Judging by the responses of surprised enthusiasm I get from meat eaters when I cook vegetarian for them: if it tastes worse, that's the chef's fault rather than the plants'.
That shouldn't matter, the point remains the same: it's the chef's fault if it doesn't taste good, even if the chef works in corporate and is designing a factory.
As a different point: "Processed" feels to me like a slippery word. Bread? Looks nothing like wheat. Beer? Grown in a vat. Beef? Take a wild animal, selectively breed it for hundreds of generations, feed it all kinds of weird things that combine "cheap" (surprise cannibalism leading to BSE) and "encourages weight gain" (we're only recently getting serious about stopping antibiotics being used this way), kill one, after all the main cuts are taken spray the rest of with a high pressure hose, dry off the resulting slurry, ta-dah mechanically recovered "100% beef" you can't use in much else besides mince, and by extension burgers and sausages.
The term seems like it's some combination of a complaint more about the long list of ingredients and that these sound new and/or scary, implying no awareness of how much of a mess biochemistry is and where most of the chemicals in question were first isolated from.
I didn't say I can't distinguish, I'm saying the word is wildly misleading.
Leavened bread is made by taking some flour, yeast, and water, and letting the yeast grow so the waste it makes turns the dough light and fluffy, and then baking it.
If you don't add a preservative to this, you'd better eat it quickly, because otherwise a fungus that produces a precursor to LSD will quickly grow on it (ergot is all over the place, and it really likes bread), and even if you don't get high, the alkaloids can poison you.
The yeast is a whole complex thing with bajillion chemicals all by itself, because life is like that.
The flour is from taking wheat etc. kernels and grinding them in what is one of our earliest industrial processes.
The wheat etc. have been selectively bred for countless generations and are now different from their wild relatives; and again, like the yeast, being alive they're full of things like "aneurine", "Pyridoxal 5'-phosphate", and "N-(4-{[(2-amino-4-oxo-1,4-dihydropteridin-6-yl)methyl]amino}benzoyl)-L-glutamic acid" and that's more than fine, it's vital, and we'd want to put them in if they were missing.
(Those three chemicals sound a whole lot friendlier when I use their common names; but biochemistry is too complex for every chemical to get an approachable friendly name even when they're vital — a quick search suggests you'd die without the N-Acetylaspartylglutamate in your brain, and that it has no non-systemic name).
And that fresh baked bread smell?
> The most aroma active compounds identified were 3-methylbutanal, (E)-2-nonenal, 3-methyl-1-butanol, and 2,3-butanedione
Loads of such things, not just whatever you're thinking of.
Quorn is pretty good if you can get it; Tofu needs to be seasoned right to taste good, and when it is it can be fantastic; nut roast is something I've only gotten right once, but that occasion it worked very well.
Tried making some nutritionally balanced cookies a while back; starting with a basic shortbread recipe and modified heavily, the one with banana as the main sugar and added vegan protein power worked pretty well.
Some protein shakes even fail to suck as drinks, but I find them so much faff I just buy milk (soy or cow, I'm vegetarian not vegan) or prepackaged[0] instead.
