Can we stomach the latest emerging food innovations?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59044820

by adrian_mrd • 5 years ago

58 258 5 years ago

jsilence3• 5 years ago

I think the quality of products from plant based alternative protein sources like peas will increas so much in the coming time that these will make the race.

We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

I have read similar accounts, only to later discover that the reviewers are vegan/vegetarian etc. If these are to displace beef, to kill the beef industry, then they need to win over the BBQ crowd. When the not-meat hotdog starts competing with the meat version at US ballparks, then I will take notice.

dragonsky• 5 years ago

Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?

quicklime• 5 years ago

Non-vegetarian here. I'd take a fake meat hotdog than a real meat ballpark hot dog any day.

The best of the fake meats has already surpassed the worst of the real meats, and the overlap is growing quickly.

canarypilot• 5 years ago

I’ve switched out meat for plant-based substitutes for most meals in a week. My reasoning is that a great deal of my mid-week cooking is lazily constructed and only making use of meat by tradition rather than the meat being treated with enough care to add something essential to the flavour - katsu curries, beef stir fries, creamy pasta dishes. Good enough texture and possibly topping up “meatiness” in sauces using stock and flavour enhancers make plant-based alternatives more than adequate replacements for a Tuesday night.

I then reserve meat for evenings where I am going to take the time (or am at a restaurant where others have taken the time) to prepare it with respect for flavour, texture.

Admittedly I won’t win over a BBQ-every-day crowd with that approach! But, I fear that all good sense will go out of the window on the new possibilities opened by this research once it is converted to another notch on the left/right “identity” battle. As so often, we will lose the nuance of which meals could be meat-free and remain tasty and devolve to shouting names between the planet-murderers and the science-lab-creeps. Progress!

_3u10• 5 years ago

This is kind of it, vegetarian meat competes in the lips and assholes market. It tastes like meat to the same degree hot dogs taste like meat. It's probably even worse for you.

mayniac• 5 years ago

Another non-vegetarian here. I made a veggie hotdog last week which was close enough to the real thing that I would struggle in a blind taste test. Hot dogs are super easy to immitate, they're mostly not meat anyway.

Also ancedotally, I recently took a meat-eating friend-of-a-friend to a vegan fried chicken place. They said it was close enough that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference after a couple of beers. And they had recently worked in KFC...

I'd hazard a guess that the reason veggie hotdogs haven't appeared at US ballparks has less to do with the food itself, and more to do with cultural attitudes towards vegetarianism, especially amongst sports fans. Call it toxic masculinity if you want, or just stubbornness.

zem• 5 years ago

I'm a diehard omnivore, and the beyond meat sausage is honestly tastier than a lot of meat sausages I've eaten. I was seriously impressed.

jsilence3• 5 years ago

It will never replace a good steak or similar high quality piece of meat. But as others in this thread mentioned as well, the new stuff can easily replace the low end and mid tier meat products.

Another pro is that the pea products are powders with long shelf life sans cooling. Can haz meatballs anytime without shopping fresh meat.

jsilence3• 5 years ago

Just to clarify: We are not vegetarians. We just try to cut down our daily meat consumption. But only if the alternative products actually taste good.

We're in the lucky position to have a hunter grand dad who is occasionally inviting us to highest quality meat meals. Unbeatable, and really appreciated and consumed very consciously.

thehappypm• 5 years ago

I agree with this. It's like 90% of the way there for ground beef (impossible) and I've had some very convincing chicken nuggets. We'll probably never replace steaks with veggies, but maybe meat as a special-occasion food (grown sustainably and to extremely high ethical standards) is the best way forward.

MivLives• 5 years ago

I recently tried the impossible nuggets at burger king. The only reason I could tell the difference is that the texture was too homogeneous, the taste, and even the texture for the most part was near perfect. I don't know if they're going to be able to substitute out other chicken uses. I'd wonder if a chicken sandwich is the next target.

GhettoComputers40• 5 years ago

Why not just buy wheat gluten to make your own seitan and season it instead of relying on corporations to process your food?

