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Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

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Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#151

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

elektor wrote: post #42
kylnew wrote: post #11

Semi-related, but the Beyond Meat burger at Canadian fast-food chain A&W has been a big hit too, it seems. I got one at a mall recently and was amazed that everyone in line at the time was there to try the beyond meat burger. There’s a serious appetite for this stuff so I’m glad to see a big meat company paying attention.

You should give the Impossible Burger a try as well, it's even more meat-like and has a great taste. Both burgers recently announced 2.0 versions of their products so there's a lot of excitement in the field of plant-based meat.

I actually much prefer the Beyond Burger. Maybe it was cooked wrong, but the Impossible Burger I tried tasted a lot like a Morningstar Farm's Griller's Prime to me. Not a bad flavor mind you, just not worth the $3 surcharge.

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#152

Post by sridca »

porpoisely wrote: post #56

It's terrible news for the environment. In terms of environmental harm, vegetable farming is easily the most environmentally damaging human endeavor. The distant second is raising livestock. The most environmentally friendly method for humans would be the "hunter gatherer" diet ( wild vegetation and wild animals ). But we might be too populous for that to work. If you care about the environment, this is the worst new…

You didn't break any of HN rules, and yet people downvoted you. It goes to show HN's vegan-bias!

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#153

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Everyone here is talking about taste, quality, and all the other things office workers making six figures base their purchasing decisions on

For every pound of free range, organic fed, fair trade ground beef that gets sold at Whole Foods Walmart sells a truck load of house brand 80/20.

Plant based ground beef replacements are not going to have a measurable impact on the meat industry or environment until they can deliver almost the same experience as cheap ground beef at a lesser price.

I see no mention of price in this article which tells me price is not one of the strong suits of this product. While another choice of vegetarian beef is certainly a good thing for vegetarians and the Whole Foods crowd I don't see this product affecting everything at the macro level. Things will likely get cheaper over time but we do not appear at a tipping point yet.

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#154

Post by gpm »

Angostura wrote: post #140
gpm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the market for this product is meat eaters (vegetarians too, but less of them) trying to serve burgers to a group of people that includes vegetarians.

As a sample size of 1, I love meat but I know that it is environmentally pretty disastrous. I'm waiting avidly for impossible burger-type meat substitutes to be available so I cam shift my consumption, and some of my family consumption. By contrast, I would never serve 'meat-alikes' to my vegetarian friends. I always cook them proper veggie dishes because many of them don't like the flavours and textures they associa…

Also a sample size of 1, but I'm the exact type of vegetarian you're describing (don't like meat because of flavor and texture) and probably get served half a dozen fake burgers a year. It's usually (not always) in settings where a large number of people are being served food. Think "union barbecue" not "dinner party".

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#155

Post by dilap »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #103
dilap wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows eat grass, which is just out there, growing naturally. Those aren't calories humans could be consuming; we don't have the right kind of stomaches. You can view a cow as machine for extracting the nutrients in grass into a dense, human-digestible form. Pretty cool. I'm also not sure your "modern agriculture" point stands -- are industrial farming methods sustainable over the long scale? Think about America pre-co…

Maybe it would be better to say "cows would eat grass" but unfortunately >90% of beef comes from cows who don't, and are raised on feed[1]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2016/01/29/the-gras...

I think it'd probably be good to stop feeding grain to cows, but even "grain-fed" cows eat grass (or hay) most of their lives -- it's at the end when they're sent to the feed lots to fatten them up that they eat grain.

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#156

Post by dilap »

tom_mellior wrote: post #134
dilap wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows eat grass, which is just out there, growing naturally. Those aren't calories humans could be consuming; we don't have the right kind of stomaches. You can view a cow as machine for extracting the nutrients in grass into a dense, human-digestible form. Pretty cool. I'm also not sure your "modern agriculture" point stands -- are industrial farming methods sustainable over the long scale? Think about America pre-co…

I just posted this in a cousin comment, but a whole lot of experts disagree with Savory's claims: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t... The TED talk is really good and sounds convincing, but in the end it's a bunch of pretty pictures going against what appears to be scientific consensus.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but the tone of the piece and the fact that it's funded by Kellog's is certainly at least eye-brow raising:

There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.

Slate’s coverage of food systems is made possible in part by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Anyway, I think it's fair to at least say the topic is debated.

