It's not bad as a burger. Go to a Burger King and get a beef Whopper and and an Impossible Whopper and compare. Even with no condiments they're pretty close.
Now if they can get the excessive salt content down...
As I understand it, that's not a necessary part of the process, it's just what fast food places like Burger King do to all their meat. I don't see why something like ground Impossible Burger meat substitute that was sold in a grocery store would need to have the same salt content that the BK version does.
I was in the store just a day or so ago looking at alternative meats and I _also_ found the sodium content to be a bit high in some (though offhand, I can't remember if it's Impossible specifically). A frustrating aspect of some of these alternatives is that they overload on this stuff to get around taste differences - many of the coconut yogurts have more sugar than their dairy counterparts, for instance.
I generally prefer these options but it's frustrating that they have these caveats. Would be nice if we could learn from the mistakes made in the existing products.
1. I thought we were done pushing the complete protein thing? All the essential amino acids are essential (duh), but don't need to be consumed together like once thought. 2. With that said, soy is a complete protein. 3. Soy is also a legume.
By "complete protein" I just meant that you need to have all the essential amino acids in your diet, not that they all need to be contained in the same dish. However, AFAIK all animal proteins do contain all the essential amino acids in a single dish, which makes it a lot easier to make sure you are getting them all. So any plant protein that is going to be a good meat substitute should have that same property.
> soy is a complete protein. 3. Soy is also a legume.
Agreed, that was a mistake on my part.
While I'm sure there are people who won't accept anything less than that, I suspect there are many more who, like me, would be quite happy with "fairly close" to meat instead of "exactly like". There are plant protein products on the market now that already meet that goal. Even if such products don't displace 100% of meat consumption, they might still make a huge dent in it.
Haven't found a steak replacement yet, but we eat vanishingly few of those so it's not much of an issue. Will jump on a healthy, eco alternative that's full of iron though.
As it stands, I'm really not interested in labmeat. I'll just save my meat consumption for "special occasions", while using plant-based as the daily driver.
They say they could feed the world on plant-based food, if only they'd give it a fraction of the subsidies meat gets. I think it's an avenue worth taking seriously.
Or just stop subsidizing meat and make it compete on a level playing field with other protein sources.
(Btw, it's not necessarily true that animals raised for food will suffer. It's perfectly possible to raise them humanely and kill them when the time comes in a way that causes no suffering. In a free market that might not even cost more than factory farming of animals does today, since animals raised humanely are generally healthier and require much less artificial intervention such as antibiotics, which are routinely fed to factory farmed animals because of the artificial environment they live in.)
Eggs from chicken that have more space and can go outside suffer less but are more expensive to produce.
Ignorance or questionable ethics should not be rewarded by monetary gain. That is why relying on consumers to "vote with their wallet" is a fundamentally broken design.
External costs should always be included in the price of a product.
In a free market, there is no "we". Each individual decides what to buy at what price based on whatever criteria they like, and each seller decides what to sell at what price based on whatever criteria they like. They everyone continually adjusts their choices based on what results they observe. There is no central authority that decides what anything is "worth".
> Eggs from chicken that have more space and can go outside suffer less but are more expensive to produce.
Generally, yes, which means you, as a buyer, have to be willing to pay more in order to provide a positive incentive to producers that do this. Which is exactly what my wife and I do when buying eggs (and many other things); we choose to pay more to reward producers that do things in a humane way and thus incur higher costs.
> Ignorance or questionable ethics should not be rewarded by monetary gain.
You are perfectly free to not buy from producers that don't do things the way you think they should be done.
> That is why relying on consumers to "vote with their wallet" is a fundamentally broken design.
If other consumers disagree with you, then the way for you to "fix" that "problem" is to convince them to change their buying decisions. Trying to get a central authority to dictate who can buy and sell what does not work; no central authority can aggregate all of the necessary information. It's mathematically impossible.
> External costs should always be included in the price of a product.
In general, the only viable way to do this is to not have externalities: to allow property rights to be traded so that all externalities get internalized, i.e., they are explicit costs or explicit benefits to one of the parties to the transaction. That ensures that they get properly taken into account.
That's often a dishonest figure which ignores how land is actually used, such as:
- Much of the land used for animals (for grazing etc) is not suitable for growing human edible plants.
- We feed animals with plants that would otherwise go to waste. When growing corn, we only use the seeds. The whole rest of the plant (i.e. most of it) is feed to animals.
I wasn't talking about land use. I was talking about energy. Plants capture solar energy directly. Animals capture it indirectly, by eating plants. That extra stage in the food chain decreases the available energy to humans eating animals instead of plants by a factor of about 10.
Also, if plant protein largely replaced animal protein in human diets, the land now used for animal grazing could be used for wild animals that weren't raised for food at all but just allowed to exist in their natural habitat. So the fact that that land is not suitable for growing human edible plants does not mean the use of that land is irrelevant to the choice between animal and plant protein in human diets.
> We feed animals with plants that would otherwise go to waste.
No, they would otherwise go into the food chain somewhere else, most likely by being eaten by microorganisms and fungi. That's not "waste". It's a natural part of the cycle. Whether or not animals eating the plant material is a stage in the cycle does not change the fact that the cycle is there.