Not everyone craves the flavor/texture of meat, but everyone needs an adequate intake of high quality protein.
Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not do much for improving the taste of food (though the food definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is healthy enough.
Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to it. There are many years since the last time when I ate meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.
For several years I have not used any animal protein sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder, whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content. This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.
So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.
From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long as they eat some good food.
You're missing out on an infinity of great food - great for anyone, vegan or not. Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan. Think of many appetizers even in mostly-meat restaurants. And there are world-class restaurants that serve vegan dishes
Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.
Double that. I'll also recommend to try some fungi/bacteria pre-processing as it bumps the taste:
Kimchi & Sauerkraut to wet the appetite.
Don't use salt, use Miso. The darker the better.
Tempeh is awesome and comes with soy (nutty), lentil (strong taste like aged meat), chickpeas (floral), beans (melty), or other legume/cereal/nut. Can include spices and seed for extra taste and crunch.
Nuts cheese tastes "cheesy" in a similar way similar to their diary version (Roquefort, Cheddar, Blue, Camembert, Brie...) depending on the ferment, without the "milky" taste. Nut taste instead, obviously but that can be offset with other oils/fats.
IMHO the Chèvre (goat) [0] and Morbier (bleu) [1] from Jay and Joy are very close. They also comes a bit cheaper in non-organic version [2]. I mostly buy from those guys but the curious may try a few from their local brands: when talking about cheese every recipe is has it's subtlety.
Vegan Chinese food? Ah, if you are vegan and go to China you need to be careful because there isn’t much vegan food, although plenty of veggies and they even have a few vegetarian restaurants in recent years.
Wherever you are, the local Chinese food is an adaptation - there is Indian Chinese, for example. But tofu, for example, has a long history in China, and you can find vegan food in Chinese restaurants in many places. I expect most people on HN don't eat their Chinese food in China.
Ok, that makes sense. You’ll find tofu art in China as well, but it usually doesn’t pass the vegan threshold unless you go to a fancy Singaporean chain (Pure Lotus was the only one I knew of in Beijing). Even then it feels wrong, tofu really shouldn’t taste like chicken.
>Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan.
What? Outside of Indian food, which does have many vegan options, but the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used). Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan. Chinese love meat, and you would have to be a buddhist monk to actually find vegan food in China. Even with a lot of cheap plant protein options, like tofu, most things use some meat for flavor. Latin America loves cooking in animal fats.
> Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan.
I've seen plenty of vegan food in restaurants serving those cuisines, so that's not true. Why is it important to you to insist that vegan food is somehow difficult?
If you just mean 'in China', that's irrelevant to this conversation - only a small proportion of people here eat their Chinese food in China. But I acknowledge, lots of people on HN like to demonstrate their worldliness by making sure we know they've been to China, relevant or not.
> the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used)
It's a bit hard to make a definitive statement about what is 'best'. Personally, I much prefer Indian without all the ghee. That vegan food exists in many varieties is an objective fact, however.
Someone making Vegan food in the style of Chinese or Latin American food by changing how its normally made, does not mean that its part of that food category by default. Its a new separate category. Sure you can make and eat plenty of Vegan chinese dishes, but it will taste different without the pork and seafood which is almost omnipresent in Chinese food.
You're arguing about categories and semantics now?
I think you know what Mexican or Chinese restaurant means in NY or LA or Topeka or London, and they have vegan dishes. In fact, usually they are run by Mexican or Chinese immigrants. You can hold a sign outside protesting the lack of traditional culinary purity.
> changing how its normally made
This is how it's normally made now. Change is normal.
Ideally we would but that costs energy, and if we can't afford the energy to completely remove the need for fossil fuels, spending even more on capturing it again seems still far out of reach.
Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use.
We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already.
I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer.
Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.
Solar + battery is a miracle technology that’s being installed at an enormous rate. Technically, it’s fusion power, capturing energy from a fusion plant 8 light-minutes away. :-D
This is not true. A different deal was offered to Anthropic, and they refused. Then the DoW turned around and went with OpenAI even though their terms weren’t materially different from the terms of their agreement with Anthropic.
it seems like oai deal does include the same red lines, plus some more, and the ability for oai to deploy safety systems to limit the use cases of the model via technical means
this seems strictly better than what anthropic had. anthropic has ruined their relationship with the US govt, giving oai a good negotiating hand
the oai folks are good at making deals, just look at all the complex funding arrangements they have
"OAI wins by playing the government's game" is such a catastrophically bad take.
> anthropic has ruined their relationship with the US govt, giving oai a good negotiating hand
You want to try defending this ridiculous statement a bit more thoroughly?
For a start, the designation by the government of a company as a supply chain risk is not a negotiating tool. It may well be found to be arbitrary and capricious once the courts look at it. Business have rights too.
For another, why do you think OAI was able to make what looks like the same deal? Anthropic was willing to say yes to anything lawful up to their red lines, and it was still a no. Why turn around and give OAI exactly the same thing, unless it's not really what it looks like?
And Altman is always looking for the next buck.
All these supposedly impressive complex funding arrangements have OAI on the hook to firms like Oracle in the hundreds of billions of dollars. No indication at all how this unprofitable business will become a trillion dollar juggernaut.
you're right, supply chain risk is not a negotiating tool. it's spite after talks have ended. it indicates a ruined relationship
the oai deal is similar, but it includes technical safeguards. I think anthropic would have wanted the oai deal
the deal was not only successful because the govt is rebounding. the miltary prefers boundaries to be technical, not contractual
they can try using it, and trust that it will only operate within its designed limits, where the output is reliable
technical barriers to misuse help prevent both accidental and bad-faith misuse. a contract allows both kinds of misuse, enforced only by lawsuits. filing in court to dispute the terms is not always allowed
> supply chain risk is not a negotiating tool. it's spite after talks have ended.
No. It's unlawful abuse of power.
> the miltary prefers boundaries to be technical, not contractual
That's nice for the military. Meanwhile, Anthropic has the right to refuse the use of its IP without being subject to punishment by the government.
You seem to me to be irretrievably "deal-brained", and not at all concerned about the obvious abuse of power by the government here, or the constant display of bad faith by gov't officials.
Adding more to this, IIRC US Govt threatened to invoke laws which have never been used against an American company in the entire history of US over two conditions that were:
1. No global surveillance on citizens
2. No autonomous killing machines (essentially)
That was it, Anthropic was fine with everything else but they couldn't (in their conscience?) agree to these two things and just these two very reasonable demands caused the govt. to spiral so bad.
anthropic has nothing but a contract to enforce what is appropriate usage of their models. there are no safety rails, they disabled their standard safety systems
openai can deploy safety systems of their own making
from the military perspective this is preferable because they just use the tool -- if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, they'll use another one. with the anthropic model the military needs a legal opinion before they can use the tool, or they might misuse it by accident
this is also preferable if you think the government is untrustworthy. an untrustworthy government may not obey the contract, but they will have a hard time subverting safety systems that openai builds or trains into the model
- When has any AI company shipped "safeguards" that aren't trivially bypassed by mid bloggers? Just one example would be fine.
- The conventional wisdom is that OAI's R&D (including safety) is significantly behind Anthropic's.
- OpenAI is constantly starved for funding. They don't make money. They have every incentive to say yes to a deal that entrenches them into govt systems, regardless of the externalities
anthropic previously agreed to deploy their models in this context with nothing but a contract to enforce their red lines -- they even disabled their safety systems!
per announcement, openai can include safety systems of their own making, including ones to prevent their red lines from being crossed. that seems to be a more robust solution, including in the face of an untrustworthy government
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