(Also, I wouldn't recommend being too overly swayed by "scientific consensus": scientists are just people, who are mostly sheep; lots of scientific consensuses turn out to be wrong. I'm reminded of the Feynman quote:

–Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?")

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#157

Post by neogodless »

sdinsn wrote: post #43
neogodless wrote: post #13

Off Topic: another example of egregious capitalization! Is "Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger" easier on the eyes? Or should proper nouns be wrapped in quotes when part of a headline?

Is English not your first language? Titles are supposed to be capitalized

Canadian English is not my first language! "Meat", "Giant", "Maple" and "Leaf" can all be nouns, and some of them can be adjectives. With everything in that sentence being flexible words, and "maple leaf" not standing out, you can't parse that sentence in order.

Canadian - I'm with you

Meat - Ok, Canadian meat!

Giant - I'm not sure here, is Giant a kind of Canadian meat?

Maple - huh... ?

Leaf - I'm really getting lost here

It isn't until I get to the "Burger" that I'm starting to realize we're talking about a "meat giant" company and that company is named "Maple Leaf." I get that if you know all companies in all countries, you probably recognize Maple Leaf, but I had not heard of them before, so it took some logic to interpret a sentence that, in my opinion, should be understandable the first time you read it, without making assumptions (or having explicit knowledge about a specific company.) If only "Maple Leaf" was capitalized, it would've been instantly recognized as a company name, and the "meat giant" descriptor would've been logical.

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#158

Post by dilap »

cageface wrote: post #113
dilap wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows eat grass, which is just out there, growing naturally. Those aren't calories humans could be consuming; we don't have the right kind of stomaches. You can view a cow as machine for extracting the nutrients in grass into a dense, human-digestible form. Pretty cool. I'm also not sure your "modern agriculture" point stands -- are industrial farming methods sustainable over the long scale? Think about America pre-co…

Think about America pre-colonization: a continent filled with ruminants happily munching away, being hunted at sustainable levels. To my mind that is peak sustainability and environmental friendliness. That's with a population of on the order of 10 million for the entire continent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... Naturally grazing cows wouldn't even come close to sustaining the current…

That's fair, but still, my point is raising beef is not intrinsically unsustainable and destructive.

Though I agree, it's probably not a reasonable primary food for most people at current population levels.

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#159

Post by dilap »

mathw wrote: post #130
dilap wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows eat grass, which is just out there, growing naturally. Those aren't calories humans could be consuming; we don't have the right kind of stomaches. You can view a cow as machine for extracting the nutrients in grass into a dense, human-digestible form. Pretty cool. I'm also not sure your "modern agriculture" point stands -- are industrial farming methods sustainable over the long scale? Think about America pre-co…

Cows eat grass which grows on land which used to have rainforest on it but which has been cleared, wiping out thousands of species, to make more cows. (Okay not all cows, but rainforest clearance for pastureland is a big problem where there are or used to be rainforests). Cows also produce a massive amount of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, and they're not very efficient converters of plants into grass. It…

Yes, it's bad to cut down rainforests to raise beef, just like it's bad to cut down rainforests to make palm oil. That's not really a knock against raising cows in natural grassland, though.

Re GHGs, you have to weigh the methane against the carbon sequestration the cows promote.

These guys are working with local (to me) farms to study and enhance that:

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about

It also just doesn't seem to me, on a gut level, that having 90 million cows in the US is our main problem (especially compared to historical levels of 20 million bison). I think we should be much more focussed on the 20 million barrels of oil a day we're burning through (compared to historical levels of basically 0).

Re: Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf debuts new plant-based burger

#160

Post by elektor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #151
elektor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should give the Impossible Burger a try as well, it's even more meat-like and has a great taste. Both burgers recently announced 2.0 versions of their products so there's a lot of excitement in the field of plant-based meat.

I actually much prefer the Beyond Burger. Maybe it was cooked wrong, but the Impossible Burger I tried tasted a lot like a Morningstar Farm's Griller's Prime to me. Not a bad flavor mind you, just not worth the $3 surcharge.

Agreed, I think the way its prepared definitely matters.

For me, I think the Impossible Burger seems "better" because I've only had it prepared by restaurants whereas the Beyond Burger I've mostly made myself from the grocery store.

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