Why? Impossible burgers are very heavily processed and they cost more (excluding BK deals with artificial price parity). I’m pretty sure all that added chemistry that drives up the cost has some sort of environmental impact. I find it very easy to be skeptical of the claimed benefits of fake meat.
You want ecologically and ethically responsible fast food? Have a falafel pita with a side of fries. It’s minimally processed, vegan (usually), and delicious.
You think higher price means a higher environmental impact? Bro, that’s not how negative externalities work.
Falafel is great. Again I don’t know why a major chain hasn’t introduced something like a falafel burger.
I’m sure there is some non-zero impact, but seems like you’re going to have assume a lot to beat beef. Perhaps your imagination is more vivid than mine.
Well, obviously, a good falafel crushes an impossible burger and most FF beef burgers. That’s not the point.
Another way to think about this is to imagine all the added chemistry needed to manufacture a cow. Those things need to be pumped full of all kinds of sophisticated antibiotics and stuff.
It’s a bit tangential to my suspicions of the environmental superiority of fake meat, but I do think that is an important point. The goal is to get people to eat fewer animals. I don’t think selling imitation animals is the way to do that, because you’re selling something with an asterisk. It has an inherent inferiority by pretending to be something it’s not, and that’s a terrible way to market something.
Nobody sells plant-based falafel. Nobody’s menu says their french fries are vegan. There’s no need. There’s already lots and lots of delicious foods that aren’t made from dead animals. We should just eat more of those instead of trying to pretend a soy bean is a cow.
I’m with you 100% on this. Imitation meat seems like a dead end to me. The world could learn a lot from India, which has ancient vegetarian traditions and is one of the GOAT cuisines.
a big selling point for me as a selfish consumer is that I don’t get that nasty bloated feeling I get with red meat, and it passes through my digestive system a hell of a lot better, and is practically indistinguishable from the real deal for me. win win win.
I dont think vegans are the intended market for the fake meat, it’s for people like me. environmentally I’d be shocked if it’s worse than beef - it takes insane resources to farm beef, not even getting into all the shipping and stuff involved as well.
+1 on we should learn from other cuisines on vegetarian traditions. For 7 months now my cooking has been heavily focused on vegetarian dishes, I’ve been loving it.
I’m just trying to eat cattle into extinction so they are no longer a problem.
+1 on this. However, I’m supportive of efforts to make fake meat out of soy bean. There are people out there who absolutely prefer that to a falafel. Better to cast a wider net. Also, I’m hopeful that eventually technology can improve to the point that fake meat can taste as good or even better than real meat. People just need to keep working at it.
+1 to this to. Indian is my favorite vegetarian cuisine by a wide margin. The problem is that a lot of it is relatively labor intensive to make.
Also, while I could eat it every day, the rest of the Melks don’t like it as much as I do.
First google hit, dunno how accurate, but the numbers aren’t close here.
Does it taste as good as real meat?
No
I can’t actually remember the last time I had steak.
Which I’m thinking about because last time at the grocery store some dude and his gf approached me to ask whether I preferred bacon with steak or with chicken to settle a disagreement between them. I replied that I hadn’t had bacon in a long time. Idk why I bothered to tell them that. I mean he did ask but he probably didn’t really care about my diet. He insisted on an answer, so I said steak. I don’t know why I said that either. Maybe I subconsciously want steak.
Anyway, I had chicken today.
Sir Mo Farah has revealed that he was illegally trafficked into Britain under the name of another child as a nine-year-old and forced into domestic servitude.
In a new documentary, The Real Mo Farah, to be broadcast by the BBC on Wednesday, the 39-year-old says he was trafficked to London by a stranger under an assumed name after escaping war in Somalia.
“Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name or it’s not the reality,” he says. “The real story is I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK.”
When he arrived in Britain Farah claimed he lived with a married couple who treated him badly. His PE teacher at school, Alan Watkinson, rescued him and also helped him to apply for British citizenship using his assumed name.
Thought that was funny when I encountered it in the wild:
