...unlike the animal industry which is just full of fluffy, happy, loved cows who proudly line themselves up to be turned into tasty beef for your pleasure...

Have you seen the animal industry? It's absolutely disgusting. Getting rid of that would be an enormous net win, both ethical and environmental.

Ethics aside, I think the parent comment was referring to weird additives and oils in things like the Impossible Burger.

That being said, I think it's only fair to compare that to all the antibiotics, hormones, and fertilizers that your average low-grade ground beef has been exposed to or fed.

> I think the parent comment was referring to weird additives and oils

Weird, how?

Weird, because they have funny names that are hard to pronounce, and are therefore magically "unnatural" and bad for you?

Or weird, because their effects on nutrition, digestion, and human health hasn't been widely studied yet?

Both. This pursuit of tasting "kinda like meat" has incurred a lot of odd ingredients most people would normally eschew if they knew the extent of study in human consumption. Plain meat has a much better track record. I don't blame any meat eater for rolling their eyes at this stuff.

And the decisions are sometimes odd. Like beet juice being added not for flavor but so it looks like the patty is bleeding. Meat eaters aren't sold because the veggie burger looks rare.

The truth is meat eaters aren't, en massé, abandoning meat for a plant based alternative that provides little to no health benefit and costs just as much or more.

Will we get there? Probably. But we're in a weird limbo area that is barely appealing to either side of the fence other than as a novelty.

Meat has a better track record huh? Basically all cardiovascular diseases are caused by animal products.

Those 'odd ingredients' don't seem so odd to me. Go through the list of a meat alternative one by one, you'll be surprised how mundane they are

> Basically all cardiovascular diseases are caused by animal products.

[ citation needed ]

I'm a long-time vegetarian but this kind of specious pseudo science doesn't sit right with me.

Calling it pseudo science is more in need of a citation than the original statement.

That's not how it works. If you're going to make a claim, support it.

The original claim was that meat has a good track record. Citation needed. NIH is brimming with publications to the contrary

Sure. Humans have been eating meat for tens of thousands of years. That's a track record. The idea that something that's been consumed by humans since there have been himself having a better track record than something that historically hasn't isn't even controversial.

Your turn. Basically all cardiovascular diseases are caused by meat, right?

I've spent most of my life as a vegetation but dishonest histrionics like this do a disservice to the aim of convincing meat eaters to eat less meat.

It's about the amount of meat and dairy we ate... Next to nothing compared to today. Today's rates of cardiovascular diseases don't exist in mostly plant eating cohorts, nor do they in other largely plant based apes.

Its not that complicated, I fail to see how this qualifies as histrionics.

Well you've drawn a correlation, for sure. As one could do for obesity rates, processed and fast food consumption, alcohol consumption per capita.

Again, citation needed.

Please recognize that the caution around new food science advances is based in experience. I’m sure most of us are old enough to remember when most crunchy fried snacks were on the shelf with oils that had no known health risk but turned out to produce widespread uncontrollable diarrhea because the oils were indigestible.

I’m not suggesting these new meat substitutes have that effect but it’s reasonable for people to be cautious. Yeah heart disease and global emissions but... also soiling yourself without warning in public.

The best thing proponents of these new foods could do is genuinely and honestly recognize and address those worries.

people should be cautious and imho more importantly, people should be informed and adding processed soy, oils, sodium etc to meat alternatives in hope of reducing price is a horrible solution. If that's the only way we're going to get people offsetting meat consumption its a sad state of affair.

Go. Through. The. Ingredients.

Caution not needed. Nothing new here

If you want to convince someone to trust something they’re likely not seeking out, giving them homework won’t be very persuasive.

Fair point. I do feel the responsibility is on the shoulders of those making claims of the dangers of meat alternatives though. Its easy to paint it as frankenfood, but if you look at the ingredients they are boringly normal

This is actually a pretty simple burden of proof question. The burden of proof is on whoever wishes to persuade the other.

As in any other case, to persuade another person is to assert a claim. It doesn’t matter that you already have done the requisite learning to understand what you’re certain is the baseline set of facts. What matters is you want to change someone else’s beliefs.

As an example:

It would be preposterous for me to say “I am certain that biological sex is a spectrum, and binary sex is a simplification useful as a tool for some applications but inadequate for others” and just expect anyone who doesn’t know that to crack open a book or start googling my hypothesis credulously. Even though I’m certain it’s true.

I understand that while there’s sound scientific basis for the claim, it’s not a shared understanding of reality.

