Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.

I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.

I have a small cattle property, we run on hill country with diversified ecosystem, mixed grass and bushland. We have a heap of native animals living across the property. And at the end of the day the steers do get sent of for slaughter after 18 to 24 months + we kill feral pigs when they get in large numbers.

While cropping properties they tend to be monoculture, very little native animal presence. The spray like buggery wiping out insects with all that flow on effect (and to be fair we spray too, herbicide only and never pesticides and far less frequently). Also the cropping properties tend to shoot 'pests' heavily. We don't mind a few kangaroos and ducks type thing about but cropping properties are very serious about deterring and killing anything that hits their property.

And to be clear, I'm not having a go at you. I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position, and my family actually try to do more vegetarians meals. While at the same time I'm not sure plant based options are so devoid of killing, only the end product is one step removed.

> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.

The problem I have with this argument is that it always seems to me to focus on the life of the animal, but not on the death of the animal.

All animals eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we slaughter animals, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to starving to death, being eaten alive by insects, being hunted and terrified by a predator etc).

So, I think that it is important how the animals are grown (factory farms are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of food). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the slaughter of animals who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of their species is kind of payment for that, in a way).

I really enjoy both BeyondBeef and Impossible Burger.

My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture.

The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I would never complain about a Beyond Meat spicy sausage in my Italian food. The sweet Italian version tastes almost like a breakfast sausage to me.

For Impossible Burgers, I feel like the taste is virtually 100%. I don't actually know, if I were eating an impossible burger on a bun with the fixings, if I could tell you it was an impossible burger. The only thing they would lose on is the texture and maybe the color. The texture is more... chipped(?) than ground beef, so looking at a patty (probably easier with an 8oz than a 4oz) is pretty obvious, but man, the flavor is great.

Like I said, I eat either one of them as my first choice whenever they're sold at a restaurant.

> they require no violence against animals.

While I sympathise with the argument, I think that it's a mistake to push this aspect front and centre.

There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.

The people I've spoken to about Beyond/Impossible and similar fake-meats all tend to think of it as something for vegans/vegetarians, because that's how this type of product has been presented for decades.

"Oh, you're having a BBQ? Fred's partner is a veggo, better chuck on some mushroom burgers or something"

It's a tough push to convince people that this isn't meant for vegans/vegetarians wanting meat, but a product for meat-eaters wanting to reduce their meat intake, but not necessarily wanting to give up their ability to have meals that taste like what they're used to.

Pushing from that angle, I would argue, is likely to have a bigger impact than saying "Think of the poor cow that had to get murdered for your burger!".

For my part, I enjoy fast food burgers (think Wendy's, Burger King, etc...). These burger patties are not exactly rare Kobe beef. Once you put that thing on a bun, add cheese, slather it in sauce, etc... I don't find the difference in the patties very noticeable. I notice how fresh the lettuce is more than the patty.

I eat plenty of meat, so I don't have an anti-meat agenda. But, for me, for fast food burgers, I may as well choose a less environmentally damaging, and yes, more animal friendly, alternative, because it hardly makes a difference.

I guess the difference would be though, that without the demand for meat, those cows would likely never have lived at all. 99%+ of all cows alive are used for human agriculture.

From the perspective of any living creature, I generally think of existence as a positive good versus non-existence. I know I certainly would rather come to a violent death at a young age than have never been born at all.

I think there's a plausible argument that modern factory farming is so horrific that it's worse than non-existence. But a cow raised with a decent quality of life, and slaughtered humanely for its meat does not seem worse for animal welfare than eliminating the entire existence of the cow.

(Of course I realize there's ecological and health arguments for giving up meat, but purely talking along the dimension of animal welfare.)

I ended up becoming vegetarian for a while due to some video that was released years ago of factory farm workers abusing animals. I found myself unable to eat meat without bursting into tears.

In time, and in part due to how complicated this ecosystem actually is (as explained by a few other replies here) I ended up settling on eating vegetarian “most of the time” and buying meat sourced from ethical places with better conditions when I do.

But it was surprising to me how threatened most people were when I was strictly vegetarian.

I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.

That said, I continue to have a great appreciation for the industry of meatless meat.

Although at this point, IMO, Impossible Burger is the gold standard, and after trying it once, eating any other burger (including Beyond) just doesn’t cut it.

Irish person here with a couple of random facts: - Ireland is one of the larger per-capita beef producing countries - Beef lobby is quite powerful - Our local Chipper / Take Away / "Fish & Chips" shop sells Beyond Meat burgers - As a meat eater who grew up on a beef farm, I can say they look and taste amazingly good... 95% as good as a real burger.

Most cattle are treated well in Ireland, living outside on fresh grass (live exports aside). My main concerns are global resource depletion, biodiversity, deforestation and climate change.

