I ate a fair amount of fake meat when I was a vegetarian (especially soy crumbles that resemble ground hamburger), but I tried the Impossible Burger at Round Robin just pre-pandemic, and thought it was inedible.
On a note slightly related to the OP, I was horrified to read this series on forced labor of people sent to rehab (including at major chicken plants): https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-to-rehab-they-ended-up-in-chicken-plants/
OP.last: You can lead a bicycle to water but you can't teach it to fish.
If you judge a bicycle by its ability to farm raise fake fish, you're teaching it up the wrong tree.
A fish on the cover of a book, don't judge me again.
If I can ask, How did you guys cook the impossible meat? I did a pair on the grill, 7/10, to me much better than heme-free cooked that way. I may be on the weaker end of the scent discrimination ability distribution though.
We buy the fancy meat at Whole Foods, though I guess when we get takeout who knows.
I had one Impossible Burger and my reaction was to wish more places served Portabella Mushroom Burgers. (In my experience it can be hard to get them right, sometimes to juicy and kind of fall apart.)
Maybe cal lit something catchy: The Unexpected Burger.
My chicken gets no antibiotics unless it catches a social disease.
I will only answer 5.1 because I know that this is a tender, nonjudgmental space. We cooked it like we cook our turkey-burgers: on a cookie sheet in the oven at 400° like the laziest of heathens.
The smell was most noticeable pre-cooking it. Much less when it was cooked, but it lingered on my hands.
You can lead antibiotics to a chicken, but it won't slime itself.
It also occurred to me that I could have just crumbled it up in a casserole and it would have been totally innocuous.
The Unexpected Burger.
The Unexpected Burger means I'mex Pected.
I've mostly cut out meat for ethical reasons; does anyone have any experience on whether that affects how meat hits your system after a while?
Anyway, I enjoy some vegetarian food, but I have never found anything that was trying to be like meat that I enjoyed as much as something regular-vegitarian let alone as much as I enjoy actual meat. This is true even if you don't count the various types of fried potatoes.
I am fortunate that I really like veggie chicken patties. Recently I tried on recommendation the Beyond breakfast sausage patties. My first thought was "This tastes almost indistinguishable from its meat counterpart!" My second was "But the meat counterpart was never all that compelling; there's a reason I rarely ate it."
Pork breakfast sausage is one of my favorite foods.
financially risky-- long term expenses, short-term revenues.
Isn't this just, you know, farming?
Corn farmers get all kinds of government handouts.
Bean farmers are corn farmers fixing nitrogen/hedging.
I cook Beyond Burgers all the time at home because it's one of the easiest ways to feed two vegetarian parents plus a picky nine-year-old and have no one complain. It doesn't rise to the heights of vegetarian things you can make with an hour-plus for prep and cook, and I guess it might hit you weird if you're used to beefy animals? (it's been too long for me to remember), but as resident chef I get a lot of latitude to decide when food needs to be on the table in fifteen minutes. And obviously it's great for chili, tacos, anything like that.
Impossible tastes weird to me though. Too meaty? Maybe it's just that I really like peas.
I like black bean burgers a lot. And I don't feel like they try to approximate meat. They're just themselves.
We still eat meat, but I feel bad about it, so I try to cook a fair amount vegetarian and stick to poultry otherwise mostly, on the vague hope that it's not as bad environmentally.
You can lead black beans to Moby, but he will lead them back to you.
I will yell at the Chipotle counter help if they move the spoon wrong. I want pinto beans.
If you judge the Chipotle counter help by their ability to avoid black beans, then they will spend their whole life believing that they are stupid.
Everyone in this house is 60% black bean by weight. I guess I'm glad I'm not feeding Moby.
The Hick House could eat no beans, the Kayaks could no meat. And so between the six of them, the Chipotle help pled defeat.
How many black beans does it take for a fish to make a bicycle? No soap, Chipotle.
