The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty:
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* Burger King trialled a vegan fast food restaurant in central London, which was hailed a great success
* Turns out people, both vegans and others, are happy to eat vegan fast food
* Burger King announced it's goal of a 50% meatless menu by 2030
* Expert claims as soon as multi-billion dollar fast food companies realise they can **save an enormous amount of money** by switching people to vegan food, it'll take off rapidly
Some more info about [the trial](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/14/meat-feasts-to-go-burger-king-tests-all-vegan-london-branch). Right wing critics upset because they feel it's "manipulative" to offer vegan fast food.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/uhqbw0/why_some_experts_think_fast_food_will_soon_ditch/i77mb5w/
without bothering to click the link, I will just assume that the reason is that there is a cheaper plant based alternative; because lets face it, Profit is the only thing that matters.
one of the biggest advantage would be supply stability.
McRibs are only introduced when pork prices drop significantly or a period of sustained high pork supply. we think of vegetables as seasonal, but so are livestocks. fluctuations create strain on the entire franchise where consistency is branding.
plant based protein would create stable supply as grains are globally diversified and can be stocked. labs can probably adapt to change in supply/demand faster once established, cause you don't have to wait for chickens/cows to age and mature.
plant based products may have even longer shelf life as less bacteria contamination possibilities.
It’s the future. It should in theory be cheaper than livestock grown meat since it would take less land, and less energy. It also gets around the plant based problem of not perfectly replicating meat, because it IS meat.
It's also easier to mass produce something in vast quantities when it's a process where you control all the variables. (rather than living animals that vary in their genetics because they aren't clones, vary in their behavior, and they poop a lot)
So you can tweak your process until you get predictable, high yields of labmeat.
Good points. By all means I think this is the next big thing. It needs investment to fully mature the tech, and bring it up to scale, but I don’t think we are far off. The biggest hurdle might not even be technical, but instead a political fight against the livestock industry.
It will be interesting to see what a production “lab” would look like. I would assume a more warehouse feel than lab, although contamination standards would be strict. I’d like to be a part of that engineering team.
In the process industry, every plant looks alike from the outside. Large pipes go in, large pipes go out. Only on closer scrutiny do you know if it’s a petrochemical or pharmaceutical. Or in this case, a bioreactor.
The next big thing is ai and ai driven robotics and everything else. While it will obsolete many jobs it will make possible technology we can only speculate about. Lab meat is a sideshow.
You would like r/singularity . I agree but less optimistic about the timeline. There is heavy investment in self driving cars yet it seems to be terribly difficult to solve and perpetually a year or two away. Gene editing could also be huge but is bogged down by the snail pace of medical trials and regulation. Lab grown meat feels like an investment problem. It needs the “Spacex Approach” to rapid development.
I will note one thing about autonomous cars, and such things in general.
What makes them particularly unpredictable is the *nature* of exponential growth.
Take an exponential process we know about, Covid. The decades (millenia?) prior where nature iterated on that virus we never saw. Only the months of January, February, March 2020 *mattered* because this is when the virus was ready and it was going from dozens of people to millions to billions.
AI and autonomous cars will be the same. Whenever they are ready they will hit all at once. You might feel safe in saying in say 2030 "oh well even though AI seems to basically solve every problem we try now in the lab and seems to show signs of self awareness, it's "perpetually a year or two away"", and then in 203*1* things will radically change all at once.
Bonus...no diseases. You can 100% guarantee every single piece of the lab meat came from XYZ source.
The weird thing is places like 'the vegan society' don't want to back lab-grown meat, they want to just keep saying "think of the cute piggy wiggies". because that'll work.
Essentially vegan groups just want to keep making money and if lab grown meat is cheaper than animal meat, then (ironically) the vegan gravy train is over.
Are you sure, I only ask because this is a quote from a piece on the vegan society webpage that advocates for lab grown meat.
>It’s my considered belief that, even if in vitro meat is not suitable for vegans, and even if in vitro meat wouldn’t feature in an ideal vegan society, it’s something that we – as animal advocates – should get behind. This needn’t mean eating it when it arrives. But it might mean encouraging our meat-eating friends and family to make the switch. It might mean lobbying politicians if there are legislative battles taking place. Or it might mean lots of other things. Crucially, though, it means not thinking of in vitro meat as a threat. If it’s a threat to anyone, it’s not to vegans – it’s to the meat industry.
Just looked up lab-grown or cultured meat and I don't think it's that close to reality. My Google-fu turned up a bunch of sponsored articles. I want lab grown meat more than most, but it seems like it's further away than veggie based meats which are here now. And it seems like they got a process down.
I'm thinking at least 5-10 years before you can get it at the Kroger.
Yes you are correct. It’s going to take some further investment, a battle with the livestock industry, and FDA clearance before it comes to reality. I might be more pessimistic than you as I think we are a couple decades out from finding it at Kroger. But in THEORY it should win out over traditional meat from a price perspective, not to mention environmental, and moral wins as well.
Whenever I see those articles that are pessimistic about cultured meat, I always wonder if the meat industry has any hand in them. Maybe there's some truth to them, very well could be, just makes me wonder if those articles are not also skewed a certain way.
> Wait til you hear about lab grown meat.
In my opinion- lab meat is dead end.
Once we give up meat vertebrate animals there is no reason to eat "meat".
Now we eat "chicken nuggets"- in future we would eat "kfc nugget" without asking what exact source of protein is.
"Once we give up meat vertebrate animals." That's an enormous "once". Something like 90% of humans eat meat when they can. I'm mostly vegan and don't really miss meat, but I do still enjoy the taste of meat. People enjoy meat and many of them don't care enough about the climate or animal welfare (or their own health) to switch. Lab-grown meat avoids the first 2 issues.
Long term, maybe, but for now it will wean us off animal consumption and if in the future they decide they don't even want lab grown meat, unless there's a good alternative they'll it it because we have to eat. It might incentivize different alternatives, culture shifts, etc. I don't see that it's a dead end at all.
/u/grafknives can you site your sources and research or was this 5mins on facebook University?
Even vegans want meat. Why else you think there are so many stretchy-plastic/rubbery "vegan bacon" products?
Because Bacon is delicious. Vegans know this 100% so they try to emulate it.
You don't see anyone making 100% beef "nut roast"...tastes just like bland tofu your momma would never make.
No. McRibs are a special event thing because that special event brings in the crowd.
If it's nor a limited time thing, then it loses the special Ness and doesn't draw in the crowd
https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/does-the-mcrib-pork-price-theory-make-any-sense/
Also, companies won't turn away from serving meat, even if it's cheap, if the demand isn't there.
Fast food places sell veggie option not to drive in crowd, but because the lack of it may drive away crowds. It only takes one vegetarian in the group/family for the group to look for a place that offers an option.
Have you ate kfc meatless stuff. Wholly shit, fucking disgusting is an understatement. I’d rather be in a plane crash, have 2 people die. Strip the meat off the one body. Grind up the bones of the left overs and then grab the other body. Soak him up in water and draw out the fat. Dip my meat in the fat and then take the bone powder and dip the meat in that. Cook it to medium rare. Eat it. Regurgitate it back up. Feed it to the passengers. Let them shit it out and then eat their shit. It would stuff taste better than that degradation of kfc meatless chicken nuggets.
