Can we stomach the latest emerging food innovations? | Hacker News Reader

Can we stomach the latest emerging food innovations?

bbc.com

58 pointsadrian_mrd260 comments

This is what grinds my gears. For years scientists and health professionals are repeating over and over "don't eat hyper processed foods" and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries. You want proteins? Eat lentils and beans and once a week chicken or fish. Artificial meat is the stupidest invention in last 50 years. Don't eat artificial meat! There's literally nothing good that can came from it, eat moderately instead.

You're right, but also people really, really like meat. And they'll continue to want to eat it a great deal. Very, very few people would willingly choose bean caserole over steak and chips more than even 10% of the time.

> Eat lentils and beans

Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it.

Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say:

https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/

They are still not complete proteins like every animal protein is, so you need to figure out combinations that can theoretically make a complete protein. And the protein content is still going to be much lower than meat. Protein is already the hardest to get enough of, it's always easy to eat carbs and fat, which people already do too much. And if something is hard to digest, common sense says that it's probably not utilised as well by the body either.

In practice it really makes a big different, to eat 100 grams of chicken for dinner, compared to 200 grams of lentils. Most people that eat plant based compensate with eating more fat to get the satiety per gram of food higher, which leads to an unhealthy diet.

It would be much simpler if plants had complete protein in the same amount as animal protein sources, but it's way off.

Could you elaborate on what makes a protein complete?

It contains all of the essential amino acids.

Legumes do contain all of the essential amino acids, just not in the ideal ratio. Specifically, I believe they're low in methionine.

"Protein" is actually a large number of different amino acids, most of which our bodies can manufacture.

Our bodies can't manufacture nine of those amino acids, we have to ingest them, and also in the appropriate amounts.

Eggs have all 9 essential amino acids and also in almost exactly the proportions we need them in, making eggs a fantastic source of protein.

In general, legumes and grains individually are not complete proteins, but are when the two are combined.

Hence rice and lentil dahl, or baked beans on toast. The combination makes complete protein.

> making eggs a fantastic source of protein

Too bad they come in a package with cholesterol and choline.

https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/eggs/

I'd rather eat beans and whole bread.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/

Here is what this non-profit that reviews science has to say:

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/

This notion of incomplete proteins is outdated and not very useful, if not quite wrong. It's really hard to eat a diet so restrictive that you end up deficient in the way the theory would predict.

Further, there are actually "complete" vegetarian protein sources. Namely soy beans.

They dry out my skin when I eat them in any significant amount. They also have toxins to your body. Sprouting them removes this issue, but they change the way they’re consumed.

That two week thing is a generalizations. Some people have more sensitivity to fodmaps.

The idea isn't meant to appeal to us, as neither you nor I consume fastfood enough for it to matter.

But plenty of people do, and it drives the meat markets whose over abundance of meat related products drive other markets that keep this horrible cycle of slaughter going.

Weaning people off meat at the fast food level is great way to start IMO.

Where are you getting that chicken or fish from? Are you quite comfortable with the story of how it got to be on your plate?

Not the person you're replying to, but I've helped process chickens half a dozen or so times. The smell puts me off eating chicken for a week or so, but overall the answer to your question has a lot of nuance.

Broadly speaking yes.

On the other hand, I definitely eat less meat when I don't how it was raised and slaughtered. I'm no saint: I had a fast food burrito last night while traveling, but I certainly try to eat less meat that comes to me by a long supply chain that hides any sense of accountability for the well-being of the animal from the consumer.

Let's also not forget the human cost of industrially produced meat. If there's one thing the pandemic should have taught us, it's that animal processing is a job people do under fairly challenging conditions, for which many of them are poorly paid, and some of them aren't in a good position to advocate for change because of their immigration status.

And this is the problem with industrial agriculture. All of the good or bad practices that go into bringing food to our plates is abstracted away such that we don't have to think about them or hold ourselves to account for them.

Am I comfortable with how those chickens I help process come to my plate? Absolutely, and without reservations. The sausage from the local farm we patronize? Yup! The pork in that burrito last night? A lot less so, but I was hungry and needed a meal quick. The burger at McDonald's? Nope. That's why I drove by it and hit the burrito place instead.

I know it's become taboo to admit to eat real meat from an animal but this is my same concern. Processed food of any nature completely destroys me, and is the cause of my IBS, and I will stay away from any form of processed meat. Being vegetarian or worse vegan doesn't work with me and my health.

I strongly believe there's much better ways of improving the status quo and being carbon neutral than buying meat built in a factory by a chemical conglomerate that uses vegetables and legume proteins flown from the other side of the world. So much for being "green".

I spend 3x in meat than the average Joe because I buy 90% of it from local, family-owned organic farms and as long as I can afford it I will keep doing so, I will keep eating meat because my body requires it and functions the best on it, and trying to push processed fake meat as the future is being blind and obtuse to why people actually eat meat. No it's not because they're just stupid and ignorant and are climate skeptics.

If obesity and health issues have become such an epidemic because most of our food is processed, I am terrified to see how much worse we'll be when more political and economical resources are invested towards even more processed junk food.

The only people loosing their mind over it seem to be the ones railing against it.

Well, several posters in this thread have made it clear that they intend to replace real meat with fake meat over any objections. I think this is reasonable to be upset about.

For many of us, this seems like another example of the affluent, technological society causing us a problem, then selling us a solution, which will inevitably cause more problems, and etc.

Perhaps the problem is not that humans eat meat, but rather something at the ideal level of this society, causing it to act in this way over and over again, despite the cascade of self-inflicted crises that it has no hope of solving…

> Well, several posters in this thread have made it clear that they intend to replace real meat with fake meat over any objections. I think this is reasonable to be upset about.

…why? I don’t see why you should care at all. It doesn’t affect you. Not even a little bit. The anti fake meat hysteria has gotten to be just as dramatic as militant veganism, but it doesn’t even have any ethical implications to justify strong emotions.

None of these rules are 100% true. "Natural" food can be bad for you, and processed food good. It is just a heuristic that works somewhat well when you have limited information.

“Processed foods” is a catch all term for what is generally known as junk food - food that is nutritionally poor and often has unhealthy quantities of flavour-enhancing ingredients that are known to be a problem in excess such as saturated fats, salt, sugar etc.

However being against a food for merely being “processed” is essential-oils level of pseudo-science. Frankly it’s baseless fear-mongering and entirely ignorant to the understanding of nutrition.

These foods are being made by the same scientific community which decries the junk food - the same people whose view you support.

There is no reason not to engage an artificially made food replacement which is both sufficiently enjoyable and nutritious. This especially so when they address the significant issues of food-supply contributions to water scarcity, climate change and antibiotic resistance.

Artificially grown meat will also be better for you - not just nutritionally but also because it doesn’t fall victim to the weaknesses in the food supply industry (disease/food poisoning/contamination.)

Also “everyone munches on it like strawberries” - the foods in question are either still in development or low supply. There is a lot of strawman going on here.

I find the first two sentences of your post incoherent. If, as you say, processed food equals junk food, being against it doesn't seem pseud-science to me.

You probably meant the term "processed foods" is being used imprecisely to mean "junk food" which is true: the large set of processed foods contains both junk food as well as other kinds of food, some of them being processed by their very nature (like cheese - you can't have "unprocessed cheese").

I wish people stopped using the imprecise phrase "processed foods" and concentrate on the overall effect on one's health. Because singling out any particular component will get you false negatives. Olive oil - high in calories. Feta cheese - high in sodium (and yet, it has an overall good effect on one's cardiac health). Red wine - bad because of alcohol. It's only when you look at the whole you can make a meaningful decision. Yes, it's more difficult and people prefer simple decisions. But your health is worth it.

The comprehension issue at hand is that you’ve ignored the quotation marks around “processed foods”, thus you’ve lost the reference to the parent comment which the statement was in reply to.

However you have come good and realised that I was indeed taking issue with the words being used as an improper stand-in for foods which merely have poor nutritional content.

Yes, I think it's because of how I interpreted your quotation marks: I assumed you wanted to indicate the use-mention distinction [0] so I took the term at face value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...

Artificial meat is the most important thing anyone could be working on right now. Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

"don't eat hyper processed foods" is a horseshit shorthand. It's types of processing that are problems, not the simple fact that food has been prepared. Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?

> eat moderately

This literally doesn't mean anything. Moderate is not an amount, or a composition.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

You wrongly assume people in general want to or need to be vegetarian. We evolved to eat and digest animal based foods.

Drastically reducing the consumption of real meat, especially beef, would have an impact on our greenhouse gas emissions comparable to making all planes and ships carbon neutral

I didn't know these numbers, so I had to look them up:

* Ships are responsible for 90% of international transport, their CO2 emissions accounting for approximately 2.2% of the global total of such emissions [0]

* Aircraft are responsible for 1.9% of greenhouse gas emissions (which includes all greenhouse gases, not only CO2) and 2.5% of CO2 emissions [1]

[0] https://orbit.dtu.dk/files/158911010/Working_Paper_4_Emissio...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

Yes, yet that doesn’t make it any easier to change peoples dietary preferences.

That is an enormous lie.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... Agriculture in total is 10%. Transportation is 29%

That seems pretty comparable.

If you consider 10% to be 29% it certainly is very comparable.

Comparable doesn't mean identical. It means they exist on the same scale, or are of similar magnitude. Obviously that's subjective to an extent, but a factor of 3 is only half an order of magnitude - sufficiently similar that "enormous lie" seems a rather unfair description.

Nearly 300% difference is a huge and fitting description of a huge lie. 10% is also all agriculture, not just bovine production, and even if you removed trucks in transportation, I am sure its not going to be similiar at all.

Emissions in Transportation are dominated by road transport, which I didn't include. Road transport is responsible for about 70-80% of all transport emissions.

