Congrats to that team for building a great product. I hope they see a lot of success. Long term, I hope plant based meat alternatives become commoditized. If there are a bunch of alternatives that taste just as good and importantly are cheaper than meat, most people will switch. That's a huge win for the environment (and also animal rights), and I can't wait to see it happen.
I'm no expert, but I expect land is different in different places. There are different sources of feed. Someone changes a supplier or a farming practice, and it changes a number in a spreadsheet, and you'll get a different answer.
Accounting gets complicated enough with money. When you're doing science it's much more difficult.
This sounds like the sort of thing that scientists and economists can debate for decades. I'm certainly not going to trust some unsourced numbers in a press release.
There's a really handy way to estimate the amount of resources that go into (and thus, the environmental impact of) making a product:
Its price.
When these are significantly cheaper than beef, then it'll be safe to state categorically that they are better for the environment. Until then, it's mostly a game of "pay attention to these metrics that favor my product and ignore the metrics which favor the competition".
I love meat but I've always struggled to reconcile my love of eating it with my love of animals. I would be happy to pay a premium if it meant I could get meat-like taste without the guilt
I'm more excited about where they go after they get passed the "uncanny valley of meat". If they can nail it, they'll get bored and move on to new and weirder flavors and textures.
Consider that killing a living thing to eat its body is not unique to "meat", nor is raising it in a controlled environment for the purpose of consumption. Fish (as is sometimes classified separately) and vegetables are living things raised and killed for consumption of their bodies as well.
I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.
You don't have to feel guilty. It is the disconnection between humans and animals that causes many of those feelings and if you shift your thinking, you can have a much better experience. When you participate in the process of raising, killing, butchering, and eating the animals which are your food you will appreciate them – love them – and the life they had and gave for you to live. Food encased in plastic from a grocery store really prevents this connection.
Life both begins and ands and you don't have to run away from the end of things or think that making life as long as possible is necessarily better.
I can't speak for all, but most vegan/vegetarians I know, myself included, don't view processed meat substitutes like this as a staple. They are expensive and seen as less healthy compared to less processed plant protein.
Meals more often revolve around beans, legumes, tofu, tempeh, seitan.
I think since many meat eaters are less familiar with cooking meals around these, they assume vegs are just subbing meat 1-to-1 with foods like Impossible Burger, Tofurkey, Quorn.
More often they are a food for convenience, special occasions like cookouts, specific recipes, or they happen to be the only option at a restaurant. Some I've known have used them as sort of an aid to transition to a plant based diet, if they happen to have cravings for meat.
However it's great to have more choices, and seeing brands like these in store gives more visibility to veg diets. (It's weird to me that this is the case, when the whole produce isle is vegan, but that's the way it is in a meat-by-default culture).
Are you really not getting this, or just making straw men? "That's a huge win for the environment (and also animal rights)". The comment seems pretty clear to me.
If it's just straw men... nothing is black and white - the same people who say boo to "synthetic foods" (which is obviously a massive scale too) are not the same people who say "meat production is bad for long-term human survival". The issues are complex and overlap in weird ways.
Because it's better for the environment and health compared to what it's replacing(95% less land and 74% less water, plusmore humane). If people eating whole plant foods start eating this, it's not good, but if meat eaters do it's a win. And it's much more likely that way more meat eaters will use this as replacement.
Highly processed foods are problematic when they’re unhealthy, which they usually are. The impossible burger seems to be healthy, relatively speaking - it’s not loaded with fats, sugar, and salt, unlike a lot of processed food.
People cheer while it's novel (like television, social media) but our children will hate it and feel cheated out of real nutrition by 'manufactured food'.
I agree it is really positive outcome. It suffers patent risk like a number of technologies that were slowed significantly in their early life (like encryption and digital cash).
This is about the only kind of vegan proselytizing that I can stomach. If you can make food that tastes as good as meat, with nutrition similar to meat, and sell it at a lower price than meat, I will switch overnight, and never look back.
And it would be nice if it came in bulk forms, rather than just as pre-formed patties. I eat ground beef a lot more often than I eat burgers.
Until then, good luck with the test kitchen research. The results so far indicate that the developers understand the problem they need to solve.
So you are basically saying "if I had to make no effort at all and I could also save some money, I would switch".
Yes, that's obvious, everyone would, it's redundant to state it.
But what those 'vegan proselytizers' are asking you for, is to not be so selfish and make a bit of a sacrifice to spare the lives of others. But of course, you 'can't stomach' to be asked to not be selfish, and they are the ones to blame.
What if the 'proselytizing' was environmental instead? Switching away from meat would lessen your footprint considerably, and likely improve your health[1] even if you don't care about the moral arguments.
IRT meat substitutes coming in bulk forms as opposed to pre-formed patties, I've had "Beyond Meat" before which comes as a ground beef substitute as well as patties. The prices for Beyond Meat weren't much higher than the leanest ground beef at the grocery store.
> This is about the only kind of vegan proselytizing that I can stomach. If you can make food that tastes as good as meat, with nutrition similar to meat, and sell it at a lower price than meat, I will switch overnight, and never look back.
I'm wanting to try it out someday, and am willing to pay the price for a "restaurant burger" made using the product - but the cost is too great currently for the home market. If they can reduce this, while making the product better, then I'm all for it.
