I’m curious about how much money was taken out by insiders who must have known what their costs were internally and how little advancement was made on making the same product at a lower cost.
I don't think it was ever the moment, even though there has always been a market for plant-based foods, the company assumed that market was far larger than it ever was or will be.
So true. All protein on the planet, was made from sunlight and photosynthesis. You can eat the animal that ate the plants, but then you lose out on tons of micronutrients and fiber.
Ah, yeah, some amino acids are synthesised in animals. We synthesise a handful of them ourselves. But there are still a bunch that we can't synthesise and need to get from our diet. I think that goes for all animals. Since you need a complete supply of all amino acids to make protein then plants provide the essential link in the chain so you could say it all comes from photosynthesis ultimately.
High-protein everything is riding the wave of GLP-1 popularity right now. Doctors are begging people on that class of drugs to chase protein targets more similar to what might have previously been reserved for heavy weightlifters just to prevent muscle wasting.
As a result, the entire packaged food industry is pumping up protein numbers and marketing it as the primary attribute of the food (where they might have previously marketed low fat or low sugar or whatever else in the past).
So, saturated market... but certainly one people are investing in now.
I hear the most ironic stuff on glp from the people I know on it. So doctor is obviously a reasonable person with an interest in making people healthy, not trying to set up glp addicts, and are encouraging better diet and increased exercise while eventually tapering and getting them off the glp entirely as the final end goal.
The whole time they are telling me this I can't help but wonder what the hell is the point of the glp1 here? You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow. So its like there is no point. Might as well just rip the bandaid off, diet and exercise, get there 6 months slower, while not taking the glp. Like wouldn't you want to actually increase muscle mass while burning fat?
I lost weight the regular way. You don't understand how much will I expend to not continuously eat. The strategy I deploy: I never have ready-to-eat anything home, I cook everything just before I eat it, I chose ingredients based on their satiety index, I always have something to drink. I fast 5 days every year to 'reset' my grahlin levels (it still hurts, even if it's way less than it used to). I'm still at 26 BMI, so overweight (from 33 to 28 in 3 years, from 28 to 26 in 5).
I have a very good support system. Not to brag, but my parents are amazing, my family have a small amounts of doctors who helped me getting through it at first. My siblings are great too, and my SO support me despite my quirks. I love sailing, which is a great way to loose weight. And I'm a SWE, the easiest job there is when you're not bad at it, that makes good money without real responsibilities or stress. It was still fucking hard. If glp1 can help people less lucky than me, let them have it.
The “easily constrained” people like the person you are responding too don’t understand. I’m not sure they ever will.
Ive also done it the right way, and it was literally easier, by far, to get a masters degree while working 40 hours a week than it was to drop from 250 to 175. Incomparable. The constant mental pressure to eat, to eat more, to search the cabinets, to stop at x on the way home, etc.
I’ve heard “wow sounds like a severe addiction” yeah no shit. It’s an addiction to a substance you MUST have 2-3x a day. Imagine if you needed alcohol twice a day to live.
> while eventually tapering and getting them off the glp entirely as the final end goal
It's an honourable goal but the evidence isn't great for that
> You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow
You don't have to. Should though.
When the drugs are working as intended, you'll lose weight without 'trying' to improve your diet, exercise will speed up the weight loss, but isn't strictly necessary for it to "work". Encouraged, sure, but you'll get weight loss from the appetite suppression alone.
The 'high protein' advice is because a lot of glp1 consumers had poor diets to begin with, and they're catabolic drugs. Combine that with reduced appetite and you're at risk of insufficient protein consumption to maintain whatever muscle mass you started with.
Because long-term calorie restriction is 100x harder than popping a pill and downing a protein-and-fiber shake, and you can't outrun a burger but you can outlift a calorie deficit, so lumping them all together under "improve diet and exercise somehow" is a nonsensical rhetorical flourish / troll move?
If you are 3-400+ pounds, quickly shedding 100+ pounds makes exercising MUCH easier, and the accompanying loss in appetite will HOPEFULLY teach you better portion sizes. Countless morbidly overweight people have tried for years/decades to lose weight, without success, and GLPs allow them to bootstrap the process.
Yes, CICO, blah blah, but overcoming food addiction by asking people to eat less is like forcing a smoker who wants to quit to work at a cigar bar or something. You can't just not buy food, especially if you have a family you have to feed.
I disagree with the idea that it's "not the moment for plant-based meat". Beyond Meat has a fantastic product that does very well in lots of markets. The problem is that Beyond Meat the company was valued as some sort of once in a generation radical reimagining of the way we eat. Beyond Meat's product is not going to change the world, it's just a good product.
If Beyond Meat had grown organically, instead of raising hundreds of millions of dollars, it would be a great company doing great things today. Instead, it has failed to live up to the unrealistic expectations that were set for it. Beyond Meat is no different than any of the other zirpicorns.
Yup, the product is fine, but there's a reason all the other brands in the freezer aisle aren't raising hundreds of millions of dollars at 100x multiples. Burgers don't scale like smartphone apps.
Here's a comparison - Tyson Foods, best known for their frozen meat, had a revenue of $54.44 billion last year. Their current market cap is $21.77 billion.
Beyond Meat reported an annual revenue of $87.9 million in their 2018 S-1, and post-IPO reached a peak market cap of $14.1 billion.
I think that 'real product' (as opposed to software) companies would actually benefit more from raising capital from equity instead of 'bootstrapping', because of the taxes on retained earnings, which have a disproportionate impact on capital-intensive business. That said, I agree that the P/E multiple on Impossible and Beyond were best described by the descriptors in their respective names...
I feel like AI and "tech" has normalised billions way too much. So even as millions are really a lot we don't even think about those anymore... Crazy crazy world.
The way the market has moved away from valuing "just a good product" (and, by extension, "just a good service", "just a good business", and "just a good employee") is one of the factors destroying life as the developed world has known it for 80 years.
I guess I think of the investors as more representative of "The Market" than the traditional entities (producers, consumers) - which is the whole problem.
100%, a product can't be just good and succeed now. Market's expect something to be "the next thing" or become a failure.
Also, price is always going to be an issue. The US spends billions and billions of dollars supporting the meat industry. The fact meat is cheap is a political choice, which makes direct plant based substitutes a tough financial proposition.
I have the opposite reaction. Beyond Meat is not a good product. It tastes gross.
It's not as good as the meat it's comparing itself against, and it's not as good as the vegetarian options also available in the store, and it's more expensive than either.
Anytime can "be the moment" for plant-based meat if the product technology was there, but it's not.
> it's not as good as the vegetarian options also available in the store
I've tried the beyond burgers, they were alright taste wise, but yeah there's many other options for a protein source.
Beyond Meat was never going to convince people to eat less meat by substituting it for fake burgers and steaks. For people that already eat vegetarian there already tastier sources of protein. Lentils, beans, quinoa, chickpeas, mushrooms, nuts & seeds, etc. All of those have much more flexibility with how you can incorporate them into dishes than a fake slab of "meat."
> more expensive than either.
This is a political problem. In the US animal agriculture receives far more funding than plant-based protein. Without government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would cost closer to $30-$40. We've historically defined food security int he US as "meat and dairy," two of the things we really need to consume less of because of environmental impacts.
But yeah, Beyond Meat wasn't going to get us there. We need real political changes, not fake meat.
I’m ~97% vegetarian but there are a few foods for which traditional vegetarian alternatives are rubbish. One of these is the burger: you either get some odd veg/potato base pattie, a large grilled mushroom, or halloumi. The meat substitute burgers aren’t close to real beef burgers, but they’re far tastier than other vegetarian options.
This is where beyond is doing so well because their burgers really are a lot closer to the real thing.
They're a lot better than a crappy low quality beef burger even, like a McDonald's patty. Not quite as good as a real steakhouse burger, but kinda in between. There's another brand that's about as good, impossible burger. Probably a bit better even but I've never tried them side by side.
The soy and potato varieties yes they're way worse than even McDonald's. They're not even trying to simulate a real burger, just the idea of 'some fried gunk on a bun'. But yeah no.
+1 Burger King has the impossible whopper and it's definitely better than the McDo smash patties (big mac, mcdouble, cheeseburger etc). Obviously different restaurants, so not really making the comparison at the store, but speaking to the levels of conparison.
I really want to know why restaurants keep thinking this is a good alternative. I've never had one that wasn't just a mess to eat, and it's weirdly common to have people think it contains a significant amount of protein. However, I'm very happy with most veg patties, and would love halloumi as an option over Beyond any day.
Many non-vegetarian restaurants don't seem to care about the vegetarian options, and just offer almost default options. It's probably down to the attitude of the chef - similarly to how you can sometimes tell whether the chef is a 'sweet' lover or not, by the relative quality of the main courses vs. the desserts.
I first noticed this years ago when eating out with a (my first?) vegetarian friend in a variety of (omnivorous) restaurants and gastropubs. The number of times he'd have to choose the goats' cheese tart became a running joke.
I disagree, I enjoy beyond and impossible beef and their sausage. I'll often (though not always) opt for it while out because I think it tastes close enough to the real deal and doesn't have the ethical concerns of real meat. I am not vegetarian or vegan, though I do sympathize with their point of view. If bean burgers actually tasted good I might occasionally get those but they're gross
> If bean burgers actually tasted good I might occasionally get those but they're gross
Bean burgers are actually delicious depending on the brand and how you dress them up. It doesn't taste like a smash burger, but if you get a brand that grills up nice and crispy and pair it with a nice spicy mayo, it's legitimately a good burger.
Also, don't sleep on the humble Boca burger which has existed for decades. It's not as good looking as Beyond Beef but I would argue it's better tasting.
Every time I've tried a bean burger, including the boca burger it's always been immensely disappointing. Other people love them, and that's fine, but bean burgers are more burger adjacent than burger substitute. It's a different thing with a different flavor profile, even if it's shaped and styled like a hamburger. Beyond meat though, it's a burger substitute. Tasted so close to real meat that unless it's been undercooked or over salted it's hard to tell a difference.
I feel this way as well. There was a moment in time several years ago where I would see the alt-meat burgers in restaurants and so I would order them from time-to-time because they tasted fine and it didn't kill a cow. Now I hardly see it available, or, if I do, it costs extra.
I think part of the reason they've disappeared from menus is they were setup to fail. Often times the only option for it was just a basic hamburger. Place might have a dozen types of hamburgers but the alt_meat was only an option for the most boring basic cheeseburger
> Lentils, beans, quinoa, chickpeas, mushrooms, nuts & seeds, etc. All of those have much more flexibility
With that flexibility comes inconvenience. With fake meat burgers or sausages I just have to whack the oven on and boil some veg to go alongside. That's family dinner. With lentils I have to s
think more about how to make it tasty for everyone.
I know that there's a lot of reasons for this, but at least in my area, the Beyond Meat products are considerably more expensive than actual animal meat.
I'm sure that's due to depressing subsidies or economies of scale, but regardless of the reason it's kind of hard for me to justify buying something that will taste like a "not-quite-as-good-as-the-thing-half-the-price" burger.
They are pretty good, don't get me wrong, it's just something that I have trouble purchasing.
You know, I am actually having trouble substantiating that.
I was just parroting what I heard but doing a search I found a bunch of posts claiming that subsidies don’t actually affect the price that much, and I cannot find a primary source for the $30/pound figure I have always heard.
As a vegetarian that regularly uses plant-based substitutes: I'm super reluctant to believe a market for a product like Beyond ever existed. Between Beyond and Impossible they've got this weird chimera market, especially the latter, with their too-realistic product. If meaters cared they'd switch, there wasn't really a whole lot of fence sitting I don't think—not in reality. I think people were pretty well committed. I also think the sympathetic market of vegetarians and vegans didn't find the premise of these too-realistic products especially thrilling. And I don't think that's a huge market in the first place, at least not in a large portion of the US.
Then you factor in the costs and it's Beyond insanity.
And frankly I don't know if Beyond was doing anything legitimately novel. Impossible was over-engineering their burger to the extent that I wouldn't eat one from any restaurant because I couldn't tell whether it was be'f or beef. Beyond just seemed to be nu-gardein which I'll grant you—it's a Monsanto subsidiary—but the product is palettable, consistent, and available almost universally and has been as long as I've been on the diet, 12 years.
I can think of reasons they would need to diversify or collapse that relate to regulatory capture of the FDA by the current U.S. administration. Better some business that maintains continuity through hostile times than to collapse and see their future evaporate.
I think there was a fallacy that suddenly the whole of the general public would rush to stop eating meat and would accept a meat-like substitute; and that vegetarians craved something that tasted like meat.
This of course was completely false, but far too many people let themselves get caught up in hype instead of reason.
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I remember having an excellent veggie burger at a bar, and then when I went back a year later, it was replaced by Beyond or Impossible, and the bar tender was pretty open about how it was gross but their distributor pushed it on them. That of course pissed off the vegetarians who didn't like meat and had no desire for a meat-like substitute.
Proprietary food.. that you can only buy from a single company are all doomed? Might I offer an example that, under some definitions, has not failed despite that strategy. The McRib.
I was going to offer the twinkie but I guess hostess declared bankruptcy, so maybe you're right.
It's not an unreasonable statement though that for the concept to work it has to "jellybean" though: many manufacturers, many variations, same basic product, ubiquitous availability.
Where it sits as a "premium" good doesn't really work as a value proposition.
Nevermind all of the specialty foods across the globe. Products made from basic ingredients and labeled to sell are everywhere. What exactly are you referring to?
I don't. I don't know where you live, but unless it's on a farm, branded foods are obviously not a US-only phenomenon. Anything even remotely processed will be based on proprietary recipes. Regular meat burgers and sausages are just as "proprietary" as Beyond Meat ones, let alone foods like candy bars or snacks. Do you think Snickers bars are not proprietary?
Bread, cheese etc have names that says what it is that is unrelated to brand. That is the normal way for most products, a minority of products in the grocery stores I visit are brand only, most things you can get essentially the same from another brand. Exception would be sodas and candy and such, but that is a tiny fraction of what people buy.
Its like when I go to a pizza place I can get the same pizzas regardless where I go even though they are all independent, the recipe for most things people eat in the world are not secrets, its stuff anyone can make and sell.
I always wondered who their demographic was. The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver (never mind issues surrounding industrial agriculture). Health-conscious folks would take one look at the ingredient list and bail because of the heavy processing and industrial fillers. You've got bodybuilders and athletes skipping it because it lacks the micronutrient density and bioavailability of real animal protein. Everyday folks aren't exactly lining up to pay a "green premium" for something that tastes almost like a burger but costs more and offers less. It feels like they built a product for a tiny, hyper-specific niche: people who desperately crave the experience of a fast-food patty but have an ideological dealbreaker with meat, while being well off enough that finances aren't carefully managed and loose enough in their convictions that a burger-joint is still ok. It always seemed like an odd propsition to me, even if cool in some ways.
Beyond Meat aren't unique, there are dozens of brands offering the same product. Tens of millions of people eat these type of products. Any (or most) burger-serving restaurant in Europe will have a Beyond Meat or equivalent on the menu. They're not always advertised as vegan (because of preparation and extras) but these fake burgers are very popular, for many reasons.
At the time it was a unique product. My alternatives reminded me more of basically black-bean patties than beef. Then impossible meat did it better, industry decided there was money in this direction, and now there’s “or equivalent” everywhere.
In my part of the world, a burger is a type of sandwhich, and the definition doesn't require meat. So it's a burger whether it contains beef, fish, chicken, a vegan patty, a large slice of tomato, or whatever.
What part of the world, and how recently? Sure a burger is a sandwich, likely being a spin off of Hamburg steak.
Given all sandwiches, what in your part of the world makes a sandwich a burger? I think for many of us it's a ground patty. If said patty isn't meat, yes we might say that is fake as in an imitation of the original. It's not a negative thing.
> What part of the world, and how recently? Sure a burger is a sandwich, likely being a spin off of Hamburg steak.
The 95.8% of the world population that isn't in the US. This is simple to deduce because everywhere else calls "a piece of fried chicken in a burger bun" a "chicken _burger_". Only the US calls it a "chicken sandwich". Some of Canada might now use the latter through US influence - any Canadians here?
KFC is a representative example, they call them "KFC chicken sandwich" only in the US, "burgers" effectively everywhere else.
I suspect Commonwealth or Asia. Is your definition of sandwich cold things between sliced bread and burger hot things in a bun?
A piece of hot chicken between bread in Italy would likely be a panino, france a sandwich, spain a bocadillo, Portugal sandes, Japan a sando, mexico a torta, Argentina a sanguche.
I think you overestimate how many people use burger for things that don't refer to the American concept. A lot of cultures have hot sandwiches and thus (ham)burger is often distinctly the American concept of a ground beef patty. Where this breaks down outside of the Commonwealth is often from cultures without things in bread that got exposed to the generic burger via fast food chain terminology. Not surprising there.
That's a really good point. Maybe in part because Beyond had a highly visible IPO they became the poster child for the success or failure of meat alternatives but in reality their story is pretty much just their own story.
being an ethical vegan does not mean you like the taste of plants (or, at least, that you don't miss the taste of meat). I'm veg and very much miss having access to meat.
I'm an occasional buyer of their product, but the issue for me is just the versatility. It's really only a replacement for the most generic ways to prepare a burger/sausage. The moment you try to use the ground beef in, say, a chili recipe, it's a totally mis-matched flavor
Based on my bubble, vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters that do want to decrease their meat consumption.
At this point, in Germany at least, discounter brands like Lidl and Aldi have beaten Beyond Meat at their game though. They produce alternatives that taste as good or better, for significantly less money.
