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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

#241

Post by sushibowl »

23B1 wrote: post #78
Moldoteck wrote: post #29

Maybe unpopular opinion, but for me, best plant based patties are those that do not try to replicate meat taste. I much prefer patties made from actual plants&vegetables/mushrooms/chickpeas/beans like potato, carrot, some spices and so on. They have like actual 'natural' flavor, almost like something homemade. Those that add a ton of additives often taste awful, even beyond/moving mountains...

You can do up a portobello burger in a thousand different ways and they all taste amazing. I do not understand the fascination with replicating meat for environmental good when nature herself provides plenty of delicious alternatives. Ever had a deep-fried cheese-stuffed portobello? Mama mia...

It's precisely because the alternatives, delicious as they are, do not replicate the experience of eating meat. People like the taste of meat and they want to have it, that's really all it is. If you want to satisfy those people without incurring the environmental and ethical costs associated with raising and killing animals, you have few options besides replicating meat.

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

#242

Post by hef19898 »

tduberne wrote: post #205
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 wanted to say the same thing. Here i Germany the choice of vegan sausage and cold cuts is huge, even in small grocery shops. I know lot of people who eat meat regularly _and_ buy the vegan alternatives on a regular basis.

Which totally puzzles me. Nothing wrong with a vegetarian diet, but would I prefer processed food, vegan or otherwise, over unprocessed one?

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

#243

Post by theshrike79 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #173
hannob wrote: post #146

How strange, we massively subsidize meat production, we don't even consider letting meat producers pay for the externalities they cause, and then plant-based alternatives have a hard time competing. It's a real mystery.

I don't see it purely as a policy problem. Plant-based meats are primarily focused on the US market, and so outside the US these brands can't compete in price either for price-conscious consumers, lacking supply chains that employ cheap domestic labor.

Finland has a (relatively) huge industry making meat substitutes from barley, fava beans etc. Stuff that we produce locally.

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

#244

Post by nottorp »

[Whine]

Is it? I mean every time I check out a so called vegetarian restaurant I get ... plant hamburgers. And I'm in Eastern Europe, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of traditional recipes that don't contain any meat.

The real vegetarian food seems to be dead, unless you cook it at home.

[End Whine]

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

#245

Post by sph »

bantunes wrote: post #212
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 Cow meat has a long list of ingredients that aren't disclosed either: antibiotics, growth hormones, etc. > They are not even that much better for you. I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're a…

> I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

Wait until the big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle & co. enter the party, and see major lobbying to promote this ultra-processed food as healthy because #PlantBased, like they've done for decades with their other products.

The marketing for this stuff has already been extreme in the United Kingdom in the past couple years, with the real deal seen as vile and immoral, after being labelled as unhealthy since the 60s due to shoddy dietary science. After all, there is not much money or processed products you can make off real meat. With plant-based fake meat, the potential profits are unimaginable.

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

#246

Post by cameronh90 »

xdennis wrote: post #127
j-pb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And vegan alternatives are not? Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history and still is in most parts of the world. Given the environmental impact of Meat and Diary in terms of CO2, Methane, Water usage, and Deforestation we should heavily reconsider our nonchalant view of them as a cheap commodity.

> Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history And nobody want's to return to those dark ages. This devil's alliance between veganism and environmentalism is what put me off environmentalism. Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.

Eating meat is essential but airplanes and AC aren't?

There are parts of the world that are uninhabitable without AC, and I know tons of people who don't eat meat, but virtually everybody in developed countries flies. My partner's family lives at the other side of the planet so banning airplanes means she would never get to see her sisters again.

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

#247

Post by MereInterest »

avhception wrote: post #114
dachryn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond burger or what was the one that was hyped 3 years ago was really good in my opinion. Especially on a burger with some sauce and other taste things. The only thing you really shouldn't do is mix real meat and fake meat. A natural thing to do is order two burgers, and compare them. Whatever you eat first will taste fine, whatever you eat second is extremely gross.

It never occurred to me to mix real and fake meat. Now I'm curious. Maybe I'll have to try a 50/50 ground beef mix, just out of curiosity, haha. My comparison method so far was the Whopper.

I did get a rather funny look one time when I ordered an Impossible Burger, with bacon on top. I wanted to try it out, and to see whether it could replace some of my meat consumption. However, this didn’t fit into the usual categories of “vegetarian” or “non-vegetarian”.

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

#248

Post by myspy »

rob74 wrote: post #229
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…

Aldi has a great chicken replacement and the meatballs packaged with a pack of ketchup are excellent. I would wish for them to be available in a larger version without the ketchup.

Another problem I have with all of this is the plastic packaging for everything. Getting something like that at a veggie butcher would be cool.

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

#249

Post by cameronh90 »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #128
scantis wrote: post #7

If any of the planet saving meat substitute promises are true, such a fake meat patty would cost a tenth of the beef equivalent and it would dominate the market. I read somewhere you would need 25 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef, ergo one could potentially produce 25 times the amount of substitute. Obviously that isn't true and such a patty is a specialized product of various highly processed plant matter. It is a…

Fake meat isn't just inferior to real meat. It's inferior to just plain old vegetables. It's a crazy product designed for a society with weird eating habits. They're not trying to cook the best vegetable dishes. They're not trying to cook dishes that use less meat. They're not trying to expand your palettes and reintroducing liver, sweetbreads or other weird cuts. All these "green" products convince you to not do the…

I'm vegetarian and I love the fake meat products.

I like vegetables too, obviously, but sometimes I just want a burger.

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

#250

Post by prepend »

hutzlibu wrote: post #207
sirsinsalot wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy that the people who don't eat meat can't see the properties of meat that meat eaters like and look for. Why on earth would anyone listen to a vegetarian about what makes a good meat alternative. If a steak chef says an alternative to steak is X, I'll listen.

Most vegetarians were not born vegetarians, though. Some did recently eat meat so can compare. In my opinion, I don't think anything vegetarian will come close to a steak anytime soon, but I have eaten chili sin carne, without noticing it being vegetarian. My main problem is also simply, that I have not learned yet, to cook without meat very good. It takes effort, but is worth it.

> Most vegetarians were not born vegetarians, though.

I’m not sure about that. Internationally, this definitely isn’t true as most Hindu were born Hindu and vegetarian.

And in the US, I’d say that about 1/3 of non-Hindu/ cultural vegetarians friends and acquaintances were born into families that are vegetarian.

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