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Comment by aydyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

The texture and mouth feel isn't right either.

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

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