181–190 of 272 posts
A friend was in China (Being and Shanghai) and Japan (Tokyo) very recently and complained about the lack of vegetarian options. In fact one of the participants in the journey was forced to eat meat because there were no other options.
Even the restaurants which weren't purely veggie had lots of options.
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POV: Omnivore with a (previously) vegetarian spouse. We generally ate veg @ home One of my biggest issues with modern veg diets is all of the veg food trying to masquerade as other food. Soy bacon does not taste like, or taste as good as, real bacon. Tofu and Boca burgers do not taste like actual meat. But tofu and the like can taste amazing on its own merit . It's an ingredient with it's own flavors and textures, so…
Absolutely this. I never met a vegetable I didn't like and there are tons of great vegetarian dishes and maybe its 100% mental but the moment you try to turn a non-vegetarian dish into a vegetarian dish, and especially if you try to use a meat substitute, its over. I'd hate to think this is true but perhaps vegetarians go so long they forget what things taste like but some of these meat substitutes are straight up di…
Wheat gluten nuggets and patties are dope, veggie patties are often disappointing but rarely bad, seitan strips can be slimy if you don't cook them but you basically can't mess it up otherwise, tempeh at worst tastes like crumbly bland nuts, shredded wheat gluten comes out 'oily' if you don't drain it but beyond that is hard to mess up, tofu just tastes like tofu you either love or hate it, and the branded burger subtitutes basically taste like an okay burger.
Where are all the disgusting options hiding?
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The point was we can live long and healthy lives by going to the supermarket and buying non-meat food. We can survive now without making animals needlessly suffer (including paying others to kill animals on our behalf). Some carnivorous wild animals have no choice but to hunt and eat prey alive to survive. We have a choice.
I choose to eat animals. You choose to eat plants. Question is why do you want plants to taste like animals and it was answered. Some folks don’t like killing. I don’t mind taking an animals life to eat. Therein lies the difference
Can I ask if you'd be okay with killing all the animals you eat yourself?
If you wouldn't be prepared to do the killing yourself, why?
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Mock meat foods are a great way for restaurants to easily serve vegetarian or vegan plates with a simple substitution. They also make a massive number of recipes accessible to vegetarians or vegans. They also lower the barrier to entry for meat eaters to convert to eating less meat. I think they're really great in many ways. Downsides: they are highly processed, currently expensive, and of questionable nutritional va…
Trying to offer "bridge" foods that are vegetable versions of normal dishes doesn't help. It never is as good, at best it's "yeah...its OK." So you have only re-enforced the idea that vegetarian food will never be quiet as good as the "real thing". On the off chance it is exactly like the meat its pretending to be then all your saying is "See? All you have to do is spend more for exactly the same thing!" I might try…
They may be more expensive now, but it's pretty likely that economies of scale will reduce the price of plant-based meat substitutes, while pretty unlikely that Tyson Foods is going to quickly find a cheaper way to raise a cow.
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I'm also quite curious, because palak paneer and other vegetarian indian dishes are awesome, veggies or not, and you didn't specify these sorts of options when you specify disliking vegetables in any form. If you hate tomatoes, does that mean you despise chili, or pasta? Are curries terrible? Is an apple pie better off with just shortbread?
> and you didn't specify these sorts of options when you specify disliking vegetables in any form I haven't had a chance or inclination to eat much Indian food yet. I'm going to try, at some point. > If you hate tomatoes, does that mean you despise chili, or pasta? Not really. Here's the thing: it all depends on the processing, and usually the more processing was involved, the better I like the end result. So e.g. I…
I grew up in a meat and potatoes family. Learning to eat vegetarian meals was a long process.
I grew up in Georgia and it's a long ways from Hawaii. All I knew of pineapple was canned pineapple. For probably the first thirty years of my life, I had a terrible opinion of pineapple.
Then I lived on the West Coast, a lot closer to Hawaii, where fresh pineapple was readily available most of the year at not crazy prices. I finally tried fresh pineapple that hadn't been rotting in transit for weeks and weeks and absolutely loved it.
Fruits and vegetables need to be fresh. There is an art to selecting them. People with a meat-centric diet seem to often not really know how to cook them well.
Overcooked veggies lose a lot of their flavor and nutritional value. Undercooked vegetables can be hard to digest or have other issues.
I have a mild tomato allergy. I can eat pizza and ketchup. I react poorly to raw tomatoes.
It's not obvious I'm allergic because I need to keep eating tomatoes regularly over several days before I get hives. But I do need to limit tomatoes and the more processed, the better.
Growing conditions, harvesting methods, storage conditions and on and on can impact taste for fruits and vegetables.
Missing is how meat-free options will generate new business. I'm not a vegetarian but I am the sort of person who would never eat a Whopper b/c it's garbage meat. Hadn't eaten in BK for probably a decade. I ate an Impossible Whopper and I'm gonna be eating BK a lot more often.
This is the core reason why Impossible Foods is a darling right now. The big fast food chains have been losing customers for years due to concerns over health and obesity. Right now there seems to be a public perception that vegetarian/vegan foods are healthier than meat/dairy based foods. Big fast food is taking advantage of this perception at the moment and reaping the rewards.
They aren't really healthier though. There's still loads of fat, carbs, and sodium in combinations that are highly rewarding relative to their caloric content and nutrition level. High reward, low satiety food and its interaction with the brain and fat cells, moderated by specific signalling hormones, comprise an extremely compelling theory [1] for the main cause of the obesity epidemic.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry...
This research is pretty laughable. Made by one university, 3 locations - ages/demographics are not represented properly at all, the cultural environment is the same (one university). The ratio of veg doubled (0.25 to 0.5) while the ratio of meat fell 33 % (0.75 to 0.5). Also it doesnt at all mention the in volume of the eaters: What if the people who predominantly eat meat simply stopped going to the cafeterias as of…
Almost all studies about vegetarianism are born of an agenda to promote vegetarianism. To a meat eater, studying the effects of eating an all vegetable diet is the same as studying the effects of walking backwards everywhere you go: it's not something we'd ever consider doing so we see no value in studying the effects of doing it. Furthermore, meat eaters do not care if other people don't want to eat meat. As such, m…
That is absurd; many vegetarians are former meat-eaters.
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Because it tastes good. It's not a contradiction to enjoy the taste of an animal, while also believing that the harvesting of that animal is unethical.
As a non vegetarian, there's only one meat I don't eat for moral reasons, and I wouldn't want to eat anything that pretends to be that meat, regardless of whether I like the taste. Quorn cubes, or Quorn mince I can understand, they're generic. Vegetarian bacon is supposed to be a specific part of a specific animal. And I've never heard anyone argue, vegetarian or otherwise, that vegetarian bacon tastes anything like…
Bacon is basically synonymous with crispy rectangle and sometimes dammit I want salty crispy rectangles on my burger.
I also have a HUGE resistance for stuff like Beyond meats - When I want meat, I really don't want to try out synthetic haeme or whatever that makes this taste like meat - at least for the next 15-20 years when we figure out what cancer it causes. A bean burger is an awesome meal, so is milk based products (pizza et al). Even better are a combination of pita bread + hummus and so on.
It is very much possible to start off small - eat real vegetarian x days of a week or move to meat only for lunch or only dinner and you can go from there in small steps. You can even switch to white meat to start with. A planned setup like that actually makes me enjoy the meat more when I get it. A good reuben is extra good when it happens only once a month.
I also don't really buy we have to be fully vegetarian to see all the benefits (I grew up vegetarian, picked up meat eating and I would like to think I walk a reasonable line).