[HN Gopher] Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald'...
___________________________________________________________________
Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald's, KFC and
Pizza Hut
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 418 points
Date : 2021-03-02 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (agfundernews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (agfundernews.com)
| nafizh wrote:
| I feel the price is still quite high for daily consumption. For
| example, 3 lbs of impossible ground meat is ~50$, so per pound
| comes in about ~16$ (data from impossible website). Real ground
| beef, even when you buy high quality will be around 7-8$ per
| pound.
| tommoor wrote:
| It has been high but it's already coming down, I don't know how
| permanently. Currently Impossible is:
|
| - Costco: $16 for 2lbs
|
| - Trader Joes: $5.99 for 12oz
| therealmarv wrote:
| This brand was tested by German magazine called "Oko-Test" on
| their ingredients. Also not for the first time. It got a BAD
| review again because it contains too much mineral oil in it
| (could have various reasons, packaging of ingredients or oily
| manufacturing machines) and 20g fat per 100g "meat".
|
| So it's unhealthy on mineral oil (MOSH) which can easily
| accumulate in your body and fat percentage.
|
| One of the sources which you can Google translate:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/food/beyond-mea...
|
| Another English article:
|
| http://www.ezineblog.org/2020/12/12/beyond-meat-fails-the-te...
| mathgorges wrote:
| The fat percentage criticism strikes me as a bit odd.
|
| At least where I am (USA) ground meat is categorized by its fat
| percentage and 20% fat is the standard I usually see in the
| supermarket.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is: 20% is indeed a high fat
| percentage, but it's also the typical fat percentage for
| conventional meat so it feels disingenuous to use it to
| criticize plant-based meats.
| pwinnski wrote:
| 80/20 is very typical for ground beef, although some people
| shop specifically for 85/15 or even 90/10. I find the 90/10
| lacks flavor.
| Black101 wrote:
| I drain the 80/20 meat after cooking it... so it is
| probably close to 90% meat when I'm done
| yurishimo wrote:
| Yea depends on how you use it. Ground meat cooked for a
| casserole, probably too much fat, but 20% fat in a burger
| is good.
| blackearl wrote:
| Totally depends on how you're using it. A burger over flame
| needs that extra fat to stay moist or you'll get a sad, dry
| burger. Making tacos on the other hand makes it gush out when
| eating and grossly congealed when refrigerated.
| rarefied_tomato wrote:
| The discussion of the fat percentage misses the relevant
| concern. Mineral oil, unlike vegetable or animal fat, is a
| petroleum product and carcinogen that bioaccumulates in body
| fat.
|
| The oekotest.de link also discusses methylcellulose as a
| cause of indigestion (a symptom mentioned in this thread),
| and the presence of genetically modified soy. GM crops are a
| concern because of their tolerance to high pesticide levels.
| p1necone wrote:
| The 20% fat does not consist of mineral oil. The mineral
| oil content is separate, and from contamination from
| machinery etc (presumably much much less than 20%).
| atombender wrote:
| You may want the primary source, Oko-Test [1], here. Your two
| links are really unclear about what they mean.
|
| It's evident from the Oko-Test article that they are referring
| to contamination ("residue" of mineral oil, as they call it).
| Unfortunately, the published results are behind a paywall, and
| they don't explain in the article just how significant the
| contamination is. For all we know, it could be an insignificant
| amount. It's also unclear if they tested any meat products for
| similar types of contamination.
|
| [1] https://www.oekotest.de/essen-trinken/Vegane-Burger-im-
| Test-...
| [deleted]
| submeta wrote:
| Just when you think there is no hope for this planet and for
| humanity something slowly emerges seemingly out of nowhere.
|
| Fridays for future was one of those developments that caught me
| by surprise. Young people fighting for our planet while ,,angry
| white men" claiming there ain't no climate change.
|
| Or take the sudden surge of interest in everything veggy / vegan.
| In Germany there is a growing demand for vegan products, and this
| demand seems to be very strong, because every grocery store has a
| growing number of vegan products lately.
|
| I turned vegetarian last year not because I hate the taste of
| meat but because there are a dozen reasons we should not be
| eating meat. Environmental reasons, but also the pain we are
| causing these animals, every single day.
| marknutter wrote:
| What's with the casual racism in your post?
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| You can't be racist towards white people. It would only be
| racist if the said angry black men.
| marknutter wrote:
| Only racists say you can't be racist towards white people.
| You, for instance.
| scottLobster wrote:
| You can buy ethically sourced/farmed meat (albeit at a
| premium), and farmed fish in particular is quite sustainable.
|
| I would dispute that there are "a dozen" reasons we should not
| be eating meat. There are perhaps a few practical reasons we
| should not be eating low-quality mass-market meat (health,
| environment, animal cruelty), and a few moral reasons we should
| not eat unethically raised meat. And even those reasons are
| debatable (what if someone in a 3rd world country can only
| afford unethically raised meat? etc)
| sparkling wrote:
| > In Germany there is a growing demand for vegan products, and
| this demand seems to be very strong, because every grocery
| store has a growing number of vegan products lately.
|
| Greenwashing PR
|
| Talk to any supermarket manager and they will tell you that the
| vegan specialty section is a net loss. HQ tells them do keep
| it, so they keep it.
| mleonhard wrote:
| Are you claiming that all grocery stores sell vegan products
| as loss-leaders? Can you please share a link to some data on
| it?
| harveywi wrote:
| Why didn't you consider cannibalism?
| nine_k wrote:
| Obviously, it still causes suffering, and the supply is even
| more limited.
| mutatio wrote:
| Interesting, are there studies in climate change denial
| demographics?
| jordache wrote:
| I tried the impossible whopper. You literally could not tell the
| difference between that and a normal beef whopper. I realized a
| lot the attributes of these commercial food products are the
| additions, like sauce, and toppings that contribute to that
| precisely calibrated flavor.
| zozin wrote:
| HN masses cheering on the success of Soylent Red or Soylent
| Yellow?? Just eat less meat if you think meat production is
| bad/bad for the planet, don't cheer on meat substitutes, which
| are just processed foods made from entirely processed
| ingredients.
|
| Eating meat for every meal is not good for you, but you can bet
| that Beyond and Impossible will advertise themselves as something
| that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
|
| Enjoy your industrial slop, I'll just make a salad and eat meat a
| few days a week.
| mft_ wrote:
| I assume you're being downvoted because of the tone of your
| comment, but this is actually a really valuable point:
|
| > processed foods made from entirely processed ingredients
|
| There's evidence that suggests the degree to which foods are
| processed (generally) correlates with unhealthiness. And
| there's also good evidence that meat is unhealthy in various
| ways.
|
| So, it's difficult to know where the balance would lie:
| unprocessed meat, vs. processed meat-substitute?
| poopoopeepee wrote:
| > So, it's difficult to know where the balance would lie
|
| I would expect that soon someone will come out with a plant-
| based meat substitute that is marketed as "Only five
| ingredients, made in a kitchen not a factory".
| mindcandy wrote:
| The founder of Impossible Foods has said that a major motivator
| for founding the company is
|
| 1. Global poverty is lifting. People around the world are
| starting to make more money. 2. A big point of pride when your
| family starts making money is literally putting meat on the
| table. 3. Our current meat production process cannot scale up
| to meet that demand.
|
| But, good luck convincing billions of people coming out of
| extreme poverty that they're simply too late and they should
| give up on the dream that they can finally have meat too --for
| the sake of climate change. They are going to demand
| _something_. He believes plant-based meat can reach that scale
| at a tiny fraction of the impact if they can make it acceptably
| close in quality.
|
| That's something I can cheer for.
| poopoopeepee wrote:
| > industrial slop
|
| Do you have a blender? Everything that comes out of a blender
| is industrial slop by definition. Why shame people because they
| allow someone to blend and form their food for them?
| at_ wrote:
| Their stuff is good. Here in the UK every supermarket chain now
| has their own vegan ranges putting out stuff almost (admittedly
| not quite) as good, priced very competitively. Even a couple of
| years ago that simply wasn't case.
|
| Random stray thought I had earlier is how interesting things are
| going to be when we move further away from emulating existing
| meat products, and become more comfortable eating plant-based
| stuff that doesn't necessarily resemble (or have names that are a
| play on) anything else in nature, in the same way Pepsi is just
| Pepsi. I'd love to take a peak at what menus are gonna look like
| in 20 years, assuming this shift is the real deal. Are we gonna
| have to memorise a slapstick sounding list of dozens of
| engineered protein sources to get by? (Oomph, tofurky,
| shroomdog... and of course, quorn! etc)
| thehappypm wrote:
| I love the idea of vegan meat alternatives but personally don't
| like Beyond's taste. It tastes too much like peas for me, doesn't
| get past "uncanny valley". I do like Impossible though -- Qdoba
| has it and it's fantastic in a burrito.
| dqpb wrote:
| How does this compare to impossible burger? I didn't like
| impossible burger at all.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| Impossible is definitely better tasting, but I'm happy to see
| Taco Bell is included in this deal (though not in the headline
| here on HN). I haven't been there since they got rid of potatoes,
| so having a vegan option would make my taco consumption during
| lunch break skyrocket.
| mrbuttons454 wrote:
| They are bringing the potatoes back.
| jfengel wrote:
| Taco meat [EDIT: in Taco Bell's usage] is a perfect
| application, since its texture is already squishy and the
| flavor is dominated by spice. Plus, it's wrapped in a shell and
| mixed with lettuce and other things. Even a mediocre fake meat
| is enough to pass. Beyond Meat should have no trouble producing
| a virtually-indistinguishable taco meat.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Del Taco already has a Beyond Meat taco and it tastes like
| shit.
| jonwachob91 wrote:
| Too be fair though... Everything at Del Taco tastes really
| bad. :)
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Taco meat is a perfect application, since its texture is
| already squishy and the flavor is dominated by spice.
|
| "Taco Bell ground beef" rather than "taco meat"; this is very
| much not true of taco meat generally, including the non-
| ground-beef options at Taco Bell or other similar fast-food
| taco restaurants.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Taco meat is a perfect application, since its texture is
| already squishy and the flavor is dominated by spice_
|
| Cheap fast food is a perfect application, There are plenty of
| higher quality tacos in the world.
| redisman wrote:
| Well yeah but this is a Taco Bell thread haha
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Jack In The Box has been using textured vegetable protein
| instead of meat forever. Most people don't even realize it's
| not meat.
| Alupis wrote:
| > Most people don't even realize it's not meat.
|
| Except that it is indeed meat. It contains a Soy filler _in
| addition_ to the meat, but it is meat.
|
| Straight from the Jack's mouth[1]: Taco,
| Regular Filling Ingredients: Beef, Chicken, Water, Textured
| Vegetable Protein (Soy Flour, Caramel Color), Defatted Soy
| Grits, Seasoning... etc
|
| [1] http://assets.jackinthebox.com/pdf_attachment_settings/
| 108/v...
| whalesalad wrote:
| 2 for $1 Jack tacos are absolutely phenomenal for the
| price.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| that's awesome; i'd love if Beyond could produce a nice
| vegetarian fish substitute as well. also hoping buying some
| shares wouldn't be a good short-term investment after their
| earnings miss.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Is beyond meat actually healthier than meat? If you search my
| question you'll see the results are hardly conclusive.
|
| What's everyone's take?
| mpalczewski wrote:
| A completely natural product eaten by humans for millenia, vs a
| new factory produced goo.
|
| I prefer real food over fake.
| mft_ wrote:
| This is a reasonable look at exactly this question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMGV_dBTE-k
|
| (no affiliation, just a subscriber)
| dilap wrote:
| Personally, I very much doubt it.
|
| Meat is an ancient food. We've evolved as hunter-gatheres, with
| most of our calories coming from hunting. It would be _very_
| surprising if we were not well-adapted to eating a lot of meat.
| Modern hunter-gatherer tribes which eat a lot of meat, like the
| Hadza, have excellent health.
|
| Something like Beyond Meat is novel; it may well be OK, but I'd
| certainly exercise a lot of caution before trusting it.
|
| Another way to look at the question, while incomplete, is just
| to look at the breakdown of the nutrients. Per cronometer.com,
| here's specimen A:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/uEWhL7E
|
| and specimen B:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/zcAXeya
|
| Which of those looks healthier to you?
|
| To me, they look pretty similar, except for A has a lot more
| PUFA, and a lot less vitamin B. There is a lot of controversy
| about PUFA, but my belief is too much of it is one of the main
| causes of disease in people eating "Western-style" diets.
|
| So I'd guess specimen B is healthier; that's the cow burger.
|
| (Tangentially, is there a good website to easily share pngs?
| Imgur compression is pretty brutal for text stuff.)
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| "Hunter- _Gatherers_ "
|
| There is a great deal of misinformation about hunter-gather
| diets: https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/what-can-hunter-
| gatherers... or
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-
| ha... (I didn't invest much effort in finding illustrative
| links, there are many more, and academic research).
|
| Walking around constantly and digging up/harvesting edible
| plants, insects, fungi, possibly carrion, and the occasional
| meat (including organs) is much more likely.
|
| Most of our ancestors' calories didn't come from hunting in
| most areas. Those that did had lifestyles so different from a
| modern one that it makes no sense to compare them.
| nepeckman wrote:
| Compared to what meat? Which animal, which cuts, which quality?
| Is it healthier than a really high quality meat, prepared well?
| Maybe not. Is it healthier than fast food "beef"? Yeah
| probably. Either way, environmental and moral concerns are just
| as relevant as health concerns when considering diet.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I personally don't think so. I'm no scientist.
|
| I have, however, done a LOT of studying about food because I
| have some serious stomach issues.
|
| What has finally worked for me? Intermittent fasting for 15-16
| hours a day -- eating a low-carb diet filled with veggies.
|
| I feel a night and day difference eating like this.
|
| Btw I was mostly vegan and vegetarian for half a decade before
| this.
|
| Take it as you will.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think it tastes pretty good, but I would be surprised if it
| were any healthier.
| therealmarv wrote:
| I think it's more unhealthy because it contains too much
| mineral oil (search my other comment) according to various
| tests of a German magazine.
| exabrial wrote:
| Personally I avoid their stuff. I'd rather have a locally raised
| steak from one of my neighbors who loves their cattle and their
| job.
|
| Eating highly processed food just isn't good for you.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| The vast majority of people don't have neighbors who lovingly
| raise cattle for slaughter.
| beisner wrote:
| To be fair, neither is red meat. Unclear which is worse,
| though.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| Where are the studies that show _grass fed_ red meat is bad
| for your health? All studies I 've seen concluding red meat
| is a health concern are using _grain_ finished beef.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| There are studies e.g.
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sacn-iron-and-
| hea...
|
| The vast majority of beef cattle in the UK are fed grass
| from pasture most of the year, then hay/silage over winter
| when there isn't much grass. The conclusion was the same;
| red meat isn't great for you, at least in significant
| quantities (90g+ a day).
| spark3k wrote:
| It's definitely bad for the health of the cow.
| spark3k wrote:
| I don't understand when farmers say they "love their cattle"
| but then industriously kill them at 12% of their normal
| lifespan. And repeat. In millions.
|
| The meat lobby really has a grip on the culture and identity of
| the animal consuming public.
| hyperpl wrote:
| I agree. I once tried beyond meat by accident (some vegans were
| visiting and did a switcheroo on me) and it was one of the most
| repulsive things I had ever tasted.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Impossible burgers are way better. Can't stand beyond meat.
| Kharvok wrote:
| Almost all of livestock farming emissions come from
| transportation and powering the processing facilities.
|
| See Frank M. Mitloehner at UC Davis research on methane emission
| from livestock.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i've had it, it's not bad. It's no bone-in ribeye but it's not
| bad. more power to them.
| chiph wrote:
| Same here. It's totally acceptable for something like a burger
| or ground meat "crumbles" for pizza and tacos. It won't replace
| a good steak (yet).
|
| Their problem as a company is that the product is pretty easy
| to copy. And the danger there (beyond the threat to the firm)
| is that one of the knock-offs will be so bad that it kills the
| entire meat-alternative product space because of the bad
| reputation. Which would be a shame - anyone who has driven by
| the stockyards on Interstate 5 in California would appreciate
| reducing our supply on cattle.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Bummer - the Impossible burger is 100x better than Beyond Meat.
| I've tried the stuff at Del Taco too and it is pretty dismal.
| Even my veggie sister was disappointed.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Just curious, is there a recipe for a home made version? Last
| time, I tried making a burger, I made one with quinoa and almond
| flower. Tasted great, but would not say tasted like meat.
| barbs wrote:
| This is undoubtedly good news, despite what some people in these
| comments would have you believe.
|
| I seriously wonder if some commenters are being paid by big meat
| industries to try and sway opinions of richer/more powerful
| people? Or perhaps it's just the tendency of HN commenters to be
| contrarian.
| drewg123 wrote:
| This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan
| "meat" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by
| average people and not just dedicated vegans.
|
| Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best
| things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to
| the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the
| surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle. (see the
| documentary "Cowspiricy", or Mark Rober's "Feeding Bill Gates a
| Fake Burger to save the world:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k-V3ESHcfA)
| bendubuisson wrote:
| I'm a vegetarian, but Cowspiracy is not something I would use
| in an argument, the thing is full of shortcuts and misleading
| facts...
| chovybizzass wrote:
| i don't believe cow farts are a bigger problem than cars.
| hannob wrote:
| Unfortunately the documentary Cowspiracy is operating with
| massively exaggerated numbers (it claims meat is responsible
| for more than 50% of ghg emissions, it's explained on the
| wikipedia article of the film).
|
| Real numbers from credible sources are that greenhouse gas
| emissions from the meat and dairy industry are around 15%.
| Which is large enough to take this problem seriously, but it's
| still far away from those claims.
|
| I think this is harming the case. The problem is big enough to
| be passionate about fake meat. No need for exaggeration.
| jredwards wrote:
| I watched Cowspiracy. It was not convincing. It used numbers
| that seemed wildly exaggerated on their face, even before
| doing follow-on research. It also seemed designed to be
| emotionally manipulative more than informative. Maybe I don't
| watch enough documentaries, but it had a youtube conspiracy
| theorist vibe to it, rather than a measured, investigative
| approach.
| nightski wrote:
| The 15% is globally also. In the US it's as low as 7% (all of
| agriculture is 10% - directly from the EPA website).
|
| We buy a 1/4 a cow from a local farmer once every six months.
| It's a pretty low impact way eat meat.
| hamax wrote:
| Except for the cow.
| fastball wrote:
| It's only 1/4 of a cow. The cow still has 3/4 to work
| with.
| [deleted]
| leadingthenet wrote:
| The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us.
| Let's treat them as humanely as possible, while not
| pretending they're something they're not.
|
| If you want to help animals, let's tackle the issue of
| rewilding and reforestation more seriously.
| _cloudkate wrote:
| I share the same take with you! Reading some of the discussions
| going on in the comments, I'm surprised anyone thinks this is
| anything but good news. Like you said, it means:
|
| 1. non-vegetarians & non-vegans have more options. This is
| great for so many reasons! 2. Demand for beef will go down,
| which has a positive effect on the environment.
| elktea wrote:
| The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided.
| Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the
| environmental impacts have been greatly exaggerated. See below:
|
| Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only
| lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions.
| Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just
| 0.7%. At the same time, both transitions would create domestic
| deficiencies in critically limiting nutrients [White & Hall
| 2017; Liebe et al. 2020], which is not unexpected given that
| Animal Sourced Foods are valuable sources of essential
| nutrition [see elsewhere].
|
| and methane: "As argued above, this is not wishful thinking as
| there is still ample potential for mitigation of biogenic
| methane in global food systems. Moreover, the global cattle
| population has not been increasing during the last decade,
| making its contribution to global warming debatable [Shahbandeh
| 2020]. It is, however, true that methane has nonetheless been
| suddenly increasing since 2007. Yet, this can be ascribed to a
| multitude of potential reasons, incl. geological and fossil
| fuel emissions, wetlands, rice farming, and landfills [Gramling
| 2016; Nisbet et al. 2016; Alvarez et al. 2018; Rasmussen 2018;
| Etiope & Schwietzke 2019; Malik 2021], or a decrease in
| hydroxyl radical levels, the main sink for atmospheric methane
| [Turner et al. 2017]
|
| https://aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/06/greenhouse-gas-emiss...
| tryitnow wrote:
| Those items just address the carbon issue (and 2.6% is still
| quite a bit), they don't address the issue of the massive
| land footprint that livestock requires.
|
| Where's the evidence that meat provides far more nutritional
| value than any plant?
|
| And there have been a lot of studies showing that high
| consumption of red meat and processed meats are not helpful
| to health.
|
| I'm a meat eater and I'd love to feel better about my love of
| steak and burgers, but sadly I just don't see the evidence.
| bjtitus wrote:
| TLDR: There is no "popular crusade" telling people to end all
| meat consumption which will somehow leave you nutritionally
| deficient. Hundreds of millions of people eat vegetarian
| diets around the world and numerous studies show the benefits
| of reducing red + processed meat consumption. Replacing fast
| food burgers with plant based alternatives could be a good
| option for people with decreased availability of plant based
| alternatives to meat.
|
| > The popular crusade against meat is one of the more
| misguided.
|
| The only "popular crusade" is the universal dietary guidance
| against the excessively high consumption of red meat in the
| western diet. There are mountains of evidence showing links
| between higher red meat consumption and increased risk of the
| top killers in many western societies (heart disease, colon
| cancer, etc.). [1] [2] [3]
|
| There's a quick summary from the Harvard School of Public
| Health for those who don't want to pour through the published
| studies: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-
| healthy/whats-the-bee...
|
| You cite many studies here about the environmental effects of
| meat production and exactly 0 citing the nutritional or
| health aspects of meat consumption. Meat can contain valuable
| nutrients but hundreds of millions eat vegetarian diets
| around the world and many other sources (nuts, legumes, fish,
| etc.) can provide these nutrients in better forms. All major
| health organizations recommend limiting red and processed
| meat consumption below what the average American diets
| currently consist of.
|
| Replacing fast foods with plant based alternatives doesn't
| seem like a bad thing at all when you consider that meats and
| grains are the only things Americans are consuming over and
| above the dietary guidelines - at 140% of the recommendations
| [4]. Given that Heart Disease is the number one leading cause
| of death in the United States, shouldn't we be prioritizing
| alternatives which reduce the intake of high-glycemic
| carbohydrates? There have been many studies covering plant-
| based alternatives which back this up. [5]
|
| [1] Battaglia Richi E, Baumer B, Conrad B, Darioli R, Schmid
| A, Keller U. Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A
| Review of Epidemiological Studies. Int J Vitam Nutr Res.
| 2015;85(1-2):70-8. doi: 10.1024/0300-9831/a000224. PMID:
| 26780279.
|
| [2] Salter AM. The effects of meat consumption on global
| health. Rev Sci Tech. 2018 Apr;37(1):47-55. doi:
| 10.20506/rst.37.1.2739. PMID: 30209430.
|
| [3] Abete I, Romaguera D, Vieira AR, Lopez de Munain A, Norat
| T. Association between total, processed, red and white meat
| consumption and all-cause, CVD and IHD mortality: a meta-
| analysis of cohort studies. Br J Nutr. 2014 Sep
| 14;112(5):762-75. doi: 10.1017/S000711451400124X. Epub 2014
| Jun 16. PMID: 24932617.
|
| [4] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-
| gallery/gallery...
|
| [5] Vatanparast H, Islam N, Shafiee M, Ramdath DD. Increasing
| Plant-Based Meat Alternatives and Decreasing Red and
| Processed Meat in the Diet Differentially Affect the Diet
| Quality and Nutrient Intakes of Canadians. Nutrients. 2020
| Jul 9;12(7):2034. doi: 10.3390/nu12072034. PMID: 32659917;
| PMCID: PMC7400918.
| maelito wrote:
| > making its contribution to global warming debatable
|
| The problem is not only rising emissions in the Last decade,
| our emissions in 2010 was already way over the climate
| budgets.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| Livestock is a real problem. Using US numbers, which has one
| of the most efficient livestock management in the world make
| those numbers not too bad at ~4% (that's still a lot, let's
| be clear), but when you look worldwide the share of GHG
| attributed to livestock is 14.5%, that's definitely bad [1].
|
| Even if Beyond Meat will have a bigger impact in the US to
| begin with, this will have a worldwide impact.
|
| [1] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/using-global-
| emission-s...
| dnissley wrote:
| I think you missed the point -- that if you tried to
| replace meat with plants providing the same nutritional
| profile, then the impact is far less than anticipated by
| most calculations.
| raws wrote:
| I'm highly dubious of the statement that growing plants
| to eat them is lightly less polluting than growing
| plants, feeding them to cattle and then preparing the
| cattle to eat the meat. Cattle does not sequester CO2
| like plants do and emits greenhouse gases. Also uses way
| more treated water.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| When cattle are raised on well managed pasture, there is
| zero transportation between the cattle and feed, where as
| _all_ vegetables requires transportation, and more of it
| pound-per-pound to reach the nutrient value of beef.
|
| Cattle only contribute GHG when raised on grain as their
| digestive systems creates excessive methane breaking down
| corn. If more people understood how cows and ruminants
| _should_ work vs how they are currently used in the
| industrialized feed complexes, they 'd realize cows are
| not the problem, it's how we are using them.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| Right, but cattle can be raised where growing plants is
| impossible, and they can be fed by-products of plant
| agriculture that is not fit for human consumption.
|
| It's really not an either-or, something that I feel is
| often lost in these discussions. Eating plants and meat
| is complementary, and has been for all of human history.
| getty wrote:
| It's also becoming possible to grow plants hydroponically
| in a highly automated and controlled environment
| (warehouse/cattle shed), with up to a 98% saving in
| treated water usage, 60% less nutrients required but with
| more nutritious crops and no pesticides. This is the case
| for High Pressure Aeroponics, which is slightly more
| complex than other hydroponic methods.
|
| https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/ch_3.html
| leadingthenet wrote:
| That's an interesting point, but isn't it also true that
| hydroponics are currently just not a very economically
| feasible option?
| kmm wrote:
| What percentage of cattle actually subsists on otherwise
| barren lands, and what percentage is fed soy and grains
| explicitly grown for them.
| jussij wrote:
| There is a big difference is growing plants for human
| consumption when compared to growing feed for an animals
| and then consuming the animal meat.
|
| Basic biology says that when cattle eat feed only of
| portion of that feed ends up as meat.
|
| The farming industry actually measures this using a
| measure called the Feed Conversion Ratio.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Beef_
| cat...
|
| For example the FCR for cattle is over 4 meaning for
| every unit of animal mass you'll need over 4 times that
| mass in feed.
|
| This basic biology means it is always be more efficient
| to grow vegetables for direct consumption than to grow
| them for animal feed.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Plus an even larger issue is soil erosion, which reduces
| the soil's capacity to act as a carbon sink:
| https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/soil-erosion-decreases-
| soil...
|
| Returning to the most sustainable method of raising
| cattle, grazing, (such as simply letting cows graze) is
| pound for pound the most effective way to greatly reduce
| the carbon footprint left by industrialized livestock
| production, and restore soil quality.
| rtx wrote:
| Grasshoppers are better
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm always kinda confused when people argue that 3.3% of
| literally all emissions produced by every activity we as
| humans engage in seem like it's a small thing. There's not
| gonna be some magic bullet that will reduce our national
| emissions by 45% or anything. It's all the result of a bunch
| of small things added together. And we're at the point where
| plant based meats and dairy substitutes are good enough in a
| lot of different use-cases.
|
| If we cut our use of animal products to just the dishes that
| really demand it then we're already way better off. Use milk
| for your baking, not your cereal. Don't feel bad about having
| a steak but maybe try the veggie chicken nuggets when you get
| fast food.
| maelito wrote:
| Here in France, a relatively small country, people often
| say "yes but China" to reject changes. But China is just
| the sum of a handful of provinces that make up for the same
| number of inhabitants than France. Each of these provinces
| could say "yes but the USA".
| windexh8er wrote:
| Aside from the questionable source laid out here, the
| statement that:
|
| > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant...
|
| ...is pure nonsense. Vitamins, minerals, fiber. Considering
| you can't get _any_ fiber from meat is just the start of how
| biased some have been influenced by misinformation.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Real climate change can only happen with the cooperation of
| the worlds biggest polluters: China and India.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| China's one / two child policy is doing a lot more for the
| environment than what we are doing in most western
| countries.
|
| That's a sacrifice I can't image us ever making in our
| democracies.
| audunw wrote:
| > Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would
| only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national
| emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a
| reduction of just 0.7%.
|
| ONLY? That's a pretty damn big percentage for such a small
| piece of the economy.
|
| It feels a bit like saying "removal of Ford vehicles from the
| road would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6%" .. or
| whatever it'd be. Of course you can make it sound small if
| you compere a portion (livestock) of a portion (farming) of
| the national economy, to all emissions from the entire
| nation.
|
| Plant alternatives would have their own emissions of course,
| but I think there's a more realistic path to zero emissions.
| There's some interesting work on reducing methane emissions
| from livestock themselves (additives to the feed and such),
| but the path is more challenging.
| luc_ wrote:
| You should flip through some pages of "How Not To Die" by
| Michael Greger some time...
