Ask Lemmy

Imitation stuff made from pea protein and coconut oil is surprisingly good. It pan fries just fine. It's chewy and meaty. It doesn't have the exact taste and texture of beef but it makes a burger.

I tried some mycelium based bacon recently. It was interesting. I've since bought it like 3 more times. It scratches the bacon itch without tasting like death. I hear that there are more mycelium based products out there that are gaining traction and I submitted requests to my local grocery store to carry those products.

Quorn is awesome for chicken nuggets. Frankly I prefer them to the real thing.

Beyond as a brand needs to fucking die. Their products suck. Their markup is excessive and makes their products cost far more than the equivalent meat products. Their stock is teetering on the brink of oblivion and I say end it. I recall them pushing for beyond orange chicken at panda express and they wanted to charge a premium for it. Then they wondered "why didnt anyone want this?" Because you charged more for an inferior product you fuckheads. Price your products *below* the meat products you replace and you'll see astronomical sales - especially when herds are culled because of sickness.

I find it very promising. As much as I love meat, its pretty undeniable that raising livestock is super inefficient. It takes so much food to raise livestock that, iirc, more farmland in the US is dedicated to growing food for our food than to growing food for us. Lab grown meat doesn't completely solve this - there are still lost calories in the process to my knowledge - but its way more efficnient. Plus less land usage, less fossil fuel emissions, overall it would be more sustainable.

I see 2 big problems facing it right now:

The first is scale, which is the more significant. We'd need to figure out how to grow meat on a truly massive scale. Definitely doable though, just needs more research.

The second is "realism" or how close it seems to natural meat. Lab grown meat has the advantage over like plant based stuff because it is actually meat. However, ifnits too perfect or uniform, or maybe doesnr have enough fat or variety, it might be seen as unnatural by many (even just subconsciously) and push them away from it.

But yeah, could be awesome.

I believe cultured meat is the future.

I don't mind the plant-based substitutes and eat them occasionally, but:

1. I don't like that they've named them meat-related names (I have the same issue with plant "milk"). This marketing strategy causes an expectation of flavour and texture that disappoints people and puts them off. If the product is good enough, give it its own niche, like tofu.
2. Part of the reason vegan / vegetarian diets are healthy is because the food is largely unprocessed, whereas many of these products are highly processed. I'd rather just eat actual vegetables.

Cultured meat has real potential to replace farmed meat because it can provide things no plant-based alternative can, while removing many of the disadvantages of animal farming:

• The taste and texture should eventually be identical to farmed meat.
• It's kinder to animals than farming - not vegan, but not cruel, no-one dies, and far fewer animals are needed.
• It's better for the environment in many ways: less emissions than animal farming, less land required than both animal and plant-based farms, can be produced close to urban centres so less transport should be required.
• It can be fed to pets that are obligate carnivores, like cats. I will never put my dog on a vegan diet but I am following the UK company Meatly, that is specialising in cultured meat for pet food, with interest.

Once cultured meat is a similar price to farmed meat, I believe the ethical and environmental advantages will give it the edge. Many people that will never go vegan or vegetarian will hopefully switch.

Other people have already mentioned how it feels like in your mouth, but I’m going to address a different angle: Ethics and environmental impact.

Modern industrial meat production is incredibly cruel. If you wanted to do the same thing in a more ethical way, the final product would end up being much more expensive, even if you had the economies of scale working in your favor. Meat alternatives would solve that issue.

Producing meat results in a lot of CO2 emissions, so a plant based alternative should be more environmentally friendly. Don’t know about lab meat though. Keeping everything sterile is not cheap or easy, so I guess the LCA of the resulting product should be very interesting to read.

If the taste, texture, and price are good, I'll eat it.

That goes for plant based stuff and meat replacements, too. I've tried the Impossible burger on a BK Whopper and thought it was plenty passable as a fast food burger patty... But it was a few bucks extra, so now that my curiosity is sated, I probably won't buy another until it's the same price as or cheaper than its animal-product counterpart.

I love Impossible meats. Their nuggets taste better than chicken to me. Their burgers taste good, not quite as good as beef, but still very good.

I would eat lab grown meat given the opportunity. I hope we can get to the point where we can stop killing animals and still have delicious meat.

I used to unsure about the idea of lab grown meat ..... but now I think they would be fine. I haven't seen any in my area yet.

Lab grown meats couldn't be any worse than the horrendous things we feed and do to the animals (large animals, birds and fish) we eat already.

Cook’s Country, who as far as I’m concerned are the go-to for any kind of taste-tests, did a comparison of several nugget brands, and the winner (Impossible, I think) actually beat out real chicken nuggets. YMMV but nuggets are just a medium for breading and sauce.

