Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop | Hacker News Reader

Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

bloomberg.com

265 pointshelsinkiandrew789 comments

This editorialized link title and the article's headline itself doesn't really match the article's content (as is increasingly common it seems). Sure, Beyond Meat has had lower sales- but soon after they mention that retail sales of Impossible meat products increased 50% in 2022- with an odd "but the CEO left so they're in trouble" assessment which seems a bit bonkers. Then the author seems to say that because fake meat hasn't *replaced* the real meat industry, that they have failed. Odd criteria, IMHO. I'm quite certain it could be assumed rather easily that such a thing would not happen, especially in a few years time. The fact it has stuck around this long makes it clearly *not* a fad.

(Anecdotal, but noting this:) My nearby Walmart Neighboorhood Market has all sorts of plant-based meat products, and that section has only expanded over time, not the reverse. I have tried some frozen meals by Impossible and really enjoyed them, as well as some other assorted items from those sections.

I do think that price is still an issue, but real meat maintains a much larger, more established market and supply chain so that is to be expected (unless fake meats are cheap to produce and we're being gouged).

But overall I would lean towards them being more popular now than I've ever seen before- or at least all of my local grocery stores' choice to use up more space for these products seems to imply so.

The problem is you could have said the same in the 90s for veggie burgers. Existing and slowly expanding doesn't mean it hasn't been a flop - especially considering the monumental amount of capital & hype that was put behind plant based meat

From that perspective, it's definitely been a flop (so far). Jury is still out on long-term lab grown meat.

There was a hype bubble yes, and from the perspective of the people who bought into the bubble, it has been a flop. But the industry has still undergone slow and steady growth and this trend will likely continue.

The fundamental problem is that everyone has a different reason for wanting plant-based meat/fake meat. So by any particular metric, they have failed.

Some people want fake meat to be a 1:1 meat substitute because they love meat but can't eat it (allergies, cardiovascular, etc). Some people want cheaper meat because quality meat you can trust has grown too expensive. Some people want more vegan/vegetarian options because they object to killing animals or economic externalities that cattle grazing causes. Some people want meat-based substitutes because the companies are public and they are looking for the next unicorn to invest in.

The problem is, those looking for meat substitute think it isn't close enough, those who want cheaper meat think it's too expensive, vegans/vegetarians have actually vegetable based options and aren't necessarily looking for fake meat at all, and investors fell for hype.

Every one of these entities has a different metric, and several of them are at odds with each other. In my opinion, if plant-based meat turns out to be a flop, it will be because its core market is too many different groups and it'll never satiate all of them.

Case in point - read the comments on this article. Everyone has a different reason for wanting or not wanting this stuff.

Does any of that really matter if people are buying it anyway?

Not sure. But I think it does help explain articles like this one.

Not really, since the article doesn't support the title.

I've been slowly cutting meat out of my diet, and stopped eating beef a few years ago.

I think Impossible burgers are too close to beef for me- I feel ill after eating them and no longer do.

Much prefer the classic veggie/bean patties

I really doubt it was the "similarity to meat" that gave you those symptoms (though obviously there is no way for me to verify that, so you have the last word on what happens in your own body).

Anyway - there is a great comment that I saved (https://www.facebook.com/david.zilber/posts/pfbid02CkCY53qDd...)

"Here’s a pesky little chemical called hexanal. If you’ve ever eaten a beyond burger, or any of these plant based products 2.0 (though to be honest, it’s more like they’re on V.46.6.2) and burped 10 or 15 minutes afterwards, and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, wow, ok I definitely just had a meat alternative” you were probably regurgitating this aerosol. Some people think it’s fruity, like green apple, others like mulched grass. At the lab, we had to walk outside to get wafts of it in its pure form, but the minute I opened the cap I knew exactly what this flavour was…. “OLD FRYER OIL, 100%”. It’s metabolized in all manners of organisms through the oxidation of fatty acids, and is… kind of unpleasant?! The point is that while this molecule exists in fava beans, peas, and soy, (the three kings of texturized vegetable protein) when you have a WHOLE FOOD, its there in harmony among all sorts of other volatile compounds, while also being locked away deep inside the beans fibres. It’s the act of processing that concentrated and heightens the presence of off-flavours like these, making the processed foods made from them taste, well, processed. Good with the bad. You can’t concentrate for protein without concentrating other aspects of a plant. There’s always a cost. Now, I will always be a huge proponent for whole foods, made with care, prepared simply. But the realities of grocery store shelves dictate a different truth. People opt for convenience, and sometimes, you’ve got to meet them where they are. My current work at CH has me doggedly hunting down an effect of fermentation I’ve long known intuitively through practice. Certain lactic acid bacteria fermenting their way through legumes don’t just mask, but dismantle this and other problematic molecules. I’m still after the mode of action, but it’s also enough for me to know that age old techniques of fermentation (like soaking ones legumes or grains days in advance of their cooking) can still put to shame the greatest technological “advances” of food science of the past 40 years. Nature is, after all, cleverer than you are. "

While this very well may be true, on this website I think we should hold our science to a higher standard than random Facebook comments

So, if I had posted this myself as a random HN comment, it would be fine but a random Facebook comment should somehow be held to a higher standard?

> if I had posted this myself as a random HN comment, it would be fine but a random Facebook comment should somehow be held to a higher standard

Yes, assuming you had a source.

excuse me while i polish my monocle.

Under/mis-processed legumes are always kinda low-grade toxic. Soaking is OK. Good live tempeh fermentation is amazing.

Anecdotal but I gave them a shot but also felt ill after eating Impossible burgers, now sticking to beef and planning to increase red meat consumption (raising cattle and pigs). I do usually opt for ground chicken or fungus over ground beef though.

I am always nervous about the "I ate this and I felt ill afterwards", because it is very easy to overinterpret.

Just two days ago I had a bit of "ill feeling", and was passing gas more than usual. Why? I ate a Chipotle burrito and I haven't had beans in a while. Not having had beans in a while almost always gives me a bit of gas. But if I keep it up and eat beans more routinely, my gut flora adapts and I get a lot less upset and gas.

I have a hard time calling "beans" a dangerous food. Yeah, some people might quibble about phytotoxins or something, but in general it's a food that has been eaten by a lot of humans for a long time and as such how bad it is is bounded; it can't be that bad. But if you use the "does it make me feel a bit ill" stick on it, you can easily get a false positive.

It is not unreasonable to expect to need a bit of adaptation to a new food. If I pay attention, I can notice a similar reaction, albeit on a smaller scale, to a number of cuisines if I haven't eaten them in a while. But it doesn't mean I can judge those entire cuisines as unsafe.

I actually don't post this in defense of the impossible burgers, which I expect are probably a bad idea for other reasons. I just don't think this is a good or reliable measure of that, because it visibly breaks in many other cases where there clearly isn't a fundamental problem.

(Now, if you eat them consistently for a while and it's still a problem, then you do have a problem. And I'm not asking you to do that, because there is no particular need to be able to eat such things.)

> the companies are public and they are looking for the next unicorn to invest in.

Just noting that "unicorns" are private companies valued at >=$1B. So, Impossible Foods is already a unicorn (still private, looks like valued around $7B a couple years ago) but Beyond Meat is public and has a market cap <$1B.

Great points. Consider the source of the message. Is it a gourmet site? A health magazine? A nature conservation or animal protection group? Nope, "Bloomberg delivers business and markets news, data, analysis, and video to the world".

You're repeating the same all-or-nothing reasoning. For many people looking for a substitute, it is close enough. For many vegans, it is an option they like. It doesn't to be every single person eating it at every meal for it to be successful.

Other vegetarian protein patty substitutes have done just fine for decades selling to customers who want it. Why does Impossible have to eliminate meat altogether in order to succeed? Why can't they just make money providing an option to a growing customer base?

Because profits must go up. Anything else is a failure.

This is a non-response. Profits go up when you give people things they want in a way that's sustainable and decently scalable. Plant-based meats have definitely not reached their peak of market penetration, and manufacturing costs are expected to continue declining.

If they continue to sell and continue to grow the customer base, profits will go up.

> If they continue to sell and continue to grow the customer base, profits will go up.

What I have found is that "profits is not enough", you must be making more profit than the competition.

If the competition is other plant based meat products then it doesn’t matter who wins

Your kind should just start calling it the P-word given how evil you think this term is.

There was also the health marketing angle that flopped when people starting looking at the ingredients.

That's what's stopped me from getting them. They're not any healthier (and arguably less healthy) than the meat they're substituting. I'd rather they stuck with the old soy burgers that tasted less like meat but were clearly healthier (unless you're on a keto diet) than what they've come up with.

Well sure, not the meat itself, but the nitrosamines used to cure it, that's the bad part. According to my old boss who's a cancer researcher, apparently it's pretty carcinogenic. And it's basically unavoidable, the food industry hasn't been able to come up with anything better. Not using it, and having widespread botulism is not very fun.

> Well sure, not the meat itself, but the nitrosamines used to cure it, that's the bad part.

Burger meat isn't cured, though.

It turns out that most fast food burgers are made from heavily processed meat that includes various preservatives and whatnot that make it noticeably less healthy than plain hamburger, unfortunately.

The vast majority of regular meat contains no nitrosamines or other preservatives.

This doesn't make any sense at all. Every one has different reasons for wanting most products. It's this nuance that is at the foundation of the entire field of marketing, and finding appeal for any product in the marketplace.

There are products that are extremely niche that serve very specific purposes that are considered very successful, and there are products that serve very broad appeal across a wide subsection of the population that by all metrics would be considered "failed" (e.g. loss leaders).

The mere fact that you can walk into most restaurants or grocery stores and see an explosion of plant-based alternatives, and that the meat industry itself has been one of the main investors in this space should provide all of the evidence that is contrary to the point you're making.

This article is, quite frankly, an author in search of a specific narrative.

And some people, such as my spouse, much prefer the flavor of Impossible burger over actual ground beef.

>Some people want fake meat to be a 1:1 meat substitute because they love meat but can't eat it (allergies, cardiovascular, etc).

Seems kind of absurd. Presumably a 1:1 meat substitute would be chemically identical to "real" meat and the allergies and health effects associated with it would be identical.

Not meat but happened with milk. Somebody allergic to casein or whey (I don't remember) drank vegan milk, but it was synthesized identical milk. Almost died, scary mistake.

Thanks for making me look this up. I was curious since my wife can't eat dairy proteins (not as a severe a reaction fortunately). I think that it was probably whey. There are some companies that have claimed to create whey that is identical to milk whey from vegan sources [0]. It makes me wonder how the ingredients list is labeled though. Since there are requirements to call out allergic sources in ingredients lists (it will say something like "Contains Milk" or "Allergy Warning: Milk, Tree Nuts") how or if it is listed on there. EDIT: On the Perfect Day website there is a small warning at the bottom that says "Our protein is a milk allergen". Also found some Brave Robot ice cream that uses their protein listed online at my grocery store. Under the Allergen Info it does say "Contains Milk and its Derivatives".

Also while looking around found that for casein, it is still used in some glues [1] on bottle packaging. Likely not the source since it wasn't ingested more of an interesting factoid.

[0] https://perfectday.com/animal-free-milk-protein/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casein#Glue

That still seems like two primary groups: meat simulacra and simply veggie-based primary protein. The "try to approximate meat" is usually the main driver of cost/ingredient complexity.

> The problem is, those looking for meat substitute think it isn't close enough, those who want cheaper meat think it's too expensive, vegans/vegetarians have actually vegetable based options and aren't necessarily looking for fake meat at all

I think of this stuff as none of these things. It's nicotine gum.

Nicotine gum won't ever replace cigarettes, nor will people who don't smoke start chewing it.

This is a product for people trying to transition away from a meat-heavy diet. It's never going to be 100% the same, but it's close enough to reduce the cravings. Eventually they'll graduate to healthier, cheaper, and (arguably) better tasting vegetarian products that don't resemble meat at all.

The motivations for cutting back on meat don't matter. Just like there's a market for nicotine gum, there's a market for this.

To add: it’s additionally a cop-out to restaurants providing a vegetarian option.

Eg. Burger joints without veg options are losing sales when a group including a vegetarian slips the meal instead of getting an impossible burger.

Actually, a lot of non-smokers use nicotine products; aside from caffeine it’s one of the few commercially available CNS stimulants out there.

> Nicotine gum won't ever replace cigarettes, nor will people who don't smoke start chewing it.

There are non-smokers who use nicotine gum; I'm one of them. Similar effect to caffeine with a lower half-life, so it's suitable to have later in the day. I'm sure that we're a small group, but if nicotine didn't have the specter of cigarettes hanging behind it, I'd imagine it could be quite a large market.

Plant-based meat is sort of the opposite. Real meat has the specter behind it, so there's a good funnel of people into the product. Furthermore, any kind of taste that's above "edible" eventually gets people acclimated; they expect and learn to enjoy it. I can't prove that on an individual basis, but the plant-based meat market is growing at a healthy clip and has been around for several years, which suggests a lot of repeat buyers. You'd have to provide some kind of evidence to say "eventually they'll graduate", as there's no indication of that so far.

> if nicotine didn't have the specter of cigarettes hanging behind it, I'd imagine it could be quite a large market.

It drives me a little bit crazy that people think nicotine itself is what's harmful about cigarettes. The myth is slowly eroding but the common knowledge about nicotine — aside from the reality that it is addictive — remains directionally wrong (as common knowledge often is).

Can you elaborate? My understanding is that nicotine raises blood pressure, which is a big part of what's harmful about cigarettes.

What’s harmful is the inhalation of the thousands of chemicals into your lungs from a burning cigarette.

Nicotine could be considered bad because its addictive qualities make smoking happen more frequently, but rising blood pressure is a small piece.

Nicotine isn't good for you by any means, but lung cancer is the main reason cigarettes are uniquely harmful. It's a really rough way to go.

Nicotine may be mildly harmful, but in a similar ambiguous you-win-some-you-lose-some way to caffeine: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Well, nicotine kind of is one of the most harmful things about cigarettes. During the curing and processing of tobacco leaves, nicotine and other alkaloids partially react with nitrate to form nitrosamines ("Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamines" or "TSNAs"), that contribute greatly to tobacco's carcinogenicity. They're not the only carcinogens in tobacco / tobacco smoke, of course, but they are important. (This is, afaik, not relevant for pure nicotine.)

I disagree - the fundamental problem with mass-market goods is the value proposition.

For a new product to replace an existing one, it has to be at least two of cheaper, better, and/or more convenient.

More convenient is out, and plant-based meat substitutes are neither cheaper nor better than meat. They need to be both.

(Better is a complex of attributes. Taste, texture, variety, tolerance of varied cooking and consumption patterns, keeping duration, side-effects of consumption (like nausea, feeling full, or fibres sticking in teeth), and in the long term, health effects, among them.)

Price has kept me away for a few years now. But now the price of everything else is rising to catch up, so maybe I should check it out again

Hah, that's exactly my thought after reading some comments here.

Last I checked, impossible burger was $7.99 on sale. More expensive than beef. That might have flipped recently, with beef rising to obscene prices because of grocery store gouging.

I don't eat meat, personally, but my family does. When we do buy meat we get the organic grass fed kind because they prefer to eat less meat but of higher quality. Impossible's price is on par with the high end ground beef. So, at least for my family, there's no increase in cost. I just checked prices online and Impossible is actually 5 cents cheaper a pound.

The article is pushing a narrative. Every once and awhile these flair up, since there's a lot of scared people in the traditional meat/dairy industries right now, since they're losing counter/shelf space in supermarkets and menu options in restaurants all over the world.

I'm not sure if the author has stepped into a grocery store recently, but they're entire aisles/half-aisles dedicated to just plant-based options now, which was unheard of 25 years ago when I originally went vegan.

Hanging the success of an entire movement and industry on two of the most recent entrants to the market seems like a very skewed metric to base your opinion on when the evidence to the contract is absolutely everywhere if you want to look for it or notice it.

The fact that they're not is telling.

Agreed. We definitely have to be more careful these days about which articles are pushing narratives that are designed to enrage or delude us. A long time ago I read an article about how Canadian kids were struggling to adjust with COVID restrictions. But my friend had a 4 year old daughter in Ontario who ate outside when it was -20C. Why? It's shameful.

Shelf space isn’t determined by the grocer so much as it is determined by the supplier. It’s called a slotting fee

In every taste test I've watched, Beyond never scores as high as Impossible. Impossible just seems to be doing better because it tastes better.

I personally like Beyond better. I know I'm not alone.

Impossible is still great though

Odd. Personally there is something exceedingly off-putting in the aftertaste of Impossible and I occasionally get rancid smelling burps afterwards. Beyond is fine, but still not in my top 5 veggie burgers.

For me personally, Beyond has a weird taste upfront, and Impossible sometimes has the weird burp after. I don't always get it though, so I figure there's an element to who's preparing it.

Impossible is also easier to cook with (for me). It can be difficult for either to cook burgers with if you don’t buy pre-formed patties. But Beyond seemed just a little more difficult. And gross. Uncooked Beyond was a little more gooey than Impossible.

Just from that regard, I could see Impossible performing better because it is easier to integrate into existing recipes. Don’t discount the contribution of cooks in this equation.

I’m a simple man. I prefer the taste of meat, and the protein quality, but some of these products are pretty good. If they were substantially cheaper than meat - which would be possible from a fundamental principles analysis - then I’d buy them. There is no way I’m paying a premium for these products.

Did we read the same article?

FTA:

> Supermarket sales of refrigerated plant-based meat plummeted 14% by volume for the 52 weeks ended Dec. 4, according to retail data company IRI. Orders of plant-based burgers at restaurants and other food-service outlets for the 12 months ended in November were down 9% from three years earlier, according to market researcher NPD Group.

> Beyond lost sales in almost every channel last quarter. Over the past year it laid off more than 20% of its workforce

That's a pretty good description of a failing growth industry.

Beyond losing sales and laying people off is compatible with a growth industry where numerous other entrants are starting to steal the customer base of the first mover by charging less or having better products.

Of course, that is counterbalanced by retail and restaurant trends.

A friend and I did a (literal) blind taste test with impossible/USDA organic beef/beyond. I was excited to do this as we don't get Impossible in Europe. We baked our own buns etc, cooked to temp with a probe, got some nice cheese on top good stuff. We also did a blind tests of the proteins on their own, and in a plain burger. Neither of us had any trouble picking out which product was which, but it was really interesting.

Beyond was the most divisive. It has a very distinct flavour which isn't anything like beef, and not everyone likes. I think it's fine, but it's more of a tasty protein than a beef replacement.

Impossible is a really interesting product. It tastes good, texture is good, and I would happily eat a burger made from it. I can definitely tell the difference side-by-side, but I think if it's cooked well-done in a ragu or meatballs, it would be more difficult to tell.

The main complaint I have is that it both can be quite hard to form and have a tendency to turn into sludge. So you have to handle them very cold before the fat melts.

In Switzerland meat is expensive. Organic ground/minced beef from Farmy is something like $15-20/lb. Organic chicken breast is $50/lb (around $15/breast). Beyond is about $10/lb so there is certainly a cost saving to be had. All the supermarkets have extensive plant based options and vegetarianism/veganism is pretty common here. I think it'll be interesting to see how this pans out globally with improved animal welfare. My next experiment is eggs (which are almost 1 CHF/per!). Unfortunately the egg substitutes are almost the same price per weight from what I can see.

Is there non-organic meat in Switzerland?

For fresh, organic, skinless, boneless chicken breast you can pay $27/lbs in the US at an upscale store. Or skin-on non-organic at Walmart for under $3.

I have no frame of reference for if that is the beast chicken you can get from a fancy grocery store or the standard chicken from a standard store.

Your eggs seem to be about 50% higher than US eggs right now. Which seems to work out to a similar multiple if your chicken breast prices are for high-end chicken in a high-end store.

> A random sample from this summer (2020) shows a kilogram of ham from conventional animal husbandry cost an average of 23 francs (21 euros), whereas a kilogram of organic ham cost 51 francs (47 euros) — more than twice as much.

https://www.dw.com/en/switzerland-meat-animals-farmers/a-545...

For reference, see another post in my history. The cheapest imported chicken breast you can buy from a typical supermarket is around 10-15 CHF/kg. The high-end organic is around 50-60 CHF/kg which is high welfare from Switzerland. So you can certainly eat meat on a budget, but the good local stuff is priced accordingly.

>but I think if it's cooked well-done in a ragu or meatballs, it would be more difficult to tell. The main complaint I have is that it both can be quite hard to form and have a tendency to turn into sludge.

Agreed on this point and its why most of the time I buy some of the pre-done items (meatballs most often) that I think taste good and work out pretty well.

> In Switzerland meat is expensive. Organic ground/minced beef from Farmy is something like $15-20/lb. Organic chicken breast is $50/lb (around $15/breast).

That's insane. I'm in the USA and I can get organic ground beef for under $7/lb. Organic chicken breast for $8/lb. Both can be even lower if I buy in bulk.

If you don't care about it being organic, then both of them get to $3/lb.

Don't forget that salaries in Switzerland are very high. In Geneva, the minimum legal salary before taxes is at 26$/h

The only places on Earth where beef is as or more expensive are Hong Kong and Korea. It's a steep drop off from those three.

Food prices in general are higher in Switzerland (1.6x EU in 2020), but meat is exceptionally expensive (2.3x EU). This affects both organic and non-organic stock. Most of the margins on both are to retailers.[1]

> The system only works because Switzerland is a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), but not part of the European Economic Area. It can therefore easily isolate itself from the EU internal market and protect domestic products from foreign competition.

> "Switzerland doesn't get flooded with cheap meat from Germany. That's a huge advantage for Swiss farmers," says Martin Rufer.

> Anyone entering Switzerland may import a maximum of 1 kilogram of meat or meat products per person. Anything above that will get extremely expensive because of the high customs duties.

1: https://www.dw.com/en/switzerland-meat-animals-farmers/a-545...

Eating animals is incredibly resource intensive, and farming animals for meat results in externalities that are not paid by the producers or consumers.

Perhaps instead it's the USA prices that are "insane."

Are the Swiss using their extra profits from meat to deal with the externalities you mention?

Where are you shopping? It’s not even close to that at migros.

Speak for yourself. Meat has been absurdly expensive for me here, to the point where I've had to cook vegetarian meals on and off.

In the post I mentioned organic from Farmy. But even Naturaplan chicken breasts from the Coop are close to 60CHF/kg:

https://www.coop.ch/en/food/meat-fish/packaged-fresh-meat/po...

If you go for Prix Garantie, it's much cheaper at about 12/kg:

https://www.coop.ch/en/food/meat-fish/packaged-fresh-meat/po...

But this isn't Swiss chicken any more, the pack photo from there is Hungary.

Something insidious that happened to a lot of customers with Impossible, and I actually think this is a "good" thing for those who were omnivorous-- Burger King(One of the largest fast food chains in America) was cooking Impossible Burgers in the same grease as real meat. People were saying "Wow Impossible tastes just like beef, maybe better!"

