There are many good reasons to incorporate more vegan options into your diet, from health to environmental to moral, and advances in vegan “meat” alternatives have made it far easy for even meat lovers to reduce their intake of animal products.

But people are still resistant to adopting some of these options, preferring the traditional animal version…at least, that’s what they think. Often, when people are told that the meat they are eating is not made from a real animal, they are more likely to give it a lower rating than they otherwise would. And of course, there is a large variation in quality between different meat alternative brands.

Though a large scale “blind” taste test of vegan meat alternatives revealed that there is a still a way to go to please dedicated meat eaters, when controlling for the favored brands within these alternatives, it turns out that there wasn’t as big as a difference as tasters thought, and in many cases, they even preferred the vegan versions.

While plant-based options fared poorly overall against their traditional animal product “benchmarks,” certain brands, such as Impossible, scored much higher. In one case, over thirty percent of tester preferred the plant-based chicken cutlets to the real thing.

In some cases, resistance to adopting plant based alternatives may be a social or psychological one, and studies have shown that this is the case. “People just don’t taste food in an objective way,” this researcher concludes.

Blind taste tests like these help reveal that although there is a long way to go for many plant-based meat alternatives to appeal to the omnivore’s palate, there is also room for growth. The developments in plant-based meat of the last decade have turned a significant corner in the market, but they are fighting a strong current.

The trick is changing people’s mind about fake meat.

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