I always wondered who their demographic was. The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver (never mind issues surrounding industrial agriculture). Health-conscious folks would take one look at the ingredient list and bail because of the heavy processing and industrial fillers. You've got bodybuilders and athletes skipping it because it lacks the micronutrient density and bioavailability of real animal protein. Everyday folks aren't exactly lining up to pay a "green premium" for something that tastes almost like a burger but costs more and offers less. It feels like they built a product for a tiny, hyper-specific niche: people who desperately crave the experience of a fast-food patty but have an ideological dealbreaker with meat, while being well off enough that finances aren't carefully managed and loose enough in their convictions that a burger-joint is still ok. It always seemed like an odd propsition to me, even if cool in some ways.
Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste.
Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty. So from a health conscious point of view, it's a decent substitute.
Then there are the people who just want to reduce their meat consumption overall. Maybe they're not vegan or vegetarian, but they're trying to watch their saturated fat intake, or reduce their carbon impact, or they suffer from gout and are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat to ease that.
Sometimes you just want to go out with your friends for a burger, and the Beyond patty can make a better substitute than a black bean or mushroom patty that used to be common.
And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat. I have, for a long time, done a low meat diet; I don't avoid it entirely, but I try not to eat it at every meal. It provides a nice alternative for that.
Is it a bit of a niche market? Sure. But, not every product needs to be for everyone.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers
Not sure what health-conscious people you know, but I'd hazard to guess that most would choose the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man over the ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils.
You may have a point about processing, but I think by talking about "most people" you have invalidated any future points you may be trying to make.
For example:
"single natural ingredient"
not every cow is only fed with grass, and what about that grass, has it been treated, etc...
also
Neu5Gc
Mammal meat contains it, Humans have lost the enzyme (perhaps over that time since "the dawn of man"), it causes inflammation.
Looking at chimpanzee diets, I don't think our common ancestor was regularly eating burgers. More likely insects and leaves...which do not contain Neu5Gc.
As a self-proclaimed "healthy person", I'm not regularly eating either of these, but unless I know where the meat comes from, I'm likely sticking to the non-inflammatory burger.
> Looking at chimpanzee diets, I don't think our common ancestor was regularly eating burgers. More likely insects and leaves...which do not contain Neu5Gc.
Chimpanzees eat plenty of meat. They particularly enjoy hunting and eating monkeys, for example.
> not every cow is only fed with grass, and what about that grass, has it been treated, etc...
the (low) possibility of mad cow always lurks in my mind when discussing things like this. I have a deep fear of prions.
The much more common scenario is the use of growth hormones in cows - to the point that pro athletes traveling/competing in Central and South America are instructed to avoid beef altogether as they later test positive in their drug tests for anabolic steroids.
I personally opt for meat over vegetarian options when given the choice to make sure I get sufficient protein (I do track and I struggle to get enough when eating vegetarian) but I still would vastly prefer more meat alternatives. I'm always very impressed by the Beyond options and I'm glad it's very slowly becoming more mainstream. I remember the first time I'd had an Impossible Burger was in San francisco about 10 years ago - a group of friends and I were talking about this "crazy meatless burger that still feels/tastes like meat" and we searched out a restaurant that offered it. The fact that national fast food chains are offering it now is indicative of the progress being made in society and normalizing the meatless alternatives.
The "dawn of man" was perhaps 100,000 years ago. Humans, in some regions, have been raising cattle for maybe 10% of that time. And for almost all of that 10%, beef was a luxury good eaten only on occasion except by the very rich. It was certainly not a staple food. Common people, when they ate meat, were much more likely to eat fish, sheep, and goats. Cattle were mostly raised for milk and as draught animals. There is absolutely nothing natural or ancient about contemporary consumption of factory-farmed beef, either in quantity or in the manner of production.
> And for almost all of that 10%, beef was a luxury good
This is simply not true. As soon as we were able, we ate almost all megafauna to extinction. Once we mastered pastoralism, peoples who engaged in it continued eating high-meat diets. Even for more settled peoples, going up to medieval or colonial times, beef or other meat was often present in a daily stew in some form.
You seem to think that the only way to eat a cow is to raise it. Humans have been hunting before a long time. Before cattle were domesticated, they were wild, and were hunted and eaten. So were other ruminants with similar meat flavors.
So yes, cattle (and their ancestors, and their relatives) have been human food since the dawn of man.
Not if you understand how Black Angus turns into that patty, or, more accurately, how Black Angus turns into Black Angus.
OTOH, plenty do attempt to source that single natural ingredient from somewhere that produces it as it was produced at the dawn of man. Unfortunately you'll find most such product claims are scams.
I stopped eating premium beef when I was old enough (5) to understand the meat packers' auction paid about the same for a dead cow we collected from the field as a live one. And ours were 100% field raised never barned, with few enough cattle rotating through fields that every field was primarily used to farm hay we sold to the mass producers.
IOW, can't get more natural, and can't get healthier cattle. If you wanted to eat one, you'd eat one of ours. And still, the packers didn't care if the carcass was alive or inexplicably dead.
> the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man.
The fact that meat comes from a single source doesn’t make it automatically healthier, so is ricin, cyanide and polonium yet I wouldn’t include any of them in my diet. Plant based protein is healthier than its animal counterpart and this is proven by proper scientific studies, not by Tik-tok stars or nutrition “experts”.
Unfortunately, it’s barely natural and there’s definitely more than one ingredient int he patty at McDonald…
I agree beyond is ultra processed. I disagree on the fact that it’s worse than most patty. Sure you have 100% organic beef patty, but in most burger places I got to, beyond still sounds like like the better choice, from a health point of view.
And let’s not forget the quantity of meat we consume, it’s too much anyway, yet another reason why a batons burger is probably better.
And finally, environmentally, also better than classic burger.
But it is true one could take a salad at McDonalds, that would be even better.
Modern industrial farming practices are so far removed from "natural" with how they are processed that an ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils is more far more "natural" by comparison.
If you want to simply go by societal resilience from biorisks then switching to more easily controllable substances like plant based meat for protein would be an absolute win.
I know a few fitness people and they've all moved past being overly worried about an ingredient list that includes words with multiple syllables. On the contrary, they usually seem pretty content to find out what all the oddities on an ingredient list mean.
Hamburger patties are processed, I don't know who y'all are kidding.
At the end of the day, red meat is bad for you. Processed red meat is in the same category as carcinogen as Alcohol and Tobacco. To put into perspective, diet coke is two categories lower. And it doesn't get much more artificial than that. Bacon is basically cigarettes in meat form, and hamburgers are just heart disease in a bun.
Believe it or not, starches and oils are genuinely healthier than meat. Meat is basically just bad for you, or at least most of it.
And before I hear more "dawn of man" stuff - uh, no. For most of human history, humans ate very little meat. It was mostly plants.
And, of the meat they did eat, it was nothing like the meat we have today. We eat extremely fatty farmed meat, they ate lean game meat. Farmed meat is a very new invention.
There is still lean meat today! Hamburgers are not it, though.
Same IARC group does not equal same risk. Group 1 just means the evidence is strong, not that the danger is equivalent. Smoking increases lung cancer risk by 2,000-3,000%. Daily processed meat increases colorectal cancer risk from around 4.5% to 5%. calling bacon "cigarettes in meat form" is wildly misleading.
Yes, I know that, my point is we know, almost definitely, that processed red meat causes cancer.
For many processes ingredients, like aspartame, we don't know. We're pretty sure it doesn't cause cancer. But from the way people talk about aspartame versus pastrami, you wouldn't know that.
And I stand by what I said about bacon. It's health detriments are much much worse than just colorectal risk - it heightens your risk of almost all cancers, similar to tobacco, due to inflammation and free radicals. And that's not even touching on heart disease, which is the more realistic concern.
It is good provocation even if it is poor analogy.
This is because bacon is more like cigarettes than most people assume, even if far less dangerous in practice.
Like another example is "sugar is poison." which is also structured as a factual equivalence and also gesturing at something real and also designed to land as a stronger claim than the evidence warrants.
"they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty"
If you buy a Beyond patty, it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store. Comparing it with a fast food burger isn't really fair.
>it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store
We're not comparing fairly here. A finished hamburger patty is not pure ground beef. Did you ever make a hamburger patty yourself? You add salt and spices at a minimum.
A more fair comparison would be looking at store-bought hamburger patties. That's the same category of food.
I just compared Beyond (0.75g salt per 100g) and block house American Burger (0.88g per 100g). The patties are somewhat similar in weight, too (113g and 125g). So both in absolute, and weight relative amounts the Beyond burger has less sodium.
You can make an awesome burger pattie with beef, onion, garlic, a touch of finely chopped jalapeno and some herbs and spices etc. You don't need to add salt.
I believe the claim being made here is that "a beyond burger" is a thing which fast food chains and supermarkets will offer as an alternative to "a beef burger", that almost nobody will make their own burgers.
