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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

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Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.

So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.

My experience has been that nobody gives a shit if you go to a restaurant in a group and order an explicitly vegetarian meal that isn't trying to emulate meat patties etc.

But they do care if you're trying to drag the entire friend group to a vegetarian restaurant.

In university, a group of friends once decided on heading out to dim sum for a celebration; one of them was Jewish, and ended up basically becoming a vegetarian for a day (since pork is all over the place in that cuisine). It was a source of lighthearted amusement for all and everyone was fully accommodating.

North American food culture doesn't depend on familiarity ("the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted") at all. If anything, being a picky eater is discouraged and a sense of culinary adventure is praised. The service at QSRs has gotten slower in part because of pressure to reconfigure their basic ingredients into new, unfamiliar recipes. (Taco Bell is basically dedicated to this craft — and the greasy ground-beef slop doesn't even really look that different from the black bean slop anyway.)

Which is to say, it's not the meat eaters trying to impose culture on others. Vegetarians and vegans in my experience demonstrate an entirely unjustified persecution complex — the "they'll tell you" stereotype arises from the fact that people simply wouldn't care if it weren't explicitly brought up. That Simpson's episode with Lisa attempting vegetarianism was amusing, but also portrayed a world entirely alien to me.

Yes, North Americans eat a fair bit of meat on average. That's not at all the same thing as the dishes being "created around" the meat. We don't say "meatballs and spaghetti" (I even started automatically typing it the normal way around); substituting the meatballs for ground meat in the sauce is as natural as substituting a different shape of pasta.

Whole pieces of meat have a particular cachet, but this is because it's harder to hide a quality issue this way. Making a patty is missing the point. A hamburger is simply not highbrow cuisine. It's one culturally-established recipe, out of many, which is preferred in the context where it is mainly for convenience as finger food.

The proper vegetarian equivalent to a burger is a vegetarian wrap. (Or veggies on a bun, if the "bun form factor" is contextually important.) The proper vegetarian equivalent to a fancy meal with whole cuts of grilled meat is a fancy meal with artfully plated grilled vegetables.

Same way that I disagree with shooting people, but I can enjoy doing so in video games

Why do so many people ask this question about burgers? It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.

> It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.

Sure, but I would say that means vegetarian cuisine has less reason to emulate the form. It's entirely arbitrary. The point of eating a burger is that it's yet another convenient way of getting meat on a bun. (cf. fast-food places describing them as "sandwiches".) The social ritual of eating burgers with friends isn't about seeing the patty extend past the edges of the bun and thinking about the cow. It's about everyone holding something they'll enjoy eating, conveniently wrapped and portable, and chowing down. The burger is recognizable as a "burger" (as distinct from a wrap or a traditional sandwich) from the bun before it's recognizable from the contents. (Which is part of why the marketplace had no problem accepting chicken burgers.)

So anything that holds the vegetables together and keeps them inside a bun ought to work just fine. If our prospective new vegetarian wants the burger filling to taste like (or match texture etc.) a beef patty, that's a personal issue.

Food is not just food: it's culture.

These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.

This is a really important point that I think a lot of people who aren't vegan don't get. There might be an understanding that food is culture (lets order chinese, or italian), but realizing that's not a culture you experience but a culture you live.

The first thing many new vegans ask is "what do I eat now?" The replacement food comes first, and beyond hits the mark a lot more than seitan does because we don't culturally eat seitan.

And even more so, I think beyond has made it so an entire generation realized they could go vegan. A black bean burger just never hit the same way.

Trust that vegans realize your assertion, but classify it in the same vein as "slavery is part of our culture, how dare you try and stop that!". It's cultural suffering that has no place in a modern society.

Of course things will Be Different. That's the Whole Point.

Have you never enjoyed a burger and a beer with your friends? Or is that you fail to see the social component of eating?

Doesn't seem relevant. There's a decent amount of veggie/vegan options these days without using fake meat.

Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans. It's is a product aimed at creating vegetarians/vegans, and that's going to be much harder.

I always feel like people are being intentionally obtuse when making these arguments. I'm vegan and know many vegans who enjoy beyond meat. We didn't go vegan because we didn't like the taste of things which were traditionally derived from animal flesh, and it's nice to be able to enjoy effectively the same foods without the animal exploitation.

That is probably coming from someone that eats meat.

> Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans

This is just flat-out wrong.

I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)

I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.

And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).

This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.

Why do you fucking think? Because it's tasty. You can disagree with the ethics of how we make animals suffer because they taste nice and still think they taste nice.

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