Ground chests are also probably not okay to inhale, but here we are eating them whole. Why not dip some of that 'bestos in guac? Should solve all issues tbh.
Here are more details (and more context is in the article):
“Someone had tipped off the foundation on something that disqualified Climax, Good Food Foundation Executive Director Sarah Weiner told the Washington Post. The complaint potentially arose from Climax’s use of the ingredient kokum butter, which has not been designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration. However, Zahn told the Washington Post that the company has replaced the ingredient with cocoa butter, which was the version he said he submitted for the awards (although Weiner contests this).
The Good Food Awards also didn’t require GRAS certification for all ingredients back when contestants submitted their products — rather, the foundation added this to the rules later on. Zahn claims the Good Food Foundation never reached out to Climax to inform the company of the new requirement, although Weiner told the Washington Post it attempted to. SFGATE could not reach the Good Food Foundation for comment in time for publication.
“It would have been very easy for them to reach out to us and tell us about the new requirements,” Zahn told SFGATE. “… The thing that’s upsetting to me is that they were kind of unprofessional by changing the rules a week before the event.””
Genuine question: how would cheese be considered “murder” in this sense (unless you’re just going along with the original comment), I guess another way to weird it would be how is cheese bad, according to veganism and vegetarianism?
Because you can’t get consent from the animal you’re milking.
Cheese isn’t bad in vegetarianism only veganism. One says “I won’t eat animals” the other is “I won’t eat anything made by animals or the animals themelves.”
As far as the murder part goes, dairy cows are mostly all killed very quickly after they stop producing milk. They are almost never allowed to live out their full lives. Especially, none of the cows in the larger dairy industry. The calves produced in the process are also just raised to be slaughtered. Besides the murder, The act of farming dairy products is also just cruel and inhumane in practice.
To produce milk, cows have to be kept in a pretty much constant state of pregnancy. Once the calves are born, they are immediately taken from the mother, and it is known that cows have maternal instincts that makes this painful for them. They have to be taken away, because otherwise they will drink the milk we are trying to steal from the process. Then the calf’s are raised in isolation for the first few months of their life on a milk substitute.
That is the bare minimum amount of cruelty needed to produce milk. Obviously, our modern capitalist driven dairy industry ramps up the cruelty in many other ways to increase productivity and efficiency.
thats like saying that the point of buying non nestle water is so that it doesnt taste like nestle water. (yes they all taste a little different, i mostly attribute that to secondary factors though)
Also you can make cheese without murdering cows im pretty sure?
also weird off topic question, im curious about this. But would consuming breast milk as a child be considered non vegan? I realize at this point it doesn’t really matter since you have no autonomy as a person, but i’m curious about the ethics in application to humans.
You technically could make cheese without murdering a cow but you won’t find any made that way. Cows only produce milk for their young. To make milk they need to be repeatedly impregnated over and over again. Lifespan of a cow can be 20 years, though they are usually killed after about 5 as their milk output drops. Half of the cows they give birth to will be male and almost all killed as they don’t produce milk. Some of the females may be killed too as you’ll end up with more cows than you have room for it you keep them all.
As for a human child, drinking human breast milk is considered vegan as long as it was given consensually. If you kidnap someone and tie them up in your basement then it wouldn’t be.
A baby human consuming their mother’s breast milk is vegan, because the mother is consenting to it. A cow cannot consent to being forcibly, artificially impregnated for the sake of producing milk. They don’t consent to having their horns chopped off. Nor do they consent to their children being stolen from them almost immediately after birth to be butchered for veal.
Yes plant-based cheeses are intended to mimic animal cheeses. But that doesn’t mean they have to be identical. Guilt puts a tint on the things we experience, and the way we feel can be considered a dimension of flavor. I would imagine a lot of people would argue they don’t feel guilty about consuming animals or their secretions, but that’s only because they’ve never experienced any time without that guilt. If you’re used to feeling a certain way every day, you start to forget about the feeling all together, even though it’s still effecting you in the background.
The idea with plant-based alternatives is to have all of the good properties of their animal-counterparts, and none of the bad. Cheese that’s free of the shame and guilt of causing unnecessary harm and suffering to thinking, feeling, sentient beings inherently tastes better.
