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The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that. I rather see more and more friends and people avoid eating meat or reduce their consumption drastically. Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.

I have been eating plant based meat alternatives for four years now, and I am never going to go back to eating meat. Yes, these products may be ultra processed food, but I cannot justify the ecological consequences and the suffering brought upon the animals just so I can eat a piece of their muscle tissue.

Our lifestyle is not sustainable, we have to look for alternatives. And young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption.

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> The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed.

I don't see this message in there. If you ask me the real message is that companies trying to sell overly processed, way too expensive, imitations of "something" will struggle. They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.

Maybe it's a US thing where people are more emotionally attached to the concept of the burger. But I think these companies would be better off selling plant based stuff that doesn't need to be processed to the moon and back with the associated costs, just to imitate the real thing, and still fall short.

Plant based food has been around for millennia, focus on that. More people would eat plant based food if it was more accessible in terms of price and effort to prepare. Imitating a meat burger wastes resources and results in something most meat eaters won't actually find as a good alternative, beyond the novelty factor.

Often I think it's largely based on the types of food people grew up with. Meat and potato diets seem to struggle with reducing the meat part of their diet. People often try to eat the same stuff but substitute meat with bad imitations of meat. In other places, as an example, Indian food has plenty of choices without meat and is delicious.

Maybe they went with burgers because it's low effort: everything else is the same (bun, salad, fries). Just replace the patty, which still goes through the same process.

Again, missing the opportunity that vegetarian/vegan food can be healthier, not just removing of animal cruelty and death.

>They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.

I love this analogy.

As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.

> People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.

This is an extremely strong generalization that is obviously not true in many cases.

It doesn't have to be true of everyone to be an entirely plausible hypothesis for why highly-processed mock-meat alternatives are struggling.

Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.

It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.

That says a lot about the public

Food is one of the joys in life that people can enjoy no matter where they are on the socioeconomic spectrum.

In the modern age, if you're poor, or just time poor, you can enjoy a tasty meal thanks to cheap food coming out of the modern food industry.

Why would you pay more for a less enjoyable experience when tasty food might be one of the only joys in an otherwise mundane or hard-up existence?

This is exactly why McDonalds is popular. It tastes relatively good, it's comforting, and it's cheap.

Agree. As a side note McDonalds veggie nuggets are from behind meat and they rank equally to the chickens one one the taste and processing scales.

The regular nuggets are from behind meat. The veggie ones are from Beyond Meat.

(Yes, this is a "nuggets are made from butt meat" joke on a typo.)

> they rank equally to the chickens one one the taste and processing scales.

What does that even mean?

I wasn't clear by grouping a subjective and a (supposed) objective opinion. I mean:

- I'd give 6/10 to the regular nugget's taste, and 6/10 to the beyond meat (sorry for typo in precedent post).

- BM and regular are both highly processed food. 22 ingredients for the regular (not even counting "spices extracts"): https://www.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/ch/nfl/pdf/2023_...

The mcdonalds/wendys/etc nuggets are junk, injection molded meat paste in 4 shapes. You have to go to popeyes or chic fil a to get actual chicken nuggets.

Enjoyment and beneficial two different concepts that often get mashed together. Excessive amounts of sugar and salt are often added to food to make it "taste" good and become "enjoyable".

Food quality is Europe is often better then the USA. USA is a heavy user of oil by-product to fertilize the planets, which have less nutritious value than non-oil based fertilizers.

Those in poverty that are on food assistance programs can only use the funds for raw goods. This means no pre-made pizza or McDonald.

* Personally, I hate the idea of going to a restaurant that benefits a Wall Street ticker and a millionaire CEO that pays their real hard-working employees a non-living wage.

Relatively cheap, it feels like fast food now has more emphasis on convenience/consistency and less on price/value (in my experience in the US midwest).

Value menu still exists

The texture and mouth feel isn't right either.

can't help but feel like including "plastic" here is just hysteria, I eat them regularly and it's certainly not accurate

Yeah i’m a meat eater just trying to avoid cholesterol (it has 0) and it’s a great alternative.

