[null0ranje]

Ive never understood the drive to make meat substitutes instead of celebrating vegetarian cuisine. I’m not a vegetarian, but if I eat some dish that is vegetarian, why wouldn’t I want to celebrate the vegetable itself made from instead of trying to make some fake meat that never quite hits the mark?

[JeremyNT]

As a vegetarian I actually prefer stuff like Beyond when eating out.

The reason is simple: it has higher protein content than most other place based fast foods.

I'd love to live in a world with minimally processed high protein vegetarian restaurant food (like lots of legumes), but the only reliable place to get this that I know of is CAVA.

Products like Beyond are at least a step up from carb heavy pastas and grains or oily fried vegetables and starches which are the staples of most restaurant fare for vegetarians.

[kjkjadksj]

Plenty of places will give you beans. Are beyond burgers really higher protein than a bean? Taco bell the whole menu can be subbed for black beans.

[santoshalper]

I think the idea was that Beyond Meat would be a "transitional" product that would provide an ever growing vegetarian/vegan population an option that was familiar to them. For example, if you do not care about celebrating vegetables, and just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat, then a beyond burger was supposed to be for you.

The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.

[joshjob42]

I think the idea was actually that it would give people who like the taste/texture/experience of meat an option to skip meat, and lower the bar for people to eat a more plant based diet, not cater to vegetarians or vegans.

I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I think eating meat is morally terrible, I just can't be bothered to go through all the trouble to not eat or use animal products when they're everywhere, cheap, and taste fantastic. But I enjoy Impossible's products immensely, and follow the artificial meat and dairy field closely, and have been long a champion of these efforts so as to make it easy to not cause any harm to animals rather than it being a royal pain in the ass.

[kjkjadksj]

The miss the taste of meat thing anecdotally doesn’t happen to my vegetarian friends. It is like without exposure they actually lose the taste for meat. They will even get nauseous if they smell it cooked because their senses are so un primed for meat by that point.

[biztos]

> just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat

Does that actually describe a commercially relevant segment of the population?

Intuitively, having known a lot of vegetarians, I'd expect the people whose primary concern is animal cruelty to be specifically turned off by realistic fake meat.

[alewi481]

I’m a vegan. I don’t longer eat meat because I find industrial farming repugnant and environmentally problematic, not because I suddenly dislike the flavor. I grew up with meat on my plate and liked it. Now I use plant-based products to recreate the tastes and textures I remember while leaving behind the cruelty and waste. I also doubt many meat eaters are pausing to “celebrate the animal”. They’re just grabbing shrink-wrapped, shelf-stable convenience foods without much thought to how they got there.

[redwall_hp]

As a non vegetarian, I also hate how tofu gets treated as solely a vegetarian meat substitute in the US. I have no interest in having a poor substitution in a meat dish, but tofu itself is a core component of great foods that it belongs in...such as miso soup or mapo tofu.

[PaulHoule]

Diced, fried in cubes, and served on a bed of cous-cous with soy sauce. Might not be traditional in any culture but it is cheap and fast to cook with minimal skill.

[rconti]

I think there are billions of people around the world, in every country on this planet celebrating vegetarian cuisine, and this is a company participating in a drive to provide an alternative. It's not a sinister drive to wipe out traditional vegetarian cuisine.

[doctorpangloss]

Is it really that complicated? There are many countries, together over 2b people, with cultural hegemonies, where eating meat is the not-so-invisible part of the racial and national identity. It’s like asking why “we” do not celebrate non-Abrahamic religions.