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Bill Gates & Twitter Founders Put "Meatless" Meat To the Test
assertation (1255714) writes "Bill Gates and the founders of Twitter are betting millions that meat lovers will embrace a new plant-based product that mimics the taste of chicken and beef. Meat substitutes have had a hard time making it to the dinner tables of Americans over the years, but the tech giants believe these newest products will pass the "tastes like chicken" test. Gates has met several times with Ethan Brown, whose product, Beyond Meat, is a mash-up of proteins from peas and plants."
"The difficulty now comes in finding a way to convince carnivores to switch."
If it tastes like meat, smells like meat, and looks like meat, then I won't refuse it on principle. How do you get me to switch? Make it cheaper than real meat.
It's not enough to industrialize agriculture, now they want to trick us with fake food.
Cows graze around boulders and on slopes, where tractors can't work. They cannot be effectively replaced. (Feeding cows corn & soybean meal is rather foolish, and is the real problem here.)
Grand liberal vision:
We stop eating meat, everyone has more to eat.
Actuality:
We stop eating meat, people breed until the damage is equivalent to what we're doing now.
Futurist Traditionalism
a pound of ground beef (16 OZ 90%) is under 4.50 as I write this in my local store. Also chicken breasts are going for 2.99$ a pound. Im not going to spend more money for less of a product, that is not even real meat
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I don't know... If everyone in the world switched from eating meat to eating vegan substitutes (which is more environmentally friendly), you're going to end up with a massive animal welfare crisis on your hands. All those cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc are no longer going to be wanted by mankind. What this means is many thousands of years worth of natural and artificial selection will be wasted, most animals domesticated for meat will die out, and us as humans will lose a large chunk of what makes us "human".
TL;DR good for environment, not so good for the billions of animals domesticated for meat.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
I tried it. The texture and protein feel matches lean chicken or turkey reasonably well. But the fat flavor is missing. This is a general observation I have with all the faux meats. They simulate really lean cuts, but all the flavor comes from the fat, which is missing. It's probably the case that recreating the fat of meat is more difficult than creating the protein. This is a challenge to the manufacturers out there.
After a long history of failures, from Hamburger Helper to VitaPro, this stuff apparently tastes more or less like processed chicken. It's sold at Whole Foods. It's not cheap. Chicken tends to be chopped up and extruded anyway. ("McNuggets"). Matching the taste of breaded chicken nuggets seems do-able.
Nutrition is an issue. The nutritional composition of this is entirely determined by the manufacturer. The mix of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals is a manufacturer choice. There are few standards on the required nutritional value for human food products. Most concerns about food safety involve excluding undesired or toxic components. It's quite possible to sell something that tastes like meat, is harmless, but has little nutritional value.
I'll never understand. For some reason some people apparently don't want to eat meat, but they want to eat a bad imitation of it.
It's like diet coke. If you want to lose weight, drink some water. If you like the taste of diet coke better, you are a weirdo, but at least I can respect that.
Recently I bought a 6 lb package of 88% ground beef at Costco for less than $18.
$5.27 for 12 oz is double what I'm paying for beef.
I'm all in favor of reducing meat consumption but not at the price of doubling my food budget.
How it got that way is that meat is tasty and provides a lot of energy. People are so fervently against giving up meat because the substitutes that have been put forth (tofu, soy) generally suck in most forms people consume them in. Yes you can kind of make Tofu tasty with some work (though personally I've never had tofu elevated beyond "edible"), but you have to do nothing to a chicken breast to make it tasty other than cook it.
If this mean substitute is actually tasty and the texture is not horrifically awful (most of the supposed meat substitutes ignore that aspect) then in fact a lot of people probably would be OK using it.
Your main problem, as with so many other things in ilife. will be environmentalists since it's not "natural".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I cannot buy meat, I'll hunt it, or raise it (and kill it) myself. Try to stop me, and you'll get a civil war between rural & urban people.
1. Transportation, packaging, and stocking costs are large for vegetables in cities. Usually, frozen, canned, or otherwise processed vegetables are cheaper than fresh vegetables in the supermarket because you have to take into account transportation and waste.
2. Subsidies for farm animals, corn, and soy.
3. Some of what is fed to farm animals is not considered fit for human consumption.
4. High concentration animal agriculture is quite an efficient machine.
5. People are picky with produce. You see a shelf of vegetables and you pick through it for the best piece, because it all costs the same anyways. With meat, it's a hunk of unidentifiable flesh in a package--it's all the same since you can't easily tell the difference.
It's the fat that tastes good, not the meat. Go make a burger from fatless steak tartar and prepare to gag. No cheating with mayo or cheese.
Why do you think a filet mignon has bacon around it, or bleu cheese or a cream sauce on it? Bogue without...even flawlessly medium rare.
A veggie patty with some good animal fat substitute is the way to go.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Artificial meat is going to happen at some point, well before it can surpass the filet mignon or prime rib. Right now, it just needs to be better and cheaper than Meat Slurry , then, market forces will accelerate the quality.
Trust me on this, the bar is set pretty low for it to succeed.
You stereotypers are all the same...
This totally misses the point. I, and many people, do not want factory produced food. I want food I can replicate without high technology. I can grow plants, fruit, nuts and MEAT out in my fields. Meat is easy to produce. I have pastures. The sun shines on them. The rain falls. The forages grow. My pigs, chicken, ducks, sheep and geese eat the plants (and bugs). I eat the animals (and plants). It works. It's easy. It's reliable. It's sustainable.
My way does not require electricity, high technology, a laboratory or shipments of chemicals from distant locations.
What the factory farmed methods, be they CAFO or huge grain fields, does is to concentrate the power and wealth into the hands of the few resulting in a fragile, brittle system that can easily fail or be attacked and controlled by hostile forces.
Bill Gates Meatless Meat is a total fail.
I'll stick to real meat.