I'm not saying Tyson chicken is good; it's CAFO meat, which is not great for the environment or for flavor. But it's not "barely meat"; it's meat that basically sets the standard for meat quality in one of the meat-eatingest countries in the world, and has set that standard for over 50 years.

† Don't get me started on how irresponsible the public interest campaign against transglutaminase franken-meat is.

Taco bell famously admit a few years ago that their beef filling was only 88% beef.

CBC did an investigative report in Canada recently that revealed subway's chicken was only 50% chicken. [0] The rest being a smörgåsbord of fillers. The 4 other chains studied in the tests didn't do much better.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-fo...

There is also nothing “gross” about the additives used in the filling, which are primarily there to improve texture. They are widely used and perfectly safe: https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien.... (For some reason people go “eww” when soy lecithin is used at Taco Bell, but don’t utter a peep when it’s used in some fancy foam in a high end restaurant. It’s all in peoples’ heads, and there is also a large amount of classism involved.)

So... do they have a way crazier quality control process? Absolutely. Will the result be better food safety than the Michelin-starred place down the street? Not a chance.

Your linked article makes the point that other chains hit the expected values for prepared chicken, Subway was an outlier.

I have no idea what Subway is selling. Subway squicks me out, as does Taco Bell.

COLD CUT COMBO: Turkey Bologna: Mechanically separated turkey, water, contains less than 2% of: salt, corn syrup solids, potassium lactate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, flavorings. Turkey Ham: Cured turkey thigh meat, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, brown sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite, water. Turkey Salami: Dark turkey, mechanically separated turkey, water, salt, contains less than 2% of: potassium lactate, sugar, sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, spice and flavorings, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, smoke flavor, sodium nitrite

So plant based milks can't be called milk, plant based proteins can't be called meats, but hot dogs can be called hot dogs and have no dog meat in them, riced cauliflower is under attack, Parmesan (cheese byproduct and sawdust) in a can is considered not misleading, a California Port wine is impossible but nobody cares, etc

Subway's Salami, Ham, and Bologna can be made with turkey instead of the cuts you'd expect because money.

It's always about money. They want consumers buying their products in stores and if you buy enough product for your restaurants you can call it anything you want.

America.

Nitpicky, but this is itself misleading. Canned parm is mostly actual cheese, it's just... not very good. "Sawdust" is there in small amounts for anti-caking purposes, not bulking.

(turkey based) is all over their signs, menus, etc in the fine print.

Which is sad, IMO.

"All white meat chicken breast" is a bug, not a feature, IMO. Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.

Wings are tolerated because they're small and predictable, but I've been seeing the rise of "boneless wings" too. People generally don't have a problem with the thighs and legs of the chicken if it's served differently or just as "chicken" in another product. But on the bone it's messy.

When I cook any recipe with chicken, I replace the chicken breast with boneless thighs (Which actually is thigh meat with the bones removed), and it comes out so much better.

It's only “much more juicy” if you prepare or cook the breast meat wrong. Of course, you often do that if you you cook them together since dark meat needs to be cooked to a higher temperature for food safety reasons.

But, yeah, dark meat has a lot more flavor (and dark meat cooked on the bone has the best.)

I don't mind KFC but Taco Bell meat always seemed a bit...off and low quality.

Tl:dr; yes it is true, inputs are the same as what you get in the store, but the outputs are vastly different. You have to factor in additives and preservation process. There really is a simple "sniff" test/heuristic I have developed after my decades in food service, and it's not really a secret, but seems like some aren't in on it, and it goes like this: If it goes bad, it's good, if it doesn't go bad, it isn't good. (Good is obviously subjective here, so my criteria is obviously "real" food in the sense that it is minimally processed and preserved and minimal chemical additives)

For what it is worth, McDonald's says on their web site that this is not true. So either you are mistaken or McDonald's is committing fraud. Do you have a source for your claim?

From the McD's web site ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y... ):

"Every one of our burgers is made with 100% pure beef and cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else—no fillers, no additives, no preservatives."

"Do you use so-called 'pink slime' in your burgers or beef treated with ammonia?"

"Nope. Our beef patties are made from 100% pure beef. Nothing else is added. No fillers, no additives and no preservatives.