See for example [1] for a more detailed breakdown. They list Aviation as 1.9% of total emissions, Shipping (by ship) as 1.7%, Livestock & manure as 5.8%. So by those numbers planes and ships add to 3.6, much less than the 5.8 of livestock (and that's not including use of energy or transport for livestock).

1: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

That data is from 2016. It’s rather outdated. That amount of percentage change is rather low for the disproportionate impact it would have, its like convincing others to use a raspberry pi 3 for a gaming desktop to use less energy but ignore the hvac that can be replaced with more efficient energy usage with less of an impact.

With data from 2020 the comparison would be unfair and even worse, look e.g. at chart 2 in [1] about how transportation emissions changed in recent years. I can't find good worldwide numbers newer than 2016, but my statement should have plenty of margin to hold for a couple of years after 2016.

> That amount of percentage change is rather low for the disproportionate impact it would have

That's the neat thing about artificial meat (what this whole thread was about): at its best it promises to slash the need for livestock without requiring any change in consumer behavior. The consumer shouldn't even notice that it's not real meat they are eating.

Of course there's impact on farmers, but that's no different from the petroleum industry being harmed from the move to EVs.

1: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/transport...

>That's the neat thing about artificial meat (what this whole thread was about): at its best it promises to slash the need for livestock without requiring any change in consumer behavior. The consumer shouldn't even notice that it's not real meat they are eating.

They know. That is the hope, but the plant based ones are disgusting. If you're talking about the bovine serum derrived one, you're assuming a 1:1 replacement that is equal in price. Manure is used to fertilize plants, it is used as a fuel in india, and can be used as a substrate to grown mushrooms but its benefits are ignored since solutions aren't really being suggested, only the complete removal of cows is acceptable.

All these problems are wealthy problems, the poor are not going to have this impact them, and it will cost too much for it to reach the masses.

This is largely a red herring. The entire world could become vegetarian overnight and emissions would only be reduced by a couple percentage points. Reducing oil dependence is a far more fruitful endeavor to pursue.

"reducing oil dependence" is hardly a singular task. "Reduce Meat consumption" would rank lower than "make electricity production less dependent on coal, natural gas and oil" but higher than "find a viable alternative fuel for ships".

Luckily we have enough people and resources that we can work on multiple problems at once

We already have nuclear as an alternative, it’s just not being used.

Using buffalo instead would lower emissions, use less resources and give healthier meat but the war against beef isn’t really looking for solutions, it’s trying to fit the abolishment of rudiments as the only acceptable method.

In the UK under rationing during WW2, during which people ate very little meat, the health of the population soared. Mortality dropped, both in infancy and old age. Children grew taller and heavier.

Also during WW2, occupying Germans removed all animal livestock from Norway - so Norwegians had to survive on wholegrains, legumes, fruit and vegetables. Deaths from strokes and heart disease plummeted almost immediately. After the war, the consequent return to eating animal products saw the previous levels of disease return.

We eat far more protein than we actually need today.

A lot of things were rationed in WW2. What definitively points to excess meat as the culprit?

>In the UK under rationing during WW2, during which people ate very little meat, the health of the population soared. Mortality dropped, both in infancy and old age. Children grew taller and heavier.

Okay but is it because of eating very little meat, or because of rationing itself? Looks like it's simply because a lot of people got a steady and stable supply of calories and vitamins/minerals, not anything to do with meat.[0] . In other words rationing + more meat could have easily produced even better results. Meat, after all, is an excellent nutritional choice.

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/9728

edit: wowza typos

They were worried about famine, people were starving and children didn’t get proper nutrition and were prone to more disease, girls stopped menstruating. Some Norwegians were lucky and grew their own food including animals. The fact your cited the malnourishment of these unfortunate people as a citation to justify your propaganda of poor nutrition and eating habits is evidence that nobody should take you seriously, it should only be seen that your dreadful beliefs as the opposite of what to do unless they agree with your advocacy for stunted children, non menstruating females, and being prone to illnesses such as diarrhea, pneumonia and meningitis, which will kill them before heart disease and they won't live long enough to have a stroke either.

https://www.kubenarendal.no/Eydehavn/undervisning/barndomung...

You cannot make absurd claims like yours without any source whatsoever. Please link it below.

We evolved to do a lot of things we no longer tolerate, and we have invented many things that do better than evolution.

As for “need”… what is good for one human is often very different to what’s good for humanity — tragedy of the commons, Nash equilibrium, there are many examples.

And as a vegetarian, I’m an existence proof that it’s fine, though not any evidence of it being better or worse than an omnivorous diet.

> We evolved to do a lot of things we no longer tolerate

Such as?

Food hygiene is the big one, in this case. We used to eat whatever we could hunt and kill (or gather) without knowing what bacterial infections looked like, much less how to eliminate the pathogens. Even cleaning bowls and cutlery is only possible after the invention of those things, and soap is much more recent, circa 5000 BC according to a quick Google (and then apparently used for curing ailments rather than as a general thing? IDK how much to trust first hit on the web).

Do you think you'd die if you were to eat with your hands off the floor? Rich Western citizen probably have weaker immune systems than people living in the middle of the jungle, but they're all the same species, it's not a matter of "we've evolved to need to eat with a clean fork."

Even the Rich Western person is much more resilient than you think they might be. You can survive, perhaps not thrive, off half rotten carrion if need be. Evolution works on much bigger timescales.

> Do you think you'd die if you were to eat with your hands off the floor?

No, that’s putting words into my mouth.

I’m saying we won’t tolerate bad hygiene, not that it will kill us, and our floors are generally quite clean these days anyway.

Food poisoning is however a thing, and from what I’ve heard (never had it myself) quite unpleasant.

> We evolved to eat and digest animal based foods.

I doubt we evolved to eat large quantities of (mostly low quality processed) meat two or three times a day though, that's a very very modern lifestyle.

“Low quality” “Processed”

These words are meaningless.

Eh... so a chicken breast and a hot dog sausage are the same ?

The beef from the farm across my parents' house is the same as an antibiotic fed beef from a large scale US exploitation shipped over the atlantic ?

A frozen burger patty vs a locally sourced beef piece minced by your local butcher ?

A bag of dehydrated potatoe crumbs vs home made mashed potatoes ?

An apple and a banana vs an industrial sugar and preservative ridden compote ?

I know removing or altering the meaning of words is a big trend these days but it seems dishonest to not see the difference here. I honestly think you'd have to be severely uneducated or straight up lying not to see it

So your gotcha is that he or all meat eaters equate hot dogs and chicken breasts and you’re trying to call him uneducated or a liar with this genius logic?

No gotcha, read the comment I'm replying to. “Low quality” “Processed” definitely have a meaning

There’s a lot of implications you’re making, like a frozen beef patty is never higher quality than one that is from a butcher. Your examples aren’t convincing.

Almost all meat our ancestors ate was processed in some manner. Very rarely did they gnaw it directly off the bone immediately after the kill.

It depends who you ask, but humans have been processing and cooking meat for probably half a million years.

Salted and preserved meats have been sound for a very long time as well.

The processed foods we eat today are probably far higher quality than anything our ancestors ate. I can only assume “quality” here to refer the safety, cleanliness, and purity of the food. I don’t know what else it could mean.

If you think the smoked or salted meat of our ancestors is "processed" in a way that is similar to modern industrial food I think you should dig a bit more.

> I don’t know what else it could mean.

I guess thats the issue then. Preservatives, colorants, added sugars/salts, melting salts, texturants, fake cheeses, and all kind of additives, &c.

Do you ever wonder why more and more people develop food related addictions and health issues ? Why half of the US is obese ? Why diabetes is skyrocketing ?

https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2019/01/03/banned...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211014102038.h...

https://thecounter.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-recla...

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318630#refined-car...

All of which exist in plant based food too.

Overeating is why people are obese, specifically overeating plant based foods. Diabetes isn’t caused by meat, it’s caused by sugar, derived from beets or sugar cane, both plants. I implore you to find me a person that is obese from eating nothing but meat, the same way you can find obese vegans. (It doesn't exist.)

If you care about people's heath, surely you'll tell them to eat more meat.

Or corn! Don't forget corn!

The US produces ~14B bushels of corn each year. That's about 1500lbs per man, woman and child. What did you do with your share of corn this year?

I think most of it is used as feed or sold isn’t it?

Oh, mostly it's cracked into syrup, oil, protein, fibre, dextrose, starch etc. And those things are used in everything - paper, fabric, building materials, other animal feed, plastic...

Corn won early and it won big, so everybody started figuring out what they could make with the cheap stuff. And it turns out, nearly everything.

Fed it to a cow and ate the cow.

That must have been one massive burger!

> All of which exist in plant based food too.

Yeah of course, that's why I think the modern take on vegetarianism/veganism is bs, every trend is corrupted by consumerism and the easiest way to make a profit is selling processed food (mostly byproducts of other industries) with a "vegan" sticker on it

> specifically overeating plant based foods

Can't find anything about that, any sources ? I can find dozen of studies linking meat over consumption to obesity and health issues in general, a few linking plant based diets to lower risk of getting overweight/obese but none linking vegetarianism to obesity.

> Diabetes isn’t caused by meat, it’s caused by sugar

Oh don't worry, they also add sugar to meat based processed food, they add sugar to pretty much everything. Ah, and you're wrong:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14576980/

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/95/3/752/4576709

> If you care about people's heath, surely you'll tell them to eat more meat.

I doubt it, the average american already it 120+kg of meat a year... and it's strongly associated to all kind of health issues already.

https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/1in3cancers/lifestyle-choic...

https://www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.741627.de/publikationen/round...

Adding sugar to meat doesn’t make meat the cause of obesity any more than shooting someone with COVID means COVID killed them.

Neither of them are all meat diets, you just posted articles less that state incorrectly that that eating too much plants and adding meat is proof that meat are the only reason they’re obese and diabetic.

