I'm mostly worried about soy and generally, this human interventionism.
Where you take something that has been with us for 2000 years and replace it with something else, on which it's impossible to have the same amount of data.
Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
201–210 of 374 posts
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis. Obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I don't know if the methane produced by cattle has a bigger impact. But it definitely seems better than both grain fed meat and monocrops, in terms of energy input and environmental/ecosystem impact. The major energy input in the system i…
Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.
If you take the historical view, we have about as many cattle now as there were bison in North America.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#203So... I pay a little extra for the BK Impossible Burger. I find its taste dead on. Awesome! But... how do I know some penny pinching Burger King franchise owner isn't just using regular beef patties for both regular burgers and Impossible Burgers? ;-)
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, there are quite a few non-dairy creamers that work great for coffee/tea etc, as almond/soy definitely do not work well.
> there are quite a few non-dairy creamers that work great As someone who has tried a lot of non-dairy creamers, I have yet to find a single one that "works great". There's something very characteristic about both the taste and the consistency of milk and most replacement products are nowhere close. That's not to say milk is irreplaceable for all applications, but there's a tendency to over-hype healthy and organic r…
In my mind, this seems like the most reasoned middle ground I've encountered.
I'm a committed carnivore, but I do have ethical qualms with animal death, and if there are options that have negligible differences in experience (cost/convenience/taste), I'll take it, but as you mentioned, there are small, but concrete ways to improve things without going whole hog into avoiding all animal products or having to wait for big companies to adopt those options.
(As an aside, does anyone know the reasoning behind avoiding honey? I've even seen a software license that forbade it's use in any product that may directly or indirectly use or industrialize animal products, including honey).
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#205As far as I can tell, I'm the target demographic for this. I eat beef (and other meat) burgers because I like how they taste. If this comes close, I'll gladly switch, even though they cost a little more. I'm far from vegetarian, but I've been thinking more and more that I'd like to slim down on my actual meat eating for a few reasons, including the environment, the animal living conditions, and the cholesterol. The o…
As someone raised around cattle ranches, I really don't understand the animal living conditions argument.
I've driven by a few factory farms in California. You know you're close to one when you're hit with the smell of manure many miles out. When you actually drive by the farms, the reality is quite depressing: the cattle are standing in their own shit with barely any space to move. I'm done with red meat myself.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find more "hopelessly stupid" is being so uptight about the matter that you care if a few particles of animal matter made their way into your food from a shared grill. Even assuming the vegan moral framework, it does no additional good to separate the grills and you're not encouraging any more animal harm by reusing the other grill. It's not like a religion that bans eating certain foods, or an allergy, in whi…
I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan, personally. I'm a hunter, a fisherman, and I buy beef by the half cow from a small ranch. All of that said, if Burger King is selling some food products and marketing them as vegetarian or vegan, but they are being cooked in animal grease, and surely that is what this means, well, then they're either stupid, they're liars, or they're hopelessly incompetent. And you see this sort of to…
In the sense that they're not giving these customers what they want, they're being incompetent, but I think it's totally unreasonable in the first place to demand such total separation. Like caring if the same coffee machine was used for non-free-trade coffee grounds before you used it for your own grounds, or that a non-cage-free egg was made on the same grill earlier in the day when you ordered cage-free.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#207Here an interesting quote[0] from the founder of Impossible Burger that kind of touches on the meatless vs vegetarian/vegan discussion happening a lot in this thread: "[Before becoming a vegan] I loved putting milk in my coffee and cereal, but plant-based milks don’t work for me so far. No-one is trying very hard to deliver the full experience of what consumers value from milk. We don’t want to follow the course of s…
Ironically I find that I (vegetarian, not vegan) tend to enjoy meat replacements that don't try replicate meat. I find the ones that DO try to replicate meats taste are just not very good at it, and it ends up tasting pretty bad. The good stuff is still tasty and savory but it's doing its own thing. edit: Not to say the impossible burger can't be good (I've not been able to try one) Just a comment on existing product…
Maybe its the "uncanny valley" phenomenon for taste? When you get closer to taste of the real thing, people notice the differences more. But people like something totally different like a TJs veggie masala burger for what it is.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis. Obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I don't know if the methane produced by cattle has a bigger impact. But it definitely seems better than both grain fed meat and monocrops, in terms of energy input and environmental/ecosystem impact. The major energy input in the system i…
> They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis. I think the equation is a lot more complicated than that. For instance, did you know that the vast majority of weight that your body regularly sheds is due to the carbon you breathe out? The average human breathes out around 2.3 lbs of C02 per day. That increases a lot when you're engagi…
Of course, I’m saying the resulting soil production is where the carbon is being captured.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, unless Burger King is using a completely separate grill for the vegetable burgers, some vegetarians/vegans are going to be upset that their vegetable patty was prepared where meat was and possibly exposed to meat, and there could be kosher/halal issues.
This is some of why it is important to distinguish moral food specifications from health-related specification: it takes work for me to eat out anywhere that isn't exclusively vegetarian because meat contamination makes me ill, and restaurants don't understand that, for example, labeling things "vegetarian" when they are fried in the same oil as meat is misleading. Sometimes the grill is well-cleaned and it is fine,…
I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, and after a couple of decades it makes me ill, presumably because my gut flora no longer tolerates it. So any reason to not eat meat can become a health-related specification, given time.
From the sounds of it I'm nowhere near as sensitive to it as you and bifrost.
Re: Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Veganism isn't an allergy, and it's not about maintaining perfect bodily purity. It's about making ethical choices. Most people aren't going to worry about incidental "contamination".
Sounds like a religion. I get not wanting factory farmed meat, but what's wrong with hunting meat for yourself? In the end we're all meat for something, even if it's just the worms.
I believe the argument is that if you were capable of subsisting without harming another living creature, then you should try to do that.