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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

#121

Post by xdennis »

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.

Your objective is terrible. The ability to eat as much animal products as you desire is synonymous with living in a first world country. A future where we can no longer do that is backwards.

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

#122

Post by eropple »

novok wrote: post #111
Pfhreak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, so do garbage fast food burgers, so maybe that's the bar they are comparing against?

My personal example was a $15 restaurant where I tried out the impossible burger. Maybe it wasn't an actual 'impossible' burger or some early version.

Maybe give it another try, at least in some contexts. These days it's gotten into fast food, and IMO? I can tell the difference between an Impossible Whopper and a regular one, but both are about as good to me. I wouldn't miss it if the regular one went away.

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

#123

Post by margalabargala »

_wldu wrote: post #112

Prehistoric humans made cheese (and beer). This helped society to grow. To call these things 'processed' when they have been made by humans using simple things (and have been for ages) is disingenuous at best and ideologically driven at worst.

The article does not call cheese (or beer) processed. That adjective is applied exclusively to the vegan cheese substitutes.

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

#124

Post by delecti »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #72
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…

> 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…

I broadly agree, certainly so with all the vegan cheese approximations I've tried, but I don't think it applies to cakes. The cake recipe I grew up eating (in a non-vegetarian, lower middle class, US household) was "accidentally vegan". It absolutely passes the test of "if you didn't know you wouldn't know". Incidentally I think impossible burgers pass that test too, and beyond burgers only barely don't.

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

#125

Post by dagw »

novok wrote: post #64
king_magic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they are all atrocious at this stage. Orders of magnitude worse than Beyond Beef* / Impossible* (as compared to actual meat). *just to be clear, I actually love both Beyond & Impossible's products. Extremely close to real meat IMO.

I really don't get how people think impossible burger tastes like meat. It has the texture of a lentil patty with blood flavoring added.

It depends what you are comparing it against. I've had the Burger King meatless Whopper and found it was no worse than the normal Whopper. If you didn't tell me and I wasn't paying attention might not even notice. But eaten 'naked' side by side with a real high quality meat patty, there is no way you can confuse one for the other.

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

#126

Post by maccard »

ipaddr wrote: post #96
mssundaram wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of this laziness. I don't care about vegan cheese - I am vegan because it's better for me, the planet, and animals. Boohoo if I can't find some cheese that tastes exactly like cultured milk from a suffering animal.

Be careful thinking just going vegan is better for the planet. "The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...

From your link, asparagus "the largest environmental footprint of any of the 56 vegetables they looked at, including its land use and water use", with 5.3kg of CO2 per kg of Asparagus. According to [0], "The average footprint of beef, excluding methane, is 36 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram" - so even the worst vegetable imported from the farthest part of the world is 10x better per kg than beef.

Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

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

#127

Post by ccmonnett »

xdennis wrote: post #121
woofcat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Your objective is terrible. The ability to eat as much animal products as you desire is synonymous with living in a first world country. A future where we can no longer do that is backwards.

Your ability to eat as much food as you desire is synonymous with living in a first world country.

The ability murder as many animals as you want is not the desired state I look for when thinking about the world in which my child to grow up. A future in which that is synonymous with status is backwards - to me.

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

#128

Post by phonypc »

ArchOversight wrote: post #97
novok wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get how people think impossible burger tastes like meat. It has the texture of a lentil patty with blood flavoring added.

In a blind taste test put on for friends people thought the Impossible was actually the real deal and the beef burger was the fake "meat" product. Both burgers were made with the same spices and were grilled on a charcoal grill. People are happier to replace their hamburger meat with Impossible instead. Beyond Meat has slightly different flavor that people were able to pick out as "fake meat".

What were you using for the "real deal" though? If it was a frozen patty that included textured vegetable protein and other things alongside beef, as so many do, I can understand. I can't understand mixing up an Impossible burger with a decently cooked 100% beef patty.

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

#129

Post by jfengel »

dheera wrote: post #53
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…

Non-vegan vegetarian here and I agree. The flip side of it is, the dairy cheeses next to the vegan cheeses don't pass my taste test either. What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices? I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices. Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogur…

Do they not make plain vegan yogurt?

That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.

I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.

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

#130

Post by mumblemumble »

jethro_tell wrote: post #94
da_big_ghey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am not liking the way many of this is packaged. any other product and hackernews would be angry for the "deceptive packaging", but because the hackernews like this product, they are give it a freepass.

have yet to read a comment that likes it :shrug:

I'll chime in as liking it. Or at least, I like the ones that are made from fermented nuts. So, brands like Miyoko's and Treeline. I even make my own fake cheese in that genre at home sometimes.

Others, like Daiya, I won't object to if someone else wants to put it on whatever we're cooking. I'm pretty lactose intolerant, so I can't speak to how it compares to dairy cheese; my personal take from the few times where I'll pop a Lactaid in order to participate in a pizza party is that, while Daiya fake mozzarella is meh, the stuff it's intended to mimic is even worse. I occasionally wonder if there is something to that casomorphin theory that the article mentions, and people who regularly consume dairy largely like it for approximately the same reason smokers like the taste of tobacco smoke.

And then there are some brands, generally of more of a 1990s vintage, that are legitimately gross. Unfortunately, those seem to be the ones that are most commonly stocked in grocery stores, for Heaven knows what reason.

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