[makeitdouble]

My gut feeling is there's a spectrum of people wanting meat replacement, and I'd expect very few to be at the extreme "it must look like meat, feel like meat, taste like meat and smell like meat" (I actually don't expect these people to ever give up meat if they have a choice)

We've been through this for other foods: we have artificial vanilla, "I can't believe it's not butter" butter, half cheese, fake crab meat etc.

There's probably a large number of people who'd settle for a white tofu if it actually tasted like delicious meat.

[hombre_fatal]

Yet the alt-meat section of the grocery store grows every year, and novel alt-meat foods constantly try to enter the market.

> it must look like meat, feel like meat, taste like meat and smell like meat

As someone who does buy these alt-meats, you're mischaracterizing the consumer behavior. It's not "It must emulate meat". It's "it's nice that I can have a non-meat burger that satisfies my taste for the burgers I grew up with from time to time".

People buy a whole range of products from Costco's tasty bean burgers to Impossible meat patties to everything else.

> There's probably a large number of people who'd settle for a white tofu if it actually tasted like delicious meat.

I doubt it. The more we understand about food and what makes food good, the more it seems to be a combo of all sorts of things including look, smell, and texture. Adding the perfect meat-tasting drops to some white tofu isn't going to cut it. Though it seems like an odd speculation from from someone who doubts the appeal of alt-meat that actually does look, smell, taste, and feel like meat.

[makeitdouble]

You're right that there's a lot of personal viewpoint and I'm mot fully understanding the people buying alt-meats at their current state. I sampled a bunch that were touted to be good, and they tasted really meh to me.

They sure are hitting some "this could be meat" points, but not the good meat that would be a guilty pleasure, and more around the deadest and cheapest meat I'd find to make sure I get my protein count of the day. That's were I see the connendrum of paying premium for meh food by sheer guilt, it doesn't feel like a growing market (the elephant in room being that meat will never fully disappear, including ethically sourced meat like meat from wild species' population control)

In decades, perhaps. But as you point out the nostalgia part is strong, and nostalgia dies, so will it ever work out at some point ?

> look, smell, and texture.

This is cultural though. For instance looking at bread, historically brown, round, starchy and compact bread was the standard in europe. But the US moved to square, white, uniform, light taste and more processed white bread. Same with fish sticks, nuggets, meat balls, hash potatoes：we moved from a complex and close to the natural form, to heavily processed, standardized and geometrically shaped presentation, and it's widely accepted.

That's where I see focusing on taste instead of shape and texture to be a viable way forward in the long term.