Yeah, I never understood what Beyond's core innovation was. Impossible had that whole synthetic heme thing going on. Beyond seemed almost like opportunistic mimicry. But Impossible turned out to be pretty expensive IIRC.
Aldi in Germany might be very different for all I know, but I've been vegan or vegetarian my entire adult life and I think every burger alternative besides Beyond/Impossible is quite awful, though I usually don't eat meat alternatives in the first place.
In my opinion as a mostly-vegetarian who used to adore burgers as a kid, the Impossible brand was by far the most realistic (and my beef-loving partner would agree, they made stroganoff with it and loved it)... but the price truly is ridiculous at this point. It started out just barely justifiable, and it's simply too high now.
I am more than a little bit outraged that animals who were raised in miserable industrial production facilities to meet an ugly end are having their parts sold for less than a decent alternative simply because of subsidies distorting the market.
Agree. Impossible is on a different planet in terms of being very very close to the taste of real meat. Unfortunately still premium priced.
It’s a pity that Beyond is getting so much attention because they’re not the best ambassadors for meat alternatives. People will try it, and then decide to wait another 5 years before trying again.
If I look at walmart right now, they have Impossible 'ground beef' for $9/lb and real ground beef is more than $7/lb. So the price isn't too high everywhere.
Beyond was available well before Impossible was. I used a combination of Beyond and Boca as my primary substitutes for ground beef, until Impossible came along, and now I use almost exclusively Impossible.
I don't feel like they have a niche anymore, but there was a time I considered them my top choice, before impossible dethroned them.
I still eat impossible sausage as a substitute for pork and find it pretty dang good. I grew up in appalachia so we know our pork sausage and impossible seasoned well comes close.
I have been vegan for 12 years. It is not that hard to make vegan burger patties at home. Or you can just cut up a block of tofu and season it to be eaten in a burger. Takes about the same time or less to cook as these Beyond grease fests. Besides there is so many cheaper alternatives these days that I very rarely buy them.
We don’t need meat alternatives. Vegan diet is cardiovascularly extremely healthy, seems to protect against most cancers, tastes good and is most importantly ethically and environmentally only viable option at this point. It’s pretty cheap as well, tofu, lentils and veggies are not exactly expensive even without all the gazillion subsidiaries pumped into meat production. [Of course your vegan diet can consist of eating only canned soda and potato chips and that is not healthy nor cheap, but the problem there is that you are a moron, not that you are vegan].
So the problem with meat alternatives is that you don’t really need them and if you want burger patties etc. you can make them at home pretty easily or these days buy cheaper alternatives sold in most supermarkets.
This was someone equating a chopped up tofu pattie with Beyond Meat, e.g. totally out of touch with the target market. Random ass food delivered via hamburger bun does not make it a hamburger analog, but Beyond, Impossible, etc do.
I get where you are coming from. I try to buy unprocessed as much as possible, but there are days where I want something that I could do myself or buy premade from the grocery store. On days like that, I'm glad I have the option to buy premade even if my self-made version tastes better, is healthier, and often cheaper.
Besides that, its a good tool to get the general omnivore to reduce meat consumption. A friend of mine does eat meat but is lowering her consumption of it. Having a convenient alternative that she doesn't have to think about and can just get prepackaged helped her half her meat consumption in a effectively a few weeks.
Vegan for 15 years. I cook 95% of my own meals, including black bean burgers, tofu, etc... Sometimes I want something that tastes like meat and I reach for a Beyond or Impossible burger. I don't need it. But I can't recreate its texture and flavor profile on my own. It's not "better" than other things I can cook. It's just different.
I love meat and I love good hamburgers. I’ve tried those Lidl and Aldi alternatives and they were uneatable for me and my family. They have slowly disappeared from the shelves. Only a couple of products remain.
I have never tried BeyondMeat but I’d be surprised that it’s so bad.
And I have eaten many classic vegan burger alternatives based on lentils, peas and chickpeas. They didn’t aim to taste like meat and were actually edible.
My vegetarian friends can now go to a restaurant (or better example yet, any event space like sports event or theme park, since having a veggie burger is pretty easy to check a box and satisfy dietary restrictions) and get any of the burger offerings on the menu with a beyond patty. Before that, the vegetarian option of only resort was often much more depressing and unsubstantial.
Reading this somewhat reminds me how the Gluten Free trend led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac.
Still, one wonders does “buying a fake burger at the ball park with my friends” translate to actual fandom and further consumption or is it just a a captive consume picking the least-worst option.
It is the latter. For a few of them they swear off impossible and tolerate beyond or vice versa. And of course some restaurants with their own bean burger formulations are sometimes whiffs but also other times completely blow any fake meat option out of the water.
> led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac.
Did it really? I have hear some complaints that before "gluten free" meant it doesn't contain those allergens at all and now it only means "there are no grains on ingredient list". And with amount of cross-contamination in food industry that is nowhere near enough for people with allergy.
i actually miss black bean burgers being more common. now it seems like all you can find are beyond/impossible burgers at restaurants. i don't mind em once or twice a year but they knock me out more than melatonin so i usually avoid them.
Thats the thing... Really really good vegetarian and vegan food tastes amazing and is filling. And unless you're intentionally picking around for meat or meat products, you're not going to notice.
A lot of Indian/Brahmin food is exactly that. Its insanely delicious.
And we have Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat(is that the name?). Both instead of going "vegetarian done well is superb" went to "sorry its a sad reminder of a hamburger". And thats a problem. Nobody wants to be reminded that this is $10/lb and real hamburger is $5/lb.
Ive also had problems with other 'meat substitues'. They're almost always plasticy or fake tasting, or chemically off.
Whereas my tofu saag is delicious. And no meet or cheese needed... Although my favorite is saag paneer (cheese). I stay away from the fake-almost-but-not-quite foods.
I'm like technically the exact demographic they should be chasing. Plant based eater who loves the taste of meat and just stopped eating it for ethical reasons. But like, I'm not gonna eat a heavily processed food often for the reasons stated above, and also it's just not great nutritionally compared to Seitan, which also actually just tasted better when prepared right. And it also doesn't stack up compared to high protein / extra firm tofu, which is incredible for cooking when frozen and then defrosted and cooked. And also made of soybeans, one of the cheapest food commodities in the world. So why would I pay 2x or 3x the amount of money for a drastically inferior product? Just when I want an exact burger replica, and once you are plant based for 3 or more years, you just don't really crave that anymore except as maybe a guilty pleasure once or twice a year.
So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.
I haven’t done a comparison of Beyond vs seitan for their nutritional value, but as someone who used to eat a lot more seitan I gleefully moved over to Beyond/Impossible. Seitan is packed full of gluten, which is much harder to digest. Seitan makes me uncomfortably bloated whereas Beyond/Impossible do not. And no, I don’t have a gluten “intolerance” or Celiac.
Seitan has 3x-5x the protein of beyond meat by weight. It sucks that your body processes it less. For me it’s usually a treat, and I’ve never noticed any digestive issues despite having issues with more whole wheat things (beer, more natural whole wheat breads).
I’m glad you like the beyond meat though. Good for them to have actual consistent customers for the 2x / year I end up eating it!
I feel like fast food is a pretty big market for stuff like this. Burger King in New Zealand has had plant based alternatives to the whopper and chicken burger on the menu for > 1 year now so it must be doing ok. I'm not even vegetarian and I get them sometimes, they're pretty good (especially the chicken one - they changed the recipe a while ago and it's now practically indistinguishable from the real chicken option, although that probably says more about their standard chicken than it does about the meat free option).
There's no premium for the plant based versions I don't think (or if there is it's small enough that I never noticed), and I think you're underestimating how many vegans/vegetarians still want junk food.
This is the insight that most people need but will never have, empathy for other living things seems to be greatly lacking amongst the general population.
I don't think that's a fair framing of the problem because it focuses on empathy towards the animals while forgetting the empathy towards the humans.
Going vegan is not a zero-cost choice. It can be difficult, expensive, and in some cases even impossible due to health issues. Some users here complain about the meat subsidies without acknowledging that meat is pretty great when you're in the bottom of the economic pyramid and need food that's cheap, quick, and will provide a fair nutritional value.
I don't think you can live in a modern city without supporting some type of cruelty, as most phones and clothes alone would already be a no-go. It's not that people don't have empathy, but rather that there's only so much one can do in a day and one has to pick their battles. If you want to dedicate extra time and energy into animal well-being that's great, but let's not point the finger at those who lack those extra resources as if it were an individual moral failing.
You make a valid point, but my comment wasn't about resources, it was about empathy. Factory farming isn't sustained by poverty, it's sustained by indifference. The majority of people who could easily choose alternatives simply don't think about it.
I grew up in a poor household and we were vegetarian, because we saw animals as living things with feelings, not commodities whose pain and suffering is meaningless.
I agree you can't live without some level of cruelty, but you can certainly live without contributing to one of its most obvious forms.
I guess for people like me. I eat meat, and I eat burgers. I can't speak for Beyond Meat, but when at restaurants, the Impossible Burger often tastes better than the real beef (likely because the former is pre-seasoned).
There are plenty of meat eaters who want to eat these as a way to cut down their meat consumption. They don't want to become vegetarians, though.
> The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver
Why not? I think there's a false conflation of veganism and health food (and gluten-free, though that's not relevant in this discussion). I love burgers, and fried chicken, and crappy chicken nuggets, but I don't want more animals to have to suffer for my sake than is necessary. I disagree on how hyper-specific that niche is.
IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.
> IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.
This is the real problem. Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now. $38 billion dollars in the US each year to subsidize meat and dairy, but only $17 million goes to fruit and vegetable farmers. It's completely backwards, especially considering the climate impact on meat and dairy farming.
Im calling BS on the $30-$40 a pound beef because ive raised my own cows for personal consumption and even if I paid myself $20 an hour for every second I spent with my cows, and assumed my alfalfa field usage could produce an expensive cash crop without fertilizer, and completely ignored the opportunity loss of only caring for 1-2 cows instead of 30+, that is still a cost WAY above what my beef costs.
Without taking a side, you've skipped every step past the field here. Transportation, butchering, packaging, and grocery store shelves, with profit margins, health / sanitation checks, and shrinkage at every step
not sure where the GP lives but in Canada even beef raised for personal consumption needs to meet most of those things you've listed, aside from grocery-related, and as someone who's bought directly from the producer (with 3rd party butchering) the price is not substantially lower than retail; scale likely makes up for a lot of the commercial supply chain costs.
Don't forget the massive costs of lobbying governments to weaken regulations and reduce inspections and also the costs of bribing meat inspectors, and the legal expenses and lawyer fees required to defend themselves from lawsuits surrounding their illegal activities, then also the millions in fines they have to pay to settle lawsuits they lose about their bribing of meat inspectors or colluding to drive wages down or whatever other illegal thing they got caught doing. You can bet all those costs increase the prices we pay.
We do things at industrial scale because that saves money. If a local butcher could pay a relatively tiny amount for direct cow shipping, save multiple steps, and sell the meat for 60% of the grocery store price, they'd instantly be booming with business.
It means that when AngryData "skips every step past the field" they didn't save any notable money by doing so. Their beef costs more than unsubsidized industrial beef would cost, so when they call BS on $30-40 that is a valid call.
I still have to transport and pay for butchering and packaging myself which is done in a certified facility with sanitation checks. Oh sure grocery stores have to make a profit, but they also get better deals than I do for both transportation and butchering because they deal in bulk.
I believe it. Every summer we buy goat or lamb imported from Australia/New Zealand. It's usually less than $15/lb. Those two countries barely provide any subsidies for their farmers, and the meat is cheaper than my local farmers, even with their strict biosecurity regulations.
Even doctors who cater to the remote areas where farmers dwell get extra payments from our governments.
Very common in the United States, too.
There are a lot of doctors who get their student loans reduced or paid off by state and local governments in exchange for working a certain number of years in less-desirable locations. I've worked with a number of them.
Yeah, it's absolute nonsense. I'm paying $34/kg for direct-to-consumer beef in Australia, a country with some of the lowest agricultural subsidies in the world, including delivery and at a premium markup, during a time that beef prices have hit a historical high due to processor capacity, and I'm getting prime cuts and roasts too, not just mince.
>Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now
Source? That seems implausibly high.
Using your $38B/year subsidy figure gets us $112/year in subsidies per American. There's no way you can get $30 unsubsidized price from that unless you think the average American only eats beef once a week.
Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.
Average includes vegans, and I'm pretty sure they eat it less than once per week. It’s just how much meat divided by population. The previous comment shows that the consumption is not anywhere close to equally distributed.
That doesn't really make sense, though, as rice — one of the main ingredients in the aforementioned product — receives the highest subsidy rate in the USA. A Beyond Meat burger should be cheaper than a meat burger thanks to subsidies.
The key difference between the old vegans and the new vegans is hiding in plain sight. It's the Internet. It used to be that vegans went to vegan restaurants and had their own particular tradition of vegan cookery. People didn't just become vegan in isolation like they do today. The acculturated vegans still exist and I think that's who gp is referring to in that statement. The Internet vegans are different but they aren't that numerous — few people even today would make such a change in their life based on something they read online.
Despite being a vegetarian and former vegan, this is not me wading into this debate to defend the figure provided by the OP of the original comment, but this is usually the source for the statistic AFAIK: https://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/CopyofFINALSavi...
Regardless, it goes without saying (from other, more well-sourced research) that the disparity of subsidies and government assistance provided to industries that ultimately exist to produce meat compared to industries that produce fruit/vegetables is fucking absurd.
I'm struggling to understand the point you're trying to make well enough to know how to respond, other than to say vegan cooking traditions continue to exist and existed before the internet (though there were fewer vegans at the time)
People did indeed become vegan in isolation before the internet, just as they do today.
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to draw between "old vegans" and "new vegans", and how do you see it pertaining to this conversation (especially under a comment pointing out that plant-based burgers struggle to compete with traditional beef because of beef subsidies)?
Yeah, I generally think people make adult diet choices on their own.
People regularly cut out meat, alcohol, sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine, fats, etc. based on things they’ve read, moral considerations, medical recommendations, and personal health observations, not because they’ve joined a community that eschews such things.
There’s plenty of vegetarians due to ethical or cultural reasons that never acquired the taste for traditional plant based foods and are looking for a more substantial, protein heavy alternative.
Is it niche? Yes, but vegetarians were always niche.
While the late 2010s fixated on “protein” and “macros” - allowing products like Beyond or Soylent to shine.
Much of the health discourse around the 2020s has focused on quality of the ingredients and “processed foods”. So naturally Beyond is caught on the crossfire.
Is there a future where this stuff is proven to be better for you in the short and long term? I sure hope so. But there’s way too many unknowns right now and it’s expensive to boot.
I actually like Beyond Meat patties, but I eat maybe a half-dozen "fake meat" burgers per year - that's not going to sustain a competitor when Americans eat an average of 3 beef burgers per week.
There's no reason ethical vegans wouldn't go for ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat just isn't a great option, it's expensive and not good enough to justify it. The selling point for them seems to be that they taste more like meat than most meat substitutes but as someone who has been vegan for a while that doesn't matter to me (unless I'm trying to match a non-vegan recipe). I get Morningstar Farms products vastly more often than Beyond Meat ones. Beyond and Impossible are maybe like my 4th and 5th most bought meat imitation brands and it's not like those other brands are less salty or processed. Idk why I only ever hear non-vegans mention Beyond and Impossible.
Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste.
Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty. So from a health conscious point of view, it's a decent substitute.
Then there are the people who just want to reduce their meat consumption overall. Maybe they're not vegan or vegetarian, but they're trying to watch their saturated fat intake, or reduce their carbon impact, or they suffer from gout and are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat to ease that.
Sometimes you just want to go out with your friends for a burger, and the Beyond patty can make a better substitute than a black bean or mushroom patty that used to be common.
And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat. I have, for a long time, done a low meat diet; I don't avoid it entirely, but I try not to eat it at every meal. It provides a nice alternative for that.
Is it a bit of a niche market? Sure. But, not every product needs to be for everyone.
> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it
I just did a quick search on Uber Eats in NYC. Every Beyond Burger I found was between $3-5 more than a regular burger. That’s the reason I stopped eating them, I actually quite like the texture and flavor. I just don’t like the price.
I never buy beyond/impossible at restaurants because of this.
I often have some at home and instead of having two red meat burgers have one and one of these, occasionally when they go on sale at Costco I’ll buy a bunch.
I am not vegan or vegetarian but do seek ways to reduce my red meat intake which years ago was grilling ribeyes 4-5 nights a week. I was unreasonably unhealthy and having alternate options helped balance my health out over the long run. I like both beyond burgers and impossible. I wish they were cheaper than hamburger meat, when I compare to buying hamburger meat in bulk it’s still more expensive at this point
So you've decided it's more ethical it not be born or live at all. Obviously the only reason beef cattle exist at all is because we eat them.
It doesn't seem such a clear cut ethical decision to me. Certainly there are some forms of raising livestock that are terrible (broiler chickens come to mind), but there are other forms that actually seem quite pleasant for the animals most of the time (e.g. free-range cattle).
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
Uhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
But the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
It doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.)
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
the issue with wild meat is going to be all parasites in the animal, at least according to friends who hunt (and when they managed to get something, which doesn't seem to be a given).
About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
Hardly anyone is eating raw flesh of the animal they just hunted down, so no, there's not going to be many studies to find, because approximately no one has been eating non-processed food for the past several thousands of years. Not even the "health conscious" folks so deathly afraid of the sin of "processing"; they just don't realize that washing and cutting and boiling are sins too.
> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
No, if anything plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet.
Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.
Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.
