Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#461

Post by bowsamic »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I 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.…

The other very annoying trend is to remove the vegetarian option and only have a vegan one. My wife is a vegetarian and obviously the food can be far better if you can have butter, milk, cheese, and eggs, but they often insist on only having either meat options or vegan options

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#462

Post by zingar »

ls15 wrote: post #360
gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I 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.…

Fake meat is a replacement for meat, not for existing vegetarian food. It is a common misconception that vegetarians want food that looks and taste like meat, but is vegetarian or vegan. Most vegetarians already know what to eat. Fake meat is for the carnivores who don't want to go cold turkey and have no idea what to eat otherwise.

And omnivores who occasionally want something that tastes like meat without going backwards. For me, BM patties are spectacular at this.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#463

Post by detritus »

Lammy wrote: post #158
colordrops wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you are being downvoted, but I know exactly what you mean. When I eat Impossible and especially Beyond burgers, my stomach feels slightly off. A bit of indigestion. I don't get this with typical veggie patties.

For me it's the coconut oil / cocoa butter “marbling” that gives me the Olé Olestra problem https://web.archive.org/web/19990203160042/http://www.zug.co...

I can't touch 'vegan cheese' made with coconout oils for this reason - for some reason it leaves me feeling like I have a film of oil down the back of my gullet that I can't shake off for an hour or two afterwards. It's a weird, unlikeable and thoroughly unwanted sensation.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#464

Post by rlt »

Cannabat wrote: post #413
agentgumshoe wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think they were suggesting that. More something along the lines of "you're likely to be killing animals either way, so just accept that nature is cruel and don't feel guilty about it".

There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering:

- Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought

- Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers.

- Only eat meat you have personally killed in the most humane way possible

- Vegetarianism

- Veganism

- Fruitarianism

- Starve to death?

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#465

Post by iforgotpassword »

JoyfulTurkey wrote: post #390
agentgumshoe wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have always wondered just how many accidental casualties occur with harvesting equipment. I guess home garden is the best bet if it’s a concern?

Look up how olives are harvested. There are big machines that go over rhe tree and vacuum off all the olives. Too bad theres a lot of birds living in there that get sucked in and die. Why don't they fly away? The noise must be a fair warning ahead of time! Well, the harvest is at night because of lower temperatures. The birds freeze in shock when the noise and bright lights get turned on and don't move.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#466

Post by OJFord »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I 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.…

Exactly, these things are all analogous to eatint something called 'meat pie' to me - Well ok but what is it?

I make vegetarian burgers sometimes, either something grilled(broiled)/griddled stacked up like halloumi & aubergine, or a patty of shredded jackfruit or something. Why would I want to eat nondescript 'vegetarian patty'?

It's not just burgers, 'vegetarian lasagne' etc. is (aside from not being good appealing marketing) a reliable negative signal for a menu.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#467

Post by parski »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #376
ajmurmann wrote: post #367

Earlier 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.

Apart from the problems with the point you're implying (see the other replies) you raise an important problem with industrial agriculture.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#468

Post by noufalibrahim »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I 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.…

I'm not a vegetarian and I eat meat almost daily.

This resonates though. A lot of restaurants have vegetarian dishes prepared to taste sort of like meat (e.g. paneer tikka instead of chicken tikka etc.). It was telling that the reverse was never there. I never liked the trend but understood it since the vegetarians would like to enjoy the taste of the other food and this was a compromise. This seems to be next step in that evolution but from what I've read, the stuff is highly processed and has a ton of chemicals added for flavour, stability etc. There are several vegetarian dishes that I enjoy for the vegetarian taste and the last thing I want is for them to pushed aside for these highly processed products that try to approximate meat.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#469

Post by fullstackchris »

kohlerm wrote: post #411

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).

Somehow I'm not surprised that I had to come this far down to find a reference to Planted. Nowadays if one doesn't know the meme term involved (in this case plant based meats directly means BeYoNd MeAt), there are no other examples that come to mind.

In fact, however, there are _plenty_ of plant-based companies doing just fine (like Planted). I'm a fan of nearly all of their products and have watched their growth over the past few years, which has been nothing short of incredible.

I wouldn't worry about plant-based "meats", as the tech improves and we bring another 2+ billion onto the planet, they'll find their market share more and more.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#470

Post by papito »

The goal should be to eat HUMANE meat if you want to eat meat but can't for ethical reasons.

When I was a kid, my gram grams in Ukraine treated our animals like family members. That cow and hog dinner cooked for them smelled so good I wanted to plant my face in it myself.

My grandfather even built a sun deck for the pigs. A sun deck.

We wanted them to be HAPPY and PLUMPY, and when it was time to get the household through the winter, the dispatching was done quickly.

Humane meat should be scarce and expensive. The problem is that it's hard to know whom to trust with the claims of humanely raised stock.

Post reply on HN