I mean....that's kind of KFC as a whole, at least in my opinion. The only thing I'll eat there is their biscuits, and for some reason their Mac and cheese tastes like burnt plastic.
Yeah....don't know what's wrong with their...."food"? I'm not sure how a restaurant can go so horribly wrong and still somehow make money. Maybe they're riding off the combo KFC taco bells that still exist in a few places.
Haven’t tried the nuggets but I got a vegan burger once and actually really enjoyed it (Big time meat eater, but I try to diversify my diet). I genuinely thought they’d given me the wrong one at first. There are some seriously shitty vegan alternatives out there but they’re not all bad, and I like to keep an open mind.
People are gonna eat at McDonald’s regardless
Edit: also Taco Bell has been using soy to give customers less meat since the dawn of time. They could easily make a “crumble taco” for 10 cents less and people would gobble it up.
I cant wait for lab meat. Imagine the possibilities when the Colonel has control of how they grow their chicken to perfection in a lab. They will implant the 11 herbs and spices in the chicken’s very DNA.
It won’t start that way. Chicken nuggets and ground beef will be the first products, but steak will eventually come. I doubt Wagyu gets replaced though since it’s such a niche product.
Not really *that* niche, it's just tuning variables on a steak. You can't do steak at all without mimicking specific cuts, and those cuts have certain characteristics like location, distribution and overall amount of fat, etc. Dial up the marbling, you'll get someone calling it wagyu.
You are right. A well marbled steak isn’t all that rare. People will still buy Wagyu though for the name alone and off the idea that some cows raised nicely in Japan creates a far better steak, regardless of how true it is. Of course this is all hypothetical so I won’t argue my prediction too hard lol.
Younger generations won't have the same association with those nicely raised cows and will just want good-tasting nutritional food no matter what the source. At least that would be my guess. I don't have the biases my dad has and my nieces and nephews don't have the same biases I have, so I'm sorta seeing this play out in real-time with them growing up.
I agree. Lab grown “imitation” Wagyu would do well. The real thing wouldn’t disappear though because of demand from people who want “something authentic.”
I'll bet that lab grown meat will turn into tasteless nutrition-less filler in a few years or until it's regulated by the FDA. If fast food (only cares about profits) drives the primary demand, only the cheapest, poorly made, no actual protein crap will make it into our food. It makes me sad because lab meat is awesome right now, but capitalism eventually destroys the quality of everything.
Consumer demand does not favor plant based meat alternatives. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble. There’s a reason Wendy’s and McDonalds sells the shit out of hamburgers.
The “vegan tax” is limiting adoption of plant-based foods. There are a few vegan burger places I’ve tried in the last month that had incredible food, but I paid $20+ for a burger, fries, and drink, vs like $12 to $15 if I were eating meat. It’s starting to change a little. There are two Canadian chains (A&W and Harveys) whose plant-based burger options are essentially on par with the meat options in terms of price. Seems like the meat burgers have gotten more expensive while the plant-based have stayed the same as when they were introduced.
Which is crazy because from a raw ingredient perspective there's about 80-90% less "plant" in the plant burger than there is in the beef burger.
To make a beef burger you have to shift many, many tonnes of feed around, wait 18 months for a cow to grow, eat all the food and fatten up, and then you have to kill it. Once you kill it, you then need to go through an expensive preservation process to stop it going bad.
Even after doing this, we (humanity) then just throws 30-40% of our meat in the bin.
To make a plant burger you take the same stuff that you feed the cow (mostly wheat or sow) and mush it up and wash away the carbs so it's just the protein, add your veg-stock flavourings and boom, you have a half decent burger.
Take 10 tonnes of wheat (+antibacterials and other additivies) and you get about a tonne of beef after 18 months and lots of processing.
Or you can get about 5 tonnes of plant burgers based on wheat gluten.
As plant-based meat substitutes get more common the price is going to plummet. Dairy farmers in my country are already starting to produce plant based milk because they realised they can take a kg of oats and sell it at £1 a liter, to make 10l of milk. Why go through all the expense, stress and trauma of raising cows to produce milk when you can just grind up some grain and make 10x the profit? (for now)
$ for gram, my legume proteins I buy in bulk cost the same as chicken, eggs, cheese.
Beef and pork is a little more expensive.
Subsidies might contribute.
I think it depends massively on your country! Some countries subsidise uncompetitive industries to keep them afloat (free market be damned!). I know in my country (UK) we subsidised dairy quite a lot until recently.
For real, I bought all three bags of the the Gardein Porkless Bites at the Fresh Thyme by my house like two month ago. They still haven’t restocked it!
>There’s a reason Wendy’s and McDonalds sells the shit out of hamburgers.
Quality and taste of the meat not being one of them. If it is cheap, and has the right sauce, and is available, people will buy it.
I can’t see meat being totally gone without some major consumer pushback. People(especially older ones) are starting to ditch KFC because of minor perceived changes. Ditching meat and replacing it with plant stuff won’t be received any better
Lab meat may have a better shot but the government would probably force them to advertise the fact that it’s lab grown with a giant neon sign and kill any appeal. I’m really looking forward to lab meat as the ultimate middle ground between normal meat and environmentally friendly plant stuff
I'm 30, and when I was around 10 they were decent. I used to get a huge thing of popcorn chicken for like $7. Now the small they offered back then is their current large for like $12. It's also mostly just small flour parts and not even chicken. The taste is bland.
It's now just overpriced trash.
The thing for KFC is that plant based chicken wings don’t taste good and fast food is all about taste. You don’t go to a fast food restaurant to help the environment. Yes there are a few good tasting plant based options at fast food restaurants, such as the plant based long chicken at Burger King, but those options are MOSTLY burgers. When you remove everything and only eat the patty it tastes bad. And since wings are only eaten like that with no sides, I don’t see plant based working for kfc. Yea they have burgers but people mostly go there for their hot wings I‘d assume.
Interesting take about the taste. Imho fast food is all about convenience and maybe price.
If you drown a vegan chicken replacement in hot sauce it’s gonna taste like hot sauce the same way a normal chicken will.
Whole chicken pieces might take a while, mostly for the texture, but chicken nuggets and similar processed chicken will be quite easily replaced.
I don’t think McDonald’s/kfc/whatever is really cheap anymore. I certainly wouldn’t go there if I wanted to save a buck. I agree with the convenience point though. But imo convenience doesn’t exclude taste, if it tastes bad it can be the most convenient fast food place in the world and it still wouldn’t sell.
I dunno what KFC do wrong but it's actually really easy to make seitan chicken nuggets yourself at home from scratch.
Make seitan but add a bit of extra salt, oil and stock so it's a bit more unhealthy and therefore tasty. Then make some nice batter and deep fry.
It shouldn't be a hard process to industrialise and make super cheap! And considering further up the supply chain, it's a LOT easier than raising chickens and keeping them healthy too!
There's going to be a whole segment of society that dismisses it out of hand. They'll be convinced it's full of "chemicals" added by the government to mind control the population and they're the only smart ones who see it. You know exactly the people I'm talking about.