You could kill a stray! Or is it better to have someone else handle that "natural" part, or would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
Since when have vegans used dog meat in a xenophobic way? The entire point of the dog meat comparison is to highlight that meat consumption is cultural and that other cultures eat animals we consider to not be food even though they are an animal that has equivalent intelligence to animals we do eat.
Dogs are the perfect example, not because of xenophobia, but because they are such a plain example of hypocrisy that can be refuted on every point.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way, presenting it as an absurd choice that is meant to demonstrate the supposed depravity of meat eaters, even though it's wholly a cultural preference. Enough of this Motte and Bailey crap.
Of course xenophobia is nothing new to most internet veganists, their whole thing is being intolerant to the culture of billions of people around the world, so a little additional intolerance to a few Asian countries (and a few Swiss people) probably seems like no biggie.
That's patently absurd. For almost every vegan, Veganism is predicated on the belief that all animal lives should be treated equally, that there is no difference between livestock and pets except cultural!
Saying that dog meat is an example of "depravity of meat eaters" makes no sense because the "depravity of meat eaters" is demonstrable... with any meat? That's the entire point of veganism! If a vegan believes that meat eaters are depraved, they believe they are depraved whether they eat cats, dogs, cows or pigs.
You may find some xenophobic people who are vegans but what you're much more likely to find is meat eaters who think that eating dog meat in Wuhan is depraved while eating pigs in New York is totally acceptable. Who do you think is signing the "end dog meat" petitions? Western meat eaters!
I have personally never met a vegan in person or online who thought that dog meat was more depraved than pig meat. The go to argument that vegans make is that pigs and dogs are of equivalent intelligence, that you could raise a pig as you raise a dog and have the same bond. Framing the dog meat argument as xenophobic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and requires either a wilful ignorance or... I don't know. I cannot even understand how you contorted yourself into believing this.
This seems off to me... Curious why you are so avidly against veganism? Most of them are not doing any harm to others, would you be against a charity that aimed to reduce harm to children?
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
I'm a bit of a fence sitter so I might actually be their target market. Very athletic, a bit health concious but not crazy about it in regards to diet. If I am eating out, usually my macros are not a big part of decision making. If there is a meatless option that might actually be good for a bit of a fibre boost, considering all the other protein I am intaking.
It's important to remember also that not athletic individuals are high achieving bodybuilders with super strict macro diets. Most other sports only require a moderate attention to diet, especially at an amateur level. Bodybuilding is very diet focused, rather than strength and skill focused.
Like all burgers this is a high protein, low fiber food option. It probably has more in common with your protein shake, being high in pea and other proteins but also has a high amount of sodium. This is a splurge food like any burger is. If you are looking for fiber, vegetables have them. Also impossible burgers taste better as they smell like coconuts instead of peas when they are cooked.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I seriously doubt that health-conscious people would pick hyper-processed plants that are meant to resemble meat over plain meat+bread+vegetables that make up a non-fast-food hamburger.
"they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty"
If you buy a Beyond patty, it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store. Comparing it with a fast food burger isn't really fair.
You asked "Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?"
My point was that groceries in general don't matter, only burgers. Some people almost never eat burgers at home and eat them exclusively at places like Burger King.
I've never eaten a beyond burger or anything like that at home. At home the improvement in flavour over tofu or just beans isn't worth it. I can get flavour from herbs spices and other ingredients. I've only ever eaten beyond burgers at restaurants.
>it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store
We're not comparing fairly here. A finished hamburger patty is not pure ground beef. Did you ever make a hamburger patty yourself? You add salt and spices at a minimum.
A more fair comparison would be looking at store-bought hamburger patties. That's the same category of food.
I just compared Beyond (0.75g salt per 100g) and block house American Burger (0.88g per 100g). The patties are somewhat similar in weight, too (113g and 125g). So both in absolute, and weight relative amounts the Beyond burger has less sodium.
You don't need salt and spices to make a burger, it can be 100% beef with no additives. A pinch of salt can be like 0.3g/burger and you're fine as well.
I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g
Still meat is very low sodium, it is weird to say plant based alternatives have less sodium since both have as much salt as you add since there is almost none naturally.
But then you're comparing apples an oranges: meat is low in sodium in its unprocessed form, but so are all the ingredients of the plant-based alternative before adding salt.
What matters is not so much the natural form, it is how the product is typically consumed.
But of course I see your point that with home made meat-based patties, you are in control of how much salt you want to add, while with factory made patties, you have to take what you get, it's typically not possible to "take away" salt. Mind you, though, the latter argument holds for both plant-based and meat-based factory-made patties.
Did you get the point about how you usually season meat (with salt) before you eat it? Beyond Beef has 230mg of sodium per 100g (according to their website), even a pinch of salt you add for seasoning easily contains 10x that amount.
Also, do you expect the vegan alternative to have exactly the same nutritional values as their meat counterparts?
Look, I don't even know why I'm defending Beyond here, I'm certainly not a fan (as a matter of fact, I don't like their beef patties). But I think the arguments you've made are not entirely fair.
The sodium content is about 3x higher. It doesn't taste 3x higher.
If you're salting your recipe with traditional ground beef, you're doing the same with Beyond. If not, same.
I do not expect or even encourage the content of any alternative to match the nutritional value of the real deal.
A typical pinch of salt is 300mg. Not 2300mg.
When the base product has 3x as much sodium, that is a problem. It doesn't need that much because as you stated, you can add salt during cooking. As a great example, let's take a use case for Beyond which is taco meat. I add taco seasoning (my own which is about 30% sodium compared to a traditional) and now the Beyond version is still roughly 250% the sodium content.
I can't remove the sodium they add. It's not a product I like or desire. It's more expensive. It's less healthy (note how often I mention reduced salt) for myself.
Also, I have been a strict vegan in life for about 5 years. I still didn't eat Beyond (aside from tasting it) during that period (it was available).
I'm not really trying to attack Beyond here, it's all personal preference at the end of the day. I make 95% of my food, from bread to tomato sauce to pickled peppers and hot sauce. When I am reaching for a vegan protein, I reach for lentils.
The difference is you CAN'T get Beyond meat to make patties without preservative-levels of sodium. You CAN get ground beef and make patties without preservative-levels of sodium.
I was going to edit the comment with this but in Canada we have a company called Metro(grocer) and they often sell 4x fresh beef patties for ~$4 which is 1lb(454g) of ground beef and exactly nothing else.
It's good to eat sans salt on bbq with your desired (typically salty) toppings.
I know people salt the patty while cooking, but the topic at hand is Beyond and their patties.
I remember working in a restaurant many years ago, where it was part of new hire training to demonstrate the importance of salt and pepper to a burger's taste. We would make 3 burgers, one no seasoning, one poorly seasoned, and one properly seasoned to the spec, and then we would taste test them all. The difference in taste was so night and day I was shocked the first time I participated in the test. Yeah I guess you don't technically need salt and spices, but not adding them or using just a pinch is not the same thing at all.
I have made burgers hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never done more than roll ground beef into a ball ans squish it flat. Salt and spices are completely unnecessarily, who am I, Gordon Ramsey? Sliced onion on top of the patty does plenty of work.
You are comparing a prepared product to a raw ingredient. Raw beef is pretty boring which is why every single restaurant add some combination of salt, pepper, mayo, ketchup, mustard, oil, butter, gochujang, etc to make it into food. If you want to convince the world to eat unseasoned beef and onion burgers be my guest but you have a tougher hill to climb than the vegetarians. Eat what makes you happy, but maybe acknowledge it's not actual cooking.
You can make an awesome burger pattie with beef, onion, garlic, a touch of finely chopped jalapeno and some herbs and spices etc. You don't need to add salt.
I believe the claim being made here is that "a beyond burger" is a thing which fast food chains and supermarkets will offer as an alternative to "a beef burger", that almost nobody will make their own burgers.
I have no opinion about the economics of the brand itself; as a vegetarian I've always thought they were over-priced, and also that it was a shame I don't have a huge range of alternatives, as I actually like spicy bean burgers and can't find them any more*. In fact, because of the limited alternatives in my local markets, I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans.
* I don't know how much of this is "bean burgers are no longer popular" vs. "I moved country and Berlin has never heard of them"; for Quorn I do at least know it's the latter.
People who make their own burgers will always make healthy burgers, whether meat or vegan.
People who buy burgers or eat out are likely to get less healthy burgers, if you look at highest selling supermarket burgers, both meat and vegan options are ALL high in salt for example.
which is much more easily explained by a garbage diet, no preventative medicine so to speak of, obesity, work/family/financial stress. there is a lot of space between 2100 mg of sodium for a 3 piece chicken w/ fries, and ~150 mg to put a little life into a patty.
This whole thread is talking about BeyondMeat burgers.
If you're comparing the healthiness of a premade vegan burger patty, you need to compare it to a premade (or equivalent homemmade) beef patty. You can't take salt out of the beef patty comparison and say "look it's better"
Edit: But you can compare it to actual products on shelves. The first frozen burger brand I can think of that would be a good comparison is frozen Bubba burger. If we compare the sodium content, Beyond patty is 3-4x higher in sodium. Beef wins! :) Although Beyond has half the fat.
Pure soy doesn't taste too good in my experience. I tend to prep the dehydrated stuff I get with (ironically) soy sauce, which is quite salty, plus whatever else the recipe I'm using the soy in calls for. In the case of soy burgers, that mince needs some binding agent.
"Loaded with sodium" is what the agrolobby wants you to think. If you knew what goes into supermarket burger patties I guarantee you would never want to touch them ever again. Look up nitrates for starter, which is used as a preservative in some meat products: burgers, hotdogs, cold cuts.
It’s ultra processed food devoid of micronutrients with low quality protein and poor bioavailability.
Health conscious folks would definitely not choose this. In fact, it’s all the things you try to avoid as soon as you start being health conscious. Folks who want to believe they are being health conscious may be convinced via marketing to buy it, but anyone seriously invested in their nutrition would steer very clear of these.
Maybe they're hoping there exists a non-crazy subset of "health conscious" population, i.e. people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin, who don't see food manufacturing plants as temples of Satan, and are otherwise health conscious and not just playing the fitness fad social games.
They must be panicly afraid of salt and saturated fat instead then, since that was OP's argument for "health conscious". Yet still insist on a simulacrum of a burger, instead of having a chicken breast.
This product will only succeed if its reasonably cheaper than the cheapest meat (not just beef). It is and forever will be inferior to meat as a food product for the vast majority of consumers. Perhaps in some vision of the future the dominant consumer is Hindu and they may find the product acceptable, but they'll still be price conscious.
There are different classes of food processing, with very different properties.
The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such processed food in an incorrect way, by making food that has an unbalanced composition, for instance food that has too much sugar.
On the other hand, the food processing methods that cause irreversible transformations of food, i.e. mixing various ingredients and/or using certain food treatments, e.g. heating, are quite likely to have harmful effects on food quality, when they are done in an industrial setting, instead of being done at home. The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. So any useless or even harmful ingredients will be used if those reduce the production cost, as long as the food still looks appetizing and it has a good taste provided e.g. by excessive sugar, salt and bad quality fat.
So the problem is less that food processing methods are bad per se. The problem is that most producers of processed food cannot be trusted to use processing methods that are good for the customer, instead of being good only for the producer. Now there are a lot of regulations that prevent some of the most harmful methods of food adulteration that were used in the past, but they are still not severe enough to ensure that every producer makes healthy food.
> The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost.
Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but it's not all evil either. They also care about appeasing regulators in countries where food regulations exist, and they may care a bit personally since they themselves and/or their family is eating that too, so I wouldn't necessarily paint them as completely disconnected from the rest of society.
Now, on the other hand, the industrial producers have a few more things going in their favor, such as they actually have quality control metrics, and they are in actual position to make good on caring about food. Home kitchens are not, regular people have neither knowledge nor appreciation of the complex chemistry involved, and even if they did, the equipment used in home kitchens is too crude to allow for consistent quality (not that we can hope for any with no supply chain control either).
(The slightly-fancy restaurants are arguably the worst - they combine all the bad incentives of a high-volume, low-margin commercial operation, with equipment and setup inadequate to guarantee any kind of process quality control. Contrast that with e.g. McDonald's - they may be serving mediocre food at best, but they do it with engineering precision, and you can be sure they aren't just microwaving you an old chicken breast and adding burn marks with an electric grill to make it look like you'd expect for a $50 menu item with a name written in French.)
So the irony is, the industrial producers may have misaligned incentives, but they're also the only ones in position to deliver actually healthy and quality food. Regular people have neither knowledge nor equipment for that, and all the "healthy eating" fads abusing real scientific terms and imbuing them with quasi-religious meaning is not helping. In reality, people just eat stuff and make up stories they don't even verify to feel good with their choices. Which, like with other such belief systems, is fine, until they believe their own stories so much they try to force others to believe in them too.
Listing "risk factors" without quantifying them is useless waste of readers' time, but even then, "diet" is only one of eight listed, with three others being the obvious ones - alcohol, smoking, and low physical activity/obesity (arguably those should be two separate ones).
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The chart you linked only talks about incidence ratio, and is more than adequately explained by improvements in access to tests, quality of tests, as well as improvements in healthcare in general, as people don't suffer and die today from what they did up to few decades ago - or anything else, really, since the world has been steadily improving across the board in every dimension.
In fact, non-linear effects of population growth alone could explain that chart: people talk more, including about colon cancer, so over time, more people in the population with access to testing would go test themselves after being made aware of the potential problem, biasing the sample.
Or, more fundamentally, the fact that medicine graduated from voodoo to proper science only around 100 years ago, would explain it too, because we're less than a century into doing proper studies about anything at all.
Strange, every single source I can find blame diets and lifestyles, but you might be right and everyone else is wrong, we just "talk more about it"... you have a good source of copium my friend
It's easy to blame diets and lifestyles because you don't have to be specific, and if reality disagrees with your hypothesis, you can claim the victim didn't hold their lifestyle or diet right. Diet/exercise are the ultimate "fuck off" advice.
I haven’t been eating processed foods for several decades now. Just because it’s trendy at the moment doesn’t make it wrong, nor does it make those who abstrain game players.
I would say veganism is more trendy at the moment. That doesnt discredit anything about the vegan diet.
Health conscious ethical vegan here. I eat these fairly often. The protein content is fine. I get micronutrients from other sources. I track all my calories and macros, every single day. My diet is perfectly balanced, thanks very much.
Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Health conscious vege here, I'd never touch these things with a 10 ft pole when I can make a bean patty burger or halloumi burger for 50% of the price and 300% of the flavor
I love just blitzing oats, carrots, onions as a base and then throwing in anything else like kidney beans or courgettes. Makes great veggie burgers you can just cook in the oven. Takes no time at all and less effort to cook than a beefburger.
Thank you. Bean burgers are delicious. I don’t eat them as part of my normal diet, but have no qualms with them and could always share a meal with my vegan friends.
Nowadays it’s all fake meat products which I would never put in my body, and there’s this weird social pressure where I’m being silly by “refusing to eat vegan foods”.
Fruits and vegetables and legumes are delicious, I will eat all of them.
Looks like agree that it's not great but you compensate elsewhere. If you chose the "hard way" of limiting your menu to vegan why not pick the options with less compromises? Even paper can be food as long as you compensate elsewhere.
> Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Are you maybe conflating "unhealthy" with "not explicitly healthy"? Plenty of foods are unequivocally unhealthy, anything else you eat will not compensate. You don't "compensate" for eating a lot of ultraprocessed food because some of the contents of that food should not be in your body at all. You can't always "subtract" by eating other food. Not saying this is the case for you and these burgers.
Health conscious drinker here. I have a double bourbon every few weeks. My diet is perfectly balanced. Alcohol still is not healthy and the rest of my diet has absolutely zero to do with that. I am healthy in light of everything else I eat; any individual item is still healthy or not.
Yes, some harms aren't linear no-threshold in their nature. Doesn't change the fact that the unhealthy doesn't become healthy because you eat a salad for lunch.
However you do realize "ultra processing" here means mechanically separating whole peas to get the protein part? Not trying to correct you or make your point invalid just flagging "processing" is not the scary thing agro lobby trying to make it, in this case. In fact they probably got super scared of meat alternatives and did everything in their power to make it go away.
Beyond meat doesn't have nitrates, filler, stabilizers or "85% meat" hence it's way more healthy than most meat-based patties or meat products.
Again, agrolobby by its full-page ads in newspapers successfully turned plant-based food which is objectively, scientifically proven to be healthy, to something unnatural, "chemical" and unhealthy.
There are a lot of people who _thrive_ off of a 100% beef diet, I don’t think there is anyone who could _survive_ off of 100% beyond meat burgers. I don’t think you can say they are way healthier than beef by any stretch of the imagination.
And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.
Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.
And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.
See that's the same thought the agrolobby used to weaponize "chemical-sounding", scary names. HCl is the same your stomach uses to digest food and used in making e.g. "organic" sea salt.
I see the same argument very often these days: that only single-ingredient, "traditional" food is good.
I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content. Yes, he literally stopped being vegan at that point, although he still is on most days since then.
Its subpar product, with way too much questionable chemistry, worse taste (or more like structure&taste) and impact on environment is... questionable too, maybe less than real beef but probably not massively. What could be acceptable for environmental impact is lab grown real meat but even that seems to not go the direction one would expect.
> I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content
You did such a good job of listing out reasons why niche demographics would skip a meat-free burger, without listing the actual core demographic who consumes them: Vegans and vegetarians, i.e. people who enjoy eating burgers but don’t eat meat.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I don't know man. I'm a health conscious person and I could just as easily choose normal chicken meat, or a beef steak that's not a hamburger, or fatty fish (omega-3!!). Why would I choose a hamburger substitute? I don't even particularly crave hamburgers.
