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McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

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Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#371

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Most Italian pizza has rather little cheese. I remember watching something once where the chef of a fancy pizzeria said that the most important thing in pizza is the bread: it should taste great without any topping. Then the sauce and finally everything else. I've had a great vegan pizza once and between bread, sauce and toppings, it tasted like great Italian-style pizza. Sure, a sprinkle of cheese would have made it…

I grew up on pizza in the NYC/NJ area. The Italian styles with minimal cheese are a disappointment to me. Many are able to get the crust and sauce perfect, which is no small feat, and then it feels like they just gave up with the cheese. Pizza in NYC usually not only has great crust and sauce, but it also has plenty of cheese. They don't "overload" it like many places outside the area. (I am purposely separating "Piz…

Its a tradeoff made differently in the US/ Italy. The Naples style pizza uses “fresh” buffalo mozzarella which releases a lot of water. It has a nice creamy flavor but you can’t cover a thin crust pizza in it without it becoming soggy. What we call mozzarella in the US is actually low moisture mozzarella and one of its advantages is you can cover a whole pizza in it.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and comparably healthy Every plant-based meat I'm aware of has been processed to hell and back, so I'm dubious of the claims that they are healthier.

What inherent trait of "processing" makes a food unhealthy?

A lot of processing does entail removing fiber and other nutritional content. That's why I just eat normal vegetables, not lab atrocities created at McDonald's.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#373
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"McPlant" is a fairly horrible sounding burger! Burger King here in NZ have plant-based burgers called the Rebel Whopper which is quite a catchy name. Technically, it can't be classified as vegetarian though, because it's cooked on the same grill as the beef burgers. Not sure if the McPlant will be cooked on different grills or not?

What on earth? Why would that matter? Does somebody lose their vegan powers if a particle of fat gets into their burger?

As a vegetarian I just don't like tasting even trace amounts of meat in my food.

Would you care if bits of human carcass were mixed into your food? That's how I feel about the cows that you all are murdering.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#374
post #74

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People can be irrational when it comes to their diets, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Some people care and some don’t. Restaurants tend to take the strictest interpretation of a diet because that minimizes angry customers.

Yeah and I don't like kale in my food. Clearly I'm not wrong, because apparently nobody is. But a busy restaurant is not the place to make a fuss over where a particular dish was cooked. I don't get to insist on a separate pot to make my meal, because it might get polluted by kale. It is wrong, it a real sense, to have unreasonable personal rules about a restaurant kitchen.

> It is wrong, it a real sense, to have unreasonable personal rules about a restaurant kitchen.

It's wrong to eat meat.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#375
post #254

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Ha ha, yes, wonder how many people know Escherichia coli is a bacterium found in feces. Often quoted in the context of polluted / unhygienic water sources. Source: a relative, who was a biologist / chemist dealing with public water supplies.

I think most people know this.

At least, I’d wager most people know that E. Coli is dangerous[0], which has about the same effect.

0: ignoring the subtleties of gut bacterial ecosystems

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#376
post #58

I think it’ll be a big win when plant-based burgers are cheaper than animal based burgers. From a raw ingredients standpoint plant based food should almost always be cheaper than animal based food because the costs associated with farming plants is lower than the costs associated with farming animals. Hopefully, with McDonald’s scale and with their vertical integration they can make affordable, tasty, and comparably…

Can anyone comment on why oatmilk is so expensive then. Because oats are super cheap. But 1L of oat milk is $4.50 where I live, which crazy because thats more than regular milk.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#377
post #58

I think it’ll be a big win when plant-based burgers are cheaper than animal based burgers. From a raw ingredients standpoint plant based food should almost always be cheaper than animal based food because the costs associated with farming plants is lower than the costs associated with farming animals. Hopefully, with McDonald’s scale and with their vertical integration they can make affordable, tasty, and comparably…

I'd bet that in a few iterations the plant based meats will taste better too.

It took them a pretty long time to get the food to taste like meat, there's nothing stopping them from tweaking the taste even more. Their food science must be pretty alright as it stands.

A few dozen taste variables and you get thousands of distinct tastes. You can tailor the taste in some acceptable 'tastes-good' parameters to fit just about anything:

'Introducing the Captain America 7 Burger (TM)! Unique and only at Burger King! Our unique blend of spices combined with our Burger scientists American gumption have created the perfect burger for shared virtual summer fun! Order with Shield Sauce (TM) for that taste of Freedom!'

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#378
post #241
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on data from 2016 (the most recent I could find a good breakdown for): Corn $2.1B, Soybeans $1.6B, Sugar $1.5B, Cotton $950M, Wheat $603M, Oranges $435M, Livestock $367M, Hay/Feed $240M

> Corn $2.1B, Soybeans $1.6B Almost all of this is turned into animal feed or fuel.

But are also subsidized considerably less. Where oranges see 0.3¢ per calorie produced, corn only receives 0.1¢ per calorie produced.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the WHO class 2 is "probably carcinogenic" and what was effectively a meta (or meta-meta) analysis showed that the increased risk was 18%. Do we know how bad vegetable oils are for people yet? Is there any reason to think that they're 100% A-OK? Humans have been eating meat for 10s or 100s of thousands if not millions of years. Humans have been eating highly refined vegetable and seed oils for what, a co…

>>Humans have been eating meat for 10s or 100s of thousands if not millions of years. Technically that may be true but humans only ate meat when the hunt was successful. Most of the time , they had a plant based diet. Meat has always been unaffordable luxury for most peole. The farm grown , tax subsidixzed, growth hormone loaded meat industry is a rather new phenomenon.

Until recently, the hunt was broadly successful (maybe not every single day, but certainly every week).

Hunter-gatherers are the only type of group for which there are no anthropologically/historically documented cases of starvation. In contrast to pastoralists and agriculturalists, which have suffered starvation regularly.

Hunter-gatherers across nearly all of the globe always had a diet of meat and plants. It is absolutely false that it was plant-based "most of the time". Eating meat has absolutely not always been an unaffordable luxury -- that's a complete myth. Meat as a "luxury" was a totally new phenomenon that arose only with agriculture.

For the vast majority of human history, meat (or fish) has been plentiful and broadly consumed.

Re: McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

#380

I traveled to India last year for a business trip. Indian McD has apparently had vegetarian burger options for decades, including the McVeggie (vegetable patty), McSpicy Paneer (cottage cheese patty) and McAloo Tikki (potato-based patty). The Indian population is about 40% vegetarian, so this makes sense. Personally, I think the vegetarian burgers tasted incredible, and I wish we had them here.

I went to India last year and found the vegetarian burgers awful. I think the American palate requires a little bit of a different taste than the Indian.
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