I'm 100% omnivore, but I fully support the alternative "meat" companies, hell I sometimes eat them cause they're tasty. I think it sucks that some groups are seeking to paint them in a bad light. Compete on the quality of your product. You didn't need to pay disingenuous games to do that.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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I'm also not vegan, but soy curls are a great ingredient. Shelf stable, very inexpensive, and enjoyable to eat and cook with.
Right! I wish they would listen to your advice more!
"We were a victim of propaganda, so we asked Fortune to print our own propaganda"
Honestly good for them though. It sounds like they are looking to make healthier burgers. I like that they're moving away from palm oil, although I'm not sure that avocado is much better for the environment. Either is leaps and bounds ahead of real meat though.
The criticisms facing plant-based meat might be justifiable, I'm not a nutritionist. Intuition suggests that they're almost certainly better than meat, but if they're dressing it up with a bunch of oils and such then maybe it's not a supremely healthy meal.
All that to say, it sounds like plant-based meat should be consumed in moderation. Just like regular meat. Or, heck, anything you put in your body
Beyond does make a pretty decent burger, I'd be interested in trying one when the avocado oil variant hits the shelves
Or we could just use the 70% of farm land to feed us instead of the animals that make up 10-20% of a diet.
Vegans have to jump trough hoops to fix issues with the environment while meat eaters happily destroy it.
Or we could just use the 70% of farm land to feed us instead of the animals that make up 10-20% of a diet.
Have you worked out how that food will be grown?
I'm not the expert, but I believe we're currently growing that food for the animals.
If demand for meat decreased then there'd be more food in the supply chain for humans.
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Um... Mostly the way it's being grown now? ~~Did you miss the part where that's already farm land being used to feed our food?~~
Edit: the last sentence was unnecessarily rude, sorry about that... Also, reading some of your other replies, I see more what you meant. I still think it's a very solvable problem though.
I also think it's a very solvable problem. But there are a lot of complex moving parts in our food production system. I'm thinking of this in the context of the current highly industrialized state of agriculture and the current demands of consumers and how do you make a shift toward sustainable agriculture while also reducing meat production and animal exploitation.
So for me, the way it's being grown now isn't actually an option. 5000 acres of feed corn on dead soil that's continually pumped with synthetic fertilizers is a thoroughly bad idea and turning those acres into corn (or anything) for humans is every bit as bad.
Believe it or not, it's actually rather hard to get quality manure inputs for many farms. Depends on where you are of course. But the stuff weighs a lot, is never where you want it and the largest quantities are from CAFOs which are decidedly NOT high quality and require a lot more work to be useable in a sustainable context. That manure is sold, sure, and ends up in food production, but not to the exclusion of synthetic inputs. If you eliminate CAFOs then there's even more demand for manure such that sustainable operations which require high quality compost because they don't use synthetic fertilizers are going to have a hard time getting enough fertility.
So it's easy to generalize and say there is excess manure from so much animal production, but the reality is that much if not most of that manure is not where you need it. I think a lot of folks don't realize that sustainable meat production that isn't integrated with sustainable vegetable production adds a lot of complexity, and yet that's where we are at right now. The integrated food systems (e.g. rotational grazing etc) of times gone by were much more efficient but are relatively uncommon today, mainly because of market forces.
Hopefully this is a better summary of the point I was trying to make yesterday.
I didn't know that the benefits were supposed to include health. I thought it was water and CO2 reduction and, ya know, less killin things.
But if they can make it healthier too, that'd be exciting
Admittedly I stopped working in food service well before the Beyond came out, but I definitely had people order the veggie burger because "they were trying to be healthier" that day.
And I guess that means different things for different people, and I don't think Beyond is actively marketing specifically as a health food or anything. But my lizard brain is always going to assume that the plant is healthier than the meat.
The sad reality is that most people don't care enough about the environment or animals to change their eating decision on the basis of those things alone. Yes, the selfishness and apathy pisses me off too, but we just have to accept it.
Three things will move them: taste, price, and healthiness. Hence the importance of this pivot.
I haven't looked into it but I think the more classic veggie/garden/bean burgers are at least somewhat healthier than their meat or faux meat counterparts
Yeah, I think anyone who eats it thinking it's healthier is missing the point.
I think it'll be healthier by not having the issues associated specifically with red meat consumption, but from a nutritional standpoint overall, yeah... The same moderation should be exercised as with regular hamburgers.
The point is removing animal meat from the equation to decrease our dependence on massive cattle lots and moving our intake to preference much more efficient plant based calories.
But yeah, if they're using palm oil they should move to something more sustainable, but I don't know that it's any less sustainable or polluting than meat lots.
I really don’t like imitation meat. It’s never going to be the same, so I don’t understand the point.
If you’re going to give up meat, why torture yourself with this garbage?
I prefer buying the veggie burgers that are just vegetable patties, or making my own.
Ita fine if you don't like it, but the people who do certainly aren't torturing theirselves.
Beyond Meat is fucking awesome. I eat more of that and Gardein products than I do actual meat anymore, and I still like meat. Pretty much just eating fish and the occasional burger at restaurants. The mild Beyond Italian Sausage is excellent now too. They reformulated it so well recently that my vegetarian wife will no longer eat it because it reminds her too much of real sausage.
For chicken alternatives, Gardein is still the clear winner. Their "Supreme Chicken" fillets and nuggets are good. I also really like their 7-grain tenders. But people have to go into alternatives willing to accept that it's not a perfect match. You have to appreciate that it is its own thing. But the newer Beyond Italian Sausage could have fooled me.
Im on a vacation and surviving on his meat....am I allowed to say his meat on the internet? I start gently just tasting his meat. Then I usually mix some ketchup and mayo then smear some fries and put them on his meat. Finally I use my teeth on the rest of his meat. I mean, technically its my meat and I love eating it....am I allowed to say that I eat my own meat? Well its not really my meat, its beyond my meat.
ADHD-posting on main... I feel for you, friend.
And another one bytes the dust.
Very hard to trust that face, though.
How can he claim to be a vegan if he's demonstrably made of meat!?
Canada's best fast food franchise item is A&W's Beyond Burger. Had one today, my only occasional fast food treat.
(Note that A&W is a totally different company in Canada, quite progressive in some respects.)
It's also objectively better than the American/international counterpart, having had both. Canadian A&Ws actually felt like they were trying to provide a great product, trusting profit would follow.
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