[pencilguin]

I tried a Beyond Meat burger. It tasted so much like the real thing that I did not finish it. It had that rusty-nail sharpness I have not missed at all.

I have been vegetarian for ~30 years. Pork and ham are the only meat I have missed. Knowing how pork is produced in the US, I would never buy any of it.

Unfortunately, fake meat is as "packaged and processed" as it is physically possible for stuff sold as food to be, making it not really food at all. That is too bad, because meat production is a huge driver of the looming global climate catastrophe, enough so that people switching to a meat substitute would cut their CO2 footprint more than giving up their car. But it is hard to recommend switching from actual food to merely food-shaped stuff. That said, a huge fraction of Americans habitually eat stuff not really food, already. If those were to switch to a meat substitute, their diet would have no more non-food than before. Unfortunately, those are the least likely to switch, no matter how closely it matches the real thing, unless it gets substantially cheaper than real meat.

[generalpf]

If you’d been a vegetarian for 30 years, your evaluation that it tasted like “the real thing” is very suspect.