There are absolutely ways to eat meat sustainably and eat vegetarian/vegan unsustainably, so by that token, the only thing you should feel bad about is being too lazy to spend hours of your day optimizing your food consumption for maximum planetary benefit. It's a bummer that beef is the most destructive of meats, because it is by far the tastiest, but I think as long as you're willing to pay a premium for ethically sourced meat (including labor practices), it's okay, and it's definitely okay for growing children who need protein.
The alternative for me writing stupid things is to write my promised guest post.
Alternative to writing these particular stupid things ...
There were too many black beans in our fish-hole, so we got rid of the goat.
Actually maybe I will go with the alternative plan of teaching heebie how to write a FPP so we can have black beans every day.
34: Yes, I'm still very open to paying the premium for better meat from time to time; I mostly find it simpler to abstain. (I'm spending a lot on eggs.)
We got Impossible burgers at A&W and they were a perfect sub for the uncanny valley real meat burgers served normally. I got bacon on mine which kind of defeated the purpose (except my purpose was to contribute to the demand after Tim's stopped serving them due to lack of demand).
We only have 1 grocery store within 2 hours so the meat selection is slim but we have several varieties of baloney and ground impossible meat.
I think one of the fake meat companies is Canadian and that's why it's so widely available here.
I would so totally consider thinking about moving to Argentina if it wasn't always having sovereign debt crises.
40: You could write your own ticket if you devised a solid way for them to leverage all those cows against the debt! This is your moment!
I figure that there are many issues with beef, but that I'm so entangled with most of them for so many other reasons that I may as well just eat the cow.
But you entangle yourself with one cow...
Central banking is like electricity generation: if you need to do it yourself, you need to get out of the neighborhood.
32 wins.
https://illustrated-menagerie.tumblr.com/image/175514133952
and for teaching bikes new things
https://www.coolthings.com/natural-born-killa-custom-lowrider/
We cooked it like we cook our turkey-burgers: on a cookie sheet in the oven at 400°
WHAT THE FUCK.
Anyway, I've found that tempeh is basically a perfect protein for me. These days when I cook at home, it's generally some kind of fried rice, and I like not having to think about salmonella or dead animals, and the flavor and texture are fine in that dish.
A fair-weather central banker is no central banker at all.
During my last year or so in Madison, I figured out that the Indonesian restaurant near my house sold its own house-made tempeh every Tuesday if you knew to ask, and that stuff was so good I can't even describe it properly. I haven't gone looking for a local source around here, and now would probably not be the time to start, but now I'm having Indonesian home-cooking fantasies and remembering various sauces I haven't tasted in years. Fuck.
I don't think I've ever had Indonesian food. I used to go to lunch often with this guy. We went to a Chinese restaurant. Of course, maybe it was an Indonesian restaurant that figured Ohio would rather they called it "Chinese." He picked the place.
I wonder if he wrote his own wikipedia page? It reads like it, but then the link to his adviser points to the wrong guy.
4.1 It's good to see senior citizens keeping alive the customs of yesteryear.
This contracting thing is just amazing.
The farms tend to be rather specialized, with a focus on growing broilers. They are geographically concentrated, in that most are located in rural areas in the South. Few contract growers are young, especially compared to the population of household heads in the United States: their average age is 55, and only 4 percent are younger than 35. Most (93 percent) are men, although most list their wives as secondary operators. Eight-five percent are white males, and while 89 percent have a high school degree, only 16 percent have completed college. Contract growers are a much more homogeneous group than either the U.S. population or the overall farm population, yet their incomes vary more widely.A kind of perfect stew for resentment and rage and low-equilibrium traps, with just enough meritocratic payoff to bounce blame back onto oneself.
...
Contract fees are rarely a fixed amount per pound delivered; instead, fees are based on a grower's relative performance compared to other growers who deliver chickens to the poultry company at the same time. This method is sometimes called a tournament method of determining pay because, like a professional golf or tennis tournament, a participant's earnings do not depend on absolute performance, but on performance compared to other tournament competitors.