> We evolved

Nutrition is poorly understood so being conservative with changes is reasonable, but making claims about what is and is not good because of the environment we evolved in doesn't make sense at all. Evolving in a specific environment emphatically does not say what you are optimal for, just what you can tolerate acceptably enough to function. That we can function while eating meat is not in doubt and every other claim based on evolution is an appeal to authority to an authority that doesn't support what you say.

Nutrition isn’t poorly understood. If what you said was true, vegans wouldn’t need to take tests to check their micronutrient profile or need so many supplements. You have no evidence to support your claim, there has been 0 vegan civilizations; for good reason. There is no dimension where a vegan does not need to check their iron levels and supplementation is a must: if you care about your health and getting what your ancestors did from meat.

If nutrition is as well understood as you claim when you criticise vegan diets (I don’t know, not my field), then we must also know how to create a vegan food item that can replace meat and dairy, and the question is then one of taste and cost.

They made that a long time ago and achieved it (vegans that supplement), dog food like vegan products like Soylent exists. Although it exists you'll have to convince people to consume it since its not preferable.

So you agree the question is then one of taste and cost.

No.

The cost of soylent is not more expensive, and its taste is not bad. The problem is culture. You don't need to convince a progammmer who doesn't want to leave his computer. Vegans are/were also not convinced by taste or cost, that is not why they are vegan.

If you don’t think it’s a question of taste and cost, why did you say in other threads: “They know. That is the hope, but the plant based ones are disgusting.”, “I ate some quorn, its rather good, but its overpriced and I would never buy the vegan one.”, “I found quorn (made with egg white) to be a 1:1 chicken breast replacement, but its much too expensive to be a real replacement.”, “I am not interested in a meat flavored veggie protein shake that is made of seed oils, costs more and is less nutritious. It’s disgusting.”

I won’t be convinced to eat heavily processed food nor will I become vegan ever. Talking about their taste doesn’t mean it’s why I’m not vegan.

When did this become about you rather than about if society can accept a new food product?

Search "you" in the thread. It has been that way since the beginning, in fact you started the thread doing so.

I don't get the your logic of starting the thread talking about my opinions then asking when it became about me when you are literally talking to me about my opinions the entire thread, posting "So you agree the question is then one of taste and cost." and even dreging comments from other posts about my opinions. It is all about me.

Checking the micronutrient profile is important and it does a lot, but absolutely 0 nutritional specialists will claim to you that this will solve your nutritional problems. That is why they tell you to have a "diverse" diet: It's a hedge against the fact that at the end of the day they have no idea what to do. All they can do is check a few markers and hope for the best.

Processed foods is mostly just a collective term for food with high amount of preservatives, food additives, heat treatment, cold treatment, grinding, emulsifying, and other mechanical force being applied.

Each step changes the food in ways that can have benefits but also drawbacks. Turn an apple into apple juice concentrate and then add water and what you have is not an apple. You got an apple-inspired surgery drink with almost none of the food properties of an apple. If people tried to reconstruct the apple using food additives, the result could even look like a physical apple and possible even fool people into thinking they are eating one, and yet it would not be an apple with the microbes, fibers, vitamin, minerals, skin and other parts for which makes an apple an apple.

A 10-step recipy that you cook at home might include some aspects of an identical finished product that you could have bought at the store, but in general I suspect it has fewer of the destructive steps. Those that you do yourself might also be less effective, as one don't usually intend to have left overs that can remain in the fridge for several months with no change.

> food with high amount of preservatives, food additives, heat treatment, cold treatment, grinding, emulsifying, and other mechanical force being applied.

I.e. the kinds of steps you cannot perform in your kitchen yourself, because you lack the necessary hardware and expertise. Home cooking is amateur-level food processing. It's still details of the individual steps that matter for whether the end product is healthy or not.

As a shorthand, it has nonzero informational value, but it's really blaming the wrong thing - it's not processing as a concept that's problematic, it's particular decisions made by companies releasing food products. The closer you are to raw ingredients, the less opportunity there is for businesses to screw with the food (optimizing for profitability over nutrition).

"Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?"

If your kitchen looks like a kitchen and not a chemistry lab or oil refinery and you're starting with things that are identifiably food, you're probably good to go either way.

And while I'm no expert on the full cycle of meat production in he US, animals are routinely grazed on land that is unfit for modern, large-scale row cropping. I'm not saying that's the only way to turn soil and sunlight into plants, but it does seem to be the predominant one.

It isn't clear cut to me that taking that land out of productive agricultural use and shifting the need to yet more industrial agriculture is a huge win. If somebody has done that math, I'd be very interested in seeing a source. And to be clear, I'm more than prepared to believe that it's a net win. It's pretty well established that cows create a lot of methane and that all the progress with seaweed-based supplements is dubiously applicable to free ranging livestock.

> If your kitchen looks like a kitchen and not a chemistry lab or oil refinery and you're starting with things that are identifiably food, you're probably good to go either way.

Well, the flip side is that if your kitchen looked like a chemistry lab, you'd be able to make better food. The difference between cooking and chemical process engineering is that the latter actually cares about quality of outcome.

There's a lot to be concerned about with what the food manufacturers are optimizing their products for, but reducing it to "processed = unhealthy" or "chemical sounding names in ingredient list = bad" is just like saying that the only real art is finger painting, everything else is not art.

It depends how many of those 10 steps involve cramming the food full of extra sugar, fat and salt. With industrially processed food, that's almost inevitably a big part of the processing. Industrially processed food wouldn't have to be so unhealthy, but it is consistently enough to make it a pretty accurate heuristic for how healthy food is.

This list is not super “convincing”: Water, pea protein*, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Why is there a laxative in my fake meat?

“100% free range grass feed beef” is a lot more convincing.

Do you take issue with any particular ingredients, or is the implication just "long list bad"?

What are you calling a laxative?

Yes, I am not interested in a meat flavored veggie protein shake that is made of seed oils, costs more and is less nutritious. It’s disgusting. I don’t know who the market for it is, I’d sooner eat tofu than overpriced corporate crap with heavy processing and industrial refining. What is the benefit? Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

If the issue is seed oils, then by all means make that case. There are arguably convincing points to be made in that area.

Implied outrage at long ingredient lists is not constructive.

I didn’t post his list.

Implying an ingredient which is made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals since the underlying implications is that plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than mean isn’t more constructive if you’re trying to convince others to eat non meat products.

Right? It's like "I want to start eating less meat". "OK, here's something that sorta kinda looks and tastes like burger or nuggets". "No, but I want to start eating vegetables". "Yeah, yeah, don't worry, this thing is made of vegetables".

So, prior to the veggie burgers and soy nuggets you were hooked on low quality meats in beef burgers and chicken nuggets, and now you are to remain hooked on low quality vegetables in bean burgers and soy nuggets.

Or rather, you are to remain hooked on the products of the same industry that has been destroying the planet and the developed world's diets for generations. And suddendly, the products of this same industry are not just not junk food anymore, they are healthy alternatives that don't harm the environment!

> I don’t know who the market for it is

People who think their is a demographic for only binary choices when it comes to diet it seems; I'm convinced the SV bubble thinking applies here. I highly recommend the series 'What you will eat next' [0] wherein they actually visit and prepare the meats, to their satisfaction.

But honestly I grew up eating tofu (it's delicious when prepared correctly as it will take the flavour of anything you make) and if you think using small amounts of animal protein (pork in this case) alongside with tofu to make Mapo Tofu isn't a better solution than these absurdly wasteful proposed solutions: I'm talking about you.

The degree they go to over-complicate and recreate a poor solution that we've been using for 10,000+ years (Agriculture) but have only recently fucked up--conventional chemical, and feed lot, factory based farming--is the epitome of clutching at straws to find a solution to a problem.

People bemoan things like Bitcoins POW energy intensity when plant based meats have probably have a larger carbon footprint than that and they were started around the same time simply because of the need for so many inputs and the likely chance they are derived from those very same sources the decry.

In short, I think renewable Ag is quite honestly the most effective solution to climate change and restoring balance to the damage we have collectively done the Earth by a significant margin--but by no means should be the only one--because of the scale and scope of it's immense size: it's the largest Industry, the FOREX is only larger because it includes commodity trading from Ag and currency exchange from within it.

Food education is perhaps the most vital thing we can do when trying to confront this solution with any sanity, something I think is entirely lost when what is required comes up because it's so visceral: we've spent most of our time as a species just trying to have enough calories to survive, we've gone to war for salt to preserve what little food we had so it's an expected response. But if we do not make progress in this domain and create solutions I sincerely think it will lead to the dystopia we've heard from water wars (the more serious issue in my view).

> Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

Sadly, yes, I cooked professionally and my career took me to kitchens in the US and in Europe (alongside my horticulture apprenticeship in Biodynamic Ag) and I even spent time at a renown Vegetarian and Vegan restaurant in the US, and the lengths we went to make 'hamburgers' or 'crab cakes' that were kind of like them but not really was absurd! The amount of oils and other inputs you need for this to be even remotely resemble the texture of the real thing is so absurd, they act as binders or fillers to satiate what is otherwise a starving person.

There isn't enough time to discuss this topic in it's entirety, but yes... this was my conclusion and while I've worked in more acclaimed and busier kitchens since then I was outright shocked at was at best misguided idealism, or more often, outright blatant self-righteous ignorance from the end consumer: and this was from someone who dedicated a significant portion of my adult life to finding viable ways to lower meat consumption add increase vegetable consumption.

Everything changed when one of regulars had a stroke in the dining room one day during service and I simply could not participate in the operation any longer--a cause I'd later find out after I left was unrelated as he was an older professor from the nearby university but he ate most of his meals at our restaurant for years. He and an older couple (who ordered the same meal everyday) came for dinner service 5-6 days a week at the same time.

I think this is simply chemical corps doing the VC model of diversifying their portfolio to fund things that may have a slight chance at playing a part in the inevitable decoupling from this model. They're flush with cash from subsidies, bailouts, corporate welfare and have the media channels and access to influencers: so what are a few billions in R/D that are using their pre-existing reagents, proteins or binders if they can shoe-horn their products into fastfood chains and tell everyone they are saving the World doing it?

