‘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'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.At the same time, over the past few years, I've explored more of the world's cuisines and generally become a better cook. What I'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's laughably easy when eating Ethiopian.I'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.