[callmetom]

So not because it tastes good, but for asspats. Maybe they should take a page from the EV market and stop trying to ape the normal offering? Their customers want to be seen "helping" - so the product has to draw attention to itself by being a weird color or shape.

[mft_]

Also for taste: for example, IMO a beef burger tastes best, but a fake-beef burger tastes better than a not-trying-to-be-meat vege burger.

I’m mostly vegetarian because it’s healthier - and I’m comfortable that a fake-beef burger is healthier than a real beef burger.

[callmetom]

heh, well at least you're honest about the asspats. If health is the primary motivation, and you haven't researched it for yourself - you might want to. Do you remember the food pyramid, and how that was the consensus position - until it got exposed for being total BS? Or how regularly eggs, wine, and cholesterol flip between being good for you one decade and bad the next? These people cannot be relied upon.

[mft_]

It’s not about asspats at all - I don’t care what others think. As I said, I’ve made a personal decision to be mostly vegetarian for health reasons.

As for “research”, there’s plenty of evidence supporting that a plant-based diet is healthier than one including meat and dairy.

Now, obviously there’s the question of how processed meat-substitute burgers compare to less-processed real meat burgers, but as said I believe the evidence points towards the non-meat option being better.

[nh23423fefe]

Food is assumed to taste good, what point are you making?

[callmetom]

lol, no it isn't - there are a lot of existing foods that certainly don't taste good but they are supposedly "good for you". It seems odd to even have to point out that such a tradeoff exists. The point is that up to now that calculation was a personal one, and food processors had to calibrate between those two things (and price, to a smaller degree). Now there is this collective dimension being promoted, which could dramatically alter the calculus - to the point where celebrities are now being recruited to get people to eat bugs... Most are less likely to choose the objectively inferior "I'm doing my part!" option when the effort goes unrecognized, that is why early EV offerings looked so ridiculous. Manufactures found that normal looking electric cars didn't sell as well as designs that informed onlookers that you were "doing the right thing".

[nh23423fefe]

it is odd, having to describe the obvious, to those who pretend to understand nothing, while condescending the entire time.

keep fighting the Illuminati

[steve_adams_86]

I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products. I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal that my conscience considers "someone" rather than "something", but I like the general flavour of meat-like foods. If they come from plants, I can enjoy it without feeling like I'm eating someone.

It never crosses my mind what people think of me buying Beyond this or Impossible that.

[callmetom]

> I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products.

You suspect wrong, and you demonstrated why. How do you know that someone is a vegetarian? They'll tell you almost immediately, either explicitly or by bring up vegetarian adjacent issues. These products facilitate that.

> I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal...

So you know better than basically everyone who lived and died since forever? Before you launch into the talking point wherein humans evolve beyond needing to eat other animals, can you think of another fundamental part of the human experience that we evolved out of in the last several thousand years? Probably not, which makes this kind of wishful thinking unlikely to work out well. This reminds me of that Australian kid who was so deranged by environmentalist fearmongering, specifically that we were going to run out of drinking water, that he died from dehydration.

[steve_adams_86]

My choice isn’t about health or evolution or talking points. It just doesn’t feel good to me. I’m comfortable with being empirically wrong, and I actually held off from making the transition because I thought it made no sense to stop eating meat. I liked hunting and spear fishing. I stopped caring if it made sense or not at some point though because it simply didn’t feel good anymore.

I don’t know better than anyone. I do know that I buy plant based meats occasionally because I don’t want to eat real meat — not because I want anyone to see me buying it. Come to think of it, I sincerely doubt anyone gives any shits what’s in my shopping cart. If anything they’d think I’m an idiot for buying pink plant slime for ridiculous prices.

Ironically I think people who don’t eat animals actually don’t like telling people (certainly not in person, though on the internet on a site like HN it can lead to interesting conversations), because people such as yourself make it into something it isn’t. I avoid mentioning it and when it does come up, people seem to think they’re entitled to an explanation of a) why I’d do that and b) how I avoid being super unhealthy.

Sometimes it’s a fairly benign, uninteresting facet of one’s life and there’s no reason to conflate it with a superiority complex or knowing better than “basically everyone who lived and died since forever”.

I drive a large SUV. If I was trying to virtue signal I should probably start there.