them to have a consistent focus on one over another ignores the fact that they are inherently split-brained.

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