I have no opinion about the economics of the brand itself; as a vegetarian I've always thought they were over-priced, and also that it was a shame I don't have a huge range of alternatives, as I actually like spicy bean burgers and can't find them any more*. In fact, because of the limited alternatives in my local markets, I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans.
* I don't know how much of this is "bean burgers are no longer popular" vs. "I moved country and Berlin has never heard of them"; for Quorn I do at least know it's the latter.
People who make their own burgers will always make healthy burgers, whether meat or vegan.
People who buy burgers or eat out are likely to get less healthy burgers, if you look at highest selling supermarket burgers, both meat and vegan options are ALL high in salt for example.
That is just wrong. I'm not sure what to say. You don't really need salt in many things. Don't get me wrong, I like salt, but things can taste amazing without it.
This whole thread is talking about BeyondMeat burgers.
If you're comparing the healthiness of a premade vegan burger patty, you need to compare it to a premade (or equivalent homemmade) beef patty. You can't take salt out of the beef patty comparison and say "look it's better"
Edit: But you can compare it to actual products on shelves. The first frozen burger brand I can think of that would be a good comparison is frozen Bubba burger. If we compare the sodium content, Beyond patty is 3-4x higher in sodium. Beef wins! :) Although Beyond has half the fat.
which is much more easily explained by a garbage diet, no preventative medicine so to speak of, obesity, work/family/financial stress. there is a lot of space between 2100 mg of sodium for a 3 piece chicken w/ fries, and ~150 mg to put a little life into a patty.
And high water increases likelihood of electrocution. And very high water increases likelihood of finding yourself with a wet T-shirt.
"Increases likelihood" is bullshit at best (manipulation more typically) without quantifying how much, and how much would it need to be to be remotely significant.
You absolutely need salt for a good burger, and just about any meat. Almost anything, really. Salt is not optional. Beef tastes less like beef without salt.
You don't need salt and spices to make a burger, it can be 100% beef with no additives. A pinch of salt can be like 0.3g/burger and you're fine as well.
I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g
I remember working in a restaurant many years ago, where it was part of new hire training to demonstrate the importance of salt and pepper to a burger's taste. We would make 3 burgers, one no seasoning, one poorly seasoned, and one properly seasoned to the spec, and then we would taste test them all. The difference in taste was so night and day I was shocked the first time I participated in the test. Yeah I guess you don't technically need salt and spices, but not adding them or using just a pinch is not the same thing at all.
I think the problem is lot's of people here don't have much kitchen experience and underestimate the effect.
But anyway, I think a pre-seasoned vegan ready made burger patty should only be compared to a pre-seasoned meat burger patty. It's an Apples and Oranges comparison with little meaning.
If you compare the high sodium of a vegan ground beef replacement with ground beef, that's fair game. The one from Beyond here is actually a good example of too high sodium. I won't judge. I only care about the comparison, not the company.
I was going to edit the comment with this but in Canada we have a company called Metro(grocer) and they often sell 4x fresh beef patties for ~$4 which is 1lb(454g) of ground beef and exactly nothing else.
It's good to eat sans salt on bbq with your desired (typically salty) toppings.
I know people salt the patty while cooking, but the topic at hand is Beyond and their patties.
....which should be compared against other premade patties and how people make and serve beef patties, not against the theoretical option that people could choose to omit salt.
The whole "salt" angle is bikeshedding - no one advocated Beyond for salt, they pick it for all of the other health benefits (fats, cholesterol)
Salt, among the ingredients in the average burger is the most likely to cause you problems. Calling it bikeshedding is a massive stretch. In a talk of the importance of the contents of your diet related only to burgers, salt is the exact opposite of bikeshedding.
Nothing whatsoever is stopping Beyond from removing salt and allowing people to salt their own burgers, as they already do.
The contribution of salt in hypertension and other issues is overblown in popular media.
I'm on blood pressure meds. I regularly check in with doctors on things. No, you shouldn't be eating unlimited salt, but sugar and cholesterol are killing (and debilitating) many more of us.
I avoided needing medicine by altering my diet to tone down salt, unhealthy fat, and sugar intake. My doctor was surprised as "everyone just takes the meds."
Still meat is very low sodium, it is weird to say plant based alternatives have less sodium since both have as much salt as you add since there is almost none naturally.
But then you're comparing apples an oranges: meat is low in sodium in its unprocessed form, but so are all the ingredients of the plant-based alternative before adding salt.
What matters is not so much the natural form, it is how the product is typically consumed.
But of course I see your point that with home made meat-based patties, you are in control of how much salt you want to add, while with factory made patties, you have to take what you get, it's typically not possible to "take away" salt. Mind you, though, the latter argument holds for both plant-based and meat-based factory-made patties.
The difference is you CAN'T get Beyond meat to make patties without preservative-levels of sodium. You CAN get ground beef and make patties without preservative-levels of sodium.
Did you get the point about how you usually season meat (with salt) before you eat it? Beyond Beef has 230mg of sodium per 100g (according to their website), even a pinch of salt you add for seasoning easily contains 10x that amount.
Also, do you expect the vegan alternative to have exactly the same nutritional values as their meat counterparts?
Look, I don't even know why I'm defending Beyond here, I'm certainly not a fan (as a matter of fact, I don't like their beef patties). But I think the arguments you've made are not entirely fair.
The sodium content is about 3x higher. It doesn't taste 3x higher.
If you're salting your recipe with traditional ground beef, you're doing the same with Beyond. If not, same.
I do not expect or even encourage the content of any alternative to match the nutritional value of the real deal.
A typical pinch of salt is 300mg. Not 2300mg.
When the base product has 3x as much sodium, that is a problem. It doesn't need that much because as you stated, you can add salt during cooking. As a great example, let's take a use case for Beyond which is taco meat. I add taco seasoning (my own which is about 30% sodium compared to a traditional) and now the Beyond version is still roughly 250% the sodium content.
I can't remove the sodium they add. It's not a product I like or desire. It's more expensive. It's less healthy (note how often I mention reduced salt) for myself.
Also, I have been a strict vegan in life for about 5 years. I still didn't eat Beyond (aside from tasting it) during that period (it was available).
I'm not really trying to attack Beyond here, it's all personal preference at the end of the day. I make 95% of my food, from bread to tomato sauce to pickled peppers and hot sauce. When I am reaching for a vegan protein, I reach for lentils.
I have made burgers hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never done more than roll ground beef into a ball ans squish it flat. Salt and spices are completely unnecessarily, who am I, Gordon Ramsey? Sliced onion on top of the patty does plenty of work.
You are comparing a prepared product to a raw ingredient. Raw beef is pretty boring which is why every single restaurant add some combination of salt, pepper, mayo, ketchup, mustard, oil, butter, gochujang, etc to make it into food. If you want to convince the world to eat unseasoned beef and onion burgers be my guest but you have a tougher hill to climb than the vegetarians. Eat what makes you happy, but maybe acknowledge it's not actual cooking.
Pure soy doesn't taste too good in my experience. I tend to prep the dehydrated stuff I get with (ironically) soy sauce, which is quite salty, plus whatever else the recipe I'm using the soy in calls for. In the case of soy burgers, that mince needs some binding agent.
It's odd, as I generally agree that "pure soya" doesn't taste that great, but I do prefer the taste of edamame beans which are just young soybeans. Products like tofu generally need more flavour adding to it - and I personally like tofu and eat it fairly regularly, so I'm not biased against it.
Also, I like the taste of Natto (soybeans fermented in straw) though that's generally thought of as an acquired taste.
I've never eaten a beyond burger or anything like that at home. At home the improvement in flavour over tofu or just beans isn't worth it. I can get flavour from herbs spices and other ingredients. I've only ever eaten beyond burgers at restaurants.
"Loaded with sodium" is what the agrolobby wants you to think. If you knew what goes into supermarket burger patties I guarantee you would never want to touch them ever again. Look up nitrates for starter, which is used as a preservative in some meat products: burgers, hotdogs, cold cuts.
I think a lot of those here are likely warehouse club buyers- Costco doesn't add anything to their ground beef or frozen patties. Sams 'seasons' some of their patties, but no nitrates.
You asked "Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?"
My point was that groceries in general don't matter, only burgers. Some people almost never eat burgers at home and eat them exclusively at places like Burger King.
> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it
I just did a quick search on Uber Eats in NYC. Every Beyond Burger I found was between $3-5 more than a regular burger. That’s the reason I stopped eating them, I actually quite like the texture and flavor. I just don’t like the price.
I never buy beyond/impossible at restaurants because of this.
I often have some at home and instead of having two red meat burgers have one and one of these, occasionally when they go on sale at Costco I’ll buy a bunch.
I am not vegan or vegetarian but do seek ways to reduce my red meat intake which years ago was grilling ribeyes 4-5 nights a week. I was unreasonably unhealthy and having alternate options helped balance my health out over the long run. I like both beyond burgers and impossible. I wish they were cheaper than hamburger meat, when I compare to buying hamburger meat in bulk it’s still more expensive at this point
So you've decided it's more ethical it not be born or live at all. Obviously the only reason beef cattle exist at all is because we eat them.
