Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves
eater.com
eater.com
I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
More than I could possibly recall. Violife, chao, follow your heart, miyokos, daiya, parmellas, go veggie, kite hill, Trader Joe’s brand
> For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions
Not a chance that I believe this. Maybe as a minor ingredient in a larger meal but certainly not as a main ingredient or on its own.
I use the liquid from sauerkraut or picked gherkins, garlic, onion powder and some salt, with the obligatory nutritional yeast. Just think of it as a nice pate.
it's like 1.3g of protein per 100g (pseudo pasta 'cheese') vs 32g per 100g (Parmigiano-Reggiano) or 23g per 100g for Emmental cheese.
What's worse, outside the EU you can find cheese with names like "feta", "parmesan", "mozzarella", "camembert" etc, that are nothing like the real deal (pet peeve: feta sold in the US is made with cow's milk). So most people who eat cheeses with these names outside the EU are eating substitutes of very inferior quality. From there, to eating plant-based "cheese" and feeling like you eat the real deal it's not such a big distance.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
Or maybe it's more like beer, most don't like it the first time but after a while you can start appreciating it?
There is no such thing when it comes to cheese. Cheese is love, cheese is life.
Orders of magnitude worse than Beyond Beef* / Impossible* (as compared to actual meat).
*just to be clear, I actually love both Beyond & Impossible's products. Extremely close to real meat IMO.
However, it seems to have improved significantly, to the point that twice now I've thought they accidentally gave me real beef, had a meet-eating friend confirm, and after talking to the waiter and cook and taking a much closer look decided I was wrong.
I love Beyond burgers too, but they are more distinct from real beef as far as my >10yr vegetarian tongue can tell.
Both burgers were made with the same spices and were grilled on a charcoal grill.
People are happier to replace their hamburger meat with Impossible instead. Beyond Meat has slightly different flavor that people were able to pick out as "fake meat".
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
Agreed. I eat meat but love veggie burgers.
Would love to be proven wrong!
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
Others, like Daiya, I won't object to if someone else wants to put it on whatever we're cooking. I'm pretty lactose intolerant, so I can't speak to how it compares to dairy cheese; my personal take from the few times where I'll pop a Lactaid in order to participate in a pizza party is that, while Daiya fake mozzarella is meh, the stuff it's intended to mimic is even worse. I occasionally wonder if there is something to that casomorphin theory that the article mentions, and people who regularly consume dairy largely like it for approximately the same reason smokers like the taste of tobacco smoke.
And then there are some brands, generally of more of a 1990s vintage, that are legitimately gross. Unfortunately, those seem to be the ones that are most commonly stocked in grocery stores, for Heaven knows what reason.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
The one I had that plant based logo was a quarter of the size and it did not have leaves like that on the front. Also that white plant based text was a few shades lighter than the background (that was previously sky blue) making it hard to read. Admittedly I should've seen the "style" part and looked further, also I should've questioned why it was the one of the only shredded cheese left in the fridge. It isn't like I was defrauded but that certainly wasn't what I intended to buy, good on them for fixing it.
Leave it to Wal-Mart to screw that up. I bet they were so focused on sticking to the "Great Value" graphic design manual that they ended up deciding that clearly conveying all the critical information on the label would have ruined their branding consistency.
For what it's worth, I can tell just by the ingredients label that that stuff is gross. Potato starch, coconut oil, and some unspecified "natural flavor" that's somehow more than 2% of the ingredient bill? No thanks.
The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
(https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...)
Much cheaper to make. Maybe their target market is "people who buy it by accident and throw it away".
And I was very annoyed. Mostly at myself.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
The ability murder as many animals as you want is not the desired state I look for when thinking about the world in which my child to grow up. A future in which that is synonymous with status is backwards - to me.
Please show me the law.
This squeamishness is a product of the infantilization western culture seems to be going through recently. Hopefully immigration from 2/3-world countries (e.g. me) helps fix it.
I spend almost nothing on food in this shop. Same for all the poor Mexicans who live in the area.
It’s quite obvious that ubiquitous access to cheap animal products is a first world thing.
That said, I invite you to consider what you would and would not allow others to do given a hypothetical: if you genuinely believed that cows were just as capable of suffering as humans — especially given that cows lactate only after giving birth, and dairy cows live only for so long as their milk is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive.
Most functioning adults can keep quiet about a simple preference (for Star Trek when around Star Wars fans, or whatever) but morals don’t work the same.
Handling difficult feelings without acting out is one of the definitions of being a functional adult. You may have that backwards, though it is very consistent with the pop culture moral / philosophical (behavioral?) flavor of late.
The level of enforcement and punishment varies form instance to instance, from culture to culture, and from year to year, but there are cases even today where religious morality leads to extreme use of force: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/hindu-mob...
Disagreeing with the requirements of sections 64, 65, and 70? Outside of philosophical discussions, most normal people find them sufficiently repulsive that even suggesting they might not be things that ought to be illegal is enough to make you a social pariah. (I’m not sure exactly how 69 or 71 are seen, but the actions they outlaw are demonstrably frowned on enough for the sections to survive multiple elections).
When imho a pretty sensible middle ground could very well be found between these two. But that would involve some moderation, rediscovering animal products as something special, and not just a mass commodity, something neither of the two extreme camps would ever agree with.
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
We also have lots of vegan "cheese" type products with funny names like "Keese" and "Cheez" and some are pretty good.
I like keeping the names clear because no one gets confused and buys the wrong thing.
Maybe it’s the case in Your Country but it’s far from being a pan European thing.
"The European Parliament has voted in favour of an amendment (no.171) which would place further restrictions on the use of dairy food labels for plant-based products. The use of dairy terms, such as "cheese", "yoghurt" and "milk", for non-dairy products is already banned within the EU, following a decision by the CJEU in 2017, however, under the new amendment, these restrictions would go one step further by also prohibiting terms that liken plant-based products to dairy, eg "yoghurt-style", "butter alternative" or "cheese substitute"."[0]
0. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=588638a6-879c...
EDIT still ongoing and not yet legislated you can still buy “vegan cheese” for now https://m.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/amendment-171-34-pol...
It’s interesting that your jurisdiction is so proactive in this area!
Between that title, and it having been posted on April the 1st, I find it difficult to take that article serious.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.
Like, wtf is almond milk? When I was a kid, almond milk was super tasty, and it was basically normal milk mixed in with sweet almond sherbet. What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk? If you asked me for almond milk and I gave you actual "almond milk" (i.e. the dairy kind) and it turned out you were vegan, you'd be pissed off, right?
Obviously searching for the various possible terms gives results mostly from recent times, about the vegan almond milk.
Soumada is very tasty, a bit like amaretto but without the alcohol. I haven't had it in years ...
