The Impossible Burger is the best veggie burger I've ever had.
I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and have now been a pescatarian for 8 years. It has been 18 years since I have had a proper cheeseburger, and since then I have had many thousands of veggie burgers. Cheeseburgers are probably my favorite food, and I haven't had one in 18 years. If someone told me that the world would end tomorrow, I would go out and eat a proper cheeseburger.
I have some experience in this area, is what I'm trying to say. The flavor and texture is the closest to actual meat I've ever had. And that, then, is the key for a lot of people: they don't want a veggie burger that simulates meat. Which is fine! I do, and I imagine the market for close-to-meat veggie burgers is bigger than obviously-not-meat veggie burgers.
Others in the thread have mentioned the Beyond Burger, which is also good. But the Impossible Burger, for me, is way better. I have had my Impossible Burgers at Bareburger. At home, I went with Morningstar Farm's Grillers Prime for a long time, but about a year ago they changed the recipe, and I did their black bean for a while. I have since discovered if I season the Griller's Prime while I'm frying it, it comes out much better.
As a vegetarian and former meat eater, I've had an "impossible taco" a couple of times. I don't want or crave meat, but they tasted very good. However, the texture totally weirded me out and both times I checked more than once to make sure they didn't accidentally serve me meat. I would wager a meat eater wouldn't know the difference if they were accidentally served these vegetarian tacos instead of beef.
I ordered an Impossible burger without knowing about the brand, I thought it was just what the restaurant called it. I never suspected a thing until I later read somewhere about the brand Impossible. So, in my case, you're right.
Yeah, the place in Brixton that sells these has made a big deal every time I've eaten there about how hey, this doesn't have meat in it, and I'm like "I know, believe me, if you made burgers with meat that were like this I would never eat here again". It's passable, but it is not good. Like you I'm conscious of the need to consume less meat, and these burgers are a step, but let's hope this isn't the destination. They've taken the "veggie burger" from "actually I've changed my mind, I'm not hungry after all" to reluctant acceptance.
For me I wouldn't say they're as good as the burgers I would normally have on rare occasion but the ones I've had were better than the sort of burger I'd expect to get at Burger King, where they're being introduced.
As a heathen who likes to have things like jalapenos on my burger I think I'm quicker to embrace it than I would be if I liked my burgers straight.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewars, especially not on classic flamewar topics. This is also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Would you please review and follow them? We ban accounts that won't.
You're attacking someone who has openly stated that they're conscious of the need to eat less meat and are actively seeking out a veggie burger that they actually like (and have finally found one that's tolerable to them).
I honestly think you're fighting the wrong battle here.
I still would. It still signals to the restaurant that I want the non-meat option. If they slip up, oh well, and at that point it would be more wasteful for me to throw the "real" burger out.
Also as a vegetarian, there is a clear difference in the earlier veggie patties that Burger King served—Morning Star possibly, not these—and that of a regular whopper meat patty.
Vegns often fail to understand how important texture is to meat eaters when it comes to replicating a meat product so that it will appeal to meat eaters.
Additionally, a lot of vegns are also extremely health conscious, and so they tend to avoid a lot of unnecessary fat in their diet. A lot of chefs will say "fat is flavor," which is true, but what's also true is that fat conveys flavor. It sticks to surfaces in places that water doesn't and allows flavors to linger.
It's why the Impossible and Beyond Burgers are succeeding: they haven't lost sight of what makes a burger, a burger.
(off topic) Is there any reason you seem to have replaced the a in vegan with an asterisk? It happened twice so I am guessing it was not a typo? I am just curious? Is it like x86 or something?
It's not very obvious that it's supposed to stand for more than one letter. Is it less confusing to do this way than to say "vegetarian" since that includes vegans?
While it's true that vegans are also vegetarians going strictly by dictionary definitions, without any other qualifier the term "vegetarian" is usually is taken to mean lacto-ovo vegetarian, at least in some circles.
Whether it's confusing or not or obvious or not, it was an extremely common term in the online vegetarian community I used to participate in around 15 years ago. Not trying to make a judgement on the term, just informing.
Have you met any Vegans? There is no way they'd accept being lumped into a larger 'Vegetarian' demographic. One thing about Vegans is, is that they are not shy about telling you what they are.
This is just a made up stereotype. They only place you see this trend is in angsty teens or Reddit users who tend to be vocally hormonal about anything.
I have met far more people who tell me cliches about vegans than I have vegans who tell me they're vegan.
That's an old stereotype that is certainly not true for the vegans I know - which are pretty many by now, most of whom have gone vegan in the past few years.
There's still a lot of toxicity in the vegan community. Just yesterday I read an article about how a vegan started eating meat and fish. The vegan community found out and started bullying her for it. [0]
That might be true for a specific community of vegans that explicitly seek each other out (see sibling comment), but that's hardly relevant for considering whether to group them together with vegetarians when a comment applies to both of them on HN.
Most vegans will say "do whatever you have to do to live" and want a reduction in the consumption of animal products and harm of animals wherever possible. They will, for example, take vaccinations and medical treatments that have been derived from animal products if there are no alternatives.
So, if a person has honestly tried everything and they absolutely need to eat some meat and fish to be healthy, then most won't have an issue with it. There will always be crazy internet kooks though.
It's a good start, but it's so, so oily, even compared to a meat burger - and the oil seeps out all over the place. It's such a mess that I eat them with a fork.
I'd rather eat something like a black bean burger, but I also eat meat so I'm not looking for my vegetable burgers replicate the experience.
It definitely depends on how it’s cooked. I’ve had quite a few of these and certain places tend to make them oily. I’ve found that to be the case when ordering a Beyond Meat patty as well from Carl’s Jr./Hardys even though they aren’t nearly as oily when I make them myself.
Addon: This youtube video posted by Burger King of "expletive-filled double-takes from actual diners informed that the Whoppers they just ate were made of plants..."
Presumably the video is either faked or (more charitably) the customers were asked if they would like to try this new recipe. No lying going on in that last case.
It's an Impossible Burger, and left undersaid is that it's a fast-food burger. It's not an Impossible Steak or an Impossible Grill Burger. I just don't see the point, vs a high-protein high-fat patty made of bean or soy protein isolate that tastes good in it own non-fake-fast-good-meat-burger way. The only reason I am tempted to buy meat patties is that they are so much cheaper than Boca patties. An even-more-expensive patty that adds red liquid to simulate the look of heme is moving in the wrong direction.
> It's an Impossible Burger, and left undersaid is that it's a fast-food burger.
Since it's right up front in the headline that it's Burger King,I don't think the fast food part is “undersaid”.
> I just don't see the point, vs a high-protein high-fat patty made of bean or soy protein isolate that tastes good in it own non-fake-fast-good-meat-burger way.
If you don't see the point of fast food, you can, I hope, at least see that lots of people do.
And since there are people going off meat for environmental or ethical reasons, providing them an open which is both attractive in taste to their current palette and fitting with their existing lifestyle but for the change they are deliberately making seems to have obvious value.
Like you point out, it's maddening people are missing this all over. This isn't for vegetarians to eat something like meat again, it's for meat eaters to carry on not giving a shit about what they eat.
And it can't be cheaper than a real meat burger, because consumers will kill its adoption by calling it the "cheap" product. Regardless of merit or quality.
No it wouldn't kill the adoption. It would become practically mandatory for processed food and the only way to eat real meat would then be to buy it and prepare it yourself.
I ate lunch at a Founding Farmers (https://www.wearefoundingfarmers.com/about/story/) and we ordered a regular burger and an Impossible burger for the table. Everyone was not only surprised at how good the Impossible burger was, the majority actually preferred it.
I disagree. Momofuku Nishi in New York sometimes (weekend brunch only, I believe; the rest of the time it's a boring fast food version) serves a high-end version of the Impossible Burger for lunch, and it's decidely not a fast-food burger. It's the best veggie burger I've had the pleasure of eating.
I also had an Impossible Burger at a Pittsburgh chain Burgatory [1], I was extremely impressed and wouldn't noticed it was a veggie burger if I hadn't ordered it.
[1] https://burgatorybar.com/
About six months ago I had it in a vegan place near Cape Canaveral, and I was in disbelief it wasn't a meat burger. I asked the waiter twice.
It's been 15+ years since I last ate meat (and even more, red meat), and I hate the taste.
For anyone vegan or vegetarian who hates the taste of meat and is afraid to try it, I recommend giving a try even though it's supposed to taste like meat as it might feel different. I believe the preparation makes it very different because all other times (10+?) I had it (both 1.0 and 2.0), I enjoyed (specially at Umami Burger in Anaheim). The only reason I haven't had it more is that I don't live in the U.S., and I prefer the Portobello mushroom patty at Umami.
Interesting. I really like the Beyond Burger (and their sausage) but the one time I had the Impossible Burger, it tasted like a pretty generic veggie burger. Maybe the restaurant ran out and substituted.
Yeah I tried the Impossible 1.0 a few weeks ago in Hong Kong, and the Beyond a few days ago in Melbourne and found the Beyond much nicer. With that said, there is a lot more to burgers than just the patties so it could just be differences between restaurants.
I honestly think if the Beyond wasn't more expensive than a normal patty, I would probably order it all the time (and I am very much a meat eater)
I'm keen to try the Impossible 2.0 and the Beyond sausages.
This is awesome that you have managed to stay vegetarian for 10 years. I have heard the term Pescatarian before but didn't quiet understand it. Is that when you eat fish + veggies?
I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons; I trust it's not hard to imagine or look up what those reasons are. At the time, I felt strongly about this. Over the years, I discovered I felt less strongly about it, but it was a deeply ingrained habit by that point. I also discovered that even though I no longer carried a deep moral imperative to not eat meat, I still carried a deep personal connection to the person I was when I did carry that imperative.
I eventually decided I didn't care about fish that much - but I decided that I would eventually eat fish again years before I finally did. Yes, it's a compromise of my original ethical judgement, but it's one I can live with.
The irony is that most people have given up on Burger King because of the poor dietary selection. In the breakfast menu, there is almost nothing to eat that is not high cholesterol and/or fattening. If Burger King manages to leverage this new item effectively, they could assist in saving the lives of the same people that they are helping to make piss poor life choices with.
It's quite clear the OP is speaking in an anecdotal manner.
The use of [citation needed] is one of the most infuriating, passive-aggressive internet trends perpetrated by people who clearly don't understand the point of citations [1].
> It's quite clear the OP is speaking in an anecdotal manner.
No, it wasn't; OP made a universal claim (“most people” not “most people I know”), and a claim of irony which makes more sense with a real geerality.
I actually assumed (and, in fact, still assume despite your interjection) that the not_a_pizza had some basis for making that general claim, and merely omitted it, perhaps because they assumed others were familiar with it.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Because it's a classic flamewar topic which leads away from the specifics of this story and towards generic hostilities; and because taking a stronger interpretation of the comment would have made the question unnecessary—i.e. scott_s is probably just as aware as the rest of us that fish are animals and their flesh is in that sense meat, and therefore he was probably just not using the word 'meat' in that sense.
scott_s replied in an evenhanded way, but many (maybe most) commenters in his position would have taken the question as hostile and responded in kind.
How could I better ask the question? I'm genuinely confused since they poster talks about not eating "meat" but eats fish, which culturally for me (Buddhist and Hindu) are non-veg
I don't think the poster ever actually said that fish isn't meat, and I guess a lot of people are interpreting your question as a hostile challenge of the idea of pescatarianism (along the lines of "Why don't you think that cheeseburgers are murder?").
If you are struggling to understand pescatarianism as an idea, my perspective is that flexitarianism, pescatarianism, vegetarianism, and flexiveganism are all compromise diets that get some but not all environmental and ethical benefits of veganism. Different people have different levels of commitment and make different tradeoffs in their life choices. Whether that's "the only meat I eat is fish" or "I eat fish but not meat" is just a matter of definitions.
In terms of the English word "meat", there is certainly some ambiguity. At least as I know the term, it feels like a stretch (but maybe technically correct) to count fish as meat. I've had people suggest sushi when I say that I'm vegetarian, unaware that vegetarians don't eat fish. If you google for the Food Pyramid, most diagrams call out meat and fish as different things. "Vegetarian" almost always doesn't allow fish, but "meat" just isn't a very precise word.
Just adding the information contained in your second sentence here would have been enough to ask the question better. This kind of point is one that people typically get very hostile about, very quickly, in internet discussions, so if you're going to go there, you need to differentiate your comment from flamebait.
Also, scott_s's original comment didn't say that fish isn't meat, or even imply that. In English the word "meat" didn't traditionally include fish, and that usage is more than enough to cover what he probably meant. Taking the strongest plausible interpretation, as the guidelines request, makes the question unnecessary.
You're getting downvoted, but I don't think everyone realizes this can be a genuine point of confusion.
"Meat", like many words, has multiple senses. One of them is the flesh of any animal. Another is the flesh of a mammal, which would exclude fish (and probably poultry).
The second definition isn't used as often, but you will find it many dictionaries, and some people do use the word in that way and treat meat / poultry / fish as disjoint sets. For example, the classic book "Joy of Cooking" has chapters titled "Shellfish", "Fish", "Poultry and Wildfowl", "Meat" (pork, beef, lamb), and "Game". (Actually, I guess "Joy of Cooking" is being even more specific and taking "meat" to mean domesticated mammal flesh, because there are some mammals in the "Game" chapter.)
This question could be posed better, but it does deserve an answer. "Meat" does not have a precise biological meaning; its meaning is largely cultural. Some people distinguish "red meat" and "white meat"; others understand meat as separate from poultry, and seafood (is fish seafood? same story). In fact, in some languages the word for "meat" is more specific to mammal meat - e.g. french, "viande" vs "volaille" - in others less so: in Japanese, 魚 (fish) is definitely not 肉 (meat) but you eat 牛肉 (cow-meat) and 鳥肉 (bird-meat).
The vocabulary of cooking is full of these sort of things (legumes/vegetables/fruits/...is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? is a potato a vegetable?)
The OP never said fish wasnt meat, so it seems like it could be jab. I can't tell if it was, and I have no real stake in the argument, but when I read the question I felt it could be a bit too open to be interpreted as hostile.
Not speaking for the OP, but Catholics don’t consider fish or seafood to be meat from a religious perspective when practicing abstinence every Friday (and Ash Wednesday) during Lent.
These kinds of comparisons just don’t work and they come off as being an odd sort of defensive reply. Not to mention it’s a false equivalence. In the end though it’s a personal choice that really doesn’t need to be criticized, whether it is based on preference or ethical beliefs.
If you consider it wrong to torture and kill animals for your pleasure, as many vegans and vegetarians do, then it's unlikely that you think that occasionally torturing and killing animals, and eating their dead bodies, is either moral or appetising.
You have to consider the set of alternative available to the person.
If you're considering people who do eat meat, and want something that is close-enough to meat as a substitute, then yes, I am not a good judge of that. But if you're considering people who do not eat meat, and want something that's as close as they can get of things that are not meat, then I think I am an expert since over the past 18 years I have had many different varieties of that thing.
The most interesting thing about this particular announcement is that it may normalize plant-derived meat-substitutes among the typical fast-food-burger eating population, and not just the mostly-vegetarian folks (like myself) who will spend $10 on an Impossible Burger at a fancy sports bar.
Within a decade this might just be normalized, and nobody will make much of it.
No, the implications are even bigger than that, because the normalization and adoption will drive costs down. And when meat-substitute burgers are cheaper than meat burgers, and taste as good, they will become the default, and that is going to make a huge dent in the animal industry, which is all sorts of awesome, because the animal industry is all sorts of terrible.
Right now, I'm seeing Beyond and Impossible substitutes at burger restaurants, and it always comes with a couple of dollars surcharge, because it is more expensive. Imagine the day when the meat patty comes with a surcharge, because the substitute is cheaper!