It doesn't seem such a clear cut ethical decision to me. Certainly there are some forms of raising livestock that are terrible (broiler chickens come to mind), but there are other forms that actually seem quite pleasant for the animals most of the time (e.g. free-range cattle).
Free-range isn't pleasant at all, that's a fair bit of clever marketing. It's virtually impossible to find meat that has lived a "pleasant" life and slaughter. I'd eat meat myself if I could find a reliable and cost effective source of ethical farming.
You actually could find a reliable and cost effective source of ethical ranching, it typically requires buying e.g. a whole side of beef from a specific ranch.
Not very convenient, but if you worry so much about the conditions of the animal, that gives you a way to choose one that fits your standards.
I'm a bit of a fence sitter so I might actually be their target market. Very athletic, a bit health concious but not crazy about it in regards to diet. If I am eating out, usually my macros are not a big part of decision making. If there is a meatless option that might actually be good for a bit of a fibre boost, considering all the other protein I am intaking.
It's important to remember also that not athletic individuals are high achieving bodybuilders with super strict macro diets. Most other sports only require a moderate attention to diet, especially at an amateur level. Bodybuilding is very diet focused, rather than strength and skill focused.
Like all burgers this is a high protein, low fiber food option. It probably has more in common with your protein shake, being high in pea and other proteins but also has a high amount of sodium. This is a splurge food like any burger is. If you are looking for fiber, vegetables have them. Also impossible burgers taste better as they smell like coconuts instead of peas when they are cooked.
Not everyone cares about processing or salt. And like the OP said it's not a comparison to a bean burger that matters, they weren't going to chose that anyway, it's the comparison to real meat
> Water, Yellow Pea Protein*, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
It’s ultra processed food devoid of micronutrients with low quality protein and poor bioavailability.
Health conscious folks would definitely not choose this. In fact, it’s all the things you try to avoid as soon as you start being health conscious. Folks who want to believe they are being health conscious may be convinced via marketing to buy it, but anyone seriously invested in their nutrition would steer very clear of these.
Health conscious ethical vegan here. I eat these fairly often. The protein content is fine. I get micronutrients from other sources. I track all my calories and macros, every single day. My diet is perfectly balanced, thanks very much.
Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Looks like agree that it's not great but you compensate elsewhere. If you chose the "hard way" of limiting your menu to vegan why not pick the options with less compromises? Even paper can be food as long as you compensate elsewhere.
> Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Are you maybe conflating "unhealthy" with "not explicitly healthy"? Plenty of foods are unequivocally unhealthy, anything else you eat will not compensate. You don't "compensate" for eating a lot of ultraprocessed food because some of the contents of that food should not be in your body at all. You can't always "subtract" by eating other food. Not saying this is the case for you and these burgers.
That's not what I meant. If you eat extra "crap" (salt, sugar, fat, palm oil, coloring, additives, etc.) in one food you can't always balance it out with another food. It's not all like counting calories, only care about the total because some things you shouldn't eat in any measurable quantity.
And if I make the effort of eating vegan also for health reasons, why would I go for the ultraprocessed vegan option? To be clear, I wasn't talking about this particular burger, just the general logic that "this food is fine because I can get what I actually need elsewhere" and that "healthy/unhealthy is relative to what else you eat". It's not, some things are objectively unhealthy and there's no option to eat something else to "balance" it.
Health conscious vege here, I'd never touch these things with a 10 ft pole when I can make a bean patty burger or halloumi burger for 50% of the price and 300% of the flavor
Thank you. Bean burgers are delicious. I don’t eat them as part of my normal diet, but have no qualms with them and could always share a meal with my vegan friends.
Nowadays it’s all fake meat products which I would never put in my body, and there’s this weird social pressure where I’m being silly by “refusing to eat vegan foods”.
Fruits and vegetables and legumes are delicious, I will eat all of them.
I love just blitzing oats, carrots, onions as a base and then throwing in anything else like kidney beans or courgettes. Makes great veggie burgers you can just cook in the oven. Takes no time at all and less effort to cook than a beefburger.
Health conscious drinker here. I have a double bourbon every few weeks. My diet is perfectly balanced. Alcohol still is not healthy and the rest of my diet has absolutely zero to do with that. I am healthy in light of everything else I eat; any individual item is still healthy or not.
Yes, some harms aren't linear no-threshold in their nature. Doesn't change the fact that the unhealthy doesn't become healthy because you eat a salad for lunch.
However you do realize "ultra processing" here means mechanically separating whole peas to get the protein part? Not trying to correct you or make your point invalid just flagging "processing" is not the scary thing agro lobby trying to make it, in this case. In fact they probably got super scared of meat alternatives and did everything in their power to make it go away.
Beyond meat doesn't have nitrates, filler, stabilizers or "85% meat" hence it's way more healthy than most meat-based patties or meat products.
Again, agrolobby by its full-page ads in newspapers successfully turned plant-based food which is objectively, scientifically proven to be healthy, to something unnatural, "chemical" and unhealthy.
There are a lot of people who _thrive_ off of a 100% beef diet, I don’t think there is anyone who could _survive_ off of 100% beyond meat burgers. I don’t think you can say they are way healthier than beef by any stretch of the imagination.
And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.
Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.
And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.
See that's the same thought the agrolobby used to weaponize "chemical-sounding", scary names. HCl is the same your stomach uses to digest food and used in making e.g. "organic" sea salt.
I see the same argument very often these days: that only single-ingredient, "traditional" food is good.
What is this about “the agrolobby”? I haven’t eaten processed foods in decades. I started when I was a kid because I didn’t like eating things where I didn’t know all the ingredients. Not from marketing or lobbying or trends. I just stopped eating processed foods, felt better, and now if I eat any processed foods I get ill, so I don’t eat them.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t eat processed foods because of marketing or advertising or lobbying they’ve been exposed to. There is a solid rational to eat whole foods, and anyone I know who does not eat processed foods does it because they’d rather eat whole foods.
There is a ton of research to suggest processed foods are safe to eat. One could also make the argument these are all funded by their own lobbying groups. The truth of the matter is nutrition is complicated, there is likely more than one answer, and we definitely do not know them.
Not everyone who disagreed has been swindled by some corporation.
HCl is toxic when ingested btw. The fact it is in your body does not mean it’s safe to consume.
My point was there is very much this kind of "whispering propaganda" when it came to vegan food, labeling it as unhealthy, "processed" and full of chemicals.
Most of it was and is done by the "agrolobby", sometimes subtly, sometimes not, e.g. through full-page ads in the NYT, laying out scary-sounding chemical ingredients. The agriculture sector collectively shat its pants when something came along for the first time in centuries that could even slightly change consumer habits.
This is not contending with the health aspects of it though. It is highly processed and it uses a bunch of toxic chemicals to make it, regardless of what any lobbying groups say.
These are the people who argue that soymilk and seed oils are healthy. Even if they're processed with using solvents such as hexane and stuff it's just processing, right? Your also "processing" when you peal your potatoes. Same thing !
Maybe they're hoping there exists a non-crazy subset of "health conscious" population, i.e. people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin, who don't see food manufacturing plants as temples of Satan, and are otherwise health conscious and not just playing the fitness fad social games.
There are different classes of food processing, with very different properties.
The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such processed food in an incorrect way, by making food that has an unbalanced composition, for instance food that has too much sugar.
On the other hand, the food processing methods that cause irreversible transformations of food, i.e. mixing various ingredients and/or using certain food treatments, e.g. heating, are quite likely to have harmful effects on food quality, when they are done in an industrial setting, instead of being done at home. The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. So any useless or even harmful ingredients will be used if those reduce the production cost, as long as the food still looks appetizing and it has a good taste provided e.g. by excessive sugar, salt and bad quality fat.
So the problem is less that food processing methods are bad per se. The problem is that most producers of processed food cannot be trusted to use processing methods that are good for the customer, instead of being good only for the producer. Now there are a lot of regulations that prevent some of the most harmful methods of food adulteration that were used in the past, but they are still not severe enough to ensure that every producer makes healthy food.
> The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost.
Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but it's not all evil either. They also care about appeasing regulators in countries where food regulations exist, and they may care a bit personally since they themselves and/or their family is eating that too, so I wouldn't necessarily paint them as completely disconnected from the rest of society.
Now, on the other hand, the industrial producers have a few more things going in their favor, such as they actually have quality control metrics, and they are in actual position to make good on caring about food. Home kitchens are not, regular people have neither knowledge nor appreciation of the complex chemistry involved, and even if they did, the equipment used in home kitchens is too crude to allow for consistent quality (not that we can hope for any with no supply chain control either).
(The slightly-fancy restaurants are arguably the worst - they combine all the bad incentives of a high-volume, low-margin commercial operation, with equipment and setup inadequate to guarantee any kind of process quality control. Contrast that with e.g. McDonald's - they may be serving mediocre food at best, but they do it with engineering precision, and you can be sure they aren't just microwaving you an old chicken breast and adding burn marks with an electric grill to make it look like you'd expect for a $50 menu item with a name written in French.)