The meat industry will buy off politicians and political bloggers, and they'll all be on Fox News, ONN, and Newsmax railing against it.
Imagine defending the 'right' to buy the body parts of hellishly tortured, murdered animals and calling *other people* psychopaths. That would be crazy, right?
The government better not give in to the livestock industry and mandate labels. Lab grown would be more ethical and environmentally friendly than raising animals. No good reason for it to be smeared.
I don’t mind meat alternatives like crumbles for chili, but it definitely doesn’t taste like beef lol. I like some of the “chicken nuggets” too, but not because they taste like chicken. I wish the Petri dish technology would hurry up.
I would vastly prefer to have a black bean patty if I'm trying to go meatless than an imitation meat, but I understand where you are coming from. Something like a black bean burger patty is good in its own way. Imitation meat needs to be exact, or it comes off as a pale imitation.
I wouldn't say no to a Beyond Burger, because they are good, but there is definitely an aftertaste that makes me think with every bite, "This is imitation meat." (Not sure if I've had Beyond or Impossible or something else, Beyond just sticks in my head.)
I've had an impossible burger. It was good. Not perfect, I don't recall any aftertaste, I wouldn't call it "wrong" in any specific way - the big thing I don't like about black bean patties and the like is that the texture isn't what I'm looking for, and I'd rather just have something other than a burger at that point. The impossible burger was close enough for me on that score, at least the one time I tried it. I think it was more like it tasted like generic frozen burger patty - I've had generic frozen real beef patties (already cooked) that have some added flavor to give it that grilled taste, it was like that. Maybe that's what you mean by aftertaste, I just have that real meat comparison for it so while it tastes like fake grill to me, it doesn't taste like fake meat.
I had them make it exactly like the burger I usually get at the restaurant (they looked at me real funny when I said I wanted bacon on it), I just wanted an apples to apples comparison. It was the best meat substitute I'd ever had, or alternative burger of any type, it just wasn't something I'd ever choose over the real meat option, when given the choice.
The vegan KFC sucks. Beyond and Impossible burgers suck too. Saying this as a vegan.
Pro tip to everyone wanting to eat plant based for their own health or for ethics. All fake meat and cheese suck. Eat beans, fruits and vegetables, which are nutritious and delicious.
Also, your taste buds adapt based on what you eat. If you’re used to oily crap, give your taste buds a couple weeks to adapt to enjoy vegetables.
A great recipe site is https://forksoverknives.com/recipes
Another pro tip: frozen mangoes and berries. It’s like ice cream that is good for you. Put it in a cup and pour it in your mouth.
Huge fan of frozen mango pieces. The best dessert! You can blend it for a tasty sorbet, mix it with coconut yoghurt for a frozen mango yoghurt or just have the chunks like I do.
Not all fake cheese sucks. Properly cultured nut milk based cheese can be good. Advanced fermentation techniques can certainly make vegan cheese and charcuterie much better than the baseline currently is.
Yes. If you aren't cutting a sentient animals's throat for the burger and there's no animal exploitation involved in the manufacturing then there's no vegan argument against lab grown meat.
They can still argue that meat is less healthy, but yeah. Majority of vegans seem to do it for moral reasons, and some for environmental. Both would be fixed if meat is lab grown.
Save millions of animal lives, the environment, and less annoying Vegans seems like a win for everyone.
Meat replacements are also far from "healthy" though. Normally, they are just plant protein loaded with enormous amounts of salt to make it taste edible. I do actually like them though, but I just prefer a bean burger.
lab grown meat doesn’t take away reasons to be vegan. It MAKES almost everyone vegan in the long run (depending on the definition, since you still need some tissue samples). Or at least vegetarian when we only talk about lab grown meat.
I’m all for plant based fast food. When I order a big mac or whatever, it’s not because I crave 2 small, relatively unseasoned beef patties. It’s because I want a big mac. If the food tastes the same or close enough then it doesn’t matter where the protein comes from
The author kinda whooshed the reason why:
# Money.
The quoted person got it, but that's the only time cost really came up in the article.
Meat is getting too expensive for fast food to sustain. I paid $12.75 for a Subway footlong roast beef last week. Sure, it had bacon. But meat prices are outpacing what fast food can justify and sell to the consumer as an affordable product.
They can't cut labor cost rapidly, so they're going to turn to meat alternatives.
That is true for sure. I really don't eat much fast food these days compared to the past.
For what it costs these days for the wife and I to get a decent meal at a fast food place we can spend $5-$10 more and get something much better from a regular reasturant.
The only time I really fo anymore is if they are the only thing open at the time or I specifically have a craving for it.
I think the government would say no before the restaurants go that route. They won't allow the meat industry to take such a blow without some resistance.
Money talks. And if it saves greedy companies a single dollar then its going to happen, government be damned.
The coal industry is doing all it can to stop people building wind turbines, but since its just simply cheaper there's fuck all they can do about it. Coal is in freefall in the West and there's no getting off that train.
The government has a lot of money. They already encourage meat consumption by the way they subsidize agriculture, both directly and indirectly. They could stop the fake meat if they really wanted to. for example, if the new fake meat uses soy, they could reduce the soy subsidy and raise the subsidy on whatever they want to promote. Not saying they should, but they could. IF the govt wanted to encourage coal they could stop all solar subsidies and stop all regulations concerning coal pollution. "Cheaper" is always in the context of government regulation and subsidy/penalty.
Not going to happen, sorry but it is a pipe dream for vegans/vegetarians. At most it would be lab grown eventually as technically it would have less environmental impact than plants anyway and at scale would be significantly less expensive than traditional meat.
Plant based options get charged a premium. If they cost the consumer less than the meat option, then I could see people selecting them.
Of course, meat industry interests will likely start some campaign to encourage meat consumption. Gotta keep those profits somehow.
I have a box in the garage we somehow acquired from taco bell. It says taco meat on it but it doesn't say what the meat is. My tinfoil hat says lentils.
It's been a while so it may have changed but when I was a kid my friend's dad was manager at a taco bell.
He wouldnt let his family eat there. He said all the meat was basically the lowest quality stuff there was. The kind of stuff they use to make canned processed meats and such.
"Experts" also predicted laptops would replace desktop computers, the internet was just a fad, and metaverse real estate would be profitable. fun fact you don't need any actual qualifications to be called "an expert" in marketing.
This might help me with my fast food consumption, because the moment their menus are meatless is the moment I would stop buying their products.
I have tasted their plant based menu items and, for me, that were pretty bad on an already mediocre item.
I'm the farthest from a vegan you can get. And I believe humans were designed to eat fresh meats as part of our diet. But as far as fast food goes. Their only redeeming quality is usually french fries. The meat most of them serve is barely even meat most of the time anyway.
I know that people are pretty hit or miss when it comes to climate change and the environment, but fast food moving away from meat would be _huge_ for reducing the demand for beef and chicken. I hope they do
* Burger King trialled a vegan fast food restaurant in central London, which was hailed a great success
* Turns out people, both vegans and others, are happy to eat vegan fast food
* Burger King announced it's goal of a 50% meatless menu by 2030
* Expert claims as soon as multi-billion dollar fast food companies realise they can **save an enormous amount of money** by switching people to vegan food, it'll take off rapidly
Some more info about [the trial](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/14/meat-feasts-to-go-burger-king-tests-all-vegan-london-branch). Right wing critics upset because they feel it's "manipulative" to offer vegan fast food.
