For a vegan burger to have a taste that’s close to anything meat-like, you need hemoglobin and a bunch of other proteins that are very expensive to grow from plants. Colouring and consistency can be fixed quite cheaply, but taste is where things become tough. The best taste equivalent I’ve found, is the equivalent in shitty fast food burgers. I don’t think there’s anything close to a properly prepared burger yet, and I don’t think there ever will be, and I think that’s fine.

Vegan food isn’t necessarily more expensive than normal food. In fact, it can be cheaper if you cook right. You can’t just cook a meat meal and substitute a slab of vegan meat, though. Instead, take a recipe that was designed from the ground up to be vegan. There are so many Indian dishes out there that will best the pants of any slab of ground meat, mostly consisting of vegetables and spices. There are pastas and noodles that’ll beat most burgers and are equally easy to put together, all without a single piece of meat.

Vegan meat is a replacement for people who want to quit meat but can’t or don’t want to learn how to cook anything but the things they were used to.