23 ms·

Can we stomach the latest emerging food innovations?

58 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

capybara_2020 5y ago
Anyone have any numbers on how cattle production compares to other meat production? Would it be much better for the environment if we just shifted to smaller animals and birds like pigs, goats, chicken?
- AngryData 5y ago
  I mean if we wanted to make beef production more sustainable we easily could, feed cows more grass and less grain. But grain is more often the choice because you can grow/fatten your animals up like 20% faster than with a pure grass diet and the grain is easier and more compact to store and ship. Alfalfa requires no additional fertilizer and actually sequesters nitrogen into the soil, reducing the need for artificial fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  In general, smaller animals with a shorter lifespan are more efficient at their conversion ratio of "plant calories vs meat calories", so if someone worries about the use of lots of farmland to grow stuff to feed animals instead of using a smaller amount of farmland to feed humans directly, then cattle production (unless we reduce so much that we keep only the number of cattle which are grazing on non-arable land) is worse than chicken farms. In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms. In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.
- tmnvix 5y ago
  I've heard that a single head of cattle yields about the same amount of meat as 200 chickens. As far as I'm aware, cattle also tend to enjoy a much more pleasant life than factory farmed chickens. As someone who does eat meat but is also somewhat paradoxically concerned with animal welfare, this is important.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
I have a kind of curiosity about how these things scale, looking at land use. Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance. Who can tell me of the impacts of such changes?
- igorkraw 5y ago
  All studied I'm aware of show that plant based protein is orders of magnitude less intensive than beef. If you look for "protein source total resource consumption meta analysis" you'll find many. Most people do not eat grass fed beef, they are in fact raised on maize or other feedstock which was grown on land that could also support plants for human consumption.
  - i_am_proteus 5y ago
    You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter. My curiosity concerns the use of what are today grasslands and maize fields to produce protein alternatives to the ruminants. Maize and soya are commonly rotated - over long periods, is it effective to rotate soya with other pulses? Or is it better for the soil to continue to crop maize or rotate land to pasture? Sources that I have seen, such as this source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/protein/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you... indicate that ruminants are perhaps one order of magnitude more resource intensive than pulses. Poultry, pork, and dairy are on the same order of magnitude, perhaps 50% to 200% more resource intensive than pulses. But I cannot graze poultry where I can graze beef, nor can I grow pulses on pasture. This is my curiosity.
    - mint2 5y ago
      >” You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter.” That fact appears to be wrong or misleading. Often 100% grass is not true in the Us In the US something like 85% of beef spends a significant portion of their lives on feedlots where 70-90% of the feed is grain and protein concentrates.
jsilence 5y ago
I think the quality of products from plant based alternative protein sources like peas will increas so much in the coming time that these will make the race. We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  I have read similar accounts, only to later discover that the reviewers are vegan/vegetarian etc. If these are to displace beef, to kill the beef industry, then they need to win over the BBQ crowd. When the not-meat hotdog starts competing with the meat version at US ballparks, then I will take notice.
  - dragonsky 5y ago
    Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?
  - quicklime 5y ago
    Non-vegetarian here. I'd take a fake meat hotdog than a real meat ballpark hot dog any day. The best of the fake meats has already surpassed the worst of the real meats, and the overlap is growing quickly.
    - steve_adams_86 5y ago
      I like this way of describing it. Things like the beyond sausage are so far beyond the quality and flavour of a cheap meat sausage. I love sausages (although I find them disgusting so often) and I’ve found these plant based ones kind of fill the void that cheap, gross meats create for me. I don’t eat much meat in the first place anymore so I guess that void has grown a lot, making the plant based options increasingly appealing. I’m pretty excited to see these options expand and evolve.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
vincnetas 5y ago
Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. Inovation would be here to inovate and create new food, not to mimic the existing. I know, existing consumers and whole industry waiting to be disrupted, but still this starts to look like “save” icon represented by floppy disk, when in reality “save” does not have anything to do with floppies anymore.
- dgellow 5y ago
  You can have both new foods AND “meat-less” copies of meat products. I like plant-based meat because I can use my favorites recipes with minimal change, just swap chicken with another source of protein that feels kind of the same, and I’m happy with that.
- pornel 5y ago
  These are new foods, but we don't have a better name for them. They're called like "horseless carriages", because a "car" term hasn't been coined yet. But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.
- rtoway 5y ago
  Because people like meat? I like meat. I don't like what happens to the animal though. I don't think it gets that much more complicated than that
- onion2k 5y ago
  Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult. It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables. People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.
diordiderot 5y ago
I've switched most of my chicken and beef consumption over to Quorn (fake meat brand) and while it's clearly not meat, I'm always happy with the result.
dvh 5y ago
This is what grinds my gears. For years scientists and health professionals are repeating over and over "don't eat hyper processed foods" and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries. You want proteins? Eat lentils and beans and once a week chicken or fish. Artificial meat is the stupidest invention in last 50 years. Don't eat artificial meat! There's literally nothing good that can came from it, eat moderately instead.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"Eat lentils and beans" Not that I do not like those but eating those in any reasonable amount for more than one day in a row is causing very strong heartburn sensation for me. So thanks bot no. >"eat moderately instead." I am very physically active (2-3 hour of daily physical activity) and have decent amount of muscle. How the fuck am I supposed to "eat moderately"? My main daily diet is greens with tomatoes and chicken/meat/fish.
- automatic6131 5y ago
  You're right, but also people really, really like meat. And they'll continue to want to eat it a great deal. Very, very few people would willingly choose bean caserole over steak and chips more than even 10% of the time.
- danuker 5y ago
  > Eat lentils and beans Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it. Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/
  - jseban 5y ago
    They are still not complete proteins like every animal protein is, so you need to figure out combinations that can theoretically make a complete protein. And the protein content is still going to be much lower than meat. Protein is already the hardest to get enough of, it's always easy to eat carbs and fat, which people already do too much. And if something is hard to digest, common sense says that it's probably not utilised as well by the body either. In practice it really makes a big different, to eat 100 grams of chicken for dinner, compared to 200 grams of lentils. Most people that eat plant based compensate with eating more fat to get the satiety per gram of food higher, which leads to an unhealthy diet. It would be much simpler if plants had complete protein in the same amount as animal protein sources, but it's way off.
hanslub42 5y ago
Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".
- fooker 5y ago
  > The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian No, this is a weird and popular misconception. ~ 97% of the people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are non-vegetarian. South India has amazing non vegetarian food.
  - speeder 5y ago
    I have impression people think that any meat that is not Beef is not meat either. Meanwhile people in India eat chickens, fish, goats (seemly a popular dish is goat neck? saw some indian chef on youtube making that) and so on. Also there are suspicions that cows were made sacred in first place to force people to not eat their source of milk, because seemly eating the cows was more popular than milking them, but they are far more useful in certain places for milk than for meat.
  - hanslub42 5y ago
    A regional cuisine can be largely vegetarian even if 0.0% of the people in the region are vegetarian. I eat meat, even though my personal cuisine is largely vegetarian: I cook a lot of vegetarian dishes, even though I enjoy a bit of meat every now and then. My non-vegetarian food is amazing, but so are my veggie dishes.
- evgen 5y ago
  Descriptions like 'glorious' or 'delicious' are completely subjective. The fact that people did not choose to fast but were instead forced to by either religious dictates or economic requirements should be telling you something. When economies shift out of poverty and subsistence farming the amount of meat consumed grows, and as the GDP grows so does this meat consumption. Is it because 'big meat' is so good at convincing people that they want to eat more meat or is it because the thing holding back that meat consumption was only the ability to buy/acquire it and not because the veg cuisine was so incomparable that people choose it over options that used meat?
squarefoot 5y ago
I tried a few times soy steaks and burgers, and honestly don't know what to say; to me it has been the most unpredictable food experience ever: one time they tasted absolutely delicious, then complete crap, then ...meh. It may have been the brand or way of cooking but I can't recall of two times in a row in which I could get the same impression, so today I tend to avoid them. On the other hand I love soy chocolate-like ice cream, but that's another thing. About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  That’s consistent with using low quality heavily processed plant based food with artificial flavor. The delicate flavor can be significantly altered with cooking methods that would not ruin real food.
losvedir 5y ago
I know this is just a personal problem, but my wife is allergic to many lentils, including chickpeas, lentils, peas, and soy and it's becoming harder and harder to avoid these days, it seems. It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")
an9n 5y ago
Eat the bugs, live in the pod...
- silent_cal 5y ago
  Wear the VR headset!
- rytcio 5y ago
  You will own nothing and you will be happy
tamaharbor 5y ago
Innovations aside, have you tasted the stuff? Yikes!
silent_cal 5y ago
It looks disgusting.
PrinceRichard 5y ago
Whole plant foods with plenty of living greens, my friends. We can do it!
kcplate 5y ago
Here is a thought experiment for you…if someone made a meat substitute that mimics the taste and texture of cooked human flesh…how would you feel about a person who knowingly ate and enjoyed such a creation?
- MengerSponge 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