Tagbert3• 5 years ago

Not at all the same thing

vincnetas• 5 years ago

Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. Inovation would be here to inovate and create new food, not to mimic the existing. I know, existing consumers and whole industry waiting to be disrupted, but still this starts to look like “save” icon represented by floppy disk, when in reality “save” does not have anything to do with floppies anymore.

rtoway• 5 years ago

Because people like meat? I like meat. I don't like what happens to the animal though. I don't think it gets that much more complicated than that

onion2k• 5 years ago

Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat.

We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult.

It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables.

People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

Beef is literally just grass. Humans began herding grazing livestock because we can't eat grass.

Given the amazing variety, quality, and price of foods available in the developed, globalized world, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to eat grass anymore.

Maybe gut bacteria are mind controlling people to eat it, to their benefit at our expense. I've certainly noticed the craving effect, almost universally regardless of food, for the things I eat. Going from meat to vegan was challenging, but I'm better for it.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

For a long time only the wealthy could eat meat regularly.

And then progress happened and even people of modest means could afford that.

And then the wealthy differentiated themselves by not eating meat.

And pretty soon the unwashed masses are going to be able to do that too.

So the techies and the doctors and the lawyers are going to have to find a different way to differentiate themselves.

Toutouxc2• 5 years ago

IMO this is a complaint most people have BEFORE they go vegetarian (or start trying to reduce their meat consumption). Then they realize that it's very convenient to be able to mimic existing recipes and maybe prepare the same meal for vegetarian and non-vegetarian friends and things start to make sense.

Also there are many meals in which we enjoy the form as much as the material (i.e. they're fun to eat or nice to look at) -- burgers, hotdogs, meatballs, and the choice is to either give it up completely or ... eat the floppy disk.

detaro2• 5 years ago

There is plenty "new food" (and lots of "old food" just not commonly eaten here) that's vegetarian too. But meat is tasty, so fake meat is nice to have - why miss out on that if you like it?

dgellow• 5 years ago

You can have both new foods AND “meat-less” copies of meat products. I like plant-based meat because I can use my favorites recipes with minimal change, just swap chicken with another source of protein that feels kind of the same, and I’m happy with that.

gypsyharlot• 5 years ago

A vegetarian told me that this is due to practicality. When he goes to some event, why does he bring sausage-shaped "meat"? Because then he can use the buns and ketchup that were provided for everyone. Same with burgers...

pornel• 5 years ago

These are new foods, but we don't have a better name for them. They're called like "horseless carriages", because a "car" term hasn't been coined yet.

But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.

belorn2• 5 years ago

Diets are a mixture of culture, availability, personal taste, cost, and social status. Culture is by far the biggest and most dominating factor when talking about diets.

If you want to be a champion of the environment and ignore culture, there is likely food that exist where you live that people don't want to eat. Invasive and overpopulated species. In order for something to be invasive or overpopulated it is likely not something that people eat in your culture.

Where I live, cyprinidae fish exist in massive overpopulation to varying degree in most fresh water lakes. They grow large in numbers from as a result from farms creating water pollution, and since our culture do not have cyprinidae fish as part of any diet, the economical incentives to fish them is only from bio gas and animal feed. That is simply not enough, and so the problem has only continue to worsen. My culture loves fish and have fish as a central figure at many occasions, but not cyprinidae so we hunt other species to extinction.

An other culture crash is seaweed, an excellent protein that doesn't use land or create pollution. Just like with plant meat there are plant fish alternatives that is constructed using seaweed. They are sadly not very popular. We could also just be eating the seaweed as it is, but people don't know how to cook it or how it fit in their recopies and lives.

Being innovative with food culture is not so much about production as it is about changing people minds. Artificial meat tries to solve this by keeping the culture as is.

chronogram• 5 years ago

Looking at my vegan friend who likes having a different processed not-meat each day while I'm having more protein in my bowl of oats, the difference seems to be more about lifestyle. He actively calls himself a vegan and actively seeks vegan things like the processed products and magazines about veganism, whereas I just like oatmeal and we both don't care that both meals are equally vegan.

diordiderot• 5 years ago

I've switched most of my chicken and beef consumption over to Quorn (fake meat brand) and while it's clearly not meat, I'm always happy with the result.

dvh• 5 years ago

This is what grinds my gears. For years scientists and health professionals are repeating over and over "don't eat hyper processed foods" and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries. You want proteins? Eat lentils and beans and once a week chicken or fish. Artificial meat is the stupidest invention in last 50 years. Don't eat artificial meat! There's literally nothing good that can came from it, eat moderately instead.

automatic6131• 5 years ago

You're right, but also people really, really like meat. And they'll continue to want to eat it a great deal. Very, very few people would willingly choose bean caserole over steak and chips more than even 10% of the time.

danuker3• 5 years ago

Eat lentils and beans

Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it.

Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say:

https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/

jseban2• 5 years ago

They are still not complete proteins like every animal protein is, so you need to figure out combinations that can theoretically make a complete protein. And the protein content is still going to be much lower than meat. Protein is already the hardest to get enough of, it's always easy to eat carbs and fat, which people already do too much. And if something is hard to digest, common sense says that it's probably not utilised as well by the body either.

In practice it really makes a big different, to eat 100 grams of chicken for dinner, compared to 200 grams of lentils. Most people that eat plant based compensate with eating more fat to get the satiety per gram of food higher, which leads to an unhealthy diet.

It would be much simpler if plants had complete protein in the same amount as animal protein sources, but it's way off.

GhettoComputers40• 5 years ago

They dry out my skin when I eat them in any significant amount. They also have toxins to your body. Sprouting them removes this issue, but they change the way they’re consumed.

mint23• 5 years ago

That two week thing is a generalizations. Some people have more sensitivity to fodmaps.

tetris11• 5 years ago

The idea isn't meant to appeal to us, as neither you nor I consume fastfood enough for it to matter.

But plenty of people do, and it drives the meat markets whose over abundance of meat related products drive other markets that keep this horrible cycle of slaughter going.

Weaning people off meat at the fast food level is great way to start IMO.

dTal4• 5 years ago

Where are you getting that chicken or fish from? Are you quite comfortable with the story of how it got to be on your plate?

mauvehaus2• 5 years ago

Not the person you're replying to, but I've helped process chickens half a dozen or so times. The smell puts me off eating chicken for a week or so, but overall the answer to your question has a lot of nuance.

Broadly speaking yes.

On the other hand, I definitely eat less meat when I don't how it was raised and slaughtered. I'm no saint: I had a fast food burrito last night while traveling, but I certainly try to eat less meat that comes to me by a long supply chain that hides any sense of accountability for the well-being of the animal from the consumer.

Let's also not forget the human cost of industrially produced meat. If there's one thing the pandemic should have taught us, it's that animal processing is a job people do under fairly challenging conditions, for which many of them are poorly paid, and some of them aren't in a good position to advocate for change because of their immigration status.

And this is the problem with industrial agriculture. All of the good or bad practices that go into bringing food to our plates is abstracted away such that we don't have to think about them or hold ourselves to account for them.

Am I comfortable with how those chickens I help process come to my plate? Absolutely, and without reservations. The sausage from the local farm we patronize? Yup! The pork in that burrito last night? A lot less so, but I was hungry and needed a meal quick. The burger at McDonald's? Nope. That's why I drove by it and hit the burrito place instead.

sph• 5 years ago

I know it's become taboo to admit to eat real meat from an animal but this is my same concern. Processed food of any nature completely destroys me, and is the cause of my IBS, and I will stay away from any form of processed meat. Being vegetarian or worse vegan doesn't work with me and my health.

I strongly believe there's much better ways of improving the status quo and being carbon neutral than buying meat built in a factory by a chemical conglomerate that uses vegetables and legume proteins flown from the other side of the world. So much for being "green".

I spend 3x in meat than the average Joe because I buy 90% of it from local, family-owned organic farms and as long as I can afford it I will keep doing so, I will keep eating meat because my body requires it and functions the best on it, and trying to push processed fake meat as the future is being blind and obtuse to why people actually eat meat. No it's not because they're just stupid and ignorant and are climate skeptics.

If obesity and health issues have become such an epidemic because most of our food is processed, I am terrified to see how much worse we'll be when more political and economical resources are invested towards even more processed junk food.

detaro2• 5 years ago

The only people loosing their mind over it seem to be the ones railing against it.

huetius• 5 years ago

Well, several posters in this thread have made it clear that they intend to replace real meat with fake meat over any objections. I think this is reasonable to be upset about.

For many of us, this seems like another example of the affluent, technological society causing us a problem, then selling us a solution, which will inevitably cause more problems, and etc.