I think this kind of transition, while somewhat deceptive, is great because it opens people's minds to the idea of a plant burger. Later on, you can eliminate the beef grease and the same people will continue enjoying Impossible Burgers because their palate has become more receptive. Then perhaps they might be open to other vegetarian options that are less oriented toward animal meat. I think these kind of gradual behavior changes are quite powerful where beating someone over the head with tofu and chickpeas fails.

The full title of TFA:

"Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop."

It is of course possible for any business to "flop", whether or not it makes good products.

A "$1 trillion meat industry" with influential interests is not going to transform (much less disappear) suddenly. Consumers of meat products, like people who seem to need bigger and bigger vehicles, are accustomed (conditioned) to viewing their needs a certain way.

The failure of a business that sought to deliver a product that would change the above is not a surprise. For sociological context, consider (as TFA states) that McDonalds is still selling its plant-based product in markets outside the US.

None of this changes the principles of vegetarianism or veganism. These practices have existed for a long time and for good reasons.

Yes they are more available now, I live in the Spanish countryside and there is an abundance of plant-based meat options around me. Nuggets, burgers, schnitzels, even made into local tapas (alas, frozen).

Agree. There are no headlines for: "People still eat tacos, so pizza has failed."

I'm not a fan of plant-based meat, this is most likely because of my culture ( I'm Sardinian ), we do have many meat based dishes and many plant based dishes, and honestly I don't see the need to cook the meat based ones with processed food that tries to replicate the taste and consistency of meat.

I believe that if you don't want to eat meat there's a world of recipes that do not involve meat and are made to elevate the delicate taste of veggies. I've grow up with eating whole foods, we cook everything from the base ingredients, sometimes we even make those base ingredients ( for example we have sheeps and cows and we make milk, and out of milk we make cheese ), personally for me pre-packaged food appears as the sub-optimal choice

Meat tastes really good.

I think there are many people who want to eat less meat but really enjoy meat. I am one of those people.

Agreed. My family has a long history of cardiovascular problems so I am trying to cut down on red meat myself to possibly extend my life...but dangit I want some chicken fried steak and cheeseburgers. I might use impossible burgers to satiate my cravings in a heart-healthy way, but it just isn't the same.

Chicken is not red meat, and also it's an healthy meat ( not sure if in USA chickens are pumped with weird stuff that makes them unhealthy ), you can make a light version of schnitzel by using chicken breast ( mostly protein, low fat ), some healthy oil like EVO oil to shallow fry it, and you should be good ( also if you are worried about cholesterol you can avoid eggs and use other ingredients like oil to make the breadcrumbs/panko/flour/semola stick to the meat )

PS: I'm not a doctor, to my knowledge this is a healthy dish but if you have any health issue I recommend first talking with someone with a specialisation to know how much is healthy and much you can eat of it

You can trim, slice, and hammer pork tenderloin as another way to get a fairly low fat schnitzel.

Regarding cholesterol, the link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol isn’t very strong. As far as I know unless someone is following specific medical advice from their own provider eggs do not need to be restricted.

Yes, that is true, if your body is healthy the two type of cholesterol ( LDL and HDL ) contained in foods should balance each other and you will not have cholesterol problems. Some people can have medical conditions and can eat maximum ~3 eggs/week. I can't know if OP is one of those people, this is why I suggested a way to avoid cholesterol rich ingredients.

Edit: replaced "have cholesterol rich ingredients" with "avoid ..."

I think it's pretty well established that the dietary cholesterol to blood cholesterol link is very strong in some people, very weak in some people, and somewhere in the middle for most people. There are definitely 'hyper-responders' for whom dietary cholesterol is very, very bad. There are also people that can eat dozens of eggs a day and have perfectly normal blood cholesterol. The only way to know how those genetic dice rolled for you is to do a personal study - eat a lot of eggs for a while and see if you start to develop elevated cholesterol.

As an anecdote, I eat on average 8-10 eggs a day. They are my primary source of calories. My blood cholesterol is extremely low, like on the extreme low end of normal on most blood tests (although it is starting to creep up as I get older)

I’m just curious why you would eat 8-10 eggs daily? That seems like a very large number.

Because eggs are filling, relatively cheap, and pretty good for you. Especially if you have a body that doesn't do well with high-glycemic index foods and you don't want to eat animal meat.

meat = animal cells

egg = one animal cell

Technically the same thing

I think the main difference is that eating an unfertilized egg doesn't end the life of a viable animal.

I am personally happily eat meat, but I respect people that choose not to kill animals and at least some of them find eating unfertilized eggs to be acceptable.

In my personal worldview I view unfertilized eggs as approximately morally equivalent to eating a peanut. In practice it's difficult to make them exactly equivalent but by carefully selecting where the eggs come from you can get closer.

In case you were responding specifically to GP's mention of "chicken fried steak": it's beef, not chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_fried_steak

I translated "cotoletta" into "Schnitzel" to give an immediate idea of the dish to the reader ( because Schnitzel is more famous ), but in Italian cotoletta can be both with chicken or pork or beef, the recipe is the same with every meat ( beat the meat, bread it, shallow fry it )

The chicken-based analogue to chicken fried steak in Southern United States cuisine is chicken fried chicken. Chicken Fried Steak is steak that is breaded and fried like fried chicken and covered in white gravy. Chicken Fried Chicken is the same thing, but with a chicken cutlet instead of steak in the case of Chicken Fried Steak or a piece of bone-in chicken in the case of traditional fried chicken.

The problem with red meat isn't meat per se; all meat has saturated fat, some more than others. Reducing LDL cholesterol (reducing CVD risk) means increasing fiber and reducing saturated fat, and if someone chimes in saying that it's not casual, we have an excellent mendelian randomization study that gives us a pretty good link [1]. All plant-based meat alternatives, including cheeses, have high amounts of saturated fat from coconut oil, which isn't very good either.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26780009/

Aw dang. I might just have to keep skipping burgers then and just learn some new favorite meals lol

Me too, and I believe OP is just saying that it's better to substitute your nutrition with other non-meat whole foods, instead of substituting it with heavily processed fake meat. And I agree.

I eat less (almost no red meat), but that is as far as I'll go. Taste is one thing, but also the high quality proteins and nutrition, plus I don't see the problem in killing animals in and of itself. I can't replicate this calorie-per-calorie strictly with veg without supplementation, nor do I feel as good. That approach doesn't seem "green" or financially viable for everyone, notwithstanding that some people do better on vegan diets than others. As far as I can tell, modest consumption is best for optimal health, by virtue that replacing them with.

Meat tastes really good.

That does not imply that plant-based pseudo-meat tastes better than plant-based recipes designed to use, not hide, the plant flavors.

It's so strange isn't it, there are so many vegetarian dishes that are delicious.

I've never understood the need to use a replacement that's worse across the board.

I wonder if it's a cultural thing, like "I want a steak"

If you become a vegetarian in the US, you will come to appreciate that almost no mains offered in any "American" restaurant are without meat. If you go to a popular American restaurant that your friends picked, you are lucky to have 1 non-salad non-side option.

For whatever reason, our culture has decided that if it doesn't have meat, it barely qualifies as a meal. As a result, high quality vegetarian food must be aquired by seeking out ethnic food, seeking out veg friendly places, or learning to cook.

But then in your effort to eat less meat, would you replace it with plant-based alternatives?

Personally, I cook without any alternatives and just make proper dishes with no meat. Then, once in a while, I’ll get some better locally sourced meat and make a great meat based dish.

> But then in your effort to eat less meat, would you replace it with plant-based alternatives?

Yes, 100%. I like meat, and meat based dishes. I’ve never had a vegetable based dish that compares to even something similar but containing meat.

I feel like when meat alternatives are discussed this option of just making vegetable based dishes always comes up. And I think most people agree with me here - meat makes them better across the board. If it didn’t this market wouldn’t exist and people buy much less meat.

As I’m unwilling to switch completely to vegetable based dishes, meat alternatives are the next best option.

As someone who enjoys meat well enough… I realized a while ago that meat itself doesn’t have that great of a flavor, it can be downright bland. The flavor comes from the seasonings and spices they are typically prepared with. Which are either: a) salt or b) something that came from a plant.

I see this a lot here in Germany (I'm an immigrant) - people buying vegan sausage, vegan ham, etc. I prefer to just eat "normal" vegetarian food (I don't even like real ham!) but meat is so central to traditional German cuisine and people here want the kind of (what they consider) staple food that they're willing to eat fake meat.

When I was backpacking around India and Nepal for 6 months altogether, I just stopped eating meat - their chicken pieces were always just bones with tiny bits of meat here and there, mutton was worse than chewing gum and that was it for the meat, food safety notwithstanding.

Now enter a wonderful universe of vegetable curries and masalas where every household has their own twist on recipes and it all tastes so much differently. I couldn't care less if there was no meat, the spice mixture, thick sauces and ingredients meant I felt very satiated and didn't miss meat at all.

Its all just in our minds. Recently I was explaining to my friend how I eat often cold salads for lunch and in the mountains its more likely some sandwich, probably already half-frozen in the backpack. And I don't care, it tastes great after some physical effort and gives body all it needs and some more. For him, you can't have lunch if its not warm and there is no big piece of meat on plate in some form.

Also some people equate spices with just chili, meaning for them that any spiced food must burn your anus for whole next week and leave permanent scars on lower back. Which is a shame, there is whole universe of intense tastes unavailable to traditional western cuisine that doesn't burn your tongue a bit (or it still can while not using any chili at all).

Often what we want is some familiar texture and substantial mouthfeel of meat. Just adding tiny slices of meat to remind you it’s there or substituting it with “meatier” veggies like mushrooms or cabbage can do the trick.

> there is whole universe of intense tastes unavailable to traditional western cuisine that doesn't burn your tongue a bit

FWIW, I agree with everything you said, but I'd like to point out there's a ton of spices used in western cuisine too.

For example, in my hometown (central Italy) we use a lot of wild fennel pollen, which goes on basically everything. In Hungary fennel seeds, marjoram, paprika and turmeric are in practically every kitchen.

Star anise, nutmeg, saffron, mace, clove etc.. have been used in western cuisine for centuries too, and are used in very traditional western dishes (french onion soup, bechamel sauce, risotto alla milanese etc)

Western cuisine certainly uses less spices than the indian subcontinent, but I would not say the spices were unavailable to western cuisine.

What about protein intake?

> their chicken pieces were always just bones with tiny bits of meat here and there, mutton was worse than chewing gum

This is strange, maybe they were exceptionally poor but generally speaking, the chicken or mutton in India is not just bones and definitely is not the texture of chewing gum. Now I don't know what they were doing wrong cooking that mutton but every time I've made it, it comes out incredibly, it melts in one's mouth. I hope you reconsider Indian meat dishes.

I agree on the vegetarian dishes, I mainly eat those during the week, but we get meat on the weekends.

Fake meat feels similar to my Slovenian eyes. There's a whole world of recipes that just don't include meat and are delicious. It wasn't until I moved to the USA that I even realized those are "vegetarian" ... to me they're just regular foods and recipes. Lots of cottage cheese hearty meals with high protein content.

It helps that traditional (100+ years ago) Slovenian culture was that you rarely eat meat because meat is expensive. Ye olden folks typically ate meat only on Sundays, I think. Maybe bacon fat to season the food on other days.

Sometimes I talk to my vegetarian friends and ask "If you want to be vegetarian, why don't you just eat natively vegetarian dishes? Why the fake meat?". So far no satisfying answer.

Fake meat is generally aimed more at meat eaters than people who are already vegetarian or vegan. If you already like tofu and seitan, you probably aren't trading those in for the new products.

I know a lot of vegetarians who have been such for decades and half their diet is veggie sausages, burgers, and similar. Not even the new fake meats, the previous generation.

Vegetarian/veganism is not a fashion choice, it's a moral one. It's like asking why a Muslim prepares a dish that's traditionally prepared with pork but instead substitutes lamb. I'm not sure what more explanation you require.

To quote a funny meme: If my mother had wheels she would've been a bicycle!

You can't just replace ingredients. Make a lamb dish if lamb is what you want!

Interesting, we say "If my grandma had wheels she would've been a wheelbarrow!" ( "Se mia nonna aveva le ruote sarebbe una carriola" ). And there's also the version with grandad, but it's better you look that one on Google "Se mio nonno aveva..."

We (neighbours to the east) sometimes say “If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandpa” as a meta on the other versions of the grandma jokes, but I searched and did like the Italian grandpa version.

> You can't just replace ingredients.

Huh? Yes you can. Replacing ingredients, adding ingredients, removing ingredients is the basis for all food culture. Recipes get passed down through generations and those variances over time are what give us distinct and unique dishes.

As my Italian friend once said:

"Yes, the thing with BBQ sauce and pineapple is tasty, but it's not a pizza!"

Your Italian friend is wrong.

This seems like such a strange fight to take on. People have been substituting ingredients in recipes since there have been recipes. Any dish becomes a lamb dish if you put lamb in it.

It was very trendy in certain circles when I was in college to be vegetarian/vegan and I think it was mostly a fashion choice. If it had been about morals, there would have been other lifestyle changes.

People also adopt religions to be fashionable, and they don't follow all the tenets of that religion. Seems bad-faith to ask someone who professes a moral stance why they don't behave more like someone who is just professing that moral stance to be fashionable.

Who is asking that?

You might be surprised. Imposing such a dietary restriction can take a lot of mental and emotional effort (especially if people around you are annoyed by the fact they must accomodate you, or act threatened by your choices). When I started being veg, I had very few (0?) other lifestyle changes unless you include maybe trying make a few environmentally conscious decisions. I wouldn't take your word on the motivations of your friends, unless you know they are no longer veg today.

> Sometimes I talk to my vegetarian friends and ask "If you want to be vegetarian, why don't you just eat natively vegetarian dishes? Why the fake meat?". So far no satisfying answer.

Because there are people who like the taste and consistency of meat, but object to killing animals.

Is it an addiction to the taste of meat?

If your objection to killing animals is strong enough there are millions of purely vegetarian recipes that are delicious and much more tastier than fake meat. Why not switch to those?

Yes Mediterranean countries tend to have less meat in their cuisine. But Anglo and Germanic cuisine tends to incorporate more meat and that's just what people are used to.

Someone already pointed out the obvious, meat tastes good, but has some ethical baggage. Ala - fake meat.

But I think as you're pointing out, people around the world have made amazing dishes for centuries that are completely vegetarian why not eat those instead? And why there's no satisfying answer is because - It's not an either or. Do both is a perfectly valid answer.

I've been vegan for 13 years and my partner of 7 years is an omnivore. When I make dishes they like, we both eat vegan for the night. When we want a burger (and we're to lazy to make black bean patties) we use the fake meat. It's just another option to keep around that's incredibly convenient.

In my experience, these tend to be the "middle-ground", between vegan/vegetarians and omnivores. When Thanksgiving comes around it stresses my family to no end that there's no "core" (aka meat) for me. It is unfathomable to them that eating 5 veggie sides is enough. Conversely for those who choose not to eat meat without many vegetarian friends/restaurants tend to use these to bridge the gap. But you're right, once you're comfortable with stocking veggie alternatives ahead of time, knowing what dishes exist, and used to plant-centric thinking, all of which takes a lot of time, these don't make as much sense.

> It's not an either or. Do both is a perfectly valid answer.

Good point. I think my confusion as a non-vegetarian comes from my habit to just not eat meat when I don't feel like eating meat. "Oh I had more meaty meals than I'm comfortable with last week? Okay we mealprep a natively meatless dish this week. Done"

Like, the idea of having meat substitutes doesn't even occur. Because when I want meat, I have meat. And when I don't want meat, I don't.

Alternative meat products are really great for people who can't or don't cook. I can cook fine now, but I still get lots of alternative meat products when I don't want to make a meal. At this point I'd consider fake chicken nuggets to be a comfort food.

> Sometimes I talk to my vegetarian friends and ask "If you want to be vegetarian, why don't you just eat natively vegetarian dishes? Why the fake meat?". So far no satisfying answer.

c'mon, stop being deliberately ignorant.

> c'mon, stop being deliberately ignorant.

Attacking the messenger is a good example of unsatisfactory answer.

Is a legit question. Do you have something to say?

Indeed, as someone who is Indian but not vegan or vegetarian, my meals during the weekdays are meatfree and usually vegan as well. This is not by conscious choice, the recipes are simply made that way. I suppose back in the day where meat was expensive, as you mentioned, so people made vegetable based meals and that's what stuck. During the weekends with family gathered, people eat meat, just as I do too on weekends. It becomes a sort of mini feast every weekend.

In the US, it often puzzles me to hear that some people actually don't consider a meatless meal a meal at all, as if they have to eat meat for all three meals of the day. That is unknown to Indians, generally speaking.

Do you also ask people why they drink diet soda when they're not on a diet?

You're basically suggesting they don't get to use an ingredient because of the way it's marketed or why it was invented, which are terrible reasons. "It tasty" is all the justification they need.

> I'm not a fan of plant-based meat, this is most likely because of my culture ( I'm Sardinian )

Many of the well-known plant based meat companies make their foods for American consumers. That food taste is not similar to what we are accustomed to in the Mediterranean. You can give a try to Heura's mediterranean items. Its an European company and it knows the Mediterrnanean cuisine well:

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/bocados-mediterraneos

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/albondigas-originales

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/bocados-especiados

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/picada-troceada

I second this sentiment. General advice is to avoid things in boxes and bags: aka highly processed foods.

The ingredients list on the beyond meat website looks like this: Water, pea protein*, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals

What are you really eating?

Huh that’s actually not too many unfamiliar ingredients. Pea protein, methyl cellulose and potassium chloride. Sure those could be harmful but that’s not exactly the same as a Twinkie

I don’t see anything glaringly bad here

There's only one thing on that list which isn't food/seasoning/salt: methylcellulose. However, it is derived from plant cellulose, and is basically a semi-synthetic equivalent of pectin, a natural product (or other dietary fibers). Methylcellulose is better than pectin because it's just easier to get standard properties.

There's nothing harmful about it and the body treats it exactly the same as pectin - it passes straight through like other dietary fiber.

> General advice is to avoid things in boxes and bags: aka highly processed foods.

What kind of rule is this?

Half of the barely-processed foods I buy are in boxes and bags. Rice, potatoes, frozen vegetables...

Fresh meat is also wrapped for sanitary reasons. Do you count plain cheese as highly processed because that has plastic on it too.

Let alone how normal it is to add things like starch and salt and juices.

Do we have to keep having this conversation? Lots of people, like myself, choose to not eat meat because we care about animal welfare. It's not because we don't like eating meat. Therefore food that tastes and feels like meat but didn't require killing an animal makes sense.

Yeah, this is the issue that most people seem to miss. It's not the flavour that is the issue, which is why products that attempt to replicate it are successful with vegans/vegetarians.

What we find abhorrent is that a living, sentient being had to be raised and slaughtered in mostly inhumane conditions, in a supply chain that is evil to humans and animals alike.

Removing that element from my diet is the goal, not the flavour. I don't understand why this is so hard for some people to understand.

Sometimes it seems so predictable that someone will say it that I think they are being deliberately ignorant and trolling.

Some people just don't care about the same things. And some people also don't have the creativity, joy or whatever to cook a vegetarian meal. People are just different and for some, biting into a burger or eating a piece of chicken gives them some kind of joy. Maybe they even associate some kind of lifestyle, identity with that. I think there is no point arguing these principles over and over. People are different.

> What we find abhorrent is that a living, sentient being had to be raised and slaughtered in mostly inhumane conditions, in a supply chain that is evil to humans and animals alike.

Looks like a phobia and probably should be treated as one.

I second this. I cut meat by cooking better vegetarian recipes, not by finding better meat substitutes. Asia has no shortage of excellent dishes, as does Italy. I'll take a good pasta dish over a fake sausage made of mystery ingredients any day.

Tomatoes are nearly fungible, but meat substitutes are not. Potatoes are cheap but meat substitutes are not. Carrots are easy to find anywhere but meat substitutes are not.

Seitan is very cheap and easy to make at home, and can be quite tasty.

It's a good option for eating out as a vegetarian/vegan. At least in the US, most vegetarian/vegan restaurant dishes are an afterthought or non-existent unless it's a vegan restaurant. I don't complain about it, but I've come to not enjoy going to restaurants as a result of this.

It's also not bad for people who want to transition from eating meat to being more plant-based and it's another option in general.

I'd argue most of the vegetarian/vegan food is going to be cooked alongside meat, especially burgers. You're not getting a special griddle when it comes to prep. The closest I've seen is cooking the vegetarian food earlier and putting it in a steamer, but who wants anything that was prepared 6 hours ago let alone steamed?.

I guess I just don't understand the whole concept. I went to vegan expo thing way back in the day at UCLA and nearly every vendor was pretty much "our fake meat" which was odd because I assumed they didn't like meat, yet clearly do. Very confusing.

Veganism is an ethical position, not a diet. It to reduce the harm to animals we cause as much as feasible and possible. A veggie burger cooked need to a beef one doesn't harm any animal nor does it add demand for animal products. Ethically there's nothing really wrong with it.

Same with the last, I'm vegan because I can live fine while lowering the harm I do to animals, but meat and dairy products do taste good.

You'd be pleasantly surprised in Europe, just checked LA on happycow and shows 828 vegan-friendly options to dine, whilst looking at Vienna, a comparatively very small city showed 818 options.

100% agreed. Never understood why vegan evangelists would try to convert me with some God awful meat-free sausage rather than a fresh falafel with tahini.

I think a lot of people either eat out or buy and heat up frozen ready-to-eat meals or meal parts (chicken tenders, fries, bag of vegetables, bag of stir fry mix) because they lack either the time or inclination to prep foods themselves. These are the maybe-could-be vegetarians that meat alternatives really appeal to.

It depends on the dish. With burgers, for example, I much prefer an Impossible Burger patty to any meat-based burger for the flavor alone. I also love vegetable-based dishes, but I seek out Impossible meat in addition to those. I also enjoy mostly non-prepackaged, unprocessed food, but it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can enjoy both.

Novelty food item still existing after a few years is a groundbreaking success, not a flop. The real mistake is treating food as a tech startup. People are understandably cautious about what they put in their bodies and also associate food with their cultural identity. Widespread acceptance would require patient cultivation of each segment of the market and tweaking product to suit different needs and sensibilities. Now that burger composition can be altered rather than being whatever comes out of the cow, diet burger that still tastes meaty / fatty would not be a bad start, that's where people will overlook preservatives so long as they get results. Next, consider if plant burgers can fulfil various religious restrictions when real meat would not. Create ads and mascots for different cultures. Then wait a decade and you might be getting somewhere.

It's the cost.

We are meat-eaters and have been trying lots of plant-based products. I was never sold as them being health products, but I liked the (presumed) environmental benefits. Plus, I could make a single meal for me and my Vegan friends.

Plant-based meats were supposed to be cheaper. But it never happened. So now we've mostly moved back to normal meat products. (It doesn't help that my vegan friends never stopped thumbing their nose down at the products).