"Some consumers may be familiar with the practice of using lean, finely textured beef sometimes treated with ammonia, which is referred to by some as “pink slime.” We do not use this. "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X1K9YukRlg

I haven't read this page recently (it certainly has changed much), but on skimming through, none of the terminology McDonalds uses on their website are meaningful in the sense that the standards there is no official definition and could not be distinguished between similar competitors that make similar claims besides simply what they say, and, more importantly, there is no regulated term between what constitutes beef being “pure” or “not pure” or otherwise put. It’s just some “thing” they say about their beef and we have to take them up on their word. Now if they said “we use USDA organic ground beef” that might have some teeth. It’s the same thing between a bag of candy telling you they no longer use artificial flavors and now use “natural” flavors.

Now the question of do I believe they have changed? Possibly. Do the burgers taste different? No, so common sense tells me you don’t drastically change your process like this and still get the same tasting burger from 20 years ago.

But I will actually do something uncommon here and admit I could be wrong, and have an outdated understanding of their process.

"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."

That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.

> After a months-long evaluation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) determined in December that BPI’s signature product—the offering famously called “pink slime” in an ABC News exposé that got the network in a lot of trouble—can be labeled “ground beef.” Legally speaking, it’s now no different from ordinary hamburger, and could even be sold directly to the public.

[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...

I will say I remain skeptical on exactly how they can go from the ammonia wash + chemical food flavoring process to using fresh beef and not have any discernible difference in taste or food safety, but kudos to them.

(TG'd meat was a faddish fine dining trend a few years back, and it's pretty neat; for instance, you can make a solid, ribeye-like slab of skirt steak by "gluing" layers of skirt together, which is pretty delicious. It's also a technique that's been used in sausagemaking for a long time.)

A neighborhood sushi place has an even bigger problem with spoilage than a friend chicken shack, but, for pretty intuitive reasons (I think?), I'd trust any well established sushi place with ahi and salmon than I would my own fridge.

Further: while fast food input costs are the highest single line item in their cost breakdowns, they don't come close to dominating, and labor plus rent dwarfs inputs even before you factor in franchise fees, marketing, and other expenses.

FYI, in the US it is common to mummify fish with carbon monoxide. It preserves the fish's color despite age. The best way to stop oxidation is to add a reducing agent!

I don't think CO is a problem, but it is a hack restaurants use that consumers are unlikely to be aware of which masks the visual indications of freshness.

Freezing is hugely deleterious to ground beef quality. It changes the texture irrevocably. The two major differences between fast food burgers and fast casual burgers are frozen/fresh and cooked in advance/cooked to order. All the more expensive, more lauded burgers like Five Guys, Shake Shack, In 'n' Out, etc are fresh beef. McDonald's launched a fresh beef quarter pounder to universally positive reviews.

[Former Yum! engineer]

It's a food-safety and labeling term, not indicative of the relative quality of what's inside and doesn't, alone, mean that the ground beef sold by Taco Bell is or isn't excellent or crappy.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18995204

TLDR: "Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%)."

From a more culinary perspective, you do probably want some fat in your burger. Depending on your tastes, I'm not sure the presence of 'plant matter' is particularly sinister either; I, for one, like a few onions in mine.

Those numbers should be right about what you'd expect.

> Meat and poultry are composed of naturally occurring water, muscle, connective tissue, fat, and bone. People eat meat for the muscle. The muscle is approximately 75% water (although different cuts may have more or less water) and 20% protein, with the remaining 5% representing a combination of fat, carbohydrate, and minerals.

The protein/fat balance should be expected to be a bit off from straight muscle cuts, as it's typical for a burger to have fat added to the mix in.

It is unclear from the abstract whether they were measuring the entire hamburger, including the bun and other condiments, or just the burger portion.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/overuse-of-antibiotics/what-...

You can always do better. But I'd like to see a well-grounded argument that KFC-grade chicken is somehow "shitty". I think it's possible that there is one (I think the argument that all fast-food chicken is necessarily shitty is much harder to defend) --- but I haven't seen it yet.

I'd say if you buy your meat from a local butcher and you know the actual source of the meat, then you'd likely say that raising chickens in high capacity growth sheds doesn't put out what many would define as quality birds. [0] The chicken is likely fine for consumption, agreed. But if you were born, pumped full of feed to make you as fat as fast as possible, and barely had room to move during that time - would you qualify yourself as healthy? Just as an athlete vs a couch potato have significantly different body composition one could assert this is also true for chickens. In the grand scheme you get what you pay for. In a race to the bottom of cheap meat you need scale and it's much easier to throw lots of chickens in a small place than it is to free-range them.

