There are better fake cheeses these days. It’s easier to give it up than it ever was. And tons of pizzerias now offer vegan cheese pizzas.
But honestly giving up beef alone should be commended, just for environmental/climate reasons.
I haven’t seen fake cheese that tastes good yet. A good tip is not to try to make vegan food taste like non vegan. Just enjoy the vegan foods as they are.
PS I’m trying the whole “give up beef” thing plus “be vegan one day of the week”.
A good tip is not to try to make vegan food taste like non vegan. Just enjoy the vegan foods as they are.
As a non vegan/vegetarian, I agree fully. By trying to replicate something else, the result often appears like a worse alternative.
I enjoy plenty of vegetarian and vegan foods, but don’t try and tell me that a plant based burger tastes the same as a normal burger, that just ruins the experience.
Play to your own strengths and don’t pretend to be something you are not, by doing that you reduce the stigma of vegan and vegetarian labels becoming associated with lower quality.
The concept of being vegetarian one day a week sounds like a brilliant idea, not sure that I would go the entire way to vegan across a full day, but a few vegan meals in a week wouldn’t be so hard.
While I understand your argument and fully agree that there are plenty of normal vegan dishes that hold there own, this point always comes from the non vegans 😅
Meat tastes good, and going vegan often means giving up favourite dishes that you grew up with. Having the mock alternatives means that when you do get that itch, you can still kind of scratch it. I also dont think it is fair to write them all of as inferior, there are some pretty incredible options these days.
No, having a mock alternative doesn’t sceatch the itch, it just reinforces how much better the real version of that thing was. While I haven’t tried them all, I have tried a lot due to recommendations by friends and every one has been like comparing turkey bacon to regular bacon. No, it isn’t even close.
I enjoy a lot of dishes that are vegetarian or vegan because they play to the strengths of their ingredients without pretending to be something else. Replicating the format is fine, many kinds of dishes share similar formats, but trying to compare it to something specific is a bad idea. I have had some vegsn sausages thst were great for example, but they are their own thing snd not comparable to beef, pork, or combination sausages and there is such a wide variety of meat sausages there is no need to compare it to anything specific. It can be its own thing!
Hard disagree. I quite like the plant-based burgers, hot dogs, jerky, cheeses, etc. They really do satisfy me in the same way as the “real” ones.
a big part is the perception of what you’re used to, I rarely eat meat nowadays and when I do it tends to be game.
My burger patties have gotten to a point where I prefer them to any meat alternative, I’m not saying they’re the same. Outside of serving the same purpose in a burger, but it’s pretty wild I scoff at minced red deer meat now - It just doesn’t carry the same umfph
don’t try and tell me a plant based burger tastes the same as a normal burger
Go to burger king. Get a regular whopper and an impossible whopper. They are literally indistinguishable. Well, until an hour later when the impossible whopper gives you a ton of gas lol.
That’s a straight up case of dumping enough crap on top of each patty that you can’t tell what the hell you are eating anyway.
Try cooking each patty with nothing more than a bit of salt and eat them plain with nothing else, not even a bun, and then tell me you can’t taste the difference.
But then that wouldn’t be a burger…
If you need to hide the taste with all that crap, can it really taste good?
All that crap? You mean buns?
Exactly. I really dislike the taste of beef patty. But i tried a patty looking vegan product. It gave me the same bad taste.
Non vegetarian here. A vegan friend served me some vegan burger and I was absolutely shocked at how good it was. Did it taste exactly like beef? No. However it hit most of the spots to sate a craving I may have for one. The vegan cheese pretty much perfectly emulated american “cheese”, which I don’t personally use, but on a burger has a specific place. I have also introduce TVP into my normal diet. If you cook it right it can act as a very good alternative to crumbled ground beef. My friend makes a vegan chili dip that, if not told, almost everyone just assumes contains beef.
Other vegan cheeses I have tried are awful, even some expensive ones. My best friend doesn’t process animal protein, so was basically forced into eating vegan style. We have made some recipes from chefs online, mostly using various types of mushrooms, that are to emulate steak, that have been very good.
giving up beef alone should be commended, just for environmental/climate reasons.
Yes, but the post is about veganism, which is the ethical principle that it’s wrong to exploit animals. Cows enslaved for milk are in most cases worse off than those enslaved for their flesh as they are repeatedly impregnated, have their children killed, and are still slaughtered at a fraction of their lifespan just like the flesh cows.
There are certainly some vegans that do it for environmental reasons. Usually a bit of both though, but not all.
most dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter, and the life span of a dairy cow is about 5 years.
