https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/21/bey...-of-burger.html

In a past life, I loved a veggie burger. But is was freshly made, homemade style. No chemicals. It was the 70's! Restaurant was only veg and fruit, no meat. Food was very good and affordable.

Today, i wint touch commercial veggie burgers and my boys point out with disgust the fake meat angle.

UMASS had a good recipe. My oldest loves ves it.

Its all about the ingredients!!

I'll never understand people who insist that eating plants is the best way to health, and yet want those plants to taste and look like meat. Or maybe the marketing is to us meat-eaters so that we'll be "tricked" into eating "healthier" fare.

I remember eating Boca Burgers (or something very similar, perhaps Morningstar Farms?) a few times back in the 70s or very early 80's. They didn't taste absolutely horrible to me at the time, but definitely did not taste like meat either. The texture was similar to a cheap fried fast food burger. I think they had some kind of smoke flavoring in them to try to give the impression of being charcoal grilled. They may have had some other flavoring in them too (something vaguely beefy-ish tasting like tamari or soy sauce), since soybean meal doesn't have much flavor on it's own - it picks up the flavor of what you cook it with.

I recall coming across some recipes for soy-burgers back during that era too, although I never made any - I think the main problem was that I had trouble acquiring all the ingredients at the same time in the small towns where we lived.

I'm pretty sure that back in those days, the idea was to provide an alternative to a beef burger for vegetarians to use - not that they were adverse to meat eaters trying them too. But they knew their niche market and there was no huge push to come up with something made purely from plant products that could convince meat eaters to give up meat.


At any rate, as all of us on here have noticed, even vegetarians have become the enemy of the vegan agenda - their goal is to convince everyone to give up all animal products and embrace highly processed and chemical laden products refined from a bunch of plant products, doctoring them up so that that they're trying to make them look, taste, and act like meat. (incidentally also the very ultimate in UPF products)

I haven't tried any of the fake meats, but DH did get one of the burgers when they were first serving them in fast food restaurants, and he said it wasn't bad. He said he could tell that it was not really meat, and there was somewhat of an odd texture about it, but that it wasn't really awful.

If it "wasn't bad", I see it mainly as a step on the way to convincing meat eaters that if they really need to give up meat at some point in the future, they will be able to *sigh* tolerate fake meat as an alternative, because *sigh* at least it would have some similar characteristics and flavor that they miss with real meat.

And that seems to be what the fake meat industry is trying to do - create products that once they figure out a way to have real meat banned, their products will be in demand, providing ersatz products to fulfill the craving for real meat.

When I ate vegetarian & vegan meals in the late 1970s & early 1990s, we used real foods and made things from scratch following Moosewood Cookbook, Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, and inventing our own recipes with Italian or Mexican herbs & spices. I.e. going for new and interesting flavours & textures, not trying to simulate meat. But grains & legumes are very inflammatory for me, and made me sleepy, so I always returned to the Atkins' diet. I prefer to eat 1-ingredient real meat, instead of ultra-processed >10-ingredient fake meat!

I'm not sure what the user base is for fake meats. Do vegans and vegetarians really want to eat something that tastes like foods that they abhor? Are many meat eaters wanting to eat fake meat when the real stuff is cheaper and healthier?

I don't think there's many vegans eating it. I can't imagine why they'd want to, except possibly on the very rare occasions when they're at something like a cookout, the host has bought vegan burgers specifically to cook for them, and there's not really anything else there that they can eat... Although it's kind of hard to imagine there's not going to be anything there that they could eat, because you know there's going to be buns, condiments, burger toppings - nothing wrong with having lettuce, pickles, mustard and ketchup on a bun and calling it a day.

I think it's mostly aimed at those who feel guilty about eating meat - whether guilt about the fact that an animal had to die to provide that meat, or because they don't really believe meat is healthy. And there are plenty of people who eat meat because they like it, they feel good on it, and it tastes good, but constantly feel horribly guilty about eating meat because they believe the constant narrative about how bad it is for you with all that fat & cholesterol, and that it truly is terrible for the environment.

But they only feel guilty about it -they don't want to become vegan, but they'd be willing to give it a try if there was something that tasted just as good as meat. That's where the vegan burgers come in, helping satisfy the meat cravings of someone who doesn't really want to be vegan, but feels so guilty about eating meat that they'll give it up anyway. They're the ones who will probably go for lab grown meat too.

Some, apparently, are even designed to "bleed" fake bloody juices when you bite into them. What vegan would want that? It is not what this carnivore is looking for in a meat.

To me that's kind of gross even for a meat eater, especially since we've been trained to make sure ground meat is fully cooked to 165F to assure there's no surviving e coli in all the surfaces in the mixed together bits of ground meat. If I got a burger that bled red juices, I'd be very put off by that - if it really has the same texture and taste as ground beef, how could I be sure they didn't accidentally give me real ground beef that didn't get cooked thoroughly?

Steaks and roasts are a different matter - those can have bloody looking juices inside because they only have surface meat on the outside of the piece of meat.

These 70's burgers are the ones I loved. A local vegan restaurant had delicious vegan burgers.

Now I must find my Moosewood cookbook!! A good way to find a spice mix to liven up a real meat burger.

I still miss black beans, but the high lectin content means they aren't worth it. However, the black bean homemade burger at a local restaurant was worth getting for the taste.

They have artificialized all kinds of things but now they are gunning for meat, that's all. It's what corporations do, now. Come up with something they can prove on a spreadsheet -- what if we grow the vegan market? because that's where the profit is! -- but I think it wasn't a coincidence they failed last time.

They want people to think meat is dangerous so they create Frankenmeat foods that they say is not. Both concepts are ridiculous.

We crave meat because our survival instincts demand it. It can't be bad for us!

This interview is Beyond Ridiculous, Beyond Belief... Beyond Reality:



https://finance.yahoo.com/video/bey...-211155601.html