| diego_moita wrote:
| > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant
|
| Bullshit, the kind of lies that the meat industry loves to
| spin.
|
| Nutritional value is not one single measurable thing. And
| even protein contents (meat's most common nutrient) when
| measured per gram can be higher in soy and derivatives than
| in some meats (e.g: pork but and shoulder). When measured by
| calories other legumes (beans, chickpeas, lupini) beat most
| meats.
|
| The only nutrient not often found in plants is B12 vitamin.
| But it can be bought cheap as a nutritional supplement.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I'm no biologist, but even assuming all of that blog post's
| sources are reliable - it is still cherry-picking findings:
|
| * Not counting livestock contribution to GHG, but rather an
| estimate of how much removing it would reduce GHG (which is
| room for a lot of speculation that is very hard to support).
|
| * Preferring a figure taken from a single paper by two
| individual researchers over the United Nations' official FAO
| statistic, which is 14.5% of emissions due to livestock
| lifecycle.
|
| * Focusing on how forestation is challenging, while the
| source acknowledge that the de-forestation is very damaging.
|
| * Ignoring the huge amounts of land necessary for growing
| livestock (Example: ~55 times the area for peas for same
| amount of protein [1])
|
| * Ignoring the question of the distribution of meat
| consumption among people in the world today, and the
| feasibility of a meat-rich diet for everyone.
|
| I'm sure there's more, but this is enough not to be very
| receptive to the claim of misguidedness.
|
| PS - Due disclosure: I eat poultry and occasionally other
| meat. But I am still worried about the environmental impact
| of its production, with the foremost aspect being de-
| forestation.
|
| [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=15588468
| rsj_hn wrote:
| This isn't a crusade against meat, it's a crusade between
| Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as to who will capture the
| (niche) alt-beef market.
|
| McDonald's signed an agreement making BM their preferred
| supplier of fake beef, so Impossible is put at a
| disadvantage. Absolutely none of this replaces any real beef
| with fake beef, or even results in less real beef eaten or
| sold.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| YMMV, but it's much more than 2.6% in the US. Livestock is
| 40% of of ag's GHG emissions.
|
| https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#agriculture.
| ..
|
| And ag is ~10% of US emissions
|
| https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/.
| ..
|
| So eliminating livestock would reduce emissions by 4%.
|
| With that said, 4% is still low, but it doesn't account for
| all the GHG emissions needed to grow feed for livestock, nor
| does it account for other things like transportation of that
| feed, energy used in processing by the industrial sector, and
| so on.
| shepting wrote:
| Yes, and much of the non-livestock emissions from
| agriculture is from growing plants _to feed to livestock_!
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| And process it, and transport it, and process and
| transport the meat after we've slaughtered the livestock.
|
| Part of meat's increased GHG emissions are because their
| are so many more steps in bringing it to market and
| because it doesn't last as long. Most plants are
| harvested, cleaned/processed, and transported to market.
| Livestock generally needs feed, which is harvested,
| cleaned/processed, and transported to the livestock, and
| after livestock is slaughtered, it needs to be
| cleaned/processed, and transported to market, and on top
| of that it tends to go bad faster.
| yxwvut wrote:
| You're conflating domestically produced GHG emissions with
| domestically consumed products' emissions. As a toy
| example, suppose we grew no animal products in the US and
| imported all our meat. Your method would conclude that
| switching to plant-based diets would have no effect on GHG
| emissions since livestock represents 0% any of our
| agricultural GHG emissions.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to another post?
| andbberger wrote:
| I'll leave to the other comments to combat the factual
| inaccuracies here but - there is an inherent and substantial
| efficiency loss in consuming secondary consumers.
|
| There's no getting around that.
| kleton wrote:
| It only takes a little bit of bromoform to poison
| methanogenesis in rumen. It would actually improve feed
| conversion as well.
| rtrdea wrote:
| HahahahahhHa
| vortegne wrote:
| > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant
|
| Completely wrong
| brailsafe wrote:
| Do you have something more substantial to add? I do imagine
| that to match meat on a value per gram measurement, you'd
| have to have either spend way more or be lucky with where
| you live, but something to check would be great.
| Drybones wrote:
| You can't just say "completely wrong" when it's clearly
| not.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| You literally just did the exact same thing
| Drybones wrote:
| Exactly how?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| "That's completely wrong"
|
| "You can't just say somethings completely wrong
| especially since you're completely wrong"
| Drybones wrote:
| Or how about not commenting to statements that aren't
| completely wrong by saying "completely wrong" when that
| is clearly debatable.
| kleton wrote:
| What is one plant that contains menaquinone or
| eicosapentaenoate?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Sauerkraut, buckwheat, fermented soy
| xwdv wrote:
| Pound for pound, it cannot be denied meat provides more
| nutrition than the same amount of plants.
| krastanov wrote:
| Pound for pound of CO2 (or water, or other resources) it
| can not be denied that plants provide more nutrition than
| meat.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Why is nutrition per pound your metric? Doctors don't
| advise that we eat x pounds of food a day. Also this is
| easily disprovable. A vegan multivitamin is thousands of
| times more nutritionally dense than meat, but i don't eat
| 2 pounds of multivitamins a day.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Not OP but as someone who lifts heavy weights and often
| needs 3-4000kcal a day, but doesn't have a huge appetite,
| I do care about nutrient density. To me vegetarian diets
| are not practical because of how much food I would need
| to eat to hit my macros compared to an omnivore diet.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| Do your beliefs forbid you from having more than 250g of
| food in your plate at a given time? If not that's not
| quite relevant.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This is like saying pound for pound lead is more dense
| than iron. It's a useless comparison. Meats have some
| nutritional content that plants have less of, and plants
| have some nutritional content that meats have less of.
| Look up comparisons between beef and broccoli, for
| example.
| veonik wrote:
| Are we also considering the pounds of plants that the
| animal had to eat to grow to such a size? I should
| imagine it takes quite a lot of food to raise a one ton
| cow for slaughter. At least one ton of plant material as
| food, right? To produce how many pounds of meat? 750lbs
| seems reasonable.
|
| So if you had 2750lbs of plant food for yourself, vs just
| the 750 lbs of meat -- which has more nutrients?
|
| (I do not know the answer myself, but I can see where it
| could be argued that meat is not more nutritious, pound
| for pound)
| nightski wrote:
| Humans can't digest grass. While we do feed cows corn for
| at least a portion of their life, it doesn't need to be
| as prolific as it is.
|
| But we also feed them things like beet pulp pellets and
| molasses - both of which are by products of sugar
| production. Unless we are going to stop eating sugar what
| else would you do with this waste?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Humans eat molasses too...
| nightski wrote:
| Cane molasses. Sorry I wasn't clear - I was primarily
| talking about sugar beet molasses which is used for
| animal feed.
| giantandroids wrote:
| This really is a vague statement without defining what
| you mean by 'nutrition'. If you're referring protein,
| well sort of, however some non meat based products carry
| plenty, nuts, black beans (15g of protein per cup).. At
| the same time there are plenty of vitamins / minerals in
| vegetables that you cannot get from meat. Vitamin C being
| a key one.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Probably exaggerated and imponderable, as it really depends
| on how you would rank such a thing. But it is really
| nutritious in that it packs a great density of protein and
| micronutrients.
| ben_w wrote:
| Lentils, tofu, peanuts, and seitan are 25%, 20%, 28%, and
| 80% protein by weight. Meat is about 26%, according to
| WolframAlpha. Not that you actually need very many grams
| of protein each day to be healthy.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I find seitan and tofu completely unpalatable, and I
| can't rely on eating hundreds of grams of peanuts to fill
| my protein needs. Lentils are fine...
|
| I lift heavy, which I believe is integral to my good
| health (the evidence on the health benefits of strength
| training is overwhelming). You do need significant
| amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both
| research and empirical evidence. Designing 3000-4000kcal
| diets high in protein without meat is entirely possible,
| but highly impractical.
| simias wrote:
| Most serious weightlifters in my experience supplement
| their diet with protein shakes or similar, many vegan
| formulations exist. It's not super tasty, but I wouldn't
| call it "highly impractical".
|
| Beyond that in my experience "lifter diet" is not exactly
| gourmet stuff, unless you really, really like chicken
| breasts.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I drink about 2-3 day. It leaves anywhere between 2-3.5k
| calories of real food to fill. It is highly impractical
| compared to brown rice, chicken and veggies, which is one
| of the reasons why they will be about the last population
| segment to ever adopt a diet without meat.
| ben_w wrote:
| The diet you're describing also has a _significantly_
| higher calorie intake than most people's exercise level
| can balance. If I ate that much, I would be fat not fit.
|
| (Also: I just picked four ingredients I just happen to
| have; there are others).
| danans wrote:
| > You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift
| - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence.
|
| Specialized athletic hobbies like powerlifting are sort
| of irrelevant to discussions involving reducing GHG
| emissions by scaling up plant based meat substitutes.
| Niches like that aren't the target market.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I am for plant-based substitutes anyway. It's a natural
| vegetarian diet that I would struggle with.
| tomstoms wrote:
| About 10% of calorie intake is the protein sweet spot.
| Incidentally about the average you would get from a
| divers whole foods plant based diet. Meat diets will
| struggle to get that low. In fact, the Norwegian
| government has stated that it would in fact recommend 10%
| because it would be the best nutritional advise, were it
| not for the fact that it would be hard to fit into the
| common meat based diets of Norwegians. I wish I could
| provide a source but have since been unable to locate the
| official document Were it was discussed.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > The popular crusade against meat is one of the more
| misguided.
|
| This seems to presume two things:
|
| 1) That vegans and vegetarians are primarily doing it for the
| environment.
|
| 2) That vegans and vegetarians can't do basic math.
|
| To the first point, I'd be fully supportive of plant-based
| diets even if the only reason was concern over the treatment
| of the animals themselves. The focus on the environmental
| benefits is really quite new. Vegetarianism has historically
| been about animal rights/welfare and/or a commitment to non-
| violence. The environmental benefits are simply the cherry on
| the cake.
|
| To the second point, you say meat provides "far more"
| nutritional value than any plant. Maybe, maybe not. (I think
| "not", but I'm open to being wrong about that.) Nutrition is
| one of those weird fields in science where there's not a
| whole lot of agreement about anything. However, the vast
| majority of nutritionists and doctors are far more concerned
| with the lack of fruits in vegetables in the popular diet
| than they are with the lack of meat.
|
| The environmental benefits have probably been exaggerated,
| but growing, distributing, and consuming vegetables is
| obviously less resource-intensive and less wasteful than
| meat. I'm somewhat shocked that this could be a controversial
| statement. I'm NOT saying the benefits are so high as to,
| say, "save the world" by going veg. There are plenty of
| people who make this claim, and I'm very suspicious of it.
|
| But that's very different from thinking the entire movement
| is misguided. EVERY movement exaggerates their claims. That
| doesn't make them misguided, simply prone to hyperbole.
|
| (On a side note: I'm not vegetarian. I simply agree with
| those who are.)
| mft_ wrote:
| I'm a fairly recent convert to being mostly (like, >99% of
| my calories, probably) vegetarian actually due to the
| health benefits.
|
| Environmental and animal welfare concerns are nice bonuses,
| but weren't enough to make me reach the tipping point, I
| guess.
| rtx wrote:
| Was it baby cow GIFs?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| >To the second point, you say meat provides "far more"
| nutritional value than any plant. Maybe, maybe not. (I
| think "not", but I'm open to being wrong about that.)
|
| Every anthropologist: Human brain development skyrocketed
| and were able to maintain them when meat became a regular
| staple to their diet.
|
| Just pick any documentary or book on the evolutionary
| development of humans. Any! I'm tired of hearing this same
| bullshit argument that, "Maybe meat isn't good for us. The
| science isn't there that it's any good." Yes it is! There's
| millions of years of scientific evidence that shows meat is
| what made us the technological masters we are today!
| Where's the science that meat isn't good for us? I want to
| see that first. And don't give me the epidemiology of a
| McDonald's junkie and lay that as claim of "all meat
| eaters". They're as much of a carnivore as a second rate
| vulture. Then there's that old study that claimed dietary
| fat is worse than consuming sugar because, dun dun dun,
| they were paid off by the sugar industry.
|
| Do a fair comparison of some folks that are straight edge
| (no alcohol, smoking, vices, etc). Some herbivores, some
| omnivores. It's even better if they grow/raise their own
| food. That's when you'll see who's right and who's wrong.
|
| The one thing I agree with vegans is the fact they want
| people to get the processed trash out of their diet. The
| reliance on ultra processed foods for a majority of our
| diets has been causing more harm than good. These plant
| based burgers... yea... fruits right off the branch.
| grawprog wrote:
| >The one thing I agree with vegans is the fact they want
| people to get the processed trash out of their diet.
|
| Except, i don't think i've yet met a vegan that doesn't
| consume ultra processed soy and or gluten based products.
|
| All these meat alternatives are ultra processed to make
| them resemble meat. They're made of ultra processed
| protein and vegetables, spices and additives to improve
| taste, colour and texture and to allow them to keep
| whatever shape and form they're pressed into. The
| creation of alternative meats is highly industrialized
| process that creates ultra-processed food products.
|
| The single number one thing humans could do to reduce
| pollution from agricultural production is to stop relying
| on global imports and exports for so many things and
| focus on small scale regional production. Reduce the
| overall amount of mass scale industrial agriculture.
| Because whatever's being produced, meat, plant or
| otherwise, the methods being used to produce them and the
| scale they're being produced on is the problem.
|
| Reduce the waste all along the supply chain, reduce the
| global footprint, go back to less productive but more
| sustainable production methods and focus food imports and
| exports as locally as possible. Rely on regional trade
| before global.
| dekhn wrote:
| Here's a perfect example of the ultra processed vegan
| food: https://www.mccormick.com/spices-and-
| flavors/other/bacn-piec...
|
| It's not surprising that the ingredients list is similar
| to Doritos: Textured Soy Flour, Canola Oil, Salt, Caramel
| Color, Maltodextrin, Natural and Artificial Flavor,
| Lactic Acid, Yeast Extract, Disodium Inosinate and
| Disodium Guanylate (Flavor Enhancers), and FD&C Red 40.
|
| It's basically and engineered umami delivery system.
| havelhovel wrote:
| I thought the argument was that fire allowed us to
| process meat and acquire the calories needed to be more
| productive.
|
| Regardless, your argument seems to be that eating meat is
| better than starving. That isn't an argument for eating
| meat. It's an argument for food security. Guess what food
| security depends on. Reduced emissions.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| The agricultural revolution - settling, understanding the
| seasons, plant selection and breeding - are much more
| important factors to where humans are today and the rise
| of civilisation and modern population scales than animal
| husbandry. That was part of the story but I've not seen
| any researcher arguing that domestication of the cow was
| more important than grains.
