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Feb 27, 2021
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Seeing as it's Lent, you can have beaver (or capybara, depending on what you can get): https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/26/468166791/when-beef-is-off-limits-beaver-and-muskrat-make-it-to-lenten-menu

"It doesn't taste like chicken and it's definitely not a fish, but some people in St. Louis are eating beaver for Lent.

Many Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays in observance of Lent, the season of penance between Ash Wednesday and Easter. The church has made exceptions — at times, in some places — for aquatic mammals such as beavers, muskrats and capybara.

That's good enough for Brenton Brown. "A friend of ours said that the Catholic Church is fine with this for Lent," says Brown, co-owner of Bootleggin' BBQ in St. Louis, which is now serving "humanely trapped" smoked beaver on Fridays during Lent."

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I've only read the first sentence but just want to point out that the Impossible Burger isn't available in large parts of the world. I really want to try it but have never. I regularly eat the Beyond Burger but we also had to wait years before we got the chance.

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If you're in the US you can order off their website at https://buy.impossiblefoods.com/ , but yeah, I don't know what the options anywhere else are.

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Thanks. I'm in Switzerland so I'll be patient while continuing to enjoy the Beyond products.

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There are a lot of brands of faux meat I'd like to try from the Netherlands. Lucky you, it's a 7 hour train from Basel or perhaps they ship within the EU. BTW I took a cooking class from the creator of the Beyond Burger before he created it. It was great, especially since he complimented my cooking.

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I am originally from the Netherlands buy only the vegetarian butcher comes to mind. It's not bad but it doesn't match Beyond meat in flavor and juiciness.

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*but

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I have wanted to try Meatless from Goes, NL

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Thanks for the suggestion. I might try them next time I'm there.

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I lived in the Netherlands for a while and I remember the seaweed-derived Weedburger being very tasty, though it wasn’t really trying to be a meat substitute. Not sure how available those are even in NL these days, but they were good.

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I'm not sure how well fake meat fares through international shipping, may be some customs issues

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Turns out "large parts of the world" are not in the US

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Somewhere in Heaven, James K "Manifest Destiny" Polk sheds a single tear.

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Growth mindset! They are not in the US "yet"

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Actually (in my best Cliff Clavin voice) . . . when we occupied Mexico City a lot of Mexicans (the elites) wanted the U.S. to annex the whole country. Polk took a hard pass on that and we just took the good bits instead.

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Tesco in UK and Ireland sells Beyond Burgers https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/305836057 It's interesting to me to see the sudden expansion of vegan options in supermarkets over the past year, it's gone from "mostly vegetarian if you can even find that" to "everyone is doing a vegan version of all kinds of products".

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Why is it surprising? They get to sell vegetable protein for the price of animal protein, at a huge profit.

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fwiw, I much prefer Beyond Meat. The Impossible Burger seems more like a real hamburger to me, but I think that's because I grew up eating well-done hamburgers and it feels well-done. Beyond gives me a nice pink, juicy burger without the risk of parasite.

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First person I've seen that fully agrees with me. I think Impossible Burger is a more impressive fake but Beyond tastes better.

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I've used both at home. I like both, but I can taste the difference between them. I don't know which I like better, though. Even once did a "head to head" test where I cooked both of them and tried them together like that. Definitely a difference in flavor, but can't figure out which I like better.

(They are rather different products, though, in that Impossible is soy based, while Beyond is pea based.)

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Yeah to be fair I also stock both, I use beyond for actual burger sorts of things, and impossible for like meatballs and lasagna where my goal is to simulate regular ground beef

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IMO Impossible tastes like a slightly below average meat burger. Beyond tastes like a pretty tasty veggie burger that's somewhat like meat.

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This makes sense to me, So far I have only tried Beyond fake meatballs. They actually tasted quite good- but they were distinctly not meat in a textural way that is hard to describe.

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In Europe the Future Burger is also a thing.

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On Vegan Mob's fries: hah! That was exactly my experience at the vegan parrilla in Buenos Aires to which I went several times in 2019 (https://www.happycow.net/reviews/la-reverde-parrillita-vegana-buenos-aires-92712). It's not just that their fake meat is remarkable, or that their fries are subpar: their fries simply aren't realistic. Real, yes, but not realistic.

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I assume it is similar to how In-n-out has terrible fries. It's a combination of using fresh potatoes and single frying. (If you want to make fries at home freezing the potatoes before frying improves the texture).

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Soaking them for >20 min and then drying them previous to frying also helps. Of course it all depends on what you are aiming for. My ideal is very much not McDonald's.

