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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

For anyone else wondering what TVP is, it's textured vegetable protein (soy). It turns out I eat it all the time in microwave burritos, because it saves the manufacturer money to mix it with the ground beef.

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Works well for tacos too. I shy away from TVP since it’s relatively highly processed. Beans work, especially lentils for a ground beef replacement - beluga, sprouted green, or any of the varieties which don’t quickly loosen up like red.

I always feel like we’re a vampire society that figures out how to make human-like blood without having to take it from humans.

Will need to look into these textured vegetable protein for the sake of the animals.

You don't generally get TVP by itself. It's very bland and has almost no fat, so it doesn't taste like much.

You generally buy it as one ingredient in a fake-meat product. You can find it at some "natural foods" stores and online, but it's much cheaper to manufacturers as a bulk product than at a consumer level. They use it to make some pretty effective fake meats, though the high-profile ones (like Impossible and Beyond) use related-but-different products.

what is funny is that there is no cheap TVP for sale in the stores...you can get the substitute meat patties (mostly soy) etc for sale in many grocery stores, but it is not cheap at all...costs considerably more than the cheapest hamburger, pork or chicken...if the food manufacturers can save money by using TVP mixed in with meat, then why is there no cheap TVP for sale in the stores ?

There's is actually relatively inexpensive flavored textured vegetable protein available in the stores though; soy chorizo (or soyrizo) is about the same price as meat, even though it probably has much lower sales.

It's all about volume. I've noticed the beyond and impossible burgers are substantially more expensive than meat despite supposedly requiring much less resources to produce. Not enough competition or volume.

My local grocer has started selling packets for 15 AUD per kg. Cursory google shows I can have 5kg delivered for 30 AUD, about a third of the price.

You can get it from ethnic east Indian stores for cheap.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ya3KgsqbL...

https://www.tradecentrezimbabwe.co.zw/wp-content/uploads/202...

And they can be pretty good if you make them right!

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