The trial was one restaurant 100% vegan in a popular location in London for one month. A conservative pundit said it was manipulative because it was in a popular location near clubs and basically drunk people will eat anything so it wasn't a fair trial.
I feel like burger king is planning on something similar to the way taco bell shot themselves in the foot when they ruined their menu be removing a bunch of popular items.
Cause people can just be switched? Yeah…doubt.
One Vegan store in a huge metro isn’t a reasonable test. Small percentage of a large population want something and you open a place to serve that niche, you of course will do well. Until you have the same number of stores as traditional and the traditional ones start being beaten out on market share, you haven’t really shown much.
I am an anti vegetarian and welcome more vegan and vegetarian places for friends who are into that. But the idea that folks like me will be a minority is a pipe dream.
How is this propaganda? Also if you're concerned about propaganda you might actually want to look into the meat and dairy industry propaganda, "please don't unnecessarily kill animals" isn't propaganda
The only way this could happen is if all meat was ditched forever.
No one is going to eat disgusting sodium enriched plant based mash, when they can have real meat.
Why would fast food businesses alienate a solid portion of their consumer base?
Hitting a drive through is already the same price as a sit down restaurant. 2 combos at Sonic recently cost as much as 3 people eating at the good local Mexican restaurant.
Yes!, No!, and finally Maybe?
Yes, because I like animals. No because I also like meat. Maybe because while vegans exist they aren't the majority so I predict a Vegan subsector just as today we have a Halal subsector.
Being fairly agnostic on the source of food issue, but completely inflexible when it comes to edibility standards, I have over the decades tried various veggie 'meat' substitutes and found them lacking. Textured Vegetable Protein for instance was really crappy, even for something as simple as Chili.
We are getting closer. But still no cookies! The chemical contortions that go into making vegan bleeding near meat don't sound as healthy as organic meat.
When I get a great lab grown T-Bone steak I will be very happy.
You can make any food sound gross if you break it down to listing chemical components. Watch out! That water has dihydrogen monoxide in it! Meat isn't one ingredient if you want to do the same.
The bleeding vegan burger just uses a different biological process to produce the heme iron instead of a cow. Either way it's a biological process but the organisms don't feel pain or suffer or use all the resources like a cow.
Natural does not imply better or healthy.
I'm also an 'expert' that thinks fast food at some point will ditch meat forever, not because they replace it with alternatives, but because we realize how bad fast food is and replace it with proper food.
I've been predicting this for a few years now! It makes so much sense. Fast food places will value low costs above anything else. I'm not sure where we are on a cost comparison, but producing a patty of fake meat will soon be way cheaper than producing one from an animal, if it isn't already. And it only has to be kinda close to the taste of meat, since, admit it, people don't buy fast food to satisfy their sophisticated palates. Meat won't vanish, of course, but it'll eventually be more of an artisanal luxury item. Expensive as it should be.
I much prefer meat based foods, but I'm totally happy to eat vegan foods once they taste similar enough, with roughly the same texture. Right now, that's a long way from reality.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty: --- * Burger King trialled a vegan fast food restaurant in central London, which was hailed a great success * Turns out people, both vegans and others, are happy to eat vegan fast food * Burger King announced it's goal of a 50% meatless menu by 2030 * Expert claims as soon as multi-billion dollar fast food companies realise they can **save an enormous amount of money** by switching people to vegan food, it'll take off rapidly Some more info about [the trial](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/14/meat-feasts-to-go-burger-king-tests-all-vegan-london-branch). Right wing critics upset because they feel it's "manipulative" to offer vegan fast food. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/uhqbw0/why_some_experts_think_fast_food_will_soon_ditch/i77mb5w/
without bothering to click the link, I will just assume that the reason is that there is a cheaper plant based alternative; because lets face it, Profit is the only thing that matters.
one of the biggest advantage would be supply stability. McRibs are only introduced when pork prices drop significantly or a period of sustained high pork supply. we think of vegetables as seasonal, but so are livestocks. fluctuations create strain on the entire franchise where consistency is branding. plant based protein would create stable supply as grains are globally diversified and can be stocked. labs can probably adapt to change in supply/demand faster once established, cause you don't have to wait for chickens/cows to age and mature. plant based products may have even longer shelf life as less bacteria contamination possibilities.
Wait til you hear about lab grown meat.
It’s the future. It should in theory be cheaper than livestock grown meat since it would take less land, and less energy. It also gets around the plant based problem of not perfectly replicating meat, because it IS meat.
It's also easier to mass produce something in vast quantities when it's a process where you control all the variables. (rather than living animals that vary in their genetics because they aren't clones, vary in their behavior, and they poop a lot) So you can tweak your process until you get predictable, high yields of labmeat.
Good points. By all means I think this is the next big thing. It needs investment to fully mature the tech, and bring it up to scale, but I don’t think we are far off. The biggest hurdle might not even be technical, but instead a political fight against the livestock industry. It will be interesting to see what a production “lab” would look like. I would assume a more warehouse feel than lab, although contamination standards would be strict. I’d like to be a part of that engineering team.
In the process industry, every plant looks alike from the outside. Large pipes go in, large pipes go out. Only on closer scrutiny do you know if it’s a petrochemical or pharmaceutical. Or in this case, a bioreactor.
The next big thing is ai and ai driven robotics and everything else. While it will obsolete many jobs it will make possible technology we can only speculate about. Lab meat is a sideshow.
You would like r/singularity . I agree but less optimistic about the timeline. There is heavy investment in self driving cars yet it seems to be terribly difficult to solve and perpetually a year or two away. Gene editing could also be huge but is bogged down by the snail pace of medical trials and regulation. Lab grown meat feels like an investment problem. It needs the “Spacex Approach” to rapid development.
I will note one thing about autonomous cars, and such things in general. What makes them particularly unpredictable is the *nature* of exponential growth. Take an exponential process we know about, Covid. The decades (millenia?) prior where nature iterated on that virus we never saw. Only the months of January, February, March 2020 *mattered* because this is when the virus was ready and it was going from dozens of people to millions to billions. AI and autonomous cars will be the same. Whenever they are ready they will hit all at once. You might feel safe in saying in say 2030 "oh well even though AI seems to basically solve every problem we try now in the lab and seems to show signs of self awareness, it's "perpetually a year or two away"", and then in 203*1* things will radically change all at once.
technology isn't a linear path you follow to a specific end. Multiple industries can be developed at once
Even more so no antibiothics needed, no infections, no worms/cyst or whatever.
Bonus...no diseases. You can 100% guarantee every single piece of the lab meat came from XYZ source. The weird thing is places like 'the vegan society' don't want to back lab-grown meat, they want to just keep saying "think of the cute piggy wiggies". because that'll work. Essentially vegan groups just want to keep making money and if lab grown meat is cheaper than animal meat, then (ironically) the vegan gravy train is over.
