This is what grinds my gears. For years scientists and health professionals are repeating over and over "don't eat hyper processed foods" and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries. You want proteins? Eat lentils and beans and once a week chicken or fish. Artificial meat is the stupidest invention in last 50 years. Don't eat artificial meat! There's literally nothing good that can came from it, eat moderately instead.
Artificial meat is the most important thing anyone could be working on right now. Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.
"don't eat hyper processed foods" is a horseshit shorthand. It's types of processing that are problems, not the simple fact that food has been prepared. Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?
> eat moderately
This literally doesn't mean anything. Moderate is not an amount, or a composition.
I have mentioned this several times in comments on other threads, and each time my comment was buried under variations of the same argument: the vast majority of people cannot be expected to give up meat, and therefore to help both the environment and their health, and to stop killing animals, we should offer them artificial meat. But I very much doubt that the additional crazy overhead of producing and packing and shipping this artificial meat (which as you said is completely unnecessary, as you can just start eating non-hyper-processed vegetables) will result in a net benefit for the planet, or for your personal health.
Another thing that concerns me is the centralization aspect. It is still fairly easy to buy meat coming from your local butcher / local animals. Looking at the ingredients of some of this artificial meat, I fail to see how it should be produced by a local shop. You need a supply chain, and possibly special machinery. This may only be carried out by large companies.
None of these rules are 100% true. "Natural" food can be bad for you, and processed food good. It is just a heuristic that works somewhat well when you have limited information.
I know it's become taboo to admit to eat real meat from an animal but this is my same concern. Processed food of any nature completely destroys me, and is the cause of my IBS, and I will stay away from any form of processed meat. Being vegetarian or worse vegan doesn't work with me and my health.
I strongly believe there's much better ways of improving the status quo and being carbon neutral than buying meat built in a factory by a chemical conglomerate that uses vegetables and legume proteins flown from the other side of the world. So much for being "green".
I spend 3x in meat than the average Joe because I buy 90% of it from local, family-owned organic farms and as long as I can afford it I will keep doing so, I will keep eating meat because my body requires it and functions the best on it, and trying to push processed fake meat as the future is being blind and obtuse to why people actually eat meat. No it's not because they're just stupid and ignorant and are climate skeptics.
If obesity and health issues have become such an epidemic because most of our food is processed, I am terrified to see how much worse we'll be when more political and economical resources are invested towards even more processed junk food.
You're right, but also people really, really like meat. And they'll continue to want to eat it a great deal. Very, very few people would willingly choose bean caserole over steak and chips more than even 10% of the time.
Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it.
Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say:
I like Quorn, I've eaten some nice tofu and really good saitan. I really like black bean burgers too. However every single actual fake meat I tried so far was sitting wrong in my stomach. Maybe one gets used to it, who knows.
The whole topic is also skewed. In Switzerland 2/3 of the land are basically non useable. This land is only used to feed cows, which makes up 95% of the diet of a organic local cow. There is no way we could grow anything useful on this land, especially not without destroying the nature.
The idea isn't meant to appeal to us, as neither you nor I consume fastfood enough for it to matter.
But plenty of people do, and it drives the meat markets whose over abundance of meat related products drive other markets that keep this horrible cycle of slaughter going.
Weaning people off meat at the fast food level is great way to start IMO.
I know this is just a personal problem, but my wife is allergic to many lentils, including chickpeas, lentils, peas, and soy and it's becoming harder and harder to avoid these days, it seems.
It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")
I think the quality of products from plant based alternative protein sources like peas will increas so much in the coming time that these will make the race.
We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.
I have read similar accounts, only to later discover that the reviewers are vegan/vegetarian etc. If these are to displace beef, to kill the beef industry, then they need to win over the BBQ crowd. When the not-meat hotdog starts competing with the meat version at US ballparks, then I will take notice.
I agree with this. It's like 90% of the way there for ground beef (impossible) and I've had some very convincing chicken nuggets. We'll probably never replace steaks with veggies, but maybe meat as a special-occasion food (grown sustainably and to extremely high ethical standards) is the best way forward.
I recently tried the impossible nuggets at burger king. The only reason I could tell the difference is that the texture was too homogeneous, the taste, and even the texture for the most part was near perfect. I don't know if they're going to be able to substitute out other chicken uses. I'd wonder if a chicken sandwich is the next target.
Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".
Descriptions like 'glorious' or 'delicious' are completely subjective. The fact that people did not choose to fast but were instead forced to by either religious dictates or economic requirements should be telling you something. When economies shift out of poverty and subsistence farming the amount of meat consumed grows, and as the GDP grows so does this meat consumption. Is it because 'big meat' is so good at convincing people that they want to eat more meat or is it because the thing holding back that meat consumption was only the ability to buy/acquire it and not because the veg cuisine was so incomparable that people choose it over options that used meat?