That said - before I would be willing to switch fully, they'd have to be able to replicate a few kinds of cuts that are currently - well - impossible:
1. Well marbled aged rib-eye - steak and roast form, bone in
2. Pork shoulder
3. Full-size beef brisket, fat cap and all, plus tip
This. I want my tacos and burgers to taste like tacos and burgers. I don't care whether it's "real" beef or not. If someone's selling 80/20 that's blended with some plant product (or even just 100% plant product) and it's substantially cheaper than 80/20 and tastes about the same then that's what I'm gonna buy.
So far no option like that exists on the shelf. All the fake meat options cater to the people who shop at whole foods and I'll take value priced 80/20 over that any day.
I did see an impossible meatloaf in a grocery store, and it looks like their website is showing ground beef. So it looks like they are slowly branching out into other products.
Until the people currently destroying forests to grow cattle, start destroying forests to grow ingredients for these burgers. Soil depletion is also a thing. I still remember the argument for biofuel and where it ended up.
More options in the mix is always good, but trying to replace everything with vegetable stuff is not going to work in the long run.
Plant-based foods are almost always significantly more efficient to produce than meat since you no longer need to grow all of the food to feed an animal for its entire life.
> But Impossible Foods can produce a burger using a fourth of the water and less than 4 percent of the land -- and emit one-tenth of the greenhouse gases -- than a conventional burger, Brown said.
So yeah, we might still destroy forests to make veggie burgers, but it'll be 1/25th of the forest destruction (if you believe the numbers).
We're so far from that being even close to a problem that I feel it's a bit disingenuous to see it repeated so often when vegetarianism comes up. There's a whole lot of meat we can cut out of our diets without any of that becoming a problem.
(And of course, if the soy that is currently fed to cattle is fed to humans directly, we can feed quite a few more humans from that than that cattle currently can, without needing to use more resources. That's not to say it does not come with its own problems, but they're unlikely to be as severe as the ones we get with meat anytime soon.)
The cattle need to be fed too, and they don't turn their food into meat very efficiently. That's why replacing meat with plant based alternatives is (almost) always a huge gain in efficiency, in terms of resource use.
I've been under the impression that plant-based proteins take up less land than does animal-derived protein[0][1][2]. I could go on with the citations. So yes, replacing everything with plant-based protein would be vastly better.
Generally, most of that forest destruction is to grow soy beans for animal feed. Feeding the soy beans directly to humans is far more efficient, so, if more people adopt TVP instead of meat, you'd expect a drop in land requirements.
Unless the Impossible Burger is exceptionally inefficient to produce, that's still a huge win. An acre of land can produce about twenty times as much edible protein from soy as from beef.
By "may", I meant "is" according to your definition. I am just skeptical of the standard process medical researchers use to determine this stuff (NHST), so used the term "may" as I would regarding anything else.
That is interesting but I don't think that it would be healthy for people to eat beef burgers as their primary source of nutrition either. What annoys me about the fake meat is that in the dystopian future soymeat was supposed to be everywhere and cheaper where real meat was a sought after expensive delicacy but due to government subsidies and hding the costs of environmental externalities real meat remains much cheaper than the fake meats in general. Just saying.
If humans were forced to start eating "dystopian future soymeat" and stop eating meat, I'm sure it would become far cheaper as it becomes more readily available. As it stands currently, most humans do eat meat so it is cheaper than a heavily researched niche alternative which has taken years to become remotely comparable to real meat.
The economics/politics of it is a different issue. I am concerned about the danger of tricking people's minds into thinking the body has consumed something with nutritional value other than it really has. Humans have been consuming beef for a long time.
Who said that? If beef is part of your healthy diet though, you shouldn't assume you can just swap out a normal burger for an impossible burger.
But my main concern is the aspect of "tricking" the brain into thinking it is consuming beef by mimicking the texture and taste (which is their goal) but instead consuming something with different nutritional value. Just seems like it could be dangerous is all.
That's really cool. Although I wish there were more vegan food that didn't try to replicate non-vegan textures and flavors. Imitation can only be playing catch-up. The best vegan and vegetarian food does its own thing.
I used to feel this way until I tried an impossible burger (1.0, I presume). I thought the only way to allow the more carnivorous of us to have a satisfying meal while eliminating animal suffering was to grow petri dish meat.
Impossible burgers seriously nail the taste and texture and nutritional proportions. It also seems like it will be much more cost effective to create them than the aforementioned petri dish burgers. When I tried an impossible burger it seriously made me excited for the future. The imitation meats from before had some serious problems, but just trust me, you need to try this one if you haven't already.
For context: I am a red blooded American meat eater.
I've always found the impossible burger to taste 'too much' of umami to taste like a burger. This might actually be a good thing (this means it tastes delicious and meaty).
Being born in India, I've had the privilege to eat vegetarian meals that can rival even the best meat based meal.
While I welcome 'impossible' meat replacements, it is funny that the meat reduction movement is looking at such impractical and immature products instead of simpler solutions such as bringing veg friendly cuisines to the fore.
I am opposed to advocating for cold-turkey veganism though. Milk products and eggs are great meat substitutes, and the lack of both makes entire cuisines inaccessible.
Being of Indian descent, I might be biased. But Indian cuisine is the only cuisine I'm aware of where being vegetarian isn't a compromise in the creativity, quality, and sheer flavors available to you.
For other cuisines, where centuries of culinary creativity mostly went towards making meat, this is the only viable approach to weaning us off growing animals for meaty foods.
Food is a cultural and emotional issue. As much as some people like to try new dishes, others prefer to stick to what they know and love, give or take a few variations. What you eat may be part of your identity and culture, and giving that up for something foreign that's supposedly better isn't easy. Seemingly small steps are an easier sell.
