why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?
quixotic120 @ quixotic120 @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 270Joined 2 yr. ago
What defines ultra processed? Are chicken nuggets ultra processed if I simply purée a chicken breast, add salt, shape, bread, and fry? I’ve turned it into something that is completely irrelevant to its original form. Is sausage ultra processed because I added nitrates? Is nitrate free sausage not ultra processed because I used the loophole where I added celery juice for its natural nitrate content instead of adding them directly?
When exactly does it become ultra processed? When a chemist gets involved and gives things proper names that freak you out?
Are you one of the kooky types that freak out when they see “sodium stearoyl lactylate” on the label of their sandwich bread even though it’s safe to eat and objectively makes your bread better and last longer? If so I’m sorry that you insist on eating bread that is not as soft and goes stale in 2 days
You can basically use it any way you would use ground beef, bolognese, meatballs, curry, tacos, whatever
Read on food and cooking by McGee and ratio by ruhlman to start
The leghemoglobin was, yeah. Tested on rats for allergen safety to achieve fda approval. Not vegan because in testing like this the rats are both robbed of their autonomy and they have to be killed afterward (which they were, and almost 200 of them)
It’s probably from the yeast extract which is part of the heme
To be clear tho it still doesn’t have all that much salt. It’s more that raw beef just barely has any. Both impossible meat and raw beef pale in comparison to the salt content of the final burger, where the sodium content skyrockets from things like ketchup, pickles, seasoning the patty during cooking, the salt content of the bun, etc
And imo you should still salt/pepper an impossible patty after formation. As mentioned, while the salt content is higher, it’s still not terribly high, and imo it benefits from a bit more. In my experience it’s not like meat and you can salt whenever you want (whereas with beef you generally want to salt patties absolutely last minute to avoid giving the meat a lightly cured texture)
I wanted to very badly but then life happened and now I have a whole other career!
I still cook a lot though and I have a lot of weird powders and additives and machinery for stuff. I have a whole ass refrigerated centrifuge that can spin 3 liters at a time so I can isolate my own pea and soy protein in quantity! It weighs like 350 pounds and it’s from the 80s but fuck it, it’s super cool and I was able to get it for $25 from a lab I interned at. I can’t make soy leghemoglobin at home though at there’s no commercial supplier I’ve found so far so I have to still buy impossible or beyond meat if I want it, bummer
Hopefully there will be more food nerds on lemmy. I am only an amateur food nerd, there are way better ones out there
It’s an excellent foaming agent! Methocel f50 foams will last a lot longer than egg foams too
Just make sure you get the right kind though. Usually if you get “methylcellulose” it’s f50 but there are a lot of different types with different properties. The a4c variety I mentioned for hot ice cream will make foams but won’t work as well and is better for gel applications. But there are a lot of varieties of methocel and many are only subtly different from each other
It was a bad joke
The meat alternatives will only get better as time goes on and market demand grows. A burger or nugget is really not an impossible (lol) to recreate item; most of the meat texture is lost by the processing involved.
A burger is obviously ground and a nugget is usually chicken that’s ground to almost a paste then shaped and breaded. At that point it’s finding something that can approximate the texture of the mushed up meat goo and then finding something that can convincingly flavor it. That’s why impossible was so adamant to get leghemoglobin cleared by the fda, it really is by far the best option. If not that your other options are basically trying to recreate a “meaty flavor” with spice blends and msg which is how the older meat alternatives worked
The much bigger challenge is finding something that can texturally approximate intact muscle (eg wings or steak). As you’ve said there are decent soy wings and there are steak strip things and such but these are generally passable. They taste good and are fine as a meal but they aren’t the same in the way an impossible burger is reallllly close to a burger. Lots of people trying though! Jackfruit, tvp, seitan, pea and soy protein, etc. but none of them come close to the mouth feel and texture of a wing or steak. Someday, maybe. I hope someone figures it out; I haven’t had meat in like 20 years or so but I do miss the texture of steak from time to time and wish I had something that could recreate that
Also having this issue a lot and have 0 things blocked
Imo impossible meat is superior to beyond although nutritionally it’s a mixed bag. It introduces a decent amount of carbs (9g per 4oz) and has over 5x the sodium of beef. But it also has a bit of fiber and a either comparable or more vitamin/mineral content than beef. Protein is comparable to 80% ground with 20% less caloric content
Beyond is similar.
They’re both basically vegetable proteins with binders and fats and some flavorings. The big game changer flavoring is leghemoglobin which both use. It’s a protein isolated from soy that is very similar to certain enzymes from bovine muscle. Impossible got the fda to approve it in 2019 and it was challenged; there are some concerns on whether it is safe to eat. I’m not super well read on the issue but from what I’ve perused the issue is one of a lack of long term testing and not of any direct concern.