We're beginning to see a real sea change in this meat eating country, meat-free products are popping up everywhere and not just marketed at vegans / hipsters.

This is probably not a popular opinion, but less environmental impact is actually more desirable to me than "no violence against animals". As far as I understand it, these sort of "animal protection" slogans only serve to make human beings feel better about ourselves, and as such could easily make us forgive (and forget) the massive amount of resources we consumed if not depleted on this earth. Simply by supplying for this huge amount of population, we have taketh away the right of other animal's possibility to have a thriving population. The human race thrived on a bloody ground, and we need to recognize that.

All living things die and are eaten by other living things. This isn’t wrong, it is the way nature works.

Would you have every living thing just...stay alive forever? That’s not going to happen.

The Beyond Beef burgers that my local burger chain (Grill’d) sell are pretty good, too. They’re a little drier than a good beef patty and a bit sweeter, but if you told me it was beef I think I would believe you, albeit not cooked perfectly.

My understanding is that popular opinion says Impossible is even closer, though I haven’t tried it personally.

> but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.

You know that plants are also living, feeling beings? Though not sure about being individual but that's highly subjective.

The cycle of life is that some trees harvest the sun, and then it's a fish-eat-fish kinda world.

Vegan meat is not important because it doesn't kill animals (it'll kill plants, and hence this is purely emotional/subjective). But because it could be very sustainable. There is a reason why Japanese eat vegetables, fish and pork. They have a large population on a tight island. They have to do otherwise. (they also drive very small compact cars/mini-vans).

I agree with you, that is especially the case for burgers that are usually not made of particularly refined meat. I’m still "old style" and enjoy a piece of steak but less than once a week. I still need to cut down on ham… decrease in meat consumption is rational. It’s mostly a matter of habit, and people hate changing those.

I do have one valid complaint with Beyond Burgers. I am a fan of meat. I like meat. I love a good cheese burger.

And Beyond Burgers actually taste fine. Not amazing, not “just like beef” but not bad. I can eat a Beyond Burger and feel satisfied.

My problem with Beyond Burgers or Beyond products as a whole is that they STINK! Bad! When cooking. I don’t know why but cooking a beyond burger stinks up my kitchen worse than my cats litter box freshly pooped in.

> But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.

In my opinion, the most important thing is that it is considerably better for the environment due to the reduction in emissions, water and land. Don't get me wrong, no violence against animals is a benefit too, but to me it's not the number one reason to try imitation meat.

I have indeed tried them, and they aren't as nice as a real beef burger in my opinion. And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation. (Of course, you can certainly reduce cruelty if you move away from a US-style factory farming model).

Looking forward to seeing how the technology develops, but yeah. It hasn't changed my habits yet.

A funny anecdote: my wife and I have removed most meat (apart from occasional fish) from our diets for a variety of reasons (health concerns, sustainability, and animal cruelty).

Do you know which concern resonates most with my 10 year old daughter? Absolutely none of them. She is aware of the issues, and appears to be a conscientious person in the abstract, but when confronted with the option of eating an animal in the moment she simply doesn't care at all.

Are adults more empathetic? Maybe. But fundamentally I think that by the time something makes it to your plate, it's simply too far removed from where it came from for any of these considerations to resonate with most people.

We've considered trying to show her Okja [0] to see if it has any effect on her perspective. I know it was at least partially instrumental in causing me to reconsider factory farming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okja

> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.

When I was about fifteen it occurred to me that while that's true, those animals wouldn't be alive at all without us raising them for food. So it seems to me that the goal should be raising them in good conditions without cruelty. At least to my way of thinking, as someone grateful to my parents that I exist, that's better than no life at all.

There are plenty of other solid reasons to eat less meat, but this argument never worked for me.

I actually like the beyond burgers. If they weren't more expensive than a beef burger, I'd eat them.

> No one needed to die for you to eat it.

Except all those animals + insects that once inhabited the fields

This rhetoric only convinces those people who already feel sympathetic to animal-rights arguments. But for example, a significant slice of the world’s population are adherents of religions that downright ordain slaughtering an animal at times, and they will only be alienated by your argument.

Consequently, I feel like health and environmental arguments are better ways to get people to limit their meat intake.

> Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter.

This is the only thing that matters, to the contrary. Previous attempts at fake meat have not done as well as Beyond and Impossible precisely due to the fact that the vast, vast majority people actually don't care where their meat comes from, they only care about the taste. Yes, on surveys they might say they care about not harming animals, but this is not true in practice, they don't put their money where their mouth is by stopping eating meat.

Indeed, the true innovation of Beyond and Impossible was focusing exclusively on taste and marketing that up front rather than the moral aspects, because people don't care.

The unfortunate part is that there is a non-significant number of people who are allergic to contents of these faux-meats.