58 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

capybara_2020 5y ago

Anyone have any numbers on how cattle production compares to other meat production? Would it be much better for the environment if we just shifted to smaller animals and birds like pigs, goats, chicken?

AngryData 5y ago
I mean if we wanted to make beef production more sustainable we easily could, feed cows more grass and less grain. But grain is more often the choice because you can grow/fatten your animals up like 20% faster than with a pure grass diet and the grain is easier and more compact to store and ship. Alfalfa requires no additional fertilizer and actually sequesters nitrogen into the soil, reducing the need for artificial fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.
PeterisP 5y ago
In general, smaller animals with a shorter lifespan are more efficient at their conversion ratio of "plant calories vs meat calories", so if someone worries about the use of lots of farmland to grow stuff to feed animals instead of using a smaller amount of farmland to feed humans directly, then cattle production (unless we reduce so much that we keep only the number of cattle which are grazing on non-arable land) is worse than chicken farms. In terms of climate change, cattle-produced methane makes cattle production worse than chicken farms. In terms of animal welfare...... it's hard to say, both are bad in different ways that are not directly comparable especially given the idea of comparing the suffering of single "more capable mind" versus many "less capable minds", there's no consensus on that.
tmnvix 5y ago
I've heard that a single head of cattle yields about the same amount of meat as 200 chickens. As far as I'm aware, cattle also tend to enjoy a much more pleasant life than factory farmed chickens. As someone who does eat meat but is also somewhat paradoxically concerned with animal welfare, this is important.

i_am_proteus 5y ago

I have a kind of curiosity about how these things scale, looking at land use. Beef in my country commonly graze on pasture or eat maize grown as a row crop. Ostensibly, the false beef requires inputs that are not identical to the true beef, presently to include tremendous energy inputs, which would necessitate a change in land use. Cropping peas rather than maize, for instance. Who can tell me of the impacts of such changes?

igorkraw 5y ago
All studied I'm aware of show that plant based protein is orders of magnitude less intensive than beef. If you look for "protein source total resource consumption meta analysis" you'll find many. Most people do not eat grass fed beef, they are in fact raised on maize or other feedstock which was grown on land that could also support plants for human consumption.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter. My curiosity concerns the use of what are today grasslands and maize fields to produce protein alternatives to the ruminants. Maize and soya are commonly rotated - over long periods, is it effective to rotate soya with other pulses? Or is it better for the soil to continue to crop maize or rotate land to pasture? Sources that I have seen, such as this source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/protein/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you... indicate that ruminants are perhaps one order of magnitude more resource intensive than pulses. Poultry, pork, and dairy are on the same order of magnitude, perhaps 50% to 200% more resource intensive than pulses. But I cannot graze poultry where I can graze beef, nor can I grow pulses on pasture. This is my curiosity.
  - mint2 5y ago
    >” You will find that most beef eat a mixture of grass and maize, often 100% of the former but almost never 100% of the latter.” That fact appears to be wrong or misleading. Often 100% grass is not true in the Us In the US something like 85% of beef spends a significant portion of their lives on feedlots where 70-90% of the feed is grain and protein concentrates.

jsilence 5y ago

I think the quality of products from plant based alternative protein sources like peas will increas so much in the coming time that these will make the race. We recently purchased a cross sampling of pea based "alternative meat" products and so far the quality is astonishingly good. One can taste that it is not meat, but texture and taste are so good that it does not really matter. It is going to become a staple in our household.