The textural difference between the two is because beyond uses isolated pea protein, which gives it a texture that’s a bit chunkier and imo more sausage like, and impossible uses soy protein, which imo is more like a cheap burger patty you’d get at McDonald’s.
The fats are typical fats like coconut oil or sunflower oil to recreate the fatty part of beef and this is the current weakness of the products imo. Coconut oil is used because it tends to stay solidified at room temp so when you’re making patties it feels like there are chunks of beef fat. In practice this is weird because they are far too hard and aren’t dispersed enough throughout the product; I believe this is why these fake meats tend to stick to the pan much easier than actual burgers cooked in a skillet.
The binders are big scary words like methylcellulose which is also a source of fiber and can be used as a laxative so people latch onto that and freak out. But it’s only used as a binder to help it hold everything together here so it’s like a tiny amount that just provides a bit of fiber that you probably desperately need if you’re having burgers for dinner. Fun fact: Certain preparations of methylcellulose (a4c) turn into gels when heated so you can use them to make hot ice cream! It’s pretty weird to eat, like a normal ice cream base that solidifies when you put it into boiling water
The other ingredients are stuff like beet juice for coloring
Final fun fact: technically impossible meat is not vegan because animal testing was done during its development.
Thanks for reading my unprompted essay on the composition of modern vegan meat substitutes. This was brought to you by my failed interest in becoming a food scientist. Also you may note I don’t really discuss how they compare to meat and that’s because I don’t eat meat which by law I am required to mention in all posts about food
Comparison of excellent quality vanilla vs excellent quality chocolate should leave you with the takeaway that both are excellent. you may have a preference for one over the other but that’s hardly objective
My personal preference shifts based on mood and (more so) based on quality. Excellent chocolate bar vs budget ice cream that uses vanillin instead of actual vanilla beans? Probably the chocolate unless I’m searching for that nostalgic artificial vanilla flavor. A shitty chocolate snack cake with like 2% actual chocolate and 98% palm oil vs a well made panna cotta? Going vanilla.
Agreed, I played it a little after it came out on and assumed I would just try it out bc it was free on ps+. I ended up both finishing the entire game. Surprisingly fun to play although not terribly long
You mean you don’t want communities infested with bots promoting thinly veiled advertisements and reposting crusty old content to farm upvotes to make their accounts look more legitimate?
Logitech has been making atrociously shitty fucking internet based software for pretty decent hardware since the first harmony remote back in 2001. Only buy their hardware if it absolutely will never require software of any kind imo
This also has the benefit of (eventually) changing your comments in the number of archives of Reddit that exist
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JSYY0HbudmYYjnZaAMgf2y_GDFgHzZTolK6Yqaz6_kQ and this is the form to remove your data from pushshifts archive
Are you sure? I thought they were restoring my comments but it was a combo of several things:
The user profile page only shows about 1000 posts so sometimes when you clears out your account a few older ones pop up. If you sort by hot/new/month/year/etc you will find more
If a subreddit was private for the protest (some still are even now) and came back up (some are coming back up even now for some reason) the posts will suddenly repopulate your feed
Those are the main ones. That said, I wouldn’t be shocked if Reddit was doing this as the library of content is a huge part of their valuation
Get your data from their gdpr request tool and use it to erase your account with shreddit or redact.dev. Don’t delete your Reddit account just yet; once it’s deleted you can no longer delete or edit posts. Consider just editing the posts instead of deleting so that Reddit archives are permanently updated with nonsense. File a request with pushshift to have your data removed as well (which is significantly easier, just a google form). Note that it’s something you’ll have to keep checking in on as Reddit is actively working to break these tools - afaik redact.dev doesn’t work to delete Reddit posts at the moment; it will let you view your Reddit posts but if you attempt to delete them it will immediately deauth your account but the devs are actively working on this and are pretty responsive and confident they’ll have a fix. Shreddit seems to still work, at least the rust build, but that’s not as user friendly
Almost any cash only retail business in 2023 is highly suspect outside of some outlier situations like rural markets
Look into the open path collective although totally understand if you don’t want to leave someone you’re established with. $40-$70.
Sure but I mean to accentuate the idea that older printers don’t have these stupid drms. Frankly I would prefer something newer that isn’t the size of a mini fridge and sounds like an industrial copier but I’ll take that over a printer that requires persistent WiFi and my debit card to print.
Pretty sad that in 20 years we went from a printer that had a chip that tracked toner use so that you could see how much was left but still easily gave you the option to say “ignore that and keep printing” to printers that arbitrarily create e waste by bricking cartridges because they’re past the assigned page count or expiry date despite having ink/toner left.
Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America
Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.
So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.
But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.
Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.
Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.
I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources
But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).
Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem