Daring Chicken saves the day!
I was wondering what you meant by this, so I Googled, and according to Harvard, the fake meats have about the same level of calories, fats, and protein as real meat, less cholesterol, more carbs and fiber (meat has none), and a lot more sodium.
So they aren’t healthier than real meat, but IMHO, that doesn’t make them unhealthy.
We don’t eat real meat or fake meat every day, but we like Impossible Meat because in most dishes it is virtually indistinguishable from ground beef. (Beyond tastes similar to real beef, but does look the same or have the same texture.) We like Impossible because we can use it with cheese in things like lasagna, which otherwise wouldn’t be kosher.
I mean, a (real) fatty burger isn’t particularly healthy to begin with. There are many leaner proteins (both real and fake) that don’t have all that excess fat, for example.
I don’t think Impossible Foods’ products are considered vegan.
Impossible meat is not produced from any animal products, but…
While Impossible’s proprietary plant-based heme is 100 percent free from animal-derived ingredients, it was tested on animals – at least once – in order to gain full approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and to be “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS.
Some vegans feel that this means it is not vegan.
The article points out…
The Impossible Burger has conspicuously never been listed or marketed as a vegan product. In fact, much of the brand’s marketing strategy – and indeed its core mission – is based on persuading omnivores and flexitarians to eat more plant-based foods.
And health issues aside, that’s another advantage of Impossible and Beyond products: they are more environmentally friendly than meat.
Yeah, I guess it depends on how strict you are. If you think about it, all human foods were tested on animals… somebody (or their dog) had to (got to?) be the first one to try it at some point…
And then there are all the animal parts used in food supply chains, like sugar and wine, or simply the rodents and insects affected by every farm harvest… or the land cleared to make farms… the birds displaced for coffee… it’s all hyper-connected and nothing is truly free of impacts to animals if you connect enough dots.
IMHO only: It shouldn’t be some silly test of absolute purity, but a general understanding of where food comes from and the individual and societal tradeoffs it takes to make that happen, including adjustments for personal, regional, cultural, etc. needs.
Our biological kingdoms are kinda awkward too… I think some funguses are closer to sentience than your average oyster or sea jelly, for example… and many plants can certainly detect and respond to damage… shrug.
They are interesting thought experiments, that’s all.
(Just wondering out loud… not really disagreeing with you, just interesting to think about…)
Generally speaking, yeah, especially in the hyper-industrialized, factory-farmed, monocropped and petroleum-dependent agriculture of the West, like most of the U.S.
Just to play devil’s advocate, though, maybe an exception could be made for some meat eaters…
I’ve been a hyper-industrialized vegan (reasonably strict, not completely) for many, many years, but way too much of the shit I eat is made of ingredients grown across the world, shipped through an enormous global supply chain and then processed in chemical baths in some mega-factory, wrapped in plastics and kept in refrigerated trucks & coolers for many months before consumption.
Meanwhile, some of my friends and farmer neighbors raise their own exclusively grass-fed animals in their backyards, butcher them locally, and sell them to neighbors. If you do the math, the industrial vegan stuff tends to still win out in terms of climate and water impacts and such (surprisingly… animals are just that carbony and farty)… but that is a very reductionist way of looking at it.
Beyond Foods is a multi-decade effort involving a lot of first-world R&D and capitalism, creating a niche product that requires an extraordinary supply chain and extensive processing. It was bankrolled by a ton of VC money and received international attention and hype, and despite that, is nearly bankrupt today. It is not really “sustainable” in the overall sense of the word; it’s not something that peoples and communities can easily replicate, reuse, and maintain elsewhere, and certainly not without a very complex logistics chain. It’s environmentally friend in the way that Soylent Green might be, but it’s not really a solution to global environmental needs, especially if you look at it from a food sovereignty/environmental justice lens. You end up with peasants farming the basic ingredients as foreign-subsidized cash crops, middlemen processors and shippers profiting off their work, a few VCs making bank, and some new PETA member feeling really good about themselves.
Even if vegans ate more locally, that is really only realistically viable in certain climate pockets. There’s a lot of land in the world that isn’t great for growing food crops but could sustain grazing animals, for example. The rest of it has to be shipped in.
Shrug. On one hand, I certainly enjoy the conveniences that the new vegan market has created — more fake meats and fake cheeses than ever. On the other hand, I also think they more or less co-opted the original points of many of these movements. It’s one thing if you are eating basic grains and legumes from the farmer’s market, but if (like me, sadly) your pathway to veganism is mostly through the frozen aisle at Safeway… eh… the environmental benefits are less clear.
When I was really poor and living with roommates (we worked together at Toys R Us basically making minimum wage part time), Hamburger Helper was an amazing luxury. One box and some very cheap ground meat meant a large meal in a skillet that we could make quickly and easily and share for dinner. I will always have fond memories of it; not because it was actually good, but because we were so poor and honestly malnourished, and as young ignorant bachelors it was the closest to a home-cooked meal we ate.
Our favorite one was some kind of “southwest” style that they obviously don’t make anymore. It had pasta shaped like wagon wheels. We thought it was the best thing ever.
Incidentally, the New York Times had an article (gift link) the other day about how sales of Hamburger Helper are increasing this year (as are sales of macaroni and cheese), perhaps reflecting uncertainty about the economy and increased food costs.
I did a quick online search and it appears this product doesn’t exist. Which surprised me. You’d think there would be a good-sized market for a product like this.
Given that Hamburger Helper is basically just dry pasta plus a spice mix to which one adds protein (like ground beef or whatever), surely you could do this yourself and make it vegan if that matters to you.