I’m vegan, converted about four years ago so I ate meat for decades. I ate impossible burgers for a while after Burger King got them, because there is some nostalgia/novelty in going to a fast food joint.
But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger or a garden burger. Those taste light and yummy and don’t leave a weird feeling in my stomach.
"Here’s a pesky little chemical called hexanal. If you’ve ever eaten a beyond burger, or any of these plant based products 2.0 (though to be honest, it’s more like they’re on V.46.6.2) and burped 10 or 15 minutes afterwards, and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, wow, ok I definitely just had a meat alternative” you were probably regurgitating this aerosol. Some people think it’s fruity, like green apple, others like mulched grass. At the lab, we had to walk outside to get wafts of it in its pure form, but the minute I opened the cap I knew exactly what this flavour was…. “OLD FRYER OIL, 100%”. It’s metabolized in all manners of organisms through the oxidation of fatty acids, and is… kind of unpleasant?! The point is that while this molecule exists in fava beans, peas, and soy, (the three kings of texturized vegetable protein) when you have a WHOLE FOOD, its there in harmony among all sorts of other volatile compounds, while also being locked away deep inside the beans fibres. It’s the act of processing that concentrated and heightens the presence of off-flavours like these, making the processed foods made from them taste, well, processed. Good with the bad. You can’t concentrate for protein without concentrating other aspects of a plant. There’s always a cost.
Now, I will always be a huge proponent for whole foods, made with care, prepared simply. But the realities of grocery store shelves dictate a different truth. People opt for convenience, and sometimes, you’ve got to meet them where they are.
My current work at CH has me doggedly hunting down an effect of fermentation I’ve long known intuitively through practice. Certain lactic acid bacteria fermenting their way through legumes don’t just mask, but dismantle this and other problematic molecules. I’m still after the mode of action, but it’s also enough for me to know that age old techniques of fermentation (like soaking ones legumes or grains days in advance of their cooking) can still put to shame the greatest technological “advances” of food science of the past 40 years.
Nature is, after all, cleverer than you are. "
Once you start paying attention, you can find bad tasting details in almost everything. For example, steak can taste metallic. People don't mind or even notice such things because they are used to it.
I see you are being downvoted, but I know exactly what you mean. When I eat Impossible and especially Beyond burgers, my stomach feels slightly off. A bit of indigestion. I don't get this with typical veggie patties.
Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.
To each their own. I greatly enjoy the flavor of meat, but feel like a serial killer when I think about the animal suffering and to a lesser extend carbon emissions. While I also get a slightly odd feeling in my stomach from Impossible beef (doesn't happen with their cyber chicken), it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger without feeling like I just tortured a puppy.
If you have the money, buy meat directly from a regenerative ag farm you can go visit personally. You'll see animals with plenty of space, given healthcare and protection from predators, and contributing to soil growth and biodiversity.
The thing is... this is not a solved problem, by far.
You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted.
Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out any and all dairy products: cheeses (all 100 million of them), yogurt, regular milk, sour milk, sour cream, whey, etc.
The entire western market isn't going to simultaneously and instantly stop eating meat. There won't suddenly be a day when all the herds are culled because everyone finally stopped eating meat at once. If it ever happens (I'm hopeful but not optimistic), it will be a gradual process, and industries will have lots of time to adapt.
But even that aside, it's not our duty as consumers to keep eating animals to keep industry able to make shoes and cheese.
My point is, what are we going to replace those with? Especially leather & co. They have real life applications, they're not just fads. Plus, will those replacement products be sustainable? Vegan leather is just rebranded plastic, for example.
I'm equally curious, but I don't know the numbers, if replacing plastic packaging with paper/cardboard is environmentally sound. I remember back in the day efforts to reduce paper consumption, I think our sustainable paper production capacity was near its limits.
Cactus leather is a new trend. I don't own any cactus leather products so I can't say how good it is, but surely it's possible to replace cowhide with something.
Even vegan (plastic) leather is significantly better from an environmental and emissions perspective than cowhide leather. The tanning process is not exactly eco-friendly, and neither is raising cows.
My old boss was vegan (or rather his wife was and he was very accommodating of her diet, he would still eat meat outside the home). He would always mention that the fanciest, most expensive vegan cheese option out there set itself apart from the rest with the tagline "It melts!" on the packaging. Vegan cheese has to come a long way to be anywhere comparable to real cheese. The same applies to synthetic leather, by the way.
There are several products lined up to come out next year that use casein produced by genetically modified plants. There are already products with similar whey protein from plants on the market. For example I've been loving Brave Robot ice cream.
It depends on what you are looking for with the vegan cheese. If you want something to go with a charcuterie plate, there are really good cultured cashew milk cheeses. They are more akin to cheese spreads though, something like this [0]
But if you are looking for something like a slice of cheddar or vegan mac-n-cheese the options are really pretty terrible and all have an aftertaste like you just ate a spoonful of Crisco.
Not knowing anything about vegan cheeses, are there options that would be something similar to say brie, camembert, emmental, fontina, gruyère, havarti, manchego, parmigiano reggiano, or roquefort?
There might be some I'm not really sure for the specific varieties you have listed above. A vegan gouda seems to be a pretty standard thing for some of the manufacturers. So there are definitely some trying to make things outside the typical cheddar, swiss, mozzarella.
I don't think I have ever seen something trying to imitate any really soft (brie) or blue (roquefort) cheeses.
It doesn't have to, Alcantara is extremely robust and a great replacement for leather, just as one example.
But the synthetic leather in cheap products aiming to look like real smooth leather, I think this is the one you mean, time and time again is so inferior it's almost a scam. Shoes will fall apart quickly, sofas, clothing will peel off after 2-3 years when the softener has gassed out.
>it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger
You're not getting the flavour of a burger, no matter how hard you try to fool yourself (or make yourself sick). That's why these companies are flailing.
There are qualities in a fake burgers that emulate parts of a burger someone might enjoy without having an exact replica. In the same way Turkey Bacon is acceptable to some and not others.
I think the purists are trying to hold a parity argument but the substitute enjoyers are cool with experimentation and want something similar even if it's not 1:1.
Sorry, I prefix plant-based/meat-substitute products with "cyber" instead of one of the more boring options because it makes me giggle. I shouldn't have used it with people not familiar with my in-joke.
I, uh, thought that the beyond meat pseudo-ground-beef I ate tasted almost exactly like beef, cooked like beef, looked like beef, etc... just without the killing of a cow. I liked it and will buy it the next time I want ground beef.
You'd be surprised how many animals die in the process of scaled agriculture and displacement that occurs to create these replacement goods. But they're not the big fluffy animals we anthropomorphise, so it's easy to accept.
It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed.
Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other creatures than non-animal agriculture simply due to the additional land requirements. It is far easier to accept the less harmful industry.
I don't think they were suggesting that. More something along the lines of "you're likely to be killing animals either way, so just accept that nature is cruel and don't feel guilty about it".
There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering:
- Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought
- Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers.
- Only eat meat you have personally killed in the most humane way possible
It's kind of bad either way tbh. Imagine going to the funeral for someone else's mother and saying something to the tune of "The old hag was going to die anyway, so don't be sad".
Telling people that their principles or feelings are wrong is rarely a great way to convince people, it just makes you look obnoxious in debates.
On the second point, I agree, if in person I wouldn't make such a statement in that way because reactions are immediate and you're within immediate awkwardness. But on the internet, you read a statement and then you will emotionally react, but can then go research more, ponder, deliberate and choose whether you respond emotionally, matter-of-factly, not at all, etc. I think that's great and in a sense encourages some more provocative honesty that we dance around in the flesh.