If they're successful they'll make their margins competitive from IP after creating the demand and make it up over a few years (decades?) with 'strategic' dividends as leaders in the newly established plant-based meat Industry.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbyoZ2KetYo

Thanks for your post. You understand my point, these disgusting processed foods are nothing but junk food with no animal produces no different from oreos, crescent rolls, and rice-a-roni which will not inprove your heath but it will taste good. Seeing it from the corperate side isn't suprising, its just embarassing how people fall for meat is bad, so this heavily processed food that costs more and has worst nutrition and is less digestable is better.

https://www.drugs.com/mtm/methylcellulose.html

I think I’ve made vegan chilli with a similar length list of ingredients.

Which ones are laxatives?

False equivalence.

Using 5 different beans is different from using something like HFCS, hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil, and industrially separated rice protein and pea protein, unless you think we should equate ingredients such as quinoa and benzoic acid.

Expeller-pressed canola oil is explicitly not "hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil". Also no HFCS.

These are examples of products that are vegan and are commonly found in vegan food. So do you equate the industrial separating of plant protein from grains as the same as a white northern bean?

No, they aren't equivalent. But that's not an argument against eating isolated plant proteins.

Yes it is. It is a legitimate reason against eating heavily processed food including plant proteins, and you have made zero legitimate arguement against it, saying no its not is an invalid point.

I'm not even trying to argue that anything is good to eat here. This comment chain, since the ingredient list of a Beyond burger was posted, has amounted to pointing in the vague direction of that list and things like it and saying "Ew! Too many ingredients. Too processed".

The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing. Implying a previously single ingredient which is now made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals gives the underlying implication plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than meat.

It isn't nebulous, its expensive, disgusting, heavily processed, who is this marketing well to? Vegans, normal people who love expensive processed food? Who is this for? Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around. They will never adopt it, the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it, most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat, and the meat eater won't think highly of it either. Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once, but not take it seriously.

> Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing.

No, it isn’t? That “one” ingredient is just a thousand in disguise. Even aside that there are lots of scary-sounding chemicals in all living things just to keep us alive: Is the beef hormone-fed? Does it have BSE because it was fed ground-up other cows? Antibiotic abuse for weight gain? And so on.

> Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around.

It’s no more of a “Frankenstein food” (a term I previously only associated with GMO) than, e.g. Snickers candy bars, which are wildly popular.

> They will never adopt it,

Perhaps, perhaps not. But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

> the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it,

Sone will, some won’t. The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

> most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat,

Do they? I don’t know what meat tastes like. But then, I’m not even vegan, I’m a vegetarian (who avoids cow milk yes, but not derivatives).

> and the meat eater won't think highly of it either.

You might not — you might even have tried one of them in order to make a fair comparison, though you’re writing in a way which suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater — but I have accidentally cooked vegan meals for people who are normally heavy meat eaters and they’ve complemented me for it. It feels like you’re projecting to claim that of most people.

I suspect most people won’t care, assuming it’s cheap enough. How much do these things cost in Burger King or McD or wherever?

> Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once

Wouldn’t be surprised. Most new things oversell and under-deliver.

But I wouldn’t write them off, either.

Snickers bars are also disgusting heavily processed crap that has no benefits to the consumer. Popularity isn't a metric of success, obesity, the use of IE6, Windows, Intel graphics, and being infected with coronavirus is for instance popular.

>But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

That is a pipe dream that doesn't exist, you are saying it will fail because of 3D printed steaks that will cost 30 cents every 10 lbs and be 100% equal to steaks. Comparing it to a fantasy replacement isn't useful.

>The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

Quorn is nearly 90% of a pressed fungus with ingridients such as egg white and flavors, not a frankenstein mixture of highly refined oil, peas and rice.

>suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater

I don't eat junk on purpose, I will eat whole foods that include meat, yet you self identity as a vegetarian but you don't see me saying you identity as one in italics disparagingly. Your small sample bias doesn't change the fact its nothing more than a novelty, and reenforces it, They will never replicate your cooking as a habit, and comparing junk food to most vegan food is fitting in nutrition but if your bar for quality vegan food is to compare it to snickers and the cost and nutrition of McD and Burger King I will not partake in eating junk food no matter how few animals are in it. The so called "food" they made is disgusting.

> Popularity isn't a metric of success

It literally is. Especially given the context of this particular thread.

That you disagree is confusing.

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processed meat?

You seem to be conflating successful with good, in both directions.

Success is popularity, and popularity is absolutely a metric for success. If this product is popular, it is necessarily successful. You are explicitly denying this specific thing.

All of the food items currently sold (at least around here), on an individual and personal basis for the consumer, basically fine. The fact that a normal person has a bad diet does not alter this, as the products themselves are not the issue, the aggregate is (and indeed one of the issues with the normal person’s diet is too much red meat). Many dietary options exist, both those subsets which are and are not individually fine for the consumer, including a lot of foods you’re rejecting.

Because the individual foods are all safe, the questions society now has to consider are: (1) ethically, do animals have intrinsic value, or are they things we can just exploit without care? And (2) what are the non-personal consequences, e.g. pollution, land and water use, habitat destruction, and crop diversity to avoid all the issues that monocultures bring.

These two are independent, any given thing (not just meat and non-meat human products, also the food which feeds livestock) can be good or bad on each and either the same or different on the other. And it’s a spectrum for each sub-part of those two big bullet-points, not a Boolean. I’m vegetarian (and try to reduce milk consumption) because I want to err on the side of assuming too many minds might be sentient than too few, but note that despite this belief my comments do not denounce “meat is murder” or similar slogans, because that’s not something other people find relevant, rather they find it annoying.

Likewise, I am not arguing against meat (and leather) by saying it is disgusting and therefore nobody would eat (wear) it, because while I find it disgusting even on a conceptual level, I can clearly see that most people don’t.

Meat is popular, meat is successful. The only way to replace meat is to make something more popular. That is success. If I was working in that sector, that would literally be my metric for success.

But you aren’t discussing on that level, you’re going “ewww pea protein, nobody can possibly want to eat that” like your body wouldn’t do a similar chemical reaction if you ate peas.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

But your point is not right though! When you cook at home you put in the stuff you want to eat, that tastes good and nourishes you, and that's the point of food.

But the ingredients in highly processed foods are not there to feed you, or even to make the products tasty. They're there to accommodate the production process (eg emulsifiers), to increase the product's transportability and shelf life (preservatives), to make the product more appealing to the senses (colorings, flavorings etc) and, more worryingly, to hook you with huge amounts of salt, fats and sugar, that you don't find in base ingredients like potatoes or beans.

These added ingredients replace and crowd out the actual food you need and want to eat. That's the point, yes? The Harvard article I quoted above says it clearly: "Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients".

That's because they must be high in ingredients that are not "fiber and nutrients" and are there to improve the ability of the product to be sold, but not to nourish you. Because the primary goal of such over-processed foods is not to feed you, but to sell well.

Am I getting my point across? Whether fake meats are nutritious or healthy is not the industry's concerns. So it will not optimise for those properties. The industry's concern is to sell its stuff. So it will optimise for that. And if that ends up feeding its consumers unhealthy shit, so be it. That's the same industry that's been selling over-procssed, unhealthy, environmentally damaging junk food made of meat for years. It's now doing the same thing with plants. Nothing has changed.

No, I don't see the point you're trying to get across.

To keep using the Beyond burger example; you imply emulsifiers are no good. Is sunflower lecithin problematic? Methylcellulose is kind of another one here, but it's literally insoluble fiber, something you imply is problematic for a food to be missing. The only ingredients that might be present as preservatives I can see are salt and vinegar/lemon juice. Are they problematic in the amounts used? Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

Now, if we were talking the emulsifiers being PGEs, sodium benzoate as a preservative and red #40 for colour, then maybe there would be a better case for not eating Beyond burgers. Or maybe canola oil simply isn't what you consider to be healthy. Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

> Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

"Problematic colourant"? Of course it's problematic. Because it's a colorant. For food! Why do you need to add color to food?

> Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing. In particular, nutrients that you need to have in your food and stuff you don't need to.

Is it the fact that it's a general classification rather than a case-by-case analysis that is bothering you? Would you prefer it if there was a long list of foods with an annotation "processed", "ultra-processed" etc with a small discussion of what's in them that shouldn't be in there and what's not in that should?

Problematic as in negative health consequences. If there aren't undesired consequences, what is the problem?

I like to add turmeric powder to my rice for the sole purpose of colouring it. Is that some travesty? Is my rice now ultra-processed?

>But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing.

No, that's explicitly not what it's doing. It tries to classify things by level of processing. The fact that the examples given often don't fit their criteria only serves to make it look more ridiculous.

Makes me wonder how the soy mince I used in the chilli was made from the soybeans. Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from. Or the creatine I put into chilli (the packet says to put it in water and drink it, but it’s nowhere near soluble enough so I put it in food instead).

> Benzoic acid and its salts are used as a food preservatives

Why would I bother? And objecting to a preservative is like objecting to refrigerators. If refrigerators didn’t exist, I’d put something like that into my chilli, no problem.

Real meat doesn't require you to research that or worry about it. No thank you to some weird expensive frankenstein food to replace a single ingredient with poorer nutrition.

A functioning food regulatory body is why I don’t worry about it and didn’t bother researching those things before happily eating.

Perhaps regulators don’t function where you live? But if so I wouldn’t trust the meat (well I’m veggie but same point; nor dairy or anything else) either.

Why do you keep asserting that Beyond Burger has worse nutrition? I’ve not seen anything to justify that.

They approve coca cola and candy bars, will you eat and drink nothing but them since the food regulatory says they are safe?

