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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

This list is not super “convincing”: Water, pea protein*, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Why is there a laxative in my fake meat?

“100% free range grass feed beef” is a lot more convincing.

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Do you take issue with any particular ingredients, or is the implication just "long list bad"?

What are you calling a laxative?

Yes, I am not interested in a meat flavored veggie protein shake that is made of seed oils, costs more and is less nutritious. It’s disgusting. I don’t know who the market for it is, I’d sooner eat tofu than overpriced corporate crap with heavy processing and industrial refining. What is the benefit? Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

If the issue is seed oils, then by all means make that case. There are arguably convincing points to be made in that area.

Implied outrage at long ingredient lists is not constructive.

I didn’t post his list.

Implying an ingredient which is made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals since the underlying implications is that plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than mean isn’t more constructive if you’re trying to convince others to eat non meat products.

Right? It's like "I want to start eating less meat". "OK, here's something that sorta kinda looks and tastes like burger or nuggets". "No, but I want to start eating vegetables". "Yeah, yeah, don't worry, this thing is made of vegetables".

So, prior to the veggie burgers and soy nuggets you were hooked on low quality meats in beef burgers and chicken nuggets, and now you are to remain hooked on low quality vegetables in bean burgers and soy nuggets.

Or rather, you are to remain hooked on the products of the same industry that has been destroying the planet and the developed world's diets for generations. And suddendly, the products of this same industry are not just not junk food anymore, they are healthy alternatives that don't harm the environment!

> I don’t know who the market for it is

People who think their is a demographic for only binary choices when it comes to diet it seems; I'm convinced the SV bubble thinking applies here. I highly recommend the series 'What you will eat next' [0] wherein they actually visit and prepare the meats, to their satisfaction.

But honestly I grew up eating tofu (it's delicious when prepared correctly as it will take the flavour of anything you make) and if you think using small amounts of animal protein (pork in this case) alongside with tofu to make Mapo Tofu isn't a better solution than these absurdly wasteful proposed solutions: I'm talking about you.

The degree they go to over-complicate and recreate a poor solution that we've been using for 10,000+ years (Agriculture) but have only recently fucked up--conventional chemical, and feed lot, factory based farming--is the epitome of clutching at straws to find a solution to a problem.

People bemoan things like Bitcoins POW energy intensity when plant based meats have probably have a larger carbon footprint than that and they were started around the same time simply because of the need for so many inputs and the likely chance they are derived from those very same sources the decry.

In short, I think renewable Ag is quite honestly the most effective solution to climate change and restoring balance to the damage we have collectively done the Earth by a significant margin--but by no means should be the only one--because of the scale and scope of it's immense size: it's the largest Industry, the FOREX is only larger because it includes commodity trading from Ag and currency exchange from within it.

Food education is perhaps the most vital thing we can do when trying to confront this solution with any sanity, something I think is entirely lost when what is required comes up because it's so visceral: we've spent most of our time as a species just trying to have enough calories to survive, we've gone to war for salt to preserve what little food we had so it's an expected response. But if we do not make progress in this domain and create solutions I sincerely think it will lead to the dystopia we've heard from water wars (the more serious issue in my view).

> Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

Sadly, yes, I cooked professionally and my career took me to kitchens in the US and in Europe (alongside my horticulture apprenticeship in Biodynamic Ag) and I even spent time at a renown Vegetarian and Vegan restaurant in the US, and the lengths we went to make 'hamburgers' or 'crab cakes' that were kind of like them but not really was absurd! The amount of oils and other inputs you need for this to be even remotely resemble the texture of the real thing is so absurd, they act as binders or fillers to satiate what is otherwise a starving person.

There isn't enough time to discuss this topic in it's entirety, but yes... this was my conclusion and while I've worked in more acclaimed and busier kitchens since then I was outright shocked at was at best misguided idealism, or more often, outright blatant self-righteous ignorance from the end consumer: and this was from someone who dedicated a significant portion of my adult life to finding viable ways to lower meat consumption add increase vegetable consumption.

