Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
I think that apparently capitalists won’t be happy until the literal entirety of 1984 is brought into being and every final vestige of joy is driven out of life.
The final vestige of joy being animal suffering?
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
I basically feel the same as you
I bought some plant burgers a while back and they were pretty decent. I struggled to fully cook them and they ended up kinda carbonized on the outside and a little underdone in the middle so the consistency wasn’t great, but fairly convincing taste-wise.
I used to unsure about the idea of lab grown meat … but now I think they would be fine. I haven’t seen any in my area yet.
Lab grown meats couldn’t be any worse than the horrendous things we feed and do to the animals (large animals, birds and fish) we eat already.
The A&W veggie burger is just as good. It’s funny to order it with bacon, (not a vegetarian, just like to moderate beef.) I’ve had a Beyond Meat burger, but it was from a cafeteria that clearly didn’t know how to cook.
If the taste, texture, and price are good, I’ll eat it.
That goes for plant based stuff and meat replacements, too. I’ve tried the Impossible burger on a BK Whopper and thought it was plenty passable as a fast food burger patty… But it was a few bucks extra, so now that my curiosity is sated, I probably won’t buy another until it’s the same price as or cheaper than its animal-product counterpart.
Its good i guess though if you want to go vegan/vegiterian go away from these ultra processed foods as well! There are so many tasty dishes that are vegan/vegitarian without substitutes
Cook’s Country, who as far as I’m concerned are the go-to for any kind of taste-tests, did a comparison of several nugget brands, and the winner (Impossible, I think) actually beat out real chicken nuggets. YMMV but nuggets are just a medium for breading and sauce.
I enjoy most of them, will eat them if they’re cheap enough. Though I prefer tempeh, seitan, and frozen tofu over stuff that tries to be meat. Quality varies from mediocre to better than the real stuff
Calling tofu and tempeh “better than the real stuff” is the pure copium I come to Lemmy for.
hi ai
what’s wrong with you
They got the taste down on a lot of imitation meats; but the texture is usually way wrong. I have been hopeful that lab grown meat would solve that problem. Like, the best plant-based substitute I’ve ever had, was a “chicken” nugget that tasted perfrct, but still had the texture of wadded up paper.
As someone who does not eat meat because I don’t like it, these are useless foods to me. Why eat a highly processed version of something you don’t like in the first place, just because it’s plant based. I like veggie burgers that taste like veggies. That’s just me. These substitutes are really for people looking to reduce their meat consumption, or transition to a plant based diet. I will take tofu over any fake ‘meat’.
Other people have already mentioned how it feels like in your mouth, but I’m going to address a different angle: Ethics and environmental impact.
Modern industrial meat production is incredibly cruel. If you wanted to do the same thing in a more ethical way, the final product would end up being much more expensive, even if you had the economies of scale working in your favor. Meat alternatives would solve that issue.
Producing meat results in a lot of CO2 emissions, so a plant based alternative should be more environmentally friendly. Don’t know about lab meat though. Keeping everything sterile is not cheap or easy, so I guess the LCA of the resulting product should be very interesting to read.
Meat alternatives would solve that issue.
For a price.
Can we all afford lab grown meat? The people making it are all trying to maximize profit by giving the least while charging the most. Keep in mind, that money has to come from somewhere.
As with any new business being built on “ethics,” they should be willing to put their money where their mouths are. If they care so much about stopping animal abuse, then they should be charging the lowest price they can tolerate, not the highest price for their customers.
I don’t expect most fake-meat companies to do this because they care more about maximizing profit than stopping animal abuse.
Fair enough. No doubt there’s some greed in it as well, but the immature production technology and small scale can easily explain most of the astronomical price. If they ever make it to large scale production, optimize every step along the way, you should be able to see the economies of scale reducing the price. Obviously, we’re nowhere near there just yet.
Also, the technology itself will always set a certain floor to the price nobody can change until you change the underlying production technology. For example, electricity, equipment, labor and materials will always cost something, but an optimized process will need less of each.
I believe cultured meat is the future.
I don’t mind the plant-based substitutes and eat them occasionally, but:
- I don’t like that they’ve named them meat-related names (I have the same issue with plant “milk”). This marketing strategy causes an expectation of flavour and texture that disappoints people and puts them off. If the product is good enough, give it its own niche, like tofu.
- Part of the reason vegan / vegetarian diets are healthy is because the food is largely unprocessed, whereas many of these products are highly processed. I’d rather just eat actual vegetables.
Cultured meat has real potential to replace farmed meat because it can provide things no plant-based alternative can, while removing many of the disadvantages of animal farming:
- The taste and texture should eventually be identical to farmed meat.
- It’s kinder to animals than farming - not vegan, but not cruel, no-one dies, and far fewer animals are needed.
- It’s better for the environment in many ways: less emissions than animal farming, less land required than both animal and plant-based farms, can be produced close to urban centres so less transport should be required.
- It can be fed to pets that are obligate carnivores, like cats. I will never put my dog on a vegan diet but I am following the UK company Meatly, that is specialising in cultured meat for pet food, with interest.
Once cultured meat is a similar price to farmed meat, I believe the ethical and environmental advantages will give it the edge. Many people that will never go vegan or vegetarian will hopefully switch.
I do not believe it is possible for cultured meat to ever be cheaper than industrially farmed meat. An animal as an integrated system has too many inherent efficiency advantages over a lab culture, even an industrially-scaled lab culture.
- Animals have immune systems. Lab cultures have to be grown in a sterile environment, which increases costs.
- Animals have digestive systems and can extract only the needed nutrition from common plant materials. Lab cultures have to be fed pre-digested and carefully proportioned nutrients, which increases costs.
- Animals have extensive circulatory systems that efficiently get nutrients to cells and remove their waste. Lab cultures are centrifuged, which doesn’t scale as well.
- Animals have integrated waste processing and excretion systems. Lab cultures have to run external kidney loops, which not only increase costs but are less efficient.
Cultured meat will come down in price, maybe from 10x animal meat to 2-3x, but it’s always going to be a novelty/luxury and will never compete on price as long as industrial animal farming practices are legal.
I agree there are still technical challenges ahead, I’m just optimistic about innovation. There are a lot of companies investing heavily in this field, so there must be many technical experts who are similarly optimistic.
I’d also like to point out that current agricultural practices are heavily subsidised. Plus there are the unpaid environmental costs. If agricultural subsidies were no longer applied, and all businesses had to start paying an emissions tax, so that consumers paid the actual cost of farming meat, any financial comparison to cultured meat would look very different.
I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next 5 years, but 15 years from now? Maybe.
Impossible meat is close enough to meat that I genuinely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison, and it would be virtually impossible for me to tell if it were mixed in with other flavors (eg in a burrito). I’ve heard it’s got high sodium though, so you’ll still have to beware that it’s not much healthier (if at all) than normal meat. I don’t get Impossible often, though I get regular meat even less. I’d say I like Impossible more than normal meat, I just wish it’s a bit cheaper.
Beyond meat simply doesn’t taste quite right, like soy trying to imitate meat. It hits an awkward uncanny valley, so I don’t like it.
IMO lab grown meat feels a bit like a waste of time. With how incredibly uncanny Impossible is to actual meat, I don’t really see the need to grow meat in the lab. And it’ll probably be more expensive than Impossible meat too, if my lab experience is any indication
There are some very good plant-based bacon alternatives. The problem is that they are priced like luxury products, rather than having common sense cheaper-than-meat pricing. Nearly all of bacon’s flavor comes smoke and seasonings, and the texture and crisp can be easily reproduced. Try Thrilling Bakon if you have the chance.
I would be more than willing to eat lab grown meat, though I’d prefer the creation of healthier plant-based alternatives. Even lab grown meat will have “bad” things like cholesterol, and plant-based alternatives should theoretically be able provide more nutritional value at lower prices than “real” or lab grown meat.
I’m an omnivore, so I will eat anything that tastes good. I just think we should be trying to make delicious, nutritious food affordable for normal people, whatever route that takes. I’m not convinced that lab-grown meat is a path to that goal. If reducing environmental and ethical harm is only for the rich, then fuck that approach, we need another.