For me as a vegetarian, getting into Indian food was a dietary breakthrough. Vegetarian Indian food has already been developed for thousands of years to be tasty and meet dietary requirements.
I grew up on typical American cuisine and then became vegetarian, and I was disappointed by a lot of vegetarian recipes that were designed to make sense to people with my culinary background. However, I recognize that switching someone's cuisine is a big thing to ask for; reducing meat consumption will go a lot smoother if it doesn't mean switching to a new culinary tradition - which is why cookbooks featuring those recipes that I didn't like are so popular.
It’s astounding to me that you mock efforts to replicate meat when the “simpler solutions” is to just tell people to eat veg cuisines and this give up the meat-based cuisines they’ve lived with. And then in the next sentence, you oppose veganism because it’s apparently wrong to give up cuisines you’ve lived with.
In my opinion Indian cuisine is the way to go for vegetarians. There are a ton of great dishes that make vegetables and beans shine without trying to imitate meat. I like veggie burgers from time to time but I don't think meat imitation products are good long term path.
The one big problem for me is that nearly every "veggie" dish I've ever known would be IMPROVED with meat in my very personal opinion. Is there any meal/food that tastes worse with a dead animal added?
I say whatever sells more non-meat burgers is good. Telling a die-hard meat eater to just eat a mushroom or some eggplant is not going to be effective.
I'm a die-hard meat eater and I'd eat a lot of a tasty veggie sandwich patty. I need more veggies in my diet but it's hard to get enough without cooking.
It doesn't have to be a fake burger. Just something tasty for a healthy daily dose of vegetables.
For me, soy doesn't qualify. It's one of the most common crops in the world and there's already enough of it in other things I eat.
I'm just a sample size of one, but I'm willing to eat it if it tastes good. I think the biggest problem is habit (or I guess that overlaps with culture). People are hungry and see a burger for a decent price and know it will be acceptable. A lot of foods you can just add chicken or ground beef to.
I've had some fantastic vegan food, but the only vegan food that's a commodity for me is Indian food or faux-meat products. So convincingly good faux-meat is probably the easiest way to move people.
My big problem is that most meals without meat I'm not satiated. This also happens when the main protein is fish. For salads I hear a bunch of people joke that you get tired of eating before you get full. I also think this is habit for me. I'm not sure if meat alternatives address this.
It's generally difficult to dissuade someone of their core beliefs. That's why political discourse often gets dirty and bloody. Language, too, oddly enough.
There was this one girl I was dating for a short while. She was vegan, for her own reasons, and so she'd eat her own meals. I asked if I could try some one time.
The tastes of the various kinds of meatballs she was have were interesting, at the very least. I'd never had anything like it. One particular kind – can't remember the name of the veggie it was made of – was so good I made my own later. A unique taste with its own unique texture: soft, dry, crumbly, yet condensing nicely after chewing.
I'm looking forward to meat imitations. I'd try one eagerly if I had the chance. I like the taste of meat, and it would let me have meat without the massive animal husbandry ecosystem required to support it. What's not to like?
In the meantime, I'm sure there are tons of things I'd enjoy, that I haven't tried yet, which are also completely vegan.
As a vegetarian that is a fairly picky eater, and (a decade ago) a big meat eater, I have a different perspective. When you don't enjoy, say, bell peppers, it is really nice to have some meat-like textures and tastes. As we get closer to having textures that do more than taste/feel like highly processed meat, it gets better.
Which doesnt contradict your point that veg/vegan options have taste and experiences that are worthwhile in their own right, but I shall forever be glad of the time I had pakora thatd recaptured the taste of KFC, as well as other chewy options to round out the relatively small set of options my tastebuds find palatable.
I certainly wish it was different, but from my perspective veggies are out there for anyone to find. Meat tastes/textures are not out there for the vegs/vegans yet.
Plus, the easiest way to reduce meat consumption is to provide drop-in replacements for those that are seeking that taste/texture in ways that done make them regret the choice.
I agree that the best vegan and vegetarian food does its own thing, but for me, a pescatarian, the idea of not having the delicious taste and texture of salmon slowly baked in a cast iron pan for four hours whilst being basted with oil every half an hour … my tongue just disallows it. It's not yet a sacrifice I'm willing to make until I encounter a viable alternative, and so efforts like these are a step further not just for people like me but for the general population.
Fortunately, fish is fairly easy to imitate with soy, but nothing quite beats that melt-in-your-mouth quality of slowly baked salmon. That's about the only meat I eat anymore, though I still experiment with substitutions. Usually some kind of tofu and a thick-but-viscous sauce of some kind, but even then it's flavoured with dashi.
Hear hear! These kinds of foods I think are handy for people transitioning to a more vegetarian/vegan diet, when they still crave "traditional" foods like hamburgers and hotdogs. But I think they also goof up public perceptions of what good veg* food is.
So, I'm a die-hard meat eater, and I categorically refuse to ever give up meat, but there is some seriously fantastic vegetarian food out there based on this exact principle.
There's a Beijing-style street food place in a suburb of Dallas. If you're ever in the area and want to check it out, it's called Fatni BBQ. My absolute favorite items on the menu are both vegetarian, and I would gladly go there and get only non-meat items because they're _that damn good_.
Item one is what the menu calls "hibachi tofu". It's a basket of tofu that's all been seared on the grill. It has all the wonderful tastes and textures I associate with fried cheese, except it's not quite as gooey. I'm lucky it comes in a giant basket, because I will devour that so fast.
