Watch Out, Beyond Burgers–The Fungi Renaissance Is Here | Hacker News Reader

Watch Out, Beyond Burgers–The Fungi Renaissance Is Here

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38 pointsdevy23 comments

As long as quorn and similar products continue to taste bland and have little texture, it's going to be an incredibly hard sell to convince people to switch over from meat, otherwise quorn would already be the top seller. And that's coming from someone who was a vegetarian for 10 years

Even the sausage in the picture looks dry

Personally I like nearly all the (many) Quorn products I've eaten, and continue to eat on occasion, as a flexitarian. Esp the large (Best of British) sausages, the "chicken" pieces and to an extent the "mincemeat".

Can they improve? Yes, sure. But when cooked in good sauces / dishes they constantly impress for day-to-day meals.

I'm not even a vegetarian and I love Quorn. Its very different from the thing its "replacing", but its nice in its own right

Pork is one of the most taste-neutral foods you can get. It's all in the spice imo. Sausages can be quite dry as well. So apart from texture, many meat-alternatives aren't so off :) I've rarely seen anything that promises to replace beef, though.

Here I thought pork was in fact the least taste-neutral. Pork is one of the few meats that tastes delicious without any kind of seasoning at all. To go further I use pork fat to season othee foods.

Ok so that's probably subjective to some extent. The fat part is definitely relevant. When making vegan Mett from rice waffles (original that is spiced raw pork), I usually add a fair amount of oil to somehow get that satisfactory feeling that arises when eating fatty meat. It somehow works, but not as much as I wish. Grated dried tomatoes give some of the umami taste. But the fat is kind of special...

I don't really agree, pork products can taste great alone. cured ham is a great example of that. For sausages, the only dry sausages I've tasted are "hot dog" sausages that are an emulsion of meat (which is usually a bad sign).

And there's tempeh, a soy food produced with a fungus. [1] I had some for the first time in a long time in a stir fry last night, and it was delicious. Nicely chewy; tasty all by itself, unlike tofu (although it needs to be fried). Would make a great burger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempeh

I tried some store bought tempeh once in a teriyaki recipe and wasn't terribly impressed. It was kind of like undercooked beans and had that grassy soybean taste.

Sounds like I'll have to try it again later with a better recipe or better tempeh.

How is the bioavailability of mycoprotein for humans? Anecdotally I don't seem to digest mushrooms very well.

It's one of the best proteins out there. Have a look at the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correcte...

I'm going to speculate it's not very high. Mushrooms are too scarce to have ever constistuted a significant amount of our caloric intake so there's rarely been an incentive to get "efficient" at metabolising mycoprotein.

On the other hand, in terms of genetic material, fungus is more alike humans than plants themselves. Maybe that means the particular proteins aren't that unrelated and hence more bioavailable?

It’s higher than all meats, and most meat alternatives other than pure soy protein.

Mushrooms aren't very scarce. Usually they made a significant part of the primitive human diet depending on biome. The gathering part of hunter gatherer that is.

Mushrooms aren't scarce in humid environments

Interesting, but given that lab meat is just around the corner I don't think it will matter much.

People like meat and will continue to like meat. You can't host a dinner party and serve a vegan meal unless everybody is vegan.

> You can't host a dinner party and serve a vegan meal unless everybody is vegan.

You absolutely can. Trying to serve a meat-based meal and replace the meat with something might be hard. But making a meal that doesn't have meat or animal products in it in the first place is not hard.

Why can't you serve a vegan meal for a dinner party?

Save the bees before anything that can be eaten is fungus-based.

I'm almost ready to give up fish, as I gave up birds and mammals long ago. Fish is going to be a very difficult texture to replace.

Another alternative is insect protein which I am in big favour of. Mealworms for example make great meatless burgers:

https://www.wur.nl/en/project/insects-as-food-ingredients.ht...

I've happily eaten insects as a regular meal in the americas and other countries, and see it only as a cultural barrier for it to be introduced large scale in western markets.

With the amount of processing and lack of awareness of what’s in our food that we accept daily, I think it wouldn’t be difficult for alternative protein sources to flourish.

They just need to be cheaper than the alternative and close to indistinguishable.

The other problem with insect protein is it doesn’t qualify as vegetarian (nor the new hip name “plant based”), so it’s not clear who it is marketed to.

We need protein for our bodies to survive, and while I love chickpeas and soy, I seek higher protein.

Further, studies that debate insects are less efficient for protein are comparing entomophagy to farmed animals, which I don't eat for ethical reasons:

https://reducing-suffering.org/eating-insects-usually-less-e...

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