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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

#601

Post by pea »

dathinab wrote: post #304

One thing I'm seeing all the time is people approaching vegetarian food by removing the meat and adding something else instead. IMHO this is the wrong approach and hardly ever works well or relies on luxury products like beyond meat(1). The best vegetarian food I had eaten was such which was designed as vegetarian food, not as a dish with meat and then modified to somehow work. Pretty much the only times I ended up w…

I was wondering this the other day when eating a saag paneer curry instead of my normal meat-based order: why would anyone go through the motions to have fake chicken when you have multitudes of vegetarian options which can be treated similarly to how we treat meat in cooking. Paneer is not 'trying to be chicken', but it can be put in a curry or fried, so can serve a similar purpose -- but is distinctly delicious in its own right!

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

#602

Post by red_trumpet »

a4a4a4a4 wrote: post #569
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #278

If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I have at least 8 vegan dishes I can make that are just amazingly delicious . A mushroom risotto, veggie tajine, chana masala, ramen, moussaka, general tso's cauliflour, cuban b…

> The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I disagree with the last part on a philosophical level. Society should push forward, and that doesn't mean we need to take convenient things and make them less convenient, so that alternatives seem more attractive in comparison. We need to make the alternatives better in-and-of them…

Philosophically I agree that this would be pretty nice.

Realistically though I don't see how to make bike travel safer and more convenient in an already packed city, without taking away road space from cars. Same for bus lanes.

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

#603

Post by saagarjha »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #484
noufalibrahim wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, most will have saag paneer or muttar paneer.

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

#604

Post by drakonka »

I really like Beyond Meat, though it's not as good as some of the other meat replacement options I can find at the grocery stores around here. I also think of all of these meat replacement options as junk food and not replacement for actual whole vegetables.

There's a fast food chain called "Max" that has veggie patties. When I tasted their burger for the first time I thought they might have messed up my order and given me real meat, the taste and texture seemed so realistic. But I hadn't eaten real red meat in around 20 years, and didn't trust my own taste, so I got my meat-eating boyfriend to try it. He was also confused and suspicious, so he went to the cashier to confirm that this was definitely not meat. I was pretty blown away!

One thing I thought was cool was, a few years ago, seeing a plant-based patty + bacon burger. At that time these replacements were only really marketed for people not wanting to eat meat at all, so at first I was confused about whether the bacon is vegetarian, too. But no - the bacon was real. After the initial double take I realized how cool it is, and how these kinds of partial-options can help normalize eating _less_ meat even if you still want real bacon (for example).

For the long term though, I'm hopeful for lab-grown meat becoming a more common and accessible option.

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

#606

Post by thinkmcfly »

I never understood why their patties are so thick. That's a thing you do with high quality meat. They should have aimed for the masses instead of gourmet. If people are skeptical of a new food why would you use a form factor that is only used with trusted meats?

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

#607

Post by thom »

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.…

As a vegetarian since childhood in the 80s it’s incredibly sad to have seen all the progress made in both shops and restaurants thrown away. Even before meat alternatives, menus were getting blander with a focus on dairy-free options (to be clear, vegan food can and should be extremely tasty, decadent even, but it’s also the dumping ground for healthy options in most menus). That the main options are now explicitly meat flavoured is adding insult to injury.

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

#608

Post by ls15 »

antihero wrote: post #536
ls15 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but the comment was pointing out that in restaurants they are replacing the latter not the former.

From that comment:

> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus.

Which to me shows that restaurants/BM assume that fake meat is what vegetarians want.

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

#609

Post by nottorp »

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 thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.

I'm not a vegan nor a vegetarian. I just sometimes think I eat too much meat and check out vegetarian restaurants. They all have 100 kinds of fake burgers and little else.

There are thousands of good food recipes without meat. Why are you trying to sell me burgers?

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

#610

Post by headsoup »

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…

No, I'm suggesting it is not a good/bad dichotomy and people should make sure large decisions are not made on what they think are simple moral choices.

I mean if you determine that animals dying for your diet is no good, then make sure you consider the people that might be dying to bring you the goods you haven't checked the source of, or for the stadium you enjoy watching events at, etc.

Quit meat if you feel you need to, but don't pretend it makes you a morally better person because 'animal murder,' it's not that simple.

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