I've been a vegetarian for the last decade and change, and I simultaneously think that finding a cheaper, appealing alternative to meat is both a fantastic opportunity for the world and a really difficult thing.
I used to love meat when I was a meat-eater, and I'm a fairly picky eater that dislikes many vegetable options. (Green peppers are nasty and food-destroying in my opinion, which immediately removes over half the vegetarian options out there, just as an example), so I consider myself a decent bellweather for people who like the tastes of meat but want to actually eat less of it for various reasons.
The options that already exist today are quite varied. Boca, Morningstar, Beyond Meat, and Quorn are all big names that offer meat alternatives that taste VERY different from each other. Most of my meat eating friends won't even try any of these, sight unseen. (When they see them, they tend to have even more reluctance). So, while I think it's absolutely worthwhile to make alternatives that seem more "real", there is still a stigma to overcome just by virtue of being fake. And in america, at least, where meat-eating is tied to masculinity and bacon is worshipped, that's a tough stigma to shake.
Decent imitations of highly processed meat exist already - I've had chicken nuggets that meat eaters had no idea were fake, and I fed my in-laws a "turkey loaf" dinner for Thanksgiving for years without them realizing - but matching the taste of "quality" meats hasn't yet happened.
I'm in the same camp as you. Vegetarian since 1989, vegan since 1999. I can certainly say that the quality of fake meats has drastically improved in the past 10 years (see https://gardein.com/, http://fieldroast.com/, and http://beyondmeat.com/ as examples), but the stigma surrounding them persists.
Short anecdote: There's a donut shop in my town that sold vegan and regular donuts in adjacent but separate displays. In some instances, the donuts on the regular side were also vegan, identical in every way save for the label. They found that they sold far better without the word "vegan" attached to them, and eventually stopped labelling them altogether, providing a side-menu to help vegans identify which are which.
Point being, perception is surprisingly important when it comes to taste.
> And in america, at least, where meat-eating is tied to masculinity and bacon is worshipped, that's a tough stigma to shake.
I'd argue that it really doesn't matter how similar to meat these products get, if they're still seen as "fake". Even if delicious, people tend to gravitate towards "real". But hey, maybe they've found a market that wants this that I'm just not seeing.
I think the problem here is that "vegan" is used to describe two different things:
1. A product that has been changed to not use any animal products.
2. A product that already fits within those constraints.
Products in the former group have a history of being noticeably worse than their non-vegan counterpart, so "vegan" carries the stigma of "tastes worse than it looks". That stigma then wafts over to products in the second category.
Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.
I think there's room for a third category, "things that need to be changed inconsequentially". Many recipes have egg or gelatine in them for functional purposes; usually as "glue" to hold things together, like in pancakes, where you aren't including the eggs for their flavour. You can easily replace them with vegan alternatives like ground flax. As a bonus it is usually cheaper and as dry ingredients they keep forever.
That's a great point. I wonder if there's an elegant/clean way to denote that something is vegan but not changed to be vegan. "Naturally fat-free" is good, and the sort of plant logo that some restaurants use at least avoid the word "vegan" which may help.
Sometimes plant-based is used as a more socially acceptable word for "vegan". I think there's also a difference between titling a product "vegan" and specifying that it is vegan. "Vegan donuts" isn't as appealing to non-vegans as "Donuts (vegan)". Likewise I'd be discouraged to get something labeled "Gluten free cookies", but if I saw "Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (gluten-free)" I wouldn't hold it against them.
On a related note: When I was vegan, I said I exclusively ate things made from plants. It was better received and understood. Also I would antagonize friends by giving them vegan pb&js, vegan pickles, vegan French fries, vegan Coke, etc.
Interestingly, if it's 'throwback' coke with white/processed sugar in it, it's NOT vegan, as animal products (mostly bone/etc.) are used in the production of that sugar.
HFCS modern coke is generally considered vegan.
Pretty terrible analogy. I have no idea if pickles are vegan or not. I would assume they are but I'm not steeped in the vegan ethos and many things have surprised me in the past as being non-vegan.
Animal products are constantly snuck into processed, preserved and packaged foods. I'd find it funny, but wouldn't be surprised, to find that something derived from an animal found its way into a jar of pickles 'for flavor'.
>Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.
Are you sure marketing didn't just want to include another buzz word to attract sales? 90% of the food that got labeled fat-free 10 years ago (Before fat was good again...) was always fat free.
You've also got the issues with processed food: Butchering a critter and cooking it up is a lot more natural than a highly engineered mixture from a group of chemical engineers.
It may be that all the processing involved in making the plant compounds look/smell/taste/feel like meat are harmless, even beneficial, but it's perfectly reasonable to withhold trust for some time - especially to those of us who grew up with "Margarine is so much healthier than butter!"
The chemicals they use to keep the animals foodstuffs free of pests and weeds, along with the antibiotics pumped into them to keep them healthy while in packed conditions?
Its all chemical engineered now, unless you can afford to buy a piece of land and DIY.
The sheer scale of industrialisation of livestock is an American thing, especially with beef.
Most Beef in the world is grass fed, and not pumped full of antibiotics. Generally animals are more or less left in a field until they're old enough, then taken in a slaughtered.
Yeah right, "in the field". Nowadays you can do old-style animal farming if you have three cows and want to sustain you own family. Otherwise, if you want to sell it, it's just not cost effective.
Its similar in Ireland. The cows here are all grass fed (I grew up in the country, lots of farming friends) and the health standards don't allow the "pumping full of antibiotics" that we keep hearing about.
Yeah, I've worked next to a lunch place that describes itself as "plant inspired" rather than "vegan." It turns out that everything they serve is vegan, and they'll confirm it if you ask, but by taking the word "vegan" out of anything public-facing, it's a lot easier to get people to be interested in eating there.
I personally eat a low-meat diet (no more than 3 servings of meat a week), but don't generally feel the need to eat any kind of meat-substitutes; there are plenty of delicious, already vegetarian or already vegan foods. It does help eating only vegetarian and not fully vegan; cheese and eggs are good sources of both flavor and protein, and make a good "center" of a dish or "main course" of a meal that is sometimes hard to do with purely vegan food without substitutes, but I've also had plenty of delicious fully vegan meals without meat substitutes.
And even when getting closer to meat base dishes, I'm personally more likely to order a "black bean burger" or "chickpea burger" than a generic "veggie burger"; it helps to know what I'm getting, while a lot of the meat substitutes are complicated and processed. And for those processed items that do more often act as a stand in for meat, I generally prefer the more minimally processed ones like seitan, tempeh, or tofu, rather than a "tofu burger" that has a whole bunch of other things in it to make it more similar to a hamburger.
I am similar. I eat a 60-70% plant-based diet, but am also a fan of burgers and the occasional steak. I am really not that interested in an artificially created burger or steak. It is just not appetizing. If I am having something vegetarian, I prefer any of the excellent options you can prepare in your kitchen.
Yes, but there are many reasons to be vegetarian. I can easily imagine a lot of people that would like to skip meat for ethical reasons (including me, to a certain extent), but do not want to give up the flavor palette that meat offers.
It's not just taste. These alternatives are loaded with carbs and just aren't practical for a low carb diet. This is coming from someone who eats a ton of fiber loaded vegetables. It's really hard to find a reasonable substitute for meat proteins that is as efficient and delicious as meat. Protein is not a huge portion of my diet, but it is very important.
The number of people who need to be on a keto diet is incredibly tiny though. Most people who are on them do not need to be, all evidence shows low carb diets are equally effective regardless of ketosis or not.
Hi. I have Type 2 diabetes and PCOS. 3 months of a ketogenic diet lowered my A1c from 6.8 ("you have diabetes") to 5.6 ("normal range"). I've also lost 25 lbs in that 3 months without feeling hungry or deprived.
I use to crave carbs, and would wind up binging on them. Now most of them do not even register as 'food' to my brain. However, on days when I eat maybe a few too many berries instead of sticking to green veggies, I can feel those cravings trying to come back. We're talking an amount that maybe pushes my daily net carb intake to the 50-60g range instead of the 20-30g range, not something that would push me over 100g. A ketogenic diet is definitely best for my health. I would rather eat a ketogenic diet than suffer the eventual consequences of diabetes - blindness, amputation, dialysis, and death.
>3 months of a ketogenic diet lowered my A1c from 6.8 ("you have diabetes") to 5.6 ("normal range"). I've also lost 25 lbs in that 3 months without feeling hungry or deprived.
All of which would be true on a low carb diet without ketosis. Which you may very well have been doing since you don't know if you were in ketosis or not.
> A ketogenic diet is definitely best for my health
Your completely unsupported anecdote of a single person claiming so does not counter the overwhelming scientific evidence consisting of actual studies, with multiple participants, proper measures, and control groups.
Okay let me just put it this way. When I consistently eat under ~30g net carbs a day, not only does my blood glucose remain at non-organ-damaging levels, but I can effortlessly resist the temptation to eat things like bread, pizza, and pasta.
When I start eating more than 50g net carbs a day, suddenly I want to shove all the pizza in the world in my mouth. Given that pizza will absolutely kill me, a diabetic, via kidney damage, a "very low carb, high fat" diet (which is much easier to explain/abbreviate as "ketogenic") diet is best for me, personally.
I know it's an anecdote, and it certainly doesn't mean a VLCHF diet is right for anyone else, but it's working for me.
>all evidence shows low carb diets are equally effective regardless of ketosis or not.
Well I will take my anecdotic evidence (and my girlfriend's, and two friends') over your scientific studies. Fat and protein make me feel full well below my caloric needs for maintaining the same weight; I am hardly ever full with carbs, and even when my stomach feel fulls, my brain keeps wanting me to eat.
I don't understand low-carb/keto diets, outside of treating an actual disease. A person can eat 5-10 lbs. of "wet" (i.e. not grains and starches) fruits and vegetables a day and stay well below 2,000 calories, rounding it off with some fish, nuts, etc. for protein and oils. It's physically difficult to eat 1,000 calories of salad at 100-200 calories/pound. The problem is it also costs about 5 times as much as a classic junk food diet (but not much if any more than a beef and bacon and cheese diet).
Bag of chips, $2. Head of romaine 99¢. I can eat a bag of chips. I doubt I can eat that whole head of lettuce. By the time I add sunflower seeds, tomato, bit of goat or parmesan cheese, chopped olives I still think it's less or about the same price as chips.
Exactly, and the bag of chips is at least 1,000 calories. Up to 2,500 calories if we're talking about those generic ripple chips. The lettuce is 50-100 calories. If you're getting most of your daily calories from the likes of lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, broccoli, etc., you can eat steadily all day and still have a hard time hitting 2,000 due to the sheer bulk. But it's gonna cost.
I think the person you're replying to is talking about the difference between maintaining a low-carb diet, and ketosis, which requires you to maintain a low-carb diet but specifically IIRC forces your body to break down fats instead of sugars in your body for energy.
I'm implying that non-low carb diets aren't as effective in my experience as they make me feel hungrier, thus making me want to always eat more than I should to lose weight.
Sure. But what you quoted was a statement that the effect of low-carb didn't depend on ketosis. Which is a very different statement---though I don't know if it's true.
(I am very sympathetic to low-carb eating, and am trying a ketogenic diet right now.)
Also, sugar is listed in the ingredients list, while the nutrition facts list it at 0 (might be rounding?)
GMO or not, even the wikipage of carrageenan (e407) says:
"Some animal studies indicate tumor promotion or initiation by carrageenan.[22][23][24][25] In an industry-funded study, Cohen & Ito discuss methodological problems with four such studies, along with several evaluations of genotoxic activity, and state that there is no credible evidence that carrageenan contributes to tumor promotion or colon cancer."
But if you're spending nearly half of your carb allowance on the "protein" parts of your meals (1 serving/3 meals a day = 21g), how many fresh vegetables are you now not eating to stay under your 50g allowance?
Huge problem with the vegan meat replacements is that they're a lot more expensive than beef, around $7/lb vs ground beef at $3/lb. Like with coal vs solar, for imitation meat to win the market it needs to get less expensive than real meat (and taste as good).
"The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket,” replies Pollan, “but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic."
$20 billion comes up under $100 per person per year in the US. Even giving it a generous x4 multiplier to account for the people subsidizing the industry without being consumers, at $400 per year, given the $3 and $7 prices by parent, you would need to eat under 100 pounds of meat for meat replacements to be viable. The average American allegedly consumes close to 200 pounds of meat[0] per year, so it ends up still being quote economical.
You're making the incorrect assumption that vegetarians are replacing whatever meat they were eating with the more-expensive meat substitutes. As I noted in my comment above, there are plenty of meat substitutes and alternatives that are much cheaper than $7/lb.
The US is fixing that problem. Starting December 2016, a vet must examine and prescribe antibiotics for each animal; it will no longer be allowable to preemptively dose an entire herd just to enhance production.
You can't just compare to ground beef though. Plenty of meat and cheese products are the same price or more than equivalent meat alternatives.
[Aside: Actually, it's kind of interesting to consider that meat alternatives top out at a relatively low price point, whereas meat, fish, etc can get really expensive.]
Just like in the meat market, there are cheaper and more expensive meat alternatives. Compare tofu at ~$2/lb vs Field Roast at ~$6/lb, where Field Roast is more toward the gourmet end of the non-meat spectrum.
I would think that if you're not a meat eater, tofu is your ground beef equivalent. Or maybe beans, lentils, quinoa, etc, which are also pretty cheap.
Also, home made seitan is super cheap and much easier to produce than home made meat.
Pigs are very cheap to raise, they'll happily get to slaughter weight quickly on "waste" foods. They don't need lots of land and they provide lots of meat for their relative size.