I am always soapboxing about this, but the only way we can meaningfully address environmental or ethical concerns, is by doing it through the economy. The "best" choice has to also be the cheapest choice, because then people will as if by magic choose that most of the time, unlike when you only have people's conscience to motivate them, then the wallet still rules most of the time.
Food security. Anywhere paying attention to history knows that you can get starved into submission, so if you don't have food security any money you spent on walls, navies, missile silos etcetera was pointless. So it makes good public policy sense to subsidize local food production and/or have high tariffs on imported food.
In WWII Britain came closest to having to surrender due to food shortages. It didn't have then (and doesn't have now) enough food production to feed everybody, it relies on imports, and during a war that gets tricky. It got down to, I think, one week's rations on hand. If the U-boats had been just a little bit luckier for just another couple of weeks the British government anticipated uncontrollably levels of public disorder and then one way or another surrender.
Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to import staple foods into Japan to this day. The question of whether or not Japan would have surrendered without nuclear attacks is still very much an open one. It's really hard to say what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, but I can say that my mother in law told me that the only reason she survived is because her uncle had a garden and had a few sweet potatoes. Most people that were alive during the war suffers still from ill health as a result of malnutrition at the time. It has given me considerable cause to re-evaluate things I thought I knew.
I'm not sure, but in re-reading what I posted it occurs to me that it's possible to read it as suggesting nowhere else starved (or not as badly as Britain) whereas what I was intending was that Britain's big threat turned out not to be aerial bombardment, rocket attack, or straight-up beach invasion but simply starvation. Invading Britain proved completely impractical, bombing it into submission was too costly to be continued, but starving it was close to working.
Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).
That cuts both ways. Corn farmers get massive subsidies which amount to subsidies for soy as well due to the popularity of corn/soy rotation (soy, being a legume, has nitrogen fixation properties that improves soil quality.)
Cheap soybeans makes meat cheaper, but the production of meat is inherently inefficient. If the production of meat substitutes from soy could be made more efficient than the production of meat from soy, then de facto soy subsidies would disincentivize the consumption of meat.
That's why big chains like Burger King are moving to offer something in the space, not out of some ethical obligation about climate change or animal welfare.
The difference is that Impossible and its competitors are making a product competitive with real meat, with nearly the same flavor and texture properties. That's the game changer as it opens a huge market that eschew traditional veggie burgers.
I wouldn't say it's inherently inefficient. It's certainly inefficient to devote the products of cropland to raising animals. But there's a lot of scrub land out there that isn't suitable to intensive farming but where you can still graze cows.
So from an efficiency perspective we wouldn't want to entirely eliminate meat production, just drastically curtail it. But from an animal suffering perspective and a "methane is bad" perspective maybe we do want to eliminate it.
I wouldn't say subsidies would disincentivize meat. I would say they would incentivize both meat substitutes and meat, in an equally proportional amount.
They distort the prices of both soy products and meat, but not by equal proportions - the reduction depends on the distribution of cost components.
Say it takes 50 cents' worth of soy and 50 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of beef, and it takes 90 cents' worth of soy and 10 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of meat substitute. If the effective price of soy falls by 10% due to subsidies (and other costs remain the same), the cost of beef will fall by 5%, while the cost of meat substitute will fall by 9%.
The economics are skewed in the opposite direction, though. It takes many times more soy, water, and energy to produce $1 of beef vs $1 of substitute, because most of the soy you feed the cow is lost to heat and non-edible cow parts.
Once R&D costs of the meat substitute are accounted for, the marginal cost of production is lower. So at the same or slightly lower retail price than meat, an equivalent substitute's profit margin will be huge compared to meat. That's what these firms are after.
And in the long run, industrial scale meat production will take a big hit.
From what I remember reading a while back, 70% of corn in the US goes to animal feed thus making meat a very subsidized industry transitively. Entire US states' agricultural product won't be needed and can be shifted over to other crops, returned to a more natural state, or used for plant based carbon capture. The best industry has some serious competition which will have massive effects up and down the supply chain.
Since you're on your soap box i'll add a talking point.
The number one reason for deforestation in the Amazon is to provide space and resources to farm cattle for beef. My point is, switching to a non animal based burger has larger implications that the overall health of the people eating the burger.
Nothing about abolishing capitalism implies that people will not be free. Arguably they could be more free. Not every socialist state needs to (or should) emulate the USSR.
Capitalism means free enterprise. It means being able to start a business. It means being able to compete with someone if you think you can do a better job. It means being able to choose from multiple options as a customer.
If it means something else to you, I'm sorry about that.
Everything about abolishing capitalism implies that people will be "less free". All capitalism means is ownership and voluntary exchange. Not allowing ownership or making exchange involuntary can _only_ be accomplished via coercion. I want to be very clear - this is not a matter of opinion but of tautology - capitalism requires freedom and freedom implies capitalism. In no way is this countered by comparing hypothetical systems with the USSR.
While I support the argument you are trying to make, I want to disagree slightly. Capitalism does not require freedom, and China is proof of that. But we have not seen freedom without capitalism and I do feel like the inverse relation is true: freedom requires capitalism.
(Feel free to replace capitalism with free enterprise if you don't like the term "capital".)
This is absolutely not true, and is a fundamental misunderstanding of socialist systems of government. There are even variants of socialism that embrace markets and competition, and almost all allow ownership of _personal_ means of production... That is, acquiring enough capital to run a personal business. What is not allowed is owning collective means of production, and the consequential rent-seeking and extraction of surplus value that business owners and landlords engage in.
Your comment is obviously propaganda, so I doubt this will help, but I strongly recommend reading some anarchist literature before making claims like that. The Conquest of Bread is a good starting point, but a bit outdated at this point.
You're confusing two topics. I'm not talking about "socialism", and I don't want to get into definitions of that word, and frankly I don't disagree with anything you've said at all regarding socialism. However, I wasn't talking about socialism. Rather, the OC said "abolishing capitalism". Abolishing capitalism _means the same thing_ as abolishing voluntary activity. In order words, limiting individual freedom. So there is no way to construct "abolishing capitalism" as to not meant "violent coercion".
None of this has anything to do with socialism or social programs or anything like that.
I've read plenty of anarchist literature, and studied economics extensively. I would, ironically, label myself something of an anarchist as well.
You've called my individual thoughts, constructed by myself alone, after careful and considerable study, propaganda. You're confusing my tautological deduction for ideology. That's fine, but golly does it make me sad. You're seeing what you want to see, my friend.
Edit: Also, none of this even makes a value judgement about the worthiness of abolishing capitalism or infringing on personal freedoms. Perhaps it's a worthwhile calculation? That's not an opinion I'm bringing up - but the word "capitalism" has a simple meaning: trade and property. Abolishing the ability of humans to own things or do certain categories of things _is exactly the definition of limiting freedom_. Socialist philosophers are not unaware of this and their entire philosophy is built upon the calculation of limited personal freedoms to enable potentially greater net happiness. This is not a controversial opinion, is my point.
Who's boots? What are you talking about? I didn't make a single value judgement in favor of one system or the other!
Be civil!
> abolishing capitalism in favour of socialism
> There are even variants of socialism that embrace markets and competition, and almost all allow ownership of _personal_ means of production...
Socialism and capitalism are not opposite ends of a yardstick. I am _not talking about socialism_. Limiting the ability to own property or trade _is the same thing_ as limiting freedom. One has literally limited the abilities of another. These are not opinions, but rather _pure deduction lead to a non-controversial point_. You can keep insulting me or you can engage. Have a good day!
Edit: Capitalism is a far more complex system than simple private ownership and trade. A critical feature is artificially reduced liability. Which goes beyond simple freedom and gets into practical considerations.
The fact that capital ownership in a cooperation does not expose an individual to legal liability for every action of that corporation is what let’s you have capital markets. A banker may loan a car dealership money with minimal concern beyond the risk of that money.
Without that protection the engine of capitalism breaks down even with private property rights. But, even simply applying strict liability to management would cause significant breakdowns. Picture the CEO of Five Guys going to prison if even a single person got food poisoning via negligence. Are they going to try to expand past a single burger joint?
PS: In practice this seems to work well. But, the ability to have legally enforceable contracts etc goes beyond simple trade. After all people would buy and sell used goods in socialist countries, but such trade did not make them capitalist countries.
Yep. I'm not at all a vegetarian, but I will definitely try it, and if it's as good as they say, I see no reason to not prefer it. There's a small subset of the population for whom meat consumption is some kind of cultural statement, but most really only just care about taste, I think. If the same taste can be had in a healthier package and without killing anything, it's a win-win.
> If the same taste can be had in a healthier package and without killing anything, it's a win-win.
Most people that are vegan or vegetarian choose that, because the ethics part of eating meat is the most important factor for them, with price and taste and nutrition trailing that.
And then a lot of those people make the assumption that everyone who isn't vegan absolutely doesn't care about the ethics of it. But that is simply not true. A lot of people, myself included, care about the ethics, it's just that we care more about taste and cost and nutrition. I love eating a good burger, or a good steak. I'm sorry a cow had to die, but I'm not sorry enough to stop doing it.
But give me an alternative that is just as good, but where cows don't have to die, and I'll switch in a heartbeat.
You can't "care about ethics" if you care about something like taste more. That's like saying you care about the ethics of not stealing, but you care about having an expensive stolen thing more. You just don't care about the ethics.
Thank you for illustrating my point by claiming that if ethics aren't the top overriding priority in your decision, you somehow don't care about ethics at all. That is exactly the attitude that I find frustrating when talking to certain vegans and vegetarians.
Imagine the following scenario: I have a choice between two burgers. They both taste the same and cost the same, but the first one requires a cow to die, and the second one doesn't.
If I don't care about ethics, then I would choose randomly between the two, because that's not a deciding factor.
But if I consistently choose the second one, then I obviously care about ethics, it is a deciding factor for me. It's just not the most important deciding factor, but it's still there. Why does it have to be binary? Why does it have to be all-or-nothing for you?
I obviously might not care as much as you do about it, but you claiming that I don't care about it at all is incredibly offensive.
How does your model of metaethics account for guilt then? I can appreciate your sentiment, I'm a pescatarian for ethical reasons, but I still believe your claim to be untrue.
> There's a small subset of the population for whom meat consumption is some kind of cultural statement
There are actors in the cultural discourse that are already trying to make large scale meat consumption a cultural authenticity issue, especially if you read some of the nativist criticism of the Green New Deal [1]
I don't think that line of manipulation will go away, as it always will have some cultural currency with a subset of the population, but eventually the economics of the meat substitutes will win out, and "real meat" will become more of a special occasion thing, like truffles.
There are people out there "rolling coal", which is such absolute insanity that I lack words, so of course there will be a cultural backlash to meat substitutes as well.
> There's a small subset of the population for whom meat consumption is some kind of cultural statement
If we're talking about the global population I'd say it's more than a small subset and it's not a cultural "statement", it's just culture.
People in Mexico aren't going to eat fake lengua or carnitas. Doro wat with fake chicken? Anything grilled or bbq'd. Sashimi, sushi...
People have been eating some of this stuff for hundreds if not thousands of years. I think it's a very Americentric view to suggest that people are going to stop eating their traditional foods in favor of fake meat.
This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
> People in Mexico aren't going to eat fake lengua or carnitas. Doro wat with fake chicken? Anything grilled or bbq'd. Sashimi, sushi...
It's not an all-or-nothing market. There will always be a demand for those things. But in the end what is used for what will be dictated by the economics, as cuisine always has been, even in traditional culture. Eating things like lengua, or tripe and other off-cuts of meat were largely about not wasting meat when resources were scarce, not about identity politics.
I was offered it with eggs ("huevos con soyrizo") at a breakfast restaurant in Baja ... 17 years ago.
There are plenty of dishes that use ground meat or meat that has been spiced or stewed to the point that the taste difference with regular meat is marginal.
> This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
They don't have to. Real meat from slaughtered animals isn't going away, but it's use cases will be more limited to steaks, etc, which aren't "everyday" foods anyways.
And a good amount of Mexico's population is urban and first world, just like their counterparts in other countries. From what I can tell, urban Mexico has as liberal a palate as any other urban part of the world, be that NYC or London.
Yes, but very few mid-westerners eat steak everyday. Ground beef will get eaten more often because it is less expensive. If and when fake meat becomes less expensive than the real thing people in Mexico may very well eat fake whatever because at the end of the day it sets a lower price floor for food options.
I'm not an American myself, but I was talking specifically about US, since that is the context of the story.
But also, if it's cheaper? People will eat it for sure regardless of the culture.
Side note: a lot of those things that are "hundreds if not thousands of years" are actually a lot more recent if you look at them. It's pretty common for cultures to reuse the name of some old dish for a new one that becomes more common, and is similar in some way - not even necessarily in terms of how it tastes, but e.g. in its purpose. In other cases, you can trace a direct connection to some much older recipe, but new additions have mutated it beyond all recognition. Just look at what the introduction of potato did to traditional recipes in Europe.
"Healthier" is speculative at best. Often there's less fat than would occur in natural highly available protein sources. And added fats definitely have a different nutritional profile. The amino/protein profile is also going to skew, and there are other issues as well.
Soy and legumes are pretty common allergens for people, and the effects mild enough early in life that some may not realize it's actually legumes (mostly soy) that is the problem. I got used to the side effects and was only at 42 when it started to get bad enough that I found out via elimination diet.
I agree, this could be big. The health implications could be a driver of this, consider how many people there are with high cholesterol that should be eating less beef. And then think about how many health driven alternative products there are, eg diet soda, margarine, alt-milks, etc that really can take off in the mainstream once big budget marketing gets behind it.
There is no correlation to dietary cholesterol and blood serum cholesterol. It was a misdirection bought and paid for by the sugar industry. The same goes for saturated fats (more so the vegan religion than big sugar).
As to margerine, it is emphatically NOT better for you than real butter or lard/tallow. Seed oils are probably third in line behind sugar and grains as the biggest causes of human dysfunction.
The cholesterol in = blood cholesterol fallacy is one of the greatest nutrition crimes in history. Low fat/high carb diets are the primary culprit, along with genetics. Replacing meat and dairy with vegetables may have environmental and ethical benefits, but it doesn't have health benefits.
It's true that diets with high added / refined sugar are unhealthy. But diets with lots of beef and dairy and low on vegetable fiber are also unhealthy.
The link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol is much weaker than previously hypothesized, that's true, but there's ample evidence of the superiority of a vegetable rich diet.
The medical and scientific consensus is still that diets high in saturated fats - especially animal fats - as well as trans fats increase your risk of heart disease and high cholesterol. Other lifestyle risk factors are obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and diabetes.
> " But diets with lots of beef and dairy and low on vegetable fiber are also unhealthy."
Not many people can afford the grocery bill of an all dairy/beef diet. Everybody I've ever met who does keto consumes more vegetable fiber than the average american many times over, because without grain as a filler and a wallet deep enough to gorge yourself on beef and cheese all day long, fibrous vegetables are the obvious solution.
So heart disease is the #1 killer because people don't eat enough meat? This is nothing but a conspiracy theory that somehow became popular in HN. Mainstream science continues to support that a diet high in whole plants is the best way to prevent heart disease.
Not because people don't eat enough meat. Because people eat too much sugar, and refined carbs (pasta, flour) are effectively sugar. That's where body fat and cholesterol come from. Meat is largely neutral in this regard. Cholesterol in your blood is produced by your liver. Only a trivial amount of dietary cholesterol becomes cholesterol in your body. When people replace meat with low-fat, high-carb, vegetable-derived alternatives, they're consuming a diet that is far worse than a meat-heavy diet. Whole vegetables are good.