Perhaps the problem is not that humans eat meat, but rather something at the ideal level of this society, causing it to act in this way over and over again, despite the cascade of self-inflicted crises that it has no hope of solving…

7952• 5 years ago

None of these rules are 100% true. "Natural" food can be bad for you, and processed food good. It is just a heuristic that works somewhat well when you have limited information.

quitit2• 5 years ago

“Processed foods” is a catch all term for what is generally known as junk food - food that is nutritionally poor and often has unhealthy quantities of flavour-enhancing ingredients that are known to be a problem in excess such as saturated fats, salt, sugar etc.

However being against a food for merely being “processed” is essential-oils level of pseudo-science. Frankly it’s baseless fear-mongering and entirely ignorant to the understanding of nutrition.

These foods are being made by the same scientific community which decries the junk food - the same people whose view you support.

There is no reason not to engage an artificially made food replacement which is both sufficiently enjoyable and nutritious. This especially so when they address the significant issues of food-supply contributions to water scarcity, climate change and antibiotic resistance.

Artificially grown meat will also be better for you - not just nutritionally but also because it doesn’t fall victim to the weaknesses in the food supply industry (disease/food poisoning/contamination.)

Also “everyone munches on it like strawberries” - the foods in question are either still in development or low supply. There is a lot of strawman going on here.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 5 years ago

I find the first two sentences of your post incoherent. If, as you say, processed food equals junk food, being against it doesn't seem pseud-science to me.

You probably meant the term "processed foods" is being used imprecisely to mean "junk food" which is true: the large set of processed foods contains both junk food as well as other kinds of food, some of them being processed by their very nature (like cheese - you can't have "unprocessed cheese").

I wish people stopped using the imprecise phrase "processed foods" and concentrate on the overall effect on one's health. Because singling out any particular component will get you false negatives. Olive oil - high in calories. Feta cheese - high in sodium (and yet, it has an overall good effect on one's cardiac health). Red wine - bad because of alcohol. It's only when you look at the whole you can make a meaningful decision. Yes, it's more difficult and people prefer simple decisions. But your health is worth it.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

Artificial meat is the most important thing anyone could be working on right now. Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

"don't eat hyper processed foods" is a horseshit shorthand. It's types of processing that are problems, not the simple fact that food has been prepared. Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?

eat moderately

This literally doesn't mean anything. Moderate is not an amount, or a composition.

karol• 5 years ago

Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

You wrongly assume people in general want to or need to be vegetarian. We evolved to eat and digest animal based foods.

belorn2• 5 years ago

Processed foods is mostly just a collective term for food with high amount of preservatives, food additives, heat treatment, cold treatment, grinding, emulsifying, and other mechanical force being applied.

Each step changes the food in ways that can have benefits but also drawbacks. Turn an apple into apple juice concentrate and then add water and what you have is not an apple. You got an apple-inspired surgery drink with almost none of the food properties of an apple. If people tried to reconstruct the apple using food additives, the result could even look like a physical apple and possible even fool people into thinking they are eating one, and yet it would not be an apple with the microbes, fibers, vitamin, minerals, skin and other parts for which makes an apple an apple.

A 10-step recipy that you cook at home might include some aspects of an identical finished product that you could have bought at the store, but in general I suspect it has fewer of the destructive steps. Those that you do yourself might also be less effective, as one don't usually intend to have left overs that can remain in the fridge for several months with no change.

mauvehaus2• 5 years ago

"Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?"

If your kitchen looks like a kitchen and not a chemistry lab or oil refinery and you're starting with things that are identifiably food, you're probably good to go either way.

And while I'm no expert on the full cycle of meat production in he US, animals are routinely grazed on land that is unfit for modern, large-scale row cropping. I'm not saying that's the only way to turn soil and sunlight into plants, but it does seem to be the predominant one.

It isn't clear cut to me that taking that land out of productive agricultural use and shifting the need to yet more industrial agriculture is a huge win. If somebody has done that math, I'd be very interested in seeing a source. And to be clear, I'm more than prepared to believe that it's a net win. It's pretty well established that cows create a lot of methane and that all the progress with seaweed-based supplements is dubiously applicable to free ranging livestock.

rubidium2• 5 years ago

This list is not super “convincing”: Water, pea protein*, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Why is there a laxative in my fake meat?

