Biz Stone Explains Why Twitter’s Co-Founders Are Betting On Vegan Meat Startup

The weirdest thing about it is that some people are seriously allergic to it so it's got a heck of a warning label.

Yours doesn't, perhaps.

Many folks are vegetarian for ethical reasons, and many of those people still really liked the taste of meat. Letting them experience the tasty without the ethical issues seems win-win.

I know plenty of vegetarians who like bacon or meat-flavoured potato chips/crisps[1]. That doesn't mean that every vegetarian should or does like such things, just that there are lots of different types of people out there.

have you tried Quorn

Admittedly, I'm a meat-eater, but I have always found Quorn profoundly disappointing, and very expensive for what it is. When cooking, say, a vegetarian curry, I usually substitute sweet potato in its place.

[1] I hasten to add that the chips/crisps in question are, as far as chemistry is concerned, 100% vegetarian ;)

However, the founders might be going after a different market than vegetarians like ourselves. They are going after the unwashed masses who aren't vegetarian. Providing meat analogues that are meat-ie might get people who are vegetarian to slowly cut out real meat from their diets. This is exactly what we need for the environment.

As far as meatless products go, they all start to taste the same after a while. However, Gardein does make some great food.

For whom? Certainly not for me, I'm quite willing to pay a cost premium for real meat.

For poor third-world villagers, then? I have my doubts. I mean, so many cultures in the world attach so much cultural significance to eating meat, and the less often you get to eat it the more significant it is.

As far as point-missing innovations go, this reminds me of the Fleshlight more than anything else. You'd think that "feels just like a real vagina, only much cheaper and less trouble" would be a selling point, but it turns out that they're significantly less popular than the real thing.

Oh, I'm sure they'll sell some of this stuff, there's a whole freezerful of gross-looking fake-meat products at my local supermarket. But it's not going to change the habits of any genuine omnivores.

I also wouldn't be surprised, given the incredibly low cost of textured gluten, if there were a fair number of Chinese restaurants out there passing it off as "duck" in their dishes.

So far, vegetarian meat substitutes have been treated as a niche luxury good and made very expensive for western markets, but this is an artificial effect caused by demographics on the demand side, not a matter of supply costs. You can see proof of this by shopping for fake meat at Asian markets and comparing the prices to those in the hippie section of their local supermarket. A bag of dried soy protein that will turn into the equivalent of several pounds of ground beef can easily be found for under $3.

I think you answered your own question there.

Oh by the way you've already put TiO2 several times in your mouth

Erm, Tripe, blood pudding, sweet breads VS Tiramasu, Sushi, Lobster

Sorry Gran!

To list a few: Chlorine dioxide, Lauramide arginine ethyl ester, Potassium diacetate, Sodium hypochlorite, Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, Ammonium hydroxide, Sodium tripolyphosphate, Bacteriophage preparation, Cetylpyridinium chloride

Plenty of saturated fat in coconut oil, chocolate, etc.

>There's no good evidence of that

I love when people use "there's no good evidence" to mean "there is a tiny amount of evidence to the contrary, and that's the only evidence I am choosing to pay attention to". People are silly.

I'm not a vegetarian, because I love my meat, but if you can give me a meat replacement that's indistinguishable in nutrition, texture, and flavour, what's wrong with that?

For starters, the small intestine of carnivores is much shorter than non-carnivores and has a higher level of acidity in the stomach. This is because the nutrients need to be extracted and the waste expelled before the meat rots inside the body(which it partially does in a human body since our intestine is much longer by comparison than other carnivores).

There's also the issue of short, dull, canines and much smaller temporalis muscle that powers the jaw. This is why we have to spend more time chewing and grinding meat down into smaller pieces instead of just tearing off chunks and swallowing it whole like most carnivores. We wouldn't be able very easily bite through hide and tear chunks of meat off nor would we be able to digest (most)raw meat without getting sick.

Most of our carnivorous traits are remnants from evolution that were never replaced. We more closely resemble a herbivore that has maintained some basic primal ability to process meat than we do a carnivore that has adapted to process vegetation.