To those downvoting the above comment... The following video is a bit long, but does go over quite a bit of the misdirection/misinformation from the large pharma and agriculture industries. A lot of this has been relatively well documented.
There has never been any reliable study or controlled experiment indicating that dietary cholesterol or saturated fat are the causes of anything negative. Sugar and refined grains have a MUCH higher correlation (higher than even early smoking studies). High fructose intake in particular has been a leading issue.
Is saturated fat bad for you? A diet rich in saturated fats can drive up total cholesterol, and tip the balance toward more harmful LDL cholesterol, which prompts blockages to form in arteries in the heart and elsewhere in the body. For that reason, most nutrition experts recommend limiting saturated fat to under 10% of calories a day.
A handful of recent reports have muddied the link between saturated fat and heart disease. One meta-analysis of 21 studies said that there was not enough evidence to conclude that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease, but that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat may indeed reduce risk of heart disease.
Two other major studies narrowed the prescription slightly, concluding that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats like vegetable oils or high-fiber carbohydrates is the best bet for reducing the risk of heart disease, but replacing saturated fat with highly processed carbohydrates could do the opposite.
> When you pour liquid cooking oil into a pan, there's a good chance you're using polyunsaturated fat. Corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil are common examples. Polyunsaturated fats are essential fats.
Why would refined oils from sources that wouldn't have been available to man for 99.9% of human and pre-human existence be recommended at all? This article does nothing but repeat most of the same tropes as espoused for the past half century with no real supporting data behind it.
> A causal relation between total and LDL cholesterol in blood and CAD has long been accepted. However, despite the strength of the relation between circulating concentrations of LDL cholesterol and heart disease, one should not assume that the relation between saturated fatty acid intake and heart disease is equally strong.
...
> Considerable evidence indicates that dietary saturated fats support the enhancement of HDL metabolism. In a study of the effects of reduced dietary intakes of total and saturated fat on HDL subpopulations in a group of multiracial, young and elderly men and women, subjects consumed each of the following 3 diets for 8 wk: an average American diet (34.3% of energy from total fat and 15.0% of energy from saturated fat), the American Heart Association Step I diet (28.6% of energy from total fat and 9.0% of energy from saturated fat), and a diet low in saturated fat (25.3% of energy from total fat and 6.1% of energy from saturated fat) (25). HDL2-cholesterol concentrations decreased in a stepwise fashion after the reduction of total and saturated fat. A reduction in dietary total and saturated fat decreased both large (HDL2 and HDL2b) and small, dense HDL subpopulations, although the decreases in HDL2 and HDL2b were most pronounced. Serum triacylglycerol concentrations were negatively correlated with changes in HDL2 and HDL2b cholesterol.
> Those on a low-carbohydrate weight-loss diet who increase their percentage intake of dietary saturated fat may improve their overall lipid profile provided they focus on a high-quality diet and lower their intakes of both calories and refined carbohydrates. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01826591.
They weren't replaced with vegetables, they were replaced with sugar made from cheap overproduced corn, and hydrogenated oils. Neither of those is a vegetable.
We wouldn't have nearly the diabetes problems we have now if they were replaced by more fresh vegetables.
Cutting dietary fat and replacing it with overly processed sugar, grains and seed oils is horrible for mankind, and a blight spread across the globe from U.S. agriculture industry.
For the most part vegetable intake is fine. Though excess fruit consumption year round, and in particular juice is pretty much inline with straight sugar. Your pancreas and liver don't care that it's "natural sugar" a term which irks me to no end.
You can concoct studies to show that dietary cholesterol is not correlated with serum cholesterol, but dietary cholesterol with dietary saturated fat is extremely correlated with high serum cholesterol (more so than just dietary saturated fat). Every high typical high cholesterol foods like eggs and meat are also high in saturated fat and reliably raise blood cholesterol. If you want to study elevated cholesterol in the lab you can just feed subjects eggs.
It's already snuck in with a lot of fast food taco meats. Soy and Legume allergies aren't that uncommon... I don't mind as long as its' clearly labelled... I have a problem when it's labelled as "beef" or left to ambiguity.
I'll 100% be giving it a try (I'm already a long time vegetarian though). I like that it's BK doing this because BK has served a veggie burger (Morningstar Farms Patty) for around ~14 years, so they should be familiar with the demand for meatless products.
I remember when they first introduced a veggie burger, I wasn't sure the demand would be there, but it seems to have worked out.
So it remains to be seen if they'll keep the Morningstar version too.
I've never had a real Whopper, so I can't be comparing the two.
I pretty much hate fast food (as opposed to fast casual) burgers in general so I won't be eating this. But I have (in fact, unknowingly--don't ask) had an impossible burger in a good burger place and I actually didn't learn it wasn't meat until a few months later. It tasted like a perfectly good burger to me.
Carl's also has the beyond burger, which I personally think is superior. My wife disagrees, and prefers your standard veggie burgers (we are vegans of 15 years).
I haven't been able to compare the Impossible Burger. I had a Beyond Burger, and it was very good. If somebody were to hand it to a meat eater at a cookout, without calling attention to it, they'd eat it without noticing the switch. Pile on a few toppings (which people usually do because of the flavorless nature of most fast-food and grocery-store beef), and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference in a blind tasting.
It's pretty clear that it's not beef if you're looking for it, but not nearly as distinct as your standard veggie burgers. Most vegans, though, aren't especially craving meat simulacra. I think of them more as transitional for meat eaters rather than as targeting vegans.
I too prefer the Beyond Meat burger to the Impossible Burger, but I don't know about a meat eater not noticing. I love meat - especially beef, but lately I've also been trying meat alternatives.
Just recently, I ordered an Impossible Burger, and it just left me wanting beef. It's not that it was bad - the burger looked similar to beef, and was juicy and delicious. But it didnt taste like beef. Maybe it's different for others, but for me, the beef is the spotlight of a burger. Beyond and Impossible haven't gotten that beefy taste - at least to my buds.
When I cook a Beyond Meat burger at home, I usually add a little butter - I dont think there is enough fat, and I also add some Takii umami powder (which I believe is just salt, and ground up mushrooms). I think those additions help the illusion of beef. You could probably also cook the burger in rendered beef fat, and that would probably really help the beef flavor...probably defeating the point of meat alternatives though.
I wish I could cook an Impossible at home, just to experiment.
That said, those of us that DO miss some level of meat simulacra (great phrase!) will appreciate this. I lost the taste for actual red meat over 20 years ago, but the texture is still something that has few parallels. Between the hardcore beef aficionados wanting nothing to do with "fake meat" and the hardcore vegetarians/vegans happy to consume veggies I find bland or noxious (As a vegetarian that strongly dislikes bell peppers, I can say the struggle is real) I've had limited options no matter where I turn.
Both Impossible and Beyond burgers have been teasing me for years, but have offered nothing for home. This doesn't get us there, but the more fast food places that carry them, the closer it becomes to being a part of normal.
Beyond Meat products are at a lot of stores, including Safeway and Target. In mine they're located over by the fresh meat. The web site has a locator: https://www.beyondmeat.com/where-to-find/
It does a remarkably good job of giving the texture of a mediocre burger. Not a great burger by any means, but it might fill a niche that you don't get from the Morningstar-type burgers.
>because of the flavorless nature of most fast-food and grocery-store beef
this was my judgement of the beyond burger too. it's basically indistinguishable from a bad hamburger. it's certainly not a good hamburger, but it could pass as meat the same way most fast food burgers pass as meat.
My girlfriend (vegan of 12ish years) actually has trouble eating any of the more realistic fake meats. She says she has just lost the taste for it and that it grosses her out now.
This is roughly what it's like for me, too, as a vegetarian of over 20 years. I wouldn't say it grosses me out, personally. It's more that that, after many, many years of eating food with much brighter flavors, it would seem that that whole corner of the flavor spectrum just isn't palatable to me anymore.
We've noticed an interesting phenomenon among kids in vegetarian families: Preschoolers who will literally fight each other over things that their peers typically avoid like the plague, like broccoli or tofu, but, if you give them a meal with some sort of realistic fake meat in it, they will diligently pick around it.
My current diet is “intermittently vegan,” and when I’m not eating meat, I find myself preferring the taste of actual veggies in my veggie burgers. Where traditional veggie burgers fall short in my experience is their texture. No matter how much breadcrumbs or potato starch or xanthan gum you add, a patty based on beans and veggies is gonna be squishier than one based on muscle fibers.
I had a homemade one once, of brussel sprouts, where the leaves must have intermeshed in such a way as to be pretty damn similar in texture. No similarity in taste, though.
FYI for a lot of folks in here who may not know, Taco Bell is vegan certified. If you order something vegan they will prep it separately and make sure no animal products touched your food. I suspect they might add Impossible Meat (or a competitor) some time soon.
Taco Bell and Burger King are two of the only chains when traveling who will (reliably) vegan/halal certify. Makes sense why we're seeing this adoption from BK early.
Yep, I stopped eating Taco Bell in my early 20s once I couldn't stomach it anymore, but I started getting it again when I went vegan and it's great. I think the traditional grossness of it must come from their weird sauces, or maybe from fillers in their meat. They're still $1 burritos so I won't pretend the ingredients are the freshest or highest-quality, but vegan Taco Bell just tastes like normal food and not like, well, Taco Bell.
del taco is about to roll out beyond tacos to all their locations. While its not a direct (size wise) competitor to taco bell. Their competitors already have made the first move.
People should be aware that Burger King has had (MorningStar) veggie burgers for a very long time that they just don't broadcast. This announcement is not about introducing a vegetarian patty but rather about introducing a _specific_ vegetarian patty.
Indeed and I do enjoy the MorningStar patty with all the toppings BK puts on it. Big difference is MorningStar is one of those "not really trying to be meat" veggie burgers, whereas the Impossible Burger is trying to be a one-to-one facsimile of meat. So I think they are similar but different.
Another big difference is the Impossible Burger is vegan and the MorningStar burger is not (IIRC).
My first complaint about the nutrition of the Morningstar burger is the ratio of carbs to protien. Restaurants are already throwing tons of carbs at me. I really want protein in my burger patty.
If I wanted a lot of carbs with some protein, I could always eat quinoa or something. There's no shortage of options there. What's interesting here is a vegan protein source that's actually a nearly pure protein source.
When you are targeting specific macros for athletic reasons, a pure protein source is pretty much a requirement. During aggressive cuts, you require a tremendous amount of protein to prevent muscle wasting. For endurance athletes, low carb diets can be useful for increasing lactate threshold. There are also low carb requirements for diabetes and epilepsy.
It’s not as though some food is automatically bad for you because it came from Burger King, and even if it were, there is a huge range of how bad it is. I could get 500 calories from a burger or 2000 from a burger with a milkshake and fries. It’s not a good idea to make a fast-food restaurant a zone of nutrition nihilism where we just accept that we doom our health by entering and ignore the choice of what to order.
At least they are forced to display nutrition info, so I know what I’m getting, unlike most sit-down restaurants that serve even larger portions with no numbers included.
Sometimes, you need something fast, cheap, and easy, so it's nice to have some fast food items in mind that have reasonable calories and macros. A great example is when I'm driving long distance, I'll swing by CFA if possible.
No way they could prepare it on the grill, unless they had a dedicated grill for it. Sharing the grill with real burgers would mean tons of meat grease contaminating the veggie burgers.
They're probably unwilling to dedicate the kitchen space for a vegetarian grill, so the microwave is the obvious choice. Microwaves won't cross-contaminate like a greasy grill will, and are already in the kitchen so the financial risk is minimized.
> Many vegetarians/vegans don't mind cross .termination.
Massively wrong. Most are easy going regarding using the same cutlery, pots, pan, etc (only ones I've met who aren't happen to be Indian mums or super strict vegans).
However... cooking up on the same griddle? Yeah, that's something most veggies and vegans I know who be very unhappy about.
Really enjoy them but I found they were a bit too thin from A&W. Managed to get the retail version (4oz vs the A&W 3oz) and was really impressed. There is one thing that I've found with them that I don't like. They have a very peculiar smell (think cat food) while cooking which tends to linger.
I'll echo the sentiment. The local Safeway sells Impossible Bratwursts.
They are honestly delicious. We grilled them on a fry-pan. The flavor and texture are almost perfectly there. It's just a bit spongy, and the depth of the umami/savory flavor isn't quite as deep. But if I hadn't known they weren't meat, I'd have been fooled. Throw a few of them on a grill or beer-boil them, put some mustard down over top, little kraut, I'd never know they weren't meat.
If the burger patties are anywhere near as good as the brats, then I think they'll sell a billion of them. For hearth-health and calorie density alone, I'd order them nearly every time.
The umami was the only differentiating factor and even there it was like a small difference. I eat meat, tried the burger because if can cut out a little meat why not? The impossible burger was exceptional enough a replacement that if its on the menu, I'll order it.
Weird, I tried it and wanted to like it simply because it was higher in fat and lower carb than your traditional veggie burger - but it was very obvious I was eating fake meat. It was ok, I'd eat it again. But I would not replace real beef with it any time soon.
But I am keto. So I am not eating it with a bun and tons of sugary sauces to cover up the meat flavor. You can really tell the quality of a burger (meat or not) when you eat it wrapped in lettuce.
I'd prefer just more humane animal farming vs. fake meat. It may be more expensive - but if we incentivized humane farming of animals as much as we subsidized corn and/or wheat it might not be that bad (or just got rid of subsidies altogether).
I also think the environmental cost of plant farming is vastly underrated.
But you do realize that the environmental cost of animal farming is guaranteed to be >10x the cost of plant farming, correct? Each step up the food chain wastes roughly 90% of the energy, meaning that you need to grow more than 10 kcal of plants to raise 1 kcal of animal. So feeding animals is 10x as expensive as growing plants, in addition to the costs incurred by actually raising the livestock.
That's not exactly true. I do a lot of work for agricultural companies. One such company is a huge supplier of animal feed. Their products are the by-products of sugar production. Raffinate, Betaine, Molasses, Beet Pulp Pellets, etc... These products are very shelf stable and cheap. But they are not the main crop. Sugar Beets are not grown for these by-products.
In addition, grazing animals require no such feed. Grass fed beef is a thing, and it's price is on par or even quite a bit cheaper than fake meat.
However, even if the animals require no food to be purchased by the farmer, there is still an environmental cost in the land being used, plus the opportunity cost of other uses of that land.
Not all land used for grazing can be used to grow plants, true, but in the cases it can be, you're using that land at a 10% kcal efficiency, so to speak.
Most cattle feed isn't digestible by humans, so it doesn't matter. Replacing grass with more human-edible crops would probably introduce new problems of similar scale.
You might ask, can we just process the grass into something humans can eat? Well, that's what cattle are for.
Better to leave natural habitat on that land rather than clear-cutting forest for grazing land, as happens so much these days and in the past. Better food production efficiency means less forest razed which is a significant win.
Other forms of agriculture also contribute to deforestation. There are also situations where some grasslands may be suitable for grazing but cannot be sustainably made suitable for crops, and situations where livestock can be fed with byproducts of other agriculture.
Livestock are a central part of traditional agriculture and they're more or less essential for people who want to operate small-scale sustainable farms. It's a complicated issue that too many people enter with ideological presuppositions. Which is not to say current agricultural practices are necessarily perfect.
The important point is that animal agriculture is calorically inefficient, so much more land has to be used than if people could substitute plant-based food sources for animal-based. Much of plant agriculture today is only necessary to feed animals. Some animals could probably still be fed with plant agriculture byproducts if little to no land were directly used only for raising animals, but far fewer than are currently raised.
And many grasslands that cannot be sustainably be used for crops could be returned to wilderness rather than plant agriculture, if we were to increase caloric efficiency of food production. They probably should be, in fact. This doesn't preclude some animals being raised, but if we don't greatly reduce the amount of land used for raising animals, deforestation, desertification and other harms will continue to degrade ecosystems.
