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Comment by phonypc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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