Also, here in Belgium, vegan Gouda is literally cheaper per kilo than actual, cheap Gouda.
I’ve never cut beef out entirely but it is surprisingly easy to dramatically reduce how much one uses. Nearly everything that’s good with beef is also good with other meats. I also found doing meatless Mondays to be a great way to experiment with vegetarian/vegan dishes without feeling like I was missing out on anything and then I could take that knowledge into other days
I think a big problem is a lot of people are not confident in their ability to cook. They maybe know how to make a couple of their favorite childhood dishes and a couple things they picked up along the way, maybe. It’s hard to replace a burger with a portabello if you don’t know how to critically approach cooking temps and times so it ends up awful, or trying to cook a passable ratatouille and not knowing how to use a knife or having any spices in the cupboard
My child has dairy allergies.
The fake cheeses are just okay at best.
I quite enjoy VioLife’s cheeses. They are mostly based on coconut oil so they have a similar flavour, but it’s delicious and it melts well.
The “spreads” are good, maybe the fake feta, but generally agree that dsiya is basically only good if you’re early days and struggling, or if your friends insist on making a regular pizza and don’t know how to make that interesting without cheese so here’s some daiya idk, I guess it’s edible.
Daiya smells like dirty socks, especially when heated
My wife is allergic to dairy and it throws me off every time
I mean, plenty of actual cheese is supposed to smell like dirty socks!
We basically only use Chao cheese (not to be confused with Sonic) for the kid these days.
It’s alright. There is also a decent shredded alternative.
Yeah, Daiya is terrible. My wife and one of my kids can;t eat dairy. Violife seems to be one of the better shredded !cheeses, but only when melted.
So I dont have to be a level 8 vegan to not be a POS?
Despite what a vocal minority on here would have you feel, no, you do not. Every small, positive change should be celebrated
We got a vegan Margherita for us 3hrn my vegan friend was visiting. Couldn’t notice a difference to a normal cheese pizza.
Trump’s mystery meat has made me pause eating beef. Replacing it with mostly pork and chicken
Listen, I’m going to cast it into the fire, sure.
But then it’s going to get all goopy and crispy and I’m going to pull it back out again to eat it.
Something is better than nothing. “I could never be a vegetarian/vegan because of bacon” “Ok, then eat vegetarian AND also eat bacon then?”
flexitarian is the way to go first: my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
my understanding is thats its more controlled, not everyday (maybe even only to special occations) eating of meat
IS IT???
I thought flexitarian was someone who can perform very flexible oral sex. 🤯
Flexual intercourse?
🎵 When I get that feeling, I need flexual healing🎵
No, I think that is a yoga cunnilingist or a pilates fellator.
just because you don’t always eat meat, doesn’t mean you need to pick a label for it
flexitarian is a ridiculous term, essentially everyone eats vegetarian or vegan foods sometimes
Someone who cuts most meat out of their diet is closer to a vegetarian than they are to the average diet. But saying they are vegetarian most of the time is going to upset a lot of people.
they’re still just an omnivore…
See, this is why the label exists, so we can say “I decided to cut my meat eating down to ecologically sustainable levels and support animal cruelty as little as possible while acknowledging that it’s a hard, nearly impossible thing to do on a budget to go even fully vegetarian, much less the reality that there’s so many many things going wrong in the world and not everyone can care about everything,” only with one word because the vegan dorks will cry about you being vegetarian too anyways.
if I dont have a label and a flag how can I tell everyone all aspects of myself as the main character in life?
you can still scream. doesneed neither a label nor a flag
Right? Anything is better then nothing
If I had a nickel for every LotR Vegan/Vegetarian meme I’ve seen I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Transcipt
Uruk-Hai Orc labelled “vegans”, holding chickens: “They are not for eating!”
Mordor Orc labelled “vegetarians”: “What about their eggs? They don’t need those!”
I mean: being vegan in anything but cheese is also already something.
Just skipping a meal with meat where you would usually have one is already a big step for the individual.
Käsespatzel 🤤🤤🤤
As a non-German living in Germany. Abendbrot goes hard. Like I didn’t expect it to be so enjoyable, but it’s tasty, easy, and cheap. I know it’s traditional to include cold cuts, but I usually just use cheeses and veggies. Fucking tasty
And the veggies pastes, Aufstrich
Your comment made me (a non-German who lived in Germany for a while this year) feel sad for not giving Abendbrot a chance
Kann man Speck rein machen!
