I think there's definitely a gradient in terms of how "meat"-like veggie patties can be. What I take issue with is that instead of offering products for what they are and letting people build their culture around them, it feels like the food industry is essentially operating in tunnel-vision mode and perpetuating what IMHO is a pretty mediocre culinary culture.

So while you may get spicy veggie cake hotpots elsewhere in the world, in the US you get... air quotes burgers? To really understand what I mean, it would likely be eye opening to see what american fast food chains look like in Asia: they have an insane amount of variety that makes their counterparts in the US look like bad jokes. It took ages for McD to wake up to breakfast culture, and likewise for Lays to pick up on mexicans' taste for spicy snacks and now these are huge segments for them. I'm still dumbfounded that food company execs don't see the lost opportunity of not introducing more variety rather than trying to make everything conform to pre-establish molds.

I sympathize with your viewpoint, having experienced McDonald's in India. My guess is that it doesn't pay to experiment and build a food culture - all the big companies can do is wait for a local success and then try to import it.

Food tastes vary a lot from person and place, so I do think it's very risky. To give you a successful example, poke bowls became popular in the urban US in the early 2010s, and reached my college town around 2015 or so? But my guess is that the locals don't eat there much, just the students. I think it's because people are less adventurous in aggregate than you might think, and the economics don't work out.

See McDonald's international menu, which is in my opinion kind of terrible. There must be something holding them back.

Yeah, the point about local tastes is very true. But consider delivery food: pizza and chinese are both very popular in the US, not because they're authentic or even good, but because some companies figured out a way to market themselves effectively. So, while tastes might not change overnight, it's certainly possible to create culture w/ clever marketing and pricing. That might potentially be a better bet for a food industry upstart than trying to negotiate w/ big chains and end up getting shut out because "economies of scale didn't pan out".

Even without creating culture, I think there are food items that big food companies could conceivably offer in a market like the US and still be relatively well accepted: chicken pot pie, pastas/lasagnas, crepes, fish and chips, are all things that americans are warm to and don't necessarily involve a huge slab of red meat as the core of the dish. One of those can even be made in a McD restaurant with existing ingredients today.

It's a weird meat taste, though, in this uncanny valley of meat like flavor. Something is a bit off about the impossible burger and others, and it tastes like they tried to hide it with grease. Cooking this sort of fake meat makes it evident why that is. You won't see high amounts of grease on the box, but you need it to cook, and fake meat absorbs grease like a god damned sponge. I have to use a massive amount of olive oil to brown fake ground meat. And it makes sense because there is nothing in there to render out, so stuff has to work its way in instead like osmosis.