Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
I’d be fine with lab grown meat, I’d actually prefer it, for health and safety reasons. Real meat is dirty.
I would rather eat a meal that doesn’t pretend to be meat and just be it’s own tasty thing. I don’t need a steak, but I do want a delicious savory thing.
Well it doesn’t really pretend to be meat, it is meat. It just grows differently.
And I’m cool with that! But my kidneys won’t let me enjoy red meat so let’s do lab grown tuna or chicken!
Meat is meat, and growing it in a lab means cattle won’t have to suffer the conditions of the average meat farm. Also means less greenhouse gasses from cattle.
Animals don’t have to suffer to make a steak taste good.
I don’t like to eat meat, so I also don’t like to eat things that remind me of meat.
I want plants that feel taste and smell like plants, please.
Which is a perfectly reasonable and valid preference
I personally like the taste of meat, but would prefer eating plants. Meat replacements are perfect for me
I swear people would rather spend a fortune developing sci-fi meat than spend pennies on beans and peas.
Same. What has been really disappointing for me is that a lot of places where my only option used to be a black bean burger have now replaced that with an impossible or beyond burger. It’s great for people who are trying to cut back on meat consumption so I like that they exist but please stop replacing my black bean burgers!
Completely unnecessary. Vegan chefs are wizards nowadays, and can show you how to make replacements for everything you need.
I make vsteak, and vchicken in large amounts about once per week, and use it in recipes. I can share the recipes I use if you like. I make vbacon about once per month, its a bit more labor intensive, but it tastes great.
Even apart from ethics, its 10x cheaper, and doesn’t contain any of the puss, blood, and feces that come in your meats currently.
Please share! This is on my list of things to learn
Some of my favs
My spouse and I are foodies and both vegetarian. We’ve had several chefs put together some absolutely incredible vegan/vegetarian dishes.
One of the chefs told us that being a plant-based chef has recently become much more respected in the culinary world. He thought we were at the start of a plant-based revolution in the culinary world. Younger folks are reducing meat consumption more than any previous generation, and there are beginning to be a lot of dedicated vegetarian/vegan restaurants popping up in most medium to large cities.
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Im game as long as the taste is good and the price is competitive (currently it would have to be the lowest price but if my situation changes I would pay a bit extra but not twice as much. well unless my circumstances changed enough for the spleurge). Im not sure if its impossible or beyond but I have had the bk plant one and the white castle. Both were fine especially in comparison to the fast food places regular fair. For those places I could see taking the plant based on just on taste as their regular burgers sorta suck.
They’re good for cravings, and absolutely help keep cultural foods alive even when going vegan. However, these days I’m very tofu-pilled (and tempeh-pilled), and don’t really rely on imitation meat.
Have you tried mushroom bacon? I havent, but seems like an alternative.
Existing meat substitutes are so, so much better than they were when I first gave up meat.
Lab-growing is really hard to make work, since muscle just doesn’t like to develop that way, and solves a problem that now barely exists because of the plant-based substitutes.
I haven’t tried lab-grown meat but assuming it tastes more or less the same, I think it’s much more ethical and probably better for you. The substitute meats like Beyond and Impossible are good but like all groceries that aren’t staples bought in bulk, they’re ridiculously expensive, at least where I live.
I’d like to experiment more of those “not really” vegetable meats, but they’re expensive. Like, the price for 300g is what I’d pay for 1kg of pork sirloin
In prinxipal fine. In fact I would like to understand the resource intensiveness of the supply chain and health effects. Wonder if vegitarian is better direction for example.
Yeah I don’t think I could go vegan but I could maybe go vegetarian, I’ve already pretty much stopped all red meat, but I do rely on chicken breast quite a bit for my protein and I don’t think I could live without eggs and dairy products.
I am thinking on the margin. Might be better to reduce meat rather then replace with synthetic meat.
Once one has done that, compare what is left including synthetic.