Item two is what the menu calls "hibachi gluten", which is a skewer containing several pieces of fried wheat gluten. Most of the pieces are cut in a spiral pattern, but there's usually one end piece on each skewer that's shaped kind of like an arrowhead. I seriously feel sorry for the celiacs of the world, because this stuff is genuinely addictive. It tastes like it's made of both meat and fried dough at the same time. Each skewer is about $1, and I never order less than five. And I still leave wanting more but having to cut myself off because I can spend way too much there if I'm not careful.
Oh, and every single item on their menu is dipped in a cumin-forward mix of spices that's just amazing.
They're actually not a vegetarian place. They have lots of meat items on their menu, but honestly they're just not nearly as good as the tofu or the gluten.
There are so many hyper-processed vegan items available marketed as "Milks", "Cheeses","Burgers" and "Sausages" etc. It's a huge business.
As someone mentioned above, food is a part of your culture. And there are many aspects of people's food cultures that they'd prefer not to get rid of. Someone may hate animals dying, but love the social gathering of a back yard party with burgers on the grill. These people may want to replicate this experience with a bean burger. Someone else has fond memories of their grandma's spaghetti and meatballs, and needs to figure out some way to replicate it.
What kind of vegan food are you thinking of? I mean, things like nuts, beans, etc. already exist. What requirements should "new" food fulfil? Providing the right nutrients?
Snack food. I'd love a snack food producer that only makes really healthy products that taste amazing, but which doesn't actually market anything as being healthy. They don't have to mimic existing snacks and probably shouldn't - nobody wants a "fake" snack when they're feeling gluttonous. I'm not ideologically vegan, but I do think vegan food science could lead the way here.
Think of the difference between Indian vegetarian food vs. tofurkey, imitation bacon, etc.
There are vegetarian cultures that have refined their cuisine over thousands of years to be nutritionally adequate and delicious. Western vegan food tends to just be imitations of non-vegan Western food and it's unfortunate.
I think this type of thing is more important to get non-vegan people to eat less animals than to provide options to vegans. Anyone who has been eating vegan or vegetarian for some time is already going to appreciate the nuances in foods, while a great meat substitute is important for the meat eaters who think they can't have a meal without some "protein" on the plate.
Just out of curiosity, are you vegan/veg? I hear this point of view a lot online but I’ve rarely heard it within the vegan community where people are usually pretty honest about craving junk food/burgers etc every now and again. Not trying to call you out, genuinely curious.
I'm neither but I have been vegetarian for extended periods of time. When I've lapsed out of vegetarianism it's been because it's easier for me to throw together a satisfying meal with meat. If I take about twice as long I can make an equally satisfying vegetarian meal. When I try going vegetarian again I'll be sure to get better at throwing together meals first.
Then you will just create a new market, not directly replace an existing market.
The creater of the Impossible Burger said he could create new types of meat. I think of it as meat of animals that have never evolved. However that's not their focus.
Well in this case it allows you to eat a burger if you like burgers. Me personally I eat vegan, vegetarian and non-vegan / non-vegetarian foods so it doesn't bother me as much.
I eat meat but my girlfriend is vegetarian, so I end up eating a lot of vegetarian meals. For some reason, the vast majority of fake meats turn me off. To me, it feels like I am eating spoiled meat. I much prefer vegetarian meals that don't attempt to seem like the real thing.
But if this leads to less total meat consumption for the population, I'm all for it.
Are you really limited in vegan options that don't try to replicate non vegan textures and flavors? Where do you shop and eat? Do they not have a section for fruits and veggies? Do they not have dry goods like rice and beans?
Those are ingredients you listed. I'm talking about prepared meals. Most vegan restaurants that aren't Indian around here use such ingredients to imitate non vegan dishes.
I used to think that, but the thing is "non-vegan textures" is by definition a superset of "vegan textures" anyway. At the moment it's a strict superset so why not make the sets equal?
I agree. The original statement was kind of silly. Vegans basically say "You don't need to eat meat" to which a population of meat-eaters say "But I like the way it tastes and feels" so vegans create this burger, and then a population of meat-eaters says "I wish you didn't just try to copy meat."
UK/EU citizen here (also having written this with a bottle of wine inside me :))
You know, I'm not a vegan, nor even a vegetarian. But as I've gotten older (I'm knocking on 52 - and god damn used to love a nicely cooked fillet steak!) I've found my eating habits tending more towards vegetarian. The last red meat I ate was a year ago...not through health reasons, but because I've kinda gone off it. I still eat some chicken, but even then it's a dwindling part of my diet.
I'm not an extremist, but as I've gotten older, I've begun to find the idea of eating another living being more than slightly repugnant. It's not that I've succumbed to vegan ideology, but I kinda got here by myself. I'm lucky to live in a rural area and bump into cows and sheep all the time. This may sound a bit odd, but I see them and interact with them and one day thought what nice affectionate(?)/curious animals and then, boom! would I kill and eat my cats?
I even recently realised that most of the clothes that I wear are mostly synthetic or cotton based, even the boots I wear. The thought of walking around in another being's slaughtered and dead skin kinda irked me for a few years so I try to buy "man-made" foot wear now.
I think the trick with becoming vegetarian (a starting point) and onto becoming vegan (though I still love eggs; if we treat egg layers nice, and if we treat cows nice can't we still have eggs and milk for a while?) we need to learn how to season and spice our meals to make them appealing.
I'm about 85% of the way there were it not for some dairy products, and in a rural area having better availability to a wider range of vegetables - which believe it or not doesn't happen. And also where I can buy individual carrots, onions, sweet potato by weight....etc (I'm single - don't need a bag of 20 carrots!).