“100% free range grass feed beef” is a lot more convincing.

kvgr• 5 years ago

That is so wrong, it doesnt even need response but here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

debacle2• 5 years ago

Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Which part of the world? The US? Eastern Europe? South America?

The barrier to "convincing" and "cheap" are very high.

Grakel• 5 years ago

There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to. Environmental concerns can be improved over time. It's a primary food type everywhere it can be gotten, and everywhere else is trying desperately to get more. Artificial meat will always be a minor alternative.

MrPatan• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's not the "processing" of it. It's that one of the steps in the process of almost all "processed" food is: "Add a ton of salt and sugar".

It's not the processing, it's optimizing for getting your dumb starving brain in your fat meat puppet to go "More of that. Now." that is a problem.

Processing is just a word, and not even that bad as shorthand. But here come the word thinkers and now it's heretical to... what? Let food see the inside of a factory? Big stainless steel vats are what make you fat? Word thinkers, man. That's a bigger problem than sugar.

cheese_goddess6• 5 years ago

There is a commnonly accepted standard about what is (ultra) processed or not. It's called NOVA and it's summarised in the following article:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...

And I quote:

"Ultra-processed foods

Also commonly referred to as “highly processed foods,” these are foods from the prior group that go beyond the incorporation of salt, sweeteners, or fat to include artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. Several processing steps using multiple ingredients comprise the ultra-processed food. It is speculated that these foods are designed to specifically increase cravings so that people will overeat them and purchase more. They are typically ready-to-eat with minimal additional preparation. Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients. Examples are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, chips, and breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets. One study using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that ultra-processed foods comprised about 60% of total calories in the U.S. diet. [4] An association has been suggested between the increasing sales of ultra-processed foods and the rise in obesity. [3]"

In short, ultra-processed food is food that's full of stuff you don't need to eat or you don't want to eat, but that's there to make you buy the product, and keep buying it. It's food whose purpose is not to nourish, but to sell.

GhettoComputers40• 5 years ago

No it won’t. Tofu has existed for centuries and it didn’t, impossible burgers didn’t. It’s hopeful, but in reality it’ll just give industrialized countries with poorer people less access to animal products, while those in 3rd world countries continue to grow chickens.

pif• 5 years ago

Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Then, by definition, it's not meat. Please, let's keep calling things with their proper name!

headsoup2• 5 years ago

No, artificial meat is not. Always looking for solutions to the symptoms of the root cause, which is feeding overpopulation.

We don't expect to hit a human carrying capacity, we expect to 'solve' that problem with technology and clever thinking and live anywhere we like forever.

What happens when everyone's eating fake meat, but we've added another few billion people and we need more and more? Bigger factories, larger crops, wider distribution. Then that's the 'problem' and we need a new wonder thing.

Fake meat and all these other engineered solutions (along with large scale monoculture and livestock industries) ignore and completely misunderstand the complexities and resources of the natural world. The ecosystems of soil, insects, plants, climate etc interacting and evolving. We think we're smarter than that and can do better with simple solutions to complex problems, so here we are arguing about not-meat.

Zababa2• 5 years ago

Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate

Way less than replacing fossil fuels. Unless you're against killing animals for moral reasons, artificial meat is not "the most important thing anyone could be working on right now".

sbacic• 5 years ago

Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

I'm not so sure about that. I've recently had the opportunity to try a vegetarian diet for a week. I did not enjoy it, I found the food tasteless and insufficiently nutritious.

But that got me thinking about all the dishes I usually consume which, while not exclusively plant based, are mostly made out of vegetables. All those dishes have a critical animal-based ingredient. The problem? Many of those ingredients aren't desirable by themselves - meat with significant bone and fat parts, pork hooves or ears, animal blood and others. Yet without them, you cannot make those dishes.

I wonder, when we finally arrive at that artificial meat future, will today's "undesirable" parts of beef or pork or chicken become an expensive delicacy? Will it basically wipe out traditional recipes that depend on them? I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a world.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

Let's agree on the ethical aspect of avoiding to kill animals.