..but nobody is allergic to meat.

There is a theory that benefits mostly ascribed to keto, are actually due to reduced inflammatory load in the diet.

Actually I don't mind killing animals for my food.

But the environment does matter to me, purely because I selfishly want to live longer and in a better environment.

> I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.

I understand what you mean by violence and I don't want to come across as a stickler just for sport, but if we are taking a hard ethical stance based on principles we need to be precise with categories. Two of which is most important;

1. category of animals include humans

2. category of violence include any suffering inflicted knowingly e.g. being overworked in a sweatshop, psychological violence etc.

If we accept above categories, our supply chain, not only for food but for pretty much everything we consume, unfortunately do incur violence on humans. As such, if someone takes a principle on requiring no violence against animals, they must also be concerned with everything they consume or use, not only what they eat. I am not saying they shouldn't not eat meat if they didn't do the other, I am saying they shouldn't claim a position from principle.

In fact if they made either these two arguments they would be perfectly consistent; argument of convenience "not eating meat is more convenient than not using an iPhone", or argument of priority "not requiring violence against other animals is more important to me than humans". But still they couldn't occupy a principled stance of no violence against animals.

What you're saying a little silly, given that if people had decided to stop eating cows 20 years ago, the cow I ate a part of today would never have gotten to exist in the first place. An argument that cows are abused and are better off never existing would be a reasonable one.

I mostly agree with you and personally love beyond ground "beef". However, it is going to be a long time before we replace meat. The only way is if we can produce it cheap enough that it literally costs an average person more to buy conventional 85/15 ground beef.

That's interesting. Can you give me your job? I mean, there are millions of people all around the world who are living in poverty and you are occupying a job that they could have had. There are many people who commit suicide because they no longer have any economic opportunities.

I like how modern people can pretend they don't live in the real world because it is hidden behind abstract complexity. Life is a competition with every living thing. You can pretend that it isn't while you order your uber eats and massively overpriced food, but you are only doing so due to some kind of psychological need.

The further you get into the city, the further you get into the lives of rich people, the more you see this "please think of the animals" attitude, because you become so removed from reality that you think the world is completely different to what it actually is. The irony is that you are in the most privileged place, taking the money that other people could have used, and using it to buy overpriced burgers.

I tried impossible burger once. Wanted to like it for all the good environmental / ethical reasons. However, it just tasted nutty to me, like somebody had ground up some nuts that had a visual appearance very similar to ground beef. Tasted nothing like meat to me.

See I think Impossible comes as close as you can get right now but Beyond definitely has weird taste/texture qualities. I get an aftertaste with it I do not with Impossible.

Beyond sausage (an easier endeavor because of how much work fennel and casing do), however, is excellent.

Well said! I am a vegetarian for much the same reasons. I think that compassion is a solid reason beyond the environmental and health reasons. As technology enthusiasts we should be driving new ways of producing food that cause the least harm.

I get the intention but wouldn't it be better to just forget the taste of it if you're doing so for the sake of the animal's suffering? To put it bluntly, the suffering ends, but the taste of suffering is still delicious...

Burgers and sausages are some of the most detached ways to eat meat. While a steak has bones, a burger is much more abstract. There is probably a good anthropological theory behind this.

And it's still overpriced. For being a bunch of soy or whatever, I'd expect it to cost a fraction of meat. I'd rather have fewer real burgers than transition to faux food.

> Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter.

Maybe to you it doesn't matter.

I don't get why exact taste of burgers is so important to some people.

I can stomach burgers from McDonald's if I haven't eaten them in few months. But if I eat them more than one or two times a week they very quickly start to taste like the garbage they are.

It's really dreadful form of food and I was assuming people eat it as last resort when they are really hungry. Not that they indulge in them because the specific flavor is so unique and wonderful.

I always prefer a wrap. But fries and mcmuffins with egg and bacon are super tasty.

I actually enjoy trying out a variety of vegetarian and vegan foods for this exact reason - just to see how they compare with the meat based ones and how good they are overall. Frankly, it's gotten to the point where most of the food that i buy myself is vegetarian, just because of how many of those options are out there.

That said, it's not a black and white issue, as people sometimes like to view it as - if most people simply treated meat as something to only enjoy rarely (say, once a week or a few times a month) or something for special occasions, then we'd make significant progress in that regard already!

Alternatively, perhaps people should see how their meat is made, or try doing it themselves, to get a greater appreciation for the amount of resources that it takes to produce any (as well as maybe get a bit more empathy towards the animals in some ways). Personally, i've gone hunting with my dad, have gutted animals in the forest, helped bring them home, skin them and cut the bones, all just to enjoy some meat. That's not to say that it'd bear much relevance to the lives of most people, but it's certainly a very humbling experience.

