As a vegetarian, I really don't get why people are so focused on realistic meat replacement. Like, there are other things to eat.

I especially don't get why people want the texture of red meat like beef patties. So you like... soft food?

There's no arguing tastes, it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about.

I thought this way too until the Beyond/Impossible burgers. Before them, the garden burgers and similar options mostly got a "why bother?" reaction from me. Give me a dish that is meant to be vegetarian, not something trying and failing to replicate a meat dish.

But I also love a good burger. To each their own, of course, but a well cooked burger (well cooked, not well done) made with quality meat.. it's hard to top. And that's the thing with Beyond and Impossible - while they don't hit the level of top tier burgers, they're actually "close enough" to the taste and texture of real beef that I actually enjoy them as a burger, not just as a burger substitute.

And being close enough is massively important. You aren't going to get the world to go vegetarian on ethical appeals. But plant-based meats that are able to get close enough, especially if they can end up priced cheaper than meat, will provide a much easier transition to less meat consumption. And hey, it doesn't even need to mean that people go to 100% vegetarian; significant reductions would help a lot.

Yes, I agree that the price is a very big factor for mass adoption.

Fellow vegetarian take: I stopped eating meat for environmental reasons, not because I disliked the experience of eating meat, and while I was never a big meat eater, there are definitely some meat-containing foods I miss from time to time, a good burger being one. I think a well-made black bean burger can be really great, and without priors I'd probably say better than fake meat, but for whatever reason it doesn't pull the nostalgia levers for me, so I do like an impossible burger every now and then.

More importantly though, I don't really thing I'm the target audience (nor are you). I think it's more like, say, my parents: generally environmentally conscious (retrofit their house with a heat pump, etc.), but have established dietary habits that have kept them from making big changes specifically around meat. I think if you were able to offer them something indistinguishable from the real thing, though, they'd be totally down to swap it out at a barbecue or whatever. Personally I think getting 50% of Americans to cut their meat intake by 20% is way easier than getting 10% to give meat up entirely, especially with good alternatives, and the outcome is the same. Worth a shot, I'd say?

> it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about

As others have replied already, pure vegetarians aren't the only audience for these products. You have plenty of people (like myself) who still enjoy meat but will happily opt for the replacements when available because of the environmental/ethical/health benefits, and I'm sure they've also lowered the barrier to entry for many people making the leap into full vegetarian diets for the first time.

I've been finding myself opting for the Impossible/Beyond options on menus more and more lately (even at fast food joints, e.g. Starbucks or Burger King), and I'm grateful for the options being there.

This is bizarre virtue signalling that you should rein in.

The entire world eats meat, and you know that.

You almost certainly have some opinions on the moral correctness of animal slaughter for food.

So it's not a leap of logic to realize that probably there's a significant cross-over between people who have this view but still like the taste.

So I have no idea why you feel like this is a "confusing" product to exist.

I don't get what you're trying to say. Of course people like the taste, but why pretend to eat meat? We all know it's not the same. I'd rather have a real version of something I like than a fake version of something I miss.

All other things being equal, so would everyone here.

But all other things aren't equal. One side requires raising and killing animals, and the other side doesn't.

So we're weighing "real thing that kills animals" and "fake thing that's really close, but doesn't kill animals".

It’s simple - we like eating what we grew up eating. For me, those are the dishes and ingredients my mom made, the restaurants near home made when I was a kid etc. Nostalgia/memory is an important component of taste because I figure it’s evolution’s way of saying “you ate this and didn’t die. Eat some more!”

I’ve never eaten a beef burger. I tried an Impossible Burger. It just tasted ... I don’t know. Not meh, not great, not bad. Just different. I’d eat it again if someone offered but I wouldn’t seek it out.

But I totally get why people who’ve had 1-2 beef burgers their whole lives love that taste. I’m the same way with a good cheese omelette or a paneer dish.

My thought is it's for people who are meat replacing rather than being vegetarian.

I agree with you about so many foods to choose from.

For me as a vegetarian it's an absurd thing wanting to eat something that tastes like animal but it's a taste thing so it's just a subjective view of mine.

As an omnivore it’s because burger is delicious. If I can get the burger without the cow I’m down. Frankly forget about what they’re replacing, they just taste pretty good. Just a round puck of yum.

As someone who tries to eat more vegetarian food - and is succeeding better at it every week, burgers are the only thing I use cow meat for. There just is no substitute when you want a proper burger.

I've tried portobello, chicken, pork, chickpea, you name it.

But when I want a burger, the only thing that actually works is minced cow meat - and Impossible/Beyond Burger. They're still a bit hard to get (usually sold out) and expensive, but we're getting there.

I want my children to live in a world where eating 4-legged mammals is an expensive delicacy, not an everyday occurrence or something you can get for $1 from McD.

Lab diamonds are adding impurities to mimic natural diamonds. Electric guitars are more popular than theremins. Photoshop lets you paint with brushes.

These are all examples to show that when we are given a technology that allows us to access any point in a high-dimensional space of possibilities, humans will explore it starting from what they already know.

There are probably points in food space much better than what we have already, but it's going to take us a while to find them.

People are vegetarian for a number of reasons. Personally, I really enjoy the taste (which includes the mouthfeel!) of meat, but I'm vegetarian for a number of reasons and have been for 13 years now. I don't think I'd want to go back to eating a meat/fish/etc. every day even if it were possible to do so in an entirely vegetarian manner, but having another thing that I enjoy eating sometimes is nice.

I don’t get it either, as someone who is not a strict vegetarian but also doesn’t eat a lot of meat. For someone that really loves meat, they are going to be supremely disappointed by that product. Similarly, I think most vegetarians would be be disappointed by that product. (I greatly prefer traditional veggie burgers.)

It fits a weird market niche. I think most people that buy it would be better served with really great (non-fake-meat) vegetarian food and the occasional bit of quality meat when they really want it, which would provide a superior eating experience all around and approximately achieve many of the same objectives. I don’t know any vegetarians that really eat the fake meat; most of the people I know that eat it seem to treat them as “offsets” for when they eat real meat.

I'm a vegetarian that eats the fake meat and I'm glad it exists even if it's not perfect.

I love hamburgers and for me, it's the biggest loss after becoming a vegetarian. Impossible is the closest I can get to recreating that experience.

I switched to vegetarian because of the animal suffering/morality angle. I have for a long time felt that it was the right thing to do, but I liked eating meat so it was hard for me to do it. The pandemic gave me an opportunity to make the switch and be more consistent.

I will go vegetarian for months at a time but the challenge I have isn’t meat per se but that most vegetarian cooking has a strong bias toward sweet/sour/starchy kinds of flavor profiles, which I dislike. As in, for example, I literally never eat fruit because I’ve don’t like the flavor. I can see how the Impossible Burger is an alternative to that but it isn’t the only solution. It did take me years to collect and develop enough recipes that are highly satisfying that don’t have that character though, so it does offer a default.

While I strongly agree with the angle of minimizing animal suffering, I am also pragmatic because I grew up in very rural agricultural communities. All large-scale agricultural kills loads of animals, that is the nature of the thing. When you buy plant products that carnage is merely less obvious and a bit more wasteful (the animals that die usually aren’t eaten by people). Feeding 8 billion people and animals dying go hand-in-hand, even when everyone is vegetarian.

I’m also pragmatic in the sense that this doesn’t change easily or quickly, but there’s a difference between incidental animal death due to plant agriculture and raising animals for slaughter. I think the goal is suffering reduction - anything that moves the needle in that direction is a good thing.

Because it's easier to convince people to take on more vegetarian foods if you can provide a good alternative to foods they already eat.

Let's be honest, most people aren't going to become vegetarian, but a lot of people will happily eat more vegetarian foods if it's available.

I'm not yet vegan/vegetarian, but I am making my way there.

> I really don't get why people are so focused on realistic meat replacement.

100% this. I enjoy Impossible as an independent food, I have it whenever I see it on the menu. The taste and texture are a couple of shades off from beef, but that's more variety at the end of the day.

It's almost a mistake calling it a meat replacement.

Beef remains the gold-standard, so to speak.

FWIW, I thought the Impossible Burger clearly tasted like heavily processed legumes, not like meat. I grew up in one of the major legume growing regions of the US and was raised on them in a part of the world where the local food culture knows how to get the most out of them. It is very satisfying when done right, and I eat far more than the average American to this day, but no one would confuse it with meat. Impossible Burger etc tastes like overly processed legumes with some chemical-y overtones.

Ironically, I think it would be far more appealing if they didn’t try to make it simulated meat and leaned into its strengths. Vegetarian burgers that don’t pretend to be meat taste better. Legumes that are expertly processed as a protein, without trying to be meat, taste better. The Impossible Burger falls into the same category as “fat-free mayo”; trying to maintain the pretense ultimately produces a poor experience.

I am an accidental vegetarian most days but I won’t eat Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger. The products taste unpleasantly synthetic. If I wanted to eat legumes, I can create something far better tasting for much less money. If I want a burger, I’ll eat a burger — marketing aside, the gap is still very wide.

To each their own. I completely disagree, in that the Impossible Burger, and to a lesser degree the Beyond Burger, are the first vegetarian products I've eaten that completely satiate my desire for meat, and I really like the taste with good seasoning, ketchup and mustard.

I've eaten many veggie burgers previously, whether they be bean, soy, or mushroom based, and always after eating one I felt like it tasted OK, but I was left wanting a steak even more.

The preparation may matter. For example, I don’t put ketchup and mustard on my burgers, which will probably disguise a lot of the processed legume taste. I don’t use strongly flavored sauces.

For reasons I don’t understand, some of the most satisfying unintentionally vegetarian food I’ve eaten has been in the agriculture regions of the US, like the Palouse, where legumes are ubiquitous local crops. Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than with fake meat.

