It’s not a cultural thing, some people just like the taste of meat. Those people tend to eat their steaks rare and soybeans will never be a substitute for that.

I like some vegetarian and vegan dishes but they have to be meals where meat isn’t the “hero” of that dish. For example a good curry is about the flavour of the source rather than the flavour of the protein.

This is why I think lab grown meat is the way forward.

> It’s not a cultural thing, some people just like the taste of meat.

Can you explain why 20-39% of Indians, or 276 million Indians, are vegetarian while in China, Chile, Colombia, and France (to pick a few) it is 5%? [1]

Because it is either cultural, or it is genetic. And I doubt Indians have a genetic mutation that makes them vegetarian, I think it is cultural. If a good curry is what makes more people vegetarian, then we can cook good curries anywhere.

In a meat-heavy culture, a lot of people might not realize how much they would like vegetarian meals!

> I like some vegetarian and vegan dishes but they have to be meals where meat isn’t the “hero” of that dish.

Not to be snarky, but that is the definition of a vegetarian dish. But I know what you mean, and you are right, meat substitutes do not make for very good vegan meals. A good vegan meal is one where it's not just trying to emulate meat based foods, but building a flavor profile that celebrates the actual vegetables and other ingredients in harmony.

Go to any of these Michelin rated vegan restaurants [2] for example, and you will find absolutely incredible tasting vegan meals. It takes culture to spread this kind of thing to chefs and patrons, and that is something we have influence over. I have been to Millennium [3], and it is incredible. If more meals like this were available, people "liking the taste of meat" would not really matter that much, because they would LOVE the taste of this stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

[2] https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/california/san-francisco/re...

[3] https://www.millenniumrestaurant.com/

> Because it is either cultural, or it is genetic. And I doubt Indians have a genetic mutation that makes them vegetarian, I think it is cultural. If a good curry is what makes more people vegetarian, then we can cook good curries anywhere.

You’ve completely ignored what I said.

1. Some people like the taste of meat. Saying they shouldn’t and it’s just a cultural thing misses the point that the flavour is desirable. This is why I suggested other means of sourcing that protein which is ethical is a better path forward than simply saying we need to change culture.

2. I’d already said in curries the meat isn’t the hero of the dish.

> In a meat-heavy culture, a lot of people might not realize how much they would like vegetarian meals!

“You shouldn’t like X, you should learn to love a completely different thing instead” is, frankly, a silly argument. What needs to happen instead is X is replaced with an ethical alternative. In this case, lab grown meat.

As I’ve said already, most meat eaters will enjoy a lot of vegetarian meals too. The problem is they also like the taste of meat. So there needs to be an ethical alternative and soybeans sadly isn’t it.

> Not to be snarky, but that is the definition of a vegetarian dish.

The fact you’ve commented saying that proves you’ve not been reading my comment properly.

> A good vegan meal is one where it's not just trying to emulate meat based foods, but building a flavor profile that celebrates the actual vegetables and other ingredients in harmony.

That’s literally the point I was making that you knee jerk argued against!

Is there any data indicating that a preference for meat is not genetic?

What is cultural is how much meat eating seems reasonable. I love meat, but both my own ethics and those of my social group basically tell me not to eat too much of it. Same for say, something like drinking beer. People like beer. But drinking too much of it too often isn't socially acceptable.

I'm from a family where one of my grandfathers was a cattle rancher and the other one a butcher, still I only eat about 1 kg of meat a month. I was terrified recently to learn that that's 10% of average American consumption. But I go in for the good shit. A little smoked meat goes a long way in altering the flavor profile of a dish. I love cooking myself a €20 steak, but I only do that every couple months. I save my fat caps and off-cuts to make sausage every few months. I only buy organic or meat with another animal welfare certification. It's expensive. As it should be.

That’s fair. But I think the only way to change that is to have substitutes that are equivalent in taste and cost.

Though even there, it would be an uphill battle fighting the farming lobbyists.

I think it's more likely to expect the changes to be largely generational. That's how most dietary trends change. I give my kids less meat than my parents did, and they'll probably give their kids even less.

The other piece is that meat should have its externalities priced in. We shouldn't be doing to animals the things we do in factory farming. Not being shitty to animals makes animal products a lot more expensive, which generally means people consume less of them. A carbon tax also wouldn't be crazy.

People eat a lot more meat than they used to because it's cheap now. Eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the west. Making it not cheap again would put us back to where we were a few generations back.

People liked cigarettes as much as they liked meat, but social norms, policy changes and price hikes have made it to where people smoke now a lot less than they used to. Having a cheap / enjoyable alternative is a nice route, but it's not the only one.

Yes, it’s all about culture and influence. As more and more people switch to a vegetarian/vegan diet, they keep coming up with more dishes and preparations. Innovation is bound to happen where there’s an influx of interest.

I love food and I love eating. Some of the most interesting dishes are vegetarian because you have to work that much harder to bring a dish together. That really excites the chef/epicurean in me.

And then you can just get a good quality slab of meat, give it a good char and sprinkle some salt on it and it'll stand on its own as basically a whole meal.

I think meat could 10-50x in price and I'll still find a way to eat it or I'll venture off into the wilderness and hunt it myself. No one could convince me otherwise - there's really nothing like catching your fish and cooking it over an open fire to round a day spent in the outdoors...

Gathering some nuts and fruit and blending soybeans to make tofu just doesn't have the same appeal to me... Even though wild fruit really are delicious and my friends stories of eating wild durian really inspire me to brave the sweat (and creepy crawlies and snakes) and venture off into the jungle

"Some of the most interesting dishes are vegetarian because you have to work that much harder to bring a dish together."

Yeah, this is the main reason why I mainly cook with meat. I am a lazy cook and I can cook vegetarian, but not with the same tasty resulty but I know it can be done..

I once cooked a vegetarian pumpkin lasagne for a vegetarian guest and it was delicious but my god was it hard work vs a regular one.

We’re still talking about the culture. It’s not that vegetarian food is hard to make, or that it’s less tasty. You just haven’t been exposed to the culture, which is why you believe it’s not feasible but literally billions of people in India have been thriving on a vegetarian diet with thousands of dishes for thousands of years.

But yeah, in the end we all try to justify our actions. No argument will be convincing enough if one values their taste buds more than someone’s life or the planet.

India isn't so great an example insofar as there are plenty of sources detailing common deficiencies in the Indian vegetarian diet - namely B12 and protein.

But in any case I don't think turning consumption into something moral will ever scale. If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.

I don't think it is cultural - my point is that as someone who appreciates food for more than just sustenance you'll never convince me that tempeh/tofu/jack fruit/bugs will one day make me forget that meat is delicious.

I will gladly vote with my wallet or blood sweat & tears to continue eating meat especially if it becomes sustainable via price hikes. And I don't say this from a position of arrogance - I'm saying that I would cut many many many other things out of my life before I gave up meat due to affordability issues.

> If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.

I agree with the idea that a capitalist society should work harder than we do to price in externalities in order to fulfill the social value of a free market.

As a counter example to it being the only way though is how the modern world has drastically reduced and now culturally shuns (although we still have things to fix) human slavery without doing it via economic sanctions or price regulation.

I don't actually have any hope here though - politically in the US I see more of a slide away from free markets and toward techno-feudalism and culturally in the US I see a backslide in empathy and personal values people are willing to make sacrifices for.

You can't regulate people into having particular values (for good or for ill).

Its directly refuting anything you said but were you aware that the UK sweetened the deal for abolishing slavery?

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-colle....

Not*

Oof. Thanks for the link! I'm not sure if this gives me hope or erodes it lol.

If that’s true, you could make a killing by creating soy bean based food products and actually marketing them properly.

Wouldn't the aim be to not make a killing?

No I could not. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m bad at business (I’ve tried) and probably worse at marketing.

Also, soy bean based products are abundant. Tofu, tempeh, and soy milk are everywhere. Soy beans are one of the most significant crops in the world. The deliciousness of soy beans is present in the existing simple foods. I don’t personally believe the thing missing is some new kind of soy-based food. One thing we can do is encourage individuals all over the world to eat more vegan meals, and dine out at vegan restaurants. This will encourage more restaurant owners to offer more vegan options. I really don’t think this is a problem that can be solved by one big company. Soy is not some secret. We just need meat-focused cultures to understand both the problems of meat based diets and the deliciousness of vegan options. And as a vegan of five years now, the tastiest vegan meals are not some heavily processed product made from extracts of soy. It’s the basics that have existed for thousands of years, cooked well and paired with delicious vegetables, legumes, grains, and beans.

I've spent enough time in Indonesia to like tempeh more than most people (it was invented there and they've figured out how to cook with it), but convincing the average meat eater to switch to soybeans is going to be an uphill fight.

"that is cultural" is a shorthand for "it took us thousands of years of trial and error to achieve status quo and I want to change things right now because I think I can do better"

I'm not saying you're wrong, because I'm aware that modern life is different from our ancestors who depended on meat, but I want you to be aware of the magnitude of the force you're fighting against, and not say "it's just cultural, so easy to change". Imagine saying "the fact that most Americans speak English instead of Mandarin is just cultural, we could literally change it overnight if we wanted to".

Nowhere in my comment did I say it was easy to change, or that "we could literally change it overnight".

What I said was that with education, outreach, and other nudges, we could, over time, affect the statistical distribution of meat consumption. Which is correct. I did not say it was easy, in fact I did not comment on how hard it would be, I just said it is possible.

In fact, fixing humanity's over-consumption of resources will be very hard. But we have no choice. We will perish if we do not. So, idk about you, but I think we had better try.

By the way, and I want to say this as a genuine bit of feedback, but it is not very interesting conversation if you are going to take what I said, turn it in to hyperbole, and then point out that the hyperbole you made up is unrealistic. I would encourage you to read comments carefully, and make sure you have really understood what the person has said. Cheers, and nice username.

I use hyperboles to highlight certain issues. I see that I could give off vibes along "here's my hyperbole, I defeat it, so I defeat your argument", but what I wanted to say is "I agree with the core idea, but I think your argument is missing something very important, but it's a problem to be solved rather than a complete failure". Next time I'll try to be clearer

Calling someone a “soy boy” is a slur but it is based in reality.

Soyboy came from the misconception that some plant based estrogen lookalike is turning all the male SJWs into femboys. I don't remember any direct racial connotations.

Though the crowd that created the term sure doesn't mind being racist so who knows.

Stop making things up please. Soy boy has never been a racist slur.

A random Reddit post from a year ago isn’t going to change the origin of a word used for 30+ years.

That's the thing, racism becomes ingrained I'm not racist, so what I say, do and condone cannot be racist.

Often people can't change. It takes generations to leave behind. But even then, if not even acknowledged, it will continue.

I suggest being the change and tempering your language to match your intent.

So if you call someone dumb long enough it’s racist?

If you call someone fat it’s racist?

If you call someone clumsy it’s racist?

So basically everything is racist?

Prof. Frederick Starr’s comment from 1936 about Roman cooking:

“Many of the Apician dishes will not appeal to the beef eaters. It is worthy of note that much criticism was heaped upon Apicius some 200 years ago in England when beef eating became fashionable in that country. The art of Apicius requires practitioners of superior intellect. Indeed, it requires a superior clientèle to appreciate Apician dishes. But practitioners that would pass the requirements of the Apician school are scarce in the kitchens of the beef eaters. We cannot blame meat eaters for rejecting the average chef d’œuvre set before them by a mediocre cook who has learned little besides the roasting or broiling of meats. Once the average man has acquired a taste for the refined compositions made by a talented and experienced cook, say, a composition of meats, vegetables or cereals, properly “balanced” by that intuition that never fails the real artist, the fortunate diner will eventually curtail the preponderant meat diet. A glance at some Chinese and Japanese methods of cookery may perhaps convince us of the probability of these remarks.

Nothing is more perplexing and more alarming than a new dish, but we can see in a reversion to Apician cookery methods only a dietetic benefit accruing to this so-called white race of beef eaters. … One has but to study the methods of ancient and intelligent people who have suffered for thousands of years under the perennial shortage of food supplies in order to understand and to appreciate Apician methods. Be it far from us to advocate their methods, or to wish upon us the conditions that engendered such methods; for such practices have been pounded into these people by dire necessity. They have graduated from the merciless school of hunger. Food materials, we repeat, were never as cheap and as abundant as they are today. But who can say that they always will be so in the future?”