*(GASGÛL) They were once men; healthy men. Then Tongue the Deceiver gave to them nine rounds of Cheese. Blinded by their hunger, they took them without question, one by one falling into gassness. Now they are slaves to his will. They are the Gasgûl: Fartwraiths, neither living nor dead. At all times they feel the presence of the Cheese, drawn to the power of the lactose. They will never stop farting. *
One Whey to rule them all, One Curd to find them, One Stink to bring them all, and in Aroma blind them
Cast it into the fire! Grill it!
Great, now I want halloumi…
I’ve never tried to convince anyone to take up veganism. Instead I avoid bringing it up at all cost because people get weird about it.
Especially funny because while there are other things vegetarians will eat that vegans won’t (Other dairy, eggs), cheese is actually physically addictive because the same protein that makes it curdle breaks down through digestion into a substance that acts like dopamine. It really is the “one ring” of veganism and often the last / hardest thing to give up when one goes vegan.
wait so when i go to the fridge at 3am for cheese im basically literally eating happiness?
You’re taking a hit!
Literally a mild opiate. The hypothesis is that it’s an evolutionary adaptation to ensure babies will reliably crave their mother’s milk.
makes sense, thank you!
Dairy and eggz are also fucking everywhere. Half Pringles flavours have dairy for instance. Fucking bbq sauce Pringles have milk powder when actual bbq sauce doesn’t.
Cakes? Eggs. Probably cream too. Chocolate? Milk. Dark chocolate? Fuck you, milk.
Half the sauces are either egg or milk based too, even though you could use soy milk and margarine to do bechamel and yeah it tastes different but it’s fucking delicious anyway. Then add some fake mozzarella into it to do a bootleg vegan Mornay sauce that is delicious.
Anyway, it’s easy to be vegan at home, but going out or ordering? It’s cheese or dairy everywhere. I do my best effort and I’m happy with it.
Fun fact, cheese is not always vegetarian. It can (quite often) contain animal rennet (from the inside of a young cow stomage, the cow needs to die for this)
Unless, of course, we’re talking about the German Leberkäse (liver cheese), which, naturally, isn’t cheese and doesn’t contain liver.
i think most of the industry uses synthetic remnet.
As a person who check all cheese in the supermarket for this. The current state (EU/NL) is almost 60%, 60% of the cheese in our supermarket is without murdering baby cows. Which I up from last year, and it has been trending up for a while.
I have no clue how other countries are doing, my guess us worse. Some france people still label ‘Fish’ as ‘Vegan’
That number moves much closer to 0% if you start counting the baby cows killed in order to keep their mothers perpetually lactating, rather than just those whose bodies were used as a direct ingredient.
A cow will be impregnated 6-8 times during her life on a typical dairy farm, before she is killed af half her natural lifespan to be replaced by a younger cow. One of those baby cows will be raised as that replacement cow, the rest will be killed shortly after birth.
Killing baby cows is an inherent part of cow-milk production.
most dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter.
a man who has never eaten veal.
hardly any dairy calves end up as veal.
the math
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsandprod.xlsx?v=1413.4
thousands_of_head_of_cows = 9448.0 actual_cows = 1000 * thousands_of_head_of_cows annual_male_calves = .5 * actual_cows veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds = 260 annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds = 58 annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal = ((annual_veal_production_in_millions_of_pounds * 1000000) / (veal_weight_of_calves_in_pounds * annual_male_calves))*100 print(annual_percentage_of_bobby_calves_that_become_veal)4.722204129486094
It’s highly market-senstive what happens to them, but I have previously worked on dairy farms in NZ and AU, and in both countries, calves(except replacement heifers) that get raised at all are a rounding error, maybe a handful per farm that are kept for personal slaughter and consumption.
If the bobby-calf (aka veal) market is paying well enough, then they are shipped off for slaughter at ~4 days old. If the market doesnt pay well enough to justify 4 days of rearing costs, then they are killed immediately and sold for their skins.
i present the math below
a dairy cows life span is like 5 years
A cows natural life span is 20ish years. They’re kept perpetually pregnant for years until their bodies give out, then they’re slaughtered at around 5 years old.
cows don’t naturally live to 20 years. they can live that long if they are well fed and watered and protected from disease, predators, and the environment. that’s an artificial life span.
ours were closer to twelve but go off the documentary you watched once
you are correct all of our cattle were born seven years old
That would be huge news if true but it doesn’t sound like you have a source
I’m not bringing any moral value, just the note that synthetic remnet is cheaper then real one, another commenter said that about 60% of cheeses use it,i thought it would be much more.