So the irony is, the industrial producers may have misaligned incentives, but they're also the only ones in position to deliver actually healthy and quality food. Regular people have neither knowledge nor equipment for that, and all the "healthy eating" fads abusing real scientific terms and imbuing them with quasi-religious meaning is not helping. In reality, people just eat stuff and make up stories they don't even verify to feel good with their choices. Which, like with other such belief systems, is fine, until they believe their own stories so much they try to force others to believe in them too.
While you are right that industrial producers could deliver high quality healthy food, when I go to any supermarket and I look at the huge variety of food offerings, after I exclude the raw food ingredients, like fresh or frozen vegetables or fruits or meat, various kinds of seeds or flour or oil, etc., from what remains 99.99% contain various kinds of garbage that I do not want in my body.
Even when such food products are intended to resemble food that I used to eat at home, based on traditional recipes, the modern industrial recipes are very different, with all expensive ingredients substituted completely or partially with worse but cheaper alternatives, and with many extra additives that do not provide any nutritional benefit, but they just improve the texture and taste to resemble that of products made with more expensive ingredients or with ingredients that cause a shorter shelf life.
So in practice, the food producers could, but they don't.
Listing "risk factors" without quantifying them is useless waste of readers' time, but even then, "diet" is only one of eight listed, with three others being the obvious ones - alcohol, smoking, and low physical activity/obesity (arguably those should be two separate ones).
-
The chart you linked only talks about incidence ratio, and is more than adequately explained by improvements in access to tests, quality of tests, as well as improvements in healthcare in general, as people don't suffer and die today from what they did up to few decades ago - or anything else, really, since the world has been steadily improving across the board in every dimension.
In fact, non-linear effects of population growth alone could explain that chart: people talk more, including about colon cancer, so over time, more people in the population with access to testing would go test themselves after being made aware of the potential problem, biasing the sample.
Or, more fundamentally, the fact that medicine graduated from voodoo to proper science only around 100 years ago, would explain it too, because we're less than a century into doing proper studies about anything at all.
Strange, every single source I can find blame diets and lifestyles, but you might be right and everyone else is wrong, we just "talk more about it"... you have a good source of copium my friend
It's easy to blame diets and lifestyles because you don't have to be specific, and if reality disagrees with your hypothesis, you can claim the victim didn't hold their lifestyle or diet right. Diet/exercise are the ultimate "fuck off" advice.
> It's easy to blame diets and lifestyles because you don't have to be specific
It's extremely specific actually: obesity, smoked meat, red meat, alcohol, cigarettes, high sugar, low fibers, nitrites and a shit loads of additives that are banned in the EU but not in the US.
> Diet/exercise are the ultimate "fuck off" advice.
No, it's a every simple and actionable advice actually, you can reduce your chances of cancer by 50-75% by "diet and exercise"
> if reality disagrees with your hypothesis
It does not disagree with "my" hypothesis (which is the universal consensus btw)
> you can claim the victim didn't hold their lifestyle or diet right
It's your life, do as you please, you're a big boy, you'll be the only one paying the price ultimately. I don't exercise and eat clean because it makes me invincible, I do it because it makes me feel better, improve my odds at pretty much everything in life and increase my health span dramatically, even if I die of cancer next month I am already benefiting from my actions every single day.
> tobacco, diet, infection, obesity, and other factors contribute approximately 25–30%, 30–35%, 15–20%, 10–20%, and 10–15%, respectively, to the incidence of all cancer deaths in the USA
I haven’t been eating processed foods for several decades now. Just because it’s trendy at the moment doesn’t make it wrong, nor does it make those who abstrain game players.
I would say veganism is more trendy at the moment. That doesnt discredit anything about the vegan diet.
> Ultra-processed foods: Ultra-processed foods typically have more than 1 ingredient that you never or rarely find in a kitchen. They also tend to include many additives and ingredients that are not typically used in home cooking, such as preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, and artificial colours and flavours. These foods generally have a long shelf life.
Are there ingredients actually in the Beyond burger?
"E123 & co" are descriptors covering both "organic" and "synthetic" substances, because their role is to add precision and clarity to an engineering process, not entertain the pseudoscientific naturalistic bullshit masses buy into (which by itself is just a way for another industry to make money - or do you think people come up with those fitness/healthy eating fads all on their own?).
LOL @ the downvotes. I'm sure that's why Americans are so healthy, with huge supermarkets stocked to the brim with food so ultraprocessed that there are things that pretend to be called "cheese" but can't be sold as cheese.
They must be panicly afraid of salt and saturated fat instead then, since that was OP's argument for "health conscious". Yet still insist on a simulacrum of a burger, instead of having a chicken breast.
This product will only succeed if its reasonably cheaper than the cheapest meat (not just beef). It is and forever will be inferior to meat as a food product for the vast majority of consumers. Perhaps in some vision of the future the dominant consumer is Hindu and they may find the product acceptable, but they'll still be price conscious.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I don't know man. I'm a health conscious person and I could just as easily choose normal chicken meat, or a beef steak that's not a hamburger, or fatty fish (omega-3!!). Why would I choose a hamburger substitute? I don't even particularly crave hamburgers.
I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, and it seems to be okay when it comes to amount of industrial fillers. It seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. So I guess it's not that bad, but I still don't still really have a reason to choose it.
On days when I don't particularly want to eat a lot of meat, I just eat more rice, vegetables and beans. It's not that hard?
I think the OP is right: their niche seemed to be people who crave something like a hamburger or at least real meat while having an ideological opposition against meat and enough money.
It does seem like that is literally what happened.
The only people i ever hear say anything positive about beyond burger (after the novelty wore off) was meat eaters. Vegeterians, for whatever reason, tended not to like it. But meat eaters were always going to choose meat anyways, so it seems like nobody actually bought it.
I feel like I am exactly the target demographic. Love the taste of meat. Would eat it every day if there were no consequences. But I mostly cook vegetarian at home because my wife is veg and I do somewhat care about the impacts of factory farming ('ethical' meat being stupid expensive). For me Beyond burgers are a good way to scratch that itch a bit. I feel like there must be many more people like me because meat is both delicious and problematic but maybe that's my own bias.
> The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals
You can agree with this sentiment (ideology?) and not be vegan, if you aren't willing to give up meat. giving up meat is what defines this demographic.
Relative to a population of people willing to give up meat, would you assume there is no difference in "liking how plants taste" versus the general population? I'd assume it correlates directly with "willingness to give up meat".
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
Maybe, but in context its a false dichotomy, why wouldn't they pick better substitutes e.g. non-average meat?
You did such a good job of listing out reasons why niche demographics would skip a meat-free burger, without listing the actual core demographic who consumes them: Vegans and vegetarians, i.e. people who enjoy eating burgers but don’t eat meat.
> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat
I'm a vegetarian. I have never _not_ paid at least $2 premium to sub in an Impossible or Beyond patty. I've had tons of them, there are some in my freezer.
I think it's pretty obvious from their financial results that this company is a commercial failure, and the subset of people who consume their product on a regular basis is vanishingly small.
Do some people occasionally eat fake meat? Sure. Enough to build a sustainable business? Less clear.
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
I would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.
Are people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc).
There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-)
Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).
There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
Uhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
But the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
I agree it's probably healthier to eat wild meat or homegrown meat grown on healthy pasture than it is to eat feedlot meat grown on whatever they feed them there. There are lots of differences between them.
Not particularly because it has more fat though. While it's true that wild deer for example especially in warmer climates can have very little fat, there are plenty of animals that were traditionally eaten all over the world that have much higher proportions of fat. Fish, geese and ducks and many kinds of birds, whales and seals and lots of aquatic mammals, bears, etc.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of industrial beef at all I'm just trying to say that natural animal fat isn't necessarily unhealthy. (I really want to know actually if it is, because I do eat a lot of it, and have for much of my life. As far as I can tell I'm very healthy but I'm always open to learning. I have not yet found any compelling evidence for natural animal fat being bad.)
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
Different kinds of fruits from around the world may well have more in common with each other than categorically new synthetic compounds which are found in processed food.
Pretty much all people ate real foods - plants, animals, and fungus, and ferments of these, all over the world. There are categorical chemical differences between this stuff and much modern food.
> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
It doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.)
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
FWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea.
Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.
the issue with wild meat is going to be all parasites in the animal, at least according to friends who hunt (and when they managed to get something, which doesn't seem to be a given).
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.
I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
You could kill a stray! Or is it better to have someone else handle that "natural" part, or would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
Since when have vegans used dog meat in a xenophobic way? The entire point of the dog meat comparison is to highlight that meat consumption is cultural and that other cultures eat animals we consider to not be food even though they are an animal that has equivalent intelligence to animals we do eat.
Dogs are the perfect example, not because of xenophobia, but because they are such a plain example of hypocrisy that can be refuted on every point.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way, presenting it as an absurd choice that is meant to demonstrate the supposed depravity of meat eaters, even though it's wholly a cultural preference. Enough of this Motte and Bailey crap.