Exactly. Most burger chains don't use high quality meat for their burgers. You go to McDonald's, Burger King, or whatever and you are getting a greasy grey slab of ground "meat" (let's not think to long about where that comes from) that is 1) very thin 2) a bit rubbery 3) not that tasty 4) has some filler content in addition to meat and fat. To cover that up, most burger chains use lots of sauce, salt, and spices. It's called fast food for a reason. You eat it and you walk away mildly disappointed with the whole experience. Not that hard to compete with with a vegan option of any kind. It will taste different, and probably better by any objective standard. But when the baseline is kind of bland and boring to begin with, the benchmark for good enough isn't that high.

The beyond burger is actually fine for that segment. I've had a few. They are alright. But I don't crave a beyond burger any more than I do a big mac. It's just bland fast food to me. I'll munch it away if I'm hungry and there's nothing else but it's not particularly good or excellent.

It's miles apart from a good quality premium burger that is made of ground meat from a good cut of meat. You grill it medium, medium rare. Grease dripping all over the place when you eat it, etc. Much harder to compete with that. Now that's something I enjoy eating once in a while.

The problem is that things like the beyond burger are somewhat better than a cheap fast food burger but not really in the same league as a really premium burger. But they are priced like one. So that narrows down the audience to people that actually like meat but feel guilty about it and want to pay more to eat less of it. These people exist of course but it's a relatively small group of people. I just try to eat other things than meat to cut down on meat consumption. Works fine for me.

It comes from a normal farm and they are actually quite thorough in validating the cow was healthy. Source: Parents had a farm in europe and mc donalds inspected it.

That doesn't make it high quality.

Does anyone remember the "pink slime" taco bell scandal? Their beef was less than 20% recognizable ground beef.

ABC (the TV network) paid out a couple hundred million in a defamation suit for that scandal.

"Pink Slime" was about a picture of a pink substance being extruded that people claimed was chicken nugget paste.

I never understand when people get riled up about that kind of stuff. What do you THINK ground up meat looks like?

I'm very disappointed in the cost as well. It hasn't come down at all. Not just the fake meat, but even tofu. But the cost isn't the main issue to me anymore, over the years I've come to realize I don't want to support the meat industry where profits rule everything. So I grudgingly pay the higher price of Beyond Meat.

And to be honest, it's not that much more expensive, for my particular budget. Two Beyond Meat burgers cost € 3.93, and two beef burgers cost € 2.75.

> I don't want to support the meat industry where profits rule everything. So I grudgingly pay the higher price of Beyond Meat.

BM is largely driven by the profit motive too

My problem is profits in relation to the treatment of animals. I don't care if someone profits off the mistreatment of pea proteins.

That's an important part of the answer (if not the answer) and should have been highlighted in OP. We've had a bit of inflation lately. Food in particular has become more expensive. Maybe this doesn't affect the average HNer much, but it absolutely does affect a lot of others. At the margins, which is where markets are made, quite a lot of people who might have bought plant-based meats won't at these prices.

Absolutely the cost. Very annoying to pay more than everyone else at BK, but at least I can eat at BK. Sorry about your friends.

I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm. I know it’s a bunch of stuff to make it look like meat, but it’s basically cow meat vs a burger containing 50 random items and chemicals that is worse or equal in nutritional content then cow.

Like one impossible vs cow is 14g of fat vs 16g of fat. 370mg of sodium vs 90mg of sodium.

They are not even that much better for you.

Rather than trying to get meat eaters to eat a sort of cow type burger. Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper. If people go to the store and see cow for $15 and a delicious veggie that is not sawdust for $10 some will buy the cheaper. And that’s all it takes is some. Slowly and over generations it could change to be predominantly.

You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

I loved the beyond burger and I’m a meat eater but after experimenting with it I also stopped eating them. The laundry list of ingredients and the contradictory information from educational institutions with respected names publishing about the impact on my body for consuming these turned me off.

It’s good to know we can create delicious plant burgers. It sucks to doubt if they are even better for us than the meat.

I eat them every now and then. Any remarkable source about the negative impacts of it on the body that you would be kind to share? Thank you in advance.

> 370mg of sodium vs 90mg of sodium.

While I agree with your comment, this is very misleading unless you eat your steak raw and unsalted.

Does the cooking itself add sodium? Salting isn't mandatory, and there are tons of spices you can add if you want some extra taste that aren't salt (i know this might be anathema to some who think seasoning starts and stops with salt and maybe pepper but it's true, try it out!).

No amount of extra spices can replace salt.

370mg of sodium is the equivalent of a LOT of salt. I assume the beyond patty has some other sodium-containing ingredient in it.

If your taste buds are accustomed to tons of salt, yes. But that's usually quite easy to adapt (over some time).

A few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker isn't going to come close to 90mg. Figure about 40mg because I use a very small amount of it when I do use it. I'd have to eat 9 of mine to get the same salt content as a plant burger sold here.

But wait, there's more! National brands of everything here load their products up with salt. Buns, condiments, fries, drinks are all packed with sodium. Under the guise of eating healthy, one can eat a loaded up plant burger w/fries and a cola and consume a day' worth of salt in one sitting.

370mg of salt in a single patty is an absurd amount of salt.

> A few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker isn't going to come close to 90mg.

Really? You're saying "a few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker" isn't going to give you as much as one 25th of a teaspoon?

I expect people salt their impossible burgers too.

I think it’s accurate and fair to list the direct ingredients rather than estimating what the nutrition content is after cooking. That gets pretty hard to follow as cooking varies substantially.

For example, I might bake my broccoli with olive oil. Does that make it misleading to only show the fat content of broccoli and not the olive oil?

There are many beef dishes that don’t add salt.

No, the impossible burgers come well salted and seasoned to hide the fakeness. I don't salt mine.

> but it’s basically cow meat vs a burger containing 50 random items and chemicals that is worse or equal in nutritional content then cow.

Is that the central north american urban choice palette?

Here in rural Australia our meat intake (albeit < %20 of total food intake) is lamb from the farm, ham from the farm, fish from the ocean, camel, kangaroo, goat.

Camel and goat are introduced feral animals that overstock and get routinely culled - they're not feed lot cattle, and anybody eating them is arguably doing the local environment a favour by denting the numbers.

Kangaroos are culled by population monitoring estimates, they have a tendancy to explode in numbers in the good years and die by the hundreds of thousands in the dry years that follow.

It's decades at least since I ate meat that didn't come from a known location, killed and butched | filleted by someone known, and passed on either directly or through a single known intermediary.

That said - kangaroo, camel, and goat make an interesting alternative to beef - the meat is lean and comes at a much lower environmental impact.

As I understand it, most of the ingredients are just extracts from or purifications of natural products. I'm not just saying this to defend plant-based meats - it's true of many chemicals with scary-looking names in other foods. "Calcium pantothenate", for instance, is just a salt of the essential vitamin B5. "Ascorbic acid" is vitamin C. And so on.

And it's worth bearing in mind that the ingredients list of a steak would be just one item - beef - but red meat consumption is nonetheless associated with increases in certain cancers and cardiovascular problems. This is even more true for processed red meat which, realistically, represents a big share of most people's red meat consumption.

Here’s the ingredient list for a beyond burger [0], I don’t think your point is relevant, as while the ingredient aren’t necessarily scary, there are many of them and the product is highly processed.

“Water, pea protein, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Peas are legumes. People with severe allergies to legumes like peanuts should be cautious when introducing pea protein into their diet because of the possibility of a pea allergy. Contains no peanuts or tree nuts.”

[0] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger

The point does seem relevant. Most of the non chemical ingredients are recognizable natural or naturally derived (rice/pea protein). methylcellulose is the only odd one out.

Hamburger Pattie’s have a single ingredient: beef.

I thought it wasn’t relevant because the ingredient list is still complex compared to cow burgers. It’s nice that the long ingredient is mostly recognizable, but the point is that there’s a long list of ingredients, not that the ingredient list included toxic waste or something.

> I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm.

If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb. Proteins, fats, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibiotics (quite likely with factory farming), microorganisms... it's just our labelling laws that mean they get to be lumped together as "meat". They're still chemicals assembled by organic nanotech.

We know some of them are bad. E.g. there's a link between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, and nitrites in bacon etc. also increase cancer risk.

> Slowly and over generations it could change to be predominantly.

Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

And I don't think anyone is doing that.

The chemicals in every plant and animal are a long, complicated list. If, as you suggest, we elaborate them out, "mushroom," "fig," amd even "carrot" get really weird. The point of the ingredients list is to backtrack from the food in front of you to a list of known safe components. Like it or not, "cow" is one of those - humans have been eating cow meat for millions of years.

1. Humans have not been eating cows produced by modern methods for millions of years. Cow diet, genetics, and lifecycle is quite unnatural at this point. (This is the overwhelming bulk of cow consumption, of course your local micro farm produces cows more similar to ancient cows)

2. Humans haven’t been eating cow (or meat generally) on this scale ever before in history.

3. Even despite the above, we genuinely don’t know to what extent baseline human health is dependent on traditional diet. It’s not impossible that there exists a modern radical diet that greatly improves health and longevity without including any “natural” foods.

> If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb.

No, I don’t think so. Most of my beef has a single ingredient: grass. Some have two ingredients: grass, grain (there may be different grains though).

Even if you listed the molecules, the ingredient list for beef is much shorter than beyond burgers.

And plastic. And other contaminants that have entered the food chain.

The naturalistic fallacy doesn't somehow become a good argument because you also don't understand microbiology.

I am certainly not saying red meat is good, I don't eat red meat. I'm just saying that the whole make a plant burger like a meat burger and bam climate change solved is not going to work. Advertising it as a meat burger won't either, cause it's not. And that just makes meat lovers angry.

It would be better to focus on making veggie burgers better. Not making a terrible copy of cow.

> Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

I'm certainly not arguing that climate change does not need immediate action, and I am certainly not undermining that it has helped even a little bit. I hope that came across in my statement.

I AM saying that red meat is good -- both for your health and for the environment.

Wanting something to be true, doesn’t make it true.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021...

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7256495/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-less-red-m...

You're going to need to put more effort into that assertion.

I notice that you haven't actually brought up any arguments. I'm especially curious if you can find any arguments at all for your second assertion.

> If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb.

The thing is, a lot of have been making plant based patties for years using almost no ingredients. All you need for a convincing non-meat burger is quality mushrooms in the patty. Sure, it might not taste exactly like beef but once you consider it like any other meat it's not an issue (pork burgers don't taste like beef, chicken burgers don't taste like pork, vice-versa).

I understand that they have to have some preservatives, but some other products are only there for the novelty or to attract meat eaters. We don't really need to have an entire formula that adds fake blood.

For example, my favourite store-bought one is from Good Butchers and it's simple ingredients that are very similar to what you would make yourself at home:

Wheat gluten, Onion, Organic black beans, Organic mushrooms, Barley, Apple juice, Organic carrots, Organic beets, Water, Organic sunﬂower oil, Organic celery, Tahini, Oats, Organic garlic, Nutritional yeast, Apple cider vinegar, Organic mustard, Natural smoke ﬂavour, Salt, Balsamic vinegar, Natural ﬂavour, Dried shiitake mushrooms, Dried porcini mushrooms, Herbs, Spices.

Meanwhile some other brands have a lot of additives, preservatives and chemicals.

> I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm

Cow meat has a long list of ingredients that aren't disclosed either: antibiotics, growth hormones, etc.

> They are not even that much better for you.

I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

> Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper.

It'll be hard to compete in price until they reach a certain scale, and there's the whole point of livestock subsidies: https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=live...

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

Not sure where the shoving and name-calling is taking place, but there's actually good feedback from meat eaters for a lot of Beyond Meat products, for example.

> I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

Wait until the big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle & co. enter the party, and see major lobbying to promote this ultra-processed food as healthy because #PlantBased, like they've done for decades with their other products.

The marketing for this stuff has already been extreme in the United Kingdom in the past couple years, with the real deal seen as vile and immoral, after being labelled as unhealthy since the 60s due to shoddy dietary science. After all, there is not much money or processed products you can make off real meat. With plant-based fake meat, the potential profits are unimaginable.

Vegan food: taste, healthy, filling - pick 2

These are all three: https://www.beanit.fi/en/our-products/

It's just processed fava beans, nothing unhealthy.

Their tex-mex mince (not on the english pages for some reason) is superior to minced meat in my opinion. It keeps in the fridge for weeks (can't do that with raw meat) and the texture is pretty similar. Less fat, more protein.

Replace healthy with unprocessed then. Vegans sure love their processed foods.

Of course it's going to be processed unless you're getting it straight from the field. That website's ingredient list for their unflavored grounds:

Water, pea protein, fava bean (9 %, Finland), rapeseed oil.

Looks fairly minimal to me. "Vegans love their processed foods" is a weird take, I don't think they likely eat more processed foods than your typical American.

The ingredients aren't the main problem. The main problem is that a lot of nutritional value is stripped out during the various industrial processes. This causes one to not feel as sated as they would from the same caloric amount of non-processed food, and causes overeating.

What are the ingredients in potato fries?

American or European?

European fries are potato, oil, salt.

And since potatos are healthy, and vegans believe seed oils are healthy, surely their sum (potato fries) must also be healthy, correct?

Potatoes are healthy is not a take I see often.

Being vegan doesn't always mean eating healthy, even though people have that idea in their head.

In Finland we have a FB group called "Chips and Beer -vegans"[0] with 65k members. Potato chips are vegan, beer is vegan. You can have both and still be vegan. It's not healthy, but still vegan.

I can deep-fry my tofu in the fattiest of all vegan fats and eat them with deep-fried french fries and a bunch of deep-fried Oreos.

Still vegan.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/groups/1701571030062709

But it’s much easier to sustain a healthy diet as an omnivore, because as I mentioned, whole vegan food either lacks in satiety or taste. Which is why you typically see vegans trying to attack protein to address criticisms of satiety, or trying to defend processed foods to address criticisms of taste.

Wait what. "whole vegan food either lacks in satiety or taste" :D

Now go into the nearest Indian restaurant and order a Chana Aloo Curry. Or pick a Thai restaurant and grab any food with tofu in it. I recommend a Pad Thai.

Both 100% vegan and if they lack "satiety or taste", then come back.

In asian cuisine the protein really doesn't matter, 99% of the flavour is in the sauce. The protein just provides the texture.

In my experience it is the opposite, being that I only practice veganism every other day, I'm always looking forward to my vegan days for the variety of whole veggies and beans and grains I "have" to eat on those days. Always satisfying.

In my experience, usually the ingredients in fake burger meat are mostly recognizable nutritious plants, at least in the stuff I buy.

> A healthy, active adult needs between 200 and 500 mg of sodium per day.

(https://www.lifespan.org/lifespan-living/how-much-sodium-day...)

> Adults should eat no more than 2.4g sodium a day

(https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-nutrit...)

I'm no nutritionalist, but doesn't that suggest you could eat nothing but 6 of these burgers every day and still be within the recommended sodium intake? Sure, nobody's eating nothing but these burgers, but nobody (I hope) is eating 6 of them every single day — in and of themselves, their sodium content may seem scary relative to cow meat, but it's not really that bad.

The goal of the "meat replacements" that are Beyond and Impossible was never being better for you (from what I recall). It was about offsetting the footprint of raising cattle.

> Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper.

These burgers are out there already, for what it's worth. Veggie burgers nowadays are very tasty, very healthy, and mostly made of ground/diced vegetables and legumes. But they don't have the marketing hype that comes with "plant based food that bleeds!" so meat eating individuals didn't and don't even consider them as an option.

Even worse. If meat is not from some local farmers(and even from them), it can have a ton of antibiotics and other things to increase muscle mass, reduce fat, etc... Hell, even some vegetables like potatoes/tomatoes can have some awful chemicals in them( Sometimes I feel envy of my grandparents that grow vegetables on their land))

Pretty much this, I don't care if taste is 50-80% facsimile, but I expect cost to be so as well, and nutrition profile to be superior.

I feel so much better knowing my burger is 50% antibiotics.

My perspective from France:

Fake meat has never been so available. There are several restaurants that serve it that are not your "we are explicitly vegan" restaurants, burger king served some, and all major supermarkets have it in stock in the freezers right next to normal meat. However, the price is still unattainable. A few days ago i bought patties to make burgers and meat was about 1 euro/100g and plant meat was about twice as expensive. For as long as it is more expensive, people are going to buy real meat, unless they're trying it (in terms of taste i think it's fine) or vegan.

Similar story here in Finland, real meat is just so much cheaper than the fake veggie stuff. My theory was this was supply chains (being physically far away from the rest of Europe) and a relatively small market size, but interesting you have the same price discrepancy in France which I guess has neither of these issues.

Just speculating here but do you think it is because of the strong food culture and links to identity in France?

I would guess that it is because real meat is a commodity, and fake meat is not. That means that fake meat companies do not enjoy the same economies of scale, nor do they experience the same kinds of market forces that help keep prices down.

I find people around me very averse to "fake"/replacement of a real product, there is no way it will replace meat in cooking. What I don't get is why it's not more successful in fast foods. In that setting you are already forgetting yourself for eating not healthy, and French paradoxically love fast food (McDonald's has a strong presence here for example). At Burger King I find it's nearly indistinguishable from real meat, so it should be a no brainer.

Half the battle at least is most likely in your head. If you bite into a sandwich with very negative thoughts (e.g. it's probably horrible/bad/diseased) then you'll most likely taste something much more different than if you had thought it was a normal delicious meal.

The obvious answer is that animals are very efficient because they use self-replicating biological means to construct the flesh, and industrial animal operations are extremely efficient particularly when they dont have to care about animal welfare, consumer safety, or the environment.

Tax policy is also very favorable, and public infrastructure usage and pollution costs are not internalized.

Biotechnology, taxation, and regulation would be the answers.

For what it's worth, it's still more expensive in the US, too. I think it's likelier simple economies of scale + branding than anything else.

It's partly due to the insane subsidies that livestock farming receives in the EU.

If meat was not heavily subsidised, it would be much, much more expensive.

There's a reason these subsidies exist: maintaining Europe's food sovereignty.

See how well it turned out for Germany -and the rest of Europe- to transfer it's energy sovereignty to Russia...

I don't mind food sovereinty per se, but do we need to subsidize meat?

Lately, in the supermarket, there would usually be some meat at about 2€/kg, which I could not comprehend, as most other groceries have gone up. Pricewise it's competitive with carrots, potatoes and bananas.

How can meat end up cheaper than ordinary pastry? Measured per kg and yes, meat has a lot of water, but still..

I think we're not yet at the point where supermarket-bought products are on par with price, but we are on par when it comes to restaurant/fast food chains.

Every vegan/vegetarian food that I try from the likes of McDonalds is surprisingly good and costs about the same as the meat equivalent. In London there is also a fast food chain dedicated to vegan food (Neat Burger), it is fairly cheap for what it is and tastes amazing.

I dont think price is the problem. quality is. I pay my meat 3 times the price you pay yours because I go to the butcher and don’t trust supermarkets. but fake meat I wouldn’t even eat for free. the taste is too bad. If they could make good vegan meat even at a high price there will be an audience.

Not just the taste, but all that processed crap is terrible for nutrition.

How strange, we massively subsidize meat production, we don't even consider letting meat producers pay for the externalities they cause, and then plant-based alternatives have a hard time competing. It's a real mystery.

I don't see it purely as a policy problem. Plant-based meats are primarily focused on the US market, and so outside the US these brands can't compete in price either for price-conscious consumers, lacking supply chains that employ cheap domestic labor.

> Plant-based meats are primarily focused on the US market,

[citation needed]

fake meat is well established in the EU. Quorn & linda mcartney, have been in the market for many years(20+). Quorn mince is cheaper than beef mince(in the UK) where beef production is subsidised.

Finland has a (relatively) huge industry making meat substitutes from barley, fava beans etc. Stuff that we produce locally.

We also massively subsidise plant based food production. And non-food production like tobacco...

Most subsidized plant agriculture is used to feed livestock

It's about a 10:1 ratio in favor of livestock, last time I checked the EU CAP.

Does that consider corn subsidies a beef subsidy? America would be subsidizing corn production whether or not beef existed. The corn belt is VERY politically powerful, and america values having a basic food industry that is impossible to blockade in wartime.

If beef producers stop needing that corn, we will just find more corn syrup and ethanol in random places.

The externalities of a plant-based diet are enormous, from the use of pesticides which then leads to the decimation of the bird population to the massive amount of fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, to the explosion in the rate of obesity and diabetes -- at least grazing cattle is good for the land and leads to carbon sequestration.

Most cattle you eat is probably are not grazing, and ironically grazed cattle are environmentally speaking the worst for the environment.

https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate...

Most cattle doesn’t graze, and grazing being “good” for the land is contentious.

Most cattle eats soy beans and stuff like that. Incidentally, crops grown for cattle are a big driver of Amazon rainforest destruction.

This is all widely known at this point.

Cattle also emits significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

So overall cattle is far far worse environmentally, having all the bad things your comment cited about an order of magnitude worse than the food your comment cited.

Most plant agriculture is used to feed livestock. Consider how eating higher up the food chain requires about an order of magnitude increase in inputs. If everyone ate plant based diets, the agricultural footprint would go down dramatically.

You have this backwards to the point I thought you were being sarcastic. Cows and pigs require a huge multiplier of agriculture (and water) to feed them in order to produce an equivalent amount of food for humans.

Thanks to subsidies targeting livestock feed, it is cheaper to buy feed shipped from the next state over than it is to grow it yourself. Thus, petroleum based fertilizer, transportation fuel, and dung reservoirs.

Then there’s the whole issue of methane from cow farts being a serious source of greenhouse effects. It would be funny if only it wasn’t.

And, the obesity/diabetes link is also tied to farm subsidies making starchy corn and wheat practically free while leaving actually healthy vegetables to compete against practically free.

The only way out is to ramp farm subsidies down to zero. That would be political suicide because it will increase the price of food. Especially meat. But, the alternative is to continue to slowly eat our way into diabetes and global warming.

This article seems a little self contradictory and also goes against my own anecdotal experience.

In the UK I am seeing more faux-meat products than ever. And at least half of the adverts I've seen in the last few months for meat products (fast food burgers, frozen foods, etc.) have been for "fake meat". It seems as popular as ever.

I know people that will now buy mostly a fake meat based meal, where as before they would have eaten the vegetarian option (for example the vegetable patties that were available before the fake meat choices).

Maybe unpopular opinion, but for me, best plant based patties are those that do not try to replicate meat taste. I much prefer patties made from actual plants&vegetables/mushrooms/chickpeas/beans like potato, carrot, some spices and so on. They have like actual 'natural' flavor, almost like something homemade. Those that add a ton of additives often taste awful, even beyond/moving mountains...

That's a misunderstanding. Fake meat products don't contain "a ton of additives".

