My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
Apparently vegan-cheese varieties of those exist, but I'm curious if anyone took tofu there.
Some varieties of 豆腐乳 (Wikipedia translates this as fermented bean curd[1]) have strong flavor and creamy texture like blue cheese.
I'm not sure there's anything quite as hard as parmesan (I assume you mean Parmigiano-Reggiano), but there are several smoked tofu varieties that taste similar to smoked gouda.
Sadly in the west most shops only sell silky tofu and firm tofu, which are perhaps the most culinarily flexible, but they are far from the most texturally interesting or flavorful varieties.
I do have a jar of red Chinese fermented bean curd in my fridge, but have only mixed it into sauces per recipes. I should probably try it by itself.
Smoked tofu sounds really interesting.
Indonesians have tempeh which is a bit like haloumi I guess when pan fried, so that's another one.
You can do this with feta, which is soaked in brine. How salty is furu?
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
I've been a vegetarian for eight years, but I eat meat substitute products. I have ethical issues with eating meat and I feel considerably better physically when I don't eat meat, but that doesn't mean that meat doesn't taste good.
I'm quite happy to be able to pop some Quorn mycoprotein into a casserole and eat comfort foods of my childhood without having to kill an animal to do it.
(I have to agree about Tofurky though. I'll generally go hungry voluntarily if that's the vegetarian option.)
Imagine my disappointment when all the restaurants in my area replaced their excellent vegetable burgers with things like Beyond and Impossible. To each their own, but it’s not just a rational issue of “is this an animal”, but also a subjective question of taste.
This attitude isn't limited to animal products either, almost every ersatz product is worse than what it is trying to imitate. People generally don't like chicory & roasted rye in place of coffee, or teas made from roasted barley & catnip. Some people do, but it's not the norm.
However, if you make a product which is intended to stand on its own, rather than imitate something else, then you can often create something pretty good. Think Nutella, which was designed to stretch cocoa, not replace it.
If you’ve never tried an Impossible burger, it’s an order of magnitude better than anything that came before. It’s a good burger. It does taste and feel like meat. It doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not.
Quorn I’d also put in the “doesn’t taste like something that’s trying to be something it’s not” category. It’s been around for a long time, but has been curiously unsuccessful in the US. Amazon Fresh sells it. The ground variety makes a good chili. The nuggets are a reasonable facsimile of white meat chicken nuggets.
Quorn’s no Impossible burger though. What Impossible has accomplished really is astounding.
I feel like you can get a good portion of the texture of beef with some good seitan, for instance. Otherwise, most of them are only really approximate substitutes, in the sense that they substitute what you would use meat for in the meal, not that they substitute directly for a given meat.
This beer is better than the median alcoholic coffee porter. https://athleticbrewing.com/products/first-ride-coffee-porte...
Their IPAs aren't as good as say, Founder's All Day IPA, but they aren't substantially worse, and they have 1/10th the alcohol.
If you want to drink something for 100 calories, these compare favorably in taste to just about everything, IMO.
Non-alcoholic beer seems more popular in Germany (yes, Germany, where beer is very serious business) than in the US.
I like it a lot, because it's a refreshing drink with good taste and no alcohol, well suitable if you want to drive or just don't feel like drinking alcohol right now.
I wish it was more common in the US (where I live now).
Goya Malta and O'Doul's are the brands I'm most familiar with.
If you are happy with non alcoholic beer, stay with that, but have you heard of - Tea?
There are lots and lots of different tea's around, as you can make tea out of allmost anything. So plenty of caffeine-free choices there.
I know I'm tasting the seasoning I used and the infusion of other flavors from the chili more than the taste of the soy burger but my stomach doesn't care, to me it's just as satisfying as chili (or stew, etc.) made with beef.
I love that place. From the decor, to their f* you set of rules, to their food.
Great place. Makes me miss ATl :(
And nor shall I drink anything with corn syrup as that's simply an imitation sugar product, nor do I eat chipotle burritos since they're a pale imitation of actual burritos. I eschew Cavendish bananas entirely since, just like a boca-burger tries to mimic a real burger, the Cavendish banana tries to mimic the real banana. You can taste the difference.
