4 ms·

Cultured meat is all bullshit marketing until supermarkets at least sell simple tofu for less than chicken. It's just mashed-up beans, loads of water and a teas

Cultured meat is all bullshit marketing until supermarkets at least sell simple tofu for less than chicken. It's just mashed-up beans, loads of water and a teaspoon of rock powder! The Chinese supermarkets can do it, but in normal supermarkets, everything meat-free is positioned as a luxury rich-people thing. Organic this, handmade that, marinated the other. Hovering at £6 or £8 a kilo. Meanwhile the shelves next to it are groaning under endless kilos of chicken from £2.50 (1kg of legs at Tesco, was £2.15 until recently). My tin-foil hat theory here is that they don't want to knock the bottom out of the meat-free market because they're hoping to replace cheap meat with expensive synthetic meat and not let on that it's a false dichotomy.

dotcoma 3y ago
Not sure I would want to eat chicken that costs only £2.50 a kilo. But again, if one ate chicken once a month, one could afford the real thing, and if most of us did the same, there would enough to go around without having to resort to industrial meat production.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  90% of the Tesco chicken is that same meat. The packs with the skinned breasts cost (much) more than bone-in, skin-on legs, but they come from the same chickens. There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird. And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu if it costs 3 times what chicken can cost them, unless they actually want to eat tofu specifically (which I do, but I also baulk at the supermarket price, since I can get it for under half the price in a Chinese supermarket and in a bigger pack). Which is then a vicious cycle because people won't buy it to try, and won't learn how to cook it (which can take a little experimentation if you didn't grow up with it) because why would they?
  - staunton 3y ago
    What's so hard about cooking tofu? I've never researched it and just fry it, seems to work fine. What techniques are you referring to?
    - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      Well, in the same way that you can say "what's so hard about cooking chicken, I just fry it, seems to work just fine", then sure. But that's not what people do with chicken: they have learned how they like to cook it: curried, roasted, stewed, etc, etc. Just ask pretty much any grandmother for her roast chicken technique and it'll be a whole system! Just whacking tofu solo into a pan and making it hot doesn't produce a result that I'd expect most people to go "yes, wow, you know, this is worth 3 times the cost of the chicken legs". For a start, if you buy the Western supermarket stuff, it's often very spongy and you need to remove the water if you want to pan fry it. The Chinese supermarket stuff is much more homogeneous (you can make it spongy by freezing it if you want). So now you need to figure out that if you want it to go crispy, you need to press it. And maybe a cornflour dredge to make a nicer crust. Frying directly also doesn't really work trivially with anything except extra-firm, it just turns into a scrambled mess (ok, so this one is cultural, in Chinese cooking you're generally supposed to maintain the shape). You can steam softer tofu, but then you still need to figure out how you like the sauce. You must also find a steamer big enough to fit the plate: attempting to extract tofu not on a plate from a steamer to a plate is a valuable and emotional learning experience on its own. In general, tofu doesn't act the same way as meat: meat provides flavour to the dish, tofu absorbs flavours from the dish (and even this varies hugely between types). So if you just do a straight swap, even disregarding the mechanical differences, you will not get a very exciting result. So now you also need to adapt what you cook to fit tofu--this is often hard and you will fail if you're expecting to be able to make a roast tofu block taste like granny's roast chicken--or find new dishes that you like which use tofu. Not to mention that for some dishes you may well need new ingredients that, as "world foods", are expensive or unavailable in normal supermarkets. This all takes time, effort and not a little tofu to figure out. In the same way that my grandmother took a lot of chickens to hit on her signature! Tofu is just an example. The same, broadly, goes for the other similar "alternatives" (in the Western-meat-avoider sense, they're just "food" to some): tempeh, seitan, paneer, gluten, whatever. Even fairly conventional "Western" things like halloumi and beans aren't simple drop-in replacements!
hammyhavoc 3y ago
To invoke soy's pricing in the Western world (let alone the UK) and not also acknowledge that it contains phytoestrogens is disingenuous because this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold. Aside from tofu causing me intolerable heartburn, I also wouldn't eat it because of the phytoestrogens. Quorn vegetarian mince is cheap, no hormones, antibiotics or fat. Real low-fat meat mince is £1 more per kg than Quorn mince. No soy either, it's mycoprotein. Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?
- ChoGGi 3y ago
  > Aside from tofu causing me intolerable heartburn, I also wouldn't eat it because of the phytoestrogens. Would you be against coffee and tea as well, or is the dose low enough to not worry about? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23141692_Phytoestrogen_Content_of_Beverages_Nuts_Seeds_and_Oils https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23141692_Phytoestro...
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    I'm not "against" anything, but I only drink water in 2023. Furthermore, beer has a far higher amount than coffee. FWIW, it's only some herbal teas that contain phytoestrogens. A more compelling "gotcha" would have been invoking something like broccoli, which is higher again, and actually higher than natto (fermented soybeans) per 100g.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  > this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold. And yet the Chinese supermarket 1km from Tesco can sell it at £2.40/kg, and at Tesco it starts at over £6. It's clearly possible. As for Quorn, I used to eat tons of that as I had a vegetarian parent. It's "OK", but if we're doing anecdata, it does cause digestive problems for many people. As I'm not vegetarian, I don't feel the need to use meat replacements. If I'm eating something else it's because I want to. As far as I can tell, non-exclusive consumption of tofu is unlikely to be a major issue in terms of health effects of phytoestrogens (at least compared to what I would say are my top health risks: sedentary job, then probably occasional cured meats and overall salt intake). > Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason? Exactly my original point with a substitution of a different protein source.
shlant 3y ago
don't forget that most meat is also subsidized on many levels[1]. Cost would probably be the same or more compared to the normal supermarket price without these subsidies[2]. 1. https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cognitive-dissonance-around-animal-agriculture https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn... 2. https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/ https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  Absolutely, but even then it doesn't really explain why no mainstream supermarket can figure out how to offer a non-premium tofu product, products that literally exist already in the country, other than "they just don't want to".
  - shlant 3y ago
    agreed, same with tempe. Should be way cheaper than it is.

