Maybe chicken meat is just easier to replicate with plants?
I was really surprised about how good https://www.eatplanted.com/ is (I am not a vegan).
Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.
Quoted post unavailable.
Not just heating, even simple cutting/mincing of the food promotes oxidation that can significantly influence the composition of food.
On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
To each their own. I greatly enjoy the flavor of meat, but feel like a serial killer when I think about the animal suffering and to a lesser extend carbon emissions. While I also get a slightly odd feeling in my stomach from Impossible beef (doesn't happen with their cyber chicken), it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger without feeling like I just tortured a puppy.
You'd be surprised how many animals die in the process of scaled agriculture and displacement that occurs to create these replacement goods. But they're not the big fluffy animals we anthropomorphise, so it's easy to accept.
It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed.
Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other creatures than non-animal agriculture simply due to the additional land requirements. It is far easier to accept the less harmful industry.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#414I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…
> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
Actually, as far as I recall, a counter argument to this, is that fresh vegetables are more expensive since their shelf lives are a lot shorter. I can buy most types of meats (chicken, beef, etc.), freeze them for weeks and the taste would still be great, while fresh vegetables will normally only last for a few days.
Of course you can go for frozen vegetables, but this is only limited to some vegetables, and in my opinion, don't taste as good as fresh vegetables.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#415Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. You are not the target group for these products! The whole point of these products is to replace meat for habitual meat eaters. If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper , we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption. That's t…
The thing is, this stuff is more expensive than normal meat, and if you go by bio availability of the nutrients, a fraction of the same nutritional value as actual meat. And if they replace meat consumption then it puts even more stress on the agricultural land that can actually grow vegetable crops, which is only about a quarter of all farm land. So either way, it wont work that well in it's current state.
> The thing is, this stuff is more expensive than normal meat
That's only because we are "subsidising" meat production cost through immense animal suffering. Once you have regulations that make the animals we keep in captivity have a somewhat good life, then meat price goes through the roof and those alternatives are the only reasonable option for the non-rich.
> And if they replace meat consumption then it puts even more stress on the agricultural land that can actually grow vegetable crops, which is only about a quarter of all farm land.
And where do you think the animal food is grown? Instead of feeding it to animals, make veggy dishes out of it.
It's true that some land can't be reasonably used for growing and harvesting crops, and keeping animals there which turn this into high quality protein is the best option, but that's only for certain regions on the planet.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health. Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad. Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vi…
> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#418I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…
This.
I've been asking myself ever since this beyond/incredible/whatever fad got started: Why spend all the time and energy trying to make something taste like beef that isn't beef? Why not spend that same time and energy creating a new, appealing of its own (and then market that)?
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. You are not the target group for these products! The whole point of these products is to replace meat for habitual meat eaters. If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper , we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption. That's t…
Cheaper doesn't seem feasible, at least not without essentially duplicating the meat production process (maybe lab grown meat will get us there someday). Human grade food is more expensive, often considerably so. Animals essentially get the leftovers that we can't eat so they are afforded a huge price advantage and it is not clear how that is to be overcome sustainably. Circumstances – widespread disease, for example…
You are missing the core technology point that drives the underlying thesis here - ‘every manufactured good, gets cheaper per unit as you make more and more of it’.
Whether this is from the lab, a recipe of plant inputs, or some other currently unknown thing - if you are able to develop and commercialize a product around a ‘specific technology’, you can drive the cost of that down through experience and scale.
Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).
By taking a technology with a much higher theoretical efficiency, and then scaling that up - creates the classic technology disruption scenario. ->‘It’s the cheaper version of X commodity, why wouldn’t I choose that?’
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#420Humans have consumed animal meat for several million years. Now we need to start eating an artificial concoction consisting of: water, pea protein, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, cocoa butter, mung bean protein, methylcellulose, potato starch, apple extract, pomegranate extract, salt, potassium chloride, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, sunflower lecithin, beet juice…
> Palaeolithic diets were diverse and prehistoric cooking complex, involving several steps of food preparation.
> mounting evidence of plant consumption by both early modern humans and Neanderthals, in addition to meat. Wild nuts and grasses were often combined with pulses, such as lentils, and wild mustard.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/23/oldest-cooke...
> Cooking in caves: Palaeolithic carbonised plant food remains from Franchthi and Shanidar
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/co...