...
Each grower is then paid a base fee, and those growers whose costs are lower than the average for all growers receive a premium over the base fee; those whose costs exceed the average for all growers receive a deduction from the base. The amount of the premium or deduction reflects the size of the cost difference.
...
If the group delivering in one week happened to have three exceptional growers, and the group delivering in the next week had just one, then any given grower would be likely to have a much better relative performance, and better compensation, if he or she were delivering in the later week. This is a pure risk, in that the grower has no control over the identity of the other growers in the group, and the addition or subtraction of one or two exceptional (or lucky) growers can have a meaningful impact on group averages when the group is small.
...
However, production fell in 2009 and again in 2012, and total production in 2013 was just 1.1 percent greater than it was in 2008. With flat or declining production, more growers face a risk of contract non-renewal or getting fewer chicks placed.
I generally like fake meat, like Thai fish made out of jackfruit, or the creepy fake chicken (stringy!) at that Chinese cult restaurant, but I find the smell of Impossible and Beyond to be off-putting. The texture is pretty good, so it works okay in mapo tofu or in other dishes that are highly-flavored enough to mask the scent.
I haven't had a veggie burger in almost a year now (it's not the kind of thing that keeps well for takeout), but I used to like the proprietary fake meat burgers made by different restaurants around LA, out of quinoa or black bean or mushroom or soy. Someone told me that Impossible would not supply their burgers to a restaurant unless the restaurant agreed not to serve any other veggie patties, and that as a result, unique restaurant veggie burgers were disappearing. But I can't find support for this online and I don't know whether it's actually true.
About a year and half ago, I somehow found myself at a symposium of scientists and engineers who were working on the development of various non-animal-based meats. Like, 3D printed meat and meat pooped out by genetically-modified bacteria. IIRC the one closest to fruition was not a fake meat at all, but a high-protein nutritional source made of genetically-modified algae. It tasted pretty bad.
Better than algae that hasn't been modified?
Minivet@15, it takes a really long time of strict no-meat diet to hit that point. 5 years? 10 years? We eat mostly vegetarian (but not very strict, typically something meat or fish once or twice a month?) and have never hit that point.
Bison is pretty much our only meat these days.
I've never had either of the two canonical vegetarian experiences: eating meat and getting terrible indigestion, or eating meat and having a conversion experience and swearing off vegetarianism forever. I suppose if I ate an enormous amount of meat all of a sudden I would feel it, but my body really does seem kind of indifferent to it.
I actually like both the Impossible and Beyond burgers and Beyond sausage is really genuinely good enough to sub for sausage in moderately meaty dishes - I'm not sure I'd do a sunday gravy with nothing but fake sausage, but it's really tasty in spag bol and so on.
Since I haven't had either since pre-pandemic "freely grocery shop for whatever you want" days, I can't recall which, but one of them tastes very strongly of pea protein. It tastes a lot like those Chinese pea flour snacks. I happen to love pea flour snacks, so this is fine with me, but it's a bit of an acquired taste.
The other one is fairly meaty. I had one at an actual restaurant and it tasted like an average hamburger although the ones I cooked at home without the benefit of a restaurant grill weren't quite as burgery.
I like fake meat in general, but I much prefer, eg, Chinese fake chickens because they tend to be a bit healthier. Those impossible burgers, etc, are chock full of coconut oil and probably slightly worse for you than a partially lean burger. But it's a sometimes food anyway.
Although the best veggie burger in town is the Wizard Burger at a local radical cafe - it's made of mung beans and tastes nothing at all like meat. I am not sure whether they intent to imply that wizards are also made out of mung beans, or whether the burger itself is made from leguminous magic users or what but it's very tasty.
53 is truly insane. I wonder if there's some word for the farmers all getting together and coming up with a system that felt fairer to them, and then if they all agreed to agree to it, they'd ...nope, I guess not.