Meat doesn't have carbs and has more digestable protein. I am not eating more expensive heavily processed fake meat with carbs and lower quality protein.

That’s like saying cars are death traps for the occupants, then responding to evidence they’re regulated for safety by asking someone who drives if they’d drive into a harbour. (And to continue the analogy, your other comments would be “Nobody would ever buy these! They’re expensive and worse than running!” while ignoring the demonstrably large market. And I guess I’d be a cyclist?)

I’m happy to eat only things that are regulated, even if not to then further limit myself to the specific subset your tangent is going to now. Don’t put words into my mouth to try to argue against something I didn’t say.

If you don't want to use an appeal to govnerment authority for what you can eat, then don't bring up food regulators if you don't want to take it to its logical conclusion of uselessness. The government approved it, so you don't worry? Why think for yourself when the govnerment can tell you whats good for you? Why do reseach, its approved, you don't have to use that precious brainpower and can happily eat everything the government tells you to.

> Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from.

Extra virgin olive oil, for instance is extracted only from olives and only by mechanical means. Basically, what you need is a lot of weight, that's all. No heat, no catalysts, reagents, emulsifiers etc. In theory, you could make it at home, but you'd need a certain setup like a millstone or two and a team of pack animals or half a dozen strong young men to turn it.

But that's how it's made anyway: press olives, collect oil.

Which is, I suppose, why it's considered one of the best quality oils you can get and as far as can be from ultra-processed stuff like hydrogenated vegetable fats and the like.

That is so wrong, it doesnt even need response but here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Which part of the world? The US? Eastern Europe? South America?

The barrier to "convincing" and "cheap" are very high.

Seitan, tofu, lentils and tempah have long fit this criteria so it’s not exactly high. It just hasn’t happened and it won’t happen just because some tech nerds who assume it hasn’t already happened decide you can do it with Frankenstein food by heavily processing it and using enough food flavorings to mask its plant origins and convincing you to pay more for a worst product.

I don't consider any of those "replacement meats," they're foods in their own right. Falafel fits the bill as well, maybe mushrooms.

The real problem is scale. We're much more likely to develop a microbial or fungal nutrient sponge that's far easier to manage (and probably better for you + the environment) than develop some sort of highly advanced fake meat extruder.

One of the biggest issues really is momentum. It will be 20-30 years before a technology can compete with a guy in muddy jeans on a tractor. We are disrupting the fossil fuel industry, but that industry is only really about a hundred and fifty years old. The agricultural industry is nearly ten thousand years old, and it's experiencing its own renaissance with the advent of IoT.

Why not?

I ate some quorn, its rather good, but its overpriced and I would never buy the vegan one.

I bought the vegan one before I left the UK (can’t find it in Berlin). It’s not great, but not terrible. (Vegan cheese however, has been terrible every time I’ve tried it).

Now I’m using tofu or soy mince or similar depending on what meal I’m making. Those do need flavour, not having much of their own (unless bought pre-flavoured, smoked tofu works well).

I don't see how any of those examples are anything like a meat replacement. Just because something is high in protean doesn't make it a meat replacement. That makes it a protean replacement.

What is your idea of a meat replacement?

At the very least it should mimic the texture and taste (to a close enough degree) of the meat it is trying to replace. Otherwise it is not a replacement, it is an alternative.

I don't call chicken a beef replacement.

I think that taste can artificially induced easily with seasonings (remember stuff like bacon salt?). The texture of seitan and some seasoned tofu are very convincing, but I found quorn (made with egg white) to be a 1:1 chicken breast replacement, but its much too expensive to be a real replacement.

There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to. Environmental concerns can be improved over time. It's a primary food type everywhere it can be gotten, and everywhere else is trying desperately to get more. Artificial meat will always be a minor alternative.

> There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat

Are you sure you see absolutely no reason to stop eating meat? You may need to read the parent comment again, a few are cited, including the "need to kill billions of animals every year" you didn't address.

Whether those reasons are sufficient to stop eating meat is a separate matter.

> we're not going to

> Artificial meat will always be a minor alternative.

I need a crystal ball, can you tell me where you got yours?

Where’s your crystal ball that says artificial meat is a larger alternative or it’ll be 1:1? Most people are poor and can farm themselves instead of relying on corporations to feed them.

I have not stated that. That's the point: I have not attempted to take a guess at the future and stated this guess (or my wishes) as a hard fact.

> There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to.

Most people in the west definitely eat too much and too low quality meat. In Germany it's pretty much the norm to eat two meat based meal a day, if not three. Meat in the US is an abomination, both in term of quality and amount consumed. No reason to stop eating meat altogether but plenty of reasons to start eating less of it

I personally reduced my meat consumption by about 80% and mostly eat a vegetarian diet based on non processed food, I feel as good as ever, my performance in the gym didn't decrease, there is no reason to eat as much meat as we do really, it's purely cultural. I don't have anything against meat morally speaking, I still get a nice piece of it whenever I can when I'm eating out, I just cut the garbage quality meat (aka 80% of what's available in supermarkets)

> no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to

What if lab grown meat was significantly cheaper than animal-sourced meat? Because that could very well happen in the future, animal production isn't exactly cheap or effective.

Yeah, it's not the "processing" of it. It's that one of the steps in the process of almost all "processed" food is: "Add a ton of salt and sugar".

It's not the processing, it's optimizing for getting your dumb starving brain in your fat meat puppet to go "More of that. Now." that is a problem.

Processing is just a word, and not even that bad as shorthand. But here come the word thinkers and now it's heretical to... what? Let food see the inside of a factory? Big stainless steel vats are what make you fat? Word thinkers, man. That's a bigger problem than sugar.

Instinct Hacking food?

Our 'natural' hamburger is already being 'processed' by well- and long-bred cow 'laboratories' on 'factory farms'. Tipoff: the burgers don't look or smell like grass (or whatever cows eat these days, besides antibiotics and meat and bone meal).

The big question, of course, is how much methane these 'laboratories' will produce! ';-)

There is a commnonly accepted standard about what is (ultra) processed or not. It's called NOVA and it's summarised in the following article:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...

And I quote:

"Ultra-processed foods

Also commonly referred to as “highly processed foods,” these are foods from the prior group that go beyond the incorporation of salt, sweeteners, or fat to include artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. Several processing steps using multiple ingredients comprise the ultra-processed food. It is speculated that these foods are designed to specifically increase cravings so that people will overeat them and purchase more. They are typically ready-to-eat with minimal additional preparation. Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients. Examples are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, chips, and breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets. One study using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that ultra-processed foods comprised about 60% of total calories in the U.S. diet. [4] An association has been suggested between the increasing sales of ultra-processed foods and the rise in obesity. [3]"

In short, ultra-processed food is food that's full of stuff you don't need to eat or you don't want to eat, but that's there to make you buy the product, and keep buying it. It's food whose purpose is not to nourish, but to sell.

>In short, ultra-processed food is food that's [...] there to make you buy the product, and keep buying it. It's food whose purpose is not to nourish, but to sell.

This isn't really supported by the quote you posted. That aspect only gets a mention in one sentence, and even that's qualified by "It is speculated".

The commonly accepted standard is incoherent.

Chips are listed. Not "some" as is qualified for frozen dinners, but just chips. Chips are just sliced potatoes cooked in oil and salted. No "artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability". If you dust some MSG and onion powder on them I guess that technically fits under artifical flavor. But I can do that at home in a couple seconds. Does dusting the same MSG and onion powder on my roasted asparagus make it ultra-processed?

Insofar as chips are an issue, it's that they contain too much fat, or too much salt or something. Not some magical property attached to them in an industrial factory.

There are similar mismatches for their other examples.

As the quote says "Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients". Chips are given as an example of that as are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. Further, "These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets".

Chips in particular are cooked in low-quality oils and highly salted (a pack of crisps in my neck of the woods has about 1.5 to 2% salt). Of course you can do that at home and nobody's stopping you, but chips are sold by the million tons all over the world. Hence the concerns about making peoples' diets a mess.

Right, the problem with chips isn't how processed they are. They're hardly processed at all. It's what is/isn't in them. Nobody would call homemade mashed potatoes ultra-processed, even if they were made to be nutritionally identical to Lay's chips.

I guess properly made sausage is now "ultra processed", despite just being smoked ground meat in a tube with some spices.

No it won’t. Tofu has existed for centuries and it didn’t, impossible burgers didn’t. It’s hopeful, but in reality it’ll just give industrialized countries with poorer people less access to animal products, while those in 3rd world countries continue to grow chickens.

Neither tofu nor impossible burgers are a convincing replacement of a real piece of meat. They are replacement for processed meat.

Sure, neither of them are ribeye equivalents. But at what cost will people pay for the the fake foods, and what issues will they bring? I'm actually very fond of quorn (with egg white) which I could be convinced is a 1:1 piece of chicken.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Then, by definition, it's not meat. Please, let's keep calling things with their proper name!

No, artificial meat is not. Always looking for solutions to the symptoms of the root cause, which is feeding overpopulation.

We don't expect to hit a human carrying capacity, we expect to 'solve' that problem with technology and clever thinking and live anywhere we like forever.

What happens when everyone's eating fake meat, but we've added another few billion people and we need more and more? Bigger factories, larger crops, wider distribution. Then that's the 'problem' and we need a new wonder thing.

Fake meat and all these other engineered solutions (along with large scale monoculture and livestock industries) ignore and completely misunderstand the complexities and resources of the natural world. The ecosystems of soil, insects, plants, climate etc interacting and evolving. We think we're smarter than that and can do better with simple solutions to complex problems, so here we are arguing about not-meat.

> We don't expect to hit a human carrying capacity, we expect to 'solve' that problem with technology and clever thinking and live anywhere we like forever.

Yeah, that's more-less the whole point of technology, and civilization. The alternative is to pack up and go back to living in caves.

Complex systems are there to be studied and managed with intelligent solutions. Not to scare us into trowing our hands up in the air and giving up.