A similar and very popular drink along similar lines is "rose milk", which is stirring up some rose sherbet in milk.
It was a popular way of getting kids to drink milk back in my day (slightly less popular these days).
But I admit, if a vegan "rose milk" comes out as some milky alternative made of rose petals and I have to repurpose "rose milk" as well, I'm going to be quite upset :p
[1] https://www.mycretangoods.com/article/16856/Soumada-traditio...
"Αμυγδαλόγαλα"; I confess I've never heard that word but maybe it's just an old word?
Because that would be crippling for an advertising perspective. It sounds like something out of a satirical sci-fi dystopian environment. The goal is to encourage people to choose it as an alternative to dairy milk, not to use the most precise label.
E.g. lactose-free dairy milk is marketed as 'delac'. It's not that hard.
Fun fact: lactose-free milk still has all the sugars that made up its original lactose content (you could even argue it still has all its lactose, if you wanted to be really obstinate). Glucose in particular registers as sweeter than lactose and for this reason many "lactose-free" milks have messages on the packaging informing consumers that they have "no sweetener added".
Lactose-free milks also tend to be Ultra Heat Treated, which enhances the sweet taste by means of the Maillard reaction. See wikipedia.
It seems totally feasible to require a new product to have a new name, even if it's kind of like an existing product. Think: ice cream. Ice cream is a regulated product with a formal legal definition. Places making cheaper ice cream substitutes were forced to come up with names to distinguish their products: soft serve, Frosty, FroYo, etc.
It takes the consumer all of 10 seconds to get the gist.
Everyone should be okay with truth in food. Especially vegan, who certainly would NOT be okay with products that mislead them into believing a product is vegan when it is not.
Lots of foods are regulated by the FDA or USDA. Mayo, yoghurt, butter, bread, etc, etc. If you search the FDA or USDA site, you'll find the requirements that must be met for a company to use such terms. That's why Miracle Whip is called a "dressing," in the USA instead of Mayonnaise.
The CFR contains a subsection specifically for frozen pies (though, one of the Trump administrations last acts was to gut this). Lemon bars must contain lemons, per food labeling regulations. Peanuts have a section too.
And yeah, industry lobbyists are largely the creators of legal definitions for foods. If you're a beef producer, you certainly don't want other companies to be able to sell ground up bugs as "ground beef" and undercut your prices or give consumers a bad impression of your product.
I will concede, tacos are not regulated.
This has little to do with the stop confusing the names of things argument.
I concede that almond milk was a bad example, but if anything that strengthens the point.
I bet even back then people had the same discussion in fact :p
What makes that the actual version? Almond milk as an animal milk substitute made from almonds dates back to the 1300s[0]. It's not new.
I hear where you're coming from, but I also question what does and doesn't count as an "authentic" name, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to people thinking that the names they used growing up or the names they ran into first are the "real" ones and everything else is a new fad.
When people are arguing about confusion I'm a little bit sympathetic (although I'm doubtful consumer confusion is actually the serious problem they make it out to be). But when people start to argue about needing to use proper words, I usually check out, because usually they have a very narrow view of what word origins count as proper. They're rarely tracing the etymology of the word, they're usually just saying that everyone should adopt the same definitions that their specific parents used.
So let me flip your question around on you: almond sherbet already traditionally contains milk. What would be wrong with calling almond sherbet... almond sherbet, or an almond milkshake if the balance of milk is increased. That would be helpful anyway, because you could make vegan almond sherbet using a vegan milk as a base, and then what are you going to call it under your system?
My take on this is that vegan cheese/milk is substitutable in nearly every single recipe I make. Many people dislike the taste of vegan cheese, which I understand and think is completely valid, but many people also dislike the taste of brie and I don't see a general campaign to classify brie as a non-cheese. So part of why I call those products vegan milk/cheese instead of "cheeze" is because I think if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and if I can use it in all of my duck recipes often without any additional thought or research, then for all practical purposes it's a duck.
That it's milk with almond. Like "chocolate milk" is milk with chocolate and "milk coffee" is coffee with milk.
From medieval and Renaissance-era recipes, religious rules appears to be the main reason almond milk is used. Because it's not dairy.
So, e.g., given your 'quacks like a duck' theory, I could happily cook a "mushroom risotto" with mushroomy chicken instead of actual mushroom, and that would still be a perfectly fine mushroom risotto, right? Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass, and all linguistic subtleties of what constitutes 'mushroominess' in chicken would probably fly out the window.
Note I'm not arguing about what ingredients are substitutable for others and thus comparable. I'm arguing about naming, and specifically about naming intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing. So while I partly agree with the 'quacks like a duck' thing, I think a big part of why it's fine to have non-dairy 'cheese', but not fine to have chicken-based 'mushrooms' comes down to which direction of duck-quacking feels more 'defendable' than what constitutes acceptable substitutes in terms of flavour.
How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.
> Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass
To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based".
If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients.
> intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing
I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do.
But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan.
Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using.
An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".
I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.
Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going.
I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences.
My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well.
> It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument:
First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling.
Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling.
I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/eggs/cheese are used almost exactly the same way in most recipes, they look the same, they accomplish the same goals in most meals, and while they're distinguishable when eaten, the taste difference between vegan cheddar and regular cheddar is not (imo) as large as the difference between cheddar and, say, cottage cheese. The differences do matter, particularly nutritionally, and they should be clearly labeled, but do they matter so much that they need completely separate words? I would argue that putting them in the same category of food is the least confusing way to talk about them, and nutritional/ingredient labeling is a separate concern from etymology.
Costco does this. They don't call it almond milk but "Almond beverage". I think they do similar with other vegan products.
Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.
As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.
They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.
Yet, for God knows what reason, whenever some vegan is trying to convince me of the merits of their diet, they hand me some godawful dry sausage made of hydrolysed soy protein and say "see, it's just like a real sausage. Did you know she's Paul McCartney's daughter?". Or some fermented cashew nuts smeared on a piece of bread that they think is anything remotely like cheese. I have never understood this and have since reached the conclusion that most vegans are closer to paleo, gluten-free (not coeliac) and other alternative diet folk in that they just don't "get" people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food.
There is an epidemiological experiment that has been going on for over a million years. It resulted in a population of 8 billion homo sapiens. That is not actually good for the Earth, but if you want to know what to eat, to maximize your health as an individual, look that way.
Mainly it's the language that is used by people who adhere to diets such as this. There is more reference to the health properties of various ingredients than there is the art of cooking, and this feels alien to people like myself. Of course, there are paleo foodies (just as there are vegans), but they are in the minority.
I'm not saying the way you see things is wrong (if anything, the fact that you're almost certainly healthier than me is strong evidence to the contrary), but for evangelists of alternative diets there is a cultural barrier to overcome that vegans especially seem to just not be aware of.
