Both. This pursuit of tasting "kinda like meat" has incurred a lot of odd ingredients most people would normally eschew if they knew the extent of study in human consumption. Plain meat has a much better track record. I don't blame any meat eater for rolling their eyes at this stuff.
And the decisions are sometimes odd. Like beet juice being added not for flavor but so it looks like the patty is bleeding. Meat eaters aren't sold because the veggie burger looks rare.
The truth is meat eaters aren't, en massé, abandoning meat for a plant based alternative that provides little to no health benefit and costs just as much or more.
Will we get there? Probably. But we're in a weird limbo area that is barely appealing to either side of the fence other than as a novelty.
Sure. Humans have been eating meat for tens of thousands of years. That's a track record. The idea that something that's been consumed by humans since there have been himself having a better track record than something that historically hasn't isn't even controversial.
Your turn. Basically all cardiovascular diseases are caused by meat, right?
I've spent most of my life as a vegetation but dishonest histrionics like this do a disservice to the aim of convincing meat eaters to eat less meat.
It's about the amount of meat and dairy we ate... Next to nothing compared to today. Today's rates of cardiovascular diseases don't exist in mostly plant eating cohorts, nor do they in other largely plant based apes.
Its not that complicated, I fail to see how this qualifies as histrionics.
Please recognize that the caution around new food science advances is based in experience. I’m sure most of us are old enough to remember when most crunchy fried snacks were on the shelf with oils that had no known health risk but turned out to produce widespread uncontrollable diarrhea because the oils were indigestible.
I’m not suggesting these new meat substitutes have that effect but it’s reasonable for people to be cautious. Yeah heart disease and global emissions but... also soiling yourself without warning in public.
The best thing proponents of these new foods could do is genuinely and honestly recognize and address those worries.
people should be cautious and imho more importantly, people should be informed and adding processed soy, oils, sodium etc to meat alternatives in hope of reducing price is a horrible solution. If that's the only way we're going to get people offsetting meat consumption its a sad state of affair.
Fair point. I do feel the responsibility is on the shoulders of those making claims of the dangers of meat alternatives though. Its easy to paint it as frankenfood, but if you look at the ingredients they are boringly normal
This is actually a pretty simple burden of proof question. The burden of proof is on whoever wishes to persuade the other.
As in any other case, to persuade another person is to assert a claim. It doesn’t matter that you already have done the requisite learning to understand what you’re certain is the baseline set of facts. What matters is you want to change someone else’s beliefs.
As an example:
It would be preposterous for me to say “I am certain that biological sex is a spectrum, and binary sex is a simplification useful as a tool for some applications but inadequate for others” and just expect anyone who doesn’t know that to crack open a book or start googling my hypothesis credulously. Even though I’m certain it’s true.
I understand that while there’s sound scientific basis for the claim, it’s not a shared understanding of reality.
I also understand that it’s a claim that may be questioned, even though I’m certain it’s correct, and it’s my choice whether to give it more weight when challenged (attempt to persuade someone who doesn’t accept the claim l) or to carry on certain I’m right. But if I take the latter path, I have to accept that it’s really very unlikely the other party will learn what I’ve learned, unless they become curious and open to the possibility.
In other words, you can be right until the end of time and it wouldn’t ever matter to some people unless you give them a reason to want to be right too.
Weird, how?
Weird, because they have funny names that are hard to pronounce, and are therefore magically "unnatural" and bad for you?
Or weird, because their effects on nutrition, digestion, and human health hasn't been widely studied yet?