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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I've tried plant based burgers multiple times and it's just not the same. The first time I had an "impossible burger", I didn't actually know it was fake meat, I just assumed it was the name of the burger at the time, I thought it was horrible. I had a different shops "impossible" burger few years later and it was far from horrible, but just doesn't have the same impact as a good burger.

Edit: Either it's juicy and the texture isn't right, or the texture is right but it isn't juicy, or the flavour isn't there. It just doesn't taste real enough, in some ways its SO close... /end edit.

Wife and I tried some of the beyond meat from the super market and that was once... never again, it was not good, any of it. Its sometimes /very/ salty, even if I don't add salt...

(as a side note I donno if it's changed but it's more expensive to buy beyond meat than it is to buy real meat)

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Huh, tried the impossible burger and a normal one side by side, and I preferred the impossible burger. I still think it's the best thing on their menu.

So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.

When I think "burger", I think of one I make on my grill, which is delicious, not a McDs or BK burger.

If you compare it to garbage fast food, then of course the impossible burger will be better.

Then you're discussing pretty minor differences. Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers. This seems like just bragging about having really good taste.

I suspect that the core audience for plant-based burgers generally tries to avoid fast food anyway.

Which was why it was amusing how much marketing dollars were spent getting it into fast food locations (where it inevitably was a “buy once and never again” for the vast majority of those who even bothered to try it).

Why? What does "not torturing animals" have to do with "eating healthy food", aside from "both are goods"?

One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.

>Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers.

Whoa there. "Enjoy" might be a bit generous. I might suggest endure. A lot of people eating fast food burgers are not doing it because they enjoy it, but at their cheap prices it is just something they can afford. Yes, there is a large portion of people that "like" fast food burgers, and that might be a number that reaches "plenty". But I would imagine that enjoyment is similar to when I was a broke ass college age person that could only afford ramen and enjoyed it as being better than nothing.

Lol this is kinda crazy: I’m a skinny person that still had to overcome a fast food phase/mild addiction, and my favorite order was 4 junior bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. They are so good I’d love one right now.

And I love well prepared burgers. I love steak. And I love goldfish. I disagree strongly with your comment.

Wait, what? Why would you eat goldfish?

Foodie gatekeepers are among the most hilarious of all gatekeepers. Everyone has different tastebuds and just because you don't like fast food doesn't mean the whole world doesn't like fast food. I love the fanciest restaurants, but I can still admit the Big Mac is one of the greatest burgers ever created.

If you are young enough, grease tastes good.

“Endure” also fits well for regions that are effectively food deserts, where fast food chains might be one of your limited options.

> pretty minor differences

There's a massive difference between a McDonald's burger and the kind of burger you'd make fresh (or order at a non-fast-food restaurant). It's not a subtle issue of taste. They're just completely different dishes.

Fast food burgers don’t taste much worse than frozen or even just refrigerated store-bought patties. Neither are tasty.

I guess the pre-made plant burgers will be close to pre-made meat burgers.

I wonder if you can make your own burger out of soy granules, which I found to be the closest to ground beef when properly spiced during rehydration. I should try that some time.

Tanget: Americans in Germany often say our McD tastes better. I find that fascinating, as McD here tastes absolutely horrible to me.

I've never seen anything wrong with grocery store patties. I think the problem with fast food burgers is the bad bread, weird sauces, missing/sparse toppings, and most of all the sloppy half-assed construction. If you make the burger at home with the same patty, it will almost certainly come out much better.

There's nothing wrong with the meat quality per se, but if you're cooking a frozen premade patty you're not properly seasoning it and it's not going to have a good taste.

You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?

Ngl I don't even know what seasoning I would put on a burger patty. A burger patty to me is just a disc of ground beef, I don't expect anything else from it.

In my experience, if the beef is fresh, high quality, and the right cut, grind and fat content, all it needs is salt on the surface at the time of cooking.

The salt mixed into many pre-made patties makes them increasingly rubbery the longer they sit in the supermarket. The seasonings are usually a crapshoot.

Toppings are a separate matter. Go to town.

I suspected as much, but I didn't want to be rude. A lot of people are unaware of seasoning and don't really think about why food from one place taste so much better than food from another.

There's a whole lot of seasoning going on with well cooked ground beef. When you go to a restaurant and the burgers pop -- this is why.

The most basic seasoning is salt. Unseasoned beef doesn't taste great and when it's cooked less than ideally often excess condiments are used to make up for the lack of seasoning.

When I cook burgers at home I often mix in diced garlic, a tiny bit of soy sauce, cayenne, msg, and rosemary.