Finally, while subjective, it's a common pattern to leverage MSG in products that are of generally low quality. I don't know anyone who puts MSG in recipes using pricier butcher cuts, I know I never have. KFC has Monosodium Glutamate in most things they sell.

I guess if you want to stand on a soap box and call out that KFC meat quality isn't "shitty" just because nobody has proven it to you, then more power to you. But, it's hard to argue that there isn't a difference of quality by a mass producer of chicken vs non-mass producing vendors. I mean, it's why people pay more for a friendlier and healthier growth environment for said meats. "Shitty" in the sense of this argument seems rather subjective anyway. But I will say it's hard to argue mass produced chicken isn't "shitty" for the environment. [1][2]

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2999689/The-35-day-... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221431731... [2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/4/197/5...

Your request doesn't have an objective answer, so I'm not sure what you were looking for other than to present something indefensible. But, you also gloss over the main points of how "shitty" this practice is for the environment and instead you try to deflect with a backhanded "you're wealthy" comment.

At least I presented some points to the conversation.

Summary, too much fat, salt, antibiotics.

Chicken tastes watery because they soak it in salt.

Brining if you can call it that is only step 2. Here's the steps they use to prepare.

https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-kfc-actually-makes-their-fri...

Are those the steps Cooking illustrated gave you? Are you cooking your own kfc at home now?

You seem like the guy who went to the coke/pepsi taste test challenge and said they both taste the same.. they taste like 7up.

I'm not exactly sure what you were trying to do with that link, but I'm pretty sure your intended outcome wasn't to show that KFC fried chicken is just like any other fried chicken, but with stricter recipes and industrial machines.

Thanks! I feel a lot better about KFC chicken now!

Just like grandma.

- Unless you are in the SLT of KFC, you have absolutely no way to know what's in their spice blend. It is one of the most closely guarded recipes in the world.

- There's famously 11 spices in the original recipe. So not only could you not possibly know what's in it (and therefore what's questionable), but you didn't even get the number of ingredients right to criticize.

- Based on all the various copycat recipes out there, I highly doubt that 10 out of the 11 ingredients (same proportion that you used, just adjusted for accuracy) are questionable. You know, unless "salt", "flour", "thyme", "garlic salt", etc. are all questionable. There's only so much that can go in a spice blend after all.

Let's address the mystery of the 11 spices. Here they are..

2/3 Ts Salt 1/2 Ts Thyme 1/2 Ts Basil 1/3 Ts Oregano 1 Ts Celery salt 1 Ts Black pepper 1 Ts Dried mustard 4 Ts Paprika 2 Ts Garlic salt 1 Ts Ground ginger 3 Ts White pepper

Have fun frying tonight.

> and 26 questionable substances out of 29 for the spices.

Maybe you should take your own advice there, buddy. I was specifically replying to what you said in your comment.

Furthermore, you can very well guess what's in the spice blend, but you still have no way to actually confirm it, nor any way to confirm it's the current recipe, or if the recipe diverged from the first one used (which was indeed leaked).

https://www.chatelaine.com/food/trends/kfc-secret-recipe-rev...

Secrets like this need to be out in the open.

There is nuance. Take the time to understand it or don't waste your time commenting at all.

{Type of meat} - {FCR, Edible Weight} - {Conversion efficiency %, caloric} - {Conversion efficiency %, protein}

Beef - 36 - 2.9% - 2.5%

Pork - 6 - 9% - 9%

Chicken - 4.2 - 13% - 21%

(specifics vary according to method, but cross species comparisons remain similar)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

I believe the big "Pink Slime" news story halted some of this, or at least led to many fast food companies publicly decrying it. But there was definitely a point when this ammonium hydroxide treated slurry was used to cut the real stuff.

https://www.rspca.org.uk/whatwedo/latest/details/-/articleNa...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chicken-supe...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/-sp-revealed-d...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-sup...

Why do you even care. They can "quality" up their meat all they want but in the end they are still a fast food chain that primarily sells buckets of meat. I don't need a citation to think that is disgusting, and if you don't then go take that argument somewhere where it's on topic. Jeez.

