While I agree with your comment, this is very misleading unless you eat your steak raw and unsalted.

But wait, there's more! National brands of everything here load their products up with salt. Buns, condiments, fries, drinks are all packed with sodium. Under the guise of eating healthy, one can eat a loaded up plant burger w/fries and a cola and consume a day' worth of salt in one sitting.

370mg of salt in a single patty is an absurd amount of salt.

Really? You're saying "a few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker" isn't going to give you as much as one 25th of a teaspoon?

I think it’s accurate and fair to list the direct ingredients rather than estimating what the nutrition content is after cooking. That gets pretty hard to follow as cooking varies substantially.

For example, I might bake my broccoli with olive oil. Does that make it misleading to only show the fat content of broccoli and not the olive oil?

There are many beef dishes that don’t add salt.

It’s good to know we can create delicious plant burgers. It sucks to doubt if they are even better for us than the meat.

Is that the central north american urban choice palette?

Here in rural Australia our meat intake (albeit < %20 of total food intake) is lamb from the farm, ham from the farm, fish from the ocean, camel, kangaroo, goat.

Camel and goat are introduced feral animals that overstock and get routinely culled - they're not feed lot cattle, and anybody eating them is arguably doing the local environment a favour by denting the numbers.

Kangaroos are culled by population monitoring estimates, they have a tendancy to explode in numbers in the good years and die by the hundreds of thousands in the dry years that follow.

It's decades at least since I ate meat that didn't come from a known location, killed and butched | filleted by someone known, and passed on either directly or through a single known intermediary.

That said - kangaroo, camel, and goat make an interesting alternative to beef - the meat is lean and comes at a much lower environmental impact.

And it's worth bearing in mind that the ingredients list of a steak would be just one item - beef - but red meat consumption is nonetheless associated with increases in certain cancers and cardiovascular problems. This is even more true for processed red meat which, realistically, represents a big share of most people's red meat consumption.

“Water, pea protein, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Peas are legumes. People with severe allergies to legumes like peanuts should be cautious when introducing pea protein into their diet because of the possibility of a pea allergy. Contains no peanuts or tree nuts.”

[0] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger

I thought it wasn’t relevant because the ingredient list is still complex compared to cow burgers. It’s nice that the long ingredient is mostly recognizable, but the point is that there’s a long list of ingredients, not that the ingredient list included toxic waste or something.

If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb. Proteins, fats, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibiotics (quite likely with factory farming), microorganisms... it's just our labelling laws that mean they get to be lumped together as "meat". They're still chemicals assembled by organic nanotech.

We know some of them are bad. E.g. there's a link between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, and nitrites in bacon etc. also increase cancer risk.

> Slowly and over generations it could change to be predominantly.

Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

And I don't think anyone is doing that.

2. Humans haven’t been eating cow (or meat generally) on this scale ever before in history.

3. Even despite the above, we genuinely don’t know to what extent baseline human health is dependent on traditional diet. It’s not impossible that there exists a modern radical diet that greatly improves health and longevity without including any “natural” foods.

No, I don’t think so. Most of my beef has a single ingredient: grass. Some have two ingredients: grass, grain (there may be different grains though).

Even if you listed the molecules, the ingredient list for beef is much shorter than beyond burgers.

It would be better to focus on making veggie burgers better. Not making a terrible copy of cow.

> Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

I'm certainly not arguing that climate change does not need immediate action, and I am certainly not undermining that it has helped even a little bit. I hope that came across in my statement.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7256495/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-less-red-m...

You're going to need to put more effort into that assertion.

The thing is, a lot of have been making plant based patties for years using almost no ingredients. All you need for a convincing non-meat burger is quality mushrooms in the patty. Sure, it might not taste exactly like beef but once you consider it like any other meat it's not an issue (pork burgers don't taste like beef, chicken burgers don't taste like pork, vice-versa).

I understand that they have to have some preservatives, but some other products are only there for the novelty or to attract meat eaters. We don't really need to have an entire formula that adds fake blood.

For example, my favourite store-bought one is from Good Butchers and it's simple ingredients that are very similar to what you would make yourself at home:

Wheat gluten, Onion, Organic black beans, Organic mushrooms, Barley, Apple juice, Organic carrots, Organic beets, Water, Organic sunflower oil, Organic celery, Tahini, Oats, Organic garlic, Nutritional yeast, Apple cider vinegar, Organic mustard, Natural smoke flavour, Salt, Balsamic vinegar, Natural flavour, Dried shiitake mushrooms, Dried porcini mushrooms, Herbs, Spices.

Meanwhile some other brands have a lot of additives, preservatives and chemicals.

Cow meat has a long list of ingredients that aren't disclosed either: antibiotics, growth hormones, etc.

> They are not even that much better for you.

I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

> Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper.

It'll be hard to compete in price until they reach a certain scale, and there's the whole point of livestock subsidies: https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=live...

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

Not sure where the shoving and name-calling is taking place, but there's actually good feedback from meat eaters for a lot of Beyond Meat products, for example.

Wait until the big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle & co. enter the party, and see major lobbying to promote this ultra-processed food as healthy because #PlantBased, like they've done for decades with their other products.

The marketing for this stuff has already been extreme in the United Kingdom in the past couple years, with the real deal seen as vile and immoral, after being labelled as unhealthy since the 60s due to shoddy dietary science. After all, there is not much money or processed products you can make off real meat. With plant-based fake meat, the potential profits are unimaginable.

Water, pea protein, fava bean (9 %, Finland), rapeseed oil.

Looks fairly minimal to me. "Vegans love their processed foods" is a weird take, I don't think they likely eat more processed foods than your typical American.

European fries are potato, oil, salt.

In Finland we have a FB group called "Chips and Beer -vegans"[0] with 65k members. Potato chips are vegan, beer is vegan. You can have both and still be vegan. It's not healthy, but still vegan.

I can deep-fry my tofu in the fattiest of all vegan fats and eat them with deep-fried french fries and a bunch of deep-fried Oreos.

Still vegan.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/groups/1701571030062709

Now go into the nearest Indian restaurant and order a Chana Aloo Curry. Or pick a Thai restaurant and grab any food with tofu in it. I recommend a Pad Thai.

Both 100% vegan and if they lack "satiety or taste", then come back.

In asian cuisine the protein really doesn't matter, 99% of the flavour is in the sauce. The protein just provides the texture.

(https://www.lifespan.org/lifespan-living/how-much-sodium-day...)

> Adults should eat no more than 2.4g sodium a day

(https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-nutrit...)

I'm no nutritionalist, but doesn't that suggest you could eat nothing but 6 of these burgers every day and still be within the recommended sodium intake? Sure, nobody's eating nothing but these burgers, but nobody (I hope) is eating 6 of them every single day — in and of themselves, their sodium content may seem scary relative to cow meat, but it's not really that bad.

These burgers are out there already, for what it's worth. Veggie burgers nowadays are very tasty, very healthy, and mostly made of ground/diced vegetables and legumes. But they don't have the marketing hype that comes with "plant based food that bleeds!" so meat eating individuals didn't and don't even consider them as an option.

I don’t see how they can capture health conscious meat eaters being highly processed. That’s obviously not who they are trying to win over but part of their marketing is that it’s a healthier alternative which for me is bunk.