I had the v2 impossible burger a few weeks ago. It felt close to regular meat, had a similar mouth feel, but the flavor was a bit off so I only ate two bites. I'm looking forward to trying their next version.
White Castle has had Impossible Burgers available for about a year now. Just interesting to see the trend emerging from what I would consider the "bottom-most" market segment. I suppose they had the most to gain from drawing in a meat-averse audience.
Whatever your feelings on this particular product, it seems that the perhaps-inevitable decline of the traditional meat industry is going to take place on many fronts (clean meats, plant hemes, alternative proteins, locavore provider networks, increased availability of traditional vegetarian cuisines).
The patty in the normal $1 White Castle slider is so thin, that the $2 Impossible Slider feels like an improvement already just because the patty is thicker.
You also can't really taste the beef in a white castle anyway!
(And don't get me wrong, I'm a white castle fan. I also would not be shocked if I can't tell the difference between beyond and beef in a white castle. I definitely can in a full size burger).
I had the White Castle version, and my estimation is how it's cooked will be the biggest determining factor in its taste. Sadly, all the big fast food joints can't cook a burger worth a crap, so this plant burger probably won't sell much under their brands.
I'm an angel investor in both plant based meat and clean meat and I'm actually more optimistic for plant based meat becoming better than animal meat in the short term. The rate of innovation has been really impressive and momentum is picking up steam.. once prices get under animal meat huge amounts of people will switch
Hopefully carbon taxes and such would kick in at some point and would include the real environmental cost of beef, so the switching to plant based beef would be even more swift.
Beef only is responsible for 3% of greenhouse gasses in America. I'm not sure an "emission" tax would really affect the price all that much. In addition, you have to account for and tax the emissions produced in plant production (fertilizer, agricultural soil, transportation, etc...). Agriculture is a total of 9%, whereas livestock only accounts for 3% of that.
I work for agriculture companies, and a lot of animal feed comes from by-products of other agricultural products. For example, beet pulp pellets, raffinate, betaine, molasses are all by products of sugar production and are used for animal feed extensively. They are cheap and very shelf stable.
According Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN 2006 report livestock were responsible for 18% of all human-related greenhouse gas production. 14.5% according to 2013 report.
Of that 43% is Enteric.
There may only be 9% GHG emissions in the US, but beef also comes from other countries where these emissions are very different. See Regional and Production System differences.
From the article -- There was an approximately 4-fold difference in emission intensity between the top 10% of producers and the bottom 10% of producers within a system.
You are right, but I was discussing in reference to a U.S. based emissions "tax". Maybe I misunderstood and they were suggesting a worldwide tax? Not sure how that would work.
If the U.S. were to tax agriculture production of beef, I'm assuming that would be for U.S. farmers so the relevant statistic is emissions in the U.S.
Minor note; "Manure management accounts for about 15 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the Agriculture economic sector in the United States."
If you include the emissions from manure management you end with 45% of all emissions emanating from livestock production.
Plant based products have similar transport & manufacturing impact so I am not including that.
In addition, for feeding often this comes from by-products of plant production (sugar by-products, etc...). The only reason corn is so popular imo is because it is so heavily subsidized by our government making it dirt cheap. But grass fed beef is a thing and it's on par or even quite a bit cheaper price wise than fake meat.
I think ultimately the price will be determined through government subsidies. Current Meat and Dairy Industry receives massive subsidies (~38$Bn) and the lobbying groups won't appreciate a cut of profits.
Right now plant based meat is well under 1 percent of the meat market in the US and it's realistic it could become the majority within 10 years. Who will get the bulk of that is up for grabs, I invested in a smaller competitor to beyond and impossible which had a much lower valuation but with product I think it's right up there with them. Personally I'm a big supporter of them all
I'm really bullish on the possibility of a wide range of competitors for any given meat alternative. There are probably 10+ different brands of prepackaged beef burgers at most grocery stores, and there's a lot more room for differentiation if you're building a product from scratch than if you're just deciding which cows to grind up and shape into a patty.
Do you mind sharing the name of the company you're referring to? I'm always looking to try new options and support companies in the space.
I tried the impossible burger and personally didn't notice a difference. The boyfriend tried a bite, and liked it, but could taste something off. I'm kinda excited to see where both the impossible burger goes, and where other restaurants take this.
Also for the price to come down, it was like $3 more than the boyfriend's burger
I’m curious about this. I had the first generation many times and found it to be pretty good.
After the second generation came out, I went to my favorite place to get the IB (Gotts in Palo Alto) and asked if they had the new recipe. They seemed uncertain at first but then said they did. I ordered it and it was fine, but not as good as I’d seen in online reviews.
Honestly, if I was told it was the first generation, I would have believed it. I wonder if some restaurants are still working through their stock of the first generation patties?
My impression of Impossible Burger v1.0 was that the pinkish/uncharred bits had an odd sweetness and moisture/texture that made it most distinguishable from a beef burger. With 2.0, the texture is a bit more firm and beef-like, and it seems they've put less emphasis on the 'bleeding' which I think has reduced the sweetness as well.
I had a notion that I intended to test with v1.0 that it would be more convincing if you charred the hell out of it and made it more like an overcooked burger, however I never did test it, and I also read that it didn't perform well (fell apart, etc) if too overcooked. However, I did really like the flavor and texture of the most charred bits of the burgers I did have.
I really liked it. At medium doneness, it was like really soft ground meat, and had a pretty beefy flavor, but perhaps a little bit sweeter. I found myself wanting seconds after I finished my burger.
I should note that I have never tasted V1 so I can't compare the two.
I'm hoping the Burger King trial goes well so we can get nationwide expansion, in large part to help bring the price down. That premium is still a little rough, Impossible is in a lot of restaurants but doesn't have the in-store presence that Beyond Meat has at the moment. Scale, scale, scale!
I bought some from the supermarket and cooked it up. While the impossible burger does resemble, smell, and taste like meat, it doesn't smell or taste like a hamburger. It smells and tastes almost exactly like Spam. It'll be great once the price goes down.
I'm curious as to how Impossible burger compares on the health impact. I understand that it's plant based, but it seems to be highly processed and perhaps (not sure) loaded with bunch of chemicals and potentially unhealthy ingredients that make it taste like meat.
Hopefully that is not the case and it's not just a meat substitute but is also healthy. Can anyone with more details please opine?
So the major thing that Impossible Foods puts in that "makes it taste like meat" is leghemoglobin, which is an ortholog of regular hemoglobin from cows blood, though in this case it was isolated from a legume. The argument, as I've heard it, is that since it's an oxygen binding molecule, it catalyzes all kinds of tasty reactions when you brown it.
They do list all their ingredients [0], and you can take a look and see whether there's anything objectionable to you. If you're going by the "5 ingredients or fewer" heuristic, then it doesn't qualify. Avoiding "chemicals" is impossible, since everything is made out of chemicals, and just limiting to naturally occurring chemicals is no better of a guideline because cyanide, asbestos, and arsenic are all "natural".
As a sibling comment notes, it's likely not significantly better or worse for you than a standard beef whopper
> loaded with bunch of chemicals and potentially unhealthy ingredients that make it taste like meat
I never understood why one would want to make a veggie burger taste like meat. Properly made veggie burgers taste delicious by them selves. Much more flavour than the meat versions.
But those are probably already on the menu and this is an addition to regular vegetarian burgers? Here in Norway we've had vegan burgers from both mcdonalds and burger king and max hamburgare (swedish company) for a couple years that do not taste like meat and especially burger kings' score high on the taste tests [1].
Personally I never eat fast food except a kebab once every two months but we do make vegetarian burgers maybe every other week here at home [2].
> I never understood why one would want to make a veggie burger taste like meat.
Because most people find meat delicious and it fills a particular cultural niche in the United States in particular. Veggie burgers are tasty too, but if you are craving a beef burger, it's not the same thing, much like tofu is not a satisfying substitute for chicken, even if it's delicious when prepared as tofu.
You can try to change the tastes of millions or you can just make a less environmentally damaging substitute.
A decent burger tastes good, be it meat or non-meat. Burger-King appeals to the majority and is not going to be making the best burger of any kind, just a "standard" one.
> I never understood why one would want to make a veggie burger taste like meat. Properly made veggie burgers taste delicious by them selves. Much more flavour than the meat versions.
Because some people - myself included - like the taste of meat, and would only choose the veggie version for environmental (or economic) reasons if the taste were basically the same.
There is an association between processed foods and poor health outcomes. There are some processes that have a clear causal link with poor health, most obviously the use of nitrates in meat preservation. It is not clear that all (or even most) processing is harmful.
Another aspect of this is that processed foods require less calories for your body to metabolize, since they are already partly broken down. While that doesn't specifically increase the rate of exposure to pathogens/toxicity, it does increase the net calories consumed in an already high-calorie category, and contributes to obesity.
additionally, soy's estrogenic nature (combined with the disproportionately widespread use of soy in processed food products, which would be the "not natural" part) is suspected of having potential influences on breast cancer, male fertility, and thyroid function.
you can of course argue none of these things are nearly as bad as the saturated fat in beef but I feel more comfortable with a sunshine burger that's just brown rice and sunflower seeds.
many soy studies are heavily influenced by corporate interests not unlike how Coca Cola and tobacco companies in the past have had extreme influence on the scientific community so while I still eat soy I will continue to avoid the industrially processed variety, but thanks for showing me things I already have read.
Including "natural flavors" in an ingredients list is a way to incorporate any number of undisclosed substances in a product. No substance obscured by the "natural flavors" label needs to go through any safety testing or analysis[1]:
> Even the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, has concluded that the “FDA’s oversight process does not help ensure the safety of all new GRAS determinations” and that the “FDA is not systematically ensuring the continued safety of current GRAS substances.”
You need to ask yourself what a company has to gain by intentionally obscuring ingredients in their product meant to be consumed by humans, and what you have to lose by consuming it.
> Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract...
"Natural flavors" is the 5th ingredient by weight in the new Impossible Burger.
While I understand that this board often has a "but dihydrogen monoxide is a chemical" outlook, being skeptical about undisclosed substances in food is a valid stance.
My wife and I have been studying nutrition for several years. Processed unnatural "foods" having bad effects on humans is an undeniable pattern that shows up over and over again.
The reason for this is simply because of evolution. Our bodies evolved eating natural plants and animals. Our bodies have never before been exposed to the huge number of food additives that have been invented in recent years.
You probably hate that we have to talk in generalities. But food studies are expensive and hard to get right, and there's a LOT that we don't fully understand about nutrition. We're nowhere close to understanding all the different ways that all the different food additives are affecting our bodies.
Right. But there's a difference between drinking a glass of water and glass of bleach. You are claiming they are equivalent.
There's something called "context" in reading comprehension, it is when words take on the meaning relevant to the discussion. In this case, "chemicals" is shorthand for "bad chemicals." I don't understand why so many people fail to understand this and have to make this inane, childish observation that in fact, everything is a chemical. We know already.
> In this case, "chemicals" is shorthand for "bad chemicals."
One problem is that lots of people include tons of known harmless stuff under "bad chemicals" because it's "artificial" (even if it's chemically identical to "natural" things that they praise at the same time).
Or put another way, the use of "chemicals" in discussions like this often suffers from the problem described at <https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey>: people talk about "artificial chemicals" being bad, when challenged fall back on "we just mean the bad chemicals", but then go back to in practice talking and, importantly, acting as if they mean a much wider class of things.
So yes, context is important, but is also manipulated in many cases to effectively gaslight the reader by saying, "Oh, _that_'s not what we meant, of course; think about the context," when in fact "that" is what was meant. And I suspect that in many cases the manipulation isn't even conscious!
>One problem is that lots of people include tons of known harmless stuff under "bad chemicals" because it's "artificial" (even if it's chemically identical to "natural" things that they praise at the same time).
People who believe in homeopathy don't believe this, since they believe that purified water has "memory", so logically they would also think that naturally-derived and artificially-derived but otherwise identical chemicals would somehow be different from one another.
One caveat, though: the identity of chemicals needs to be pretty carefully defined. Especially any time chiral things are involved, naturally-derived things are much more likely to be a pure enantiomer or close to it while artificial synthesis is more likely to produce racemates unless you are very careful.
True, but even here we're not talking about identical molecules. Chiral molucules are ones (which are usually organic--based on carbon) which have both "left handed" and "right handed" versions. The two versions have the same molecular formula, but they're opposites of each other. So it's like having a left-hand drive car versus a right-hand drive car: they might look identical using a mirror, but they're really not, and you can't use them the same way because the way they interact with their environment is different (a driver in a RHD car in a LHD country will have a hard time seeing everything properly because the roads aren't designed with this configuration in mind).
Given the nature of evolution, I think that the appeal to nature in nutrition is a much more substantive argument than can be immediately dismissed. Grossly speaking, natural foods have also existed for longer and been better studied, meaning we are more likely to know about the impact of natural foods than newer foods that aren't yet common to our diet.
While "better because natural" isn't some infallible nutritional law, it serves as a very solid rule of thumb for those of us who don't have the time or motivation to more thoroughly study the science behind it.
Nature has also evolved lots of stuff that would kill you. And many things that are just plain unhealthy. And even those foods you consider 'natural' are highly evolved plants that have been optimized for human consumption by generations of humans. There is very little natural about many of the fruits and vegetables we eat that are actually truly natural.
I agree, there is a lot that's harmful in nature. But we as humans have been developing knowledge about how these natural foods affect our health for thousands of years, across a sample on the scale of billions.
Tribes completely isolated from modern society have been proven to have extremely rich knowledge of the plants in their environments. As humans, we are extremely familiar with plants found in nature.
GMO foods are chemically speaking much closer to natural than this veggie patty we are talking about. It lies on a spectrum so arguing about how neatly something fits a definition is missing the point.
You just said that someone is claiming that water and bleach are identical.
Let me put it to you this way, instead of saying "everything is a chemical": If you stand with the poster above worrying about "chemicals", perhaps state your question more clearly so we know exactly what we're getting ourselves into. I will even give you some examples. Do you perhaps mean chemicals known to cause cancer or other diseases? What about chemicals known to aggravate diseases or conditions? Or would it be enough to be simply suspected? Maybe your threshold of what is a sufficient amount of research should be mentioned. How many studies do you wait for before you eat a certain ingredient? Do all regulatory bodies need to agree?
That's certainly a lot of work going into asking a question, I suppose, almost as much as answering something like "are there [bad] chemicals in it?" What research is out there, is out there. Only you know what will make a "[bad] chemical" not just a "chemical".
Of course, if you know of a place that lists all the "[bad] chemicals" that you agree with, this [practically extreme] "lib" wouldn't mind seeing it.
Here's an easier answer: eat real food, not to much, mostly vegetables. Happy mr/mrs practically extreme lib?
You've just played the no true scotsman on me. Well done!
It's a pretty easy choice for me: I literally eat no food with added chemicals. I simply don't know what is good and what is bad because I've given up following research and meta-studies. There is literally no way to be informed, even if I had a PhD and spent a lifetime studying nutrition and the relevant sciences.
Know what the easy answer is? I'm vegan. I literally eat nothing with added preservatives or chemicals. Nothing. Except when I got to restaurants every now and then, and I don't know what's in the food I ordered. But it isn't 12 meals a year that change you, it is 1,000 meals a year.
It is trivial for me to bypass the good/bad chemical debate.
I can assure you that I am never trying to "own the libs"; I am often the kind of person such people would want to own. But I do care about unstated assumptions about what is "good," when I fear those unstated assumptions are rooted in some form of magical thinking.