Most humans can live deeply fulfilling and joyful lives without causing as much suffering as they do now. They don't need to feel guilty about what they are doing now so much as strive to cause less suffering.
Maybe you must eat factory farmed meat, fine, it's not for me to say. But that's not most people. Most people can do with reducing their meat intake, and it isn't hard. It's not like you are in the wilderness hunting or anything. You just go to the grocery store and buy veggies and beans and stuff.
Furthermore, for some people, eating meat from a factory farm is orders of magnitude more difficult than eating a strict plant based diet. Maybe that's easy for you - not for me.
Finally, while nature may indeed be cruel, we do not need to be.
Curious about deer: if deer aren’t hunted, they overpopulate and starve. It would be cruel not to hunt them. Wild pigs are another significant environmental nuisance. They reproduce rapidly and cause massive destruction wherever they go. Seems like managing those populations without eating the meet is worse ethically.
The idea that killing animals is more cruel than not is to ignore ecology.
Factory farms and industrial meat is certainly another story. But I wanted to point out that cruelty is not so black and white. It’s similar to the cat people that feed strays — makes them feel good, but it makes the problem worse which is more cruel than simply not feeding the strays.
> Curious about deer: if deer aren’t hunted, they overpopulate and starve. It would be cruel not to hunt them.
I strongly disagree with this. If there were no humans participating, and deer ended up overpopulated, and then starved, would there be any issue? Of course not, this is just how nature balances itself.
That "killing an animal directly via hunting" is more cruel than "letting the populate self-correct via natural processes" is not a matter of common sense - it's not something we all agree on. There is an implication that we know better than the universe and I'm not convinced that is the case.
> Wild pigs are another significant environmental nuisance. They reproduce rapidly and cause massive destruction wherever they go. Seems like managing those populations without eating the meet is worse ethically.
I assume you are referring to feral pigs, which are not wild in the sense that a native creature is. They are domesticated pigs which have ended up in foreign environments. Whether hunting them is appropriate or not, I'm not sure.
Nowadays, though, we have gotten ourselves in a pickle, by eliminating the natural predators in many environments in which deer thrive naturally, or have adapted to. Via our own lack of foresight, consideration for the planet as a whole, or even some degree of self-serving malice, we have created a really tricky problem.
I do agree we ought to work on this issue. Hunting is probably the best, most practical solution we have, but only because I believe we should try to fix what we have broken, not because it is somehow less cruel. A less practical but far less cruel solution may be a sterilization program for the invasive populations.
Two factors: 1) Humanely raised 2) Efficiently killed (done quickly with limited/no pain).
One can argue the cruelty of eating animals regardless - but there very much is a difference between tightly caged factory farming, pumping animals with medicine constantly because the conditions keep them sick all the time, and raising animals in a healthy environment.
> Is the humane way to kill an animal the same way one would humanely kill a toddler without consent of the parents or child?
Interesting wording.
> If not why not, when we consider animal have at least the intelligence, will to live, social connections and capacity for suffering as children?
When we will be able to ask for that kind of a contest?
PS. I know, animals has some signs of intelligence. But for me this measure of intelligence is not enough for not willing to eat it. And referring to parent poster, I really think there is some ethics in eating only those meat which has been killed by me, but I only have a chicken farm when I want to eat not only chicken.
Halal slaughter is certainly not the most humane way to kill animals; it optimizes for religious taboos on consumption of blood more so than lack of suffering. For the latter, you really want to target the brain directly if at all possible.
I think they are simply pointing out that you must kill other animals in order to live. There's no way around it.
If your interested in killing the least amount of animals, why not go hunting and fishing, that almost assuredly kills fewer than industrialized agriculture. I've replaced almoat all beef all year round in our family with deer venison kept year round in a chest freezer.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that veganism or vegetarianism for most people is very emotional action. Most of the pop media around it focuses on the cuteness of the animal not on the total number of animals killed. and it's ignoring that like in hunting or ethical farming, the animals have a very full happy life.
As a hunter it's interesting seeing this article on HN and seeing no mention of hunting. Also not a bad thing, it's not part of the culture here, but it's interesting to see that bias in the HN culture.
> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.
> Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore.
This is just silly. I can't imagine an internally consistent worldview that would assert something like this. Of course natural biomes are valuable regardless of the presence of cattle. Besides, modern cattle are domesticated creatures and don't even really have a native (i.e. not man-made or facilitated) environment.
The assertion regarding soy fields is at best a misunderstanding of the actual data regarding land use, or at worse, a meaningless tautology.
For those who don't have time to click and read the link in the other reply by user vnorilo, I'll just quote the relevant paragraph:
> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.
This is quite a red herring. The bulk of soy production is waste, that we have managed to use for cattle feed, because they can upcycle it into consumable nutrients.
If we got rid of all cattle, we would not reduce the amount of soybeans grown by 77%, just our utilization of what is grown.
77% of soy beans are used as feed in animal fattening. The basic biology and ecology of trying to push calories through a lossy (25x!) step in the food cycle doesn't work out.
Yes but before feeding the cow the bean we press it for soybean oil, which now accounts for a significant portion of calories consumed globally (somewhere around 10%, a quick search did not yield the study and I can't recall it exactly).
What do you imagine we would do with the soy pucks that are produced after extruding the oil?
Also, ruminants need non starchy, fibrous plant materials. I can't speak toward chicken and pork but I don't advocate people eat those.
It doesn't reflect well on your argument that your quote doesn't appear in the source.
"Results estimate that livestock consume 6 billion tonnes of feed (dry matter) annually – including one third of global cereal production – of which 86% is made of materials that are currently not eaten by humans. In addition, soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake. Producing 1 kg of boneless meat requires an average of 2.8 kg human-edible feed in ruminant systems and 3.2 kg in monogastric systems. While livestock is estimated to use 2.5 billion ha of land, modest improvements in feed use efficiency can reduce further expansion."
Even the source you are citing agrees that after massaging the numbers as much as possible it's still 3x less efficient to produce calories for human consumption by feeling animals.
I was quoting Diana Rogers, who provided a source for her statements, so I thought I would include it.
I cannot access the full article, but from the abstract that seems to not be congruent with what the study is suggest. Perhaps you are confusing kg for kcal? It could indeed be the fact that it is 3x less efficient by weight.
Given that the article is pointing out that 86% of the feed for animals is not edible by humans, claiming that meat is 3x less efficient calorie wise with these numbers is also making the claim that we are growing plants 2x more calorically dense by meat than weight.
30-70% of their food - depending on the region and local industry - is distillers grains [1]. That’s the waste from ethanol production, including biofuels and alcohol.
Of that last 14% of human edible food, the vast majority is used at the end to fatten up the animals for slaughter.
Is easy to understand even without bibliography. Soy is an annual herb. It grows all the summer, invest everything on producing fruits in fall and then die in winter.
Beans are the crop. Everything else must wait until they are ready, and by then it will be basically dry matter. Therefore all except the beans is a residual.
Can still be recycled into more human food by herbivores, but we couldn't do it directly. We can't feed on dry stems, withered flowers or brown leaves.
I would highly recommend the book Sacred Cow. It has links to hundreds of studies within for further research. The authors, Diana rogers and Robb Wolf have been on many podcasts since it's release to discuss the topic.