You’re probably right, these fake meats are ultra-processed so their CO2 emission might not be all that great and regardless I’m not trying to increase how much processed food I eat…
It is complicated. There is land out there that is not suitable for agriculture on one hand so free range grass fed might not be that bad, but herd animals produce methane too which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Then there is the whole question of eating meat from live animals as well if one cares about that and synthetic might be a way around that. Then of course the whole eco footprint issue. It would be interesting to know more.
They were really helpful in my transition into Vegetarianism. When I first became vegetarian, I pretty frequently craved meat, Impossible/Beyond meat alternatives were great for those times.
Pretty quickly the cravings lessened, after a few months I rarely craved meat at all.
Almost 5 years later, I crave something meaty maybe 3 times a year. Sometimes I want a heavy savory burger during the summer. Impossible meat patties are great for that.
They are also useful for entertaining family and friends who still eat meat. I’ve cooked vegetarian burgers, brats, breakfast sausages, etc. And most people give them pretty rave reviews. I even have had some family members say “I didn’t know you are eating meat again.” because the taste/smell was so close, they thought it was real meat I was cooking.
I can’t speak for lab meat, but it would be pretty cool if we were able to grow authentic meat from cell cultures that were acquired ethically, like painlessly from already dying/dead animals.
At this point, I can’t see myself ever going back to even totally ethically synthetic meats, I just don’t have a strong taste for it anymore. I prefer the health benifits I get from eating cleaner anyways.
I do wish they had a really good Impossible fish, I still often miss a hearty fish and chips with fresh tartar sauce and nice balsamic vinegar dip.
Lab grown meat still requires live animals. You still need to collect stem cells to start a culture and you also need fetal bovine serum (blood plasma from baby cows) to keep the cells healthy.
We currently DO NOT have a way to culture mammalian cells without animal blood plasma. We currently DO NOT have a way of infinitely culturing mammalian biomass from a single cell sample. So lab grown meat still needs animals to be raised in captivity and slaughtered, just fewer. It’s not vegan for that reason and won’t be for the foreseeable future unless massive breakthroughs happen in multiple different fields.
IMO a better path to explore would just be to figure out which exact chemicals give meat their flavour and directly synthesize them from raw materials. Have something like a completely artificial bacon powder you can add to a vegan protein source and completely cut out anything to do with animals. We can make every other scent and flavour artificially, why not meat? And it’s not even that hard, a science YouTuber can do it.
The few imitation meat products I have tried have been ok, I guess. Impossible burgers aren’t terrible and I could probably make do with them, if meat were removed from the market completely. I have yet to taste any non-pork bacon which didn’t taste bad (meat or no meat). And I doubt I’m going to find anything to replace a good rack of pork ribs. Really, the best place I’ve found for imitation meats is in dishes where ground meat is used as a protein and is so heavily spiced that you’d have a hard time identifying the type of meat anyway. Once the flavors are all mixed up, the meat is mostly about protein and texture.
Lab grown meat could be a complete game changer, if it’s ever more than a novelty product. A lab grown hamburger, which costs significantly more than one sourced from a cow isn’t it. Sure, you might get a bunch of rich, privileged yuppies eating them, just to show off their smug superiority. It will never have mass market appeal. I do think we’re seeing some interesting advancement in higher end meats though. Lab grown steaks seem like a place where the cost could be competitive and, if they are close enough to, or indistinguishable from cow sourced steaks, then that would be great. I’d be perfectly happy to slap a lab grown rib eye on the grill. I’m not squeamish about raw meat or it’s sourcing from dead animals, but I do recognize the impact that ranching has on the environment and that needs to be reduced.
Overall, I see lab grown meat as a net positive, assuming the costs can be brought in line with other options. This may require subsidies or taxes to skew the market in that direction. But, the government using its power to deal with large, complex problem is kinda the point of government. Stopping more climate change isn’t profitable in a way which will favor it in the market, but it does have a negative impact on society. So, the only real solution is going to be government action to reduce the harm, before the tragedy of the commons comes for us all. Lab grown meat can be one part of a broader solution. And hey, if it means more rib eye, without all the climate harm those bring to the table, that’s fantastic. Though, I’d probably still keep lab grown red meat to a sometimes food, just for health reasons.