However, regarding the environment we need to look at the actual data and the weight of different activities on global greenhouse emissions:

- Livestock farming : 5.8%

- Road transport: 11.9%

- Heating/cooling offices and house: 17.5%

[0]

So considering the actions we can take right now, we would get much more bang for buck in curbing emissions, by reducing heating and cooling costs in our own homes and avoid car usage, than we would by not eating meat.

For the record I agree that we should stop animal cruelty but specifically on the environment the unconfortable truth is that there are more urgent 'confort' actions you can take right now, very people are willing to leave their car behind or curb their house A/C usage.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#agriculture-f...

lr4444lr2• 5 years ago

I like the sentiment, but I'm an unrepentant "animal flesh once a day" on most days kinda guy, and various health markers all point to that working well for me.

The real issue to me is the branding: too many people think that just because a fancy label touts locally sourced organic whatnot that the product is automatically healthier than store-branded simple foods.

liveoneggs• 5 years ago

yeah but what if you take those lentils (or split peas), grind them into a powder, add tons of salt, color them with brown stuff, add juice to simulate blood, and then glue them into the shape of a hamburger?

herbst• 5 years ago

I like Quorn, I've eaten some nice tofu and really good saitan. I really like black bean burgers too. However every single actual fake meat I tried so far was sitting wrong in my stomach. Maybe one gets used to it, who knows.

The whole topic is also skewed. In Switzerland 2/3 of the land are basically non useable. This land is only used to feed cows, which makes up 95% of the diet of a organic local cow. There is no way we could grow anything useful on this land, especially not without destroying the nature.

Balero• 5 years ago

You could argue that instead of using that land for grazing, it should be allowed to go wild again, helping to improve the nature. It is still usable by other species than humans and cattle.

This would likely change the landscape and make the countryside look different. So there is a question about whether you want to change back to the 'original natural' landscape, or keep the cow managed 'agricultural-natural' landscape.

There is a a similar discussion happening in the UK about re-wilding some moorland, should it be kept in it's current tree-less state, for grouse shooting and not particularly economical sheep grazing, or be reverted to a 'pre-human' state of forest. Only it has been the moorland for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it would actually take some intervention in some places to change to a forest due to the grazing by deer and lack of predators (due to humans killing them all).

Personally I think there is room for both keeping some, and letting/helping some go wild.

2OEH8eoCRo05• 5 years ago

Meat tastes good. I want to keep eating it.

phonypc11• 5 years ago

If you knew human flesh to be the most tasty substance on Earth, would you want to keep eating it?

(No, obviously eating people is not equivalent on all levels to eating non-human animals. But merely tasting good isn't a very sensible reason to eat something on its own)

TheCondor• 5 years ago

We bought a half cattle from a local organic farmer. It’s not ultra green, but there was no fertilizer and fairly minimal transport carbon. And it keeps the money local. We are a family of four and I fully expect it to last 18+ months, pretty easily. Additionally, you can get it aged if you work with the processor.

It was a very interesting experience, we learned a lot and will do it again. Check out eatwild.com to find a rancher near you.

lqet3• 5 years ago

I have mentioned this several times in comments on other threads, and each time my comment was buried under variations of the same argument: the vast majority of people cannot be expected to give up meat, and therefore to help both the environment and their health, and to stop killing animals, we should offer them artificial meat. But I very much doubt that the additional crazy overhead of producing and packing and shipping this artificial meat (which as you said is completely unnecessary, as you can just start eating non-hyper-processed vegetables) will result in a net benefit for the planet, or for your personal health.

Another thing that concerns me is the centralization aspect. It is still fairly easy to buy meat coming from your local butcher / local animals. Looking at the ingredients of some of this artificial meat, I fail to see how it should be produced by a local shop. You need a supply chain, and possibly special machinery. This may only be carried out by large companies.

windexh8er5• 5 years ago

Most of the "real" processed meat has more overhead than its counterparts. Most people do not buy from a local butcher, to imply otherwise is turning a blind eye. They buy big brand overly processed "meat" that comes in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic just the same.

With respect to "crazy overhead" animals require land, food and water at an exponential rate of consumption compared to alternatives. They also taint and pollute groundwater sources and contribute to a significant amount of food recalls due to the above.