If you want specific studies I can go look up in the book but it sounds like your asking for further reading, not cited sources.
How much of the meat we consume do you really think are grazing in meadows? Even most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil. However you turn it, it’s impossible to claim that cattle raising is a net gain for biodiversity.
You are moving the goalposts. The parent post was comparing non-animal agriculture with animal agriculture in terms of biodiversity. I'll copy it here for you.
> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture is better for biodiversity than crop monocultures. I understand that the truth can be shocking for some people, but there are dozens of ecological studies pointing to the environmental value of pastures and meadows, specially as ecotones.
As the initial plan to demonize cattle failed, now you are silently replacing "non-animal agriculture" by "rainforests" as a straw man to attack the original claim. Sorry, but this was not the point that we were discussing.
"Non-animal agriculture", also known as "Agriculture", has replaced happily as many rainforest hectares as cattle, if not more. Take a look to the fate of Indonesian rainforests
No, no goalposts have been moved. It is worse for the environment, in all aspects, including biodiversity, to raise animals to eat than to eat the crops directly.
The reason is simple: to produce the same amount of energy (and protein) with livestock as you would with crops, you have to use orders of magnitude more resources and you affect the environment orders of magnitude more: you use more fuel, release more greenhouse gases, use more water, use more land area, destroy more soil, et.c.
And while it might be true that one hectare used for grazing might be more biodiverse than one hectare used for, your example, soybeans. But 85 percent of the world's soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.
I think you need to look up the meaning of the expression "straw man". And about the rainforests: Tropical rainforests are the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems in the world, and right now, huge areas of that rainforests are destroyed for the land to be used to raise cattle.
>> most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil
> Evidence for that rather large claim?
While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:
"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]
"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]
See also:
How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:
> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:
> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
Cattle do not eat solely from a meadow. Even if cows are free range, that's generally only a spring to fall state, in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).
For factory farmed cattle (which is the most common) the situation is far worse.
An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?
> in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).
To have hay in winter you still need a meadow of high grass that will burst with life in spring, and cattle is excluded from this areas. Hay don't require pesticides or weedkillers. Traditional farming areas double its purpose as small natural reserves, even in winter. (Not all is nice, we could have a forest there instead, but is still better than modern agriculture for a mile).
> An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?
This is a false equivalence.
The correct question would be: "how much soy consume the number of people that could be feed with this cow".
The error is understandable because many of this movements are focused in the individual, and equality among individuals. This is just one way to study ecology, but not the more interesting or rewarding one, and sometimes leads to plain wrong conclusions.
A cow can produce until 88lbs of milk a day. Having 12000 L of milk by cow in a lactating season is not uncommon, and some can reach 20000 L of milk. And this without talking about the meat and the leather.
No, it's not a good point. Cows are rarely grown in "meadows". Free-range beef is a minority, and most cow feed comes from monoculture fields. And it takes more monoculture grain to grow a pound of beef versus a pound of vegetables, and it's not even close.
No, I'm suggesting it is not a good/bad dichotomy and people should make sure large decisions are not made on what they think are simple moral choices.
I mean if you determine that animals dying for your diet is no good, then make sure you consider the people that might be dying to bring you the goods you haven't checked the source of, or for the stadium you enjoy watching events at, etc.
Quit meat if you feel you need to, but don't pretend it makes you a morally better person because 'animal murder,' it's not that simple.
Which would be very compelling if your body only needed calories to survive. Meat is the most efficient way to deliver proteins and essential amino acids. You should also dig into the concept of bioavailability.
This is debunked. Tofu is incredibly protein dense - on par or surpassing chicken breast. Without looking it up and subjectively, tofu also seems to be digested very easily. There’s also seitan and the beans. Nuts also exist but have fat/protein ratios that tend toward uncomfortably high. (If what your eating has macros that approach the fat content in nuts to other nutrients that’s pretty high and should be noted.)
Taken from wikipedia entry on Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score [1]:
- Chicken has a PDCAAS of 0.95
- Soy has a PDCAAS of 0.92
- Black beans have a PDCAAS of 0.74 (highest legume)
- Other beans and legumes have a PDCAAS of 0.70
- Wheat (seitan) has a PDCAAS of 0.42
Facts:
Soy has good enough nutrients to make a valid claims for it without throwing away valid science.
Soy is not surpassing chicken breast in PDCAAS, or red meat.
Eggs and dairy literally break the scale and are by far the highest ranking whole foods on a PDCAAS basis.
Seitan and beans are terrible in comparison in terms of PDCAAS, with you needing to consume nearly 2x the amount of protein from the former to compete with the later.
Opinions:
As far as fat goes, keep in mind tofu has a 1:2 fat:protein ratio. Chicken breast is 1:20+. This reason is the reason a lot of people herald chicken breast
Overconsumption of soy can lead to health implications
Soy does not have enough leucine to trigger the MTOR pathways to build muscle. If you are having soy post workout, you need to consume 45-60g of protein, vs just 20-30g of protein from animal products
Red meat has literally everything you need to live. Throw in a little carbs and fiber too and you can run at peak performance without worrying about anything in your diet.
Biases:
I've been relentless about my diet for 10 years and have tried everything. This includes vegan, vegetarian, keto, carb cycling, protein sparring modified fasts, you name it.
This year I started eating an animal based diet and not only do I feel great, my TDEE went from 2400 to over 3700. This means while I used to eat 2400kCal to maintain my weight, I now have to eat 3700 to maintain my weight, and I feel fantastic while doing so.
I don't disagree that it's comparable - in fact that's half my point. That was the first 'fact' I listed. It's pointless to claim bioavailability is 'debunked', because soy stands on it's own in the bioavailability data.
However, it's also misleading to claim it's debunked then point to seitan and beans as viable alternatives, or warn against fat content immediately after comparing tofu to chicken.
> How do you feel great knowing you are harming other sentient beings?
Because I wake up refreshed, have steady energy throughout the day, and can focus on solving complicated tasks throughout the day. I'm happier and healthy than I've ever been.
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
Almost every area of my life is at the expense of other sentient beings. I use energy that probably comes from coal that is fueling the war. I use an iPhone that has a battery that was probably made from slaves in china, built from materials sourced from slaves in mines in Africa. If you're checking hacker news, I'm assuming you are optimizing for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings.
I'd like to change some of that. The are more effective ways of doing so than just opting out of society.
> Are there areas where you don’t?
Chicken and pork are actually my favorite foods. I don't eat them because I think as livestock they're a net harm to the environment.
I don't kill spiders in my house, they're happy to cohabitate.
I have a dog, I sacrifice hours a day to make sure he is happy and healthy.
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
I think the answer must be yes for everyone here. We are choosing to use (and pay for) the internet and electricity when we could instead be buying food for people who have none. We participate in Western economies which prey on the economies of the developing world.
I think it's important to also think about the definition here of 'sentient' and the definition of 'harm'. Is it 'harmful' to build houses, when otherwise animals would live in the fields/forests? Is it 'harmful' to burn fossil fuels for energy? Do you refuse to use electricity which has come from fossil fuel sources?
Is 'sentience' the right point to draw the line? How would you respond to findings like this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.13065, which comes to the conclusion that the assumption that plants are not sentient may be flawed?
I just spent the last month learning to build EarthShip homes from the human waste stream. Not perfect but heading in the right direction as they generate all their own power.
You make great points about exploitation that we all benefit from.
As for plants, I think it’s possible, however raising animals requires even more plants to be killed.