Edit: In the words of Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I'm actually curious about how others view a more moderate stance on the issue of nutrition - one that calls for gradual changes.

we must also remember that these beasts are a product of selective evolution

if we had not interfered with this animal, it would have stayed similar to a gazelle

humans of course favoured a meat to size ratio and strength over agility, for their food and labour, reducing the creature to the cows we have today

Given that my income is dependent on rare earths, which usually are mined by slaves, and the independence of my homeland is directly dependent on the US being a global hegemon, I've got far more serious moral issues to resolve before I'll have time for animals. Don't get me wrong, I love animals, but there are far greater fish to fry first.

Impossible meat is way ahead in texture compared to beyond meat when cooked IMO

What is your view on lions, tigers, bears and other meat eating species?

honestly I don't really see the point of eating a burger that doesn't taste or feel like a burger. I'd prefer to eat meat less often than try a subsitute

every one of the fake meat products upsets my stomach. I think TVP is the culprit. If I ever decide to forgo meat, I would just skip the fake meat products entirely

Define violence against animals please?

If there wouldn't be an economic incentive to keep animals alive, their land would be reporposed to crops/housing and a lot of animals would be slaughtered pointlessly.

Why "Beyond Burgers" and not the dozens (if not hundreds) of meat substitutes that have been available in Europe for more than 25 years?

> No one needed to die for you to eat it.

I wonder what you make of carnivorous animals (cats, lions, tigers and the like)?

Should they also subscribe to your weird moral system?

And hey they taste really good.

It is very easy to understand. People like Bill Gates who is a big investor in artificial meta are lobbing for normal eat and fish to be banned one way or another.

That it, people eating the way they always had eaten have other people wanting to force them to do something. That triggers reaction in the opposite sense.

Those technologies should prosper on its own, and they will be if they are cheaper or more nutritious. Over time they will.

It is like illustration ideas in Spain. People that read were accepting those ideas on their own until Napoleon came and wanted to impose the ideas by force. The reaction against the invader made those ideas(and the people that supported them) not only to not to prosper but go back(and the people expelled from the country), because they were the ideas of the invaders.

I love technology, and as entrepreneur and engineer have always managed innovation. I believe it it the future, but because I know innovation well I also know the drawbacks.

Early products tend to have bugs on them. When we create something knew I expect those like Elon expects their new rockets to explode. When those bugs are related to health it means people die.

And we don't really know what those bugs are. The world in incredibly complex. For example autism or cancer, leukemia, and allergies in young people are skyrocketing.

We know it is related to microorganisms in the gut and we also know that we are killing those microorganism like fungus, bacteria and virus that were beneficial to humans.

We started spraying roundup and other products thinking the world was super simple. And it is not, eliminating all insects, fungus and bacteria that were with us for millions of years will have consequences and secondary effects we could not predict.

Over time all our food will be grown indoors and cultured bacteria will do everything for us like cotton, vaccines or paper. But trying to accelerate the progress by coercion could backfire.

Compared to grass fed beef fake meat generally involves the killing of many more animals, due to the way industrial grains and vegetables are produced.

From a cruelty perspective probably the best thing to eat is free range Buffalo, but whale or elephant could potentially be better.

Considering how many animals whales kill, especially blue whales, we could be doing the planet a massive service by hunting them to extinction.

The burgers are full of stuff I wouldn't consider to be food. That's why I don't eat them (regularly at least). I don't think being violent to my own body is a good substitute for violence against animals.

Also I actually like their taste and texture.

> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals

Isn’t this disingenuous because the endgame will be the genocide of almost all farm animals. If they’re so environmentally unfriendly, can’t look after themselves, serve no purpose because they’re no longer food then why would we let them live and continue to breed them.

So there will still be some final suffering until we remove these species from the earth.

Obviously we as a race are responsible for creating animals that can’t look after themselves but to hold up the environment argument makes killing them all the greater ethical choice.

Actually there are thousands of rats, snakes, moles and other pests that are killed every time crops are planted and harvested.

The realities of this world are quite ugly. We've just managed to put a civilized veneer over it

But why would you want to replicate the outcome of a slaughter if that part of the process upsets you?

Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?

For me eating things in their most natural forms seems more appealing. I don't know what is in beyond meat but avoiding processed anything seems like a more healthy strategy.

While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".

We are, at the very least, decades away from having a complete enough understanding of nutrition to safely replace the nutritional value of beef with a substitute fake beef product. Once we accomplish that, there are some second-order effects to worry about, like increasing single-path reliance on complex agrochemical supply chains to meet basic nutritional needs.

It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.

Where do you draw the line between animals and plants? Plants are a form of life. Is it the pain? What is it about animal pain that is morally objectionable? Because humans can feel pain too, therefore animal pain is also bad? Assuming we grant that, what if animals were put to sleep before being killed? Does that then make it okay? I find the whole "violence against animals" argument to be incredibly hand-wavy and without substance.