Water, soy protein concentrate, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors, 2% or less of potato protein, methylcellulose, yeast extract, cultured dextrose, food starch modified, soy leghemoglobin, salt, mixed tocopherols (antioxidant), soy protein isolate, zinc gluconate, thiamine hydrochloride (vitamin B1), niacin, pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6), riboflavin (vitamin B2), and vitamin B12. This is the list of ingredients in an impossible burger. Just so it can somewhat (barely) mimic the taste and texture of actual meat, for what? Shoving myself full of GMO produce and preservatives? It's much more fulfilling and better for your own health to buy fresh produce, make your own umami rich, organic blends and eat them and not strive to mimic something it cannot be.

It fits the definition of ultraprocessed food since fats and proteins are modified (that's sort of the whole point, to create a new texture).

Which to me is the downside of a lot of the "replacement" foods. Industrial, processed food, that is pretty far away from whole foods. I'd prefer to just eat whole foods instead, vegetarian or not.

Do you have anything at all to back up the claim that modified proteins and fats as found in fake meat products are unhealthy? I can't find anything. This seems like superstition.

Almost all of those are protein and vitamins - good for you. Then there are some carbs. Not horrible.

Even sunflower oil gets a bad rap bc it's assoc w proc foods but it's fine just don't get it too hot or overconsume:

https://www.webmd.com/diet/sunflower-oil-good-for-you

Coconut oil's sat fat is highly contested and mixed. Very hard to untangle its effects but it seems to be nonlinear: A little seems okay.

Excess vitamins may in fact be bad for you in some situations. Studies using antioxidants A, C, and E found they can accelerate cancer growth.

Wouldn't most food accelerate cancer growth? Cancer needs nutrients to grow the same way normal cells do.

So you're claiming GMO is bad for your health? Wow. And preservatives? Can you point out the preservatives in the ingredient list? I can't see any. Except maybe salt...

Really not convinced at all.

I'm a meat-eater, but those "classic" plant-based patties often taste perfectly fine. Not like meat at all, but they don't have to, that's okay. It's not like I only eat meat. But the new breed of patties that claim to be meat taste really awful, definitely. They sometimes smell really weird, too.

Beyond burger or what was the one that was hyped 3 years ago was really good in my opinion. Especially on a burger with some sauce and other taste things.

The only thing you really shouldn't do is mix real meat and fake meat. A natural thing to do is order two burgers, and compare them. Whatever you eat first will taste fine, whatever you eat second is extremely gross.

It never occurred to me to mix real and fake meat. Now I'm curious. Maybe I'll have to try a 50/50 ground beef mix, just out of curiosity, haha.

My comparison method so far was the Whopper.

I did get a rather funny look one time when I ordered an Impossible Burger, with bacon on top. I wanted to try it out, and to see whether it could replace some of my meat consumption. However, this didn’t fit into the usual categories of “vegetarian” or “non-vegetarian”.

Sounds like the same kind of look I get when I eat one of the aforementioned "classic" plant-based patties or other veggie-stuff around people who know I eat meat. Somehow they assume that only vegetarians would eat that.

I saw an actual 50/50 mix of beef/plant based burger patties at the grocery store once. It really had me scratching my head.

That sounds delicious though

also found out that during this years, some 'local' businesses have changed the 'formula' of their burgers, so even if I liked what they made in the beginning, due to less chemicals maybe, they became awful to my taste

The oil-ness is not pleasant.

I find ground beef smells worse than any of the plant-based alternatives, personally. Give me the impossible or beyond burgers any day over a real burger if we're judging by smell or mouth-feel. In taste, I'd say they're equal. The planty patties lose out and mouth-feel, usually, but some of them are ok in taste, and usually smell good. The planty patties tend to crumble and fall apart which makes them hard to eat as burgers.

You can do up a portobello burger in a thousand different ways and they all taste amazing. I do not understand the fascination with replicating meat for environmental good when nature herself provides plenty of delicious alternatives.

Ever had a deep-fried cheese-stuffed portobello? Mama mia...

It's precisely because the alternatives, delicious as they are, do not replicate the experience of eating meat. People like the taste of meat and they want to have it, that's really all it is. If you want to satisfy those people without incurring the environmental and ethical costs associated with raising and killing animals, you have few options besides replicating meat.

Or, portobello carpaccio with pecorino and truffle.

I'm not sure what the need is for the fake confusion. People like these items because they enjoy the taste and/or they are familiar. It's not at all hard to understand.

I've been a vegetarian for well over two decades. Growing up I was always completely grossed out by the concept of meat, so I almost never ate it before I went vegetarian, and didn't AT ALL enjoy it when I did eat it. For many years I didn't want anything "meaty." It was still obvious why people would want meat analogues, even if I wasn't one of them. I don't believe that these "I don't get it" comments are in good faith.

Around 5 years ago I started dabbling in fake meat. Turns out enough time had passed that I got over the icky-ness of a "meaty" product. Now I really enjoy a large variety of fake meats even though there's ALSO a large variety of vegetarian dishes I enjoy.

I want a burger, I don't want a mushroom sandwich. How is that so hard to understand? When I want mushrooms I will eat mushrooms. If random replacement was a viable alternative, I would just eat a fish sandwich.

Yes, I agree. I'm not vegetarian but I don't like meat patties so I used to buy the vegetarian option, which was like mashed up actual veg. Always pretty good I thought. Now these meat alternatives have actually ruined my social burger eating because I don't like anything on the menu. Lucky for me I don't really have that kind of social life anymore.

I agree. I dont think this should be unpopular option.

Most of actually vegetarian food I tried tasted fine. It did not tasted like meat, but I don't even understand why I should want it to taste like a meat. It tasted like its own thing and it was made from actual fresh vegetables plus cheese, nuts and what not. I like eating meat, when I want meat I eat that. I do not need vegetarian meat that tries to pretend to be meat.

I share the same opinion. With plant based meats you're trying to fit a round peg through a square hole. It just isn't meat and doesn't get close enough for me. I would much prefer a good well prepared and thought out vegetarian style dish full of flavor. Maybe it's possible with more time and effort to get close enough but it's not there for me.

The issue in the West is that we have fairly limited time and experience in preparing good vegetable dishes. Most are traditionally quite bland and off putting (for me, at least). Don't get me wrong some are quite good but usually as sides and very rarely can I visit some random person or resturaunt and expect a decently prepared vegetable dish compared to a meat dish.

In contrast, when I eat at Indian resturaunts, it's not uncommon that I prefer some vegetarian dishes over ithers. I don't even feel "cheated" like I often do with poorly made vegetarian dishes because the food is usually quite satisfying and flavorful.

That! I do not want meat substitute for my burger. I want a veggie burger. One that has it's own taste profile. If I want a meat burger I'll have a meat burger. Sell me something else with a sane list of ingredients and I'm there.

I was a vegetarian for years, and I totally agree. People always recommended me these awful veggie/vegan alternatives to meat, and they were all disgusting. Fake bacon, fake meat, fake sausage, fake ham, baloney, all ended up being stomach turning.

Interestingly, only people who recommended me these still ate meat, never vegetarians. The thing is that there are many alternatives (falafel, all kinds of different cheese, beans, etc) that are delicious but not trying to replicate meat taste, and they are all great. I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy.

I'm convinced that the push for these plant-based meat products are purely economical: if you can make a good enough vegan ground beef, bacon, cheese, it will be hard to copy so you can make a ton of money with that.

Recommending people to eat beans, carrots and zucchini? That's just good old vegetables sale, so you can't hype up your VC-backed company to billion dollars of estimated value with a handful of real consumers.

Interestingly, only people who recommended me these still ate meat, never vegetarians.

Some people have a near religious connection with their burgers & nuggets. I'm not so naive as to believe this isn't in some way motivated by "winning" the fake meat market like McDonald's more or less "won" fast food, but by getting omnivores to remember that they aren't carnivores, and getting them to just cut down their meat intake a little bit will do wonders for the sustainability of our planet and help move away from factory farming animals. That's enough for me.

If this stuff acts as the gateway drug to actual carrots and zucchini? Even better...

> The thing is that there are many alternatives (falafel, all kinds of different cheese, beans, etc) that are delicious but not trying to replicate meat taste

And not a one of them is available at a common fast food joint, but I can get an Impossible Whopper anywhere there is a Burger King, which is a lot of places. This is enormously convenient for me when I have to go on a road trip.

> I don't get the point of eating fake meats, just eat veggies, learn to cook, and enjoy

Cooking is a time investment and many of these dishes are pretty heavy on the time investment.

How about this: I'll eat what I want and you eat what you want, ok?

oh god, i adore falafel. I found some frozen falafel made in my town that didn't have additives at all and it was just .... I can finish a 400g package at once))

I don't get falafel. Chickpea tastes like sand. It always seemed to me like the kind of food you create when you don't have an alternative source of basic plant bulk for certain foods, like cornmeal or wheat flour or soybean.

Why not fill tofu with the same spices and deep fry that? To my palate that would be strictly better. Or alternatively like a hashbrown sandwich with indian spices in the hash brown seems like it would create the same result without leaving you with a mouthful of sand. Of course, I'm about as white man as you get so...

Afaik falafel isn't just chickpeas. It also has some vegetables, spices, at least the one that I prefer and even after baking it doesn't feel too dry

It's a matter of taste. If you're accustomed to meat, or even industrial meat-products, then they taste quite good. But if you're from a different taste-realm, it can be indeed very disgusting. This is similar to all the diet-products. People always want the taste, but not the guilt.

well, I was implying that at least for me, those alternatives tasted worse compared to 'classic' meat burgers back when I wasn't vegetarian. I'll even put it another way> I liked the taste at first for some brands, but I suspect they changed the formula in an attempt to 'improve' the taste or maybe cut some cost, but that change in additives ruined the experience for me

I am a lifelong vegetarian and I completely agree, and tbh the idea of eating something that tastes like meat is pretty unappealing.

I think the way this shakes out is that the plant-based meats like impossible burger and beyond burger marketed to people who don't eat plant focused diets to pull them away from meats whereas vegetarians typically don't like the high processed component and prefer the vegetable based patties.

Seems to be the common thread that I hear when I talk to people who are vegetarian. I myself am omni but prefer the vegetable based burgers. To your point though the vegetarian 'natural' nutty flavor is for the most part a learned palette through exposure.

It doesn’t taste that good, it smells weird when cooked, it isn’t actually healthier, it’s typically more expensive than real meat as it’s “premium”, the nutritional value is suspect… the list goes on and on

I think Impossible is fine as a casual ground beef substitute. It tastes okay (not amazing) in burgers and would be fine in any sauce.

The problem is its price is eponymous: Impossible for consumers to, pun intended, stomach it. Sell it for 75% of 80/20 ground beef’s price and it will fly off the shelves. At 250-400%, nope.

True, but they say in the article that "Pricing, which has already come down, could match beef as early as the end of the year, [Impossible's CEO] says, as his costs continue to improve with increased efficiency.“

That suggests to me that certainly by sometime in '24 we ought to see Impossible Beef down to cost parity with 80/20 (so ~$5/lb or so) which I think would really start to drive a transition. I'd certainly not buy animal beef anymore I don't think, unless it was some crazy good stuff for a special occasion.

I can regularly buy 80/20 ground beef at $3/lb at the retail level (family pack, on sale) and I’m sure commercial food service is buying it cheaper than I’m buying it at retail.

The transition acceleration happens closer to $2.50/lb than $5/lb, IMO. Even matching beef price would be significantly welcome progress though, as one of my kids eats vegetarian.

It doesn’t taste “better” to most people, so the transition has to be driven by a non-taste metric. That leaves price or ethics, and I know which way I’m betting on the US consumer, especially in a high-inflation, likely recession environment.

IMHO, this sort of thing is not really going to be a consumer-driven change.

If the commercials for meat alternatives are compelling enough even in the face of lobbies and subsidies, capitalism will drive the big fast food chains to market these more aggressively at more attractive price points and nudge consumer preferences in that direction.

Beyond and garden gourmet taste amazing and I love beyond's texture.

The taste and smell was the killer for me. I wanted to like it and tried the burger patties, but they taste really weird. I'm not even sure if it's the beef itself or the seasoning. Maybe I should try the "ground beef". But the burger patties just taste really weird to me, not good at all. Guess I'll be waiting for lab-grown real meat.

which one did you try? impossible burger was great for me. beyond, not so much

Not really sure, depends on who had a partnership with BurgerKing Germany.

In that case, you may have gotten actual beef. Burger King Germany recently had a scandal where it turned out for quite a while they didn't stock enough vegan patties and served regular beef patties while pretending they were vegan.

Tough choice.

Weird goo that was grown in a lab by people that have no idea what they're doing OR natural food we've been eating since the dawn of time.

What makes you think they have no idea what they're doing? There's a lot more weird goo we eat all the time, after all.

I’m vegetarian (several years now) and I agree with you. Meat has its problems, but our bodies make very good use of it.

Long list of chemicals with unproven value? We have a bad track record with trying to engineer our own ‘healthy’ food. See: margarine for example.

Impossible/beyond is great as a vegetarian as a rare treat (different flavors than normal veggies, loaded with umami — I don’t love them or anything but there are some recipes they work well with). I might have it once every couple months or so, often when a thoughtful friend invites me to their bbq and brings some impossible patties so I’m not left out...

But to actually use it as a meat replacement, like for several meals per week? It feels like we’re going to look back on that in 30 years like we do now for margarine.

PS: there are a million delicious vegetarian dishes that don’t need any fake meat, you kind of stop wanting the impossible/beyond stuff after you’re vegetarian for a little while

> See: margarine for example

What's wrong with it for reducing cholesterol intake? Butter has gotten very expensive, too.

A long time ago Margarine contained lots trans fat. Nowadays it's fine, but I think that's what OP meant.

it had tons of trans fat when it came out, also cholesterol intake isn't important. Dietary cholesterol == bad is just a myth

It's the margarine of meat.

The idea that the American beef industry produces anything like the meat primeval hunter gatherers subsisted on is hilarious!

> natural food we've been eating since the dawn of time.

I don't know if you seen the factory farms that produce chicken and beef? There is nothing natural from the dawn of time from that. They are loaded with antibiotics, and they are naturally selected for maximum meat production. Deli meats and hotdogs sure are natural products made of some amalgamation of random animal parts.

Some people speak as if everyone procures their meat from Eden's organic farm in New Zealand where the animals are hugged to death. It really is not the case for most people.

Beef is not factory-farmed. All cows are raised grazing on grass and are taken to feedlots for fattening only just prior to slaughter. Cows don't go through the torture that chickens and pigs go through.

> All cows

Entirely untrue.

> Beef is not factory-farmed.

That seems to go against common knowledge.

Cows spend about a few months to a year on a feed lot which is most likely a concentrated feed lot (CAFO is a factory farm). Veal seems to be especially cruel. Dairy cows seem to have it pretty bad for around five years from start to finish.

I know -- common knowledge on this subject is atrocious. Also, being fed on a lot is not the same as being "factory farmed". It sounds like you just equate "raising cattle" with "factory farming".

Yep, for me it just tastes weird.

That's news to me. Looks like the US is speaking for the world again. You have bigger problems with your food than whether or not it is plant-based, I promise you that.

In the UK and the rest of Europe, plant-based meat alternatives have been growing in popularity, quality, and variety over the last decade. It's never been easier for someone to go vegan without "giving up" their favourite foods.

If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.

I read somewhere you would need 25 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef, ergo one could potentially produce 25 times the amount of substitute. Obviously that isn't true and such a patty is a specialized product of various highly processed plant matter. It is around 2-4 times the price of meat equivalent and to me it is no surprise, that people aren't willing to pay more for an inferior product.

Now people say, well if we all had bought it, mass production would already reduced the price significantly. I don't think people are paying new cooking methods and food processing reactors here.

There are more people involved, more complex ingredients, more processes, more shipping and more energy. That is why it is much more expensive.

> There are more people involved, more complex ingredients, more processes, more shipping and more energy. That is why it is much more expensive.

I am myself not a big fan of those fake meat products, but you have a source for that.

I'd assume economies of scale matter, because economies of scale matter everywhere?

A big problem is also that it can't be independently produced by small local farmers. (and then there's patents)

Turns out beating nature is pretty hard.

Cows look basically like processing plants. They produce food, fertilizer and energy (biogas).

After 5000 years of selective breeding, cows aren't that natural any more.

By that logic, nothing is(including us).

Quite the opposite. Animal farming is proven to be incredibly inefficient.

Depends on your metrics. If you consider land and water use as a factor they are very inefficient. In terms of nitrogen (for fertilizer etc.) we get most of from the air these days (via the Haber-Bosh process). Manure also has a cost as a source of water pollution and food contaminate. The CO2/NOX emissions are a downstream cost. We are paying for these as externalities and subsidizing the industry via our taxes in turn.

there is no bird that flies faster than a boeing. Nor a bird that flies higher than a rocket.

If your story is true, it is remarkable it is not universally true.

E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned. [0] The vegetarian equivalent has been cheaper there than the real meat thing, although the process for both is not very different in the EU than in the US.

[0] https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/07/26/plant-based...

That’s the average for vegan products.

Soy/tofu/cardboard Patties bring the average down but the recent products that try to replicate the taste of meat are still a premium product.

No, the article I linked mentions it's a comparison between equivalents. So burgers vs burgers and chicken pieces vs chicken pieces.

Unless you mean the vegetarian chicken pieces don't taste like chicken but like cardboard, that is fair. Then again, supermarket chicken also tastes like chicken flavoured cardboard. It's not a premium product either.

> Soy/tofu/cardboard Patties

Basic legumes and veggies are much cheaper.

> If your story is true, it is remarkable it is not universally true.

Not really.

> E.g. in the Netherlands the prices are more competitive, and sometimes even turned.

Meat prices relative to non-meat food prices are much higher than in the US (taxation on a lot of the things that drive the additional costs of meat play a role here.) So, yes, it stands to reason that plant-based meat substitutes, using similar process that adds similar (proportional) cost to the raw materials (actual production costs and margins) would remain more competitive with real meat than it is in the US.

And with a number of EU countries (and I think there are EU-wide proposals, as well) discussing “meat taxes” as part of climate efforts, that’s quite possibly going to get more pronounced.

It's hard to beat the efficiency of a biological machine that turns grass into meat all by itself. Meat is the most nutrient dense (and unsurprisingly, most delicious) food there is, since we're basically made out of the stuff and it has pretty much everything a human being needs to eat right there. Fake meat, electric cars, "green" energy, it's all good and "cost effective" as long as not too many people decide to switch to it and the government keeps subsidizing the upper echelon of the population that wants to indulge in such virtue signaling behaviour. Good ridance to all those chemical infused "meat" alternatives.

If you factor in beef subsidies, then plant-based "meat" is already at or nearly competitive...

> The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5

https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/

I think the problem with those calculations is that the grain fed to cattle can be incredibly low quality and efficiently grown/harvested (not to mention subsidized). So it's probably a much lower ratio than 1:25 if you factor in plants that are actually high in protein and calories.

A lot of the grain fed to cows is distillers grain [1] and brewer's spent grain [2], which is basically industrial waste that would otherwise go to compost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer%27s_spent_grain

Plant based alternatives are very price competitive where I live (in Denmark). They’re more expensive than the cheapest ground beef, but more affordable than grass fed or organic.

> it is no surprise, that people aren't willing to pay more for an inferior product

You hit the nail on its head. I think there's still hope for meat substitutes if they can improve their flavor while also lowering their price. But I'm not holding out hope for that.

Not sure where you're located, but in the UK the supermarkets stock stuff like this:

https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-plant-menu-ultimate-no-...

https://www.trolley.co.uk/product/linda-mccartneys-2-vegetar...

They taste delicious and are absolutely competitive with meat burger prices.

Aldi sells minced beef at literally half the price of the veggie burgers you linked to: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-ashfields-25-fat-britis...

Right but that's more calorific, higher in fat, and requires preparation.

If you go for lean mince then you're at exactly the same price range: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-ashfields-british-extra...

That's lower calorie than the veggie burger, but you still have to do the prep yourself.

Or you can go for the quorn mince which is much leaner than all the above and costs less than the lean beef mince: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-quorn-mince-500g/501950...

I find the "chicken" pieces to be the best meat substitute.

They're not exactly like chicken but if you treat them as their own thing then they're a perfectly good substitute in things like stir fries.

Quorn bacon substitute rashers are also pretty good in a fry up. Again, they're not bacon but if you treat them as their own thing, very enjoyable.

Not sure anything substitutes for a good steak or nice bit of cod yet but that's only an occasional treat for us anyway.

Mainly because of meat subsidies, though. They don't need to compete when governments all over the world hand them billions.

At least in the US, at first glance it looks like corn and soybeans receive much higher subsidies than livestock.

Or the powers that be collude to drive up the price of meat, removing the choice from people because they know better.

US livestock subsidies are in dozens of billions. Whole sector seems to have revenue in lower hundreds of billions (harder to get exact data, please correct me).

Even without premiums target audience is willing to accept, subsidies of 10-20% of sector revenue are pretty hard to beat.

Same in the E.U. we have billions of subsidies for milk and meat. Many countries like germany also have a tiered VAT system, where basic foods are taxed lower, there is a base line tax and some luxury items are taxed higher.

Thanks to lobbying meat and cow-milk are taxed as basic foods, while vegan alternatives are taxed as luxury items.

Meat and milk are basic foods.

And vegan alternatives are not?

Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history and still is in most parts of the world. Given the environmental impact of Meat and Diary in terms of CO2, Methane, Water usage, and Deforestation we should heavily reconsider our nonchalant view of them as a cheap commodity.

Dairy is much less of an environmental concern than beef (not sure about chicken). If the concern is animal welfare, then yes it's still a horror story in many ways, but not everyone who is pushing away from meat has the same reasons.

> Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history

And nobody want's to return to those dark ages.

This devil's alliance between veganism and environmentalism is what put me off environmentalism. Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.

If you care about environmentalism then you should resonate with the fact that 68% of the Amazon is Burnt for pastures for Cattle Farming. 28% is Burnt for Agriculture, of which 60% is for soybeans, of which 77% are shipped overseas for livestock feed.

That means at least 80% is burned for livestock or livestock feed. Since part of the palm oil and other plant produced is also used for livestock feed that number probably closer to 85%.

See:

https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Fern%2...

Your proposed solutions simply don't add up. Air Travel makes up 2.5-3.5% of all GHG emissions, Air Conditioning makes up 3.94%. Livestock makes up a whopping 18%.

So even banning all air travel and air conditioning, would only give you the same reduction on GHG emissions as eating 40% less dairy and meat.

So cutting meat and dairy from your diet is one of the easiest ways to cut your CO2 footprint massively. And it's actually just a minor inconvenience once you get used to plant based cooking, calling vegan cooking "dark ages" is ridiculously overdramatic, considering that e.g. indian food is often vegan and delicious.

See:

https://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf

https://academic.oup.com/af/article/1/1/19/4638592

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2022/nrel-shows-impact-of-co....

If we can't eat all the meat we want without destroying the planet, that tells me we need to manage down the population, not the standard of living. I'm not willing to give up one single shred of my standard of living to this braindead cram as many people as possible on the planet challenge.

Good news! We're on our way to do both, scale down the population AND the standard of living!