With the surge of popularity of bacon, there are a lot of pigs being brought to market. Any part of the pig that isn't bacon ends up being cheap because supply/demand.
agree with what your saying and these burgers would probably sell fine if they didn't get labeled as vegan. but yeah there must be a specific market that does want this, because we've been seeing fake meats for years.
personally I'm in a different camp. I've been vegan for a while now. I pretty much never buy fake meat or fake cheese. I don't really understand it. I just eat food I make from the bulk section of the grocery store. I don't see a need to have a "boody plant burger that smells like meat" or a boca burger, that just tastes like a...boca burger. honestly I rather just have a patty made out of blackbeans and lentils that doesn't taste anything like meat. seems way simpler to me.
I like vegetarianism in concept, and would like to eat less meat, but I like meat, A LOT. If alternatives were more meatlike (fingers crossed for indistinguishable) I'd gladly eat that regardless of label. Some reservations about macro contents.
I understand where you're coming from, but some people don't want to change a habit, but are fine with substitutes.
From a marketing perspective, I'd suggest the way to shift perceptions would be to run taste test challenges similar to the ones Pepsi ran back in the day. If the burgers are as close to meat versions as they say then it could be good to have people who are reluctant to try it to at least give it a go. Even if they can still tell the difference, the difficulty in telling them apart may be enough to change the perception of the product.
Werent those shown to be flawed? My source is Gladwells books, but the pepsi vs coke taste test favoured pepsi because it was sweeter. But in drinking the full can people found pepsi overwhelmingly sweet and coke was more popular. My guess would be a similar thing would happen. You could optimise to appeal to low-quantity taste tests. but as a full proper meal a lot needs to be done (imo)
When I visit India and eat vegetarian food properly prepared by a culture that has refined vegetarian cuisine beyond "fake meat", I don't miss meat at all.
Much of Western food is only expected to be an accompaniment to a meat dish, which is why you can't just cut meat out and eat the vegetable dishes you're used to when you're eating meat as well, imnsho.
Not a vegetarian but I do go out with many Indian colleagues who are vegetarian and have family members or friends who dont eat meat.
I do agree with the assumption that western vegetarians tend to want meat replacements. The biggest difference for me was seeing how a lot of Indian cuisine is actually unhealthy. Most everything is fried in oil or has so much clarified butter its unhealthy. The Indian diet (at least the people in my office) seems more unhealthy vs the western vegetarian diet and several people in my office have had heart attacks.
It is true for most of the restaurants serving different cuisines.
Home-prepared Thai food is healthier than the food at Thai restaurants.
Replace Thai with Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indian, and it would still hold true.
Having eaten a lot of home-prepared South Indian food, I'm not sure I really agree. Home cooked food has the ability to be healthier than restaurant prepared, but I don't know if there's enough data to really claim one way or the other - homecooked is not healthier just by virtue of being homecooked.
As an Indian and a vegetarian, I agree with both those assertions. Indian cuisine(s.. there are many regional cuisines) is full of naturally delicious vegetarian (and even vegan) dishes. But that also includes a lot of starchy and fried foods. But there's such an abundant diversity available that you can prepare lots of healthy, delicious menus with different set of constraints (high protein, low carb, low fat, high fat/protein etc.)
Many Indian restaurants try to focus more on taste of the dish and hence the dishes tend to be not-so-healthy. But, traditional Indian cooking doesn't have the same levels of oils or clarified butter. The dishes are pretty healthy and filling too. Things have gotten bad only since the past 2-3 decades with the adoption of hydrogenated oils, refined grains.
My experience runs slightly against yours. Yes the restaurant food is more on the tasty but unhealthy. But even in general I've found the vegetarian indian diet to still be high in fats and sugar. Empirically (I havent checked the data on this) theres a lot of diabetes (related to carbohydrates) and cholesterol problems in india (related to fats, kind of). my call is despite being vegetarian, the typical indian isn't any more healthier than say the typical american if we're just looking at diet alone.
You are probably right on that though Indian restaurant food seems to be that way to cater to customer demand. At home the food tends to be more healthy but there is a tendency toward excess carbs.
People still think that oil and butter are bad for you, despite the mountains of research that saturated fat is not unhealthy, and the new research regarding weight loss that the high fat Mediterranean diet is better than low fat diets.
The only reasonable complaints re Indian food are high carbs and low amounts of high quality protein
I'm a huge fan of Indian food. (Because it's tasty, AND because they are one of the few foreign countries that uses the same definition of "vegetarian" that I do).
That said, I actually have a fairly limited range there too: if you don't like yogurt, dill, bell peppers, cucumbers, or okra, a lot gets cut out. That's on me an my tastes, not the Indian food, but it's still a reality I have to deal with.
Even as a meat eater I don't eat fish unless I caught it myself. Commercial fishing has gotten out of control and I refuse to contribute to the practice, as well as the shocking frequency that fish are mislabeled.
This is such a huge gripe for me. I love fish but hate the industry. In fact I wish we could have a 5 year moratorium on any fishing. Fishing is the best example for the tragedy of the commons.
There was an episode of Archer recently that was a crossover with the old Sealab cartoon (2021, the "spoof" version to be specific) and Captain Murphy was holding the world hostage with "nukes" (he didn't have any nukes) in demand for a moratorium on fishing. It wasn't the first time I had heard demands for such a pause, but it was definitely a position I wasn't expecting to see echoed in Archer.
In some other cartoon as a wink and a nod to the parents, sure. But definitely not Archer.
There's plenty of disparity on what vegetarian means in India too. It varies by region and caste and plenty of other things. Some find eggs, fish, and other things acceptable, some don't, and only ~30% of observant Hindus would fit a strict definition of vegetarian. Brahmins are often more strict, etc etc.
Good to know. Reminds me of my favorite expression. "Inside the U.S., a hundred years is a long time. Outside the U.S., a hundred miles is a long distance".
Also, gelatin is considered vegetarian by some, or at least there are some vegetarians that don't realize that gelatin is an animal product (just some sort of "mystery" ingredient, I guess).
For those who are wondering if there are alternative to animal gelatin, Japanese have been using agar [1] (they call it kanten) for centuries to prepare sweets. It's similar to gelatin, but made from algae, so it is absolutely vegetarian. As far as I know all Japanese traditional sweets that require something gelatinous are made with it, so they are safe to it if you are vegetarian/vegan.
Wow, I didn't realise that agar the same products used in science experiments/testing was also the food thing (wiki lists uses as microbiology and culinary) . I recall the smell of the agar used in the lab to be very strong and quite off putting if thought of as a food. Has your experience of the aroma of culinary agar been positive?
The agar used in labs generally has a lot of other (potentially smelly) stuff put in it, depending on what kind of microorganisms you're trying to grow.
This can become an issue for religious vegetarians, too. In India when you say that something is vegetarian it contains no gelatin or animal fat or anything like that. Vegetarian food is prepared separately.
Orthodox Hindus who move to the West often struggle with this. Even ice cream (marked as vegetarian) sometimes has gelatin. You can ask for vegan food, which is an approximation, but "no milk" is the antithesis of many Indian diets :)
I know such families who basically never eat out ever, and prepare things from scratch at home. Though they usually are more lax on allowing the kids to eat pseudo-vegetarian food.
Not all ice creams, some of them. When I say marked I mean in general if you ask the store; doesn't need to be actually marked (though some foods are marked this way, even if they contain gelatin)
Going by wiki, I believe there are non-animal sources or substitutes to gelatin "Partial, nonanimal alternatives to gelatin include the seaweed extracts agar and carrageenan, as well as pectin and konjac.".
There are substitutes. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that many people will see gelatin itself as vegetarian or as some sort of "mystery" ingredient that they don't really know the source of. I didn't know the source of gelatin until I was iat university, for example.
Sure. Usually it boils down to whether fish/seafood is considered vegetarian, but sometimes it also includes broth or animal byproducts.
For the purposes of definition, I use the below, which appears to be the general consensus definitions in America, though I'm sure some will dispute this.
Vegetarian: (also called ovo-lacto vegetarian) No meat (including fish/seafood). Eggs, dairy, and honey are okay. Byproducts that involved killing animals are not. Those vegetarians that are so for health reasons often skip that last part, and many vegetarians only go "so deep" when looking, so they don't worry if bleached (with animal bone) flour was used, or if the cheese was made with animal-based rennet. Lastly, insects and some low-nervous system mussels occupy a questionable space that isn't often discussed at large, but like the "so deep" issue should likely be considered "not strictly vegetarian but some vegetarians have exceptions".
Vegan: Vegetarian, plus no eggs, dairy, or honey. They tend to look deeper and more strictly than vegetarians, though the general belief that you shouldn't be killing things is shared between those vegetarians and vegans that are so for ethical reasons. (other vegan restrictions aren't food based)
Pescatarian: Vegetarian, but fish and seafood are permitted.
Some examples:
In the American southeast (not a foreign country, but might as well be) pork is as much a "spice" as a food. Many vegetable offerings at restaurants are seasoned with pork. At one cafe in Atlanta I asked if a soup was vegetarian and they said yes...then after a moment said "but it does have chicken stock", because in their mind anything that wasn't "chunks of meat" was vegetarian. (also, since I have the pulpit, as a once lover of ham, what the south does to ham is a crime. It has two varieties: salty, and really salty. I forget which is "country ham" and which is "virginia ham", but both made it easier for me to drop pork from my diet.)
In Chinese food, fish is generally considered vegetarian, and oyster sauce is particularly prevalent. If I request something "vegetarian", they'll avoid using pork-based seasonings, but will include oyster sauce unless I'm very explicit and make a pain of myself.
My Japanese friends tell me there's no point in me trying to eat there. The only option that doesn't involve seafood is "monk training food", which is...not intended to be tasty.
Thai food and Vietnamese food have, I think, some of the same issues. I know curry paste is often made with shrimp, and where an Indian restaurant will pay attention, Thai places often won't. (That said, I love Thai, so when I find a place where I trust the staff "gets it", they get a lot of business)
I wasn't vegetarian when I was in Europe, so I don't know how easy it is to be vegetarian there, but I know a lot of places that had a strong Catholic influence consider fish to be "non-meat".
In many of these places I could try to be explicit, but that's often painful because there are sometimes language issues, because I don't want to make a pain of myself, and because some places leave me not trusting that the result is actually vegetarian despite my explicitness.
In contrast, Indian restaurants tend to:
1) Share the same definition, so we have no language issues
2) Take the vegetarian/non-vegetarian divide seriously (Many Indians are vegetarian or part-time vegetarian for religious reasons), so my requests are neither a pain nor is there often a worry that I'll get something animal-based anyway.
A friend of mine from India once told me "if a mob would burn down your restaurant if you got caught mixing meat and vegetarian, you'd take it seriously too". I still don't if she was joking with me, and if so to what degree.
>>A friend of mine from India once told me "if a mob would burn down your restaurant if you got caught mixing meat and vegetarian, you'd take it seriously too". I still don't if she was joking with me, and if so to what degree.
Yes, that is (unfortunately) a possible outcome, if not outright murder by an angry mob of people who take their religious and societal taboos too seriously[1].
> My Japanese friends tell me there's no point in me trying to eat there. The only option that doesn't involve seafood is "monk training food", which is...not intended to be tasty.
I'm vegan an eat Japanese food all of the time. It really just depends on the restaurant. Examples:
- Tempura batter can be vegan if they don't add eggs to it. Some restaurants do, and some don't.
- Sushi rice is basically sugar, salt and rice vinegar seasoning.
- Miso soup is fine as long as you confirm they don't add "bonito" (aka fish flakes).
- Many of the vegetarian rolls are fine.
The only thing that you might worry about is if you are super-strict about cross-contamination. But if that's the case you really can't eat out at most restaurants.
Eating vegetarian in Japan is hard. I gave up eating vegetarian in restaurants pretty soon after I arrived here (and gave up eating vegetarian at all after I got married ;-) ). A couple of comments:
- In Japan, I have never heard of anyone one using eggs in tempura batter. You can be almost 100% sure that it's OK. So vegetable tempura is a good bet. Probably the most safe is cold soba noodles with tempura.
- Vegetable sushi is only really available at those cheap revolving sushi restaurants. However, when dining with vegetarians this is my go to spot. You are unlikely to find vegetarian options at good sushi restaurants.
- You will never find miso soup or any soup (ramen, etc, etc) in Japan without animal products (apart from the rare exception that I will explain below). Ordering off the menu is likely to cause serious heart attacks in the staff. If you are a regular customer, you can get away with it, but you seriously can't expect to walk off the street and ask that the change the food for you. Which is odd because Japanese customer service (with this one exception) is usually insanely accommodating.
- Although it is remarkably better than when I arrived, Japanese people really do not understand vegetarian cooking. If you ask for vegetarian tempura they are likely to give you extra shrimp to make up for the other fish that you didn't get. If you protest that it isn't a vegetable they will look blankly at you and say, "But it's delicious". Having a moral stance on what you eat and don't eat without it being a religious thing just does not compute. They totally get the non-pork issue for those whose religions don't allow it, for example. When I was teaching English, I tried to educate the students about the word "vegetarian" and in the exam I had the question, "John does not eat meat, fish or eggs. He only eats vegetables. What is John?" One of my students answered, "John is a cow" (to which I had to give him full marks, of course ;-) ).
However, this brings me to the only strategy that worked for me consistently in restaurants. It turns out that Japan has it's own traditional vegan cuisine. It is called "shoujin ryouri". It is a Buddhist way of eating (the "monk training food" noted by the GP). It is composed of very traditional Japanese dishes and is wonderful. Although there is much more to shoujin ryouri than just eating vegetables (and they also avoid alliums like garlic and onions for some reason), it is a word that every Japanese restaurant worker will understand completely. The GP's characterisation of shoujin ryouri as "not intended to be tasty" made me laugh because it is true that it is not intended. However, it is invariably mind-bogglingly delicious. I highly recommend going to a temple that serves it and trying it.
Anyway, usually I would say, "I'm very sorry, but I only eat shoujin ryouri. I know it's completely impossible, but I wonder if there is any way you could make something like that." After getting over the shock that a westerner would eat only shoujin ryuori, the response would inevitably be, "That's incredible. I'm impressed. That's a very difficult way to live" and they will either try to make something for you, or tell you that it is indeed impossible.
