I hear this sort of thing a lot but don't quite understand it.

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.)

I’ll chime in as a long time vegetarian and former meat eater. The more realistic an imitation meat product is, the more it creeps me out. I lost the taste for meat, and I’m no longer used to the texture, and I find it disgusting.

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.

It comes down to personal preference. I'm with the GP comment for the exact reasons: I don't like vegan/vegetarian products that imitate animal products because they never actually hit the mark.

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.

As someone who had been a vegetarian since birth, I almost never like foods that attempt to imitate meat simply because they don't usually taste better good. I'm not trying to replace something I used to eat, and I'm also not disgusted by meat so if like to think this is an unbiased opinion...

I’d bet that anyone decrying imitation meat - or, at least, anyone who generally likes real meat decrying imitation meat - hasn’t had good imitation meat.

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.

For me most imitation meats just don't hit the same notes. One of the mainstays of my childhood was a lamb and leek stew called cawl. I've tried different meat substitutes but none get the right flavour there. Ironically, the closest I've gotten is to skip meat replacements and just put some butter in, it produces the same creamy, fatty taste lamb meat does.

I think lamb is also one that is particularly hard to substitute, IMO.

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.

As someone who has drank 3,000+ different commercial beers, and has brewed a few hundred gallons of homebrew (alcoholic) beer, I'd highly recommend giving athletic brewing companies non-alcoholic beers a shot.

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.

Seconded. Just finished one less than half an hour ago, in fact, because I'm abstaining for a bit after my second Pfizer shot (apparently alcohol is not ideal for the process). Sometimes low-calorie and/or no-alcohol are desirable traits. When I can I'll still go for a Southern Tier or Allagash product, but Athletic makes some thoroughly decent drinkable beers for a different set of occasions.

Members of my family are dry and drink NA beer. I buy it to have it around for them, but honestly it's great for having a beer with lunch, or wanting to drink something that isn't sugar. Even going over to a friends place while I'm planning on driving, go every other beer real vs NA.

> anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer.

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).

It was very common in Miami, and I can find it usually in normal grocery stores in NYC.

Goya Malta and O'Doul's are the brands I'm most familiar with.

We drink a lot of non alcoholic beer. I want something more exiting than water even on work day lunches and I don’t like sweet drinks and I’m trying to reduce my caffeine intake. Not that much left to choose from then.

There's a product called Hop Water that hits a perfect spot for me. No alcohol or calories in it, and it is refreshing and hoppy enough to drink either by itself or to cut the oilyness of many bar-type foods.

Awesome where can I try this??

"Not that much left to choose from then."

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 sometimes make ice tea in the summers. But I have to make it myself. All readymade ice tea that I’ve found is horribly sweet.

Why not both?

I agree completely but one exception for me is using Boca burger as a sub for ground beef. If I chop them up, season them and then use the result in chili or something it really does give it, to me anyway, the "taste" and "texture" of ground beef.

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.

Here's an easy vegetarian chili recipe we've been using for years in my house:

https://pastebin.com/84cwiJ02

Thank you! I'll have to try this. weird that it uses a less chili powder than I usually use in my meat chili (roughly 3 tbs for 2lbs of meat and a can of beans). Maybe I'm just used to a ton more spice. I could have been amping it up after going away from red meat

That could be because the chili molecule has polarity and clumps together in fatty environments, like meat sauces and yoghurt. Conversely it gets dispersed by water. That recipe probably has a bit less fat than what your usual meaty one has, so less chili goes further :)

It's actually the other way around: capsaicin is non-polar, that's why it is hydrophobic but soluble in oil and fat.

Have you tried impossible meat? It’s so satisfying and mimics meat better than anything I’ve tried out there.

Well if anyplace is going to have a decent vegi-burger it will have to be The Vortex.

I love that place. From the decor, to their f* you set of rules, to their food.

Great place. Makes me miss ATl :(

> I wouldn't eat imitation animal products anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer.

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.

> 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.

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.