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They’re now “vegetizing” the world with “plant-based” (read: highly processed) products and lab-grown meats (ditto). The sooner we realize that food industry a
by omginternets 3y ago
They’re now “vegetizing” the world with “plant-based” (read: highly processed) products and lab-grown meats (ditto).
The sooner we realize that food industry are engaged in capitalism and not public health, nor ecology, the better. What the food industry pushes is best read through the lens of patentable intellectual property and market disruption in an economic sector with razor-thin margins. I would encourage all conscientious people not to be their useful idiots.
- armatav 3y agoThis is true - everything along the lines of plant based food has an underlying capital cost transformation driving it, not a cultural or environmental basis. That’s why they need to convince/mandate people to eat it; it tastes worse and is worse for you.
- ben_w 3y agoJudging by the responses of surprised enthusiasm I get from meat eaters when I cook vegetarian for them: if it tastes worse, that's the chef's fault rather than the plants'.
- omginternets 3y agoI think the parent post is referring to processed foods, not the cooking of actual, recognizable produce.
- ben_w 3y agoThat shouldn't matter, the point remains the same: it's the chef's fault if it doesn't taste good, even if the chef works in corporate and is designing a factory. As a different point: "Processed" feels to me like a slippery word. Bread? Looks nothing like wheat. Beer? Grown in a vat. Beef? Take a wild animal, selectively breed it for hundreds of generations, feed it all kinds of weird things that combine "cheap" (surprise cannibalism leading to BSE) and "encourages weight gain" (we're only recently getting serious about stopping antibiotics being used this way), kill one, after all the main cuts are taken spray the rest of with a high pressure hose, dry off the resulting slurry, ta-dah mechanically recovered "100% beef" you can't use in much else besides mince, and by extension burgers and sausages. The term seems like it's some combination of a complaint more about the long list of ingredients and that these sound new and/or scary, implying no awareness of how much of a mess biochemistry is and where most of the chemicals in question were first isolated from.
- omginternets 3y agoIf you can’t distinguish between bread and something like Impossible Foods, I’m not sure what to tell you.
- ben_w 3y agoI didn't say I can't distinguish, I'm saying the word is wildly misleading. Leavened bread is made by taking some flour, yeast, and water, and letting the yeast grow so the waste it makes turns the dough light and fluffy, and then baking it. If you don't add a preservative to this, you'd better eat it quickly, because otherwise a fungus that produces a precursor to LSD will quickly grow on it (ergot is all over the place, and it really likes bread), and even if you don't get high, the alkaloids can poison you. The yeast is a whole complex thing with bajillion chemicals all by itself, because life is like that. The flour is from taking wheat etc. kernels and grinding them in what is one of our earliest industrial processes. The wheat etc. have been selectively bred for countless generations and are now different from their wild relatives; and again, like the yeast, being alive they're full of things like "aneurine", "Pyridoxal 5'-phosphate", and "N-(4-{[(2-amino-4-oxo-1,4-dihydropteridin-6-yl)methyl]amino}benzoyl)-L-glutamic acid" and that's more than fine, it's vital, and we'd want to put them in if they were missing. (Those three chemicals sound a whole lot friendlier when I use their common names; but biochemistry is too complex for every chemical to get an approachable friendly name even when they're vital — a quick search suggests you'd die without the N-Acetylaspartylglutamate in your brain, and that it has no non-systemic name). And that fresh baked bread smell? > The most aroma active compounds identified were 3-methylbutanal, (E)-2-nonenal, 3-methyl-1-butanol, and 2,3-butanedione https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643812003593 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002364381...
- armatav 3y agoI mean plant based meat replacement meals, the fuck?
- ben_w 3y agoLoads of such things, not just whatever you're thinking of. Quorn is pretty good if you can get it; Tofu needs to be seasoned right to taste good, and when it is it can be fantastic; nut roast is something I've only gotten right once, but that occasion it worked very well. Tried making some nutritionally balanced cookies a while back; starting with a basic shortbread recipe and modified heavily, the one with banana as the main sugar and added vegan protein power worked pretty well. Some protein shakes even fail to suck as drinks, but I find them so much faff I just buy milk (soy or cow, I'm vegetarian not vegan) or prepackaged[0] instead. [0] My "This Is Food" label is leading to many questions answered by the label: https://www.yfood.eu/collections/tasterpacks/products/probierpaket https://www.yfood.eu/collections/tasterpacks/products/probie...
- jjtheblunt 3y agoWouldn't eating a salad of all vegetables be "plant-based"? Are you saying they use that phrase misleadingly too?
- tester13894059 3y agoI think that's the misunderstanding here. Things like Beyond Meat aren't really any better for you than real meat. It's just another push from the capital class to co-opt the medical profession's message that we should all be eating less meat. The ingredients, textured vegetable protein and highly processed lentils, have had almost all of the really healthy stuff removed from them and they serve only as a substrate for particular flavors that mimic meat. Insofar as it isn't recognizably an ingredient that is picked from a field and marketed as a plant or animal part, it's part of what's causing all of us to be really unhealthy in the US.
- dkdbejwi383 3y agoThat’s fair enough, but it still has a far lower impact on the planet, for those times when someone just really wants a burger.