I also understand that it’s a claim that may be questioned, even though I’m certain it’s correct, and it’s my choice whether to give it more weight when challenged (attempt to persuade someone who doesn’t accept the claim l) or to carry on certain I’m right. But if I take the latter path, I have to accept that it’s really very unlikely the other party will learn what I’ve learned, unless they become curious and open to the possibility.

In other words, you can be right until the end of time and it wouldn’t ever matter to some people unless you give them a reason to want to be right too.

Well put, I concur

That is not accurate at all. There are small links with increased cardiac issues but salt is a much much bigger culprit

> weird additives and oils in things like the Impossible Burger.

Here's the ingredients list for the impossible burger:

Water, textured wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, natural flavors, 2% or less of leghemoglobin (soy), yeast extract, salt, konjac gum, xanthan gum, soy protein isolate, vitamin E, vitamin C, thiamine (vitamin B1), zinc, niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin (vitamin B2), and vitamin B12.

The only thing unusual is leghemoglobin, which is fermented soy protein.

Maybe if you are used to eating processed food, but as someone who almost always cooks meals from scratch, this list of ingredients doesn't look appealing. If I was buying a chicken breast, there wouldn't even be a list of ingredients.

"textured wheat protein" - no idea what it, but it sounds disgusting, and very highly processed. I'd presume it also contains gluten?

"potato protein" - again, it sounds like something highly processed.

"natural flavors" - it doesn't specify exactly what they are, so I don't even know what I'm eating - I don't like it.

"leghemoglobin" - you mentioned what this is, but otherwise it sounds like a lab-produced chemical.

"yeast extract" - makes me think of marmite, which is one of the most revolting substances on earth! Aside from that, I think of the smell of yeast; I... don't think I want to eat that.

"konjac gum" - never heard of it.

"xanthan gum" - I think it's some kind of thickening agent?

"soy protein isolate" - no idea what this is. The wheat and potato proteins don't have "isolate" in their names, so I assume this is even more highly processed. For some reason it makes me think of processes like "hydrogenation" - ways we mess around with foods to make them as cheap as possible, sometimes with negative health consequences.

"vitamin E..." - makes me think the raw ingredients on their own are so unhealthy that they had to add a few crushed multivitamins.

Overall: it sounds highly processed and devoid of nutrition. blech!

Konjac is a plant that has been eaten in East Asia for thousands of years.

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

And if you find yeast "revolting", I take it you don't like bread or beer either?

Of course not (tho when baking bread I do find the smell of the yeast on it's own to be quite unpalatable). My point is that I don't expect to find yeast in the ingredients list for "meat", and that was simply my initial reaction.

I know it wasn't your point, but as an aside: isn't the "used" yeast slurry removed from most commercially produced beer? (depending on the style, obv)

Your comments read as contrarian and determined to find fault with this product. If your instinct is to dislike it so much, the answer is simple: don't eat it.

Each of the ingredients bar "natural flavors" (which usually means a proprietary spice blend or msg) can be found with a simple Google search - as someone else said, konjac is an Asian vegetable, textured wheat protein has been a staple of vegan cooking for decades and can be bought in any health food shop, and so on.

> isn't the "used" yeast slurry removed

From beer, partially. From bread, no.

This is a really unkind interpretation of my comments - I am certainly not trying to find fault, merely sharing my initial reaction to a list of seemingly strange ingredients.

You may be familiar with these ingredients, but that doesn't mean anyone who isn't used to highly processed food is "wrong" for not knowing what they even are.

I can buy organic, grass-fed, no-GMO, sustainably pasture-raised beef. Can I buy a higher-quality vurger? AFAIK not (right now).

> I can buy organic, grass-fed, no-GMO, sustainably pasture-raised beef.

No, actually you probably can't [1]:

> Is there such a thing as a climatically-guilt-free steak? Are grazing livestock climate villains or climate saviours? A new report by an international research collaboration led by the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), part of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, provides an authoritative answer to these questions.

> The new report Grazed and confused? helps add clarity to the debate around livestock farming and meat and dairy consumption.

> 14.5% of all human made greenhouse gas emissions come from the livestock sector as a whole. There is however some confusion and disagreement in the debate about the climate impacts of grazing livestock (and particularly grass-fed beef).

> Some commentators have argued that well-managed grazing can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in soils, and that these removals can substantially compensate for, or even exceed, all other emissions from the livestock that are doing the grazing. In this way, grass-fed beef has been offered by some as a climate solution, rather than a problem.

