That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times.

In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example.

So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.

>That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times.

Where I'm at, I do the mediterranean diet, like most people (with a little more meat and BS snacks thrown in following the cultural example of the US, but still, nothing like the S.A.D.).

I'll also mention that most staple plants, legumes, etc. on that diet is cheaper in the US than here, where wages are double and more in the US. So price is not an excuse for Americans not to eat similarly.

People who want to eat "less processed food" can start eating less processed food. Highly processed, lab grown "meat" is hardly the way to eat "less processed food".

But are they "not mainstream" or just "not affordable"?

One of the great things about this restaurant is that it was super cheap. $5 could easily get lunch for two, which would consist of noodles, vegetables, some type of imitated meat chunks or cubes with sauce, and tea back when I used to go there. And it tasted really quite good. According to their current menu, you can still eat well there for less than $10 per person, and they have a whole lot more items than they did back then.

Interesting!