If meat is causing people to burn down the amazon, then don't eat meat produced from the Amazon. There is a reason why for example here in Sweden the price of imported beef from Brazil tend to be about half the price of locally produced beef. Local producers has to follow regulations and laws that Brazil producers do not.

I will generally advise that people avoid buying any products from countries who has a history of burning rain forests to produce (or we can call it subsidize) cheap exports. Similar for cheap products created from child labors, military conflicts, sweatshops, or forced labor camps.

I think you missed the bit where 77% of farmland is used for feed export. Your beef might be produced locally, but the feed for that beef, was produced on deforrested land.

While I don't expect a lot of feed is exported to Sweden, the same rule applies. Don't buy products which use imports from Brazil if those imports are created from burning down the Amazon. It would be the same as buying a locally produced shirt created from cotton that child labor picked (which was a scandal with a major Swedish clothing company).

> Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.

you mean softened by removing things you dont use.

Look at the moment no one is banning meat. There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers. I'm not vegan, and like most people I really wish vegans weren't the noisy shouty face of environmentalism.

But, if you want change, people have to, well change. There are a few routes to that, one is price change (inflation is helping with that, stuff that requires a lot of energy to produce, ie feedlot meat and greenhouse based veg) are rising in price more than less refined or forced food stuffs.

Subsidies could be re-directed to different parts of the farming ecosystem (but that's politically challenging)

or you can outright ban things, but again thats also challenging.

> There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers.

No, there isn't any reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that. Vegans get cancer at the same rate as non-Vegans.

Nitrates in preserved meats have a correlation to higher rates of cancer. [1]

Lung cancer however, you are right.

I'm not vegan by the way, I really like salami. just less now.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30850575/

Eating meat is essential but airplanes and AC aren't?

There are parts of the world that are uninhabitable without AC, and I know tons of people who don't eat meat, but virtually everybody in developed countries flies. My partner's family lives at the other side of the planet so banning airplanes means she would never get to see her sisters again.

Living in an "uninhabitable" place is extremely environmentally damaging right?

Almost every human civilization is extremely environmentally damaging in some way. Much of the global North would be uninhabitable without heating for a proportion of the year.

Limiting ourselves to places we can occupy (and actually work/produce) year round without environmental control would mean basically killing off a significant chunk of the planet's population and telling loads of whoever is left that they need to leave behind their homes and move.

Compared to eating less meat, that seems to be a much bigger ask.

Around 60% of people in germany fly less than once a year. A third never flies. I expect that to be similar in other european countries. A lot more people eat meat.

> air conditioning

Keep your hands off my AC. I’ll go vegan before I sleep in a pool of my sweat nightly.

Same goes for vegetables. That being said, animal milk drinking is not something new at all. And in "traditional" setup, milk availability is massive improvement nutritionally/health wise over no milk.

That's a false dichotomy. These days we put so many nutrients artificially into the feed of livestock, e.g. B12, that we might as well skip the whole livestock step and just take a vitamin pill every morning.

Most people have a vitamin-D deficiency, most vegans that I know of at least take care of making sure that they get enough supplements.

> And in "traditional" setup, milk availability is massive improvement nutritionally/health wise over no milk.

only if you can process lactose. A large amount of people can't. Plus, "traditional" farming is highly dependent on location.

Invention of agriculture through industrial revolution is not most of history. Meat would have been very much an ordinary thing to a hunter gatherer.

There is also lot of other food.

if these things are to be basic, then what constitutes a non “basic” food?

Traditional or basic?

Meat wasn't a staple food 100 years ago, it was too expensive for regular people. Same with milk, if you didn't own a cow, you just didn't drink it. You drank some sort of ale.

And their livestock werent perpetuately pregnant. They made abt 1/10th the milk they do know.

My grandfather was a kid at the end of the Great Depression. One of the stories which blew my mind growing up was that he ate beef basically twice a year, when his cousins on a small dairy farm culled the herd.

His mother kept chickens, so they had eggs - to the point that as an adult he never eats them because he got sick of them by the time he graduated from high school.

Yep, (western) people are acting like meat is a human right and a staple day to day food.

My grandparents were the first generation in my country who started to have regular access to meat after WW2. Before that it was either a rare thing and much of the "meat" they ate was offal.

Pea soup was 99% peas and a small chunk of smoked meat added for flavour.

Meanwhile billions of people live perfectly normal lives eating legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts) for protein.

I think some people misconstrue traditional with today's sensationalized Food TV marketing. Which tradition are we even talking about? The world has never had this much access to food. We eat like almost every culture's royal family every night of the week, and pretend like it always been this way.

We do not need fake meat. We just need to stop these subsidies and import tax on meat.

Providing people with alternatives is never a bad thing.

That is not true. All food in the supermarket is taxed the same.

There are huge non-livestock farming subsidies as well, both in the US and in the EU. Farming is not directly driven by supply, demand and price the people are willing to pay (because without food people riot).

Well meat profits most from subsedies since it is the last in the chain. I think it is not as simple, we would throw a lot more food away without our animals. Sure there is room to optimize and improvement. The city of Wien has an overproduction of fresh baking good that exceeds three times the needed amout. It is then reprocessed to animal food instead of being thrown away, which is a good thing but keeps prices down.

So not as simple as one would think...

Is there any part of agriculture that isn't subsidised?

From the first google search on US farmland subsidies:

" Who Benefits Most From Farm Subsidies?

Farm subsidies don't benefit all farms equally. According to the Cato Institute, farmers of corn, soybeans, and wheat receive more than 70% of farm subsidies. These are also usually the largest farms.

From an other source:

"Corn growers received the most product-specific assistance with $2.2 billion in subsidies. That was only about 4.4% of the $50.4 billion in total corn production that year. Soybeans rank second in subsidies. While the US soybean industry produced $41.3 billion worth of products in 2017, it received $1.6 billion in subsidies in 2016, representing 3.9% of production.

The US sugar industry produced $2.5 billion worth of product in 2017 and received $1.6 billion in subsidies, according to the report. The support amounted to 63.5% of the value of total production."

- https://www.thoughtco.com/us-farm-subsidies-3325162

- https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.

That would only be true if the cost of the patty was only thing that impacted the price to the consumer, but everything else like transporting the thing to a store, paying the store staff to sell it, paying for marketing, branding, etc, paying taxes on it, are essentially the same regardless of whether the patty is made of cows or plants. A patty that costs 0.25c to make could be reduced to 0.01c to make, which would reduce the price in the market from 5.99 to 5.74...

86% of feed is grown on land [1], which is not suitable for growing human food crops.

[1]: https://www.agfoundation.org/common-questions/view/could-mor...

This is plain false. Please find reputable sources.

> This is plain false. Please find reputable sources.

Do you have reputable sources for that statement being "plain false"?

You're quoting a literal farming foundation, so here is a neutral source:

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...

"If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. Of all the land we use for agriculture, 77% of it is used for livestock."

These 77% are only responsible for 18% of the produced calories and 37% of the produced proteins.

So, if you leave out water consumption and most importantly animal walfare, eating meat is the worst thing you can to for the environment (when talking about food).

Nothing said here refutes the parent comment. It turns out that a lot of land is really shitty for growing stuff that isn't a weed (without adding a ton of chemicals to the environment), and humans don't eat weeds. Cows, sheep, pigs, and chicken do.

I doubt that 86% of that 77% is truly unsuitable for farming human food, but I wouldn't be surprised if 30-50% of it was.

It is naive to believe that these 86%, assuming the numbers are true, have any impact on the food production at all.

Of all the cropland we have, 57% is used to produce human food and 43% is used to produce animal food.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...

The whole point is that you need way more crops in general to "produce" the same amount of calories & proteins. That's because feeding the animals with crops instead of eating them is highly inefficient in comparison to eating them directly. "As an example: beef has an energy efficiency of about 2%. This means that for every 100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back."

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#livestock-waste-a-...

With how much meat is eaten right now, there is just no way we have enough grazing land to produce enough meat. 99% of meat comes from factory farms. [1] These animals are always fed with crops, so there will always be land usage to product food for animals. And it is way more inefficient.

[1]: https://www.livekindly.com/99-animal-products-factory-farms/

The implicit assumption that you are making is that all cropland is fungible and that the 43% used for animal food can be converted directly to human food. That is almost certainly not the case. Also, the original comment's 86% doesn't imply that it is necessarily "cropland" - just that it is land that grows animal feed.

You see this with human crops too - Why do people grow corn when almonds are much higher dollar value per acre? Why not wine grapes? The reason is because not every patch of land is suitable for high-value cash crops. Going down the quality scale, not every patch of land is suitable for food for human consumption either. The reason why is that "cropland" is not fungible - soil has particular characteristics, nutrients, contaminants, and microorganisms, all of which affect which crops you can grow.

> If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market.

Products can fail even if everything promised is delivered. This is why the supermarket Tesco gave up on trying to enter the USA market.

Or why I can't get Quorn here in Germany even though I personally think it's a much better taste and texture than any of the Rügenwalder Mühle brands.

Or why I can get Sauerkraut juice here, but not in the UK.

Fake meat isn't just inferior to real meat. It's inferior to just plain old vegetables.

It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits.

They're not trying to cook the best vegetable dishes. They're not trying to cook dishes that use less meat. They're not trying to expand your palettes and reintroducing liver, sweetbreads or other weird cuts.

All these "green" products convince you to not do the most important things: REDUCE and REUSE.

Never thought about it but you’re spot on. A big roasted field mushroom with a dash of balsamic and perhaps some feta cheese is 1000% tastier than a weird processed vegetable patty.

A real good way to do it is to saute some thin-sliced shiitakes and creminis in a pan with salt, pepper, and a shallot; once you get a good fond, put the shrooms in between two slices of bread with a bit of cheese (fresh mozzarella is a good one here, so is gruyere), deglaze the pan with butter, and then throw the sandwich in the pan until it's done the way you like your grilled cheese.

I call it "beyond beyond meat."

Completely agree with this. As a vegetarian I'd really prefer to eat meat over the synthetic meats. The reason being the texture, flavour and nutritional value isn't there. They're also expensive, covered in horrible packaging, don't keep very well and are difficult to cook.

99% of the important bits of a dish don't come from making something meat-like but cooking something that isn't bland and uninteresting. And you don't need fake meat to work around that.

I have been a pescatarian (eat fish, no meat) since 2018. For me, this has almost nothing todo with being healthy and all about the animal welfare (yes I eat fish but to me, a fish and a pig are two very different things). But, sometimes I just fancy a McDonalds Big Mac (McPlant), or chili nachos (Quorn, Meatless Farm) , or a dirty burger (Impossible, Beyond). I know its not healthy, I know its not good for me but it just satisfy my meat eating days craving every now and then. The rest of the time I eat delicious unprocessed veggies, rice, beans etc.

There is a place for these meat substitutes but should they be eaten all of the time; no. Education around veggies is the key for solving the meat production issues.

I have been a carnivore since reading your comment. For me, this has almost nothing to do with being snarky and all about the plant welfare.

Fake meat isn't for vegans who want to eat meat-like products.

It's supposed to be a gateway product that will eventually entice hardcore meat eaters to first try fake meat and then maybe dare to try a non-fake meat vegan product.

The best vegan products aren't "meat thing but vegan", they're all just gateway stuff.

The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine. The protein doesn't really matter, 99% of the taste is in the sauce.

It's supposed to be a gateway product that will eventually entice hardcore meat eaters to first try fake meat

I agree, but I don't think it's a gateway. They want to replace all those beef burgers with Impossible meat burgers. However things like Impossible meat, while very impressive, cost more than the real thing and don't taste right. It's the uncanny valley of meat.

The best vegan food is stuff you couldn't do with meat at all. Just look at Indian or Thai/Vietnamese cuisine.

That's my point. There's plenty of good meat free or meat reduced food. But we're not running campaigns to encourage less meat consumption or promoting the cuisines of other cultures. Instead they created a company to make and sell hyper realistic fake meat. If you were really concerned about your meat consumption and it's impact on the environment, you'd just eat less meat. It's 100% actionable without these companies and tastes better.

I'm vegetarian and I love the fake meat products.

I like vegetables too, obviously, but sometimes I just want a burger.

> It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits.

Expand your research a little bit. Fake meat has been very popular in buddhism countries for very long time, often to entice people to switching to non animal food.

https://www.foodandwine.com/cooking-techniques/plant-based-m...

I don’t want to point out specific cultures. But that article is not the counter point you think it is:

To compensate for her homesickness, Ng decided to sell her own line of vegetarian imitation meats, and partnered with manufacturers in Taiwan to develop and import many of the dishes that she grew up with. In 1994, she opened up May Wah Vegetarian Market in New York City's Chinatown, and stocked it full with packets of imitation steak, spare ribs, shrimp, mutton, and grilled eel—all made some sort of combination of soy, seaweed, wheat gluten, or mushrooms.

It didn't land well. "Unfortunately it was not a good beginning for us. People were hesitant about trying these products," Lily says. "They wanted to stick to tofu and beans, and it was very hard for us to get people to try it. We ended up giving a lot of stuff away.

You can get the Chinese fake meat as snacks from your local Asian supermarket. I have Weilong brand fish tofu and barbeque gluten right now. These are meaty, but no where near as convincing as impossible meat. My fish tofu and barbeque gluten snacks have a fish cake like texture and are full of MSG. They appear to be vegan though.

We’re pointing to a culture that is used to a wide range of flavours and textures every day. They don’t needed that much convincing to try a not meat product, but it’s also easier to fake certain meat products. (Their existing fake meats are way cheaper than impossible meat though.)

But Impossible meat wasn’t designed for the Chinese. Or even Asians in general.

For me at least, these fake meats are to get more protein heavy texture options into a dish. Vegetable are way too low in that regard, and there's only so many things I can do with tofu or beans.

Except, despite all the hate because it's not "unprocessed" (a stupid categorization), it does REDUCE: No more need to stuff a meat machine with plant based products for a 10% or worse ROI. BAM. REDUCTION.

No, you are forgetting that meat is heavily subsidized while low-impact food is not.

I do not want to pretend that it is not part of the equation in US, but I am genuinely unsure how big a factor it is and if the argument makes sense.

Anecdotally, people in my social circle go for food that is socially acceptable in that circle. If 'low impact' food became a thing, price would have less influence on it ( kinda like every teen has to have an Iphone -- I am exaggerating a little - or when driving a small sedan in US means you are poor ).

There are all sorts of minor dynamics that are underexplored in that arena.

> one could potentially produce 25 times the amount of substitute

25 times of cattle feed, sure. But there's a lot of selection and mixing of various plants for taste. It's not a simple replacement.

Using modern farming practices it's about 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi...

(Disliking and thus moving away from those practices is a goal some people have, but they are the dominate method of meat production at the moment, so it's the reasonable comparison)

I raise cattle (one day for a living, but now a side job and for my enjoyment). Your read on the feed is very true for the feedlots, not trying to discredit that, because if you buy your beef from a feedlot than this is very much the case -- chances are if you don't know where you beef came from, then it came from a feed lot. If your packing says "Grass Fed" than it just means they spent most of their lives in a pasture before being shipped to a feedlot for a miserable last three months of life, so chances are you probably don't know where your cattle came from, even if you're going on the packaging in a grocery store, and it's actually grained to some extent.

There are a few exceptions to this, even in stores. If you buy from Whole Food and get their brand beef, it's grass-only. I know the largest rancher selling to WF, we're friends -- my teeball team beat his teeball team in the season finals last summer.

I mostly raise dairy cows, but if you're going to go through the effort to raise one sort of breed of cattle, it's trivial to add in an even lower maintenance cattle as well. As a result I have three or four animals in my pasture right now who are getting ready for freezer camp. My neighbors are all beef ranchers, I am the exception. But none of us are feeding grain to our cattle. My area sells a massive amount of grass-only beef. We have the luxury of this being basically free for us to do and then having found a niche market willing to accept a lot more money for their beef if it was raised right and fed right. I don't sell my beef the way most folks do, so unless you know me personally, you've never eaten my animals or had our farm's dairy products.

All that to say, there are very good alternatives to feedlots. My beef cattle only need supplemental food (aka more than the green grass in my pastures) between December and April. I did the math, it costs me $140 / year to feed out cattle and it takes two or three years for an Angus to be butcher-weight. That's $420 on the high end for a grass-only steer that'll dress to like 600lbs of beef.

I'd get by with even fewer days feeding except I also own and breed Appaloosas and horses are much harder on the pastures than cattle. If I ran two herds my cattle would keep the pastures in grass until about January -- and with this warm weather I know folks who have YET to feed hay! But with my horses mixed into the herd it means that the grass is killed if I keep them on it -- horses have top and bottom teeth, they can cut grass clear to the dirt but cattle only have bottom teeth and they'll leave about 1/2" of grass on each blade, meaning the grass can continue to regenerate all winter if it's wet and warm enough.

If you look at the other articles published by the author, Deena Shanker, they are pretty much all doom-and-gloom headlines related to plant-based companies:

https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ASznQGEjaUE/deena-shanker

This does not look like someone objectively trying to sort through the facts and present a representative picture of the state of things.

Just something to consider.

When my wife and I tried these meat alternatives -- a burger, and Dunkin' Donuts breakfast sausage -- our conclusion was that they have a real chance at replacing low quality meats.

If you've ever eaten good fresh sausage or a quality burger, you know how it differs from the fast-food burgers and breakfast sausages served at chain restaurants.

Beyond and Impossible will have a hard time competing agains the quality stuff. But compared to the lower-quality meats, they hold up just fine in terms of taste. As long as they can bring the price down, they'll do alright in the non-quality meat markets.

I predict that if they can get their unit economic down, they can sign deals with many mass-market restaurants and gradually use their non-meat as filler for real meat. Ratchet that up over time, don't tell anyone, and all of a sudden, everyone is eating less meat.

They are having a hard time convincing the world that their product tastes better and is healthier than meat. They won't have as hard of a time convincing the world that their product taste better and is healthier than currently-used meat fillers at mass-market outlets. But that just does not sound like an exciting business plan for a VC founded California company, so unless the ego steps aside, it will be a hard win.

I'd flip that on its head and venture to guess they can do well against most meat except the nicest stuff. It works a treat for the super low end stuff (e.g. fast food like McDonalds or Burger King). For a lot of dishes I'd cook meat is a background flavor (e.g. mapo tofu) where the nuances of super fresh ground meat would be lost and for that Impossible did well enough. The issue I had is that Impossible has a more beefy flavor when I'd typically use pork in that dish.

For the mass market high end stuff I'd expect lab grown meat to be the thing to keep an eye on because…

  As long as they can bring the price down, they'll do alright
  in the non-quality meat markets.

Prices are going to continue to increase for the things that go into meat production. Water. Fertilizer. Grain or grass. Depending on how things go I'd bet that the fake meat would only have to keep their costs steady to compete on price.

I think this is the key. This isn’t a business which will be an overnight success but it’ll grow over time, especially as climate change, water shortages, or rising fuel costs start making real beef more expensive.

Don't count on it. I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but in the US, the way we solve this problem is to provide ever-increasing subsidies to the entrenched corporate entities that are "sponsoring" the politicians.

It will be exactly like what we've done with hydrocarbon fuels over the last 50 years. To the consumer, gasoline is seemingly half as expensive in the US when compared to the rest of the world; which is why every other vehicle on the road is a 5,000 pound monster truck.

Beef, poultry, and pork are likely going to continue to be cheap because the agriculture lobby is so damn powerful. And the culture war against fake meat hasn't even begun...

I’m not counting on it but I think we are hitting a breaking point which people under, say, 50 are increasingly aware of. It’s not like you can look at how much of the Colorado river goes to beef production and not see a problem.

I've been vegan for 35 years and the thought of eating a burger that tastes like meat turns my stomache. If you're a meat eater that wants to reduce consumption of animals then do that in the other (healthier) meals and have a decent animal burger once a week/fortnight. If you're eating burgers much more regularly then you're probably better off getting more variation into your diet and than eating highly processed vegetable patties that aren't as satisfying.

I’m an omnivore who enjoys eating meat. I also really enjoy these plant-based alternatives. I think we should avoid the anecdotal fallacy here.

Hmm.. I'm a vegatarian, once vegan, since let me count.. oh why does that matter at all?

Taste like meat? Not at all, likely, don't remember, but I usually find them taste just nice, pea protein with spices, so what's the problem? Also what does thst have to do with how regular?

I hope they don't go out of business, being concerned for animals and environment I think every alternative that some people enjoy is great.

I don't think this line of "persuasion" is going to rally many to the cause.

There are millions of vegatarians that like meat like products. See the 100s of products made from things like wheat gluten that Buddhist monks have been eating for 1000s of years

I don't know a source on the history of all of it but I've been to several restaurants in Asia that specialize in dishes that taste like they're made with meat but aren't

this came up resently tho

https://youtu.be/lrrmysxnTdA

I've been vegetarian for 12 years now. I used to dislike replacement products, but what Rügenwalder and Beyond produced in recent years is so good, I now eat some kind of meat replacement every week.

One very local anecdote that seems to contradict this: my local Trader Joe’s is nearly always out of Impossible burgers. On many occasions, I have stood in line at the shelf where they are kept, waiting for the person who is unboxing them and supposed to be stocking shelves but basically just handing directly to customers. Maybe not representative of the larger marketplace but at least in that store they are the proverbial hotcakes.

I think that Beyond is feeling the pinch more, because it just tastes terrible. Impossible isn't as good as a real burger, but it's significantly better than Beyond, and Impossible is fine (discounting the cost) for filling out a spaghetti sauce or something where you can't taste the meat that well. So I think it's consumer preferences at work here

Impossible, to me, tastes better than most grocery store burgers. Certainly better than the cook-from-frozen ones that it’s closest to in texture, plus they crisp up better on the grill.

If it were as cheap I don’t think I’d ever have another beef burger unless it was from a butcher/steakhouse.

In Germany this is simply not true.

All supermarket chains, at least in the cities, now have a considerate selection of plant based meat and it sells like bread. Yes, it is sadly more expensive than real meat for now.

Still -- vegan burger patties are regularly sold out.

Can confirm, but would add that "more expensive" depends on the exact brand and what kind of meat you compare it to. Even the more expensive faux meat products are often cheaper or very comparable to their organic counterparts. But if you take for example the supermarket brand version of the products, they are often around 33% cheaper than products from gourmet garden oder beyond. Protip: Ikea sells frozen meat ball alternatives. They are SO good and pretty cheap.

Same in Switzerland. The selection has grown considerably over the last years.

Same in the US. It's never been easier to be veg.

And we don't need fake meat. It's just something that the food industry can make and sell to us instead of us just eating stuff that grows in the earth.

If you want something with a texture similar to meat, many mushrooms will do the job. If you want something reminiscent of ground beef, quinoa with seasoning will suffice. However, limiting yourself to vegetarian approaches of recreating meat dishes, then you are missing out on what good vegetarian food can be.

There are now enough great restaurants (as well as endless numbers of cook books) which can help you find very satisfying, or even excitingly new and wonderful meals that involve basic natural plants (and legumes etc.)

