I don't think feeding people industrial waste is gonna be a sustainable solution for solving the world's hunger problems. Keep raising money and keep feeding people soy burgers. It's capitalism. It makes money.
I agree. These fake meats only get around the mistreatment of animals. As far as I can tell, they're worse for the environment and worse in terms of health impact than eating meat. Not too long ago, a local fake sausage maker got into trouble for dumping their industrial waste into a stream. It's possible to farm animals ethically. This is not the way.
Do you have any links to back up the claim that they're worse for the environment? I've heard that they're better, and my immediate reaction would be to believe that. It takes a lot of plant material to raise a cow, so cutting out that step (and using the plants more directly) would seem that plant-based "meat" needs less water, land, emissions, etc.
Look up monoculture and what it's doing to the land. Destroying it.
Why are we subsidizing soy crops anyways? Soy is terrible for your health. It contains loads of phytoestrogen and allergens. We are reliant on exporting the crop because it's not a part of the typical american diet. It's just bad news altogether.
That doesn't really seem completely related to the topic at hand. Besides, if we _were_ producing more things like Impossible foods that _did_ use soy, then we wouldn't need to export it as much?
I'm not proposing all production in the US switch to soy crops, and your argument seems pretty disingenuous to me
> Besides, if we _were_ producing more things like Impossible foods that _did_ use soy,
Impossible Foods is a drop in the bucket compared to tofu, but, there are too many calories of soy grown in the US to feed them all to humans. That's also true for corn.
What's wrong with phytoestrogen? Despite the name it's not the same thing as estrogen found in humans and it doesn't always trigger the same response in your body. The research[1][2] seems overall mildly positive on the effects of soy and phytoestrogen on health. At worst it's a wash.
I believe that most artificial meat consumers would argue that it's impossible to kill and eat animals ethically. After all that's why they choose to eat the more expensive artificial meat instead of the real deal or no meat at all.
I don't think it follows that because the largest fraction of soy consumption is as animal feed, that animal agriculture drives soy consumption. Soy animal feed is mostly a byproduct of soy oil and biofuel production. If not for that production, we'd just move to the next cheapest feed.
The amount of feed crop acreage needed to produce a beef burger is much greater than the crop acreage needed to produce an Impossible burger, so the Impossible burger reduces the number of those habitats that are being destroyed. (I'm using "feed crop" loosely to include hay - even 100% grass-fed cattle can't just be pastured year-round in most areas, and cutting hay is just as bad as harvesting feed crops for any smaller animals that've made their homes in the fields.)
The bigger ones run away. Combines are enormous and noisy. They don't sneak up on you.
But I think intent makes a difference.
Mice killed by farm equipment are accidental side effects with some ethical implications which most of us choose ignore.
Livestock raised for slaughter is a different ethical question entirely.
(Meat eater here. I do find it to be the natural order of things, but I am aware that I could justify slavery and sexual exploitation by the same logic, and that makes me pretty sure I'm giving myself a pass on the meat thing.)
Yeah, I'm with ya on the combine. But, farmers shoot or exterminate animals like deer, gophers and pigs that threaten their crops. It seems as though it's necessary to kill animals in order to provide even a vegan diet to the world's population, and I often see this truth being ignored by absolutists -- which seems to be what the original comment about combines was reaching for.
I eat meat, too. I'm... mostly okay with that. But I'm told that pigs are smarter than cats, and that makes me a bit squeamish. Natural order sure is a slippery slope. It is human nature, I hope, to aim to be better than our nature.
Artificial meat consumer here, I’d argue a slight modification to that: it’s impossible to kill and eat animals ethically, if you cannot verify the animal was treated ethically while it lived. For the vast majority of supermarket/restaurant food such verification is impossible, and in these cases I opt for the pseudo stuff (or just plain vegetarian). However, when buying directly from small family farms it is actually quite easy and I have no hesitations about consuming their animalian products.
Don't you think that killing an animal is unethical no matter how nicely it used to be treated? I'm currently trying to keep my meat consumption as low as possible, but I still eat some and I don't think it's very ethical of me. I'm the higher life form and cows can't really do anything about it, and most people won't hold it against me, but I don't think there's anything ethical about it.