The real issue is that it’s not stocked in many supermarkets in the USA. Whole foods for example doesn’t sell it.

In a blind taste test [1] people said "it kinda tastes like plastic". It's objectively bad.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOCv-y8ckM&t=132s

These people know they're testing meat alternatives, so it's not blind — there are a lot of biases that come out as soon as you start talking about alternatives because people don't understand them.

Anecdotally I've heard similar thoughts "I can taste the chemicals" from someone that didn't realize they were eating a handmade veggie burger made from chickpeas.

> These people know they're testing meat alternatives, so it's not blind

Did you miss the part where lots of people preferred Impossible over real beef? This is just cope lol.

Beyond Meat is industrial plant-based protein. The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants. That means their market is is poor and lower middle-class folks—hence the distribution through fast food and mid-grade grocery channels.

They’re not buying plant-based proteins. (The conscientious are already eating plants.)

Beyond Meat is broken as a mass-market brand. It should be restructured as a niche play.

> young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption

Statistically insignificant [1].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922...

> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.

I don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand.

The whole dismissal doesn’t make sense to me. It’s marketed at well-off former meat eaters.

The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans just like they have for the last hundred plus years.

> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand

It’s not. The premium options for plant-based foods are vast, fresh and more expensive than BM.

Beyond Meat isn’t serving premium. It’s premium to the lowest-grade ground beef. But that’s like saying a basic economy seat is premium to Greyhound. Technically true. But misleading relativism.

> The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans

Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.

The market must be very different in the US. In the UK, Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket, other than one type of fake steak. There are some other premium brands at slightly lower prices, then cheaper brands, and finally supermarket own brands.

> Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket

I think that’s true here too. The point is it’s less expensive than both high-quality meat and very fresh vegetables bred and grown for taste versus weight.

> Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.

Not even the poor immigrants from countries with those food cultures? Really?

> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.

I have never understood the implicit premise here.

I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale; most of my supply has been purchased at about $4. By weight, it's on par with raw ground beef for protein content, and 4 lb. of that would cost several times as much.

> I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale

Not as tasty as meat or garden-fresh vegetables.

Says you. My split pea soup is awesome.

More like "hyper-processed plant-based faux-meat may not succeed".

Beyond Meat's problem is that they're catering to a tiny, highly-specific niche: people not willing to eat meat but are willing to pay through the nose for hyper-processed fake meat. So their audience is:

1. Vegan or vegetarian 2. Fairly well-off 3. Willing to consume highly-processed foods. 4. Craving a beef burger

This is all sorts of problematic as a combination.

First off, people who have stopped eating red meat (even if they haven't gone vegetarian) tend to really not enjoy the smell of beef, so their craving for a beef burger is under question from the get-go. Second, many vegetarians/vegans made that choice for health reasons (rather than ethical reasons), so "highly processed foods" are a no-go. Once you've cut out those two groups, you only get to keep the wealthier people of the leftovers.

Honestly, as a meat eater who loves vegetarian food, I just don't understand the appeal of fake meat like this. Give me a chana masala or a dal dish instead, any day of the week.

There are lots of high end vegetarian restaurants in Beijing that focus on fake meat. Pure Lotus is a famous one, that goes over the top on everything. I don’t really get the appeal, I would rather have more vegetarian-honest dishes at a veg place (I’m not a vegetarian)

And worse: really expensive compared to other brands or store brands. This is my issue with Beyond.

The biggest issue to me is that beyond and impossible aren’t just making replacements that are worse than meat, they are making things that are worse than the alternatives we already had.

A beyond burger might be more like meat than a patty made from beans or lentils, but it tastes worse and has a worse nutritional profile. Beyond chicken isn’t even all that similar to chicken and it’s a worse substitute than seitan for something like wings.

Actually, we'd expect better health outcomes on a plant-based meat patty than real meat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32780794/

Or you could take the position that it's at least noninferior. But you'd have to show the work for how you got to the idea that it's inferior.

> Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that.