I take my non-vegetarian fast-food loving stepdaughter out for fast food once a week and when we go to Burger King or White Castle I always get the Impossible Burger versions of their signature dishes. They taste fine to me.
It's been so long since I had a "real" hamburger I'm hardly a worthy judge.
White Castle has a meat substitute?
The Morgan Spurlock film Holy Chicken, while problematic, was good on the problems faced by the growers.
"Because [Tyson] controls all of the factors that go into influencing how much chicken gets produced and the health of the chickens and the ability of the chickens, Tyson manipulates it and influences how much the growers get paid in a way that is anti-competitive and against the law," claims David Muraskin, a lawyer for the public interest law firm Public Justice, which is one of the firms representing farmer Charles Morris. Morris is in "Super Size Me 2," and is also part of a lawsuit in Kentucky against Tyson.
...
Morris, along with Jonathan Buttram, are both big parts in "Super Size Me 2." Buttram, who declined to comment for this story, was the only farmer Spurlock could find who agreed to grow chickens for Holy Chicken! In the movie, Morris paints a grim picture of the farmers who are millions of dollars in debt due to the tournament system. Both men were with Spurlock at TIFF, were introduced on stage at the world premiere, and did press with Spurlock the days that followed.
64: Feast your eyes!
https://www.whitecastle.com/promotions/impossible-slider
67: I had that feeling when the first time I saw a Denny's commercial that featured something sriracha-flavored. That was a long time ago, so I guess my feeling was wrong.
If it wasn't, that would explain so much.
57: Thanks! I'm probably doubly warded because the kind of meat I'm cutting out the slowest is bacon.
Something we still have to look forward to -- the McPlant Burger!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262481/mcdonalds-mcplant-burger-denmark-sweden-test-markets
We don't really have a convenient Burger King anyway.
Several of the Burger Kings that were near me closed in the last few years.
||
I think Andrew Yang is a lurker here, because I can't imagine anything more precisely calculated to troll chris y and Alex.
|>
15: My sweetie and I found it very symmetric to non-bean-eater's bean effects (e.g.., stinky flatulence), but that was after ten or fifteen years of pretty thorough ovo-lacto vegetarianism. The funniest thing was that each kind of meat apparently has its proper enzymes or bacteria, so we had to go through it for chicken, beef, lamb, fish separately.
Since then we've had at least a little of some kind of meat almost every week, both for the allergy-workaround reasons that broke our vegetarianism in the first place, and so we don't create the death clouds at social events which In the Beforetimes were likely to be the weekly meat meals.
There used to be canned mock duck, mostly wheat gluten, that I loved, but it vanished a couple years ago. I wonder if anti-gluten and vegetarianism overlap enough in the US that it just isn't worth importing any more.
Sustained flatulence is great for events. Crop dusting, ahoy.
79 but not 80
https://snukfoods.com/products/companion-imitation-roast-duck?variant=14691763421296¤cy=USD
80 but not 79
https://www.etsy.com/listing/801861753/rare-ailsae-giant-big-monster-onion
Looking up New Texas, of which I had never heard, I see that thousands of Confederates immigrated to South America after the Civil War.
74: He also just tweeted something about how it's not like New York has any special connection to the Dutch. He's either trolling or hopelessly confused.
There's only an infinitesimally small chance that those two tweets together are not trolling, but... why? To get... elected... mayor?
Maybe he should try to be mayor of somewhere easier first, like something in Connecticut.
83: That thread, and its responses, were a wild ride. He acknowledges the history (he starts with going over the flags) but feels it isn't relevant anymore. Some people clearly agree with him, even seeing it as reactionary white nationalism to acknowledge a particular white ethnicity (and a relatively obscure one, at least as western European colonial powers go) as relevant to such an important multicultural city. Good to see that those people are in a minority, even on Twitter, since I think that take is self-parodical. And of course there were a lot of TMBG quotes from a song about Turkey.
