371–380 of 794 posts
While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers: - The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. This is not an argument that fairs well…
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Totally agree on Impossible Burgers. Like the GP, I also try to avoid eating meat due to animal welfare concerns. That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic. With Impossible Burgers, though, it really tastes and feels like I'm eating a real b…
> That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic. The same thing happened to me when I first tried going vegan. It wasn’t until I went through a major effort at planning my meals — to the point of making an outright diet plan for myself — that I…
You're right about meal planning. I also think that if you're going to cut out an entire food group you should phase it out. You eat food every single day. You have to find something that works long term for you.
A key thing is that some folks have boring "meat and potatoes" taste, with no interest in moving beyond that. My parents are old-timers living in the Irish countryside. When I was growing up in the early 80s, you couldn't get one-tenth the stuff I now eat a daily basis. I became a vegetarian by first developing a love for cooking (especially Indian). When you have a wide range of tastes, and the supermarkets stock everything you need, it's easy to find alternative to meat. Otherwise, it takes a long time to expand your tastes and learn what to actually do with ingredients. My mother walks around the supermarket at the weekend, and still picks up the same old things she used to get in the 80s. She wouldn't know what to do with 90% of the herbs and spices on my shelf. So asking her to cut out the one tasty part of her daily meal is pointless, not to mention unhealthy (she would have low b12 and iron).
If I were a meat eater planning to go vegetarian I would avoid cold turkey (not a pun). Phase it out. Maybe start with the biggest greenhouse emitters (cow), or the most intelligent (pig). Maybe give up fowl and fish last. Rather than see it as a limitation, start by learning how to cook one new meal every week that is nutritious, tasty and also meat free. Also, if someone else is doing all the hard work (ie: you're in a restaurant or ordering delivery) use that as an opportunity to try different things that don't have meat. Indian food is great for this because it's not just "meat and potatoes without the meat" or their vegetarian food is amazing. But you might need to develop a taste for it.
For some people it might take a year, but if you think about it as expanding your tastes, perhaps it won't feel like a chore, and you won't feel like you've given up anything (especially now that you can fall back on the decent meatless burgers/sausage you can get nowadays).
Most of the ranch land in my area isn't really suitable for other kinds of agriculture so I don't know if that measure means much. It certainly isn't irrigated and I think the cows give back the water they use.
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> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed. I have a small cattle property, we run on hill country with diversified ecosystem, mixed grass and bushland. We have a heap of native animals living across the property. And at the end of the day the steers do get sent of for slaughter after 18 to 24 mont…
I don't get the feel that you're having a go, no worries :) I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the…
we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals
Genuinely curious; is eating something processed like this better than eating regular unprocessed ground meat?
No, and that’s why the fake meat companies are very careful from not mentioning anything about health benefits, and instead stress carbon nonsense and naturalness of ingredients. Impossible is legume flour and coconut oil. Legume flour is rough on the gut, and coconut oil is 90% saturated fat, way more than butter. Beyond is soy and coconut. If you have a moral or other objection to meat, go vegetarian or start eatin…
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> I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right? Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for…
Well... look up things like “cow eating chicken” or “deer eating bird” on YouTube. Not saying it’s common, but “never” is perhaps too strong a word. And of course I really meant it in a larger sense, not the direct ruminant/person relationship.
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The preparation may matter. For example, I don’t put ketchup and mustard on my burgers, which will probably disguise a lot of the processed legume taste. I don’t use strongly flavored sauces. For reasons I don’t understand, some of the most satisfying unintentionally vegetarian food I’ve eaten has been in the agriculture regions of the US, like the Palouse, where legumes are ubiquitous local crops. Popular vegetarian…
> Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than wi…
The thing to understand about legumes is that some of them, with appropriate preparation, can constructively absorb prodigious quantities of salt and fat. For example, you can fry lentils, which are delicious on their own (I think these are eaten in the Middle East), but that can be a prep step for further processing. Many people make cakes or patties, often pan frying them. Addictive as hell and salty, and you can’t eat a lot of it, but it tastes amazing and various forms are sometimes used as a meat alternative e.g. with eggs for breakfast.
The caveat, which I’ve learned the hard way, is that there is quite a bit of non-obvious knowledge on how to process the legumes for these dishes, and it has multiple stages. Texture and consistency control, as well as the interplay of oil and water, is not trivial. Lentils are the most complicated but also the most interesting, but the multiple processing steps are more work than is convenient. I left when I was a kid, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out by trial and error. When I travel back there, local restaurants still serve these kinds of things. I could basically eat this stuff every day and never miss meat. They also make some interesting sauce/gravy type preparations from legumes, which are similar to things I’ve had in Germany (probably adapted, the population there is ethnically German).
They have variants of all these things based on lentils, chickpeas, and dry (split) peas, which are pretty different in practice.
I’ve also done a fair amount of work adapting classic Indian vegetarian food concepts to completely different European food contexts and use cases. These creations have been immensely popular; my prodigiously carnivorous friends request them.
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I really enjoy both BeyondBeef and Impossible Burger. My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture. The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I wo…
As a vegetarian, I really don't get why people are so focused on realistic meat replacement. Like, there are other things to eat. I especially don't get why people want the texture of red meat like beef patties. So you like... soft food? There's no arguing tastes, it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about.
These are all examples to show that when we are given a technology that allows us to access any point in a high-dimensional space of possibilities, humans will explore it starting from what they already know.
There are probably points in food space much better than what we have already, but it's going to take us a while to find them.
While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers: - The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. This is not an argument that fairs well…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right? Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for…
I've been feeling more conflicted about consuming meat lately, but it's blanket assertions like this that trigger my inner libertarian hard, and I come out swinging. There is considerable evidence suggesting meat consumption contributed significantly to our cerebral expansion ( https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477?mob... ). Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can…