sandworm101 5y ago
I have read similar accounts, only to later discover that the reviewers are vegan/vegetarian etc. If these are to displace beef, to kill the beef industry, then they need to win over the BBQ crowd. When the not-meat hotdog starts competing with the meat version at US ballparks, then I will take notice.
- dragonsky 5y ago
  Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?
- quicklime 5y ago
  Non-vegetarian here. I'd take a fake meat hotdog than a real meat ballpark hot dog any day. The best of the fake meats has already surpassed the worst of the real meats, and the overlap is growing quickly.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    I like this way of describing it. Things like the beyond sausage are so far beyond the quality and flavour of a cheap meat sausage. I love sausages (although I find them disgusting so often) and I’ve found these plant based ones kind of fill the void that cheap, gross meats create for me. I don’t eat much meat in the first place anymore so I guess that void has grown a lot, making the plant based options increasingly appealing. I’m pretty excited to see these options expand and evolve.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago

vincnetas 5y ago

Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. Inovation would be here to inovate and create new food, not to mimic the existing. I know, existing consumers and whole industry waiting to be disrupted, but still this starts to look like “save” icon represented by floppy disk, when in reality “save” does not have anything to do with floppies anymore.

dgellow 5y ago
You can have both new foods AND “meat-less” copies of meat products. I like plant-based meat because I can use my favorites recipes with minimal change, just swap chicken with another source of protein that feels kind of the same, and I’m happy with that.
pornel 5y ago
These are new foods, but we don't have a better name for them. They're called like "horseless carriages", because a "car" term hasn't been coined yet. But overall the "slighly chewy umami-flavored protein-rich chunks" however you call them are very useful in cooking, as they increase variety of flavors and textures in dishes.
rtoway 5y ago
Because people like meat? I like meat. I don't like what happens to the animal though. I don't think it gets that much more complicated than that
onion2k 5y ago
Regarding plant based “meat” why are we trying to fool our selfs that we are eating meat. We've spent several thousand years optimizing our cultural history to tell ourselves that well-prepared and cooked meat dishes are the peak of cuisine. To just throw that away and start over would require ignoring practically everything we believe about food. It could be done, but it would be difficult. It's very likely that there's even a genetic component - we've evolved to enjoy eating cooked meat. I wouldn't be at all surprised that we really do, at a provable scientific genetic level, prefer it to vegetables. People just like meat. If we can enjoy the experience without the moral and environmental side effects that's not a bad thing.

diordiderot 5y ago

I've switched most of my chicken and beef consumption over to Quorn (fake meat brand) and while it's clearly not meat, I'm always happy with the result.

dvh 5y ago

This is what grinds my gears. For years scientists and health professionals are repeating over and over "don't eat hyper processed foods" and the moment someone invents artificial meat everybody loses their fucking mind and munch on it like strawberries. You want proteins? Eat lentils and beans and once a week chicken or fish. Artificial meat is the stupidest invention in last 50 years. Don't eat artificial meat! There's literally nothing good that can came from it, eat moderately instead.

FpUser 5y ago
>"Eat lentils and beans" Not that I do not like those but eating those in any reasonable amount for more than one day in a row is causing very strong heartburn sensation for me. So thanks bot no. >"eat moderately instead." I am very physically active (2-3 hour of daily physical activity) and have decent amount of muscle. How the fuck am I supposed to "eat moderately"? My main daily diet is greens with tomatoes and chicken/meat/fish.
automatic6131 5y ago
You're right, but also people really, really like meat. And they'll continue to want to eat it a great deal. Very, very few people would willingly choose bean caserole over steak and chips more than even 10% of the time.
danuker 5y ago
> Eat lentils and beans Absolutely. Legumes are the healthiest sources of protein. While it takes a week or two for the gut to adjust (and be the butt of gas jokes), it extends your healthy lifespan, so it's worth it. Here is what a non-profit that I follow has to say: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/legumes/
- jseban 5y ago
  They are still not complete proteins like every animal protein is, so you need to figure out combinations that can theoretically make a complete protein. And the protein content is still going to be much lower than meat. Protein is already the hardest to get enough of, it's always easy to eat carbs and fat, which people already do too much. And if something is hard to digest, common sense says that it's probably not utilised as well by the body either. In practice it really makes a big different, to eat 100 grams of chicken for dinner, compared to 200 grams of lentils. Most people that eat plant based compensate with eating more fat to get the satiety per gram of food higher, which leads to an unhealthy diet. It would be much simpler if plants had complete protein in the same amount as animal protein sources, but it's way off.