Not with modern food science. A lot of people consider cornsyrupy sugar water to be satisfying because companies have collectively spent billions and decades in R&D and marketing to make it taste and look as satisfying as possible.
It works because our sense are not infallible, they can be tricked and purposefully mislead. Just like taste expectations are often built from childhood on.
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
I know I'm tasting the seasoning I used and the infusion of other flavors from the chili more than the taste of the soy burger but my stomach doesn't care, to me it's just as satisfying as chili (or stew, etc.) made with beef.
I've been a vegetarian for eight years, but I eat meat substitute products. I have ethical issues with eating meat and I feel considerably better physically when I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean that meat doesn't taste good.
I'm quite happy to be able to pop some Quorn mycoprotein into a casserole and eat comfort foods of my childhood without having to kill an animal to do it.
(I have to agree about Tofurky though. I'll generally go hungry voluntarily if that's the vegetarian option.)
This attitude isn't limited to animal products either, almost every ersatz product is worse than what it is trying to imitate. People generally don't like chicory & roasted rye in place of coffee, or teas made from roasted barley & catnip. Some people do, but it's not the norm.
However, if you make a product which is intended to stand on its own, rather than imitate something else, then you can often create something pretty good. Think Nutella, which was designed to stretch cocoa, not replace it.
I feel like you can get a good portion of the texture of beef with some good seitan, for instance. Otherwise, most of them are only really approximate substitutes, in the sense that they substitute what you would use meat for in the meal, not that they substitute directly for a given meat.
Imagine my disappointment when all the restaurants in my area replaced their excellent vegetable burgers with things like Beyond and Impossible. To each their own, but it’s not just a rational issue of “is this an animal”, but also a subjective question of taste.
If you’ve never tried an Impossible burger, it’s an order of magnitude better than anything that came before. It’s a good burger. It does taste and feel like meat. It doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not.
Quorn I’d also put in the “doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not” category. It’s been around for a long time, but has been curiously unsuccessful in the US. Amazon Fresh sells it. The ground variety makes a good chili. The nuggets are a reasonable facsimile of white meat chicken nuggets.
Quorn’s no Impossible burger though. What Impossible has accomplished really is astounding.
And nor shall I drink anything with corn syrup as that's simply an imitation sugar product, nor do I eat chipotle burritos since they're a pale imitation of actual burritos. I eschew Cavendish bananas entirely since, just like a boca-burger tries to mimic a real burger, the Cavendish banana tries to mimic the real banana. You can taste the difference.
My point here is that "imitation" is very poorly defined. Is a boca burger an imitation? Is a black bean burger? What if the black bean burger uses spices similar to what you use on meat patties?
I think that taking inspiration from another food and trying to mimic it (as chipotle does with real burritos) is a valid way to make a new food, and that food should be judged on its own merits. I don't like "imitation meats" that are just pure saitan for the most part, but I'm fine with other imitation meats. It's not the imitation bit that matters, it's the quality of the thing itself, taken standalone.
That's a strange analogy. Cavendish bananas are a type of "real" banana already. They're not "trying to mimic" anything, and are not at all like Boca burgers in that regard.
If you are happy with non alcoholic beer, stay with that, but have you heard of - Tea?
There are lots and lots of different tea's around, as you can make tea out of allmost anything. So plenty of caffeine-free choices there.
This beer is better than the median alcoholic coffee porter. https://athleticbrewing.com/products/first-ride-coffee-porte...
Their IPAs aren't as good as say, Founder's All Day IPA, but they aren't substantially worse, and they have 1/10th the alcohol.
If you want to drink something for 100 calories, these compare favorably in taste to just about everything, IMO.
Non-alcoholic beer seems more popular in Germany (yes, Germany, where beer is very serious business) than in the US.
I like it a lot, because it's a refreshing drink with good taste and no alcohol, well suitable if you want to drive or just don't feel like drinking alcohol right now.
I wish it was more common in the US (where I live now).
Goya Malta and O'Doul's are the brands I'm most familiar with.
I love that place. From the decor, to their f* you set of rules, to their food.
Great place. Makes me miss ATl :(
Personally I would love a list of animal product ingredients and their suitable vegan replacements when trying to cook after some recipe.
Exactly. Maybe the main problem is that it's hard to market 'Soylent Yellow'.
If I were to become a vegetarian, I think I'd just buy a bunch of Indian cookbooks and stay away from IncrediblyMeatyPlantBasedBurger(tm).
Our local way-overpriced health grocery story, which is always packed with people, is completely stuffed with health potato chips and health dessert items and health pre-made stuff with long ingredient lists.
Maybe it's just the beauty of a free market, you can always make money on social behavior.
Impossible does a great job of imitating meat, primarily the flavor of blood. But as I'm eating less meat, I'm tasting the blood more distinctly and find I actually don't enjoy it at all.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
While I also like black bean burgers, veggie patties, etc (though I can't personally handle portobello mushrooms as a patty, I know tons of people also love that), it's clear that people like having the pseudo-meat option.
I know I do like having the option, especially for cooking when I don't want to make seitan or grounds or something from scratch, which involves following a whole other recipe just to reach my "base protein" that I then cook with.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
Apparently vegan-cheese varieties of those exist, but I'm curious if anyone took tofu there.
Some varieties of 豆腐乳 (Wikipedia translates this as fermented bean curd[1]) have strong flavor and creamy texture like blue cheese.
I'm not sure there's anything quite as hard as parmesan (I assume you mean Parmigiano-Reggiano), but there are several smoked tofu varieties that taste similar to smoked gouda.
Sadly in the west most shops only sell silky tofu and firm tofu, which are perhaps the most culinarily flexible, but they are far from the most texturally interesting or flavorful varieties.
You can do this with feta, which is soaked in brine. How salty is furu?
I do have a jar of red Chinese fermented bean curd in my fridge, but have only mixed it into sauces per recipes. I should probably try it by itself.
Smoked tofu sounds really interesting.
Indonesians have tempeh which is a bit like haloumi I guess when pan fried, so that's another one.
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...
Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
You've thrown that basis out the window by adding additional foods and reframing the argument.
[0] https://cigrjournal.org/index.php/Ejounral/article/view/3461
If you buy locally grown asparagus -- where I live, that means around four weeks every year -- it's fine.
Stuff that gets put on a boat is in-between; no idea if that's viable for asparagus, it never occured to me to buy it out of season.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
Agreed! They are different but equally delicious.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
I'll say it then - it's all terrible. There's so many great vegan foods out there, fake cheese is not one of them.
These are both true of dairy cheeses too.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
https://youtu.be/4CVzqJWkodA?t=834
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
But cheese? Half the Miyoko's products taste like a finely ground nut paste mixed with mold and spoiled milk.
vegan cheese just doesnt have the same fat and sugar properties that normal cheese does.
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.
There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpellmanrowland/2017/06/2...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8447883/milk-health-benefit
You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.
The fact that demand for dairy was "manufactured" is somewhat orthogonal to whether or not it is for-profit.
Vegan cheeses aren't subsidized at 73 cents on the dollar, dairy is.
First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow. Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.
You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.
That's just mad. Go eat Indian (meaning food from a dozen different places in and around India, including Bengali, Bangladeshi, etc). Eat a mediterrannean diet. Eat a North African diet. But why do you have to eat something vegan and call it cheese? That just doesn't make sense.
If you like meat so much you just have to have it, then what sense does it make to be vegan? Be flexitarian. Eat meat once a year, every Easter Sunday. Eat vegentarian. I don't know! But at least accept the fact that you can't stand being vegan because you really want to eat meat and dairy.
For me, anyone who eats pretend-meat or pretend-dairy is a pretend-vegan. If you're going to go off meat to save the planet, or because you think meat is murder, then stick to your own morality and go without anything that is in any way "like" meat. Otherwise, you're just advertising the need to eat meat and justifying everyone else to keep eating it and ignore your pleas for the environment and the baby calves.
If you tell me "I'm vegan, but I have to eat something like cheese", the easiest thing for me to reply is "I'm not vegan and I have to eat cheese". It just makes a joke of the whole idea of being vegan.
I don't really understand it either because I'd usually rather have tasty veggies than imitation meat, but what someone finds tasty is what they find tasty and they don't need to justify it.
I love that you can get all the taste without the violence and suffering. Eating is not always a single-person activity, so having vegan substitutes for meat and cheese is great when eating together with non-vegans who may be wary of falafels.
There are very few vegans who are vegans because of taste. Many are worried about the environmental impacts of mass animal agriculture killing trillions of animals every year.
The most prominent and outspoken animal liberation advocates — Ali Tabrizi and Ed Winters come to mind — are strong proponents of vegan-dairy, vegan-seafood and vegan-meat. It really doesn't make sense to call those people "pretend vegans". Check their talks and films[0][1], they aren't "making a joke of the whole idea of being vegan".
I don't get why carnists place such importance on real suffering and real death. Is it not real Adidas shoes if it isn't made by slave labour or something? Is it not a real car if it's not guzzling diesel? Why not cut down on causing harm when it's so easy? I don't get it.
[0]: Earthling Ed vs Infowars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScbeMdYkKDc
[1]: Land of Hope and Glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF3VOpa3a7c
You want to be like saint in the world and reduce harm? Then don't go baptising nut mush as "cheese" so you can enjoy what you have sworn off and are pontificating against, like the apocryphal stories of Catholic monks baptising their meat "fish" so they could eat it on Wednesday. Stop advertising meat and dairy with your actions, contrary to your words. Stick to your principles and then come to preach to me about mine.
Lots of people try and fail to become vegetarians because they don't find the substitutes acceptable. If you consider it a purely personal issue it probably doesn't matter, but if you're interested in lowering global animal product consumption, then I think ideological purity is the more morally questionable position than trying to develop a product that can convince the world to take up veganism.
Yes? This is what veganism is, is it not? Vegans don't eat animal products at all.
Why not?
I would agree that people who endorse pretend-vegan products are pretend-vegans. There are many products labelled as "veggie" that still contain egg, such as Quorn.
But your logic fails by assuming pretend-meat = pretend-vegan. You don't kill anyone by playing Doom, just like you don't eat anyone when eating vegan nuggets.
(Yes, there's an argument that violent games can lead to real-life violence, but are you really claiming that vegan meat-substitutes can cause harm by in some cases leading people to eat meat?)
> You want to be like saint [...] Then don't go baptising [...] then come to preach to me about mine.
I find it interesting how religious terms are used as an insult towards vegans. It's a very common and highly irrational defense-mechanism many carnists use when experiencing cognitive dissonance because of all the violence they're willingly and knowingly contributing to while also thinking of themselves as good people.
> Stop advertising meat and dairy with your actions, contrary to your words. Stick to your principles and then come to preach to me about mine.
The paradox here is this: The more you stick to your principles as a vegan, the more upset non-vegans can get, while simultaneously demanding that you do stick to your principles, because otherwise you're a hypocrite. I have heard these carnist proverbs before, and unfortunately they defy logic.
For instance, regarding sticking to principles, I choose to not sit at a table where animals are eaten, even if there's also vegan food available. I do this to stop endorsing meat, which is what you're demanding, but no doubt such a stance would upset you as well.
It's challenging to examine one's own beliefs. I've eaten too many animals myself. I hope you have a good day.
For example, what I find annoying in your comment is the casual attribution of thoughts, emotions, morals and life experiences to me that you have no way to know I have. But you go ahead and make the assumption I do anyway and then triumphantly proclaim you defeated my "logic".
For example, I am not a carnist. I don't even know what that is.
I don't believe it's immoral to kill another animal to eat its meat. I don't believe it's immoral to kill another animal violently to eat its meat. Killing another animal requires violence that cannot be reduced to zero. And if you don't know what you're doing, you'll make matters worse because the animal will know what you're trying to do and then it'll try to run away and resist and cry for its mother. I know this very well. I know where my food comes from. I see my food running around when I look outside the window. I don't have any cognitive dissonance to work through.
Maybe you've eaten too many animals. I'm prepared to bet you have, especially if you come from North America or Western Europe, where people eat way too much meat and don't really know what to do with food unless it has meat in it. I do not come from such a culture and I haven't eaten too many animals.
Finally, I don't know how I'd react if you refused to sit at the same table as me because I'm eating meat. Probably, I'd think your'e a bit of an entitled prick, but be upset about it? Why?
You're making too many assumptions about my motives and experiences, when all I've said is that if you are vegan then you should stick to your principles and not eat meat or dairy. Are those not your principles? Or are you the kind of vegan that's OK with eating meat and dairy?
"Carnism is the invisible belief system, or ideology, that conditions people to eat certain animals." ( https://carnism.org/carnism/ )
> you should stick to your principles
You're measuring vegans by principles they're not claiming to have, such that eating plant-based meat and dairy substitutes is ethically wrong.
This is additionally double-standards: Criticizing someone who tries to reduce harm for not being perfect (because of this alleged transgression of eating plant burgers, wtf?!), while giving a free pass for those who don't care. Surely it is better to try to reduce suffering and harm than to be indifferent?
> Or are you the kind of vegan that's OK with eating meat and dairy?
No. But I'm fine with plant milk and plant burgers, because those are not made out of animals or animal products. I like the taste and, most importantly, it has made vegan eating more accessible for my non-vegan family.
