A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
Sounds like margarine with more chances to shit myself
Carbo-LEO.
“You see, we take all that bad stuff we learned from Oleo pantshitting technology, and then we move it around. Now we have ‘Carbo-LEO’'.”
Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.
Margarine is made of hydrogenated oil. This is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not an alternative for dietary purposes, it’s just a more planet friendly solution.
actual margarine is getting hard to find in stores around here, and when you do it’s priced almost as high as a non-sale price of real butter. margarine has 80% fat content and similar baking and cooking properties as butter.
what’s on store shelves is a cheapened, watered down product laced with extra chemicals and fillers, ranging from 25-40% oil and can’t even make a proper box of mac & cheese. some of them don’t even melt when put on toast, hot, right from the toaster.
I think it’s closer to the coal butter synthesis but maybe they found a more efficient method using other carbon sources
the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
Yeah, never heard that one before. Weird how every non-whatever replacement foodstuff tastes just like the original… literally 0% of the time.
I don’t know about international food, but the German vegan meat companies like Rügenwalder Mühle and Like meat have made huge leaps last year. Mortadella, Fleischwurst, Schnitzel and Chicken Nuggets all taste almost identical to the original. Ground “meat” is close, but you have to chose the right kind for each recipe. More complex stuff is still really bad tho. I say all of this as a passionate vegan meat hater.
Quote Randy Marsh from South Park, while tasting the impossible burger… “Wow this sucks. People actually eat this?”
They’re not bad, on par or better than most frozen grocery store hamburger patties, and way better than the vast majority of fast food burger meat. No, they’re not better than a hand ground 80% lean sirloin patty, but they could easily replace what McDonald’s uses without their customers batting an eye.
Butter is one of the few that I legitimately can’t tell the difference between the real thing and the vegan alternatives (some of them).
Cheese is the opposite. Not only have a never had a vegan cheese that tasted like real cheese, I’ve never had a vegan cheese that tasted good.
Have you tried good proper butter? Not that weird white stuff Americans make. Actual flavourful yellow Irish butter.
Margarine tastes okay and I use it all the time, but it’s a pale imitation of the real thing.
French butter like Prèsident is so good, better than Irish butter in my opinion.
Yeah, I have. If you put that and a good vegan butter substitute on toast back to back, I might be able to tell the difference, but if you put them in a dish, I definitely wouldn’t. Yeah, margarine isn’t very good. There are much better substitutes than margarine.
The problem is a lot of store bought vegan cheeses are ok at best. I think violife is probably the best i have been able i buy but it’s still not great.
But, making vegan cheese yourself otoh you can make some really good shit.
Cathedral city has a delicious mature cheddar, but otherwise yes I tend to also avoid most vegan cheeses simply because they taste crap. Even if they taste okay, they lack the faintest bit of nutrition; dairy cheese at least has some protein and calcium, but vegan cheeses are usually just fat and salt with nothing of value.
I want that vegan blue cheese that won the competition and then got disqualified by dairy industry corruption
Ever since I’ve had to go dairy-free due to sudden lactose intolerance, I’ve had to learn the sad world of vegan cheese. And, the thing that I’ve learned is that almost all the makers have this obsession with coconut oil, the smallest amount of which I can taste—giving the cheese an “off” taste—and which gives me heartburn.
You should be able to eat cheese that has been matured for 6 months or more for example cheddar, just make sure it actually is matured for that long, cheddar can be sold as 3 to 24 month. I am assuming it is 3 if nothing is specified, younger cheddar is sweeter so I wouldn’t be surprised if most cheddar in your store is that young like those hamburger slices. Everyone except me in the family has lactose intolerance and are very sensitive but can all eat 6+ months matured cheese. Which is great because that was the only kind of cheese we all liked anyways.
lactose sensitivity can be different from person to person so maybe you can eat a younger cheese. Cheese that had a low lactose from the start could be enough for you or just a few weeks maturing. 6 months is just something that has always worked for us without the need to know how much lactose there are.
They make pills that you can take that have the enzyme to digest lactose for you. If you eat one before dairy, you shouldn’t have any ill effects.
Vegan butter has tasted very good, both with their own tastes but also others tasting just like “normal” butter for years now.
There are some decent replacements, I was amazed by the vegan foie from hello plan foods. Almost all the taste without the horrible feeling of guilt.
https://www.helloplantfoods.com/_foie-gras-plant-based/
For foie specifically, it’s worth to try to find alternatives due to the creation process of the original being so bad that it’s basically banned outside of Spain and France.
Guarantee that A) it doesn’t taste just like real butter, and B) it’ll make you shit yourself and bring a return of the label “may cause anal leakage”.
Does that mean it’s not a potentially viable product? No, it doesn’t. But let’s not bullshit.
There was a run of fat replacement back (iirc) in the late nineties. Olestra was one of the name brands.
It wouldn’t digest at all, and it also wouldn’t mix in happily with the rest of the body waste in the colon. Hence, anal leakage becoming a phrase you would see on food labels.
And you would, sometimes, have not only leakage, but diarrhea. Sometimes violent diarrhea.
Basically, the oil was slippery enough to escape the anus no matter how tight it was. And there was a lot of it, under pressure from other waste behind it.
The problem with Olestra (the anal leakage oil alternative) is it’s a mixture of hexa-, hepta-, and octa-esters of sucrose with various long chain fatty acids. The resulting radial arrangement is too large and irregular to move through the intestinal wall and be absorbed into the bloodstream.
What Savor has supposedly created is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not made of new compounds, but made in a new way.
Fat and oil production from animal and plant-based sources are collectively responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2
You cannot be serious that animal-based and plant-based are grouped in this figure. Plant-based is likely close to carbon-neutral, and only not net-negative, because of transport, cooling etc., which will also be necessary for this artificially created fat…
Well you see, animal sources are responsible for 3.7 billion tons and plant sources are responsible for -0.2 billion tons.
Tilling, seeding, treating, and harvesting all require machinery and therefore increase carbon output in farming.
Yeah. But since farm animals are often fed from farmed plants these days, animal-based tends to be worse by quite a solid factor. This article puts butter at 4x worse than margarine, for example: https://www.forkranger.com/blog/is-margarine-a-sustainable-alternative-for-butter/
How plant-based compares to this new process still needs to be seen for sure. If it’s just a machine you can plug in at the store and everyone can get their butter like out of an ice cream machine, without transport and cooling chain, then it’s likely a lot better.
But at this point, I don’t expect the process to be much more efficient than what plants are doing, which means you’d still need a ton of energy and particularly also land area for it.
The largest (farm) landowner in the US is backing a venture that does not require land?
