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Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

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Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegans absolutely generally object to killing flies… Many won’t even steal the work of bees

If they really did, you'd expect to see calls to mitigate insect deaths as part of their usual dialog. They're apathetic. If you ask them, ostensibly they might object to killing insects to stay consistent, but they won't bring it up. THat's pretty much in line with naturally expected behavior, because intuitively we don't expect much from insects.

I don't feel comfortable speaking for ALL vegans, but in my house, we gently move spiders outside. We would also be totally fine with killing a mosquito. My general theory is that it is fine to hurt an animal if it attacks you first, but it's cruel to do it whenever it can be avoided. Just like all other forms of violence.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace healthy with unprocessed then. Vegans sure love their processed foods.

Of course it's going to be processed unless you're getting it straight from the field. That website's ingredient list for their unflavored grounds: Water, pea protein, fava bean (9 %, Finland), rapeseed oil. Looks fairly minimal to me. "Vegans love their processed foods" is a weird take, I don't think they likely eat more processed foods than your typical American.

What are the ingredients in potato fries?

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's stopped me from getting them. They're not any healthier (and arguably less healthy) than the meat they're substituting. I'd rather they stuck with the old soy burgers that tasted less like meat but were clearly healthier (unless you're on a keto diet) than what they've come up with.

Well sure, not the meat itself, but the nitrosamines used to cure it, that's the bad part. According to my old boss who's a cancer researcher, apparently it's pretty carcinogenic. And it's basically unavoidable, the food industry hasn't been able to come up with anything better. Not using it, and having widespread botulism is not very fun.

The vast majority of regular meat contains no nitrosamines or other preservatives.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's going to be processed unless you're getting it straight from the field. That website's ingredient list for their unflavored grounds: Water, pea protein, fava bean (9 %, Finland), rapeseed oil. Looks fairly minimal to me. "Vegans love their processed foods" is a weird take, I don't think they likely eat more processed foods than your typical American.

What are the ingredients in potato fries?

American or European?

European fries are potato, oil, salt.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, those looking for meat substitute think it isn't close enough, those who want cheaper meat think it's too expensive, vegans/vegetarians have actually vegetable based options and aren't necessarily looking for fake meat at all I think of this stuff as none of these things. It's nicotine gum. Nicotine gum won't ever replace cigarettes, nor will people who don't smoke start chewing it. This is a produc…

> Nicotine gum won't ever replace cigarettes, nor will people who don't smoke start chewing it. There are non-smokers who use nicotine gum; I'm one of them. Similar effect to caffeine with a lower half-life, so it's suitable to have later in the day. I'm sure that we're a small group, but if nicotine didn't have the specter of cigarettes hanging behind it, I'd imagine it could be quite a large market. Plant-based mea…

> if nicotine didn't have the specter of cigarettes hanging behind it, I'd imagine it could be quite a large market.

It drives me a little bit crazy that people think nicotine itself is what's harmful about cigarettes. The myth is slowly eroding but the common knowledge about nicotine — aside from the reality that it is addictive — remains directionally wrong (as common knowledge often is).

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#717
post #481

This editorialized link title and the article's headline itself doesn't really match the article's content (as is increasingly common it seems). Sure, Beyond Meat has had lower sales- but soon after they mention that retail sales of Impossible meat products increased 50% in 2022- with an odd "but the CEO left so they're in trouble" assessment which seems a bit bonkers. Then the author seems to say that because fake m…

Agree. There are no headlines for: "People still eat tacos, so pizza has failed."

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#718
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but beyond taste/value arguments, there is an argument that the production of lab-grown meat is not able to reach significant scale with the available technology.

> And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, Good Food Institute (GFI)’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.

> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.

> By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts.

> There’s another issue: In focusing on micronutrients as the primary cost driver, GFI may have underestimated the cost and complexity of providing macronutrients at scale. Just like other living animals, cultured cells will need amino acids to thrive. In Humbird’s projection, the cost of aminos alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef.

[0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#719
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional or basic? Meat wasn't a staple food 100 years ago, it was too expensive for regular people. Same with milk, if you didn't own a cow, you just didn't drink it. You drank some sort of ale.

My grandfather was a kid at the end of the Great Depression. One of the stories which blew my mind growing up was that he ate beef basically twice a year, when his cousins on a small dairy farm culled the herd. His mother kept chickens, so they had eggs - to the point that as an adult he never eats them because he got sick of them by the time he graduated from high school.

Yep, (western) people are acting like meat is a human right and a staple day to day food.

My grandparents were the first generation in my country who started to have regular access to meat after WW2. Before that it was either a rare thing and much of the "meat" they ate was offal.

Pea soup was 99% peas and a small chunk of smoked meat added for flavour.

Meanwhile billions of people live perfectly normal lives eating legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts) for protein.

Re: Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

#720
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote a funny meme: If my mother had wheels she would've been a bicycle! You can't just replace ingredients. Make a lamb dish if lamb is what you want!

Interesting, we say "If my grandma had wheels she would've been a wheelbarrow!" ( "Se mia nonna aveva le ruote sarebbe una carriola" ). And there's also the version with grandad, but it's better you look that one on Google "Se mio nonno aveva..."

We (neighbours to the east) sometimes say “If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandpa” as a meta on the other versions of the grandma jokes, but I searched and did like the Italian grandpa version.
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