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Comment by alphanullmeric | Hacker News Reader

going vegan would be a much more appealing proposition if it wasn't for the fact that the only vegan food that both tastes good and is satiating is processed.

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I'm not vegan or vegetarian. It sounds like you simply haven't cooked vegan meals before. Vegan isn't raw carrots and boiled vegetables. Vegan curries, sauces, soups are all delicious and aren't processed. The satiating aspects of non-vegan food are mostly the same ones as in vegan foods. It's mainly the staple carbs that fill us up and they're all practically vegan - potatoes, yams, corn, rice, wheat. As for "tastes good", well it's subjective but fat carries flavour and coats your mouth and lingers. Meat comes with fat already so it's easy to make it tasty enough. Apply the same process to vegan food and make some roast potatoes in oil. Taa daa tasty and filling. Probably about as unhealthy as fried meat. Your comment just seems like you need to actually try cooking some vegan food. It's easy af to make any food delicious by covering it in salt, oil, spices.

"vegan food"?! There are boat loads full of vegan cooking books teaching how to make delicious food. I wouldn't equate "fake meat" with vegetarianism or veganism. This is more of a problem of reliance on processed foods in general which is bad, vegetarian, vegan or not.

I guess added sugars, tofu and canola oil aren't processed?

Added sugars are definitely processed and definitely unhealthy, but completely optional for many good vegan recipes. Canola oil is processed, but also easily swapped for olive or peanut oil. And sure, I guess tofu is processed… but it’s also a 2000 year-old dish that has been consumed as part of a healthful diet in multiple Asian cultures for centuries. The common denominator among all the things you mention here is that they’re also optional in a healthy vegan diet.

if I was cool with getting my protein from processed food I'd be better off with a protein shake. If you believe processed food is optional in a vegan diet, feel free to enumerate any whole-food sources of protein in a vegan diet.

It sure feels like every argument with a vegan ends with "you don't need protein" or "<insert processed vegan thing> is actually good for you" or "1 kilo of kale has just as much calcium as a glass of milk!"

You don't need as much protein as most people get on omnivore diets, and you can easily still get more than enough protein on a vegan diet anyway, and plenty of processed foods are fine even if you don't stick to whole foods. Multiple things can be true. There are very few things that are remotely difficult to get from a vegan diet, and a B-Complex vitamin covers most of them.

legumes, grains, potatoes, seeds, nuts (if you can afford them).

plenty of protein in all of those things. I've been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for the past 19years. I've never once had to think about getting enough protein. Having never eaten real meat and I don't much care about the fake processed stuff. I mean I'll eat it, but I don't buy it much. lentils and rice is a lot cheaper and tastes better imho.

I guess if it matters, I would say I'm a fairly active person. I bike for transportation when ever possible, I backpack and hike a lot, and typically work jobs in the trades or farming. So not a pro athlete but just keep active and moving.

> Canola oil is processed, but also easily swapped for olive or peanut oil.

Not really?

Olive oil cannot withstand higher temperatures, it smokes at 350F, compared to 500F+ for canola oil.

Peanut oil imparts a strong peanut flavor, compared to the neutral flavor of canola oil.

Fair points! I guess my cooking rarely requires a smoke point above 350. Looking at the internet, it seems like avocado oil and light olive oil (as opposed to EVOO) have high enough smoke points to use for frying. But I suppose vegetable and canola oil are ideal for frying and switching to other sources requires some tradeoffs

What’s your point? The topic is vegan food, not the first three things you thought of right?

Also lol, processed sugars aren’t vegan because the whitening stage uses bone meal.

> processed sugars aren’t vegan because the whitening stage uses bone meal

This is a good rule of thumb for North America, but not true all the time.

In the USA, organic sugar cannot be processed with bone char. Also, beet sugar is never processed with bone char, only cane sugar.

Also, not all non-organic cane sugar is processed with bone char. For example, in Canada, neither of the two main sugar companies (Rogers/Lantic and RedPath) use bone char for processing their sugar anymore (RedPath never did, and Rogers/Lantic stopped within the last few years).

Finally, all sugar in Australia and the EU (and probably other places) is processed without bone char.

Neat! Thank you very much for the details

Tofu is not actually very processed. It's an ancient dish, on the order of 2000 years old, that is essentially just cheese making but with soy beans instead of milk.

(Agreeing with and amplifying you:) Tofu is processed only in the sense that some techniques for making soy milk involve grinding the soy beans.

I don’t think “pressing the curds for a while”, which is about all there is to making tofu after curdling hot soy milk, really qualifies as processed.

What a sad state of existence if you think this is true. There are so many incredibly tasty and satiating foods made entirely out of vegetables. Many cultures have a wide range of tasty plant-based foods -- India, Thailand, Japan, Mexico (just to name a few)...have you never had chana masala? Bean tacos? Any of a dozen types of curries? Veggie sushi? Vegetables add so much texture and flavour to dishes (even dishes with meat...).

Vegan food is not just salads and Impossible burgers. Get to an Indian restaurant and pick from any of a half-dozen to a dozen options that are entirely plant-based, and then tell me that there's no vegan food that tastes good and is satiating.

All the things you've listed can be tasty, but none of them are satiating. Even after eating enough of that stuff for 2 or more people, I end up needing a serving of meat to actually feel satisfied.

Not a vegan but I disagree with this as someone who has lived with one and dated two. Rice, beans, lentils, Indian recipes, mac and “cheese” made with nutritional yeast, pasta with tomato sauce: all filling, all delicious when seasoned correctly, all (relatively) unprocessed.

This is an education problem and the solution is learning how to cook. I’ll admit that pure vegan is a higher and harder bar, but this is the same way people talk about not having meat every meal. It’s the way I used to talk. It’s just confident ignorance.

to be satiated on a vegan diet, you have to eat more... but I would argue that you "get to eat more". Eating is fun - more is better :)

Mmm. Have you ever heard of curry?

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