Apart from rice (which is a given), the basis of most Japanese cooking is dashi (soup stock). Most restaurants (and homes) use powdered soup stock that already has katsuo bushi (the dried fish flakes) added. In shoujin ryouri they use only kombu dashi (stock made from sea kelp), sometimes with dried mushrooms. If a restaurant has kombu available, they can make dashi and then can usually figure out something. All restaurants have vegetables and tofu hanging around somewhere. If they do not have kombu, then they will be completely at a loss and there is nothing they can do.
I was vegan when I came to Japan (although not ethically vegan -- I just like eating that kind of food). I tried to keep eating that way, but it was pretty difficult (and downright impossible when I had to go to work related functions -- I got a reputation as a hard drinker because I would only pick at my food and drink beer all night ;-) ). Pretty quickly, I started eating things with normal dashi and after about 3 or 4 months just ate whatever anyone else ate at restaurants.
It is not impossible to be vegetarian (or even vegan) in Japan, but it is extremely difficult.
There are generally 2 reasons to avoid garlic and onions - 1) they are considered 'stimulating' (eg: Krishna) and/or more likely: 2) onions and garlic are bulbs - if you uproot them you effectively kill the plant whereas other vegetables you harvest their fruits/leaves/etc and the plant lives on.
> However, this brings me to the only strategy that worked for me consistently in restaurants. It turns out that Japan has it's own traditional vegan cuisine. It is called "shoujin ryouri". It is a Buddhist way of eating (the "monk training food" noted by the GP). It is composed of very traditional Japanese dishes and is wonderful. Although there is much more to shoujin ryouri than just eating vegetables (and they also avoid alliums like garlic and onions for some reason), it is a word that every Japanese restaurant worker will understand completely.
This. I had some vegan friends that spent some time in Thailand and there are similar things. You just have to know the "secret code word" for vegan-type food. IIRC, restaurants in Thailand that have a yellow flag outside are marking that they serve food acceptable to a particular religious order of monks (or something of the sort).
That said, I was mostly referring to eating at Japanese restaurants in the West. I realize that eating in such a way in Japan itself is somewhat difficult.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. It sounds like your definitions fit mine, so it's good to know that India would (at least from a dietary perspective) be a viable vacation destination.
And that's probably not just a thought experiment given the likelihood of eventually going there on business trips.
If you are traveling in southeast asia, and want vegan food, ask for buddhist food. (Alas, that also precludes garlic and onion, but that's a small sacrifice in exchange for having an easy shorthand to explain vegan food.)
In japan seafood isn't considered meat. If you do then it can be pretty hard.
Also, as far as I understand, they don't use a lot of vegetable oil. So things that would be ok in the west, like bread, more than likely have lard in them.
This is true. I'm an Indian , now living in Australia. I love meat! The only time I don't crave it is when I'm in India where the vegetarian food is incredibly tasty/satisfying doesn't consist of largely salads. I eat salads, not because I enjoy them but because I know its good for me.
As much as I enjoy Indian vegetarian food, as a person that does eat meat, there are also a bewildering variety of dishes possible with the same spices and ingredients with meat added. One example is what you can find in Pakistani cuisine where the vast majority of the population is Muslim and does eat meat.
There is of course a great deal of culinary overlap in the Punjab region, food is much older than the 1947 partition. If you ever visit Lahore I highly recommend trying the local restaurants.
Oh, nonvegetarian food from the subcontinent can be amazing. Even from Hindu-majority areas -- Indian (or even Hindu) vegetarians are the minority (30%), just a generally affluent and vocal minority. Aside from beef, of course.
Not to mention pork as well--it seems like in a lot of places with arid climates and Islamic influence, people don't eat pork even if there is no religious prohibition per se. That's why I like Greek, Goan and northwestern Chinese food--it has all the tastiness of middle eastern & central/south Asian food, but with my favorite meat.
If I had to give up meat, south Indian would be a lifesaver. It's so flavorful, you come out feeling filled and sated, and yet your stomach doesn't have the heaviness you get from a steak dinner.
Interestingly, a recent survey shows that despite having that highly refined vegetarian cuisine, Indians (especially South Indians) are nowhere near as vegetarian as is usually assumed:
To present the other side, I lived in India a long time and vegetarian cuisine there always left me unsatisfied. If, for some reason, I had to eat a vegetarian meal (say I'm going to a Brahmin wedding), I'd just eat meat before I left for it because the alternative was to be unhappy.
I'm Indian origin. At home, we usually eat vegetarian food (not a religious thing, it just is). I don't miss non vegetarian food at all. But if I go out to eat I usually have non vegetarian food.
Not a vegetarian or vegan, nor will I ever be in all likelihood - but I have been trying to curb the amount of meat I eat purely due to the environmental impact it has. I have a box of beef burger patties in the freezer that never gets touched outside of family gatherings, when I decide I want a burger I grab my bag of Morningstar Spicy Black Bean patties and toss one on the frying pan. I've also gotten really good at preparing tofu over the years, and I've found all sorts of delicious ways to prepare it.
I've found that substituting meat is an almost impossible task, I certainly haven't found anything that is as satisfying as a good steak. But replacing it with something I find enjoyable in a different way works really well, as long as you have an open mind and accept that it's not going to be an identical experience. (Personally, I prefer the black bean burgers for this reason. I absolutely adore spicy foods, I've been topping burgers with pepper jack and jalapenos since I was 13, having the patty itself with a good texture and a nice kick out of the box is wonderful)
Can you elaborate on the environmental impact? I've heard so many vegans say this but I've never seen a proper explanation of it. How can eating meat have a negative environmental impact when humans are natural omnivores?
It seems to me like people are confusing eating meat with our modern agricultural processes. And if that's the case then the solution should be to improve said processes, not to stop eating meat.
Cows produce a huge amount of methane, from their digestive system. That alone is enough to cause significant environmental impact, and if we stopped eating beef we would see a decrease in the amount of methane released.
Things like vats of liquified cow feces stored underground, which are later sprayed on (organic!) crops - these have a much larger impact than a few cows producing their feces, which is later composted. Cows produce methane, as do chickens.
The thing is - how is the average person going to improve the processes? People can eat less meat and urge the governments in different areas to force better farming practices through regulation, financial support for upgrades, investment in technology (for example, something that composts manure and spreads it better than the liquid manure we keep in vats or somehow breeding cows that produce less methane), and other such things.
Some countries will be able to pull this off. Others... well, will fail. And some of those are either major contributors or consumers.
Some farmers set parts of the rain forest on fire to then grow plants exclusively intended to be used as animal food, until there are no more remaining nutrients usually causing permanent damage to the soil.
The way I see it, selling anything to meat eaters as a "meat equivalent" is setting it up for rejection. I'd bet that if you took even real meat and told people it was "fake", a good portion of them would reject it as somehow weird.
The "burger" is just a convenient form factor. Each kind is really its own thing, with its own taste and mouthfeel. It needs to be tried and appreciated as such, or disappointment is inevitable.
Totally agreed, on both points. I think selling "fake meat" to meat-eaters is missing the point (as they could just as easily eat the real thing), and selling "fake meat" to vegetarians is a weak offer (as it reduces them to imitating meat-based recipes).
As an example of your second point, one of the more succesful alternatives in NL is Valess [1], which mostly comes in the "burger" form factor but does not try to sell itself as imitation meat.
But does that change if the fake is $3 and the real one is $15? I think a lot of people in the front end of these startups trying to create almost identical to meat and dairy products are looking at that possibility in the not so far future as to why they will be successful. As opposed to something like a boca burger that is more intended to fit inside a hamburger bun as opposed to being exactly like meat.
I say this as someone who hasn't eaten meat for well over a decade and a really close meat substitute sounds gross.
At social situations (where pollination between meat eaters and vegetarians occurs), that would make the appeal even tougher. Eating meat then becomes a way of showing off financial status, even more than it already is ("we grilled up this real nice cut of blah blah").
I say this as a vegetarian, but I'm having a hard time seeing cost being a real advantage for imitation meat. It seems like more of a first world problem - if one cannot afford meat, they're better off spending resources on replacing its nutritional value rather than its taste.
>Decent imitations of highly processed meat exist already
I am a meat eater and I can tell you that, in my experience, this simply isn't the case. Your opinion is colored by the fact that you really, really, want it to be a decent imitation because you're a vegetarian. Every imitation meat product I have ever tasted has been immediately recognizable as such, and was almost inedible.
Unfortunately, the idea of fake meat that people won't notice is, at least today, a vegetarian fantasy.
I'm also an omnivore and have made the same observation.
I think the larger issue is why do we stubbornly try to make one thing taste like another? I may be a meat-eater but I can fill my heart's content at a number of Indian vegetarian places, to the point where I don't realize I didn't eat meat. The meal as a whole is fully satiating and nourishing.
In the same vein, I love tofu when it tastes like tofu. But when some try to make it ressemble meat, it simply becomes bad tofu. Beans are awesome and can be combined in so many ways. Bean burgers are just over-seasoned patties posing as meat.
Maybe it's my French background showing but I prefer minimal processing, or processing that brings out the natural flavors of the ingredient, not trying to hide them.
> why do we stubbornly try to make one thing taste like another
because lots of people love meat but dislike the way it is obtained. compare fake cheese and icecream for the lactose intolerant - they love the taste of cheese and icecream, just not its effects on them.
Cheese and ice cream for the lactose intolerant are the same as normal cheese and ice cream, just with the lactose removed.
Vegan cheese is completely different from lactose-free cheese, and is one of the worst things I have ever eaten. It does not retain a single attribute that makes normal cheese appealing, but still manages to smell like an old sock.
i have a vegan friend who swears by her brand of fake cheese; she's even made bruschetta with it and had it turn out okay. also i didn't know you got actual lactose-free ice cream; the lactose-intolerant people i've known usually ate coconut-based ice creams. i wonder if any of them had tried the lactose free stuff but found they were more used to the coconut.
Lactaid makes lactose-free versions of many dairy products that usually contain lactose, including ice cream. A special process isn't necessary for most cheeses since they naturally have very low levels of lactose due, since the lactose doesn't really get caught up in the coagulation.
I've never had coconut ice cream, but I've had soy ice cream on several occasions and I thought it wasn't bad. (Shout-out to Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream, a Wisconsin manufacturer who does a great job of accommodating a wide variety of dietary restrictions)
I'm sure your friend finds her brand of fake cheese palatable, but I seriously doubt it bears any resemblance to real cheese. One of my close friends was a vegetarian because she couldn't give up cheese, until the point where her conscience overwhelmed her and she became a total vegan. She's been looking for a vegan cheese for the past seven or eight years, and I've unfortunately shared in the experience. I'm comfortable with the claim that right now, vegan cheese is not a replacement for real cheese.
The problem with vegan cheese is that vegan foods are generally only convincing substitutes in a specific domain. Ice cream works because ice cream is always frozen. Nobody complains if your vegan ice cream doesn't look like ice cream when melted or boiling. On the other hand, the same cheese can be melted, broiled, burnt, shredded, or some combination of the 4 depending on the application. Plus, it has to taste like cheese too.
In some sense, it's a bit like vegan bacon, which generally just tastes a bit smokey, and I've never found any that has the crispy texture that melts in the mouth like real bacon. Fake cheese just has a really ... off texture, and it's flavor is one-dimensional.
>Lactaid makes lactose-free versions of many dairy products that usually contain lactose, including ice cream
Despite the label claiming that, it isn't actually the case. Rather than removing the sugar, which is quite difficult without affecting the milk, they simply add lactase.
i agree with you in general (and cheese is definitely not one of the things i'd want a substitute for myself), but note that one of the things that makes this fake mince product exciting is that they're explicitly trying to replicate the taste, the smell, the mouthfeel and the consistency of real beef mince. short of a breakthrough in vat-grown meat this seems like the most promising avenue yet.
>I think the larger issue is why do we stubbornly try to make one thing taste like another?
In my opinion, it's because vegetarians know that their diet is an extreme departure from the norm, and anything they can do to feel more included in the mainstream, they will do. I have relatives that are vegetarians, and being vegetarian limits their social lives to some degree (I'm sure the impact is partially dependent on where you live; this comment is based on my observations only). For example, they can't eat at certain restaurants, and they tend to not bother trying to host dinners at their homes for people with normal diets (or worse, they do host, and guests don't come back after the first time). One of my vegetarian relatives has children, and it impacts their social lives as well - kids in households with mainstream diets usually aren't big fans of tofu and aren't going to be hanging out in vegetarian households as often.
Everyone wants to feel normal, even when their lifestyle choices are far from it. This, in my opinion, is the driving force behind the quest for "vegemeat".
Your response is logical, but ultimately not true for me.
As a vegetarian, I'm weird. As a picky vegetarian, I'm even weirder. That's fine, I'm used to weird, and I don't expect people to cater to my weirdness.
For me, it's not about specific taste. When I went vegetarian, I lost the taste for red meat. Last time I had it (10+ years now) it was NASTY - I remembered it tasting good, but it doesn't meet (ha!) that memory.
No, it's mostly about texture. I want something that tastes _good_ (for however "good" is defined) and has the right chewiness to my mouth.
It's also about convenience - My wife and I have "meat cookies", which are morningstar "burgers" fixed on a george foreman grill, and after a few minutes of cooling, are able to be picked up and eaten like a cookie. The taste is good, but it could be better. Nothing about this experience is like a normal meat-eater.
I will concede that it'd be really nice to go to a restaurant and have an easy time picking out food from the menu. That's less about being normal and more about being able to eat when hungry.
So no - I don't think my desire for meat alternatives is about a desperate need to feel like I belong. Its about having tasty options that didn't kill animals. For many vegetarians straight vegetables can fulfill that need. Not so for me.
>Last time I had it (10+ years now) it was NASTY - I remembered it tasting good, but it doesn't meet (ha!) that memory.