Lastly in the metro I live there are about a half dozen alt meat "butcher" shops that supply alt meats to consumers and local restaurants. They're insanely popular and have been for over 5 years now. There's great brand recognition of those alt meats on local menus. You don't often see that with "real" meat because there's not as much differentiation in the product in real meats, just price.

A lot of the above points are simply ignoring facts and the market. Hopefully, like with EVs, more people can continue to make positive progress and acceptance with alternatives to real meats as we've been seeing.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

comment was buried under variations of the same argument: the vast majority of people cannot be expected to give up meat, and therefore to help both the environment and their health, and to stop killing animals, we should offer them artificial meat.

People historically have largely given up meat because it was too expensive at the time. To help the environment and stop killing animals, we should impose proper Pigovian taxes on meat (and/or the supporting process that directly produce the environmental impacts) so that they disutility imposed by eating meat is properly priced in. (This will also naturally create a demand for alternatives that substitute without the adverse effects to which taxes are attached.)

windexh8er5• 5 years ago

...and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries.

This is not exclusively a bad thing as is implied. For some it will be their endgame, but for others it will be a transition. In our household veggie "burgers" are more common than fake/alt meats. But fake meats have largely displaced the real thing. For example a commonly requested menu item is buffalo chicken dip. The family simply refers to it as "fake chicken dip" and that's been normalized over the last few years.

We've transitioned from smoking, grilling, sous vide and other methods of traditional meat cooking multiple times a week to a request once or twice a month for real bacon and around the holidays a brined and smoked turkey breast. Fish is another story, nobody's giving up sushi anytime soon. But overall we enjoy it, and it's a net positive in many other ways.

We've served other family members homemade burgers (not preformed) using off the shelf alt "hamburger meat" and they've taken to making them in their homes after enjoying them. In many ways there's not much health gain currently, but - again it's a great transitory step for many.

GhettoComputers40• 5 years ago

It’s more expensive, less healthy, and relies on tricking people they’re eating a more nutritious food than they are, who benefits aside from corporations? If you told people which is real and fake, you think it’ll still be wanted?

FpUser• 5 years ago

"Eat lentils and beans"

Not that I do not like those but eating those in any reasonable amount for more than one day in a row is causing very strong heartburn sensation for me. So thanks bot no.

"eat moderately instead."

I am very physically active (2-3 hour of daily physical activity) and have decent amount of muscle. How the fuck am I supposed to "eat moderately"? My main daily diet is greens with tomatoes and chicken/meat/fish.

globular-toast• 5 years ago

"Processed" actually has a specific meaning, though. It generally refers to the addition of some kind of salt or smoking. So cured meats, sausages, bacon etc. These are processed foods. It doesn't generally mean stuff that isn't "natural". Do you really think meat from factory farms is "natural" anyway?

kcplate2• 5 years ago

Feel free to grow my meat in a lab, as long as that lab is full of living cows, chickens, turkey, deer, pigs, lambs, and fish.

hanslub422• 5 years ago

Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".

fooker• 5 years ago

The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian

No, this is a weird and popular misconception.

~ 97% of the people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are non-vegetarian. South India has amazing non vegetarian food.

speeder• 5 years ago

I have impression people think that any meat that is not Beef is not meat either.

Meanwhile people in India eat chickens, fish, goats (seemly a popular dish is goat neck? saw some indian chef on youtube making that) and so on.

Also there are suspicions that cows were made sacred in first place to force people to not eat their source of milk, because seemly eating the cows was more popular than milking them, but they are far more useful in certain places for milk than for meat.

hanslub422• 5 years ago

A regional cuisine can be largely vegetarian even if 0.0% of the people in the region are vegetarian. I eat meat, even though my personal cuisine is largely vegetarian: I cook a lot of vegetarian dishes, even though I enjoy a bit of meat every now and then. My non-vegetarian food is amazing, but so are my veggie dishes.

evgen2• 5 years ago

Descriptions like 'glorious' or 'delicious' are completely subjective. The fact that people did not choose to fast but were instead forced to by either religious dictates or economic requirements should be telling you something. When economies shift out of poverty and subsistence farming the amount of meat consumed grows, and as the GDP grows so does this meat consumption. Is it because 'big meat' is so good at convincing people that they want to eat more meat or is it because the thing holding back that meat consumption was only the ability to buy/acquire it and not because the veg cuisine was so incomparable that people choose it over options that used meat?

astura2• 5 years ago

Oh, come on, Catholics who observe lent in [my part of] America almost exclusively eat fish on Fridays during lent, not lentils or anything vegetarian.