There are some very good plant-based bacon alternatives. The problem is that they are priced like luxury products, rather than having common sense cheaper-than-meat pricing. Nearly all of bacon’s flavor comes smoke and seasonings, and the texture and crisp can be easily reproduced. Try Thrilling Bakon if you have the chance.

I would be more than willing to eat lab grown meat, though I’d prefer the creation of healthier plant-based alternatives. Even lab grown meat will have “bad” things like cholesterol, and plant-based alternatives should theoretically be able provide more nutritional value at lower prices than “real” or lab grown meat.

I’m an omnivore, so I will eat anything that tastes good. I just think we should be trying to make delicious, nutritious food affordable for normal people, whatever route that takes. I’m not convinced that lab-grown meat is a path to that goal. If reducing environmental and ethical harm is only for the rich, then fuck that approach, we need another.

I won't stop eating meat, eggs, or dairy, but if we can take the whole killing and torturing animals out of the process, I'm all for it.

Once we've got affordable synthetic equivalents (and I mean equivalents; synthetic milk you can make proper cheese with, cold meats, steak, ribs, eggs, anything you can make with an animal), we should outright ban using animals for food.

(Except for birds, of course. Fuck birds. Should've gone extinct 65 million years ago with the rest of the dinosaurs, the bastards.)

I think the texture thing with impossible burgers has to do with cooking them a certain way. I've had them at restaurants where the texture was great and others where it was abysmal. I don't bother with them at home.

I'm delighted for more options, though I'm mostly past the point of wanting a substitute for a certain type of meat; I just want more vegetarian options. For decades, the only vegetarian options most restaurants had were salad or pasta tossed with whatever vegetables they had left over in the kitchen, both of which you knew were quick and cheap options for the restaurant and which you'd have to pay close to the same amount as the meat dishes. There were more options for ethnic vegetarian food, but a lot of them don't have much texture (seriously, what is with so much Indian food) or are either bland or over-spiced. The over-spiced thing goes to some of the frozen foods as well - looking at you, Amy's.

Regardless, it's nice to be able to go to a restaurant and have actual options, or go to a grocery store and not being reduced to looking at the tofu and beans again.

I’m not a good barometer for this since I pretty much like everything, but I like them. I just bought some vegetarian bacon and it was good. I’m not quite ready to stop eating meat, and I probably won’t ever fully stop, but I do plan on reducing it greatly over the next few years. I’m starting with pork since it’s the easiest one for me (bacon is about the only pork I eat regularly), cow is next, and then chicken which is the hardest one for me but it’s also the ones who suffer the most. I’m starting to buy cage free only eggs. I know the birds still live in bad conditions, but at least they are better conditions somewhat than overcrowded cages.

I am looking for ethical farmers near me and I think I might have found one but I need to visit to make sure.

I do wish lab grown meats become viable soon but in the US, these so called capitalists are already moving to impede progress and market adoption.

Lab meat seems like a great idea for those who know nothing about tissue culture. lab-grown meat production traditionally relies on animal serum, particularly fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of slaughtered cow fetuses to stimulate cell growth. It's all bullshit.

Some companies are trying to find alternatives, but nothing else is working and all this tech will produce meat only smug Hollywood celebrities can afford.

I enjoy most of them, will eat them if they're cheap enough. Though I prefer tempeh, seitan, and frozen tofu over stuff that tries to be meat. Quality varies from mediocre to better than the real stuff

Apparently food scientists did the research and found out that people liked the imitation chicken nuggets more than real chicken nuggets. I didn't fully believe it at first so I gave it a try, and promptly got hooked on veggie nuggets lol (I only stopped since no one sells it at where I live now)

Personally I do support reducing meat consumption for environmental benefits. I find meat substitutes a bit of a roundabout way to be vegetarian/vegan especially since some other cultures (e.g. a lot of Indian food) have been making delicious vegetarian food for a long time without needing meat substitutes. But I guess meat substitutes did indeed work?? As long as there is a demand for it I don't see an issue. Maybe having to make sure ppl have adequate vitamin B intake (which might be less of an issue for lab-grown meat), but that's pretty much it

The A&W veggie burger is just as good. It's funny to order it with bacon, (not a vegetarian, just like to moderate beef.) I've had a Beyond Meat burger, but it was from a cafeteria that clearly didn't know how to cook.

As someone who does not eat meat because I don't like it, these are useless foods to me. Why eat a highly processed version of something you don't like in the first place, just because it's plant based. I like veggie burgers that taste like veggies. That's just me. These substitutes are really for people looking to reduce their meat consumption, or transition to a plant based diet. I will take tofu over any fake 'meat'.

I have only tried one brand of plant-based nuggets and sometimes make my own meat substitutes from tofu and TVP (textured vegetable protein). Eating it by itself, it’s not quite meat-passing in terms of texture, but the flavor is close if seasoned correctly. When it’s used as a part of other dishes, the taste becomes more convincing. You get used to the taste after you stop eating meat for a while.

I bought some plant burgers a while back and they were pretty decent. I struggled to fully cook them and they ended up kinda carbonized on the outside and a little underdone in the middle so the consistency wasn't great, but fairly convincing taste-wise.

Impossible meat is close enough to meat that I genuinely wouldn't be able to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison, and it would be virtually impossible for me to tell if it were mixed in with other flavors (eg in a burrito). I've heard it's got high sodium though, so you'll still have to beware that it's not much healthier (if at all) than normal meat. I don't get Impossible often, though I get regular meat even less. I'd say I like Impossible more than normal meat, I just wish it's a bit cheaper.

Beyond meat simply doesn't taste quite right, like soy trying to imitate meat. It hits an awkward uncanny valley, so I don't like it.

IMO lab grown meat feels a bit like a waste of time. With how incredibly uncanny Impossible is to actual meat, I don't really see the need to grow meat in the lab. And it'll probably be more expensive than Impossible meat too, if my lab experience is any indication

I think lab-grown meat will be an interesting alternative, looking forward to try that out.

Couldn't care less about the imitation products, they have been a massive letdown every time I tried. Pretty sure we'll have lab-grown meat before these things ever come close.

I went through a phase of beyond/impossible meats and they’re ok. I generally don’t object but they didn’t hit the same as actual meat or actual veggies. Plus they’re awfully expensive and sold in small packages with excessive plastic packing. I gave up in favor of either meet or plant based.

Except breakfast sausage. My grocery hasn’t reliably had breakfast sausage in over a year and the beyond stuff doesn’t work for me

I think it's an interesting solution to a growing problem (the industry of meat). But I've never had "fake meat" that tastes like real meat, though I don't actively try a lot of them.

I remember when the Impossible Burger came to Burger King. I got one of each, a regular Whopper and an Impossible Whopper. The regular Whopper was the typical Burger King sad burger, the same taste you expect. The Impossible Burger tasted like what I imagine a well used ashtray tastes like. To simply say "it tasted burnt" doesn't cover it. I took a couple bites and threw it into the trash.

I think vegetarianism and veganism are noble causes, but they aren't for me — I say, eating an omelet with pepper jack cheese and turkey sausage. I'm also a bariatric patient, so I need 80-120g of animal protein a day. Vegans will say "um no actually you don't..." but before any wanna start, I'm gonna take the advice of my medical team over some people on the Internet with an agenda who won't lose a wink of sleep if I get sick. I'm not the one. I can't be the one. But I'll root for you from the sidelines (and offer a bit of an olive branch — ahead of chicken and turkey, I find fish to be the best protein).

Uuh I like this question :D I have thought about it because I am vegan and tried figuring out whether I'd be interested in it, and I have no issue to admit that I sometimes crave the taste of meat, while being repulsed by it another time. After you don't eat meat for a whule you become aware of flavours that you didn't notice before, and there is an undertone of rot. No, it was not off, it was a majority of meats when I followed a flexitarian diet years ago. So would I eat it? Eh... Likely not? I wouldn't consider it vegan since you'd have to get DNA samples from live animals still to grow the meat, which to me is an unnecessary stress to the animal. But I don't want to dismiss the idea either if it means a rapid decline in livestock and carbon emissions and of course, less animal suffering.

I love Beyond Meat products, but lab grown still freaks me out a little. It's hard to articulate, but I don't know that I could eat it without imagining some kind of wet, pulsating mass of slimy flesh sitting in a bin of some sort in a lab, with tubes and wires hooked up all over it. I know damn well that's not what it is, but the image is there. I hope I get over it.

I'd rather just give up meat entirely and stick to plant-based alternatives.

They got the taste down on a lot of imitation meats; but the texture is usually way wrong. I have been hopeful that lab grown meat would solve that problem. Like, the best plant-based substitute I've ever had, was a "chicken" nugget that tasted perfrct, but still had the texture of wadded up paper.

I basically feel the same as you

Its good i guess though if you want to go vegan/vegiterian go away from these ultra processed foods as well! There are so many tasty dishes that are vegan/vegitarian without substitutes

Are you interested in the answer?