So they're actually doing the right thing in 2019 and replacing part of their product with non-meat. I hope it goes all the way, or at least make meat be the expensive "special occasion" option.

https://www.tacobell.com/ingredients

> Seasoned Beef: Beef, water, seasoning [cellulose, chili pepper, maltodextrin, salt, oats (contains wheat), soy lecithin, spices, tomato powder, sugar, onion powder, citric acid, natural flavors (including smoke flavor), torula yeast, cocoa, disodium inosinate & guanylate, dextrose, lactic acid, modified corn starch], salt, sodium phosphates. Contains: Soy, Wheat

I occasionally make my own (with tastier cheeses than you get in commercial products) for its melting characteristics.

I wish this urban legend would die.

Fast-food beef and chicken at major chains is no different in quality from what you buy at the supermarket.

A McDonald's burger is 100% ground beef and salt, no "additives" or "fillers". And Taco Bell ground beef is ~90% beef, because the rest is ~10% spices (cumin, etc.) because... that's what taco meat is supposed to be, like when you make it at home.

Spreading rumors that it's somehow worse doesn't help anybody. I get that it's entertaining to believe -- but it's simply false.

It won’t die because it makes yuppies feel superior to the plebes who eat at McDonalds. My wife once encountered a lawyer at a prominent DC firm who literally sneered at the idea of eating McDonalds. I think of her every time we drive through to get an Egg McMuffin.

It's no closer to food than Doritos or Coke are.

I personally would choose grass fed beef or bison or chicken, multiple steamed or roasted vegetables and I would not add salt, ketchup or salad dressing. And no soda.

In that case, the food is of much higher quality than anything I can buy at McDonalds.

But the burger is certainly food according to anyone's definition. Get a quarter pounder with cheese and tell me how that's nutritionally any different from a burger you make at home with standard supermarket ingredients -- ground beef, hamburger bun, american cheese, ketchup, pickles, onions. Yet nobody complains about that at a neighborhood, family or church cookout.

You are correct that I could buy and eat that stuff at home, but like I said, I could also buy Doritos, coke, sugar rolls, candy, etc. etc.

It seems like they could, since it appears many commenters here think so (there is no PR cost to serving bad meat if everyone thinks you are)

https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingredien...

Consumer advocates in the past few years have actually done a pretty good job at pressuring the top fast food chains to not dilute their beef with additives.

McD's, Burger King, and Wendy's all advertise their hamburger patties as being nothing but 100% USDA inspected ground beef, salt, and pepper. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html https://menu.wendys.com/en_US/product/daves-double/ https://www.bk.com/food-quality/our-burgers https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y...

It's all the other stuff (the bun, the fries, etc. ) that have preservatives, fillers, and shady additives.

(When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte. Tasty, nutritious and very filling).

This "impossible burger" trend basically reverses the work of consumer advocates. The one element of fast food that is actually an all-natural, nutritionally complex whole food is replaced with a patty that is nothing but processed food and additives -- https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189374... The fast food restaurant will likely save money -- but because of how fashionable vegetarianism has become, instead of being condemned, they will be actually praised as being eco and health conscious.

o_O

> how fashionable vegetarianism has become

I don’t think it’s a question of fashion. However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad. Whether it’s in 50 or 500 years’ time, one day our descendants will look back at us and wonder: “they ate corpses?!”

I disagree entirely, but there is no need to relitigate this debate here. If by any chance you have never read the pro-meat argument, the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is a pretty good primer.

Where do you draw the line as far as ethical behavior towards animals? I think even most who eat meat don't think things need suffer right? After you admit animals CAN suffer and that such suffering ought to be minimized the logical minimum suffering is not raising animals for food save to the degree that is required for the health of human beings. Essentially balancing the 2 factors.

I'm personally hoping that particularly knot can be untangled by artificial meat. If we can ultimately cheaply produce fake meat that is identical insofar as utility there remains zero reason at that point to justify killing animals.

Do you disagree?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vegetarian_Myth

From the article:

---------------------------------------------------------

For the earth to survive, Keith thinks, the human population needs to be reduced by more than 90 percent. She also argues that the human food-supply needs to come mainly from hunting and small-scale animal husbandry.[4]

Criticism:

Sami Grover, referencing "Jason V", says Keith's book is filled with "factual errors and fallacious thinking". Furthermore, Jason V writes that Keith fallaciously uses her ex-vegan status in an attempt to depict herself as an authority on the subject.[11]

Patrick Nicholson writes that the book misinterprets scientific articles, cherry-picks facts, uses strawman arguments and relies heavily on anecdotes and faulty generalisations.[5] Ian Sinclair writes that Keith's arguments are "full of lazy thinking, willfully ignorant logic and glaring omissions".[12]

---------------------------------------------------------

My thoughts:

I think its meaningful or even sane to suggest that virtually everyone stops having babies or dies and all the survivors go play hunter gatherers in the woods.