|
| But anyway there is no doubt animal meat is nutritious.
| The question is not xis it nutritious" or "was it
| important for humanity in the past," the question is
| where we go from here. Even if you can make a cogent
| argument that it was essential to humanity's rise that
| doesn't provide an argument (or vegans might say a
| justification) that we still need animal meat in 2050.
| Arguably constant warfare and burning coal was what drove
| technological prowess in Europe to bring us a long way to
| today's world, but would you argue we still need those?
| Slavery was essential to the rise of America, does that
| make it right to continue? Colonialism made Britain rich
| and rose many Brits out of poverty, does that mean
| Britain should continue exploiting India? Domestic
| violence and marriage of underage girls was a common and
| essential feature of human societies every where, does
| that justify continuing them these today?
|
| Arguments based on past practice hold no moral or
| scientific sway over our future.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| Just because meat helped develop humnans to have large
| brain growth does not mean it is the best thing for
| humans. Evolution prioritized different things. Living
| longer and healthier past the age of 30 are not things
| that would have been affected.
|
| You're going to believe what you want, but the meat/dairy
| industry are truly diabolical in what they produce and
| how they do it. From the conditions of animals, to how
| they treat them, to even how they treat their human
| workers are just bad up and down.
|
| How many people grow and raise their own food? We need
| comparisons that work on a global scale. I believe some
| amount of high quality meat and dairy can be good for
| you, but we as a species consume way to much and it's
| just been going. Our fish intake is absolutely
| devastating for our oceans. The amount of cows, chickens
| and pigs we slaughter is also extremely detrimental.
|
| These plant based burgers are a start. Beyond claims no
| GMOs where as Impossible openly embraces gmos. Nutrition
| science is difficult, but hopefully we're progressing,
| and I think reducing meat consumption will improve
| peoples diet on average.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think this is a strawman.
|
| It can be true that meat provides a lot of good
| nutrition. It can be true that the human cooking/eating
| of meat led to better nutrition and development in
| ancient times (when people ate less of it).
|
| It can also be true that in the modern world you can get
| that nutrition without meat and there may be other good
| reasons to do so (animal suffering, environment, ability
| to feed more people, more easily, potentially fewer heart
| related diseases).
|
| These things don't have to be in conflict. I don't think
| the comment you replied to was suggesting they were.
| hirundo wrote:
| It may be that the extra nutritional benefits of meat can
| be matched by plant products. But the Beyond Meat
| offerings do not achieve anything close to that. They are
| made of highly processed industrial ingredients that are
| designed to approximate the texture of meat but not the
| nutritional profile. Pea proteins are not as complete nor
| bio-available as meat proteins, and the fatty acid
| profile is very different (and IMHO very inferior). To
| the extent that your purpose is greater health for
| yourself rather than less suffering, these products don't
| provide good value.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah I agree, and I don't think that's Beyond Meat's goal
| (or Impossible's) goal and it really shouldn't be.
|
| I think they're trying to get the experience of eating
| meat right, they don't care about the health profile,
| you'll have to get your nutrition elsewhere. I think
| that's the right approach for them.
|
| Some others are trying to grow actual meat (Memphis
| Meats), in that case you'd get the same nutritional
| profile without the suffering if they can pull it off.
| hammock wrote:
| >you say meat provides "far more" nutritional value than
| any plant. Maybe, maybe not. (I think "not", but I'm open
| to being wrong about that.) Nutrition is one of those weird
| fields in science where there's not a whole lot of
| agreement about anything
|
| No need to look in nutrition, just look at biology or
| physics instead. All of the animals with the largest
| calorie / day and calorie / kg body weight / day
| requirements, eat meat. There is no other way.
|
| Edit: if you are going to downvote me, provide a
| counterexamnple please
| LegitShady wrote:
| like elephants? giraffes? Hippos?
|
| I'm not a vegetarian but I can think of lots of large
| herbivores.
| fossuser wrote:
| > "On a side note: I'm not vegetarian. I simply agree with
| those who are."
|
| This was my position for a long time until finally making
| the jump at the beginning of the pandemic (vegetarian, will
| rarely eat fish sometimes).
|
| For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other
| animals. I thought this way before but it's hard to change
| behavior and I liked hamburgers. I think this is the
| strongest argument and the environmental or nutritional
| arguments feel like side issues to avoid just tackling this
| issue directly. The meat substitutes are nice because
| they're close enough to satisfy the want at a cook out or
| something.
|
| There's some long reasoning behind it, but basically
| 'thoughtful local eating of meat' or whatever just felt
| like a rationalization to me. If an alien came down to
| earth and loved eating humans, but said they thanked every
| human they killed and ate or that the humans had a decent
| 20yrs of life before they killed them (and they only ate
| local humans), it still wouldn't sit well with me.
|
| In the above example I was basically the alien that
| understood and agreed with all the human arguments, but
| still ate human because I liked human burger. Being
| vegetarian makes my actions more consistent with what I
| think is the right thing to do.
|
| In theory, you could draw some line at 'well humans and
| other more intelligent beings are different because they
| have dreams and a plan for their future'. Even if humans
| could draw this line perfectly (which I'm skeptical of),
| you'd still need to kill the 'lesser' animals in a way
| without suffering or fear. I just don't think that's
| logistically possible. It's definitely not the way it's
| done in practice anyway.
| core-questions wrote:
| > For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other
| animals. I thought this way before but it's hard to
| change behavior and I liked hamburgers. I think this is
| the strongest argument and the environmental or
| nutritional arguments feel like side issues to avoid just
| tackling this issue directly.
|
| For me, this is the weakest argument. Animals are not
| people, and agriculturally farmed animals only exist
| because of our actions. Cruelty aside, farming and eating
| them is hardly immoral (as it is evolved behaviour - we
| wouldn't be here to talk about it otherwise). The
| suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human;
| and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty
| of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we
| worry about animals.
|
| > In theory, you could draw some line at 'well humans and
| other more intelligent beings are different because they
| have dreams and a plan for their future'.
|
| I don't have to resort to dreams and plans. They're
| simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't
| anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care
| whatsoever about their emotional state. It doesn't
| noticeably impact the quality of the meat.
|
| I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who
| watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as
| kids. Some of them become sexually attracted to such,
| some of them just won't eat them anymore. Either way,
| it's a strange and divorced-from-reality way to go, seems
| to mostly have negative nutritional impact, and no
| difference is made in the world as less demand = cheaper
| meat = everyone else just gets more.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > vegetarian, will rarely eat fish sometimes
|
| > Even if humans could draw this line perfectly (which
| I'm skeptical of), you'd still need to kill the 'lesser'
| animals in a way without suffering or fear. I just don't
| think that's logistically possible.
|
| So your line sits far above vegetables and below legged
| animals with fish near it on lesser side, I see...
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not perfect, I probably shouldn't eat fish either.
| Maybe I'll stop at some point.
|
| Just because you don't do something perfectly doesn't
| mean it's not worth doing at all.
| fastball wrote:
| Drawing the line at cognizance is not something you do
| "in theory". That is where the vast majority of people on
| the planet draw the line. You going one step further
| doesn't make the line you've drawn any more objective.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I don't think this is true. People don't care about the
| thoughts and emotions of the animals we eat and we can
| eat other huamns, just as cognizant as ourselves, easily
| enough. Cannibalism is common throughout human history
| and there have been even quite advanced societies that
| practiced it widely, for instance the Aztecs.
|
| In any case humans have killed other humans for all sorts
| of reasons that do not include eating them, again
| throughout history. Why is invading another peoples' land
| and killing them to take their stuff any better than
| killing them to eat their meat?
| fossuser wrote:
| It's not that the line is drawn 'in theory'. It's that
| they think they've drawn it in the right place (usually
| humans on one side and everything else on the other).
|
| I think this is pretty empirically wrong and I don't
| think humans are likely to get it right.
|
| Even ignoring that, there's still the suffering issue.
|
| There is objectivity at drawing the line to the left of
| neural nets.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| If at some point in the future we discovered a way to
| identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and
| (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not
| experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure
| the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call
| that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals
| experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as
| food? What then?
|
| I'm sure you have thought of these scenarios in some way
| and have a more nuanced judgement, as most people I've
| talked to have. I'm just curious what are _your_ reasons?
| Maybe they 'll convince me!
| fossuser wrote:
| > "If at some point in the future we discovered a way to
| identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and
| (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not
| experience it, then what?"
|
| Then I'm okay with it (assuming in this hypothetical the
| result is true). I'd be surprised since fear/suffering is
| a pretty base level thing, but it'd change my mind.
|
| > "What if the animals experience quantifiable higher
| pleasure when raised as food?"
|
| There's still the issue of slaughtering them and the
| suffering/fear associated with that. Maybe you could
| argue on net that it's ethical from a utilitarian
| standpoint if their happy life outweighs their unhappy
| end. I think though, that I'd find it hard to overcome
| the negative suffering value they'd incur from getting
| killed.
|
| One thought experiment is imagine a pig that was
| historically bred to get happiness from being eaten. Its
| life dream is to get killed and eaten and that's its main
| purpose/goal in life, its only source of happiness. In
| this instance while breeding this animal may have been
| unethical, it already exists. Now is it ethical to _not_
| eat the pig?
|
| I think in the above example I think it'd be fine, but
| it's also pretty far removed from reality.
|
| Reminds me a bit of this:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-
| worl...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of
| other animals.
|
| The way I think of it, pigs are very intelligent, more
| intelligent than dogs. However, humans are more
| intelligent. If pigs were more intelligent, pigs would
| eat humans.
|
| And that's not a figure of speech. Pig would eat us if
| they could. They wouldn't stop and think, gee, does this
| little baby human girl cry because it doesn't want to be
| eaten, maybe I should stop munching on its belly? They
| wouldn't stop to think, sheesh, this little blond baby
| boy with piercing blue eyes is so cuuute, how can I eat
| it? They'd eat us.
|
| And they'd also eat the cows and the chicken and the
| sheep and the fish and everything else we eat. And they'd
| kill their babies to keep the cows lactating and to take
| their stomachs to make cheese with. And so on, and so
| forth.
|
| So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior
| morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm
| morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I
| eat a pig.
|
| I appreciate that's not a common line of reasoning and
| I'm possibly overestimating the nutritional value of
| humans, but in any case I don't see any problem with
| eating meat, given that I'm an animal and some animals
| eat other animals' meat.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Artificial meat doesn't have to be plant based. It's entirely
| possible that we could grow synthetic meat at scale with the
| same nutritional profile as the real thing.
| yboris wrote:
| As I understand, there are places where you can just put cows
| and they feed themselves off the land. But there is also a
| tremendous amount of deforestation happening because those
| lands are then used to grow food for cows that are in other
| locations.
|
| I find it amazing how well avoiding eating meat aligns good
| things:
|
| - less animal suffering
|
| - less pollution of air, water, and land
|
| - less waste (inefficient way to get calories)
|
| - better health (assuming you substitute meat with vegetables
| and not highly-processed food)
| mdorazio wrote:
| I'm less inclined to believe a blog post than I am to believe
| published & cited articles. Most estimates I've found put
| overall GHG from diet at about 15-20% of total per capita.
| And sources like [1] indicate that switching to a plant-based
| diet cuts that number in half for western countries (the UK
| in this study). That's 3x your number. Granted, meat
| substitutes are higher on GHG than eating straight plant-
| based meals, so it's probably more like a reduction of 3-4%
| from switching to Beyond or Impossible. But as with any GHG
| discussion, you have to consider what's actually feasible to
| do (ex. changing dietary components) vs. really hard (ex.
| reducing energy inputs to manufacturing) and optimize for the
| former.
|
| [1]
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1
| NoOneNew wrote:
| So, animals being alive is the general problem now when it
| comes to climate? At that, the greenhouse gas problem in
| livestock fed artificially large amounts of grains has been
| solved by introducing a small amount of seaweed to their
| diet. That's been kind of a non-issue for the past few
| years as more and more commercial feeds have seaweed
| included already. Just because you're not in the
| agriculture industry doesn't mean other people aren't doing
| actual good and change for the better.
| hammock wrote:
| >So, animals being alive is the general problem now when
| it comes to climate?
|
| I wonder if Planned Parenthood has ever put out a climate
| impact report.
| kekebo wrote:
| Do you happen to have a source for this?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Let me google that for you: "seaweed livestock feed"
|
| But here, Yale, have a blessed day. God speed.
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-
| help-c...
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| That is about "how it can"
|
| That is about a small scale pilot. It says nothing about
| grazing cattle, about scaled up asparagopsis production
| necessary to support global beef and dairy cattle
| populations, or anything.
|
| It would be more helpful if you could find what level of
| impact that is having, based on the article you linked it
| is negligible right now.
| tinco wrote:
| Are they really? I recently heard in a local TV show that
| farmers were not feeding seaweed to cows at scale because
| it was more expensive, and the related uncertainties. Was
| the information in the show outdated? The Netherlands is
| globally known for its high tech agriculture, so I was
| surprised they still were not feeding seaweed when the
| benefit has been known for so long.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| From all I have seen (e.f. [1])the seaweed idea was still
| in small scale trials as of 2018, please provide some
| evidence for your claim that this is now already
| mainstream. That said, the focus of this is on _methane_
| as one of the GHG produced by cows. This doesn 't count
| CO2 produced by cows or the rest of resource wastage of
| the meat industry, from the 7:1 grain:beef ratio to the
| huge industry of the barns and slaughterhouses,
| packaging, transport, ... All these factors are much
| lower with vegetables/grains or even plant based options.
|
| And that is not to mention the moral side of animal
| cruelty in the industry, deforestation for that
| Argentinian beef, or the human suffering on the
| processing side.
|
| 1 https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-
| help-c...
| dnissley wrote:
| The linked blog post contains a couple dozen citations,
| fwiw.
| codyb wrote:
| One estimate probably includes shipping emissions for food
| and one doesn't would be my guess.
|
| Of course, plant based burgers might not reduce total final
| product shipping emissions but they might reduce a lot of
| the intermediary shipping emissions since cattle require
| feed.
|
| Also, there's that thing where we apparently ship chicken
| to china to be cleaned and then back sometimes? That seems
| bad, but I don't really know any of the numbers. I can only
| assume it's on those cargo ships which use very crudely
| refined fuels with little emission caps.
| Bang2Bay wrote:
| May be anecdotal, but four generations prior to me and myself
| have all be vegetarians with no sign of deficiencies. and
| many lived 90 yrs + . and I know many families who ate meat
| only once a month or approx '10 meals a year'. meat is over
| hyped.
| tomstoms wrote:
| Sorry stopped reading at " Meat provides far more nutritional
| value than any plant"
|
| Edit: Vote it down all you want. The statement isn't getting
| any less idiotic
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant
|
| Meat provides far less nutritional value than was
| collectively contained in the plants used to produce it.
