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Comment by OrvalWintermute | Hacker News Reader

“When you look at Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, they have 21 or 22 highly processed ingredients. So processed, that you are hard pressed in identifying the difference between those items, versus let’s say, pet food.” [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/ghgguru & https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog

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Is "highly processed" always the same as "bad"?

I would argue for the position of 'not always'. In my opinion it is much the same as GMO plants. The intent and target of the modification matters. A plant that is modified to tolerate deadly chemicals is evil; it must be handled carefully if consumed at all so that the chemicals it tolerates do not poison us. A plant which is modified to have a higher or higher quality (more nutrition?) yield might be good.

Thus the highly processed foods. It depends on what the intent of the process is and how the results are used in the whole. Even if it might be less healthy I sure do love breads and noodles.

Highly processed is almost always synonymous with the types of food that are considered bad for your health.

From WP [0]: "he term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping, hydrogenation, and hydrolysis. Ultra-processed foods generally also include additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, sensory enhancers, colourants, flavours, and processing aids, but little or no whole food."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food

Capitalism doesn't optimise for health, it optimises for addiction, profit, and lower costs (a.k.a. lower quality).

So, yes, the more processed a food is, the more aligned it is to capitalistic motives, the less healthy it is.

This is a false dichotomy. Plenty of people do whole foods plant-based diets without those. Additionally, it's also often replacing highly processed meats

This alone makes me avoid these products like the plague. I honestly do not understand why if you desire and need “meat” enough to opt for a highly processed inferior meat analog, why you don’t just eat the real thing.

Is there really any highly processed foodstuff out there that is truly healthy? Doesn’t really seem to be.

> I honestly do not understand why if you desire and need “meat” enough to opt for a highly processed inferior meat analog, why you don’t just eat the real thing.

Many people would like to eat meat without the environmental impact/killing animals. What is hard to understand about that?

It just has a strange irony to me. “I don’t want to kill animals, but I am not willing to give up the taste of their delicious flesh”

Giving up food, a cultural and often deep identity-level cornerstone, is hard even when they conflict with your ethics. Eating fake meat because you disagree with animal slaughter but enjoy the taste is still consistent.

Anyways I don’t think these are the people who deserve our scrutiny. They are more consistent than those of us who are onboard with vegan ethics but still can’t stop eating meat, which is me most weeks of the year unfortunately.

I think we need to be more careful about fake meat. It is likely to be very processed food and who knows what the nutritional consequences of something invented last year are for your body. I agree with the ethics of not causing suffering to animals. People in the future will very probably despise us for how we treat animals.

I don't understand how this is hard to follow:

"Doing X gives me pleasure, it requires doing Y which causes suffering to entities that are not myself. I will avoid doing X and instead do X' which minimizes suffering in the world, even if it's not as good for me"

It’s not hard to follow, it’s just strange to me on a couple of levels:

Approaching from a non-vegan morality perspective, but vegan for health, I don’t understand why you would opt for something so highly processed instead of having something whole and unprocessed.

From a vegan for morality sake…it’s like Westworld, but the food equivalent.

It is not like Westworld because the pleasure is not in killing / perceiving suffering in others. It’s just in eating (which for most people raised in cities is completely disconnected from the animal suffering).

I disagree. It’s a way to enjoy an experience that is “outside” of your “moral code” without the moral consequences.

Let me be clear: eating something that tastes like meat is not "outside" of my moral code. Causing animals to suffer is.

Also, I have no idea what are "moral consequences".

> Let me be clear: eating something that tastes like meat is not "outside" of my moral code. Causing animals to suffer is.

No offense, but I don’t recall accusing you specifically of anything. I was speaking conceptually and expressing my opinion. Eat how you want and what you want for whatever reason you want. You may be completely perplexed by my choice of diet as I am by a vegan who eats fake meat. For what it’s worth, I eat strict keto, nearly 90% carnivore, and I have zero qualms about killing and eating animals and don’t care if people find that offensive, perplexing, bad for the environment, or whatever. I may find the vegan diet an odd choice, but I’d never work against it.

> I have no idea what are “moral consequences” Meaning “guilt”

Since you seem to understand why people might want fake meat, it seems you are really just taking a judgmental position in which you condemn others for not going far enough along an axis in which you don't even take one step.

Humans aren't robots. We can't just align every level of our stimulus response around a single goal. Lots of studies have been done on how complicated the relationship between conscious motivation and eating is, and for the most part have come down on the side of "we have very little control over our base desires when it comes to food."

It's a loss of opportunity cost that reveals how much people actually care about the environment.

Want to sacrifice a bit of taste and save the environment? Yes!

Want to sacrifice the taste of meat to save the environment? Nah.

Not all people avoid meat for health reasons. If there’s a market for it, so be it.

That's why I eat beans

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