Thoughts on Beyond Burger and other fake meat

rodnichols69 wrote: »

My point was that this is not fear mongering.as some loon assumed. Understand what you are eating. There are good options and there are bad. My neighbor makes incredible veggie burgers from scratch using ingredients we can pronounce.

I hope it doesnt contain spinach

I have a lisp and cant pronounce it properly

estherdragonbat wrote: »

What if I slice it before adding yogurt? Is that ultra-processed, or do I have to mash it first?

Just make sure you don't eat it with more than 3 other foods. 5 = ultraprocessed frankenfood, remember!

Let's come at the concerns about processed foods, and the strategy of small ingredient lists as a determinant, from another direction.

Consider cacao powder, generally considered a healthful, simple, minimally processed product. (I think it came up earlier in the thread, by implication at least.) For clarity about motives, I absolutely agree that it's a good thing to include in one's eating.

Cacao beans grow in big pods that are hand-harvested (sometimes by exploited workers BTW). The pods are split open, and cacao beans are removed. (They don't taste like chocolate at this point, and they're not brown.) Next, they're fermented, an anaerobic/aerobic process that actually ferments the pulp around the beans rather than the beans themselves. This process involves heating and turning them over a period of days until they turn brown. (Often but not always, the heating is natural, i.e., uses sun in a warm region.) During the fermentation, microbial magic happens, the pulp drips away, and various effects of heat, acid, and enzymes also affect the beans. Sometimes microbe mixtures are introduced to facilitate the process (vs. just relying on the microbes that are naturally present).

Next is drying, and possibly aging. Sometimes the drying is also sun/climate, sometimes not. If they were destined to be cocoa powder or chocolate, they would be roasted, which raw cacao powder is not (that's one main diffence between basic cocoa powder and cacao powder).

Next, the beans are broken up into nibs, and sieved to sort by size. The nibs need to be ground/pulverized to separate out most of the cocoa butter. For cacao powder, cold-pressing is normally used to concentrate the particles and separate the cocoa butter. Usually, the particles would then clump into the form of a sort of cake, which is pulverized to powder. (Cocoa powder would've been heat-ground rather than cold-pressed to separate the cocoa butter.)

So, this is a minimally processed, or unprocessed product, I guess because the treatment of the beans with heat/acid/enzymes is a natural fermentation, not the introduction of chemicals (other than maybe those microbes). And the chopping, drying, maybe aging, cold-pressing don't count as processing, I guess.

The end result has just one ingredient: Certified organic cacao powder (Theobroma Cacao), according to my packet of Navitas Organics Cacao Powder. I wonder why they get to say that, since they pressed the cocoa butter out, mostly, so part of the plant is removed - labeling laws are weird that way, I guess? (Theobroma cacao is the botanical Latin name of the tree. BTW: Can we pronounce that? I admit I have trouble with botanical Latin pronunciation, but I think I know this one. (Whew!)).

FWIW: Cacao powder retains some beneficial phytochemicals that roasting/heat-grinding the roasted cacoa beans excludes from cocoa powder. So, the main difference between the two is heat, at the roasting (or not) stage, and grinding (which involves heat) vs. cold-pressing. Cocoa powder may be further treated (Dutch processed) with alkalai to change the flavor profile, but that's not always part of the process.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Let's come at the concerns about processed foods, and the strategy of small ingredient lists as a determinant, from another direction.

Consider cacao powder, generally considered a healthful, simple, minimally processed product. (I think it came up earlier in the thread, by implication at least.) For clarity about motives, I absolutely agree that it's a good thing to include in one's eating.

Cacao beans grow in big pods that are hand-harvested (sometimes by exploited workers BTW). The pods are split open, and cacao beans are removed. (They don't taste like chocolate at this point, and they're not brown.) Next, they're fermented, an anaerobic/aerobic process that actually ferments the pulp around the beans rather than the beans themselves. This process involves heating and turning them over a period of days until they turn brown. (Often but not always, the heating is natural, i.e., uses sun in a warm region.) During the fermentation, microbial magic happens, the pulp drips away, and various effects of heat, acid, and enzymes also affect the beans. Sometimes microbe mixtures are introduced to facilitate the process (vs. just relying on the microbes that are naturally present).

Next is drying, and possibly aging. Sometimes the drying is also sun/climate, sometimes not. If they were destined to be cocoa powder or chocolate, they would be roasted, which raw cacao powder is not (that's one main diffence between basic cocoa powder and cacao powder).

Next, the beans are broken up into nibs, and sieved to sort by size. The nibs need to be ground/pulverized to separate out most of the cocoa butter. For cacao powder, cold-pressing is normally used to concentrate the particles and separate the cocoa butter. Usually, the particles would then clump into the form of a sort of cake, which is pulverized to powder. (Cocoa powder would've been heat-ground rather than cold-pressed to separate the cocoa butter.)

So, this is a minimally processed, or unprocessed product, I guess because the treatment of the beans with heat/acid/enzymes is a natural fermentation, not the introduction of chemicals (other than maybe those microbes). And the chopping, drying, maybe aging, cold-pressing don't count as processing, I guess.

The end result has just one ingredient: Certified organic cacao powder (Theobroma Cacao), according to my packet of Navitas Organics Cacao Powder. I wonder why they get to say that, since they pressed the cocoa butter out, mostly, so part of the plant is removed - labeling laws are weird that way, I guess? (Theobroma cacao is the botanical Latin name of the tree. BTW: Can we pronounce that? I admit I have trouble with botanical Latin pronunciation, but I think I know this one. (Whew!)).

FWIW: Cacao powder retains some beneficial phytochemicals that roasting/heat-grinding the roasted cacoa beans excludes from cocoa powder. So, the main difference between the two is heat, at the roasting (or not) stage, and grinding (which involves heat) vs. cold-pressing. Cocoa powder may be further treated (Dutch processed) with alkalai to change the flavor profile, but that's not always part of the process.

An impressive understanding of the growing and processing of cacao! I say this as one who lives in Oaxaca, a cacao growing region and a place where there is a lot of chocolate processed. Our youngest daughter was here for a visit last week and we were able to actually see and handle fresh cacao pods in one of the mercados. You can easily buy processed cacao beans here and make your own nibs or grind them or whatever else you'd like for very little money. Honestly, when you break open a cacao pod, it's hard to imagine someone once came up with the idea to dry/ferment them and eat them. They are very slimy with a coating. But the same can be said of coffee, another product grown and processed here.

As a retired chef and avid foodie, there are few foods that are not processed to some degree or another. I'm not one personally for a lot of highly processed foods but that is not because I believe they are necessarily bad. I'd just rather buy the raw materials and make it myself because, well, that's just what I like and I feel like I can control the flavor and quality better.

But for people for whom processed foods are a useful convenience or they just plain like some of them, no problem. It really is about educating yourself about nutrition and selecting good products. Also, as your botanical name of cacao indicates, the whole idea that one needs to be able to pronounce the name of ingredients in order to deem them safe for consumption is just plain silly and borderline orthorexic IMHO.

Based on the web searches I've done while following this thread, Yahoo News threw me a story that Kellogg's is coming out with it's own plant-based burger products.

The name : Incogmeato