‘I’d rather eat an actual burger’: plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the US
As someone who would want to be a vegan but struggles not to eat meat, I&#x27;ve been very interested in Impossible since it started. The idea that you might make synthetic meat that tastes as good as real meat while being cheaper is very alluring -- seemingly, you could eliminate most meat consumption globally.<p>At the same time, over the past few years, I&#x27;ve explored more of the world&#x27;s cuisines and generally become a better cook. What I&#x27;ve learned (which surely is obvious to many but was not obvious to me) is that the typical US diet is unnecessarily meat centric, and that being a vegetarian is much easier, healthier, and tastier when one basically stops eating typical American meals. Being a vegetarian is much easier when eating Indian food for instance, and it&#x27;s laughably easy when eating Ethiopian.<p>I&#x27;m still rooting heavily for Impossible, because factory farming is a global atrocity. And, it would be really cool if one day, I could eat an Impossible burger that was cheaper and healthier than a regular burger. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, I think that my attempts to be vegetarian will revolve around learning to better cook food from non-American cuisines, foods that are better suited to not having meat.