Meatballs may have more than half chicken skin. Burgers contain 25% filler. Pink slime (= lean finely textured beef) is a highly processed meat by-product. In the US its processed with ammonia but that's not allowed in EU.
I have a sneaking suspicion that what people find disgusting is the industrial production of meat, and that if Gordon Ramsey had a small and inoffensive centrifuge attachment for his KitchenAid the process would seem less gross.
Good chef can do good simple food, but they want good ingredient and that's not that pink slime is.
On the other, isn't it all really quite subjective? What you describe is tied every bit as much to irrational emotions about histories of things as it is about 'quality' in any measurable sense. What is considered the highest delicacy with a complex preparation in one century has that same process industrialized and becomes 'poor people junk food' in the next, despite being objectively, measurably a better quality product by every possible metric.
https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...
People who don't have a kitchen big enough for cooking in bulk like that? People without freezers? People without that amount of free time? People don't really like food? People with motion disabilities? I've probably missed out some groups.
By "bulk" I mean an oven tray or two. I'm not rocking an commercial kitchen here.
>People without freezers?
Where do they put their frozen meatballs from the store?
The time is amortized, if you don't like food then you shouldn't care anyway, and I really doubt most people buying frozen meatballs from the store have disabilities.
Perhaps they're buying frozen ones to cook immediately (much like frozen meals)?
> I really doubt most people buying frozen meatballs from the store have disabilities
It might not be "most" for that one group, sure, but the groups I suggested probably do cover "most" in total.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara...
And I'm the one who used to be a vegetarian for nearly 20 years.
(The best bit of the chicken is the thigh, though.)
I can see GMO foods being owned by the likes of Monsanto, earning healthy royalties on seeds that cannot bear offspring. I think there should be a GMO open source initiative...
Roundup-ready GMOs led to replacement of many more toxic herbicides with glyphosphate. BT GMOs led to much less usage of insecticides on crops.
Compounded with that is there are very few people doing research without an agenda.
You also have to realize that "organic" in the US doesn't mean treatment-free crops. There are a large number of substances approved to treat crops for pests and weeds and still be counted as organic with the rationale that those treatments are less synthetic. There is absolutely no guarantee that this means they have fewer negative effects.
Herbicides are actually a _kind_ of pesticide (weeds are a kind of 'pest'), so Roundup is actually both. TIL!
That depends entirely on the kind of GMO. GMOs don't exist for any particular single purpose. Some GMOs exist to make it easier to use pesticides. Some GMOs contain pesticides.
Some GMOs have nothing to do with pesticides but add nutritional value. For example, Golden Rice, which has beta-carotene added to increase the vitamin-A intake of the hundreds of millions of people who subsist mainly on rice, generally gets mentioned as the one GMO that's completely positive with no discernible downside: it doesn't mess with ecosystems in any way, beta-carotene is already common in many plants, it doesn't do anything pesticide-related, and it makes people healthier.
That said, if farmers move from producing a wide variety of rice strains to only golden rice, that's still a significant reduction in biodiversity. Maybe they should make beta-carotene versions of more kinds of rice.
Mixing in a few greens is surprisingly hard when people are almost too poor to buy rice.
As mentioned by wonderwonder, Roundup-ready soybeans are the poster child for GMO varieties being create to allow more chemical herbicides. And in this case glyphosate (RoundUp) is being seen more and more widely as a really nasty chemical to allow into the water supply and into nature. It has been linked to honey bee colony collapse, and the general insect collapse, not to mention lymphomas and lukemias.. (As an old Iowa farm boy, I am shocked at the number of relatives and their neighbors that are getting strange lymphomas and lukemias.)
> I never really understood why people are so scared of GMO....
But I do agree that eating a GMO grain is not scary by itself. It is the side effects of the different style of agriculture it allows that concerns me. (see glyphosate, above, and more below).
> I think there should be a GMO open source initiative...
Just Monsanto's poor luck that you can not create an unstable soy bean hybrid. They all breed true. The is the great advantage of selling seed corn, if you just avoid doing the last, stabilizing, cross, you can sell seed corn that will create a healthy plant who's seeds will not produce productive plants. Mother Nature gives you free IP protection. (Monsanto is a nasty company in so many ways.... I don't even want to get into it.)
