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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> One way I tried to do this, was to switch the kind of milk I drink. This also had a secondary impact on reducing my environmental impact.

This is why I'm not hopeful that lab grown meat will be transformational. We already have a handful of sustainable, widely available, and affordable cow milk alternatives right now and people aren't switching over in droves. Getting people to change their habits is hard without a huge incentive. I can't see how lab grown meat is going to be substantially cheaper (soy/rice/oat milk is more expensive than cow milk in the UK still) or much better tasting to make people switch.

I see people saying things like "I'm sure to switch when it's cheaper and tastes the same or better" but I'm not sure how we'll avoid global warming when people aren't willing to really change anything (vs only willing to switch to identical alternatives).

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Something I've noticed about both vegan/plant-based customers and the industry, is that no one is willing to change their eating habits.

Asian and African cuisine are far less reliant on meat (as a percent of their diet) to bring flavor to their food. However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food. Instead it is the same old efforts towards mastering the vegan beef patty/sausage and vegan pizza. Guess what, India has had an amazing mc Aloo Tikki & mcVeggie in McDonald's for 20 years and they taste better than any vegan burger that is readily available. Let alone native dishes that are far more aligned with vegan ingredients.

As long as our diets are reliant on meat and dairy as the sources of flavor and lynchpins of the cuisines, we won't see a perceptible change in net contributions to environmental degradation and climate change.

At the same time, the recycle campaigns of the 2000s have shown that expecting ground up action from the customer almost never works. There needs to be a production side once give to push sustainable solutions. Maybe we could start with. Ew balancing subsidies to push sustainable practises in the food industry. But food luck getting past that lobby.

> Asian and African cuisine are far less reliant on meat (as a percent of their diet) to bring flavor to their food. However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food. Instead it is the same old efforts towards mastering the vegan beef patty/sausage and vegan pizza. Guess what, India has had an amazing mc Aloo Tikki & mcVeggie in McDonald's for 20 years and they taste better than any vegan burger that is readily available. Let alone native dishes that are far more aligned with vegan ingredients.

I agree with this. It's odd when you think about it that many people expect cow, chicken, pig or cheese to be part of every meal they eat.

The alternative to meat shouldn't be Beyond burgers, it should be plants, vegetables, tofu, tempeh, setain etc. and a change in mindset about food.

There are plenty of vegans who don't regularly use meat substitutes. Imo, it seems like most of them are more directed to curious meat-eaters rather than vegans.

> However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food.

I really question if you actually know any/many vegans saying this. "Meat substitutes" are far more common among people who aren't very serious about it, are only just trying to shift their diet, or are only really doing it for dubious 'health' reasons.

Any vegan I've ever known who's been vegan for more than a couple years has a diet that consists almost exclusively of meals designed around vegetables, with maybe one or two things like you're talking about as nostalgia-pleasers.

That said, "alternative milks" are not like beyond burgers. Liquids that contain fat, protein, and sugar are almost universally called milks and have been for a very long time, and are very useful in daily use and for cooking.

Just because something resembles a meat or dairy product doesn't mean it exists solely to be a placating replacement. Sometimes it's just a convenient form factor. Like, a black bean patty is nothing like a beef patty. But you eat it the same way. Oh no they're copying meat!

If by "driving adoption" you mean being the cause of a shift to these things I dunno what you really expect. Vegans are a vanishing minority of all people in terms of "western" diets, they can't drive the market to the corner store.

I agree almost exactly with everything you said, except

> Vegans are a vanishing minority of all people in terms of "western" diets, they can't drive the market to the corner store.

I think Vegans (and memes about how they tell everyone) are shifting big-city cuisine more, and they're successful in mainstreaming the idea of no-animals. Even if vegan food isnt successful, they're making the idea of not needing meat products more mainstream (and i think milk is the real success story of this).

I dunno, I think health food fad diets have done far more to move that needle than actual vegans. The idea that meat is bad to eat because it's "bad for you" is pretty distinct to me from the moral arguments most vegans are interested in. I'd honestly expect the number of people out there who use soy milk instead of normal milk because they heard "fat is bad" or "lactose is bad" alone easily outweigh even loosely defined vegans.

(likewise, vegans frequently get blamed for labour issues involved in production of superfoods like quinoa but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people eating those are doing so with no interest at all in completely eliminating animal food sources from their own diets, let alone from the entire culture)

Anecdotally,

> I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food.

As a vegan-ish non-indian american person, i am a huge advocate for more indian food. I LOVE indian food.