The problem for many people is they only know the "meat and potatoes" perspective. But they want to reduce their meat consumption, so they buy the meat replacement thing; and that replacement is not particularly healthy, nor is it usually a believable substitute. (It's hard to recreate the exact pleasure that comes from animal fats and proteins.)

And we don’t need people engaging in vegetarian purity contests and gatekeeping.

And we don’t have to eat the same thing all the time.

Using a meat substitute is not limiting yourself, you have no idea what people eat on other days, it can simply be an enjoyable part of a varied diet.

Someone always makes a comment like this about meat substitutes.

Wether you pick the vegetarian or meat-based option, there’s a lot of reasons why someone would choose a processed slice, sausage or whatever over cooking from scratch.

We don't need any kind of specific food. Some people just like it, even if we know the alternatives. For example I enjoy both meet and vegan food, but will take Grill'd Impossible burger over a beef one. The good plant based burgers reached the level of being good on their own for me, not as a replacement.

These products exist _because_ your claims about mushrooms and quinoa being acceptable (and somewhat available) just aren't true. There seems to be this army of people who say "compressed vegetables in a circle" are acceptable burger alternatives; they're really not.

This market isn't for existing vegans/vegetarians in most cases, it's for people curious about going that way or cutting down their consumption.

Crazy that the people who don't eat meat can't see the properties of meat that meat eaters like and look for.

Why on earth would anyone listen to a vegetarian about what makes a good meat alternative.

If a steak chef says an alternative to steak is X, I'll listen.

> Why on earth would anyone listen to a vegetarian about what makes a good meat alternative.

Because most vegetarians have likely tried a lot more meat substitutes than a meat eater, and most of them have eaten meat at some point?

It seems that any story about meat-eating brings out all the reactionary commenters and switches off critical thinking skills on HN.

True - but OTOH, most serious vegetarians haven't eaten any meat-based products in a long time. And after a long time of not eating meat, I can imagine that your preferences adjust and you actually think that the alternatives taste better than "real" meat? I mean, I only tried a vegetarian/vegan diet for a few weeks (thanks to my wife insisting we do it), and even after this short time, I started being slightly disgusted by products oozing with animal fat - especially when having to clean the frying pan after preparing some burgers...

> Because most vegetarians have likely tried a lot more meat substitutes than a meat eater

Tried, maybe. The vegetarians I know don't do veggie burgers or steaks. They eat the actual vegetables.

I wouldn't take driving advice off someone that hasn't driven for 10 years, even if they passed their test.

I wouldn't take health advice on faith from someone who has a medical degree but never practices medicine.

It's about relative interest. My point wasn't that vegetarians can't know, but that their advice isn't as valuable to me as a recommendation from a current meat eater. The meat eater has less agenda and more recent experience to base their recommendation on.

> If a steak chef says an alternative to steak is X, I'll listen.

> I wouldn't take driving advice off someone that hasn't driven for 10 years, even if they passed their test.

That's a faulty analogy. The equivalent would be getting advice on alternatives to driving from someone who no longer drives.

I don't think I'd request advice on the best form of public transport from someone who drives everywhere and has taken the train once or twice.

> The meat eater has less agenda

Ha! Really? Everyone has an agenda. Meat eaters / car drivers / vegetarians / non-drivers have all emotionally committed to their decision. It's naive to think otherwise. Everyone likes to assume their choice is the sensible one and the "other side" has an irrational militaristic agenda.

> I don't think I'd request advice on the best form of public transport from someone who drives everywhere and has taken the train once or twice.

My point exactly.

Most vegetarians were not born vegetarians, though. Some did recently eat meat so can compare.

In my opinion, I don't think anything vegetarian will come close to a steak anytime soon, but I have eaten chili sin carne, without noticing it being vegetarian.

My main problem is also simply, that I have not learned yet, to cook without meat very good. It takes effort, but is worth it.

Fable mushrooms are the closest thing to steak-like that I've ever had. It's even better than the fake meat steaks I've found in supermarkets. I was never a lover of mushrooms in the first place, but these don't even taste or feel like a traditional mushroom. It looks and feels more like steak.

I love fable mushrooms and mushrooms in general. They are not steak substitutes. I’m surprised by people who make this claim.

100/100 if a good chef cooks fable mushroom and a filet or ribeye or sirloin and blind taste tests they are distinguishable.

And that’s ok. Mushrooms and steak are different. The textures are a little similar but definitely different. Things can be different, that’s ok.

Indeed. Impossible meat etc are also different, and that's OK too.

I'm confounded by folks hammering on about how close they are to 'meat'. Hey, chicken, pork, beef are all different too! So what's the problem? Are they good? Do you know a good recipe? That's all that counts.

> Most vegetarians were not born vegetarians, though.

I’m not sure about that. Internationally, this definitely isn’t true as most Hindu were born Hindu and vegetarian.

And in the US, I’d say that about 1/3 of non-Hindu/ cultural vegetarians friends and acquaintances were born into families that are vegetarian.

Most of the vegetarians I thought we are talking about, meaning people from "the west", were only some grew up with it, but rather switched to vegetarism for ethical/health reasons.

You assume that vegetarians have no history or experience as carnivores. That's certainly not the case for many vegetarians, myself included.

No, they exist because someone can see an opportunity to make the same or more money than they make on beef with something that is extremely cheap for them to manufacture.

> These products exist _because_ your claims about mushrooms and quinoa being acceptable (and somewhat available) just aren't true.

No, what OP said is exactly correct, but the vast majority of people never get exposure to what good vegetarian food is or how to cook it, so they wouldn’t know.

I’ve alternated between vegetarian and omnivore for years, for various reasons (current omnivore but limiting some meats due to cholesterol). I’ve gone through the veggie phase where I think vegetarianism is about black bean burgers and various packaged soy things.

It’s unfulfilling from a food perspective, much in the same way that having a diet of fast food and packaged crap is an unfulfilling omnivore diet. If you eat it every day your body starts to enjoy it and crave it, but it’s not good.

True food enlightenment is not restricted to veggie/meat, it’s expanding your horizons and discovering new tastes and textures and appreciating the cultures and techniques that produced them. This cuts a lot deeper than at face value whether a mushroom can imitate a steak, because that should never have been the goal.

I don’t need to replace meat with something fake. Western meatless diets try to replace meat with either way too processed of a food or a nasty mash of fake meat.

I’ve found I like vegetarian Indian way better than anything else. The dishes do not try to recreate some fake meat concoction.

Sure! You are not the market for plant-based meat.

You missed my point completely. Mushrooms can provide a nice chewy texture to balance other textures in a vegetarian dish. The effect is similar to what meat provides. It's not a processed meat replacement that attempts to mimic meat.

Quinoa can provide small chewy things and also absorb spices as it is cooked. Then, like ground beef, it can be mixed with other foods.

Just because something is a reasonable substitute doesn't mean it must be a processed "replacement" (as they use the word).

Agreed, I am not vegetarian, but when I want to eat vegeatarian dishes the last thing I ever want to get is fake meat.

These are not supposed to substitute the vegetarian dishes you eat, but the meat dishes you eat.

It works for some people, e.g. me.

I think you’re right that that is the intent. But since it is more expensive and has worse macros, it doesn’t seem like a good substitute.

If it was healthier and cheaper, I would gladly swap it out. But it’s not, so I don’t.

Alternatively, if it tasted better than meat, I would pay more. But it doesn’t, so I don’t.

I think the market remaining are vegetarians who don’t eat meat for ethical reasons, so they are willing to pay more.

I actually prefer the old veggie patties like boca burgers as they are quite a bit cheaper than beef for the same protein.

It would be cheaper if meat wasn't ridiculously subsidised, which needs to change. In restaurants it costs about the same.

Regarding health it of course depends on product and what metric of healthiness we are looking at. With burger patties I consider them to be at least the same. With sausages I would consider the plant version healthier.

Taste is subjective and also a matter of trying out things and getting used to them. I love meat, but I also like the taste of many plant based alternatives as well and sometimes I even crave them over meat.

Ethical/ecological angle is clear.

(I live in EU and consume more actual meat than plant based alternatives.)

When I want meat, I eat it, no need to have a fake version of it.

Good for you

As a consumer, I want a good vegan protein source that isn't carb-heavy and is easy to cook with, whether or not it's a fake meat. Something with the same macros as skinless chicken breast (75% balanced protein by calorie, 25% fat) would be perfect.

Tempeh is okay but fattier and closer to a steak. TVP is higher protein but has carbs instead of fats. Pea protein powder is perfect but I have no idea how to use large quantities of it in a solid meal.

As an fyi here in AU there are a handful of chicken facsimiles based on pea protein. Theyre “ok” to cook with, but tend to be a bit dry and lacking in binding agents in my experience. Not quite as good as the wheat gluten and soy products yet.

Sweet Earth seitan has almost identical macros to chicken breast. And easy to saute or microwave and put in sandwichs, wraps and bowls. Nature's promise makes a similar competitor.

> However, limiting yourself to vegetarian approaches of recreating meat dishes, then you are missing out on what good vegetarian food can be.

This is the key to becoming a vegetarian/plant-based food eater. I cook an amazing lasagna-like (sandwich-cake like) vegan meal with Plantain slices as the sheets and a yummy inside with soy, bell pepper and herbs. It's delicious.

But people keep wanting to mimic the same meat-based recipes with vegetables... it just doesn't work. I love a good steak, a nice bbq hamburger (usually I eat them on weekends) but also love the vegan food I eat through the week.

> I cook an amazing lasagna-like…

> people keep wanting to mimic the same meat-based recipes with vegetables...

Do you see what you’ve just done here?

Hopefully, soon we'll be able to get the exact pleasure that comes from animal fats and proteins without slaughtering cows or plant-based imitations — cultured meat is already a thing, it's a matter of time before it becomes affordable: https://mosameat.com/growing-beef

> However, limiting yourself to vegetarian approaches of recreating meat dishes, then you are missing out on what good vegetarian food can be.

The people looking for meat alternatives are looking for something that looks, tastes and feels like meat.

> good vegetarian

dish is not what they are looking for.

Yeah, no. I’m a vegetarian and life without these meat substitutes would be much harder.

When I first became vegetarian four or five years ago, the plant-based meat stuff helped me transition off of real meat more easily than I think I could've done without it. I grew up on the traditional meat-and-potatoes diet that a lot of rural midwestern people did in my area. My father raised and butchered cows through most of my childhood/teenage life, so having ground beef or steak every night was the norm. We always had a freezer full of meat ready to be cooked for a meal.

Because of that I sadly didn't have much taste for most vegetables. Even after I decided to stop eating meat, I would've refused to eat something like a salad because I never developed a taste for most leafy greens.

These days most of my meals do not include plant-based meat, but if I'm out at a restaurant or if I want fast food I'll grab an impossible burger or something like it. I just love that the option is available for me.

Has anyone from Bloomberg set foot on a random general purpose supermarket in Germany as of late?

As a vegetarian I prefer to get my proteins from eggs, vegetables, beans, Asian-style preparations such as tofu and Tempeh, or from soya derivates. That said, once in a while the low-sodium soy schnitzel is a welcome addition and it just tastes pretty good.

Of course, this is in the US.

Impossible doesn't sell its products in Europe (or none of the good ones anyway).

Here we have things like Burger King UK which has a more or less 50/50 plant based/meat split on its major products advertised in store.

Or McDonald's that has a dedicated menu of 100% Vegan options: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/vegan.html

In Germany they introduced the McVegan a couple years ago. It wasn't great with a weird patty.

They changed that to Veganburger TS sometime ago https://www.mcdonalds.com/de/de-de/product/veganburger-ts-25...

The Veganburger is really good. The patty has a nice bite to it and the sauce tastes great. Great alternative.

I don't know why but I just can't keep myself from laughing at the name of McPlant. (I do think plant based meat is a great thing though, it's just a hilarious name.)

Aren't these experimental menus? I read McPlant in theUS went away after one-year trial. Would love to give Double McPlant® a try.

I've been vegetarian (99% vegan food intake) for five years, and the main reason I regularly buy so few of these products is that most of them are absurdly expensive, and most of the ones that aren't are not very nice to eat.

Also turned off by gimmicks clearly not aimed at me, such as 'beetroot blood', and other nonsense.

I don't know whether the economy-of-scale issues are what make these products so expensive, or whether the manufacturers were rubbing their hands together at a possible inroad into a wealthy 'hipster' market, and priced their wares accordingly.

I do know that the prices have to come down before I will even start experimenting with some of these offerings. Right now I have zero motivation to 'treat myself' by trying an overpriced vegan burger that is too expensive to become a regular purchase.

I eat meat, and am also turned off by these products. They are a facsimile that just doesn't sit well.

However, I would eat this if it was blended/bulked out a real meat product. Like a burger that was 50% "real" beef and 50% "fake" beef.

I think this has the big opportunity as a filler to reduce the amount of meat eaten as a whole. I don't understand who the current consumer target is supposed to be, if not meat eaters who should eat less meat (for any reason; health/environment/economoy/etc.)

My wife is vegan, so we eat a lot of vegan food at home. One of the treats of being in the UK is the huge variety of vegan products at the supermarket. Fake bacon, fake chicken, fake cheese, UK supermarkets seem to have an endless variety. None of these items are made by Beyond or Impossible, though.

Yup - I go back to my native London from eastern Europe once a year, and it's frustrating not to have access to an oven or hob, when I am suddenly surrounded by so much vegan choice (compared to Bucharest, which is still way better than the rest of Romania in this regard).

Trying to discuss diets is always controversial, and I hope I don't sound like I'm on a high horse. Everyone has different motivations for their diets. It could be health, ethics, taste preference, etc..

I try to be a "flexitarian", because personally I find it gives me a good balance between nutrition, environmental impact, taste and ethical animal treatment (I try to animals seldomly and eat every single bit of the animal, offal, intestines, ears, tails, feet, etc).

I'm also probably in the minority that actually likes the taste of "fake meat". I have them every now and then, but I'm fully aware that it's not "healthy food" and it's expensive and I'm not sure about the enviromental impact. When I have it, it's mostly to fulfill req #4 (eating fewer animals).

I recall when I was in the states budget king was doing an impossible whopper for the same price as a standard whopper.

And the taste was pretty equivalent. Obviously a Burger King beef patty is not a premium product, so that’s not an impressive feat from a taste perspective. But as a replacement for mediocre quality beef, it seemed like a winner.

I assumed at the time tho that the price was subsidised. And I’m not sure if Burger King still offers this.

Another anecdote, a year or so back, in Australia, the meat alternatives were being heavily discounted in Cole’s (major supermarket), which I assumed was due to poor sales. At 50% off it was an easy buy. But when the cost is significantly higher than meat I’m less interested.

In my neck of the woods, Impossible Whoppers were higher than regular Whoppers for as long as I've paid attention.

It is difficult to get someone to understand the contributions of climate change, antibiotic resistance, and pandemics when their somatic addiction depend on their not understanding it.

It's depressing to see such ignorance here and ignorance rationalized.

I am vegetarian and I buy plant-based meat probably every day or two. If I was a meat eater, I would find it an unsavory replacement for the real thing, not to mention more costly. Perhaps that is the problem.

Is this a regional thing?

With the amount of vegan stuff I see advertised I'd assume the meat replacement industry has grown remarkably.

Is this talking about specific VC backed brands, or specific subproducts?

> Impossible has spun up new products such as animal-shaped faux chicken nuggets and blitzed supermarkets, leading to more than 50% retail sales growth in the US in 2022.

The article seems to be mostly talking about Beyond Meat not living up to their "we'll replace the meat industry overnight" pitch. But the wider market seems to be doing fine.

A product that is everywhere, on the menu in seemingly every restaurant, is a flop??

Article paid for by the meat industry perhaps?

Where do you live? In the United States, I have yet to see plant-based meat on a menu.

Where in the United States? It’s very easy to find restaurants serving Beyond/Impossible in most major cities in the US.

You don't live near a Burger King, Starbucks, Carl's Jr, or White Castle?

Beyond meat breakfast sausage is an amazing product. Real sausage is gross to me and beyond tastes better and I never have to worry about eating a ground up bone. I make it on an almost daily basis.

Expensive? Yes. Healthy? Maybe not but can’t be worse than real sausage.

The burgers I’m not crazy about but still eat them from time to time. The chicken is gross.

Here's the thing. You might see a lot of these plant-based meat options in grocery stores and think "it's certainly not a flop! look at the grocery store sales!"

But now take a look at the major industry players. JBS, Tyson, Danone, etc. The ones with more capital than you can imagine and every reason to consider plant-based product lines.

Track their PR timeline over the past 5 years and it's easy to see that they tried to push this stuff into the market and it was not accepted in a way that generated profits.

Yes, I know big-meat is subsidized and not pricing in externalities. But that is the world we live in. These are just honest observations of a bizarre market.

If you are passionate about sustainable food systems, it's important to take a hard look at the truths surrounding meat production. Sexy tech and moral high-grounds only get you so far.

>JBS, Tyson, Danone

It is in the best interests of these companies to preserve the status quo of sub-par veggie burgers

At least in the UK, the plant-based meat business appears to fall between two stools.

In the high-end niche market, plant-based meat is up against organic, grass-fed, free-range, 30-day aged and the like. While itself frequently including awful ingredients like Palm Oil, being (of at best) unknown impact on health and never (so far) being anything other than just about *acceptable* in terms of taste and texture to a meat eater.

While at the other end where there is little concern for animal welfare, climate change, health and even taste. It costs more for the same quantity.

To achieve its potential, the plant-based meat industry either needs to figure out how to do better than millions of years of evolution and target the high-end. Or figure out how to churn out mass-market products at a lower cost than the dead-animal equivalent.

(For my money, churning it out at least appears tractable)

Can confirm, since about last year, plant-based meat is found with heavy discounts at my place (DE). I'm not a vegan or sth but I'm eating just not that much meat (maybe once a week). Why would you eat burgers, or any meal sold as intransparent compound of fat, sugar, protein anyway if your intent is to eat healthily or sustainably? There are delicious funghi and vegetables instead. Why would you replace milk by some branded food such as allpro or whatever? Though I haven't tasted it yet, oat milk might be ok, is being offered when ordering coffee all the time here; i just don't drink my coffee with milk, at all. More and more people claim lactose intolerance; which they have because they stopped drinking milk in the first place rather than because milk is bad would be my guess.

I have a strong preference for Bonsoy soy milk over the flavor and texture of just about any alternative (including dairy). It is made in the traditional way in Japan. Just appreciate that you have to shake it at least 10X more than you think you ought to, as otherwise it is a watery mess followed up by soy goop at the bottom. It is better for not being homogenized like everything else, so it is a small price to pay.

I prefer the impossible burger to a regular one. The sausage is pretty good too. But you have to season it well and cast iron cook it.

Is it healthy? Probably not. It is juicy though.

I have a personal opinion on the trend itself and it is basically that it is trying to imitate something, while it could ( and some would argue should ) be its own thing with its own flavor ( and everything that goes along with it ). It is a little like me trying to re-live to experience of hotdogs for the sake of nostalgia. I suppose I could, but the why goes back into focus. Why are we doing this? Is it to appease the mass consumer? Is it to make a temporary pitstop on humanity's hopeful trajectory that does not include self-destruction? I just fail to see the appeal and I tried some of the products out of sheer curiosity.

Why can't we just have falafel, bean patties and so on? Why does it have to 'feel' like meat?

[Whine]

Is it? I mean every time I check out a so called vegetarian restaurant I get ... plant hamburgers. And I'm in Eastern Europe, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of traditional recipes that don't contain any meat.

The real vegetarian food seems to be dead, unless you cook it at home.

[End Whine]

I dont understand the obsession with reproducing meat out of plants. There are many plant based meals that are excellent without pretending to be bacon or steak or burgers.

There is not, and should not be an industry trying to making pasta-based lettuce or potato-based lemons.

I love the taste of plant based meat, it's something that I was never able to emulate myself.

Because meat (particularly beef and lamb) is environmentally disastrous and ethically problematic, but a majority of people really like the taste and wouldn’t want to give it up.

Hence the desire to make a product that tastes like meat but is less environmentally damaging and doesn’t have the same ethical concerns.

You may not like the implications (as someone who really enjoys meat, I don’t) but the environmental arguments against red meat are pretty compelling.

> I dont understand the obsession with reproducing meat out of plants.

I don't understand why someone has to bring this up every. single. time.

People like meat. Those same people may want to become vegetarian for ethical reasons. They still like meat though.

Oh look, a product that can fit in that "I like meat" slot without killing animals. Sounds tasty.

What else is there to understand?

> ethical reasons

I like the consequence of murder; the texture, the taste, the blood, the everything ... but not the bit where something actually dies.

Yup. Not sure it's that hard to understand.

I think that is the eventual evolution of someone who becomes vegan or vegetarian. But those fake meat products definitely help someone who's been eating meat their whole life and never really had to think about how you prepare a meal that where vegetables are the centrepiece.

I still buy some frozen whatever-the-fuck that I can just whack in the air fryer and have ready in 10 minutes when I can't be bothered cooking, but now that I've been vegan for like eight months most of my diet is whole vegetables and grains, and if I've been out cycling that day I'll have some tofu or beans for protein.

The fake meat definitely helped me ease into it, and if I'm eating with my meat-eating mother and it's her turn to cook then it's easy to have something she doesn't have to think about.

How about reproducing plants out of meat? Can there be an industry trying to make meat-based carrots? ;P

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb8wmx/arbys-has-invented-a-...

I did try some recently, and actually, it was better than I expected.

the thing that put me off for ages is we have had decades of really terrible attempts at vegi things that we're told are just as good as meat, but we all know fell far short of expectations.

I guess a lot of people who reduce meat do so for health reasons, eg to reduce cholesterol, increase vitamins, etc. Changing to a heavily processed veggie burger seems against that especially when they're so expensive.

I think you're on to something here... the target audience of this product is the hardcore meat-eaters, hoping they'll just do a drop-in replacement. But I think the actual target should be the people who are meat-eaters considering quitting.

Those people are more likely looking at health benefits, and would probably be willing to tolerate some small issues here and there if it was definitely healthier. It looks like they prioritized taste over health concerns, meaning those 'early adopters' rejected the product, so it never makes it to their core segment.

I will not eat fake meat (including lab grown meat) for one simple reason: it weirds me out. I will happily eat tofu, black bean burgers, and the like, but I cannot emotionally bring myself to eat fake meat.

In the UK there is a huge variety of plant based meat options and supermarkets have very large sections dedicated to that. I do not know however, if the percentage of people still consuming this has increased or decreased recently. I know from my experience (as an omnivore who can enjoy a veggie burger as much as he enjoys chicken schnitzel), I found out those plant based meat substitutes are so processed (and have an endless list of ingredients) that in comparison meat seemed like the healthier option in many cases.

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but beyond taste/value arguments, there is an argument that the production of lab-grown meat is not able to reach significant scale with the available technology.

> And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, Good Food Institute (GFI)’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.

> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.

> By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts.

> There’s another issue: In focusing on micronutrients as the primary cost driver, GFI may have underestimated the cost and complexity of providing macronutrients at scale. Just like other living animals, cultured cells will need amino acids to thrive. In Humbird’s projection, the cost of aminos alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef.

[0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

When I started a vegan diet 20 years ago and asked for tofu in my local grocery store, they didn't even know the term (this happened in small town in Finland). Nowadays you can find a wide selection of various plant-based, meat-imitating products in every grocery store, even in small ones located in rural areas. Looks wildly successful to me, not a flop.

I love Impossible meat. Wish it was available in my EU country! Various brands of fake meat have been at Whole Foods for a long time now. Not sure things are failing.

Also I wonder how much of this negative sentiment is macroeconomic and tech-related? The stock prices of many tech/bio companies have come down. Is that what caused this article?

"Early iteration of new technology has not yet solved the problem it is aimed at solving, more news at 11".

Artificial meat is a one take on the sustainability problem but a more pragmatic approach that will not solve it but make a big dent is to reduce meat consumption instead of replacing it.

Sainsburys in the UK ran an advert at one point where e.g. add 50% red beans and 50% meat to your casserole. Have one vegan day per week etc. Imagine if we could reduce meat consumption by even 50% by just being more disciplined? It would make a massive difference, we can then treat meat as a special treat so if it costs a bit more and is reared in a more friendly way then that is also good.

What might then happen is that as people get used to eating veggie/vegan, they start to realise, as I did, that they don't miss meat that much (I married a vegetarian). I have meat maybe once per week if I am out but otherwise mostly veggie (and cheat with some fish too!)

If sustainability is the goal then convinving people to switch from beef to fish and chicken is a lot easier. People don't have to go full vegetarian to make a big impact on reducing their greenhouse emissions. I feel like that's the most pragmatic approach right now.

I think the view that the only sustainable option is the vegetarian one isn't helpful. Especially since, depending on your diet, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily sustainable.

The Lancet-EAT report puts some numbers on this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_health_diet

Basically reducing red meat, dairy and starchy vegetables is good for the planet and your health.

Vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, flexitarian can all work though and anything in moderation is fine.

Anyone who's had Indian food can say that you don't need meat to have a delicious meal. European and American food uses vegetables mostly plain, so of course it's not going to be the same as meat. But try any veg curry and then tell me you'd rather have Beyond Meat.

Right, though the large meat-abstaining culture in India is vegetarian and not vegan. As far as I'm aware, there has not been a traditional vegan culture. It's been made viable owing to supplementation and tangential modern products.

I feel the issue with the meat alternatives has been the idea that Vegetarians and Vegans are growing in number and most people don't prepare their own food.

Couple that with some indications that in the western world both Vegans and Vegetarianisms seem to have more disposable income [0] and you get people with business backgrounds naturally pricing the products higher.

Also from a social perspective in the west, people will pay a premium to appear to be making "healthier" or "ethical" purchases.

0: A study on self-reported eating habits with some interesting citations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5622783/

I think it should be clarified as a "flop" versus sky-high expectations. Plant-based options have exploded in the past few years, and not just for meats but dairy too.

I often get vegan options (lactose intolerant) and find it much easier to find a good option now than a few years ago.

I'm not sure that this is true but for me personally it doesn't work. I prefer to eat vegetables as 'themselves' rather than to fake it, it just doesn't really sit right with me to expend a ton of energy and processing to make one food into another when the original is just fine. So what if it isn't meat and doesn't look like meat. It feels a bit like a surrogate for a drug: if you're at the point that you mentally need the surrogate you are still not facing the problem squarely, at that point you're telling one part of your brain that 'this is meat' and another part of your brain that 'this is vegan'.

There are far tastier and more natural veggie burgers and sausages made from beans, lentils, chickpeas, mushrooms, etc. The only catch for VCs is you don't need labs and millions of dollars to make them.

Alternatively, plant based meat products are doing quite well in the US. The problem is that the corporate world, being essentially incapable of moderation and self-control, banked on a quick ramp up in growth leading to economies of scale in the very short term. What went wrong was that hyped bet on quick growth. This is a common problem in the US because fast growth brings better returns especially for investors and so is more desirable than less risky slow growth.

This means there will most likely be a period of shake up in the industry which will be followed by leadership being taken up by more reasonable producers who have the capacity to tolerate modest profits and a period of relatively slow growth as the market gets a foothold.

Venture capitalists should take note of this demonstration of how growth is not the only important variable and fast growth is not always most desirable, especially with relatively new products and market segments.

I've never understood what the point of "vegan meat" is. It tastes terrible, and often leads to lazy recipes. Indian food is super-delicious without using any of these things.

Not even going to read the article because I know this is bs. Every time I go to the grocery store there are more plant based meat alternative products to choose from than last time, and the best ones sell really fast.

It's not even just in the US. In the UK recently I was elated to find so many vegan food choices in the supermarket. More than in America! And so good. Vegan Pukka Pies! Vegan Quorn ham slices that I wish we had in America!

It's a great time to be a vegan!

I’m surprised- it’s the only kind I buy. And, on occasions when I get fast food, Burger King is the only place I visit since they’re the ones with plant based burgers.

Durable plant-based meat brands have existed for decades. Beyond/Impossible certainly raised the bar, but when I was a vegetarian teenager in 2003-4, Tofurkey had already been a thing for a long time, and as far as I know still is. Impossible/Beyond had a “tech company” veneer, so a certain kind of business writer maybe expected more from them in terms of growth, but that was probably never a realistic way to judge these companies.

Yeah Boca and Morningstar Farms have been around for a while. And tbh are almost as good as Beyond while being way cheaper. Beyond is extremely overpriced for the quality younget. Impossible is expensive, but it's also much better quality.

I don't eat meat, nor do I have any inclination to eat fake meat.

I'm curious who thought people would rather eat more expensive fake meat compared to cheaper actual meat?

IMO: The real problem is that the plant-based-meat crowd really let their imaginations run away without using much common sense.

The market for plant-based fake meat is much smaller than they believe. They thought they would displace animal based options on menus; but instead they displayed traditional veggie burgers and ticked off the people who should have been their biggest advocates.

IMO: Cultured meat has a much better chance at displacing traditional meat. You can substitute it, because it's the same exact thing, and it won't make any difference.

I’d love to switch to fake meat, even if it is more expensive. But it’s also usually less healthy (more sodium, more calories per serving).

If someone makes a fake lean chicken breast or 93%ground turkey then I’d happily switch over.

There was a massive market for meat substitutes long before Impossible and Beyond hit the scene. So I guess the real question is, why would you assume no one did any market research before bringing these products to market?

My local grocery is constantly out of https://www.morningstarfarms.com/en_US/products/chikn/mornin...

They restock and it’s gone in a week or two.

Contrast that beyond meat, impossible burger, and other pricey options which never budge.

I recently saw Beyond sausage on BOGO sale at Safeway. I’ve never bought it before, but between that discount and a general meat coupon (which interestingly applied to meat substitutes), it was a decent deal. Haven’t tried it yet but interested to see if it could be a worthwhile purchase at this lower price level.

I quite like the sausage. Hope you enjoy it.

If you’re like me and want the slightly rubbery texture: Try microwaving a sausage before you using it (e.g., sausage roll).

As a long time mostly vegetarian (still avoid red meat) I have long avoided all imitation "meat". The ingredients are generally utter garbage, if you are at all concerned about long term health you don't want to be eating that stuff. I don't know it its worse than meat but its probably close (trading heart disease for cancer or maybe increase risk of both).

Look just accept that all "meat" in the future will be vegan. i.e. "Taco Bell Is Vegan in the Future" Article:[0]) according to the movie 'Demolition Man'. :)_

[0] https://www.livekindly.com/taco-bell-is-vegan-demolition-man...

Right now you pay an extra $1 or more for the Impossible version of a burger, so there was a spike of curious people trying it once, and now it's leveled off to the much smaller number of people who are willing to pay the premium regularly. But getting the average consumer to switch requires competitive pricing. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

The biggest flop about it is it's higher carbs than normal meat. Steak and things like that typically have zero or near zero carbs per serving. This plant-based stuff is carby as hell, so keto people are going to avoid it, and basically everyone is keto right now in some capacity. If it was zero carb, people would put up with the taste and increased cost.

How is anything plant-based considered meat?

By its very nature, it is not meat. It is plant fiber.

Words have meaning, and without meaning we have chaos.

I think the problems with plant-based "meat" is the fantasy that it is "meat."

It will never be meat, just like insects will never replace a steak, even if Bill Gates starts jumping up & down and demanding we eat it to save planet earth.

I think it was on the Off Menu podcast that the hosts summed it up perfectly, that plant-based meat is a great substitute for the dodgy low quality meat you would get at a kebab shop at 1am, but you aren't going to get a the quality of a nice steak.

None of the plant based meat I have tasted has been great, but I'd scoff it down for a quick post pub snack.

This is purely my own subjective experience, but there is just something off-putting about the more accurate forms of plant-based meat.

I think it's because meat actually has some quite disgusting and off-putting qualities. Qualities that humans are only used to within the context of meat. For example, recently we had some pea-protein based burgers, and they had three bizarre qualities in their attempt to recreate the beef burger. First, they were quite red inside. Second, they had an almost acrid, rancid acidity to them which really did taste quite similar to beef. Finally, they had a very burger-like texture, even with pieces of simulated unwanted gristle.

So, what we get is a meat-eating experience recontextualised into the realm of vegetables. And, as vegetables, these qualities are bizarre, alien, and unexpected. We don't expect an acrid kind of acidity from vegetables, we don't expect strange chewy textures or inconceivable red juice in the absence of beetroot. So with the accurate plant-based meats the only choice is to try and forget that you're not eating meat.

Of course this doesn't happen to everyone, but it is true for me. Plant-based meat is fundamentally revolting in a way that actual meat is not, and that's kind of ironic, considering the infinitely more pleasant production of the former over the latter.

For that reason I generally prefer meat replacements that don't try to be exactly like meat: fake chicken nuggets and fish fingers are generally good, soy mince is fine, etc. Those things are far cheaper too

Most fertile soil is used for cattle. It has a large environmental impact.

If we want to preserve trees and let the biosphere heal and conserve animal habitats, we need to stop the expansion of the meat industry, or even reduce it.

Fake meat is comfort food not healthy food. Health-wise, it can be worse than meat.

3D printed meat sounds promising to me (real meat without the suffering).

Plant based alternatives either equal or exceed meat prices by portion, so there's no real insentive for me to buy them.

I think the only "fake meat" plant-based meat I've enjoyed was a Gr*ggs vegan sausage roll, which was genuinely a great flavour and texture.

A lot of the things like the "Impossible Burger" type stuff just tastes disgusting, horrible overprocessed crap.

Edit: The Ikea "veg balls" are actually pretty good too.

This sounds like the "trough of disillusionment", I'd say that means things only increase from there.

I was vegan for 3 years and even then I couldn't stomach this garbage. Give me plain ground beef over this hyper-processed garbage any day.

The best "meat alternatives" were always the ones that didn't try to replicate taste and texture of meat and did their own things. Quinoa burgers are delicious.

I feel like I'm going crazy sometimes with the fake meat convos. Fake meat is fantastic and I sometimes pick it over regular meat. It's sort if its own thing in my mind, but I get way less of a carb crash from it. I dunno if that's actually caused by anything or just a placebo though.

I had a "long vegetal" burger in Spain from Burger King. Basically an imitation chicken burger. And it was awesome! And Spanish people were ordering it too.

In the UK, the meat free alternatives are pretty great too. Honestly, it feels like meat free stuff is turning out to be the opposite of a flop.

I would really like to know whether there are some biological reasons why some people love meat and others don't. I have met so many veggie munching folk of various flavours who upon questions would confess, that they didn't like meat that much anyway.

It's been the other way around for me. I used to really like meat when I started eating vegetarian, and made it a policy to still satisfy those cravings if they got strong. But over time, having not eaten that much meat, almost every time I give in to the cravings I'm disappointed by the taste, and the cravings don't come back. I figure it might just be an acquired taste to some extent.

Whole chicken, stick it on a tray, whack it in the oven, chop some onions if you fancy it. Bam, not far off 1kg of meat for 5 GBP.

Healthy, tasty, keeps in the fridge for a good amount of time, can be used for sandwiches, roast dinners, snacking cold or hot, whatever.

Basically a dupe of the submission from the NYT [0] (2022) with different/more editorializing:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773135

not surprised. I wanted to get some beyond burgers. The regular grass beef burgers were CHEAPER.

until we start subsidizing plant based meat the way we do meat, its just not gong to take off. Its not an even playing field.

Having tried it a number of times it's not really there yet. It clearly has an odd texture and tastes unpleasant. They may have jumped the gun a bit. I think vat grown meat is a better bet.

What is this article's obsession with things being "processed" food? Is "processed" the new "chemical"?

It's like the article trying to keep repeating the words "processed", "ultra-processed", "hyper-processed" as if it's some scary boogey man.

> ... as if it's some scary boogey man

In a way processed food is a scary boogey man - whether animal or plant based, processed foods are bad at providing nutrients to our bodies and can be packed with excessive amounts of salt and other substances.

https://www.lhsfna.org/the-many-health-risks-of-processed-fo...

The patties themselves are packed with fat and heme iron (which is an unhealthier form of iron).

Agreed: "made from processed ingredients such as pea protein, potato starch and potassium chloride"

Since when is potassium chloride a processed ingredient? I think the author just doesn't know enough chemistry. And you can make potato starch by shredding a potato and drying the resulting water - that's not really what I think of by "processed".

Agreed. The pea protein though. All the food chemistry technology that enables such proteins to make deep fried nuggets, or vegan ice cream, and so on, that fits the definition of processed food. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399967/

"Processed" as in, this food has been altered from its original state. i.e. Peas = not processed, pea protein = processed. The exact cutoff of how much processing is allowed is kinda up to the individual, but generally when you hear people talking about processed foods being bad, they are talking about almost anything that isn't a "whole" food, i.e. vegetables, whole grains, etc... So things like homemade pasta sauce, even if made with simple ingredients, would be a processed food.

The advice to avoid processed foods isn't necessarily to avoid nasty chemicals, it is to avoid high calorie, high salt, high fat foods that often strip out the healthiest parts of the constituent components during processing. For example, the healthiest part of a potato is the skin, but very few "processed" foods made from potatoes will keep the skin on as part of the processing. You can make a pretty healthy french fry by using organic potatoes and air frying instead of deep frying, but at the end of the day, you would have been better off just eating the whole potato. That is the argument that is generally being made when people talk about processed foods.

I personally like the new plant-based meats and hope they succeed, but I definitely consider them processed food and limit my consumption to every once in a while. But I also consider normal burgers to be processed food, because of the bun and sauces, and in many cases the patty. Using really good pasture raised meat to make a burger patty is way more expensive than any of the plant-based patties. And the cheap meat based patties are probably made from factory farmed animals full of antibiotics. So I am fine paying a little more for a non-meat patty that kinda mimics the real thing. Even if I consider it a processed food, I think I would rank it above the cheap meat patties in terms of health risks.

There are many millions of people who believe that, generally, the less processed, ie the closer to it's natural state any food item is, the better it is for you (or the less bad it is for you). Are you not aware of this?

and their are billions of people who like cooking and pounding vegatables into goo and then adding 10 to 30 spices to make yummy curries

Which step do they throw some high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats and yellow #5 into their curries?

Where's that in impossible mince?

It's mostly laziness. People don't care enough to find more specific words. Also it does evoke a reaction which is silly but can be effective.

Impossible burger meat is literally the only reason I am able to eat Burger King and Red Robin. It increased the customer base of those companies.

Speaking as a vegan, I'll gladly try this so long as it's done on a separate griddle, but I really do not want a copy of the taste of meat.

I would switch to plant-based meat if it scored at least 2/3 on...

- healthier - cheaper - tastier

I think it currently scores somewhere between 0 and 1 out of three.

Aside from taste not always being there, biggest problem for me is some of the crazy ingredient lists. Part of what I'd look for when occasionally avoiding meat is a clean/healthy alternative. I can find this in something like a black bean veggie burger, but some of these plant based options seem loaded with unfamiliar ingredients. Just my limited perception from a few things I considered at the grocery store but put back down.

It took my lokal German supermarket ages to even offer something.

8 meter of pure meat products vs. 30 cm of vegi options...

> Then came the nose-biting fiasco

You know you’re having a bad year when Bloomberg includes that in their coverage

What are your thoughts on those companies making plant-based "meat -- food for dogs?"

If you are going to sell margarine you can't make it more expensive than butter.

I doubt it's the last we'll see of meat flavoured substitutes or meat grown in vat....

First mistake: stop calling it meat. It’s _not_. That alone would satiate a lot of problems.

I hate these fake meats. It has led to the death of legitimately good alternatives like black bean burgers, all because vegans and vegetarians are obsessed with pretending they can eat something very similar to animals. So now it seems every restaurant only wants to offer fake meat.

I like how these articles come out to tell us something most of us knew from the start. There is something to be said about the wisdom of repugnance. You're supposed to hear "fake meat" and think "gross." That is why most people react that way.

My favorite meat replacements are smoked tofu, and soy flakes.

Tofu I sometimes use to substitute meats (We are eating keto, so it’s very easy to eat a lot of meat, trying to lower that amount a bit), sometimes simply by itself. It excels in both of those.

Soy flakes are always a ground beef replacement (not in a burger, only when the meat is loose), when properly spicing them during rehydration (MSG is even more important than usual here), they come close to the real thing in some ways, better in others. If they weren’t so carby, and now sold out for several months, I’d completely replace ground beef ;)

Stop calling it "meat", please. It's not. Meat grows on animal skeletons.

Use terms like "reprocessed plant sludge", soysage, or shitpatty.

Do you feel the same about almond milk?

Yes and no. You see, almond milk does not aggressively attempt to take over "normal" milk, they coexist peacefully, and the distinction is obvious.

The fake unmeat thing tries to look like meat, appears everywhere I expect my normal meat to be, and annoying like a popup with a broken [x] close button.

We already have cheap beans and tofu. Thanks

It’s also pretty easy to make burger patties out of black beans.

Tastes great, is simple and you can throw in things you like, such as onions and garlic. Pretty sure it’s nutritious as well.

I too make my own patties most of the time, instead of ready-mase fake meat. Just mash whatever beans/tofu I have. Maybe some dry falafel mix. Half an egg and some potato starch will help with keeping it together. A splash of soy sauce for colour. Just make sure that the mixture does not get too wet.

Turns out to be true tbh. I've tasted all kinds of fake meat and sausages and some is pretty good. But at the end tofu (pulled is the best) and saitan (not satan) is the easiest and most versatile. You can do almost anything with it. Chickpeas, beans and bean-cheese (aka tofu) and except from spices and herbs nothing more is needed.

Seitan* you can actually make it at home easily, same for tempeh, reducing the amount of unknown things you eat even more since you control every step of the process

This is the way.

It's also possible to make burgers out of buckwheat. It has an interesting and unique taste.

It tastes terrible - so who’s really surprised?

Anyone saying it tastes like meat is ignoring the rubber texture and dryness

Then you didn't try a good one, yet. I can say the same about a steak that's cooked "wrong" or a "burger" where nobody ever knows what actually is in there because for all you know it can be hundreds of dead animals in a single burger patty.

It tastes terrible, if you cannot cook. That is true for every single meal.

Heroin is already a thing, and they had to make Oxy.

Meat is already a thing.

Strange choice of headline given the content, but I'm guessing they went link-bait-y to drive clicks.

Nonetheless, I don't know that any of this is unexpected. They're doing about as well as I would have thought they would. Honestly, they have a tricky market in the first place: (a) Vegans that I know[0] don't want a product that makes them "think they're eating meat[1]" and (b) they haven't marketed sufficiently enough to "me".

By "me", I mean, the guy who's only going to buy the meat-free burger if and only if I can't tell the difference between real/fake. I'm also unwilling to buy a fake "raw ground beef" product if I have to substantially change the way I cook it in order to use it.

That gets you through the "I'll try it" gate -- and I ate an Impossible Whopper. I didn't side-by-side it, but I went in expecting I'd be able to tell the difference and really wanted to but I had to concede that it was exactly the "kind-of-shitty-but-you-still-crave-it" Whopper. And that says a lot -- it's a weird flavor and texture (which was slightly different, but it was either unimportant or slightly better).

But then there's the second reason -- if it tastes the same, why am I not eating the regular Whopper? I am not in any way invested in "Animal Rights", I do not have a political or other bone to pick with the meat industry, I don't know enough about the effects of the meat industry, specifically, on climate change so as far as I can tell, this product needs to be one or more of the following: (a) a little (or a lot) cheaper than meat, (b) healthier than meat equivalent to the additional cost, (c) shelf-stable or has an otherwise much longer refrigerator/freezer life than meat.

I found out at Burger King that "it's more expensive" and "tastes the same". I bought it because I read about the company and "I wanted to see if it tasted like a Whopper." On one hand, they nailed marketing it early on. There's no way I would have tried this. I was vegetarian and swore off all forms of plant-based ground beef after throwing up my share of Boca Burgers. Had I not read a bit about the science behind it and "the blood", I wouldn't have been curious enough.

Having now satisfied that curiosity and having even had a good experience, I have never purchased another Impossible Whopper, nor have I even thought about purchasing another plant-based product. I suspect that they may be better for my heart, but they haven't told me[2]. I suspect it's quite a "process" to make and wonder how many ingredients "I can't pronounce and don't understand the origin of" that the product may have. These are the "gut-instinct" judgements that I made with no knowledge, not so much as picking the product up off of the shelf the hundreds of times I've passed it because they haven't given me a good enough reason to get past the price.

Not everybody in this space is failing "me". I probably bought Morningstar Farm's "fake chicken patties" for my family every grocery trip for 10 years. The reason was easy: they were far more consistent and tasted better than processed chicken patties. I only stopped because my kids stopped enjoying chicken patties (buns were going bad too quickly).

And despite the bumps in the road, I don't think any of the bigger brands are really failing ... they need to adjust their messaging a bit, maybe, if they want to extend their market. Or maybe this is the totality of the market for "plant-based meat" at this price point.

[0] I don't know why this phrase is starting to sound like "I have (insert minority) friends" but ... I was (lacto/ovo) vegetarian for a year in my 20s (having nothing to do with animal rights); many friends were vegan.

[1] This topic often came up when discussing Boca Burgers and other veggie burgers; universally they preferred mushroom/eggplant-based patties because they don't taste anything like meat.

[2] OK, so this may be my fault. Maybe they're not reaching me or my family. I've found that living 15 years without Cable Television nor watching any broadcast at home (I stream everything and do not watch sports ... not even the Olympics), having Adblock everywhere and the like means my exposure to ads has resulted in major gaps (gasps of "you've never heard of X" ... and I'll say, the spray-dish-soap was something I wish I had in my life a few years ago, but all in all it's a big plus). But nobody talks about those aspects of the product, either.

The weird Silicon Valley aesthetic of it all is severely unattractive to me. I don't need a version number, a slick website, Twitter fanboys and angling for more VC funding in my diet.

Does the version numbering at least make more sense than USB?

Unfair comparison. The Voynich Manuscript makes more sense than USB versions.

Can we add an "in the US" at the end?

Since for EU countries this is not true.

I'm living in sweden now and lived in germany and poland.

Plant-based meat products are growing in numbers and the price of meat is going so high that its cheaper to buy the plant-based one.

In Germany one producer of meat sausages want to turn 100% plant based[1].

I will not go into the whats better and not for you. Since this highly depends on not just one food category. You can eat "Vegan" and still eat unhealthy and you can eat meat and be healthy. The body is to complex on just saying is something is healthy or unhealthy on one factor.

[1] https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte

Your link doesn't support your statement. Where does it say they want to turn 100% plant based?

I have not found any news that would support that claim. They sold more vegan products in 2021 than meat products, but nowhere can I find anything that they aim at selling only vegan products.

Source is https://app.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/mittelstand/ruegenw..., a "we would if consumers choose that route".

> Letztlich wird das der Verbraucher entscheiden. Vorstellen können wir uns alles.

which is far better translated to

> In the end, the consumer will decide. We can imagine [doing] anything.

Which is extremely noncommittal (and also the only thing that makes sense)

No, this was extreme. When that interview came out it was completely astonishing to read that this option is in play at all for such a traditional meat processor. Other companies would have talked about their tradition and old strengths they should not give up, and said something like "we expect there to always be a market for our high quality meat products". But he opted for a different route.

> (and also the only thing that makes sense)

Companies die all the time because they refuse to adapt to a changing market, especially private german companies. Adapting to the market might be "the only thing that makes sense", but that is in no way the default position. Think about how much force was necessary to get german car companies to even just make alibi electric cars, even though it was completely obvious that not investigating that path would lead to their destruction in the next decade.

> When that interview came out it was completely astonishing to read that this option is in play at all for such a traditional meat processor.

The meat producer who had already been dominating the vegan refrigerators… It’s not as if their prediction of 40% for the next year came out of nowhere.

This is a gross misrepresentation. Ruegenwalder is not turning 100% plant based, in terms of sold products I would be surprised if they turned > 5% plant based, but I don't know the numbers there.

It seems that they don't plan to "turn 100% plant based", but rather built a new factory that is 100% plant based.

The ≤5% estimate is just as inaccurate though.

> “Over the full year [2021], we sold for the first time more of our vegan and vegetarian products than of the classic meat products. Last year, the ratio had been fifty-fifty,” the spokesperson added, without giving detailed figures.

https://www.just-food.com/news/germanys-rugenwalder-muhle-ey...

> The ≤5% estimate is just as inaccurate though.

Well, render me extremely surprised! I am wondering if that is because the population as a whole goes vegan/vegetarian (which I doubt), or if they are one of the few producers offering a wide range for vegetarians, and so they get all the vegetarians as customers.

> I am wondering if that is because the population as a whole goes vegan/vegetarian (which I doubt)

The truth is actually somewhat close to that – not everyone goes vegetarian, but the vast majority of young adults are replacing some (not all) of the meat in their diet with replacement products.

Rügenwalder isn't the only company seeing such growth, though. Nestlé (Garden Gourmet) and Iglo are seeing similar growth.

The marketing director that started the meatless program said "The [meat] sausage will become the cigarette of the future". Sales were stagnating or declining. Sales in the meatless segment were low but increasing steadily and they entered that segment, convinced, that they could produce alternatives with broader appeal. For one year, they spent all their advertisment budget on the new meatless line.

Initially the target group was "reducers". The first products included a lot of egg protein, so vegans were not targeted at all. Somewhat surprisingly, they decided to launch the new line under their well-known and established brand. That probably prevented some marketing claims that may have been off-puting to their existing customers.

> I am wondering if that is because the population as a whole goes vegan/vegetarian (which I doubt),

At the moment, the number seems to be more around 10%.

> or if they are one of the few producers offering a wide range for vegetarians, and so they get all the vegetarians as customers.

Yes, mainly this. They have a big focus on vegi-products, were building the market in the past, but were also cannibalizing other producers and products. But still, the market grows, people are more often buying replacements, going half-vegetarian and such. But we have to see whether this sticks. The market is still very dynamic, with new products coming every some months and old products changing from time to time. At the moment there is big hype with many companies going into the market, but not all of them are that good.

>but I don't know the numbers there

When you do know [the numbers]...please let us know. Perhaps before posting?

Luckily, others picked up from where I dropped the ball, and provided useful information. Too bad you are not one of them.

Sausages always seemed such obvious candidates. Many nondry sausages are already often a majority nonmeat. They get their flavor already from plant derived flavorants. Yet mostly fake meat products are burger and chicken nugget replacements.

I've got to say, the fake chicken schnitzels are the first one that I really can't distinguish from the real chicken schnitzel. (Before the purists pour in, yes, compared to supermarket chicken schnitzel, which moreover isn't a real schnitzel anyway.)

Here in the UK, there's a lot of vegan sausages. The others like vegan / vegetarian burgers and such are relatively less common.

Vegan Richmond are among the best, better than their (somewhat) meaty alternatives in my opinion.

Richmond are amazing.

Lidl also have a range of various vegan options including pizza (surprisingly good), lasagne, and burgers.

Quorn has been ubiquitous in stores for decades now. I've never been a fan, but it will do at a push.

The problem elsewhere is insane pricing. I've had a lot of "I'm not paying that!" experiences looking at the veg/vegan options in supermarkets. The prices are completely out of reach for most shoppers.

If there's been a "flop", that will have been a big factor.

What brand do you mean? I've never tried a vegan schnitzel I think but all the nuggets and such I tried didn't taste good to me. And yeah, you're absolutely right that it makes sense to start with sausages/cold cuts because they're easier to imitate. Depending on where you live, there is a lot of choice now and they've gotten really good. I also had vegan cheese the other day that I'd assumed was real cheese until I found out.

The next step will be cultured meat (precision fermentation and similar methods). If you're in Singapore or Israel you can already try it in restaurants.

eg https://www.jumbo.com/producten/jumbo-lekker-veggie-krokante...

In soviet times they had this saying: "the pieces of lard visible in your sausage are the only part which you can rely on to be meat."

Yup, things where the texture is very removed from the original food definitely make sense.

In the US, both Beyond and Impossible have very good bratwurst-style sausages. Like you said, sausage is apparently very forgiving when it comes to replacing the meat.

The numbers I can find do suggest high percentage growth in Europe, but growth on numbers that are small compared to the US. Something like ~$7B in sales in plant based meat in the US, and ~$3B in sales for Europe. So maybe a bit early to judge? Meaning, maybe there's a similar plateau for EU, but it hasn't gotten there yet?

Those numbers tracks with GDP per capita of the US and EU. I'm guessing it is going to be different if you look at certain segments of the market. Also in this case you probably need to look at tonnage per capita. You might also be right that it is too early to say, comments here can be up to a year ahead of statistics.

You should look at gdp, not per-capital gdp, for a comparison of markets. Europe and the US aren't far apart. I'm assuming the slower uptake in Europe is because of stricter food labeling laws and the fact that most of these companies are US-centric.

There is no lack of European veggie food companies, I do not see labeling as a problem, do you know of some actual problems with that? I do think the variance between markets is just too high for me as an European to supply anecdotal evidence.

I wanted to say the same thing. Here i Germany the choice of vegan sausage and cold cuts is huge, even in small grocery shops. I know lot of people who eat meat regularly _and_ buy the vegan alternatives on a regular basis.

Which totally puzzles me. Nothing wrong with a vegetarian diet, but would I prefer processed food, vegan or otherwise, over unprocessed one?

People like variety. Also, people may still like eating meat, but want to eat less of it - not for health reasons, but for the environment and to kill less animals.

I would prefer unprocessed food as well but it sounds like cost is a major driver in this case.

Vegan chicken nuggets are similar easy food than processing vegetables yourself.

For me, I love meat, makes it easier to buy the 'better' processed food having this option.

If your supermarket doesn't have a vegi option than I can't buy it, try it etc.

I think the whole "processed" vs "unprocessed" food label is too imprecise to say anything about whether it's healthy or not. I don't think there's anything that implies that processed foods have to be unhealthy. It's just that most processed food tend to be less healthy.

> I don't think there's anything that implies that processed foods have to be unhealthy

Honestly it's just a good rule of thumb to use. Even if it's not 100% true, you're better off acting like it's 100% true in the end.

Meat sausages and cold cuts are processed as well. And are likely made with carcinogenic preservatives!

Edit: cancerous -> carcinogenic

Normally, but not always. I can get freshly produced sausages from my local butcher.

"fresh" sausages most likely contains some of those preservatives too, as they prevent worse things like botulism. Unless maybe they're made the same day as you consume them?

"Fresh" as in made on the day they're sold from the same meat that's sold there.

According to our local, nitrate free, butcher freshly slaughtered meat contains enoigh natural nitrate-alternatives to not require additional nitrate if ham, sausages and so on are prepared soon enough.

nitrate-free is a myth. They use celery powder which breaks down to sodium nitrate. The FDA allows the producers to call this "nitrate free" since they are not using sodium nitrate directly and the FDA considers the celery powder a flavoring agent.

Chemically it breaks down to sodium nitrate and has the same carcinogenic nitrates. Its just a legal labeling loop hole.

Lucky me I don't live in the US then. And no, no celery powder used neither...

When butchered a clean facility foods without nitrates will last longer than a day.

Making a sausage is a form of processing. Sausage is a processed food, no matter what. The distinction is whether or not it is highly processed (i.e., amount of additives).

By that logic, splitting a peapod with my hands is processing, and thus all food is processed.

A nit: The nitrates/nitrites/celery powder in bacon etc. is carcinogenic, the bacon doesn’t have cancer.

Thanks for the correction!

> but would I prefer processed foo

When the processed food tastes as good and as fresh as the one you cook in your house - why not. In the case of European plant-based meat, this is the case.

Do you cook your food?

Congratulations, it's processed. Worrying about something as nonspecific as "processing" is much the same as worrying that it's made up of chemicals.

I'm from Germany, and I can confirm that the number of vegan alternatives to any imaginable animal product have increased sharply both in quantity and quality over the last years, to the point that you can get good vegan alternatives at discount supermarkets now.

Even in the US, I wonder if what Bloomberg is calling a "flop" is a real flop or just some companies falling short of their over-ambitious forecasts (or the even more ambitious goals of their investors/stockholders)? But I'm not really qualified to talk about the situation in US supermarkets...

Aldi has a great chicken replacement and the meatballs packaged with a pack of ketchup are excellent. I would wish for them to be available in a larger version without the ketchup.

Another problem I have with all of this is the plastic packaging for everything. Getting something like that at a veggie butcher would be cool.

"Getting something like that at a veggie butcher would be cool."

Wouldn't it just be shipped in plastic and repacked in plastic?

They could ship a lot of them in less plastic to a vendor where you could get them in a paper bag.

How does that work if they use fake blood?

In a podcast I heard that The Vegetarian Butcher initially had experimental biological degradable packaging, but after buying hundreds of thousands they all went bad, and had to be thrown out. Now they use plastic packaging and they only try to solve one problem at a time.

Didn't our ancestors just use paper for such things? Or cloth?

I guess lots of them died of dentistry before getting to oregon, but still.

Killer cavities or misspelling of "dysentery"?

Knowing that the dentists of the early-mid 19th century were mostly trained as barbers, probably both.

Dysentery?

Waxed paper, usually. It is not nearly close to biodegradable. It requires specific yeasts yo be present in the soil or the paper will remain for a very long time. Also waxed fabrics and glass or ceramic jars.

This sounds weird to me, it was a surprise to them that biodegradable packaging biodegraded?

The general assumption is that biodegradable materials biodegrade under conditions different from regular use and storage, or over long timeframes. The timber in your house is biodegradable, but if you keep it dry it will last a century or so. Packaging that biodegrades in regular storage isn't nessesarily bad, but surprising

Ah, it was a storage issue? That's interesting, thank you.

Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis https://www.theherbivorousbutcher.com/

I prefer polypropylene packaging to cardboard coated in PFAs. The latter is ostensibly "compostable", as long as you're ok with compost laced with forever chemicals.

In the EU the quality is good of the plant-based meats. In the US/Canada is it quite bad though.

Maybe it is the same situation for regular meat, can’t comment on that. But finding actually good tasting and healthy meat replacement here in Canada is a challenge.

>"finding actually good tasting and healthy meat replacement here in Canada is a challenge"

I can confirm. Few things I tried - I did not like it at all. Also I do not know about now but back way before COVID when I actually tried this fake meat the cost was outrageous. Throwing some decent fresh meat into a grinder and turning it into burger tastes way better and was way cheaper.

Do you think this trend will continue if the price of meat falls?

Beef prices have fallen in the US over the past year (quite unlike all other meat) because farmers increased production. That certainly contributes to the "flop", but anecdotally no one I know (in the US) likes or even seeks out the fake meat. It's just not accepted here as far as I can tell (and I work in the restaurant/hospitality industry).

Depends where you live, in SF, LA, Vegas, Austin, and Miami I have impossible burgers all of them time - even Mighty Taco in Buffalo has impossible meat and Buffalo is last to get anything (they “allowed” Uber ten years after everyone else).

The high quality fake meat is great - really satisfies the want for a burger or hot dog since becoming vegetarian and makes a lot of dishes where something like ground beef is usually called for very similar to what I used to have.

Of course there are markets where it has been more readily adopted than others, but even in those markets it's not performing the same as it has in Europe or Asia.

Yeah, I was just sharing my own anecdote - I know lots of people that eat it and I’ve personally had it in lots of cities when traveling.

Re your second paragraph, you are exactly right. The title is clickbaity, to the point of using a disparaging term (fake) instead of a generally accepted one (lab grown). The article is meant to be shared by meat lovers, who were never the market. Entrepreneurs and early adopters did proselytize it - but that happens in every industry. Lab grown meat is everywhere in the US and people buy and eat it. It's just another choice that consumers have now. It is not a flop.

It's a bit of a flop in the UK too tbh. It's been pushed fairly hard, but not that much uptake.

I've avoided it because of the push. A tech-adjacent company that's pushing a "disruption" that hard makes me very suspicious.

In principle I'm all for it ethically, and it's probably no "worse" then any other ready meal/processed food à la Unilever that I sometimes eat. But I'd rather just eat tofu (which I do very much like anyway) than whatever some "founder" is pushing on me so he can get another funding round in.

It's a flop for me because of the 'plant-based' marketing. I make my own burgers with jackfruit or chickpeas and things quite often, but I call them what they are, not 'plant-based', which is about as appetising to me as 'meat-based'. (What's the meat?! Surprise mix of whatever was going cheapest plus horse?).

The whole thing is reminiscent of Simpsons marketing joke:

"It has over 60 ingredients!"

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/meat/meat-substitu...

The size of the meat-substitute market in the UK appears to have grown steadily to about 1.5 billion quid.

With the UK beef products market hitting around 4.4 billion quid, I'd say that's pretty sizeable.

You must live in a very different part of the UK to me then. Every supermarket has extensive plant-based options, Greggs has been expanding their vegan range, McDonalds has the McPlant on the menu permanently now..

The plant burger is not a fake meat patty, it is a vegetable patty. Very different and also tastier than their meat alleged burgers.

I second this. Where I am in Europe, plant based 'meat products' are growing in number and variety, and their prices are falling. Their taste is as good as or better than meat, and actually they constitute pretty well fleshed out, tasty dishes in themselves. Especially when old housewives start buying a product, you know that it has succeeded in the taste department.

This brand seems to be the one that is pretty successful where Im at (a Mediterranean country), and you know that Mediterranean cuisine is quite tasty and housewives are very picky. This brand is able to replicate Mediterranean taste in all its meat products.

https://heurafoods.com/

These two ones are its particular hits:

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/burgers-epices

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/bocados-mediterraneos

There is definitely more and more meat alternatives in the stores now. One other curious development are these blended meats like 50% meat, 50% mushrooms or 50% meat and 50% plant.

Taco Bell has been selling this as "seasoned beef" for quite a while now.

McDonald's has been selling it as "McNuggets" for ages.

The nugget is 100% chicken breast - but that's only ~55% of what you're eating - and only about ~23% of the calories.

>and the price of meat is going so high

Sounds like a contributing factor. But this isn't a normal situation; there's a war going on, and before that there was a huge disruption to global trade due to COVID-19. These aren't the sort of conditions that anyone wants to see continue indefinitely.

"Plant-based meat" already existed before 2015. Then Impossible Burger came up with synthetic heme and thought it would be a game-changer. Long story short, it raised a few eyebrows, but it didn't produce the desired uptake.

I might be missing something, but aside from that, I don't know what the core innovation is supposed to be in the recent products, aside from a big PR push and an economic crisis.

Similar in Austria, veg products are increasing in quality and availability. There is even a 100% vegan burger king...

It actually is not, they use standard mayo.

I am not so sure about that. In Spain we have also seen a remarkable increase of vegan offerings, with even the smaller supermarkets having a good selection of vegan food and vegan precooked dishes. However, I have barely seen anybody ever buying those. So, I can't tell if that increment in supply is a response to an increment in demand by the consumers, or those companies are burning money fast hoping for a market to appear.

*upvotes in European * Fucking hell, i was eating vegan sausages 30 years in the uk...

Same in Hong Kong. Recently Impossible, Beyond and (our local equivalent) OmniFoods have been introduced to almost all restaurant menus. It's died down a bit, but still quite popular. And this is the place with the highest meat consumption per capita in the world.

Interesting! Can you order faux meat for claypot rice?

I live in Hong Kong and can only remember one time I saw a fake meat on a restaurant menu, and it was at an extremely western health-focused restaurant of a large gym chain (nood food). It's definitely not "almost all" restaurant menus.

I think it depends on the restaurant, I'm definitely not the kind of person who goes to nood food, Mana or the other upper-middle class restaurants where plant based is in their branding.

We have restaurants which are quick, cheap eats (Cha Chaan Tengs and other fast food) and restaurants where you can sit down an talk for a bit. The latter is what I am referring to. Saying that, even CCT chains like Cafe de Coral and MX are starting to introduce these options and these lower end restaurants are the companies that OmniFoods have been targeting with their partnerships. They are also on the permanent menus of McCafe and KFC these days.

I've also noticed that Park n Shop and Wellcome now have dedicated plant based option freezers.

Yep, i've almost completely stopped eating meat because the vegan and vegetarian replacements are so good.

I live in the US and I know it's a big country, so I can only speak for my little slice of the country, but we've always had vegetarian & vegan options at our restaurants, and only recently has plant based meat entered into the picture. Lots of food brought to the US from other places, like Mexico, China, India, Italy, etc. is already vegetarian or vegan, so we don't need to have fake sausage on a restaurant menu when we can have huitlacoche quesadillas, sesame noodles, chana masala, tomato pie, or vegetarian variations of other dishes.

Mostly the same for Europe. Varies by country but lots of dishes don’t rely on meat.

But you’re missing the point. The bulk of American sausages sold are fake as hell. If I’m eating fake meat, why not actually eat fake meat

But you’re missing the point. The bulk of American sausages sold are fake as hell. If I’m eating fake meat, why not actually eat fake meat

No one is making this point, lol. If you want to try to bash America for no reason in particular, at least wait for it to be on topic.

> so we don't need to have fake sausage on a restaurant menu

The point is you already do have “fake sausage on the restaurant menu”.

"The bulk of American sausages sold are fake as hell"

What in the world are you talking about?

I’m talking about how the bulk of American sausages would be classed as “fake as hell”? It’s in the comment you read, replied to and quoted.

Always is a relative term. I can assure you that as recently as the 1990s there were large swaths of the U.S. where if you didn't consume meat at each meal you would essentially be branded a communist.

In the us, "plant based meat" refers to a specific type of fake meat product (impossible burger and friends), not all meat substitutes.

I'm also in Sweden and agree. There are so many great plant-based alternatives everywhere now, and I'm constantly seeing new products and varieties on the shelves. I've found excellent alternatives for everything except whole eggs.

Good

Good ! Enough with the industrial, processed, fake stuff.

"Innovative New Process Converts Plants Into Meat By Feeding Them To Cows" (The Babylon Bee)

Don’t think I ever managed to finish one of those seitan fake chicken things, just always feels where chicken would be the lighter part of the dish you’re replacing that with stodge and it creeps up on you with an unpleasant fullness sensation.

Decided no more fake things after noticing that.

I am an advocate of the all-beef diet.

I didn't consume a single calorie from any plant-based source for the entirety of 2021 and I ended the year feeling fantastic and in the best shape of my life.

For some reason, I went off the "carnivore diet" in 2022, but I just gained belly fat and got lower back pain, so in September of 2022 I went back on it and this time I plan to stick with it for the rest of my life.

I buy my beef by the 1/4 cow and I find that it is a surprisingly time-efficient and economical way to eat. Of course, the health benefits are marvelous as well.

Everyone thinks that I must be constipated or about to die of heart disease, but I have the smoothest digestion I've ever had in my life, I absolutely never fart, and my cholesterol and blood work is exquisite.

I just wish more people were open to even hearing about, let alone eating, an all-beef diet. It is incredible the amount of resistance I get to my way of eating.

Even if all-beef cured every disease know to man it still would not be sustainable. Curiously: how do you get your vitamin C?

Fresh meat contains vitamin C. Also, vitamin C is needed for the synthesis of collagen and an all-beef diet contains a lot of collagen. Scurvy is only a problem for people like sailors in the old days who did not have access to fresh meat on extremely long voyages. Finally, consider the fact that human beings have lived in northern climates through ice ages that lasted a thousand years.

A quick consultation with Dr. Google states caveats to what you are claiming (this is data from a carnivore advocate [1] btw.): you have to consume 2.2lbs of grass fed beef to get ~25mcg of Vitamin C. The daily recommended value is 75mg [almost double if you are pregnant] (you need 1000mcg to equal 1mg). The WHO recommends at least 45mg a day to prevent scurvy. 1 decently sized orange would cover the recommended daily value. Beef seems woefully inadequate to me at least.

The next fascinating question: how much does 2.2 lbs of grass fed beef cost? Just looking at the prices for fresh organic steak is almost $40 per pound at my local supermarket. That is an amazingly expensive diet! Imagine feeding a family of four on that! That is almost $400 per day, $2800 per week, $146,000 a year in just food costs. Yikes!

[1] https://www.doctorkiltz.com/vitamin-c-on-carnivore-diet/

There is a massive community of people who are only eating ribeye steaks. Many have been doing this for over ten years. They aren’t getting scurvy. So that’s the end of that story. And you don’t need to eat grass-finished beef (it has a worse flavor profile anyway). I’m sorry you can’t afford it.

> I’m sorry you can’t afford it.

I guess when you have nothing to stand on you throw insults. Don't bother trying to trigger me, I am totally secure.

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