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“Single-frying” implies the possibility of more frying. This is intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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To achieve the perfect frie (is it fry) you first cook the fries in a low temperature, then let them rest and refry at a high temperature to get the lovely exterior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZzhpYBmXBY

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Its pronouns are “fry/fries” :p (yes, I know, I don't care)

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That's what I do when I fry cassava.

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The trick to really good fries is twofold:

1) Make sure there is very little starch on the outside. Starch burns very quickly and you'll end up with dark bitter fries long before the inside is sufficiently cooked.

2) Cook the insides until most of the water has boiled off. If you don't do this, the steam coming out from inside will make the fries go from crisp to soggy within a minute of taking them out of the frier.

If you take a fresh potato, cut it into strips and dump it in a frier at 375F, you will fail on both these counts. You will end up with overly dark fries that go soggy almost immediately, because they would burn on the outside long before they're sufficiently cooked.

If you want a good fry, you have to soak them for a long time and/or blanch them to get rid of starch, then usually cook them twice, once at a low temperature to drive off moisture, the second time to crisp and brown the outside.

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In-N-Out's fries can be vastly improved by "secret" menu ordering. Just ask for "well done" and you'll get a much crispier fry. You can also have them topped with cheese or "animal style" (cheese, grilled onions, burger sauce).

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I much prefer the Animal Style version, FWIW, but maybe it's just because I love grilled onions in general.

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Even "well done" In-N-Out fries are surprisingly bad for such an established fast food chain. Overcooking potatoes the wrong way is still no match for cooking them the right way.

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This is the deep difference that is at the core of the French classical theory of theatre: in the brutal polemics about Corneille's Cid, Corneille argues that his story is real (as it is taken out of historical facts) while his opponents complain it is not realistic.

Popular success has sided with Corneille but I'm not sure French fries will follow the same way.

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I prefer to make a value judgement. There's nothing “unrealistic” about crappy cooking, doesn't mean I want to eat it.

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Unrealistic fries are not the same as bad fries. They are fries that don't taste or feel like fries.

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The Butcher's Son often (but not always) does delivery on DoorDash, including stuff from the market.

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(Like out of about 20 orders I have been surprised by them being fully closed once and only available for pickup once.)

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Drive down and try the burgers and fried chicken at Indigo Burger in Newark! They're amazingly good. 5/5 for me, and their seasoned fries are 6/5.

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Almost every healthy diet involves eating real food and avoiding processed, highly palatable slop. This drive towards replacing the only "real" food that a significant proportion of the populace eat (i.e. meat) with this artificially created stuff is extremely misguided when considering the health of the population as a whole.

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Granted. But I find it's easier to be consistent on a diet if I'm a little flexible and allow myself treat foods like fake meat occasionally.

Also, if someone is trying to go vegan for ethical/anti-meat-plant/CO2 reasons, substituting impossible meat for regular ground beef is a win.

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I don't see stripping entire ecosystems of all life and replacing them with a mono-culture as good for the environment. Sustainable agriculture includes a whole lot of animal husbandry and cyclical pasturing.

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Yes, but let's not pretend that the majority of meat production relies on those practices. The majority of beef comes from high density farms, which rely on monocultures for animal feed. One of the main reasons people keep cutting down more of the rainforest is for cattle and soy to feed that cattle.

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In general, vegetarians live longer and healthier lives than meat eaters. Although I agree that eating natural whole foods is generally better than eating processed foods, I think processed plant-based meat is no worse for people than the processed animal-based meat most of them are already eating.

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Better vegetarian health is a very plausible claim, but do we have good evidence that it's (primarily) because of the vegetarianism, or because people who go veg tend to be healthier for other, hard-to-control-for reasons?

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Good question!

The boring answer is something like "we can never be sure of this, but clearly being vegetarian is at least compatible with good health"

The speculative answer is that it does seem potentially causal, based on studies of otherwise-similar Adventist churches that do or don't ban meat. See Section 4 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/

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The Adventist research is quite interesting. Two observations from reading this summary of findings https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144107/ :

First, in the subgroup analyses the pescatarians seem to show the best results. I wonder if this points in the direction of the classic Mediterranean/'Blue Zones' type diets being equally or more healthy than full-on vegetarianism.

Second, the Adventist health studies control for BMI in some sub-analyses but not others. Notably, the all-cause mortality results control for a whole raft of covariates, but not BMI; this has me wondering how much 'maintaining a healthy weight' is the causal pathway for a lot of these outcomes vs meat consumption per se.