Burgers aren't really that unhealthy. Skip the fried onions and fried jalapenos and aioli and mayo and it's no big deal. I just had a 1/3lb bison burger last night in a pita, with all kinds of good stuff (feta, sweet hot mustard, ketchup, jalapenos) and it's something like 550 calories. It's quite easy to have a healthy-ish meat burger. Skip the fries and soda.
I make black bean burgers sometimes, and they actually have more calories and less protein than beef or bison.
Yeah right, i'm sure BK is really putting a lot of money into small family businesses with diversified farming light on the ecosystems using no herbicides/insecticides, and not mega food-industry with fields that have thousand of hectares of a single crop and get farmed using a whole fleet of huge diesel machines, get a load of pharma chemicals dropped on their head preventively to make sure no other life form gets to survive in that field.
I'm picking on you now but it fcking freaks me out how this whole page seems to feel concerned about "healthy food", "veganism", "ecology". This is a fast-food mega-corp, they are part of one of the ugliest side of the already disgusting industrial food chain. They are right on incompatible with any kind of healthiness you could imagine (of human beings, of crops, polinators, overall countryside ecosystems, farmers). Hey, fast-food/sweet-drink business uses the same marketing strategies than tobacco groups. Or pharma. These are the people that created all the massive public health issues we've got since say '50s. Cancer, diabetes, obesity, one-off epidemics (h5n1, h1n1, mad cow...).
And i didn't even start talking about work conditions or economic aspects of these bastards (the corps, not targeting any individuals here).
I drink 32oz of whole milk a day, bacon with grits and butter for breakfast, steak at lunch, then my dinner varies. I have normal levels of cholesterol. I believe genetics play a bigger impact.
Actually a real burger is often healthier then a carb loaded veggi burger. We should finally move beyond the 'red meat' bad analysis that has unfortunately dominated scientific discourse for a long time.
A burger is fat and protein and there is very little reason not to eat if for health reasons for normal people.
Well that's kind of my point... a burger isn't a healthy thing, the burger patty is probably the most healthy part of it outside of plain vegetable toppings
> the company aims to give people the taste and nutritional benefits of meat without the negative health and environmental impacts associated with livestock products.
The goal of the founder seems to be primarily the negative impact animal agriculture has on the environment/climate, while matching the same taste/nutrition of meat (not improving upon it).
I'm curious, what would you consider an appropriate food? I personally look for high fat/protein when picking my food, and the there isn't much reason to believe salt is bad for you.
That's cool, I mean definitely do what is best for you. I think there is a lot of room for self-discovery of our own optimal diets. The salt debate is one of those things where nutrition science can't seem to settle on it, depending on the survey.
High salt consumption is linked to high blood pressure, stroke, and cardiovascular disease.
You're right in that there's some debate around salt, and what amount is the "right" amount. However, for people with auto immune diseases (like me) it's a valid concern.
If you have a specific disease its one thing but please do not advocate and claim what is healthy or not for most people based on that. Many vegi burgers that people would eat as replacements are far more unhealthy.
Blood tests. However, what spurred me have blood tests in the first place were symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis (in my case: painful swelling of the joints).
That saturated fat and salt are bad has been falling out of favor scientifically for a long time. They specifically built the burger to be like a normal burger because many people actually consider it a healthy thing to eat.
I should have chosen my words more carefully. It's about the big picture. You can keep it easy by choosing a diet with fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish, nuts, and unsaturated fats.
Apologize for the late edit (home now) but you might want to scrutinize closer your sources on saturated fat:
it seems to be highly processed and perhaps (not sure) loaded with bunch of chemicals and potentially unhealthy ingredients
This is true of pretty much everything at Burger King. It's true of most burgers, too. I mean, any meal coming with processed cheese and a processed bun is going to be on the low end of the "healthy" scale, relatively speaking.
Mayo and cheese might be skipped if the person is trying to be more vegetarian. I've always found mayo to be unnecessary and kind of gross on burgers anyway. It's only useful if your meat is lousy or you've overcooked it really badly.
Many high-quality burgers have mayo by default. Au cheval/small cheval come to mind. Mayo is useful for adding flavors, and can protect the lower bun from water-based liquid penetration that would weaken the structural integrity.
I think it's a great opportunity for exposure for these new meat alternatives, and also a potentially great income boost that will help them expand operations and secure their future business.
I presume this is only for the US Burger King? Although there are perfectly fine plant-based alternatives available in the Netherlands, after all the hype about the Impossible and Beyond burgers on HN I'm curious to give either a try.
Edit: Found a different article [1] that says:
> Burger King is giving the Impossible Burger a trial run in 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area, and if that goes well, the fast-food chain will make the product available in all its 7,200 branches across the US
There are places with Beyond Burger in Berlin and it's one of the best patties I tried, to the point were some non-vegetarians friends choose it when available.
Just out of interest, what's the reasoning behind a strict separation of the two? I understand it in the case of gluten free products because that can really have health implications, but when you are vegan for ethical reasons it shouldn't make a difference, right?
But I'd say this is great news either way. I like meat, but when there's a way to get the same taste and texture without the bad consequences for animals and environment I'm all for it, and I'm sure many others are the same.
Some people seem to go vegan because they're emotionally off-kilter. I'm in a few vegan Facebook groups and I've seen posts where people are way over-reacting to food cooked on the same surface, or talking about their emotional breakdown over the suffering of animals. I'm vegan almost two years and I'm pretty sure I ate mayo on a burger two weeks ago. I ordered it explicitly without, but sending it back would just create waste and no benefit.
I definitely agree with your reasoning about sending things back. I've been a vegetarian my whole life, but I don't see the point in making a stink if people didn't know or made a mistake.
I've eaten meat a few times just to avoid making a scene. Got invited out to dinner by colleagues on several different occasions (diff people) and they were sushi and steak places. No vegetarian options. Such is life.
Interesting. Speaking as a carnivore, I find eating human flesh morally wrong, and would be quite insulted if someone cooked my burger next to some 'man' burger.
Yeah, I’m a happy meat eater and will actively defend having meat options at workplace cafeterias for example, but that is exactly the analogy that pops to mind. I would be grossed out eating meat cooked on the same grill as human meat, and expect vegans to be grossed out the same way by food cooked on the same grill as animal meat.
Eh, even with the lengths this comment went to present a working framing I still don't accept it.
Either cannibalism is so objectionable that I'd refuse to patronize a restaurant that served human flesh, or I'd probably not mind them being cooked side-by-side.
That might be a bigger things for vegans, by buying even vegetarian stuff from burger king you're supporting a company that financially motivates a lot of actions you find unethical - that is logically consistent at least.
Interestingly I don't think it'd be the only logical stance for an ethical vegan - purchasing beyond meat products would signal the company of the increased relative demand of vegetarian substitutes potentially leading to that company investing more in beyond meat products and lowering their meat purchases, decreasing the market stability and liquidity for real meat products.
This isn't complicated. Many vegans would prefer to never eat where meat is being served, but recognize the practical reality that if you want business to start providing more ethical alternatives, you need to actually patronize those businesses. So they compromise by providing that revenue, while still trying to avoiding cross-contaminating what they're eating with what they see as murder-byproducts.
So I don't disagree with anything in this statement, but what is it about cross-contaminating that's an issue here specifically? Is there a health reason to avoid any intake of meat products or an ethical/moral one?
For the later case... I'm on board with sane things (don't fry veggie burgers in animal fat) but less with (don't prepare this food where meat products were prepared) simply because... I feel like the same amount of effort should be taken with each meal and vegetarians shouldn't require separate processing things.
To draw a parallel, I'm lactose intolerant myself, but I've always felt it's a bit silly that <GENERIC COFFEE PLACE> has separate blenders for milk/soy/other (except almond, due to the factor of nut allergies).
I'm struggling to think of suitable analogue that would work for someone who eats meat. If you have a better suggestion ill go with that.
You're trying to bring logic into a moral decision. While I agree that that's the way I would approach it, it isn't the only way to approach it. As I said I'm a meat eater so I don't follow all the logical steps to being vegan, but that logical step I do understand.
I think the closest analogue you can find is peanut allergies, but (as far as I've ever seen) no body has that sort of anaphylaxis reaction to meat or the taste of it.
Cooking the burger in beef/pork fat would likely be noticeable, but that is pretty trivial to avoid and _usually_ grills are crudely scraped down between different grillings, that will remove everything but trace amounts.
>... by buying even vegetarian stuff from burger king you're supporting a company that financially motivates a lot of actions you find unethical...
Vegans say this all the time. You can choose to be 100% consistent with ethics but how far do you take it? Do you shut out your family and close yourself off from most of society?
For the particular extreme religious community (almost cult) I grew up in, meat eating was a sin (more or less). Financial support for a company wasn't really a big deal, it was more about keeping their bodies "pure" for God. I even knew a rancher who raised cattle to sell, but wouldn't eat any kind of animal products himself.
I was responding to the parent, who despite being an ex vegan, can't understand why other vegans wouldn't want their food cooking with meat based food.
I'm not a vegan, or vegetarian, and I can understand that point of view.
So I don't understand how your comment is at all relevant.
Strange, the most celebrated people ever to live in the world have often been theists. Ardent theists, too, some of them.
Do you think Copernicus was intellectually stunted? Göedel? Do you think Mr. Rogers was emotionally stunted? Do sweeping generalizations usually make for nuanced views?
Please don't denigrate the attributes of people whose commonly held beliefs are unrelated to those attributes. Theists may be wrong but they not are inherently vacuous, malicious, or otherwise mentally deformed.
For some vegetarians and vegans, they are greatly troubled if they consume even any animal by-product. There was a point when I felt this way; I stopped after a while, and told people "Don't worry, I'm not religious about it."
I think there can be digestive concerns; eating a non-meat thing that was soaked in beef-grease may cause digestive trouble for someone who hasn't had beef in a very long time. But I've also heard of former vegetarians who had no trouble when they started eating meat again. Personally, I've suspected if some minor digestive trouble after various meals was caused by stray meat by-products making their way into my food, but I can't be sure what caused it.
Wouldn’t those same people want to avoid a place like Burger King in general? They’d be supporting the business of one of the largest consumers of beef in the world.
There's value in supporting ethical businesses. There's also value in encouraging less-ethical businesses to be more ethical.
I can't speak to the situation in the US, but here in the UK, veggie burgers in fast food restaurants represented a fairly significant tipping point. In the late 80s and early 90s, it could be genuinely inconvenient to be vegetarian. Asking "do you have a vegetarian option?" in a restaurant often resulted in a blank look. If you wanted to buy meat substitutes, your only option was a health food shop.
By the 00s, being a vegetarian had become a complete non-issue. Every restaurant had at least one reasonable vegetarian option, every supermarket had a decent selection of meat substitutes and vegetarian ready-meals, every product that was suitable for vegetarians was labelled as such.
For would-be vegetarians, that ubiquity removed a significant barrier. The sheer convenience of vegetarianism induced a lot of people to give it a try and took away an excuse for not trying. Perhaps equally significantly, it normalised vegetarianism - when McDonalds and Burger King offer a vegetarian option, you can no longer argue that it's some weird hippie fad. The same thing is now happening for veganism.
I’m not clear that this makes Burger King any more ethical, or less unethical. You wouldn’t praise a prolific serial killer for letting the odd victim go. Besides, fast food has a lot to answer for besides animal welfare.
On the other hand, by purchasing vegan options at a fast food chain, they would be increasing the market signal for vegan food. Getting a massive chain to reorient its supply logistics so that 0.2% of inventory is vegan instead of 0.1% could have a huge impact on overall animal welfare and environmental welfare.
Some, yes, but not all. Everyone has to negotiate their personal principles versus practical and social constraints on a daily basis; this is just an instance of that phenomenon, and not everyone will do it in the same way.
Some vegetarians are just very grossed out by it (I'm one of them).
I generally look the other way at very minor cross contamination, its probably going to happen once in a while, especially if I don't know about it, but if I taste meat juices in my food I completely lose my appetite. I once bit into sausage that found its way into my pizza (I suspect it fell into the cheese) and I couldn't eat pizza for a while after that. (of course, for a burger that's supposed to taste exactly like beef, you wouldn't know...)
If you think that makes me crazy or whatever, then so be it.
Fascinating study, it looks like they really did their best to control all the variables.
Makes sense that dairy and eggs were the most commonly found non-vegan ingredients-- they are both such a huge part of cooking. As someone who has tried to go vegan in the past, I can tell you that cheese was probably the hardest thing to fully cut out for me, and eggs were right behind it. I'm glad the liars are being called out, though, that is some despicable behavior.
My wife has a similar distaste for red meat, she can stand it in food but just doesn't enjoy the taste so, when we eat, it's never center stage in the meal.
Amusing to me is that frozen pizza meat (and some delivery pizza meat) is seriously bottom shelf and can be disgustingly greasy. I've gotten very picky about my frozen pizza preference because some of the brands have a meat with a terrible aftertaste (looking at you, Delissio).
Hmm, I think I understand your viewpoint to a degree. I myself have similar experiences when a meal contains alcohol, its taste makes the food inedible for me. There have been cases where other people ate the same thing and didn't even notice it while I couldn't eat it.
> what's the reasoning behind a strict separation of the two?
Some observant Jews choose a vegetarian option because vegetarian things are kosher by default. But if the veggie patty is cooked on the same grill as both meat and cheese, then the veggie patty becomes (according to some views) non-kosher. This is because kosher stipulates strict separation of meat and dairy: separate grills, separate sinks to wash any dishes afterwards, etc.
Vegetarian is not always “kosher by default”. Grape juice and wine--and products made from them--aren’t kosher by default, for example. And many people hold by cholov or pas yisroel, which means that milk or bread will need special supervision.
Furthermore, the requirements for cleaning vegetables to make sure they're free of insects and insect parts is usually more stringent that what many vegetarians and vegans are used to.
I don't think that Burger King is getting a Kosher certification any time soon, so I would think that those who don't require a restaurant to be properly certified understand the risks that they are taking.
Can't speak for others but I've seen vegetarians for whom it evokes disgust. Unlike folks who choose later in life not to stop eating meat, these folks have never consumed any meat in their life. For them, eating something cooked on the same pan as chicken would be as repulsive as eating chicken itself.
I'm not vegetarian myself, but I imagine their revulsion is similar to what mine would be to dog meat. Even the sight of dog meat would likely make me lose my appetite.
The taste and texture aren't anything at all like ground beef. What they have created is something that DOES taste good in a 'hamburger bun with hamburger-style toppings'
You can prove this by trying to make meatball or spaghetti or a taco with the 'impossible burger', and it's nothing like it should be.
Cross contamination. You don't want your veggie burger to be prepared/fried/grilled/microwaved/burnt on the same surfaces with the same fats that are being used for the dead animal products.
Some of this is to do with pathogens, some of it is due to taste.
There are many vegetarian products designed to taste like meat, e.g. fake bacon, but plenty of vegetarians do not actually like the taste of meat even if that is acquired second hand by using the same grill or utensils.
even using the same knife to cut a meat sandwich and then a vegetarian sandwich with no washing in between is a cause of concern as far as contamination with 'animal germs' is concerned.
Quality establishments get these details right. They also tend to do better when the food inspectors come round.
This is too extremely silly for me. I can understand the taste angle (my wife isn't a fan of red meat, she can tolerate it but doesn't enjoy it), I can understand the religious angle (people are silly) and I can understand the ethical angle... Lastly, I have heard of people who have gone full vegan and react poorly to a soup that surprised them by being a beef broth base which causes indigestion.
But!
Using the same knife to cut a meat sandwich and then a vegetarian sandwich, that sounds like some "wifi allergy" level BS to me. If that's actually a thing I'd like to see a well designed double blind study that could back it up - depending on the knife thickness there's a decent chance that the knife has been implicitly wiped down through the action of cutting before it gets anywhere near the vegetarian sandwich - I'd find it more concerning if the same cutting board was reused as that would give a decent chance that some left-over meat is pressed into the bottom of the sandwich, though in that case a quick dry wipe down would suffice.