(Actually, I'm not too much into Beyond Meat, because it tastes too much like flesh for my taste, while I love Linda McCartney sausages. But that's just my own taste buds, and I don't worry too much about what tastes other people like.)
Someone made a webpage.
> You're measuring vegans by principles they're not claiming to have, such that eating plant-based meat and dairy substitutes is ethically wrong.
Are you measuring me by the principles I don't have? For example, do you think it's wrong for me to eat meat and cheese and any animal products I like, even though I don't think there's anything wrong with it, as you do?
Because you're really upset about some people substituting cheese with fermented nut butter while still calling it cheese. It's not really too far fetched.
I don't believe you can, because I understand how cheese works and nut paste doesn't work that way. If you want nut paste to behave in a way that reminds of cheese, you have to stuff it full of gums and emulsifiers and stabilisers and all the additives that go into typical over-processed junk food. Cheese works the way it works because of a confluence of factors that developed over millions of years of evolution of mammals, and the bacteria that live in our guts and help us digest our food, including our mothers' milk. For example, did you know that cheese is made naturally in the stomachs of ruminants? When a young ruminant drinks its mother's milk, that milk ends up in the fourth stomach, the abomasum, where it is fermented by lactic acid bacteria and coagulated by proteolytic enzymes, pepsin and chymosin, and turns into cheese. I'm not sure why that is done so. Obviously the fermentation, that breaks down sugars, and the proteolysis, that breaks down proteins, helps the animal digest its milk, but why coagulate it also? One possible reason is that it helps the animal digest the milk slowly while it runs away from predators.
The same processes are also in effect in the human stomach and while I'm not 100% sure about this, human babies likely also make cheese in their little stomachs.
Bottom line is, cheese has evolved along with mammals over millions of years and there is no other process that we know that can create the same kind of substance. The vegan cheese substitutes we're discussing in this thread don't even come close.
As to vegan "meat", that's just vegetables. Why do you need to eat vegetables and pretend to eat meat? In another comment you accuse me of cognitive dissonance, but what is the mental process that allows you to eat cauliflower and call it a steak? To me it sounds like self-dellusion, make-believe.
But even if you really could reproduce the taste of meat and cheese "without the violence and suffering" as you say, then I'd think you just want to have your steak and eat it.
Totally agree. It's not quite the same. I'm prepared to occasionally abstain from certain well-tasting foods or use a less-than-perfect substitute out of solidarity with farmed animals and out of care for the planet. It's a trade-off. I agree.
> As to vegan "meat", that's just vegetables.
Yea, exactly. And sometimes mushrooms.
> Why do you need to eat vegetables and pretend to eat meat?
It's a good question. I think it's a bit more complex than pretending to eat meat. For me, personally, it's more about reclaiming certain dishes that we usually consider meat-based but that don't have to be, such as burgers and hotdogs.
For those who've just seen Cowspiracy or Earthlings and start to realize how harmful industrial animal agriculture is but also "can't live without their cheese and their meat", those meat substitutes are perfect. They substitute the taste but not the harm. They can make a zero-effort switch without changing any habits or learning to cook new dishes. It's the best of both worlds.
I love that 7-Eleven has started selling vegan hotdogs here. You get the choice of buying a delicious hotdog without having to worry about eating the body of someone who've been driven around in crowded trucks to then have their brains shot out with a pressure gun or being gassed. To me, it seems like self-delusion to buy the murder-hotdogs when the vegan ones are available.
"Killing animals is not murder. Murder is when a human kills another human".
Go ahead then. Say your thing.
By the way, I think that hotdogs are gross and unhealthy and I wouldn't eat one, meat or no meat. Like I said in my original comment (from which it's true I digressed more than a bit) there are a ton of other things you can eat and enjoy that are vegetarian or vegan and that are not fake meat or fake cheese. I don't understand why some vegans and vegetarians prefer to substitute the meat and dairy they say they don't want to eat anymore with fake versions, rather than learn to cook and enjoy food without meat and animal products. That to me is just lazy and self-deceiving.
> there are a ton of other things you can eat and enjoy that are vegetarian or vegan and that are not fake meat or fake cheese.
We agree completely here.
> That to me is just lazy
Again, I agree. However, I think it's good that we're creating opportunities for lazy people to eat vegan too (or people who don't have time to cook, or parents with picky children, or traditionalist family that insist that you can't have Christmas without roast pig, etc.).
The context was that killing a non-human animal is murder. Murder is when a human kills another human. When a human kills a non-human animal it's just a "killing".
In my experience people tend to become vegan:
1. for the animals; and/or 2. for the planet; and/or 3. for health.
I have never heard another vegan say they became vegan because they didn't like the taste of cheese.
Not me, but the gal I am dating is allergic to dairy, and so we had some fun finding vegan cheeses that did not have casein. It was nice to make a dish that typically has cheese, that we both could enjoy.
Honestly if it weren't for all the amazing fake meats, milks, and cheeses, I would find it a lot harder to be a vegan. As it is though, it's a piece of (vegan) cake :)
And my interpretation of the original question wasn't why someone wants to be vegan, it was why someone would want to eat vegan imitations of non-vegan food.
The only way to end all this suffering is a good nuclear armageddon.
But of course what I said had nothing to do with being vegan because you don't like the taste of cheese. What I said was, if you like the taste of meat and cheese so much so that you can't do without a substitute of it, then why are you vegan? If you are vegan, for good ethical or environmental reasons, then why do you need to eat pretend-meat and pretend-dairy? Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.
"I eat it because I like the taste of it" is exactly the moralising accusation levelled at non-vegans. If I have to go without meat and dairy to satisfy your morals then you have to go without pretend-meat and dairy to satisfy mine. You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.
And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.
I used to love steak, and fish, and various other non-vegan things. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the thought of where those things came from, and eventually I had to give them up. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Having vegan substitutes just made it easier. I don't see the harm in that, neither do I see the hypocracy. I want the taste, but I don't want the suffering.
You can't. You have no idea where I come from. I never had to perform any mental gymnastics because I don't believe I contribute to any suffering by eating meat.
For example, maybe you "come from" (to be literal) such a place as North America, Argentina, or Western Europe, where people eat way too much meat and have no idea how to eat without meat? If so, then I grew up eating half or less the amount of meat you eat, and still do as an adult, I don't eat beef, most of the dairy I eat is not from cows bred in industrial farms, like yours, and I do not have to worry that I'm eating too much meat, or contributing to the destruction of the environment, as you would.
The bottom line is that you have some moral ideology that is yours and matches your life experience, but it doesn't match mine and I don't need to share it. And I don't need to make mental gymnastics to avoid sharing it, I just have no raeson to share it in the first place.
But I do have rasons to wonder why vegans, who don't eat meat and cheese, eat meat and cheese. Unless what they eat is not meat and cheese, in which case why call it meat and cheese?