And I’m not sure plants experience pain the way animals do. And if I had to choose, it seems animals are more capable of experiencing pain and suffering.
Honestly, from a poorly philosophical standpoint I struggle finding a reason not to conclude that the best solution as a human is to remove oneself entirely from the equation. As humans we are practically a walking Holocaust no matter what we do. The point about plants only drives this home further. There are even reasonable arguments for panpsychism which might mean even more unavoidable cause for suffering from one's existence
In my opinion this is the weakest argument for veganism. Are Lions bad because they eat deer? Are Sharks good because they eat fish that eat other fish that eat plants? Are cats demons...maybe?
The philosophy makes no sense even if you start with the assumption that animals are on the same moral plane as people that does not preclude or discount eating them out of preference because animals already do that. If you want to argue for veganism use a less combative prideful argument. For example I'm not vegan or vegetarian but I heavily reduce my meat consumption for environment and health reasons, less than 2 times a month and I want to go lower. Talking about the nuance and difficulty that comes with eating less meat and overcoming them should be inline with the, moral pride based better than you attitude you have. And it should be something you are seeking not trying to derail because your goal is to get people to eat less meat.
You seem to place humans and animals in the same moral category w.r.t. violence, specifically predation, due to your usage of "other sentient beings" in the above comment.
In your view, if a lion and a hunter both kill a gazelle, have they both committed the same moral violation?
Knew I was leaving things out. Thanks for including peas!
I don’t want to know how anybody gets actual, non-supplemented B12 nowadays. Many foods add a B12 in the form of cyanocobalamin. We evolved in a world where bacteria left B12 on nearly every surface left out long enough. But nowadays we clean our food and it shouldn’t be present. People will say they get it from the organ meat of certain animals - because that’s where those animals collect the B12 in their environment.
Notably, I avoid cyanocobalamin like the plague. It releases small amounts of cyanide into your liver upon processing. It’s also not particularly bioavailable. There are better B12s and I wish food would leave me to choose it myself.
Peas are a complete protein, but in their natural form they suffer from poor digestability compared to animal proteins. (Split peas have a PDCAAS score of around 0.5 - 0.6. Pea protein isolates can get up to 0.9, or comparable to chicken.)
It’s not all about bioavailability. Fiber might not be digested by us but the microbes that do fill the role of an organ. Giving the body something to work on offers benefits like leveled out blood sugars. This pdcaas metric needs a high quality reference.
Peas (gen Pisum) are very close to gen Lathyrus. Many of this wild flowers use a chemical defense to protect their seeds that is accumulative and can lead to serious and permanent neurodegenerative consequences at long term.
Lathyrism is one of the oldest diseases known in the history. Was observed in people with irreversible damages on their spinal cord after eating big amounts of the plant Lathyrus sativus, today known as Pisum sativum or "pea".
The disease develops after heavy consumption of peas for over two months so, to include an unlimited amount of Pisum sativum in the diet as your main source of protein is a terrible idea. Another case of wrong solutions and dangerous advice provided by veganism. If you are doing it, please stop right now and read this:
Just because 2 things are related does not mean they are equally dangerous. Potatoes, tomatos, eggplants, and most peppers are in the Solanaceae family, same as deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), which is extremely poisonous. Yet potatoes are a staple crop.
The commonly consumed pea types (yellow, sweet, snap, snow) have no risk of causing Lathyrism. Only wild peas pose a risk and those are outright banned in most nations. (notable exception, india, where it is part of several common dishes).
You have been warned. Plants are unsafe to eat by default
The fact that wild peas are much more dangerous does not remove the danger from common sweet peas (of any kind or color, Is the same species). Is a matter of how much of it you eat, and if you allow enough days between meals to detox.
It depends also in "how" you eat it. If you mix it with cereals or not (hint, you should) and even in "where" you cook it.
By common sweet pea, I mean the green common edible one. Pisum sativum = Lathyrus sativus a species that is known to cause the disease if eaten in large amounts. Lathyrism is happening still today in a few parts of the planet like India, and is a serious irreversible condition, not much unlike paraplegia. This is not FUD, is a proven medical fact. Maybe the vegetable has a different name in English. Dunno, but we are talking about the same species all the time.
Lathyrus odoratus, is the Fragrant sweet pea, a small species with huge flowers that smell really well. It has tiny peas that are not really edible -in big amounts- (all are "edible" in very small quantities but it does not worth the risk) and of course, as most Lathyrus it causes lathyrism. is just that is a different case of Lathyrism, affecting bones instead nerves if I remember correctly.
Pisum sativum and Lathyrus sativus are not the same plant. Pisum sativum’s Lathyrus name is “Lathyrus oleraceus”
Lathyrus sativus is also referred to as the “white pea”. Because it’s white.
I know sativus and sativum look the same but that doesn’t mean they are the same plant.
Here’s an article with photos of Lathyrus sativus. [1]
If I may inquire, are you from india? If so, then yes, you probably do have to be more aware of the peas you are eating. From the articles I can find it sounds like Lathyrus sativus is banned in india but still somewhat commonly sold. That’s not the case where I’m at in the US. You cannot accidentally get Lathyrus sativus here because nobody is selling it.
Yep. The International Plant Names lists 33 synonims for Pisum sativum L. and 16 for Lathyrus sativus L. and none of them coincide. Botanical names are changing all the time, and is not straightforward sometimes.
So you were right and I was wrong. I stand corrected. Thank you for getting me out of my mistake.
Tofu is not digested easily, it has a lot of ingredients our omnivore stomachs cannot digest, so the bacteria gets to it. It's made out of soy beans, so yes, it will cause gas and bloating.
Your comment is obviously (to me) someone who hasn't explored any other diet except meat eating (feel free to dispute). There are many people thriving on a vegan diet.
There are, but everyone has different dietary needs too. Some studies found a genetic sequence evolved in asia that confers better utilization of legume protein. Western Europe and eastern Africa evolved lactose tolerance to get protein instead. Up north people got bigger livers to handle more meat consumption.
I have tried vegan (whole foods only) for months, and I have real trouble with legumes, not just normal gas, and my blood work went crazy. Triglycerides shot up for one.
The healthiest I have ever felt, and the best my blood work has ever been, was eating 1.5lbs of grassfed beef every day (with lots of roots and leaves too).
I can do vegetarian pretty easily, I process eggs and dairy well, but both of those foods are designed to trigger rapid growth in young organisms. I'm not growing anymore so I tend to pack on fat with them.
My chosen middle ground is to get my protein from fish (Cobain said they don't have feelings) and dinosaurs(they had their time). I feel little kinship to cows, grew up around them, but it isn't efficient, even if I feel physically better eating them.
I was vegetarian for six years. But my personal diet has nothing to do with debunking the myth that humans are not omnivores by necessity.
There are plenty of studies showing large populations of vegetarians suffering vitamin deficiencies, so thriving is quite a stretch. Here is one example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29446340/
We could cut down on oxygen use by not breathing too. Ultimately you have to ground these abstract vectors of comparison in some fundamental purpose. For me, the only possible ground is humanity.
If humanity is the ground of your analysis, meat consumption will fail to present itself as the decisive factor for any vector of comparison. The decisive factor will generally be the elevation of capital or oligarchic social ends over general social interest.
It would allow nature to begin to recover from the damage we've been doing to it for thousands of years. Besides increased biodiversity being an inherently good thing, it would also reduce flooding and erosion, stabilise weather systems, preserve topsoil, etc. etc.
I've seen a number of reports of large farms being planned in places like the middle east.