I'm also not sure, philosophically, about the idea of creating synthetic meats to remind us of what it was like to eat a factory slaughtered animal - it seems like creating a video game to satisfy some needs to be 18th century slave owners.
If we had better knowledge about how to make vegetables more inviting, and more available, we wouldn't need this. I ate a vegetarian lasagne the other day, it was glorious. Sure some dairy products were involved but no cows died upside down in a factory being bolted through their skulls...but yes I am aware of the factory farming of milk cows to the tremendous detriment of their health and comfort.
Becoming vegan is a hard thing. I still crave Gressingham "chinese duck", pancakes and hoisin (I use my own, their's is shit).....but I am striving towards this. I genuinely don't think synthetic meats aid this cause.
I am also trying to become a better human and not exploit other living beings for my tastebud sensory gratification.
> if we treat egg layers nice, and if we treat cows nice can't we still have eggs and milk for a while?
Not (really) trying to ruin your life here, but this idea was crushed for me when I realised that only female chickens can lay eggs, and that roosters end up in the shredder as soon as their sex is identified. I guess that's still less suffering than those that are raised for slaughter in industrial farming, but it's still not great...
I'm really curious about the "fake meat" products that exist in other countries. In the Netherlands, there's been enormous growth both in the number of vegetarians and in the number of "fake meat" products that have become widely available, and the quality of the latter has improved dramatically. Before, these products were mostly useful for the non-vegetarians wanting to prepare a meal for vegetarians without having to relearn how to do it (with actual vegetarians preferably preparing vegetarian-first meals, e.g. with nuts and beans rather than fake meat). However, nowadays these products have become so good that they're actually of added value to a meal in terms of taste.
Interestingly, they do not appear to place as much focus on matching actual meat as much as the foreign products that are usually the subject of articles like these. Instead, they merely have to taste good and have good texture - it doesn't matter if it's still somewhat different from actual meat (sometimes they even taste better).
At the forefront of this has been the Vegetarian Butcher (that's a brand name). They've recently been acquired by Unilever and will likely expand internationally more aggressively. I have the feeling that the Netherlands is friendlier to vegetarians, on average, than other Western countries, and if that will give them an advantage. Time will tell!
In France I have seen a clear growth in the variety of products commonly available (which is great). Regarding taste it is still not clearly better than actual meat but I have tasted good supermarket-bought vegetarian burgers.
In Germany's supermarket, I found the kind of food I find in France's shops that specialize in healthy food.
There's been kind of a boom in vegetarian ready-made foods in Finland. I think it started with Pulled Oats (https://goldandgreenfoods.com ), but soon after that appeared in stores, several of the major food producers came out with their own vegetarian meat-substitutes, with varying degrees of emphasis on replacing meat and veganness etc. There's even a "healthier" ground pork that has carrots mixed in.
I'm not a huge fan of the new batch of products personally, although I see people buy them quite a lot. The products are usually roughly comparable to organic ground beef in price. Personally, I find cooking vegan from scratch is cheaper and tastier, but I guess it's not really a fair comparison - I also think homecooked meat is better than storebought patties.
Cool, that sounds rather similar to the situation in the Netherlands! It'll be interesting once all these local companies start going international which win out. With a few mergers and acquisitions, at a certain point the best products of each will probably be available in many countries, which would make this even more accessible. Good prospects!
Yves is really popular here in Canada. You can get it in just about every grocery store and some corner stores: http://yvesveggie.com/en/
That said, it's more traditional "fake meat", and probably not a close synthesis.
I'm actually more curious about the lab grown meat as an alternative. It almost seems like that could catch up by the time anyone gets a veggie burger actually tasting like meat.
Judging by just the packaging and product range, that looks to be a year or two behind what's available in the Netherlands - though I guess it's just different as well, since we don't have that many things that resemble the deli slices. Still, I'd love to give them a try.
And absolutely, I'm looking forward to see what lab-grown meats will become available, although I guess that taste will not be that surprising. If it's anything like regular chicken, then I'd still prefer the Vegetarian Butcher's chicken - it tastes differently, but better.
We have a few available in the US, my favorite is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production which is not vegan as it contains some amount of egg. But the majority of the product is made from soil mold protein, which is what makes it unique among the options I have available.
Ah, you have Quorn as well? Back when there was not that much choice in the Netherlands, Quorn was one of the few brands that was available. It doesn't taste as good as most others in my opinion, though, and also has the disadvantage of not having added some nutrients that vegans and vegetarians often miss out on.
In the US, based on personal experience, I'd recommend Morningstar Farms for their variety, Beyond Meat if you can find it, and Field Roast Grain Meat.
One of the smaller Asian grocers in New York City has made the best fake meat I've had by far, and I wouldn't be surprised if it sources for many of the vegetarian Asian restaurants in the city. http://www.maywahnyc.com/ I wonder how many other places exist in the world like it, and how much a little bit of marketing would do for them.
The tradition of "mock meats" in Buddhist culture is one of the oldest. I've found some of their veggie meats to taste really close to real meats, and they tackle things like fish and tuna, which hasn't been addressed much in the west. https://www.tastecooking.com/buddhist-mock-meats-paradox/
I'm disappointed they switched away from seitan / gluten protein to soy protein. I just like wheat protein better, it feels better to me. But there's tremendous--and unfounded--pressure to eliminate gluten. Sad.
It's not unfounded ... for whatever reason, it seems very few people are allergic to soy, whereas more than 1% of population (Americans ? not sure) have 'allergies' to gluten.