Everything changed when one of regulars had a stroke in the dining room one day during service and I simply could not participate in the operation any longer--a cause I'd later find out after I left was unrelated as he was an older professor from the nearby university but he ate most of his meals at our restaurant for years. He and an older couple (who ordered the same meal everyday) came for dinner service 5-6 days a week at the same time.

I think this is simply chemical corps doing the VC model of diversifying their portfolio to fund things that may have a slight chance at playing a part in the inevitable decoupling from this model. They're flush with cash from subsidies, bailouts, corporate welfare and have the media channels and access to influencers: so what are a few billions in R/D that are using their pre-existing reagents, proteins or binders if they can shoe-horn their products into fastfood chains and tell everyone they are saving the World doing it?

If they're successful they'll make their margins competitive from IP after creating the demand and make it up over a few years (decades?) with 'strategic' dividends as leaders in the newly established plant-based meat Industry.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbyoZ2KetYo

Thanks for your post. You understand my point, these disgusting processed foods are nothing but junk food with no animal produces no different from oreos, crescent rolls, and rice-a-roni which will not inprove your heath but it will taste good. Seeing it from the corperate side isn't suprising, its just embarassing how people fall for meat is bad, so this heavily processed food that costs more and has worst nutrition and is less digestable is better.

https://www.drugs.com/mtm/methylcellulose.html

I think I’ve made vegan chilli with a similar length list of ingredients.

Which ones are laxatives?

False equivalence.

Using 5 different beans is different from using something like HFCS, hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil, and industrially separated rice protein and pea protein, unless you think we should equate ingredients such as quinoa and benzoic acid.

Expeller-pressed canola oil is explicitly not "hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil". Also no HFCS.

These are examples of products that are vegan and are commonly found in vegan food. So do you equate the industrial separating of plant protein from grains as the same as a white northern bean?

No, they aren't equivalent. But that's not an argument against eating isolated plant proteins.

Yes it is. It is a legitimate reason against eating heavily processed food including plant proteins, and you have made zero legitimate arguement against it, saying no its not is an invalid point.

I'm not even trying to argue that anything is good to eat here. This comment chain, since the ingredient list of a Beyond burger was posted, has amounted to pointing in the vague direction of that list and things like it and saying "Ew! Too many ingredients. Too processed".

The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing. Implying a previously single ingredient which is now made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals gives the underlying implication plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than meat.

It isn't nebulous, its expensive, disgusting, heavily processed, who is this marketing well to? Vegans, normal people who love expensive processed food? Who is this for? Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around. They will never adopt it, the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it, most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat, and the meat eater won't think highly of it either. Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once, but not take it seriously.

> Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing.

No, it isn’t? That “one” ingredient is just a thousand in disguise. Even aside that there are lots of scary-sounding chemicals in all living things just to keep us alive: Is the beef hormone-fed? Does it have BSE because it was fed ground-up other cows? Antibiotic abuse for weight gain? And so on.

> Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around.

It’s no more of a “Frankenstein food” (a term I previously only associated with GMO) than, e.g. Snickers candy bars, which are wildly popular.

> They will never adopt it,

Perhaps, perhaps not. But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

> the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it,

Sone will, some won’t. The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

> most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat,

Do they? I don’t know what meat tastes like. But then, I’m not even vegan, I’m a vegetarian (who avoids cow milk yes, but not derivatives).

> and the meat eater won't think highly of it either.

You might not — you might even have tried one of them in order to make a fair comparison, though you’re writing in a way which suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater — but I have accidentally cooked vegan meals for people who are normally heavy meat eaters and they’ve complemented me for it. It feels like you’re projecting to claim that of most people.

I suspect most people won’t care, assuming it’s cheap enough. How much do these things cost in Burger King or McD or wherever?

> Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once

Wouldn’t be surprised. Most new things oversell and under-deliver.

But I wouldn’t write them off, either.

Snickers bars are also disgusting heavily processed crap that has no benefits to the consumer. Popularity isn't a metric of success, obesity, the use of IE6, Windows, Intel graphics, and being infected with coronavirus is for instance popular.