You seem very self-aware, which I view as a rare and positive trait. So here's a question that I am genuinely curious about: in light of the fact that you said you remembered meat tasting good prior to becoming a vegetarian, do you believe that it is unpalatable to you now because it actually tastes bad (i.e. your brain actually no longer likes the taste), or is it the thoughts that you associate with meat (those that drove you to be a vegetarian in the first place - perhaps that a cow was killed for it, or its impact on the environment)?
Pretty sure it was specific to the actual taste my brain was receiving - I consider pork to marginally ethically worse than beef, yet pork retained its good taste to me (at least then, no idea now, but I assume that's still true). Chicken and turkey and fish likewise remained tasty, but red meat tasted very greasy, a touch bitter, and otherwise tasteless.
It was actually very weird - I'd smell it, and remember the good taste, then have some and be quite startled how bad it seemed to me. (and again, other meats did not have that reaction). I have no idea if this is a matter of personal chemistry, a more intricate mental gymnastics than the one you propose, or is actually commonplace. To this day, the smell of KFC original recipe will make me salivate. (I once found an Indian place that had a veggie Pakora that tasted JUST LIKE THAT BATTER. Man I miss that)
For background: I went full vegetarian for 6 months in college, but stopped when I was seeing stars constantly. It's easy to get decent nutrition with a vegetarian diet, particularly as I'm not active, but microwaved rice and beans and mac n'cheese (my college diet) wasn't healthy enough. So I returned meat to my diet and that's when I found I didn't like red meat anymore. I imagine I could've taught myself to like it again, but I was content with the other meat options and had no more health issues. After a few years like this I noticed that a few foods (e.g. lettuce, baby spinach) that were previously on my "ick" list were now palatable, so I started dropping a meat a year, giving my taste and lifestyle time to adjust. After a few years of that, I was fully vegetarian, and my diet has expanded, though I still have a depressingly large "these foods don't taste good to me" list.
Why do I think pork is marginally than beef? I grew up in a rural-ish* area, and have a lower opinion of cows than pigs, in terms of intelligence and awareness. I similarly think a turkey is smarter than chicken, but we are talking literal bird brains at that point.
* rural-ish = a large town surrounded by farmland. State College, PA, for the curious.
Some meat eaters and conformists in general have a bizarre insecurity that causes them to invent elaborate just-so stories to explain how anyone who is different from them.
I pity the provincial world you love in where nobody can tolerate a departure from slabs of meat. It's such a rural American perspective, alien to most of the world.
It beggars belief that you claim to be related to a vegetarian and you think that kids subsist on tofu, or even that meals are a major part of kids hanging out. Kids eat chips and pizza and pasta, all of which is vegetarian.
> I pity the provincial world you love in where nobody can tolerate a departure from slabs of meat. It's such a rural American perspective, alien to most of the world.
I am French, I live in France, and grew up in a large city. I can confirm what he said about kids in some cultures, and it's not limited to the "rural America" the sanfran crowds like to dismiss so much on the internet. I had Indians friends I grew up with as a kid, and they were made to eat meat every time we were going out with the other neighborhood kids because we liked to go to fast foods like Quick (a belgian fast food franchise that's a bit like the European McDo) and there was no decent vegetarian food there, at least when I was a kid, I wouldn't know if they changed their menus because I haven't gone to fast foods for a long time. He had to lie to his parents about not eating hamburgers, they were devout, religious vegetarian hinduists and I have no idea how they'd react if they knew their kids ate beef.
What would have happened if they refused to eat meat with us? They would either have to watch us eat at Quick while growing hungry, or just leave the group altogether.
Seeing our food cultures, I would definitely have hated the very idea of growing in a vegetarian household.
The indian kids could come at our places and order pizza with us, but we never, ever shared a meal at their home.
My parents loved sharing food with our indian neighbors though, despite the fact that my father loved meat, he also enjoyed the food they made and my grandmother often made vegetarian cooking to exchange with them. But that's a whole another story when it comes to kids.
I think the larger issue is why do we stubbornly try to make one thing taste like another?
For the same reason that people use birth control instead of abstinence: People like to "have their cake and eat it too." If we can get the part of something we value minus some downside we deem undesirable, we are all over it.
> Every imitation meat product I have ever tasted has been immediately recognizable as such, and was almost inedible.
I am a vegetarian, and have been for about 8 years. I agree that the taste isn't a duplicate, but inedible that's a stretcher?
> Unfortunately, the idea of fake meat that people won't notice is, at least today, a vegetarian fantasy.
And I never understood why. I like the taste of vegetables. Needing things that duplicate meat in taste and texture feels unnecessary and almost ... not quite, I can't find the right word ... hypocritical -- as if humans need that flavor?
I think the whole idea behind "fake meat" components is due to the lack of vegetarian dishes in Western cuisine (speaking specifically for NL here, don't know much about the rest of Europe or US). That situation is changing very slowly, but ten to twenty years ago there was almost nothing.
Still, these imitation components strike me as tacky or cheap knockoffs. Even worse, for me they signal that even vegetarians can't go without the taste (or structure) of meat. I really wonder if their availability is a net positive for reducing meat consumption.
I consider myself quite a meat-eater, but I do enjoy properly thought-out vegetarian dishes (like Thai or Indian vegetable curry's), and I'm a big fan of main dish salads (usually with Feta cheese, walnuts or raisins). Still, when I do need to "replace" meat, I'd much rather go with nuts (mostly cashew, pine and almond) than any of the meat imitations.
Technically, cardboard and shoe leather are edible, if you boil them enough, but you tend not to go out of your way to eat them, unless there's a bunch of people with pointy-murder-sticks outside and you've already gone through all the dogs, cats, rats, and insects.
With all due respect we can agree on your factual observations, yet while you're pessimistic about replacing a top quality perfectly grilled London Broil steak, I'm feeling optimistic about replacing a mcdonalds hamburger, which also is immediately recognizable as almost inedible.
How about that stick of beef jerky I carry when I go out hiking ... replacing something that artificial with something plant based doesn't sound overly challenging and maybe it would have better shelf life? Or the mystery meat in canned store bought soups?
Insert standard argument about zillions of flies can't all be wrong WRT poo.
Also the argument doesn't depend on a specific "meat" or seller or sales figures. How about mystery meat products at the food store like "olive loaf bologna" not even sure what kind of animal that comes from...
The OP claimed that McDonalds burgers were "inedible". Observably, millions of people do eat them, therefore the OP is wrong.
That says nothing about the quality of the burgers, or whether eating them is a good idea, or anything else. It merely demonstrates that people do, in fact, find them edible.
"How about mystery meat products at the food store like "olive loaf bologna""
What about it? People obviously buy it and presumably eat it, or it wouldn't be in the store.
> How about that stick of beef jerky I carry when I go out hiking ... replacing something that artificial
Artificial? Where the heck are you buying your jerky? Jerky is one of the least artificial mass produced foods you can find - a big hunk of solid beef, dried, and flavored with some salt and salt-relatives. If at anything else it's not jerky.
...I'm going to have to go with the meat eaters that ARE fooled by the meat alternatives and found them quite (note I mentioned it is a decent imitation of "highly processed meat", not "quality" meat) vs your lone opinion of my burning desire to be normal.
Your opinion is colored by the fact that you really want to hate vegetarian meat, as is seen by calling it "inedible" when in reality is is merely different and bland.
I've eaten "imitation meat" at my friend's and sure it's not the same thing as the real deal but if real meat suddenly disappears I wouldn't be unhappy with the "fake" meat. (I'm not a vegan if that wasn't obvious and my friend isn't either but he eats very little real meat)
Beyond Meat's ground beef and chicken strips are the closest I've had to "I had no idea" meat alternatives, but even though the flavor is pretty much spot-on, the texture is always just a little bit wrong. It's a very tricky problem, and I'm inclined to say that it's a better idea to sell things as "not meat, but delicious in their own right" instead. See, for example, Chipotle's sofritas - which are the most heavily seasoned / arguably most flavorful protein on the menu.
Beyond Meat's ground beef really surprised me by how close it was to ground beef (texture and appearance are great, flavor needs work). The chicken strips somewhat less so, but still enjoyed it.
Do you not find it unethical to serve your in-laws fake meat without informing them?
Wouldn't you be upset if your in-laws served you seitan that was actually chicken?
*edit: I bring this up because many people do not react well to meat substitutes. Gluten and soy intolerance affects many people and serving soy or gluten-based meat substitutes without prior informed consent can induce adverse reactions. I do believe that veganism in morally superior to carnivorism, but that still doesn't grant the right to trick others into consuming meat substitutes without their informed consent.
I almost covered this case because I knew someone would (reasonably) ask, but didn't for length.
I checked everyone's dietary restrictions beforehand. I served fake meat without informing them at my wife's request, because she knew her father (who is stubborn southerner) and brother (who is mentally handicapped) would both refuse to like it immediately. (A visit to an all-vegetarian restaurant would later prove her correct).
In all other circumstances where I've served fake meat to others it's been very openly labeled and/or pointed out.
I'm inclined to agree with everything you've said, but Thanksgiving with the in-laws is a special moral situation, vegetarian or not :)
I'm sure the parent would be upset if secretly served chicken, not because they would feel defrauded, but because they were tricked intol violating their ethical principles.
Secretly serving non-vegetarians vegetarian food is, technically, fraud, but it's not disrespecting their morality. That fraud might be slightly immoral (I don't think it is, but it's a topic for debate), but it's easily offset by the potential for convincing someone to become vegetarian.
* I think it was absolutely unethical of me. But it's one of those unethical things you do with in-laws, and falls within "white lies" territory as long as am I'm not endangering anyone's health nor causing them to violate moral principles.
* It was done simply to serve food we'd all eat, it was not my goal nor intention to "convert" anyone. Personally, I don't try to convert people beyond example and offering my reasonings when socially appropriate.
* I would consider tricking me into eating meat as worse than tricking someone to eat more non-meat than they would. That doesn't make what I did less of a trick.
It helps not to get too theoretical when it comes to morality. Someone that eats turkey and not vegetables out of moral conviction? That's not a sane thing to worry about and compensate for. There is a 0% chance of that being the case. If you worried about preferences that obscure/made-up you'd forbid every category of food, every color of food, every texture of food...
On top of that, it's very likely that every ingredient in the "turkey loaf" was something that would not be out of place in an actual turkey loaf. In other words, no ingredients being secretly added, just one being removed.
You happen to be wrong, I am a counterexample (I don't eat soy, and yes, for moral reasons), but I won't explain, because I don't have to. And what I am saying is that I shouldn't have to. Sure, you can decide to believe whatever you want on your own, but when it makes you justify feeding things to me that I have resolved not to eat, that's downright violating.
I meant someone whose morality specifically insists that there be bird meat. Sorry for being unclear.
So again here there is a difference adding a problem ingredient, and there being an ingredient you don't put in. For the former you need to ask about dietary restrictions and respect that. Which they did. For the latter, I don't think you're in much risk of violating anyone's moral system.
You're making a lot of assumptions: I'm not a vegetarian, first of all. My point is simply that tricking someone into eating tofurkey is objectively more moral than tricking them into eating turkey, because both involve equal trickery, but it is incredibly improbable that anyone has moral objections to tofurkey (and in the specific case, this was a certainty). With a stranger it's more complicated because they might have a soy allergy or some compelling reason other than ethics to avoid the fake meat, but that's not relevant to the specific situation.
Fine, but you being vegetarian wasn't part of my objection. You're the one making assumptions. I don't eat tofu for ethical reasons, and I shouldn't have to justify them over your own to prevent you from violating my bodily integrity by deception if I were to eat at your table. Your argument is still deplorable and morally corrupt.
In spite of my better judgement, I'll continue this discussion. What could possibly be your moral objection to soy? Is it GMO related? If it's Monsanto's abusive practices toward farmers, how is eating turkey any different, considering the similar entrapment practices of the poultry industry? If it's because you object to the idea of GMOs, then have you considered that GMO practices could help develop crops for cultivation in hunger-stricken areas, and that GMOs can enable the use of pesticides that are less damaging to the environment? How do you justify that objection when it stifles progress that could save lives? It seems similar to objections to stem cell research.
If it's unrelated to GMOs, I'm genuinely interested in what your objection might be.
There are people concerned about how soy might disrupt the endocrine system, and who don't broadcast this concern the way vegetarians do. Tricking them into eating it anyway is definitely unethical.
I don't get this sentiment. I'm not close to vegetarian, but I go out of my way to try to eat less meat and when I'm not at the discretion of others (eating out, eating over at a friends house, etc) I prioritize my favorite meat-free foods, but nobody should be saying "its not meat? No way, never gonna try it, I am a blood thirsty carnivore". Even if you're like me and don't have the time, effort, or circumstance to cut meat out entirely, you should still at least try alternatives when they are presented to you.
I've noticed people tend to react defensively on certain issues:
* Mention you are dieting, and someone will declare how good their triple chocolate fudge cake is.
* Mention you're a vegetarian and they'll talk about how tasty meat is.
* Say you can't eat a particular thing (lactose, gluten, sugar, etc) and they'll loudly declare how they don't share your restriction.
I've even noticed the same tendencies in myself, so I think it's some sort of deeply wired social construct. It's not solely restricted to food but is quite common there.
I think this is partially a defense mechanism. Ask yourself -- how have people been hurt in the past that might make them want to react aggressively to these sorts of mentions? I think most people have, at some point in their lives, had someone treat them as morally inferior for their weight or their eating habits. So loudly extolling a positive perception of their experience is a way of creating a wall to preempt an attack on their character from a "superior" dieter/vegetarian/religiously-kosher/whatever type of person.
Of course, this creates a vicious cycle. Just yesterday, someone offered to buy lunch for a friend of mine. He said it would have to be vegan, and the guy lost his temper. Like "how DARE you be one of those pushy types!" When the guy only said something because he was being offered food for himself to eat. Which perpetuates the cycle of distrust and mockery.
I get where the gp is coming from, to me texture is a big issue with foods that I can eat. I'm mostly vegetarian now, (less than half a kilogram of bison a week) but that last step to cutting out beef is difficult, because I just can't stand the texture/flavor of mushrooms, soy or tofu and other 'meat substitutes'.