So many animals die at the blades of the harvester. Also, the reason the argument fares poorly is likely due to the fact that it’s devoid of reason and couched entirely in emotion. Emotion is powerful and important, as it is part of our humanity. But it’s not a good basis for argument, given its fickle and poorly understood nature.

It is possible to have so much empathy that your brain falls out.

> is they require no violence against animals.

And you wonder why people can't take absolutists seriously. The marketing power of the moral superiority concept is no new thing. Pivoting the crux of success of your ideology around an incredibly poor burger filling makes no sense either.

In the UK restaurants are being allowed to reopen in 10 days. In London there are an incredible density of steak restaurants which happen to already be booked out completely.

I think your appeal to squeamishness around slaughtering animals will feel entirely cringeworthy to most emotionally intelligent persons.

All food is processed. Cows are genetically engineered. There's no reason to be afraid of simple chemistry. Cranks like Michael Polian have made a fortune selling FUD with no science. Just read a label. Boxed food with a ton of salt and sugar is probably not good for you whether it's corn syrup or agave nectar. Similarly, boxed fiber and protein is perfectly fine. Buying locally is not scalable and fails to take advantage of the climate advantage of different geographies.

Thanks, this is the most underrated answer. Selling processed food as one solution to climate change is genius marketing BS but still just BS. It reminds me of Soylent, Juicero and the like.

If you care about the environment, your health and animal well being then just eat less animal product (you need some anyway), buy only local food (local meat) and above all stop wasting so much of it.

Just a few decades ago people knew what they were eating, no processed food in any way. They were raising their livestock in their yard, they knew their single sheep / pork / cow and poultry and respected them. At some point you need to eat and kill them, people getting shocked by this have just become brainwashed or oversensitive. Go spend some time in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe, they're laughing at this nonsense trend.

>If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything?

If I'm really going to be dead within 100 years, why am I doing anything?

Lots of reasons, but the easiest is because it's more enjoyable than the alternative. Who cares if a plant burger is heavily-processed? I like it and I don't have to think about whatever died to bring me my meal.

Yes, it would be better if I grew my own lentils and only ate homemade dal. But that's not realistic for most people, and from a health and environmental perspective, it seems like it's hard to do worse than red meat.

Seed oils are toxic. These fake "meats" are the some of the worst processed foods around. It's sad people are being duped once again by the food industry and medical establishment. This will only further worsen the awful health of the population.

You seem to throw all food processing into the same pot, so to speak. Humans have an under-developed digestion system. Why? Because they can pre-process their foods to compensate. They know that some plants are poisonous unless cooked, for example.

And obviously, few food-processing factories or bulk shipping methods of ingredients cause enough greenhouse gasses that you can just eat local meat instead, if you care about your footprint. Saying that none of this is solving a real problem is wishful thinking.

About once a month I have a huge craving for a burger, so I’ll eat a Beyond burger. It’s worse than eating veggies but it helps keep me vegetarian. Without it, I’d probably eat a real burger to satiate my meat craving. Since I’m an all-or-nothing person (major personality flaw), eating meat once a month would turn into a slippery slope. Beyond meat helps to keep me on the vegetarian straight and narrow

Health is not the reason these products exist. I buy them because I want an unhealthy treat that doesn't have the same ecological or animal rights impacts as beef.

If 10% of whopper sales switch to impossible whoppers, that's a big deal, and foods like this can provide a bridge to consumers who have never considered vegetarianism.

I do buy or grow local food, I'm a vegetarian myself. Your view is, in my opinion, too black and white. There's serious momentum around plant based meals, and that's making even more plant based foods available elsewhere.

Couldn't agree more. It's highly proceeded fake food.

I think you could do better by simply eating more veggies and cutting red meat consumption.

I think this is a counterproductive view. Gas turbines are bad for greenhouse gas emissions, but the fact is that gas turbines have displaced coal generators in many places in the US reducing net emissions.

Are gas turbines a part of a zero emissions electricity grid? No of course not. But are they an improvment on what's happening today? In some cases yes.

Ultimately you're right, eating locally grown plant based diets would be better for an individual, but you're also wrong because the beyond burger is a hell of a lot better than the food it's replacing in most cases.

I don't think anyone's buying a burger for the health benefits though

I did try it. It was revolting. Never again.

Vat-grown meat may have a future, but fake meat does not.

I think danShumway answered 1) pretty well. I just wanted to add my opinion about 2).

Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.

I turned vegan after watching Game Changers: https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/

It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan.

The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating meat still have a B12 deficiency.

80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa! We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient.

And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.