I believe that as conscious entities we have the power to choose the ethical “axioms” we use to guide our decisions. Under the axioms I’ve chosen I can “prove” (in a surprisingly formal sense) the claim “it is ethically okay to consume animals that have been treated humanely”. That being said, it would only take a slight modification to one of my axioms to successfully argue the opposite.
I’d be very interested to hear how you use your axioms to argue the opposite. I’m happy to share mine but don’t want to taint your thought process before you’ve had time to fully consider the problem.
> the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
This is one of the problems with the mainstream obsession about climate change.
The environmental destruction wrought by gigantic, inhumanely scaled monocrop farming is direct, immediate, obvious, and worthy of huge mobilization to resolve.
Instead, we hear, as you say here, that if the carbon emissions are low, it's Great For The Environment!
If you're going to have 8 billion people eating meat do you really think there's going to be less environmental impact growing the food for the animals + the impact of the animals themselves compared to just growing vegetables?
I feel like meat scales even worse due to efficiency losses
My cows are fed exclusively grass, right to finishing.
My pigs and chickens are fed mixes of locally-sourced corn, oats, barley, peas, and lentils from organic growers. And they supplement with grasses and broadleafs because we raise 'em on pasture.
Well-raised, environmentally reasonably-fed animals cost lots of money.
Meat is basically the healthiest thing people can eat.
If you just take the pasture-raised cows alone, the grass grows itself and large herbivores are a natural part of the environment here--the environment and its polyculture would be harmed by their removal.
I don't expect the plant based products to outcompete high-quality, expensive, free-roaming cattle.
I hope it will outcompete cheap, monoculture-soy fed, medicine pumped, densely grown and factory slaughtered cheap meat.
The second is far more common than the first. As you said, good meat from well-raised animals is expensive.
So not the awesome and expensive steak you may eat from time to time, but the cheap meat in fast-food, the chicken-wings, burgers, lasagnas, pizzas, tacos, currys and more.
I’m eating a steak this evening raised on pasture in upstate New York. We have weather in New York and lots of water, etc.
Soy and corn is mostly grown in the Midwest, using aquifer water that is being rapidly and permanently depleted. Not only is monocropping as a strategy for feeding the nation unwise on its face, but it will ultimately lead to food insecurity In 30-50 years as desertification of the Midwest starts to be a thing.
Good for you that you can afford grass-fed beef, but this doesn't scale at all.
The monocrops you mention as a problem are largely used to feed cattle today: about 80% of land used for agriculture produces feed for livestock, most of it single crops like corn and soy – despite only contributing to about a fifth of the calories we consume. And it's not like we can greatly expand production either, we already use about half of all habitable land for agriculture.
Sure it does. The United States made a policy decision to push for cheap meat. That’s why we are where we are.
The tail wags the dog in the thinking here. “Scaling” fast food price hamburgers is the problem.
It’s a problem on a bunch of levels. It’s not scalable because we’ve changed the definition of food. The best farmland in the world lay fallow because we’ve committed to growing vegetables in the desert and raising ruminants in pens, because it’s more efficient to the small cartels of processors who drive the status quo.
I am not convinced that this is true because it necessitates raising an animal for the sole purpose of slaughtering it. Though I realize that many will have a different measure of "ethical", I would say that these products are most certainly the way for me.
I've switched maybe 1/3 of my meals to beyond/impossible in the last year. They truly are great shoe-ins. Impossible has really hit on something special as my girlfriend practically refuses to eat beyond but in into impossible's taste. It is a little tough sometimes seeing the cost be higher than the equivalent meat product but I'm sure this capital raising has the potential to lead to lower unit costs. It cannot be because of input that prices are as high as they currently are.
I'm presently torn about this. I want to be vegan / vegetarian as often as I can be for ethical / environmental reasons, but I find that whenever I eat a substitute it tastes like it should, but the satiation of the inner desire for meat isn't met. It's like smoking a nicotine-free cigarette or a non-alcoholic beer. Yeah, sure, it's better than nothing but I wish it fully replaced the experience because I would literally pay double not to cause an animal to suffer ever again.