Of course xenophobia is nothing new to most internet veganists, their whole thing is being intolerant to the culture of billions of people around the world, so a little additional intolerance to a few Asian countries (and a few Swiss people) probably seems like no biggie.
That's patently absurd. For almost every vegan, Veganism is predicated on the belief that all animal lives should be treated equally, that there is no difference between livestock and pets except cultural!
Saying that dog meat is an example of "depravity of meat eaters" makes no sense because the "depravity of meat eaters" is demonstrable... with any meat? That's the entire point of veganism! If a vegan believes that meat eaters are depraved, they believe they are depraved whether they eat cats, dogs, cows or pigs.
You may find some xenophobic people who are vegans but what you're much more likely to find is meat eaters who think that eating dog meat in Wuhan is depraved while eating pigs in New York is totally acceptable. Who do you think is signing the "end dog meat" petitions? Western meat eaters!
I have personally never met a vegan in person or online who thought that dog meat was more depraved than pig meat. The go to argument that vegans make is that pigs and dogs are of equivalent intelligence, that you could raise a pig as you raise a dog and have the same bond. Framing the dog meat argument as xenophobic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and requires either a wilful ignorance or... I don't know. I cannot even understand how you contorted yourself into believing this.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way
You apparently have never heard or seen the fairly widespread 'the only difference is your perception' line of vegan merchandise which uses dog meat it in the opposite way: it calls out the hypocrisy of all meat-but-not-dog people. Not of a select group of people eating dog meat.
This seems off to me... Curious why you are so avidly against veganism? Most of them are not doing any harm to others, would you be against a charity that aimed to reduce harm to children?
> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
No, if anything plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet.
Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.
Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.
Just going to address a few points here in case people believe this!
> plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet
The idea that herbivores have a "less diverse" diet is rubbish. Lots of herbivores (like elephants or deer) eat hundreds of different plant species.
> "ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful"
This is also rubbish. Horses, Rhinos, Elephants, and Rabbits are all highly successful non-ruminants.
Oh and the reason horses can die from too much is because they have a one-way digestive valve, so if they eat something toxic/gas-producing, they can suffer from colic, which can be fatal. Saying they only lived "a year or two" is pure speculation btw and they aren't "fragile" because of evolution, they are "fragile" because humans have bred them for extreme speed and aesthetics, at the cost of general health etc.
I don't know where you get your information from, but it all seems very biased or hyperbolic to fit a certain viewpoint.
Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
Hardly anyone is eating raw flesh of the animal they just hunted down, so no, there's not going to be many studies to find, because approximately no one has been eating non-processed food for the past several thousands of years. Not even the "health conscious" folks so deathly afraid of the sin of "processing"; they just don't realize that washing and cutting and boiling are sins too.
The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else, which made me wonder whether you felt that the person you were replying to did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words.
Being something written for another context with no words added by you to explain how it fits into the current context puts more work on the reader, which implies that the reader needs to put in work to continue to hold up their end of the conversation (whereas you don't need to put in much work or at least don't need to indicate to us that you are putting in work) which in turn tends to put you in the position of a teacher assigning us something to read as homework.
Its being longer than the average HN comment tend to carry the same implication.
Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.
I concede that it is impossible for me to tell whether you actually felt any contempt while writing your 2 comments, but many readers react negatively to even weak signs that contempt might be present.
More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.
As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I seriously doubt that health-conscious people would pick hyper-processed plants that are meant to resemble meat over plain meat+bread+vegetables that make up a non-fast-food hamburger.
I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content. Yes, he literally stopped being vegan at that point, although he still is on most days since then.
Its subpar product, with way too much questionable chemistry, worse taste (or more like structure&taste) and impact on environment is... questionable too, maybe less than real beef but probably not massively. What could be acceptable for environmental impact is lab grown real meat but even that seems to not go the direction one would expect.
> I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content
> The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver
Why not? I think there's a false conflation of veganism and health food (and gluten-free, though that's not relevant in this discussion). I love burgers, and fried chicken, and crappy chicken nuggets, but I don't want more animals to have to suffer for my sake than is necessary. I disagree on how hyper-specific that niche is.
IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.
> IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.
This is the real problem. Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now. $38 billion dollars in the US each year to subsidize meat and dairy, but only $17 million goes to fruit and vegetable farmers. It's completely backwards, especially considering the climate impact on meat and dairy farming.
>Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now
Source? That seems implausibly high.
Using your $38B/year subsidy figure gets us $112/year in subsidies per American. There's no way you can get $30 unsubsidized price from that unless you think the average American only eats beef once a week.
Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.
Average includes vegans, and I'm pretty sure they eat it less than once per week. It’s just how much meat divided by population. The previous comment shows that the consumption is not anywhere close to equally distributed.
The subsidies are also paid by vegans. Both the average meat consumption and average subsidy can be multiplied by the total population to get the total.
Im calling BS on the $30-$40 a pound beef because ive raised my own cows for personal consumption and even if I paid myself $20 an hour for every second I spent with my cows, and assumed my alfalfa field usage could produce an expensive cash crop without fertilizer, and completely ignored the opportunity loss of only caring for 1-2 cows instead of 30+, that is still a cost WAY above what my beef costs.
Without taking a side, you've skipped every step past the field here. Transportation, butchering, packaging, and grocery store shelves, with profit margins, health / sanitation checks, and shrinkage at every step
Don't forget the massive costs of lobbying governments to weaken regulations and reduce inspections and also the costs of bribing meat inspectors, and the legal expenses and lawyer fees required to defend themselves from lawsuits surrounding their illegal activities, then also the millions in fines they have to pay to settle lawsuits they lose about their bribing of meat inspectors or colluding to drive wages down or whatever other illegal thing they got caught doing. You can bet all those costs increase the prices we pay.
I still have to transport and pay for butchering and packaging myself which is done in a certified facility with sanitation checks. Oh sure grocery stores have to make a profit, but they also get better deals than I do for both transportation and butchering because they deal in bulk.
We do things at industrial scale because that saves money. If a local butcher could pay a relatively tiny amount for direct cow shipping, save multiple steps, and sell the meat for 60% of the grocery store price, they'd instantly be booming with business.
It means that when AngryData "skips every step past the field" they didn't save any notable money by doing so. Their beef costs more than unsubsidized industrial beef would cost, so when they call BS on $30-40 that is a valid call.
not sure where the GP lives but in Canada even beef raised for personal consumption needs to meet most of those things you've listed, aside from grocery-related, and as someone who's bought directly from the producer (with 3rd party butchering) the price is not substantially lower than retail; scale likely makes up for a lot of the commercial supply chain costs.
I believe it. Every summer we buy goat or lamb imported from Australia/New Zealand. It's usually less than $15/lb. Those two countries barely provide any subsidies for their farmers, and the meat is cheaper than my local farmers, even with their strict biosecurity regulations.
Even doctors who cater to the remote areas where farmers dwell get extra payments from our governments.
Very common in the United States, too.
There are a lot of doctors who get their student loans reduced or paid off by state and local governments in exchange for working a certain number of years in less-desirable locations. I've worked with a number of them.
Yeah, it's absolute nonsense. I'm paying $34/kg for direct-to-consumer beef in Australia, a country with some of the lowest agricultural subsidies in the world, including delivery and at a premium markup, during a time that beef prices have hit a historical high due to processor capacity, and I'm getting prime cuts and roasts too, not just mince.
That doesn't really make sense, though, as rice — one of the main ingredients in the aforementioned product — receives the highest subsidy rate in the USA. A Beyond Meat burger should be cheaper than a meat burger thanks to subsidies.
> I think there's a false conflation of veganism and health food
Indeed. I ate at two different vegan restaurants in a city I visited recently and they both were on par with bar or diner food, but vegan. Plenty of vegans (I'm not one, but I've got eyes...) clearly don't have a problem with that.
The key difference between the old vegans and the new vegans is hiding in plain sight. It's the Internet. It used to be that vegans went to vegan restaurants and had their own particular tradition of vegan cookery. People didn't just become vegan in isolation like they do today. The acculturated vegans still exist and I think that's who gp is referring to in that statement. The Internet vegans are different but they aren't that numerous — few people even today would make such a change in their life based on something they read online.
Despite being a vegetarian and former vegan, this is not me wading into this debate to defend the figure provided by the OP of the original comment, but this is usually the source for the statistic AFAIK: https://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/CopyofFINALSavi...
Regardless, it goes without saying (from other, more well-sourced research) that the disparity of subsidies and government assistance provided to industries that ultimately exist to produce meat compared to industries that produce fruit/vegetables is fucking absurd.
I'm struggling to understand the point you're trying to make well enough to know how to respond, other than to say vegan cooking traditions continue to exist and existed before the internet (though there were fewer vegans at the time)
People did indeed become vegan in isolation before the internet, just as they do today.
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to draw between "old vegans" and "new vegans", and how do you see it pertaining to this conversation (especially under a comment pointing out that plant-based burgers struggle to compete with traditional beef because of beef subsidies)?
Yeah, I generally think people make adult diet choices on their own.