My point here is that "imitation" is very poorly defined. Is a boca burger an imitation? Is a black bean burger? What if the black bean burger uses spices similar to what you use on meat patties?
I think that taking inspiration from another food and trying to mimic it (as chipotle does with real burritos) is a valid way to make a new food, and that food should be judged on its own merits. I don't like "imitation meats" that are just pure saitan for the most part, but I'm fine with other imitation meats. It's not the imitation bit that matters, it's the quality of the thing itself, taken standalone.
That's a strange analogy. Cavendish bananas are a type of "real" banana already. They're not "trying to mimic" anything, and are not at all like Boca burgers in that regard.
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
Like, wtf is almond milk? When I was a kid, almond milk was super tasty, and it was basically normal milk mixed in with sweet almond sherbet. What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk? If you asked me for almond milk and I gave you actual "almond milk" (i.e. the dairy kind) and it turned out you were vegan, you'd be pissed off, right?
What makes that the actual version? Almond milk as an animal milk substitute made from almonds dates back to the 1300s[0]. It's not new.
I hear where you're coming from, but I also question what does and doesn't count as an "authentic" name, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to people thinking that the names they used growing up or the names they ran into first are the "real" ones and everything else is a new fad.
When people are arguing about confusion I'm a little bit sympathetic (although I'm doubtful consumer confusion is actually the serious problem they make it out to be). But when people start to argue about needing to use proper words, I usually check out, because usually they have a very narrow view of what word origins count as proper. They're rarely tracing the etymology of the word, they're usually just saying that everyone should adopt the same definitions that their specific parents used.
So let me flip your question around on you: almond sherbet already traditionally contains milk. What would be wrong with calling almond sherbet... almond sherbet, or an almond milkshake if the balance of milk is increased. That would be helpful anyway, because you could make vegan almond sherbet using a vegan milk as a base, and then what are you going to call it under your system?
My take on this is that vegan cheese/milk is substitutable in nearly every single recipe I make. Many people dislike the taste of vegan cheese, which I understand and think is completely valid, but many people also dislike the taste of brie and I don't see a general campaign to classify brie as a non-cheese. So part of why I call those products vegan milk/cheese instead of "cheeze" is because I think if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and if I can use it in all of my duck recipes often without any additional thought or research, then for all practical purposes it's a duck.
So, e.g., given your 'quacks like a duck' theory, I could happily cook a "mushroom risotto" with mushroomy chicken instead of actual mushroom, and that would still be a perfectly fine mushroom risotto, right? Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass, and all linguistic subtleties of what constitutes 'mushroominess' in chicken would probably fly out the window.
Note I'm not arguing about what ingredients are substitutable for others and thus comparable. I'm arguing about naming, and specifically about naming intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing. So while I partly agree with the 'quacks like a duck' thing, I think a big part of why it's fine to have non-dairy 'cheese', but not fine to have chicken-based 'mushrooms' comes down to which direction of duck-quacking feels more 'defendable' than what constitutes acceptable substitutes in terms of flavour.
How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.
> Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass
To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based".
If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients.
> intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing
I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do.
But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan.
Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using.
An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".
I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.
Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going.
I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences.
My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well.
> It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.
I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument:
First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling.
Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling.
I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/eggs/cheese are used almost exactly the same way in most recipes, they look the same, they accomplish the same goals in most meals, and while they're distinguishable when eaten, the taste difference between vegan cheddar and regular cheddar is not (imo) as large as the difference between cheddar and, say, cottage cheese. The differences do matter, particularly nutritionally, and they should be clearly labeled, but do they matter so much that they need completely separate words? I would argue that putting them in the same category of food is the least confusing way to talk about them, and nutritional/ingredient labeling is a separate concern from etymology.
That it's milk with almond. Like "chocolate milk" is milk with chocolate and "milk coffee" is coffee with milk.
From medieval and Renaissance-era recipes, religious rules appears to be the main reason almond milk is used. Because it's not dairy.
Because that would be crippling for an advertising perspective. It sounds like something out of a satirical sci-fi dystopian environment. The goal is to encourage people to choose it as an alternative to dairy milk, not to use the most precise label.