My daughter has diagnosed celiac disease, so I'm glad for any pressure to eliminate gluten :) I'm also amazed at how many things you wouldn't imagine have gluten :(
Whether accurate or not, lots of opinion swirls around the effects that eating soy has on testosterone levels in men. Even if these plant based "meats" are indistinguishable in flavor and texture, they might end up losing to lab grown meat in the long run because of concerns like that.
Having looked at a few of these studies I found the following problems
1. Industry sponsorship. Which has been shown to produce wildly biased results.
2. Small, short term studies which can only find a "significant" (i.e. statistically significant) effect if the effect is large and immediate.
In some of the studies an effect showed up close to statistical significance but the headline was "no effect found"
3. I don't know about this one, but some analyses have found that a majority of review papers were ghost written by industry PR hacks who them paid professors to put their names on them.
I suggest read the papers closely and looking hard at sponsorship issues before believing them.
Also note that these studies were on adult men. There is every reason to suspect that the developing male fetus is orders of magnitude more vulnerable to environmental hormone disruptors of all kinds.
Readit News
Impossible has an environmental mission first.
Checkout the sustainability report from 2017 http://www.ift.org/~/media/Food%20Technology/Weekly/IF_Susta...
Or the update from 2018 https://impossiblefoods.com/if-pr/2018-Impact-Update/
I'm no expert, but I expect land is different in different places. There are different sources of feed. Someone changes a supplier or a farming practice, and it changes a number in a spreadsheet, and you'll get a different answer.
Accounting gets complicated enough with money. When you're doing science it's much more difficult.
This sounds like the sort of thing that scientists and economists can debate for decades. I'm certainly not going to trust some unsourced numbers in a press release.
If not, the purpose is to make money and the "mission" is just marketing BS.
Its price.
When these are significantly cheaper than beef, then it'll be safe to state categorically that they are better for the environment. Until then, it's mostly a game of "pay attention to these metrics that favor my product and ignore the metrics which favor the competition".
Hook it up to Watson and you don't just get new recipes, but they're combined with new meat! (https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...)
I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.
Life both begins and ands and you don't have to run away from the end of things or think that making life as long as possible is necessarily better.
Sadly if everyone did this it would probably mean we would only see cows, sheep etc in zoos, rather than grazing in fields.
Meals more often revolve around beans, legumes, tofu, tempeh, seitan. I think since many meat eaters are less familiar with cooking meals around these, they assume vegs are just subbing meat 1-to-1 with foods like Impossible Burger, Tofurkey, Quorn.
More often they are a food for convenience, special occasions like cookouts, specific recipes, or they happen to be the only option at a restaurant. Some I've known have used them as sort of an aid to transition to a plant based diet, if they happen to have cravings for meat.
However it's great to have more choices, and seeing brands like these in store gives more visibility to veg diets. (It's weird to me that this is the case, when the whole produce isle is vegan, but that's the way it is in a meat-by-default culture).
If it's just straw men... nothing is black and white - the same people who say boo to "synthetic foods" (which is obviously a massive scale too) are not the same people who say "meat production is bad for long-term human survival". The issues are complex and overlap in weird ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-...
What matters is how it is processed.
And it would be nice if it came in bulk forms, rather than just as pre-formed patties. I eat ground beef a lot more often than I eat burgers.
Until then, good luck with the test kitchen research. The results so far indicate that the developers understand the problem they need to solve.
But what those 'vegan proselytizers' are asking you for, is to not be so selfish and make a bit of a sacrifice to spare the lives of others. But of course, you 'can't stomach' to be asked to not be selfish, and they are the ones to blame.
1: http://time.com/4266874/vegetarian-diet-climate-change/
https://www.beyondmeat.com/
I'm wanting to try it out someday, and am willing to pay the price for a "restaurant burger" made using the product - but the cost is too great currently for the home market. If they can reduce this, while making the product better, then I'm all for it.
That said - before I would be willing to switch fully, they'd have to be able to replicate a few kinds of cuts that are currently - well - impossible:
1. Well marbled aged rib-eye - steak and roast form, bone in
2. Pork shoulder
3. Full-size beef brisket, fat cap and all, plus tip
One day, perhaps...
So far no option like that exists on the shelf. All the fake meat options cater to the people who shop at whole foods and I'll take value priced 80/20 over that any day.
More options in the mix is always good, but trying to replace everything with vegetable stuff is not going to work in the long run.
From another article ( https://www.cnet.com/news/impossible-burger-2-0-tastes-like-... ):
> But Impossible Foods can produce a burger using a fourth of the water and less than 4 percent of the land -- and emit one-tenth of the greenhouse gases -- than a conventional burger, Brown said.
So yeah, we might still destroy forests to make veggie burgers, but it'll be 1/25th of the forest destruction (if you believe the numbers).
(And of course, if the soy that is currently fed to cattle is fed to humans directly, we can feed quite a few more humans from that than that cattle currently can, without needing to use more resources. That's not to say it does not come with its own problems, but they're unlikely to be as severe as the ones we get with meat anytime soon.)
Edit: Vastly better than Beef*
[0]https://www.wri.org/resources/charts-graphs/animal-based-foo...
[1]https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899434/
But we have to eat... what do you recommend we replace our protein intake with?
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I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. People need to eat.
This stuff has no cholesterol and (a small amount of) carbs while also containing way more salt, thiamine (vitamin B1), and folate (vitamin B9): https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/beef-products/6205/2
http://livablefutureblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/impo...