I almost exclusively eat meat. Just the thought of trying vegetables makes me feel sick to my stomach. Whether that's immoral or not is of secondary concern to me, when the alternative borders on a panic attack. Why that is, I have no idea, but I know other people with the same reaction as me, and it might partially answer your question.
Do you think people with different sexual preference than you also "should still at least try alternatives when they are presented"? When it comes to something as personal as putting food in their own body for their own nutrition and enjoyment, nobody should do anything just because you think so.
My concern is health. Soy even fermented isn't that great. It is a trigger food for many as well. The amino profile is an issue too. Rice\pea is the closest I've found but lean poultry is the king of protein quality and until I see bodybuilders switching I'll stick with that. I know they also use whey which works for me but makes me put on fat. I have tried vegan and vegetarian, but after more than a month on each I never got out of the feeling fluish phase. Atkins did the same thing. So I just stick with vegetables, lean white meat, a few fruits, and a handful or two of whole grains and nuts a day. And some eggs, dietary cholesterol is not blood cholesterol.
Someone fed me a veggie burger once, several years ago, without telling me it was a veggie burger. I insisted there was something wrong with it, but they said it was fine. They finally told me it was a veggie burger, and it all made sense.
I would MUCH rather have had a good vegetarian dish that wasn't trying to be something else.
> Green peppers are nasty and food-destroying in my opinion, which immediately removes over half the vegetarian options out there
I'm a flexitarian, but I'm pretty veggie heavy and have been mostly vegetarian for significant periods of time. I very rarely come across foods with green peppers.
I never noticed it until I finally committed to going fully vegetarian (and thus, stopped considering the non-veg options as possibilities if the veg option was unappealing...making unappealing vegetarian options a lot more noticeable). It doesn't happen everywhere, but I know what he/she is talking about.
In sandwich shops and some places with tacos and wraps, it's not uncommon to find just one dish that's properly vegetarian - often some mix of peppers, onions, squash, etc. I've always been puzzled by it, considering they tend to be somewhat polarizing vegetables. Something like beans, potatoes, rice, even corn - those things are much more broadly appealing, filling, and probably cheaper, too.
I also find that a lot of places/people don't know much about vegetarian cooking and they seem to think the only way to cure the blandness is to toss in peppers and onions.
My wife is vegetarian, so more often than not, I'm eating that way. Boca and Morningstar taste awesome, but my problem is that I truly continue to feel quite hungry by foregoing meat in the meal. So even if these veggie options "behave" as they should, I think the bigger problem is that, for people like me, the lack of animal protein propagates as hunger, and I never feel fulfilled, and consequently am irritable.
Are you eating enough? Faux meats tend to have fewer calories than the meats they are replacing. Boca burgers only have 70 calories each (according to Google... I never eat those). That is hardly anything!
I keep a close eye on calories (used to be very overweight) as a rule, and comparing days I eat meat and days I don't, even when calories are the same, I end up much hungrier.
To be fair, if you give someone and tell them it's a chicken nugget, you are setting the bar pretty low. People have come to expect pretty much any quality of meat and even texture in a chicken nugget.
You're talking mostly about the aesthetic part of fake meat, but there is another huge advantage over existing products which is health/environmental. Current vegan/vegetarian incarnations of fake meat (Boca, Morningstar etc.) are typically actually not that healthy in terms of protein/amino acid content and sort of end up being eating a cake made of grains.
The ability to create, cheaply, a high protein, high calorie, amino acid packed product, regardless of whether or not it is aesthetically pleasing, could have massive impacts on our ability to support the human population of this planet, in a way that existing meat and vegetarian solutions do not.
> Current vegan/vegetarian incarnations of fake meat (Boca, Morningstar etc.) are typically actually not that healthy in terms of protein/amino acid content and sort of end up being eating a cake made of grains.
This is why I've stopped trying to find a meat substitute, they all fail in some way or another (they either don't taste right, don't have the right texture, or are far worse nutritionally than what they try to replace). I'm not a vegitarian, but I've found I prefer the Morningstar Spicy Black Bean Burger to a traditional beef patty - I like spicy foods and it has a nice texture I enjoy without feeling the need to compare it to beef. Also, the first ingredient is just plain black beans, there's some brown rice in to help as a binder but overall it has a fairly low amount of carbohydrates compared to other similar products (13g total, 4g of that is fiber).
Right, which is why I'm more excited by "fake" meat vs meat alternatives. There are some trying to recreate literal meat (chemically indistinguishable) but without the animal. If you consider the stomach of a cow to simply be "input grass, output beef" it's obviously a vast oversimplification, but is sort of what is being aimed for, and where I see most of the potential in this market. Numbers I've seen have been close to 1/9 the caloric cost to create a calorie of "fake" meat as opposed to real meat (3:1 as opposed to 27:1).
When it comes to Morningstar's black bean burger, we agree it's not an adequate alternative in terms of taste, but I'd argue it's also not an adequate replacement in terms of health. I mentioned most existing meat alternatives do not provide enough protein. Black beans are generally fine and normally thought of as high protein, but they actually aren't a great source protein since they do not have complete amino acid profiles.
This was how I managed to find carob edible. I used to think "this is a chocolate substitute" when eating it, and it was awful and never measured up. But when you eat it on it's own merits and aren't "comparison-tasting", it's tolerable.
> I've had chicken nuggets that meat eaters had no idea were fake,
Because chicken nuggets are mystery meats to start with. They're usually made from meat slurry, with various fillers added, and shaped into that shape. A chicken breast, for example, has 43g of protein per 140g of weight; a nugget, on the other hand, has 3.1g of protein per 20g of weight.
I've also been a vegetarian for the last decade and change, and the idea of eating dead animals disgusts me, as does the taste of it.
I find it very difficult to understand how meat eaters can manage to get it through their throat without throwing up, but to each their own.
I sometimes get comments about how environmentally conscious I am or how ethical I am for being vegetarian, but I don't feel virtuous at all. It doesn't take any special willpower for me not to eat meat, I have zero craving for it.
I hate vegetarian food that tries to replicate the taste and texture of meat.
As other commenters have mentioned, there's a big market for just honest vegetarian cooking that does not try to imitate anything.
The same goes for food as for people: just be yourself! Don't try to be something you're not.
>I fed my in-laws a "turkey loaf" dinner for Thanksgiving for years without them realizing
I was fed a Tofu-rkey one year when my sister and her husband were vegan. I don't think rioting occurred, but I seem to be suppressing all memory of that horror fest.
Convincing meat eaters to convert is going to be hard but just getting McDonalds to make it special on their menu could make a vast number give it a go and once they find it to be just as good or even better, and eventually cheaper, then a good portion of that resistance will have been overcome.
McDonalds gets hit disproportionately by anti-capitalists and environmentalists and is always trying to improve their green credentials so I'm sure they'll be working on their own recipe.
Honestly, at this point I'm satisfied with the approximations in terms of flavour. I've had fantastic maple-smoked bacon tempeh, seitan italian sausages, and soy burgers. I'm good.
At this point the challenge is more flavour, astronomical preparation time for home-made versions thereof (DIY deep-fried veggie patties can taste excellent but they're an assload of work), and trying to reduce dairy/eggs and move more towards a vegan direction (daiya has some catching-up vs fakemeat).
I spent several years as a vegetarian, and then a few as a vegan, and I wouldn't/won't touch any of those products, either. I've tried them, and they're gross. They don't taste like or feel like meat.
There are enough delicious vegetarian and vegan recipes that it makes very little sense to go vegetarian and then eat processed imitation meat. I found being vegan significantly easier when I just looked for recipes that happened to be vegan.
> Most of my meat eating friends won't even try any of these, sight unseen.
I don't want to speak for your friends, but I'd be unwilling to try any veggie burger, sight unseen, either, due to a long history of disappointment with people trying to get me to try veggie burgers that aren't tasty.
Just as a n=1 anecdote, I'm (mostly) vegetarian, and this wouldn't really appeal to me. I might try it out of curiosity (just like I tried chicken and fish), but it isn't something my brain has learnt to crave, and in fact will probably trigger the same kind of mild nausea that non-vegetarian food currently does in me.
I am curious to see how it works out in practice though.
I've been vegan for over 10 years and I like where things are going.
My favorite dishes don't contain mock meats (when I went vegan they didn't exist where I used to live, so I just got used to eating lots of legumes, whole grains and tubers), but it's fun to try these foods once in a while.
I'm assuming you mean Quorn, which is a mycoprotein (the history of that company is fascinating!). Those are the nuggets I mentioned that are quite similar to "real".
Grocery store chicken in North America has no flavor or texture because of the speed it's "grown" in factory farms. Almost to the point where a fried chicken breast is like a mass of dense meat-like wonderbread. I'm no organic foods/free range/whatever zealot, but if you eat a chicken raised on a small farm in Pakistan or Indonesia it probably took 3x as long to grow to full size, ate a much more varied diet and also has SIGNIFICANTLY more flavor in the meat. Every time I travel outside North America to somewhere in the developing world I'm struck by how much the chicken actually tastes like chicken, whereas in the US you need to specifically search out the "special" expensive chicken to get something that tastes like chicken. See also:
>but if you eat a chicken raised on a small farm in Pakistan or Indonesia it probably took 3x as long to grow to full size, ate a much more varied diet and also has SIGNIFICANTLY more flavor in the meat.
They have small farms and dual purpose chicken breeds in the US too. You don't even need the small farm, you can raise them yourself quite easily and cheaply.
What does being "vegan on principle" mean here? What specific principles are you talking about?
Some vegans do it because killing animals is morally bankrupt.
Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.
Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.
I'm not sure what vegan principles are violated by GMOs. I don't know of anyone who is actually against GMOs, the debate is around labeling them not banning them.
Personally I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to eat pesticide/herbicide drenched food. It's how we're going to feed the third world.
> Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.
I'm dubious about this statement. There is a lot of ocean, so seafood farming is probably quite capable of feeding humans meat. In addition, western societies currently overconsume meat. I suspect that if calorically balanced levels of consumption were observed, we probably have plenty of land.
> Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.
I see a lot of vegans eating far less healthy diets than those of carnivores. They up the oil and carb content quite significantly to make things taste better/create satiety.
I find that vegetarians (and even those who just back off on meat) seem to eat healthier than vegans, in general.
One pound of beef requires 1,847 gallons of water. Cattle produce a huge amount of methane. Ranchers use antibiotics profligately. Cows require a terrific amount of energy to grow, relative to plants, meaning lots of the corn we grow in the US goes to meat, which is far less energy efficient.
Not all people subscribe to the conventional wisdom that carbs and oils are unconditionally unhealthy.
Oils can help your body absorb nutrients more effectively and also aid in other cellular processes.
Carbs are energy and your body needs this.
The key is to not consume processed carbs/oils that your body can't integrate.
Carbs from fruits and natural oils (like coconut) are a large component of any thoughtful vegan's diet. You can eat lots of these foods because they not only have carbs but they also have fiber, protein and other vitamins in good proportion, so "carb the f* up!"
Obsessively starving your body of all carbs and eating lots of meat is an extreme and unbalanced diet and will certainly lead to an early death. Just eat whole foods.
I prefer (and am so far practicing my self) population control to bring the number of humans inhabiting Earth towards a /sustainable/ level with all living humans having the quality of life we'd like to see.
For the record, I know plenty of people who are actually against GMO's and want them labelled so that all consumers can boycott them and they get forced out of the market.
I don't think getting GMOs labeled is a plot to get all consumers to boycott them... It's so the subsection of the population that cares about ingesting GMOs can make an informed choice when buying food.
That's like saying getting kosher food labeled was really a plot to get everyone to boycott all non-kosher food.
That's not the plan by everyone who wants labelling, no. All I said is that I know people who do want/expect it to work that way. (I neither want it to or believe that it will).
A vegan or vegetarian diet (as commonly practiced, with loads of grains, potatoes, sugar, etc, etc) tends to be much less healthy than a meat-loaded keto diet.
It's an informal sociological clustering observation. Vegans are often sort of 'hippy' types, who place value on food being 'natural', 'organic' and dislike GMOs.
Ohhh I see. It's similar to how vegans generally consider all non-vegans immoral lazy unhealthy fat poison-eating murderers. The informal sociological clustering is efficient since the generalization is ~80% true. Nuance wastes too much time.
Is linking to some random opinion article on the Internet your way of arguing for the validity of stereotypes? Well, I'm convinced. Too bad "accurate enough" doesn't work in physics, we'd already understand the universe by now!
> It's a GMO, and people who're vegan on principle often don't like that.
veganism != primitivism
I understand that there's an overlap between "I don't eat that, I'm vegan" and "I don't eat that, it's not natural", but when I think of vegan principles I think of animal rights -- not fallacious appeals to nature.
> It's a GMO, and people who're vegan on principle often don't like that.
That's okay! They're already vegan, so clearly they've already found a way to eat a meat-free diet that works for them.
Carnivores are a much bigger market to chase than vegans. These new meat substitutes are targeted at converting more carnivores, not making existing vegans happier.
As a carnivore, don't try to make a fake steak, if I wanted a steak I would by one. Instead try to create food so delicious that I want to eat it, even if it happens to be vegan.
You won't convince me with ethical arguments, you won't convince me with guilt, you won't convince me with health (I am sitting with a glass of whiskey right now), but you might convince me with taste.
That actually ties into an interesting problem: People who are vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons and lab-grown meat.
One idea is, instead of trying to make plant-based food taste like meat, just make meat that doesn't involve raising and killing animals. Efforts thus far have had only mild success (IIRC, it's been done at great cost, and it reportedly tasted terrible).
Assuming these efforts succeed, where does that leave me? I have no objection to harming cells, but I'd be against the killing/harming of the various animals necessary to GET the initial stem cells to be able to grow that lab meat. But, if they perfect a method of growing "meat" that no longer involves that mistreatment, at what point is it morally acceptable to me to buy and eat that "meat"?
