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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

#161
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> murder Please show me the law.

They’re clearly using the word in the moral sense rather than the legal sense.

So in the wrong sense?

This squeamishness is a product of the infantilization western culture seems to be going through recently. Hopefully immigration from 2/3-world countries (e.g. me) helps fix it.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself? Exactly. Maybe the main problem is that it's hard to market 'Soylent Yellow'. If I were to become a vegetarian, I think I'd just buy a bunch of Indian cookbooks and stay away from IncrediblyMeatyPlantBasedBurger(tm).

Or ultra-processed junk food in general. Being a vegetarian is a good "excuse" (or side effect if you prefer) to avoid that kind of food but all those surrogates are basically following the trails of junk food. I understand their "gateway drug" behavior but still...

I agree, and that is an odd thing.

Our local way-overpriced health grocery story, which is always packed with people, is completely stuffed with health potato chips and health dessert items and health pre-made stuff with long ingredient lists.

Maybe it's just the beauty of a free market, you can always make money on social behavior.

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

#163
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.

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.

I bet it would just cause a change in production conditions which would be poor for the animals. It would be far better to find sustainable ways to use the livestock to sequester carbon (c.f. Allan Savory TED talk) and limit their environmental impact instead of giving up good eating.

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

#164
I am not a vegan but I do eat vegan meals from time to time ...

I would prefer that we develop and maintain true vegan foodstuffs and recipes rather than create vegan versions of animal products.

I am interested in eating an interesting new dish that was designed to showcase vegan ingredients. I have no interest in eating fake cheese pizzas and fake hamburgers.

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

#165
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which brands have you tried? There's a wild diversity, and I suspect even with dairy cheeses you could try many kinds and think it's "missing" something (compared to another type of cheese, or even the same cheese from a different producer) For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" somet…

>For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan. Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us…

>Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference.

Or maybe it's more like beer, most don't like it the first time but after a while you can start appreciating it?

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

#166
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…

The main exception I would grant to this is when you have ingredients in a recipe that you need to figure out vegan substitutions for. In this case you do want something marketed as the vegan version of it.

Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.

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

#167
post #164

I am not a vegan but I do eat vegan meals from time to time ... I would prefer that we develop and maintain true vegan foodstuffs and recipes rather than create vegan versions of animal products. I am interested in eating an interesting new dish that was designed to showcase vegan ingredients. I have no interest in eating fake cheese pizzas and fake hamburgers.

Exactly. Fried onion rings will beat fake-mozzarella sticks every single time, simply because that dish was designed and intended to be vegetable-based from the beginning. Want to make classic onion rings full vegan? Substituting vegetable oil for lard is far less drastic than trying to come up with a substitute for cheese. Pizza? There are many pizza recipes that do not involve cheese at all! Try a no-cheese pesto or something.

It makes little sense to me. But I suppose I have relatively few food cravings. If you're trying to avoid dairy and and every week you just need cheese sticks or pizza, then I guess that's the market this is aimed at?

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

#169
post #55
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…

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

The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.

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

#170
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

...conveniently ignoring that beef is 10x as calorically dense as asparagus.
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