I'm more excited about where they go after they get passed the "uncanny valley of meat". If they can nail it, they'll get bored and move on to new and weirder flavors and textures.

Hook it up to Watson and you don't just get new recipes, but they're combined with new meat! (https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...)

I wonder if they can somehow replicate the flavor in bones. I'd love to make stock or a stew, but so much of the "meaty" flavor comes from bones

With a combination of porcini powder (ground dried porcini mushrooms), nutritional yeast, MSG, miso, kombu, and something with hydrolyzed vegetable protein, you can make some almost-meaty tasting stocks that have as much richness/flavor/oomph as any bone broth. I'm not vegetarian, but I have friends and business partners who are, and I like a challenge. Any four of those six (careful with the yeast -- it gets overpowering quickly) can combine for a pretty powerful stock or sauce. I use most of them in my regular cooking, too.

I eat plant-based and don't know what bone broth tastes like, but I assume very savory from the others descriptions

When I want to cook savory foods, there's certain things you can look to:

1. Miso pastes. There's several kinds but in a regular American grocery with international sections you'll usually find a mild white miso and a slightly more pungent red one. Both are usually savory. I am sure Chinese and Japanese groceries will have more options.

2. Seaweed

3. Certain vegetable broth brands - "Better than Bouillan" vegetable stock, with the green label, is extremely savory

4. Less of an impact, but certain foods, like lentils and tempeh can impart an earthy, savory flavor

You'd be surprised how many flavors you can get mixing these in various quantities, along with other seasonings such as liquid aminos, liquid smoke, nutritional yeast, roasted tomatoes, and soy sauce.

are you telling me all miso pastes aren't savory? I love cooking with miso and if there is a world of non-savory miso out there that I'm blind to I would be very excited.

Not the OP, but while all miso is savoury you can mix it with a variety of different things. Some miso sauces in Japan have a lot of sugar in them and I've even had miso ice cream. It's very good.

i'm a lot happier calling miso umami than savory. i reserve savory for things more herbal flavors.

I originally learned to cook by going through the entire "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (it took me 3 years). Later in life I was completely broke and had to give up either meat or beer. I chose to give up meat :-) Even later in life I figured I might as well go whole hog (hmm???) and become vegan. I learned how to cook again.

My biggest piece of advice for anyone wanting to learn how to cook really good vegetable based meals (and who doesn't want to adopt an already established ethnic vegan diet) is to forget ingredients and instead focus on techniques. Cooking is applied chemistry. You need to understand why certain foods and certain preparations give certain results. You can then replicate similar results.

It's not so much that you want to imitate the "meaty" flavour of beef bones, but rather that you want to create a similarly satisfying broth. If you try to imitate an existing food, you will always end up with a pale shadow of that food. Instead make something that has the same value, but with a different ingredient. It will be different just like chicken stock is different from beef stock which is different than lamb stock which is different than pork stock. But it will be just as good.

For stocks, it's complicated because vegetables are sweet. You want umami for stocks. As much as possible keep the sweetness out of the stock (because it will get in there no matter what you do). Fermented proteins (miso as others have said -- but make sure to get the oldest you can find), beans/lentils, rice, etc. Stay away from things like a mirepoix because it will add too much sweetness. You can add onions, but caramelise them down to being black, etc, etc. To be honest, there is too much to making a good stock to explain here. You just need to practice and adjust until you get what you are looking for. Learning an ethnic cuisine that is already traditionally vegan will help a lot if you pay attention to the techniques they are using. At the same time consider what a bone stock is doing in a stock pot. What is meat? What is connective tissue? What is skin? What is marrow? What happens when you simmer that for 5 hours?

You can make great vegan stocks and it is fun to learn how to do it, but it takes an inventive spirit.

One trick I learned from one of Heston Blumenthal's videos is slowly caramellising onion together with star anise, it can add a lot of meaty flavour.

at what point is it good enough to change to an alternative consistently? for the most part we enjoy foods that we are used to eating, if you change your habits to a non-bone based stew in a matter of time you will begin to favor those flavors instead.