My point is not going about going backwards, it's realising there isn't infinite growth that we just need to solve for

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate

Way less than replacing fossil fuels. Unless you're against killing animals for moral reasons, artificial meat is not "the most important thing anyone could be working on right now".

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

I'm not so sure about that. I've recently had the opportunity to try a vegetarian diet for a week. I did not enjoy it, I found the food tasteless and insufficiently nutritious.

But that got me thinking about all the dishes I usually consume which, while not exclusively plant based, are mostly made out of vegetables. All those dishes have a critical animal-based ingredient. The problem? Many of those ingredients aren't desirable by themselves - meat with significant bone and fat parts, pork hooves or ears, animal blood and others. Yet without them, you cannot make those dishes.

I wonder, when we finally arrive at that artificial meat future, will today's "undesirable" parts of beef or pork or chicken become an expensive delicacy? Will it basically wipe out traditional recipes that depend on them? I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a world.

> This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

Let's agree on the ethical aspect of avoiding to kill animals.

However, regarding the environment we need to look at the actual data and the weight of different activities on global greenhouse emissions:

- Livestock farming : 5.8%

- Road transport: 11.9%

- Heating/cooling offices and house: 17.5%

[0]

So considering the actions we can take right now, we would get much more bang for buck in curbing emissions, by reducing heating and cooling costs in our own homes and avoid car usage, than we would by not eating meat.

For the record I agree that we should stop animal cruelty but specifically on the environment the unconfortable truth is that there are more urgent 'confort' actions you can take right now, very people are willing to leave their car behind or curb their house A/C usage.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#agriculture-f...

Oh, so it would only remove as much in emissions as completely removing half of all road transport in the entire world. Might as well not even bother then.

I like the sentiment, but I'm an unrepentant "animal flesh once a day" on most days kinda guy, and various health markers all point to that working well for me.

The real issue to me is the branding: too many people think that just because a fancy label touts locally sourced organic whatnot that the product is automatically healthier than store-branded simple foods.

yeah but what if you take those lentils (or split peas), grind them into a powder, add tons of salt, color them with brown stuff, add juice to simulate blood, and then glue them into the shape of a hamburger?

I like Quorn, I've eaten some nice tofu and really good saitan. I really like black bean burgers too. However every single actual fake meat I tried so far was sitting wrong in my stomach. Maybe one gets used to it, who knows.

The whole topic is also skewed. In Switzerland 2/3 of the land are basically non useable. This land is only used to feed cows, which makes up 95% of the diet of a organic local cow. There is no way we could grow anything useful on this land, especially not without destroying the nature.

You could argue that instead of using that land for grazing, it should be allowed to go wild again, helping to improve the nature. It is still usable by other species than humans and cattle.

This would likely change the landscape and make the countryside look different. So there is a question about whether you want to change back to the 'original natural' landscape, or keep the cow managed 'agricultural-natural' landscape.

There is a a similar discussion happening in the UK about re-wilding some moorland, should it be kept in it's current tree-less state, for grouse shooting and not particularly economical sheep grazing, or be reverted to a 'pre-human' state of forest. Only it has been the moorland for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it would actually take some intervention in some places to change to a forest due to the grazing by deer and lack of predators (due to humans killing them all).

Personally I think there is room for both keeping some, and letting/helping some go wild.

Meat tastes good. I want to keep eating it.

If you knew human flesh to be the most tasty substance on Earth, would you want to keep eating it?

(No, obviously eating people is not equivalent on all levels to eating non-human animals. But merely tasting good isn't a very sensible reason to eat something on its own)

I can find non-human animal meat for sale at the grocery store.

That’s not relevant to the question asked.

For some people, meat is a moral issue that makes the literal holocaust look like a one-off homicide, and must be utterly eliminated. (Personally, given what I believe about the nature of minds, I suspect the moral issue varies by species; but the number of dead is that order of magnitude).

Other people believe it to be a mere personal health issue, which is basically just “you do you, none of my business”.

Other people say the environmental consequences of meat production affect us all, and therefore needs to be minimised: here, if everyone wants it but only the super-rich can afford it, that’s still a win.

It is relevant. It tastes good and it's food. I know that it's food because it's sold as food in the grocery store. It's sold in the grocery store because my society has deemed it as edible food. It would be a strange world if human meat was somehow for sale in the grocery store.

If I own a pet chicken and it lays an egg what do I do with it?

That the idea is strange is irrelevant, because your previous line was not based on strangeness or availability, but on taste and personal desire.

If I own a pet chicken and it lays an egg, what do I do with it?

That feels like it’s supposed to be a rhetorical question, but I don’t know what answer you’re expecting.

Apart from anything else, the idea of a pet chicken is too far from my lived experience to properly imagine.

We bought a half cattle from a local organic farmer. It’s not ultra green, but there was no fertilizer and fairly minimal transport carbon. And it keeps the money local. We are a family of four and I fully expect it to last 18+ months, pretty easily. Additionally, you can get it aged if you work with the processor.

It was a very interesting experience, we learned a lot and will do it again. Check out eatwild.com to find a rancher near you.

Sounds interesting. I will check that out. Thanks.

I have mentioned this several times in comments on other threads, and each time my comment was buried under variations of the same argument: the vast majority of people cannot be expected to give up meat, and therefore to help both the environment and their health, and to stop killing animals, we should offer them artificial meat. But I very much doubt that the additional crazy overhead of producing and packing and shipping this artificial meat (which as you said is completely unnecessary, as you can just start eating non-hyper-processed vegetables) will result in a net benefit for the planet, or for your personal health.

Another thing that concerns me is the centralization aspect. It is still fairly easy to buy meat coming from your local butcher / local animals. Looking at the ingredients of some of this artificial meat, I fail to see how it should be produced by a local shop. You need a supply chain, and possibly special machinery. This may only be carried out by large companies.

Most of the "real" processed meat has more overhead than its counterparts. Most people do not buy from a local butcher, to imply otherwise is turning a blind eye. They buy big brand overly processed "meat" that comes in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic just the same.

With respect to "crazy overhead" animals require land, food and water at an exponential rate of consumption compared to alternatives. They also taint and pollute groundwater sources and contribute to a significant amount of food recalls due to the above.

Lastly in the metro I live there are about a half dozen alt meat "butcher" shops that supply alt meats to consumers and local restaurants. They're insanely popular and have been for over 5 years now. There's great brand recognition of those alt meats on local menus. You don't often see that with "real" meat because there's not as much differentiation in the product in real meats, just price.

A lot of the above points are simply ignoring facts and the market. Hopefully, like with EVs, more people can continue to make positive progress and acceptance with alternatives to real meats as we've been seeing.

> With respect to "crazy overhead" animals require land, food and water at an exponential rate of consumption compared to alternatives.

Why is the overhead exponential in the rate of consumption?

Well, the claim isn't "exponential in the rate of consumption," it is "exponential in comparison to alternatives" which is... not wrong really, just complete nonsense.

E: Unfortunately "exponential" just sounds too cool, so everybody goes for it. To push back we will need pick something else cool sounding. Maybe "nigh incomparably larger"

Mathematically that's wrong.

What is? Their original statement I guess. I think it is more unparsable than wrong. I think the we should invite the philosophers and linguists in. From a programming point of view -- fatal compilation error, "exponential" is not a comparator.

Is the implication that alt meats aren't being consumed and therefore more wasteful? I'm not sure I'm following - because when I started to look at the waste in existing livestock lifecycle you begin to understand that it's never been efficient, nor has the industry done much to pivot with better methods.

Here's a water footprint comparison [0]. Here's a study that showcases where: "Agriculture accounts for 92% of the freshwater footprint of humanity; almost one third relates to animal products." [1] And here's a study that showcases how many people could be fed by grain given the footprint of food livestock need to be raised and bred [2]. And here's data showcasing the significant delta of available land vs diet types for different nations [3], many being unsuitable without external use of land for food.

[0] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221237171... [2] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

> Is the implication that alt meats aren't being consumed and therefore more wasteful?

No, I just didn't understand how the overhead of classic meat production can be "exponential", and I fail to find an explanation in your comment above. If your argument is that it is more wasteful to eat meat than to eat vegetables, I completely agree and this is hardly surprising. But this says nothing about the additional overhead and environmental impact of processing these vegetables into artificial meat on a global scale.

If the ingredient in a given product is known to be more environmentally impactful then the sun of the parts is, minimally, representative of those ingredients. It's well known, as you stated, that plants are less impactful on our world. The data linked in my parent comment showcases this. Alt meats are mostly plant based. Processing of livestock vs plants is much more costly, so I'm not sure where the disconnect is.

The data linked in your comment does not indicate any relevant exponential relationships so its unclear what you mean by that word.

Maybe you didn't open any of the links.

As an example, from "Water footprint of crop and animal products: a comparison" [0]...

Litre per kilogram - vegetables: 322, bovine meat: 15415 (47x more water required for meat) Litre per kilocalorie - vegetables: 1.34, bovine meat: 10.19 (7.6x more water required for meat) Litre per gram of protein - vegetables: 26, bovine meat: 112 (4.3x more water required for meat) Litre per gram of fat - vegetables: 154, bovine meat: 153 (1.006535948x more water required for vegetables)

It seems that with respect to water consumption bovine meat requires, in a way the particularly concerning word is often used, exponentially more for similar output - in most (3 out of 4) cases described by the article.

[0] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

> comment was buried under variations of the same argument: the vast majority of people cannot be expected to give up meat, and therefore to help both the environment and their health, and to stop killing animals, we should offer them artificial meat.

People historically have largely given up meat because it was too expensive at the time. To help the environment and stop killing animals, we should impose proper Pigovian taxes on meat (and/or the supporting process that directly produce the environmental impacts) so that they disutility imposed by eating meat is properly priced in. (This will also naturally create a demand for alternatives that substitute without the adverse effects to which taxes are attached.)

No need to apply taxes on meat. Just stop subsidising animal husbandry, as well as subsidising crops dedicated to animal feed, and the true cost of meat will emerge.

> ...and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries.

This is not exclusively a bad thing as is implied. For some it will be their endgame, but for others it will be a transition. In our household veggie "burgers" are more common than fake/alt meats. But fake meats have largely displaced the real thing. For example a commonly requested menu item is buffalo chicken dip. The family simply refers to it as "fake chicken dip" and that's been normalized over the last few years.

We've transitioned from smoking, grilling, sous vide and other methods of traditional meat cooking multiple times a week to a request once or twice a month for real bacon and around the holidays a brined and smoked turkey breast. Fish is another story, nobody's giving up sushi anytime soon. But overall we enjoy it, and it's a net positive in many other ways.

We've served other family members homemade burgers (not preformed) using off the shelf alt "hamburger meat" and they've taken to making them in their homes after enjoying them. In many ways there's not much health gain currently, but - again it's a great transitory step for many.

It’s more expensive, less healthy, and relies on tricking people they’re eating a more nutritious food than they are, who benefits aside from corporations? If you told people which is real and fake, you think it’ll still be wanted?

>"Eat lentils and beans"

Not that I do not like those but eating those in any reasonable amount for more than one day in a row is causing very strong heartburn sensation for me. So thanks bot no.

>"eat moderately instead."

I am very physically active (2-3 hour of daily physical activity) and have decent amount of muscle. How the fuck am I supposed to "eat moderately"? My main daily diet is greens with tomatoes and chicken/meat/fish.

"Processed" actually has a specific meaning, though. It generally refers to the addition of some kind of salt or smoking. So cured meats, sausages, bacon etc. These are processed foods. It doesn't generally mean stuff that isn't "natural". Do you really think meat from factory farms is "natural" anyway?

Feel free to grow my meat in a lab, as long as that lab is full of living cows, chickens, turkey, deer, pigs, lambs, and fish.

I know this is just a personal problem, but my wife is allergic to many lentils, including chickpeas, lentils, peas, and soy and it's becoming harder and harder to avoid these days, it seems.

It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")

I think the quality of products from plant based alternative protein sources like peas will increas so much in the coming time that these will make the race.

We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.

I have read similar accounts, only to later discover that the reviewers are vegan/vegetarian etc. If these are to displace beef, to kill the beef industry, then they need to win over the BBQ crowd. When the not-meat hotdog starts competing with the meat version at US ballparks, then I will take notice.

Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?

Non-vegetarian here. I'd take a fake meat hotdog than a real meat ballpark hot dog any day.

The best of the fake meats has already surpassed the worst of the real meats, and the overlap is growing quickly.

I like this way of describing it.

Things like the beyond sausage are so far beyond the quality and flavour of a cheap meat sausage. I love sausages (although I find them disgusting so often) and I’ve found these plant based ones kind of fill the void that cheap, gross meats create for me.

I don’t eat much meat in the first place anymore so I guess that void has grown a lot, making the plant based options increasingly appealing. I’m pretty excited to see these options expand and evolve.

> real meat ballpark hot dog

I agree with you, although if a "ball park hotdog" is what I imagine, I doubt it has much real meat. It is probably protein and coloring. I think in the USA they can call it mechanically separated meat.

A friend worked at a protein extraction plant here in New Zealand. They extracted the grey goopy protein from animal offcuts for the "fake sausage" industry. Just about any unused animal part was used. In New Zealand a real sausage has to contain at least 50% actual meat.

I don't understand, what makes mechanically separated meat not real meat?

There is no structure to it and it might be from parts considered traditionally (depending on the cultural) inedible.

The exteme version of this is pink slime:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

Sure, I'm aware of what it is, but I still don't understand how people consider it not meat. If I pureed a steak, I'd still consider it meat (well, liquid meat). And just because there were meats we didn't traditionally eat doesn't make them not meat.

It just feels like the fake distinction people make where they don't consider fish meat.

> Just about any unused animal part was used.

I can't logically see this particular aspect as anything but a pro rather than a con. Shouldn't we make use of every bit of an animal and reduce waste as much as possible? A video essay talking about Jamie Oliver's War on Nuggets [1] makes an argument better than I could about why this specific point against mechanically separated meat might not at least be consistent. Not to say there aren't other valid reasons to be against mechanically separated meat (or meat as a whole).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a9VDIbZCU

Sausage was always traditionally made from the trimmings and parts of an animal that were not “cuts of meat”. That was part of using as much of the animal and not wasting things. It might make us squeamish now if you were raised on only pure muscle meat, but there is nothing really wrong with it. There is a reason that they say you don’t want to see the sausage being made.

I can't agree with this more. Vegetarian ones taste pretty much the same as cheap meat ones. In the UK there used to be Linda McCartney frankfurters, Holland and Barret now sell their own brand ones which are seemingly the same. If you want real meat ones Big Apple Hot Dogs or Turner and George are legit, but it's expensive in comparison as the meat is sourced properly and they are not full of binding agent, sulphites or E numbers.

I don't know if it's different elsewhere, but for me the "alternative meat" products are competing with premium meat products due to their price - being "better than a cheap hot dog" is appropriate if it costs comparable to a cheap hot dog, however, it costs multiple times more and if it has a price tag comparable to premium cuts of beef, then the bar for taste is much, much higher than that.

I’ve switched out meat for plant-based substitutes for most meals in a week. My reasoning is that a great deal of my mid-week cooking is lazily constructed and only making use of meat by tradition rather than the meat being treated with enough care to add something essential to the flavour - katsu curries, beef stir fries, creamy pasta dishes. Good enough texture and possibly topping up “meatiness” in sauces using stock and flavour enhancers make plant-based alternatives more than adequate replacements for a Tuesday night.

I then reserve meat for evenings where I am going to take the time (or am at a restaurant where others have taken the time) to prepare it with respect for flavour, texture.

Admittedly I won’t win over a BBQ-every-day crowd with that approach! But, I fear that all good sense will go out of the window on the new possibilities opened by this research once it is converted to another notch on the left/right “identity” battle. As so often, we will lose the nuance of which meals could be meat-free and remain tasty and devolve to shouting names between the planet-murderers and the science-lab-creeps. Progress!

This is kind of it, vegetarian meat competes in the lips and assholes market. It tastes like meat to the same degree hot dogs taste like meat. It's probably even worse for you.

It has basically risen to the level of low-quality meat products. Not a bad bar to hit and if it makes a healthy alternative for crap meat then that is great. OTOH, it is nowhere near the level of replacing any meat product/use that is not ground/minced/paste prior to cooking. Sorry alt-meat fans, but it still has shit texture and lacks the other characteristics that most meat recipes have been built around. No one with any working sense of taste is going to have any problems distinguishing between a high-quality burger that you grind and mix yourself with a faux meat burger.

I’m very much a meat eater and think, if they can get the cost to be competitive, Impossible is already there as a ground beef burger substitute. It’s 5x the price now, but closing that gap with scaled production seems like it might be possible.

Is it going to displace a $20 burger at a boutique burger place? Probably not, but it’ll displace all fast-food and fast casual usages just fine and there’s a damn lot more of those sold.

In our area, Impossible and Beyond are around the same price as the better ground beef products (around $6-7 per pound). Even the cheaper ground beef is not that much cheaper in the stores. Not sure about commercial prices, though.

Another non-vegetarian here. I made a veggie hotdog last week which was close enough to the real thing that I would struggle in a blind taste test. Hot dogs are super easy to immitate, they're mostly not meat anyway.

Also ancedotally, I recently took a meat-eating friend-of-a-friend to a vegan fried chicken place. They said it was close enough that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference after a couple of beers. And they had recently worked in KFC...

I'd hazard a guess that the reason veggie hotdogs haven't appeared at US ballparks has less to do with the food itself, and more to do with cultural attitudes towards vegetarianism, especially amongst sports fans. Call it toxic masculinity if you want, or just stubbornness.

I'm a diehard omnivore, and the beyond meat sausage is honestly tastier than a lot of meat sausages I've eaten. I was seriously impressed.

That's the point of ultra processed food. They taste incredible.

Tbh I associate "processed" with High Fructose Corn Syrup and stuff like Nitrite. The stuff that increases our chances of getting cancer. I don't feel like 3D cultured cells are the same thing. Sure, both are the result of "a process" but it's not what the term "highly processed" signifies. What you are doing is like saying that natural vitamin C is better than chemically produced vitamin C. It's the same molecule so it is simply not true.

If synthetic meat does not contain any Nitrites or other stuff that turns carcinogenic inside the body, it should not be called "highly processed" imho, we decided collectively to use that term for something else: For food that has additives in it the make it less healthy than it's "unprocessed" natural state.

The group of unhealthy processed foods is larger than just the ones with corn syrup or nitrite in it. What most have in common, is that they contain too much added salt, too many 'fast' carbohydrates and too little or no nutritional fibers at all. All these factors are very bad for your health on the long term.

> What you are doing is like saying that natural vitamin C is better than chemically produced vitamin C

Of course the chemical substance is exactly the same, but if it is said that using fruits as a natural source of vitamin C is better than to rely only on supplements, then this is true.

I fully agree.

It will never replace a good steak or similar high quality piece of meat. But as others in this thread mentioned as well, the new stuff can easily replace the low end and mid tier meat products.

Another pro is that the pea products are powders with long shelf life sans cooling. Can haz meatballs anytime without shopping fresh meat.

Just to clarify: We are not vegetarians. We just try to cut down our daily meat consumption. But only if the alternative products actually taste good.

We're in the lucky position to have a hunter grand dad who is occasionally inviting us to highest quality meat meals. Unbeatable, and really appreciated and consumed very consciously.

I agree with this. It's like 90% of the way there for ground beef (impossible) and I've had some very convincing chicken nuggets. We'll probably never replace steaks with veggies, but maybe meat as a special-occasion food (grown sustainably and to extremely high ethical standards) is the best way forward.

