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Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

bloomberg.com

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Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#221

Post by pclmulqdq »

chimprich wrote: post #181
dubcanada wrote: post #137

I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm. I know it’s a bunch of stuff to make it look like meat, but it’s basically cow meat vs a burger containing 50 random items and chemicals that is worse or equal in nutritional content then cow. Like one impossible vs cow is 14g of fat vs 16g of fat. 370mg of sodium vs 90mg of sodium. They are not even that much better for you. Rather than trying to get…

> I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm. If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb. Proteins, fats, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibiotics (quite likely with factory farming), microorganisms... it's just our labelling laws that mean they get to be lumped together as "meat". They're still chemicals assembled by organic nanotech.…

The chemicals in every plant and animal are a long, complicated list. If, as you suggest, we elaborate them out, "mushroom," "fig," amd even "carrot" get really weird. The point of the ingredients list is to backtrack from the food in front of you to a list of known safe components. Like it or not, "cow" is one of those - humans have been eating cow meat for millions of years.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#222

Post by KaiserPro »

dvh wrote: post #80

[flagged]

Mcdonalds have a vegan burger. its a shittonne better than its veggie burger and pretty much indistinguishable from its cheese burger.

The chicken burger is still superiors though.

However I'm not threatened by food, so if people want to eat it, I'm not going to slighted, I don't have enough energy to project politics into food.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#224

Post by daveoc64 »

Of course, this is in the US.

Impossible doesn't sell its products in Europe (or none of the good ones anyway).

Here we have things like Burger King UK which has a more or less 50/50 plant based/meat split on its major products advertised in store.

Or McDonald's that has a dedicated menu of 100% Vegan options: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/vegan.html

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#225

Post by helen___keller »

cr3ative wrote: post #170
michaelteter wrote: post #149

And we don't need fake meat. It's just something that the food industry can make and sell to us instead of us just eating stuff that grows in the earth. If you want something with a texture similar to meat, many mushrooms will do the job. If you want something reminiscent of ground beef, quinoa with seasoning will suffice. However, limiting yourself to vegetarian approaches of recreating meat dishes, then you are mis…

These products exist _because_ your claims about mushrooms and quinoa being acceptable (and somewhat available) just aren't true. There seems to be this army of people who say "compressed vegetables in a circle" are acceptable burger alternatives; they're really not. This market isn't for existing vegans/vegetarians in most cases, it's for people curious about going that way or cutting down their consumption.

> These products exist _because_ your claims about mushrooms and quinoa being acceptable (and somewhat available) just aren't true.

No, what OP said is exactly correct, but the vast majority of people never get exposure to what good vegetarian food is or how to cook it, so they wouldn’t know.

I’ve alternated between vegetarian and omnivore for years, for various reasons (current omnivore but limiting some meats due to cholesterol). I’ve gone through the veggie phase where I think vegetarianism is about black bean burgers and various packaged soy things.

It’s unfulfilling from a food perspective, much in the same way that having a diet of fast food and packaged crap is an unfulfilling omnivore diet. If you eat it every day your body starts to enjoy it and crave it, but it’s not good.

True food enlightenment is not restricted to veggie/meat, it’s expanding your horizons and discovering new tastes and textures and appreciating the cultures and techniques that produced them. This cuts a lot deeper than at face value whether a mushroom can imitate a steak, because that should never have been the goal.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#226

Post by KaiserPro »

tomp wrote: post #126
planb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If artificial meat would taste like the real thing and cost less, everyone would want to eat it: Meat eaters and poor people because it costs less, vegans because it tastes good and does not harm anyone and rich people because they feel good when saving the earth.

Given the choice between non-processed food (meat) and ultra—high-processed food (fake meat), the former is the much healthier option.

> non-processed food (meat) and ultra—high-processed food (fake meat), the former is the much healthier option.

I mean sure if you are comparing a chop from grass fed sheep from somewhere like wales (or good quality horse meat) to something like a vegan burger, then yeah.

but comparing a mystery meat burger to fake meat, no.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#228

Post by KaiserPro »

Lio wrote: post #191
dvh wrote: post #80

[flagged]

Well much like a suspiciously cheap sausage, this opinion is clearly a load of old bollocks. We often choose to eat meat substitutes. We like the texture and the taste. Since the supermarkets in the UK are full of meat substitutes from the likes of Quorn, What The Cluck, etc. and have been for years, we can't be the only family of omnivores to enjoy it. Meat alternatives don't have to 100% replicate meat to be enjoya…

> this opinion is clearly a load of old bollocks.

aye, so I really like the fake kebab meat that's full of spice. I like it because unlike real kebab meat, its not going to give me TB, Scrapie or monstershits.

slap it in a microwave, dump it in a pita bread, add hot sauce, done. 4 mins tops.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#229

Post by rob74 »

lampe3 wrote: post #161

Can we add an "in the US" at the end? Since for EU countries this is not true. I'm living in sweden now and lived in germany and poland. Plant-based meat products are growing in numbers and the price of meat is going so high that its cheaper to buy the plant-based one. In Germany one producer of meat sausages want to turn 100% plant based[1]. I will not go into the whats better and not for you. Since this highly depe…

I'm from Germany, and I can confirm that the number of vegan alternatives to any imaginable animal product have increased sharply both in quantity and quality over the last years, to the point that you can get good vegan alternatives at discount supermarkets now.

Even in the US, I wonder if what Bloomberg is calling a "flop" is a real flop or just some companies falling short of their over-ambitious forecasts (or the even more ambitious goals of their investors/stockholders)? But I'm not really qualified to talk about the situation in US supermarkets...

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#230

Post by taylorius »

lampe3 wrote: post #161

Can we add an "in the US" at the end? Since for EU countries this is not true. I'm living in sweden now and lived in germany and poland. Plant-based meat products are growing in numbers and the price of meat is going so high that its cheaper to buy the plant-based one. In Germany one producer of meat sausages want to turn 100% plant based[1]. I will not go into the whats better and not for you. Since this highly depe…

It's a bit of a flop in the UK too tbh. It's been pushed fairly hard, but not that much uptake.
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