It is actually basic food hygiene and nothing to do with your wifi.
In the UK we have the Food Hygiene Act 1995.
In it you are supposed to have different colour knives and chopping boards specifically for this matter of cross contamination.
Sounds to me like someone wouldn't pass their Basic Food Hygiene Certificate 1 here. And no, a basic dry wipe down does not suffice.
Catering is about being inclusive as well as hygiene. Lousy hygiene - that goes against the law - should not cost a business customers just because staff don't respect the rights that vegetarians have to not have their food tainted by meat.
Most of fiance’s family is vegetarian and when we go out to dinner we make sure to separate the utensils and plates between the veg and non-veg people. They are very sensitive to the scent of meat and consider a utensil that has touched meat to be contaminated. Usually, when we’re at her parents house, we aren't allowed to cook meat (unless her mom is out of town). In short, anything that has been used in the preparation of meat is to be avoided.
Damn, this day is ruining me. Took me way too long to realize that the title has beef-less written, not bee-less.
Anyway, Fast Food-Franchises are IMHO the perfect breeding-ground to raise lab-grown meat to success. Most of their meat is processed to a degree, that you can't taste the original texture or figure out their real source of it. And they are one of the biggest sellers for meat. Removing this chain will be a big service for environment.
Seems I had a bad misconception here. This brand is not available in my country and I only ever heard of indirectly. But reading up on it, I see where it's coming from.
Vegan Here. I know a bunch about the health implications about meat. I follow very closely the impossible burger and beyond burger and their move into the mainstream restaurants. If you have any questions ask away.
I personally went straight from being a heavy meat eater and steak lover to a full blown vegan.
below is a video in which they make the impossible burger by hand and show every ingredient as well as showing the ins and outs of the impossibel burger from a science perspective.
Impossible burgers are awesome and I've had quite a few. It also really depends on how it's made and how it's dressed up - as with any burger. My only lingering issue is that it is a highly processed food, and psychologically it helps to know what you're eating.
> My only lingering issue is that it is a highly processed food
As is a huge portion of the food consumed by people today, including things that are marketed as forms of meat. The difference here is that the climate impact of mass-production of beef and the associated mass scale animal cruelty is mitigated.
"If you think all this talk of laboratory food is ridiculous or unappealing you really need to spend some time discovering where your current food supply comes from. Most of the nitrogen molecules in your body right now were created in a factory using the Haber Bosch method. Natural gas is used to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a usable form needed by plants. Enormous amounts of this synthetic fertilizer is what makes it possible to feed seven billion people. Take away that factory made nitrogen and our crop yields would drop like a stone. Without Haber Bosch nitrogen half the humans on the planet would starve to death. Synthetic food grown in fermentation vats is just a matter of cutting out the inefficient middle steps of agriculture. Like it or not it’s coming to fish sticks, chicken nuggets, and meatballs near you. And you might not even notice."
Yeah, it's basically an ethical burger, which, if that's what you're looking for, that's great. While I can tell it tastes different, when dressed up in a burger it hits the spot just like a hamburger does. The problem is when people try and convince themselves that just because it's vegetarian it's healthy, which isn't the case at all. After all, Oreo's are vegan.
I'd like to add that I see a lot of people saying, "If you're vegetarian/vegan why are you going Burger King?" - Well, I don't go often, but on the off chance that I'm with some friends and they go to a fast-food restaurant, it's much easier and less awkward if there's something I can eat too.
I go because it's quick, easy, and quite cheap (€2 for a veggie burger in Germany). For 4 bucks I'm full. Kebab is slightly more expensive and has meat, pizza is more expensive (also if you pick it up), and chinese/thai/vietnamese takeaway is more expensive. The snackbar (frituur) might come close, but those don't seem to exist outside of NL/BE.
I'm not actually vegetarian, but trying to eat less meat, mcdonald's makes that extremely easy. When we go, it's quite a no-brainer to take that option.
I heard the following business story about McDonalds salads and I don't know if it's true but it sounds plausible:
Apparently, McDonalds salads are not directly all that profitable for them. So why do they offer them as an menu option?!? Because there is often one member in the car that would veto going to McDonald's if they didn't have a salad as an alternative to a meat burger. E.g. if mom vetoes McDonalds, they would lose the 3 potential burger sales to the dad & 2 kids in the car. Scenarios like that makes the salad option (and veggie/meatless burgers) worth it for them.
Makes sense. Sometimes the kid and I need something to do when it's dark or rainy and other things are closed, and the McDonald's down the road has a play area. Having something at least nominally healthy on the menu (nutrition of the dressing aside) makes going there an easier choice for me.
This comment was a bit silly - but I'd say that my experience with beyond meat in A&Ws up here in Canada... the fact that the regular beef that's being substituted out is already treated and pressed to being barely recognizable makes the beyond meat substitution a fair replacement. If I were in a fancy restaurant getting a nice thick & juicy burger the differences might be more noticeable.
Why would anybody eat a chicken nugget when they can get a slice of that grade A free-range whole wheat grass fed organic chicken breast which provides only objectively superior flavor for every human palette? Better not put bbq sauce on it though, because that is meant for only the classiest of ribs. Every aspect of food: price, quality, appeal, ethics, and flavors, lie together on a single linear scale. So sayeth the religion of the sacred snob diet.
I know you're trolling, but there once was a time when fast food wasn't objectively terrible. Something happened in the name of cost-cutting. Taco Bell is one of the biggest ones I remember, as they would have an employee prepare the lettuce manually, grate the cheese, etc. Even the olives were sliced by a kitchen tool.
McDonald's is another one, my cousin once earned a "fry guy" pin where he cut and fried the most potatoes in a day. Yes, _cut_. None of that frozen garbage.
I am not 'trolling', because I am not looking for an emotional reaction. I am using sarcasm or parody in an attempt to bring attention to the absurdity of taking something as subjective as personal taste and pretending it is objective fact.
You can say McDonalds food is different from what it was. That's a fact. You can say McDonalds food is terrible. That's your opinion. But if I want a thin salty burger with cheese dissolved onto it on a suspiciously smooth bun... who are you to say McDonalds isn't the correct choice? You wouldn't prefer it? Ok. Don't eat it. But don't try to say it is objectively terrible.
Sometimes I like a steak that dissolves in my mouth in a burst of flavor. Sometimes I want one that can be chewed on and doesn't turn to mush. They're different experiences. Neither is objectively better than the other, no matter how many chefs are trying to sell me $70 steaks.
I've had McDonald's in multiple continents, and FWIW, they taste quite consistently good no matter where you are. The homogeneity of their global supply chain is actually pretty amazing.
Also I'm glad I couldn't go a story about fast food without a comment about how <your fast food> is <highly processed unnatural garbage> and <America sucks> / <go European master-culture>.
Thank you so much for over generalizing my comments.
The McDonald's burgers I had in Italy tasted just like the McDonald's burgers I remember McDonald's tasting like. I actively will not eat the current McDonald's burgers in the US--they have gotten that unpalatable to my taste.
Fortunately, in the US, I have plenty of options for burgers that are not McDonald's--unlike most of Europe.
It's similar to saying, "if you care about your health, why are you going to Burger King". We all make compromises (not saying vegans eat meat though) so I think this is a fair analogy... as an omnivore, I like that if I do decide to compromise and get food from a fast food restaurant, I at least have this as another option that seems healthier for me and the environment than other options on their menu. FWIW I've tried the Beyond Burger at Carl's Jr. and liked it for the same reasons. I enjoyed it and would consider getting it again if I went there in the future.
Yep, if I remember correctly, their current veggie patty is a morning star patty.
Depending on how often these items are asked for, though, and particularly in smaller cities, it's not uncommon for them to be deep frozen and pretty freezer-burnt by the time they reach you (same as Subway).
The Impossible Burger is in weird niche that screams "fad" to me, or at least early-prototype, like self-driving cars -- it's an expensive fake meat, dollar-for-dollar optimized for looking and feeling like low-quality ground beef burger, instead of high-quality something-else-burger. At best it's an expensive but meatless mediocre meat-imitation burger. Why opt for that instead of a less-expensive but good burger?
It's at least another option, and seems to be far healthier than actual beef. In the tech world especially, there are people that have more money than time, and might choose this as a healthier alternative. Once you dress up an Impossible/Beyond patty with all the fixins, it is a lot closer to a real beef burger than a more traditional veggie burger.
Because I mostly eat vegetarian and Impossible Burger is served at only ~7 places close to me (in the VA-DC-MD metro area). With Burger King, i'd get access almost anywhere. That is awesome.
Same. When traveling with a group of friends, fast food is sometimes the easiest thing to do. I've gotten lucky recently as some of the breakfast basics are still available at night.
As a vegetarian my entire life. I don't think I am the right audience for this. McDonald's in India gets the right mix of potatoes and veggies to make a delicious veggie burger. Trader Joe's has some Spicy Masala Patties that are very good too. Needless to say these are mostly carbs and no protein but the taste is awesome :)
I've had both the original and, just this weekend, the new, version 2 Impossible burger. The new one is substantially better than the original and I think the original is quite good. Whereas the original is a bit dry, no matter where I have had it (HopDoddy in LA, Fat Burger and Earl's in Bellevue, WA), the new version has a better texture and flavor. I think it'd be hard to tell it apart from a decent beef burger although I am sure it won't stand up to a high-end, custom-grind type, beef burger.
My Jewish fried rejoices in that she can now have cheeseburgers,
Speaking as a Jew, while this is accurate, it’s not that common in the US among non-orthodox families. There was a poll of American Jews a while ago that found less than a quarter keep kosher.
That reminds me of the time I was in Jerusalem on Saturday (the Sabbath, so like everything was closed) and I stumbled upon a restaurant that reveled in being as un-kosher as possible: the main menu item was cheeseburgers and of course they were open on Saturdays. There were probably other things they did that rubbed people the wrong way because apparently the restaurant had been firebombed at one point.
Not only that, but the kosher requirements (no dairy and meat together), depending on how kosher you are, also to apply to the plates the meal is served on, the equipment the meal is cooked on, and food storage areas; you need strictly segregated facilities, and washing between uses does not make it kosher. The requirements are strict to the point where rabbis have to regularly certify kosher restaurants as kosher.
Of course not, but rituals that survive probably have some kind of objective survival value, so it's reasonable to try to figure out what these ancient food taboos origin really are.
For example, shell fish were probably or average unhealthy to eat back in the day. So claiming God commanded The People to not eat it was the FDA implementation of its time.
I'm definitely not an expert on Jewish law (my exposure to it is through reading Leviticus as a Christian). I suppose it's possible that the reason changed over time. However, now that I think about it the health reasons that others have pointed out seem to make more sense. Especially since I would presume that a cow wouldn't have the intelligence to actually be concerned about the precise manner in which you eat it.
Is it though? I tried to find a source for your claim but came up with inconclusive studies, at best. Do you have any sources for this or is it just a well known myth?
No. That's an extrapolation protein blocking calcium absorption. But unless you eat fake American dairy products like yogurt or "American cheese", there tends to be protein in that cheese.
Incidentally, oxalic acid found in spinach also blocks calcium. Also beans and such have similar effect.
American cheese and yogurt have significant protein. American-produced fat free Greek yogurt particularly is high in protein.
You may be thinking of Velveeta and Kraft Singles but they don’t qualify by the FDA to be called processed cheese, they’re a cheese product. But even they have significant protein, albeit less.
The impossible 1 is super salty where I've had it in hop doddy and ruby's diner in SoCal. It reminded me more of mince meat type quality, passable but gross. I'm hoping 2 is perfect because I really would prefer to not have to eat cows and have that reduced carbon footprint along with better health. Win win win.
Canned meat that tastes like cat pate although I assume because I've just smelled it so far (cat food). Not sure exactly sure how to describe the weirdness of the impossible 1.
I really hope McDonalds adds a veggie burger to their menu soon, too. I try to avoid meat, but often end up eating it in fast food for the convenience and due to a lack of alternatives.
Taco bell is a surprisingly good fast food option for vegetarians I've heard. You can make basically all their options meat-less and add options you like and you're good. (note I'm not vegetarian, just going by advice I've heard others mention this)
Same here. McDonalds has long had veggie burgers available outside the US, most notably in India, but also in many of the (Arabian|Persian) Gulf countries.
It's already most likely cheaper when you take into account false pricing signals due to the fact that the US meat industry is heavily subsidized through taxation. Add to that lower healthcare costs due to less heart disease and realistically it should be pretty cheap comparatively.
I've had this burger and I prefer the Beyond Burger, but the meat eaters that had it said it tasted just like a run of the mill fast food burger, so I'm hoping that it takes off with the health and environmentally conscious. If anyone can really make this work I'm thinking Burger King or McDonalds could, they are both excellent logistically and process wise.
This is exciting news in the food world and opens up a lot of choices for people looking for less heavy food choices.
Be careful, ounce for ounce, the meat substitute burgers may not be all that healthy.
The impossible burger has more fat, more saturated fat and more sodium than the standard beef patties. Less cholesterol though. Again, by mass (their patties are smaller, so direct comparisons are a little harder).
I know that the beef industry has a lot of subsidies (many billions per year), but how much impact does that have on price? Without subsidies, what happens to the $3.99 Big Mac? Would it go to $4.19 or $7?
Nutrition per mass is irrelevant -- that depends on water content (meaningless) and starch content (minor). your choice of toppings and bun dominate the "per unit measure" analysis.
What matters is the ratios protein vs sat fat vs fat vs carbs, and what your view of health science tells you is optimal.
Per g of protein, impossible burgers are low fat, and Beyond Meat is reguar fat.
Agreed - As someone who enjoys the taste and the effort being made, Impossible burgers still feel very much like a novelty. There are several restaurants in my area serving Impossible burgers, but they are usually the most expensive burger on the menu. Given that this is going to be a dollar more than a standard whopper, it'll cost the same as a double whopper.
With that, the only real incentive to eat the impossible whopper over the standard whopper would be personal motivation to eat less meat. And I'll hazard a guess that most people eating Burger King aren't immediately concerned with cutting down their meat consumption.
Agreed as well. I find this encouraging given beef's large carbon footprint, and think low-grade burgers are the best target for replacement by synthetics (forget trying to engineer a steak). I don't expect them to become popular until they're almost indistinguishable and at least as cheap, but I think that could happen soon.
This is so important. I do eat meat (actually quit a lot right now due to health experiments) and I don't think the vegetarian movement will significantly reduce our meat consumption.
While I can't argue that animals should have the same rights as humans, I believe our psychology is wired for empathy even of animals and that may be the only "collectively objective' moral compass we have as humans.
The better we treat animals, the more resources we consume to produce meat. Lab-grown meat startups IMO have incredible potential to not only solve this problem but also make high quality meat incredible cheap. Great space to follow.
Note: of coarse the impossible burger isn't lab-grown, but they're working on that.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of the meat-substitute products, as they don't taste as good nor are they likely to be as healthy as a proper, whole-food plant veggie burger.
Impossible Burger 1.0 was vital wheat gluten based, and Impossible Burger 2.0 will be soy based. I'd probably rather have the 2nd over the first, but a lot of these announcements aren't specific about which formulation is being sold.
I have tried the Impossible Burger in a number of places, and to my taste, it's inedible. My girlfriend likes to try them, and the best we've had so far is at a fish & steak place in Phoenix (Dillon's, out on the west side, near Sun City).
My comment was more about Impossible / Beyond, and their ilk, the ones taking in lots of investment money, and inking deals with fast food, and gourmet chains alike.
Impossible started in "nicer" restaurants and is moving downmarket.
