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Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

nytimes.com

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Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#521

Post by thorin »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…

Interesting you should mention that. I used to really like the spicy beanburger at McDonald's. There was no reason to make something that pretended to be meat with even more additives, except to drive the marketing of the non-meat meat industry. I'm happy to eat rice and beans, I don't need no pretend meat. Although I do eat meat about half the time.

Interesting I'm reading Michel Pollan's book the Omnivore's Dilemma, about large scale agriculture, it's quite worrying, although I don't feel the UK is quite at the stage of the US yet. I see quite a lot of animals roaming and diversity when I'm out walking, but it's definitely going in that direction.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#522

Post by zemvpferreira »

mathieuh wrote: post #481
zemvpferreira wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to say this is your moral prerogative but it's pretty simple: Eat only hand-picked fruit. It's by far the least death-causing food out there and it's offered to you by the tree to eat. I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.

If you did that you would become extremely unhealthy. Veganism has the caveat "as far as is practicable", and a fruitarian diet is not practicable for extended periods of time as you will become malnourished.

Fair enough. Swap "only fruit@ for "as much fruit as possible without becoming malnourished" if you would value your own wellbeing above another animals' (which I would as well).

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#523

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

effingwewt wrote: post #498
hcks wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you or someone link this article please? Thanks

Here[1] is the article post on HN and the OP[2] on case you want the article directly. Tangentially, seems to me the science on every food seems to change every few years. Sugar, fat, MSG, eggs, butter, meat, fish, milk, the list goes on. As others in both this and the linked article stated, I think just reducing consumption would drastically reduce the amount of necessary livestock, which would reduce everything els…

I tried to do a deepdive on nutrition a few years back when I went on a diet. My conclusion was that there are far too many confounding factors for any population studies to be taken too seriously. That's why the field is so vogueish like you point out.

Long term, highly controlled trials are more useful, but much rarer.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#524

Post by ianai »

mathieuh wrote: post #486
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be the same thing I’d find in tofu? Because tofu doesn’t upset my stomach at all.

To be honest I don't know too much about it, but as I understand it tofu is the curd made from soya milk, and soya protein is some form of the processed whole bean. My thinking that it's soya protein is just from the fact that I've tried a few different brands' soya fake burgers and they all give me the same discomfort. I don't have any ill effects from tofu either.

The fake stuff usually lists “textured vegetable protein” or “soy protein isolate” or things like that. Those are much more processed than tofu. Tofu is more like a curd in so far as the tofu gets minced then settled out of the water. I think it sometimes gets calcium carbon added.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#525

Post by StreamBright »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…

Exactly. Even if I was a vegan I would not touch heavily processed food like beyond meat. The distinction between processed vs non-processed is much more important to me than the vegan vs non-vegan.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#526

Post by Broken_Hippo »

kybernetyk wrote: post #421
tptacek wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.

Quoted post unavailable.

Tell me that raw, uncooked wheat is just as healthy as processed and cooked wheat. I'll wait.

Cooking makes some things edible that weren't before. Just because it doesn't work on an apple in the way you are imagining doesn't mean much.

I'll also note that many folks think of baked apples as sugar-laden desserts and fresh apples as eaten plain. Nevermind that folks add apples to savory rice dishes and nevermind that folks dip fresh apples in caramel sauce. You need more than the descriptions of "baked" and "raw" to denote health.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#527

Post by WalterBright »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…

I tried being a vegan for several months. I developed all sorts of aches and pains. As an experiment, I ate a steak. It was the best tasting thing I ever ate. I even licked the plate. I felt great the next day.

What can I say? My body needs meat.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#528

Post by kuschku »

jsemrau wrote: post #104
georgefrick wrote: post #13

"Its stock has slumped nearly 83 percent in the past year. Sales, which the company had expected to rise as much as 33 percent this year, are now likely to show only minor growth." So they still showed growth, the stock just crashed; and the others in the segment who don't have to report numbers are doing better. Just sounds like a discounted stock to me.

Is there really a market for that product? I tried their burger patty and couldn't finish. Might be personal taste, but it just didn't work for me. https://app.finclout.io/t/kRPQyAo

There is such a large market for this that one of Germany's largest meat processing companies, Rügenwalder, is heavily pivoting towards vegetarian products, and now makes more money with vegetarian meat replacements than with actual meat. And they're not even the largest seller of meat replacements in the country.

The market is huge, but it's quite literally a matter of taste.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#529

Post by xtian »

xorfish wrote: post #471
agentgumshoe wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how many animals die in the process of scaled agriculture and displacement that occurs to create these replacement goods. But they're not the big fluffy animals we anthropomorphise, so it's easy to accept.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets If everyone were to switch to a vegan diet, global agriculture land use would be reduced by 75%.

To what end?

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#530

Post by donkeyd »

fsloth wrote: post #444
friend_and_foe wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the target market for these products is people that want to eat real meat and actively seek it out? And they're catering to them by... replacing existing vegetarian options? They must not have read your comment. Sounds like a bad market fit. The number of people who eat meat and don't care if their meat is made of meat has got to be in the 7 figure range worldwide. The number of people that don't eat meat and want…

It's not as impossible as you make it sound IMO, I would guess it's more a matter of pricing. If plantburgers and plantdogs where considerable cheaper than meatburgers and hotdogs I would guess people would follow the money and shift to consuming the plant based alternative if they were otherwise close enough.

I'm a meat eater and I really prefer no meat over fake meat. A good vegetable curry, ratatouille, stew, pasta or a portobello mushroom burger really beats all of the fake meat substitutes for me. If meat becomes too expensive, I'll just cut it out completely... Until lab grown meat becomes a viable alternative. All these fake meat substitutes are just awful, to me.
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