This. This is their stated reason for creating the product.
People like to jump on the vegetarians-hurr-durr bandwagon, but this product isn’t the right springboard for that bigotry. This isn’t actually about them, at all.
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And as a carnivore, I am both their target audience and intrigued. As a cook, I gotta see how it handles on the BBQ first. 
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I’m kinda torn on the fake meat VS real vegetables thing TBH. I like seitan and other meatless but meatlike foods, but at the same time I like vegetarian foods that don’t pretend to be meat.
I was a vegetarian for about a year, when I realized it just wasn’t right for me. I only planned on being vegetarian for a couple months. To each their own, I guess.
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Their patties are consistently loose - every single video of someone pushing down on a bun shows the whole thing starting to pull apart from itself. They should add an egg in there before cooking to help hold it all together.
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Because psychologically we in our minds are carnivores (or most of us anyway), and we need that psychological comfort of pretending that it’s meat, or filling in those blanks.
I know I do, and I haven’t had beef or burgers in quite a long time. Although I’ve gotten to the point that black bean burgers are just an assortment of black bean, veggies, and seasonings. The mind is tricky.
Still can’t get away from chicken and turkey, as much as I’d like. I’d drive myself crazy if I cut out all meat (poultry, fish, eggs) entirely. Seems the carnivore instinct is still there.
I miss a good burger, but continue to not want to actively go toward it. So I guess it is possible with chicken or turkey as well.
Well said. It makes me think about how cuisines and food choices across the world differ from culture to culture, and what is “normal” or viewed as simple reality, and assumed to be “the way it is”, is arbitrary and programmed into people. Stop meat entirely, and eventually you will get hungry enough that it really doesn’t matter what you eat. So yes, we can move to a plant-based society if meat is taken away from us on a large scale.
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I don’t think anyone ever said otherwise.
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I can’t imagine what you think the point of not eating meat is that this doesn’t satisfy it. I read your response to Jerwin, and every one of the points you mention applies just as well to veggie burgers as any other vegetarian fare.
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Sorry to break it to you, but domesticated livestock didn’t just pop up in the forest. We made them, too.
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If I’m reading you right, I agree with the point that meat and “meat” is not necessarily needed or wanted. This product continues with the dominant assumptions, and it also is selling you something, just like the Beef lobby, the Dairy Appreciation Board, and similarly motivated groups would do in your country. It upholds a status quo because there’s money to be made (a potential market share that prefers meat but would consider faking it).
Nobody’s going in to bat for broccoli, and if they do, lots of promotions for (e.g.) organic veggies end up adding packaging, which is A Bad Thing. The point is to have yummy, healthy, ecologically sound options without marketing BS.
Being able to tell everyone around you that you don’t eat meat, constantly.
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I’d love to try this, but it really doesn’t look all that meat-like up close, nor does it appear to taste very meat like (if you’re looking at more than just the partisan reviews). Has anyone on here actually tried it?
What does it cost though? I’ve not seen that mentioned anywhere.
As a non practicing vegetarian (I agree with the moral principles, but just like eating meat too much), I’d love for something like this, or lab grown meat, to really take off. Hard to see that happening with version 1 (or even 2 or 3) of these products though, there’s a long way to go to replicate the complexity of a hunk of flesh.
This very thing surprised me the first time I visited the US as an adult. Being asked how I wanted my hamburger patty cooked. Well, all the way through, obviously. We don’t do it any other way in New Zealand (at least nowhere I’ve found).
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To some extent; after all a lot of “what we are like” is simply conditioning.
But a human’s teeth and digestive system have carnivore / omnivore written all over them.
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I think it’s more about the flavors you were brought up eating than “pretending it’s meat”.
Most of us were brought up eating meat, and even if you’ve been a vegetarian for a very long time & have no desire to eat animal, there’s certain flavors that simply don’t exist in the world of vegetables and soy: deeply savory, rich, umami flavors like chicken & pork, or that caramelized, deeply rich, charred flavor of grilled red meat. They’re satisfying, comforting flavors that most of us were brought up thinking of as the centerpiece of a meal, and they’re hard to replicate with veggies and soy and wheat proteins.
I think we’re all omnivores who have the luxury of either eating meat or vegetables as we desire, but ‘fake meat’ is just a way to get more flavors to the table. And for people who’re already eating meat, it’s a great way to have the flavors you want without all the fat or environmental impact.
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Point of order: who’s us?
Maybe most of us on bbs, but this isn’t true of most of the world’s population. It’s only true of that same portion of it that uses grossly disproportionate amounts per capita of resources in other ways as well. I’ve met many people from other places who find the amounts of meat consumed by most Americans, for example, hard to fathom (to put it politely).
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Sorry, I should clarify: most Americans, or to clarify even more, most Americans who’re 30-50. People who grew up in the generation where meat is the default centerpiece of the table, where a meal without red meat (or at least some chicken) was lacking something essential. I know that America (and similar western countries like Australia) focus on meat far more than the vast majority of the globe.
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I’d be willing to try this, but I keep coming back to why? And I’m not saying that in the terms of why it was created, environmental impact, better for you, ect… But in terms of my choice as a dinner. If I’m going to a place that serves a really good burger I’m not sure what’s going to want to make me order this…I mean if I somehow ended up at a vegetarian place it’s a high likelihood (but then that opens up all kinds of other questions.)
The local Costco was doing their usual free sample stuff and had a veggie burger, it was fairish. I mean if you want the meat eaters to try it you might have to reduce that barrier to entry pretty far.
On a different note, I take my burgers medium rare - pink to dark pink. From a taste perspective I don’t understand the point of well done…literally you will have cooked all the juiciness out of it. Just to the point of all brown is tolerable but hardly makes a worthwhile burger. However I like my burgers simple, a few condiments, cheese, a slice of tomato maybe, sometimes bacon. So the patty is the main focus, not the 10 other things you’d shoved between the buns.
Do you always have such minimal concern about the broader effects of your actions?
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Pretty much what I was thinking.
I’d define “us” as anyone who grew up thinking that a meal wasn’t a meal unless it was mostly red meat, and that the proper way of cooking vegetables is boiling the living fuck out of them and slathering them in butter. To us, meat is the meal and vegetables are the unpalatable things that we have to eat to get dessert. I know every culture is different, but I’m a provincial small-town Midwesterner, and I wasn’t exposed to a whole lot of cultures growing up. We had the typical mediocre Chinese restaurant that everyone jokes is dogs and cats*, and Indian/Thai/Vietnamese/etc just didn’t exist.
*I had a college roommate who refused to eat any kind of Asian food because he literally thought it was dogs and cats.
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