I imagine it's similar to anyone in a field that benefits from ethically questionable research. Military smallpox testing, that one king that raised "feral" children to see what their tabula rasa state was, the Milgram experiments...I suppose this falls in the same, um, vein.
> Efforts thus far have had only mild success (IIRC, it's been done at great cost, and it reportedly tasted terrible).
I have so much hope for this. I'm not vegetarian, but I wouldn't mind cutting out animal cruelty from my life as much as possible, as it is a place I recognize cognitive dissonance in myself. I'm really hoping they can get the cost down, and since it's controlled, can start experimenting on ways to improve taste (artificial stimulation, etc). I see no reason why we can't eventually grow meat that tastes multiples better. It's not like nature selected for pigs and cows to taste good (although we may have, over the last few hundreds or thousands of years).
> Assuming these efforts succeed, where does that leave me?
Hopefully, it means you'll eventually be eating the best burger you've ever tasted. :)
> at what point is it morally acceptable to me to buy and eat that "meat"?
I would assume immediately at the point there's a version that doesn't harm animals, if you're in it for ethical reasons. I'm not sure I understand the question, or the implications, because it doesn't seem controversial to me at all, given the predicates.
> I imagine it's similar to anyone in a field that benefits from ethically questionable research.
I'm not sure it's related at all. What animals are harmed to help us get better lab-grown meat?
That said, questionable research it's a very interesting question in itself. I've been culturally indoctrinated to belief that it's bad, but rationally, if the resaerch leads to improved lives for people during the time we would not know that information until we found it otherwise, shouldn't we weigh that correctly? Would a study that resulted in the death of 1000 people but eliminated heart disease be worth it? Yes, but we can't know what any specific research will result in, so all we do is increase the risk of our gambles with the hope of a bigger payoff.
That said, I think we need more nuanced rules regarding some studies and people that want in them. If someone is already terminally ill, but it shouldn't affect the study, I don't see the problem with a large payout to participate in a very dangerous study.
> What animals are harmed to help us get better lab-grown meat?
I'm assuming the acquisition of the original cells is not done at all kindly, (as in, I suspect the animal doesn't survive it), and that this is done many, many times before they perfect the process, but I'll admit that's an assumption on my part and it could be well within my ethical boundaries.
I don't plan to prejudge any options until I actually know, this was more of a hypothetical exercise that I've pondered now and again because I assume the day will come when it's actually real and the question will no longer be hypothetical. Knowing what matters to me then is better than trying to figure it out on the spot.
> I'm assuming the acquisition of the original cells is not done at all kindly, (as in, I suspect the animal doesn't survive it), and that this is done many, many times before they perfect the process
I was sort of under the impression it's animal stem cells, which doesn't necessitate death on the part of the animal (although I'll give you it's probably likely, to easy harvesting in some way). Like human stem cells, they aren't consumed entirely in use, which is good since US law precludes any new lines of stem cells in research[1]. There are 279 approved lines of cells in the US, but most researchers just use two or three lines. They just culture more cells from that line when they need them.
Well, it's only hypothetical in that it costs far too much at the moment, but if if trends continue from the extremely small dataset I've seen[2], we're seeing a 60% drop in price per year. If it's $18k a pound now, it should be under $10 a pound in 15 years (which might match the cost of beef with inflation by then). So, count on it in 15 years. Totally scientific. ;)
Meat enthusiast here. There is no one who wants a viable meat alternative for meat eaters than me. The bleeding heart (pun intended) in me cares about the sustainability of meat and the sheer cost of ethical farming. Fact of the matter is though, I won't give up eating meat. I love it, so so much. And I have a leery eye towards meat substitutes. This product for example:
- How well does this product replicate the Maillard Reaction [0]? This is key when we're talking about taste and texture.
- Why did the author taste the burger with 82 toppings slathered on top by a professional chef? That's like testing out a new 21 speed, strapped to the top of an SUV.
- Why are they (presumably) trying to recreate chuck? Ground chuck is a terrible thing to replicate. It's like burger meat designed by committee[1].
- Is the sizzle coming from only extracted water from the plant burger (water vapor, decreasing heating temp)? Or are their lipids present spiking the flame, positively contributing to the cooking process?
That said, I'd love to give it a shot. Proper seasoning, a nice medium rare with a slice of American. But I'm not holding my breath. Meat is very hard.
It's quite hard but not impossible (pun intended). Full disclosure: Patrick Brown was on my committee in grad school. I've had many long conversations with him about these things and he's quite aware of all the challenges. The talk of scientifically breaking down the problem and figuring out exactly what makes meat meat is not just talk, it's actually the way he and the company operates. I think the heavy duty science they're putting into this is going to eventually yield a "burger" that is functionally indistinguishable in many applications.
I think there's always going to be a place for The Counter or other such premium burgers, but what about the zillions of patties used by the likes of Burger King, McDonald's, In-N-Out? Those are cooked heavily, and flavor engineered six ways to Sunday. The top of the SUV analogy is nice, but realistically most burgers are not terribly subtle flavor experiences coming from the brilliance of the meat substrate.
How many millions of gallons of water and tons of greenhouse gases would be eliminated if 10% of patties at big chains were vegetarian? Even small shifts in consumption could have incredibly positive impacts on the environment and perhaps even overall health.
> The top of the SUV analogy is nice, but realistically most burgers are not terribly subtle flavor experiences coming from the brilliance of the meat substrate.
Are we talking about fast food burgers? Then yes, flavor country lives in the lab, not the burger. But this article seemed to be strongly hinting at a meat substitute, not just a burger substitute for fast food chains (which I agree with you, would be wonderful). If the flavor experience isn't coming from the meat, than why is it so hard to find a widely excepted meat substitute?
That's why it seems strange the author loaded up their burger with exquisite toppings to taste the meat.
>Why are they (presumably) trying to recreate chuck? Ground chuck is a terrible thing to replicate. It's like burger meat designed by committee[1].
Probably because it's common as hell and if you could widely replace both burger patties and sausage filling with this meat substitute, you might be able to knock 5% off the worlds meat consumption with one product.
I wish they'd pick some other cut to grind up. I have to look really hard to find chuck steak. In my opinion it's the best taste/value combination - sure, a rib-eye tastes better, but you can buy five chuck steaks for one rib-eye, and chuck steak is usually cheaper, and tastier than trash like T-bones, top round, or London Broil.
I've broken down and bought the roasts and sliced them myself when I can't find proper chuck steaks.
> The bleeding heart (pun intended) in me cares about the sustainability of meat and the sheer cost of ethical farming. Fact of the matter is though, I won't give up eating meat. I love it, so so much.
This is exactly why plant-based substitutes for meat are so important. I'm a vegan, but I don't think the majority of human beings will ever be convinced to adopt a plant-based diet on ethical grounds. That's a completely hopeless cause. The only way is for plant-based versions of the foods meat eaters love to be 1) indistinguishable or better tasting 2) as cheap or cheaper. In the end, most people value convenience and their own experience over ethics and the experience of others (and I'm not saying I'm better than you or anyone else—I'm the same, just not on this particular issue), so I think the right approach is to make plant-based foods the most convenient and enjoyable experience. It may be far away, but it will happen eventually.
I think they try to do something similar to what the cow does when growing muscles (chaining proteins or whatever). So I think it browns the same.
Why chuck? Once this gets cheaper in production than meat burger, but still tastes exactly the same, the big fast-food chains might join the boat. So I guess they try to stay close to that.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know what, the good people of Impossible Foods, are doing. Way over my head. What I do know is recreating nature is hard work, with limited success.
Ho! A learning opportunity. I know you're a vegetarian, but maybe this might interest you...or someone.
The chuck sub-primal cut is the shoulder of the cow. As you can imagine, the shoulder gets a lot of use while the cow is alive, so there is a lot of connective tissue which makes the cut tough (fwiw the muscles that are rarely used are the most tender to eat) However, a cow being a cow and not a horse, there is a good amount of fat interspersed within the cut. So while the cut is hard to eat like a typical steak, it has a wonderful meat to fat ratio which gives it good flavor if cooked properly (think stews and roasts). That ideal fat to meat ratio, combine with the grind making it more palatable, the ease of (mass) producing, and low price point for the cut, make it the cut of choice by distributors.
A properly cooked seven bone chuck steak is a taste to behold, though. Far and away my favorite cut, with all of the marbling, on the grill. Obviously, not for you if you like your steak more than medium rare, though, since cooking it all the way through tends to make it tougher than hell.
I would definitely like to try the products (another reason to make a trip back to Colorado).
Lots of questions long term though. Is this the "Ethanol of Meat" ? Where the total cost/impact of producing the good overwhelms the benefits? Ground chuck roast is $7/lb and currently this stuff is more expensive than that. Can it be less expensive than that? Way less expensive?
The fundamental question is does this move us toward a more efficient use of the resources we have to feed us, or is it more the high tech / high energy lifestyle? I am always wondering is this this increasing the kilowatt / person ratio or decreasing it.
There are places in the world where cattle production is the most efficient (and really only) efficient use of resources.
Very large herds of cattle on extremely large areas of semi-arid grasslands mimic the buffalo that humans eradicated. They take few to no resources that aren't already there, and they actually support the ecosystem.
In some places cattle suck down resources that could go to other more useful places (grain, water, etc.) but in others they're the only way to gain anything from the land, and they protect it from desertification.
It's not just about use of land resources though, it's about greenhouse gases (methane) generated by cattle. Beef is just about the worst thing you can eat with regards to climate change.
Hmm, I was going to say "No way!" but looking around it seems like 60M buffalo back in the day [1] and at times 100M cows [2], certainly not "order of magnitude" but more cows that buffalo.
100M is an order of magnitude more than 60M, by definition. "order of magnitude" doesn't mean "ten times as much", it means "you have to use another column to describe it"... and so 1x10^8 is an order of magnitude more than 6x10^7...
an order of magnitude conventionally means an approximate power of 10; the implicit accuracy of the approximation is such that n orders of magnitude means a multiple between 10^(n-0.5) and 10^(n+0.5).
From an ecological perspective, replacing cattle with buffalo wouldn't be much of a win. There are too many meat-eating people on the planet to make either animal the primary source.
Is there a problem with having a 'revolving' population of 60M? That is, we are eating out of the population, and it is replacing itself (with our help)?
Assume we could feed all the meat-eaters on a revolving 60M cattle--would we then have solved the problem? Or are we supposed to maintain a smaller-than-original population?
60M is possibly double the population there ever was, and that was a time when far, far more land was devoted to them. The only way to have that many now would be an extremely concentrated population (with its methane output) plus all the other outputs of humanity.
There is no single answer about what we're "supposed to" do, but it is clear that cattle are driving the increase of methane production and that methane is a far, far more potent greenhouse gas than C02. A plant-based replacement wins hands-down in any ecological analysis.
I think this could increase the kilowatt/person ratio and still be a net win for our climate. Eating less meat as a society reduces our reliance on animals, which as husbandry reduces so does the methane output. Methane is a significant contributor to climate change, although it dissipates relatively quickly so is much easier to recover from than CO2.
So to me, reducing methane is more important than reducing total energy used (as long as we're using renewable resources for energy). If we're burning coal to produce eco-friendly plant burgers, then forget it.
Ground chuck roast is heavily subsidized; it would be surprising if any fake meat product could actually rival the energy and water costs needed to raise and process beef. So one solution would be to price both more fairly, in which case lots of consumers might be happier to choose the vegan option.
They are both subsidized, clearly - but since it takes 8lbs / 3.6kg of grain to produce 1lb / 0.45kg of beef [1], and the livestock then receive additional subsidies [2], the effect is magnified.
> Ground chuck roast is heavily subsidized; it would be surprising if any fake meat product could actually rival the energy and water costs needed to raise and process beef.
Substitutes have much lower growing costs in energy and water, but so far also much higher processing costs. Not too surprised that these might end up offsetting each other.
If you want plants to be efficient food sources, the best approach is not to try to make them imitate meat. Making them imitate meat is an inefficient use of plants.
> "When I tried a mini burger slathered in vegan mayo, mashed avocado, caramelized onions and Dijon prepared by San Francisco chef Traci Des Jardin at the company's headquarters in Redwood City, I was floored."
Honestly a good chef can make cardboard taste good. But as a daily meat eater I'd love a good ground beef alternative.
Honestly a good chef can make cardboard taste good.
Which is exactly the core operating principle upon which the fast food industry (including much of what is put on the shelves in larger grocery chains) basically works these days:
Yes, reminds me of discussions of whether I "like" alcohol:
"You don't like alcohol? Even when we dilute the heck out of it by mixing it with lots of sugar and fruit flavors? Crazy! I definitely like alcohol, although only Smirnov Ice and cosmos, for some inexplicable reason..."
I feel like with these types of discussions, people like the feeling of alcohol, and conflate the feeling and the taste under the idea of alcohol. You could not like how it tastes but enjoy how it feels, and in the end it'd be a net positive.
Good point. Especially for strong drinks. Although the argument _may_ fall apart when you start talking about the taste or wines, ciders, or beers. I mean, I think they're delicious and I like the way they make me feel.
He did say it was about the texture, which is really the hard part in imitating beef. He also mentioned the flavor was a little weaker than normal beef.
FWIW I tried an Impossible Food burger and was also impressed. I cooked it without condiments and found it a little nutty but definitely in the same category as meat.
Depending on the context, texture vegetable protein (TVP for short) is an option for things like pasta sauce that you want to add a ground beef alternative too. I'm sure there's many other ways to use it, but that's one we regularly use in our house.
A really good tip is anchovies and black olives, grounded. It honestly approaches ground beef in pasta sauce (Especially the cheap, student-living kind).
There's one version that's like spicier and it's better. You should also check out Gardein. Their vegan crab cakes are heavenly but all their products are really good. The fish is very convincing.
I do the same thing when somebody decides to buy the ultra-lean 95-93% ground beef. You've got to do something, or else burgers fall all apart and taste like shoe leather - the easiest is to just buy the cheaper, tastier, better, 75-80% hamburger...