People regularly cut out meat, alcohol, sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine, fats, etc. based on things they’ve read, moral considerations, medical recommendations, and personal health observations, not because they’ve joined a community that eschews such things.
Based on my bubble, vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters that do want to decrease their meat consumption.
At this point, in Germany at least, discounter brands like Lidl and Aldi have beaten Beyond Meat at their game though. They produce alternatives that taste as good or better, for significantly less money.
I have been vegan for 12 years. It is not that hard to make vegan burger patties at home. Or you can just cut up a block of tofu and season it to be eaten in a burger. Takes about the same time or less to cook as these Beyond grease fests. Besides there is so many cheaper alternatives these days that I very rarely buy them.
We don’t need meat alternatives. Vegan diet is cardiovascularly extremely healthy, seems to protect against most cancers, tastes good and is most importantly ethically and environmentally only viable option at this point. It’s pretty cheap as well, tofu, lentils and veggies are not exactly expensive even without all the gazillion subsidiaries pumped into meat production. [Of course your vegan diet can consist of eating only canned soda and potato chips and that is not healthy nor cheap, but the problem there is that you are a moron, not that you are vegan].
So the problem with meat alternatives is that you don’t really need them and if you want burger patties etc. you can make them at home pretty easily or these days buy cheaper alternatives sold in most supermarkets.
I get where you are coming from. I try to buy unprocessed as much as possible, but there are days where I want something that I could do myself or buy premade from the grocery store. On days like that, I'm glad I have the option to buy premade even if my self-made version tastes better, is healthier, and often cheaper.
Besides that, its a good tool to get the general omnivore to reduce meat consumption. A friend of mine does eat meat but is lowering her consumption of it. Having a convenient alternative that she doesn't have to think about and can just get prepackaged helped her half her meat consumption in a effectively a few weeks.
Vegan for 15 years. I cook 95% of my own meals, including black bean burgers, tofu, etc... Sometimes I want something that tastes like meat and I reach for a Beyond or Impossible burger. I don't need it. But I can't recreate its texture and flavor profile on my own. It's not "better" than other things I can cook. It's just different.
> ethically and environmentally only viable option at this point
Seems like a broad statement that I don't agree with, but why would it be the most important aspect unless the framework is a religious one and that's where your ethical framework derives from? It's a dietary choice, nothing more, and if you feel that way it's perfectly fine to do so, but don't blow it out of proportion.
I personally tend to enjoy some vegan food, and enjoy the people in my life who are vegan or choose other restrictions as they see fit, but if they decided it was important beyond that, such that it might impact our relationship, I'd let just let them because it's a bit silly. Eat meat, don't eat meat, pick your suppliers of whatever you eat carefully if you have the means and choose to, have your personal principles whatever they are, all the more power, it's just not much more than that, no?
Are you seriously asking me why ethics and environment might be the most important consideration in the decisions I make? I don’t use cocaine either - not a dietary choice. I also do not bludgeon poor old ladies to death with a shillelagh - not a simple choice how I decide to get my daily exercise.
Interestingly enough I also don't use cocaine and don't bludgeon poor ladies to death. I'm also not particularly tempted to do either, but if I did cocaine it certainly wouldn't be an ethical question, more of a recreational indulgence. Seems like we have more in common than different.
I gladly trash all people who live unhealthy, myself included. However, that is not what I say in the text, that is what you read into it. Examples of ”unhealthy vegans” are always flatmates who survive purely by vegan donuts or some other absurdity like that, but it has not even anecdotal evidence in terms of health benefits or the lack of thereof of the said diet or any other.
This was someone equating a chopped up tofu pattie with Beyond Meat, e.g. totally out of touch with the target market. Random ass food delivered via hamburger bun does not make it a hamburger analog, but Beyond, Impossible, etc do.
Yeah, I never understood what Beyond's core innovation was. Impossible had that whole synthetic heme thing going on. Beyond seemed almost like opportunistic mimicry. But Impossible turned out to be pretty expensive IIRC.
In my opinion as a mostly-vegetarian who used to adore burgers as a kid, the Impossible brand was by far the most realistic (and my beef-loving partner would agree, they made stroganoff with it and loved it)... but the price truly is ridiculous at this point. It started out just barely justifiable, and it's simply too high now.
I am more than a little bit outraged that animals who were raised in miserable industrial production facilities to meet an ugly end are having their parts sold for less than a decent alternative simply because of subsidies distorting the market.
If I look at walmart right now, they have Impossible 'ground beef' for $9/lb and real ground beef is more than $7/lb. So the price isn't too high everywhere.
Agree. Impossible is on a different planet in terms of being very very close to the taste of real meat. Unfortunately still premium priced.
It’s a pity that Beyond is getting so much attention because they’re not the best ambassadors for meat alternatives. People will try it, and then decide to wait another 5 years before trying again.
I still eat impossible sausage as a substitute for pork and find it pretty dang good. I grew up in appalachia so we know our pork sausage and impossible seasoned well comes close.
Aldi in Germany might be very different for all I know, but I've been vegan or vegetarian my entire adult life and I think every burger alternative besides Beyond/Impossible is quite awful, though I usually don't eat meat alternatives in the first place.
Beyond was available well before Impossible was. I used a combination of Beyond and Boca as my primary substitutes for ground beef, until Impossible came along, and now I use almost exclusively Impossible.
I don't feel like they have a niche anymore, but there was a time I considered them my top choice, before impossible dethroned them.
I love meat and I love good hamburgers. I’ve tried those Lidl and Aldi alternatives and they were uneatable for me and my family. They have slowly disappeared from the shelves. Only a couple of products remain.
I have never tried BeyondMeat but I’d be surprised that it’s so bad.
And I have eaten many classic vegan burger alternatives based on lentils, peas and chickpeas. They didn’t aim to taste like meat and were actually edible.
My vegetarian friends can now go to a restaurant (or better example yet, any event space like sports event or theme park, since having a veggie burger is pretty easy to check a box and satisfy dietary restrictions) and get any of the burger offerings on the menu with a beyond patty. Before that, the vegetarian option of only resort was often much more depressing and unsubstantial.
Reading this somewhat reminds me how the Gluten Free trend led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac.
Still, one wonders does “buying a fake burger at the ball park with my friends” translate to actual fandom and further consumption or is it just a a captive consume picking the least-worst option.
It's definitely the "least-worst option", most of the time, but I'd rather be able to eat _something_ with my friends when we go out to do something. At burger joints the burgers are usually otherwise dressed to impress, dripping with cheese and some awesome sauce; those are quite good with an Impossible patty subbed in. But American restaurants in my experience offer a selection of very, very sad foods, because they simply don't know how to make food taste good without meat. Vegan and vegetarian restaurants and many ethnic restaurants make excellent food. It's a cultural problem.
> led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac.
Did it really? I have hear some complaints that before "gluten free" meant it doesn't contain those allergens at all and now it only means "there are no grains on ingredient list". And with amount of cross-contamination in food industry that is nowhere near enough for people with allergy.
It is the latter. For a few of them they swear off impossible and tolerate beyond or vice versa. And of course some restaurants with their own bean burger formulations are sometimes whiffs but also other times completely blow any fake meat option out of the water.
i actually miss black bean burgers being more common. now it seems like all you can find are beyond/impossible burgers at restaurants. i don't mind em once or twice a year but they knock me out more than melatonin so i usually avoid them.
This is the insight that most people need but will never have, empathy for other living things seems to be greatly lacking amongst the general population.
I don't think that's a fair framing of the problem because it focuses on empathy towards the animals while forgetting the empathy towards the humans.
Going vegan is not a zero-cost choice. It can be difficult, expensive, and in some cases even impossible due to health issues. Some users here complain about the meat subsidies without acknowledging that meat is pretty great when you're in the bottom of the economic pyramid and need food that's cheap, quick, and will provide a fair nutritional value.
I don't think you can live in a modern city without supporting some type of cruelty, as most phones and clothes alone would already be a no-go. It's not that people don't have empathy, but rather that there's only so much one can do in a day and one has to pick their battles. If you want to dedicate extra time and energy into animal well-being that's great, but let's not point the finger at those who lack those extra resources as if it were an individual moral failing.
You make a valid point, but my comment wasn't about resources, it was about empathy. Factory farming isn't sustained by poverty, it's sustained by indifference. The majority of people who could easily choose alternatives simply don't think about it.
I grew up in a poor household and we were vegetarian, because we saw animals as living things with feelings, not commodities whose pain and suffering is meaningless.
I agree you can't live without some level of cruelty, but you can certainly live without contributing to one of its most obvious forms.
Empathy for other living things isn't a fair framing for the problem? what?? Eating less meat being difficult, expensive, or complicated do to health issues are excuses. Most people don't even try to consume less animal products.
The riches of capitalism is built off of the suffering of humans, that doesn't mean it isn't important to try to minimize the suffering of other animals that literally have no ability to escape their circumstances.
> lacks the [...] bioavailability of real animal protein
I never understood this argument: what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?