Another chemical-related factor with GMO varieties is the unintended consequences of evolutionary selective pressure. A common GMO application in maize is to modify the plant to produce a toxin that is poisonous to the root-worm moth and/or the corn-borer moth. So, in this case, less pesticide chemicals. Which is great, but used indescrimanently, in a few generations we will have largely resistant moth populations. The state of Iowa has been very forward-thinking on this front, and requires that some percentage of every field planted to the GMO variety (like 15% or so, I forget the exact number) must be planted to "refuge rows". That is, if you plant a GMO moth-resisant variety, a percentage of the same field must be planted to traditional varieties to create a refuge for the moths so that the population does not develop resistance. Now, since maize does best in large blocks, the fence rows never yield as well anyway. And you always have turn-round rows where machines trample some unlucky plants as well. So plant the already poor-yielding rows to the refuge variety, and the GMO variety more than makes up for the loss. So it still pencils out advantageously.
What concerns me about this scenario is more environmentally naive and myopic regions might allow 100% GMO-toxin varieties, for the moth or other similar scenarios where evolutionary selective pressure can be a fast-acting force. Rolling out a GMO variety of anything requires examining the second- and third-order consequences.
So while I have little fear of eating GMO Doritos, I don't want GMO Doritos to bring on The Invasion of the Super Locusts in 3D with Dolby sound.
The industry seems to object to any such suggestion.
15 years later, there will be science talking about how micro nutrients are missing from meat substitutes and how a natural, healthy and balanced diet is necessary for human beings.
“Backyard Production of Meat Rabbits in Texas”[0]
[0] http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/877...
A high carb low fat low protein whole food plant based diet with (cheap) vitamin supplements and maybe linseed oil:
- is the healthiest diet.
- is the cheapest diet.
- is the most efficient and environment friendly diet.
- is the most ethical diet with regard to immoral animal suffering caused by humans.
I was on such a diet for many years and eventually gave up on it because I could not make it work in a healthy way.
Why?
Too many deficiencies. Example: Linseed oil /= DHA/EPA. Many or most people cannot make long chain Omega 3 fats in the quantity needed from vegetable "Omega 3" fats.
Too many anti-nutrients in plants.
Get on youtube and search "I used to be a vegan" for numerous cases like mine, health irreparably damaged.
Besides: Vegans In The US Can Now Get Cheaper Life Insurance Thanks To Their Diet : https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/vegans-plantbased-cheape...
DHA/EPA are not essential fatty acids but conditionally essential fatty acids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid
> Get on youtube and search "I used to be a vegan" for numerous cases like mine, health irreparably damaged.
What did a vegan diet do to you ? Lack of vitamin B12 or other vitamins ? I advice to use vitamin supplements no matter the diet.
I agree that youtube offers much true and useful knowledge.
Unfortunately youtube offers also much false and harmful knowledge.
Some better youtube channels about nutrition:
Mic the Vegan : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid...
Nutritionfacts.org : https://www.youtube.com/user/NutritionFactsOrg/videos
PLANT BASED NEWS : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...
> A high carb low fat low protein whole food plant based diet with (cheap) vitamin supplements and maybe linseed oil:
> - is the healthiest diet.
An excess of energy makes you fat. Besides, fat is much easier to store as body fat for the body than carbs or protein.
> You need proteins and some fat. Having your diet be all carbs sounds like a bad idea.
I wrote whole food plant based diet.
I wrote high carb, low fat, low protein.
NOT: max carb, min fat, min protein.
* carbs digest into glucose
* too much glucose in your blood triggers insulin production which turns glucose into fat
* a glucose spike can trigger an insulin spike which leads to a glucose dip an hour or two after lunch
* eating fat triggers the feeling of being full, reducing your desire for more food
I have no idea how true these all are, but my impression is that there's at least some evidence supporting these. And if you add them all up, it sounds to me like you get fatter from eating carbs, because that can lead to a glucose spike -> insulin spike -> glucose dip which makes you want more sugar to get your glucose back up. Whereas food with more fat may make you feel full and stop craving more food.
But your conclusion is still not true. Saying carbs should be avoided is like saying water should be avoided because people died from drinking too much.
