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Fake meat products are a bad idea since they will at best fall in the uncanny valley. They are never going to produce real dairy or meat from plants in a factory.
The vegan alternatives producers should stop emulating meat and instead focus on making something that fills the same role. Tasty on the BBQ would be better than almost meat. The goal shouldn't be to approach dairy or meat but instead create a product that fills the same niche. Instead of trying to recreate milk from a cow create an excellent liquid to have in coffee. It doesn't have to be white or resemble milk, it just needs to improve coffee.
Fake meats are handy because they allow use of existing recipes with a simple substitution, rather than requiring a new cookbook.
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Agreed. They're also limiting to their audience to people who don't eat meat but still want something similar, which is a large number of people but not as large as it could be. I've never tried Impossible products and don't plan to. I do find, however, that pretty tasty "burgers" can be made with non-meat products, like portobello mushroom or black bean. These don't taste anything like beef, but they're not trying to; I can enjoy them for what they are and not in comparison to something else that I'm perfectly willing to have if I want it. I even think Garden Burgers are fine on occasion. I'm honestly surprised such products exist in the first place since I'd assume a vegetarian wouldn't be particularly interested in a meat-like product, but who knows.
There's a significant number of vegetarians (myself included) who miss meat and don't eat it for purely ethical reasons, although most are pretty sheepish about admitting it because vegetarian culture has a central myth that food lacking meat lacks nothing that food with meat has. For that group, fake meat is theoretically an attractive idea. In practice, though, it falls short.
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They…are doing this. Tofu variants, tempeh, seitan, all the other not-quite-substitutes. Sometimes they get marketed as replacements, sometimes they’re very straightforward about filling a similar role. A savory, calorie-dense blob of protein and fats is always going be used similarly to meat.
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