(I fully acknowledge that, as a lapsed vegetarian, I may be engaging in motivated reasoning here.)

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On the other hand you might consider vegetarian and non-vegetarian populations in India, where the vegetarians have much worse health (the first article on this I found by googling: https://www.nutraingredients-asia.com/Article/2019/02/04/Meat-and-morbidity-Why-are-Indian-vegetarians-more-likely-to-be-obese-than-their-omnivorous-counterparts#).

Purely anecdotally, I noticed growing up that the Indian vegetarians I grew up around mostly ate potatoes and rice, along with a shocking amount of deep fried food. Seeing vegetarianism be associated with health in America was pretty surprising.

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Mar 1, 2021
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That sounds wonderful! Indian vegetarians also don't eat eggs, so egg-based desserts like mousse aren't an option for them.

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Vegetarians smoke less and are richer & higher class than non-vegetarians, so this correlation is not proof of causation.

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I definitely looked at Impossible from a health perspective and concluded it was not obviously an improvement over hamburger. (As I recall, it is made with coconut oil, which is absolutely the vegetarian equivalent of meat, in terms of saturated fat content.)

That said, both hamburger and Impossible are "processed foods", in different ways, and I could believe that either one has a secret bad-for-you X-factor. For example, I know that carcinogens are created when cooking meat with high heat -- presumably the Impossible Burger doesn't have those? Does it have other ones instead? Who knows.

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Given the very recent proliferation of these meat substitutes, do we have enough data to make any conclusion whatsoever? I assume most vegan diets till date have included very little of these.

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When factors such as exercise, smoking, and processed food consumption are factored in, meat eaters fare much better than vegetarians, particularly on mental health.

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Do you have links to studies? I'm curious.

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I don't pretend plant-based food is healthier, but I have a (mostly) plant-based diet out of ethical (and to a lesser extent) environmental reasons...(I do eat seafood occasionally, but definitely won't eat tetrapods)...

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Hath a vegan hotdog the processed-nature?

It's not the processing in and of itself that's bad, it's the refinement of the tasty parts by removing the healthy parts that's the problem. Most processed foods are not a painstaking attempt to recreate a different food, they are what you get by feeding existing foods to Moloch. (Impossible Firstborn Son™?)

Thus I doubt we can generalise from white bread to vegan meat.

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I'm not sure you're thinking of "processed” correctly. Cured meat of any form is considered processed. While some modern techniques are even worse, curing meat in a salt brine is very much part of what makes the processed result tasty, and bad for you.

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Well then we need no recourse to the abstraction of 'proceesed food'. We can assay real and impossible bacon to see which contains more sodium, nitrite ions etc.

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Indeed, hence my confusion with the excitement over this topic.

Conflation of doing this for ethical vs health reasons, I guess, but I cannot fathom what makes people think the primary goal of creating an indistiguishable ethical meat is health.

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*Cooking* is also a form of food processing. Now go eat your uncooked chicken and wheat.

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Do you have a guess as to what percentage of meat Americans eat is what one would call "real" food, particularly as compared with the non-meat that they're eating?

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I found a study summarised here:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/e-ase061719.php

Average weekly consumption:

Processed meat: 182g

Unprocessed red meat: 340g

Poultry: 256g

Seafood: 116g

So, about 20% of meat consumption in the US is "processed meat", which includes luncheon meat, sausages, ham and bacon.

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I'm a non-vegetarian who eats Impossible Burger to reduce my carbon footprint. (Also, "processed" is a very high-level category that likely disguises many relevant distinctions between "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods.)

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McDonald's (at least in my country) has had a "veggie burger" for as long a I can remember. The patty was made of potatoes, peas, corn, carrot and onion squished into a patty, and it tasted exactly like potatoes, peas, corn, carrot and onion.

If I were to eat a vegetarian burger, that sounds a lot better than some form of weird textured pea protein tortured in a lab until it seems vaguely meaty.

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> The French fries almost, but not quite, managed to taste like real French fries. I have no explanation for this. I have no reason to think that vegan restaurants make fake French fries. I don't even know what making fake vegan French fries would mean. Yet they were still slightly off.

I know McDonald's fries are cooked in animal fat, which contributes to the flavor. It wouldn't surprise me if this is actually pretty common, and potatoes fried in other fats just taste differently.

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Actually, McDonalds fries used to be cooked in lard but now are cooked in vegetable oil. Think there was a long New Yorker article about this a few years ago.

