Is it just pure lobbying or perhaps also consumer preference? Because there’s plenty of money to be made across the entire agriculture and food and production spectrum in the processing of the goop that goes into these types of products. I think a lot of people honestly would rather eat a real vegetarian diet (Indian, etc) than the ultra processed soy beans and various chemical binders wearing a meat Halloween costume.
> the ultra processed soy beans and various chemical binders wearing a meat Halloween costume.
This reads like propaganda. Take tofurkey for example, it's just seitan and tofu and the same "chemical binders" you'll see in every other product in the freezer aisle.
And tofu is only as "ultra-processed" as cheese or bread is.
Yeah, tofu is not even in the same class as the synthetic burgers. Take a second and go read their ingredient lists. I’m gonna go with the Indian or falafel meal, which happens to be delicious. Which I think is the choice consumers are making.
I assume you're talking about Impossible Burger and its ilk. Stuff like methylcellulose (non-digestible fiber) and L-Tryptophan (present in meat and eggs, added here to supplement nutrition) sound scary, but they're everywhere as boring nutritional additives.
The only odd one is soy leghemoglobin, which comes from soybeans but mimics meat hemoglobin. It's just part of the legume, though.
The only troubling thing on the ingredients list is how much oil they put into it, but you can make the same complaint with 70/30 meat burgers. The macros are bad, but most burgers are.
I hope you use fresh turmeric for your Indian meal, because the powdered stuff is sometimes adulterated with lead oxide.
Eating is something one does several times a day every day of their lives. It must be done regardless of how broke or in how much of a hurry you are. I applaud anyone who chooses to add this stress to their daily lives voluntarily till the end of their days, but I'm not going to demonize someone for choosing to reject the time-intensive thing in favor of an alternative that's completely normal, cheaper, and faster.
I wouldn't have an issue with consuming meat if people wouldn't neglect how wrong the state of the industry is at scale. Eating meat might have been normal throughout humanity, but the industry scale meat production is everything but normal. Its ruining peoples health, normalizes the atrocities happening in farms on a daily basis and generally treats animals horribly. If you eat meat at least do it with a consciousness.
