Beyond Meat headed to Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Say you're on the road with a vegetarian and the only place to stop is a fast food burger place. If that fast food place has a fake meat burger on the menu then they'll get a sale from the vegetarian.

Fake meat is a fun transitional choice for those of us who appreciate meat's texture and flavor but not its costs to future generations.

Indian food is a delight, yet sadly my digestive system cannot handle much of it anymore, for medical reasons. To each their own.

No need to throw shade because different people have different tastes.

I agree. If you want to eat meat, fine. If you don’t want to eat meat, fine. But the whole, “Let’s trick our taste buds and eat fake meat,” thing doesn’t make much sense to me.

I like indian food. I like a good black bean burger. I also like real meat and fake meat. I wouldn’t mind eating less real meat if the fake meat was even closer and offered more pervasively.

Not everyone likes Indian food. I think most people like familiar flavors. Western people didn't grow up eating veggie-based food so I don't know why this is surprising. People just want to eat familiar things.

What I've noticed, especially from visiting Singapore, is that Indian (and other South Asian) religious vegetarianism often involves finding great alternatives to meat, while Chinese religious vegetarian often involves finding imitations of meat. Both of these habits are rather strong culturally and it would probably feel kind of weird to Indian vegetarians to eat mock meat, or to Chinese vegetarians not to eat mock meat.

The big (well, it's all relative!) mock meat store in Oakland, California, is in Chinatown and their staff and clientele are mostly Chinese, and their products are mostly from Chinese-speaking regions and companies. They have dozens of highly specific mock meats so that people can avoid the religious violations associated with eating meat, while continuing to have specific dishes that they're familiar with.

I personally started out with aesthetic vegetarianism before getting into ethical vegetarianism; that means I disliked meat itself at first, so I usually haven't been excited for mock meat and sometimes have been grossed out by it. But I have a good friend who started out with ethical vegetarianism and has never gotten into aesthetic vegetarianism; he loved meat but came to feel that it was rather harmful and didn't want to be responsible for its production. He has been trying every single kind of mock meat that he can find ever since going vegetarian and has made many of them staple parts of his diet.

I doubt that there's a single way to bridge this cultural gap or resolve it decisively in favor of one tradition or the other.

I totally agree that cultures that have a native tradition of vegetarianism (Indian, Ethiopian, Eastern Orthodox Christian) have tended to come up with awesome stuff that's not based on meat at all. However, people going vegetarian from a non-vegetarian cultural and culinary background don't necessarily want to change their entire cuisine and palate as a result. For many of them, that means mock meats are an extremely appealing option!

Well presumably those other cuisines took a long time to develop the good recipes you mention.

It’s not really biologically normal for humans to just up and completely change their culture based on logic. So while Indians have already done the intergenerational work to have good vegan dishes, in the west we don’t have that. Making a drop in replacement that works within the existing food culture does seem like a reasonable hack.

Food is important. Most people don't want to stop eating all the dishes they enjoy and just switch to Indian food. People lie on a spectrum of openness to new things. Developing a high quality direct alternative to a foundational yet highly fraught ingredient of the American diet makes sense to me. Even a bit less beef mitigates the near daily amputations by workers at processing plants or horrors we are adding to with climate annihilation.

Personally, Impossible and Beyond materially improved my life by adding to it. I enjoy their products, and still make plenty of Indian food.

I'd argue that if you didn't buy the meat, somebody else did so your argument that it was "good for the world" lacks evidence.

I would pay them to go bankrupt, but thats it

There are those like me who eat meat, like the taste of meat, but think for health reasons they should be eating less meat.

People that don't eat meat socialize with people who do. They go to burger places, they go to Chili's or Outback, they go to cook-outs. Chili's does not serve briam.

Yeah it's not like burgers have the monopoly of delicious food. There are so many good foods out there, people have been eating mostly plant based foods in both the Mediterranean and India for thousands of years. There are literally thousands of recipes from multiple cuisines around the world that don't have meat in them