FYI, both folate and thiamine over-consumption may be linked to cancer:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29529163
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4178204/
So while it is fine for people to eat it for "pleasure", it may be dangerous to trick the mind into thinking it is consuming a real burger.
Yeah but processed meat IS linked to cancer.
https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...
And last I checked, most Americans have a problem with high cholesterol, not low cholesterol. Americans eat too much meat.
But my main concern is the aspect of "tricking" the brain into thinking it is consuming beef by mimicking the texture and taste (which is their goal) but instead consuming something with different nutritional value. Just seems like it could be dangerous is all.
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Impossible burgers seriously nail the taste and texture and nutritional proportions. It also seems like it will be much more cost effective to create them than the aforementioned petri dish burgers. When I tried an impossible burger it seriously made me excited for the future. The imitation meats from before had some serious problems, but just trust me, you need to try this one if you haven't already.
For context: I am a red blooded American meat eater.
While I welcome 'impossible' meat replacements, it is funny that the meat reduction movement is looking at such impractical and immature products instead of simpler solutions such as bringing veg friendly cuisines to the fore.
I am opposed to advocating for cold-turkey veganism though. Milk products and eggs are great meat substitutes, and the lack of both makes entire cuisines inaccessible.
For other cuisines, where centuries of culinary creativity mostly went towards making meat, this is the only viable approach to weaning us off growing animals for meaty foods.
I grew up on typical American cuisine and then became vegetarian, and I was disappointed by a lot of vegetarian recipes that were designed to make sense to people with my culinary background. However, I recognize that switching someone's cuisine is a big thing to ask for; reducing meat consumption will go a lot smoother if it doesn't mean switching to a new culinary tradition - which is why cookbooks featuring those recipes that I didn't like are so popular.
I like a few Indian dishes, so I can appreciate what can be done in the vegetarian space.
Even so, I'd find it difficult to believe that any of them could match a properly cooked smoked BBQ beef brisket in flavor or texture.
Though I'm sure more than a few would make good side dishes, or work well with the brisket as an ingredient.
To me, transforming people's food preference requires obviously much more complex solutions than replicating meat.
It doesn't have to be a fake burger. Just something tasty for a healthy daily dose of vegetables.
For me, soy doesn't qualify. It's one of the most common crops in the world and there's already enough of it in other things I eat.
I've had some fantastic vegan food, but the only vegan food that's a commodity for me is Indian food or faux-meat products. So convincingly good faux-meat is probably the easiest way to move people.
My big problem is that most meals without meat I'm not satiated. This also happens when the main protein is fish. For salads I hear a bunch of people joke that you get tired of eating before you get full. I also think this is habit for me. I'm not sure if meat alternatives address this.
The tastes of the various kinds of meatballs she was have were interesting, at the very least. I'd never had anything like it. One particular kind – can't remember the name of the veggie it was made of – was so good I made my own later. A unique taste with its own unique texture: soft, dry, crumbly, yet condensing nicely after chewing.
I'm looking forward to meat imitations. I'd try one eagerly if I had the chance. I like the taste of meat, and it would let me have meat without the massive animal husbandry ecosystem required to support it. What's not to like?
In the meantime, I'm sure there are tons of things I'd enjoy, that I haven't tried yet, which are also completely vegan.
Which doesnt contradict your point that veg/vegan options have taste and experiences that are worthwhile in their own right, but I shall forever be glad of the time I had pakora thatd recaptured the taste of KFC, as well as other chewy options to round out the relatively small set of options my tastebuds find palatable.
I certainly wish it was different, but from my perspective veggies are out there for anyone to find. Meat tastes/textures are not out there for the vegs/vegans yet.
Plus, the easiest way to reduce meat consumption is to provide drop-in replacements for those that are seeking that taste/texture in ways that done make them regret the choice.
Fortunately, fish is fairly easy to imitate with soy, but nothing quite beats that melt-in-your-mouth quality of slowly baked salmon. That's about the only meat I eat anymore, though I still experiment with substitutions. Usually some kind of tofu and a thick-but-viscous sauce of some kind, but even then it's flavoured with dashi.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40559474/this-salmon-burger-tast...
https://primeroots.com/
Disclaimer: I am a cofounder of this company, we have recently rebranded to Prime Roots from Terramino
There's a Beijing-style street food place in a suburb of Dallas. If you're ever in the area and want to check it out, it's called Fatni BBQ. My absolute favorite items on the menu are both vegetarian, and I would gladly go there and get only non-meat items because they're _that damn good_.
Item one is what the menu calls "hibachi tofu". It's a basket of tofu that's all been seared on the grill. It has all the wonderful tastes and textures I associate with fried cheese, except it's not quite as gooey. I'm lucky it comes in a giant basket, because I will devour that so fast.
Item two is what the menu calls "hibachi gluten", which is a skewer containing several pieces of fried wheat gluten. Most of the pieces are cut in a spiral pattern, but there's usually one end piece on each skewer that's shaped kind of like an arrowhead. I seriously feel sorry for the celiacs of the world, because this stuff is genuinely addictive. It tastes like it's made of both meat and fried dough at the same time. Each skewer is about $1, and I never order less than five. And I still leave wanting more but having to cut myself off because I can spend way too much there if I'm not careful.
Oh, and every single item on their menu is dipped in a cumin-forward mix of spices that's just amazing.
They're actually not a vegetarian place. They have lots of meat items on their menu, but honestly they're just not nearly as good as the tofu or the gluten.