It seems totally feasible to require a new product to have a new name, even if it's kind of like an existing product. Think: ice cream. Ice cream is a regulated product with a formal legal definition. Places making cheaper ice cream substitutes were forced to come up with names to distinguish their products: soft serve, Frosty, FroYo, etc.
It takes the consumer all of 10 seconds to get the gist.
Everyone should be okay with truth in food. Especially vegan, who certainly would NOT be okay with products that mislead them into believing a product is vegan when it is not.
Lots of foods are regulated by the FDA or USDA. Mayo, yoghurt, butter, bread, etc, etc. If you search the FDA or USDA site, you'll find the requirements that must be met for a company to use such terms. That's why Miracle Whip is called a "dressing," in the USA instead of Mayonnaise.
The CFR contains a subsection specifically for frozen pies (though, one of the Trump administrations last acts was to gut this). Lemon bars must contain lemons, per food labeling regulations. Peanuts have a section too.
And yeah, industry lobbyists are largely the creators of legal definitions for foods. If you're a beef producer, you certainly don't want other companies to be able to sell ground up bugs as "ground beef" and undercut your prices or give consumers a bad impression of your product.
I will concede, tacos are not regulated.
This has little to do with the stop confusing the names of things argument.
I concede that almond milk was a bad example, but if anything that strengthens the point.
I bet even back then people had the same discussion in fact :p
E.g. lactose-free dairy milk is marketed as 'delac'. It's not that hard.
Fun fact: lactose-free milk still has all the sugars that made up its original lactose content (you could even argue it still has all its lactose, if you wanted to be really obstinate). Glucose in particular registers as sweeter than lactose and for this reason many "lactose-free" milks have messages on the packaging informing consumers that they have "no sweetener added".
Lactose-free milks also tend to be Ultra Heat Treated, which enhances the sweet taste by means of the Maillard reaction. See wikipedia.
Costco does this. They don't call it almond milk but "Almond beverage". I think they do similar with other vegan products.
Obviously searching for the various possible terms gives results mostly from recent times, about the vegan almond milk.
Soumada is very tasty, a bit like amaretto but without the alcohol. I haven't had it in years ...
A similar and very popular drink along similar lines is "rose milk", which is stirring up some rose sherbet in milk.
It was a popular way of getting kids to drink milk back in my day (slightly less popular these days).
But I admit, if a vegan "rose milk" comes out as some milky alternative made of rose petals and I have to repurpose "rose milk" as well, I'm going to be quite upset :p
[1] https://www.mycretangoods.com/article/16856/Soumada-traditio...
"Αμυγδαλόγαλα"; I confess I've never heard that word but maybe it's just an old word?
Yet, for God knows what reason, whenever some vegan is trying to convince me of the merits of their diet, they hand me some godawful dry sausage made of hydrolysed soy protein and say "see, it's just like a real sausage. Did you know she's Paul McCartney's daughter?". Or some fermented cashew nuts smeared on a piece of bread that they think is anything remotely like cheese. I have never understood this and have since reached the conclusion that most vegans are closer to paleo, gluten-free (not coeliac) and other alternative diet folk in that they just don't "get" people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food.
There is an epidemiological experiment that has been going on for over a million years. It resulted in a population of 8 billion homo sapiens. That is not actually good for the Earth, but if you want to know what to eat, to maximize your health as an individual, look that way.
Not with modern food science. A lot of people consider cornsyrupy sugar water to be satisfying because companies have collectively spent billions and decades in R&D and marketing to make it taste and look as satisfying as possible.
It works because our sense are not infallible, they can be tricked and purposefully mislead. Just like taste expectations are often built from childhood on.
Mainly it's the language that is used by people who adhere to diets such as this. There is more reference to the health properties of various ingredients than there is the art of cooking, and this feels alien to people like myself. Of course, there are paleo foodies (just as there are vegans), but they are in the minority.
I'm not saying the way you see things is wrong (if anything, the fact that you're almost certainly healthier than me is strong evidence to the contrary), but for evangelists of alternative diets there is a cultural barrier to overcome that vegans especially seem to just not be aware of.