I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, and it seems to be okay when it comes to amount of industrial fillers. It seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. So I guess it's not that bad, but I still don't still really have a reason to choose it.
On days when I don't particularly want to eat a lot of meat, I just eat more rice, vegetables and beans. It's not that hard?
I think the OP is right: their niche seemed to be people who crave something like a hamburger or at least real meat while having an ideological opposition against meat and enough money.
Not everyone cares about processing or salt. And like the OP said it's not a comparison to a bean burger that matters, they weren't going to chose that anyway, it's the comparison to real meat
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers
Not sure what health-conscious people you know, but I'd hazard to guess that most would choose the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man over the ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils.
> The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals
You can agree with this sentiment (ideology?) and not be vegan, if you aren't willing to give up meat. giving up meat is what defines this demographic.
Relative to a population of people willing to give up meat, would you assume there is no difference in "liking how plants taste" versus the general population? I'd assume it correlates directly with "willingness to give up meat".
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
Maybe, but in context its a false dichotomy, why wouldn't they pick better substitutes e.g. non-average meat?
> lacks the [...] bioavailability of real animal protein
I never understood this argument: what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?
I'm not rushing to demand IV tylenol because its oral bioavailability is only 80%-90%, which is around the "loss" we're talking for plant vs animal protein on average. And the ultraprocessing should improve plant's profile here.
>what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?
Because the macros suck. If you’re trying to hit certain protein / carb / fat ratios, eating more of the “protein” means eating a lot more carbs and fat too, which often isn’t the goal.
Your analogy is not accurate, it would be more like waking up in pain in the middle of the night after a bad injury, and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
if you have only fixed-ratio food options, sure, but otherwise, no.
> and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
that's what tylenol #4s are for, double the codeine, none the caffeine. Take half a t#4 and half of a regular standard tylenol = T#3 without the codeine.
Eating raw Miso a few times a month can move one's biome to get more plant protein digested per gram than even from egg whites. So the issue with protein is somewhat overhyped. The main potential shortfalls in the vegan diet are vitamins B-12, D & K.
Veganism is a fake health conscious diet. You can eat whatever you like while simultaneously feeling superior about it. Oreos, chips, pizza, fries, candy, soda, etc. why not also highly processed burgers?
I say this after having lived with vegans who literally ate vegan pizza every day.
You can be vegan as part of a health conscious diet, but strict veganism is usually motivated by ethics, not health. (That being said obviously there's more market share if you're in the intersection of the venn diagram.)
My wife often quips that on our first stay-at-home date during Covid she made me a fruit bowl for my desert whilst she had ice cream. The fruit was amazing but I (much to my wife’s surprise) also immediately Uber Eats’d a full tub of Vegan Ben & Jerry's.
I’ve personally never met another vegan who chose this lifestyle for “diet” reasons. They’ll be out there for sure, but for the folks I know It’s always been about the animals.
Just because I choose not to eat animals doesn’t mean I’m choosing to be healthy :) I should focus more on the food that I eat but alas, it’s just not how I roll at the moment.
You do get some unintentional health benefits here and there (lower cholesterol in my case) but other trade-offs too for those like me that aren’t as diligent as they should be (lower b-12, iron etc).
This is completely unrelated to the question of “can you be healthy as a vegan”. To that I would say absolutely. Is it the reason most people choose to be vegan - my gut would say no (but I’m not claiming this as fact).
Goddamn I love me some Oreos.
Plus, it’s easier to sit atop a high horse when you’re not eating it ;)
so in order for vegans to be legit for you, they not only have to find alternatives for everything, constantly be on the lookout not to accidentally buy or consume products related to animals, no - they also all have to be eating healthy and organic constantly in order not to be phony fakes.
what a weird form of gatekeeping. at least they're using some form of ethics and trying to change the world in a way they're able to.
coming from a non-vegan, btw, even though this shouldn't even be a requirement.
1. non-vegans eating with vegans at a vegan restaurant, where eating there wasn't their choice (they were craving a burger), and so, being forced to order off this menu, will choose the most burger-like thing on the menu.
2. non-vegans eating with vegans at a non-vegan restaurant, where for whatever reason they feel the need to impress / not-offend the vegan by eating vegan food as well. (Think "first date" or "client meeting.")
Ethical vegans and vegetarians may like the taste of meat but be sworn off it because of their ethics. I see this so much in these discussions - if they don't like meat then why are they going for a subsitute? They love vegetables so should stick to vegetables.
Do people genuinely think that 'ethical' vegans and vegetarians are doing it because they don't like meat? Or genuinely not comprehend the idea of taking an ethical stance even if you actually like something?
For illustration, human baby could be the best tasting barbecue on the planet, but even if it was I would still think that murdering children for my dinner would be wrong and wouldn't do it. Ethical vegans and vegetarians feel similarly about eating meat, that it's (often) delicious but killing animals for food is wrong. Offering them a "meat without any of the suffering" option, in theory, has quite a large audience.
Plus as a meat-eater who had a vegetarian partner for a few years, things like impossible mince also made it easier for me to cook things we could both enjoy, and things like beyond/impossible made eating out a little easier in burger joints etc.
Obviously there is a big enough market for plant-based meat alternatives. At least in the European countries I have lived, if you go into a grocery store, you will see a large aisle that sells this stuff. Many big companies likes Nestlé are in this market. They sure as hell are not doing it for ethical reasons, they are making money.
Just because Beyond as a company is doing bad doesn't mean the whole category of products is doing bad.
As an ex-vegetarian, I never understood the premise of the Impossible/Beyond stuff because when they launched there already was a really good soy burger in the supermarket frozen aisle that had excellent macros, priced reasonably, and tasted great.
I never thought the notion of "let's make the veggie burger taste like meat" made any sense.
I’ma regular guy who likes burgers but is very worried about the effects cattle farming has on the planet. I don’t love killing animals so I can have a tastier meal either.
Right, so because no one in this thread has the ability to remember past their own personal preferences:
The demographic that Beyond and Impossible claimed to be chasing was the like 85% of Americans that answered polls about wanting to eat less meat (back in the early 201Xs). "Meatless Monday", weeknight vegetarian... Whatever. Thats who they pitched investors on.
It's also a market that never materialized, whether because it was always a mirage of push polling or because an ascendant fascist GOP has made meat eating a cornerstone of their identity or COVID or whatever.
The way you say "ultra processed" just shows the agro lobby did it's thing. You have to realize processed in the case of beyond is mechanically separating whole pea to use the protein.
You are right. I assumed it would be full of junk like most meat substitute products. But I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, it seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. I'm quite surprised by how decent the ingredients are.
Still, I don't really have a reason to buy it. I don't avoid meat. I specifically eat beef for, for example, creatine and iron. But I guess it is good for people who crave beef yet have an ideological resistance against meat, a niche which I'm not sure how big it is.
Supermarket burger patties all have nitrates to cure/preserve them which turn into nitrosamines when cooked (carcinogenic). Same goes for bacon etc. I'm actually super appalled how the agrolobby with its full-page ads was able to turn something healthy into something being viewed as chemical and unhealthy.
Ethical vegetarians are exactly the people who might like meat but refuse to eat it because of the impacts. Maybe you mean "natural" vegetarians - people who just don't like meat any way so don't eat it
The demographic is people who have tricked themselves into thinking there are "healthy options" at a hamburger restaurant and who are willing to pay $2 extra for that validation.
> The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver (never mind issues surrounding industrial agriculture).
I don't see why this follows. There are a lot of ethical vegans and vegetarians who like junk food. And these patties have higher protein than less processed plant based alternatives, which is important to a lot of people. It's just that vegetarians and vegans are a small portion of the overall "burger" market.
I suspect the "meat" branding helped early on, because it got some people to give it a try who otherwise never would have. There were other plant-based burgers on the market already but Beyond really exploded quickly.
It's just that it didn't really live up to the hype enough for meat eaters to go back for a second helping after the novelty wore off. So at this point the "meat" in the brand name isn't doing anything.
I haven’t been eating meat for 14 years, and I sometimes buy stuff like beyond meat patties or similar, but definitely not as a daily food, but like a fast food to eat with beer, or to take with me when grilling with friends. So I assume same way how other people eat meat burgers (am I correct to assume that people don’t eat McDonald’s or supermarket burgers everyday?).
And it’s not really about the taste, it’s more about form factor of a “protein fried patty” in a sandwich. Could easily be falafel.
Normal daily food is of course actual vegan/vegetarian food that doesn’t need to pretend to be meat.
As a vegetarian of 20 years, I like being able to go to restaurants and have something that is on par with what my friends and family are eating (although I do prefer Impossible to Beyond, by far). Even without friends and family, there's a social (and distinctively American) aspect to being able to have a realistic burger and beer at my local sports bar/grill and not just have a salad or some Sysco frozen black bean burger.
I'm the demographic. I became vegan a several years ago when I was in my late 40s for health reasons -- all males in my family my age or older have had multiple heart attacks except for me. I didn't become vegan because I like eating salads. I miss the taste of meat, and beyond does a decent job of it (Impossible is far better).
If animal agriculture was not subsidized, I expect plant based "meats" would be on par or cheaper than real meat.
That's too bad. I don't expect fake-meats to be healthy, or cheap, but I like that they can be made without killing animals and without raising them in inhumane conditions.
I had really hoped that people would say, "Well, if it tastes close enough, then how about I go for the cruelty-free version." And it is close-enough -- it's at least as good as a fast-food hamburger.
Perhaps the cognitive dissonance is just too much. The world would be a better place if we ate less meat, even if we don't eliminate it entirely. But to acknowledge the cruelty by avoiding it sometimes means facing it when you do choose animal protein.
Maybe it's just me, but beyond has never tasted close to the original. Impossible does.
The fact that it doesn't taste close to the original and that it commands a price premium is why I ultimately gave up on it. Where I might use beyond, I can usually get a healthier option using ground turkey instead with a much more agreeable flavor and price.
But really, I've just focused on making more meatless dishes in general. Highlighting the flavor of legumes and mushrooms beats trying to fake the flavor of beef.
Impossible definitely has more of a "dead cow funk" taste to it. Which is why I actually prefer Beyond Meat, because it tastes better without "that taste".
I think it actually is "Beyond" meat, in that sense.
The issue I have is I can definitely taste ingredients and they don't really jive with me. Like, the pea and beat flavors come out pretty strongly to me and gives the patties a sort of funky smell.
IMO, this is a much better tasting burger that doesn't try to fake beef flavor (Not vegan) [1]
But at a much higher price? The value is not really there IMO.
From their performance it seems like the intersection of (cares about animals | methane emissions) & doesn't mind health effects & less price sensitive & must eat hamburger-likes is too small.
Interesting point on cognitive dissonance though. I think it's possible to draw a rational tradeoff between acceptable amount of (externalised) cruelty and personal benefits of eating meat - no cognitive dissonance needed.
Are you saying that opting for a beyond burger patty instead of a beef patty is going to "poison and destroy" your health? That's a bit of a stretch no? Are they really any worse for you than a regular burger from a fast food joint or something?
There are no studies I’m aware of where focusing on a plant-based diet makes you “very ill” and gives you “chronic diseases”. On the contrary, it’s not that hard to be healthier.
Meat, on the other hand, is linked to diseases. Especially red meat and cancer.
So your scenario is more like “imagine telling a parent ‘Give meat to your kid. They will get sick, unnecessarily kill animals (as we all know, kids hate animals, right?), and accelerate destroying the environment (who needs to live in a good environment, anyway, as long as there are burgers?)’”.
"Linked to" in the sense that someone guessed that red meat might cause cancer, devised a bunch of experiments to prove it, and ended up after incredible amounts of effort with a result that shows just on the very limits of statistical significance that perhaps one person in a population the size of the UK might have a slightly elevated risk of cancer, maybe going from one in 15 to one in 14.
So, yes, "linked to".
You're going to die of heart disease, not bowel cancer caused by eating meat, even if you are a vegan. In fact, especially if you are a vegan, as it turns out, if you believe another ever-so-slightly-sketchy set of statistics. I personally don't, but I have noticed a lot of the people I know who eat a vegan diet don't eat particularly healthy stuff.
> I have noticed a lot of the people I know who eat a vegan diet don't eat particularly healthy stuff.
Neither do people who don’t eat vegan, so that’s irrelevant to the point. I couldn’t help notice you skipped over the points of killing animals and accelerating destroying the environment.
You need livestock farming to have arable farming. Growing only plants is phenomenally destructive to the soil.
Every time you eat a "Beyond Meat" burger, you have permanently destroyed a patch of what used to be rain forest and is now crappy farmland about the size of a car parking space.
You need far far far more land for raising livestock for eating than for vegetables. Furthermore, we’re discussing vegan diets in general. No one is vegan and survives solely on Beyond Burgers.
I agree and also find it unpleasant, but I wouldn't claim to be incredulous that someone would deliberately want to deceive themselves. We deceive ourselves all the time for all sorts of stupid and less stupid reasons. If you need money but hate your job, you have to convince yourself that somehow getting up every day grinding it out is worth it. If you don't need money but are addicted to it, or don't have any other hobbies, you deceive yourself into making your number higher.
If you're a bodybuilder you might have convinced yourself that a certain repulsive aesthetic is attractive, or if you have weight issues, you might intentionally deceive yourself into hating the consumption addictions that are your weakness.
Many people who are vegans do happen to convince themselves of remarkably implausible nonsense that I haven't really seen in others as much, but it's usually due to what I'd suspect are other underlying mental health issues—the two groups I've observed the most mistrust in medicine from are 30+ men and vegans.
The act of self-deception itself isn't rare though
It was close enough for me and I do acknowledge the cruelty and abstain from many kinds of meat. I was super excited when I tried it first. But after about a year of being part of my regular diet it started being disgusting unfortunately. Now I can only eat it once a in a while.
Personally, when I want to eat less meat, I just eat something else, because they are enough vegetarian/vegan alternatives out there that I don't really see the point of a poor imitation that's even more expensive than the real thing.
I never understood these engineered ultra processed meat imitation products, they are not healthy - period. There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others). This desire to just recreate the SAD (standard American diet) with goo is beyond strange...
You can make thousands of absolutely delicious vegetable dishes. You can adapt another few thousands by replacing the meat with veggies. Why the obsession about ultraprocessed "meat substitutes"?
Low-protein Indian diets are not healthy. The food certainly tastes good, but let's be real, there's a reason heart disease and diabetes in the subcontinent are stratospheric.
You’re getting downvoted but they do seem to have some of these issues, including the skinny fat problem. But their cuisine sure is tastier than the fake meat and other goop that is pushed, which is even worse for health.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that. I think for them they want something that has the "utility" of a burger, as in here is some easy protein plus some sundry stuff packaged into a hand holdable unit that is pretty filling on its own and cost like $12 at a restaurant.
The reason is for a lot of them is that they become repulsed by the smell of meat after not eating it for a long time. So they would very much not want something that tastes like meat. They just want the function of the burger really. And to be fair there isn't a lot of good options otherwise for vegetarians that are truly comperable to a burger in terms of it as a product. Veggie lunch meat is even sadder state of affairs than the burger meat so sandwiches are out. Then you have bean burritos I guess, falafel wrap. All stuff that tends to be found solely in ethnic specific restaurants than democratized across the entire globe like the burger is, which you can probably find anywhere you find reliable electricity in 2026.
I'm a vegetarian who likes burgers, but all the flavour in a burger comes from vegetables anyway: the sauces, garnishes, etc, plus cheese, of course. So I just go one step further and replace the patty with something made from veggies too. More delicious, and cruelty free.
Is animal meat healthy? In small amounts (10% less caloric intake) disease correlation does not increase, but higher then 10%, disease rates see a direct correlatory increase.
The plant meats are healthier than the animal meats.
There’s so such thing as “plant meats”, and yes, animal meat is healthy when balanced with a good diet. What’s killing everyone is the white carbs and sugar, not the meats and fats. Anyone telling you otherwise is ideologically motivated vs science-based.
> I never understood these engineered ultra processed meat imitation products, they are not healthy - period.
People don't eat burgers for health reasons.
> There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others).
Why eat ice cream when chicken is healthier?
You're comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there are plenty of delicious vegetarian foods, but you can't just substitute one for the other. If you're craving eggplants, replacing it with lentils will not satisfy you.
Then eat a burger if you want a burger, they are healthy if you skip the buns and sugar ketchup and use quality beef. Throw it on a veg salad for a balanced meal.
Maybe I've missed it but I see a much more palatable market in "light" meats. It has great flavor and texture but it needs to be part of a composition even if it is just salt and pepper. I've seen really great tasting meatballs in the wild that had less than 4% meat in them, say 5% for lazy calculations. You can feed it to 20 people and get the same results as 19 vegetarians + one meat eater.
Some are so much into meat the vegetarian evangelism has about as much chance as trying to convince them cannibalism is the solution to all world problems.
If you sell them something cheap that tastes great and tell them it has meat in it there is no need for all that tiresome talking about saving the world on an empty stomach. They become easy to catch and kill.
In the UK there's a meme that Richmond's plant-based sausages taste better than their "meat" sausages because they already had years of experience making sausages with no meat in them. "Meme" in the sense of "funny because it's true", even many meat-eaters agree. In processed food so much of the "meat" product is already pork eyeballs and chicken anuses that there's zero difference in substituting it with something that doesn't count as "meat" but with a similar texture.
This is the moment, but they refuse to market the product in a way that is acceptable, (and adds affordability) to consumers.
If they would do a 55/45 beef/plant-based meat blend and burgers, I think adoption rate would pick up significantly. Anybody who questions the taste is going to see that beef is the main ingredient. If the product comes in significantly cheaper than beef alone, more consumers will try it and look to it as an affordable way of eating beef.
For the bigger picture, 65 cows will stretch as far as 100 cows previously did, lowering suffering, environmental damage, inputs, etc.
For the people who like the 55/45 blend, it would open the door to an 80/20 blend plant vs. beef, and a 100% plant-based product.
I'm not sure how well it would integrate into a cohesive unit. Veggie meat is pretty weird stuff in terms of cooking with it. It doesn't really want to form cohesive paddies. It is almost like feta cheese where there is a tendency for it to break down into smaller and smaller pieces the more you work it.
Also really hard to cook with imo compared to meat. Meat is nice to cook with from all the fat in there. It just renders out perfectly and also separates it from the pan. You get some nice carmelization, maillard reactions, all the nice stuff going on.
The fake meat is like a sponge for grease on the other hand. Nothing renders out. Stuff gets sucked in. It is like being on the opposite side of the osmosis reaction going on here. And boy do you need grease to cook with this stuff. Otherwise it just fuses to the pan like nothing, and again crumbles apart getting it off. It pretty much needs to be pan fried and soaks up a ton of grease after. You therefore can't trust nutrition guidelines because of the grease requirement to get anything out of this stuff. I bet if you air fried it, it would be absurdly dry.
I mean if we were really concerned with lowering animal suffering we would be changing farming practices. Factory farming is only saving a small amount of the cost of beef over more traditional style cattle farming.
Nothing against mixing beef with plants and the like, but there are far easier ways to improve the welfare of cattle that only costs pennies.
A protein soda pop, as they're pivoting to, sounds like a gross version of Coca Cola.
The protein bar could work. I personally don't like them, because most of them are just candy bars with added protein.
Meat substitutes (e.g. fake turkey made of tofu) are generally an inferior good, in both the economic sense and the sense of taste. It's not surprising to me that they don't work. Maybe if they're made much cheaper.
We bought and tried their products several times only to find they were no different than a basic veggie burger or whatever. We couldn’t figure out what the hype was even about. And then I started reading about how their ingredient list wasn’t the healthiest.
Just seemed like just another weird Silicon Valley money bubble built on hype and vc cash instead of any kind of meaningful product differentiation.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s our genuine experience.
Obviously Americans have no qualms about artificial foods or "inferior" substitutes, but it has to be cheaper. Paying a premium price for something that's even a decent facsimile guarantees that the product will remain niche.
I also am disappointed there was no iteration or improvement of the product over time. There was clearly room to innovate or make it taste better - it feels like the product hit, there was some excitement about the novelty... and then they didn't capitalize on it by pushing new variations and updates.
Costco and similar do have them at a decent price, currently see them 20$ for 10. I think most people just look at the 2 packs, which are more expensive.
As a rare non-ideological vegetarian (I just really don't like the taste) you've got the market for this completely backwards. Beyond meat is for ideological vegetarians and vegans who like the taste. Non-ideological ones who would really prefer not to have a meat substitute.
At something like 6% of the world the market the population of ideological vegetarians and vegans is huge. With another handful of percent who are ideologically opposed to eating meat on certain days but not entirely vegetarian.
PS. Your claim that "most people are not ideologic with their food"... Not all food ideology is related to vegetarianism so it's not terribly relevant but I think this claim is just wrong. Islam + Hinduisim + Buddhism make up nearly half the world and all have pretty strong religious ideological beliefs about food, and a non-trivial fraction of the quarter of the world that is christian has at least a few scruples like avoiding meat during lent. And that's just people preaching religious beliefs not less documented ideologies like believing real men eat their steak raw or whatever.
> Beyond meat is for ideological vegetarians and vegans who like the taste.
I must be in bubble or have a very different definition of "idiological": of the dozens of vegans/vegetarians I know none would actively seek the "taste" of industrialized "ready-made" "meat replacement". They may put up with it if must be, but seek it? Desire it?
By definition, if you're a vegan or vegetarian for strictly ideological reasons, you still like the taste and feel of meat. So, compared to a vegetarian or vegan who is doing it for other reasons, you're statistically far more likely to seek meat substitutes.
Now, this relies on considering people "ideological vegans/vegetarians" if their only motivation for not eating meat is ideology. This means that the huge amount of Hindu Indians who are ideologically opposed to eating meat don't count, since even without this ideological motivation, they would still have traditional and social and supply reasons to not eat meat.
> Lets be real: unless fake-meat products become at least the same price as equivalent meat options what's the point?
If you were to make fake plant-based products that were (a) noticeably healthier than meat, and (b) indistinguishable from meat taste-wise (or better-tasting), I'm quite confident a lot of people would pay a premium for that.
The problem is the current products just don't deliver that. All they deliver is eco-friendliness at a premium, at which point they're basically offering something more akin to the optional climate fee on flight tickets.
beyond meat was a super cynical bet that ordinary non-vegetarian consumers would no longer be able to afford meat, so they would turn to meat substitutes even if they were more costly than meat had been in the psat
now they are publicly listed, and their cynical premise has not born fruit
Vegetarian here. I like Beyond products, such as their chorizo, and eat them all the time. I don’t eat animals not because I’m trying to “eat healthy”, but because I’m trying to opt out participating in a system that is brutally cruel to sentient beings.
I'm in a similar boat and have to give up cheese since it's part of the chain. It's a bummer, I'm pretty addicted to it, and plant-based cheese is just nothing compared to a good young cheese
I tell myself that in the long-term the pros outweigh the con, if you value being on the right side of morality
Who says they eat dairy and eggs? “Vegetarian” isn’t such a simplistic label like that. It doesn’t mean “I eat exactly these things”. For all we know, they eat only eggs and from a local farm (or have their own chickens).
Furthermore, it’s a bad argument to imply vastly reduced complicity with a system is the same as full complicity.
Yes that's what vegetarian means, 99% of the time.
Where did I say "full complicity"? But yes, animals who are farms for milk and eggs are treated just as badly, sometimes worse, than animals that are farmed for meat.
> Yes that's what vegetarian means, 99% of the time.
What’s your source for that claim? I know plenty of vegetarians and there’s not a single one where I could assume they eat both dairy and eggs. I don’t think any of them drink milk (oat drinks and the like are common), only some eat cheese, in very varying quantities (from regularly to almost never), same with eggs.
You are assuming what your parent commenter does.
> animals who are farms for milk and eggs are treated just as badly
Again, you have no idea what your parent commenter does. With eggs in particular, there are different tiers related to the animals’ conditions. It is possible to make more ethical choices.
In a world without animal rights, this is sadly inevitable. It would be like doing work without slaves in a world without human rights. Like, yeah, well done, mate, but I'll still be using my slaves, thanks, it's much cheaper.
Also (at least in germany) their burger patties are nearly twice as expensive as groundbeef. I really like them but since I am neither vegan or vegetarian I either opted to groundbeef or to haloumi or something as a replacement. I think the substitutes could work well when they are reasonably priced or actually cheaper than what they want to replace so people are more likely to try it.
Same goes with soy milk. Alpro costs like 2.80€/L while common dairy milk is less than a euro per liter.
It's because the meat industry is a welfare queen. In my local supermarket last year I could buy pork for ~8 EUR by kg, but champignons costed 10 (Nordic country).
> Alpro costs like 2.80€/L while common dairy milk is less than a euro per liter
Sure if we are cherry picking the "premium" brand this comparison works. Store brand soy or oat milk are 0,95€[0] and 0,90€[1] per liter respectively, so about what cow milk costs. For milk and milk alternatives there hasn't been a financial differentiator between them for about 5 years now.
With meat replacement patties there is still a significant price difference, though there Beyond Meat is also one of the more expensive ones (which is bold, as they've also been lapped by the competition in taste and variety of products).
I badly wanted no other market to develop but synthesised meat, to produce something at par with natural one.
The industry has successfully marketed and packaged meat as "that thing you buy", hiding the immense and unconscionable cruelty which sentient beings are subjected to.
I remember going to a grocery store for the first time during the pandemic: the meat aisle was completely bare, but there was plenty of Beyond products left on the shelf.
Nowhere near real meat, full of ultra-processed junk and more expensive than the real thing. The solution some people here propose: "let's make real meat just as expensive". Yeah sorry, you're not getting my sympathy.
Haven't these guys been to a Taiwanese restaurant, they have great mock meats, and of course vegetarians have great mock meats too, love a good black bean pattie. The hubris this company shows is amazing.
They are focusing on an American palette, which is averse to things like tofu, seitan, or tempeh as they are considered not masculine enough by a significant portion of the population. This is reinforced by both genders.
There's no hope trying to sell "plant-based hamburger" with any name to toxic masculinity advocates who think soy feminizes you (even though seitan isn't soy). These guys are getting hospitalized from eating all-beef diets because chicken is "too feminine".
Tofu is so ridiculously OP in terms of nutrition, production costs, and culinary versatility. It's a shame society here in the US is so strongly stymied by the manipulative meat lobby.
I think beyond nailed the texture of their burger patties. When you fry one up it has the same texture as a cheap frozen hamburger patty. Their sausage links also have a similar texture to a cheap frozen bratwurst. I think beyond nailed the taste a bit better than impossible. Also beyond seems to use better ingredients than impossible. All these products are high in sodium like all processed food and you definitely shouldn't live off them, just like you shouldn't live off cheap frozen burgers and sausages. Price-wise they cost more per pound than good quality beef in my area. For any meat eater you should definitely amuse yourself and fry up some of this "Internet Meat" and try it out.
One of the underrated ways of reducing meat consumption, imo, would be to mix a certain percentage of plant-based meat to regular meat products. Imagine a world in which McDonald's would just mix 20% plant-based meet to their patties. I can see some risk for them, but honestly, long-term, I don't think people would actually mind much.
The did that in Tesco (uk supermarket) for a couple of years - sold fresh mince that contained 30% carrot and other veg. I used it quite a lot and it was good. But they stopped. I guess it wasn’t popular
oh, what a shame! Also interesting that they stopped that after a couple of years... You'd think that it would either flop from the beginning or just work
You can already do that to great effect by mixing in mushrooms, the end result tastes great and doesn't require a billion dollar company providing fake meat.
On this subject, my university rolled out mushroom-blended beef burgers in the 2010s. They were poorly received for replacing beef burgers entirely.
I wasn't vegan or vegetarian at the time and I thought they were just a complete improvement over beef burgers. But I think that thick congealing beef fat is gross and that it's just better mixed with mushroom juice, and I also already liked mushrooms.
jaybyrd | 17 hours ago
shrubble | 17 hours ago
Simulacra | 17 hours ago
carlosjobim | 17 hours ago
Simulacra | 17 hours ago
carlosjobim | 17 hours ago
ElijahLynn | 17 hours ago
bsjshshsb | 10 hours ago
globular-toast | 7 hours ago
bsjshshsb | 7 hours ago
> All protein on the planet, was made from sunlight and photosynthesis
globular-toast | 6 hours ago
goosejuice | 16 hours ago
justin66 | 17 hours ago
That is the plan?
sethhochberg | 17 hours ago
As a result, the entire packaged food industry is pumping up protein numbers and marketing it as the primary attribute of the food (where they might have previously marketed low fat or low sugar or whatever else in the past).
So, saturated market... but certainly one people are investing in now.
wmeredith | 17 hours ago
asdff | 17 hours ago
The whole time they are telling me this I can't help but wonder what the hell is the point of the glp1 here? You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow. So its like there is no point. Might as well just rip the bandaid off, diet and exercise, get there 6 months slower, while not taking the glp. Like wouldn't you want to actually increase muscle mass while burning fat?
orwin | 16 hours ago
I have a very good support system. Not to brag, but my parents are amazing, my family have a small amounts of doctors who helped me getting through it at first. My siblings are great too, and my SO support me despite my quirks. I love sailing, which is a great way to loose weight. And I'm a SWE, the easiest job there is when you're not bad at it, that makes good money without real responsibilities or stress. It was still fucking hard. If glp1 can help people less lucky than me, let them have it.
Lord-Jobo | 40 minutes ago
Ive also done it the right way, and it was literally easier, by far, to get a masters degree while working 40 hours a week than it was to drop from 250 to 175. Incomparable. The constant mental pressure to eat, to eat more, to search the cabinets, to stop at x on the way home, etc.
I’ve heard “wow sounds like a severe addiction” yeah no shit. It’s an addiction to a substance you MUST have 2-3x a day. Imagine if you needed alcohol twice a day to live.
Scoundreller | 10 hours ago
It's an honourable goal but the evidence isn't great for that
> You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow
You don't have to. Should though.
When the drugs are working as intended, you'll lose weight without 'trying' to improve your diet, exercise will speed up the weight loss, but isn't strictly necessary for it to "work". Encouraged, sure, but you'll get weight loss from the appetite suppression alone.
The 'high protein' advice is because a lot of glp1 consumers had poor diets to begin with, and they're catabolic drugs. Combine that with reduced appetite and you're at risk of insufficient protein consumption to maintain whatever muscle mass you started with.
blargey | 9 hours ago
jawilson2 | 2 hours ago
Yes, CICO, blah blah, but overcoming food addiction by asking people to eat less is like forcing a smoker who wants to quit to work at a cigar bar or something. You can't just not buy food, especially if you have a family you have to feed.
MarceliusK | 4 hours ago
3rodents | 17 hours ago
If Beyond Meat had grown organically, instead of raising hundreds of millions of dollars, it would be a great company doing great things today. Instead, it has failed to live up to the unrealistic expectations that were set for it. Beyond Meat is no different than any of the other zirpicorns.
paxys | 17 hours ago
Here's a comparison - Tyson Foods, best known for their frozen meat, had a revenue of $54.44 billion last year. Their current market cap is $21.77 billion.
Beyond Meat reported an annual revenue of $87.9 million in their 2018 S-1, and post-IPO reached a peak market cap of $14.1 billion.
See the issue with these numbers?
nickff | 16 hours ago
bsjshshsb | 10 hours ago
Ekaros | 6 hours ago
happytoexplain | 17 hours ago
PunchyHamster | 17 hours ago
happytoexplain | 17 hours ago
choilive | 16 hours ago
xp84 | 11 hours ago
And it’s perfectly safe out there. There’s nothing out there but mission statements and TAM slides and pea-protein slurry.
And $1.8 billion of burned cash.
dgxyz | 17 hours ago
Hope this doesn't kill them.
marricks | 17 hours ago
Also, price is always going to be an issue. The US spends billions and billions of dollars supporting the meat industry. The fact meat is cheap is a political choice, which makes direct plant based substitutes a tough financial proposition.
indubioprorubik | 17 hours ago
legitster | 17 hours ago
It's not as good as the meat it's comparing itself against, and it's not as good as the vegetarian options also available in the store, and it's more expensive than either.
Anytime can "be the moment" for plant-based meat if the product technology was there, but it's not.
thewebguyd | 16 hours ago
I've tried the beyond burgers, they were alright taste wise, but yeah there's many other options for a protein source.
Beyond Meat was never going to convince people to eat less meat by substituting it for fake burgers and steaks. For people that already eat vegetarian there already tastier sources of protein. Lentils, beans, quinoa, chickpeas, mushrooms, nuts & seeds, etc. All of those have much more flexibility with how you can incorporate them into dishes than a fake slab of "meat."
> more expensive than either.
This is a political problem. In the US animal agriculture receives far more funding than plant-based protein. Without government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would cost closer to $30-$40. We've historically defined food security int he US as "meat and dairy," two of the things we really need to consume less of because of environmental impacts.
But yeah, Beyond Meat wasn't going to get us there. We need real political changes, not fake meat.
mft_ | 16 hours ago
I’m ~97% vegetarian but there are a few foods for which traditional vegetarian alternatives are rubbish. One of these is the burger: you either get some odd veg/potato base pattie, a large grilled mushroom, or halloumi. The meat substitute burgers aren’t close to real beef burgers, but they’re far tastier than other vegetarian options.
wolvoleo | 15 hours ago
They're a lot better than a crappy low quality beef burger even, like a McDonald's patty. Not quite as good as a real steakhouse burger, but kinda in between. There's another brand that's about as good, impossible burger. Probably a bit better even but I've never tried them side by side.
The soy and potato varieties yes they're way worse than even McDonald's. They're not even trying to simulate a real burger, just the idea of 'some fried gunk on a bun'. But yeah no.
BigGreenJorts | 11 hours ago
gs17 | 9 hours ago
I really want to know why restaurants keep thinking this is a good alternative. I've never had one that wasn't just a mess to eat, and it's weirdly common to have people think it contains a significant amount of protein. However, I'm very happy with most veg patties, and would love halloumi as an option over Beyond any day.
mft_ | 6 hours ago
I first noticed this years ago when eating out with a (my first?) vegetarian friend in a variety of (omnivorous) restaurants and gastropubs. The number of times he'd have to choose the goats' cheese tart became a running joke.
malfist | 16 hours ago
legitster | 14 hours ago
Bean burgers are actually delicious depending on the brand and how you dress them up. It doesn't taste like a smash burger, but if you get a brand that grills up nice and crispy and pair it with a nice spicy mayo, it's legitimately a good burger.
Also, don't sleep on the humble Boca burger which has existed for decades. It's not as good looking as Beyond Beef but I would argue it's better tasting.
malfist | an hour ago
wewtyflakes | 13 hours ago
malfist | 2 hours ago
ocdtrekkie | 12 hours ago
n4r9 | 16 hours ago
With that flexibility comes inconvenience. With fake meat burgers or sausages I just have to whack the oven on and boil some veg to go alongside. That's family dinner. With lentils I have to s think more about how to make it tasty for everyone.
throwup238 | 11 hours ago
This is absolute nonsense, but I’m curious why you believe this to be the case?
tombert | 12 hours ago
I'm sure that's due to depressing subsidies or economies of scale, but regardless of the reason it's kind of hard for me to justify buying something that will taste like a "not-quite-as-good-as-the-thing-half-the-price" burger.