Isn't that most vegan food already? I.e. vegetables
As someone mentioned above, food is a part of your culture. And there are many aspects of people's food cultures that they'd prefer not to get rid of. Someone may hate animals dying, but love the social gathering of a back yard party with burgers on the grill. These people may want to replicate this experience with a bean burger. Someone else has fond memories of their grandma's spaghetti and meatballs, and needs to figure out some way to replicate it.
Compare the use of vegetables in American cuisine versus vegetarian Indian cuisine.
There are vegetarian cultures that have refined their cuisine over thousands of years to be nutritionally adequate and delicious. Western vegan food tends to just be imitations of non-vegan Western food and it's unfortunate.
The creater of the Impossible Burger said he could create new types of meat. I think of it as meat of animals that have never evolved. However that's not their focus.
But if this leads to less total meat consumption for the population, I'm all for it.
There are. They're called vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans, and grains.
You know, I'm not a vegan, nor even a vegetarian. But as I've gotten older (I'm knocking on 52 - and god damn used to love a nicely cooked fillet steak!) I've found my eating habits tending more towards vegetarian. The last red meat I ate was a year ago...not through health reasons, but because I've kinda gone off it. I still eat some chicken, but even then it's a dwindling part of my diet.
I'm not an extremist, but as I've gotten older, I've begun to find the idea of eating another living being more than slightly repugnant. It's not that I've succumbed to vegan ideology, but I kinda got here by myself. I'm lucky to live in a rural area and bump into cows and sheep all the time. This may sound a bit odd, but I see them and interact with them and one day thought what nice affectionate(?)/curious animals and then, boom! would I kill and eat my cats?
I even recently realised that most of the clothes that I wear are mostly synthetic or cotton based, even the boots I wear. The thought of walking around in another being's slaughtered and dead skin kinda irked me for a few years so I try to buy "man-made" foot wear now.
I think the trick with becoming vegetarian (a starting point) and onto becoming vegan (though I still love eggs; if we treat egg layers nice, and if we treat cows nice can't we still have eggs and milk for a while?) we need to learn how to season and spice our meals to make them appealing.
I'm about 85% of the way there were it not for some dairy products, and in a rural area having better availability to a wider range of vegetables - which believe it or not doesn't happen. And also where I can buy individual carrots, onions, sweet potato by weight....etc (I'm single - don't need a bag of 20 carrots!).
I'm also not sure, philosophically, about the idea of creating synthetic meats to remind us of what it was like to eat a factory slaughtered animal - it seems like creating a video game to satisfy some needs to be 18th century slave owners.
If we had better knowledge about how to make vegetables more inviting, and more available, we wouldn't need this. I ate a vegetarian lasagne the other day, it was glorious. Sure some dairy products were involved but no cows died upside down in a factory being bolted through their skulls...but yes I am aware of the factory farming of milk cows to the tremendous detriment of their health and comfort.
Becoming vegan is a hard thing. I still crave Gressingham "chinese duck", pancakes and hoisin (I use my own, their's is shit).....but I am striving towards this. I genuinely don't think synthetic meats aid this cause.
I am also trying to become a better human and not exploit other living beings for my tastebud sensory gratification.
Not (really) trying to ruin your life here, but this idea was crushed for me when I realised that only female chickens can lay eggs, and that roosters end up in the shredder as soon as their sex is identified. I guess that's still less suffering than those that are raised for slaughter in industrial farming, but it's still not great...
Interestingly, they do not appear to place as much focus on matching actual meat as much as the foreign products that are usually the subject of articles like these. Instead, they merely have to taste good and have good texture - it doesn't matter if it's still somewhat different from actual meat (sometimes they even taste better).
At the forefront of this has been the Vegetarian Butcher (that's a brand name). They've recently been acquired by Unilever and will likely expand internationally more aggressively. I have the feeling that the Netherlands is friendlier to vegetarians, on average, than other Western countries, and if that will give them an advantage. Time will tell!
In Germany's supermarket, I found the kind of food I find in France's shops that specialize in healthy food.
I'm not a huge fan of the new batch of products personally, although I see people buy them quite a lot. The products are usually roughly comparable to organic ground beef in price. Personally, I find cooking vegan from scratch is cheaper and tastier, but I guess it's not really a fair comparison - I also think homecooked meat is better than storebought patties.
That said, it's more traditional "fake meat", and probably not a close synthesis.
I'm actually more curious about the lab grown meat as an alternative. It almost seems like that could catch up by the time anyone gets a veggie burger actually tasting like meat.
And absolutely, I'm looking forward to see what lab-grown meats will become available, although I guess that taste will not be that surprising. If it's anything like regular chicken, then I'd still prefer the Vegetarian Butcher's chicken - it tastes differently, but better.
My daughter has diagnosed celiac disease, so I'm glad for any pressure to eliminate gluten :) I'm also amazed at how many things you wouldn't imagine have gluten :(
https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/celiac-disease
Each batch of every product should be run through a litany of health and safety tests, and such a thing could be crowdsourced.
1. Industry sponsorship. Which has been shown to produce wildly biased results.
2. Small, short term studies which can only find a "significant" (i.e. statistically significant) effect if the effect is large and immediate.
In some of the studies an effect showed up close to statistical significance but the headline was "no effect found"
3. I don't know about this one, but some analyses have found that a majority of review papers were ghost written by industry PR hacks who them paid professors to put their names on them.
I suggest read the papers closely and looking hard at sponsorship issues before believing them.
Also note that these studies were on adult men. There is every reason to suspect that the developing male fetus is orders of magnitude more vulnerable to environmental hormone disruptors of all kinds.