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I thought that, but when I Googled it to fact-check it appears to not be true as of Jan 2020: https://www.treehugger.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-still-not-vegetarian-3970283

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My understanding is that they are cooked in vegetable oil, but have some sort of beef juice added to them to mimic the beef-fat flavor.

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The oil includes Natural Beef Flavor, which does not have to, and probably doesn't, include beef. It includes enzymes that make a beef flavor. Those enzymes were probably created from base chemicals, not animals.

The article linked above does not contain any evidence that actual beef products are used in the oil. The statement form McDonalds only says "Beef Flavor"

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Vegetable oil is a highly processed "food" so I doubt it's an improvement over lard, which people have used for hundreds of not thousands of years for frying.

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I know they were cooked in veg oil years ago in the UK so I expect it's a regional thing - I remember something about converting it to biofuel for their delivery trucks, and I don't think that works for lard.

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Ok, they appear to be doing a blend:

"McDonald’s wanted to keep its signature beefy flavor but without the beef fat itself, so it came up with a solution. Now, the fast-food chain adds “natural beef flavor” to its vegetable oil to give its fries their irresistibly meaty (though not-so-vegan-friendly) taste."

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"Natural Beef Flavor" does not have to, and probably doesn't, include beef. It includes enzymes that make a beef flavor. Those enzymes were probably created from base chemicals, not animals.

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Beef tallow, actually, then vegetable oil with beef tallow flavoring, which is why a group of Hindus did a class-action lawsuit against them for not disclosing this.

McDonalds fries are a highly engineered product, like Pringles, with wheat, a sugar coating to caramelize, the aforementioned flavoring and only a 60% core of potato. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would prefer them to In-n-Out’s, which are made of actual potatoes sliced in front of you. If they are not crispy enough for you, ask for them well-done.

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You answered your own question: they're "a highly engineered product", perfectly calibrated for maximum appeal for minimum price, of course people prefer them to real food - that's why we're all so unhealthy!

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I don't know what to tell you: I like all kinds of fries: fast food, sit down resteraunt, homemade, from a bag in the frozen aisle, I love fries. But when I tried In-n-Out's fries they just tasted bad. It didn't make sense: I was so happy to see them slice the fries in the store, from whole potatoes, and yet it tasted bad. I make fries at home, and while they aren't as good as restaurant quality they do have the benefit of being just sliced potatoes cooked in oil, and they taste remarkably better than In-n-Outs. I was so disappointed.

Burger was fantastic though.

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Next time, ask for “fries well-done”. It’s part of the secret menu.

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The lawsuit was in 2001. The oil currently contains "Natural Beef Flavor", which does not have to and likely does not contain actual beef products. Its likely made from base chemicals that create enzymes that make the beef flavor.

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Yes, whether that change was because of the lawsuit or because the new flavorings are cheaper is anyone's guess.

Most likely they are produced by yeasts, as much "beef" flavor is. "Natural" does not mean what most people think it means, e.g. "natural strawberry flavor" doesn't mean "made from strawberries" but "made by a natural organism or process, not chemical synthesis", and more often than not engineered yeasts are involved, as with most pharmaceuticals.

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Beef tallow drippings from the burgers, not lard. Lard is hog fat.

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This is fairly uncommon, and is generally advertised on the menu at upscale restaurants when it is the case. I asked every time I ordered for a while after learning about McDonald's, and never found a second case

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If you're in the midwest, the Culver's chain has a veggie burger that is extremely solid. It does not try to directly simulate meat, exactly, as it has visible pieces of various vegetables in it - instead it proudly occupies the liminal space between veggies and meat and tastes vaguely fresh and meaty at the same time.

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I only tried it once, but I remember the Culver's veggie burger being hard, disappointing, and seemingly mostly made of rice? To be fair, this was like 10 years ago, maybe they have improved.

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Taste aside, ancient and modern nutritionists agree that highly processed food is vastly inferior nutritionally to minimally processed food and often are determined years later to have a deleterious effect on human health.

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I think you should be careful there. Nutrition claims are notoriously weak when exposed to any scrutiny.

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I do think there's a general consensus that processed food is probably bad for you, that's pretty much the only thing nutritionists can agree on, although that's more because of all the added salt, fat and sugar than anything else.

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Nutritional science is so broken that it probably doesn't matter what nutrition experts agree on (and there's criticisms that the field censors dissent, so "consensus" might not mean what it ought to), just as it didn't matter how doctors in the 1200s had a consensus that bloodletting was the #1 way to cure any illness.