They are pretty good, don't get me wrong, it's just something that I have trouble purchasing.
dmitrygr | 11 hours ago
Based on what data do you make such unsubstantiatable statements?
xenospn | 11 hours ago
tombert | 10 hours ago
I was just parroting what I heard but doing a search I found a bunch of posts claiming that subsidies don’t actually affect the price that much, and I cannot find a primary source for the $30/pound figure I have always heard.
brnaftr361 | 11 hours ago
Then you factor in the costs and it's Beyond insanity.
And frankly I don't know if Beyond was doing anything legitimately novel. Impossible was over-engineering their burger to the extent that I wouldn't eat one from any restaurant because I couldn't tell whether it was be'f or beef. Beyond just seemed to be nu-gardein which I'll grant you—it's a Monsanto subsidiary—but the product is palettable, consistent, and available almost universally and has been as long as I've been on the diet, 12 years.
altairprime | 11 hours ago
MarceliusK | 4 hours ago
gwbas1c | an hour ago
This of course was completely false, but far too many people let themselves get caught up in hype instead of reason.
---
I remember having an excellent veggie burger at a bar, and then when I went back a year later, it was replaced by Beyond or Impossible, and the bar tender was pretty open about how it was gross but their distributor pushed it on them. That of course pissed off the vegetarians who didn't like meat and had no desire for a meat-like substitute.
znpy | 17 hours ago
Proprietary food, that you can only buy from one company?
Of course it was doomed to fail. It’s not even about veganism, it’s a cancerous idea.
MrLeap | 17 hours ago
I was going to offer the twinkie but I guess hostess declared bankruptcy, so maybe you're right.
XorNot | 17 hours ago
Where it sits as a "premium" good doesn't really work as a value proposition.
flexagoon | 17 hours ago
Huh? Isn't that most of it, except for basic grocery ingredients?
znpy | 17 hours ago
Only if you live in the us.
goosejuice | 16 hours ago
flexagoon | 10 hours ago
Jensson | 4 hours ago
Its like when I go to a pizza place I can get the same pizzas regardless where I go even though they are all independent, the recipe for most things people eat in the world are not secrets, its stuff anyone can make and sell.
ben_w | 2 hours ago
They're both doing fine.
And Huel.
Likewise beyond just substitutes, all specific sodas, sweets, biscuits*, most breakfast cereals, etc.
* I'm British by birth, I don't mean those scones Americans have with "gravy".
Grimblewald | 17 hours ago
3rodents | 17 hours ago
Den_VR | 17 hours ago
markdown | 17 hours ago
In my part of the world, a burger is a type of sandwhich, and the definition doesn't require meat. So it's a burger whether it contains beef, fish, chicken, a vegan patty, a large slice of tomato, or whatever.
goosejuice | 16 hours ago
Given all sandwiches, what in your part of the world makes a sandwich a burger? I think for many of us it's a ground patty. If said patty isn't meat, yes we might say that is fake as in an imitation of the original. It's not a negative thing.
deaux | 10 hours ago
The 95.8% of the world population that isn't in the US. This is simple to deduce because everywhere else calls "a piece of fried chicken in a burger bun" a "chicken _burger_". Only the US calls it a "chicken sandwich". Some of Canada might now use the latter through US influence - any Canadians here?
KFC is a representative example, they call them "KFC chicken sandwich" only in the US, "burgers" effectively everywhere else.
goosejuice | 6 hours ago
A piece of hot chicken between bread in Italy would likely be a panino, france a sandwich, spain a bocadillo, Portugal sandes, Japan a sando, mexico a torta, Argentina a sanguche.
I think you overestimate how many people use burger for things that don't refer to the American concept. A lot of cultures have hot sandwiches and thus (ham)burger is often distinctly the American concept of a ground beef patty. Where this breaks down outside of the Commonwealth is often from cultures without things in bread that got exposed to the generic burger via fast food chain terminology. Not surprising there.
deaux | 10 hours ago
peacebeard | 10 hours ago
edm0nd | 17 hours ago
Wealthy hippies, vegans, and yuppies.
benmusch | 17 hours ago
I'm an occasional buyer of their product, but the issue for me is just the versatility. It's really only a replacement for the most generic ways to prepare a burger/sausage. The moment you try to use the ground beef in, say, a chili recipe, it's a totally mis-matched flavor
mschild | 17 hours ago
At this point, in Germany at least, discounter brands like Lidl and Aldi have beaten Beyond Meat at their game though. They produce alternatives that taste as good or better, for significantly less money.
scythe | 11 hours ago
leodler | 11 hours ago
slfnflctd | 10 hours ago
I am more than a little bit outraged that animals who were raised in miserable industrial production facilities to meet an ugly end are having their parts sold for less than a decent alternative simply because of subsidies distorting the market.
JSR_FDED | 10 hours ago
It’s a pity that Beyond is getting so much attention because they’re not the best ambassadors for meat alternatives. People will try it, and then decide to wait another 5 years before trying again.
Dylan16807 | 10 hours ago
JoshTriplett | 10 hours ago
I don't feel like they have a niche anymore, but there was a time I considered them my top choice, before impossible dethroned them.
xeromal | 10 hours ago
delis-thumbs-7e | 8 hours ago
We don’t need meat alternatives. Vegan diet is cardiovascularly extremely healthy, seems to protect against most cancers, tastes good and is most importantly ethically and environmentally only viable option at this point. It’s pretty cheap as well, tofu, lentils and veggies are not exactly expensive even without all the gazillion subsidiaries pumped into meat production. [Of course your vegan diet can consist of eating only canned soda and potato chips and that is not healthy nor cheap, but the problem there is that you are a moron, not that you are vegan].
So the problem with meat alternatives is that you don’t really need them and if you want burger patties etc. you can make them at home pretty easily or these days buy cheaper alternatives sold in most supermarkets.
KPGv2 | 6 hours ago
Vegans have a problem with avocados and beans now? THat's where the "grease" comes from in these fake meats.
evilduck | an hour ago
mschild | 3 hours ago
I get where you are coming from. I try to buy unprocessed as much as possible, but there are days where I want something that I could do myself or buy premade from the grocery store. On days like that, I'm glad I have the option to buy premade even if my self-made version tastes better, is healthier, and often cheaper.
Besides that, its a good tool to get the general omnivore to reduce meat consumption. A friend of mine does eat meat but is lowering her consumption of it. Having a convenient alternative that she doesn't have to think about and can just get prepackaged helped her half her meat consumption in a effectively a few weeks.
samusiam | 2 hours ago
tirant | 6 hours ago
I have never tried BeyondMeat but I’d be surprised that it’s so bad.
And I have eaten many classic vegan burger alternatives based on lentils, peas and chickpeas. They didn’t aim to taste like meat and were actually edible.
k__ | 5 hours ago
I'm a huge burger fan and stopped eating meat at home, thanks to this wave of vegan alternatives.
asdff | 17 hours ago
antonymoose | 17 hours ago
Still, one wonders does “buying a fake burger at the ball park with my friends” translate to actual fandom and further consumption or is it just a a captive consume picking the least-worst option.
The impression I’ve gotten is for the latter.
asdff | 16 hours ago
zvqcMMV6Zcr | 4 hours ago
Did it really? I have hear some complaints that before "gluten free" meant it doesn't contain those allergens at all and now it only means "there are no grains on ingredient list". And with amount of cross-contamination in food industry that is nowhere near enough for people with allergy.
GuinansEyebrows | 11 hours ago
Scoundreller | 10 hours ago
for a lot of people that could be a selling point
(not you, themselves!)
mystraline | 17 hours ago
A lot of Indian/Brahmin food is exactly that. Its insanely delicious.
And we have Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat(is that the name?). Both instead of going "vegetarian done well is superb" went to "sorry its a sad reminder of a hamburger". And thats a problem. Nobody wants to be reminded that this is $10/lb and real hamburger is $5/lb.
Ive also had problems with other 'meat substitues'. They're almost always plasticy or fake tasting, or chemically off.
Whereas my tofu saag is delicious. And no meet or cheese needed... Although my favorite is saag paneer (cheese). I stay away from the fake-almost-but-not-quite foods.
blackjack_ | 17 hours ago
So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.
jsbisviewtiful | 17 hours ago
blackjack_ | 8 hours ago
I’m glad you like the beyond meat though. Good for them to have actual consistent customers for the 2x / year I end up eating it!
p1necone | 17 hours ago
There's no premium for the plant based versions I don't think (or if there is it's small enough that I never noticed), and I think you're underestimating how many vegans/vegetarians still want junk food.
dgxyz | 17 hours ago
This is a good filler product.
level87 | 8 hours ago
probably_wrong | 5 hours ago
Going vegan is not a zero-cost choice. It can be difficult, expensive, and in some cases even impossible due to health issues. Some users here complain about the meat subsidies without acknowledging that meat is pretty great when you're in the bottom of the economic pyramid and need food that's cheap, quick, and will provide a fair nutritional value.
I don't think you can live in a modern city without supporting some type of cruelty, as most phones and clothes alone would already be a no-go. It's not that people don't have empathy, but rather that there's only so much one can do in a day and one has to pick their battles. If you want to dedicate extra time and energy into animal well-being that's great, but let's not point the finger at those who lack those extra resources as if it were an individual moral failing.
level87 | 3 hours ago
I grew up in a poor household and we were vegetarian, because we saw animals as living things with feelings, not commodities whose pain and suffering is meaningless.
I agree you can't live without some level of cruelty, but you can certainly live without contributing to one of its most obvious forms.
mattas | 17 hours ago
I want not-meat that is definitely not meat.
BeetleB | 17 hours ago
There are plenty of meat eaters who want to eat these as a way to cut down their meat consumption. They don't want to become vegetarians, though.
delecti | 17 hours ago
Why not? I think there's a false conflation of veganism and health food (and gluten-free, though that's not relevant in this discussion). I love burgers, and fried chicken, and crappy chicken nuggets, but I don't want more animals to have to suffer for my sake than is necessary. I disagree on how hyper-specific that niche is.
IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.
thewebguyd | 16 hours ago
This is the real problem. Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now. $38 billion dollars in the US each year to subsidize meat and dairy, but only $17 million goes to fruit and vegetable farmers. It's completely backwards, especially considering the climate impact on meat and dairy farming.
AngryData | 16 hours ago
xethos | 15 hours ago
skeeter2020 | 11 hours ago
autoexec | 10 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 10 hours ago
NewJazz | 9 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 9 hours ago
AngryData | 8 hours ago
yesfitz | 11 hours ago
thevillagechief | 11 hours ago
KnuthIsGod | 9 hours ago
There are massive tax, fuel, land tax, health care subsidies for our farmers.
Even doctors who cater to the remote areas where farmers dwell get extra payments from our governments.
https://www.health.gov.au/topics/rural-health-workforce/clas...
reaperducer | an hour ago
Very common in the United States, too.
There are a lot of doctors who get their student loans reduced or paid off by state and local governments in exchange for working a certain number of years in less-desirable locations. I've worked with a number of them.
There was an entire TV show based on it that ran on CBS for five years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure
strken | 11 hours ago
gruez | 11 hours ago
Source? That seems implausibly high.
Using your $38B/year subsidy figure gets us $112/year in subsidies per American. There's no way you can get $30 unsubsidized price from that unless you think the average American only eats beef once a week.
CalRobert | 5 hours ago
I would have thought once a week is high.
Though median could differ from average. 12% of Americans eat half the beef
https://sph.tulane.edu/how-mere-12-americans-eat-half-nation...
Jensson | 4 hours ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-usa
Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.
542354234235 | an hour ago
9rx | 8 hours ago
scythe | 11 hours ago
leodler | 11 hours ago
Regardless, it goes without saying (from other, more well-sourced research) that the disparity of subsidies and government assistance provided to industries that ultimately exist to produce meat compared to industries that produce fruit/vegetables is fucking absurd.
pcthrowaway | 11 hours ago
People did indeed become vegan in isolation before the internet, just as they do today.
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to draw between "old vegans" and "new vegans", and how do you see it pertaining to this conversation (especially under a comment pointing out that plant-based burgers struggle to compete with traditional beef because of beef subsidies)?
smelendez | 10 hours ago
People regularly cut out meat, alcohol, sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine, fats, etc. based on things they’ve read, moral considerations, medical recommendations, and personal health observations, not because they’ve joined a community that eschews such things.
PrimalPower | 16 hours ago
Is it niche? Yes, but vegetarians were always niche.
While the late 2010s fixated on “protein” and “macros” - allowing products like Beyond or Soylent to shine.
Much of the health discourse around the 2020s has focused on quality of the ingredients and “processed foods”. So naturally Beyond is caught on the crossfire.
Is there a future where this stuff is proven to be better for you in the short and long term? I sure hope so. But there’s way too many unknowns right now and it’s expensive to boot.
Marsymars | 16 hours ago
tdb7893 | 11 hours ago
lambda | 10 hours ago
Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste.
Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty. So from a health conscious point of view, it's a decent substitute.
Then there are the people who just want to reduce their meat consumption overall. Maybe they're not vegan or vegetarian, but they're trying to watch their saturated fat intake, or reduce their carbon impact, or they suffer from gout and are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat to ease that.
Sometimes you just want to go out with your friends for a burger, and the Beyond patty can make a better substitute than a black bean or mushroom patty that used to be common.
And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat. I have, for a long time, done a low meat diet; I don't avoid it entirely, but I try not to eat it at every meal. It provides a nice alternative for that.
Is it a bit of a niche market? Sure. But, not every product needs to be for everyone.
Klonoar | 10 hours ago
afavour | 10 hours ago
I just did a quick search on Uber Eats in NYC. Every Beyond Burger I found was between $3-5 more than a regular burger. That’s the reason I stopped eating them, I actually quite like the texture and flavor. I just don’t like the price.
fosco | 9 hours ago
I often have some at home and instead of having two red meat burgers have one and one of these, occasionally when they go on sale at Costco I’ll buy a bunch.
I am not vegan or vegetarian but do seek ways to reduce my red meat intake which years ago was grilling ribeyes 4-5 nights a week. I was unreasonably unhealthy and having alternate options helped balance my health out over the long run. I like both beyond burgers and impossible. I wish they were cheaper than hamburger meat, when I compare to buying hamburger meat in bulk it’s still more expensive at this point
xvector | 3 hours ago
slashdev | an hour ago
It doesn't seem such a clear cut ethical decision to me. Certainly there are some forms of raising livestock that are terrible (broiler chickens come to mind), but there are other forms that actually seem quite pleasant for the animals most of the time (e.g. free-range cattle).
lithocarpus | 9 hours ago
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
viccis | 9 hours ago
haraldooo | 9 hours ago
djtango | 8 hours ago
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o
EDIT: grammatical cleanup
californical | 8 hours ago
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
tomhow | 6 hours ago
whakim | 9 hours ago
dataflow | 8 hours ago
KAMSPioneer | 7 hours ago
lithocarpus | 7 hours ago
KPGv2 | 6 hours ago
lithocarpus | 7 hours ago
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
KPGv2 | 6 hours ago
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
auggierose | 5 hours ago
missingdays | 4 hours ago
By this logic, you shouldn't eat modern meat, as its very different from the one our ancestors were eating. Modern meat is mostly fat
croes | 8 hours ago
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
lithocarpus | 7 hours ago
Peas != extracted pea protein
They're not the same thing.
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
OJFord | 5 hours ago
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
baud147258 | 5 hours ago
noufalibrahim | 7 hours ago
KPGv2 | 6 hours ago
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
Not really a dig at you, sorry.
noufalibrahim | 5 hours ago
TBH, I haven't heard the complaints about the use of "oil" in that context.
OJFord | 5 hours ago
unfitted2545 | 7 hours ago
You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal! Have you tried dog meat?
lithocarpus | 7 hours ago
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
TeMPOraL | 6 hours ago
ErroneousBosh | 5 hours ago
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
auggierose | 5 hours ago
Interesting! If that's true, maybe it is because carnivores are less healthy.
ErroneousBosh | 3 hours ago
Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.
Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.
baud147258 | 5 hours ago
I'd like to try one day. But I don't think I'd easily find a butcher selling it here in Western Europe
unfitted2545 | an hour ago
baud147258 | an hour ago
> would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
Well, I'm not against (regulated) hunting, so no. Though I don't think that dogs are allowed to be hunted here.
mikkupikku | 4 hours ago
(It also amuses me when vegans retreat to xenophobia as their Motte.)
3rodents | 4 hours ago
Dogs are the perfect example, not because of xenophobia, but because they are such a plain example of hypocrisy that can be refuted on every point.
mikkupikku | 4 hours ago
Of course xenophobia is nothing new to most internet veganists, their whole thing is being intolerant to the culture of billions of people around the world, so a little additional intolerance to a few Asian countries (and a few Swiss people) probably seems like no biggie.
3rodents | 3 hours ago
Saying that dog meat is an example of "depravity of meat eaters" makes no sense because the "depravity of meat eaters" is demonstrable... with any meat? That's the entire point of veganism! If a vegan believes that meat eaters are depraved, they believe they are depraved whether they eat cats, dogs, cows or pigs.
You may find some xenophobic people who are vegans but what you're much more likely to find is meat eaters who think that eating dog meat in Wuhan is depraved while eating pigs in New York is totally acceptable. Who do you think is signing the "end dog meat" petitions? Western meat eaters!
