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Obvious Goes Beyond Meat
- J3L2404 14y agoThis web page is a good example of simplicity gone too far. I guess you don't know where the boundaries are until you have crossed them. This design is off-puttingly empty. I am not saying you have to fill it with bling, but you have to have something to focus on. Just my two cents.
- gte910h 14y agoI could use a little texture on there as well.
- crazygringo 14y agoFont size is also far too large for readability.
- sneak 14y agoOn the contrary - upon seeing this I immediately got the urge to go remove some more shit from my site's layout.
- Joeboy 14y ago> This web page is a good example of simplicity gone too far It's extremely readable and loads very quickly. I wish more pages would go too far. Edit: Although given its otherwise commendable minimalism it seems odd that it goes to the trouble of using a non-system font.
- tedmiston 14y agoI totally disagree. I jumped back just to comment how nice the design is: large typography, sparing color, reasonable line spacing, and no junk. Although I do think the column width could be about 20% narrower, overall, it's fantastic. I think a subtle textured background would be a welcome addition as well.
- cpeterso 14y ago> you have to have something to focus on. Focus on the words. I read most multi-paragraph articles using Readability to strip out extraneous formatting.
- phil 14y agoThese guys are doing such awesome stuff. I like eating meat, but would love to live in a world where Big Macs are made from vegetable protein and all meat is raised locally/humanely and fed a healthy diet.
- epoxyhockey 14y agoSeeing as how Taco Bell recently got dinged for using mostly soy (only 35% was beef) in their beef tacos, have no fear, your McD's meal will probably be the first to become all-veggie as soon as they can lower the FDA's definition of what qualifies as meat.
- slyn 14y agoSlightly OT: Maybe I'm just underestimating to the power of familiarity as a plus in marketing, but I've never been able to wrap my head around meat-imitation vegetarian and vegan options. I understand things like veggie dogs or burgers, patty and tube shaped foods are just plain convenient to store and eat. But I don't really get: "... Beyond Meat™, the first plant protein that looks, feels, tastes, and acts like meat." Wouldn't it be more prudent to create an identity for next level plant-based products than essentially "It's like meat but not"?
- fistofjohnwayne 14y agoBased on the Obvious posting, I assume that Beyond Meat is targeted at all the meat-eaters who are saying things like, "I would love to become vegetarian... But I could never give up chicken." To get large quantities of people to drop meat you'll need a product that appeals to those that don't really want to.
- garyrichardson 14y agoI've been a vegetarian for 3 or 4 years now. The hardest part for 'meaters' to understand is that I don't want imitation meat. There is far too much good food for me to be eating pretend meat. Also, the state of imitation meat products is already quite good. I 100% guarantee that the average person couldn't tell the difference between ground beef and 'ground round' in chili. I've fooled too many people to count now. Chicken is bland anyway, so why bother simulating them when you can use tofu or some other meaty vegetable instead.
- freshnote 14y agoI'm not a "meater" and yet I like imitation meat. Maybe a fake hot dog on the rare occasion. I concur with everything else you said though.
- mazuhl 14y agoFrom my experience a lot of this is to do with people's "food culture" (I can't think of a better way to express that). People have ideas about what constitutes food or a "proper meal". (I've heard people say "My dad would be offended if I cooked him dinner and there wasn't any meat in it"). Give people something they recognise and they can handle it. It's not just convenient to store and it, it's convenient to think about and fit into the (heavily marketed) idea of a proper meal (for vegetarians and vegans too).
- ben1040 14y agoAn interesting article from two years ago about the product development (the names in the "About" page here match up to the Mizzou team in the article): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1993883,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1993883,00....
- mark_l_watson 14y agoWhile I applaud anyone who gives up eating lots of animal protein (I believe it is bad for their health, and I know it is bad for our environment by using about 10x more water and energy for production), there is this: why not just eat regular vegetarian foods? Why fake meat? We eat vegetarian with little bits of seafood (Pescatarians), BTW.
