Genuinely curious; is eating something processed like this better than eating regular unprocessed ground meat?
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.
Even cheap meat still has a great nutritional profile compared to vegetables. In fact, meat consumption is quite (economically) progressive because expensive cuts subsidize nutritionally similar cheap cuts.
Venture capital isn’t investing in fake meat because of some love of the earth. It’s a vertical integration play for fast food. Any shift of the demand curve hurts beef producers a lot, and they don’t have the economies of scale that a factory has.
If successful, they’ll be making 50 points of margin on a tray of mush.
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.
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.
Ground beef is readily available at sub-$3/lb. Plant-based ones like Beyond are over $6/lb. So Beyond is more than twice the price of ground beef.
It gets even worse if you compare it against what I imagine is the most popular meat sold today, chicken breast; that's $1.75/lb in value stores like Sam's Club but is often on sale for less, around $1.50/lb if you pay attention to weekly ads[0]. So in that respect, Beyond meat can be more than four times as expensive!
That may not mean a whole lot to many on this site who are earning six figures but for everyday folks it's a large consideration.
[0] https://circulars-prod.cpnscdn.com/pdf-cache/Randalls/21_14_...
This cuts your beef consumption in half and I actually prefer it to plain burgers now.
If you want a healthy unprocessed burger, might I suggest trying a delicious homemade black-bean burger.
This claim is obvious a-priori bullshit if you know much about human metabolism. Plain old meat is very rapidly metabolized almost entirely into peptides and absorbed; there is little room for it to cause GI problems. Hence why there are a lot of people with plant-related digestive issues (e.g. celiac) but very few people with beef intolerance, outside of freak allergies like alpha-gal (lone star tick syndrome).
https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2021/03/17/bacon-sa...
The rest of your comment is clearly irrelevant to the topic at hand.
“Reams of evidence” for an extremely weak effect more than counterbalanced by nutritional benefits.
Red meat has an IARC classification of 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans. This is based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies, but also (contrary to your claim) mechanistic evidence.