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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?

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.

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.

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