A baby human consuming their mother’s breast milk is vegan, because the mother is consenting to it. A cow cannot consent to being forcibly, artificially impregnated for the sake of producing milk. They don’t consent to having their horns chopped off. Nor do they consent to their children being stolen from them almost immediately after birth to be butchered for veal.
i suppose that makes sense, so hypothetically if we solved all of those problems, it would be vegan? That sounds about right to me. And if it’s consent based, then what if the mother is forced to bear a child for example, surely that would no longer be vegan?
Yes plant-based cheeses are intended to mimic animal cheeses. But that doesn’t mean they have to be identical.
Yeah, but then you should probably not name it, or base it directly off of an existing cheese, in which case, fine by me. Don’t pull up with some shit that is explicitly not “blue cheese” and then call it “blue cheese” though. That’s just lying.
The idea with plant-based alternatives is to have all of the good properties of their animal-counterparts, and none of the bad. Cheese that’s free of the shame and guilt of causing unnecessary harm and suffering to thinking, feeling, sentient beings inherently tastes better.
i mean, i guess so, but then at that point we start getting into philosophy and nihilistic shit starts to crop up. But any improvement is a potential improvement i suppose. It’s incredibly hard, if not impossible, to live a truly “net zero” lifestyle. Even monks don’t do it, and they don’t do shit.
Only replying to your last point, and on that I only have to say that perfection is the enemy of greatness. The vegan philosophy is about doing the best we can, within practical limits. I can’t stop myself from breathing or my mere existence causing harm to beings I can’t even see, but doing more feasible actions like abstaining from animal consumption and electing not to purchase or use other animal products has substantial benefits that are felt.
yeah that’s fair enough. But then again it is called veganism for a reason. I suppose i would probably rather it be called something more broad, if it’s actually less about the actual consumption, and more about the morals and technicalities of how things work.
I do think the name itself is problematic. To anyone unfamiliar to the ideas, the word hints at something to do with vegetables, and yes that currently plays a role, but it’s not the point. It’s more of an animal rights milieu, and plants are only relevant at this point in time because it’s the least harmful way humans can sustain themselves for now. But that ignores that animal rights go far beyond diet, and that fact tends to get lost during any outreach since all most people are thinking about is the foods they dread to give up.
I’ve had a few good vegan cheeses. Not all of it is 1 to 1 with the real deal, but a lot ends up being good in its own way. Just wish it wasn’t so damn expensive. Hopefully that changes over time. Lactose doesn’t agree with me so the more (affordable) non-dairy options there are, the happier I am.
Many have gotten super good in the last few years. I’ve had some people who are very hard to get to admit to liking anything vegan ask what brand and where to buy it after they tasted it. Everything from blue cheese and brie to feta, smoked cheddar, parmesan and mozzarella. There are also many really good, both simple and more complicated recipes online to make your own of basically any kind.
So I don’t necessarily agree in general, it depends on how you define milk… If you curdle a liquid and it becomes cheese like, it’s probably cheese? Unless milk can only come from mammals/animals.
I would, in fact, definite milk as only coming from a mammal. Coconut milk or soy milk or nut milk or whatever else may superficially resemble milk but they’re pretty fundamentally not the same sort of substance as milk.
Just because it’s called the same, doesn’t mean it generally is. In Germany we have something called “Scheuermilch”, which literally translates into “abrasion milk”. The only property it shares with milk or even plant-milk is its colour. It’s a cleaning product. You could of course define milk more broadly as “white liquid”…
Fun fact on the side: almond milk & co. are not allowed to be called milk on the packaging in germany. They’re usually called something along the lines of “almond drink”. Reason being because it might confuse the buyer. Scheuermilch is still allowed to be called Scheuermilch though and coconut milk is still coconut milk. So according to our government, apparently, milk can be any white liquid unless it’s a plant based substitute for cow milk. Then it’s something entirely different.
So it’s arbitrary except for the whitish color. So who do you think is pushing for the name changes, because we’ve been doing this for 1200 years now. I expect someone doesn’t want to have to put dairy or cow on their labels. Goat milk, after all, is still unquestionably milk and is still called goat milk.
It’s extreme. The fact that you can’t see that it is undermines your entire argument. You’re not doing yourself any favors by saying that vegan cheese is as oppressed as gay people have been. No one’s being dragged behind a truck because they presented vegan cheese as a dairy product. No one’s shouting slurs at you.
You alienate people who might otherwise have agreed with you.
As an example, look at the other end of the spectrum using exactly the same, ridiculous logic. Selling vegan cheese is legal. Selling people was also once legal.
