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How to lower the price of plant-based meat

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Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#541

Post by n4r9 »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #392
Judgmentality wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this at all. Why? So long as it's labeled appropriately (ingredients, possibly some disclaimer if required but I think that would be absurd) why not call it whatever we want? Meat is already a somewhat ambiguous term in English, so giving it legal protection seems odd to me. Personally I think we shouldn't sell juice that's from concentrate as 100% juice, but I can easily find out by reading the ingredien…

Juice from concentrate is still the juice of its original source - no one is taking the juice of an orange and calling it apple juice. The water has been removed somewhat for ease of storage and packaging and probably also as a side-effect of pasteurization. While we do informally refer to the edible portion of certain vegetables as meat, that is absolutely not the same thing as meat from animal sources and I doubt t…

> Using a formal term, other than meat, would help to reduce confusion about the source material

Is there significant consumer confusion over this, though?

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#542

Post by bsdz »

bsdz wrote: post #474
pinot wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need a nitrogen source. They are using the glucose energy to turn nitrogen (ammonia in this case) into protein.

I'm not sure I agree with your wording, ie use "glucose energy to turn nitrogen into protein". Proteins are made up of amino acids which are made from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The glucose not only provides energy to the process but also carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. In fact, this is a very common process in plants. Note: The comment I originally responded to appears to have changed their wording fr…

I made a typo above when I said glucose provides nitrogen that should be hydrogen.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#543

Post by jayphen »

Grustaf wrote: post #518
runarberg wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think parent was ever saying that tofu was (nor should) be similar to meat in taste nor texture. That is not the point. You can still prepare and spice tofu just like you would do with meat, and get a complete meal that replaces meat with something else that adds to the quality of the meal just like meat would, regardless of whether the substitute replicates the texture or taste at all.

That is much closer to my standpoint then. I think it’s silly to imitate meat, when there are plenty of delicious vegetarian dishes. For example tofu dishes.

During my life as a vegetarian/vegan I regularly consume “fake meat” products because they are simple to prepare and allow me to use recipes that are not vegetarian. For example, it’s extremely hard to find a good vegetarian burger — the beyond burger was a revelation the first time I tried it. I still like burgers, even though there are many wonderful vegetarian dishes. I didn’t stop eating meat because I don’t like the taste of meat.

Imagine that many of your favourite dishes, those you grew up with, were suddenly unavailable to you because some ingredient no longer existed. If a new ingredient hit the market that was not quite the same but was a convincing substitute in taste and texture, would you consider it silly and avoid it?

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#544

Post by GordonS »

OJFord wrote: post #340
henrikschroder wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or they’ll say “why have a fake burger, can’t you just enjoy vegetarian food, why does it have to be a burger? If you want burger just eat one and stop trying to copy meat, innovate on your own”. It's hilarious, because there's one comment just like that below yours now. > The high high majority of meat consumption is not high quality product, but the absolutely lowest quality possible. Yes, this. A lot of people,…

> The Impossible Whopper is almost there now. It just needs to get a couple of notches better, and be the same price as a meat Whopper and there'd zero reason to choose the meat Whopper anymore. And if you can get the Impossible one cheaper than the meat one, it will be the default choice, I'm not sure about cheaper , I think that might have some of effects - perceived inferiority, etc.

I would argue that being cheaper would be a positive selling point, rather than a negative one.

Consumers know that producing meat takes a lot of time and effort, and is therefore expensive. They also know that vegetables are much cheaper than meat.

Personally, I'm not going to try an Impossible Whopper if it costs more than a normal, meat-based one, because in my mind it should be cheaper, and I'd feel like I was getting ripped off by excessive margins.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#545

Post by paulluuk »

tomstoms wrote: post #515
biztos wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, aren’t there some countries where this isn’t the case? We might look at them to see how diet relates to agriculture subsidies.

India

I'm not sure if I understand your comment correctly, but India does subsidize meat production, especially for fish, pig and chicken.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#546

Post by GordonS »

esperent wrote: post #461
snakeboy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics aside, I think the parent comment was referring to weird additives and oils in things like the Impossible Burger. That being said, I think it's only fair to compare that to all the antibiotics, hormones, and fertilizers that your average low-grade ground beef has been exposed to or fed.