I recently tried the impossible nuggets at burger king. The only reason I could tell the difference is that the texture was too homogeneous, the taste, and even the texture for the most part was near perfect. I don't know if they're going to be able to substitute out other chicken uses. I'd wonder if a chicken sandwich is the next target.

Why not just buy wheat gluten to make your own seitan and season it instead of relying on corporations to process your food?

Not at all the same thing

Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".

> The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian

No, this is a weird and popular misconception.

~ 97% of the people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are non-vegetarian. South India has amazing non vegetarian food.

I have impression people think that any meat that is not Beef is not meat either.

Meanwhile people in India eat chickens, fish, goats (seemly a popular dish is goat neck? saw some indian chef on youtube making that) and so on.

Also there are suspicions that cows were made sacred in first place to force people to not eat their source of milk, because seemly eating the cows was more popular than milking them, but they are far more useful in certain places for milk than for meat.

A regional cuisine can be largely vegetarian even if 0.0% of the people in the region are vegetarian. I eat meat, even though my personal cuisine is largely vegetarian: I cook a lot of vegetarian dishes, even though I enjoy a bit of meat every now and then. My non-vegetarian food is amazing, but so are my veggie dishes.

Descriptions like 'glorious' or 'delicious' are completely subjective. The fact that people did not choose to fast but were instead forced to by either religious dictates or economic requirements should be telling you something. When economies shift out of poverty and subsistence farming the amount of meat consumed grows, and as the GDP grows so does this meat consumption. Is it because 'big meat' is so good at convincing people that they want to eat more meat or is it because the thing holding back that meat consumption was only the ability to buy/acquire it and not because the veg cuisine was so incomparable that people choose it over options that used meat?

Oh, come on, Catholics who observe lent in [my part of] America almost exclusively eat fish on Fridays during lent, not lentils or anything vegetarian.

I grew up in a Catholic family and vegetarian dishes are actively shunned, the absolute only socially acceptable lent option for dinner is fish.

Why is fish not considered meat? I'm genuinely curious

It absolutely is meat.

Catholic rules say it's the only meat that one can consume on Fridays during lent. Why? Cause that's the rules. Religious rules are usually fairly arbitrary.

I have a kind of curiosity about how these things scale, looking at land use.

Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance.

Who can tell me of the impacts of such changes?

All studied I'm aware of show that plant based protein is orders of magnitude less intensive than beef. If you look for "protein source total resource consumption meta analysis" you'll find many. Most people do not eat grass fed beef, they are in fact raised on maize or other feedstock which was grown on land that could also support plants for human consumption.

You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter.

My curiosity concerns the use of what are today grasslands and maize fields to produce protein alternatives to the ruminants. Maize and soya are commonly rotated - over long periods, is it effective to rotate soya with other pulses? Or is it better for the soil to continue to crop maize or rotate land to pasture?

Sources that I have seen, such as this source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you... indicate that ruminants are perhaps one order of magnitude more resource intensive than pulses. Poultry, pork, and dairy are on the same order of magnitude, perhaps 50% to 200% more resource intensive than pulses.

But I cannot graze poultry where I can graze beef, nor can I grow pulses on pasture. This is my curiosity.

>” You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter.”

That fact appears to be wrong or misleading. Often 100% grass is not true in the Us

In the US something like 85% of beef spends a significant portion of their lives on feedlots where 70-90% of the feed is grain and protein concentrates.

The United States of America is not the only country, although it is a very prominent one. Grass-feeding is more popular in South America. Each of us is, of course, entitled to split the vocabulary hairs of his own choosing.

Given the amount of soya Brazil grows and how like 90% goes to animal feed and the amount of rainforest cleared for cattle, I don’t think South American cattle is something admirable. Grass fed is no good if by it means burning down the forest to range cattle and grow soybeans for animals.

I tried a few times soy steaks and burgers, and honestly don't know what to say; to me it has been the most unpredictable food experience ever: one time they tasted absolutely delicious, then complete crap, then ...meh. It may have been the brand or way of cooking but I can't recall of two times in a row in which I could get the same impression, so today I tend to avoid them. On the other hand I love soy chocolate-like ice cream, but that's another thing.

About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.

That’s consistent with using low quality heavily processed plant based food with artificial flavor. The delicate flavor can be significantly altered with cooking methods that would not ruin real food.

Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. Inovation would be here to inovate and create new food, not to mimic the existing. I know, existing consumers and whole industry waiting to be disrupted, but still this starts to look like “save” icon represented by floppy disk, when in reality “save” does not have anything to do with floppies anymore.

Because people like meat? I like meat. I don't like what happens to the animal though. I don't think it gets that much more complicated than that

Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat.

We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult.

It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables.

People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.

Beef is literally just grass. Humans began herding grazing livestock because we can't eat grass.

Given the amazing variety, quality, and price of foods available in the developed, globalized world, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to eat grass anymore.

Maybe gut bacteria are mind controlling people to eat it, to their benefit at our expense. I've certainly noticed the craving effect, almost universally regardless of food, for the things I eat. Going from meat to vegan was challenging, but I'm better for it.

Beef is not just literally grass. That's just unhelpful reductionism, and ignores that the properties are changed dramatically through energy inputs and chemical reactions. Grass is just dirt and CO2 and water after all. Dirt is just a bunch of atoms...

For a long time only the wealthy could eat meat regularly.

And then progress happened and even people of modest means could afford that.

And then the wealthy differentiated themselves by not eating meat.

And pretty soon the unwashed masses are going to be able to do that too.

So the techies and the doctors and the lawyers are going to have to find a different way to differentiate themselves.

IMO this is a complaint most people have BEFORE they go vegetarian (or start trying to reduce their meat consumption). Then they realize that it's very convenient to be able to mimic existing recipes and maybe prepare the same meal for vegetarian and non-vegetarian friends and things start to make sense.

Also there are many meals in which we enjoy the form as much as the material (i.e. they're fun to eat or nice to look at) -- burgers, hotdogs, meatballs, and the choice is to either give it up completely or ... eat the floppy disk.

There is plenty "new food" (and lots of "old food" just not commonly eaten here) that's vegetarian too. But meat is tasty, so fake meat is nice to have - why miss out on that if you like it?

You can have both new foods AND “meat-less” copies of meat products. I like plant-based meat because I can use my favorites recipes with minimal change, just swap chicken with another source of protein that feels kind of the same, and I’m happy with that.

A vegetarian told me that this is due to practicality. When he goes to some event, why does he bring sausage-shaped "meat"? Because then he can use the buns and ketchup that were provided for everyone. Same with burgers...

These are new foods, but we don't have a better name for them. They're called like "horseless carriages", because a "car" term hasn't been coined yet.

But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.

Diets are a mixture of culture, availability, personal taste, cost, and social status. Culture is by far the biggest and most dominating factor when talking about diets.

If you want to be a champion of the environment and ignore culture, there is likely food that exist where you live that people don't want to eat. Invasive and overpopulated species. In order for something to be invasive or overpopulated it is likely not something that people eat in your culture.

Where I live, cyprinidae fish exist in massive overpopulation to varying degree in most fresh water lakes. They grow large in numbers from as a result from farms creating water pollution, and since our culture do not have cyprinidae fish as part of any diet, the economical incentives to fish them is only from bio gas and animal feed. That is simply not enough, and so the problem has only continue to worsen. My culture loves fish and have fish as a central figure at many occasions, but not cyprinidae so we hunt other species to extinction.

An other culture crash is seaweed, an excellent protein that doesn't use land or create pollution. Just like with plant meat there are plant fish alternatives that is constructed using seaweed. They are sadly not very popular. We could also just be eating the seaweed as it is, but people don't know how to cook it or how it fit in their recopies and lives.

Being innovative with food culture is not so much about production as it is about changing people minds. Artificial meat tries to solve this by keeping the culture as is.

Looking at my vegan friend who likes having a different processed not-meat each day while I'm having more protein in my bowl of oats, the difference seems to be more about lifestyle. He actively calls himself a vegan and actively seeks vegan things like the processed products and magazines about veganism, whereas I just like oatmeal and we both don't care that both meals are equally vegan.

I've switched most of my chicken and beef consumption over to Quorn (fake meat brand) and while it's clearly not meat, I'm always happy with the result.

Eat the bugs, live in the pod...

Wear the VR headset!

You will own nothing and you will be happy

Here is a thought experiment for you…if someone made a meat substitute that mimics the taste and texture of cooked human flesh…how would you feel about a person who knowingly ate and enjoyed such a creation?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

Anyone have any numbers on how cattle production compares to other meat production?

Would it be much better for the environment if we just shifted to smaller animals and birds like pigs, goats, chicken?

I mean if we wanted to make beef production more sustainable we easily could, feed cows more grass and less grain. But grain is more often the choice because you can grow/fatten your animals up like 20% faster than with a pure grass diet and the grain is easier and more compact to store and ship. Alfalfa requires no additional fertilizer and actually sequesters nitrogen into the soil, reducing the need for artificial fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.

In general, smaller animals with a shorter lifespan are more efficient at their conversion ratio of "plant calories vs meat calories", so if someone worries about the use of lots of farmland to grow stuff to feed animals instead of using a smaller amount of farmland to feed humans directly, then cattle production (unless we reduce so much that we keep only the number of cattle which are grazing on non-arable land) is worse than chicken farms.

In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms.

In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.

I've heard that a single head of cattle yields about the same amount of meat as 200 chickens. As far as I'm aware, cattle also tend to enjoy a much more pleasant life than factory farmed chickens. As someone who does eat meat but is also somewhat paradoxically concerned with animal welfare, this is important.

Whole plant foods with plenty of living greens, my friends. We can do it!

Innovations aside, have you tasted the stuff? Yikes!

It looks disgusting.

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