You really believe in veganism and that’s great. I’m happy for you. But punch in your weight class my dude. Some people think vegan blue cheese is better, but it lost a competition for not technically being cheese. Some people think chili has beans, but since 1967 beans have been strictly forbidden from ICS cookoffs but the people’s choice competitions strictly require them. There are reasonable parallels to be drawn there.
There is no reasonable parallel between vegan cheese in a cheese cookoff, and actual hatred of LGBTQ+ people
You’re straw manning their argument. They aren’t comparing the oppression of LGBTQIA+ folk to the oppression of cheese. The comparison is to the oppression of animals - who most definitely are being dragged behind the truck.
You can, and probably would, make the argument that animals don’t deserve the same level of moral consideration as LGBTQIA+ humans, but the vegan argument is that non-human animals experience pain and suffering and deserve the same right to life and non-exploitation for the same reason that any human (LGBTQIA+ or not) does.
And I suppose it is up to the organizers of a contest over cheese to define the parameters of what constitutes cheese. But milk seems like a reasonable starting point. It is, after all, a dairy product.
Plant-based cheeses are allowed in their competition. They technically got disqualified because one of the ingredients is some type of fat that currently doesn’t have GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status. Except they only made it an issue after the plant-based cheese had won.
The whole resistance to reinterpreting culinary language is just nothing but anti-competitiveness.
That actually strikes me as a extremely reasonable justification for disqualifying it. The fact that they only noticed after it won is also not particularly suspicious.
Edit: how many alt accounts are down voting me for saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to enter in a food with potentially unsafe ingredients?
I’ll just copy and paste the same thing I replied with, above:
Here are more details (and more context is in the article):
“Someone had tipped off the foundation on something that disqualified Climax, Good Food Foundation Executive Director Sarah Weiner told the Washington Post. The complaint potentially arose from Climax’s use of the ingredient kokum butter, which has not been designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration. However, Zahn told the Washington Post that the company has replaced the ingredient with cocoa butter, which was the version he said he submitted for the awards (although Weiner contests this).
The Good Food Awards also didn’t require GRAS certification for all ingredients back when contestants submitted their products — rather, the foundation added this to the rules later on. Zahn claims the Good Food Foundation never reached out to Climax to inform the company of the new requirement, although Weiner told the Washington Post it attempted to. SFGATE could not reach the Good Food Foundation for comment in time for publication.
“It would have been very easy for them to reach out to us and tell us about the new requirements,” Zahn told SFGATE. “… The thing that’s upsetting to me is that they were kind of unprofessional by changing the rules a week before the event.””
Maybe they didn’t make it an issue until after because it was under their radar? Once it became the center of attention they might have thought safety of the winner was important? The vast majority of the comments in this thread don’t even seem to know why it was disqualified.
Here are more details (and more context is in the article):
“Someone had tipped off the foundation on something that disqualified Climax, Good Food Foundation Executive Director Sarah Weiner told the Washington Post. The complaint potentially arose from Climax’s use of the ingredient kokum butter, which has not been designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration. However, Zahn told the Washington Post that the company has replaced the ingredient with cocoa butter, which was the version he said he submitted for the awards (although Weiner contests this).
The Good Food Awards also didn’t require GRAS certification for all ingredients back when contestants submitted their products — rather, the foundation added this to the rules later on. Zahn claims the Good Food Foundation never reached out to Climax to inform the company of the new requirement, although Weiner told the Washington Post it attempted to. SFGATE could not reach the Good Food Foundation for comment in time for publication.
“It would have been very easy for them to reach out to us and tell us about the new requirements,” Zahn told SFGATE. “… The thing that’s upsetting to me is that they were kind of unprofessional by changing the rules a week before the event.””
Tried some vegan "feta" type cheese for my salad, based on cocos oil, and it was pretty bad. It had a terrible stink and taste like overripe cheese, which is kinda the opposite of what you'd expect from this type. It also became incredibly smeary immediately when I tried to crumble it, so it only mimics the original consistency when it is untouched.
The only vegan products that I've tried and liked so far were oat milk, which is pretty much tasting like regular milk at this point (at least my brand), some vegan Schnitzel which tastes not quite but close enough like those premade regular ones you'd get at a grocery store, and some "cut chicken" type stuff which honestly was pretty great in taste and consistency and definitely something I get again if I want to throw some mixed veggie bag into the pan. Everything else I've tried ranged from "meh" to "eugh". But I'm sure it's just a matter of more R&D.