Nothing rude about it, it's the way I prefer burgers. I've never considered restaurant burger special or 'pop'ish, mostly just convenient. I do put lots of raw onions on the burger though, the refreshing crunch of freshly sliced onion goes well with the greasy meat. Restaurant burgers rarely have much onion, and when they do it's usually cooked or limp and sad. A lot of restaurant burgers go heavy on lettuce instead, but lettuce is bland compared to onions.

I know some people prefer unseasoned food, but I think you probably shouldn't be surprised when people complain about lack of seasoning.

One of my kids went through a phase of eating burgers with no toppings at all. Another, noodles with no sauce. It's a preference, but - if the topic is quality of cuisine it shouldn't be surprising that people have higher expectations.

Also decent restaurants get their patties pre-made..

The only decent restaurant burger I had was in an American restaurant that grinds their own meat.

And you probably buy good meat, or even mince it yourself and make your own right?

The vegetarian equivalent isn't anything you can buy (in a supermarket anyway), they're all crap, it's making your own with good (non-meat) ingredients.

I buy the meat at Costco. No prep. Just grill it properly.

100x better than fast food "burgers"

It’s not obvious that fake meat is healthier than real meat.

Depends on the meat and its alternative. Later is always better for the environment

Why does it cost more then?

Because it’s newer and externalities exist?

I'm assuming it is because of the lower volume of alternative burgers. Looking at my supermarket, they have probably 150-200 linear feet dedicated to meat and maybe 5-10 for alternatives.

Meat is heavily subsidized.

Subsidies. I'll just link my other comment from this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32964298

Cows work for free.

I don't think 'healthy' meant no meat there, it was just about (lack of) fast food (whether it be meat or not, but mostly is).

I’ve yet to try an impossible burger but one of the best burgers I’ve ever had was a veggie burger patty made in house at a little brewery near me. Seasonings and texture etc were perfect. Wasn’t trying to be a burger but trying to be a very good veggie patty and succeeded.

Veggie pattys are great and standard faire in India.

I agree, I’d just like a good veggie burger sometime. Doesn’t need ultra processing.

I once accidentally ordered a veggie burger. It was called a "garden burger" on the menu and I naively assumed it was a regular burger with vegetables on it. When I got it I immediately recognized my error, but ate it anyway and it was fine. Not what I wanted, but wholly inoffensive.

Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen.

Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.

A regular whopper is also vile, though.

The plant based meat alternatives are more expensive. It's a newer, smaller scale manufacturing process and regular meat benefits from US agricultural subsidies.

I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back.

General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.

In Singapore I used to buy 4x wagyu beef burger Pattie’s. Cost around $12 sgd but they were amazing.

I’ll admit tho if we compare fast food then I don’t really mind impossible meat. Fast food burgers are very soso.

Weird, not my experience at all. I prefer the alternatives now and for anything requiring ground beef in a sauce it’s indistinguishable

Ground meat in a sauce is actually the only situation where it is easily distinguishable for me. The texture doesn’t feel right. It ends up rubbery, kind of like overcooked fish. And it doesn’t impart the same kind of umami depth of flavor. I end up having to supplement with bouillon instead, but then it gets a little too salty.

You don't have to use bouillon, though. There are lots of ways to increase umami: Soy sauce, tomato paste, and ground mushroom powder all work out well, and the last two are low-to-no salt.

Most people do such an awful job of cooking ground beef, just making a gray mush, I could see how the fake stuff wouldn’t be any worse.

Sorry if I come across as a little rude here, but, it's never going to be the same. Never, ever. The problem is people keep using it as an excuse now, "well I'd be vegan if there was fake meat that tasted like the real deal".

At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more.

Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat.

Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.

It’s not just the taste and texture, the nutritional profile is worse than actual meat for my dietary needs.

The first time I had a good vegetarian burger was when it wasn't trying to imitate the real thing. As others already commented, I also think trying to engineer a schnitzel from tofu and whatnot that tastes and feels like the original is just the wrong approach. Vegan cheese, like wtf, I was curious and tried it once; that was so bad I had to throw away that stuff. But I digress. The burger I liked had a patty made from broccoli and just had its own distinct texture and taste.

Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.

I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.

Ecological engineer Howard Odum developed a system for tracing back the energy inputs into something back to sunlight which revolved around ‘embodied energy’ or emergy.

When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy.

A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.

You need to add in the externalities that aren't being paid for, too, which can vary significantly between different kinds of farming.

Odum's system has numerous problems.

One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it.

Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other.

Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences.

The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS?

There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently.

(It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)

I had the same experience. I have tried both the impossible and beyond meat burgers and ended up not being able to finish them as I really didn't like the taste.

I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.

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