As a pretty hardcore meat-lover (we had sous-vide filets tonight at home), I think Impossible is close enough on the taste and feel side for a lot of dishes that use beef (including hamburgers).
They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.
Economies of scale will push the cost down over time. Meanwhile, meat continues to receive significant government subsidies. If we had to pay the actual cost of meat (not even including a tax on the externalities from its environmental costs), it would be a lot less affordable to regular people.
>Economies of scale will push the cost down over time.
This is, of course, true, but as a business proposition it's a bit daunting.
When you're competing with industrial agriculture, you're competing with a technology stack that's tens of thousands of years old, spans the globe, and employs literal billions of people. It's not quite the same as accepting a couple years of unprofitability when scaling up a social network. What if it takes centuries?
"The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today."
Those numbers don't make sense. If you follow the chain of references, they seem to be made up.
(Why do I say the numbers don't make sense? a) That subsidy works out to about 35 cents per person per day. How could that possibly reduce the price of a pound of hamburger by a factor of 6? b) In other countries, a Big Mac costs at most $6.71. The $13 figure seems to be nonsense.)
I agree the reference is weak and there is most likely a large amount of conjecture behind that number, but the numbers don't a priori not make sense.
Subsidies can have both > 1 multiplier impacts and non-linear impacts. For example, subsidies allow for artificial economies of scale to kick in that can then bring the price down significantly. However, were those subsidies to dry up, then certain thresholds may no longer be met and you may see again a non-unitary and non-linear rise in price.
Indeed this is the main theoretical reason why a society would be interested in subsidies: they can get back more benefit than what they pay for in the form of the subsidy.
AFAIK there is no subsidizing of the beef industry in the US directly. There is subsidies for the sales of common feed plant crops and that's an indirect subsidy for growing beef, but that also applies burgers made directly from plants.
This is dwarfed by feed subsidies. Feed subsidies don't convert directly to edible-food subsidies; the 'big five' staple crops are subsidized independent of 'specialty' crops, and the vast majority of corn is grown for feed and ethanol in the US, and is of a variety not used for any kind of human food production.
The corn for feed is just used as a protein source though. I'm not sure why you couldn't grind it up for use as a protein source in say a plant-based burger.
Isn't most of the meat subsidy via the feed? Shouldn't competing plant-based products be able to benefit from the same subsidy? Buy a ton of corn, extract the zein (protein), make a burger, use the excess carbohydrates for ethanol (fuel or liquor).
Agreed. The first time I had an Impossible burger, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was just the weird name the hotel bar in SF I was at gave its burgers. Loved it, they made a great burger. I had no idea it was nonmeat until weeks later when I learned what Impossible was.
Now, if I'd known to look out for it, I'm sure I could have picked and found out. But since I wasn't looking for a difference, I didn't notice one. And that's coming from someone who eats a ton of (real) burgers.
I’m surprised by this… they’re possibly 20% more expensive in the grocery store here in the UK, but not 3x. More like on the order of what you’d pay for a meat product that was particularly high quality.
I don't understand how you can say this. The Beyond/Incredible meat is not close enough. It's not even close at all. The texture is wrong, the feel chewing it is wrong, the taste is wrong unless you slather it with enough condiments that you can't taste it anyway. It is exactly the sort of highly processed industrially-created food that health experts tell us to avoid.
I’ve seen huge improvement, from what felt like a lump of shredded beetroot and corn 18 months ago and made me swear off veggie patties, to being a patty that will permanently replace beef burgers in my diet (not a huge component anyway, maybe 1 /2 a month).
In general I’d rather eat vegetarian than fake chicken or sausages, but beyond meat’s current product makes me feel optimistic about a future without methane emissions.
I had seen a family of 8 people by accident grab our order of impossible burgers from BK by accident and consuming them, while we were waiting for our order. When we figured out what happened and tried to explain to them that they just ate meatless burgers, they couldn’t understand what we’re talking about. It was believable enough for them, I guess.
That’s the issue here, veggie folks think meat tastes gross and everyone who eats it is evil and carnivores think vegetables taste gross and vegans are just NPC henchmen for the Illuminati
They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.