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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.

I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.

I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.

The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much

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Potato != extracted potato starch

Peas != extracted pea protein

They're not the same thing.

I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.

It doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.)

Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.

FWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea.

Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.

the issue with wild meat is going to be all parasites in the animal, at least according to friends who hunt (and when they managed to get something, which doesn't seem to be a given).

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