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Comment by dsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need bacon? I just want the mushrooms without paying an arm and a leg!

For context, I live in the city and don't have a reliable way (or space) to grow them myself, or else I would.

I'll be honest, these kinds of skeuomorphic alt-meats never make sense to me. That said, I'm someone who eats healthy by default and doesn't consume a lot of meat, so I understand that I'm not the target audience.

But if you think someone living in rural America and eating bacon regularly is going to convert to this stuff, you're kidding yourself.

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Non-meat eaters are behind skeumorphic meat alternatives for the same reason car detractors are generally in favour of electric cars.

Moving people away from the old sources weakens the entrenched power of those who benefit from the old way (factory farms and fossil fuel companies, respectively), massively helping with one first-order problem (animal cruelty and carbon emissions, respectively) and opening the way towards further improvements that would have been blockaded by those entrenched powers.

The point of not eating meat is that meat is not that healthy in our modern lifestyle. replacing real meat with mycelium meat won't make a difference as fat is fat and protein is protein

That might be your understanding of "the point of not eating meat", but other people have plenty of other views.

Clearly bacon tastes good and there are lots of people who would love to eat it but are against killing animals for food. This gives them an alternative that hopefully tastes good like bacon but without the ethical implications.

If they can actually capture the taste, smell, and texture of bacon I would be highly interested. I'm mostly plant based at this point (except for awkward situations like family events...), but the other day I oversmelt some bacon and boy did those cravings kick in. Nothing like it.

I doubt mushrooms can really capture the bacon experience, though.

You can grow mushrooms in a shoebox sized tub in your closet if you wanted to

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