I think our present trajectory is obviously unsustainable but that doesn't make any alternative suggestion reasonable.

Our future is the stars or extinction. In between we have to find a sustainable reasonable way to live civilized lives. This probably isn't horrifically complicated we don't have to reduce our population by 90% we just have to not keep increasing it and make do with simpler and less.

Curious what makes you think that, with some real hard numbers, etc.

I think we've become very good as a culture at brainwashing ourselves into a doomsday attitude when it comes to planetary resources...yet we've actually done quite well at getting rid of or minimizing bad practices as we learn they are damaging. Nukes, CFCs, noxious smokestacks...sure not 100%, but getting better over decades.

Yes I'm an optimist...I think the Earth is all we need, and based on scientific advancements and slow learning over decades (we barely even use the [deserts|seas|tundra]!), we could easily live well and without abject poverty at 100 BN+ in centuries to come.

What will kill us off...I think it more likely to be external [asteroid|aliens|supernova] or inescapable [Yellowstone|Krakatoa|Earthquakes|virus|new apex species]

It would have been virtually impossible for virtually any percentage of hunter gathers to wipe out humanity let alone the biosphere. Eventually one person crazy enough may engineer all of our doom. This could even be so without malice aforethought.

Once you get to the stage of a planetary civilization expanding further gets fantastically harder. It's entirely possible that most intelligent species go extinct between getting big enough to destroy the requirements for their continued existence and actually escaping their planets.

The more obvious answer of ecological catastrophe is actually a lot harder. We could actually be well on our way to crashing and burning and still not be able to predict well enough that far ahead.

I don't endorse the book or her particular worldview 100% but I believe she does bring some true evidence to light about the good aspects of meat.

Her only stated expertise outside of a high school education is that she spent multiple decades unhealthy because she decided to adopt a lifestyle choice and didn't bother to simultaneously read about how to eat a healthy diet without eating meat. Instead of figuring out how to eat vegetarian without being unhealthy or simply returning to a balanced diet she has decided that we ought to somehow get rid of almost all people and go back to being hunter gathers.

The problem is that she is a writer who writes about a broad range of topics she has no understanding of. Knowing how to put words together effectively can grant one an audience but it doesn't grant one any sort of expertise. She is a crank.

Which is “less gross” is highly objective.

> I wonder what impact it'll have on climate change when McDonalds stops buying real beef.

Would be a nice longbet, “McDonald’s will stop selling beef burgers by 20XY”. I’d be on the “no” side of that bet.

Somewhat amusingly, I first had an Impossible Burger not knowing that it was not real "meat." I didn't find out until a few months later. It tasted like a perfectly good burger to me.

[ADDED: Lab-grown is apparently more accurately used to specifically refer to food made from animal cells. I guess "plant-based" meat is the more common term with "meat" distinguishing from traditional vegi-burgers in the grocery freezer.]

https://www.cnet.com/news/meet-impossible-foods-lab-grown-ve...

http://www.makery.info/en/2018/05/07/jai-teste-limpossible-b...

I expect with actual lab-grown meat substitutes starting to get attention, people are more precise to distinguish between the substitutes today.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat/

I, too, used to confuse Memphis Meats with Impossible Food / Beyond Meat.

It's just that news of lab-grown meat and outfits like Impossible Food kinda sprung up at the same time in the news within the last 5 years and it's easy to confuse the endeavors. In fact, I see this misconception enough that I think IF/BM benefit from the confusion.

But I acknowledge that just because this is completely obvious to me and I've never met someone who was confused about the difference doesn't mean they don't exist.

Yes, I understand that there is a difference between grown from meat cells and made from plants with components that make it look and taste more like meat.

I've seen plant-based burger, plant-based sausage, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22plant-based+meat%22&oq=%2...

Of course, some people will want to taste dead cows similarly to how exotic meats have an audience today. But McDonald’s would not be the venue for something like that.

Well, no, that's lamb.

Beef won't go away completely in 20XY; maybe not ever, which is fine. But at the scale and quality standards of fast-food, and with the recent progress in the meatless space, I would bet McDonald's will stop selling it in my lifetime.

Food that can make you sick isn't necessarily gross tasting.

Spoiled food is definitely gross, though.

There are probably more than a few foods you eat that are technically "spoiled" - it's just termed differently, like "fermented" or "aged".

Thank you for clearing that up, much appreciated.

As soon as they proudly put pictures of the animals and their living conditions on the packaging. You can put a field of corn or beans on packaging.

You can even put an image of the big machine with giant blades in the field.

Try that with meat and tell me again which is less gross.

At least, I think that's about when it's likely to happen.

Impossible Burger patties are actually more expensive. For example, Burger King:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meatless-fast-food-burgers...

> The meatless burger is $5.99, around a dollar more than the regular Whopper with meat.

I guess with Beyond and Impossible you pay a hefty price for their marketing. Or for irrelevant features: Didn't one of them put a lot of research into making a "bleeding" plant burger? Bleeding may be relevant in some settings, but not at Burger King where you always get your burger well done (AFAIK).

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...

It's been a while, but I remember findings signalling something like 30% less emissions?

There are however a lot of assumptions in that study. For example, a cow is not 100% 1/4 lb beef patties. So how do you go about distributing emissions that relate directly to the beef patty vs. those for steaks, brisket, or numerous other cuts? Since beyond meat does not currently provide substitues for those. They use an "economic model" which isn't entirely clear to me.

Or the lighting thing. They make all these assumptions about light energy consumption based on lumens and size of facilities - but there is no justification of the accuracy of these assumptions. Also how much of that energy is coming from renewable sources? It could favor either way but without figuring this out it makes a lot of it questionable.

There are other assumptions in there that raise questions and I think a lot more study needs to be done (ideally not funded by either industry).

As for this new wave that is intended to simulate real meat, the flavor is completely natural, just found in an unusual source outside of actual meat:

> Impossible Foods' scientists discovered that heme is a key factor in how meat behaves.[15] Heme is the molecule that gives blood its red color and helps carry oxygen in living organisms.[16] Heme is abundant in animal muscle tissue and is also found naturally in all living organisms.[17] Plants, particularly nitrogen-fixing plants and legumes, also contain heme.[18] The plant-based heme molecule is identical to the heme molecule found in meat.[19][20]

> To produce heme protein from non-animal sources, Impossible Foods selected the leghemoglobin molecule found naturally in the roots of soy plants.[21] To make it in large quantities, the company's scientists genetically engineered a yeast and used a fermentation process very similar to the brewing process used to make some types of beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Foods

These vegetarian burgers aren't particularly healthy, but it's because of their salt content.

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...

[1]

"Simple animal farming" is slightly disingenuous. It's not like the animal is slaughtered on the farm, cut up into steaks and sent directly to supermarkets. There's tons of complicated processing and handling going on after the animal is finished growing. And that's on top of the energy losses from feeding and raising the animal.

as soon as the economic-taste-weirdness function reaches a certain point, i'll expect you'll see these cheap fast food options convert more and more fractions of their products (right now many use fillers already) to fake meat, eventually replacing it entirely alongside offering reduced prices for these products, while leaving meat generally as a higher priced option signaling disposable income (sort of like Argentinian beef or w/e is today)

Could conceivably cut out all the work of growing bones, feeding/watering, animal healthcare, breeding & transport with labgrown meat. And the fixed cost of maintaining farmland. The cost saving potential is huge.

Not even considering the benefits of being able to quickly adjust production to what can be sold, as opposed to waiting however long it takes for a calf to grow up.

That's for the solar panels!

There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier. Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/impossible-burger#nutri... https://www.cookinglight.com/news/is-the-impossible-burger-h...

It's not a clear win for either side. Impossible Burger has more carbs and less protein, so it's inferior in that way. But it also has more fiber (beef has none), which is good. Impossible also (surprisingly) has more saturated fat than beef, but it has no cholesterol.

As one of the articles points out, Impossible's main goal isn't making healthy food. It's other stuff like saving the planet. So it is possible that another fake-meat company could prioritize health more.

The formula for beef isn't going to change, but the formula for fake meat will, so fake meat might gain ground when it comes to health.

And that's bad? After working on my property cutting down weeds and dead trees carbs are super healthy. Carbs are only not healthy if you live a sedentary lifestyle. Carbs are our main short-term fuel source.

And yes i do intermittent fasting.

Yes, we have an over abundance of carbs and anyone that has to go out of their way to eat more is living an extreme exercise heavy lifestyle. This is especially true in the case of places like KFC, your getting a load of carbs in the bun and the fries on the side, the actual chicken is the only healthy part.

Yes, because carbs are a non-essential nutrient.

Protein and fats are both required.

Most non-meat products are low on protein and high in either fat or carbs. Very few products actually replace the nutrients of meat.

It's totally possible they aren't; just a reasonable guess.

> There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier.

There's plenty of evidence that eating red meat on a regular basis is bad for you. Chicken is admittedly a different story.

> Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?

Many veggie patties are filled with fiber and most are filled with protein (from beans, soy, etc.). I don't know the nutritional details of the Impossible Burger or the meatless chicken featured in the article, but generally meat substitutes are not just carbs.

2. While they do have carbs, they also have protein. And a bunch of other stuff the burgers don't have. Oh, and less fat in most cases. I'm guessing many are lower in calories, but I'm not sure about these particular products.

3. Not all of them are super processed. I've literally made different sorts at home, though I'm just as likely to buy a soy option. (obviously not Beyond Meat or Impossible Burgers. I actually am not impressed with these options).

4. They are an easy meal.

In terms of Impossible/Beyond Meat, health seems kind of a wash.

Thus if we want to tackle climate change, we should rethink our Cold War era grain subsidies and ultimately reduce our dependence on cattle.

Sources:

(1) Freakonomics Radio Podcast

(2) Earth and Space Science Honors course

How many total units of methane are there vs. total units of CO2? Otherwise, I can’t make a value judgement about the impact of cows on global warming.

However, Bill Gates writes in his blog that Agriculture contributes towards 24% of the world’s climate change and that “Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases!”(2). His blog post that I link to below is admittedly a secondary source but I think he does a pretty good job at showing the big picture.

Sources:

(1)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

(2)https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...

If you go on to find a good (hopefully primary) source, please reply with it here!

Definitely not the case at the moment. Last week I went to Del Taco and tried their Beyond Taco. It was $2.49 each compared to the meat one which was $1.49. If I recall correctly, you can switch to an Incredible burger patty at Red Robin for $3 extra.

One of my friends from India was quite surprised when he moved to the US that McDonald's doesn't have many vegetarian options like it does in India.

There's wide variability within the US anyway. I've noticed that affluent suburbs tend to have great fast food, while urban and rural environments have awful fast food.

EDIT: I mean the restaurant chain, I'm not sure of the root beer itself.

Many other first-world countries (thinking of EU, etc.) have much stricter rules about food additives, etc. So the bread, for example, tastes significantly less cardboard-ey.

They weren't “flavoring them with beef juice”, they were frying them in tallow. And AFAIK they didn't stop because of a lawsuit by vegetarians, but because of nutrition (saturated fat) concerns, and they now use other flavorings to attempt to simulate the flavor imparted by tallow:

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/whats-inside-mcdonalds-french-...

They actually did both.

https://www.thoughtco.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-still-not-v...

> But when they switched to vegetable oil, the fries were no longer as tasty. The solution was to add natural beef flavor to the spuds.

> Admitting that the fries were coated in beef flavoring, McDonald's settled for $10 million, with $6 million going to vegetarian organizations.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-settles-beef-over-fri...

> The vegetable oil used to prepare the fries and hash browns was not pure, but contained essence of beef for flavoring purposes. Many Hindus consider cows sacred and do not eat beef.

So we can't eat them and people who liked the tallow-fried ones don't enjoy them as much (?)

Seems like as of a bit earlier this year, they still contained animal products, but this is in the US (in Canada, for example, it's vegan ingredients only).

If you go to McDonalds and all your friends get a meal, you're not going to be all that satisfied with just fries and soda.

[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/no/nb-no/meny/vegetar.html

[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/beyond-meat-burger-beef-hea...

Contrast this with Chick-Fil-A's nuggets, which are 100% chicken breast meat (with thinner breading to boot).

[0] https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/10/whats-chicken-nugge...

I mean they're good -- don't get me wrong but I don't see anything wrong with nuggets made by grinding up some of the ugly parts of the chicken. I basically consider them two separate things. I thought it was actually kind of silly for them to grind up the good bits of the chicken just for a marketing push.

> Our tender, juicy Chicken McNuggets are made with 100% white meat chicken and no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.

