Beyond Meat’s goal is a good one: to take your everyday meat eater and convince them, with low-impact, low-fat, and low-cost fake meat, to eventually cripple the livestock industry, which destroys the land, requires massive amounts of water and power, creates tons and tons of greenhouse gases, and encourages factory farming of monoculture crops. I am, generally, on the same team as Beyond Meat. But Beyond Meat also doesn’t taste good, and ends up, for me, in the same childish zone where Soylent, the meal-replacement shake, resides. Do you guys really hate vegetables that much? Does anyone really, genuinely prefer pea-tasting chewy fake chicken over, like, chick peas? Is the quest to reduce our reliance on animal protein really best accomplished by striving this hard to convince people to eat something that tastes almost, but not quite, like animals?
—Dan Nosowitz writing at The Awl about a new, hyped plant-based meat replacement, and questioning the way we design our meat analogues.
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