I love using ground beef substitutes in meatloaf and shepards pie. Using ground flaxseed as a binding agent and coursely ground oats as breadcrumbs has made for some excellent dinner dates!
Tried a vegan ground meat from my local Lidl and it was easily one of the worst things. Terrible taste and smell, nothing like meat at all and my kitchen stank for weeks. Really put me off of a lot of those meat substitutes, especially since it was so highly praised.
Lentils make for a great meat replacement in a Shepard's Pie. You adjust seasonings a bit, but at this point I might actually prefer it to regular ol' Shepard's Pie.
I’m not convinced of that. At the end of the day, it’s a collection of mostly proteins arranged in certain ways plus water and salt. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that something like that can be replicated.
There is cartilage, fats, cell structure, and a ton of other things that make up the majority of meat that are extremely difficult to replicate for texture both when it is first cooked/heated/whatever and how it holds up as leftovers. Like different cuts of meat are basically the same parts but wildly different in taste and texture just like plants are basically the same except for all their differences.
Honestly I don’t get why so many people want a fake version of meat made out of plants when plants are pretty awesome on their own. grilled vegetables are fantastic! There are a ton of cultures with meals that are vegetarian or vegan and very complex in both flavor and texture because they played to the strengths of their available foods. Why bother with trying to make mediocre fake sausage when spring rolls exist?
If it convinces people who feel that it is necessary to have something that is a basic replacement for the meat that they eat to switch, which I believe it does sometimes, I think it makes sense.
Even convincing people to eat less meat and have a veggie burger once a week instead of a beef burger would be a good thing. It’s easier to convince them to do that than to have Nepali food.
I wouldn’t go that far, but it does have a flavor that the fungus adds that other cheeses don’t. However, to win this award, it would have to be pretty indistinguishable from not just blue cheese, but top-of-the-line blue cheese, which is damn impressive for something without any dairy in it.
I’m curious what they can achieve with cheddar based on that.
I’ve definitely had some good hot dogs and brats. I don’t remember which stadium style hot dogs I’ve tried, but I usually go for some flavor of Field Roast.
Dairy ain’t going anywhere, it’s legitimately a national security thing for food scarcity (government cheese). It’s still also heavily subsidized of course (as is Corn). Now if that could be swung to a different animal (sheep or goats), that’d have a significant impact environmentally.
I don’t see why it has to be government cheese and couldn’t be government rice and beans or government lentils. Put the subsidy dollars into plant foods and it’ll happen.
I (and my lactose intolerant intestines) wholeheartedly agree. We seem determined to recreate the conditions of the dustbowl by neglecting crop rotation and mono-crops.
Ugh, It’s a little judgy and I actually like AI in some day-to-day search scenarios but instantly disappointed in the blue cheese company when this banner appeared across the top of their homepage. " Find out how AI is shaping the future of Food and how you can support the movement! " With links to join a mailing list.
Also, just an FYI, they aren’t selling the cheese to consumers yet, it’s only available in a handful of restaurants.
That is a specific day to day scenario that makes sense to me for AI - finding new combinations of flavors by following some machine learning recommendation, especially if the intended application is to use AI to discover better vegan cheeses
I don’t think you really even need AI (in the sense of LLMs, as that’s usually what’s referred to with AI) for a flavor pairing software whatchamacallit. I forget what the concept is called but I learned about it through the flavor matrix. Where you essentially compare the different aromatic and flavor compounds in a given food/ingredient and base recommendations off of other foods with compatible compounds in them. A large enough database and a good UI would be a gamechanger for cooking
Yeah, machine learning is going to be great for the protein revolution. For Qorn they had to run thousands of experiments to find something that tasted good. Imagine if you can model millions of experiments and already weed out 98% of proteins…
I'm not sure I get the mailing list part, but this is the type of task modern Machine Learning is actually great at (much better than they are at text or art generation). You have some huge open possibility space the humans can't possibly explore all of, and where false negatives aren't costly. You can use the model to narrow down the possibility space to something manageable for a human to review manually. Very similar to how its used in astrophysics, for example.
The dairy and meat lobbies are something else. It’s like smoking in the fifties.
It’s well established that there are serious health concerns when you consume animal produce (not to mention environmental and animal welfare ones), yet the industry keeps pushing back on plant-based alternatives.
