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Comment by quicklime | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

> 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.

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