| bweitzman wrote:
| How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and
| plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if
| not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian
| diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have
| been popular for millennia.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so
| bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure,
| meat offers a different set of nutritional value than
| vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely
| with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of
| people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as
| you've said.
| novok wrote:
| It's not brosciency, it's called bioavailablity. Ex:
| Carrots have a lot of a vitamin A precursor in the form
| of beta carotene, but the rate it's absorbed compared to
| the form commonly in the liver (retinol), is
| significantly lower and is reduced even further if you
| have certain health problems, including common ones like
| diabetes or insulin resistance.
| kzrdude wrote:
| A counter argument - billions of people subsisted on ok
| food for centuries, but somehow in the 20th and 21st
| centuries people got taller, smarter and had earlier
| puberties because of better nutrition.
|
| Doesn't that mean there is a quality (and quantity) to
| nutrition and not just subsisting, that we need to
| examine? And the claim about meat is that it has a
| quality that is beneficial.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Certainly you have to look at causations for that
| holistically. People have cooked and eaten meat in the
| past as well. It needs to be further studied on the
| qualities that has driven our growth in the industrial
| age. I think we now have a better understanding of our
| bodies and how to gamify our growth, through a myriad of
| ways whether or not eating certain amounts of meat and
| balancing it with other foods.
| dnissley wrote:
| Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only
| country with more than 15% of it's population being
| vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of
| this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but
| do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking
| to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar
| health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.
| tmotwu wrote:
| There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly
| because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't
| count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our
| food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform
| the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly
| separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent
| take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective
| - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a
| vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.
| dnissley wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the stats of a country
| like India though, where you don't have confounders like
| vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the
| developed world. Although the more I look into it, the
| more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label
| there.
|
| What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian?
| None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the
| human race took a pretty big hit in the early
| agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Buddhist societies and the sects formed around them
| immediately come to mind.
| ska wrote:
| > How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and
| plant products?
|
| It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are
| too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed
| you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which
| means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's not magic shit in meat, it's mostly water and
| amino acids and the remaining fraction is mostly bad for
| you.
|
| (I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than
| barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs
| in milligrams if you want an example)
| ska wrote:
| I didn't say we know "barely anything", just that the
| unknowns are significant enough to allow a lot of wiggle
| room and arguments. Including, for example, the accuracy
| of many vitamin RDAs.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| I'm shocked that people seriously believe that the
| fundamentals of nutritional science are a virtual mystery
| or has enough "wiggle room" to make ridiculously broad
| claims about diet necessities. We know almost exact
| micrograms of iodine we need per day to be healthy. We
| have a pretty great idea of what the body needs to
| function optimally and are getting a clearer picture
| every day.
|
| Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?
| ska wrote:
| If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have
| wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being
| made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are
| wrong, it seems, but the science is hard.
|
| You are right we have some pretty good information on
| deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12
| (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how
| even dietary source actually work even with some key
| nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that
| dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We
| are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will
| tell you we are but they still contradict each other
| regularly. This is not a mature science.
| elktea wrote:
| I'm comparing it by ... comparing the nutrients in each.
| There are lots of examples of nutrients in meat that aren't
| found in plants (carnitine, b12 etc) and even more where
| the type found in plants must be consumed in far greater
| quantities and converted to a form we can use (retinol vs
| beta-carotene, DHA vs EPA/ALA etc)
|
| Millions of vegetarians doesn't mean meat is suddenly less
| nutritious.
| giantandroids wrote:
| The B12 in off the shelf beef , chicken is from it being
| injected by farmers (along with all manner of other stuff
| such as antibiotics).
|
| The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to
| soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is
| supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan
| is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a
| much more specific dose).
| munk-a wrote:
| But hundreds of millions of vegetarians does mean that
| eliminating that meat from our diet is extremely
| realistic and much more widely affordable.
| mythrwy wrote:
| By all means, feel free to eliminate meat from _your_
| diet. But "Our" diet is a different issue.
| cphajduk wrote:
| I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin
| B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.
|
| If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin
| containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+
| year absence of the vitamin.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing
| nutrients as well.
| kamranjon wrote:
| There is plenty of B12 in seaweed and mushrooms and I eat
| quite a bit of those - wonder if that's what's keeping me
| afloat.
| jhickok wrote:
| Vitamin B12 can only be found naturally in the amounts we
| need in meat and eggs. With the advent of culturing there
| are now vegan sources at nearly every grocery store.
| yread wrote:
| It's ok you can just drink beer (!1l a day) to get B12
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/
|
| (Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where
| average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per
| capita)
| codyb wrote:
| I was under the impression alcohol impacted B vitamin
| absorption though, so this may not work?
|
| I looked it up and it seems to be suggested that it does
| but I didn't look long enough to find a study.
| ska wrote:
| > however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.
|
| That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by
| bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it
| an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products
| of animals that have been eating such plants (or these
| days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and
| especially in developed countries is often the easiest
| one.
|
| It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for
| humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products
| from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those
| plants, or fortify another food more directly.
|
| The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder
| by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous
| washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial
| and water soluble.
|
| It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we
| don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very
| difficult.
| pwinnski wrote:
| I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're
| literally hundreds of millions of people on this
| planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives,
| and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the
| age of two.
|
| I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-
| false statements like this. Please?
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
| graeme wrote:
| Meat and _eggs_. So you need eggs. It's also present in
| dairy.
|
| So the parent's claim is an argument against
| unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of
| _vegetarianism_ doesn't address that. Massive difference
| between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement
| or not.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the
| linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same
| chart.
|
| You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S.,
| Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans,
| while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage,
| though those two are disputed.
| novok wrote:
| Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the
| B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and
| eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods
| are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common
| nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their
| standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at
| face value.
| pvarangot wrote:
| There's a lot of vegan sources for B12, mostly fermented
| stuff like tempeh or powdered yeast leftovers from making
| beer. Some plants also have it. They are cheap and
| plentiful and usually used in a lot of vegan foods like
| "substitute cheese" or people blend them shakes because
| they are also rich in other aminoacids.
|
| You can get all the B12 you need and even more from this
| while still being balanced in macro and micro-nutrients.
| Also B12 deficiency will usually make you psychotic or
| very very tired and to die from it you have to be
| completely depleted, if you live in the modern world and
| eat products made with fortifried grains, like white
| bread, pasta or some breakfast cereals, you will probably
| never go below the threshold were you cause damage.
|
| There's also multiple protein shakes or meal replacement
| shakes that sell for like 2 dollars that have enough B12
| for the daily recommended intake which is far far more
| than what you actually need as it's based on the old 2000
| calorie diet thing.
| [deleted]
| hamax wrote:
| Most omnivores get their B12 from supplements given to
| livestock.
|
| It's the same supplements but with extra steps.
| Spivak wrote:
| Look, this isn't the whole picture and it super misleading.
| Just because humans survived with a particular diet doesn't
| mean that they wouldn't have been healthier had they eaten
| meat. You can't just point to historical populations who
| didn't have widespread access to animal products and be
| like "see they lived."
|
| I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are
| fine from a health perspective but this isn't evidence of
| it.
| arrrg wrote:
| Don't you have the burden of proof exactly reversed?
| mft_ wrote:
| It's not just that vegetarian diets are "fine" - there's
| actually a wealth of evidence that a meat-free diet is
| far healthier - in terms of risk of heart disease, high
| blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and various forms of
| cancer, for example.
|
| https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/
| Bancakes wrote:
| Thhere's also evidence for the contrary. If you care
| about any dieting at all and watch your micros and
| macros, you will invariably be above average in health.
| mft_ wrote:
| Really? There's a body of evidence that a meat-containing
| diet is _protective_ against heart disease, type-2
| diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, _versus a
| plant-based diet_?
|
| I'd genuinely be very interested for those sources to be
| shared, please...
| buckthundaz wrote:
| https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?lo
| gin...
|
| https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-
| diet-fo...
| nicoburns wrote:
| I'm a vegetarian, I think this is true when comparing meat
| with whole plant foods. But to be fair the the GP comment,
| meat substitute products are almost certainly considerably
| less nutritious (micronutrient wise) than actual meat.
| Bang2Bay wrote:
| for generations we have been vegetarians and many of my
| carnivorous friends have told me the opposite. That is
| they feel better nourished with plant based meals.
| tomstoms wrote:
| Exactly how certain is it?
| sjg007 wrote:
| I know it's McDonald's but if this is a healthier option
| cholesterol wise that'd be good.. I mean maybe that's
| impossible at McDonald's but -shrug-
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would
| only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national
| emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a
| reduction of just 0.7%._
|
| Methane (molecule for molecule) contributes far more to the
| greenhouse effect than CO2 so without knowing how much of
| those gases are from transportation versus digestion, it's
| hard to tell how much actual impact it has. Focusing on the
| GHG statistic also ignores the many other ecological effects
| of animal agriculture like runoff and forest clearing that
| has significant effects on our carbon stores and oxygen
| producers like plankton and trees.
|
| _At the same time, both transitions would create domestic
| deficiencies in critically limiting nutrients [White & Hall
| 2017; Liebe et al. 2020], which is not unexpected given that
| Animal Sourced Foods are valuable sources of essential
| nutrition [see elsewhere]._
|
| Cows need more essential amino acids from their diets than
| humans do and the overlap between the two needs is almost
| 100%. They can't synthesize atomic minerals so they're just a
| delivery device for nutrients we'd get from other sources
| anyway. Obviously I'm not suggesting we all switch to a diet
| of alfa alfa but the whole point of the climate crisis is
| that our way of life is unsustainable; something has to
| change and I think most people rather it be diet, even if we
| lean more on synthetic alternatives, than the total
| population. This argument made sense a hundred years ago when
| overwintering was a real concern and transportation wasn't
| fast enough to deliver unspoiled fresh food so people had to
| convert inedible plants to edible food.
|
| (I'm ignoring the difficulty of getting a large group of
| people to switch away from culturally important or locally
| available staples, which is what that nutrition argument
| hinges on, because that seems to be the weakest link in the
| face of an existential threat)
| maelito wrote:
| > removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG
| reduction of 2.6% in national emissions.
|
| 100% can be split in so many small sums. Each percent is
| worth taking.
| ngngngng wrote:
| Once we remove that 2.6% though, we'll have a whole new
| 100% to fight against.
| bnj wrote:
| Just chiming in to say that I personally found this
| really funny. Similar sense of sarcasm, I guess.
| munk-a wrote:
| Did you know that while HEPA filters might remove well
| over 99% of air particulates once that's done you've
| still got 100% of the remaining particulates in the air?
|
| Did you know that if I steal half of your money you've
| still got 100% of your remaining money?
|
| That is a really weird argument.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I know hacker news isn't exactly the place for sarcasm
| (not to mention sarcasm loss over text) but I couldn't
| resist.
| max-ibel wrote:
| I thought you made a good point, actually.
|
| I believe its common to just give up a fight like this
| because it's really never over, and no single step leads
| directly to perfection. Why recycle when some recycling
| still ends up in a landfill in India ? Why help a
| homeless person when there still will be homeless
| tomorrow?
|
| OTOH, most of us are still getting up every morning and
| go to work.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best
| things we can do in the short term for the environment,
|
| And reducing the amount of food we eat in general! If the 66%
| of the U.S. population who are obese or overweight just started
| eating no more food than they needed, we'd go a long way to
| reducing greenhouse emissions.
|
| Source:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oby.22657
| swiley wrote:
| Maybe. As someone who isn't a fan of the meat production
| process and accidentally bought some vegan "meat" due to Amazon
| pushing it on everyone it's _not_ the same. I threw it out
| because I couldn 't eat it.
| bluntfang wrote:
| My toddler did the same thing! Just threw it off their high
| chair trey!
| partiallypro wrote:
| Are there stats to back up that non-vegans begin consuming more
| vegan based meals if they have the option? And I mean more than
| once. A consumer might try it but then go back to normal. At
| there good stats on repeat buying on a large scale?
| nicoburns wrote:
| I don't have any statistics to share with you, but in the
| last couple of years pretty much every mainstream restaurant
| chain in the UK has added at least one vegan option and few
| vegetarian options. And I frequently hear non-vegetarians
| saying that they sometimes choose those options (either
| because they feel like it's a more ethical choice, or simply
| because they like that particular menu option).
|
| Some people seem to consider meat a necessary part of every
| meal. But that number of a relatively small percentage in my
| experience.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Anecdotally, environmental concerns led me to consume less
| beef and to try the Impossible burger. I liked it better than
| beef and now I'll order it rather than a burger.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| "Conversions" and other voluntary consumption where people
| specifically pick the beef they want doesn't really matter to
| the bigger picture.
|
| Plant based meat is a rounding error until it gets good
| enough (at an equivalent or better price to ground beef) that
| McDonalds and Walmart can cut their low end products without
| anyone noticing or caring. People don't understand just much
| low end beef sells compared to the mid range products people
| might replace with plants (at present). In my experience at
| the foodservice level it's easily 50:1, maybe even 100:1.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It's ambiguous what you mean by "cut," but Taco Bell has
| cut their ground beef with soy based product for years. The
| biggest question is how far can meat preparations be
| diluted with fillers... I don't think we have to eliminate
| meat to have a meaningful impact (e.g. a 50% reduction in
| meat consumption would cut about 3% of US greenhouse gas
| emissions.)
