If you buy dutch chocolate for baking you are told that this is actually significantly less flavorful, but a darker color, and useful for eg dark baked goods, when you're mostly trying to create a certain color shade without adding a ton of chocolate flavor.

Signature taste if Oreos

Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.

One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.

I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.

Globally, people are getting richer (particularly east Asia), and consequently using more energy and resources. Sustainability is really contingent on demand versus innovation and land encroachment; some products use more than others, but basically all will use more land/energy if demand grows enough. There's no agreed-upon benchmark for what constitutes sustainable, it's vibes. You could just as easily say that a perpetually growing global population is not sustainable, but thankfully it is projected to stall. In a scenario where the population doesn't grow (or not much), no product can be considered unsustainable.

You can yield improved efficiency for almost anything. In China, fossil-fuel use has plateaued despite growing demands for energy, because they have so much solar. Their emissions growth is finally projected to stall, but the coal mining has hindered that somewhat.

The U.S. hasn't seen significant land-use increase for agriculture over the years, in fact there's been less. Some of that is innovation, but some is also cruel commercial practices. As the States move away from that animal products will get yet more expensive in the short-run, and consumers will more readily look to alts. Actually the subsidies have been driving down prices for those, but everyone seems quick to defend them as though farmers couldn't possibly do without. Animal products are cheaper in the U.S. than many developed countries. If you really wanted to scale back that consumption, all it would take is to allow the products to be more expensive; simple.

Or if you just pass through a US Walmart! Tony’s is everywhere, now.

Heads up Tony's Chocoloney is available across the EU now.

It was news to me that it's an ethically driven business, I just enjoy the chocolate.

Was the vaping ironic? I know very little about the effects. Last I heard the flavors people buy are full of garbage, so this is more or less a question

Is Tonys different in the US? Just got a bar of it and it was alright Aldis brand milk chocolate blows it out of the water

Here in Germany meat alternatives/substitutes have definitely reached a level of popularity that goes beyond a fad. The leading commercial producer of deli-meats has started producing vegetarian and vegan alternative products that now make up more than 60% of their annual revenue and they even dropped some of their original meat based products in favor of the plant-based alternatives.

It might not be the burger that's going to be replaced but sliced meats and other meat based products might be.

They sell it at Burger King. I get one fairly regularly (with respect to how often I go at all), because it's only like $1 more.

In Los Angeles it is still there, particularly at the fancy grocery stores. More visibly you see it on some restaurant menus.

I have lived through enough food trends in my life to suspect if something is popular in California it gets popular everywhere. I don't know if that will be Impossible, I mean just meat substitutes.

Also, I think this is one of those trends where people think the change will happen in 2-5 years but really its more like 10-20. There are a lot of good reasons for meat substitutes.

I'm in a major city (>1 million pop) and with exception of the BBQ type places every eatery I've visited has had a passable meat imitation burger (or nuggets, etc) on offer.

Are you based in a more rural area? That might account for why the selection is small where you are.

I regularly consume impossible, and use it in pretty much any recipe that calls for ground beef.

It's reliably available in any grocery store I've been into, and I don't particularly compare it to stuff from animals but it's pretty damn good on its own merits.

It isn't commonplace at all. It's fairly uncommon to see it even offered, much less consumed.

> Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem

I don't think saying "it's just as good as chocolate" helped, but I never cared for the taste in general. Of course, I haven't tried it since I was a kid, so maybe someone has figured out what to do with it (or my tastes evolved) since.

It seems that eating one serving a day is fine. Everything has trace levels of metals. Rice has high arsenic but it doesn’t seem to affect the longevity of the Japanese. Here is a summary from one paper that tested lots of chocolate.

> This indicates that heavy metal contamination—in more than half of products tested—may not pose any appreciable risk for the average person when consumed as a single serving; however, consuming some of the products tested, or more than one serving per day in combination with non-cocoa derived sources heavy metals, may add up to exposure that would exceed the Prop 65 MADLs. Notably, “organic” products were significantly more likely to demonstrate higher levels of both Cd and Pb.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11321977/

The organic part is interesting and something most people probably don’t realize. I used to grow medical marijuana for a living and the people that failed their heavy metals testing were always growers that grew organic. The metals bioaccumulate and when you use manure or fish meal or whatever you are increasing the heavy metal content of your crop compared to using pure synthetic fertilizer, which has much lower trace metal contamination.

This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.

If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.

Cocoa flavanols are some of the most powerful compounds for heart and brain health. If you look around, you’ll find brands that actually test their cocoa for heavy metals. To get the most benefits, go for natural (undutched) cocoa, as, like the article mentions, the dutching process can strip away up to 80% of the good stuff.