> weird additives and oils in things like the Impossible Burger. Here's the ingredients list for the impossible burger: Water, textured wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, natural flavors, 2% or less of leghemoglobin (soy), yeast extract, salt, konjac gum, xanthan gum, soy protein isolate, vitamin E, vitamin C, thiamine (vitamin B1), zinc, niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin (vitamin B2), and vitamin B12. The only…

Maybe if you are used to eating processed food, but as someone who almost always cooks meals from scratch, this list of ingredients doesn't look appealing. If I was buying a chicken breast, there wouldn't even be a list of ingredients.

"textured wheat protein" - no idea what it, but it sounds disgusting, and very highly processed. I'd presume it also contains gluten?

"potato protein" - again, it sounds like something highly processed.

"natural flavors" - it doesn't specify exactly what they are, so I don't even know what I'm eating - I don't like it.

"leghemoglobin" - you mentioned what this is, but otherwise it sounds like a lab-produced chemical.

"yeast extract" - makes me think of marmite, which is one of the most revolting substances on earth! Aside from that, I think of the smell of yeast; I... don't think I want to eat that.

"konjac gum" - never heard of it.

"xanthan gum" - I think it's some kind of thickening agent?

"soy protein isolate" - no idea what this is. The wheat and potato proteins don't have "isolate" in their names, so I assume this is even more highly processed. For some reason it makes me think of processes like "hydrogenation" - ways we mess around with foods to make them as cheap as possible, sometimes with negative health consequences.

"vitamin E..." - makes me think the raw ingredients on their own are so unhealthy that they had to add a few crushed multivitamins.

Overall: it sounds highly processed and devoid of nutrition. blech!

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#547

Post by GordonS »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #405
elif wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that tracks. Impossible burger: Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% Or Less Of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Mixed Tocopherols (Antioxidant), Soy Protein Isolate, Vitamins and Minerals (Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitam…

For the vast majority of those ingredients, the answer sure looks like "yes." A few are literally standard home cooking ingredients, and nearly all the rest (dextrose, yeast extract, vitamin mixes, etc.) are pretty common in any processed food, which -- let's be honest here -- a lot of us buy pretty regularly. I'm not sure there's anything there that's unique to the Impossible Burger other than the "soy leghemoglobin…

I don't know what on earth you cook at home, but "salt" and maybe "sunflower oil" are about the only things on that long list that sound like a "standard home cooking ingredient".

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#548

Post by radicalbyte »

hannob wrote: post #64
wyre wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I would love to see subsidies ended on animal products, it couldn’t happen overnight without huge backlash. Lowering the subsidies over time and eliminating the power that the animal agriculture industry has over politics would do a lot to increase the number of plant-based eaters.

Depends on how you do it. There are proposals for carbon tax schemes that go like "we'll pay back all the income from the carbon tax to all citizen directly". You can imagine the same for methane. Pretty sure such a proposal would be popular.

Carbon taxes apply to all GHG, including methane. We just use "carbon" as the unit.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#549

Post by PickledJesus »

tomp wrote: post #494
atweiden wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can buy organic, grass-fed, no-GMO, sustainably pasture-raised beef. No, actually you probably can't [1]: > Is there such a thing as a climatically-guilt-free steak? Are grazing livestock climate villains or climate saviours? A new report by an international research collaboration led by the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), part of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, provides an authoritative…

Any food transported to your plate by a car has an environmental cost. As does modern life in general. I believe we will eventually solve the problem (via carbon-capture & sustainable energy production) but I see that mostly orthogonal to eating meat.

There's orders of magnitude of difference: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

>Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#550

Post by GordonS »

Grustaf wrote: post #227
henrikschroder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it pushes away those who are on the cusp of moving towards plant-base foods. I think you are completely wrong. People eat meat because they like the taste and the texture, but at the same time everyone knows that meat is produced by killing animals, and that it's much less sustainable than vegetarian food. If you want to get people to switch to meat alternatives, you have to keep everything that's great abo…

Well you could also just promote delicious vegetarian dishes. There are entire cultures that mostly eat vegetarian. Fake meat is such a silly concept.

I've spent a fair bit of time in India, mostly with work, over the past 15 years or so.

Despite being a meat eater at home, any time I'm in India, I don't eat meat - none at all, for up to 4 weeks at a time. And I don't miss it one bit! Fact is that India veg food is much more common, but also IMO much more tasty.

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