I grew up in a Catholic family and vegetarian dishes are actively shunned, the absolute only socially acceptable lent option for dinner is fish.

jwineinger• 5 years ago

Why is fish not considered meat? I'm genuinely curious

squarefoot• 5 years ago

I tried a few times soy steaks and burgers, and honestly don't know what to say; to me it has been the most unpredictable food experience ever: one time they tasted absolutely delicious, then complete crap, then ...meh. It may have been the brand or way of cooking but I can't recall of two times in a row in which I could get the same impression, so today I tend to avoid them. On the other hand I love soy chocolate-like ice cream, but that's another thing.

About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.

GhettoComputers40• 5 years ago

That’s consistent with using low quality heavily processed plant based food with artificial flavor. The delicate flavor can be significantly altered with cooking methods that would not ruin real food.

capybara_2020• 5 years ago

Anyone have any numbers on how cattle production compares to other meat production?

Would it be much better for the environment if we just shifted to smaller animals and birds like pigs, goats, chicken?

AngryData• 5 years ago

I mean if we wanted to make beef production more sustainable we easily could, feed cows more grass and less grain. But grain is more often the choice because you can grow/fatten your animals up like 20% faster than with a pure grass diet and the grain is easier and more compact to store and ship. Alfalfa requires no additional fertilizer and actually sequesters nitrogen into the soil, reducing the need for artificial fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

In general, smaller animals with a shorter lifespan are more efficient at their conversion ratio of "plant calories vs meat calories", so if someone worries about the use of lots of farmland to grow stuff to feed animals instead of using a smaller amount of farmland to feed humans directly, then cattle production (unless we reduce so much that we keep only the number of cattle which are grazing on non-arable land) is worse than chicken farms.

In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms.

In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.

tmnvix• 5 years ago

I've heard that a single head of cattle yields about the same amount of meat as 200 chickens. As far as I'm aware, cattle also tend to enjoy a much more pleasant life than factory farmed chickens. As someone who does eat meat but is also somewhat paradoxically concerned with animal welfare, this is important.

losvedir• 5 years ago

I know this is just a personal problem, but my wife is allergic to many lentils, including chickpeas, lentils, peas, and soy and it's becoming harder and harder to avoid these days, it seems.

It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")

i_am_proteus3• 5 years ago

I have a kind of curiosity about how these things scale, looking at land use.

Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance.

Who can tell me of the impacts of such changes?

igorkraw• 5 years ago

All studied I'm aware of show that plant based protein is orders of magnitude less intensive than beef. If you look for "protein source total resource consumption meta analysis" you'll find many. Most people do not eat grass fed beef, they are in fact raised on maize or other feedstock which was grown on land that could also support plants for human consumption.

i_am_proteus3• 5 years ago

You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter.

My curiosity concerns the use of what are today grasslands and maize fields to produce protein alternatives to the ruminants. Maize and soya are commonly rotated - over long periods, is it effective to rotate soya with other pulses? Or is it better for the soil to continue to crop maize or rotate land to pasture?

Sources that I have seen, such as this source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you... indicate that ruminants are perhaps one order of magnitude more resource intensive than pulses. Poultry, pork, and dairy are on the same order of magnitude, perhaps 50% to 200% more resource intensive than pulses.

But I cannot graze poultry where I can graze beef, nor can I grow pulses on pasture. This is my curiosity.

an9n• 5 years ago

Eat the bugs, live in the pod...

silent_cal2• 5 years ago

Wear the VR headset!

rytcio• 5 years ago

You will own nothing and you will be happy

tamaharbor• 5 years ago

Innovations aside, have you tasted the stuff? Yikes!

silent_cal2• 5 years ago

It looks disgusting.

PrinceRichard• 5 years ago

Whole plant foods with plenty of living greens, my friends. We can do it!

kcplate2• 5 years ago

Here is a thought experiment for you…if someone made a meat substitute that mimics the taste and texture of cooked human flesh…how would you feel about a person who knowingly ate and enjoyed such a creation?

MengerSponge• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

Can we stomach the latest emerging food innovations?

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