Article says “Not Vegans”
I have had them generally when available. Just to get a sense for how it compares.
My SO asked me last night how it stacks up. The answer is: it is better and more consistent than a cheap burger patty. Given a choice, I would get it at your average burger place.
As a society, this is probably the best outcome: getting meat eaters to eat more plant based foods. (It probably has fewer nitrates as well so it is probably better for you)
It is a step forward from people demanding the bun, lettuce, and tomato be made from 100% beef.
Maybe my experience doesn’t match that of The Takeout’s data, but I know plenty of vegans, and they’re seeking out both Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers and are thrilled at having a vegan option available at fast food (or quick service) places.
But I also know a lot of curious meat eaters that enjoy them as well.
I find the texture nearly perfectly replicates finely textured beef. But it just doesn’t taste like anything. Which is fine on a burger since that usually tastes like the condiments. But on something like a burrito, or meatloaf etc, I don’t care for it.
It’s impressive engineering. But if I want meat I’ll eat meat. If I want to avoid meat there’s a lot of better non-meat foods. I honestly prefer bean patties or mushroom burgers.
And yeah, given the choice between impossible and super low quality ground beef, I would pick impossible.
I believe vegetarians/vegans are not the target market for these patties anyway. If I had to eat at Burger King and this was an option I would take it.
Agreed. Despite moving to ”beef central”, Texas, my partner and I have decided that beyond meat burgers (and sausages!) are finally ”good enough” that we will choose them over any real-meat grocery-store or restaurant equivalent, unless I’m going to grind my own meat for burgers (rare), or want a specially seasoned or smoked sausage, two areas the meat analogues cannot compete.
All this despite being pretty serious carnivores (about the only vegetarian meal we eat is falafel).
That being said, one of the stores we’ve purchased beyond meat burgers from had to move them from the meat aisle (beyond meat are trying to reframe that area as the ”protein aisle", including plant protein), to another refrigerated location because vegans were complaining of having to grab beyond meat from the ”meat section”.
So, if meat eaters are eating them, and part of the reason is they’re right there as an option with the meats, then vegans (here at least) seem to be trying hard to make the patties far more obscure and difficult to find.
Definitely not vegan, but Impossible Burger is 
. Have not tried Beyond, but will look for it. Honestly, if we can get more carnivores to eat vegetable-based proteins, we might improve our overall situation a little bit.
I am decidedly an omnivore, but I know that I suffer from that delusion that “without meat, it’s not a meal.”
Despite that, I am well pleased with both Impossible and Beyond burgers, and often choose them when they are available.
How did the price compare?
Depending on where you are getting it, it could be a couple bucks or a buck.
White Castle it is ~80 cents more than a regular slider, so pretty expensive.
I’ve been a vegetarian for a couple years. I realized that the meat products I enjoyed most were the most processed ones which least resemble actual animal flesh - i.e. burgers (I prefered the griddled, flattened, thin, cooked through and crispy kind, rather than the thick bloody kind), spiced sausage, fried chicken with plenty of batter, etc.
So for me, meat replacements like the impossible burger are perfect. I eat Beyond burgers fairly regularly (I prefer Impossible but those are still hard to find outside of fancy [expensive] restaurants or Burger King; my local burger place has Beyond burgers and I can get them at the grocery store to cook at home.) I also love soyrizo in burritos.
I’m glad to see fast food places starting to offer them because it can be really hard to find filling vegetarian food if you’re traveling and fast food chains are the only option around.
If meat-eaters enjoy them too, awesome.
They’re comparable to premade beef patties. In my market (Wegman’s) 4 premade 90/10 hamburger patties are about $9. Two Beyond Burger patties cost about $5, though they’ve been sold out for a while now. We tried a knock-off (LightLife) last night which were similarly priced, but not as good as Beyond.
The way to deal with that is to have the product available in both places: vegan section and meat.
Well. Until PETA comes up with a bullshit reason to protest it being in one place, or the other, or anyplace at all.
“It resembles meat, which advocates meat eating!”
No excuse is too crazy or tenuous, which is unfortunate because the cause is a worthy one.
Agreed - but I’ll wager the realities of the fight for shelf space makes that infeasible. At least until these things get more traction in general at the supermarket - perhaps when the Impossible burger launches their home product.
This is why people don’t like vegans.
I’ll have them when they’re in the cafeteria. They’re close enough to the real thing and I dont have to worry about BSE from mystery meat. I am not a vegan or vegetarian.
Probably depends on one’s motivation for going vegan. If I believed eating animal flesh was a disgusting, morally abhorrent concept then I guess I probably wouldn’t be drawn to a product that was marketed as being almost indistinguishable from animal flesh.
Kind of like how most of us meat-eaters wouldn’t be interested in eating something that supposedly tasted just like a human baby.
(Why do people still name products in horrible ways? Please, talk to some more random people before you call the printer.)
I dunno. The roast baby at the atheist convention was really tasty.