I’ve heard of potential health issues from red meat consumption, but all animal products? That’s a first for me. Do you have any sources to share on this?
I don’t get much time to watch videos these days so I’m not going through the Netflix series. Though it looks like it’s based off this paper, and that I can look through.
They studied 22 pairs of twins, intervened by changing their diets so that one gets a vegan diet and the other an omnivore diet, then measured a bunch of stuff via blood and stool samples. I don’t see mention of how they correct for multiple hypotheses, but I’ll just give them the benefit of the doubt here.
They found statistical significance in two places
LDL-C: Participants all start out in a healthy range, and they stay in a healthy range. So while the vegans improved on this measure, it also tells us that omnivores are perfectly healthy as well.
Fasting insulin levels: Same as LDL-C. Start off healthy, ended up healthy. We see the vegans having lower fasting insulin, but we don’t know if that’s a good thing or not when they’re already starting at 12.7 μIU/mL.
So basically, the conclusion from the paper is that vegan and omnivore diets are both perfectly healthy, but you might gain slight benefits from going vegan.
Thanks for looking that up. I’m no dietician or medical expert myself, so I have to go by the more easily digestible media. That does run the risk of being more sensationalised.
One thing I did take away from the Netflix series was that both the omnivore diet and vegan one were designed to be well-balanced. Everything in moderation works well, I suppose.
Technically it can’t be all animal products, since honey is about 98% sugar, and despite the hate campaign currently hitting carbs, sugar is not quite as harmful (in and of itself) as it’s made out to be.
But if we’re referring to all animal products in the sense of meat, dairy, and eggs - those three foods have nutritional properties that are all very similar and they do have some overlap in terms of health issues.
The biggest thing they have in common is being a package deal with high amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. Heart disease is generally the industrialized world’s number one killer, and all three animal foods initiate the onset and progress the state of heart disease.
Then there are issues that are less settled, like to what degree do these foods cause various cancers?
And then this one is even more in need of further study, but there might be a link between these foods and autoimmune disorders.
I’m aware that there’s evidence of saturated fats having undesirable effects on your health. But plenty of meats are low in saturated fats (e.g. skinless chicken breast, or fish).
Relatively low if you compare it only to other meats or animal products. So while you can choose animal products that might progress these chronic metabolic diseases slower, you are still advancing them. But there are lots of factors that complicate things. For example the health impacts of animal products also depend on how you cook them, and what you eat them with. Cured meats are unanimously considered one of the worst things you can consume, right up there with smoking. Steamed fish would probably be about the least harmful (except that fish have some of the highest levels of bioaccumulated toxins and heavy metals). Actually, bugs are likely the least harmful, for those who are comfortable with that. Eating a source of fiber mitigates some of the harm from animal products as shown in this video:
Further complicating things is that single nutrients often behave differently depending on context. For example antioxidants other than some of the essential vitamins have never been shown to produce their purported effects outside of laboratory conditions, and some supplemented sources of antioxidants have even been shown to be a little harmful. But when we test the whole foods that contain those antioxidants, we get data like how increasing leafy green consumption has been correlated with a longer life expectancy.
And it’s similar for saturated fats and animal products. In the most established science on the matter you’ll see they don’t just talk about saturated fat alone - the science appears to show a relationship between the ratio of saturated and unsaturated fats consumed, particularly polyunsaturated fats. This book describes that science quite well-
But going back to that nutrients vs whole foods, there might be more than just the fats at play. This piece by Colin Campbell is a bit of a manifesto against nutritional reductionism, and suggests that the animal proteins themselves might play more of a role than we had thought:
When you put whole diets to the test, what starts to become most consistent is how the most whole-plant-dominant diets by far achieve the most remarkable results. It’s apparent in the Adventist Health Studies, the Esselstyn Heart Disease Reversal diet, as well as Dean Ornishes full lifestyle intervention program. The latter two claim they can reverse heart disease, which is a controversial claim. More study is needed to prove whether that’s true or false, but regardless it’s still apparent that these fully plant-based dietary interventions do more than any others to restore people to good health.
And it’s a thing where science and personal experience match. If you check out the online whole-food plant-based support communities, you see people routinely report almost miraculous changes to their health and wellbeing in a matter of weeks or even days. It’s the kind of thing that once you experience it fully enough, you don’t want to go back.
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