I'm not rushing to demand IV tylenol because its oral bioavailability is only 80%-90%, which is around the "loss" we're talking for plant vs animal protein on average. And the ultraprocessing should improve plant's profile here.
Eating raw Miso a few times a month can move one's biome to get more plant protein digested per gram than even from egg whites. So the issue with protein is somewhat overhyped. The main potential shortfalls in the vegan diet are vitamins B-12, D & K.
>what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?
Because the macros suck. If you’re trying to hit certain protein / carb / fat ratios, eating more of the “protein” means eating a lot more carbs and fat too, which often isn’t the goal.
Your analogy is not accurate, it would be more like waking up in pain in the middle of the night after a bad injury, and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
if you have only fixed-ratio food options, sure, but otherwise, no.
> and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
that's what tylenol #4s are for, double the codeine, none the caffeine. Take half a t#4 and half of a regular standard tylenol = T#3 without the codeine.
On top of that, there seems to be a pervasive misconception of the effectiveness of plant vs animal-based protein on things like muscle growth. Older studies showed that plant-based proteins had lower digestibility scores via metrics like PDCAAS. In turn, people interpolated that muscle growth would be lower. Some early studies comparing the two protein sources on muscle synthesis didn't do gram-for-gram comparisons and that increased the misconception. Newer studies are showing that, if you match the protein amount at or above the 1-1.6 g/kg for muscle growth, you will get the same level of muscle growth.
I feel like it'll take another 5 years for this "bio-availability" myth to die out.
Ethical vegans and vegetarians may like the taste of meat but be sworn off it because of their ethics. I see this so much in these discussions - if they don't like meat then why are they going for a subsitute? They love vegetables so should stick to vegetables.
Do people genuinely think that 'ethical' vegans and vegetarians are doing it because they don't like meat? Or genuinely not comprehend the idea of taking an ethical stance even if you actually like something?
For illustration, human baby could be the best tasting barbecue on the planet, but even if it was I would still think that murdering children for my dinner would be wrong and wouldn't do it. Ethical vegans and vegetarians feel similarly about eating meat, that it's (often) delicious but killing animals for food is wrong. Offering them a "meat without any of the suffering" option, in theory, has quite a large audience.
Plus as a meat-eater who had a vegetarian partner for a few years, things like impossible mince also made it easier for me to cook things we could both enjoy, and things like beyond/impossible made eating out a little easier in burger joints etc.
The way you say "ultra processed" just shows the agro lobby did it's thing. You have to realize processed in the case of beyond is mechanically separating whole pea to use the protein.
You are right. I assumed it would be full of junk like most meat substitute products. But I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, it seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. I'm quite surprised by how decent the ingredients are.
Still, I don't really have a reason to buy it. I don't avoid meat. I specifically eat beef for, for example, creatine and iron. But I guess it is good for people who crave beef yet have an ideological resistance against meat, a niche which I'm not sure how big it is.
Supermarket burger patties all have nitrates to cure/preserve them which turn into nitrosamines when cooked (carcinogenic). Same goes for bacon etc. I'm actually super appalled how the agrolobby with its full-page ads was able to turn something healthy into something being viewed as chemical and unhealthy.
As a vegetarian of 20 years, I like being able to go to restaurants and have something that is on par with what my friends and family are eating (although I do prefer Impossible to Beyond, by far). Even without friends and family, there's a social (and distinctively American) aspect to being able to have a realistic burger and beer at my local sports bar/grill and not just have a salad or some Sysco frozen black bean burger.
Beyond Meat aren't unique, there are dozens of brands offering the same product. Tens of millions of people eat these type of products. Any (or most) burger-serving restaurant in Europe will have a Beyond Meat or equivalent on the menu. They're not always advertised as vegan (because of preparation and extras) but these fake burgers are very popular, for many reasons.
At the time it was a unique product. My alternatives reminded me more of basically black-bean patties than beef. Then impossible meat did it better, industry decided there was money in this direction, and now there’s “or equivalent” everywhere.
That's a really good point. Maybe in part because Beyond had a highly visible IPO they became the poster child for the success or failure of meat alternatives but in reality their story is pretty much just their own story.
In my part of the world, a burger is a type of sandwhich, and the definition doesn't require meat. So it's a burger whether it contains beef, fish, chicken, a vegan patty, a large slice of tomato, or whatever.
What part of the world, and how recently? Sure a burger is a sandwich, likely being a spin off of Hamburg steak.
Given all sandwiches, what in your part of the world makes a sandwich a burger? I think for many of us it's a ground patty. If said patty isn't meat, yes we might say that is fake as in an imitation of the original. It's not a negative thing.
> What part of the world, and how recently? Sure a burger is a sandwich, likely being a spin off of Hamburg steak.
The 95.8% of the world population that isn't in the US. This is simple to deduce because everywhere else calls "a piece of fried chicken in a burger bun" a "chicken _burger_". Only the US calls it a "chicken sandwich". Some of Canada might now use the latter through US influence - any Canadians here?
KFC is a representative example, they call them "KFC chicken sandwich" only in the US, "burgers" effectively everywhere else.
I suspect Commonwealth or Asia. Is your definition of sandwich cold things between sliced bread and burger hot things in a bun?
A piece of hot chicken between bread in Italy would likely be a panino, france a sandwich, spain a bocadillo, Portugal sandes, Japan a sando, mexico a torta, Argentina a sanguche.
I think you overestimate how many people use burger for things that don't refer to the American concept. A lot of cultures have hot sandwiches and thus (ham)burger is often distinctly the American concept of a ground beef patty. Where this breaks down outside of the Commonwealth is often from cultures without things in bread that got exposed to the generic burger via fast food chain terminology. Not surprising there.
What are you even arguing about? KFC and McD uses "Burger" everywhere outside of NA. There's nothing left to discuss besides that, it shows that indeed the rest of the world all calls it a burger even though it's not a ground meat patty. Good luck finding a country outside of NA where they call their chicken burgers a "chicken sandwich".
> Is your definition of sandwich cold things between sliced bread and burger hot things in a bun?
There's no reason ethical vegans wouldn't go for ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat just isn't a great option, it's expensive and not good enough to justify it. The selling point for them seems to be that they taste more like meat than most meat substitutes but as someone who has been vegan for a while that doesn't matter to me (unless I'm trying to match a non-vegan recipe). I get Morningstar Farms products vastly more often than Beyond Meat ones. Beyond and Impossible are maybe like my 4th and 5th most bought meat imitation brands and it's not like those other brands are less salty or processed. Idk why I only ever hear non-vegans mention Beyond and Impossible.
I haven’t been eating meat for 14 years, and I sometimes buy stuff like beyond meat patties or similar, but definitely not as a daily food, but like a fast food to eat with beer, or to take with me when grilling with friends. So I assume same way how other people eat meat burgers (am I correct to assume that people don’t eat McDonald’s or supermarket burgers everyday?).
And it’s not really about the taste, it’s more about form factor of a “protein fried patty” in a sandwich. Could easily be falafel.
Normal daily food is of course actual vegan/vegetarian food that doesn’t need to pretend to be meat.
being an ethical vegan does not mean you like the taste of plants (or, at least, that you don't miss the taste of meat). I'm veg and very much miss having access to meat.
I'm an occasional buyer of their product, but the issue for me is just the versatility. It's really only a replacement for the most generic ways to prepare a burger/sausage. The moment you try to use the ground beef in, say, a chili recipe, it's a totally mis-matched flavor
I'm like technically the exact demographic they should be chasing. Plant based eater who loves the taste of meat and just stopped eating it for ethical reasons. But like, I'm not gonna eat a heavily processed food often for the reasons stated above, and also it's just not great nutritionally compared to Seitan, which also actually just tasted better when prepared right. And it also doesn't stack up compared to high protein / extra firm tofu, which is incredible for cooking when frozen and then defrosted and cooked. And also made of soybeans, one of the cheapest food commodities in the world. So why would I pay 2x or 3x the amount of money for a drastically inferior product? Just when I want an exact burger replica, and once you are plant based for 3 or more years, you just don't really crave that anymore except as maybe a guilty pleasure once or twice a year.
So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.
I haven’t done a comparison of Beyond vs seitan for their nutritional value, but as someone who used to eat a lot more seitan I gleefully moved over to Beyond/Impossible. Seitan is packed full of gluten, which is much harder to digest. Seitan makes me uncomfortably bloated whereas Beyond/Impossible do not. And no, I don’t have a gluten “intolerance” or Celiac.
Seitan has 3x-5x the protein of beyond meat by weight. It sucks that your body processes it less. For me it’s usually a treat, and I’ve never noticed any digestive issues despite having issues with more whole wheat things (beer, more natural whole wheat breads).
I’m glad you like the beyond meat though. Good for them to have actual consistent customers for the 2x / year I end up eating it!
The large Beyond patty has 260mg of salt. The American Heart Association recommends a daily limit of 2300mg, with an ideal limit of 1500mg for most adults, including those with high blood pressure. How is this a salt bomb? You can eat 4 of them a day and still have salt to spare in your diet.
