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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that alternative meat consumption in the U.S. is struggling but taking off in Europe.

One thing I noticed after moving to the UK: alternative milk is normalized here. Like, it’s so common to avoid milk that if you order coffee without specifying, you will be asked what kind of milk you want.

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Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking).

PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.

> There's almost no oil in the ground beef, so adding some avocado oil while browning onions and peppers was required.

Their sausage works well for that, no added oil needed.

Recipe called for ground beef. It was the most appropriate texture product for the recipe.

> never use olive oil for high temperature cooking

This is a myth and needs to die. Olive oil is fine at high temperatures, even EVOO.

https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-faq-safet...

350 degrees is not high temperature cooking. Stir fry for instance is 500+ degrees and even higher

All this in F of course

I do a lot of stir frying on high heat. Olive oil would create plastic-like compounds at these temperatures.

I use avocado oil but even that can struggle with stir fry.

Yeap. I don't like using too much heat because then you're just creating toxic compounds to breathe in and eat unnecessarily. It takes longer but oh well. I really see the difference on AQM VoC and PM2.5 ans PM10 for various cooking techniques and ingredients.

> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.

Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.

Can you say more? I've got milk allergies and I might want to try making this just for me.

You can make vegan cheeses with nut milk.

Here is a video for vegan blue cheese[1]. The basic idea is nut milk and the culture for the blue cheese.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cxMAl_LiSUU&pp=ygUZR29ydW1ldCB...

Channel is “Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen”

Sorry, I wanted to know about the egg cheese

Caveat: This is only in terms of taste, not necessarily texture. And cheese of course has a massive range of styles on its own. Below targets something like a proper parmesan cheese.

Make soy sauce marinated eggs ([1] Korean version, but there's Japanese as well). Boil them a bit more so the yolks get crumbly rather than runny. Crumble those yolks. The result tastes similar to grated/powdered parmesan or grana padano, and the texture isn't too far off. Which makes sense given the similarities between fermented soy sauce and cheese, in their glutamates and fatty acids (see e.g. isovaleric acid). It doesn't work as well with tofu, there might be a food chemist here who knows their stuff and can explain why, I assume it's something inherent to the animal proteins.

Proper Thai fish sauce (nam pla) also shares quite a bit of its taste profile with cheese. It's no coincidence that all of these are fermented foods.

[1] https://tiffycooks.com/korean-marinated-eggs-mayak-gyeran-ea...

I posted this to give you another option since you can’t have milk at all. If you watch that channel, there’s lots of high quality recipes. Thus my sharing it with you.

Egg cheese recipes tend to have milk in them any way, so you would likely not avoid needing a milk substitute.

I feel like people who want milk-free cheese may not particularly want egg-based products either.

Hence why I said there wouldn't be a market :)

Part of their financial woes might come from them paying for shelf space at retailers and/or making sale guarantees. A grocery chain will gladly carry a poorly performing product if the manufacturer is paying them to do so.

> vegan parm

Have you tried nutritional yeast? I use it everywhere I’d put parm. The taste is a bit different but as much delicious.

It's not all of the UK, you get asked in London, not in the countryside. Same in the Netherlands, you get asked in Amsterdam but not much outside.

I guess San Francisco also has much more oatmilk latte's than rural villages

I don't know I've been in Bristol and Cornwall last week and was always asked. I guess you can extend that to anywhere they might reasonably expect a Londoner to turn up.

It's more about the density of hipsters than Londoners per se. Lots of Londoners go to Canvey Island for a holiday, but you probably won't get oat milk there, because it's not that kind of Londoner. Bristol and the West Country are crawling with their own local hipsters.

(actually, you probably will oat milk on Canvey, it really is everywhere now)

> Bristol and the West Country are crawling with their own local hipsters.

So it isn't only London then?

It’s very normalized in any of the medium to large cities in the Netherlands.

(take “medium to large” with a grain of salt given that means population of 100k)

Obviously it depends on the venue. We visited many coffee shops on our recent trip through the Baltics and then across Ireland, and were always asked which of 6 "milk" options we wanted.

On the other hand, we were staying in larger cities, stopping in towns along major transit routes, and going to the "kind of coffee shops" where you would expect such a thing.

I feel like most coffee shops here in California always ask what type of milk you want, too.

What part of the UK does this happen in? I've never been asked this. I can only assume you're in London?

Woops, sorry, yes, this is in London.

According to Good Food Institute (which is a plant-based food lobbying group), 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023 and 33% of UK households bought plant-based meat alternatives at least once during 2023.

https://gfieurope.org/blog/plant-based-meat-and-milk-are-now...

For a less biased source, a 2022 ipsos poll found that 48% of the UK uses alternative milk and 58% " use at least one plant-based meat alternative in their diet".

I think things dropped a bit since then due to cost of living crisis.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/almost-half-uk-adults-set-cut-in...

> 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023

I'd estimate my household purchased ~200 litres of cow's milk in 2023. We also "purchased plant-based milk at least once" or twice when we had guests over that don't drink cow's milk.

As a counter, I cant remember the last time I wasn't asked what milk I'd prefer. In fact, I now prefer oat milk in coffee to regular milk

Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.

Interesting, in Britain it's completely the opposite. Alternative milk is way more expensive.

Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.

You can obviously buy more expensive milk to, which would give it price parity... But there are also more expensive replacement products. On average, the replacement products cost about 50-100% more.

The only way to save money via vegetarian meals is by making everything yourself and not the finished products from the supermarkets (at that point the relationship reverses - making meat meals about twice as expensive)

And I feel the urge to point out the obvious: the reason why the vegetarian replacement products get ever more space in supermarkets is precisely because they've got a gigantic profit margin, whereas the "traditional" milk/meat products have razor thin margins

> [profit margin]

Sure, but if nobody buys them, a 1000% profit margin won't get them very far. So I think that it's a good enough indicator that more people are buying these products.

Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.

Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.

First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.

This is only true if you buy the chilled branded stuff, most of the big supermarkets sell generic soy, oat, almond, coconut for £1/litre

Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.

Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.

In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.

From a "macro" nutrition perspective they're also much, much better (more protein, less carbs) and don't usually contain a bunch of weird oils and other crap.

However, they're usually a bit more expensive than actual meat.

I live in the US and it's normalized here as well. Not sure where you lived but there's ample variety of dairy alternatives that are offered at grocery stores, coffee shops, etc.

It's just the prices. Normies here are never going to spend more to get an inferior-tasting thing. If it saves money though? Suddenly it's on their radar.

Some high street chains already make some of their products with plant-based milk by default. I was shocked to hear the cow milk being an "option".

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