Consider that killing a living thing to eat its body is not unique to "meat", nor is raising it in a controlled environment for the purpose of consumption. Fish (as is sometimes classified separately) and vegetables are living things raised and killed for consumption of their bodies as well.

I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".

When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.

Suggesting that there's enough ambiguity for it to be reasonable to assume ferns exist on the same level of consciousness or understanding of the world around them as cows is a bit of a weak argument. There's a pretty obvious difference between the two, and even if you believe plants can experience pain or distress in a meaningful way, it still makes way more sense to kill a carrot over a pig if you have the choice, making the two very clearly not morally equivalent.

The parent has specifically mentioned that they love animals, and it's pretty easily to see why: animals are much easier to relate to, can show pain easily, and are much more similar to us than plants are.

Sure, but just because we relate to them more doesn't affect the ethics of killing other things that are just as alive but are simply less relatable. This has been a strong theme in the progression of civilization.

Ending life to feed our own is how much of nature works, and we have to deal with being a part of that in our ethical thinking, regardless of how associated we are with the life we're ending.

It's simply something to think about: Most people are as flippant about ending the life of a plant, as some are about ending the life of an animal (or various different species of animal, including fish & insects).

Animals, or at least cows, pigs, and chicken, clearly show a level of consciousness that plants do not

There are no indications that plants feel pain.

> it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".

How about the line between "life that will likely suffer when prepared for us to eat" and "life that will likely not suffer when prepared for us to eat"?

Even that can be a difficult distinction. Colonies of trees, for example, have been shown to respond to damage and illness.

IIRC, trees release specific substances into their root systems in response to damage or illness in order to communicate to nearby trees. Dying trees will even give up their sugar reserves to feed younger, healthier trees.

So, while it may not be on the same level as animals, I can see an argument being made that trees respond to something resembling "pain" or "suffering".

I did a quick search and stumbled across this article[1] from the Smithsonian Magazine which corroborates some of this and expounds on it a bit. It waxes a bit... mystical, I guess? It does seem to be based on science, but the only thing it links to are books on the subject. So, you know, grain of salt. It's a place to start, though.

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...

You don't have to feel guilty. It is the disconnection between humans and animals that causes many of those feelings and if you shift your thinking, you can have a much better experience. When you participate in the process of raising, killing, butchering, and eating the animals which are your food you will appreciate them – love them – and the life they had and gave for you to live. Food encased in plastic from a grocery store really prevents this connection.

Life both begins and ands and you don't have to run away from the end of things or think that making life as long as possible is necessarily better.

Unless you can argue that the cows don't mind anything about the way they're treated (including slaughter), then there's reason to feel guilty. If you can live without that (and you can, vegetarians exist), then there's reason to feel guilty about not doing so.

That idea doesn't work for me because I know for a fact that I don't really need meat to live a healthy life. My wife is vegetarian, as are my parents, and they're all healthy and happy. All my nutritional needs can be met with vegetarian alternatives.

I eat meat solely for the taste, which, when I get down to thinking about it, is a shallow and selfish reason

I disagree. Once you shift your thinking in the other direction and cherish their life and only eat them if its the only option for survival you will feel greater love and appreciation for animals. I've eaten meat only once in the last 2 years and when I did I actually wept.

> Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends. --George Bernard Shaw

https://gist.github.com/samueleaton/cccfd86dcca72bc33f72bdfa...

> I've eaten meat only once in the last 2 years and when I did I actually wept.

Sorry to bring this up, but I'm curious as to the circumstances around this. Did you not know you were eating meat? Or did you eat, and realize later that it was incompatible with your ethics?

I take a lot of inspiration from Native Americans on this topic. Eating is a part of existing for any organism and without life, there is no energy to transfer. This applies to plants and animals.

Appreciation for the life that was given for my nourishment is important to me and I really take it seriously. I make an effort to not waste any meat I buy and I've definitely shifted to eating less than I used to.

Yes eating is necessary for everything, but keep in mind that we humans can meet our needs solely with plants.