> Written by FCRN’s Dr Tara Garnett in collaboration with Cécile Godde of CSIRO and a team of international experts, this report dissects claims made by different stakeholders in the debate, and evaluates them against the best available science. This report finds that better management of grass-fed livestock do not hold a solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate. Dr Garnett explains the key takeaways from this report:

> “This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land use. Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.”

[1]: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-news-grazed-and-...

Any food transported to your plate by a car has an environmental cost. As does modern life in general. I believe we will eventually solve the problem (via carbon-capture & sustainable energy production) but I see that mostly orthogonal to eating meat.

There's orders of magnitude of difference: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

>Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

I’d be fine with that and then plant-based pub burgers for the rest.

>Have you seen the animal industry? It's absolutely disgusting.

Yes I have. My job as an electrician brought me to farms, slaughterhouses, and food factories. Denmark has rigorously enforced standards for ethical treatment of animals, as well as strict hygiene standards for industrial food preparation. Not disgusting at all.

Fix that then. Replacing garbage meat with garbage ersatz meat isn’t a win.

It’s a win for the food industry, because fake meat can be made extremely cheaply, but the price is still anchored to the cost of actual meat.

That’s what’s so gross about it. We take a governance problem (bad practices in meat and dairy industry), hijack fringe movements like veganism, and turn it into way to undermine sustainable agriculture. The MBAs running big companies don’t care if burgers are from beef or ground up sawdust. It’s just cash.

Along the way, we’re tricking people into thinking that some palm oil smoothie is healthier than meat, and that sugared water filtered through oats is better than dairy.

The worst thing is that consumers fall for it, every single time.

I'm not sure that tracks.

Impossible burger: Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% Or Less Of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Mixed Tocopherols (Antioxidant), Soy Protein Isolate, Vitamins and Minerals (Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12).

These are common ingredients?

For the vast majority of those ingredients, the answer sure looks like "yes." A few are literally standard home cooking ingredients, and nearly all the rest (dextrose, yeast extract, vitamin mixes, etc.) are pretty common in any processed food, which -- let's be honest here -- a lot of us buy pretty regularly. I'm not sure there's anything there that's unique to the Impossible Burger other than the "soy leghemoglobin".

Yeast extract is Marmite! And dextrose is a derivative of corn syrup. And enriched flour is characterized by having vitamins added to it. So they’re not that uncommon either.

D'oh! Being an American with little Marmite exposure, I'd totally forgotten it was yeast extract. :)

I don't know what on earth you cook at home, but "salt" and maybe "sunflower oil" are about the only things on that long list that sound like a "standard home cooking ingredient".

Yes and no. All of these are common ingredients in commercial food production. You’ll see these in all sorts of stuff at your local grocery store. Not so common in your kitchen though.

So is the animal industry in the USA, with ammonia-washed meat, wide-scale deployment of antibiotics (which has the knock-on effect of helping create antibiotic resistance), and the use of growth hormones in cattle to increase production.

I'm not defending the plant-based industry here, but the way meat is produced in the USA is also a nightmare.

I basically avoid American meat for these reasons, and typically source my beef from Australia , Japan or other countries ( which is easier since I live in Taiwan ).

But honestly I’m not 100% sure how much better aussy and Japanese meats are.

Not to mention they still don't taste like meat. The Impossible Burger comes closest and i think it's fine for getting a meat eater to give it a shot but I'd rather eat a black bean burger with just a few ingredients at a fraction of the cost.

I tried the A&W fake meat burger (I think theirs is Beyond brand) and I have to say in the context of a burger with toppings, it was quite good. Probably 95% as enjoyable as an A&W beef burger.

Is that kinda like how mass produced meat is literally an industrialized nightmare? Or are you just saying that having more than a handful of ingredients is bad?

I agree. I've been eating vegan a while, and I've hated certain foods such as onions for my whole life. A ton of fake meat is pre-seasoned with onions and other stuff. Hard to find things I even want to try among it. Typically a beef hotdog would come unseasoned, so it's a bit unfortunate.

There's still plenty good food to eat, but the fake meat is not the most exciting stuff to me.

I think that’s why fake meat is so popular in the US, where all food is very processed, and the concept of natural food is something only the rich care about. The average person already eats ultra processed low industrial food, so the switch is easy, and since it will make a few companies a ton of money, it’s being heavily promoted everywhere.