I'm also a meat eater but have cut down on the amount of meat I eat. I think many of us in wealthy "western" countries don't realise we eat more meat today than in any time of history, thanks to industrial-scale farming and cheap supermarket prices. It wasn't always like this but we're now conditioned to think plentiful and cheap meat has always been the norm.

In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role.

This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards.

The joy of veg:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fe...

From the article:

"Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why?

To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm."

> 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?

I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger.

I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment.

After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.

One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs (~2m40 people reacting to what you will see; ~3m23 the actual footage)

To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US.

Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here.

Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world.

So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way.

Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.

> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment?

The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit.

> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?

As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality.

> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?

Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere.

The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.

When I was a teenager I worked for dairy farms helping them with the accounting. A big part of their expenses were antibiotics and antidepressants for the cows that had a calf taken away and they had to stay there producing milk.

It really shocked me.

> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death

The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different.

I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them?

Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals.

> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?

I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake.

What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways.

So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea.

> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?

Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do.

But, let's get to the rest of your question:

> However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily

Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made.

What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products.

We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well.

So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter.

I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.

1) The ethicality of something is not sourced from nature. If this would be the case, then raping would be completely okay as animals doing something like that too, right? It's more coming from empathy, like we don't let people beating or killing each others as you don't want that happened to you as well.

2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly.

Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.

I'm quite torn about the utilitarian argument, that claims that it is justified to kill animals for their meat as long as we give them better lives than they would have in nature.

I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them.

I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.

> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?

I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.

I made a conscious effort to develop some vegetarian dishes I could make simply for variety. If nothing else, vegetarian cooking has to do a lot of work to make up for not just leaning on meat as a primary flavor component, but the result is you can get much more diversity and interesting flavors and textures.

It's honestly more exciting to see where we're going to do once we're at "seamless replica" and can start playing with the capability to make brand new things.

I really wonder if there are special cooking instructions to make them that might be causing so many restaurants to pull them off the menu.

I've tried several Beyond burgers at various restaurants, and all of them were the worst burgers I've ever had. Dry, tasteless, and chewy - absolutely nothing like real meat. Do a degree that I question if they're all being prepared wrong.

What’s the name of the place?

Are you referring to the Beyond Burger at Burger King or Beyond Meat in the grocery? I ate the former today and think it tastes pretty good (I don't miss the real-meat Whopper at all.)

P.S. I think your reference to radical candor is unnecessary; how does it further your 3 points? At the same time, thank you for pointing out this managerial meme; a tangential response since you brought it up: you do realize that the opposite of ruinous empathy is depraved indifference, right? How can we be sure that in critiquing Beyond Burger support as ruinously empathic, you aren't shielding your readers from valid concerns that choosing Real-Meat Whoppers over Beyond Meat Whoppers is immorally indifferent?

Yep... people are missing the obvious point that since the taste is so much worse, Beyond Burgers are just NOT going to sell beyond the population of people that value the ethics over the taste.

So you still eat red meat, even though it is classified as a Group 2A carcinogen and is far from sustainable? You clearly only really care about your taste buds.

Great priorities!

As if the Big Mac is healthy now. We need sustainable replacements for both healthy and unhealthy food. Pick your battles.

Sources?

I like to say beyond meat is like an animal you haven’t eaten yet, but sounds plausible. I think with it framed that way it tastes delicious (if you crave animals). I went vegetarian and crave fake burgers more now than real ones before and Beyond really hits the spot for me. I love the sausages as well. The taco crumbles are a weird texture but I’ve used them in some hash scrambles.

Didn't know they did sausages. That could be a decent market to tackle. We don't typically make burgers at home, but we do often buy simple sausages as a quick meal for the kids. Usually the supermarket choice is premium sausages with more exotic combos (that I like but the kids don't), or basic plain ones which always seem a bit miserable. If we're buying plain sausages, might as well get something like this instead.

Tbh I prefer Gardein's more traditional soy-based burger in this category. Grills up more nicely imo. I agree that Beyond's sausages are good. Even the fast-food version that Dunkin uses on their sausage McMuffin clone comes out well (they have both meat and Beyond versions). I'm split on Impossible. The fake blood really weirds me out.

So is that comparing against plain red meat with no salt added? Because if so that’s not really a fair comparison because you generally add a decent amount of salt to burger whereas you don’t really need to for beyond

Cheese has more salt.

I don't think people tend to eat plain ground beef though? Flavouring/salt is generally added

No, and that’s why the fake meat companies are very careful from not mentioning anything about health benefits, and instead stress carbon nonsense and naturalness of ingredients.

Impossible is legume flour and coconut oil. Legume flour is rough on the gut, and coconut oil is 90% saturated fat, way more than butter. Beyond is soy and coconut.

