ground meat is probably the easiest to replace. There are so many options and because it’s usually mixed with things, it’s easy to make the impossible/beyond meat taste like the real stuff.
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That’s how I started. I was feeling like shit and sleeping like shit and said, fuck it, I’ll try this for at least two weeks. It was so much easier than I thought.
Cook them better IMO. Hate broccoli if it’s not steamed properly or stir fried, don’t mind it steamed properly (it can’t sit in the water) and enjoy it stir fried.
Que?
Hallelujah, a vegetarian recipe without a ton of lentils or beans (my stomach just goes ballistic with too much of either :/), thanks!
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Well, I can’t let all that game go to waste, can I?
I steam vegetables a bunch because I’m lazy, but I can’t think of a vegetable that isn’t better either raw, fried/stir-fried or roasted than it is steamed. Steaming some things is downright criminal, brussels sprouts come to mind.
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The absolute würst: frozen, steamed brussel sprouts.
The absolute nuts: oven roasted brussel sprouts at high temp for ~ 15-25 mins, pre-coated with olive oil and tossed with salt and pepper.
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Peas might be better steamed rather than fried or roasted. I don’t know about raw or stir-fried.
I’m going with artichokes.
Peas is a solid counterexample. I prefer them raw personally but I’m probably in the minority there.
Minted pea puree FTW. Spectacular with scollops. Uh I mean, spectacular with beans.
I have a shit diet for now because my refrigerator is broken.
Before the lockdown, I was a vegetarian and it was actually pretty cool. Food tasted better. Cooking is fun. I was losing weight. I was set on going back with the state of emergency long over and then down goes my fridge.
I think it’s pure Jingoism. Vegemite is fine tbh, but it doesn’t elicit those memories when I consume it.
I have an auto-inflammatory condition that is made worse by consuming plant-based foods (particularly starchy carbohydrates). I suspect others have similar issues without realizing it.
All plants contain toxins in some quantity as an evolutionary defense mechanism. When you eat meat, you are letting the animal process the toxins so you don’t have to. See: Carnivore Diet.
I’ve been eating pastured eggs and sardines. Neither one is cheap, I buy the King Oscar sardines in olive oil which run about $2.30 per 3.75 oz can. They’re pretty tasty and I have a hard time imagining that a fish that you can pack 20 into a tiny can suffer in any meaningful way when they’re caught and killed. And you’re eating the whole animal with both eggs and sardines, so you’re getting all the nutrients in organ meat without having to eat organ meat.
And I’ll eat mussels and clams and oysters in restaurants. And when I get a strong impulse to eat some real actual meat I usually just go get a prime ribeye from the grocery store and go to town. Don’t do it too often but I’m not going to fight it. And if free BBQ or Chipotle or chik-fil-a appears at work yeah I’m definitely going to eat it. What am I going to do, not eat it? Come on. Let’s be realistic.
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Vegetarian for ethical reasons (saw Earthlings and that started it) since I was 18 (10 years), been great for my health - I look a lot younger than I am and have low bodyfat % despite rarely exercising (note: I have hardly eaten any bread or pasta during those ten years). Can’t imagine going back.
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Pastured sardines sound delish
Sounds like a plan! Be more than happy to discuss this with you either via a thread or privately. Maybe I can help you avoid some of the (many) mistakes I’ve made.
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Of all the papers you could have picked, the China project has to be one of the weakest. I’d start by tossing every single observational study on this topic. All of them are hopelessly plagued by confounders and they singularly (and rightfully) give nutrition / medical research a bad rap. In the relatively few studies that actually attempt to match vegetarians and/or vegans with comparably-adjusted omnivores, the effects practically vanish; what you’re observing is selection bias. The proposed causal mechanisms (if they exist) are invariably post-hoc-theorized afterthoughts shoehorned in to fit the results. The first thing I learned training as a “soft” (!) scientist is that none of this shit would meet the definition of science. Ioannidis is essentail reading:
Some nutrition scientists and much of the public often consider epidemiologic associations of nutritional factors to represent causal effects that can inform public health policy and guidelines. However, the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform.
In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk. Substantial deficiencies of key nutrients (eg, vitamins), extreme overconsumption of food, and obesity from excessive calories may indeed increase mortality risk. However, can small intake differences of specific nutrients, foods, or diet patterns with similar calories causally, markedly, and almost ubiquitously affect survival?
See also:
Implausible results in human nutrition research
http://www.dcscience.net/Ioannidis-2013-nutrition-bmj.pdf
Eggs are good for you, bad for you, good for you, bad for you:
Why doesn’t more cholesterol in the diet lead to higher blood cholesterol level and subsequently to heart attacks? The answer is complicated, beyond the scope of this blog, but it illustrates how amazingly complex the body’s regulation of lipids and lipoproteins is, as well as how complicated the process of atherosclerosis is.
Bolded is the important part because the implied causal reasoning in these papers is often something laughably simplistic like “eating more X leads directly to more X.” There’s a giant Rube Goldberg device of reactions that happen in between eating something and the end result and we don’t even know all of them yet.
If you want more solidly-causal villains in meats, you can find them in processed meats and HCAs / PAHs, the latter of which result from preparation type (i.e., high heat, smoking, long cook times). Those are still weaker than murdering animals and melting the planet.
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My main problem with Beyond meat are the ingredients. At the moment my focus is eating good food with as little as possible added sugar and no added flavours. But a lot of the vegan or vegetarian stuff that gets praised as substitutes has so much garbage added that I dont want to buy it. The main reason to reduce my meat consumption even more is lazyness to prepare good food.
Yea most of the "meat replacement’ options are pretty processed. There are plenty of whole food protein options though; lentils, beans, tofu, seitan, tempeh, etc.