I think many French protected cheeses are not allowed to, but I’m not sure about that
Usage of animal rennet requires disclosure on the packaging, in my country, thanks to a majority of religions being against meat and stuff.
I would really like to be the case more often. I’m a cheese eating vegetarian and I have to look on the ingredients every time I buy cheese. Some brands will even switch from animal to microbial rennet and viceversa within the same product without warning.
What fresh hell is this?
Dairy is the most challenging thing to give up. There are good alternatives - particularly when they’re made of nuts and seeds that have been fermented traditionally - but they’re good in their own way, don’t expect them to be the same.
The stuff made out of almost pure coconut oil is universally disappointing, and coconut is arguably not vegan given the environmental footprint and resulting animal endangerment.
From my experience, there is no good Vegan cheese. Daiyo cheese is awful.
I mean, Daiyo is an example of the artificial-basically-mostly-coconut-oil cheeze I mentioned previously. Most stuff that you can find in the average grocery store is going to suck. Have you tried anything along the lines of, say, this almost award-winning plant-based cheese? Stuff like that is way better, but again, unique. Don’t expect it to be the same, although things may be changing soon since people have figured out how to get one of the key dairy proteins from non-animal sources.
There’s also homemade stuff, which varies. It’s pretty easy to make super creamy mac and cheese with plant-based sources only, for instance.
One of my close friends went vegan right around the pandemic beginning, when everything first started shutting down. Our local bar shut down the day of St Patrick’s day so we invited him over to our place instead for shitty beer with green food dye (it was 3 of us total and we worked in close proximity daily, AND we were very pro-mask)
He used it as an opportunity to introduce us to a vegan version of the cheesy spinach and artichoke dip from like Applebees/Chilis/insert old people restaurant here, but it was made with cashews.
It took him an hour but OH MY LAWD my husband and I still talk about that dip to this day as non-vegans. Better than anything we’ve ordered at a restaurant. We tell everyone about that shit.
Damn that sounds tasty. People hate plant-based food, until they try good plant-based food.
I’ve had some good vegan cheese, and I’ve had bad real cheese, but only one of them cost 3.50 for a pound
I’m lactose intolerant and even for lil old vegan me is difficult to avoid the seductive siren song of cheese.
I actually went about it the other way. After seeing how bad dairy cows have it in the daily (I have in-laws who are dairy farmers) compared to cows raised for their flesh, I tried giving up just cheese, because it’s the one thing I told myself I could never do. I remember specifically saying to a lactose intolerant person that I would kill myself if I couldn’t eat cheese lol.
I can’t imagine eating cheese now, just the smell grossed me out. Like I was cleaning a plastic case that held cheddar (my partner’s) and I swear I couldn’t get the stink out of my fingers for hours. Even cow milk which I used to think was neural and creamy smells and tastes funky and cheesy.
Anyway, that’s all to illustrates how malleable tastes are. I think it must have been so hard to quit, because I remember what I said and did, but not how I felt. It’s like the urge just faded away. Like it was a temptation one moment, and then the next I forgot what I ever liked about it.
Anyway from there reducing and eliminating other products was easy, since I’d already fought the animal product boss battle.
Could always source ethical human milk…and other cheeses.
My Hu-cow sub consents.
ethical human milk
Imagining this overlayed on a man with a big smile on his face.
I feel like this creates some sort of hostility between two groups which usually head into the same direction and respect each other
You vegans sure a contentious people.
You just made an enemy for life!
Then there’s me, a pesce-pollotarian. Because not everywhere has fish.
As with politics, purity culture leads to being ineffective.
Coalitions are important if you want to get anything done.
No unity. No strength. No true scotsman.
Fight, fuckos, Fight!
I feel like it’s just a silly joke.
Rennet makes this a much more complicated decision for vegetarians. Like, if I know that the cheese was made with bacteria-derived enzymes, then that’s cool, but it’s really hard to know and trusting random cheese is just like still eating beef sometimes, so even though I’m vegetarian I end up being so picky about cheese that I hardly eat it anyway.
Spoiler: milk cows get murdered as well. A milk cow is productive for about 5 years, after which they usually get slaughtered for pet food. In that time, they need to have about 3 calves, to continue producing “good returns” amount of milk daily. Two of those calves are not needed to replace the cow, so they get - guess what? - slaughtered and processed to pet food.
Stupid me grew up next to a milk farm and didn’t realize that until way later than I care to admit.
Also, I still eat cheese (reduced amounts) and that’s a moral dilemma for me.
