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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

#381

Post by crazygringo »

Nbox9 wrote: 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…

Also when plant-based burgers actually meet the nutritional profile of animal-based burgers.

Right now the Impossible Burger still significantly trails behind an equivalent-weight beef burger in protein, and has a bunch of carbohydrates (which beef doesn't have at all) [1].

Our diet is already far too stuffed with processed carbohydrates, so it's unfortunate that the Impossible Burger adds even more. Hopefully, further improvements can focus on healthy proteins instead.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/health/is-the-impossible-burger-healthi...

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

#382

Post by adtac »

bgdam wrote: post #365
adtac wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even funny how Italian and Indian food are so trivially made vegan!

Most Indian food is not vegan. We use a lot of dairy products in our cooking. The vegetarian stuff is still awesome though.

well, I'm from India too, so :)

Also, I said it's trivial to make Indian food vegan, not that Indian food is vegan by default. What specific ingredients are irreplaceable in Indian cooking? I've replaced paneer with tofu, kheer (and consequently, most milk-based drinks) is trivially made with oat milk, vegan yoghurt can replace curd in 99% of the dishes (like chaat, raita, etc), vegan butter is indistinguishable from dairy-based butter. Ghee doesn't have a substitute, but it isn't a big deal. Naan has curd in it traditionally, but it's pretty easy to make it without dairy. Since going vegan, I've made virtually all of my favourite Indian dishes and it was no more difficult than the traditional recipes.

South Indian food (where I'm from) is even easier as most dishes don't have dairy to begin with.

Some milk-based sweets are the only things that I miss out on, but that's probably a good thing anyway.

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

#383

Post by therealx »

ada1981 wrote: post #188
markdown wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the appeal of a vegan pizza? Is it even pizza without cheese?

I’ve been vegan for about 15 years.. I love Daiya cheese for pizzas and it melts well too. There are also a number of specialty cheeses that are great. I think if you live in a decent sized city you can find great vegan pizza / supplies.

Interesting! Daiya is very bland to me. I do like many of cashew cheeses.

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

#384

Post by sweetheart »

realisticeater wrote: post #351
adtac wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Make the lion vegan to complete the circle. 1. Lions are obligate carnivores, we're not. We do not need meat to survive (evidenced by several cultures around the world living off a nearly entirely plant-based diet for centuries), lions do. 2. What animals do isn't a good moral compass. Animals rape each other, steal, kill their children, and do all sorts of morally reprehensible stuff. >Some animals are abused and w…

How about because I don't care about it that much? Sometimes good food involves suffering. I'm glad we're at the top of the food chain. I'm not about to give up my steak, I'm not about to give up my cheese, I'm certainly not about to give up my foie gras. I don't think we should go out of our way to hurt animals (for example intensive chicken production where you have overcrowded operations where chickens stay in the…

> Sometimes good food involves suffering

It never needs to. You're performing mental gymnastics, I'm sorry. It's never true that this sort of immense suffering just needs to magical occur for the world to operate normally. There are limitless delicious recipes that require 0 suffering, 0 pain, 0 murder.

> I don't think we should go out of our way to hurt animals

That's what the entirety of animal agriculture is. We go WAAAY out of our way. It's expensive, inefficient, unhealthy, and immoral, and we do it anyway.

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

#385

Post by mongol »

danepowell wrote: post #350

Can someone help me to understand all of the pessimism surrounding plant-based meat? Of all of the morally-dubious technologies in the world today, this seems like a force of unequivocal good, and yet the criticism is endless: "it's not healthier", "the name sucks", "it'll give you cancer". All of these just seem to be missing the point that it's _no worse than meat_ in most respects, and _way better_ in others (i.e.…

I want to know what I eat. For example, if I eat meat I want to know if it is pork or beef. Plant-based does not cut it on that criteria. Call it what it is, not what it pretends to be.

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

#386

Post by y2bd »

notRobot wrote: post #104

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.

As someone who pretty much only orders vegetarian when doing Indian takeout, these sound amazing.

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

#387

Post by sweetheart »

sukilot wrote: post #292
PretzelPirate wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But vegans want burgers, they just don’t want to kill an animal for that burger. This is no different than someone making a turkey burger because they don’t like beef. For some reason, only vegans get called out for making substitutions.

"Vegans" aren't who really want burgers. Newbie vegans who have been indoctrinated by a lifetime burger culture. Burgers aren't a huge deal in Asia, for example.

I'm no newbie vegan and I still looooove vegan burgers. I'm "indoctrinated" only insofar that everyone is "indoctrinated" by the gastronomic culture of their upbringing.

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

#388

Post by detaro »

NewOrderNow wrote: post #363
crooked-v wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegans object to eating animal products , not to eating things that happen to resemble animal products.

You just repeated yourself. So I ask again why when you claim that this is something you think is bad. By conception, you want something that is not what you claim to desire. It is engineered and the opposite of natural by design.

Where do they claim that they think it is bad?

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

#389

Post by jakear »

Balgair wrote: post #377
Nbox9 wrote: 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 ab…

I want to see a coca-cola freestyle-style plant-hamburger machine where you choose your own blend of bases and watch them be extruded from some bags then blended together and plopped onto a griddle.

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

#390

Post by chris-orgmenta »

hated wrote: post #357
dkersten wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Italian styles with minimal cheese are a disappointment to me. Have you had one in Italy? Personally, I quite like American style pizza, but the Italian style I still find has a more interesting flavour profile and therefore I tend to prefer it.

As far as I am concerned the Neapolitan pizza is the only real pizza. Compare it to the archetypical Dominoes Margherita pizza. American variants of "pizza" definitely deliver melted cheese, tomato sauce, and heated bread in large quantities but the layers of flavor that you find in a faithful reproduction of Neapolitan pizza to the Italian standard are completely missing. One of the first things Americans will notic…

I suppose it's worth noting that the Neapolitan pizza can only have been in existence since 1548 at the earliest, and there are probably more 'real'/traditional pizzas sans tomato
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