>when you add up every hot pocket, frozen pizza, slider, hot dog, or chicken nugget, it's hard to argue that most of meat actually being consumed can't be easily substituted. For something healthier and cheaper too!
Read the labels more closely the next time you eat that hot pocket or frozen sausage pizza. A large number of these products already have "textured vegetable protein" (TVP) or other meat substitute in them to pad out the protein on the label and reduce overall cost to produce.
How on Earth did we end up having so many ingredients in what essentially is just pizza. The food industry really has gone too far by over-processing everything.
It's not as bad as it looks. Half those ingredients are sub-ingredients. It's like you making something like chili and using salsa. You'd then need to add all the ingredients of the salsa to your chili ingredients. With the sub-ingredients removed it comes down to this:
ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, LOW-MOISTURE PART-SKIM MOZZARELLA CHEESE, TOMATO PASTE, COOKED SEASONED PIZZA TOPPING (MADE WITH PORK AND CHICKEN, BHA, BHT AND CITRIC ACID ADDED TO HELP PROTECT FLAVOR), PEPPERONI MADE WITH PORK, CHICKEN AND BEEF, COOKED BEEF PIZZA TOPPING, SUGAR, WHEAT GLUTEN,
2% OR LESS OF VEGETABLE OIL, DEGERMINATED WHITE CORN MEAL, YEAST, SALT, DEGERMINATED YELLOW CORN MEAL, DATEM, BAKING SODA, SPICES, WHEAT FLOUR, ENZYMES, DRIED GARLIC, ASCORBIC ACID.
A lot of it is due to the "frozen" part of frozen pizza. There's a ton of what amounts to materials science happening in your frozen pizza. Find a local pizza joint that makes their dough from scratch and bakes in a brick oven, and you can cut down on that ingredients count by an order of magnitude.
The issue is that the vast majority of these ingredients are artificial substitutes for the actual content of a pizza-like-thing that an average consumer might expect. That they are artificial is not in itself inherently an issue (at least to me, although many many artificial additives have been proven to cause problems while manufacturers continue to use them), but the fact that so many substitutions are made all at once in a given product renders any "common" understanding of its health effects effectively irrelevant.
It basically means that you can't compare a pizza made from the basic ingredients that you and I might normally expect to the contents of a hot pocket. Even comparing apples-to-apples, the ingredient list of a DiGiorno's frozen pizza would be wildly different from the basics of a pizza you could make yourself.
Fearmongering over these subjects never helps, but it is fair to raise concern over the unknown effects of the things you consume.
What ingredients of a "real" pizza have been substituted for? That list includes flour, water, salt, yeast, tomato and cheese, which are roughly speaking the essential components of a pizza.
Using soy protein or other substitutes like this is relatively rare. Hot pockets use real cheese meat. The same is true of most food people buy at grocery stores or restaurants. Even hotdogs are generally either all beef, or a mixture of chicken and pork.
I suspect that sneaking it into prepared foods is easier (detail doesn't matter quite as much) and high volume (people who don't care what they eat), while presenting it solo is more difficult (needs to look/feel/taste/smell just right) and lower volume (people who make an effort to avoid meat).
Read the labels more closely the next time you eat that hot pocket or frozen sausage pizza. A large number of these products already have "textured vegetable protein" (TVP) or other meat substitute in them to pad out the protein on the label and reduce overall cost to produce.
For example, here are the ingredients for Digiorno Meat Lover's (you may have to scroll and click "Nutrition" dropdown. They call it "TEXTURED SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE": https://www.goodnes.com/digiorno/products/rising-crust-three...