I personally welcome the recent increase in vegan products and I hope it continues that way. You're still free to skip the vegan isle in the supermarket, fortunately.
I mean, you disagree with me so I must be worked up about what you say? What can I reply to that? There's only one way discussion quality can go after that, and that is down the drain.
Not to mention the casual sexism inherent in that kind of comment to users with clearly feminine identified usernames. "Calm down dear" and all that.
In any case, I didn't even state that you were worked up, I honestly wanted to know if the semantics was your only beef (lol). However, I can see how that may have come across as provocative and for that I apologize.
Nonetheless, I stand by what I said and I think you are indeed worked up. Hell, I'm worked up after this nonsensical back and forth. That's my assumption based on the amount of various emotions you put into your comments.
I doubt it.
Curious to find out more about where you might be coming from, I took a look through some of your past comments. One in particular caught my eye:
> "I don't know how people can do that, slaughter an animal they've raised themselves."
To me this suggests that do have compassion for animals. This doesn't surprise me, because virtually everyone does. However, having compassion for animals just doesn't sit nicely with eating them, so we come up with reasons to justify that illogical behaviour of ours. Otherwise we would not be able to live with ourselves.
I am sure you do eat less meat than many people. But I bet that you would eat a lot less again if you had to personally slaughter all the animals you eat. Especially given how easy it is to not eat animals at all.
And in response to your last question, I think it's mainly just because it tastes good. Vegan meats and cheeses could quite reasonably be called something else, and I would still happily eat them. Though having them named as they are does make them more discoverable. I can see why that might make you annoyed if you are in the business of making and selling dairy cheese, and you see the rise of vegan alternatives as a threat to your business.
With all the anger you seem to have towards veganism I sense you may be closer to an awakening that most. Perhaps soon you will be making delicious vegan cheeses yourself :)
Your assessment is exactly right and most people go vegan for the animals and the planet. You're also exactly right in the mental gymnastics most of us have partaken in before making the switch. It's a meme, but bacon is fucking delicious. I would love to continue eating bacon, but I couldn't keep blocking out the thought that this shouldn't go on like this. And if there is ever vegan bacon that comes close to the real thing, you can bet I'll be on that shit in no time, while simultaneously hoping I won't hurt any meat eaters feelings in the process.
I'm not sure where you live but in the UK we have something called This Isn't Bacon that I find rather delicious :)
In the UK recently we just keep getting more and more new vegan substitutes, and vegan options in restaurants. It's an exciting time!
> Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.
This is some strange version of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Why can you not want to eat meat and dairy and yet be vegan anyway? Why can someone not be vegan for ethical reasons, and yet still miss the taste of cheese? That makes them not a "true" vegan, in some weird definition, but who on earth cares? The person is still not eating cheese. The end result is the same, whether you gatekeep the name "vegan" or not.
> You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.
This is where you've gone off the deep-end. Eating a pretending sausage is not "murder," and whether you like meat or not doesn't suddenly make eating the pretend-sausage "murder." No one's ethics are being violated because someone eats a soy product, unless it's ethics against the eating of soy, which is irrelevant to this discussion.
> And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.
[Citation needed]
Piano keys were traditionally made of ivory, now, fortunately, they are made of plastic. Does the elephant butchery of the past mean I should not play the piano today? I don't think so.
Times change. When kinder and more sustainable alternatives exist, it makes sense for us to favour them.
I've had a slice of their vegan pizza and it's quite awesome.
Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”.
The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard cheeses, and works in sandwiches. I’ve not even considered trying it on pizza though.
I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.
https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte
The closest brand in the U.K. (and, I think, the USA) is Quorn, which I’ve missed since moving here.
Forget about vegan cheeses on pizza/pasta. They taste crap.
What tastes really good is ground nuts. I sprinkle a mixture of ground pine nuts, cashew nuts, and tiny bit of pecan, (-/+ possibly some macademia nuts) and it tastes great. When ground properly in the right proportions, this mixture also has that nice fluffy, "cheesy" feel to it (i.e. it's not rough to the touch, it's soft and spreadable).
Different experience from actual cheese, but very tasty. Whereas whenever I've tried vegan cheese on pizza/pasta, they always leave an ugly aftertaste, have a disgusting texture and stick to my teeth and throat, and leave me bloated and feeling like crap afterwards.
Most vegan cheeses I have are just fermented ground up nuts or soy.
When I do it, I actually use a rotary cheesegrater in the finest setting (i.e. something like this: www.thebakerskitchen.net/images/products/detail/811642026798.jpg). This makes the nuts come out soft and flakey.
But, yes, presumably a food processor should be ok too.
Edit: to be clear, I'm commenting as a tangent to the ground nut suggestion. I'm not suggesting anyone put queso on pizza, unless that sounds good to you :)
But in the end: at least it’s something.
It also hurts my digestive system.
Both are subtle initially and ramp up with continued dairy consumption, so I can tolerate small infrequent amounts.
I suspect many more people have similar issues but don't realise.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
But, as an example, the Impossible Burger notably has more fat and significantly more salt than its meat-based brethren. Sure, it may be purchased due to a perceived variety of other benefits (sustainability, animal rights, etc) totally unrelated to the healthiness of the product, but it's objectively not a healthier option.
I am not saying you are wrong, but there is a whole lot more to "healthiness" than amount of fat and salt.
Depends on the beef. I looked the numbers up before I commented, and a simple beef burger made with lean ground beef weighs in at 11% fat, slightly less than the Impossible version (though yup, I admit, basically equivalent, which is what I should've said).
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
As to whether the plant-based substitutes are healthier, they probably are when compared to the thing they're replacing in nearly all cases. But if you want to optimize your health I'd expect a plant-based diet based on less processed foods would be much better.
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
Putting that aside for the moment because it is a rabbit hole, there is a continuum of what people think constitutes animal abuse.
One the worst side of the spectrum (IMHO), are CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are the first things you read about when you research animal cruelty. They're the videos of hundreds of thousands of cows standing kneed deep in their shit their whole lives and pumped full of antibiotics. And yet, some people look at this and go, "Yeah, I'm cool with that."
On the other side of the spectrum, we have vegans who do not use any products derived from animals.
In between we see efforts to mitigate the cruelty, such as: free range vs. constricted cages where movement is impossible; feeding them diets of foods they would find in nature (instead of feeding cows ground up chickens); not forcing them to grow so much meat they cannot move (chicken breasts; growth hormones in cows); not forcing them to produce so much milk their udders tear and become infected so they are injected with antibiotics, etc.
For example, there is a cattle farm 10 miles from my house that has about 20 head of cattle, and you can purchase one as part of a co-op a year in advance. You can go visit the cow. You can see how it is raised and its conditions. This makes me feel a lot better than buying plastic-wrapped package from a Save-Rite supermarket. But that's me: some people might laugh at me for being "fancy pants liberal simp" other's think I'm still keeping animals from doing what they would do in nature if we weren't harvesting them.
