5 Comments
Mar 7, 2023·edited Mar 7, 2023

Great post on this topic, especially the solutions part. thank you!

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I much prefer Substack over Mailchimp for this type of content, your previous newsletters didn't look as good when sharing, it also seems easier to pick up referrals here.

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Well written - identified all the worries that have come up in conversations with colleagues when discussing plant based alternatives. Hope your identified solutions will soon be taken up by producers and stakeholders.

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Since plant based meat is a tech industry, I am wondering if it's worth comparing with VR - another industry that was hyper to the hills not too long ago and is now (for the n-th time!) floundering. The uncanny valley might be the underlying problem in both cases. As a vegan, plant based meat is the only kind of meat I eat, but I don't like it enough to make it a staple. Despite having a high moral prior and a real fondness for patties in a bun.

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Mar 7, 2023·edited Mar 7, 2023

The comments on taste ring true to me as someone who isn’t socially well-connected to the animal welfare or vegan world. Plant-based meat lost its appeal to just about everyone I know after they tried it and found it wasn’t remotely close to the taste of (good) meat from animals. Of course, it was way better than the veggie burgers of yore - but most people have never tried a veggie burger; they want the animal meat taste.

But I've always been puzzled by the plant-based meat hype. I'm more hopeful about cultured meat. It makes intuitive sense to me (admittedly, not a food scientist) that cultured meat would achieve comparable taste more easily than plant-based meat.

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