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| That's exactly what I mean by cut. As the filler gets
| better (which is certainly the long game for synthetic
| meats) you can keep upping the amount as long as the end
| user can't tell. You're very right about diminishing
| returns and not needing to eliminate meat fully though.
| koolba wrote:
| It's like boiling a frog with the intention of eating it
| before it jumps out of the pot.
| maxfurman wrote:
| There's an assumption here that, at scale, non-meat options
| will be cheaper than raising cows. If the vegan option is $1
| and the meat option is $2, many consumers will choose vegan.
| These are big ifs, of course, but it seems possible to me.
| loceng wrote:
| There will certainly be people who are indifferent and eat
| whatever, and be lead/manipulated via the propaganda that
| "vegan is healthier" - which arguably isn't true - but eating
| high-quality, fatty, red meat is healthy; it's the other junk
| people also eat with red meat that causes problems.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I'm just a single data point... But I'm not vegan, but I eat
| fake meats multiple times a week. In fact I haven't eaten any
| real meat in 3 weeks.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I'll eat fake meat from time to time but I still eat real
| meat the vast majority of time. The main reasons are that
| it's only distributed in restaurants where I live, it is less
| protein-dense (I lift heavy) and I'm not 100% sure about its
| safety. But I would be willing to eat more of it as these
| issues are solved.
| GVIrish wrote:
| My personal anecdote is that I've shifted most of my meat
| consumption away from red meat to Beyond Meat burgers,
| chicken, and fish. I only eat steak as a special occasion now
| where I used to have steak regularly.
|
| If there are more meat substitutes out there that taste good
| and aren't exorbitantly priced I'll absolutely eat more of
| them.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I'm also interested in any stats people can bring up, but the
| proliferation of realistic fake meat has absolutely led to me
| eating less meat
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Every meal without meat is a win in my book. I could be wrong
| - I assume most Americans have meat at least twice a day if
| not all three meals and also snack on jerky and other
| meat/dairy products. So any change will be a win.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I would think most Americans diet looks something like:
|
| Breakfast is vegetarian but not vegan, a bowl of cereal
| with milk, bagel with cream cheese, coffee with milk, toast
| and butter. Even the more involved breakfasts like eggs or
| waffles don't necessarily need to have meat, just because
| making bacon or sausages is time consuming and most
| breakfasts are on the go.
|
| Lunch usually has meat but maybe not a lot. A few slices of
| turkey on a sandwich, a salad with a few strips of chicken,
| a bowl of soup with chunks of chicken or beef.
|
| Dinner has meat almost always, unless you are actively
| avoiding it or are eating one of the rare vegetarian
| dinners Americans will eat, like cheese pizza. Most dinners
| will be something like chicken with mashed potatoes, pasta
| with meatballs, stir fry, burgers and fries.. meat is a
| centerpiece.
|
| Snacks are usually unhealthy but vegetarian. Chips,
| cookies, ice cream. Jerky is expensive and more of a road
| trip/camping food.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I have friends that prefer the Impossible breakfast
| sandwiches at Starbucks to their meat versions so that's what
| they order.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'd like to know that too. I've never tried fake meat, and
| have no desire to. If I want to eat meat, I want real meat. I
| don't trust industrially processed synthetic foods, and I'd
| think we'd have learned by now that they are not worthy of
| our trust.
| brightball wrote:
| IMO this is the better solution to methane...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/941030964/adding-red-seaweed-...
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Headline is "Adding Red Seaweed To Cow Feed Could Cut Bovine
| Flatulence"
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> This is the best news I've heard all week.
|
| Not meaning to snark, but I don't see the good news. A
| manufacturer of mass-produced, low-quality, highly procesed
| food has struck a deal with large companies that specialise in
| selling exactly that kind of food. That the food in question is
| plant-based makes no difference at all. Companies like
| McDonalds, KFC and PizzaHut are responsible for the
| normalisation of industrial food production that is causing
| widespread environmental destruction and they have no incentive
| to solve the problems it creates. Switching to plant-based
| alternatives will simply change where the damage is done. This
| is just typical greenwash.
|
| As a for instance of how companies like McDonalds encourage
| industrial farming and agriculuture tactics that are
| detrimental to the environment:
|
| _A Mongabay investigation, prompted by a report done earlier
| this year by the NGO Mighty Earth, suggests that customers
| buying chicken from some of Britain's largest supermarkets and
| fast food chains may unwittingly be fuelling rampant
| deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian savanna._
|
| _Tesco, Morrisons and McDonald's buy their chicken from
| Cargill, the biggest private company in the world, which feeds
| its poultry with imported soy. The U.S. food distributor
| purchases its soy from large-scale agribusiness operations that
| often burn and clear large swathes of native forest to make way
| for their plantations._
|
| https://www.mightyearth.org/ukmeatinvestigation/
| war1025 wrote:
| > The more widely vegan "meat" is available, the more likely it
| is to be adopted by average people
|
| This argument always reminds me of Margarine, which was
| promoted for years as having great health benefits, and then we
| later find out that it is loaded with trans fats and actually
| terrible for you.
| therealmarv wrote:
| You should research on German Okotest and beyond meat test. I
| don't get why things like beyond meat is not more tested. Why
| is mineral oil in their patties ???
| savrajsingh wrote:
| there is no mineral oil in beyond meat:
| https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/beyond-beef/ click
| 'ingredients'
| therealmarv wrote:
| not on purpose. Just google for words:
|
| beyond meat mineral oil Oko-Test
|
| or see my other comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26320898
| kleton wrote:
| If you fly over the country, you will see a bunch of green
| circles from center pivot irrigation systems mining "fossil"
| groundwater. All the brown spots outside of those circles are
| vegetated, but the only way to get human food out of them is
| grazing. By necessity there will always be a large amount of
| cattle grazing area. Feedlots should be ended as a practice-
| wasteful of feedstock and poor quality and nutrition of the
| output.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The agreement isn't to make vegan meat more available, but to
| make Beyond Meat the "preferred supplier" of vegan meat when
| they do sell it (so that they don't choose an alternate vegan
| beef supplier for their patties but buy all their alt-beef from
| BM).
|
| E.g. this is an industry press release akin to saying "We were
| chosen to supply the rubber for the new Toyota Tacoma". People
| reading this as McDonald's promising to stop using beef or
| replacing beef with the fake beef or even putting the alt-beef
| into new dishes are misinterpreting this press release.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| I truly don't understand the methane issue. Historically
| worldwide the # of ungulates is probably well below historical
| averages. It looks like today we have around 98 million head of
| cattle in the US. Historically we had bison in excess of
| conservatively 60 million. This doesn't even begin to count all
| the animals in Africa. Overall wide life is declining.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/194297/total-number-of-c...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison
|
| The point is the amount of large mammal farts, it appears to be
| burps, going on now is probably not that much higher than it
| always has been. We have merely swapped out one large untamed
| mammal for a more domesticated one.
|
| EDIT: I should point out I am not advocating for more cows. I
| don't think we should be clear cutting forests to raise more of
| them. Yet I don't think we should be running to get rid of all
| of them either. Historically beef was quite expensive and was
| usually reserved for rare occasions or the very wealthy. I can
| see a path forward where we keep the herd size constant and let
| prices rise. This would obviously drive people to look for
| cheaper substitutes.
| mleonhard wrote:
| Today we are not choosing between raising meat animals and
| restoring land to its pre-industrialization state. So the
| original GHG emission rate of ancient animals is not
| important to our decision. We are choosing between raising
| meat animals and raising crops. Therefore the GHG emissions
| rate of modern meat animals is important.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| If we can reduce any source with little to no consequences we
| should do it. The point is we're over capacity because we've
| added petroleum and other sources, namely large container
| ships that aren't going to be constrained anytime soon.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This would only be relevant if all other things were equal.
| If we can cut methane emissions to below "historical
| averages" it will at least buy us some time to get CO2
| emissions in check.
| rictic wrote:
| Every greenhouse gas counts, whether it's part of the
| preexisting baseline or something recent we started emitting.
| The goal isn't a return to how things were, the goal is to
| keep the temperature from climbing too high too quickly.
| xnx wrote:
| Burps, not farts, are the primary source of methane:
| https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-
| so...
| dwd wrote:
| There's already a solution in the works...
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-
| change/flatulent-...
| wyre wrote:
| For this to scale properly it would need to rely on
| creating a new market for seaweed farms with the purpose
| of sending to feedlots. I have a hard time imagining this
| actually happening.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It's not just cow farts. Raising and killing a whole cow is
| an inefficient way to extract calories from plants. Even
| chicken would be more efficient.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| My understanding is that cooked meat has much higher
| caloric value than vegetables.
|
| To be honest if it wasn't so good for us we wouldn't have
| evolved to consume it!
| wyre wrote:
| Cows need to eat thousands of pounds of plants before
| they are at a size to get slaughtered and prepared as
| food.
|
| Humans evolved to eat meat as a way to survive through
| winter. Early diets relied heavily on gathered foods.
| contravariant wrote:
| The best I can figure out there _has_ been a massive increase
| in global methane levels in the last millenia or so.
|
| I suppose we could argue about the source but livestock is
| the most obvious candidate.
|
| Edit: Okay turns out fossil fuels are also responsible fro
| some non-negligible part of the methane emissions, and it's
| not just livestock but all agriculture and the resulting
| waste.
| telchar wrote:
| Prior to the industrial revolution the CO2 in the atmosphere
| was significantly less than today, around or under 250 ppm,
| so a bit of methane wasn't a problem. Now even the same
| amount of methane when added to the 410 or so ppm CO2 we have
| today and it becomes a problem. Of we can reduce atmospheric
| methane it takes off a bit of the pressure on us to reduce
| CO2 levels.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > large mammal farts going on now is probably not that much
| higher than it always has been
|
| I believe a big part of it has to do with the feedlot diet--
| when they're eating a high-calorie diet of mostly corn/grain
| instead of their natural diet of grass, it puts their
| digestive system into overdrive.
|
| EDIT: I looked into it a bit more after posting this, and it
| looks like it's not clear-cut-- for example, it takes a cow a
| lot longer to reach slaughter weight eating grass, so even if
| they're belching less during that time, it's a long enough
| time that it may be a wash, or even worse:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/climate/beef-cattle-
| metha...
|
| EDIT 2: Here's a piece which makes the original case,
| acknowledging greater direct emissions but claiming a savings
| that makes up for it from soil sequestration due to grazing:
| http://newzealmeats.com/blog/grain-fed-vs-grass-fed-beef-
| gre...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The corn consumed by cattle includes the corn stalks which
| are more or less the same as consuming grass. Corn is after
| all in the grass family. The actual kernels of corn
| increase the calories versus grass, but it's not like cows
| are just eating corn off the cob all day long. They need to
| consume tons of roughage to help with their digestion. I
| think a good argument is that converting grain and grass to
| beef is inefficient - if you could have consumed the grain
| yourself, but the nice thing about cows is that they
| convert very low calorie foods into high calorie meat that
| we can consume. If we had to eat what cows do, we'd be
| chewing all day.
| jules wrote:
| It's the opposite. The reason cows produce more methane is
| precisely because they eat grass.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| You are better at research than I am. I was wondering the
| same thing once I read your comment.
| yrgulation wrote:
| As a beef "fan" i was amazed by the taste of beyond meat. I am
| trying to reduce meat (due to practical moral considerations)
| so dont be harsh. Happy to try such alternatives.
| macintux wrote:
| I always assumed the inefficient grain and water requirements
| alone would make it worthwhile.
| ngngngng wrote:
| Raising cattle can easily become a net negative to carbon
| emissions if cows are given slightly more space to graze and
| moved around more often. If all cattle were raised in this way
| there would be slightly less cattle production but a far more
| positive environmental impact than if we all switched to vegan
| "meat".
|
| https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grass...
| loceng wrote:
| There needs to be a proper discussion, debate, to break apart
| ideologies that are perpetuating misinformation or just
| simply not taking into account the whole ecosystem; the
| documentary Sacred Cow seemed to do a good job to explain it.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > less cattle production
|
| This idea would lose the interest of anybody with influence
| over cattle production right here. It's almost impossible to
| make people simply want less, but it's more feasible to make
| them want something different than what they want today.
| est31 wrote:
| What you are looking for are subsidies. In the EU you can
| get subsidies for not touching a plot of arable land at
| all.
| pat2man wrote:
| I think both solutions work hand in hand. We replace the
| lower quality meath with vegan alternatives. This allows meat
| producers to focus on higher value, grass fed products. So we
| still eat steak but frozen processed meat patties are
| replaced with plan alternatives.
| atharris wrote:
| This is really meat-dependent, ironically - the biggest
| thing we could do is cut consumption of steak and other
| prime cuts of beef, since ground beef is made out of what's
| left after those expensive, sought-after cuts are taken. I
| would guess that eliminating ground beef consumption
| doesn't really get us anywhere for the environment.
| asoneth wrote:
| The linked research is interesting and may be slightly more
| nuanced than your summary. From their executive summary:
|
| "The WOP system effectively captures soil carbon, offsetting
| a majority of the emissions related to beef production. The
| largest emission sources -- from cattle digestion and manure
| -- are highly uncertain. We believe the results shown here
| are on the conservative side. Accounting for soil carbon
| capture is not yet standard practice and the results may meet
| with challenges, such as on ensuring long-term storage. In
| the best case, the WOP beef production may have a net
| positive effect on climate. The results show great
| potential."
|
| It looks like their beef production does produce carbon (and
| methane) emissions, they just pair that with the carbon
| sequestration due to their land use. I appreciate that they
| did this research and published the results. It's an
| interesting argument.
|
| But I'm unsure how well it scales at a societal level. For
| one thing there's the opportunity cost of using so much land
| for a single pound of beef. More significantly it seems like
| one could use their logic to pair _any_ activity with enough
| soil-based carbon capture to argue that it 's now a carbon
| neutral activity.
|
| For example, one could argue that dirt biking has "net
| negative carbon emissions" if you subtract their tailpipe
| emissions from the carbon capture from thousands of acres of
| forested trails.
| drewg123 wrote:
| That study seems to be comparing cropland to pasture. The
| problem is that the tradeoff is not between cropland and
| pasture, but pasture and forest. Eg: https://www.theguardian.
| com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...
|
| Due to increasing demand for meat, we have people burning the
| forest and releasing all the carbon sequestered in the trees,
| and reducing the efficiency of the land as a carbon sink
| going forward.
| fastball wrote:
| But there are also places in the world where forests are
| never gonna grow but are well suited to raising cattle.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| And what undeniable value do forest provides?
|
| I live in NZ where which still somewhat recently used to be
| covered in forests. There's tons of pastures and forests
| certainly look nice (and native bush is just something
| else), but other than that I don't know why forests so
| important? Properties with shading are more expensive here,
| but that also causes more issues with your rain water
| tanks.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| I live in NZ as well - forests provide a myriad of
| benefits, the ones you'd probably consider most
| importation is the sequestering of co2 and the production
| of oxygen (that thing you need to live). Beyond that they
| are a habitat in which much wildlife finds a more
| suitable environment (forested areas are protected from
| birds of prey), act as wind breaks across areas such as
| the Canterbury plains, help with retaining topsoil and so
| much more.
|
| The shade they provide your BBQ is literally the least
| important role forests play.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| The o2 production that forests and rainforests provide
| always seems a bit overstated - your surrounding oceans
| are even better at that, but algae don't help with
| regional smog much, do they?
|
| Carbon sequestering, wind breaks, increased biodiversity,
| topsoil protection, game reserves - they may not seem
| huge to the average person, but like you say they are
| crucial for our continuity.
| duckerude wrote:
| > The 2017 data showed that converting annual cropland to
| perennial pasture, under holistic and regenerative grazing
| practices, had the effect of storing more carbon in the soil
| than cows emit during their lives.