Dubai opened one about 6 months ago capable of producing over a million kg of leafy greens a year, the largest vertical farm in the world by some margin, and that's just a pilot project.
A million kg of the most calorie dense leafy green (parsnip or kale at 50-60 kcal/100 grams) would be equivalent to about 167,000 kg of wheat (~360 kcal/100 grams). A bushel of wheat is about 27kg and the US produces about 50 bushels per acre [1] or 1,350 kg of wheat per acre. To produce the caloric equivalent of a million kg of leafy greens you would need about 130 acres (167,000/1350) of wheat. The average farm in the US is over 400 acres in size [2]. There are over two million farms in the US alone.
The “largest vertical farm in the world by some margin” produces less calories than a tiny family farm that can barely afford its own tractor. The largest wheat farm in Canada is over 35,000 acres which means it produces just as much food per day as the largest vertical farm produces per year. That wheat farm isn’t even in the list of top 10 largest farms in North America.
Edit: I made a slight mistake in my math. A 60 lbs bushel of wheat when processed doesn’t yield exactly 60 pounds of usable food, but it doesn’t change the overall picture (360 kcal => 240 kcal, 130 acres => 180 acres)
Edit 2: That vertical farm cost $40 million to build. Our hypothetical wheat farm would cost under $2 million for the land, fertilizer, seeds, and machines.
Wheat was first grown in Mesopotamia, literally in the middle of the Middle East!
> The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.
Pure fantasy. We’ve had vertical farming for thousands of years already - first built by the same Babylonians that grew wheat in Mesopotamia! When’s it going to start snowballing?
There will still be a relation, `more vertical farms => more use of water and pesticides`. Now, the factor between those might change. But I fail to see why vertical farming would change the dynamics fundamentally.
Not to say this is your moral prerogative but it's pretty simple: Eat only hand-picked fruit. It's by far the least death-causing food out there and it's offered to you by the tree to eat.
I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.
If you did that you would become extremely unhealthy. Veganism has the caveat "as far as is practicable", and a fruitarian diet is not practicable for extended periods of time as you will become malnourished.
Fair enough. Swap "only fruit@ for "as much fruit as possible without becoming malnourished" if you would value your own wellbeing above another animals' (which I would as well).
I know a guy who was promoting frutarian lifestyle. He was a previous world champion kayaker and works in the outdoor industry. I saw him recently and he was still in the top 15-20 in the world in his even. I need to check with him if he's still doing it. He looks like a model, superfit and full of energy. He had an interesting blog on the amount of fruit he was having to eat, most of which he picked up for free or cheap at markets as it was approaching use by date.
Look up how olives are harvested. There are big machines that go over rhe tree and vacuum off all the olives. Too bad theres a lot of birds living in there that get sucked in and die. Why don't they fly away? The noise must be a fair warning ahead of time! Well, the harvest is at night because of lower temperatures. The birds freeze in shock when the noise and bright lights get turned on and don't move.
I don't think any organic certifications regulate the method of slaughter. If you go to a local farmer, maybe there's a more humane method of slaughter (although the vast, vast majority of even local farmers will contract out slaughter and butchery), but organic at Walmart is probably going to be processed more or less identically to other meat.
Really..
Is that what you are doing, seems more like you just want to be violent toward others and have built yourself a causi belli to engage that way.
> wanting to reduce suffering
Bullshit, you don't give 2 shits about that, you want to increase suffering in actual sentient beings.
Which a cow is not. Hence you are in a cult because what else would you call that position??
You are not a moral agent and you don't get to define what others can and can't do when it comes to food production.
Organics is a fantastic way to go, it just shows how full of shit you are to go against that.
We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat.
What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground.
Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several years running now). We are controlling for exercise patterns too. He’s just replaced his frequent burgers with an impossible patty instead.
This comment is just a wild claim with no evidence and falsely equates “processed” with “unhealthy”
I think you mean we have studies of dubious quality blaming red meat. And scores of people repeating the same trite arguments.
It's the same people that brought to you salt causes high blood pressure and saturated fat causes atherosclerosis, pushing the low fat craze and the obesity epidemic.
Sure, meat is bad, go eat hyper processed fake meat.
not the OP, but this was covered a fair bit in a book I read recently called "genghis khan and the making of the modern world" which was a pretty good read.
Iirc it was that the figting forces of the various northern chinese states were comprised of conscript peasants whose diet consisted of grain and not much else, which stunted their growth among other things, meaning the mongols were significantly larger and stronger than them leading to certain mythologizing in the centuries afterwards. It probably also didn't help that the conscripted peasants were, well, conscript foot soldiers, wheras the mongols were willing participants on horseback
Bang on, same thing with the Dutch and the Brits when the empire flourished.
Dietary changes drive a lot of these things, more than I think is generally understood and credited.
The Mongols are a very famous example and extreme as you stated the Chinese peasant and soliders mostly had a grain based diet and poor health that came with it.
Epidemiologic nutritional studies are proven to be totally useless. They literally are a questionnaire asking people what do they eat, take some health markers and drawing conclusions. I spent the morning reading through the data of that "plant-based diets reduce colorectal cancer" on the front-page of the Guardian [1], and it's yet another pile of cherry picked inconclusive crap people will keep sharing on social media.
From just 2 minutes with your paper: "Higher heme iron intake appeared to be
significantly associated with a 31 % (95 % CI 4–67 %)
elevated risk of developing CHD" --- lmao, loving that 95% confidence interval between 4 and 67%.
Passing those out as proof of real science keeps the disinformation and terrible practice alive. If I had a dime every time a random commenter gave me a link to an epidemiologic nutritional study, I could fund a double blind randomized one myself.
I'm curious how one gets a 95% confidence on such a wide margin. I'm having trouble visualizing data that would give such a result. Is this just a result of a very wide distribution of data? Or is this done with shady statistics. The 95% seems to imply that there's data on either side of their chosen bounds. To my understanding, the real "beef" with the article is the choice of representing the data as "31%" when there's such a wide distribution. A more accurate statement would be that, "nearly everyone experienced some heightened risk of CHD with the actual risk varying largely, but firmly positive". Thoughts?
Consuming a lot of TMAO is proven to be bad for the heart. Cod contains TMAO in great amounts.
Yet white fish is one of the most recommended heart healthy foods.
You have to be careful when talking about specific mechanisms in terms of Whole Foods. Nutrition can't be reduced down to single mechanisms to provide confident recommendations, and often times results are the opposite of what we would expect mechanistically.
First we have lot of studies based on statistics.
There are also simple statistics which show than vegetarian live longer then meat eaters.
Then we have the five blue zone where people do not eat meat and most of them are centenarians.
But some people do not support their habits to be changed and are ready to believe anything that confort their opinions.
Even if their habits destroy the planet.
It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy.
Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy.
Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can find 10 studies proving the opposite side.
For one thing, the high level of saturated fats in beyond meat patties (25% of max daily recommended intake) could be considered unhealthy. On some other aspects it seems pretty decent, with good protein content and some added vitamins as well.
Not exclusively, of course, but the degree of processing of food greatly influences our body’s insulin response, which can over time have huge impacts on health (leading to fatty liver disease / metabolic syndrome / obesity / diabetes). This is why, for instance, fruit juice is so much worse for us than the whole fruit — most of the fiber is removed which would otherwise slow down digestion and temper insulin response. For more info I’d highly recommend Jason Fung’s Obesity Code book — he’s a nephrologist specializing in diabetes treatment.
