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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

#241
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…

>Why do we

Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.

As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.

They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.

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

#242

Heavily-subsidized dairy takes up multiple grocery store aisles: crickets Vegan cheese simply appears: "we've been INFILTRATED"

Exactly. On the topic of grocery store real estate. It blows my mind how much space meat products take up. Huge shelves of beef, pork, chicken in all forms and stages of processing. It's crazy to me the degree of reliance and attachment to animal products we've been coerced into.

Aren't humans omnivores? I don't think we've been coerced into animal consumption so much as that is the default state (if available).

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

#243
post #208
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with this. I'm not a vegetarian, but if I were, I'd wouldn't eat imitation animal products anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer. I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.) Imitation products that I've tried have always just lef…

I hear this sort of thing a lot but don't quite understand it. I've been a vegetarian for eight years, but I eat meat substitute products. I have ethical issues with eating meat and I feel considerably better physically when I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean that meat doesn't taste good. I'm quite happy to be able to pop some Quorn mycoprotein into a casserole and eat comfort foods of my childhood without havin…

It comes down to personal preference. I'm with the GP comment for the exact reasons: I don't like vegan/vegetarian products that imitate animal products because they never actually hit the mark.

This attitude isn't limited to animal products either, almost every ersatz product is worse than what it is trying to imitate. People generally don't like chicory & roasted rye in place of coffee, or teas made from roasted barley & catnip. Some people do, but it's not the norm.

However, if you make a product which is intended to stand on its own, rather than imitate something else, then you can often create something pretty good. Think Nutella, which was designed to stretch cocoa, not replace it.

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

#244

A lot of the time I feel like health food is really just a way for manufacturers to cheap out and then sell something at a premium. Margarine is vegan, but it was always just marketed as "cheap". Discerning or well-to-do consumers would just pass it up. Now, people will put up with things that are very cheap to make, taste horrible, and are very expensive to buy. That creates a problem: the food is becoming about the…

> A lot of the time I feel like health food is really just a way for manufacturers to cheap out and then sell something at a premium. Probably, but vegan cheese isn't marketed as health food. > Margarine is vegan I wish.

> Margarine is vegan

Some of it is, it's just not safe to assume it always is unless you check the ingredients.

But that's the case for a lot of foods that fall into the sometimes-but-not-always-vegan category.

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

#245

Mmmmmm, more processed food options, joy!

OG cheese is obviously a processed product. I have never seen a cheese cow but perhaps that just me

All you need is a backhoe and a rocket ship that can carry a backhoe.

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

#246

A lot of the time I feel like health food is really just a way for manufacturers to cheap out and then sell something at a premium. Margarine is vegan, but it was always just marketed as "cheap". Discerning or well-to-do consumers would just pass it up. Now, people will put up with things that are very cheap to make, taste horrible, and are very expensive to buy. That creates a problem: the food is becoming about the…

> A lot of the time I feel like health food is really just a way for manufacturers to cheap out and then sell something at a premium. Probably, but vegan cheese isn't marketed as health food. > Margarine is vegan I wish.

> > Margarine is vegan > >I wish.

While not all margarine is vegan quite a lot of them are. Though you have to look out and read the packaging to make sure you don't missgrab.

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

#247
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…

I am not vegan, but lactose intolerant. Vegan cheese has changed my life. Mind you that I was not lactose intolerant till about 18yrs. So I have certainly tried most versions of dairy cheese. I love them both. Sometimes Vegan cheese' flavor and texture is suited and in other cases I would have preferred regular cheese. The fail case happens for me when I try to compare these new vegan X with original X at every single detail instead of judging each of them on their own merit.

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

#250

Pro tip when it comes to pasta / pizza. Forget about vegan cheeses on pizza/pasta. They taste crap. What tastes really good is ground nuts. I sprinkle a mixture of ground pine nuts, cashew nuts, and tiny bit of pecan, (-/+ possibly some macademia nuts) and it tastes great. When ground properly in the right proportions, this mixture also has that nice fluffy, "cheesy" feel to it (i.e. it's not rough to the touch, it's…

There are some cashew-based queso dips that are pretty darn tasty. Although, it's a bit easier for vegan to compete in that context since "real" queso dips are the whey stuff not cheese, per se.

Edit: to be clear, I'm commenting as a tangent to the ground nut suggestion. I'm not suggesting anyone put queso on pizza, unless that sounds good to you :)

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