My point is: this is not an easy answer, and in my opinion how we treat animals that we capture and cage matters. Why? Since reason is a social construct, I can go deeper if you push, but it is my choice to not make animals suffer more than they have to.
The question of whether abuse is inherent is largely academic at this point. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the animal products we consume are the result of optimized industrial processes that result in shortened, low-quality lives for those put through them. Whether an animal could, under the right circumstances, be humanely raised for resource extraction or slaughter doesn't really apply in modern consumption.
It's inherent. Cows, like all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk. This means dairy cows are impregnated and give birth roughly yearly. It's entirely uneconomical to raise all of the calves, since it would effectively triple or more the cost of producing milk, which is already barely profitable, even with government subsidies. So the calves are killed and sold as veal.
Wrong. Humans don't need to be pregnant or give birth to produce milk. Lactation can happen with medication or stimulation, which becomes easier as women age. If a woman is not inducing lactation with hormones, she must stimulate the breasts several times a day using hand compression or a breast pump. This is how adoptive and foster mothers breastfeed their babies. Lactation can also occur in men because they have milk glands, which is the reason they too can get breast cancer.
Now extend that train of thought towards other beings.
Perhaps you need some remedial reading comprehension.
If you are having difficulty ascertaining this point, you definitely need remedial reading comprehension.
There is no economical way to do it otherwise. I honestly don't care that much about animal abuse (I do think that animal agriculture is often environmentally unsustainable), but you can't really play pretend about "some milk not involving abuse"
Personally, I am fine with it as long as no extra, unnecessary suffering is caused, but some activists may call it inherent animal abuse.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan
Doing a quick search seems to support that, but perhaps the trends / reasons are changing as veganism in general becomes more mainstream.
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
Is less processing always more healthy? It's often touted as such but adding some processing can unlock nutrients vs eating raw, right?
Spinach for example, when eaten raw, has less bioavailable iron than if it were "processed" by steaming.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
Recently I was eating my "standard" sandwich order from a local restaurant. It actually tasted so much better than normal that I asked if they had changed anything, only to find out that they had used their vegan cheese substitute by mistake.
I'll be giving these cheese substitutes another shot in the future!
However, I do still eat them on occasion. Sometimes after a 30km run, all I think about is burgers so when I get home and sit and have vegan burger with vegan cheese.
It may not be as good as the 'real thing' but it hits the spot :)
A lot of the meat I was consuming was just a matter of treating meat as the default option, not because it was actually adding significant value. That style of eating comprised at least 75%-90% of my meat consumption, and cutting that out turned out to be extremely easy.
The last 10%-25% has been much harder though, especially when my wife and most of my friends like eating meat so much.
Also, I like the flavor and mouthfeel of things like oatmilk.
I'm also not convinced that milk is not a 'heavily processed' commodity. You are just using a pregnant cow to do a lot of the processing.
Sugar content without regard to glycemic index [0] is meaningless. Cow milk contains lactose, which has a very low glycemic index. Most milk replacements use maltose, which has almost double the glycemic load, making them significantly less healthy than actual milk (since they are all basically sugar and canola oil [1]).
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mnfr.201901082
Milk alternatives on the other hand can actually be anti-inflammatory because they contain antioxidants. Whether that still holds true for processed versions of it... probably depends!
The other big risk factor in cheese is saturated fat. I don't know if plant-based cheese is generally healthier in that respect.
Edit: Also keep in mind that cheese is a processed food too. I think it's somewhat subjective whether oil mixed with starch and yeast is more processed than milk coagulated with an enzyme (rennet, usually from mold), strained, and fermented. Processed food isn't inherently unhealthy, but both cheese and vegan cheese definitely are.
So perhaps deceptive marketing/packaging is how it's gaining in sales?
People want this stuff. We've transitioned our house to vegan milks because, quite frankly, we like them better and they don't have the same awful externalities that milk production has.
We still use some butter and cheese, and some vegan butter/cheese. There are definitely recipes where it doesn't matter which cheese/butter you use, and some where it does.
Vegan cheese products also tend to be pretty upfront about not actually being cheese too, because they're marketing to people who don't want cheese.
Vegan cheese simply appears: "we've been INFILTRATED"
On the topic of grocery store real estate. It blows my mind how much space meat products take up. Huge shelves of beef, pork, chicken in all forms and stages of processing. It's crazy to me the degree of reliance and attachment to animal products we've been coerced into.
What I mean is that there is huge amounts of money out there working hard on preventing us to move on through commercials and lobbying, things like that. Recently, right wing conservatism even started using meat consumption as a signal to show that you're not a liberal.
These companies are all getting extremely close in terms of flavour, but I’ve not personally tried anything that replicates a stringy melty mozzarella to top a pizza. That’s the holy grail for me.
I would prefer that we develop and maintain true vegan foodstuffs and recipes rather than create vegan versions of animal products.
I am interested in eating an interesting new dish that was designed to showcase vegan ingredients. I have no interest in eating fake cheese pizzas and fake hamburgers.
It makes little sense to me. But I suppose I have relatively few food cravings. If you're trying to avoid dairy and and every week you just need cheese sticks or pizza, then I guess that's the market this is aimed at?
"Traditionally" rennet was taken from an unweaned milk animal's stomach (not just a calf's stomach. Some people make most of their cheese from ewe's and goat's milk).
Fast-forward a couple thousand years and in modern times, most rennet in commercial cheeses is the product of fermentation by cute little bacteria cultured in cute little bacteria incubators:
... Because of the above imperfections of microbial and animal rennets, many producers sought other replacements of rennet. With genetic engineering it became possible to isolate rennet genes from animals and introduce them into certain bacteria, fungi, or yeasts to make them produce recombinant chymosin during fermentation. The genetically modified microorganism is killed after fermentation and chymosin isolated from the fermentation broth, so that the fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC) used by cheese producers does not contain a GMO or any GMO DNA. FPC is identical to chymosin made by an animal, but is produced in a more efficient way. FPC products have been on the market since 1990 and, because the quantity needed per unit of milk can be standardized, are commercially viable alternatives to crude animal or plant rennets, as well as generally preferred to them in industrial production.[12] ...
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet#Fermentation-produced_c...
But, somehow, everytime I read an article about vegan cheese it seems to lead with the outdated information that rennet is, like, normally, made with the stomach lininig of unweaned calves.
From the article:
> What Perfect Day is doing isn’t new, exactly: Pandya, who is vegan, points out that for a long time, dairy cheese wasn’t even considered vegetarian because of its use of rennet. When vegetarian rennet was developed in the 1970s and commercialized in the 1980s, “it wasn’t done for any profitability reason or consumer trend reason or anything to do with animal welfare,” Pandya says. “It was just economics — like, it just made more sense to use the latest in fermentation and biotechnology to figure out a way to make that enzyme without the extraction from an animal.