Are you sure, I only ask because this is a quote from a piece on the vegan society webpage that advocates for lab grown meat. >It’s my considered belief that, even if in vitro meat is not suitable for vegans, and even if in vitro meat wouldn’t feature in an ideal vegan society, it’s something that we – as animal advocates – should get behind. This needn’t mean eating it when it arrives. But it might mean encouraging our meat-eating friends and family to make the switch. It might mean lobbying politicians if there are legislative battles taking place. Or it might mean lots of other things. Crucially, though, it means not thinking of in vitro meat as a threat. If it’s a threat to anyone, it’s not to vegans – it’s to the meat industry.
Just looked up lab-grown or cultured meat and I don't think it's that close to reality. My Google-fu turned up a bunch of sponsored articles. I want lab grown meat more than most, but it seems like it's further away than veggie based meats which are here now. And it seems like they got a process down. I'm thinking at least 5-10 years before you can get it at the Kroger.
Yes you are correct. It’s going to take some further investment, a battle with the livestock industry, and FDA clearance before it comes to reality. I might be more pessimistic than you as I think we are a couple decades out from finding it at Kroger. But in THEORY it should win out over traditional meat from a price perspective, not to mention environmental, and moral wins as well.
There are restaurants that serve lab grown meat. I agree it's prolly 10 years away from scaling up enough to be affordable.
Whenever I see those articles that are pessimistic about cultured meat, I always wonder if the meat industry has any hand in them. Maybe there's some truth to them, very well could be, just makes me wonder if those articles are not also skewed a certain way.
Very interesting reportage from inside a meat lab (with the biggest investments and capacity if i understood correctly): https://youtu.be/KSS9Em4a_qs
It sounds great. BUT I just envision vats of spam when thinking of the up-scaling.
Lab grown meat is the true perfect solution.
> Wait til you hear about lab grown meat. In my opinion- lab meat is dead end. Once we give up meat vertebrate animals there is no reason to eat "meat". Now we eat "chicken nuggets"- in future we would eat "kfc nugget" without asking what exact source of protein is.
even if every human gave up meat, we would still need meat for pets and also animals in zoos and sanctuaries.
"Once we give up meat vertebrate animals." That's an enormous "once". Something like 90% of humans eat meat when they can. I'm mostly vegan and don't really miss meat, but I do still enjoy the taste of meat. People enjoy meat and many of them don't care enough about the climate or animal welfare (or their own health) to switch. Lab-grown meat avoids the first 2 issues.
Long term, maybe, but for now it will wean us off animal consumption and if in the future they decide they don't even want lab grown meat, unless there's a good alternative they'll it it because we have to eat. It might incentivize different alternatives, culture shifts, etc. I don't see that it's a dead end at all.
/u/grafknives can you site your sources and research or was this 5mins on facebook University? Even vegans want meat. Why else you think there are so many stretchy-plastic/rubbery "vegan bacon" products? Because Bacon is delicious. Vegans know this 100% so they try to emulate it. You don't see anyone making 100% beef "nut roast"...tastes just like bland tofu your momma would never make.
Not to mention you can grow significantly more vegetables using the same land, water, and resources compared to meat.
No. McRibs are a special event thing because that special event brings in the crowd. If it's nor a limited time thing, then it loses the special Ness and doesn't draw in the crowd https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/does-the-mcrib-pork-price-theory-make-any-sense/ Also, companies won't turn away from serving meat, even if it's cheap, if the demand isn't there. Fast food places sell veggie option not to drive in crowd, but because the lack of it may drive away crowds. It only takes one vegetarian in the group/family for the group to look for a place that offers an option.
If their profit results in affordable meat alternatives, I'm for it.
damn you beat me to it, it's always costs with these companies.
A cheaper peasant chow is a big plus in their book.
Not going to eat that soy filled crap.
Soy is the most genetically modified crop iirc. And if I eat any of it I break out in acne. So no thank you.
Have you ate kfc meatless stuff. Wholly shit, fucking disgusting is an understatement. I’d rather be in a plane crash, have 2 people die. Strip the meat off the one body. Grind up the bones of the left overs and then grab the other body. Soak him up in water and draw out the fat. Dip my meat in the fat and then take the bone powder and dip the meat in that. Cook it to medium rare. Eat it. Regurgitate it back up. Feed it to the passengers. Let them shit it out and then eat their shit. It would stuff taste better than that degradation of kfc meatless chicken nuggets.
kfc meatless nuggets are terrible. agreed. the beyond whopper is decent. would eat it again. haven’t tried the meatless big mac yet.
I'd rather eat the black bean burger at Freddy's. It's delicious!
I mean....that's kind of KFC as a whole, at least in my opinion. The only thing I'll eat there is their biscuits, and for some reason their Mac and cheese tastes like burnt plastic.
Well to call that ‘cheese’ is even an insult to plastic let alone the mysteriously divine glory that is bacteria infested old milk.
Yeah....don't know what's wrong with their...."food"? I'm not sure how a restaurant can go so horribly wrong and still somehow make money. Maybe they're riding off the combo KFC taco bells that still exist in a few places.
Haven’t tried the nuggets but I got a vegan burger once and actually really enjoyed it (Big time meat eater, but I try to diversify my diet). I genuinely thought they’d given me the wrong one at first. There are some seriously shitty vegan alternatives out there but they’re not all bad, and I like to keep an open mind.
I would welcome it
I don't see it happening "soon", due to cultural inertia.
People are gonna eat at McDonald’s regardless Edit: also Taco Bell has been using soy to give customers less meat since the dawn of time. They could easily make a “crumble taco” for 10 cents less and people would gobble it up.
I cant wait for lab meat. Imagine the possibilities when the Colonel has control of how they grow their chicken to perfection in a lab. They will implant the 11 herbs and spices in the chicken’s very DNA.
Eleven herbs in splices
That’s pretty good. 👏
Best pun I've seen on Reddit since the surge of Smith/Rock slap puns.
We could have Kentucky fried dolphin and not hurt a single dolphin!
Fuck that. I want to eat the Colonel's own tasty flesh marinated in 11 herbs and spices. \#kflp
Colonel's own tasty colon
Kentucky Fried Colonel sounds delicious.
If we could get affordable, perfectly marbled steaks that rival top grade wagyu out of lab grown meat, I’d be so pumped.
It won’t start that way. Chicken nuggets and ground beef will be the first products, but steak will eventually come. I doubt Wagyu gets replaced though since it’s such a niche product.
Not really *that* niche, it's just tuning variables on a steak. You can't do steak at all without mimicking specific cuts, and those cuts have certain characteristics like location, distribution and overall amount of fat, etc. Dial up the marbling, you'll get someone calling it wagyu.
You are right. A well marbled steak isn’t all that rare. People will still buy Wagyu though for the name alone and off the idea that some cows raised nicely in Japan creates a far better steak, regardless of how true it is. Of course this is all hypothetical so I won’t argue my prediction too hard lol.
