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Comment by fader | Hacker News Reader

I hear this sort of thing a lot but don't quite understand it.

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.)

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I’ll chime in as a long time vegetarian and former meat eater. The more realistic an imitation meat product is, the more it creeps me out. I lost the taste for meat, and I’m no longer used to the texture, and I find it disgusting.

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.

It comes down to personal preference. I'm with the GP comment for the exact reasons: I don't like vegan/vegetarian products that imitate animal products because they never actually hit the mark.

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.

As someone who had been a vegetarian since birth, I almost never like foods that attempt to imitate meat simply because they don't usually taste better good. I'm not trying to replace something I used to eat, and I'm also not disgusted by meat so if like to think this is an unbiased opinion...

I’d bet that anyone decrying imitation meat - or, at least, anyone who generally likes real meat decrying imitation meat - hasn’t had good imitation meat.

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.

For me most imitation meats just don't hit the same notes. One of the mainstays of my childhood was a lamb and leek stew called cawl. I've tried different meat substitutes but none get the right flavour there. Ironically, the closest I've gotten is to skip meat replacements and just put some butter in, it produces the same creamy, fatty taste lamb meat does.

I think lamb is also one that is particularly hard to substitute, IMO.

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.

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