Neither do I, but it's a highly competitive market that competes with both the established industrial meat market, as well as people actually educating themselves on cooking without "meat". I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy, let's just swap one thing out for another, instead of find / cook something different entirely. I see it as a kind of middle-class virtue signaling, which wasn't helped by the fact the meat replacements are (or used to be, I haven't checked) more expensive than meat. Even though on paper they should be cheaper because growing vegetables should be a lot less resource intensive and more sustainable than the meat equivalent.

Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).

And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.

Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.

In the Netherlands it's dirt cheap in all supermarkets. 550g package, so 500g of tofu is €3.72/kg, soy milk is €0.80/l.

Perhaps there isn’t much demand in your Tesco. Store brand (organic) soy milk is 0.9€ here in Paris which is cheaper than the organic cow alternative - which is subsidized btw.

6.5£ for seems super cheap for beef and I’m sure tofu can be even cheaper when optimized. I find it here at the same price but it’s organic and grown in France. I wish it become more popular where you live so the prices become more competitive.

> I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy

Pretty harsh to expect people to throw away their entire food culture just to cut down on meat consumption.

Also why does everything need to come with a snide remark?

We buy plant-based meats because we grew up with meat, love the taste, and like to recreate our favorite dishes of the past.

Everyone loves to use the phrase virtue signaling but seems blind to when they do it, like how they would never do such a lazy thing like buy a plant-based meat; they're just too much of a culinary epicurean who crafts artisanal experiences in their home kitchen.

Yet I'm virtue signaling when I want to eat a burger every couple weeks unless I support the beef industry when I do it.

> Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.

There was a period of my life when I went dairy-free as part of investigating some health issues. At first I bought almond milk. It was clearly not an adequate replacement, and rather expensive, so I quickly ended up just dropping it entirely. I can't imagine a point to using these alternatives in coffee (or tea) — I'd sooner use an artificial whitener, or again just go without (although still with plenty of sugar, knowing me).

Making almond milk is as easy as blending a handful of almonds with a gallon of water, then straining.

Well, that is probably just some kind of perception bias.

Of course vegans or vegetarians have more vegan or vegetarian friends.

If it helps you, I know hardly anyone who eats plant base meat.

Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.

I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.

I think the article is more about one company that over-expanded and now has massive debt and no chance of repaying it.

I think it’s largely a cultural problem though. Good tasting alternatives to meat and vegetarian dishes have existed in other cultures for a long time. But Western cultures, you immediately try and find a facsimile that needs a start up to produce rather than just cook something else.

Same thing with coffee. Just drink black coffee? Nope, let’s work out how to convert nut juice into something that froths using emulsifiers!

It is sustainable.

Your word, plausible

It is. Just not at the rate we consume it.

Everything comes down to world population, which has quadrupled in a century, making the previously-sustainable now unsustainable.

But even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'. And 'growth' is most easily obtained by creating more consumers and more workers.

> Everything comes down to world population

This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.

> even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'

Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.

Degrowth is inevitable.

Whether it will happen "naturally" because of climate catastrophes and war, or whether we will somehow understand this and do something before it's too late, I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.

> I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.

I can't assure you that the moon or the planet Mercury will exist in 2100, because 75 years is much too far ahead to forecast if we do or don't get e.g. von Neumann replicators by 2040 years and spend the next 60 using them to disassemble either or both into a Dyson swarm.

HN Bio: FinTech + Space + B2C angel & seed investor. Jackson Hole local; frequently in New York and the Bay Area.

Yeah, I can see why degrowth looks extreme to you. It must be rather frightening to lose your sense of control, comfort, and purpose in an unsustainable path.

> why degrowth looks extreme to you

To me personally? It’s fine. I work fewer hours than I did a decade ago, and generally travel and consume less than I did then too.

The wealthy can do with degrowth fine since degrowth implies deflation. The wealthy were doing fine before the agricultural revolution, too, for example.

Is it? Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth. Even if it isn’t us, there will be a last generation that enjoys growth as the motor of wealth. At some point, resources will deplete and the standard of living will decrease as a consequence. This is logically inevitable. Everyone just pretends this can go on and on without stopping, but that’s wrong.

> Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth

As you say, this is simple.

Growth doesn’t require increasing use of finite resources. A more-productive widget can (and generally is) less material intensive than its predecessor. The material and even energy intensity of GDP has been falling in the developed world for decades. Value is subjective; its substrate isn’t finite. A world of artists producing digital works could be incredibly materially unintensice, but still feature growth, as an absurd example.

Even that doesn't work as "infinite": eventually you reach atoms and bits and thermodynamic limits, the maximum complexity of our world is still finite.

And sure, there's room for now, but 3%-year-on-year growth halves the remaining gap to whichever limit is critical every 24 years. I'm not at all clear how close e.g. current computer tech is to the Landauer limit, but it is definitely still developing much faster than 3%-y.o.y.

For truly infinite growth, we'd have to find a way to make mass and dark energy in balanced quantities — that would allow us to have not only arbitrarily more actual stuff, but also make sure it doesn't then collapse into a black hole.

When we look at the places that have experienced degrowth in this country such as the midwestern cities, it is hard to argue today that the effects were truly all that bad. They still have all the services, institutions, and plenty of the entertainment options you'd expect. Major hospitals and universities. They aren't full of derelict homes either, those have been all more or less razed by now.

The biggest benefit is far more people can actually afford a life of property ownership in these cities. Look at what 250k buys you in these places vs the places that didn't experience a degrowth period. We are talking a complete 4 bedroom home outright vs a 10% down payment on a comparable home.

This might seem perverse why it could be beneficial to experience degrowth. But the answer to that is simple: no where actually accommodates growth sufficiently to keep costs from going out of control. So a degrowth period really means prices are no longer being significantly influenced by an ever incoming class of high income earners, but are more in line with the actual median incomes found in the area.

> When we look at the places that have experienced degrowth in this country such as the midwestern cities

Do they work without subsidies from the growing parts of the country?

Look at the map in this linked article (1). Seems like southern states are the ones getting most subsidy. Midwest for the most part relatively lower on the spectrum.

And what is even the subsidy? Interstate road works? Hardly matters to your daily life. The other subsidies are probably things like welfare benefits or medicaid, which might be a significant thing in your daily life if you qualify but if you don't are also irrelevant.

Lower property prices on the other hand lift all boats. Renters benefit. Homeowners benefit. Corporations benefit. At every income level in the market.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-federal-aid-r...

I really don't think subsidy is a factor in keeping things cheap in terms of cost of living. I think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory. For example it is even cheaper to live in Mexico due to this relationship, and there is probably a lot less subsidy going on there.

> Interstate road works? Hardly matters to your daily life

Sure does if you want trucked vegetables in the winter!

> think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory

The American housing market is broken. You are absolutely correct in that shrinking Rust Belt cities sidestep this problem by being in the rare position of housing surplus.

What I’m challenging is the notion that life in those cities would be as nice as it is if the entire country copied their population and economic contraction.

> This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.

It's not nonsense. In overwhelming majority of cases GDP is tied to energy consumption. We have not yet learned how to decouple it.

With renewables, there is faint hope, but the transition is slower than we would ideally like. It also remains to be seen what % can be decoupled by pure solar and wind (hydro is already tapped out, mostly).

> Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.

So is growth at any cost.

> So is growth at any cost

Yes. It is. We deeply regulate growth in every economy.

> It also remains to be seen what % can be decoupled by pure solar and wind

That's entirely dependent what % of the planet we feel like tiling in PV; wind is ultimately solar powered, and there's more places we can usefully put PV than wind anyway.

Environmentalists will be Very Unhappy if we tile the Sahara with something as close to black as PV is; but that location alone (we have more deserts), using middling quality PV (20%, we have stuff more than twice that good), and the current global average capacity factor (13%, but it's a good latitude and could plausibly get 23%), would still be 11.8 times current global primary energy demand, which itself is 6-7 times current global electricity demand.

> hydro is already tapped out

As a source, yes; as storage, no. I only mention this because it's very easy to mix them up.

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