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Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

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Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#71

Post by danans »

ben_w wrote: post #11

Just before the pandemic, I was thinking about how cheese was made from milk and how soy milk could (with the right extras) be a pretty decent milk substitute, and wondered if you could make a cheese alternative by applying the milk-to-cheese process to soy milk. Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”. The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard…

Rügenwalder Mühle makes vegetarian/vegan cheeses in Germany that are quite good when eaten cold, but probably don't melt well.

I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.

https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#72

Post by eatbitseveryday »

derbOac wrote: post #55
jjcon wrote: post #2

> Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It? I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing. Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility. Mayb…

So my wife and I are vegetarian and I love certain vegan cheese, the naturally cultured ones where you essentially have a plant product that is cultured with cheese bacteria. My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products. I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan chee…

> stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses

Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?

"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.

If you want

> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?

we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.

If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.

Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.

edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#74

Post by jandrese »

La1n wrote: post #13
endisneigh wrote: post #6

Leaving aside for a moment the morality of eating meat and dairy - is there actually any (health) benefit to the heavily (and I mean heavily ) processed dairy alternatives compared to just eating regular cheese?

Not all vegan cheeses are heavily processed, the cashew based type mentioned in the article tends to be not processed more than a normal cheese would be.

It should be noted that cheese is almost all process. It's just what it is. Unprocessed cheese is just milk.

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#75

Post by throwaway5752 »

woofcat wrote: post #62
derbOac wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my wife and I are vegetarian and I love certain vegan cheese, the naturally cultured ones where you essentially have a plant product that is cultured with cheese bacteria. My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products. I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan chee…

>Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself? It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.

We can also wait (not so long, either) for increasingly severe heat waves and droughts to harm the viability of the dairy industry in the US. That way scarcity and cost will take care of the job in a less gentle way, but there were be a lot of other incidental problems to cope with.

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#76

Post by novok »

One thing I really don't like about a lot of these meat / dairy alternatives is how they use cheap PUFA oils with their bad health effects vs something better like coconut or avocado oil. I would also put butter / ghee / tallow to the list, but then it's not vegan.

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#77

Post by ianai »

derbOac wrote: post #55
jjcon wrote: post #2

> Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It? I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing. Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility. Mayb…

So my wife and I are vegetarian and I love certain vegan cheese, the naturally cultured ones where you essentially have a plant product that is cultured with cheese bacteria. My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products. I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan chee…

Agreed. I explained benevolent bacon to someone as “you’re not going to think ‘wow it’s like I just ate bacon’ but you might think ‘ok I don’t need to eat bacon when I’ve had that’.” For me, anyway, certain key flavors and textures are there, but it’s still a new experience itself.

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#79

Post by Pfhreak »

werdnapk wrote: post #41

There has been countless times when I've reached for some cheese on the shelf and then finally noticed the words "cheese product" on the packaging and realize that I didn't actually grab what I intended to... so I put it back and look for one with the correct labeling. So perhaps deceptive marketing/packaging is how it's gaining in sales?

I strongly doubt that. If the product was inferior, you'd maybe see one purchase from someone accidentally buying it, but it wouldn't be sustained.

People want this stuff. We've transitioned our house to vegan milks because, quite frankly, we like them better and they don't have the same awful externalities that milk production has.

We still use some butter and cheese, and some vegan butter/cheese. There are definitely recipes where it doesn't matter which cheese/butter you use, and some where it does.

Re: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves

#80

Post by hannob »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #17

There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle, resulting in the development of more and more advanced food processing technologies designed to synthesize the experience of foods being excluded from the diet. Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more pro…

I don't think "natural" is not a very good metric or goal to begin with.

Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".

Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.

It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.

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