Andrew Wang's such a fucking weirdo. He's charismatic, smart, and willing to take weird risks, but he's in some sort of uncanny valley between that and being an effective politician who could win stuff. Definitely needs better advisers, but I dunno if he's the kind of guy who'd listen to them. Yes, you're right Moby, he should be a small town mayor because he's basically Ben Wyatt.
It was the "hey, we should open up some casinos in NYC tweet" turned me against him.
If Wang is the New Yang, is there an old one?
I've liked the Impossible burger both times that I've tried it (at relatively fancy places). That said, beef is far from my favorite meat; I disagree strongly with the claim above that it's the tastiest. If I had to eat only one kind of animal meat for the rest of my life it would be pork.
The tastiest meat is crab, which makes me a little more optimistic about us eventually having to eat bugs for protein.
I went vegetarian a year and a half ago. Fake meat made it pretty easy. Impossible burgers are great, probably the best of the bunch (but they aren't available here). I can continue not showing any particular self-control over my diet despite my meals not being made of dead creatures.
91: Agreement, if by pork you mean pig meat in general. I miss ham and cheese sandwiches. And bacon! And ham on pizzas.
91: Take with a grain of salt if it's medically advisable, I guess: I haven't really had steak since I was 12, but it was my favorite then and the one meat I still occasionally crave. However I also loved eating chicken livers, so possibly I'm just drawn to dietary iron like a ravenous magnet.
Pork is the best meat. Sorry other monotheists.
I've been pescatarian for close to 3 years now. In a moment of weakness I agreed to do it to help my then 8 year old daughter do it, so giving up would be a failure as a parent.
Anyway, the meat I really, really miss is bone in chicken thighs.
We don't eat much fish in the winter (except for smoked salmon and canned tuna). I'd rather cook it on the grill.
The tastiest meat is crab, which makes me a little more optimistic about us eventually having to eat bugs for protein.
I'm pretty much in agreement with the first part of this sentence, but the second doesn't necessarily follow. Some years ago a friend invited me over for a meal of what turned out to be bugs prepared in various ways -- in fried rice, lettuce cups, and I can't remember now what else, in part because of trauma and in part because I got super drunk in a fruitless effort to numb my senses. I'm a very unpicky eater, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to eat the bugs. I wrapped my lettuce cup neatly to cover any visual evidence of the mealworms, put the packet in my hand, got my hand nearly to my mouth...and then my whole body spasmed and I absolutely could not do it. I did eat some fried crickets later on in the evening. Oh and also ants, but I have lots of experience eating ants.
Lettuce cups can't help. We made some tacos with a paleo recipe and substituted tortillas for the lettuce cup. So much better. Of course, we had beef.
The tortilla package said "6 tortillas" but there were only five.
Inspired by this tender, nonjudgmental thread, I made tostadas with black beans and Beyond Beef for dinner, but then I accidentally cut up the kid's cucumber with the same knife I'd used to de-seed the serranos, and now there are threats to call CPS.
I had toast with butter, because I'm a man of the people.
The people who are now only going to the grocery store once a week so their bread is a bit less than fresh.
I don't miss much of my DC life, not even this, but wouldn't mind eating at Fogo de Chao when I'm next in a city that has one, after the pandemic.
I've been a lacto-ovo-vegetarian for over 20 years now. When I was in the US I used to buy Boca Burgers. I've never tried the Impossible Burger or the other one though they are available here in Arrakis but that's mostly because I'm a lazy ass and can't be bothered to grill them. If I can't microwave it I'm not interested. When I go back (if I can this summer) I'll pick some up to throw on the family grill when they do BBQ.
The tortilla package said "6 tortillas" but there were only five.
Just squeeze out the bottle, you'll find the sixth.
Topically, I just got takeout from a restaurant that offers a dish called "Chicken Roll" which has no actual chicken in it. It's made of pork and fish!
I can see that. Chicken is halfway between pork and fish.