Plant-based meat substitutes not popular among mainstream flexitarians | Hacker News Reader

Plant-based meat substitutes not popular among mainstream flexitarians

medicalxpress.com

1 pointPaulHoule10 comments

Had these sauced soy jerkies from China that taste much closer to fatty beef slices than any plant based meat substitutes, which is still too much trade off in taste and cost. I feel like if plant based VCs should have just flown to Asia to try some plant-based temple foods, and then spend some (most) of their marketting budgetting openning faux meat restaurants (not just fast food) and then move products into grocery stores. That said, I tihnk plant-based efforts by western VCs with their profit expectations probably always doomed. There's no way I'll ever regularly pay premium for plant-based over normal meat, until it's commoditized (or even subsidized) to margins, it's not viable as mass substitute.

A 1970s text book by ecologist Eugene Odum suggests that environmental pressures will eventually push people to meat substitutes. His brother Howard developed a system of environmental accounting that tried to track back all the energy in a product or service back to sunlight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy

Inevitably you find that there are some parts of the product where you can calculate the emergy directly, but some things you can't. You take the dollar value of the remaining parts and multiply that by a factor of emergy/dollars across the economy.

Practically what that means is that expensive things are probably ecologically bad because money is a license to spend resources. If you can track down exactly where the money goes in an $8 gallon of e-Fuel maybe it really beats a $3 gallon of gas, but money in general is a license to buy stuff that has environmental impacts so if the administrators of a solar plant in texas are driving around in a big-ass track or the investors in a fake meat company are flying around the world in a private jet to conferences to spread the word of the great work they're doing, that's an environmental impact.

>but money in general is a license to buy stuff that has environmental impacts

I've had the same thought for a while, and when extrapolate thought to extremes, the money I spend on "premium" / "socially responsible " or however branding used to justfy goods that support advanced economy producers with high consumption habits "feels" like it would contribute to net contribution over say, some sweat shop owner/worker in ASEAN making margins, and spending their wages on essentials. Then again past certain point, essentials turn into big QoL items like new concrete housing. Ultimately, you can only do embodied energy calculation that factor in so many degrees of seperation, but (IMO) merely spending less money on things = contributing less money for recirculation used consume more things. But on large enough scale, that's also how growth stalls and economies stagnate.

Right, expensive=bad is not automatically true but you should be weary of expensive=good.

Plant based meat substitutes are a nice treat occasionally, but they are way too expensive to be an every day thing. Also, Impossible products make my guts rot. My favorite by far are the Beyond Chicken patties with Tikka Masala.

I'm not surprised that they are not very popular though. The best vegetarian dishes are the ones not trying to replace/replicate meat dishes.

I enjoyed things like Boca Burgers and Quorn back in the day. It’s not clear to me that the new generation products are substantially better: there is like 20x the hype (the media just never wrote about those things 20 years ago) but at best 50% more self space for products in the store.

Ten years the product space in the store will be the same or maybe another 50% more but blessedly there won’t be so much hype and chatter. The VC-based “startup” model seems to be mismatched for this field, I mean there was no getting Quorn into Y Combinator but they got on shelves. This megafactory got built without any western VC or hype:

https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo

but you can get a pack of delicious straw mushrooms at the Chinese grocery store for about $2 in the US because they can grow mushrooms for six months with people only handling them with a forklift.

Because ground meat texture and taste is nothing great. It’s collagen and fat marbling .. and the refined cooking techniques that make meat eating pleasurable.

Plant based meat texture can be easily replicated with.. plant based dishes!

meat analogs trending down! hardcore carnivores not down. replace meat with nuts or mushrooms, says study. thoughts?

Let’s see, tofu, tempeh, seitan have been around a long time and are affordable and I think pretty tasty.

There is no replacement for meat given the common diet, just like there is no replacement for ICEs given the common transportation infrastructure. Underlying fundamentals must change.

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