cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2674486
TL;DR: the meat industry’s misleading messaging campaign + lobbying
I don’t have any particular issues with plant based meats, but I really don’t like the whole idea that everything has to replicate meat.
There are so many amazing dishes that just happen to be vegetarian/vegan that seem to go overlooked
You often hear this take from non-vegans. If someone wants to make substitutes, what’s the problem? Who cares?
Making the good option easier is a good way to get people to do the right thing
One thing many vegans don’t get about non-vegans is that we’re frustrated at veganism for the same “reasonable if not valid” reasons. I’ve had some vegan family/friends have serious health issues directly related to their refusal to eat meat. Yes, there’s a lot to that, and it usually spawns from people easily prone to PTSD being made to watch some disgusting documentary about the meat packing industry and going full starvation on and off until all their hair fell out. Is it veganism’s fault? Not directly.
It’s kinda like the Catholic Church. There’s SO FEW pedophiles in the Catholic Church, but for anyone who has been touched by that, the Church itself is tainted far worse than the facts allow.
Agreed, meat serves a specific role within traditional dishes. I find well cooked mushrooms to be one of the better substitutes in most sauce based dishes, though it lacks in protein. If we are going full vegan I believe South Indian to be some of the best cuisine in the world.
There is so much flexibility in cooking. I got some beyond meat Jamaican patties this week and I just genuinely wasn’t impressed with the flavor and texture.
I’d argue that bad implementation of substitutes is generally the culprit here. Meshing well with the cuisine is a better move. I’d rather have a curry rice with herbs filled patty.
Anyway I guess my point is that making meat replacement options just taste “OK” isn’t doing a lot of favors.
Many (probably most) vegetarians or vegans didn’t start that way, so having the option to have some familiar foods without the meat is nice, beyond stuff for example is not cheap where I live, so it’s a treat to have one, but sometimes you just feel like a greasy hamburger that tastes like beef
Because selfish humans love their fucking meat and they don’t care that animals are locked into prisons where they can barely move or clean themselves, generate massive acres of literal shit pools that pollute large areas, the impact that kind of farming has on the environment….
THAT is why there is motivation for replication. Without it how do you shut down these disgusting cow/pig/chicken torture facilities
Yet so many of these people that claim to care about the environment still have children. Hypocrisy at it’s finest.
If you had to choose between being vegan and the environment going to shit, or eating meat and the environment getting figured out, which would you pick?
I find a lot of vegans have a really inaccurate view of non-vegans wrt eating meat. It’s not that we selfishly choose to eat meat despite feeling animals dying is a bad thing. It’s that we don’t think it’s a bad thing that animals die in a farm for food.
And if you realize that, you might find you have things in common with non-vegans. I fight for free-range laws, anti-farm-cruelty laws, etc. I just think you’re morally in the wrong about everyone stopping eating meat. Oddly, a lot of us non-vegans see vegans to be selfish. But we try not to use that to be uncivil towards them.
While I’m sure the meat industry/lobbying has made sure people knew about the drawbacks of plant based meat I think there’s several legitimate reasons it hasn’t taken off yet. It’s firmly stuck in the middle.
When compared to animal based meat plant based meat is:
- more expensive
- not hardly any healthier
- doesn’t taste as good
When compared to more traditional plant based protein, plant based meat it is:
- more expensive
- much less healthy
- doesn’t taste as good
The only benefit of plant based meat is that it’s more environmentally friendly than traditional meat.
That’s something that most people don’t care to pay more for.
I hope R&D continues into plant-based meat as I do think that once the cost comes down below animal-based meat it will see wide adoption. Especially because the price of animal-based meat will continue to rise.
The only reason it’s so much more expensive than animal-based meats is because of the amount of subsidies the meat industry gets. Actually, now that I think about it, all of the major pillars of the US agricultural industry, whether it be meat, corn, or dairy, are upheld by subsidies.
The only reason it’s so much more expensive than animal-based meats is because of the amount of subsidies the meat industry gets.
If the environmental costs of producing it were added as taxes to meat, its price would skyrocket. Related link.
When compared to more traditional plant based protein, plant based meat it is:
- more expensive
- much less healthy
- doesn’t taste as good
Now hold on just a minute!
Plant based meat is expensive and unhealthy, but I’ll be damned if I let you besmirch my junk food!
In Canada, A&W’s “Beyond Burger” is actually even better tasting than a regular meat burger imo.
I haven’t really gotten into Impossible or Beyond. I’ve tried them both but they just don’t seem worth the cost or calories. Boca on the other hand make a hell of a plant based burger.
once the cost comes down below animal-based meat it will see wide adoption
oh yeah, absolutely. the nanosecond it becomes cheaper is the moment McDonald’s and all the other large corporate fast food places make the switch. taste or anything else is secondary to shareholder profits anyways (which in this case is a good thing at least)
Taco Bell has “bulked up” their ground beef with soy for years IIRC. Nobody noticed, because their seasoning and actual beef flavor were strong enough to cover.
My problem with Impossible/Beyond is neither is nearly as good as real beef flavor, and I’m saying this as somebody who was vegetarian for over a decade. Boca and Morningstar were my favorites back when I didn’t eat meat, and I still buy the Morningstar breakfast patties because I like them better than greasy meat patties to start my day.