If you have a moral or other objection to meat, go vegetarian or start eating vegetarian meals. It’s healthier and you’ll eat better. Fake meat has all of the health downsides of lousy meat, has inferior taste, and a questionable story around environmental nonsense.

We don't know the answer to this of course. Presumably they did some animal studies to show that huge doses of their product don't obviously damage a mouse.

Generally there is a 30+ year lag time to work out if some lifestyle change is detrimental. Look at smoking, soft-drinks... even more difficult with food products. We err on the side of recklessness by letting these products loose with minimal testing.

Personally I think that the cellular meat products, where they grow actual animal muscle cells in the lab, including seafood, are going to be the real killer product in this space. They have the advantage of true biocompatibility with us, less cringe factor and avoid the need for excessive processing to mimic the real thing. I also think that cellular meat will be cheaper and less resource intensive than plant based products in the end.

You should try it just to test it yourself.

I get a different burger maybe once or twice a quarter to see how they stack up.

Some of them I wouldn't know it was veg if someone else ordered it for me. Legitimately that good.

I've also had some terrible ones too, not sure if it was due to the prep work vs the 'meat' itself.

For now the price is always 25% higher which keeps me away from being a regular, but I expect that to continue to come down.

Consider me a believer, so - grain of salt.

This is my main concern with fake meats. The taste and texture are fine, the price point is acceptable, and I like the idea of not harming animals for my dinner, but I find it hard to believe that something with 20 highly-processed ingredients is healthy for me to eat. I thought I was supposed to be avoiding processed foods.

Last time I did a comparison, in terms of things that I personally want to consume less of (sodium, calories), real meat still wins

Better nutrition? I'd be surprised.

They're supper processed. I recommend stacking a beef burger with a "impossible/ beyond or other veggie burger".

This cuts your beef consumption in half and I actually prefer it to plain burgers now.

Meat is plant material that was processed inside the body of an animal. So they're both processed food.

If you want a healthy unprocessed burger, might I suggest trying a delicious homemade black-bean burger.

Nutrition "science" cannot yet make accurate predictions here, but from my perspective there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that no single artificial product yet captures the nutritional profile of real beef.

Simple answer: No, this stuff is not good for you… get ready to shit your pants if you consume this lab goo on a regular basis.

I'd be curious to know which ingredients are the most worrisome. I don't eat much Beyond or Impossible at this point, but I could see myself eating a lot in the future if they made lower-fat options (more like ground turkey than ground beef).

But I don't want to eat something that is made out of unhealthy ingredients. What should I look out for?

All your food started in the heart of a star. What's a few more steps.

Let's not overlook the fact that most cows raised in massive farms are fed a horrible diet and most beef based products - even raw beef - are also processed and have additives.

I'm not saying that Beyond Burger is better or worse, but that pretending all beef is healthy is kind of silly.

Define suitable. In a market sense? Most farm profits come directly from the government. 2020 was supremely profitable for farms (https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-ag-sub...) due to subsidies.

In terms of some like of positivist, ecosystem sense? I don't know, ask an ecologist what used to be on the land. I can promise you it wasn't cows.

You're right. The water discussed here is just the total rain water that was in the grass the cows ate. Its not taken from aquifers or rivers like you need to irrigating crops.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

Does grassland really need to be suited for any kind of agriculture?

The prairies used to be one of the greatest carbon sinks in the world, storing as much or more carbon per acre than most forests. They were also a source of incredible diversity.

Cattle ranching operations transforms that carbon sink into methane gas to warm our atmosphere. And while the water is returned, the energy spend transporting and cleaning it isn't.

Depends of the volume. Cows don't just drink, eat, and return lovely fertilizer. The huge amount of urine and manure some cow ranches produce is dangerous to the environment around them, and to the ranchers, so their waste actually needs to be removed and processed.

IIRC someone was working on a seaweed-based feed additive to cut down on the methane production, not sure what came of it.

Hey, I agree with pretty much everything you just said. One other obstacle that is worth highlighting is that (at least where I am) the cost delta between beyond/impossible and plain-old beef is pretty massive, and the #1 thing keeping me from eating more of it.

Well shit, the taste is slightly off so let's keep killing billions of sentient animals.

I agree, but also find joy in the larger “burger experience” (toppings, bun, fries, soda, presentation, etc). I hope I’m not the only one.

It feels like they're on the right track, but after all the hype, I was a bit disappointed too. It has like a slightly odd oiliness that I didn't think I minded at first but ended up finding quite off-putting.

So for awhile I liked it and ate it. Then out of nowhere it turned into a thing that when I eat it I, without getting graphic, let’s just call it extreme digestive issues.

I wonder how frequently that occurs. Or am I just odd?

It's pretty close. If faux beef is 100 per X, and real beef is 5,000 per X, then faux beef is 98% of real beef.