>is important to me and I really take it seriously

sounds like "we take security very seriously"

Do you usually kill all that you love for some fleeting pleasure, when pretty healthy alternatives are available?

Please don’t love me then

I'm not sure if I'd eat this burger, but if lab-grown meat was available and as good as the natural alternative, I think I would definitely switch.

Sadly if everyone did this it would probably mean we would only see cows, sheep etc in zoos, rather than grazing in fields.

The industrial meat/ag complex loves that you think of their products as coming from the sort of happy pasture-grazing farms you see on the side of the highway.

Most of them do. Chickens are the main exception, and I would agree that their conditions are pretty bad.

Downvoters - I live in the Midwest. I grew up on a farm. Much of my family still farms and raises livestock. Factory farming of livestock is not the norm for non-poultry.

I beg to differ - it has basically become the norm for pigs. It didn't used to be, but it has become so.

I grew up in Indiana. Now, I've not lived there in 5 years, but I did live quite some time in a place that pigs outnumbered people in the county. The county seat was 3000. Even smelling pigs was becoming a rarity while out on a country drive and a flood meant that thousands of pigs drowned in a flooded barn ("pig factory").

Perhaps you are in a place where the pigs usually roam free, but I certainly wasn't.

Hogs are not a very common livestock animal in my area, so I have no knowledge of their conditions. I do know that sows are commonly caged separately from their piglets to avoid the mother accidentally rolling over and crushing them while they nurse, but that's about it.

According to the ASPCA, over 95% of farm animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms[0]:

[0] https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/farm-animal-welfare

According to Dr. Hershaft, a holocaust survivor which has dedicated his life to researching animal rights, it is estimated that less than 1% of the meat in the US are from smallscale family farms, he and his team did an AMA on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2h8df0/i_am_an_80year...

According to the ASPCA:

> A factory farm is a large, industrial operation that raises large numbers of animals for food.

That's an _extremely_ broad definition that says nothing about the condition of the animals.

On top of this, that percentage is most likely due the sheer volume of chickens in the world. From what I remember there's something like 750 million head of cattle in the world, and like 18 billion chickens. This doesn't make up for the awful treatment of poultry, but it doesn't really extrapolate to animals like cattle and sheep.

I live in semi-rural England in Kent. In the collection of fields around my house are pigs, sheep and beef cattle. I'm lucky enough that I can buy meat from happy pasture-grazing animals.

On the flip side, I also get to interact with the animals - stroke them, feed them apples etc. It makes me happier that they have a good life, and also sadder as I can see that they're actual creatures with a life.

"Sadly if everyone did this it would probably mean we would only see cows, sheep etc in zoos, rather than grazing in fields."

Eh, not really, as cows and sheep and goats still provide valuable resources. Milk and wools, for example. I'm guessing lots of other things can be taken as they die naturally - leathers and stuff from bones and pet foods and whatnot. Sure, we could eventually engineer ourselves out of needing farm animals, but it is going to take some time.

Granted, I am excited for this meat/burger to be available to the public even if you shy away from eating it. I don't eat meats outside of fish anyway and I'm always excited to get tastier edible stuff.

I assume virtually everyone knows but I'll be pedantic anyway: if one wants to reduce the number of animals killed, the milk industry not immune. A cow's natural lifespan is 18-22 years (according to google). The average lifespan of a dairy cow is 4-6 years. A dairy cow has between 2-4 calves in that time. Only 1 is needed for replacement, meaning that for each dairy cow in the herd, you kill a calf every second year. Unfortunately it is not economically viable to slaughter dairy cows for meat (the meat is distributed in a non-efficient fashion on dairy cows). A cow produces about 8,800 litres of milk in a year (which is unbelievable to me), though only when calving. So the number of litres of milk per dead calf is about 5-7,000 (give or take -- it's the middle of the night so someone should better check my math ;-) ). It's surprisingly efficient, but not free.

If it's a male calf, it's almost always castrated and raised for meat (there's no difference in the "distribution of meat" on a dairy cow, simply that others are bred to make more), if it's a female it's normally raised to put into the milking herd. The cows that become too old to milk effectively are sold for slaughter as well, the new females are their replacements.

>> A dairy cow has between 2-4 calves in that time. Only 1 is needed for replacement, meaning that for each dairy cow in the herd, you kill a calf every second year.

I think they would just kill the boy calves, and keep the girls.

You only need one girl to replace the previous one. If you keep more than one, then your herd size increases (which you usually don't want).

Well I guess if you're at maximum capacity you wouldn't want additional female calves, but I would imagine some of those could be sold.

I have a friend who had a beef cow farm (which is slightly different, but close enough). Basically, you goal in building a herd is to strategically breed the best cows that you can. When you start, you buy some cows. Depending on what you are doing, you may or may not keep a bull yourself (you might artificially inseminate the cows, or pay for the services of a bull). Generally speaking you inbreed the cows, looking to develop specific traits that you want and occasionally breed your cows with a bull that you don't own for specific purposes (essentially improving the blood line). Once you have your initial cows, you almost never buy another one -- you just pay to breed with a higher quality bull. There are obvious exceptions, but that's the general rule.

It takes time to breed a herd of cattle. My friend had an outbreak of foot and mouth and he lost his whole herd one time. It took years and years and years to build it back up. At best you can double your herd size every year. In practice, though, some cows don't produce a calf every year. Also, there are cows that you don't want because they don't have the traits you want. But once you have the herd size you want, it is a steady state thing.

I tried to find some place to find the volume of cattle traded that's not destined for slaughter, but the data doesn't exist. It seems that dairy cows are traded mostly via want ads on the internet these days. Here's a typical site that specializes in it: https://www.dairylivestockservices.com.au/stock-for-sale/ Notice how all of the livestock is fully grown. That's because these are livestock from failed farms. I don't think anybody sells calves because there just isn't a market for it. You can't sell calves for meat either, because as I mentioned earlier, it's not economical (the price for a meat calf going to slaughter is only $125!)

It is sad to think about it, but the reality is that milk production necessarily relies on the death of cows to stay economical. If we drank a lot less milk and were willing to pay maybe 10x the price for it, then you could change that fairly easily. However, it's just not possible at anywhere near the price point we have for food right now.

there's nut milks and faux leather. nearly everything has a plant-based alternative and if something doesn't, it will have one soon.

Nut milks are nowhere near the same as animal milk. I have tried all sorts of alternate milks, and none of them come close to the flavor or texture of good whole milk from cows. So I'd say there are many things we really haven't figured out how to replicate without animals yet.

We do have faux leather. I have yet to find one that behaves like leather for footwear, however: Faux leather causes me to develop foot fungus. I can wear cloth, but by the time it gets treated as necessary, I'm not sure we are improving over the leather. But hey, it can improve.

Nut milks are an odd thing. They aren't really nutritionally the same nor do they behave similarly while cooking. The taste is lacking and I highly doubt they can make cheese. And if I remember correctly, many nuts milks are also bad for the environment - much better to just eat the nuts. I don't know if this is the same for oat milks. Soy milk is simply not edible. (I don't personally drink milk, but do cook with it).

Milk is truly one of those things that has to replace all functions for it to be a viable switch. The same goes for eggs.

All this basically to say that just because there is an alternative doesn't really mean it is viable. Cotton doesn't replace wools and neither do synthetic fabrics, for example. Not to mention that at least some synthetics are made with petroleum products. I always hope they are otherwise waste products from producing fuel (like many other plastics), but I'm not sure.

> many nuts milks are also bad for the environment - much better to just eat the nuts

I'm don't disagree with the rest of your comment, but I think the better comparison here would be to compare nut milk to what it's substituting for, which in this case is regular milk.

You should really give them a shot before entirely dismissing them out of hand. Admittedly my opinion is less informed, being a vegetarian, but I love them. My wife loves them too though, and her favorite food is steak.

See how happy they are: https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko