And imagine the impact if these just displaced 50% of beef patties at fast food joints.

I'd love to see a world where the bottom shelf of meat isle is completely plant based.

Why not use beans, or mushrooms? Or quinoa? Or cauliflower? Or lentils? All cheaper and healthier. And if they don't make sense in your dish...why eat that dish? Food combinations are endless; find something you like made up of the food you want to eat.

I'm not lecturing. I also love meat, but I have trouble wrapping my head around "vegetables and other stuff smashed together to simulate meat". Seems easier to just eat the vegetables.

Because people like meat. It tastes good, it's comforting. People like meat, that simple.

> And if they don't make sense in your dish...why eat that dish?

For a lot of people, cooking and eating is something they have to do but don't particularly care for. Maybe homie just wanted to have spaghetti with meat in it like his mom made all of his life. And now you're telling him that he should just eat something else entirely because he doesn't use quinoa in his spaghetti.

I'd rather have a bit of ground beef in my spaghetti than anything you listed. I could do mushrooms but I just... Like meat more.

So, yeah I'm stoked on impossible meat.

They do? All of them?

The best "ground meat" texture I make is made out of overcooked lentils combined with ground walnuts. The texture is terrific! All healthy fats, no animals or palm oil fat.

In the long term, plant-based meat substitutes should be cheaper to produce than actual meat, and if you can get a burger that tastes just like a regular meat burger, but is cheaper, that's also a win. Burger King already features the Impossible Whopper, but at a premium. If that becomes cheaper than a regular meat Whopper, a lot of people, and a lot of other fast food chains will follow. So that's the economical perspective of it.

There is definitely a use case for this, I've had impossible stuff with a lot of non vegetarians. In fact most vegetarians don't care about this product.

Beef will never be able to optimize past feed conversion ratio.

Plant-based meat still has a large chunk of the price in processing.

Edit: this got asked a lot, so I'll all a related question instead. Is it possible for a burger to have "good taste and good texture" but also not remind you of beef?

Try a turkey burgers, a chicken burger, a black bean burger, ect... There's so much better variety in veggie burgers, (and they don't cause the run to the bathroom, if you know what I mean.)

And, if you ever find yourself in India, try McDonald's vegetarian burgers. Nothing like beef, but still delicious.

Think of a "burger" as a style of sandwich. Some of us are so used to "hamburger" that it's hard to imagine the patty being anything else.

Honestly, it's worth trying a veggie burger. (A lot of people order them with bacon on top.) As long as you stay away from the "I can't believe it's not meat" style, they're delicious.

Ugh. As someone who hates catsup and mustard, I hate the "it tastes the same when it's loaded with sauce" veggie burgers.

The patties actually need to taste good on their own.

Only of tangential relevance, but maybe still interesting: there's no ham in a traditional hamburger.

The name seems to be derived from the German city of Hamburg.

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

I've heard plenty of anecdotes of recent immigrants / tourists to the US ordering a "hamburger" expecting it to be ham. It's a rather awkward surprise for Indians who will eat pork, but not beef.

(The downvotes are unfair, IMO.)

Ever had a turkey burger? The meat has a different taste and texture from beef, but it's not bad.

Also see alligator, elk, deer, chicken sausage, etc. "Exactly like beef" is not the end-all-be-all of "satisfyingly meaty", even when you only include actual meat.

Yes! I had one today for dinner in fact. The one I ate today the patty was made with mushrooms, tempeh, and wheat berry. Greens, aioli, pickes & pickled vegetables on top.

Impossible is a blessing because I can be a boring eater and still do ad little harm as possible.

(Being a picky eater sucks. I wish I liked food. I promise, it's not because I like being a pain. My policy is that I'll try anything twice, to avoid any initial bias. I'm just kind of broken.)

I feel like there's a really big hump to get over with expanding a pallet, where once you have even just one or two new foods under your belt it becomes easier to learn to like other ones. For me, it was (and still is) kind of a snowball effect. I'm eating more variety of food now than I ever ate before, but I'm still a lot more narrow than other people I know.

I spent a relatively large portion of my adult life trying to learn to eat vegetables, and it wasn't until midway through transitioning to a vegetarian that I suddenly discovered the magic of sauteing with a little butter and salt instead of boiling vegetables until they were all soft and waterlogged and horrible, or baking them until they just turned into hot mush. That was honestly kind of surreal -- years of not liking veggies, and occasionally trying them in different recipes to see if something had changed, and not having anything change. And then in the space of a few weeks suddenly very quickly realizing that crunchy string beans with a tiny bit of soy sauce were delicious and that I really wanted more food like that.

That's not to say you would like the same stuff. The point is, learning to eat more things is hard, and being a picky eater is hard, and just in case you're stressed about it, don't stress about it. Just keep trying at your own pace and don't worry too much. As long as you keep occasionally experimenting, eventually you'll find a few things you like, and your pallet will expand from there.

And even if you stay a picky eater, as long as you're still getting a decent nutritional intake, and assuming you're meeting whatever dietary goals you have, then you're fine.

So an excellent ground beef substitute for “utility” use. Nobody’s buying a fast food hamburger to savor the delicious, high-quality beef or as part of a carefully-planned fitness and nutrition strategy.

Can’t wait to see how the pork variant works out.

4chan says that it raises oestrogen, but I was treating this as usual 4chan trolling.

Also, soyabean is mostly GM, which doesn't go down so well in EU either, though some varieties are approved for use - possibly due to further labelling requirements: https://www.fsai.ie/legislation/food_legislation/gmos/labell... and the association with the (over)use of glyphosate.

"I drink a gallon of soy milk a week and tofu and tempeh almost daily. Never had a problem with anything, best shape of my life, and highest test levels ever."