If someone who didn't know anything about cheesemaking were to read the article, the opinion they would form from it would probably be that rennet is made from calf stomachs' linings and that other kinds of rennet are "some times used".
It wouldn't help anyone reading the article to find out that "vegetarian rennet" was commercialised in the 1970's and 80's as the article later says, because the article hasn't made any attempt to explain what "vegetarian rennet" is, exactly. "Vegetarian rennet" can apply to fungal or plant rennet as well as it can apply to rennet produced by bacterial frermentation and an inexperienced reader may well confuse the three and think that it only applies to the former two.
To quote directly from the article, the phrase "vegetarian rennet, derived from molds or plants, is used in some cases" is the one I find the most potentially confusing to readers who don't have detailed knowledge of cheesemaking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmigiano-Reggiano#/media/Fil...
Sadly, vegan replacements for dairy products generally don't hold up, but having something close is better than nothing.
Margarine is vegan, but it was always just marketed as "cheap". Discerning or well-to-do consumers would just pass it up.
Now, people will put up with things that are very cheap to make, taste horrible, and are very expensive to buy.
That creates a problem: the food is becoming about the story and not the taste. That's not going to lead to good products; only good stories and packaging to tell the story. And bad products won't make for wide adoption.
Asking your customers to sacrifice gets you a small band of loyal customers, like a cult. But good products stand on their own and don't ask for sacrifice... think Tesla.
Probably, but vegan cheese isn't marketed as health food.
> Margarine is vegan
I wish.
Some of it is, it's just not safe to assume it always is unless you check the ingredients.
But that's the case for a lot of foods that fall into the sometimes-but-not-always-vegan category.
While not all margarine is vegan quite a lot of them are. Though you have to look out and read the packaging to make sure you don't missgrab.
The vegan cheese isn't an exception: some of them are actually pretty good, but most are really processed with a lot of added oil. Although most vegans do seem to realize and accept this, because it still has the benefit of being vegan.
If you want real "healthy" food, get whole foods: vegetables, meats (or good vegan meats, look for protein / calories ratio), fish, yogurt, beans. Fruits and even grains are ok, as are nuts and nut butters - just watch your portions. Even a bit of cheese or olive oil is good because they actually have nutrients. Ironically, all of these are usually packaged plain and don't mention "low-carb" or "good source of vitamin B12".
Certainly there’s a lot of debate about “cheese” even before getting into vegan
Milk is already used for non animal milks as coconut shows, so I don't see this doing anything pro-consumer.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/almond%20milk https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/almond-milk-obsession-...
There are multiple legal fights by animal agriculture lobbying groups to exclude plant-based products from using the meat/cheese/egg terms, specifically (IMO) to try to maintain the status quo and prevent these products from gaining traction.
Ultimately there are no natural laws governing language, and given the above acceptance of plant-based products under these terms is a fight worth fighting for anyone hoping to see them gain traction and mainstream acceptance.
That said, I think there's potential for plant-based cheese-like products to be delicious in their own right, without trying to perfectly mimic existing cheese products. I don't think the techniques are there yet, but that's to be expected, conventional cheesemaking has been honed by millennia of experience.
As an appreciator of fine cheeses, I'm excited to try the delicious creations of food scientists working with cheese cultures and plant-derived materials. Unfortunately, the vegan cheeses on supermarket shelves are not aiming at the fine cheese market, and instead trying to compete with dirt-cheap sliced/shredded cheese, and that's not what interests me.
I've never seen anything that comes even remotely close.
I think there are other food items that have that funky, umami tang that those cheeses have though. Plenty of cultures have built up some interesting flavors in vegan food stuffs with lactobacillus.
> Given McAthy’s expertise and scholarship on the subject, it’s not surprising that Blue Heron has been producing the vegan cheese world’s most dairy-esque products since 2016: its dried herb- and wine-powdered rounds look nearly indistinguishable on a cheese board from dairy. But that’s not actually McAthy’s intention.
> “My personal goal has always been that I really want to try to create or expand the boundaries of cheese-making, period,” she says. “So that means I’m happy to use the analogous term that people have a reference point for” — some of her cheeses resemble blues and Camembert — “but I’m just trying to create new cheeses.” This brings up the question of what cheese really is, exactly, and what vegan cheesemakers might be proving is that it’s simply fermented milk. Could be cow’s or goat’s milk, or it could be cashew.
The article talks a lot about artisanal cheese makers applying traditional dairy processes to nut-based cheeses
Until the tech improves I will prefer to stick to burger toppings like sliced tomato, avocado and onion. Much, much better. And for pizzas, it’s better just to go without.
I've seen molten plastic with more cheese like qualities.
It was a 3/10 experience. I would try again, but there would have to be improvement.
If I'd wanted to make a non-dairy pizza, I'd just remove the cheese and find other interesting ingredients. The world is too vast and beautiful to eat what the Americans call cheese.
https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/veganism-is-the-pinnacle-of-b...
I think they've gotten to casein protein production but the site is kind of light on progress details.
https://www.thompsoncoburn.com/insights/blogs/food-fight/pos...
Sorry you were confused! Poor behavior by your grocery store.
Please don't lie when you're selling me food though (or play games to trick me into buying your stuff.) I tried amazon fresh a couple times and accidentally bought the plant based "meat" which was pretty much inedible (if I wanted a vegetarian diet I would just eat vegetables not some crazy processed garbage.) I no longer buy food from Amazon because of this.
Don't eat Almonds from California, they are contributing to a major ecological disaster in the state.
More products for the grocery aisles best ignored.
is this an april fool's joke?
fake meak was proven to be non-healhtly, and now fake cheese
if i want cheese i'll buy cheese, stop trying to sell me fake things as X, because it clearly is not the same thing
meat and cheese are what they are because the animals eat plenty of things and they are living creatures, you can't replicate this
can we stop promoting pseudo VC startups, they clearly are only interested in making money, STOP
also only americans will use "cheese" as a universal word
what kind of cheese? do they know it's not yellow and it doesn't come from an aluminum tube?
> meat and cheese are what they are because the animals eat plenty of things and they are living creatures, you can't replicate this
I mean, you certainly can. Look at the companies making 'clean' meat and fish.
Here [0] is a series of nine short videos (with text transcripts and links to all scientific sources) on plant-based meat substitutes' health and environmental impact. The reported findings go against your claim.
[0] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-environmental-impacts-o...
Actual "nutrition facts" are few and far between. I could selectively cite all kinds of studies that go for or against veganism. They're all flawed in some way, so people can just dismiss what they don't want to hear.