>But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

That is a pipe dream that doesn't exist, you are saying it will fail because of 3D printed steaks that will cost 30 cents every 10 lbs and be 100% equal to steaks. Comparing it to a fantasy replacement isn't useful.

>The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

Quorn is nearly 90% of a pressed fungus with ingridients such as egg white and flavors, not a frankenstein mixture of highly refined oil, peas and rice.

>suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater

I don't eat junk on purpose, I will eat whole foods that include meat, yet you self identity as a vegetarian but you don't see me saying you identity as one in italics disparagingly. Your small sample bias doesn't change the fact its nothing more than a novelty, and reenforces it, They will never replicate your cooking as a habit, and comparing junk food to most vegan food is fitting in nutrition but if your bar for quality vegan food is to compare it to snickers and the cost and nutrition of McD and Burger King I will not partake in eating junk food no matter how few animals are in it. The so called "food" they made is disgusting.

> Popularity isn't a metric of success

It literally is. Especially given the context of this particular thread.

That you disagree is confusing.

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processed meat?

You seem to be conflating successful with good, in both directions.

Success is popularity, and popularity is absolutely a metric for success. If this product is popular, it is necessarily successful. You are explicitly denying this specific thing.

All of the food items currently sold (at least around here), on an individual and personal basis for the consumer, basically fine. The fact that a normal person has a bad diet does not alter this, as the products themselves are not the issue, the aggregate is (and indeed one of the issues with the normal person’s diet is too much red meat). Many dietary options exist, both those subsets which are and are not individually fine for the consumer, including a lot of foods you’re rejecting.

Because the individual foods are all safe, the questions society now has to consider are: (1) ethically, do animals have intrinsic value, or are they things we can just exploit without care? And (2) what are the non-personal consequences, e.g. pollution, land and water use, habitat destruction, and crop diversity to avoid all the issues that monocultures bring.

These two are independent, any given thing (not just meat and non-meat human products, also the food which feeds livestock) can be good or bad on each and either the same or different on the other. And it’s a spectrum for each sub-part of those two big bullet-points, not a Boolean. I’m vegetarian (and try to reduce milk consumption) because I want to err on the side of assuming too many minds might be sentient than too few, but note that despite this belief my comments do not denounce “meat is murder” or similar slogans, because that’s not something other people find relevant, rather they find it annoying.

Likewise, I am not arguing against meat (and leather) by saying it is disgusting and therefore nobody would eat (wear) it, because while I find it disgusting even on a conceptual level, I can clearly see that most people don’t.

Meat is popular, meat is successful. The only way to replace meat is to make something more popular. That is success. If I was working in that sector, that would literally be my metric for success.

But you aren’t discussing on that level, you’re going “ewww pea protein, nobody can possibly want to eat that” like your body wouldn’t do a similar chemical reaction if you ate peas.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

But your point is not right though! When you cook at home you put in the stuff you want to eat, that tastes good and nourishes you, and that's the point of food.

But the ingredients in highly processed foods are not there to feed you, or even to make the products tasty. They're there to accommodate the production process (eg emulsifiers), to increase the product's transportability and shelf life (preservatives), to make the product more appealing to the senses (colorings, flavorings etc) and, more worryingly, to hook you with huge amounts of salt, fats and sugar, that you don't find in base ingredients like potatoes or beans.

These added ingredients replace and crowd out the actual food you need and want to eat. That's the point, yes? The Harvard article I quoted above says it clearly: "Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients".

That's because they must be high in ingredients that are not "fiber and nutrients" and are there to improve the ability of the product to be sold, but not to nourish you. Because the primary goal of such over-processed foods is not to feed you, but to sell well.

Am I getting my point across? Whether fake meats are nutritious or healthy is not the industry's concerns. So it will not optimise for those properties. The industry's concern is to sell its stuff. So it will optimise for that. And if that ends up feeding its consumers unhealthy shit, so be it. That's the same industry that's been selling over-procssed, unhealthy, environmentally damaging junk food made of meat for years. It's now doing the same thing with plants. Nothing has changed.

