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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

#561
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, carbon sequestration, for example. Or habitat restoration. Or more suburbs, or whatever.

It's not just land use, it's every single vector of comparison, like water use, energy use, human labor (ab)use, habitat destruction, etc.

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

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

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

I agree in so far that I believe that the observation of "more processing > less health" is not caused directly by the amount of processing, but by the way those highly processed products are designed to match as many "appetites" as possible. I use the term "appetites" in the sense of a low intensity craving, the feedback signal the body sends to fill some nutrient deficit. But our taste buds can't really identify most of the nutrients in question, we just have is a set of complicated heuristics taking an educated guess. And many of those highly processed foods, in their quest to maximise desire, will fool those heuristics, matching the "appetite" without fulfilling the deficit. Perhaps not by deliberate design, but by market selection.

On one hand, the faux meats sound quite risky, but in the other hand they are under extreme scrutiny like no highly processed food before them, so they might not actually be bad at all.

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

#563
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.…

For a vegetarian burger option, nothing beats a potato patty burger done to perfection. It's incredibly simple, essentially just mashed potatoes formed into a patty, breaded and fried. It can be seasoned to your liking with herbs, garlic, salt, etc. and the traditional burger toppings nicely compliment it. You can somewhat emulate it by replacing a burger patty with the fries that often come with an order but it's not the same as a purpose made one.

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

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

Categorically? Absolutely!

But as humans we can't read every study for every ingredient. We have to use heuristics to guesstimate a healthy diet. Reducing (not eliminating) processed foods is a decent one. Same goes for including protein, increasing fiber (so whole wheat instead of the cake americans call "bread"), including veggies.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed. Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other…

> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.

How much of the meat we consume do you really think are grazing in meadows? Even most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil. However you turn it, it’s impossible to claim that cattle raising is a net gain for biodiversity.

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

#566
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It would allow nature to begin to recover from the damage we've been doing to it for thousands of years. Besides increased biodiversity being an inherently good thing, it would also reduce flooding and erosion, stabilise weather systems, preserve topsoil, etc. etc.

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with OP. Fake patties taste like... erm... But a nice veggie patty with peas, corn and stuff is great. Maybe I agree, that this modern crappy fake food is make by meat eaters for people who try to not eat so much meat, but they forgot that a normal veggie patty doesn't need to taste like meat.

> a nice veggie patty with peas, corn and stuff is great. That's irrelevant - someone who is in the mood for a meat patty burger won't be happy with a veggie patty no matter how great it tastes, unless it tastes like meat. There's tons of comments here saying how nice veggie patties can be[1], but none of the posters saying this have the self-awareness to realise that the taste of veggie patties are irrelevant if the…

Yeah, I agree, but most fake meat doesn't taste like meat. It tastes like made out of grain and stuff. Sure, there are some brands who can mimik the taste quite good, but this stuff will never ever really taste and feel like meat, because it isn't. And some people might try it, think that it nearly is meat maybe, but not 100% and then never try it again. Like me :D I would always prefer a true veggie patty, but maybe I'm not the target audience. But I should, because I often tried to not eat so much meat but failed because of bad tastes.

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

#568
post #504
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would be very compelling if your body only needed calories to survive. Meat is the most efficient way to deliver proteins and essential amino acids. You should also dig into the concept of bioavailability.

This is debunked. Tofu is incredibly protein dense - on par or surpassing chicken breast. Without looking it up and subjectively, tofu also seems to be digested very easily. There’s also seitan and the beans. Nuts also exist but have fat/protein ratios that tend toward uncomfortably high. (If what your eating has macros that approach the fat content in nuts to other nutrients that’s pretty high and should be noted.)

This is absolutely not 'debunked'.

Taken from wikipedia entry on Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score [1]:

- Chicken has a PDCAAS of 0.95

- Soy has a PDCAAS of 0.92

- Black beans have a PDCAAS of 0.74 (highest legume)

- Other beans and legumes have a PDCAAS of 0.70

- Wheat (seitan) has a PDCAAS of 0.42

Facts:

Soy has good enough nutrients to make a valid claims for it without throwing away valid science.

Soy is not surpassing chicken breast in PDCAAS, or red meat.

Eggs and dairy literally break the scale and are by far the highest ranking whole foods on a PDCAAS basis.

Seitan and beans are terrible in comparison in terms of PDCAAS, with you needing to consume nearly 2x the amount of protein from the former to compete with the later.

Opinions:

As far as fat goes, keep in mind tofu has a 1:2 fat:protein ratio. Chicken breast is 1:20+. This reason is the reason a lot of people herald chicken breast

Overconsumption of soy can lead to health implications

Soy does not have enough leucine to trigger the MTOR pathways to build muscle. If you are having soy post workout, you need to consume 45-60g of protein, vs just 20-30g of protein from animal products

Red meat has literally everything you need to live. Throw in a little carbs and fiber too and you can run at peak performance without worrying about anything in your diet.

Biases:

I've been relentless about my diet for 10 years and have tried everything. This includes vegan, vegetarian, keto, carb cycling, protein sparring modified fasts, you name it.

This year I started eating an animal based diet and not only do I feel great, my TDEE went from 2400 to over 3700. This means while I used to eat 2400kCal to maintain my weight, I now have to eat 3700 to maintain my weight, and I feel fantastic while doing so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correcte...

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

#569

If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I have at least 8 vegan dishes I can make that are just amazingly delicious . A mushroom risotto, veggie tajine, chana masala, ramen, moussaka, general tso's cauliflour, cuban b…

> The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful.

I disagree with the last part on a philosophical level. Society should push forward, and that doesn't mean we need to take convenient things and make them less convenient, so that alternatives seem more attractive in comparison. We need to make the alternatives better in-and-of themselves, otherwise there will be more pushback from people who currently only use cars, as opposed to a more positive "oh, we can use our car for X and then use this other thing for Y because it offers Z advantage vs the car"

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

#570
post #444

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.

Well, we're running that experiment right now with soaring meat prices and it looks like you're wrong. Turns out if you make one type of meat more expensive then people just switch to a different kind of meat. If you make all meat more expensive, people buy cheaper cuts and get creative with how they prepare it. My bet is that if you make it prohibitively expensive then people will get creative about sourcing their meat instead so rather than go to the grocery store they'll put in a group order direct from CSA or a small independent meat producer and just store a years supply in a deep freeze.

It turns out a lot of people just prefer eating meat over other options regardless of price. I'm not really surprised.

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