Made WITH not made OF. Meaning all the meat within a McDonalds nugget is 100% white chicken meat, not that ALL of a McDonald's nugget is 100% chicken. It is designed to be misread/misunderstood.

McNuggets still don't contain 100% chicken or even close, and the fact that 100% of the meat they do contain is "white meat chicken" isn't a significant change.

Go taste a whole-chicken nugget (like Chick-Fil-A's) next to a McDonalds nugget. Heck go look inside them, at the filler. It is night and day.

> White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning [autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil,dextrose, citric acid], sodium phosphates, natural flavor (botanical source).

The only real space in that list for fillers to be found is the food starch, but it's less abundant than water, so if there were a bunch of fillers, it'd be pretty soupy. (Its typical use is as a binder, and it'd make sense for it to serve that purpose in a nugget - you're not going to manage to make a white-meat nugget without some.)

There is certainly a texture difference between a whole-chunk nugget and one made from pureed meat, but you'd see the same sort of texture difference if you ground up a filet steak, too.

McD's used to sell chicken nuggets that were a mix of dark meat and white meat. Some were a piece of dark, other's were made of breast meat chunks. But consumers being the a-holes that they are (rant mode on)...

(this whole thing really bothers me - the "American Consumer" has pretty much single handedly ruined meat products in the United States by insisting that such products not remind them of live animals - so first "breast meat" then "white meat" and might as well be "bland meat" - then they went after pork "the other white meat" - making it so damn lean it's flavorless - you can't get any good fat anymore on your pork chops - with ground beef you have to look for the 70/30 mixture to have any real flavor in your patties. Steaks and ribs they trim off a ton of the fat, and for most supermarket briskets the Point is "gone" - so no burnt ends for you. All its done is make meat - at least from the supermarket - almost flavorless. You have to either buy commercial meat which hasn't been trimmed, or you have to go to a real butcher - either way, you end up spending a ton more money just to get the flavor back...

(ok rant off) ...where was I? Oh, as I was saying, consumers decided that all they wanted was "white breast meat", but McDs knew that dark meat is cheaper. So this food scientist at some USC university (IIRC) came up with a method to bleach the dark meat, then blend it with the white, and you get this "ground chicken" like product that can be molded into perfect nugget shapes - all shaped consistently, all fry consistently. Win for the restaurant.

But I remember real nuggets - there were two different shapes that were the dark meat; flavorful, tender, wonderful. Then one shape (that was "round") that was a disk of white meat (tasted good, but dryer, and less tender). Today, they are all a uniform shape, flavor, and texture profile, all "white meat" - and the texture is somewhere between that of dark meat, and breast meat.

I just don't get people. I love dark meat, I love flavor. Give me the fat, give me well marbled beef and pork. Nothing like a well-smoked brisket, or pulled pork shoulder, or a wonder slab of pork belly. People who say otherwise - I don't know what to think about them.

Oh - here we go - UGA, not USC:

https://phys.org/news/2005-08-uga-scientist-dark-chicken-mea...

On the other hand I’d like to see studies on the healthiness of consuming these products long term. Intuitively they’d seem healthier, but I’d like to see that proven given their synthetic nature.

Replacing questionable meat with hype pseudo-meat is a straight win all around. I'm as carnivore as they come, but if I have to hit a Burger King, I'm just going to get an impossible whooper: if i'm going to be getting a shitty burger either way, I'll take the one that didn't require all the logistics around cows.

This KFC one is just the next step. Replace all the questionable meat with pseudo-meat that is (hopefully) more sustainable, and leave the "real" stuff in caviar territory where people actually care.

Propaganda by people trying to sell the same thing as "healthier" has convinced a lot of people that it is true. It helps that the idea of a large corporation selling sawdust as meat is incredibly believable though.

I don't eat a ton of fast food anymore, and when I do its usually McDonalds, but I have always enjoyed the Whopper. I had one a few months ago at an airport and tried the Impossible Whopper last week. It's close, but the beef version is still better in my opinion.

When I have a whooper most of the taste is the sauce/bun/toppings with the patty only being responsible for a small portion of the taste, which makes it perfect for a substitute. I've had impossible whoopers a few time, and while eating the whole thing, it's basically the exact same taste. If I eat a piece of the patty with nothing else then there's a noticeable difference though.

"limited time is mostly marketing trying to create a buzz. If people buy it, they will continue to offer it. Simple as that. Otherwise it really was limited.