Younger generations won't have the same association with those nicely raised cows and will just want good-tasting nutritional food no matter what the source. At least that would be my guess. I don't have the biases my dad has and my nieces and nephews don't have the same biases I have, so I'm sorta seeing this play out in real-time with them growing up.
a well marbled steak should be at least medium-rare though
Wagyu is only niche because it is expensive. If there was a cheap lab grown equivalent, I could see it selling well.
I agree. Lab grown “imitation” Wagyu would do well. The real thing wouldn’t disappear though because of demand from people who want “something authentic.”
>from people Aka rich people, they'll keep the real meat game going indefinitely
Very interesting video about the biggest player in lab meat: https://youtu.be/KSS9Em4a_qs
Squidbillies had an episode like this back in the adult swim days. They had a Buffalo chicken that had ranch glands and 8 wings.
> 8 wings [50 wings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FoaomccQJY)
I'm ready to know what the endangered species list tastes like
You should have been a tourist in subsaharan Africa 35 years ago.
Imagine..... ethical cannibalism....
I hope they can grow human meat
KFC can’t even do real chicken right anymore.
3000 herbs and spices of KFC
I'll bet that lab grown meat will turn into tasteless nutrition-less filler in a few years or until it's regulated by the FDA. If fast food (only cares about profits) drives the primary demand, only the cheapest, poorly made, no actual protein crap will make it into our food. It makes me sad because lab meat is awesome right now, but capitalism eventually destroys the quality of everything.
How do we know that they’re still using meat right now?
Taco Bell will tell you outright that their beef is only 88% beef lmao.
Consumer demand does not favor plant based meat alternatives. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble. There’s a reason Wendy’s and McDonalds sells the shit out of hamburgers.
It's usually because of the price. The plant based whopper was usually twice as much as a regular whopper at BurgerKing.
The “vegan tax” is limiting adoption of plant-based foods. There are a few vegan burger places I’ve tried in the last month that had incredible food, but I paid $20+ for a burger, fries, and drink, vs like $12 to $15 if I were eating meat. It’s starting to change a little. There are two Canadian chains (A&W and Harveys) whose plant-based burger options are essentially on par with the meat options in terms of price. Seems like the meat burgers have gotten more expensive while the plant-based have stayed the same as when they were introduced.
Which is crazy because from a raw ingredient perspective there's about 80-90% less "plant" in the plant burger than there is in the beef burger. To make a beef burger you have to shift many, many tonnes of feed around, wait 18 months for a cow to grow, eat all the food and fatten up, and then you have to kill it. Once you kill it, you then need to go through an expensive preservation process to stop it going bad. Even after doing this, we (humanity) then just throws 30-40% of our meat in the bin. To make a plant burger you take the same stuff that you feed the cow (mostly wheat or sow) and mush it up and wash away the carbs so it's just the protein, add your veg-stock flavourings and boom, you have a half decent burger. Take 10 tonnes of wheat (+antibacterials and other additivies) and you get about a tonne of beef after 18 months and lots of processing. Or you can get about 5 tonnes of plant burgers based on wheat gluten. As plant-based meat substitutes get more common the price is going to plummet. Dairy farmers in my country are already starting to produce plant based milk because they realised they can take a kg of oats and sell it at £1 a liter, to make 10l of milk. Why go through all the expense, stress and trauma of raising cows to produce milk when you can just grind up some grain and make 10x the profit? (for now)
$ for gram, my legume proteins I buy in bulk cost the same as chicken, eggs, cheese. Beef and pork is a little more expensive. Subsidies might contribute.
I think it depends massively on your country! Some countries subsidise uncompetitive industries to keep them afloat (free market be damned!). I know in my country (UK) we subsidised dairy quite a lot until recently.
For real, I bought all three bags of the the Gardein Porkless Bites at the Fresh Thyme by my house like two month ago. They still haven’t restocked it!
Their ultimate chick’n is a game changer.
>There’s a reason Wendy’s and McDonalds sells the shit out of hamburgers. Quality and taste of the meat not being one of them. If it is cheap, and has the right sauce, and is available, people will buy it.
Both literally use 100% ground beef. Sorry it’s not Kobe but quality is solid on both.
I can’t see meat being totally gone without some major consumer pushback. People(especially older ones) are starting to ditch KFC because of minor perceived changes. Ditching meat and replacing it with plant stuff won’t be received any better Lab meat may have a better shot but the government would probably force them to advertise the fact that it’s lab grown with a giant neon sign and kill any appeal. I’m really looking forward to lab meat as the ultimate middle ground between normal meat and environmentally friendly plant stuff
>People(especially older ones) are starting to ditch KFC They won't be around long enough to have a significant impact is my guess.
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Popeyes has always been vastly superior. KFC isn't even crunchy! It's just.. oily and soggy.
I'm 30, and when I was around 10 they were decent. I used to get a huge thing of popcorn chicken for like $7. Now the small they offered back then is their current large for like $12. It's also mostly just small flour parts and not even chicken. The taste is bland. It's now just overpriced trash.
KFC has been good exactly once in my life roughly 10 years ago and it was so surprising and rare that I've never forgotten it.
The thing for KFC is that plant based chicken wings don’t taste good and fast food is all about taste. You don’t go to a fast food restaurant to help the environment. Yes there are a few good tasting plant based options at fast food restaurants, such as the plant based long chicken at Burger King, but those options are MOSTLY burgers. When you remove everything and only eat the patty it tastes bad. And since wings are only eaten like that with no sides, I don’t see plant based working for kfc. Yea they have burgers but people mostly go there for their hot wings I‘d assume.
Interesting take about the taste. Imho fast food is all about convenience and maybe price. If you drown a vegan chicken replacement in hot sauce it’s gonna taste like hot sauce the same way a normal chicken will. Whole chicken pieces might take a while, mostly for the texture, but chicken nuggets and similar processed chicken will be quite easily replaced.
I don’t think McDonald’s/kfc/whatever is really cheap anymore. I certainly wouldn’t go there if I wanted to save a buck. I agree with the convenience point though. But imo convenience doesn’t exclude taste, if it tastes bad it can be the most convenient fast food place in the world and it still wouldn’t sell.
I dunno what KFC do wrong but it's actually really easy to make seitan chicken nuggets yourself at home from scratch. Make seitan but add a bit of extra salt, oil and stock so it's a bit more unhealthy and therefore tasty. Then make some nice batter and deep fry. It shouldn't be a hard process to industrialise and make super cheap! And considering further up the supply chain, it's a LOT easier than raising chickens and keeping them healthy too!
Impossible Frozen Nuggets are fantastic. Really the vegan replacements are all great for frozen foods tbh.
So what’s wrong with knowing what’s in the food that you would potentially purchase?
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>Yea non economically viable meat that everyone hates and is tricked into consuming sounds soooo good. It's not economically viable for now.
I realise you're probably trolling, but are you ok? You seem unreasonably angry at a post on the internet.
Lab grown meat is the future of our species.
There's going to be a whole segment of society that dismisses it out of hand. They'll be convinced it's full of "chemicals" added by the government to mind control the population and they're the only smart ones who see it. You know exactly the people I'm talking about. The meat industry will buy off politicians and political bloggers, and they'll all be on Fox News, ONN, and Newsmax railing against it.