The food frequency questionnaire, which is a survey that asks people how often they eat certain items, is the source of data behind a lot of nutritional science, and it's been shown repeatedly to be basically worthless.

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I'm all for being sceptical of nutritionists, but I'm pretty confident that getting the majority of your calories from cola and crisps will not be good for your health compared to eating fruit and vegetables. It's hard to think of a plausible explanation for the recent rise in obesity and diabetes that isn't in some way linked to diet, they're just too well correlated.

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The assertions of western nutritionists are shown to be wrong on a regular basis. It doesn't help the food pyramids put out by the gov't are designed to enrich corp ag donors, rather than encourage healthy eating habits in the general population.

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So you disagree that fresh foods are better tasting and more nutritious than stale, rotting foods. Got it!

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Indeed, nutrition is junk science.

*Chugs methanol*

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Rotting foods? Like wine and cheese?

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Fermenting is a kind of "rotting" I suppose, which creates bacteria that happen to be good for our guts. Outside of fermentation, though, we all know what rotten food that's just been left out smells and tastes like. But there are groups of people who swear by rotten meat. You can find them on youtube, if you have the stomach for it.

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This is disingenuous arguing, and amounts to burying your head in the sand and refusing to have a discussion. Respond to a strong interpretation of someone's comment, not an implausible strawman.

The parent comment was just about how claims like "highly processed foods are vastly inferior [etc]" are not widely known to be true. That doesn't mean rotting foods are good.

I think there's a very good case that some kinds of processing are good. For example, bread is made by a complex process (quite a bit of time kneading to change the chemical properties of the dough, yeast, etc), but bread is a far more nutritious food than eating raw wheat and yeast unprocessed.

There's processed foods that are evidently bad for you (fast food), but I don't think it's the highly processed bit that by themselves makes them bad, but rather the specific kind of processing and ingredients.

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The Incas died as a race and a civilization so there’s that. But yes there are more factors involved than just aspects of the process. that doesn’t make the issue of processing irrelevant or silly.

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The Inca empire ended, as all empires do sooner or later. But they didn't all die "as a race"; their descendents are still there. Are you suggesting that they all died because they prepared their potatoes wrong? Even with our lousy modern diet we aren't dying out!

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So many clowns in this forum

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Depends on the process surely? After all, cooking something is a process but is often healthier for the person eating it.

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Cooking and soaking makes many foods edible that otherwise would be. Not sure why everyone ignores "highly processed" vs. "minimally processed." The former did not exist until fairly recently, about the same time heart disease and diabetes became more prevalent in western society.

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The Incas would process potatoes by repeatedly freezing and drying them over a period of five days, then trampling them, then leaving them exposed for another five days, then washing them for another week in a river, then drying them for another five days. After all that, you can store your potatoes for decades without refrigeration.

Anyway, all of that sounds like "highly processed" food to me. But it drives home the point that it's silly to talk about degree of processing instead of the specifics of what processes are happening.

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The Incas died as a race and a civilization so there’s that. But yes there are more factors involved than just aspects of the process. that doesn’t make the issue of processing irrelevant or silly.

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How could any ancient nutritionist have made any claim comparing existing food to food that didn't exist yet?

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I doubt the ingredients in these burgers are new and unknown to the people past. Or are the ingredients created in a lab?

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I thought you objected to the modern processing (which ancient peoples could not have known about), rather than the ingredients (which are ordinary harmless things like beans).

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I do "object" to eating chemically treated foods subjected to extreme pressure and heat, and multi-ingredient dishes are hardly unknown in traditional cooking. And beans contain "anti-nutrients" that cause the farting and poor absorption of nutrients, and require simple but tedious processing and cooking for optimal results.

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"Processed" is such a broad term as to be meaningless

Also who are "ancient nutritionists"? Vitamins were discovered barely a century ago. And preventing scurvy with fruit only a little before that

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I don't know about ancient nutritionists, but medieval nutritionists knew what to eat to keep your humors balanced.

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There's TCM from China and Ayrurveda from India. Processed means what do you have to do to make a food edible? You can eat a peach off a tree as it is. Such foods are completely unprocessed. Soaking or adding heat are also processes used to make foods more digestible. Yogurt undergoes a fermentation process. So traditional processes of this kind on whole foods has sustained to human race up to the present. This is what I meant by minimally processed. Compare these simple processing methods to those used to make, say, canola oil, which requires a fair amount of extreme temperatures and chemical soaks and bleaching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ-hz6ZHv0E

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Is a Beyond Burger more or less processed than a meat hamburger?

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You tell me. That's easy research.

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