The story is flipped for home cooking, e.g., making mapo or meatballs at home. We actually prefer the plant based alternative there, and lately it's also been the economical choice.
Admittedly, this is a very informal survey, but of the people I know of who have tried one, all of them claimed that not eating meat was not a big enough motivation to change. They'd rather they also be healthier than they actually are.
Cheaper might actually harm adoption. when you compare eating ground meat to an engineered product, making the engineered product cheaper just makes it seem more like processed junk food.
Taking a bunch of plants and heavily processing them to make them look, taste and feel like ground beef is clearly not going to be as healthy as just eating plants or eating beef. We just do not understand nutrition and biology well enough yet to do that. The actual "Beyond" meat will be when someone figures out how to grow it safely in a petri dish, hopefully people stop eating meat from slaughtered animals then, but who knows.
"Insufficient evidence of association is present for intake of ... saturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat ... meat, eggs and milk" - Mente A, et al. A systematic review of the evidence supporting a causal link between dietary factors and coronary heart disease. Arch Intern Med. 2009 April 13.
"... no significant evidence for conclusing that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD" - Siri-Tarino PW, et al. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar.
"There were no clear effects of dietary fat changes on total mortality or cardiovascular mortality..." - Hooper L, et al. Reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2011 Jul 6.
And he says "the balance of evidence available at the time of developing our nutritional guidelines says that saturated fat in the diet is not associated with any deleterious health outcomes, that is, it's safe".
Newer research published after 2013, same results, he cites three more reviews and meta-analyses, two from the British Medical Journal.
Then he mentions the biggest most expensive study done on reducing dietary fat, $700,000,000 dollars, 50,000 people, 8 years, and the only statistically significant result from the study was that women with a history of heart disease who were randomly selected into the lower fat group, increased their risk of problems such as heart attacks was increased by 26%.
That is, saturated fat (animal fat tends to be) hasn't been proven to do anything bad, and reduced fat (vegetarianism tends to be , but not necessarily) hasn't been proven to do anything beneficial.
Anyway, “Meat is not healthy” is distraction against the real killer: sugar. The main problem in typical American diet is way too much sodium and sugar. But sugar industry is way way too powerful do do anything.
So let’s attack meat … or gluten or whatever. But god forbid removing sugar from bacon and hamburgers (and plant based burgers have about 10g of sugar in it).
Where are you getting this? Impossible’s nutrition facts state < 1g per serving.
Plus the food we eat does all kinds of stuff to our bodies. What is good for our bodies on one dimension might be bad on another. Our interaction with food is incredibly complex.
Wait, what? Canola oil does have some saturated fat but is mostly unsaturated fat. (You know, because its "oil")
I've had the Beyond Meat burger patties. The taste is not bad at all, but there is an uncanny valley feeling when you eat it (with the manufactured juiciness) that isn't there with black bean burgers.
It's also very expensive. In Canada, a pack of 4 patties is $8.49.
I think another minor item that's overlooked is that there are a number of people trying to avoid "processed" foods, and there's few foods on the planet more processed than artificial meat.
People interested in their health and this line of thinking will take beef from a local butcher over shrink-wrapped frozen frankenfood that is pretending to be beef.
I'm not much of a meat-eater. I probably eat meat maybe three or four times a month. But when I do, I get something from the farmer down the street who is happy to show me her cows, pigs, and chickens, and not something from a cardboard box that came from an industrial factory.
I’m not a vegetarian as such but the McPlant burgers are rather better tasting as well.
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n17/benjamin-kunkel/shor...
More variety in EU and overall better quality. (That actually goes for many food products though)
Personally I don't care about the health aspect, and as long as they're somewhat close in cost that's fine by me. I like that it is cutting down on the ecological impact, or at least that's the claim. At the same time I don't care about that impact so much that I'm going to cut meat out of my diet. This provides a nice middle ground for me.