^^^ "your situation is anecdotal and thus insignificant for trying to prove some point."

There are lots of sites that describe everything these days. 4chan being one example. I was looking for something that had some scientific credibility.

Examine.com is probably the best resource out there for science based nutrition information.

The point being, the more people you get to skip a meat meal by eating a veggie alternative, the better it is for whatever your reasons for avoiding meat are.

I hear this complaint a lot about "imposing" beliefs, but mainly when it comes to diet. Why does diet get singled out?

It's usually considered a good thing to campaign for changes in politics (e.g. for/against drug legalisation, for/against vote reform, for/against higher taxes). You may not agree with a particular argument, but I think most people agree that being allowed to persuade people towards a point of view is part of a healthy society.

Why does politics when it comes to diet get such a visceral reaction?

Not true in many contexts, and comes across as preachy and holier-than-thou, especially when using guilt. Campaigning upwards is fine, even for diet, but not downwards.

What a nonsense argument. "I won't inconvenience myself because it's not the BEST way to help the environment and the human race." In that case, I can't afford a Tesla, so I'll keep driving my F-350.

The issue isn't strictly overpopulation. Its overpopulation combined with the amount of consumption. You can solve this either by reducing the population, or reducing consumption, or both. For a lot of people, there are compelling ethical, economical, and personal reasons for wanting to have children or at least avoiding restricting other people's desire for children. So in that case it makes more sense to reduce consumption.

And for others it makes more sense to not having children. As you write, it's also about "personal reasons".

What good is an empty planet?

However, many vegetarians believe there are societal or ethical benefits to promoting vegetarianism that don't necessarily apply to other diets. It might be because they believe they have an ethical responsibility to limit the suffering of animals raised for slaughter, for example. Or they may believe that the spread of vegetarianism will curb the number of livestock and growth of pasture, which will be good for the environment.

That sounds more like a religious argument. At the extreme, some people don't believe that it matters ethically how animals are treated, and there are certainly many people who adopt an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude, or try to only eat meat from animals raised and slaughtered as humanely as possible. People are of course free to make a value judgment on these attitudes, but preaching vegetarianism/veganism on those grounds sounds too much like religious proselytizing for my taste.

I think it's fine and useful to promote non-meat diets by arguing that meat production (as we currently do it) is devastating to the environment, but religious/emotional preaching is IMO what gives a lot of vegetarians/vegans a bad name.

Where is everyone hanging out that vegans and vegetarians are constantly pestering them? And, if you're being honest to yourself, is it really an issue in your life?

Nothing? Or as simple as "I loved watching X tv program, you should check it out too"? Surely there is something you promote in your life? If so, same thing. Why should you impose your tv watching habits on other people?

I believe strongly in things, but I never have the need for everyone else to have the same beliefs. I respect the choices of others.

Do you understand better now?

But I will let you know that I respect your choice of not eating meat, even though you won't accept that I will continue, like the majority of people, eating meat. Have a nice day.

This is fundamentally the way we talk about morality - not as a matter of attitude or personal preference, but as objective facts we believe are true. Whether any particular moral statement is true or false is what most people would question, not whether moral statements are in themselves motivating. In this way, most people seem to be (1) moral realists, (2) moral internalists.

Assuming you're a moral realist, it's easy to understand why someone would "promote/preach" their diet restrictions on moral grounds - because morality, to the realist, is a matter of fact (either an "objective" morality, or a "relative" (to a culture, time, or place) one). The assumption, also, is that unlike other facts, moral facts are inherently motivating.

To the moral realist, a statement like "eating meat is morally wrong" has a truth value, in the same way "the earth is spherical" or "the earth is flat" has a truth value. The moral internalist further states that this fact is enough to provide some motivation for action, so the statement "eating meat is morally wrong" necessarily implies and states to us that "one should not eat meat" - assuming there is no failure to motivate (as may the case with depressed people or people who face extreme exhaustion, or have some other mental malady).

Or just something to eat sometimes as a way to reduce your personal "meat footprint."

I've joked before that if I ordered an Impossible Burger and got served a regular one, I wouldn't know :)

It does feel kind of weird eating it. There's definitely a part of my brain that protests when I take a bite. But it's also kind of novel, and I do still occasionally miss meat -- there's also a part of my brain that feels really good while I'm eating it. I like what they're doing, and I'm happy to occasionally grab one when I see it offered.

The thing is, vegetarian food is already really good -- I don't feel like I have a problem finding tasty, nutritious non-meat dishes that are filling, satisfying meals. And that's getting progressively better, not because new foods are being invented, but just because restaurants are getting better at adding vegetarian dishes that aren't just token options. I don't think there's a need for a brand new breakthrough in that area. There is no need to swoop in and invent a compelling dish for vegetarians, we have plenty of them.

It's the space in-between vegetarian and carnivore that needs innovation.

There are vegetarian meat-substitutes that I already avoid because my aversion to feeling like I'm eating that specific meat outweighs the novelty, even though they're not that convincing. I still think it's fine to have these kind of weird "in-between" foods -- my "I don't want to be reminded of that" is someone else's "this is close enough that I could give up or cut back on the real thing." I first started down a vegetarian route once I found a taco-meat substitute that I liked; I might not have even made that initial decision to start cutting back on meat if that product hadn't existed.

I'm not even sure it's "healthy". The entire purpose of the product is to taste and feel like real meat. Although, I'm with you in that I don't understand why anyone would want to eat a food with a mile-long ingredient list because it's "like the real thing". There are plenty of healthy vegetarian alternatives to hamburger, obviously.

It's owned by Nestle which isn't my favorite fact in the world, there are plenty of other brands though that make super healthy burgers out of things like lentils, quinoa, and black beans. Or of course, roll your own.