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Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

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Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#261

Post by schitzapplebits »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #260
schitzapplebits wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes down to logistics. Maybe I'm a smaller restaurant, and I want to serve BBQ or fresh bread. Might not be feasible for them to smoke a brisket every day if they're not a brisket place, but you can definitely freeze some brisket and bring it back to life in pretty good quality. It doesn't improve it, but it lets a restaurant serve something that they otherwise couldn't. Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they wan…

Yes, these are examples of people maximizing for a variable other than quality. The linked study indicates that the freeze-thaw cycle has significant negative effects on the quality of ground beef. I believe ground meat is probably more damaged by freeze-thaw than whole cuts of meat. https://www.dti.dk/_/media/66980_Effect%20of%20packaging,%20... (PDF!)

The methodology used for that paper makes it irrelevant for a discussion of optimizing the quality of frozen items——the packaging, the cooked burger doneness (167F), and the fat percentage are all significantly different from what would be used in a high-end commercial setting. I've been saying that a great burger could be cooked with a frozen patty (and you could even freeze the bun as long as you don't freeze them together), not that the freezing itself improves the quality of the meat for typical burger metrics of quality (with the exception of crust formation, which could be much better potentially if cooked from frozen).

Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.

Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#262

Post by b_ttercup »

awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #220
b_ttercup wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just you. This product is indeed capable of changing the world for the better if scaled up. "Saving it" is hyperbole. But it's not about making a nice meal for vegetarians, it's about sustainable meat consumption for a growing population.

>This product is indeed capable of changing the world for the better if scaled up. "Saving it" is hyperbole. But "changing the world" isn't hyperbole? > But it's not about making a nice meal for vegetarians, it's about sustainable meat consumption for a growing population. What? Meat eaters aren't going to choose fake meat no more than vegetarians are going to choose fake vegetables/fruits. People are still going to…

Meat eaters will eat fake meat if economics incentive them too. You don't need to completely switch over to impact the world. Growing meat is a substantial waste of energy and nutrients. Unless you think we will never struggle to produce enough food, it's hard to reconcile how you can think we won't run into issues with meat.

Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#263

Post by dang »

twelvechairs wrote: post #4

Tofu/soy burgers have been around for >20 years already. How is this significantly different? [Edit: way to be downvoted instantly for asking a serious critical question. Remember when hn prided itself on a higher level of discussion than reddit?]

The HN guidelines ask you not to go on about downvotes, so would you please not? However low the discussion quality is, this always makes it worse.

Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#264

Post by dang »

concinds wrote: post #3

> Soy I wonder how the community here will respond to this. Most here seemed upset by the male-infertility story from a week or two ago. Turning around to gush over soy would be completely incoherent. "Soy as health food" is diabolically false.

Of course HN is 'completely incoherent'. So is any real sample of millions of people.

Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#265

Post by adrianmonk »

aedron wrote: post #186
adrianmonk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's per serving. Obviously, it's easier to compare if they are all relative to 100g, but arguably per-serving is more useful when making eating decisions. When I'm buying a food, I'm not trying to do science; I'm trying to figure out how much of a particular nutrient I'm personally going to get when I eat that item. For example, if I have soup, there's no way I'll have as little as 100g of it. If I have tea, there's…

Why not both? Which is what is used in Europe.

It can certainly go either way, but space and simplicity would be the arguments against including both. On a small label, you might need to use a smaller font. Even if you have enough space, a more minimalist approach can be quicker to read (provided that it contains the information you actually want).

Re: Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers

#266

Post by sneak »

simplify wrote: post #225
sneak wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is less resource intensive to produce. Hand-tuned assembly code burger vs transpiled javascript for the hot path (I eat cheeseburgers very often, as do many, many others in the countries I frequent). You can feed more people with the same amount of resources. 80,000 humans a day die from lack of food. Everything we can do to meaningfully improve food production efficiency is a big win for the species.

I thought we technically make enough food for everyone on earth? It's the distribution that's the hard part.

That's true, however optimizations like this have wide-reaching effects.
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