Meat that you buy in a store, including ground beef, doesn't have blood in it. The red color is almost entirely myoglobin, not so much hemoglobin. Your burger doesn't bleed. What comes out is just water with some protein including myoglobin.
This is a noble effort. Animal agriculture is pretty terrible. It's massively wasteful in terms of land use and water use. It's incredibly inefficient when it comes to energy use (beef cattle production requires an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1 [1]). And, of course, there are the animal welfare concerns.
Even given all the problems, I'm convinced that people won't stop eating meat unless there is a market alternative that's at least equivalent in terms of price, taste, smell, texture, and nutrition. While the plant-based alternatives are getting better and better and I'm a big fan, I'm much more excited about the cultured meat alternatives.
Basically, you can think of a cow as a biological machine inside which certain processes occur which lead to things humans like to eat (milk, meat). If you can replicate those process in the lab instead of in the cow, you can get real meat without the negative side effects mentioned above.
Until very recently, this field had been relegated to academia, but there are now several companies working on commercializing it, like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, and Modern Meadow. In my mind, this is the only solution: give people real meat, made without the animals.
I eat meat, love the taste of it, but would be the first to switch to a plant-based alternative.
I know it's tough to acknowledge it, but lots of people like me are a bit hypocrites when it comes to meat: we hate killing animals, but we love the outcome.
I'm super excited by these startups. It seems to be the most promising meat alternatives around at least judging by the articles I've read. The faster we can stop maintaining livestock for meat production the better. It takes the 'middle man' out from plants to people. I love meat and I'm hopeful they can make a steak someday.
I've had the good fortune to try an Impossible Foods burger. It really does taste like meat. I'm not sure I would say it's indistinguishable from a beef burger. But I would definitely have a hard time telling it apart from a ground turkey burger. Or an ostrich burger from Fuddruckers.
I've tried the beyond burger[0], which is similar in that they're both trying to be meatless meat burgers. I don't know if they taste anything alike.
The beyond burger was interesting. It was the closest to a meat patty I've eaten, of all the beef substitutes. It cooks and looks like a beef burger. However, the taste and texture is only reminiscent of meat. Against, it's the closest I've seen anyone get. But it's not a beef burger, and it's worse for inviting the comparison. I'll stick to bean burgers for now. I hope this impossible burger is better.
Adding heme is a brilliant idea - and I think high amounts of iron would make it a great product. There are a few things that are important to watch to make sure you get enough of when you're a vegetarian, and iron is one of them. (Women who donate blood have their blood tested for iron, and are sometimes surprised the learn that they're low in iron.)
Glancing at that I'm guessing it's just that people who pig out on steaks and burgers tend to get more heart attacks and it correlates with iron consumption.
No there's more to it than diet. Similar findings have been found in multiple studies. There is evidence to indicate that this is why pre-menopausal women have a lower risk of heart disease than men and post-menopausal women (after controlling for other differences).
Awesome! If this is close to meat in macronutrient profile (no carb, protein/fat based), I'd be fine switching >90% of my ground beef consumption to it as soon as commercially available as long as it is less than $10/pound (cheaper would be better, though).
Even if a great steak is still better/worth eating, no one will say that fast food hamburger patties, taco bell mystery meat, etc. are in any way exemplars of amazing meat. If an animal is going to die for me to eat, it should be something like steak, not the lowest quality ground beef possible.
They're really smart going after the carnivore market.
Family member made me watch Cowspiracy on Netflix, a documentary on the effects/unsustainability of large-scale animal agriculture. I'm sure someone on HN can prove the movie wrong, but it did scare me into wanting to reduce my meat consumption. If these faux meats can be produced large-scale sustainably and with significantly less negative impact than raising the real meats, I'd say that's a win.
I took part in a taste testing for a "revolutionary new vegetarian burger" in the past few months in the SF Bay Area. It was marketed for upscale locations.
That said, it was incredibly good to the point I asked one of the researchers who was making it so I could buy it. Unfortunately they couldn't disclose to me that information, maybe it was this product.
On the one hand, I love the science and I love watching these engineers get closer and closer to mimicking meat with each passing year. If they can succeed in creating a cheaper, tastier alternative to real meat, there could be untold benefits for both our health and the environment.
On the other hand, the article mentioned that this particular patty uses coconut oil. Well, I happen to be allergic to coconuts, so that leaves me out. I'm weary of encountering in daily life yet another highly engineered foodstuff that requires close scrutiny. I'm especially worried about eating something like this on accident someday, if they get close enough to the patina of the real meat, and having an allergic reaction.
There's a part of me that hopes the mimicry is a passing fad, and instead they use the techniques to create new tastes and experiences. That's more fun in general, and it's easier for guys like me to distinguish and avoid if needed.
>chef Traci Des Jardins served the Impossible Burger (pictured uncooked) with vegan mayo, Dijon mustard, mashed avocado, caramelized onions, chopped cornichon, tomato and lettuce on a pretzel bun.
I think I'd probably enjoy a single postage stamp served in the above configuration (in place of the patty). Obviously my review of the postage stamp would be heavily influenced by these trimmings.
Given the rest of the article, they should have just browned it and served it on a $0.50 store-bought hamburger bun http://www.walmart.com/c/kp/hamburger-buns with some lettuce and ketchup.
Or is it not actually up to the task? The rest of the article fawns that it is, but they don't put their hamburger where the reviewer's mouth is. They put mashed avocado, carmelized onion, and chopped cornichon on a pretzel bun there.
As a vegan, I'm very excited by this news because it might convince others to give it a try. Today someone told me that they recently ate a chicken burger at Veggie Grill and she didn't know until later that it was not chicken. She said at the time she thought, that was a really good chicken sandwich!
The SF Bay Are Vegans in Technology meetup group organized a Future of Food panel last month featuring some local biotech companies in this space (http://www.sfvtech.org/oakvegtech). Memphis Meats is one of the SF Indie Bio accelerator companies that is working on cultured meat (http://sf.indiebio.co/mentor/memphis-meats/)
I was a vegetarian from 14 to 32 or so. I think eating less meat (than most people currently do) is definitely desirable, both for the planet and your own health, but you don't need to stop eating meat altogether.
There is so much we don't yet understand about nutrition or metabolism that I would take a very low tech approach to diet. The more we process things the more chance there is of things going wrong.
I find it fascinating to look at diets of groups people who live relatively long and disease free lives. It's almost always minimally processed food
> The more we process things the more chance there is of things going wrong.
Actually the whole point of factories and assembly lines is consistency and efficiency. There's a huge amount of variability with current meat based on how it was raised, transportation, age, butchering conditions, etc.
Do we really believe our body's are going to process 'fake meat' as 'real meat'? I am highly skeptical of that aspect as well. Moreover, we are removing a very natural element out of food (killing an animal for meat) out of the picture by growing meat in a lab, this is a very primal element that technology has forgotten.
The problem stems from current livestock farming practices. Fixing that problem is far easier than trying to create lab grown meat, and in the end will be healthier as it doesn't require a change in our biological system.
Plus food is not complicated. Humans have made it complicated over the last 50-60 years. Food has been a basic necessity of life, yet most struggle with every aspect related to food, from acquiring it to cooking it.
Don't get me wrong I see this type of innovation as being very important to long-term space travel or planet colonization but for everyday human consumption I view this as a waste of time and energy.
IMO they need to not only replicate flavor, but also macro nutrient profiles and a few other things like omega3s and CLA found in grass fed beef.
I think we're better off cleaning up the meat industry than trying to make plants into meat. Fixing things like CAFOs and our corn subsidies could go a long way to a more sustainable meat.
Out of the set of mean eaters who this market would target, I really think the subset that thinks about or considers omega 3 and CLA in their meat is minuscule. I'm a very health conscious omnivore and honestly didn't even know there were omega 3s in beef. Guess that's another excuse for me to eat hamburgers...
I'm regularly surprised by how little the average person knows about the things that make/keep them healthy. If I really wanted a car to last I'd be sure I knew all about the gasoline and oil I was putting into it.
There is always a link to Dr. Mercola's articles when people try to defend the health benefits of eating meat, but no one mentions that is an anti-vaxxer and has many other unscientific claims on his website.
It was just the first hit in google tbh and I already knew it to be true, just needed a link to attempt to satisfy haters.
Seeing as you'd rather attack than do some useful work, I'll do it for you. See below:
"A healthy diet should consist of roughly one to four times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3 fatty acids. The typical American diet tends to contain 11 to 30 times more omega -6 fatty acids than omega -3, a phenomenon that has been hypothesized as a significant factor in the rising rate of inflammatory disorders in the United States[40]. Table Table22 shows significant differences in n-6:n-3 ratios between grass-fed and grain-fed beef, with and overall average of 1.53 and 7.65 for grass-fed and grain-fed, respectively, for all studies reported in this review."[1]
> I'm a very health conscious omnivore and honestly didn't even know there were omega 3s in beef.
Here's a rule of thumb, fresh fatty meats (incl. eggs) contain all human micronutrients except for Vitamin C and so called "phytonutrients" (that usually only make it past our livers/kidneys by accident, as far as could be observed so far in-vivo).
They're extremely efficient at synthesizing phospholipids, EPA, DHA, carnitine, choline, creatine, taurine, coenzyme Q10, carnosine, just from grazing on cellulose all day.. well they're way better at it than all the vegans I know.
Animals absolutely do synthesize nutritious substances that you can't get out of plants. For instance humans, as long as we ingest the 9 essential amino acids, can create from scratch any protein our body needs. Our bodies are also capable of turning protein and fat into carbohydrates when needed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis).
Animals, us included, are not inefficient filters, or tanks that hold minerals and energy. We are chemistry sets designed for survival in a wide range of conditions.
Everyone is talking about the environmental effects, but what about the huge economic shifts that would come with the introduction of a viable meat substitute?
If the substitute is cheaper and tastier, a large chunk of the agricultural industry will disappear almost overnight. For many poor countries agriculture supports a large percentage of the workforce.
And if the company that develops the meat substitute can protect their manufacturing process from being copied through patents or simply keeping it a secret, then it will become enormously rich and powerful.
So you'll effectively have a transfer of wealth from poor farmers to a large US corporation on a massive scale.
Is that a good thing?
(And yes, I recognise that poor people will also benefit by having a cheaper source of 'meat')
Because there's different motivations for being vegetarian. Some do it, because they simply find meat disgusting, in which case, yes, they probably don't want their food to look, taste or feel like meat.
But others do it for moral reasons, and to them, meat might be the tastiest food in the world, they just choose to abstain from it, because well, you know, animals have to die for it. So, if they can eat something which tastes like meat, but doesn't require animals to die for it, that's the best of both worlds to them.
I feel like I see these posts regularly on HN and reddit from various companies with "meat killing" veggie meats, but they are never for sale. I sign up for the newsletters and no one ever has products for sale, just more hype. When can I try these?
As mentioned in the article, another company Beyond Meat makes some products which are currently available in some stores. Their website has a locator for which stores carry them.
Looks like a pretty neat "engineering feat". I'll certainly try it if it ever becomes available here (I'm an avid meat eater and low&slow bbq lover).
Since I'm sure many vegetarians/vegans will read this thread I'm curious why so many v-products try to imitate the look and feel of meat. This has always startled me a bit. Why not create awesome new/distinct stuff instead of the typical "tofu shaped like a piece of meat" I see so often.
(apart from the fun engineering/optimizing aspect of recreating something with different ingredients which is fun).
The Impossible Burger is made with wheat protein (source: the NPR article). If this is indeed gluten, then there's a lot of hopeful people that can't eat this burger, myself included.
Also, why call it wheat protein instead of gluten? That's like food manufacturers calling sugar 'cane juice'.
Tastes like meat is something I'm really doubtful of... Resembles the taste of meat maybe... but the coconut oil, while relatively mild definitely adds a definitive flavor. And while I appreciate the sentiment, saying something tastes like something else doesn't make it true. Similarly, I think bison tastes better than beef, and that alligator tastes better than chicken.
I'm also not sure if this is better than processing mealworms and similar actual meat that can be fed algae and mass-produced would be, if at all.
There seems to be a lot happening in this area lately.
There's a new soy based meat substitute called Oumph, which I believe is only available here in Sweden so far. The texture and taste is fantastic. It's the first time I've tried a meat immitation where I don't just feel like I should have gone for the real thing. I'm not a vegetarian but I've actually found myself buying it more often than real meat lately.
It wouldn't work in a burger though - it's more chicken or pork like.
From what I've previously read, the challenge isn't creating meat-alternatives that taste and smell like meat. The challenge is recreating the texture of meat.
Interesting. As somebody who is not at all familiar with the "alternative meat" industry, my first question is, why not use real cow blood?
You wouldn't need to kill the animal to use its blood and you could extract more blood from an animal than meat. Presumably the environmental impact of a blood only farm would be substantially lower than that of a meat farm. Or is that not the case?
Because the target group for this is product like this is virtually non existent.
If you don't eat meat for health reason blood or meat doesn't make the difference, if you don't eat meat for the animals, why would you support a gruesome vampire farm.
Also this sounds ridiculously impractical if you can just simulate the stuff by using ketchup for the color and iron for the taste.
Blood is not the unhealthy part of red meat. Couldn't you market these "blood steaks" to health and environmentally conscious people who want something that tastes a bit more like meat than a soy patty?
Although I agree that selling blood at scale would need clever marketing. It seems like the blood imitation in the article would have similar problems, since it looks and tastes like blood.
It narrows the market, it requires explaining and justification, and it's unappetizing. It sounds like they've figured out a good approach to heme, why bother using actual blood?
>Yet although organic crops are grown without the use of chemicals, an organic certification does allow farmers to use animal waste, including blood meal and bone meal, to fertilize fields. Some organic farms purchase these animal by-products from slaughterhouses and other non-organic sources. The animals have been given antibiotics and hormones throughout their lives, and exposed to pesticides and other chemicals.
