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

nytimes.com

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

#481

Post by mathieuh »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #446
ajmurmann wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'd be surprised. I don't know how to solve that though short of starving myself to death.

Not to say this is your moral prerogative but it's pretty simple: Eat only hand-picked fruit. It's by far the least death-causing food out there and it's offered to you by the tree to eat. I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.

If you did that you would become extremely unhealthy. Veganism has the caveat "as far as is practicable", and a fruitarian diet is not practicable for extended periods of time as you will become malnourished.

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

#482

Post by dustedcodes »

I married a Vegetarian and I converted to a mostly Vegetarian diet myself and I have made a very real realisation over the last 10 years:

The one group that really hates Vegans more than meat eaters are Vegetarians. Veganism is making being Vegetarian increasingly harder. It's so hard to find a Vegetarian pizza nowadays with real cheese. It's either meaty or fully Vegan. Same for burgers. Vegetarians don't want to eat a shitty meat like patty. They want a Vegetarian burger, made of a bean patty, mushroom or some other vegetables which is not some form of dystopian processed food. Unfortunately Veganism has pushed all real Vegetarian burgers off the menus and repalced them with Beyond meat.

Look, I don't mind Beyond meat, I tried it and thought it was nice, but currently it costs as much as a real prime cut of beef which doesn't make sense to me and doesn't taste nearly as good. Our (Vegetarian) household actively refuses overpriced Vegan food because it starves menus of good creative Veggie options and therefore is a net harm at the moment.

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

#483

Post by mike_d »

mattmanser wrote: post #407
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.

Err, vegetables require less land per calorie than meat for consumption does. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets So your comment makes no sense at all.

Which would be very compelling if your body only needed calories to survive. Meat is the most efficient way to deliver proteins and essential amino acids. You should also dig into the concept of bioavailability.

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

#484

Post by Normal_gaussian »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #468
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 i…

Ive been a vegetarian for nine years. I very quickly learned that you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the type of vegetation dishes it has. 'meat substitution' is lazy and generally means a poor chef.

As a note - many traditional curries are vegetarian, which isn't surprising as India has a long history of vegetarianism. Paneer curries have been around for at least a few hundred years with reasonable evidence for a few thousand. Whilst it may be a substitute for meat in a westernised 'x tikka masala', and half decent Indian restaurant should have some established dishes designed around the paneer.

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

#485

Post by drewm1980 »

novok wrote: post #385
henrikschroder wrote: post #267

Earlier 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.

Impossible burgers take an order of magnitude less land to produce than beef. They're not made of vegetables. Beef fat clogs your arteries and causes heart disease. Putting soy in a veggie burger results in way more nutrition than putting soy in a cow.

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

#486

Post by mathieuh »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #220
mathieuh wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and I think it’s the soya protein. I don’t have any problems with pea protein, but the soya protein makes me feel queasy. I think those meat replacements are good for people who have just become vegan as they give you a sense of familiarity, but after a while you realise that it’s possible to eat a delicious vegan diet that doesn’t consist of mega-processed things trying to be meat.

Would that be the same thing I’d find in tofu? Because tofu doesn’t upset my stomach at all.

To be honest I don't know too much about it, but as I understand it tofu is the curd made from soya milk, and soya protein is some form of the processed whole bean. My thinking that it's soya protein is just from the fact that I've tried a few different brands' soya fake burgers and they all give me the same discomfort.

I don't have any ill effects from tofu either.

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

#487

Post by mathieuh »

drewm1980 wrote: post #472
musiciangames wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the naming/labeling thing is tricky. We have a friend who brings round 'vegan cheese' when she visits; living in the EU, I'm surprised this labeling is allowed. Is it OK to label vegetarian things as 'beef'? On the other hand, 'beef substitute' doesn't sound terribly appetising. But we are all familiar with 'peanut butter'; I'm sure someone more knowledgeable can explain what is and is not allowed.

I live in the EU. The thing that makes cheese cheese is arguably the mix of fungi and bacteria growing in it. We have some excellent cheeses here that are traditional except for the substitution of nut milk for mammal milk. They are currently specialty items, but that may change. We may have to give up meat and dairy to get through the energy transition, but fortunately the same mold and bacteria responsible for blue…

Could you recommend any blue vegan cheeses?

I'm in the UK so I might have trouble getting them, most of the vegan cheese I have access to is basically the same flavour just in different shapes and forms.

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

#488

Post by Dylan16807 »

oifjsidjf wrote: post #365
tptacek wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.

Quoted post unavailable.

Unless you're on a paleo diet, heating to cook is considered minimally processed. So that's more evidence that looking for "processing" isn't a good metric.

Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.

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

#489

Post by pyrale »

rlt wrote: post #464
Cannabat wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's kind of bad either way tbh. Imagine going to the funeral for someone else's mother and saying something to the tune of "The old hag was going to die anyway, so don't be sad".

Telling people that their principles or feelings are wrong is rarely a great way to convince people, it just makes you look obnoxious in debates.

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

#490

Post by Normal_gaussian »

petepete wrote: post #459
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.…

In the UK that's rarely the case. The veg options are usually the same price as the meat. In some places. At Gourmet Burger Kitchen the Beyond Meat cheeseburger costs 30% more than its beef counterpart. https://gbk.co.uk/menu Clearly just one example but it's rare the veg option's cheaper.

The point being made was that these fake meat patties are more expensive, whereas the old vegetarian options were cheaper or bottom priced.

I've been a vegetarian for nine years. It becomes noticeable when your meal jumps 50% in price and goes from being the cheapest in a group to the most expensive.

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