- famousactress 14y agoI've often wondered (and been asked) this. I haven't eaten meat for about twenty years now. My wife and I purchase and eat plenty of fake-meat products. It's frankly, simple. Easy to prepare, easy to eat. Fairly high in calories and protein for effort-expended compared to many alternatives. The other interesting question was posed by another commenter who asked why fake-meat in terms of flavors, instead of finding their own identity. The interesting thing is that I don't think most of these things have much flavor either way. Does chicken have much flavor? The veggie-chicken doesn't. It's more of a high-protein, high-calorie carrier of other flavors. Dip it in siracha, fry it and make orange 'chicken'. All in all it doesn't contribute much flavor to the meal, just substance. All of that said, I think of it as junk food (not compared to meat, but compared to other vegetable based meals). I'd much rather get better about putting together more balanced dishes.
- UnFleshedOne 14y agoThe tasty parts of chicken have a lot of flavor, you can pretty much boil and eat drumsticks (in skin) with no seasoning whatsoever. It is white meat that is tasteless and needs a lot of postprocessing. (or mayo, mayo makes everything taste good...)
- famousactress 14y agoThat makes sense. I think it's the white meat that's imitated.
- _pius 14y agoWhy not just eat regular vegetarian foods? Why fake meat? Many people love the taste of meat, plain and simple. If I'm craving a medium rare NY Strip steak, neither a Portobello mushroom nor Ahi tuna filet will quite satiate that desire, no matter how good they taste. A fake meat that successfully replicates the flavor profile and mouthfeel of meat while providing the ethical and health benefits of vegetables would be a game-changer.
- nosse 14y agoThe text sites this "51%" of greenhouse gas emissions globally. It comes from here: http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climat... I can cut this short for you. It's a lie dressed as calculation. It calculates cow breathing for instance. And more heat produced while cooking meat compared to vegetables. Still they don't really show you the numbers. EDIT: http://beyondmeat.com/ http://beyondmeat.com/ doesn't state how large environmental effect their product has.
- bawllz 14y agoIts like nearly all statistics, I have learned to ignore the large part of them. I hate it when people drop percentages based on correlations which they don't reference the actual methods. In my opinion, its what defines bad media/writing.
- geekfactor 14y agoBeyond Meat is people!
- Nogwater 14y agoHow much will it cost in my local grocery store? Will it be cheaper than regular (non-fancy/organic/free range) chicken by the pound and by the calorie? Does it have all of the same amino acids that chicken has in close enough to the same amounts to completely replace real meat without having to think about changing the rest of your diet to compensate? Genuinely curious.
- samstokes 14y agoObligatory Title Police comment: not knowing that Obvious and Beyond Meat were companies, this headline gave no clues as to the topic of the article. In fact I only clicked to see how on earth that title could parse as English... I know the submission just took the title from the original article, but when the article title is that obscure a little editorial summarisation wouldn't go amiss.
- nswanberg 14y agoI'm as much a fan of clear, meaningful titles as the next person, but when life hands you such an unforced, ambiguous, deliciously absurd title, I think it's best to savor it.
- epoxyhockey 14y agoI'm more excited about synthetic meat R&D. Rather than trying to make soy-based products more like meat in taste and texture, why not just create meat in a test-tube, sans the animal?
- earlyriser 14y agoThis has been discussed previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873470 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873470 It seems to be really hard to create tissues.
- quadrant6 14y agoThe article gave me hope. Then when I clicked through to the website and looked at the ingredients, I was let down. The 'chicken strips' seem only marginally better than the soy sausages in our supermarkets already. I guess I was expecting some miraculous new ingredient. It's nice they have amaranth in there but it doesn't exactly seem groundbreaking.
- tomjen3 14y agoI don't get it, but that may be because I don't have a problem eating meat -- our emotions are not evolved to live in the world we live in now, so they shouldn't be used to derive what we should eat.
- cpeterso 14y agoOur emotions are not evolved to use iPhones or modern medicine either. Animals eat other animals because have no alternative. Humans have the knowledge, technology, and (I hope) empathy to eat without killing animals.
- Zaheer 14y agoIs this perhaps VC Vinod Khosla's stealth meat startup? http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/09/13/vinod-khosla-clean-tech-not-a-disaster-i-have-stealth-meat-startup/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/09/13/vinod-khos...
- cdcarter 14y agoNot to parrot Michael Pollan too much, but I think I'll stick to eating food. His latest book provides plenty of skepticism on whether eating animal protein actually leads to cancer, obesity, type II, &c... or if it is perhaps due to an overly reductive food culture in the West. What nutritionists are saying is good for us is changing ever decade. I'm going to stick to eating minimally processed food in moderation.
- earbitscom 14y agoVegetables are food. And even better still, they have zero cholesterol and basically provide much the same benefits without the bad side effects. Say what you want about the flip-flopping nature of nutrition trends, there is very little scientific data that shows that milk, cheese and red meat don't cause heart disease and other health concerns. Broccoli tends not to.
- cdcarter 14y agoOh I completely agree. Vegetables are great food. Whole grains are great sources of yummy carbs. And meats in moderation are likely Just Fine. Broccoli is food, highly processed soy injected with omega-3s and corn is a food-product, not food.
- earbitscom 14y agoFair enough. I'm not saying eating anything vegetarian, no matter how processed, is good for you. Just clarifying that, in my opinion, avoiding meat if you can is healthier.
- anthonyb 14y agoThere's very little evidence that it does. You just have to look at the recent article on salt (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613) to see that conventional wisdom is often flawed. Similar cases were made for eating cholesterol (it has no effect on blood cholesterol) and fibre (doesn't prevent bowel cancer). There is strong evidence that eating a "western diet", high in calories and processed food, will cause obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc. but there's a lot of disagreement as to what that root cause is.
- cvg 14y agoI like that Beyond Meat is trying to offer better vegan options. The product looks interesting, but after reading the ingredients, http://beyondmeat.com/products/ http://beyondmeat.com/products/ , I doubt I will try it. Titanium Dioxide (what color is it normally), Dipotassium Phosphate and tons of Phytoestrogens (Soy) don't sound so tasty.
- earnon 14y agoMeat is not bad for the environment. Factory farms are indeed terrible, but they're not the only way to raise animals. On the other hand, grain agriculture is beyond fixing See http://lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm http://lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm for a great intro. Meat is also healthy. Grains are not. See any of these Good Calories Bad Calories/Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf, http://www.marksdailyapple.com/cholesterol/#axzz1wxjdQqRB http://www.marksdailyapple.com/cholesterol/#axzz1wxjdQqRB Eat real food.
- eclipxe 14y agoAgreed! Taubes' writing is excellent and Paleo is a great way to lose weight and improve overall health markers (cholesterol, blood pressure, etc).
- markkanof 14y agoThank you for making this point. A lot of the other commenters here start by stating that meat is definitely bad for you and then go on to make some point about the article based on that initial premise. It would seem that meat may in fact be quite good for humans to eat and it's really disturbing how ingrained the idea that meat is bad has been drilled into our entire society.
- chc 14y agoNo matter how you slice it (no pun intended), raising an animal for human consumption is a net energy loss. AFAICT, it's just a mathematical fact. Unless you have magic cows that photosynthesize, you are taking resources that could have gone toward supporting a human being and instead using them to grow an animal. I mean, if you're happy with your Neo-Atkins Diet, that's cool, but enough already with this looking down on people who don't eat as trendily as you do.
- earnon 14y agoWhat if the animal ate only grass? Also, keep in mind that modern grain agriculture is 100% dependent on fossil fuels. Back in the day, animals were raised on the farm along with vegetables. The animals ate the cellulose (inedible to us) and scraps and created protein. They also created fertilizer (today it is synthesized from fossil fuels and wreaks environmental havoc - the Dead Zone at the mouth of the Mississippi is mostly caused by nitrogen runoff from farms) and ate bugs, so there was no need for pesticides.
- freshfunk 14y ago#FirstWorldProblems