Some kinds of processing increase insulin impact, others don't. If your goal is controlling sugars, a diet premised solely on minimizing processing isn't a great strategy; "processing" isn't the high-order bit of that problem.
Theoretically, you are right, of course. In practice though, to apply this, you would need to know how the processing exactly works, and how the body responds to that processing. Given that you can not really determine this easily, it is in practice just simpler to stick to unprocessed foods as much as possible, and just apply the sugar limit to those.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. Cheese is cooked, fermented, emulsified, and aged. It has a lower glycemic impact than milk, its primary unprocessed input.
Mostly, I think the "processed" vs. "unprocessed" debate is an appeal to tradition, not science; if it's a kind of processing we were doing 200 years ago, it's OK; otherwise, it's unhealthful.
I would say that Cheese, at least its classic variants, fall exactly under the category where you have fairly good knowledge of the nature of its processing and its effects on the body. I'd say your example supports my argument.
But as humans we can't read every study for every ingredient. We have to use heuristics to guesstimate a healthy diet. Reducing (not eliminating) processed foods is a decent one. Same goes for including protein, increasing fiber (so whole wheat instead of the cake americans call "bread"), including veggies.
For some reason there is no reply button on the other replies.
Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.
Your references seem to back me up, and not the person I was replying to? Eg:
"There is evidence showing an association with certain types of food processing and poor health outcomes (especially highly- or ultra-processed foods). This association applies mainly to ultra-processed foods that contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthful fats."
From the second one. Maybe you confused my position?
That's mostly related to the curing salts and their reaction with heme iron. Curing salts are not used when processing vegetables; heme iron is not added either (I hope), so this should not apply in this case.
What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programming languages, only slow implementations" type of argument about the absence of strict logical necessity?
Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like?
Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc).
None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms).
But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it.
For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?
Saying there's necessarily a causal relationship is probably not well supported, but there's absolutely a correlation, and as a rule of thumb, if you choose whole foods over processed foods it will tend to net out as more healthy.
Nutrition pretty much by definition requires a lot of simplification to allow people to make quick decisions on food choices, and so broad rules that are mostly right are pretty useful (and pretty much the basis of how most diets work).
I agree in so far that I believe that the observation of "more processing > less health" is not caused directly by the amount of processing, but by the way those highly processed products are designed to match as many "appetites" as possible. I use the term "appetites" in the sense of a low intensity craving, the feedback signal the body sends to fill some nutrient deficit. But our taste buds can't really identify most of the nutrients in question, we just have is a set of complicated heuristics taking an educated guess. And many of those highly processed foods, in their quest to maximise desire, will fool those heuristics, matching the "appetite" without fulfilling the deficit. Perhaps not by deliberate design, but by market selection.
On one hand, the faux meats sound quite risky, but in the other hand they are under extreme scrutiny like no highly processed food before them, so they might not actually be bad at all.
Tell me that raw, uncooked wheat is just as healthy as processed and cooked wheat. I'll wait.
Cooking makes some things edible that weren't before. Just because it doesn't work on an apple in the way you are imagining doesn't mean much.
I'll also note that many folks think of baked apples as sugar-laden desserts and fresh apples as eaten plain. Nevermind that folks add apples to savory rice dishes and nevermind that folks dip fresh apples in caramel sauce. You need more than the descriptions of "baked" and "raw" to denote health.
Depends on fruit/vegetable. Some have nutrients that are easily destroyed by heat, but some have nutrients that are easier absorbed after light heating, or problematic compounds removed during cooking.
You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health.
Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad.
Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vitamins) is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.
Cooking meat allows your digestive system to ingest more proteins, for example.
This is why fire was such an unprecedented step in our evolution.
For example:
Raw egg: 3g of protein at most.
Cooked egg: 6g of protein.
Not just heating, even simple cutting/mincing of the food promotes oxidation that can significantly influence the composition of food.
On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.
Eating heated food is a staple of human diets for hundreds of thousands of years - ever since fire was invented. I wouldn't worry about that part so much.
Unless you're on a paleo diet, heating to cook is considered minimally processed. So that's more evidence that looking for "processing" isn't a good metric.
Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.
I disagree. Depending on the prep, I could have been fooled into thinking it was a real patty at Hopdoddys. Saying it is unhealthy sounds ideological. The point of making this imitation meat is to over time, get better and better until it is truly indistinguishable. It is premised on the idea that many people don't want to give up their meat foods, and that mass meat production is unethical and environmentally negative.
Beyond/impossible aren't trying to be healthy. They're trying to be meat replacements and have similar healthiness to red meat, which they do. I prefer them to previous generation meat substitutes. They work great as ground beef replacement, much better than any vegetables.
I'm a heavy meat eater, and I actually kinda liked the impossible whopper.
More importantly, while I like the taste of meat too much to give up on it, I would also very much prefer that it could be had without killing animals. I don't think plant-based meat is going to be the ultimate solution to this - more likely, it'll be the lab-grown stuff. But, either way, it requires investments from the food industry to reach maturity, and those won't happen unless there's a real customer interest. Buying fake-meat burger is a way to express that interest.
I’m not positive but I have a feeling it’s the methylcellulose. In my own home experimentation, none of the ingredients seem to cause issues except for that.
It seems fairly benign, but it can’t be digested and it isn’t clear to me if we have gut flora which can break it down efficiently.
I enjoy throwing together little experiments in a similar vein to beyond meat or impossible burger products, but it feels too much like a lab experiment to eat regularly. My kids like “meat balls” with spaghetti, so I tend to make that and otherwise I’m gravitating back towards whole food-based garden burgers.
A weird thing about beyond/impossible is that while they appear moderately healthier than real meat from some perspectives… They are still pretty trashy. I can’t not feel like I’m making a bad choice, even if it’s home made, and at the end of the day I just want to feel good (mentally and physically) about my food.
This is a qualitative/irrational assessment and not a quantitative/rational one, especially considering that fat consumption got a wrongfully-deserved bad rap for decades thanks to unethical lobbying by the sugar industry.
For years I’ve spent a lot of time (probably more than I should) crawling through research about exactly this, which is precisely why I use the term trashy. Relatively speaking I suppose it’s better than many other options, which is relevant to some people. In the broader scope, this is still junk food.
I’d argue (based on the best dietary research the world has produced) that saturated fats do deserve a bad rap, and most refined fats are also worth minimizing in a diet. Are all fats bad? Not at all, we should eat them. We’d die without them. Are saturated fats and refined plant fats worth including in our diet? Arguably no, not at all. Incidental consumption of them is more than enough and intentional consumption becomes problematic quite quickly.
I’m not aware of any outcomes-based studies spanning the globe which indicate that a high fat diet serves most people well as far as long term quality and quantity of life. On the other hand, there are several, and more all the time, showing the opposite.
The valid “fat is actually okay!” data almost exclusively comes from whole-food based studies. However, those which position saturated fats as safe or healthy are typically of poor designs. One example off the top of my head is one which put vegetarians on an extremely high coconut oil diet and meat eaters on a lean meat diet. The results? Eating meat is better for your cholesterol! Surprise?
I couldn’t make this stuff up. In fact, someone likely paid people a lot of money to make it up. The irony is that it uses the truth (saturated fat raises blood lipids) to indicate that this truth is actually false. If saturated fat was bad, wouldn’t the intersection of meat eaters and vegetarians look different? It must be okay. Makes a great headline!