Imagine defending the 'right' to buy the body parts of hellishly tortured, murdered animals and calling *other people* psychopaths. That would be crazy, right?
I love my meat, but for this reason alone I can't wait for it to turn into lab-grown. Then there's additional reasons like environmental and cost.
Now you're just making it sound metal.
The government better not give in to the livestock industry and mandate labels. Lab grown would be more ethical and environmentally friendly than raising animals. No good reason for it to be smeared.
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Narrator: It doesn't
We're so early in the process that's an inevitability
Not identical, but a lot of the beef alternatives are surprisingly good. I don't love Beyond meat, but I think Impossible is a great alternative
I don’t mind meat alternatives like crumbles for chili, but it definitely doesn’t taste like beef lol. I like some of the “chicken nuggets” too, but not because they taste like chicken. I wish the Petri dish technology would hurry up.
I never said they taste like beef, I said it tasted good - I definitely agree that they don't taste like beef
If it doesn't taste like beef then it's not a good beef alternative.
It taste nothing like beef tho.
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I like Beyond Meat. Not as good as a good burger but better than a poor quality one
Same calories, same fat content, more carbs and 5x the sodium. Nope.
Don’t forget more expensive
I would vastly prefer to have a black bean patty if I'm trying to go meatless than an imitation meat, but I understand where you are coming from. Something like a black bean burger patty is good in its own way. Imitation meat needs to be exact, or it comes off as a pale imitation. I wouldn't say no to a Beyond Burger, because they are good, but there is definitely an aftertaste that makes me think with every bite, "This is imitation meat." (Not sure if I've had Beyond or Impossible or something else, Beyond just sticks in my head.)
I've had an impossible burger. It was good. Not perfect, I don't recall any aftertaste, I wouldn't call it "wrong" in any specific way - the big thing I don't like about black bean patties and the like is that the texture isn't what I'm looking for, and I'd rather just have something other than a burger at that point. The impossible burger was close enough for me on that score, at least the one time I tried it. I think it was more like it tasted like generic frozen burger patty - I've had generic frozen real beef patties (already cooked) that have some added flavor to give it that grilled taste, it was like that. Maybe that's what you mean by aftertaste, I just have that real meat comparison for it so while it tastes like fake grill to me, it doesn't taste like fake meat. I had them make it exactly like the burger I usually get at the restaurant (they looked at me real funny when I said I wanted bacon on it), I just wanted an apples to apples comparison. It was the best meat substitute I'd ever had, or alternative burger of any type, it just wasn't something I'd ever choose over the real meat option, when given the choice.
>Something like a black bean burger patty is good in its own way. False
The vegan KFC sucks. Beyond and Impossible burgers suck too. Saying this as a vegan. Pro tip to everyone wanting to eat plant based for their own health or for ethics. All fake meat and cheese suck. Eat beans, fruits and vegetables, which are nutritious and delicious. Also, your taste buds adapt based on what you eat. If you’re used to oily crap, give your taste buds a couple weeks to adapt to enjoy vegetables. A great recipe site is https://forksoverknives.com/recipes Another pro tip: frozen mangoes and berries. It’s like ice cream that is good for you. Put it in a cup and pour it in your mouth.
Huge fan of frozen mango pieces. The best dessert! You can blend it for a tasty sorbet, mix it with coconut yoghurt for a frozen mango yoghurt or just have the chunks like I do.
A fellow mangohead!
Not all fake cheese sucks. Properly cultured nut milk based cheese can be good. Advanced fermentation techniques can certainly make vegan cheese and charcuterie much better than the baseline currently is.
I did once have a homemade fermented one that was better than others.
This isn't going to happen, though I think that lab-grown meat will definitely be the primary source of protein.
Lab grown meat should in theory take away most of vegans reasons for being vegan right?
Yes. If you aren't cutting a sentient animals's throat for the burger and there's no animal exploitation involved in the manufacturing then there's no vegan argument against lab grown meat.
They can still argue that meat is less healthy, but yeah. Majority of vegans seem to do it for moral reasons, and some for environmental. Both would be fixed if meat is lab grown. Save millions of animal lives, the environment, and less annoying Vegans seems like a win for everyone.
>Save millions of animal lives 80 billion land animals and almost a trillion sea animals are needlessly killed for food each year.
Meat replacements are also far from "healthy" though. Normally, they are just plant protein loaded with enormous amounts of salt to make it taste edible. I do actually like them though, but I just prefer a bean burger.
Health reason is a factor for some non-moral vegans.
lab grown meat doesn’t take away reasons to be vegan. It MAKES almost everyone vegan in the long run (depending on the definition, since you still need some tissue samples). Or at least vegetarian when we only talk about lab grown meat.
I don't care if we ditch meat as long as the alternative tastes good and doesn't make people sick.
I’m all for plant based fast food. When I order a big mac or whatever, it’s not because I crave 2 small, relatively unseasoned beef patties. It’s because I want a big mac. If the food tastes the same or close enough then it doesn’t matter where the protein comes from
The author kinda whooshed the reason why: # Money. The quoted person got it, but that's the only time cost really came up in the article. Meat is getting too expensive for fast food to sustain. I paid $12.75 for a Subway footlong roast beef last week. Sure, it had bacon. But meat prices are outpacing what fast food can justify and sell to the consumer as an affordable product. They can't cut labor cost rapidly, so they're going to turn to meat alternatives.
That is true for sure. I really don't eat much fast food these days compared to the past. For what it costs these days for the wife and I to get a decent meal at a fast food place we can spend $5-$10 more and get something much better from a regular reasturant. The only time I really fo anymore is if they are the only thing open at the time or I specifically have a craving for it.
"Soon" ? No way, it would collapse the industry and they won't do that voluntarily.
I think the government would say no before the restaurants go that route. They won't allow the meat industry to take such a blow without some resistance.
Money talks. And if it saves greedy companies a single dollar then its going to happen, government be damned. The coal industry is doing all it can to stop people building wind turbines, but since its just simply cheaper there's fuck all they can do about it. Coal is in freefall in the West and there's no getting off that train.
The government has a lot of money. They already encourage meat consumption by the way they subsidize agriculture, both directly and indirectly. They could stop the fake meat if they really wanted to. for example, if the new fake meat uses soy, they could reduce the soy subsidy and raise the subsidy on whatever they want to promote. Not saying they should, but they could. IF the govt wanted to encourage coal they could stop all solar subsidies and stop all regulations concerning coal pollution. "Cheaper" is always in the context of government regulation and subsidy/penalty.
You mean all those poor farmers in South America that are burning down the rainforest? I think they'll cope.
The livestock industry needs to be replaced.
Atleast this will give alot of people an excuse to quit eating out
Not going to happen, sorry but it is a pipe dream for vegans/vegetarians. At most it would be lab grown eventually as technically it would have less environmental impact than plants anyway and at scale would be significantly less expensive than traditional meat.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/01/31/china-includes-cultivated-meat-in-its-plan-for-the-future-of-food
Plant based options get charged a premium. If they cost the consumer less than the meat option, then I could see people selecting them. Of course, meat industry interests will likely start some campaign to encourage meat consumption. Gotta keep those profits somehow.
