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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

#591

Post by thorin »

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.

I know a guy who was promoting frutarian lifestyle. He was a previous world champion kayaker and works in the outdoor industry. I saw him recently and he was still in the top 15-20 in the world in his even. I need to check with him if he's still doing it. He looks like a model, superfit and full of energy. He had an interesting blog on the amount of fruit he was having to eat, most of which he picked up for free or cheap at markets as it was approaching use by date.

https://www.instagram.com/jamesbebbington/?hl=en

http://www.inspiredlife.org/richard-harpham/item/35-james-pr...

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

#593

Post by logicallee »

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'm not a vegetarian. I recently bought packaged sliced baloney for a sandwich, as well as sliced sharp cheddar. The baloney I accidentally bought was fake baloney. (No meat.) I didn't notice until I was making my sandwich. It tasted absolutely disgusting, like chemicals. I am not a picky eater and I think it is the only disgusting food item I've ever bought in a grocery store. As I tried to finish eating it, I kept thinking, how can my grocery store sell something that tastes so disgusting? I mean aren't there taste tests during product development? My sandwich literally tastes better without it. And not just because of the cheddar - I nearly bought hummus and it also would have tasted great. Hell, a single leaf of lettuce would taste better in my sandwich than that. It was horrible.

The thing is, I think the only criteria it was judged by is that it has to look completely like baloney. It did, it had me fooled. But tasted disgusting.

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

#594

Post by deaddodo »

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.…

> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.

This is literally the whole point of the Food Chain and why species counts generally decrease as you go up the chain. Plants make up the vast majority of biomass on the planet. Animals that eat plants make up the next largest chunk. Animals that eat those animals make up the next largest. Etc.

I eat meat, but it's undeniable that vegetation is far more economic than meat on sheer scale.

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

#595

Post by peoplefromibiza »

bryan0 wrote: post #114
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.…

But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals. Beyond/Impossible is close enough.

> But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals

so basically you want a veggie patty disguised as an hamburger.

but there's a catch: agriculture kills as many animals than we do to eat them.

You might not see them, but billions of insects, worms, small rodents etc are killed in the process of making agriculture a viable business.

Pesticides are not exactly environmental friendly.

But then the crops need to be protected from their natural predators: herbivores!

You might have asked yourself sometimes why we don't see deers, boars, jackrabbits, cows, goats (the list is endless) roaming free close to crop fields and the answer is simple: they eat the crops, so they have been killed in the past and are now kept away, maybe not shooting them directly, but not asking gently either.

That causes massive repercussions on natural fauna too: coyotes, wolves, bears, cougars, bobcats etc cannot survive in absence of preys.

So basically veggie patties are not made of dead animals, but a lot of animals died so that we could eat them.

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

#596

Post by Gare »

dhritzkiv wrote: post #160
Gare wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is wet cat food smell revolting to you? It's meat, after all.

Have you… smelled cat food? Not appetizing. It is meat, yes, but does not smell like ground meat, pâté, or hot dog meat, even. I'm not sure if it's because of the way the meat is processed (akin to potted meat), or if it's because of potentially added aromas, as cats do prefer fishy doors.

Yeah, I feed my cats wet food every day. It smells a bit funny, but not repulsive.

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

#597

Post by Gare »

zingar wrote: post #441
Gare wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience as you. Quite tasty for a burger, but not affordable at 3x the price of a beef burger patty.

I’m surprised by this… they’re possibly 20% more expensive in the grocery store here in the UK, but not 3x. More like on the order of what you’d pay for a meat product that was particularly high quality.

Yeah, I'm in Croatia. Our wages are way lower than yours. Local beef is adjusted for that, imported veggie patties are not.

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

#598

Post by ada1981 »

rlt wrote: post #464
Cannabat wrote: post #413

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…

I don't think they were suggesting that. More something along the lines of "you're likely to be killing animals either way, so just accept that nature is cruel and don't feel guilty about it". There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering: - Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought - Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers. - Only…

What is the “humane” way to kill?

Is the humane way to kill an animal the same way one would humanely kill a toddler without consent of the parents or child?

If not why not, when we consider animal have at least the intelligence, will to live, social connections and capacity for suffering as children?

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

#599

Post by oblio »

deaddodo wrote: post #594
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.…

> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper. This is literally the whole point of the Food Chain and why species counts generally decrease as you go up the chain. Plants make up the vast majority of biomass on the planet. Animals that eat…

A classic: https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo?t=26

"Ten pounds of grass make a pound of steak. And ten pounds of steak make a pound of tiger.

But these have the same number of calories - so you might as well just eat the cow and save yourself a lot of work."

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

#600

Post by peoplefromibiza »

JohnFen wrote: post #175
PankajGhosh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood that you dont; But before Beyond/Impossible came, there used to be veggie patty that vegetarians enjoyed. And many of them have never tasted meat, and don't want to eat something that tastes like meat. OP's point is that Beyond/Impossible replaced the veggie patty with a non-meat version of meat patty, instead of adding a new item in the menu.

And, honestly, as a meat-eater I really enjoy certain veggie patties. It's not meat, but it shouldn't be. They're their own delicious thing. When I'm in the mood for a veggie burger, I don't want a hamburger. Restaurants shouldn't replace veggie patties with imitation meat -- they should have both.

The thing some vegetarians do not understand is that traditional cuisine from all over the World is basically 90% vegetarian, because poor people had to survive too.

I'm Italian, I could eat vegetarian meals everyday for a month without ever eating the same thing twice.

Same goes for all of Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa or South America.

Vegetable dishes are the foundation of every established culinary tradition.

There's absolutely no need for incredible|magical|impossible|whatever meat.

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