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A Fresh Take On Fake Meat
JMarshall writes: Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley food start-up started by a Stanford professor who quit his job, just raised $108 million to pursue a plant-based burger that truly tastes like meat. This ACS article explains how Impossible Foods and other startups and researchers are tackling the tricky chemical and engineering challenge of making fake meat that tastes real. "Meat flavors and aromas come from thousands of volatile small molecules released by muscle and fat cell destruction. Flavor precursors start with an animal’s diet, which influences the molecular composition of its cells. After slaughter, enzymes in an animal’s muscle cells begin breaking down biomolecules into simpler amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. This means some flavor molecules develop even as the meat ages during its trip to the store. Other flavor and aroma components emerge from reactions between sugars, amino acids, or fatty acids as the meat is cooked."
Because it's a veggie burger, not a veggie patty. They are expressly trying to simulate meat, because there are also people like me who quite like meat and quite dislike vegetables. I might move to a veggie burger but sure as hell am not going to move to a vegemite patty, a bean patty, or 90% of whatever ground-vegetable-matter-in-puck-form you're after.
Don't complain that a thing called a "burger" is trying to simulate a "real burger." Complain that they aren't making something some other thing that tastes way too much like a vegetable.
There's also "I don't want to kill animals for the sake of my dinner". Meat in moderation isn't bad for you, but there are plenty of other reasons why a lot of us don't eat it.
Our ancestors were using fire to cook meat long before recorded history.
medical literature shows significantly lower incidence of diseases such as cancer and ischemic heart disease in populations eating a vegetarian diet
Correlation is not causation. Those populations either have much poorer healthcare and die of other things, go undiagnosed, or they're young health nuts who don't have many unhealthy symptoms like smoking, lack of exercise, and overweight.
Why even try to mimic meat? It struck me the first time I walked into a grocery in an Adventist community - there were multiple aisles of highly processed vegetable/fungus/grain matter trying to resemble meat.
I mean, especially if you're living a totally meatless lifestyle, why even kowtow to the omnivore food culture?
For example, look at Middle Eastern cuisine. Sure, they have kabobs, etc, but things like Falafel, Faul, Hummus, Baba Ghanouj, Tabouleh and Dolmas are all fantastic, and none of them are trying to mimic a hunk of beef or chicken.
Same with Asian food. There are fantastic meatless dishes that don't try to resemble an animal part.
Why do we do it in the West? Marketing?
I can see the fnords!
But it doesn't have to taste like meat. That part is pointless I feel. If they don't want to eat meat than that's fine. Veggie burgers are good too (not the tofu junk) and even meat eaters like them. It's just that the need to make faux meat seems strange to me. It's not like they're coming off of a lifetime of heroin and need something like methodone to keep themselves clean.
I know when I visit the veggie line for lunch the worst things they have are the meat substitutes, like seitan or tempeh.
You're being unfair and unnecessarily polarizing. Just because you've met people who have both beliefs doesn't mean they always go together. People aren't always either right about everything or wrong about everything.
I'm not convinced there's any correlation at all, though there could be. As anecdotal evidence, at the time of writing there are four responses to my post. Two of them are explicitly meat eaters who are making the "chemicals are bad" argument and both precluding any possibility they are wrong. Clearly none of them are vegans.
I've also met lots of vegetarians and vegans, and literally none of them have irrational fears of chemicals in foods (they have rational fears of things that actually cause food poisoning and such). The only time I've seen those two beliefs together are in stereotypes.
In fact, the person I know who is most irrational about food is almost a complete carnivore. He's all-in on his keto diet. He lost like 150 lbs when he switched to basically only ever eating sausages, and from that he's drawn the conclusion that a co-worker of ours could cure her Multiple Sclerosis by cutting the grains and veggies out of her diet. Second place goes to a vegetarian who was pretty convinced that ancient humans never hunted for meat.