Biochemistry and psychology is complicated.
But a healthy diet is well known and not complicated.
Basically: Whole food plant based diet with vitamin supplements (notably vitamin B12) and e.g. linseed oil for the essential fatty acids.
Dr Garth Davis: Americans have become obsessed with Protein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCt3IhaUtU&feature=youtu.be...
Speaking for just myself, I used to feel that sugar low after my lunch, and I know that craving for more carbs. I gained too much weight as a result. Now I've cut down on my carbs and I mostly snack on veggies these days and try not to overdo carbs at lunch, and that seems to help at least with that sugar low.
Even kitchen machines for vegetables have "low carb" stickers on the box. Crazy.
> Vast majority of people in America get majority of their calories from carbs.
Maybe they still get too much calories form other sources. Of course sugar in soft drinks are not the best carbs.
Dr Garth Davis: Americans have become obsessed with Protein (2015-10-28). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCt3IhaUtU
And US food and junk food is quite fatty. Also because of meat.
But not eternally. Science will prevail eventually.
Basically, at this point each person has to try various things and figure out what works best for themself.
Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat. https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19562864/
Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27886704/
Nutrition concerns and health effects of vegetarian diets. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21139125/
Why Doctors Don't Recommend A Vegan Diet | Dr. Michael Greger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d1Ca6SsKfE
New Canada Food Guide: Some Can't Handle It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp4zWaLE_ik
Unfortunately lies and fake science affected by a personal or political or financial agenda confuse people.
Quoting from the first link: "In the case of red meat, the classification is based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies showing positive associations between eating red meat and developing colorectal cancer as well as strong mechanistic evidence.
Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed chance, bias, or confounding) could not be ruled out."
This is garbage science. It's all like that. Believe whatever you like, though.
With strata within each caste of course. The grass-fed yak-meated vs the factory-pig-meated; the wild-grasshopper entomeated vs the squishy-larva entomeated; and the fresh-veg meatless vs the Wal-Soylent meatless.
I think there will be such a period, but eventually it'll swap.
Both because more affluent people will tend to be more pro-animal welfare and so synthetic meat will be more associated with the successful, and because eventually (probably distant future, but who knows) all the meat substitutes will just taste better than real meat and anyone who's ever had a meal won't be able to deny the reality.
Its when you get into the territory of that "natural flavor" ingredient listing that things get really weird in food. Think la croix soda. Freakish, really unnatural flavor, almost salty even, but somehow they have two things listed. Water, Natural Flavor.
People don't seem to bat an eye at that, but having seen firsthand beverage formulation work (not la croix) its a pretty odd thing. Dozens of small glass vials with oil extracts with intense fragrances of orange, lemon, lime, cherry, etc. Even among one of those, there might be dozens of variants, each a different oil from the plant that produces that orange smell.
How carcinogenic are these things? Do they have any poor side effects? Why aren't they listed individually? Have there been studies on each one?
Its like the FDA caters to large companies not wishing to share beverage and food formulations, despite a cancer epidemic.
* There will be a meat substitute options catered to groups with higher net income.
* Nations dependent on meat products for export will try (in)directly impact society's view on these meat substitutes.
* We will see issues with IP laws associated with meat substitutes
* There will be 'generic' meat substitutes similar to the prescription drugs.
I'm not sure if they'll be universally cheaper than meat. There's a lot of diversity in meat substitutes in the Netherlands, and you already see quite a price difference between the "high-end" meat substitutes, and the basic store brand soy burgers. We seem to be going in the direction where there are "inferior" meat substitutes, and high quality ones that are considered better than at least cheap meats.
While I actually haven't seen this debate online,I hear it in real life when the subject lands on those meat substitutes available where I live.
People who look at the ingredients list see a lot of E-numbers and things that sounds even scarier.
Now they can sell it as long as they spell it differently. So we get lots of fake meat with spelling errors now.
We'll have to download filet mignon from thepiratebay to get around the 'French cuts of meat' DLC.
I also predict that meat substitutes, if made cheaper than meat, will be deemed inferior in quality (cheap = inferior, because psychology) and reserved for those who cannot afford real meat (the "meatless masses").