But not everyone is onboard. I see the issue more to do with culture and flavor than anything. Americans want american food not indian food (at least in part). Thats why impossible burgers are more popular than Aloo burgers.

On the flip side, i see tofu appearing in all sorts of dishes, even Tofu tacos and the like. This is because tofu is less imposing. You can make tofu whatever you want (like meat), which is not as true of more flavorful alternatives from eg. india. This makes it a better "gateway" alternative". Thats why alt-milk is getting popular now - its just milk, but made differently and now better. Everyone already knows and likes Almonds and Oats, so why be nervous about the change?

Not vegan/vegetarian, but I never really understood this either. I absolutely love Indian food, vegan or not. Whereas most “western” vegan foods I see don’t look overly appealing or seem to just want to emulate meat .

> hereas most “western” vegan foods I see ... seem to just want to emulate meat .

You're looking at the wrong stuff. Most vegans don't eat that stuff its for recent converts and people who don't know how to eat. Most vegans make meals that aren't "we had meat and potatos and substituted fake meat" they're meals meant to be filling and nutritious without meat. They just use other better proteins. Silly example, but a ham sandwich vs a peanut butter sandwich. PB is way better than "ham sub" but still protein filled.

I have noticed that very few of the products launched are actual ingredients in food. They sort of are the food. With tofu, there are a gazillion ways to cook and prepare it. With these other foods there is one way, and then you serve it differently.

I have a tendency to always come back to tofu, tempeh and seitan. They are extremely versatile, and at least the first two feel "healthy". Soy mince makes me extremely full and leaves me feeling bloated all day. Sure, I eat it sometimes (it is probably the only one of the more modern products In regularly eat), but it is never my preferred food.

I think milk substitutes are fine alternatives for drinking and cereal, but not baking/cooking. I don't know how much that matters.

But I do think in general people will buy whatever's cheapest, and it is an uphill battle against the many dairy assistance programs the government provides: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy...

Lab-grown meat (and presumably lab-produced milk) are going to be a different sort of product than Morning Star patties or Pea Milk. Lab-grown meat would be meat, not merely some thing that is vaguely meat-like.

I really like soy milk and almond milk, but they remain twice as expensive as milk and distinct in taste.

I'm not sure anyone thinks that lab-grown meat will go through the roof if it's not cheaper than farm-grown meat.

Sure but very few of those affordable cow milk alternatives are a really good facsimile.

I've had so many of them and the pea protein ones are probably the closest in texture and the barista oat milk tastes pretty good but none of them are exact copies.

Lab grown meat is by definition a good facsimile. I don't think people care too much if it spent time as part of a cow or in a bag/vat.

Maybe people aren't switching over in droves but when I opened up my 21 yr. old daughter's fridge the other day she had oat, soy and almond milk in there but no dairy.

Personally, I like all the alternatives except soy but my goto remains 2% cow milk for my tea in the morning. All other uses I could switch to alternatives without too much pain.

We need to get rid of all meat and dairy subsidies asap. If the price of milk and meat reflected their social costs then consumption would drop pretty quickly

Alternative milks make up about ~10% of the US market according to this report [1].

If the trend continues, in 6 years, they're likely to make up ~50%.

[1] https://www.totallyveganbuzz.com/news/vegan-milk-sales-grow-...

Lab grown meat (and milk, for that matter; there’s some work on that) should taste much like real meat. Milk substitutes don’t really taste like real milk.

It’s also likely that at some point animal agriculture subsidy will end, and cost of externalities may be tacked on. At that point price will influence consumer behaviour. Plant ‘milks’ are currently more expensive than actual milk largely because farmers don’t have to pay for emissions, largely don’t have to pay for water, and are quite heavily subsidised in other ways; this can’t continue indefinitely.

So why aren't we demanding incentives? Let's make policy which causes plant-based diets to be the path of least resistance for most people. We do this for plenty of other things.

They are taste very differently and every time I try to make baked foods with substitute milk something is wrong. Lab meat has appeal because is the exact same.

Also, people with ethical concerns about killing cows > people with ethical concerns about drinking their milk

I don't act much on my moral convictions, but generally I'm anti-torturing farm animals. The lives of beef cows seem way, way better than the lives of dairy cows.

Drinking cows’ milk at any scale requires killing cows, though possibly people are less aware of this.

In the EU, people are switching over in droves - to the point that the dairy lobby got a law passed that they cannot be called milk, and cannot be advertised in ways evocative of milk.

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