Yes, it exists for many year. Ask you local vegan community (as product in this field are very different from place to place). We have several vegan sushi places, and the omnis that I know like the food there very much.

What's wrong with cheese now? Why is meat a "problem" and for who?

I get it though, pretty f'd watching a chick get thrown into a grinder for being a male, etc...

It's tough... on the other hand nice how convenient it is to just walk into any store and buy food.

The company is still developing its products, and the extra margin reflects the fact that it hasn't yet been able to amortize the costs as Tyson etc. have with already established slaughterhouses, monopolies on the business to secure their trade and other infrastructure.

What would the value be of a company that was the sole provider of all imitation meat to America and was the only meat you could buy because of environmental laws against sale and production of legacy meat.

Completely ignores the methane output issue which is a huge contributor to global warming.

Also, killing billions of sentient beings simply because the taste is a bit off, but let's all just ignore that.

We also destroy enormous swaths of rain forest each year to increase the amount of land for cattle...

But we use SO much land to grow the food that cattle eat. It's not a useless metric at all.

I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that you use "fewer" for discreetly countable things (fewer tables, fewer people) and "less" for continuous things (less rice, less time).

Emissions are continuous. I don't emit one emission now and another emission the next hour.

Not quite: https://www.wisconsinacademy.org/magazine/prions-plants

You are aware of how beef is raised, right? From antibiotics to increase mass, to an unnatural grain based diet, to confinement and CAFOs. Beef you get at the supermarket is far from "natural."

I couldn't agree more with you. However, the following I disagree with: >The real issue to the obesity issue in much of the West is a lack of exercise coupled with over consumption of calories, from all sources be it veg or animal protein...

I really don't think exercise has anything to do with it. I also don't think the number of calories has much to do with it either. I believe it's largely the type of calorie that's mostly ingested by Americans, especially poor Americans: simple carbohydrates. The processed sugars, processed grains and simple carbs are causing most of the damage to our quickly declining health. Frankly the country and most of the world is addicted to sugars of one kind or another.

I would also like to add, that India is not being hit hard at all. I know this seems counter-intuitive based on the constant bombardment by the main stream media, but India's death toll is significantly under the US, UK, and other countries death tolls (per capita). India simply didn't have a first surge when the rest of the world was at it's apex...it seems it just took longer for Covid to spread through India.

>> The only real net emissions in the process of creating beef are the fossil fuels burned in the process, from transportation

I think you are drastically oversimplifying the carbon impact of modern agriculture. Artificial fertilizer production, irrigation, mechanized farm equipment all substantially contribute to CO2 emissions and other serious environmental impacts.

Edit: Reading the EPA report, the sources I mentioned aren't even in the top 3: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis....

Soil management practices (aka tilling) causing N2O release, digestive methane from cattle, methane, and methane and N2O from manure handling. Fertilizer was lumped in with crop residue burning and rice cultivation in 4th place.

Two of the top three are directly related to animal husbandry, and the rest are heavily impacted by the vast amount of land used to grow feed for cattle in feedlots instead of directly feeding people.

That's true, and I hadn't considered that angle too much.

However, methane's greenhouse effect is 25 times more potent[1] than the one of CO2, so converting carbon to methane is worse than just burning it.

And lastly, farming meat is not neutral either: at the very least, that's land you're not going to use as forest (carbon sink). And then there's the other net emissions.

I think the IPCC is doing a very thorough job at getting accurate estimations. They have many lobbies to go against, which will carefully examine discrepancies on their reports. Like wikipedia, having persons of different opinions and interest cooperate on a report, the report comes out as generally more objective and accurate, as that's the only compromise acceptable by both parties.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...

Is it even interesting though? How can it be trusted at all?

This kind of study is really easy to massage into the result you want. You're dealing with extremely variable, large-scale supply chains.

Agreed

Less taste? That's not a complaint I've heard nor experienced. I've always found Beyond burgers to be a bit strange, sure, kinda like the uncanny valley of hamburger patties, but I certainly never found them to be bland.

We all watched bad sci-fi growing up... right?

Beyond burgers are what I imagine when the advanced microwave food creator machine spits out when I say I want a cheeseburger

Have you tried one? This just isn't true. They taste slightly different, but definitely not "less".

If you do it right -- get a nice crust on there, don't overcook it, toast up some decent buns in butter and use good pickles, cheese, etc. -- it's every bit as flavorful and indulgent as a beef burger. (a decent one at least... you're not going to replicate the best of the best, nor should that really the goal)

And 100% less violence.

I think you're being facetious, but I kind of agree— I've found more joy in homemade black bean patties, shallow-fried falafel-based sandwiches, etc. Basically I enjoy it more when it's something clearly different that is filling that role, rather than something pretending to be something else.

This video is pure garbage. Detailed rebuttal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G44CDBdC8CA