I had the impossible burger at Momofuku and... it's just nothing like a burger, the two big differences being in flavor and in texture. (It looks the same as a regular burger.)
In flavor, it just doesn't have it. It has the same char flavor that a burger has... but without any meat flavor behind it, which is of course most of the flavor of a hamburger. Which makes sense, of course, because there's no meat. It's like picking up what you think is a Coke only when you taste it it's just sparkling water.
And then in texture it's quite different too. As if meat, instead of being ground (with all the satisfying texture that still has), were somehow blended into something more like a smooth paste before cooking. It isn't physically substantial or satisfying to chew, just mushy.
Since I'm not vegetarian, it's definitely not something I would ever order again because it doesn't have flavor and doesn't have texture. I'm not even talking about as a substitute, I'm just talking about as food period. Just give me some roasted veggies instead which have both flavor and texture. I mean, I love vegetables.
Or if you want a vegetarian "burger", a meaty Portobello mushroom is waaaay tastier.
But the Impossible Burger just feels like the worst of all worlds -- not satisfying like meat (just nowhere close), but also not satisfying as vegetables or any kind of "real food" at all.
There is a significant difference between the v1 and v2. v1 is a reasonable copy of a meat burger. v2 is nearly indistinguishable. Many restaurants are just now finishing up their v1 stock, so you may still see it around.
Well, that's a funny coincidence. McDonald's Australia has an April Fool's joke about a McPickle Burger (https://www.instagram.com/p/Bvr3W-AjUWd/) which you could, in a sense, call a goofy version of a veggie burger. Meanwhile, on the same day, their competitor is announcing an actual veggie burger.
In the US, at least, before Burger King introduced their current veggie burger, they had something that wasn't far off from this.
It wasn't posted on th emenu, but you could order a "vegetarian Whopper" that cost something like $0.50 and was just a Whopper where they left off the patty.
I'm a little surprised the fiber is 3g, taht seems low seeing as it's made from plants. But then an e.g. Morningstar Farm black bean patty has 4g fiber and 1/3 the protein.
I had one at a restaurant just last week, $3 up charge made it an $18 burger. I'm not sure about that. But I doubt I'd have guessed it wasn't cow had I not ordered it myself. Perhaps eventually this or something like it becomes the default and it's a $3 up charge for animal meat. Meanwhile Native Foods makes their own burgers from plants rather than using a name brand 3rd party product, and manages to put together a pretty good $12-13 burger that includes a side. It's a bigger pile of fiber. (I'm not a vegetarian let alone vegan.)
I have tried a lot of fake meat in China where you get entire restaurants serving mock meat of every variety - beef, chicken, many types of seafood. Though the rest of the characteristics of the meal were the prime reason to consume them for me - the flavor, the style, the ambience.
As a life-long vegetarian, the Impossible burger worked differently for me. I have been seeing ads for the beef burgers forever and used to wonder about them, without really feeling like trying them. This gave me a chance to see what the "real" texture of meat was. Distinctly different toi the plenty of vegetarian burgers I have had, it came across as lot more dense, more toothy (for lack of a better word) and lot more filling than a regular one. I had only encountered them in more trendy restaurants and an glad to see them in the mainstream now.
I'm allergic to soy protein, so I was bummed to hear that the impossible burger is switching to it. Same thing with Soylent. I guess if it's hydrolyzed I might be able to tolerate it, but I'm pretty sure they're using concentrate because it's cheaper.
Recently, I ordered an impossible burger. It was so close to real beef (or as I remember it), that after 1 bite I stopped. I wasn't sure if I was eating real beef or not, and I didn't want to risk it.
For those who crave the taste of meat but want to be vegetarian: you must try the Impossible Burger.
Personally, I don't crave the taste of meat, I just like the form factor. So a good veggie patty is all I need.
BK was the first burger chain to carry the Gardenburger line of veggie burgers and this is why I would seek out BKs whenever I travelled. I hope they continue to carry them if they decide to include the IB too in their offerings.
When I was vegetarian I really loved the Impossible burger when it was just coming out. I was amazed at how much it tasted like meat. Over time though it seems like most restaurants forgot how to cook them. I'd order one and it would be gray all the way through, cooked to hockey puck toughness. I stopped ordering them all together.
My guess is that as it was offered longer, fewer people would order it since it was no longer a novelty, so the cooks would forget that they don't need nearly enough time as a normal beef burger.
I'm no longer vegetarian but I'll definitely try v2 once it's more available.
Today, you can order an Impossible Burger from the Bar Louie on 23rd St in Crystal City, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. - It's my favorite item on the menu, and I'm not a vegetarian. It's more tender, juicy, and tastier than a "real" burger patty.
Not sure about other Bar Louie locations.
Burger King has had vegetarian burger patties supplied by Morning Star Farms for around two decades now. These were the standard for quality for a long long time. I am glad something as amazing as Impossible Burger has stepped in to advance the legacy.
If you want a cheaper alternative to the Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger, try MorningStar's "Meat Lovers" burger. IMO it's just as good, with 27g of protein and without as much saturated fat.
For me, there is no comparison - and I say this as someone with a freezer full of Morningstar Farm veggie burgers and has consumed thousands of that brand in my life. The Meat Lovers burger is basically just a bigger Grillers Prime. Before cooking an Impossible Burger, it looks like ground beef, and the resulting veggie burger has striations and the cohesion yet crumbling nature of a real burger. Both the Meat Lovers and Grillers Prime look basically the same before and after cooking. (So much that my parents affectionately call them "hockey pucks.")
I quite like the impossible burger and would order it four out of five times I'm in an establishment that serves it. But the other day I tried some impossible meat spicy "sausages". I don't know if they are a product from those guys or something the caterer concocted. They were addictive! I can definitely see a near future where meat "substitutes" (for lack of a better word) are the default
Looks like the formula was originally based on seitan but is now based on soy. I've been experimenting with seitan recently in my own cooking. Its texture is almost perfect as a chicken substitute, but it's low in some important amino acids (lysine). It's very interesting that they've switched to a soy-based formula, since soy is a whole protein source. I may try to copy this at home...
This is a good thing. More vegetarian fast-food options are coming down the pipe.
I've recently seen a few ads from Harvey's, went there and had a burger. It's not the same as beef but it's a burger.
The good part of having a vegetarian burger is that I don't enter into catatonic state for about 1/2 hour after I had fast food. I can eat fast food when meat is replaced with something else.
I guess fast food burgers is where a lot of meat is consumed but ... oddly I find most fast food burgers to not taste like beef. Or maybe it is better said they taste "like" beef.
I'll be happy to replace meat with better alternatives when they come, but at least from my perspective it's not a huge step, although maybe it will make a big difference in the larger scope.
Years ago I worked at a Burger King in the kitchen and someone ordered a vegetarian Whopper. We all looked at each other wondering how to do that when the manager came back and instructed us to make a Whopper without the meat patty. IE: A bun, with Mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup and pickles. This sounds a lot more appetizing than what we served that day...
This may sound like a stupid question, but I am genuinely trying to know/see what people at HN think. Is it less ethical to kill and eat mammals/birds than plants? I know farming and eating animals is certainly worse for the environment, but I wanted to know the ethics aspects of it. Why is the life of a potato tree any less significant than a cow’s?
Probably the same reason why the life of a cow is apparently less significant than that of a human.
There is a hierarchy of 'life'.
Those who try to say 'All or Nothing' when it comes to harming a sentient being are either ignorant or simply trying to justify their meat-eating habits.
I am definitely justifying eating meat, but that is not a fallacy of the argument by itself. If you think of “hierarchy of life” as being closely related to us, then I could justify eating super intelligent octopus over cows. Again if you mean the hierarchy as intelligence then I would ask if it is ok to consume the less intelligent variants within a specific species. Moreover, would it be ethical if we bred/genetically engineered a cow/chicken which have near zero IQ and no emotion at all and consumed that only?
On the plants front, know that the ratio for beef is over 20 to 1. ie a cow eats 20 calories of plants, to produce 1 calorie of meat. It's far more efficient (and less plant consumption overall) to just eat the plant calories instead.
You could make the same argument with eating engineered zero sentience humans. Or humans born with extreme disabilities. I think ethically it comes down to does the being have the ability to feel pain and suffer, and the emotional responses that come with it. eg a pig is more intelligent than a 3 year old, can solve the mirror test and has deep bonds with family, builds emotional connections, has the basic emotions we have etc. It's hard to justify their suffering and ultimate consumption by us when there are so many alternatives available.
Calling out the cholesterol is kind of a distraction, because it is no longer what is associated with heart disease. The level of saturated fat in the impossible burger is actually very high.
Impossible Burger, for example, has more than double the saturated fat of an 85% lean beef burger: 3.6 grams per ounce (derived from coconut oil) versus 1.7.
I know there is debate about the link between saturated fat and heart disease, and further question about the specific types of saturated fat in coconut oil. I have no idea what the truth is, but if you are on a low fat diet, impossible burger isn't a good substitute for beef.
I've tried impossible burger, and thought it was very good, so I'd eat it just for the flavor.
I've tried the impossible burger on a friend's recommendation (fat burger).
He overblown it.
It's good. But it doesn't taste like meat and the texture isn't close, only the seared like texture works the inner is different. The flavor is off. I want to say the fat of meat gives it that good taste which impossible burger does not have.
I'm really looking forward to this. As far as I can tell, no restaurant or store sells Impossible burgers in my city or anywhere in reasonable driving distance, so this will be my first opportunity to try one. If they're as good as people tend to think they are, I'll have no issue moving my whopper habit over to these :D
This is great. The more places people can choose not to eat meat, the better. Personally I don’t foresee this demographic trying anything new, but for those who never eat meat or fast food and suddenly find ourselves in a pitstop somewhere, it’s great to know that we’d have something to eat that isn’t baby carrots and hummus.
Where I currently work every now and then they have spaghetti and meatballs using the Impossible meat. I was so convinced that it was a legitimate substitute that I asked to see if I could just buy the meatballs straight-up to use at home. No dice.
I can't wait until the time I can just get them from the grocery store.
The real change is going to happen when people can't tell a difference in taste and Walmart starts selling synthetic meat at a substantial discount to meat. At that point the consumer won't care just like the consumer doesn't care if their strawberry flavored cereal has real strawberries in it.
Strawberry flavoured cereal and synthetic meats are miles apart - if we're talking lab grown meat that's amazing - it's tender meat that has no ethical issues. If you're talking the impossible burger, that's a burger that again has no ethical issues and a minor compromise in taste. Nutritionally it's basically equivalent to a normal burger.
Strawberry flavoured cereal is nothing like a strawberry, and can't possibly hope to emulate any of its properties (not even taste).
There can be ethical issues surrounding lab grown meat, mostly around how much energy it takes to produce lab grown meat, and the nature of that energy production.
My guess is that beyond will soon be cheaper than regular meat, but that the requirements for creating lab grown are simply going to be too great to be able to compete economically or ecologically. I'm going to be very happy to be proven wrong someday, but that's my initial, knee-jerk reaction.
The HN crowd is not the typical consumer that shops at Walmart. The typical consumer buys things that they can afford and makes compromises on flavor.
The ethical part won't effect demand just like it hasn't effected demand in the past. The price and taste will help consumers afford more meat. And I'm sure that they would agree that is a noble thing.
you can tell the difference in an impossible burger?
the only difference I can tell is that I don't feel full and then lethargic afterwards which is honestly part of the conditioned expected experience of eating meat, so I feel empty, but I can accept that. maybe we can make people feel the same way after eating a non-meat burger, with a benign chemical.
I tried the V1 and found it lacking in terms of flavour and texture. It looked decent until you bite into it, at which point it looked less like meat and more like ground up veggies. I applaud the effort and look forward to tasting V2. That said I don't believe it is necessarily healthier for someone.
Why don't you think it would be healthier for some? The article claims 90% less cholesterol. There are many millions of people that have high cholesterol and $billions is spent to control it and many more $billions is spent on the heart disease consequences. Everything I've read says red meat is one of if not the biggest contributor to high cholesterol.
Sounds great. It's impressive to see just how far the industry has come, and what's in store for the future. Hopefully it'll be available near me at some point, but even in the last 5 years, the vegetarian alternatives have come a long long way (i.e. not just one menu item any more).
This is a pretty great way for these simulation burgers to start out. When I get a fast food hamburger, I'm not expecting something processed. I haven't had an impossible burger but it looks a lot like a fast food hamburger. Looking forward to trying it!
As a vegetarian of ~20 years, I kinda find them too meat like. I constantly wonder whether I accidentally got the wrong patty. I guess that's largely because I've only dim memories of the real thing.
For those that think the Impossible is still not up to snuff:
Has anyone done any testing of mixing of real beef and impossible to get as close as possible to "real" perception while minimizing the amount of real?
I am in a pizzeria right now and reading this. Looking at the pizza being prepared and thinking... Can we already have ham-like meat, like those slices they put on pizzas ? Or is it only beef-like meat for now?
The technology is more or less there. But it would require a significant amount of actual product development. The technology is capable of producing pretty much every meat, even new kinds of meat that smell like meat but where evolution did not conveniently evolve an animal to produce it.
For the company the issue is scale, and since the beef market is huge and profitable they are focusing on scale, more then on introducing other products.
Yes, the gardein fishless fillet has convinced several of my omnivore friends they are eating real fish. Same I've heard for the ocean hugger raw tuna sushi etc
Yep! I'm an angel investor in them from outside of the U.S. so I haven't tried it myself but friends who have say it's great:
https://oceanhuggerfoods.com/store-locator
Wow this is very interesting and I am very surprised by how much experience you guys have with this stuff. Does anybody know where I can order this in Germany?
Oh no? Burger Kind currently has the best veggie burger of any fast food chain. That char flavour sets it apart. Though maybe that will be in the new one too.
I think it's appropriate to be worried. But I look at it this way: we can't make a lot of the foods we eat at home. I could not replicate white flour in my home at all. Same goes for many other staple ingredients that we mindlessly consume everyday (sugar, most grain meals like oat or cornmeal, most oils, chocolate).
A Burger King hamburger sounds awful already. A Burger King hamburger with fake meat somehow manages to sounds even worse. It's not just shit food, it's shit food with a fake flavour.
I mean, can't we just try to push real food, that looks, smells and tastes like real food? It doesn't have to be meat. Just something that isn't made on a production line, from ingredients you can't identify and in a way you don't ever get to see?
If you hate Burger King, more power to you. But it's not just about putting real food out there, it's also about making it accessible to people who are lower on resources like money and time. Apparently it's super hard to do that. Even this rollout, which I applaud as getting healthier food in reach of more people, can be financially daunting to some families at an extra dollar per burger.
There's a food truck by my house that sells Impossible 2.0 burgers, and they charge $4 extra for it over meat burgers. If I can get something even close to that burger for half the price, I'm there, because it's that good.
Yes, that's what I mean by "why can't we push real food?". Why can't we make it cheap and fast for people who have no money or time? Why do those people need to eat shit, in order to stay satiated (but not really fed)?
And if fake meat is more expensive than the real deal and is not the real deal, then how is it going to fix anything?
They're really decent tasting, and it's exciting as a gateway to vegetarianism. I personally like veggie burgers that don't try to be meat better, but there's still a market for meat-likes.
One thing that gets me though: They smell terrible. I've cooked them in my house and have to air the place out afterwards. It's like an awful chemical plant fart. I'll never cook one in my house again.
The Impossible Burger patty is not available in grocery stores yet. I suspect that you are thinking of the Beyond Meat patties, which are sold in grocery stores and do smell unappealing while cooking.
As someone allergic to legumes, increasingly so each year, It really sucks when I get whammied, more from protein sources than the oils, but all the same. I don't have a problem with things like this as long as it's clearly labelled as such. I sometimes think that fast food is the devil (Jack in the box and Taco Bell in particular).
