First Tasting of Plant-Based Oysters in Berkeley, CA

Well half the time take out places serve imitation crab for costs reasons. Maybe we can start getting cheap foyster takeout

According to the article, the problems are that "Conventional oysters are known to carry risks of foodborne illness and are currently threatened by overharvesting and pollution."

They don't link to any source though.

Fertilizers and pesticides don’t count at ecological impact?

we don't all base ethics on the capacity to suffer

> but I'd imagine they're pretty healthy

How about them absorbing microplastics/PFAS?

The oyster thing is a bit of a meme at this point, considering I've seen the same thing about 5 times in the last month.

For vegans, avoiding eating any animal is easier than trying to discern which animals can truly feel pain. There are always updates to our understanding about what animals feel, and it's vastly easier to draw a line between kingdoms than to create some fractal border of which animals are ok to eat.

Also, people thought newborns didn't feel anything decades ago and performed circumcisions without anesthetic. There isn't a final word on how awareness and pain work and the nature and location of the seat of consciousness, so it's better to be conservative on this.

I'm with you, I find meat substitutes off-putting.

too much soy, too many seed oils in fake meat for my liking. but if you haven't tried char broiled oysters, that don't carry the same risks, then you're missing out.

The plant based meat replacements won't substitute for a steak, but they can do pretty well treated as done in some Asian cuisines, as a flavoring element rather than by themselves.

Even in something as simple as a burger, they can do very well -- because a fast food burger is often loaded with sauces and other add-ons that you barely notice that there's a patty in there at all. They could substitute chicken or fish and you'd barely notice.

The best thing is to learn cuisines that feature vegetables cooked with strong flavors. Indian, Korean, and Chinese are notable examples. Doing that it's easy to extend that and add protein with either meat in small quantities, or substitutes, or non-meats like tofu or mushrooms. All very delicious, nutritious, and environmentally sound.

Indeed. I can't help but think a lot of the "plant based" products now are about erecting new toll booths around vegetable products that in a more natural form people could be growing themselves. We should be moving further towards people growing at least some of their own food where possible, not further away from it.

When I first tried the now notorious Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll - which I have to admit are very good - I happened to meet a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and stopped for a chat. His dog was begging for some of the food - and it occurred to me that I had no clue if it was safe for the dog to eat.

> Good vegetarian meals are practically art in terms of their combinations of textures and flavors, not to mention colors. But they take a lot more skill to make, so people rarely encounter them.

Indian food is vegetarian almost by default, has a spectacular variety, and doesn't rely on meat substitutes at all. This, of course, is after having developed and iterated a culture of vegetarianism over almost four millennia (the Ṛgveda mentions abstention from meat consumption, and was likely composed in 1900 BCE – 1700 BCE).

This vegetarianism is a result of the Indian religions' tenet of ahiṃsā, or non-violence.

From pani puri to paneer, and from sambar to sarson ka saag, I feel like everyone should look at Indian food to see exactly what 'vegetarian food variety' is.

There's something for everyone: sweets, spicy (no, not all Indian food is diarrhoea-inducingly piquant), sour, savoury, bitter, stews (also called 'curries' in Anglosphere countries), stir-fried dishes, rice dishes, snacks—the sheer diversity is endless.

Honourable mention to Chinese and South-East Asian cuisine, which do use meat analogues, and developed a breathtaking variety of 'mock meats' centuries ago, and developed their own vegetarian cultures from Buddhism (an offshoot of Hinduism anyway, and therefore an export of Indian culture).

It's a very Western thing to eat so much meat, every meal of every day. More than one-third the population in India calls themselves 'vegetarian' (that's more vegetarians than the rest of the world, combined); the proportion of meals that are vegetarian anyway is significantly higher, approaching 80% or so[1].

Note that in India, 'vegetarian' typically means 'lacto-vegetarian and stricter' (includes veganism and Jain vegetarianism[2], which excludes root vegetables and the alliums).

Seriously, Western people: make Indian food.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/08/eight-in-te...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

Replicating meat is important for cultural reasons: people don’t want to reinvent dishes or have them taste different, they want what feels right. Vegetarian substitutes work in many - but most importantly - not all dishes.

Anyway, an interesting company in this space is Meati: https://www.meati.com

Effectively growing steaks/chicken from mushroom root. I’ve tried their stuff over the past day and it’s pretty damn close, and overall feels much simpler than the other fake meats. It’s pretty cool stuff.

With respect to the item they have chosen to create, I think there's a solid rationale. Oysters are considered a delicacy, not to mention their fame of being (supposedly) and aphrodesiac.

So the oyster is a good showpiece to replace, if you can do it successfully.

I still think the whole fake meat business is misguided, but I ranted about that in another comment.

Well, a lot of new processes start where you can make money at small scale. Then you improve on it as you scale and address bigger markets, where you need larger scale to be profitable.

they're cheap in FL unless you're ordering some variety that requires shipping - but that's in the same vein as non-local seafood. elitist? your bias is showing - oysters are harvested and eaten by all walks of coastal inhabitants. if fancy restaurants are your only point of reference I'd suggest expanding your experiences.

Oysters are elitist!?

Vegan pizza, hot dogs and mac are pretty widely available.

In addition to the points brought up by other commenters, have you had vegan pizza or hot dogs?

Vegan hotdogs are honestly fine and good enough. Thinking back to when I ate meat, I'd rather have a vegan hotdog than a budget one made from who knows what.

And pizza and pasta are quite amendable to being vegan without substitutions if one wishes- don't add cheese and you're done?

Many people object to eating or using any animal products at all as a red-line on ethical grounds - that can't be news to you?

Harvesting oysters is easy if you live near the sea (like in Berkely, CA). If you live 500 miles from it, you start looking for other options.

Oysters seem difficult to replicate, and an unusual food to create. I had no idea anyone was working on this, and it's interesting to see such a positive result.

I would have absolutely no idea how anyone could try to synthesise anything as complex and subtle as an oyster, so I'm interested to hear about it.

Same would be true of almost all oyster-based oysters.

I would imagine they mean "could be served in a restaurant as a very close substitute to oysters". Mushrooms and seaweed are perfectly edible as-is and can be served in a restaurant, but people would not confuse them for oysters.

I think I read somewhere that early vegan literature was actually fine with bivalves, and it only changed because some were loud enough about the uncertainty at the time of whether they felt pain or not.

Someone should feel free to prove me wrong on the above, but in general vegan or plant based replacements of oysters/scallops/etc make no sense to me. They’re like the mushrooms of the sea.

So… just eat oysters.

Plant based as a term gets conflated with veganism, but veganism is it’s own thing: a plant based world means we just depend less on those other sources, not that they go away entirely.

The problem is not so much the consequences themselves, but that the consequences may never be apparent to the average person. It's a cultural change that is occurring very slowly, and consequences to one's health usually don't manifest until later in life. You don't eat a Beyond Booger and suddenly experience systemic inflammation in a noticeable way. Even when a person's health is gradually failing, they can become accustomed to being obese, lethargic, diabetic, and so on. Even if they go to a doctor, that doctor is unlikely to know anything about nutrition, so they will recommend a combination of contraindicated plant material and pills.

The only hope we have is that future generations become hip to things like PUFAs and antinutrients, and that preceding generations stuck believing that meat is bad will become less relevant. Maybe that can happen, but then younger generations still have to contend with the corporate-globalist charlatan complex telling them pure bullshit like meat being bad for the climate and enacting "meatless Mondays."