No, I don't see the point you're trying to get across.

To keep using the Beyond burger example; you imply emulsifiers are no good. Is sunflower lecithin problematic? Methylcellulose is kind of another one here, but it's literally insoluble fiber, something you imply is problematic for a food to be missing. The only ingredients that might be present as preservatives I can see are salt and vinegar/lemon juice. Are they problematic in the amounts used? Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

Now, if we were talking the emulsifiers being PGEs, sodium benzoate as a preservative and red #40 for colour, then maybe there would be a better case for not eating Beyond burgers. Or maybe canola oil simply isn't what you consider to be healthy. Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

> Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

"Problematic colourant"? Of course it's problematic. Because it's a colorant. For food! Why do you need to add color to food?

> Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing. In particular, nutrients that you need to have in your food and stuff you don't need to.

Is it the fact that it's a general classification rather than a case-by-case analysis that is bothering you? Would you prefer it if there was a long list of foods with an annotation "processed", "ultra-processed" etc with a small discussion of what's in them that shouldn't be in there and what's not in that should?

Problematic as in negative health consequences. If there aren't undesired consequences, what is the problem?

I like to add turmeric powder to my rice for the sole purpose of colouring it. Is that some travesty? Is my rice now ultra-processed?

>But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing.

No, that's explicitly not what it's doing. It tries to classify things by level of processing. The fact that the examples given often don't fit their criteria only serves to make it look more ridiculous.

Makes me wonder how the soy mince I used in the chilli was made from the soybeans. Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from. Or the creatine I put into chilli (the packet says to put it in water and drink it, but it’s nowhere near soluble enough so I put it in food instead).

> Benzoic acid and its salts are used as a food preservatives

Why would I bother? And objecting to a preservative is like objecting to refrigerators. If refrigerators didn’t exist, I’d put something like that into my chilli, no problem.

Real meat doesn't require you to research that or worry about it. No thank you to some weird expensive frankenstein food to replace a single ingredient with poorer nutrition.

A functioning food regulatory body is why I don’t worry about it and didn’t bother researching those things before happily eating.

Perhaps regulators don’t function where you live? But if so I wouldn’t trust the meat (well I’m veggie but same point; nor dairy or anything else) either.

Why do you keep asserting that Beyond Burger has worse nutrition? I’ve not seen anything to justify that.

They approve coca cola and candy bars, will you eat and drink nothing but them since the food regulatory says they are safe?

Meat doesn't have carbs and has more digestable protein. I am not eating more expensive heavily processed fake meat with carbs and lower quality protein.

That’s like saying cars are death traps for the occupants, then responding to evidence they’re regulated for safety by asking someone who drives if they’d drive into a harbour. (And to continue the analogy, your other comments would be “Nobody would ever buy these! They’re expensive and worse than running!” while ignoring the demonstrably large market. And I guess I’d be a cyclist?)

I’m happy to eat only things that are regulated, even if not to then further limit myself to the specific subset your tangent is going to now. Don’t put words into my mouth to try to argue against something I didn’t say.

If you don't want to use an appeal to govnerment authority for what you can eat, then don't bring up food regulators if you don't want to take it to its logical conclusion of uselessness. The government approved it, so you don't worry? Why think for yourself when the govnerment can tell you whats good for you? Why do reseach, its approved, you don't have to use that precious brainpower and can happily eat everything the government tells you to.

> Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from.

Extra virgin olive oil, for instance is extracted only from olives and only by mechanical means. Basically, what you need is a lot of weight, that's all. No heat, no catalysts, reagents, emulsifiers etc. In theory, you could make it at home, but you'd need a certain setup like a millstone or two and a team of pack animals or half a dozen strong young men to turn it.

But that's how it's made anyway: press olives, collect oil.

Which is, I suppose, why it's considered one of the best quality oils you can get and as far as can be from ultra-processed stuff like hydrogenated vegetable fats and the like.

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