We also have lots of vegan "cheese" type products with funny names like "Keese" and "Cheez" and some are pretty good.
I like keeping the names clear because no one gets confused and buys the wrong thing.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
Maybe it’s the case in Your Country but it’s far from being a pan European thing.
"The European Parliament has voted in favour of an amendment (no.171) which would place further restrictions on the use of dairy food labels for plant-based products. The use of dairy terms, such as "cheese", "yoghurt" and "milk", for non-dairy products is already banned within the EU, following a decision by the CJEU in 2017, however, under the new amendment, these restrictions would go one step further by also prohibiting terms that liken plant-based products to dairy, eg "yoghurt-style", "butter alternative" or "cheese substitute"."[0]
0. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=588638a6-879c...
EDIT still ongoing and not yet legislated you can still buy “vegan cheese” for now https://m.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/amendment-171-34-pol...
It’s interesting that your jurisdiction is so proactive in this area!
Between that title, and it having been posted on April the 1st, I find it difficult to take that article serious.
Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.
Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.
As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.
They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.
Exactly. Maybe the main problem is that it's hard to market 'Soylent Yellow'.
If I were to become a vegetarian, I think I'd just buy a bunch of Indian cookbooks and stay away from IncrediblyMeatyPlantBasedBurger(tm).
Impossible does a great job of imitating meat, primarily the flavor of blood. But as I'm eating less meat, I'm tasting the blood more distinctly and find I actually don't enjoy it at all.
Our local way-overpriced health grocery story, which is always packed with people, is completely stuffed with health potato chips and health dessert items and health pre-made stuff with long ingredient lists.
Maybe it's just the beauty of a free market, you can always make money on social behavior.
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
The ability murder as many animals as you want is not the desired state I look for when thinking about the world in which my child to grow up. A future in which that is synonymous with status is backwards - to me.
That said, I invite you to consider what you would and would not allow others to do given a hypothetical: if you genuinely believed that cows were just as capable of suffering as humans — especially given that cows lactate only after giving birth, and dairy cows live only for so long as their milk is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive.
Most functioning adults can keep quiet about a simple preference (for Star Trek when around Star Wars fans, or whatever) but morals don’t work the same.
Handling difficult feelings without acting out is one of the definitions of being a functional adult. You may have that backwards, though it is very consistent with the pop culture moral / philosophical (behavioral?) flavor of late.
The level of enforcement and punishment varies form instance to instance, from culture to culture, and from year to year, but there are cases even today where religious morality leads to extreme use of force: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/hindu-mob...
Disagreeing with the requirements of sections 64, 65, and 70? Outside of philosophical discussions, most normal people find them sufficiently repulsive that even suggesting they might not be things that ought to be illegal is enough to make you a social pariah. (I’m not sure exactly how 69 or 71 are seen, but the actions they outlaw are demonstrably frowned on enough for the sections to survive multiple elections).
When imho a pretty sensible middle ground could very well be found between these two. But that would involve some moderation, rediscovering animal products as something special, and not just a mass commodity, something neither of the two extreme camps would ever agree with.
Please show me the law.
This squeamishness is a product of the infantilization western culture seems to be going through recently. Hopefully immigration from 2/3-world countries (e.g. me) helps fix it.
I spend almost nothing on food in this shop. Same for all the poor Mexicans who live in the area.
It’s quite obvious that ubiquitous access to cheap animal products is a first world thing.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
While I also like black bean burgers, veggie patties, etc (though I can't personally handle portobello mushrooms as a patty, I know tons of people also love that), it's clear that people like having the pseudo-meat option.
I know I do like having the option, especially for cooking when I don't want to make seitan or grounds or something from scratch, which involves following a whole other recipe just to reach my "base protein" that I then cook with.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
Personally I would love a list of animal product ingredients and their suitable vegan replacements when trying to cook after some recipe.
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
The one I had that plant based logo was a quarter of the size and it did not have leaves like that on the front. Also that white plant based text was a few shades lighter than the background (that was previously sky blue) making it hard to read. Admittedly I should've seen the "style" part and looked further, also I should've questioned why it was the one of the only shredded cheese left in the fridge. It isn't like I was defrauded but that certainly wasn't what I intended to buy, good on them for fixing it.