So why isn't there an organic+ that only uses organic animal waste? My guess is that it's because it's not worth advertising. Most people probably don't want to think about what kind of waste their produce grew in, and hearing that these potatoes grew in hormone free blood meal doesn't really make you more inclined to buy them. Whereas veganic can explain it's advantages without making you think it's gross. Plus the potential audience for veganic is all inclusive.
The red stuff in beef and other red meat isn't blood, it's myoglobin. "Bloody" is a common way to describe meat cooked rare, but it's not an accurate term there.
I'm guessing the real reason the company's not marketing to vegans because there's essentially zero need to market to vegans, and good reasons not to.
Vegans are a relatively night-knit lot. As long as it contains no animal products and tastes good, all they'll need to do is pass out a few free samples at a single vegan meetup and then sit back and wait. Every strict vegetarian on the continent will be talking about it within a week.
Meanwhile, if they do spend much money on marketing it to vegans then they risk locking themselves into niche product status as a result of the public perceiving it as being all covered in vegan cooties.
I know of at least one fairly popular cafe that only serves vegan baked goods, but does not publicly label them as such for that reason.
Great points. There is a restaurant in my city that serves exclusively vegan food, from lunch and dinner entrees to bakery sweets.
It's actually one of my favorite restaurants (despite not being vegan) but it's very difficult to convince my non-vegetarian/non-vegan friends to go try it with me.
There seems to be a weird mental block for a lot of people. I've seen non-vegetarians be genuinely surprised to be informed that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are vegan.
As someone with a mental hesitation (not quite a block) on food advertised as vegan, my reasoning is due to the type of food I'd expect. If it's advertised as vegan, I'm expecting food that would otherwise not be vegan that has been compromised to make the vegan version. If it's not advertised as vegan, I'm expecting food that just happens to be vegan, but is not the intended goal of the food. It's good food compared to all food vs good only compared to vegan food.
Take veggie burger patties. I've had some that were not made to resemble meat, but were just vegan ingredients in patty form, that are on par with some of the best meat burgers I've had. I've never had a veggie patty that was supposed to taste like meat that I could finish a bite of.
It could be done in a way that isn't cruel. Just take a little at a time, like we do with humans. It might not even be less efficient if the rate of blood production is fairly constant. (I don't know enough biology to speculate.)
I don't think it would be cruel for animals, because once you remove pain as a factor, the only suffering left for humans exists on a psychological level that I don't believe animals would experience.
Possible benefit. Less chance of food poisoning over real meat? If a cow has a soul it has been clearly exorcised in most fast food beef patties by the lengths they go to to make them safe.
> And because it's plant-based, this "meat" has no cholesterol.
This statement is loaded with judgment. In response, I'd love if the author could provide some good data that shows a link between dietary cholesterol and blood serum cholesterol, let alone between dietary cholesterol and mortality.
It's disturbing how much they focus on blood and sizzling. I'm not a vampire. I just want something that tastes really good.
Honestly, if plant-eaters took a fraction of the time they take replicating meats and just spent it making tastier vegetables I think we'd all have different diets by now.
No one has a problem with releasing hemoglobin producing yeast? No one? That sounds terrifying in that many _other_ industries rely on wild yeast.
This goes beyond the general case for GMO (where wild growth is generally crippled) and involves actively modifying the wider environment. This is a serious problem.
"So, he decided to use yeast instead. By taking the soybean gene that encodes the heme protein and transferring it to yeast, the company has been able to produce vast quantities of the bloodlike compound".
So it sold out at Whole Foods, and it's GMO. LMAO.
I was excited when I saw the Impossible Foods burger on Hacker News—my wife, who's Hindu, could finally enjoy a what I've been enjoying for years… I showed her the video and she said: "gross!" wtf lol
Taste is also a matter of habituation.
The easier, healthier and better solution is to learn to love natural vegetarien food. I went this way. I do not miss meat at all, although I ate a lot of it years ago.
> By taking the soybean gene that encodes the heme protein and transferring it to yeast, the company has been able to produce vast quantities of the bloodlike compound.
I think most people are already 95% vegan, since they are against causing unnecessary suffering and inefficient resource management. The issue is that there's a variable level of sacrifice that goes into making a practical transition to plants.
For some, there's enough motivation to do it; for others, the inconvenience of changing habits and their emotional attachment to certain foods are greater than their desire to reduce animal suffering and environmental degradation.
I hope that plant meats become so close to animal meat that the complete experience can be replicated, except for the slaughtering. I know some people like the slaughtering part, but that's a small minority.
I'm a content carnivore but have no problem enjoying vegetarian meals on a regular basis. I don't understand the market for fake meat. Give me a salad or give me a proper steak, but you can keep your slimy tofu substitute. Garden Fresh in Palo Alto, I'm looking at you.
Interesting topic. Not a vegetarian here, but when I'm eating outside the home I'll often act as one (no chicken/red meat. Fish/seafood acceptable but I'm not adventurous. Egg dairy okay). I went to a local chain restaurant that opened in a nearby shopping center that serves meat substitute. It's called lord of the fries (does this exist in other countries?). They dont specify on their website what substitute they use. My views (tried in burger form):
- Beef. This was terrible. Texture was best described as processed mush. Nothing like beef, even the processed type. The taste was worse. it was for some reason sweet. Didn't feel like I was eating beef at all. You'd fool no one with this. The appearance was convincing, but thats all the praise I had for it.
- Chicken: Actually pretty good. Friend was convinced it was real. It did taste pretty good, actually a little milder than 'real' chicken and without the sometimes unpleasant strong chicken-y taste (my opinion, im referring to the slight offputting taste that old/non-fresh chicken sometimes has). So i could definitely see the utility in this. It still didn't feel indinstinguishable, if you were paying attention I think you can tell the difference. Arbitrarily i'd give it a 90% there.
I havent seen the brands other posters discussed in my supermarket (Australia here). I wonder if meat substitutes are more of an American thing?
A point I wanted to bring up was safety. The experimental nature of these substitutes leaves me feeling a bit uneasy. The primary reason I never went back to the above discussed food outlet despite liking their fake-chicken was because I am unsure what is really inside it. Yes I know its vegetable based. My guess is soy protein? But how do I know that it's safe, for example too much soy milk has been shown to have increased estrogen like hormone and potentially a risk factor for cancers in females, and altered hormonal profile in males. Ideally I'd like to eat something that's been tested and through a strict approval process (treated like a pharmaceutical would get my confidence) to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot later. Yes I'm aware the verdict currently out on red meat isn't great either. But between chosing the devil I know vs the devil I don't know, i'd rather know what I'm getting myself into. Interested to hear what others think about this. I admit I'm not as knowledgeable with the regulatory processes for these things. I inherently dont trust companies on face value (they have too much conflict of interest, see tobacco companies or even meat companies for example). I've kept myself basically informed via documentaries, but so far it feels like we're all in an experimental phase.
so being allergic to wheat, peas (beans) and parsley (celery, carrots, etc) all this stuff is pretty much poisonous. if they replace the wheat proteins perhaps...
Believe it or not, some of us don't want to be vegans. I quite enjoy the taste of meat. I harvest my own by ethically hunting when I have the time. No I do not want a vegan substitute.
I'm not really sure what you're reacting to. NOTHING in my message said that everyone wanted to be vegan, nor did I imply that everyone SHOULD.
So I totally believe you. As I said, I spent a long time as a meat eater and enjoyed the taste/texture, I haven't gone full vegan despite my ethical beliefs, and I spend money on luxuries while people suffer. I'm in no place to judge other people for their choices.
I won't comment on "ethically hunting" except to say that's ethical relative to some options, not objectively ethical, but that's a discussion for later.
As for not wanting a substitute - that's fine. But there are a few groups that do:
* Those of us that don't want to kill things, but still like the taste/texture (as you can see from other comments, being vegetarian doesn't mean you hated meat, nor does it mean you loved it and miss it. All kinds exist.).
* Those that want cheaper, healthier food. As an example, the US produces a vast amount of corn, and in fact covers 35% of the global corn demand...and corn for human consumption is a tiny, tiny sliver of that corn usage. Most goes to feed animals. A lot of calories go into feeding those animals, so that they can be killed and eaten. If we convert some portion of that process into feeding people instead of animals, we've just made food (calories) cheaper. (And currently, the cheapest food is often empty calorie - ironically corn syrup factors in to that). Presumably we'd want that food to be considered tasty to people, be that by simply making vegetables cheaper, or making meat alternatives tastier.
* Those that want to reduce the impact on the world by domesticated animals raised for food. Methane is one output, but lots of sewage is another, just as an example. (Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1338/ )
If the above doesn't cover 100% of people, that's hardly a surprise. But the above is certainly greater than 0%. If you can point out what part of my message offended you, I'll see what I can do to correct it.
Please don't be rude in comments here, even if another comment was unsubstantive.
When responding to a bad comment, try to raise the quality of the thread instead of lowering it further. If you can't or don't want to do that, please just don't post anything.
Even if carbohydrates aren't bad, I prefer foods that are low in them when possible because other foods have disproportionate amounts. Eating a low-carb protein allows you to eat a cookie later and still hit your macro targets.
Carbohydrates in excessive amounts, yes. Meats and cheeses are basically the last bastions of non carb-laden foods. Pretty much everything that's not "diet" or meat/cheese is jam packed with carbs for flavor/cost cutting/fat reduction.
And there's plenty of evidence that this is a bad thing.
Ive been an atkins follower for... 20 years. I eat mostly meat.
The few things I indulge in other than meat are mama lupe low carb tortillas, blue diamond almonds almost all flavors, and some veg like cauliflower because its LC. And cheese. I am a cheese addict. :/
Other than that I don't touch anything from a grocery store.
I do make paneer cheese and butter from raw milk I get from a sweet lady that has a small farm 30 minutes from here. Love paneer! And let me tell you if you have NEVER had butter made from RAW MILK by hand your missing out. That garbage in the store called "butter" will seriously make you rethink what the EFF you are eating if you taste raw milk butter you make yourself. It's not a subtle "eh I can kind of tell the difference." Its more of a "HOLY SH!@# What the @#!$ have I been eating?!?!" moment.
Normal today or normal 200 years ago? Eating non-processed food is difficult for a large segment of the population of the US and many other parts of the world. Processed foods have drastically change our nutritional intake balances of the years. So 'normal' is something that should be defined.
There's plenty of vegetables that aren't loaded with starch, especially the really bad sorts of starch. In fact I can only name a few that are that bad for you. Russet potatos, mostly.
There are a lot of pretty sugary fruits, even after you account for fiber.
Sugar specifically is showing signs of being incredibly bad for you and yet is added to most of the "diet foods" instead of fat (which is showing signs of being less bad for you then people say).
I don't have the studies handy, and you can find studies that say either way.
Why waste all this money and time designing something that is great the way it is? Give a cow some land, feed it some grass, wait a few months, kill the cow and now you have real beef. Nature intended it to be this way.
Nature also intended humans to use intelligence when sharing thoughts with others. If you bother to dig a little deeper than your mindless appetite for cheeseburgers and attempted internet wit, perhaps you'll discover the answer to your own question.
There wasn't any Internet wit in there. The problem stems from current livestock farming practices. Fixing that problem is far easier than trying to create lab grown meat, and in the end will be healthier as it doesn't require a change in our biological system.
Do you really believe our body's are going to process 'fake meat' as 'real meat'? I am highly skeptical of that aspect as well. Furthermore, you have taken the very natural element of food out of the picture by growing meat in a lab, this is a very primal element that technology has forgotten.
Plus food is not complicated. Humans have made it complicated over the last 50-60 years. Food has been a basic necessity of life, yet most struggle with every aspect related to food, from acquiring it to cooking it.
Don't get me wrong I see this type of innovation has being very important to long-term space travel or planet colonization but for everyday human consumption I view this as a waste of time and energy.
What are you talking about? The burgers are made from plants and natural ingredients, it's not "lab grown meat" did you even read the article?
Further more, if you think "fixing livestock farming practices" is easy, then you're missing the big picture issue where billions of people demand meat on their plate every day for little cost. The environmental cost of the meat industry is not on your average meat eater's mind. Is it on your mind? Doesn't sound like it if you say things like "hey just fix it hmmkay cos I loves my meat".
I read the article and made from plants and natural ingredients still requires a lab to get everything in the right state to get laboratory meat. Can you make this your kitchen with easily purchasable appliances? No. Lab produced meat. I can put a cow on my land and have meat pretty easily in a few months.
Personally, I buy a half of cow from a local farmer every year. The cow is raised in open fields that I have visited and feed an all grass diet. It comes out to $6.99 per pound.
Honestly, I don't do this to better then environment, that doesn't cross my mind in the least and probably never well, I do this because it provides better tasting meat and a better quality of life for the cow until the day of the slaughter house.
Meat is necessary to live a strong healthy life. Meat comes from an animal. Killing is necessary to eat meat. You can keep this processed food.
I used to love meat when I was a meat-eater, and I'm a fairly picky eater that dislikes many vegetable options. (Green peppers are nasty and food-destroying in my opinion, which immediately removes over half the vegetarian options out there, just as an example), so I consider myself a decent bellweather for people who like the tastes of meat but want to actually eat less of it for various reasons.
The options that already exist today are quite varied. Boca, Morningstar, Beyond Meat, and Quorn are all big names that offer meat alternatives that taste VERY different from each other. Most of my meat eating friends won't even try any of these, sight unseen. (When they see them, they tend to have even more reluctance). So, while I think it's absolutely worthwhile to make alternatives that seem more "real", there is still a stigma to overcome just by virtue of being fake. And in america, at least, where meat-eating is tied to masculinity and bacon is worshipped, that's a tough stigma to shake.
Decent imitations of highly processed meat exist already - I've had chicken nuggets that meat eaters had no idea were fake, and I fed my in-laws a "turkey loaf" dinner for Thanksgiving for years without them realizing - but matching the taste of "quality" meats hasn't yet happened.