hanslub42 5y ago

Why are most answers pretending that the choice is between meat and plant-based fake meat? For millennia, people have been eating plant proteins straight from the plant, like chickpeas and lentils. The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian and doesn't need any fake meat. The Catholic practice of fasting during Fridays and Lent has resulted in many delicious Mediterranean recipes without meat (or even fish), again, without any "meat substitutes".

fooker 5y ago
> The glorious south-Indian cuisine is largely vegetarian No, this is a weird and popular misconception. ~ 97% of the people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are non-vegetarian. South India has amazing non vegetarian food.
- speeder 5y ago
  I have impression people think that any meat that is not Beef is not meat either. Meanwhile people in India eat chickens, fish, goats (seemly a popular dish is goat neck? saw some indian chef on youtube making that) and so on. Also there are suspicions that cows were made sacred in first place to force people to not eat their source of milk, because seemly eating the cows was more popular than milking them, but they are far more useful in certain places for milk than for meat.
- hanslub42 5y ago
  A regional cuisine can be largely vegetarian even if 0.0% of the people in the region are vegetarian. I eat meat, even though my personal cuisine is largely vegetarian: I cook a lot of vegetarian dishes, even though I enjoy a bit of meat every now and then. My non-vegetarian food is amazing, but so are my veggie dishes.
evgen 5y ago
Descriptions like 'glorious' or 'delicious' are completely subjective. The fact that people did not choose to fast but were instead forced to by either religious dictates or economic requirements should be telling you something. When economies shift out of poverty and subsistence farming the amount of meat consumed grows, and as the GDP grows so does this meat consumption. Is it because 'big meat' is so good at convincing people that they want to eat more meat or is it because the thing holding back that meat consumption was only the ability to buy/acquire it and not because the veg cuisine was so incomparable that people choose it over options that used meat?

squarefoot 5y ago

I tried a few times soy steaks and burgers, and honestly don't know what to say; to me it has been the most unpredictable food experience ever: one time they tasted absolutely delicious, then complete crap, then ...meh. It may have been the brand or way of cooking but I can't recall of two times in a row in which I could get the same impression, so today I tend to avoid them. On the other hand I love soy chocolate-like ice cream, but that's another thing. About growing meat in lab, I'm totally in favor. I'm no veg* but of course I'm not happy about animals being killed, even for feeding us; also I hope that being able to grow a steak today might be 1/100 of the research needed to grow a kidney or other human organs for transplants tomorrow.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
GhettoComputers 5y ago
That’s consistent with using low quality heavily processed plant based food with artificial flavor. The delicate flavor can be significantly altered with cooking methods that would not ruin real food.

losvedir 5y ago

I know this is just a personal problem, but my wife is allergic to many lentils, including chickpeas, lentils, peas, and soy and it's becoming harder and harder to avoid these days, it seems. It used to be that "healthy" meant simple combinations of relatively straightforward base foods. But now you have all these alternative meats, milks, and flours, and all these products tend to incorporate some sort of legume it feels like. We spend a long time looking at labels and see "pea protein" or "locust bean gum" popping up all over the place. Most recently an oat milk unexpectedly had pea protein in it. (Not that she'd order that directly, but it's the kind of thing that flies under the radar if someone offers a drink and knows you're allergic to legumes. "Oats, those should be fine")

an9n 5y ago

Eat the bugs, live in the pod...

silent_cal 5y ago
Wear the VR headset!
rytcio 5y ago
You will own nothing and you will be happy

tamaharbor 5y ago

Innovations aside, have you tasted the stuff? Yikes!

silent_cal 5y ago

It looks disgusting.

PrinceRichard 5y ago

Whole plant foods with plenty of living greens, my friends. We can do it!

kcplate 5y ago

Here is a thought experiment for you…if someone made a meat substitute that mimics the taste and texture of cooked human flesh…how would you feel about a person who knowingly ate and enjoyed such a creation?

MengerSponge 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu