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.