Oh, come on, Catholics who observe lent in [my part of] America almost exclusively eat fish on Fridays during lent, not lentils or anything vegetarian.
I grew up in a Catholic family and vegetarian dishes are actively shunned, the absolute only socially acceptable lent option for dinner is fish.
I have a kind of curiosity about how these things scale, looking at land use.
Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance.
All studied I'm aware of show that plant based protein is orders of magnitude less intensive than beef. If you look for "protein source total resource consumption meta analysis" you'll find many. Most people do not eat grass fed beef, they are in fact raised on maize or other feedstock which was grown on land that could also support plants for human consumption.
I tried a few times soy steaks and burgers, and honestly don't know what to say; to me it has been the most unpredictable food experience ever: one time they tasted absolutely delicious, then complete crap, then ...meh. It may have been the brand or way of cooking but I can't recall of two times in a row in which I could get the same impression, so today I tend to avoid them. On the other hand I love soy chocolate-like ice cream, but that's another thing.
About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.
That’s consistent with using low quality heavily processed plant based food with artificial flavor. The delicate flavor can be significantly altered with cooking methods that would not ruin real food.
Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. Inovation would be here to inovate and create new food, not to mimic the existing. I know, existing consumers and whole industry waiting to be disrupted, but still this starts to look like “save” icon represented by floppy disk, when in reality “save” does not have anything to do with floppies anymore.
IMO this is a complaint most people have BEFORE they go vegetarian (or start trying to reduce their meat consumption). Then they realize that it's very convenient to be able to mimic existing recipes and maybe prepare the same meal for vegetarian and non-vegetarian friends and things start to make sense.
Also there are many meals in which we enjoy the form as much as the material (i.e. they're fun to eat or nice to look at) -- burgers, hotdogs, meatballs, and the choice is to either give it up completely or ... eat the floppy disk.
Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat.
We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult.
It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables.
People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.
A vegetarian told me that this is due to practicality. When he goes to some event, why does he bring sausage-shaped "meat"? Because then he can use the buns and ketchup that were provided for everyone. Same with burgers...
Diets are a mixture of culture, availability, personal taste, cost, and social status. Culture is by far the biggest and most dominating factor when talking about diets.
If you want to be a champion of the environment and ignore culture, there is likely food that exist where you live that people don't want to eat. Invasive and overpopulated species. In order for something to be invasive or overpopulated it is likely not something that people eat in your culture.
Where I live, cyprinidae fish exist in massive overpopulation to varying degree in most fresh water lakes. They grow large in numbers from as a result from farms creating water pollution, and since our culture do not have cyprinidae fish as part of any diet, the economical incentives to fish them is only from bio gas and animal feed. That is simply not enough, and so the problem has only continue to worsen. My culture loves fish and have fish as a central figure at many occasions, but not cyprinidae so we hunt other species to extinction.
An other culture crash is seaweed, an excellent protein that doesn't use land or create pollution. Just like with plant meat there are plant fish alternatives that is constructed using seaweed. They are sadly not very popular. We could also just be eating the seaweed as it is, but people don't know how to cook it or how it fit in their recopies and lives.
Being innovative with food culture is not so much about production as it is about changing people minds. Artificial meat tries to solve this by keeping the culture as is.
You can have both new foods AND “meat-less” copies of meat products. I like plant-based meat because I can use my favorites recipes with minimal change, just swap chicken with another source of protein that feels kind of the same, and I’m happy with that.
Looking at my vegan friend who likes having a different processed not-meat each day while I'm having more protein in my bowl of oats, the difference seems to be more about lifestyle. He actively calls himself a vegan and actively seeks vegan things like the processed products and magazines about veganism, whereas I just like oatmeal and we both don't care that both meals are equally vegan.
There is plenty "new food" (and lots of "old food" just not commonly eaten here) that's vegetarian too. But meat is tasty, so fake meat is nice to have - why miss out on that if you like it?
These are new foods, but we don't have a better name for them. They're called like "horseless carriages", because a "car" term hasn't been coined yet.
But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.
I've switched most of my chicken and beef consumption over to Quorn (fake meat brand) and while it's clearly not meat, I'm always happy with the result.
Here is a thought experiment for you…if someone made a meat substitute that mimics the taste and texture of cooked human flesh…how would you feel about a person who knowingly ate and enjoyed such a creation?
In general, smaller animals with a shorter lifespan are more efficient at their conversion ratio of "plant calories vs meat calories", so if someone worries about the use of lots of farmland to grow stuff to feed animals instead of using a smaller amount of farmland to feed humans directly, then cattle production (unless we reduce so much that we keep only the number of cattle which are grazing on non-arable land) is worse than chicken farms.
In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms.
In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.