I have personally never met a vegan in person or online who thought that dog meat was more depraved than pig meat. The go to argument that vegans make is that pigs and dogs are of equivalent intelligence, that you could raise a pig as you raise a dog and have the same bond. Framing the dog meat argument as xenophobic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and requires either a wilful ignorance or... I don't know. I cannot even understand how you contorted yourself into believing this.
deepvibrations | 3 hours ago
chabska | 6 hours ago
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
oblio | 6 hours ago
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
KPGv2 | 6 hours ago
what absurd scaremongering! Do you know how yellow pea protein, for example, is "refined"?
You take dried peas and grind them into powder. Pop in a centrifuge to separate protein from starch. Not exactly pumped full of "toxins"!
> Avocado Oil
You literally press avocado flesh. It's been done for centuries. It's not some crazy refinement process.
> brown rice protein
This is just ground up rice mixed with amylase or protease to isolate the proteins. There's nothing scary here. We've been eating it for millennia.
etc
eeixlk | 4 hours ago
thesis | 9 hours ago
If those 2 things are your barometer for healthy… it’s not a clear win.
ehnto | 9 hours ago
It's important to remember also that not athletic individuals are high achieving bodybuilders with super strict macro diets. Most other sports only require a moderate attention to diet, especially at an amateur level. Bodybuilding is very diet focused, rather than strength and skill focused.
eeixlk | 3 hours ago
xdennis | 8 hours ago
I seriously doubt that health-conscious people would pick hyper-processed plants that are meant to resemble meat over plain meat+bread+vegetables that make up a non-fast-food hamburger.
rcakebread | 8 hours ago
If you buy a Beyond patty, it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store. Comparing it with a fast food burger isn't really fair.
kulahan | 8 hours ago
messe | 7 hours ago
Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?
AlecSchueler | 6 hours ago
messe | 6 hours ago
AlecSchueler | 5 hours ago
You asked "Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?"
My point was that groceries in general don't matter, only burgers. Some people almost never eat burgers at home and eat them exclusively at places like Burger King.
messe | 5 hours ago
ccppurcell | 7 hours ago
carlmr | 5 hours ago
We're not comparing fairly here. A finished hamburger patty is not pure ground beef. Did you ever make a hamburger patty yourself? You add salt and spices at a minimum.
A more fair comparison would be looking at store-bought hamburger patties. That's the same category of food.
I just compared Beyond (0.75g salt per 100g) and block house American Burger (0.88g per 100g). The patties are somewhat similar in weight, too (113g and 125g). So both in absolute, and weight relative amounts the Beyond burger has less sodium.
iinnPP | 4 hours ago
I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g
kleiba | 4 hours ago
Jensson | 4 hours ago
kleiba | 4 hours ago
What matters is not so much the natural form, it is how the product is typically consumed.
But of course I see your point that with home made meat-based patties, you are in control of how much salt you want to add, while with factory made patties, you have to take what you get, it's typically not possible to "take away" salt. Mind you, though, the latter argument holds for both plant-based and meat-based factory-made patties.
iinnPP | 4 hours ago
kleiba | 3 hours ago
Also, do you expect the vegan alternative to have exactly the same nutritional values as their meat counterparts?
Look, I don't even know why I'm defending Beyond here, I'm certainly not a fan (as a matter of fact, I don't like their beef patties). But I think the arguments you've made are not entirely fair.
iinnPP | 3 hours ago
If you're salting your recipe with traditional ground beef, you're doing the same with Beyond. If not, same.
I do not expect or even encourage the content of any alternative to match the nutritional value of the real deal.
A typical pinch of salt is 300mg. Not 2300mg.
When the base product has 3x as much sodium, that is a problem. It doesn't need that much because as you stated, you can add salt during cooking. As a great example, let's take a use case for Beyond which is taco meat. I add taco seasoning (my own which is about 30% sodium compared to a traditional) and now the Beyond version is still roughly 250% the sodium content.
I can't remove the sodium they add. It's not a product I like or desire. It's more expensive. It's less healthy (note how often I mention reduced salt) for myself.
Also, I have been a strict vegan in life for about 5 years. I still didn't eat Beyond (aside from tasting it) during that period (it was available).
I'm not really trying to attack Beyond here, it's all personal preference at the end of the day. I make 95% of my food, from bread to tomato sauce to pickled peppers and hot sauce. When I am reaching for a vegan protein, I reach for lentils.
kleiba | an hour ago
butlike | an hour ago
iinnPP | 4 hours ago
It's good to eat sans salt on bbq with your desired (typically salty) toppings.
I know people salt the patty while cooking, but the topic at hand is Beyond and their patties.
edgyquant | 3 hours ago
gravatron | 27 minutes ago
mikkupikku | 4 hours ago
eeixlk | 4 hours ago
Intermernet | 4 hours ago
deepvibrations | 3 hours ago
The comparison here is shop-bought burgers or those you would buy in a burger restaurant, which WILL have salt and likely more than a Beyond burger.
edgyquant | 3 hours ago
ben_w | 2 hours ago
I have no opinion about the economics of the brand itself; as a vegetarian I've always thought they were over-priced, and also that it was a shame I don't have a huge range of alternatives, as I actually like spicy bean burgers and can't find them any more*. In fact, because of the limited alternatives in my local markets, I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans.
* I don't know how much of this is "bean burgers are no longer popular" vs. "I moved country and Berlin has never heard of them"; for Quorn I do at least know it's the latter.
carlmr | 29 minutes ago
Do you have a link or name for this? I also prefer black bean or lentil burgers, but I've been making them by hand really.
deepvibrations | 2 hours ago
People who buy burgers or eat out are likely to get less healthy burgers, if you look at highest selling supermarket burgers, both meat and vegan options are ALL high in salt for example.
blks | an hour ago
malfist | 2 hours ago
behringer | an hour ago
malfist | an hour ago
The vast, vast, vast majority of people do not have any reason to restrict salt intake.
behringer | 40 minutes ago
krsw | 16 minutes ago
littlexsparkee | 33 minutes ago
butlike | an hour ago
cj | an hour ago
If you're comparing the healthiness of a premade vegan burger patty, you need to compare it to a premade (or equivalent homemmade) beef patty. You can't take salt out of the beef patty comparison and say "look it's better"
Edit: But you can compare it to actual products on shelves. The first frozen burger brand I can think of that would be a good comparison is frozen Bubba burger. If we compare the sodium content, Beyond patty is 3-4x higher in sodium. Beef wins! :) Although Beyond has half the fat.
krsw | 20 minutes ago
Saline9515 | 3 hours ago
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
mcdonje | 5 hours ago
iinnPP | 5 hours ago
eeixlk | 4 hours ago
ben_w | 2 hours ago
mcdonje | an hour ago
ricardobayes | 3 hours ago
edgyquant | 3 hours ago
deepvibrations | 2 hours ago
Meat: 1. Those who buy from butcher (health conscious) 2. Those who buy packaged products from supermarket.
Vegan: 1. Those who make homemade plant-based alternatives (eg.lentil burgers) 2. Those who buy Beyond burgers from supermarket.
Hence I think most people are trying to compare apples to oranges, which is not the correct comparison to make when weighing up each type.
liveoneggs | 3 hours ago
Ingredients: beef
https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger
Ingredients: a bunch
barrell | 6 hours ago
It’s ultra processed food devoid of micronutrients with low quality protein and poor bioavailability.
Health conscious folks would definitely not choose this. In fact, it’s all the things you try to avoid as soon as you start being health conscious. Folks who want to believe they are being health conscious may be convinced via marketing to buy it, but anyone seriously invested in their nutrition would steer very clear of these.
TeMPOraL | 6 hours ago
rdn | 6 hours ago
This product will only succeed if its reasonably cheaper than the cheapest meat (not just beef). It is and forever will be inferior to meat as a food product for the vast majority of consumers. Perhaps in some vision of the future the dominant consumer is Hindu and they may find the product acceptable, but they'll still be price conscious.
oblio | 6 hours ago
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
Please tell the British Heart Foundation that they're "the crazy kind of health conscious" :-)
adrian_b | 5 hours ago
The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such processed food in an incorrect way, by making food that has an unbalanced composition, for instance food that has too much sugar.
On the other hand, the food processing methods that cause irreversible transformations of food, i.e. mixing various ingredients and/or using certain food treatments, e.g. heating, are quite likely to have harmful effects on food quality, when they are done in an industrial setting, instead of being done at home. The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. So any useless or even harmful ingredients will be used if those reduce the production cost, as long as the food still looks appetizing and it has a good taste provided e.g. by excessive sugar, salt and bad quality fat.
So the problem is less that food processing methods are bad per se. The problem is that most producers of processed food cannot be trusted to use processing methods that are good for the customer, instead of being good only for the producer. Now there are a lot of regulations that prevent some of the most harmful methods of food adulteration that were used in the past, but they are still not severe enough to ensure that every producer makes healthy food.
TeMPOraL | 5 hours ago
Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but it's not all evil either. They also care about appeasing regulators in countries where food regulations exist, and they may care a bit personally since they themselves and/or their family is eating that too, so I wouldn't necessarily paint them as completely disconnected from the rest of society.
Now, on the other hand, the industrial producers have a few more things going in their favor, such as they actually have quality control metrics, and they are in actual position to make good on caring about food. Home kitchens are not, regular people have neither knowledge nor appreciation of the complex chemistry involved, and even if they did, the equipment used in home kitchens is too crude to allow for consistent quality (not that we can hope for any with no supply chain control either).
(The slightly-fancy restaurants are arguably the worst - they combine all the bad incentives of a high-volume, low-margin commercial operation, with equipment and setup inadequate to guarantee any kind of process quality control. Contrast that with e.g. McDonald's - they may be serving mediocre food at best, but they do it with engineering precision, and you can be sure they aren't just microwaving you an old chicken breast and adding burn marks with an electric grill to make it look like you'd expect for a $50 menu item with a name written in French.)
So the irony is, the industrial producers may have misaligned incentives, but they're also the only ones in position to deliver actually healthy and quality food. Regular people have neither knowledge nor equipment for that, and all the "healthy eating" fads abusing real scientific terms and imbuing them with quasi-religious meaning is not helping. In reality, people just eat stuff and make up stories they don't even verify to feel good with their choices. Which, like with other such belief systems, is fine, until they believe their own stories so much they try to force others to believe in them too.
lm28469 | 5 hours ago
If you're not you should, colon cancer is becoming a leading cause of death in people under 40...
https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/colorectal-cancer-awaren...
https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...
TeMPOraL | 4 hours ago
-
The chart you linked only talks about incidence ratio, and is more than adequately explained by improvements in access to tests, quality of tests, as well as improvements in healthcare in general, as people don't suffer and die today from what they did up to few decades ago - or anything else, really, since the world has been steadily improving across the board in every dimension.
In fact, non-linear effects of population growth alone could explain that chart: people talk more, including about colon cancer, so over time, more people in the population with access to testing would go test themselves after being made aware of the potential problem, biasing the sample.
Or, more fundamentally, the fact that medicine graduated from voodoo to proper science only around 100 years ago, would explain it too, because we're less than a century into doing proper studies about anything at all.
lm28469 | 4 hours ago
TeMPOraL | 3 hours ago
barrell | 2 hours ago
I would say veganism is more trendy at the moment. That doesnt discredit anything about the vegan diet.
billynomates | 5 hours ago
Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
lm28469 | 5 hours ago
PxldLtd | 3 hours ago
barrell | 2 hours ago
Nowadays it’s all fake meat products which I would never put in my body, and there’s this weird social pressure where I’m being silly by “refusing to eat vegan foods”.
Fruits and vegetables and legumes are delicious, I will eat all of them.
Bring back bean burgers!
close04 | 4 hours ago
Looks like agree that it's not great but you compensate elsewhere. If you chose the "hard way" of limiting your menu to vegan why not pick the options with less compromises? Even paper can be food as long as you compensate elsewhere.
> Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Are you maybe conflating "unhealthy" with "not explicitly healthy"? Plenty of foods are unequivocally unhealthy, anything else you eat will not compensate. You don't "compensate" for eating a lot of ultraprocessed food because some of the contents of that food should not be in your body at all. You can't always "subtract" by eating other food. Not saying this is the case for you and these burgers.
Avshalom | 2 hours ago
ap99 | 4 hours ago
If I eat perfectly clean for 90% of my diet and then I consume poison for the remaining 10%, that's still doing some damage.
You can, however, be happy with the fact that 10% is better than 50%.
eeixlk | 4 hours ago
landl0rd | 25 minutes ago
Yes, some harms aren't linear no-threshold in their nature. Doesn't change the fact that the unhealthy doesn't become healthy because you eat a salad for lunch.
ricardobayes | 3 hours ago
Beyond meat doesn't have nitrates, filler, stabilizers or "85% meat" hence it's way more healthy than most meat-based patties or meat products.
Again, agrolobby by its full-page ads in newspapers successfully turned plant-based food which is objectively, scientifically proven to be healthy, to something unnatural, "chemical" and unhealthy.
barrell | 2 hours ago
And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.
Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.
And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.
ricardobayes | 11 minutes ago
I see the same argument very often these days: that only single-ingredient, "traditional" food is good.
kakacik | 6 hours ago
I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content. Yes, he literally stopped being vegan at that point, although he still is on most days since then.
Its subpar product, with way too much questionable chemistry, worse taste (or more like structure&taste) and impact on environment is... questionable too, maybe less than real beef but probably not massively. What could be acceptable for environmental impact is lab grown real meat but even that seems to not go the direction one would expect.
shafyy | 5 hours ago
So, he wasn't vegan then?
sarreph | 5 hours ago
dcminter | 5 hours ago
sarreph | 3 hours ago
dcminter | 3 hours ago
whywhywhywhy | 5 hours ago
Why? Carbs and processed oils bound together by stodge isn’t healthier than fried ground beef.
amelius | 4 hours ago
mhl47 | 4 hours ago
Regardless of what you think about phytooestrogens (which has very little evidence to have negative effects in normal quantities)
amelius | 3 hours ago
(It is also an Asian crop, originally, maybe that has something to do with Western people, especially men, not being very well tolerant to it)
FooBarWidget | 3 hours ago
I don't know man. I'm a health conscious person and I could just as easily choose normal chicken meat, or a beef steak that's not a hamburger, or fatty fish (omega-3!!). Why would I choose a hamburger substitute? I don't even particularly crave hamburgers.
I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, and it seems to be okay when it comes to amount of industrial fillers. It seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. So I guess it's not that bad, but I still don't still really have a reason to choose it.
On days when I don't particularly want to eat a lot of meat, I just eat more rice, vegetables and beans. It's not that hard?
I think the OP is right: their niche seemed to be people who crave something like a hamburger or at least real meat while having an ideological opposition against meat and enough money.
chaostheory | 3 hours ago
liveoneggs | 3 hours ago
a beyond burger has 310mg https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger
They are lower in fat and total calories but they are obviously more processed = salt. Even a mcdonalds burger patty (without the bun) has less salt.
malfist | 2 hours ago
liveoneggs | 2 hours ago
bubba burgers are real meat, not bean burgers
hbn | 34 minutes ago
Not sure what health-conscious people you know, but I'd hazard to guess that most would choose the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man over the ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils.
Chris2048 | 33 minutes ago
You can agree with this sentiment (ideology?) and not be vegan, if you aren't willing to give up meat. giving up meat is what defines this demographic.
Relative to a population of people willing to give up meat, would you assume there is no difference in "liking how plants taste" versus the general population? I'd assume it correlates directly with "willingness to give up meat".
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
Maybe, but in context its a false dichotomy, why wouldn't they pick better substitutes e.g. non-average meat?
Scoundreller | 10 hours ago
I never understood this argument: what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?
I'm not rushing to demand IV tylenol because its oral bioavailability is only 80%-90%, which is around the "loss" we're talking for plant vs animal protein on average. And the ultraprocessing should improve plant's profile here.
VladVladikoff | 10 hours ago
Because the macros suck. If you’re trying to hit certain protein / carb / fat ratios, eating more of the “protein” means eating a lot more carbs and fat too, which often isn’t the goal.
Your analogy is not accurate, it would be more like waking up in pain in the middle of the night after a bad injury, and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
Scoundreller | 9 hours ago
> and taking t3s with codeine+ caffeine, and wanting more codeine without wanting the added caffeine.
that's what tylenol #4s are for, double the codeine, none the caffeine. Take half a t#4 and half of a regular standard tylenol = T#3 without the codeine.
sph | 8 hours ago
Projectiboga | 10 hours ago
VladVladikoff | 10 hours ago
etbebl | 9 hours ago
tys- | 9 hours ago
tys- | 9 hours ago
I’ve personally never met another vegan who chose this lifestyle for “diet” reasons. They’ll be out there for sure, but for the folks I know It’s always been about the animals.
Just because I choose not to eat animals doesn’t mean I’m choosing to be healthy :) I should focus more on the food that I eat but alas, it’s just not how I roll at the moment.
You do get some unintentional health benefits here and there (lower cholesterol in my case) but other trade-offs too for those like me that aren’t as diligent as they should be (lower b-12, iron etc).
This is completely unrelated to the question of “can you be healthy as a vegan”. To that I would say absolutely. Is it the reason most people choose to be vegan - my gut would say no (but I’m not claiming this as fact).
Goddamn I love me some Oreos.
Plus, it’s easier to sit atop a high horse when you’re not eating it ;)
mhitza | 5 hours ago
4ggr0 | 5 hours ago
what a weird form of gatekeeping. at least they're using some form of ethics and trying to change the world in a way they're able to.
coming from a non-vegan, btw, even though this shouldn't even be a requirement.
derefr | 9 hours ago
1. non-vegans eating with vegans at a vegan restaurant, where eating there wasn't their choice (they were craving a burger), and so, being forced to order off this menu, will choose the most burger-like thing on the menu.
