These are being marketed in Canada - reduced meat burgers and sausages. I’m wondering who their target market is. The environmentally conscious? Failed vegetarians? Folks with high cholesterol?
I actually am intrigued by it. I eat lots of meat, but not thrilled about the humanitarian (animalterian?) aspect. So while I don’t see myself becoming a vegan or vegetarian till Jesus enforced it during his next appearance, I wouldn’t mind a delicious food that has less killing involved. Perhaps thats what our Lord was talking about all along and Adam and Eve were eating well on this stuff.
Love a good thick slab of meatloaf! Save a little money, good for the planet, and it tastes right fine!
Sounds ok to this carnivore…if there is a dietary or economic benefit, especially, or the environmental thing. Taco Bell et al may already be feeding us something along these lines.
It’s not a new idea. In the 1990s, my mother subscribed to a newsletter called the Tightwad Gazette that recommended a 50-50 mixture of ground beef and soaked TVP (textured vegetable protein, a soy product). We tried it once or twice but it didn’t have a very nice flavor or texture. As you might guess from the name of the newsletter, the appeal was supposed to be that it was cheaper than straight ground beef, but I recall the health benefits were also mentioned. Maybe the modern incarnation is tastier, but I’m not in a big rush to find out.
If you’re going to stretch hamburger, far better to use egg and breadcrumbs, mashed potato or grated carrot.
I can appreciate eating less meat due to a humane philosophy, desire for health or concern for its production. But I suspect it’s a compromise that may make couples a little happier when they disagree on the merits of gammon or gluten. I don’t think the plant based stuff is under processed or tends to have a much improved nutrient profile.
Sounds like they have found a way to market cheap meat with lots of filler at a premium price. The same way someone found a way to market industrial diamonds as jewelry by calling them “chocolate” diamonds.
I’m curious as to what percentage of Dopers would eat this.
I would try it once, as long as it didn’t involve any of my allergens.
I would rather extend my meat for meatloaf/meatballs with egg and breadcrumbs [a friend uses a box of instant stovetop stuffing and an egg, no butter or water, just dump the crumbs in and mix] and we do at least one meal a week that is vegetarian [tofu is actually our preference, though seitan has made an appearance occasionally]
I would eat it. I actually do eat something like it on occasion. When I hit Dollar General for budget stuff, or stuff like their hot cheese curls* that I cannot get better for more, I tend to throw in a couple of their 2 packs of burgers. They are beef, beef heart and TVP. They are not exactly the same as ground beef but close.
They are cheap at $1 for two quarter pound patties. They are reasonably tasty. I like variety so the small differences with pure beef are by themselves a benefit to me. They use unpopular bits of the cow without throwing them into more processed meats, and their health problems, like sausage. Soybeans are a nitrogen fixer. Eating more soy helps support a bigger human food market for something already used in crop rotations to make agriculture more sustainable.
I don’t have a good reason not to eat something like this sometimes.
- Dammit. Now I want some.
If you’re eating a meat/plant hybrid as a humane issue, that’s just stupid. Either become vegetarian or don’t.
If you’re eating it for some kind of health benefit, hey whatever floats your boat, I guess.
I’d taste it out of curiosity. But I don’t think I’d be converted. I’ve tried the Impossible Burger, and if that didn’t convert me, I don’t think I’ll voluntarily give up meat.
I could definitively see the environmental aspect of it. If we’re all supposed to consume less dead animals, the choices are to reduce the number of meals that contain them or reduce the amount of them in each meal. If they manage to make a burger just as tasty, and every burger sold at McDonald‘s contained 50% less meat, that would have a huge environmental impact.
I don’t get it. I like veggie burgers and I like a good beef burger, but I’m going to pick one or the other, rather than some frankenstein combo, if I’m buying frozen patties or a prepared burger.
I did throw a handful of tvp into the last meatloaf I made to stretch it a bit, and it tasted pretty good, but that had more to do with not having enough ground beef for two hungry adults, than some kind of ethical issue.
This.
On a separate note …
Despite the call for ethical purity from @Two_Many_Cats2 just upthread this can be defended as simply the food equivalent of “reduce reuse recycle.” It’s harm reduction; nothing more, but also nothing less.
And like any harm reduction effort, the total impact on the world is number of people times amount of change. Individual large change is hard to do and even harder to incentivize at a societal level. So it’s actually more effective, not less, at the societal level to get large numbers to make small changes than vice versa.
Don’t be so sure. I was visiting the Amazon last fall and we talked a little about the fires that were going on around that time in that area. Turns out some of the farmers in the area are chopping-down and burning the forest in order to grow not cattle, but soybeans, to meet increased global demand for plant-based protein.
By the time I get done assembling my cheeseburger, there’s enough lettuce, onion, pickles, tomatoes and relish on there to qualify as a 50/50 hybrid.
We’ll, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, aren’t you?
Said another way, 9 billion well-fed humans, regardless of the food source, are a scourge on the rest of the planet.
And slash-and-burn agriculture on raw land is profitable precisely because it steals land at nil cost and values the lost forest at zero value. Despite the fact it’s otherwise much less economically efficient than intensive farming on existing land.
Interestingly, a lot of the grown th Brazilian soya production can be laid at the feet of the Trump tariffs that have caused China to not buy US soybeans. So the US now has fallow farmland & money-losing farmers while the Brazilians are incentivized to further destroy the Amazon faster to feed the Chinese.
I saw these at the grocery store yesterday. The tray of 50/50 sausages and patties was full. The tray of real, I.e. meat, sausages and patties was almost gone. Perhaps these products are a decoy.
“I’ll have your second cheapest bottle of wine, garçon.”
I haven’t tried the ones by Maple Leaf yet, but the 50/50 mushroom/beef burger that one of my local restaurant chains has is pretty good - originally it was marketed as “the 500” (because it had 500 calories) so I assume they were going for the health angle when they came up with concept. Basically anyone who likes eating mushroom burgers would enjoy those ones.
I actually like eating the beyond burger from time to time (even though I’m not a vegetarian), so I’m a bit curious about the 50/50 burger but I do feel like it’s a pretty niche product. The beyond burger isn’t any healthier than actual meat, so I don’t know if the 50/50 burger would be any healthier than regular meat, in which case there is only the angle of reducing the amount of meat you are eating, which can be achieved simply through portion reduction. If they sold the 50/50 burgers at a lower cost than regular beef burgers instead of twice the price I’d be a lot more inclined to try them.