|
| Does this continue storing more carbon, or does it just store
| a constant amount of carbon? It reads to me like it's a one-
| off reduction in carbon that's already cancelled out after a
| couple of years.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| That methane emission meme is not accurate, as simple logic
| reveals. The methane produced by cows is not going to be
| significantly more than the equivalent produced by the same
| amount of plant material left to rot/decompose. One would even
| have to reasonably theorize and possibly could even conclude
| that the energy the cow takes out of the plant material to
| produce milk and meat and heat, actually captures energy that
| rotting plant material would have converted into methane.
|
| An interesting side story about this issue is that it has been
| shown a long time ago that ruminants actually enrich the
| environment (assuming non-industrial practices) through both
| processing the plant material and both converting it into
| compost and also seeding it with bacteria, while also trampling
| the plant material into the ground and thereby facilitating the
| breakdown. That lesson came out of the discovery of Allan
| Savory a Rhodesian/Zimbabwean ecologist that desertification
| only accelerated once huge herds were culled in an assumption
| that the grazing was causing the desertification, rather than
| that they were part of the system.
|
| I encourage you to reassess what you surely are convinced
| about.
| ornornor wrote:
| > ruminants actually enrich the environment (assuming non-
| industrial practices)
|
| Wink wink. What's the ratio of non industrially farmed beef
| vs industrially farmed beef anecdotes non withstanding?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Follow the foodchain, though-- the "plant material" that
| industrially farmed cows are eating is almost entirely grown-
| for-purpose corn for which there are substantial inputs in
| terms of petroleum-based fertilizers. And even if there
| weren't, those same fields left fallow would be capturing the
| same atmospheric carbon for plant/tree growth and holding it
| for much longer than a crop which is being harvested every
| season.
|
| It's not like the cows are eating exclusively grass clippings
| which were just going to be left to rot otherwise.
| ceph_ wrote:
| This post is disingenuous at best. Want to cite some credible
| sources that back it up?
|
| Methane is produced by decomposition in oxygen deprived
| anerobic environments. Like a cows gut or a tidal bog. Grass
| rotting in a field will not produce the same levels of
| methane as grass digested by cows.
|
| And that's not even touching on the rate at which it's
| released. Are you going to say burning the field is just as
| bad as letting it decompose because they both release CO2?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I eat less meat because I think quality has declined; as meat
| is seen as the default-superior option, quality is less
| scrutinised, and has thus lowered.
|
| As such, either I buy expensive, from a trusted location, I I
| stick to something else; Vegan options has been good quality so
| far, not that I don't expect this to change in the future.
|
| Right now highly processed & shaped pink slime (with added salt
| + sugar) is sold at unreasonable prices, partly because people
| don't know what they are eating (or what it's really worth,
| often masquerading at other things), and partly because the
| main factor in consumer choice is PR budget - the low cost
| cheap meat therefore gets the higher marketing budget.
|
| My one hope in this space is grocery delivery services becoming
| the norm will make it easier for people to scrutinise products
| from the comfort of home, with the convenience of a search
| engine.
| com2kid wrote:
| I agree that this is important, and less meat consumption is
| good, but I am kind of upset that the entire American culinary
| experience is being reduced to "burgers, pizza, and fried
| chicken."
|
| I say that because most of the articles on meat alternatives
| are written from the perspective of "if only Americans can stop
| eating hamburgers!"
|
| First off, in terms of global solutions, that isn't going to
| fly. Try going to Italy and telling people "we've replaced all
| your meat, with a ground beef alternative!" and see how pissed
| people get. Countries around the world have culinary traditions
| older than America itself. Many of these traditional
| preparations of various cuts of meat are a huge part of culture
| and history.
|
| Second off, I, an American, don't even eat hamburgers[1] more
| than once or twice a year. And I'm not going to switch all my
| meat eating over to meat alternative hamburgers.
|
| Of course replacing some meat is good, my main complaint is how
| so many articles reduce American food to just a few categories.
|
| I have the same problem when friends come to visit from
| overseas, or even friends who've been in America for awhile
| (sometimes years!) who have no idea that American food is
| anything other than burgers and pizza.
|
| [1] I eat sausages a bit more frequently, which I could fill
| with a plant based alternative.
| dheera wrote:
| > Second off, I, an American, don't even eat hamburgers[1]
| more than once or twice a year. And I'm not going to switch
| all my meat eating over to meat alternative hamburgers.
|
| You're also likely in a privileged class of Americans.
| Unfortunately the US government indirectly subsidizes meat.
| Hamburgers and fried meat of sorts are staples of the low-
| income class. The meat consumption in that class is off the
| charts, and at extremely unhealthy levels for both the body
| and the planet.
|
| Ideally, the government should be subsidizing a variety of
| healthy vegetables for human consumption, not corn (which
| indirectly subsidizes both meat and HFCS). That policy change
| alone would fix a lot of nutritional deficiencies, heart
| disease, obesity, and numerous other problems.
| lemmsjid wrote:
| As a fellow American, I also just eat a few hamburgers per
| year. I actually prefer non meat burgers to regular, though I
| love high quality meat (though I don't it it very often). I
| like to primary source stuff and can't find a hard, verified
| number in my limited Googling, but as far as I can tell our
| consumption is incredibly low compared to the per capita
| average (over a hundred per year, into the multi hundreds per
| year depending on region). The key is not to get people who
| are eating 2 per year down to 0, but to get people eating
| hundreds per year down to, I dunno, 10? Either way we can
| picture a sustainable economy in which high quality plant
| based meals are cheap, and then everyone gets their high
| quality meat meals less frequently and for an amount of money
| that is commensurate with their ecological impact.
| input_sh wrote:
| > "we've replaced all your meat, with a ground beef
| alternative!"
|
| I'm sorry but who ever says anything about replacing _all_
| meat? It 's more about having a readily available alternative
| and starting to think of meat as a luxury instead of it being
| a part of _every_ meal.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| > Countries around the world have culinary traditions older
| than America itself. Many of these traditional preparations
| of various cuts of meat are a huge part of culture and
| history.
|
| Many of these traditions include "new world" ingredients such
| as tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, corn, squash, some
| beans, &c that wouldn't become common in europe or asia until
| the 16th or 17th century. While still older than the founding
| of the united states, they're still "newer" than many people
| realize. These new ingredients were incorporated into older
| traditions just as new ingredients will be. Noone will force
| it on anyone, but people will experiment and find culinary
| and economic reasons to use new ingredients.
| legitster wrote:
| I enjoy eating meat and have no plans of going off of it
| completely. But we eat so much of it as a culture.
|
| And 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!
|
| And I know people blast tech companies for focusing too much on
| making things flashy and cool, but the people who are making
| electric cars and fake meat cool are the ones who are going to
| save our asses while we were busy scolding people for not trying
| harder to enjoy brown rice.
| redisman wrote:
| I've turned to mainly a restaurant meat eater. My day to day
| protein and fats are mainly from plants now. Especially garbage
| fast food meats really don't need to be from animals. If I feel
| like a long smoked brisket or carnitas or a steak or game
| meats, well there just isn't any meaningful analog so I don't
| feel too bad about indulging every once in a while.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah and the health arguments tend to fall apart when you get
| into fast-food/highly processed crap territory, which probably
| accounts for a large portion of meat consumption in the
| developed world. Eating less of that stuff is probably a good
| thing.
|
| That said quality meat is a good source of various nutrients
| and amino acids that can be difficult to get from plant-based
| sources, and fish in particular can be farmed very sustainably.
| I would never consider cutting meat out of my diet.
| exyi wrote:
| Beyond Meat is not like tofu or so, it is designed to be
| unrecognizable from meat by tasting it - so you won't have to
| give on our beloved meat. I also don't want to go with a vegan
| diet just because "environment", but having a reasonably priced
| substituent which does not contain tortured animals and has
| lower env. impact - then just why not.
| legitster wrote:
| I've consumed a lot of Beyond and Impossible, and it's good!
| But still a far way from unrecognizable.
|
| In fact, one thing they have made me appreciate is how good
| some of the "traditional" meat substitutes are. I actually
| quite like Boca and Garden Burgers et al!
|
| Still, the once or twice a year I go to a steakhouse and get
| a nice medium rare steak - we're a long, long way off from
| that.
| blackearl wrote:
| I'm sure Burger King's meatless burger is recognizable to
| some, but when I tried it I don't think I'd really be able
| to tell the difference. It's easier to hide when the meat
| is already super processed like fast food meats.
|
| Agreed that there's still no comparison to a fine steak.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This reminds me of how my dad would always blast taco bell for
| using filler in their beef. But from my perspective, it's
| tastes good and the filler makes it cheaper (and probably
| healthier).
|
| I think you're right, most processed meat could be replaced
| partially, or entirely with vegetable proteins without anyone
| really noticing. The last time I had baked a frozen, breaded
| chicken, it tasted like little more than grease and pepper. I'm
| certain a plant substitute could be found that would maintain
| the flavor of nothingness and be suitable for dipping in honey
| mustard.
|
| The current issue, I think, is price. Vegetarian substitutes
| I've seen are more expensive than the meat based products.
| mleonhard wrote:
| The secret to enjoying brown rice is to add some
| sweet/sticky/"glutinous" rice to it. A good recipe:
|
| 1. 600 g brown rice
|
| 2. 200 g sticky rice
|
| 3. Mix the dry rices together. Use a spoon to avoid a sticky
| rice layer on the bottom.
|
| 3. 1200 mL water
|
| 4. Cook on "rice" mode in a 3-quart Instant-Pot. Makes about 15
| 120 mL (0.5 cup) servings. These freeze nicely in containers.
| You can heat one up in 1:30 in a 1500 W microwave.
| hammock wrote:
| >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 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...
| corban1 wrote:
| Thanks vegan meat, now I can enjoy my prime beef steak with less
| remorse. Go vegan meat!
| pindab0ter wrote:
| Aren't Beyond and Impossible ground beef replacements, not
| steak and other kind of "whole meat" replacements?
| somehnguy wrote:
| He was making a way overused and lame joke ala 'others eating
| less meat means I can double my meat consumption'
| e_commerce wrote:
| People hate fake meat. It's also horrible for you.
| spacejam88 wrote:
| sdfsdf
| [deleted]
| gverrilla wrote:
| lab food will be a very limited trend.
| dekhn wrote:
| I really wanted to like Beyond Meat, but there's something about
| how it smells that seems... off... to me. I really want to go
| work there just to play with a GCMS and figure out what component
| smells bad to me and remove it.
|
| Personally, I think the epitome of vegan meat replacement is
| Morningstar Veggie Breakfast Patties. most meat eaters I know who
| try them say "huh... this is pretty damn good for something that
| doesn't have meat in it"
| redisman wrote:
| We have the same taste buds. Morningstar Hot Dogs are also
| really good for that cheapo hotdog experience.
| alacombe wrote:
| I just slaughtered two muttons over the week end, enjoy your
| highly processed fake meat while I enjoy some tasty juicy ribs !
| goatcode wrote:
| I wish we were neighbors :)
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| How does it compare to Japanese A5 Wagyu?
| redisman wrote:
| A veggie meat with Wagyus fat content would be... interesting.
| lolbrels wrote:
| Tried it a single time just to entertain a co-worker. The smell
| was putrid and overwhelming - like a mix between ammonia and raw
| intestines from a gutted fish. All got thrown away but the smell
| lingered in the kitchen for a day or two.
|
| Just terrible lol. I don't eat at any of these places, but I'd be
| interested to see how much is sold.
|
| Just one of those products where everyone raves about it online
| yet I've never heard someone actually talk about it, seen anyone
| actually eat it and in my own test it was just awful for even the
| least picky eater. Think the hype surrounding this product is all
| fabricated.
| spacejam88 wrote:
| I look at this as good but cautious news. People really need to
| be eating more vegetables in their diet, but I just don't think
| we need to go to such measures simply to mimic meat, when there
| are so many vegetarian options already exist. Remember that there
| is a large population of the world that doesn't even eat meat and
| that Beyond Meat is not serving those people, even though they
| are in the "vegetarian" market.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Getting someone eating 4 or 5 big macs a week to switch to 4 or
| 5 big beyond macs, served at the takeout they've been going to
| for years, is much easier than getting them to switch to
| traditional Indian dishes made by nobody that lives within a
| three hour drive of them.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Ehh I think it's fair to say that encouraging people to eat
| more vegetables didn't work.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| maybe if there were more salty greasy vegetable meals that
| were cheap and readily available.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Is this the same as what is described here? [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktgh51E8V1Q
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| I stopped eating meat in January 2018 and I can honestly say the
| only thing I miss is a Big Mac! This is VERY good news for me and
| a long overdue!
|
| That being said, whilst I do love a Beyond burger, here in the
| UK, I was surprised to hear it was Beyond that McDonalds selected
| for this. While in Orlando 2 years ago, I tried an Impossible
| burger for the first time and it was incredible. The size,
| texture and taste would be perfect for McDonalds (Big Mac).
| Still, I will be all over this once it hits UK branches!
| noneeeed wrote:
| I keep seeing people say that Impossible tastes better, bit
| Beyond keeps snagging big deals like this and it makes me
| wonder if they have either a price or supply-chain advantage.
| hahahahe wrote:
| A key factor being BYND is a public company and they are
| under pressure to produce results. These are largely small
| experimental runs. I think the general consensus is that
| Impossible is the better product. And my guess is McDonald's
| knows this and could be trying to drive down valuation for
| Impossible so they can buy it. It's currently valued around
| $4-5B vs $9B for BYND.
| redisman wrote:
| I tried a Big Mac recently and it's really not that great,
| pretty dry. The sauce is the amazing part. I prefer getting a
| Impossible burger from a slightly more expensive burger place
| instead now. Maybe I just need to buy a gallon of that sauce
| and pour it on there.
| marrone12 wrote:
| I prefer the taste of impossible but this is great news for the
| category.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| If you prefer the taste of Impossible, wouldn't you prefer that
| Yum brands select them as their fake beef provider? Why is this
| good news for the category?
| tootie wrote:
| I think either beats any frozen beef that gets served at a
| cheap fast-food joints while neither comes close to beating
| fresh, high-quality beef. They can take over the entire bottom
| of the market which is probably the most unwholesome for the
| environment.
| Spivak wrote:
| Eh, the bottom of the market is made from the "bad" cuts of
| meat. As long someone wants the good cuts there's no reason
| to waste the rest. Nobody's making hamburger out of cuts of
| meat that could have been sold as a steak.
| enigmo wrote:
| most dairy cow meat is used for hamburger, it's rarely sold
| as steak or roasts.
| spacejam88 wrote:
| Speak for yourself. Nothing can beat an oily, greasy In N Out
| beef burger with processed American "Cheese" on top of
| something that barely resembles beef, but you can't say it
| isn't the best thing you've ever tasted!