Leave it to Wal-Mart to screw that up. I bet they were so focused on sticking to the "Great Value" graphic design manual that they ended up deciding that clearly conveying all the critical information on the label would have ruined their branding consistency.
For what it's worth, I can tell just by the ingredients label that that stuff is gross. Potato starch, coconut oil, and some unspecified "natural flavor" that's somehow more than 2% of the ingredient bill? No thanks.
The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
(https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...)
And I was very annoyed. Mostly at myself.
Much cheaper to make. Maybe their target market is "people who buy it by accident and throw it away".
Others, like Daiya, I won't object to if someone else wants to put it on whatever we're cooking. I'm pretty lactose intolerant, so I can't speak to how it compares to dairy cheese; my personal take from the few times where I'll pop a Lactaid in order to participate in a pizza party is that, while Daiya fake mozzarella is meh, the stuff it's intended to mimic is even worse. I occasionally wonder if there is something to that casomorphin theory that the article mentions, and people who regularly consume dairy largely like it for approximately the same reason smokers like the taste of tobacco smoke.
And then there are some brands, generally of more of a 1990s vintage, that are legitimately gross. Unfortunately, those seem to be the ones that are most commonly stocked in grocery stores, for Heaven knows what reason.
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
More than I could possibly recall. Violife, chao, follow your heart, miyokos, daiya, parmellas, go veggie, kite hill, Trader Joe’s brand
> For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions
Not a chance that I believe this. Maybe as a minor ingredient in a larger meal but certainly not as a main ingredient or on its own.
I use the liquid from sauerkraut or picked gherkins, garlic, onion powder and some salt, with the obligatory nutritional yeast. Just think of it as a nice pate.
it's like 1.3g of protein per 100g (pseudo pasta 'cheese') vs 32g per 100g (Parmigiano-Reggiano) or 23g per 100g for Emmental cheese.
What's worse, outside the EU you can find cheese with names like "feta", "parmesan", "mozzarella", "camembert" etc, that are nothing like the real deal (pet peeve: feta sold in the US is made with cow's milk). So most people who eat cheeses with these names outside the EU are eating substitutes of very inferior quality. From there, to eating plant-based "cheese" and feeling like you eat the real deal it's not such a big distance.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
Or maybe it's more like beer, most don't like it the first time but after a while you can start appreciating it?
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
Agreed. I eat meat but love veggie burgers.
There is no such thing when it comes to cheese. Cheese is love, cheese is life.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
Agreed! They are different but equally delicious.
Orders of magnitude worse than Beyond Beef* / Impossible* (as compared to actual meat).
*just to be clear, I actually love both Beyond & Impossible's products. Extremely close to real meat IMO.
Both burgers were made with the same spices and were grilled on a charcoal grill.
People are happier to replace their hamburger meat with Impossible instead. Beyond Meat has slightly different flavor that people were able to pick out as "fake meat".
However, it seems to have improved significantly, to the point that twice now I've thought they accidentally gave me real beef, had a meet-eating friend confirm, and after talking to the waiter and cook and taking a much closer look decided I was wrong.
I love Beyond burgers too, but they are more distinct from real beef as far as my >10yr vegetarian tongue can tell.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
https://youtu.be/4CVzqJWkodA?t=834
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...
Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
If you buy locally grown asparagus -- where I live, that means around four weeks every year -- it's fine.
Stuff that gets put on a boat is in-between; no idea if that's viable for asparagus, it never occured to me to buy it out of season.
You've thrown that basis out the window by adding additional foods and reframing the argument.
[0] https://cigrjournal.org/index.php/Ejounral/article/view/3461
Would love to be proven wrong!
But cheese? Half the Miyoko's products taste like a finely ground nut paste mixed with mold and spoiled milk.
I'll say it then - it's all terrible. There's so many great vegan foods out there, fake cheese is not one of them.
These are both true of dairy cheeses too.
vegan cheese just doesnt have the same fat and sugar properties that normal cheese does.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).