I mean if we wanted to make beef production more sustainable we easily could, feed cows more grass and less grain. But grain is more often the choice because you can grow/fatten your animals up like 20% faster than with a pure grass diet and the grain is easier and more compact to store and ship. Alfalfa requires no additional fertilizer and actually sequesters nitrogen into the soil, reducing the need for artificial fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.
I've heard that a single head of cattle yields about the same amount of meat as 200 chickens. As far as I'm aware, cattle also tend to enjoy a much more pleasant life than factory farmed chickens. As someone who does eat meat but is also somewhat paradoxically concerned with animal welfare, this is important.
[+] [-] dvh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
"don't eat hyper processed foods" is a horseshit shorthand. It's types of processing that are problems, not the simple fact that food has been prepared. Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?
> eat moderately
This literally doesn't mean anything. Moderate is not an amount, or a composition.
[+] [-] lqet|4 years ago|reply
Another thing that concerns me is the centralization aspect. It is still fairly easy to buy meat coming from your local butcher / local animals. Looking at the ingredients of some of this artificial meat, I fail to see how it should be produced by a local shop. You need a supply chain, and possibly special machinery. This may only be carried out by large companies.
[+] [-] 7952|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|4 years ago|reply
I strongly believe there's much better ways of improving the status quo and being carbon neutral than buying meat built in a factory by a chemical conglomerate that uses vegetables and legume proteins flown from the other side of the world. So much for being "green".
I spend 3x in meat than the average Joe because I buy 90% of it from local, family-owned organic farms and as long as I can afford it I will keep doing so, I will keep eating meat because my body requires it and functions the best on it, and trying to push processed fake meat as the future is being blind and obtuse to why people actually eat meat. No it's not because they're just stupid and ignorant and are climate skeptics.
If obesity and health issues have become such an epidemic because most of our food is processed, I am terrified to see how much worse we'll be when more political and economical resources are invested towards even more processed junk food.
[+] [-] automatic6131|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it.
Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say:
https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|4 years ago|reply
The whole topic is also skewed. In Switzerland 2/3 of the land are basically non useable. This land is only used to feed cows, which makes up 95% of the diet of a organic local cow. There is no way we could grow anything useful on this land, especially not without destroying the nature.
[+] [-] tetris11|4 years ago|reply
But plenty of people do, and it drives the meat markets whose over abundance of meat related products drive other markets that keep this horrible cycle of slaughter going.
Weaning people off meat at the fast food level is great way to start IMO.
[+] [-] dTal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losvedir|4 years ago|reply
It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")
[+] [-] jsilence|4 years ago|reply
We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.
[+] [-] sandworm101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MivLives|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhettoComputers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanslub42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evgen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astura|4 years ago|reply
I grew up in a Catholic family and vegetarian dishes are actively shunned, the absolute only socially acceptable lent option for dinner is fish.
[+] [-] fooker|4 years ago|reply
No, this is a weird and popular misconception.
~ 97% of the people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are non-vegetarian. South India has amazing non vegetarian food.
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|4 years ago|reply
Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance.
Who can tell me of the impacts of such changes?
[+] [-] igorkraw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|4 years ago|reply
About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GhettoComputers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vincnetas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Toutouxc|4 years ago|reply
Also there are many meals in which we enjoy the form as much as the material (i.e. they're fun to eat or nice to look at) -- burgers, hotdogs, meatballs, and the choice is to either give it up completely or ... eat the floppy disk.
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult.
It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables.
People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.
[+] [-] gypsyharlot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtoway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|4 years ago|reply
If you want to be a champion of the environment and ignore culture, there is likely food that exist where you live that people don't want to eat. Invasive and overpopulated species. In order for something to be invasive or overpopulated it is likely not something that people eat in your culture.
Where I live, cyprinidae fish exist in massive overpopulation to varying degree in most fresh water lakes. They grow large in numbers from as a result from farms creating water pollution, and since our culture do not have cyprinidae fish as part of any diet, the economical incentives to fish them is only from bio gas and animal feed. That is simply not enough, and so the problem has only continue to worsen. My culture loves fish and have fish as a central figure at many occasions, but not cyprinidae so we hunt other species to extinction.
An other culture crash is seaweed, an excellent protein that doesn't use land or create pollution. Just like with plant meat there are plant fish alternatives that is constructed using seaweed. They are sadly not very popular. We could also just be eating the seaweed as it is, but people don't know how to cook it or how it fit in their recopies and lives.
Being innovative with food culture is not so much about production as it is about changing people minds. Artificial meat tries to solve this by keeping the culture as is.
[+] [-] dgellow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chronogram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|4 years ago|reply
But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] diordiderot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an9n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silent_cal|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] MengerSponge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capybara_2020|4 years ago|reply
Would it be much better for the environment if we just shifted to smaller animals and birds like pigs, goats, chicken?
[+] [-] PeterisP|4 years ago|reply
In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms.
In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.
[+] [-] AngryData|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmnvix|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] silent_cal|4 years ago|reply