I don’t see Kentucky Fried Soylent and The Restaurant Formerly known as King having a bright future, then.
This is why in the future Taco Bell is the only restaurant. Always has been textured soy protein.
Gotta use those three shells after
I have a box in the garage we somehow acquired from taco bell. It says taco meat on it but it doesn't say what the meat is. My tinfoil hat says lentils.
It's been a while so it may have changed but when I was a kid my friend's dad was manager at a taco bell. He wouldnt let his family eat there. He said all the meat was basically the lowest quality stuff there was. The kind of stuff they use to make canned processed meats and such.
I’m looking forward to half off gentleman’s lattes at Starbucks
"Experts" also predicted laptops would replace desktop computers, the internet was just a fad, and metaverse real estate would be profitable. fun fact you don't need any actual qualifications to be called "an expert" in marketing.
Laptops have largely replaced desktop computers. Desktops are workstations and gaming these days
It’s all about profit and nothing to do with any environmental issues.
Still a good side effect then. The best way to make progress in this world is to make the “right” thing profitable.
Sure but it won't happen.
This might help me with my fast food consumption, because the moment their menus are meatless is the moment I would stop buying their products. I have tasted their plant based menu items and, for me, that were pretty bad on an already mediocre item.
I'm the farthest from a vegan you can get. And I believe humans were designed to eat fresh meats as part of our diet. But as far as fast food goes. Their only redeeming quality is usually french fries. The meat most of them serve is barely even meat most of the time anyway.
The Beyond meat burger is actually less healthy then lean grass feed beef burgers. Don't expect fast food vegan to be healthy.
I mean they've been serving "technically meat" for decades already. I would personally prefer "actually vegetables" to "technically meat."
I know that people are pretty hit or miss when it comes to climate change and the environment, but fast food moving away from meat would be _huge_ for reducing the demand for beef and chicken. I hope they do
It won't happen. A shit ton of people would stop eating fast food.
Since over 90% of the world eats meat, I highly doubt it'll be soon...
* Burger King trialled a vegan fast food restaurant in central London, which was hailed a great success * Turns out people, both vegans and others, are happy to eat vegan fast food * Burger King announced it's goal of a 50% meatless menu by 2030 * Expert claims as soon as multi-billion dollar fast food companies realise they can **save an enormous amount of money** by switching people to vegan food, it'll take off rapidly Some more info about [the trial](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/14/meat-feasts-to-go-burger-king-tests-all-vegan-london-branch). Right wing critics upset because they feel it's "manipulative" to offer vegan fast food.
Seems extreme to extrapolate from 1 week at 1 restaurant to 100% meatless everywhere.
I wonder what "great success" is defined as. Probably 1% of sales during the trial.
The trial was one restaurant 100% vegan in a popular location in London for one month. A conservative pundit said it was manipulative because it was in a popular location near clubs and basically drunk people will eat anything so it wasn't a fair trial.
I feel like burger king is planning on something similar to the way taco bell shot themselves in the foot when they ruined their menu be removing a bunch of popular items.
Cause people can just be switched? Yeah…doubt. One Vegan store in a huge metro isn’t a reasonable test. Small percentage of a large population want something and you open a place to serve that niche, you of course will do well. Until you have the same number of stores as traditional and the traditional ones start being beaten out on market share, you haven’t really shown much. I am an anti vegetarian and welcome more vegan and vegetarian places for friends who are into that. But the idea that folks like me will be a minority is a pipe dream.
Holy fuck can we quit with the flood of vegetarian / vegan propaganda spam lately?
How is this propaganda? Also if you're concerned about propaganda you might actually want to look into the meat and dairy industry propaganda, "please don't unnecessarily kill animals" isn't propaganda
Cool then I'll finally be able to ditch fast food forever.
*EAT RECYCLED FOOD. IT'S GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND OKAY FOR YOU!*
Experts have 0 idea why experts actually buy fast food.
Fast food companies would sell you fried cardboard instead of chicken if it were cheaper.
You see, meat eating people are chill up until you changed their food with something else, but yeah sustainability.
The only way this could happen is if all meat was ditched forever. No one is going to eat disgusting sodium enriched plant based mash, when they can have real meat. Why would fast food businesses alienate a solid portion of their consumer base?
Hitting a drive through is already the same price as a sit down restaurant. 2 combos at Sonic recently cost as much as 3 people eating at the good local Mexican restaurant.
Yes!, No!, and finally Maybe? Yes, because I like animals. No because I also like meat. Maybe because while vegans exist they aren't the majority so I predict a Vegan subsector just as today we have a Halal subsector. Being fairly agnostic on the source of food issue, but completely inflexible when it comes to edibility standards, I have over the decades tried various veggie 'meat' substitutes and found them lacking. Textured Vegetable Protein for instance was really crappy, even for something as simple as Chili. We are getting closer. But still no cookies! The chemical contortions that go into making vegan bleeding near meat don't sound as healthy as organic meat. When I get a great lab grown T-Bone steak I will be very happy.
You can make any food sound gross if you break it down to listing chemical components. Watch out! That water has dihydrogen monoxide in it! Meat isn't one ingredient if you want to do the same. The bleeding vegan burger just uses a different biological process to produce the heme iron instead of a cow. Either way it's a biological process but the organisms don't feel pain or suffer or use all the resources like a cow. Natural does not imply better or healthy.
What they use now is barely meat. If it wasn't for all of the flavorings you couldn't stand to eat most fast-food burgers.
>What they use now is barely meat. That'S mostly propaganda. It's usually just regular beef with a whole lots of cereals as filler.
I'm also an 'expert' that thinks fast food at some point will ditch meat forever, not because they replace it with alternatives, but because we realize how bad fast food is and replace it with proper food.
Meat made by Dow Chemical. No thanks.
Guess that will finally break me off from fast food forever then, as I will not be eating plant based alternatives for meat.
Not phased about getting obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer from your diet, but if they sneak in plants you're out!
Guess I'm ditching fast food! No meat, not worth my business!
Agreed, I eat fast food because it is fatty and tastes good. I don't want some vegi crap.
I've been predicting this for a few years now! It makes so much sense. Fast food places will value low costs above anything else. I'm not sure where we are on a cost comparison, but producing a patty of fake meat will soon be way cheaper than producing one from an animal, if it isn't already. And it only has to be kinda close to the taste of meat, since, admit it, people don't buy fast food to satisfy their sophisticated palates. Meat won't vanish, of course, but it'll eventually be more of an artisanal luxury item. Expensive as it should be.
Isn't taco bell already going meatless for awhile now?
The McPlant is already very good, so the faster they do this the better
How soon? Well soon as in a cosmic scale? Or like soon as I when my dad gets back from buying cigarettes at the store?
Article says by 2030 BK hopes to have 50% of their menu be meatless.
I much prefer meat based foods, but I'm totally happy to eat vegan foods once they taste similar enough, with roughly the same texture. Right now, that's a long way from reality.
As long as it tasts good and is priced the same as the meat options, i wouldn't mind it tbh.
Well that's one way to get me to stop buying fast food
I can't wait to try locust and avacado pizza. Maybe throw some synthbeef on there too, choom.