Every modern society, looking back fifty years, condemns behavior once considered normal (male-only voting, interracial marriage bans, jailing gays, etc).
I'm convinced industrial animal agriculture will be one of the things today's society is condemned for, fifty years from now.
I'm in complete agreement. What's interesting are the people who speak out or act on behalf the advancement when the practice is still completely normalized.
There is a group of vegan activists in Portland called the Cube of Truth. They hide their identity and hold up monitors on the street. If you approach and consent, they will display difficult to consume video of industrial animal practices.[1]
I commented there that "the cavalier, even gleeful use of animal products in food and and consumer goods will be a regrettable cultural wave."
The bias inherent in our psychology is very intriguing. We are still jailing blacks/men disproportionately, marriage between men was not allowed (and is not many places) until recently, we are still locking up non-violent drug offenders while murderers and rapists get paroled. And yet, there is only a token amount of outrage about these topics. Surely, we tell ourselves, we are notmaking the same ethical mistakes as "moderates" in totalitarian states or slave-holding economies; specifically, how are we much better, we who do not stand up and criticize, but rather tacitly condone these evil practices by our inaction?
In the marketplace of ideas, the criticisms of these obviously abhorrent practices simply do not get much currency. Where does the failed war on drugs rank in terms of politically important issues? How about wage slavery, student-loan-indentured servitude, or industrial meat farming?
I don't know much, but I do know that people form habits and tend to set their beliefs/wants in stone, such that they will simply overlook suffering caused by their meat eating, tough on crime stances, etc. If it stands in the way of their bacon cheeseburger, most people simply don't spare a thought for others' suffering.
I don't think that will happen until we get both cheaper and better animal product substitutes. Vegan substitutes usually fail at both which means they are niche mid-upper class foods.
Although that seems like it would hopefully fix itself as demand for vegan substitutes increases. The Impossible Burger is a good example of a vegan substitute that tastes uncannily like the thing it imitates.
As for cost, it seems intuitive that turning soy into a milk substitute would be cheaper than feeding soy to a cow and milking it if both were done on the same scale. On top of that, some countries tax substitutes higher than the products they replace. In Germany, for example, non-dairy milk has a VAT rate of 19% while dairy milk gets the reduced 7% rate for staple foods.
The cost curve is rapidly decreasing. Within 5 years, plant-based meats cheaper and tastier than meat. The food world is about to be turned upside down (for the better)
Just look at Denise McAllister and her recent twitter meltdown. She trolled people by declaring that her husband told her to shut up because the game was on and that she should mind her place. Others responded, one of them a gay journalist. She replied nastily about his homosexuality.
She in turn was banned from two far-right wing publications: The Daily Caller and The Federalist. Even twenty years ago, she would have been applauded for her reaction by the same kind of people and they would have concern-trolled for weeks about the negative reaction others might have had.
Yes, it is better! Part of the goal is to provide a "gateway patty" to make it easier for meat-eaters to reduce their consumption. Good for their health, good for the environment, good for the animals.
(Also, I've been vegan for years and _love_ the Impossible burger.)
Also the impossible burger has about the same amount of calories as an 80% lean ground beef burger, so it's no better as far as calories are concerned.
Speaking just for myself, yes a meat-replacement that tastes and feels very similar to real meat would be a huge step towards me eating less or no meat.
There's a subset of people who are content with good vegan or vegetarian food. That set doesn't include me. I would however like to not eat meat anymore for ethical reasons.
I lack the willpower however to commit to vegetarian and vegan food, because I absolutely do not like those dishes and I don't have the mental headspace to tackle that alongside with a dozen other improvements I'm trying to make in my life (eg. producing less trash, staying healthy, charity work, etc.)
Compare it to the vape-pens that can replace smoking a cigarette. I'm not well versed enough to know if the numbers back up my intuition on this, but on face value I'd say that if vape-pens are available to help the subset of people who would like to stop smoking but are finding it too hard, why would that be a bad thing? The people who want to stop smoking completely can still do so.
A big thing for me was figuring out what vegetarian food I liked. There was a lot of experimentation. Building my own recipe bank for fast, easy to make food and more complex dishes. I am still expanding that knowledge.
This question comes up quite often. I'm with you insofar as I also prefer a good vegetarian* product, but tbh, in my experience, almost every vegetarian burger (for example) one encounters day-to-day is in no way trying to "be" meat. Falafel patties, beetroot patties, sweetcorn patties, whole portobello mushrooms as patties, etc. I'd say the added diversity added by faux-meat products is not harmful.
* I'd like to say I prefer a good vegan/vegetarian product, but I have struggled to find vegan (egg-free/dairy-free) food I really love.
Well, what I was really trying to say is—I don't really mind the "it's just like meat!!" products. I may personally prefer the "it's just vegetables" products, but having more options is fine.
I imagine that whatever culture is developing the vegetarian/vegan food products will do whatever they can to emulate the foods that are already part of their culture, as that is going to be the primary replacement request.
In the US, I'm guessing the biggest items are burgers, dogs and sandwich meats.
They allow vegetarians to utilize hundreds of years of meat-based recipes with a simple substitution. Instead of your whole diet changing, you can just swap some ingredients.
For the same reason, they're great for restaurants to retrofit their menus to be veg friendly.
Small steps are important on any road of transition. People often don't like big changes, and are more likly to go back to their old habits when the difference is to big.
It's also important to understand how much food is tied to culture and identity. It's not simply a matter of convincing them it's healthier or kinder to animals.
Same here, I prefer a black bean burger to one of these. I don't dislike the impossible burger but still have the uncanny valley sensation while eating them.
In terms of resources used in their production, a $6 burger expends more resources than a $3 burger.
For those worried about the ethics of eating animals, I can understand the extra $3.
For those just worried about other wastes (eg: losing 90% of the food value by feeding it to cattle), this isn’t a magic bullet, for now. Those extra $3 went into something else, whether it was a complicated energy-intense process, or luxury vacations for the patent owners of the process.
A $4 beef burger where $1 went toward reforestation or some other project may have the most impact over a $3 beef burger or $6 Impossible burger.
> In terms of resources used in their production, a $6 burger expends more resources than a $3 burger.
The meat/dairy industry in the US is subsidized to the tune of $38 billion, there's a little more to it than "Costs more at the store so it must cost more resources to make."
There's not a lot of hard data I can find on where the money goes, but the table on Wikipedia (2004) indicates that we mostly subsidize livestock feed grains, then cotton, wheat, and rice. Those four added up to 64%. Soybeans and products come in 5th at 7.6%. Fruits and vegetables, pretty much zero.
Health-wise, it makes all the wrong things cheaper.
What I want to see is what the pricing would be without the subsidies.
My guess is that the retail price impact would be tiny. Kinda like the calculations where Walmart could double associate salaries by raising prices by 6%.
Are we talking about a $5 steak becoming $5.09 or becoming $10?
You really cannot strictly equate price with "resources" like this. Does a $10,000 designer shirt require 1,000 times the resources of a $10 t-shirt to produce?
I imagine they are charging a premium for the impossible burger because it's a novelty and they think they can get it. Time will tell if that pricing model is sustainable in the long run.
I said production costs or fancy vacations to the process owners.
Ie: cost + profit = price.
The $10000 shirt may pay for a lot of “designers” to tour the world about how great their shirt is, or for a celebrity to build a bigger house in exchange for an endorsement.
Or it could pay for $9990 in subsidizing reforestation, but doubtful.
A more profitable alternative to meat that's popular with the mass market would be a huge victory for conservation and animal rights.
Even if you hate those greedy rich people, their greed will mean their interests (more profit) will align with yours (fewer mistreated animals, less land devoted to meat-production).
Holding out for the capitalists to spontaneously get religion ("$9990 in subsidizing reforestation") seems like a losing bet here.
Somebody is spending those dollars, they’re not burning them.
If you have an extra dollar, what do you do with it? You either spend it on land, labour or capital. Stuff, property, or other people that will spend it on one of the three above things.
I’d put that under labour and/or capital. And the equipment bought for the R&D requires building (ie: uses up resources), or the people involved spend that money on other stuff.
> Burger King’s chief marketing officer, Fernando Machado, said that in the company’s testing so far, customers and even employees had not been able to tell the difference between the old meaty Whopper and the new one.
Ugh.
First: The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb.
Second: When I tasted an Impossible Burger, it was awful. It tasted like a horrible veggie burger.
At the places that I've tried it, the staff usually apologize as I order it, and warn me that I probably won't like it. They all tell me that the ordinary veggie burger that they used to serve was better.
At that point, they hint that they were strong-armed by their distributor to server it.
I personally reduced my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons, but when I want a burger, I get a burger.
I'm a vegetarian. I love meat. I'd eat meat all the time if I knew it didn't cause horrifying suffering and environmental damage.
I've had the impossible burger (and liked it) as well, and on a highly mass produced burger like the whopper I'm willing to bet it's close to the real thing.
Abstinence from meat seems like an extreme step if all you are concerned about is environmental damage. Just eating meat at a "normal" frequency of two or three times a week would be enough to mitigate much of the impact. True organic agriculture is not possible without meat production as a side effect, and this can only be replaced by nonrenewable synthetic fertilizers.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but for me it's much easier to abstain from meat than to moderate it to a certain amount of times per week. It's not difficult for me to eat meat, but it would be if I were to half-abstain.
Our family buys a whole animal from a local farmer periodically. We evaluate how the animal was raised, the sustainability of the farm, etc. to the best of our ability. It's the one exception to my vegetarianism. It results in me eating meat every now and again, but meat I know was treated humanely.
It does make it much easier to 'half-abstain' because it's not an exception I can make easily on a whim at the grocery store. Buying a whole animal takes some planning.
It's been an ideal combination for us -- higher quality meat, considerably less meat consumed, and education to my kiddo about where meat comes from (and what responsible looks like on a farm).
Ugh. First: The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb.
Guessing anecdotally, I know as many vegetarians as you. Almost every one of them is happy to have a good burger option. I'm sure some % would be ok without a meat clone but the utility alone of having fast-food chains offer good vegetarian food is amazing.
My non vegetarian friends have tried the beyond and impossible burgers and the vast majority have found them to be a satisfactory alternative to conventional beef patties.
Second: When I tasted an Impossible Burger, it was awful. It tasted like a horrible veggie burger.
You are probably in the minority here or you didn't have it prepped well. I'd recommend trying one at umami burger as so far, I have found their preparation the most reliable and
delectable.
I personally reduced my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons
That's great, and precisely why this space is taking off.
> Ugh. First: The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb.
What about the other 95% of people you know who aren't vegetarians because they like meat a lot?
> Second: When I tasted an Impossible Burger, it was awful. It tasted like a horrible veggie burger.
Haven't had one myself, but the friends I've heard from (largely not vegetarians) have liked it better than that. Reserving judgement until I can get one.
> I personally reduced my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons, but when I want a burger, I get a burger.
It sounds like you're disagreeing with your own first point. "So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb," but (supposing they'd actually pulled that off) you're exactly the market who would eat it. Likes meat, wants a burger, reducing meat consumption for environmental and health reasons. Doesn't sound dumb to me.
I've had a lot of veggie burgers, my main problem with them is the lack of structure. If they're more than like 1/4" thick you try to take a bite and the whole thing squishes out the sides of the bun.
Personal favorite veggie-protein-patty is morningstar's "buffalo chik," which aren't really that chicken-like but taste good and have enough structure to stay together while you eat them.
"First: The vegetarians that I know don't like meat."
Hi, nice to meet you! Vegan for almost a decade, the smell of a burger on the grill in the summer gives me hella cravings. We exist.
"Second: When I tasted an Impossible Burger, it was awful. It tasted like a horrible veggie burger."
I'm jealous, you must not have ever eaten a truly horrible veggie burger. I had a Gardenburger in like 2005 that literally tasted like cardboard. The Impossible Burger is a miracle of science.
The cravings are probably a sign that you are missing something essential that is in the burger. It tastes good because it is nutritious. I would eat a burger occasionally to stay healthy.
No, it doesn't taste (or smell) good because it's nutritious. The cravings are a psychological reflex of remembering something you liked the taste, nutritious or not.
There's people who doesn't consider charring meat having a good odour, and that doesn't make it less nutritious. There's super tasty things which are horribly un-nutritional, or even poisonous. That goes both for smell and taste.
This is specious reasoning. A whiff of cigarette smoke can trigger cravings for nicotine. That doesn't mean one is missing something essential or that its nutritious. (or that one should eat a cigarette occasionally to stay healthy ;)
> At the places that I've tried it, the staff usually apologize as I order it, and warn me that I probably won't like it. They all tell me that the ordinary veggie burger that they used to serve was better.
They're probably trying to prepare it like a veggie burger, which ruins it.
I've had the Impossible Burger a few times, and just like ground beef, you can make a good burger or a bad burger.
The places that it turned out well, they were aware that it was meant to be prepared like meat. I order it medium-rare, like I do with beef, and it comes out well.
Another place that I've been to still thinks it's a veggie patty. They end up cooking it until it's dry and disappointing.
>The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb.
I like meat so i'll give it a try.
If it's a choice between me eating junk food that's killing animals and earth, and eating this junkfood that is probably very slightly better for those and my health then i guess this will work.
For those like myself who have a diet largely consisting of meat, this sounds great for the exact reasons you described; reduced environmental impact and possibly greater personal health. I agree that the original Impossible Burger was disappointing, but if they manage to incrementally improve to the point of being barely distinguishable, I think overall its a really good thing.
Speaking as a vegan, by the numbers it's people like you not us who are the ones who are going to have the bigger positive impact on the environment by eating plant based options more often. It's encouraging to hear meat eaters being increasingly open minded...
>The vegetarians that I know don't like meat. So making a veggie burger that tastes like the thing they don't like is just dumb.
As long as we're sharing anecdata, I've reduced my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons, too. And I would love to have a decent veggie burger option at more fast food places. If it's a perfect fascimile of beef, all the better.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed the old BK veggie burger. I think the Impossible Burger is good, too, but I'm not sure it's a step up for me so much as a horizontal change. But I do think it will be more appealling to more reluctant prospective veggie burger consumers, in which case, we all win.
I guess I fit into the "don't like the taste of meat" vegetarian. Except it's not actually the taste, I was never able to get past the "ewww... Gross... I don't want to eat dead animals" mental factor. When the idea of your food grosses you out, you don't enjoy the taste. Without the gross factor there, I can enjoy the taste. I had a vegetarian sausage patty recently that was very similar to what I remember sausage tasting like ("tastes like a McDonald's sausage patty" according to my meat eating husband) and I enjoyed it.
Funny I guess as a super meat lover I tried the Impossible burger and like it a lot even though it doesn't quite taste like beef it tastes good on it's own.
I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and have now been a pescatarian for 8 years. It has been 18 years since I have had a proper cheeseburger, and since then I have had many thousands of veggie burgers. Cheeseburgers are probably my favorite food, and I haven't had one in 18 years. If someone told me that the world would end tomorrow, I would go out and eat a proper cheeseburger.
I have some experience in this area, is what I'm trying to say. The flavor and texture is the closest to actual meat I've ever had. And that, then, is the key for a lot of people: they don't want a veggie burger that simulates meat. Which is fine! I do, and I imagine the market for close-to-meat veggie burgers is bigger than obviously-not-meat veggie burgers.
Others in the thread have mentioned the Beyond Burger, which is also good. But the Impossible Burger, for me, is way better. I have had my Impossible Burgers at Bareburger. At home, I went with Morningstar Farm's Grillers Prime for a long time, but about a year ago they changed the recipe, and I did their black bean for a while. I have since discovered if I season the Griller's Prime while I'm frying it, it comes out much better.