It’s a marketing gap. A lot of vegetarian cooking is biased towards a sweet/sour/starchy flavor profile; people that don’t like those flavors in their food generally are on their own, the alternatives are not well represented.

> Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than with fake meat.

It’s impossible not to ask. Could you share any recipes or dish preparation tips?

I lived in the rural Palouse growing up. That region is responsible for producing a lot of the lentils, dry peas, chickpeas, et al in the US. There is a wide range of local cuisine in that region based on those ingredients that is absurdly delicious that I’ve never seen anywhere else. There are a lot of recipes online but they are materially different. There are distant analogues of some of it (e.g. falafel or some Indian cuisine) but it is pretty different from that. This was home food on the farms.

The thing to understand about legumes is that some of them, with appropriate preparation, can constructively absorb prodigious quantities of salt and fat. For example, you can fry lentils, which are delicious on their own (I think these are eaten in the Middle East), but that can be a prep step for further processing. Many people make cakes or patties, often pan frying them. Addictive as hell and salty, and you can’t eat a lot of it, but it tastes amazing and various forms are sometimes used as a meat alternative e.g. with eggs for breakfast.

The caveat, which I’ve learned the hard way, is that there is quite a bit of non-obvious knowledge on how to process the legumes for these dishes, and it has multiple stages. Texture and consistency control, as well as the interplay of oil and water, is not trivial. Lentils are the most complicated but also the most interesting, but the multiple processing steps are more work than is convenient. I left when I was a kid, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out by trial and error. When I travel back there, local restaurants still serve these kinds of things. I could basically eat this stuff every day and never miss meat. They also make some interesting sauce/gravy type preparations from legumes, which are similar to things I’ve had in Germany (probably adapted, the population there is ethnically German).

They have variants of all these things based on lentils, chickpeas, and dry (split) peas, which are pretty different in practice.

I’ve also done a fair amount of work adapting classic Indian vegetarian food concepts to completely different European food contexts and use cases. These creations have been immensely popular; my prodigiously carnivorous friends request them.

Totally agree on Impossible Burgers. Like the GP, I also try to avoid eating meat due to animal welfare concerns. That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic.

With Impossible Burgers, though, it really tastes and feels like I'm eating a real burger. It completely satiates my desire for meat, and it makes my body feel "good" from an energy perspective.

> That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic.

The same thing happened to me when I first tried going vegan. It wasn’t until I went through a major effort at planning my meals — to the point of making an outright diet plan for myself — that I was able to make veganism work for me.

From your description, it sounds like you were eating too little calories.

Could also have been b12 or iron.

You're right about meal planning. I also think that if you're going to cut out an entire food group you should phase it out. You eat food every single day. You have to find something that works long term for you.

A key thing is that some folks have boring "meat and potatoes" taste, with no interest in moving beyond that. My parents are old-timers living in the Irish countryside. When I was growing up in the early 80s, you couldn't get one-tenth the stuff I now eat a daily basis. I became a vegetarian by first developing a love for cooking (especially Indian). When you have a wide range of tastes, and the supermarkets stock everything you need, it's easy to find alternative to meat. Otherwise, it takes a long time to expand your tastes and learn what to actually do with ingredients. My mother walks around the supermarket at the weekend, and still picks up the same old things she used to get in the 80s. She wouldn't know what to do with 90% of the herbs and spices on my shelf. So asking her to cut out the one tasty part of her daily meal is pointless, not to mention unhealthy (she would have low b12 and iron).

If I were a meat eater planning to go vegetarian I would avoid cold turkey (not a pun). Phase it out. Maybe start with the biggest greenhouse emitters (cow), or the most intelligent (pig). Maybe give up fowl and fish last. Rather than see it as a limitation, start by learning how to cook one new meal every week that is nutritious, tasty and also meat free. Also, if someone else is doing all the hard work (ie: you're in a restaurant or ordering delivery) use that as an opportunity to try different things that don't have meat. Indian food is great for this because it's not just "meat and potatoes without the meat" or their vegetarian food is amazing. But you might need to develop a taste for it.

For some people it might take a year, but if you think about it as expanding your tastes, perhaps it won't feel like a chore, and you won't feel like you've given up anything (especially now that you can fall back on the decent meatless burgers/sausage you can get nowadays).

It's funny to me how people talk about iron being a problem on a vegetarian diet. I've been a vegetarian for a decade or so now and my iron level is consistently at the very high end of the normal range. I don't do anything special to achieve this.

Same. I'm a vegetarian and I'm in perfect health. But if someone is extremely lethargic all the time, it's usually either iron, B12 or calories (rarely the latter). Also, some people become vegetarian and simply do it wrong. I know a girl who is vegetarian for icky reasons, ie she is disgusted by the idea of eating something's spleen/veins/anus, and it just stops her from eating any meat. But she's similarly icky about vegetables. Hates all kinds of things. She's low on iron, is constantly sick and lethargic.