That ethical problem could be solved (well, not if you are “fully” vegan, and view even keeping pets and livestock, unacceptable), by doing good small-scale production. Factory farming producing the inhuman conditions, is needed to make the operations economically sustainable, in the way it is build into capitalist systems. But if you would keep the cows well, milk products could be made quite ethically… Now of course the costs needed to do that would make milk extremely expensive, and small-scale could not replace the massive demand, so people would have to consume way less anyway.
But if you would keep the cows well, milk products could be made quite ethically…
Could be - but that would also mean taking milk away from the calves for a while. Not sure how much milk a cow would be able to continue to give and what the quality would be after the calf has had enough to outgrow infancy.
Now eggs however, those could be absolutely produced without animal suffering. Just be willing to pay more for the eggs so that hens can live free range in natural environments, and still get to continue living when they produce less or even no more eggs until they die from natural causes.
I don’t see a big ethical problem with snatching an unfertilised egg, considering that hens are able to lay like one egg a day. They won’t miss it if you take away a bunch of them and let them breed out the odd one.
Could be - but that would also mean taking milk away from the calves for a while. Not sure how much milk a cow would be able to continue to give and what the quality would be after the calf has had enough to outgrow infancy.
This is doable, especially with the cows, that have been bred to produce milk. You do not even need to separate the mom and calf, for more than a moment, to milk, so we do know it is possible. You just get less milk, than by taking the calf away, so it is not profitable in comparison. There are other problems though, like they should be able to feed mostly by pasture grazing, which takes a lot of land, and if you do not kill some of the cows and bulls for food, you will have way too many… etc.
And with eggs - yes. The EU standards for “bio” eggs are already better (very far from perfect though), so it might be possible to do profitably even. A big ethical problem with factory farming chickens right now, though, is the process of mass producing the egg-laying chickens themselves. Hens are kept, but the male chicks might be just thrown into a shredder. Even if all of them were raised, a lot of the cocks would have to be killed, since there would be carnage otherwise, as you cannot keep them together, and you have to have multiple hens more than cocks in a flock. This also applies if you keep chickens in your backyard, so there are always excess cocks being given away, that nobody wants, and many end up as food.
Poor roosters. I believe the best solution for that would be the “in ovo” gender detection. One article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257912300425X - in an ethical egg production scenario, the quoted machine learning could actually be viable: the false positive roosters are simply lucky, and get raised to adulthood / live a happy life ;) If the reason for false positives is not self-enforcing through genetics, they could even be the normal “fathers of the next generation”.
Assuming, of course, the false positive rate can be lowered enough.
Re: milk - I have to say, for drinking, if you find a good brand, oat milk can be very tasty - I personally even think it tastes better in coffee / cappuccino than regular milk. And cheese - I just happen to have bought this hour for the first time a delicious vegan “Brie” variant: https://vanozza.de/en/produkte.html#brie-pfeffer I am positively surprised, after the last couple of tries I no longer thought I would see the day - but this one is actually yummy!
For oat milk: tastewise best is Oatly Barista, but Oatly is in bed with investors from fascistan, so I go for the second best option which is also delicious: Lidl house brand vemondo, barista drink. Important: it must be the one produced by Grønvang (https://gronvang.dk/?lang=en) - the one by Green & White from Vlissingen/NL tastes bland / watery in comparison.
Oh, I hope they make breakthroughs with the “in ovo” system, that sounds really promising.
And good tips for the oat milks and cheese! I usually just buy one cheap store brand, that is made here in Finland, since I like the really bland taste of it, lol. The least chemically tasting I have found! I also have one vegan cheese I like, but it too, is sold only locally…
I am aware and I do make every effort to reduce and remove dairy (and eggs) from my diet, but I recognize that I fall short of what I would consider vegan. Like if I’m at a party and am offered cake I’m probably going to eat it even though there’s probably egg in it, but I’m not going to order an egg-based dish, same with dairy if we’re having pizza or something. As I get older I’m increasingly lactose intolerant anyway, so I have additional incentive to avoid it.
The important thing is that you make a conscious effort to improve. I am the same. I eat cheese and occasionally eggs - rarely even meat, but I try to overall consume very little animal products.
Absolutely. For me it’s all about harm reduction so as long as I am trying to improve, I can still fall short sometimes without having a crisis of conscience.
I had to look up what that is.
If it’s any help, according to wiki 90% of cheese is made with artificial enzymes, because it’s cheaper.
It depends a bit om where you are and what kind of cheese. For instance in the EU, Parmigiano Reggiano always has calf rennet, otherwise it’s not allowed to have that name. Nowadays a lot of cheeses in the Netherlands do specify it on the ingredients list though.