2. non-vegans eating with vegans at a non-vegan restaurant, where for whatever reason they feel the need to impress / not-offend the vegan by eating vegan food as well. (Think "first date" or "client meeting.")
fooker | 8 hours ago
Nursie | 7 hours ago
Do people genuinely think that 'ethical' vegans and vegetarians are doing it because they don't like meat? Or genuinely not comprehend the idea of taking an ethical stance even if you actually like something?
For illustration, human baby could be the best tasting barbecue on the planet, but even if it was I would still think that murdering children for my dinner would be wrong and wouldn't do it. Ethical vegans and vegetarians feel similarly about eating meat, that it's (often) delicious but killing animals for food is wrong. Offering them a "meat without any of the suffering" option, in theory, has quite a large audience.
Plus as a meat-eater who had a vegetarian partner for a few years, things like impossible mince also made it easier for me to cook things we could both enjoy, and things like beyond/impossible made eating out a little easier in burger joints etc.
pasquinelli | 6 hours ago
shafyy | 5 hours ago
Just because Beyond as a company is doing bad doesn't mean the whole category of products is doing bad.
roncesvalles | 5 hours ago
I never thought the notion of "let's make the veggie burger taste like meat" made any sense.
CalRobert | 5 hours ago
I’ma regular guy who likes burgers but is very worried about the effects cattle farming has on the planet. I don’t love killing animals so I can have a tastier meal either.
Avshalom | 5 hours ago
The demographic that Beyond and Impossible claimed to be chasing was the like 85% of Americans that answered polls about wanting to eat less meat (back in the early 201Xs). "Meatless Monday", weeknight vegetarian... Whatever. Thats who they pitched investors on.
It's also a market that never materialized, whether because it was always a mirage of push polling or because an ascendant fascist GOP has made meat eating a cornerstone of their identity or COVID or whatever.
MarceliusK | 4 hours ago
kgwxd | 4 hours ago
bryanrasmussen | 4 hours ago
Yes it was generally more expensive, for the worst quality meat but otherwise I think it was at a reasonable medium price point.
ricardobayes | 3 hours ago
FooBarWidget | 3 hours ago
Still, I don't really have a reason to buy it. I don't avoid meat. I specifically eat beef for, for example, creatine and iron. But I guess it is good for people who crave beef yet have an ideological resistance against meat, a niche which I'm not sure how big it is.
ricardobayes | 3 hours ago
timmmmmmay | 2 hours ago
ricardobayes | 22 minutes ago
IncreasePosts | 3 hours ago
liveoneggs | 2 hours ago
JeremyNT | an hour ago
I don't see why this follows. There are a lot of ethical vegans and vegetarians who like junk food. And these patties have higher protein than less processed plant based alternatives, which is important to a lot of people. It's just that vegetarians and vegans are a small portion of the overall "burger" market.
I suspect the "meat" branding helped early on, because it got some people to give it a try who otherwise never would have. There were other plant-based burgers on the market already but Beyond really exploded quickly.
It's just that it didn't really live up to the hype enough for meat eaters to go back for a second helping after the novelty wore off. So at this point the "meat" in the brand name isn't doing anything.
blks | an hour ago
And it’s not really about the taste, it’s more about form factor of a “protein fried patty” in a sandwich. Could easily be falafel.
Normal daily food is of course actual vegan/vegetarian food that doesn’t need to pretend to be meat.
paulirwin | an hour ago
drewg123 | an hour ago
If animal agriculture was not subsidized, I expect plant based "meats" would be on par or cheaper than real meat.
Angostura | 50 minutes ago
jfengel | 17 hours ago
I had really hoped that people would say, "Well, if it tastes close enough, then how about I go for the cruelty-free version." And it is close-enough -- it's at least as good as a fast-food hamburger.
Perhaps the cognitive dissonance is just too much. The world would be a better place if we ate less meat, even if we don't eliminate it entirely. But to acknowledge the cruelty by avoiding it sometimes means facing it when you do choose animal protein.
cogman10 | 17 hours ago
The fact that it doesn't taste close to the original and that it commands a price premium is why I ultimately gave up on it. Where I might use beyond, I can usually get a healthier option using ground turkey instead with a much more agreeable flavor and price.
But really, I've just focused on making more meatless dishes in general. Highlighting the flavor of legumes and mushrooms beats trying to fake the flavor of beef.
jghn | 17 hours ago
ElijahLynn | 17 hours ago
I think it actually is "Beyond" meat, in that sense.
cogman10 | 17 hours ago
IMO, this is a much better tasting burger that doesn't try to fake beef flavor (Not vegan) [1]
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-black-bean-burger-recip...
wmeredith | 17 hours ago
Liftyee | 17 hours ago
But at a much higher price? The value is not really there IMO.
From their performance it seems like the intersection of (cares about animals | methane emissions) & doesn't mind health effects & less price sensitive & must eat hamburger-likes is too small.
Interesting point on cognitive dissonance though. I think it's possible to draw a rational tradeoff between acceptable amount of (externalised) cruelty and personal benefits of eating meat - no cognitive dissonance needed.
NotGMan | 16 hours ago
Imagine telling a parent "yeah, it's ok if your kid gets very ill and has chronic diseases, but hey, the chickens will live!"
Mogzol | 11 hours ago
latexr | 5 hours ago
Meat, on the other hand, is linked to diseases. Especially red meat and cancer.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
So your scenario is more like “imagine telling a parent ‘Give meat to your kid. They will get sick, unnecessarily kill animals (as we all know, kids hate animals, right?), and accelerate destroying the environment (who needs to live in a good environment, anyway, as long as there are burgers?)’”.
ErroneousBosh | 5 hours ago
So, yes, "linked to".
You're going to die of heart disease, not bowel cancer caused by eating meat, even if you are a vegan. In fact, especially if you are a vegan, as it turns out, if you believe another ever-so-slightly-sketchy set of statistics. I personally don't, but I have noticed a lot of the people I know who eat a vegan diet don't eat particularly healthy stuff.
latexr | 2 hours ago
Neither do people who don’t eat vegan, so that’s irrelevant to the point. I couldn’t help notice you skipped over the points of killing animals and accelerating destroying the environment.
ErroneousBosh | an hour ago
Every time you eat a "Beyond Meat" burger, you have permanently destroyed a patch of what used to be rain forest and is now crappy farmland about the size of a car parking space.
latexr | 25 minutes ago
stackghost | 11 hours ago
It's not, though. Vegans that I know always proselytize about how "you can't even tell the difference" but I can tell the difference.
I don't understand the weird vegan obsession with eating fake food. Edible oil product "vegan cheese" and other junk.
If you want to eat meat, eat it. If you don't, don't. You do you, but don't try to sell me on disgusting fake food.
thfuran | 9 hours ago
stackghost | 9 hours ago
It tastes like imitation meat, the same way artificial vanilla tastes like imitation vanilla.
People are just deceiving themselves.
brailsafe | 7 hours ago
I agree and also find it unpleasant, but I wouldn't claim to be incredulous that someone would deliberately want to deceive themselves. We deceive ourselves all the time for all sorts of stupid and less stupid reasons. If you need money but hate your job, you have to convince yourself that somehow getting up every day grinding it out is worth it. If you don't need money but are addicted to it, or don't have any other hobbies, you deceive yourself into making your number higher.
If you're a bodybuilder you might have convinced yourself that a certain repulsive aesthetic is attractive, or if you have weight issues, you might intentionally deceive yourself into hating the consumption addictions that are your weakness.
Many people who are vegans do happen to convince themselves of remarkably implausible nonsense that I haven't really seen in others as much, but it's usually due to what I'd suspect are other underlying mental health issues—the two groups I've observed the most mistrust in medicine from are 30+ men and vegans.
The act of self-deception itself isn't rare though
halapro | 9 hours ago
They should just use that as a label: https://xkcd.com/641/
Would you like the cruel or cruelty-free patty?
entropyneur | 6 hours ago
baud147258 | 5 hours ago
cpursley | 17 hours ago
XorNot | 17 hours ago
What's to not understand?
andrepd | 17 hours ago
cpursley | 3 hours ago
bpodgursky | 17 hours ago
cpursley | 3 hours ago
carlosjobim | 17 hours ago
asdff | 17 hours ago
The reason is for a lot of them is that they become repulsed by the smell of meat after not eating it for a long time. So they would very much not want something that tastes like meat. They just want the function of the burger really. And to be fair there isn't a lot of good options otherwise for vegetarians that are truly comperable to a burger in terms of it as a product. Veggie lunch meat is even sadder state of affairs than the burger meat so sandwiches are out. Then you have bean burritos I guess, falafel wrap. All stuff that tends to be found solely in ethnic specific restaurants than democratized across the entire globe like the burger is, which you can probably find anywhere you find reliable electricity in 2026.
globular-toast | 7 hours ago
ElijahLynn | 17 hours ago
The plant meats are healthier than the animal meats.
cpursley | 3 hours ago
BeetleB | 17 hours ago
People don't eat burgers for health reasons.
> There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others).
Why eat ice cream when chicken is healthier?
You're comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there are plenty of delicious vegetarian foods, but you can't just substitute one for the other. If you're craving eggplants, replacing it with lentils will not satisfy you.
cpursley | 3 hours ago
BeetleB | 49 minutes ago
Furthermore it's nice that no animal got killed and there were fewer emissions.
6510 | 17 hours ago
Some are so much into meat the vegetarian evangelism has about as much chance as trying to convince them cannibalism is the solution to all world problems.
If you sell them something cheap that tastes great and tell them it has meat in it there is no need for all that tiresome talking about saving the world on an empty stomach. They become easy to catch and kill.
deaux | 9 hours ago
midnitewarrior | 17 hours ago
If they would do a 55/45 beef/plant-based meat blend and burgers, I think adoption rate would pick up significantly. Anybody who questions the taste is going to see that beef is the main ingredient. If the product comes in significantly cheaper than beef alone, more consumers will try it and look to it as an affordable way of eating beef.
For the bigger picture, 65 cows will stretch as far as 100 cows previously did, lowering suffering, environmental damage, inputs, etc.
For the people who like the 55/45 blend, it would open the door to an 80/20 blend plant vs. beef, and a 100% plant-based product.
asdff | 16 hours ago
Also really hard to cook with imo compared to meat. Meat is nice to cook with from all the fat in there. It just renders out perfectly and also separates it from the pan. You get some nice carmelization, maillard reactions, all the nice stuff going on.
The fake meat is like a sponge for grease on the other hand. Nothing renders out. Stuff gets sucked in. It is like being on the opposite side of the osmosis reaction going on here. And boy do you need grease to cook with this stuff. Otherwise it just fuses to the pan like nothing, and again crumbles apart getting it off. It pretty much needs to be pan fried and soaks up a ton of grease after. You therefore can't trust nutrition guidelines because of the grease requirement to get anything out of this stuff. I bet if you air fried it, it would be absurdly dry.
AngryData | 15 hours ago
Nothing against mixing beef with plants and the like, but there are far easier ways to improve the welfare of cattle that only costs pennies.
touwer | 17 hours ago
maxkfranz | 17 hours ago
The protein bar could work. I personally don't like them, because most of them are just candy bars with added protein.
Meat substitutes (e.g. fake turkey made of tofu) are generally an inferior good, in both the economic sense and the sense of taste. It's not surprising to me that they don't work. Maybe if they're made much cheaper.
datahack | 17 hours ago
Just seemed like just another weird Silicon Valley money bubble built on hype and vc cash instead of any kind of meaningful product differentiation.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s our genuine experience.
legitster | 17 hours ago
I also am disappointed there was no iteration or improvement of the product over time. There was clearly room to innovate or make it taste better - it feels like the product hit, there was some excitement about the novelty... and then they didn't capitalize on it by pushing new variations and updates.
khelavastr | 15 hours ago
deterministic | 14 hours ago
It will never be the right moment for plant-based meat. It is ultra processed unhealthy garbage.
The length of the ingredient list tells you everything you need to know. The longer it is, the more processed and unhealthy the "food" is.
xvxvx | 14 hours ago
subpixel | 11 hours ago
I like em but I think the idea of them being somehow premium doesn’t translate.
karmakurtisaani | 11 hours ago
jmkr | 11 hours ago
627467 | 11 hours ago
How big is the market for non-ideological vegans/vegetarians that are shopping for meat alternatives?
Most people are not ideological with their food. Most people will only stop eating meat when it becomes too expensive to afford. Simple as that.
What is the status you gain for being seen eating a beyond burger in 2026?
gpm | 11 hours ago
At something like 6% of the world the market the population of ideological vegetarians and vegans is huge. With another handful of percent who are ideologically opposed to eating meat on certain days but not entirely vegetarian.
PS. Your claim that "most people are not ideologic with their food"... Not all food ideology is related to vegetarianism so it's not terribly relevant but I think this claim is just wrong. Islam + Hinduisim + Buddhism make up nearly half the world and all have pretty strong religious ideological beliefs about food, and a non-trivial fraction of the quarter of the world that is christian has at least a few scruples like avoiding meat during lent. And that's just people preaching religious beliefs not less documented ideologies like believing real men eat their steak raw or whatever.
627467 | 11 hours ago
I must be in bubble or have a very different definition of "idiological": of the dozens of vegans/vegetarians I know none would actively seek the "taste" of industrialized "ready-made" "meat replacement". They may put up with it if must be, but seek it? Desire it?
tsimionescu | 8 hours ago
Now, this relies on considering people "ideological vegans/vegetarians" if their only motivation for not eating meat is ideology. This means that the huge amount of Hindu Indians who are ideologically opposed to eating meat don't count, since even without this ideological motivation, they would still have traditional and social and supply reasons to not eat meat.
dataflow | 8 hours ago
If you were to make fake plant-based products that were (a) noticeably healthier than meat, and (b) indistinguishable from meat taste-wise (or better-tasting), I'm quite confident a lot of people would pay a premium for that.
The problem is the current products just don't deliver that. All they deliver is eco-friendliness at a premium, at which point they're basically offering something more akin to the optional climate fee on flight tickets.
matt_daemon | 10 hours ago
ph4rsikal | 10 hours ago
ramon156 | 7 hours ago
hapless | 9 hours ago
now they are publicly listed, and their cynical premise has not born fruit
time to pivot!
gusennan | 8 hours ago
ramon156 | 7 hours ago
I tell myself that in the long-term the pros outweigh the con, if you value being on the right side of morality
billynomates | 5 hours ago
latexr | 5 hours ago
Furthermore, it’s a bad argument to imply vastly reduced complicity with a system is the same as full complicity.
billynomates | 49 minutes ago
Where did I say "full complicity"? But yes, animals who are farms for milk and eggs are treated just as badly, sometimes worse, than animals that are farmed for meat.
latexr | 29 minutes ago
What’s your source for that claim? I know plenty of vegetarians and there’s not a single one where I could assume they eat both dairy and eggs. I don’t think any of them drink milk (oat drinks and the like are common), only some eat cheese, in very varying quantities (from regularly to almost never), same with eggs.
You are assuming what your parent commenter does.
> animals who are farms for milk and eggs are treated just as badly
Again, you have no idea what your parent commenter does. With eggs in particular, there are different tiers related to the animals’ conditions. It is possible to make more ethical choices.
codeulike | 2 hours ago
globular-toast | 8 hours ago
Sjeiti | 7 hours ago
socalgal2 | 7 hours ago
gethly | 6 hours ago
billynomates | 5 hours ago
It absolutely is the time for plant-based meat. It has never been more crucial. It's just that their business model was easily replicable.
bravetraveler | 5 hours ago
tom1337 | 5 hours ago
ahoka | 5 hours ago
tom1337 | 4 hours ago
hobofan | 3 hours ago
Sure if we are cherry picking the "premium" brand this comparison works. Store brand soy or oat milk are 0,95€[0] and 0,90€[1] per liter respectively, so about what cow milk costs. For milk and milk alternatives there hasn't been a financial differentiator between them for about 5 years now.
With meat replacement patties there is still a significant price difference, though there Beyond Meat is also one of the more expensive ones (which is bold, as they've also been lapped by the competition in taste and variety of products).
[0]: https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/rewe-bio-vegan-soja-drink-1l/5852... - Links may not work depending on what postcode you enter. Should work with 10115
[1]: https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/rewe-bio-vegan-hafer-drink-ohne-z...
penguin_booze | 5 hours ago
The industry has successfully marketed and packaged meat as "that thing you buy", hiding the immense and unconscionable cruelty which sentient beings are subjected to.
liveoneggs | 3 hours ago
the_gastropod | an hour ago
Lord-Jobo | 48 minutes ago
MarceliusK | 4 hours ago
bdcravens | 2 hours ago
conorcleary | 2 hours ago
outime | 2 hours ago
chadcmulligan | 2 hours ago
mapotofu | 2 hours ago
jrjeksjd8d | 2 hours ago
chadcmulligan | an hour ago
some_random | an hour ago
lynndotpy | 19 minutes ago
kgnhkldlsm | 2 hours ago
calrain | an hour ago
t1234s | an hour ago
nbosse | 54 minutes ago
Angostura | 51 minutes ago
nbosse | 38 minutes ago
some_random | 38 minutes ago
lynndotpy | 12 minutes ago
I wasn't vegan or vegetarian at the time and I thought they were just a complete improvement over beef burgers. But I think that thick congealing beef fat is gross and that it's just better mixed with mushroom juice, and I also already liked mushrooms.
mckennameyer | 49 minutes ago