Just because someone is vegetarian or vegan doesn't mean they don't like the taste of meat.
I'm a strict vegetarian myself and have been for about ten years. But as much as I love plant foods, I absolutely miss meat — I was never a big meat eater, but I would enjoy burgers, salami, pepperoni, bacon, Italian meatballs, prosciutto, things like that.
I dislike Beyond products, which taste a bit weird and metallic to me. The only imitation meat product I've remotely enjoyed is Impossible Burger. Nobody has managed to make anything else — if someone would nail plant-based pepperoni or bacon I would be all over it.
I guess for people like me. I eat meat, and I eat burgers. I can't speak for Beyond Meat, but when at restaurants, the Impossible Burger often tastes better than the real beef (likely because the former is pre-seasoned).
There are plenty of meat eaters who want to eat these as a way to cut down their meat consumption. They don't want to become vegetarians, though.
People like me: who prefer not to kill animals to live but enjoy the taste of some type of meat in moderation. I am absolutely happy to pay for a premium meat alternative for the occasional visit to a burger joint. There are lots of them where I live alongside the Beyond patties and they're quite popular. I'm not quite sure what desperation has to do with it - you just eat things you enjoy that fit your dietary preferences.
Obviously there is a big enough market for plant-based meat alternatives. At least in the European countries I have lived, if you go into a grocery store, you will see a large aisle that sells this stuff. Many big companies likes Nestlé are in this market. They sure as hell are not doing it for ethical reasons, they are making money.
Just because Beyond as a company is doing bad doesn't mean the whole category of products is doing bad.
I'm vegetarian and used to live in EU. Strong +1 to this, many more meat alternatives than in Canada/US, and the options taste better whilst being overall healthier. The amount of fat and salt in the products in NA is sad to see.
I’ma regular guy who likes burgers but is very worried about the effects cattle farming has on the planet. I don’t love killing animals so I can have a tastier meal either.
"Ethical vegans" are just as capable of wanting a salty, oily piece of junk food to slither down their gullet. I'd wager practically every vegan that exists in the US spent at least a decade of their formative years eating burgers at least a few times a year.
Thats the thing... Really really good vegetarian and vegan food tastes amazing and is filling. And unless you're intentionally picking around for meat or meat products, you're not going to notice.
A lot of Indian/Brahmin food is exactly that. Its insanely delicious.
And we have Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat(is that the name?). Both instead of going "vegetarian done well is superb" went to "sorry its a sad reminder of a hamburger". And thats a problem. Nobody wants to be reminded that this is $10/lb and real hamburger is $5/lb.
Ive also had problems with other 'meat substitues'. They're almost always plasticy or fake tasting, or chemically off.
Whereas my tofu saag is delicious. And no meet or cheese needed... Although my favorite is saag paneer (cheese). I stay away from the fake-almost-but-not-quite foods.
I feel like fast food is a pretty big market for stuff like this. Burger King in New Zealand has had plant based alternatives to the whopper and chicken burger on the menu for > 1 year now so it must be doing ok. I'm not even vegetarian and I get them sometimes, they're pretty good (especially the chicken one - they changed the recipe a while ago and it's now practically indistinguishable from the real chicken option, although that probably says more about their standard chicken than it does about the meat free option).
There's no premium for the plant based versions I don't think (or if there is it's small enough that I never noticed), and I think you're underestimating how many vegans/vegetarians still want junk food.
There’s plenty of vegetarians due to ethical or cultural reasons that never acquired the taste for traditional plant based foods and are looking for a more substantial, protein heavy alternative.
Is it niche? Yes, but vegetarians were always niche.
While the late 2010s fixated on “protein” and “macros” - allowing products like Beyond or Soylent to shine.
Much of the health discourse around the 2020s has focused on quality of the ingredients and “processed foods”. So naturally Beyond is caught on the crossfire.
Is there a future where this stuff is proven to be better for you in the short and long term? I sure hope so. But there’s way too many unknowns right now and it’s expensive to boot.
I'm not a vegan but I eat Beyond. The stuff is perfectly good on its own merits. The steak tips have great protein numbers, take hot sauce well, and therefore makes a great breakfast.
> The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver (never mind issues surrounding industrial agriculture).
I don't see why this follows. There are a lot of ethical vegans and vegetarians who like junk food. And these patties have higher protein than less processed plant based alternatives, which is important to a lot of people. It's just that vegetarians and vegans are a small portion of the overall "burger" market.
I suspect the "meat" branding helped early on, because it got some people to give it a try who otherwise never would have. There were other plant-based burgers on the market already but Beyond really exploded quickly.
It's just that it didn't really live up to the hype enough for meat eaters to go back for a second helping after the novelty wore off. So at this point the "meat" in the brand name isn't doing anything.
I’m their market. I don’t eat processed food all the time, but I’m looking for ways to reduce my animal consumption. I’ll pick it over animal usually, though I’ll pick good quality animal or less processed plant based.
I think the part that’s accurate is that it’s hard to get past the highly processed hurdle for the kind of people that think critically about food.
Ethical vegetarians are exactly the people who might like meat but refuse to eat it because of the impacts. Maybe you mean "natural" vegetarians - people who just don't like meat any way so don't eat it
I actually like Beyond Meat patties, but I eat maybe a half-dozen "fake meat" burgers per year - that's not going to sustain a competitor when Americans eat an average of 3 beef burgers per week.
I'm the demographic. I became vegan a several years ago when I was in my late 40s for health reasons -- all males in my family my age or older have had multiple heart attacks except for me. I didn't become vegan because I like eating salads. I miss the taste of meat, and beyond does a decent job of it (Impossible is far better).
If animal agriculture was not subsidized, I expect plant based "meats" would be on par or cheaper than real meat.
1. non-vegans eating with vegans at a vegan restaurant, where eating there wasn't their choice (they were craving a burger), and so, being forced to order off this menu, will choose the most burger-like thing on the menu.
2. non-vegans eating with vegans at a non-vegan restaurant, where for whatever reason they feel the need to impress / not-offend the vegan by eating vegan food as well. (Think "first date" or "client meeting.")
There is a huge thread basically refuting the parent's "nobody wants this" claim.
The fact that the Beyond Burger sells in mainstream grocery stores tells you all that you need to know: it's popular (enough). There are muliple products in this niche in my not-very-large grocery store.
Grocery stores don't stock products that don't sell. No matter how you personally think it doesn't have a niche.
Right, so because no one in this thread has the ability to remember past their own personal preferences:
The demographic that Beyond and Impossible claimed to be chasing was the like 85% of Americans that answered polls about wanting to eat less meat (back in the early 201Xs). "Meatless Monday", weeknight vegetarian... Whatever. Thats who they pitched investors on.
It's also a market that never materialized, whether because it was always a mirage of push polling or because an ascendant fascist GOP has made meat eating a cornerstone of their identity or COVID or whatever.
As an ex-vegetarian, I never understood the premise of the Impossible/Beyond stuff because when they launched there already was a really good soy burger in the supermarket frozen aisle that had excellent macros, priced reasonably, and tasted great.
I never thought the notion of "let's make the veggie burger taste like meat" made any sense.
Veganism is a fake health conscious diet. You can eat whatever you like while simultaneously feeling superior about it. Oreos, chips, pizza, fries, candy, soda, etc. why not also highly processed burgers?
I say this after having lived with vegans who literally ate vegan pizza every day.
My wife often quips that on our first stay-at-home date during Covid she made me a fruit bowl for my desert whilst she had ice cream. The fruit was amazing but I (much to my wife’s surprise) also immediately Uber Eats’d a full tub of Vegan Ben & Jerry's.
I’ve personally never met another vegan who chose this lifestyle for “diet” reasons. They’ll be out there for sure, but for the folks I know It’s always been about the animals.
Just because I choose not to eat animals doesn’t mean I’m choosing to be healthy :) I should focus more on the food that I eat but alas, it’s just not how I roll at the moment.
You do get some unintentional health benefits here and there (lower cholesterol in my case) but other trade-offs too for those like me that aren’t as diligent as they should be (lower b-12, iron etc).
This is completely unrelated to the question of “can you be healthy as a vegan”. To that I would say absolutely. Is it the reason most people choose to be vegan - my gut would say no (but I’m not claiming this as fact).
Goddamn I love me some Oreos.
Plus, it’s easier to sit atop a high horse when you’re not eating it ;)
You can be vegan as part of a health conscious diet, but strict veganism is usually motivated by ethics, not health. (That being said obviously there's more market share if you're in the intersection of the venn diagram.)
so in order for vegans to be legit for you, they not only have to find alternatives for everything, constantly be on the lookout not to accidentally buy or consume products related to animals, no - they also all have to be eating healthy and organic constantly in order not to be phony fakes.
what a weird form of gatekeeping. at least they're using some form of ethics and trying to change the world in a way they're able to.
coming from a non-vegan, btw, even though this shouldn't even be a requirement.
The demographic is people who have tricked themselves into thinking there are "healthy options" at a hamburger restaurant and who are willing to pay $2 extra for that validation.