I agree that the sugar lobbying is absurd and harmful to society, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice to believe there isn’t a massive and busy lobby behind fats as well. Why wouldn’t there be? Look at how many studies around animal products and fat are funded by associates of the food processing industry.
And yet the best studies we have clearly have no commercial agenda behind them, they typically took years or decades of work, yet they’re hastily discounted by all kinds of people.
diet is a fairly complex topic and it's a shame that most doctors don't get more than a single course in nutrition. I read a paper like this (which is related to our discussion) and the raw complexity is just... difficult to boil down into a variety of good food choices sometimes: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000871
I can't touch 'vegan cheese' made with coconout oils for this reason - for some reason it leaves me feeling like I have a film of oil down the back of my gullet that I can't shake off for an hour or two afterwards. It's a weird, unlikeable and thoroughly unwanted sensation.
You might have a touch of legume allergy (if only have a touch is possible). Beyond has pea protein and Impossible has soy protein. What's in your veggie patties?
Hmm not to say that’s not it (because people vary) but my wife and I both get this feeling with these Beyond/Impossible meats but we otherwise eat a lot of legumes which don’t give us that feeling
I think they both contain methylcellulose, which is considered benign but not digestible. In my experience it doesn’t cause major discomfort, but a mildly off putting sensation in my GI tract for a few hours. It might be something else, but it seems likely after narrowing things down for a while.
If you dig a little deeper you’ll find that methylcellulose has some interesting culinary properties, making it well suited to adding structure and firm texture to soft foods.
When mixed with water it transforms into a firm gel after heating, or it can be used to create extremely resilient emulsifications.
It’s practically flavourless, so it works well. I’m not convinced it passes through the GI tract with no impact whatsoever, but it appears so far to be relatively benign.
It’s nothing like sawdust or a filler, though. It’s also somewhat expensive so it wouldn’t be a good option for filler. My 500g bag was around $25, but if you wanted to use actual sawdust, well I think you could get that for close to nothing.
Thank you for your eloquent and well reasoned refutation! Getting early 90s internet vibes, where prople actually typed out their disagreement in an informative way instead of just downvoting.
I take that as a huge compliment! I find myself dreaming of Old Internet quite often these days, so thank you very much. Maybe we can restore the old ways one comment at a time.
I know exactly what you mean and I get this a lot too. I always thought it was in my head but recently I tried a Drunken Noodle recipe from FreshPrep which used Beyond Meat Burgers and I felt nothing. It was actually delicious. I guess the prep method somehow affects it?
100% in agreement. It’s not even in the fast food places I struggle to find a plain bean burger now… it’s the supermarkets too.
The odd peculiar taste of these kinds of new plant based burgers can be pretty foul. For me and my partner, the Burger King veggie burger now tastes similar to dish soap.
Bring back the delicious bean burgers and actual normal veggie burgers.
I used to love the Morning Star Chipotle Black Bean burger. Then they changed the recipe and now it tastes horrible. It's lost the fresh, garden flavor and now it may as well be burnt bean paste or mush. At this point I'm moving on to my own patties.
"delicious" and "bean burger" never have gone together in my experience. To each their own, I understand. Maybe it's because I only had a bean burger at Chili's .
It might be, but it's not that particular genetic marker. I have it (confirmed by testing) and, while I hate Impossible Burgers, they definitely don't taste like soap to me. More like a bean that's developed a "funk". And not like tasty cheese funk, more like meat that's gone off funk.
i don't know about anyone else, but the second I eat a portabello burger, I'm racing to the bathroom. unless they are washing extensively, whatever those spores are just hit me the wrong way and i'm off to the races. don't get me wrong though, they taste amazing, i just have to be selective of where i'm eating them at.
I'm an omnivore but still like to have the odd non-meat option, and I'm the same. I find the impossible (etc) burgers are just.. weird. I really prefer having a felafel if it's available!
I've not eaten a real burger or sausage since the 80's and I've only had two of these impossible burgers but they tasted quite nice when I had them and no adverse reactions, but at NZ$14 (US$8.50) for two frozen burgers at my local supermarket, they wont be on my menu often.
Public service announcement from the vegan community: Cutting out meat doesn't mean you have to eat bugs, or any other gross animal byproducts. Plants are plenty nutritious.
Hypothetically, would this still be the case if eating bugs was better on environmental and animal welfare/displacement metrics over plant agriculture, and those considerations were motivations for someone being vegan?
I also had this thought once, but then looked it up, and found that it is completely wrong. It's basically like saying "we already eat plenty of fish... We just call em things like beef, pork, and bird meat".
Except that fish are much more closely related to mammals than crustaceans are to insects (same phylum, different class). Here is an example of an animal that is as closely related to a cow as a grasshopper is to a lobster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp
Edit: Even more, dietary preferences tend to focus on a single species. Plenty of people eat chicken but not turkey, or eat pork but not boar. There are even people who eat lamb but not adult sheep. And no one eats wolf or eagle meat. To then come and say "hey, you already eat one arthropod, why not another" is pretty absurd.
I'm not at all against eating insects, I'm just pointing out that the fact we eat shrimp has 0 to do with it.
That's still at best relating insects and crustaceans at the level of (most) fish and mammals. I'm also unclear on where this pancrustacea clade comes in, as most Wikipedia articles for specific species don't even list the clade, just the phylum and class - and fish are still the same class as mammals, while insects and shellfish are not.
Either way, while we eat some mammals and birds, we still don't eat the vast majority of mammals or birds, and we barely eat any reptiles or amphibians or fish.
We also eat plenty of other bugs and insects which just get into the way of processing plants ;=)
(crustaceans are a good example as traces of them tend to get included into algal based food, but less pleasant sounding examples are e.g. from time to time small worms being in fruited pressed for juice, sound terrible but isn't really that terrible and impossible to avoid without using pesticides which are worse then that by far)
I'm someone from far away, reading this unfold with curiosity. My country's variety is NotCo, who in all fairness makes damn good patties without any of the downsides told here (the fakeness sensation, the heavy stomach after eating, that strange waft when burping). NotCo uses AI for their processes, combining strange things like chicory, pineapple juice & cabbage to create milk that even froths like the real one; or strawberries, chickpeas, cocoa, beetroot & bamboo to make very passable "meat". They simply taste good, to the point sometimes I prefer to buy them instead of regular burgers. It helps that we have a healthy market of real veggie (ie. no meat-replacement) products to choose too.
Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
I assume Beyond, Impossible etc use another, more crude/unrefined approach.
Tried to eat a NotBurger last night. I couldn't finish it... because my meat-eating girlfriend took it for herself. Their milk is pretty good too. The patent for the ML approach they use is kind of interesting as well, I honestly expected their "AI" to be a lot dumber: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10915818B1/
> Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
Here they recently partnered with Kraft to make Not versions of their cheese singles (although some would say they weren't really cheese to begin with) and eventually other products. NotChicken is supposed to also make it here relatively soon, but sadly only as patties.
Haven't heard of it here in Australia yet. Australia has a few brands of its own (Buds and Veef are two popular ones) as well as some of the more global brands, so it's quite a saturated market.
I agree with you, and I think it’s the soya protein. I don’t have any problems with pea protein, but the soya protein makes me feel queasy.
I think those meat replacements are good for people who have just become vegan as they give you a sense of familiarity, but after a while you realise that it’s possible to eat a delicious vegan diet that doesn’t consist of mega-processed things trying to be meat.