I’ve bought impossible burgers and real burgers before and really struggled to taste the difference.
unfortunately I fall into the lucky few who get extreme stomach pain, cramps, nausea and like over a day of horrific diarrhea from Impossible meat, So that basically means I’ll never eat it again, and also be incredibly unlikely to try any others.
Took me 3 times before I noticed the pattern and started poking around online about it, to find I wasnt alone.
I wouldn’t say nobody noticed.
What is “plant-based meat” vs “traditional plant-based protein”? Like, which things are in which categories? Tofu? Beans? Seitan? Peanut butter?
I would say you should change “not hardly any healthier” to “much less healthy”. There are definite gotchas for eating anything in excess, but real meat (let’s say beef, since that’s the popular discussion point) is one of the most nutrition-rich foods you can possibly eat, with the most important nutrients that are hard to get elsewhere effectively. The Impossible Burger (probably the least unhealthy plant burger) might compete with an 80/20 burger (depending on what metrics you use for health), but a 90/10 burger SORTA blows it out of the water except a few random added minerals you just get in your morning multivitamin.
The only benefit of plant based meat is that it’s more environmentally friendly than traditional meat.
I’m going to use OP’s tact and suggest that this is not strictly true either. It took me years of not understanding how the meat industry worked differently from the farms I grew up near, only to realize it DOESN’T work that much differently from the farms I grew up near at all. This video is a great resource by a neutral person (no bias towards or against meat or veganism) who did the research himself. There are still arguments that stand about meat being environmentally unfriendly, but just as many arguments to the contrary.
If the meat and dairy industries were to stop being subsidized, the real costs would skyrocket animal products and plants and plant based products would look much, much cheaper.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
If that is to be believed it says their study in 2015 showed the cost of beef bring brought from $30 to $5 (I assume per pound, but 1/6th cost is rediculous)
That is much higher than I expected
IMO, his article is dramatically better than his last line. He is quite accurately attacking Big Ag (something even a majority of farm groups do), but throwing all the subidies together and adding it to the burger is simply mathematically inaccurate. I don’t think he intended that line to be taken literally (as in, we’d suddenly see meat prices skyrocket that high), but it leads to a pretty unjustifiable soundbyte nonetheless.
I get meat untouched by subisidies all the time, and it sells for very nearly the same price as subsidized meat. Unfortunately, most of the subsidies are really just giving some companies a monopoly, which they abuse to control prices. The majority of feed (for example) is owned by a couple multinational countries because of the subsidies we’re discussing. Those subsidies are actually an obstacle for small farmers, who very arguably could resell their meat for the same (or less) than Grocery Store prices if their costs weren’t artificially higher than they should be.
Unfortunately, this is where it gets complicated, the subsidies now amount to 44% of plant farmer income. It will devastate the plant farmer industry to strip away the meat subsidies too quickly or carelessly.
I mean, here’s something you might not realize about the subsidies. A good deal of the money from them come from farmers. Have you ever heard of the Beef Checkoff Program? It’s a fee paid by farmers, ranchers, and producers every time they sell commodities… like beef. That money used to be voluntary and used for meat and dairy marketing. Now, it’s mandatory and used to subsidize feed to Big Ag. In a microcosmic level, it’s impossible to say subsidies will increase the price of meat when it costs the rancher money on the net.
The farm subsidies (all of them, not just the meat subsidies) really need to be cleaned up. They’re not about helping an industry, but about lobbiests having locked in competitive advantages at the expense of everyone else. ( ref )
That’s not strictly true. The practice of applying the value of subsidies and applying it to retail cost of a product is bad-faith. Not saying some of these subsidies shouldn’t be changed.
For example, many of these subsidies just give “Big Ag” an advantage over smaller farms, and actually lower the quality and value of meat on the shelves while raising prices (by hurting competition).
And depending on where the numbers come from, one of the “subsidies” generally included in numbers is the “lease” cost of letting animals graze on national parks. This is an incredibly complicated “subsidy” because it is a net good for the National Parks and for the environment to allow that to happen.
Finally, people generally consider “animal products purchased by government” to be a subsidy. Technically it is, but you can imagine that the army buying what it needs isn’t giving an industry an unearned advantage.
Most importantly, these subsidies aren’t the government giving ranchers money.
There’s no question that some of these subsidies need to be changed dramatically. But you’re very likely to NOT see a massive or long-term price jump when they do. (ref)
For me, I buy meat from places that don’t benefit from these subsidies, and I generally pay within the range of $1 more or less per pound than stuff from “Big Ag” in my grocery store.
Just eat some damn falafel, people - it’s not hard to make, it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a plant, and bulk dry chickpeas are cheap as fuck and last forever.
Falafel doesn’t taste like a cheeseburger. Beyond burgers taste like tasty cheeseburgers.
It was almost as if the meat industry orchestrated the whole thing itself.
It did.
… “As a nutrition scientist I have one view…Processing per se isn’t bad. What is bad is food that has no nutritional value.” (Or, in the case of red meat, food that raises your risk of several chronic diseases.)
Nail on head