dotcoma 3y ago

Not sure I would want to eat chicken that costs only £2.50 a kilo. But again, if one ate chicken once a month, one could afford the real thing, and if most of us did the same, there would enough to go around without having to resort to industrial meat production.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
90% of the Tesco chicken is that same meat. The packs with the skinned breasts cost (much) more than bone-in, skin-on legs, but they come from the same chickens. There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird. And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu if it costs 3 times what chicken can cost them, unless they actually want to eat tofu specifically (which I do, but I also baulk at the supermarket price, since I can get it for under half the price in a Chinese supermarket and in a bigger pack). Which is then a vicious cycle because people won't buy it to try, and won't learn how to cook it (which can take a little experimentation if you didn't grow up with it) because why would they?
- staunton 3y ago
  What's so hard about cooking tofu? I've never researched it and just fry it, seems to work fine. What techniques are you referring to?
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    Well, in the same way that you can say "what's so hard about cooking chicken, I just fry it, seems to work just fine", then sure. But that's not what people do with chicken: they have learned how they like to cook it: curried, roasted, stewed, etc, etc. Just ask pretty much any grandmother for her roast chicken technique and it'll be a whole system! Just whacking tofu solo into a pan and making it hot doesn't produce a result that I'd expect most people to go "yes, wow, you know, this is worth 3 times the cost of the chicken legs". For a start, if you buy the Western supermarket stuff, it's often very spongy and you need to remove the water if you want to pan fry it. The Chinese supermarket stuff is much more homogeneous (you can make it spongy by freezing it if you want). So now you need to figure out that if you want it to go crispy, you need to press it. And maybe a cornflour dredge to make a nicer crust. Frying directly also doesn't really work trivially with anything except extra-firm, it just turns into a scrambled mess (ok, so this one is cultural, in Chinese cooking you're generally supposed to maintain the shape). You can steam softer tofu, but then you still need to figure out how you like the sauce. You must also find a steamer big enough to fit the plate: attempting to extract tofu not on a plate from a steamer to a plate is a valuable and emotional learning experience on its own. In general, tofu doesn't act the same way as meat: meat provides flavour to the dish, tofu absorbs flavours from the dish (and even this varies hugely between types). So if you just do a straight swap, even disregarding the mechanical differences, you will not get a very exciting result. So now you also need to adapt what you cook to fit tofu--this is often hard and you will fail if you're expecting to be able to make a roast tofu block taste like granny's roast chicken--or find new dishes that you like which use tofu. Not to mention that for some dishes you may well need new ingredients that, as "world foods", are expensive or unavailable in normal supermarkets. This all takes time, effort and not a little tofu to figure out. In the same way that my grandmother took a lot of chickens to hit on her signature! Tofu is just an example. The same, broadly, goes for the other similar "alternatives" (in the Western-meat-avoider sense, they're just "food" to some): tempeh, seitan, paneer, gluten, whatever. Even fairly conventional "Western" things like halloumi and beans aren't simple drop-in replacements!

hammyhavoc 3y ago

To invoke soy's pricing in the Western world (let alone the UK) and not also acknowledge that it contains phytoestrogens is disingenuous because this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold. Aside from tofu causing me intolerable heartburn, I also wouldn't eat it because of the phytoestrogens. Quorn vegetarian mince is cheap, no hormones, antibiotics or fat. Real low-fat meat mince is £1 more per kg than Quorn mince. No soy either, it's mycoprotein. Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?

ChoGGi 3y ago
> Aside from tofu causing me intolerable heartburn, I also wouldn't eat it because of the phytoestrogens. Would you be against coffee and tea as well, or is the dose low enough to not worry about? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23141692_Phytoestrogen_Content_of_Beverages_Nuts_Seeds_and_Oils https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23141692_Phytoestro...
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  I'm not "against" anything, but I only drink water in 2023. Furthermore, beer has a far higher amount than coffee. FWIW, it's only some herbal teas that contain phytoestrogens. A more compelling "gotcha" would have been invoking something like broccoli, which is higher again, and actually higher than natto (fermented soybeans) per 100g.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
> this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold. And yet the Chinese supermarket 1km from Tesco can sell it at £2.40/kg, and at Tesco it starts at over £6. It's clearly possible. As for Quorn, I used to eat tons of that as I had a vegetarian parent. It's "OK", but if we're doing anecdata, it does cause digestive problems for many people. As I'm not vegetarian, I don't feel the need to use meat replacements. If I'm eating something else it's because I want to. As far as I can tell, non-exclusive consumption of tofu is unlikely to be a major issue in terms of health effects of phytoestrogens (at least compared to what I would say are my top health risks: sedentary job, then probably occasional cured meats and overall salt intake). > Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason? Exactly my original point with a substitution of a different protein source.

shlant 3y ago

don't forget that most meat is also subsidized on many levels[1]. Cost would probably be the same or more compared to the normal supermarket price without these subsidies[2]. 1. https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cognitive-dissonance-around-animal-agriculture https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn... 2. https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/ https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Absolutely, but even then it doesn't really explain why no mainstream supermarket can figure out how to offer a non-premium tofu product, products that literally exist already in the country, other than "they just don't want to".
- shlant 3y ago
  agreed, same with tempe. Should be way cheaper than it is.