| poopoopeepee wrote:
| > In N Out
|
| In-N-Out is never frozen and is of a higher quality beef
| than most other chains, fyi
| jandrese wrote:
| I agree, Beyond overdoes the fake smoke flavor. But they seem
| to be better equipped to scale up than Impossible, they've
| beaten them to mass market in almost every location I've seen.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I bought a package of Beyond Meat. It was right next to the
| ground beef, and looked like ground beef. I assumed I could
| substitute it for ground beef in my spaghetti. Big fat nope!
| I opened the package, and it smelled exactly like dog food.
| The smell when cooking it was horrible. It completely ruined
| my batch of spaghetti. I don't know how people are cooking
| this stuff and enjoying it. Maybe there's some other way to
| cook it or season it? As someone who isn't much of a chef, I
| don't know what to do with it. Go to your favorite search
| engine, search for "Beyond Meat Smells..." and check out the
| autofill. I know I'm not the only one.
| chasd00 wrote:
| put it on a charcoal grill and cook a hamburger. It's
| definitely not beef but the taste is ok for what it is. I
| think of it like a veggie compromise, not a perfect burger
| but not terrible either.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yeah, the artificial smoke flavor makes it useless for
| anything that isn't supposed to taste like it was on an
| open flame grill. I tried using the Beyond ground burger
| substitute for tacos once and all I could taste was that
| stupid smoke flavor.
|
| The Impossible ground burger substitute is far more
| versatile, but harder to find. None of my local grocery
| stores carry it.
| thekyle wrote:
| Actually that's an interesting idea I wonder if Impossible
| or Beyond meat have considered selling their stuff as dog
| food. I'm sure vegan dog owners would love that.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Maybe people are getting spoiled product? I regularly use
| Beyond and Impossible and usually don't notice any off
| smell. Once I got a pack of Impossible from the
| refrigerated section that did smell wrong.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I prefer Impossible Burger as a substitute for grounds, but
| Beyond Meat also makes things like hot dogs and breakfast
| sausage, which Impossible doesn't.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| YES, Beyond has some incredible sausage products! I go with
| them for sausage and Impossible for burgers.
| redisman wrote:
| Those sausages are definitely better than the burger patty
| to me. I just wish Impossible would get more products out
| since their burger patty is the first uncanny valley
| leaping veggie meat I've had.
| Spivak wrote:
| Trader Joe's tofu based chorizo is also in this space and
| is amazing as well. If you want something that makes for
| good "grounds" but don't need it to literally be hamburger
| then a marinated block of tofu will probably get you there.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Yeah, I've had that one, and it's good. Unfortunately,
| it's harder to come by because Trader Joe's doesn't allow
| delivery and doesn't sell their store-brand products
| anywhere else; I've stopped relying on anything from
| Trader Joe's store brand for that reason. It also has a
| specific flavor profile that works in some dishes but not
| others; it isn't a neutral substitute for grounds.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Impossible makes breakfast sausage. Starbucks has an
| Impossible breakfast sandwich.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's great to hear, but they don't appear to sell it
| publicly yet. It appears to be restaurant-exclusive.
| tommoor wrote:
| Agreed, impossible is far superior. Impossible is only $5.99
| for 12oz in Trader Joes at the moment
| ArchOversight wrote:
| It's also for sale at Costco: $16 for 2 lbs which matches the
| pricing of the Trader Joes.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i can get a pound of organic, free range, rocked to sleep
| every night by the rancher, ground beef for about that. i
| thought Impossible/Beyond was suppose to be significantly
| cheaper than beef? I've had it but my wife brought it home
| one night so didn't see the price.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Butcher box sells you free range, grass fed beef for
| $16/pound, delivered to your home.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Beef is hella subsidized in the USA. Both directly, and
| indirectly, through low grazing fees on public lands and
| subsidized feeds.
|
| The grocery store tubes of 73/27 are under $3/lb where I'm
| at. Making beef insanely cheap per calorie.
| bredren wrote:
| Beyond nutritional or environmental reasons to reduce meat
| consumption, there are ethical considerations about the
| consciousness of the animals we slaughter.
|
| It doesn't matter how we get people to be less reliant on factory
| farms, so long as we do.
|
| We must examine every avenue that allows us to reduce the
| suffering of animals.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Preface: I'm a hypocritical omnivore who likes animals.
|
| If meat alternatives and lab grown meat become cheap and
| indistinguishable from real sources, I predict that within the
| span of two generations our descendants are going to look back
| on us as immoral savages. I use cognitive dissonance and
| distance from how my food is made to get over how horrible
| industrial farming is and how brutal life can be for livestock.
| They'll wonder how we were able to tolerate such brutality and
| all the answers come back to either 'out of sight, out of mind'
| or 'it's tasty'.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Gross. Replacing meat with coconut oil and pea protein is bad for
| the earth and bad for people.
| goatcode wrote:
| https://youtu.be/eoWvrcvTrZI
| unchocked wrote:
| All of the sudden - I get it. These co's are dealing with a
| really shitty, commodified form of beef that they'd love to
| develop an alternative to. So the immediate benefit is they get
| to serve vegetarians, but the long term is they can transition
| off their price-above-all meat supply chain.
| redisman wrote:
| Kind of a win-win-win. Companies like it if they can just press
| soy or peas and fats into patties, environment likes having
| less bottom of the barrel meat farms, animal welfare is better
| at the high end farms, maybe the veg patties are a bit
| healthier(?).
| swyx wrote:
| what prevented you from getting it before? this seems like it
| was the explicit goal of the meat substitute companies for
| forever
| umvi wrote:
| Impossible meat with ketchup, mustard, lettuce, tomato, etc.,
| tastes just like a beef burger to me. If impossible patties were
| cheaper than beef patties at the supermarket I would definitely
| buy them.
| psychometry wrote:
| There's huge variance in prices where I live. Some grocery
| stores sell a pack of two for about $5. If you were buying
| sustainable beef from humanely-raised cattle you'd probably be
| paying that much, too.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Rather than trying to encourage people to substitute the
| ingredients in their meals, I wish we'd encourage more healthy
| habits and work life balance.
|
| So many people are either pressed for time or incapable of
| preparing a decent meal. If they aren't ordering takeout, they're
| falling back on boxed or prepared options.
|
| Simply substituting fake meat for real meat isn't improving
| anyone's lives.
| barbs wrote:
| Can't we do both?
| notyourwork wrote:
| >Simply substituting fake meat for real meat isn't improving
| anyone's lives.
|
| Is the goal improving lives or solving a supply chain problem
| in a scalable fashion?
| cptskippy wrote:
| I believe it's being sold as the former to customers and the
| later to businesses.
|
| This is just furthering our race to the bottom while we pat
| ourselves on the back and say we're the best.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| You don't think less factory-farming is a good thing?
| cptskippy wrote:
| This doesn't reduce factory farming it, it just changes it.
| hahahahe wrote:
| I agree 100%. We need to eat more natural food. Farm our own.
| In that sense, I think ag tech will be a big disrupter in the
| next decade.
| eatwater123 wrote:
| Improving cow's lives though :)
| cptskippy wrote:
| If the demand for beef plummeted over night, they wouldn't
| release the cows into a field to live out the remainder of
| their lives.
|
| At best a drop in demand will reduce the population size of
| future generations of cows. It doesn't fundamentally change
| how they'll be raised or treated.
| [deleted]
| superkuh wrote:
| I wish companies were not able to label and sell these textured
| vegetable proteins as "meat". They are great products but they
| are not meat and as scale increases and they become less
| expensive than meat there will be strong commercial profit
| motives to replace real meat with "* meat" for monetary reasons.
|
| I'd strongly prefer for increased funding to isolated tissue
| culture methods. That way we could have real meat without the
| environmental or ethical issues.
| [deleted]
| ausbah wrote:
| there was a small push by the meat lobby to do exactly that a
| couple years ago [1]
|
| I think it's a silly form of regulation. there are plenty of
| non-milk milk products, or "fruit flavor" things that don't
| have any fruit
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/technology/meat-veggie-bu...
| p1necone wrote:
| I think it's very silly. I as a consumer would like to buy a
| substitute for cows milk that is not animal based. Being
| forced to call it "almond juice" or something is just making
| my life harder (and not making anyone elses life easier).
|
| _Nobody_ is going to think that "almond milk" is actually
| the same as cows milk and accidentally buy it instead of the
| dairy product, so what's the problem?
|
| (Also, almond and soy milk are not new products, they've been
| consumed for hundreds of years in Europe and Asia
| respectively)
| p1necone wrote:
| I've never seen plant based meat labelled in a way that could
| trick a reasonable person into thinking it was animal meat.
|
| I don't see what you'd gain from not allowing the word "meat"
| to be used - it's very clearly a product that's trying to
| imitate various kinds of animal meat, and I want that
| communicated to me efficiently.
| leereeves wrote:
| On a somewhat related topic, has anyone seen any information
| about how well the Impossible Whopper is selling?
| silicon2401 wrote:
| In hopes of boosting the Impossible Whopper, it's the first
| thing I've eaten from BK that I've enjoyed in over a decade. No
| hyperbole, it just tastes good whereas to my taste, the rest of
| BK food tastes pretty dismal.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I don't have that data, but I have an anecdote.
|
| I buy them about 4 times a week on my way to work (its a really
| convenient stop and I don't get fries, cheese, or mayo with
| it).
|
| When they were new, they would sometimes be out of stock. But I
| haven't encountered that in probably six month or more. They
| really seem to be fully supporting the product. So hopefully
| that means they're selling pretty well!
| judge2020 wrote:
| Jan 2020: https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/burger-king-
| franchisees-...
| fl0wenol wrote:
| So that's why they added it to the 2 for $6 menu. I got them
| all the time when it was on there.
|
| Anecdata, but ... It's basically the only thing I get from
| Burger King anymore. And I'm not vegetarian or anything, I
| just had consistent (not the best, but serviceable and
| consistent) texture and flavor so I didn't feel like I was
| missing out on anything.
|
| But I wouldn't be down to paying a big premium for them...
| that 2 for 6 putting it on the same level as the normal
| Whopper made the case.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| They just missed the start of this Lenten season. I'm fascinated
| by what fast food places market when a huge chunk of their
| customers won't eat land or air-based meat one a day out of the
| week. Is Beyond Meat finally going to topple the fish sandwich?
|
| As an aside, I did always want to try the Mc hula burger, but
| thanks to Vatican II, it was not long for this world and died way
| before I was born...
| tssva wrote:
| I have never tried Beyond Meat and maybe I should give it a try
| but I am hesitant because of my experience with Impossible
| burgers. Obviously they must taste similar to meat and be tasty
| to the majority of people, but to me they taste nothing like meat
| and are quite disgusting. I know a few others that have the same
| reaction while most people at worse seem to think they taste like
| a low quality burger. I wonder what is in them that causes some
| like myself to have such a negative reaction to them and how
| large that percentage of people is.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I don't think they taste like meat, but i think they're both
| pretty good.
| pdx6 wrote:
| Impossible burger tastes like it is engineered. It isn't
| terrible but in San Francisco, it isn't any less expensive at a
| typical non-chain burger joint. I also had digestive issues,
| though I have only had it once so I can't claim it was the IB.
|
| Veggie burgers just seem like a healthier, more delicious
| option, and a known quantity if I want to skip the beef.
| grecy wrote:
| and yet their stock price is down..... this market is hard to
| read!
| headmelted wrote:
| I would think this was less correlated as it's only a contract
| for supply.
|
| In any case McDonalds isn't selling a co-branded Beyond Meat
| product, they're selling the McPlant. Beyond Meat's moat looks
| very shaky here.
|
| It seems likely that Beyond Meat is only getting these
| contracts as it's a relatively cheap way for McDonalds to test
| the substitute market before producing their own alternatives.
| It makes no business sense for them to hand over the core of
| their product to BM when it's likely they can create something
| similar in-house.
| arebop wrote:
| Can they create something similar in-house? Beyond and
| particularly Impossible appear to be far ahead of the
| competition in meat substitutes, and presumably they each
| have close to 20yr left on their patents. It doesn't look so
| easy to rival the leaders in this space.
| axlee wrote:
| Agreed. The only food items that McDs have not vertically
| integrated are sodas, everything else is bound to end up part
| of their supply chain.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "vertically integrated" they do
| not own cattle ranches or potato farms. They buy Heinz or
| Hunts catsup, etc. They do have a lot of proprietary
| recipes and process, but the ingredients are mostly sourced
| from other wholesale producers.
| erichurkman wrote:
| The cattle ranches and potato farms don't have their
| names or logos on the burgers or fries. McDonalds can
| swap them out at any time.
|
| Soda, on the other hand, is Coke's product and brand
| completely.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes, this is hardly different from any other restaurant.
| dataflow wrote:
| Okay but Pizza Hut literally brands it as Beyond:
| https://www.pizzahut.com/c/content/beyond-meat-
| pizzas/index....
|
| and so does KFC? https://global.kfc.com/press-releases/kfc-
| beyond-fried-chick...
|
| so I think this doesn't fully explain it?
| evgen wrote:
| Both of those are Yum brands, so it is really a single
| deal. Looks like you have one deal that is branded but
| chicken and pizza places are not going to drive a huge
| amount of visibility into the segment that Beyond wants
| (cheap burgers) and I suspect previous comment is correct
| regarding McD wanting to test the waters while they work on
| their own solution.
| [deleted]
| LegitShady wrote:
| >Beyond Meat's moat looks very shaky here.
|
| Beyond doesn't have a moat. They make veggie burgers.
|
| They became super popular when impossible burger started
| making the rounds on the news and rode the wave of interest
| impossible burger created.
|
| Impossible burger has a moat - they have yeast produced heme
| and I assume some patents on it.
|
| Beyond meat makes veggie burgers. They have no moat.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| Exactly, and Beyond Meat is only the "preferred supplier". BM
| probably has to meet quantity and price targets or they are
| done. Good luck building up big profit margins.
| aphextron wrote:
| >and yet their stock price is down..... this market is hard to
| read!
|
| Stocks don't just magically go up forever on good news. They've
| run a loss for the last 4 years in a row, and they've missed
| their last two earnings by more than half. They're already
| massively overvalued as it is.
| giarc wrote:
| But those factors would have been priced in prior to this
| announcement.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Traders were expecting better news than they got.
| xnx wrote:
| I believe this good-news press release was timed to counter the
| narrative around their unfavorable earnings report.
| ksec wrote:
| >market is hard to read!
|
| The stock market guidelines has been the same for a very, very
| long time.
|
| Shares collapse on bad news, fall on good news, and rise on no
| news.
| Black101 wrote:
| And their stock dropped 5% today.... good time to buy!
| hahahahe wrote:
| This was already discussed last week and it was essentially a
| PR stunt.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I was wondering why the stock dropped.
| What's the PR stunt and why has the price dropped?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-02 23:00 UTC)