Photos and internal documents from a Beyond Meat plant in Pennsylvania show apparent mold, Listeria and other food-safety issues, compounding problems at a factory the company had expected to play a major role in its future https://trib.al/q1SAHYO
To be honest I don't know too much about it, but as I understand it tofu is the curd made from soya milk, and soya protein is some form of the processed whole bean. My thinking that it's soya protein is just from the fact that I've tried a few different brands' soya fake burgers and they all give me the same discomfort.
The fake stuff usually lists “textured vegetable protein” or “soy protein isolate” or things like that. Those are much more processed than tofu. Tofu is more like a curd in so far as the tofu gets minced then settled out of the water. I think it sometimes gets calcium carbon added.
Not a vegan, but I went to several places that served some veg patties that I really enjoyed. It didn't attempt to taste like meat, but it was just as enjoyable.
After this I tried several of these alternatives just to look for different flavors. Beyond meat really smelled weird when cooking, and while somewhat acceptable in taste I can totally share the stomach weirdness.
This didn't prevent me to keep trying other stuff. "Impossible meat" I was never able to find yet. But as other have said, the major issue is that all the alternative options cost _more_ than actual beef where I live. This makes it a luxury option.
I find that Beyond Meat is 'okay' in a burger when it's got all the other flavours going on, but I was recently playing around with using it in other dishes like meatballs and wasn't nearly as happy with it. It has a weird aftertaste that I can't quite identify, and whilst not awful, isn't terribly pleasant.
I bought a pound of the "ground beef" to try it out. Pretty sure it was Beyond beef, but I'll be goddamned if it didn't smell and taste like cat food when I opened up the package. It was fucking revolting, and totally ruined the dish I was making.
There must be some special way to prepare it to make it taste good. There's no way I'll take this stuff and make burger patties out of it just like I would regular ground beef.
I'm not the only one either, do a search for "beyond smells like..." and look at the autocomplete results.
My favorite of all of these products are the various Impossible Sausages, probably for exactly the reason that sausage is way more flavor and texture than just the meat or “meat” itself. Seriously love the bratwurst alternatives. The burgers from either brand? I completely agree with you, there’s something just slightly off about them.
The Beyond meat we've had from the grocery store has too much smoke flavor added in. It's fine if you're making burgers, and maybe chili, but anything else is a non-starter. I think they make sausage and meatballs that don't have this flavor, but whatever generic 'ground meat' we got was suitable only for making food on a grill.
They're really good with no awful side effects or tastes. I like some vegetarian options, but honestly, most of it either tastes nasty or has poor texture.
My girlfriend dislikes some meats and seems to want to be a low-meat household, she loves morningstar nuggets of most kinds. Another good one is Quorn. They are a cultured fungus protein and it just makes a much more meaty tasting and feeling product, and you could easily forget it's not chicken.
Big problem though is the required level of processing to take a vague protein slurry and turn it into a glued together nugget means it's only really comparable to the absolute lowest quality, bulk batch, school lunch grade nuggets.
Quorn is a fermented slime mold, the fungi label is a marketing trick.
This said, I used to like Quorn before they started stuffing egg (mostly eggwhite) into everything. The real slime mold is great, but where I live it's near impossible to get Quorn products without the egg. They taste as bad as impossible/beyond with their clearly chemical taste.
Going beyond this, mosr vegetarians/vegans find over time that it is much cheaper and actually nicer to go simple, not with the replacements. tofu, seitan or simply vegetable dishes without any of these things. E.g. in a well flavoured bolognese/ragout no one can taste a difference between meat, fake meat or simple hard tofu (mouth feel/texture are clearly different though). And anyone should really try making seitan, it's super fun and easy - basically you just wash a bag of flour repeatedly with warm water.
I realize they are processed food but I really like Morning Star ~~Farms~~ Laboratories products. No one is going to mistake their products for meat but they are still delicious.
And I doubt their business is struggling, or that Beyond Meats's fate has them worried.
I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but I like certain black bean and garden burgers. I don't eat them with a bun though, I cook them and then top with a little cheese.
There's a good chance that your gut microbiome forgot about meat which is why you have the problem.
It's a well known story I've heard of vegetarians going back to eating meat and then getting sick from the meat for some time. This is also why eating foods you're not used to can often make you sick even if they're fine. Your gut microbiome adapts to your diet, and if you suddenly change what you eat you can get indigestion.
From my understanding the beyond/etc "meat" acts like real meat to your body microbiome because it's so similiar.
Interesting I've experienced this too though interestingly it is way more noticeable for me with beyond than impossible. I get a weird after taste for hours and my stomach feels off. Not bad enough to never eat again but noticeable enough that I tend to avoid beyond in particular now. Some people have suggested it is so close to meat that your stomach just isn't used to it but I'm pescatarian and eat fish fairly regularly so I doubt it is that simple.
It’s cheap and people who avoid soy might buy pea instead. Almond protein might work better for ice cream from a taste perspective, but that’s super expensive. We have a great almond & coconut based ice cream in our region but it costs 2x as much as the milk based one.
One thing both Impossible and Beyond do is add artificial smoke flavoring/aromatics to their product to more closely resemble a flame broiled burger. I find them to be somewhat offputting personally, and it also makes the product useless for anything other than a burger. You can't do a hot dish with the Beyond meat because the smoke flavor will overwhelm everything else in the dish.
I agree the naming/labeling thing is tricky. We have a friend who brings round 'vegan cheese' when she visits; living in the EU, I'm surprised this labeling is allowed. Is it OK to label vegetarian things as 'beef'?
On the other hand, 'beef substitute' doesn't sound terribly appetising.
But we are all familiar with 'peanut butter'; I'm sure someone more knowledgeable can explain what is and is not allowed.
I live in the EU. The thing that makes cheese cheese is arguably the mix of fungi and bacteria growing in it. We have some excellent cheeses here that are traditional except for the substitution of nut milk for mammal milk. They are currently specialty items, but that may change. We may have to give up meat and dairy to get through the energy transition, but fortunately the same mold and bacteria responsible for blue cheese grow on plant milk too!
The etymology doesn't really matter, but the french word for cheese refer to how milk is ~processed... "Fromage" -> "Formage" -> "putting stuff in forms". If you think "peanut butter" is confusing... it is called "pinda kaas" in dutch... directly translates to "peanut cheese"!
I'm in the UK so I might have trouble getting them, most of the vegan cheese I have access to is basically the same flavour just in different shapes and forms.
I have celiac and often feel the same way about gluten free foods. Please stop trying to feed me gluten free versions of things that rely on gluten to be good. Just give me a rice bowl or tacos on corn tortillas. With Veganism/Vegetarianism it makes even less sense to me. Not eating gluten is not a choice for me, but Vegans and Vegetarians chose this lifestyle because they don't want to eat meat, why make fake things that resemble meat?
Yeah I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I get a weird aftertaste that lingers when I've tried the impossible burgers. Closest thing I can compare it to is the aftertaste I get after eating chicken thighs. I know that's not exactly a useful comparison, but it's what I've got to work with. Definitely not an aftertaste I've ever associated with beef.
We haven’t had issues with stomach upset, but I’ve found that cooking impossible burgers leaves an oder lingering in the house for days. It smells good while cooking but over time becomes off putting and I loose my appetite to cook the rest of the pack through the week.
It's could be the high amount of fat / saturated fat. This happens to me with a lot of high fat products. When I was consuming a lot of coconut milk / cream with curry dishes it happened too.
But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger or a garden burger. Those taste light and yummy and don’t leave a weird feeling in my stomach.