Yep, you have to learn new recipes but this is what I've done and works well. Don't really miss meat after redoing my cookbook to focus on south asian, buddhist, and other traditionally vegan or vegetarian cuisines. Dinner guests also prefer getting a freshly made curry instead of a sad frozen bean burger.
I personally think it's a matter of mindset. First few times I tasted plant based meat substitutes I too had this feeling, but as soon as I stopped thinking of them as substitutes and just considered them a new category (if you will) of foods that feeling went away.
Like most things, just do it and you'll get used to it. The satisfaction might be due to culturally being raise in a place that eats meat.
> I would literally pay double not to cause an animal to suffer ever again.
Think of it this way. It's not about _you_ it's about the _animals_ suffering. It's a selfless thing to do and fairly simple. Most foods are not animals they're plants! It gets easier.
This zoomed in view of a single animals suffering seems short sighted to me. Sure, factory farms are terrible, but farm animals (cows, chickens, sheep, goats, etc.) in general have grown up symbiotically with humans. Replacing a system where we collaborate with nature to one where we're dependent on a corporate lab grown product does not seem like it's being more integrated with, or compassionate to nature.
> Replacing a system where we collaborate with nature to one where we're dependent on a corporate lab grown product does not seem like it's being more integrated with, or compassionate to nature.
Are you really saying that slaughtering animals is more "compassionate" than growing meat synthetically? And are you saying that the massive environmental cost of factory farms makes it more "integrated" with nature?
It's like you're deliberately trying to attach a negative connotation to synthetic meat by using the words "corporate lab".
Literally all first world amenities originate in a corporate lab! Are you suggesting we stop taking COVID vaccines because they were developed in Pfizer's corporate lab?
What do you propose we do instead to curb the world's desire to eat meat? You say "factory farms are terrible". Yes they are! And synthetic meat is the only way factory farms will go away.
Sorry, I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Synthetic meat seems morally better than a factory farm, however I don't think the choice is between factory farms and synthetic meat. I'm saying it would be better to to cultivate an approach where we collaborate with nature via humane farms and moderated consumption.
I don't have any economic answers, however I think the vegan vision of a human race separate from nature is very scary, and not separate from one where we eradicate the natural world through industrialization.
My wife is vegan so I have tasted them all. I think the initial taste is good, but the after taste and the taste as you chew it, they get wrong somehow. The main problem however is lack of variation in texture and consistency. It is like everything is a cheap hot dog in texture.
I wish they added strains of imperfection that get stuck in your teeth or something.
Beyond Meat do burgers that are particularly close to the real thing. Bleeds correctly, burns slightly in the right way. My main issue is not the taste experience, but that the thing is probably quite processed. For instance there's a lot of salt. If the thing is a really good reproduction of a burger, might it also be just as unhealthy? Waiting to see while I enjoy having one now and again.
I'm also trying to be as vegan as possible, but mainly for health reasons. Though after starting that, I now also think there's ethical reasons. Funny how that works.
Personally, I think this stuff is probably more unhealthy. The fats they use are not good, and legumes can be problematic in quantity.
Our family decided to adopt a more vegetable based diet and buy more ethically sourced local meat, especially beef and pork. The unit cost is higher but we spend about the same by eating smaller portions.
Substituting food like a burger for food like a burger isn’t doing much other than some warm fuzzy stuff.
It's probably because there is something nutritionally missing compared to actual meat and your body can tell. Macronutrients might be similar, but the micronutrient composition, down to the amino acid ratios and bioavailbility, is probably significantly different.
I was just about to comment that, aside from first-moved advantage, the Impossible strategy of near-perfect imitation seems much more promising than the half-assing that Beyond is doing.
I like Beyond just fine (but I prefer Dr. Praegers, so not exactly representative of the American public) but Impossible is enjoyable in its own right as a marvel of technology.
Just tried the nuggets for the first time this week - truly indistinguishable, aside from being a bit more consistent than real chicken.
> Just tried the nuggets for the first time this week
I just tried them 30 minutes ago with some picky children. They could immediately tell something was amiss and wouldn’t eat more. I thought the chicken nuggets were adequate but the texture was smushy.
Yeah, I'm sure it's partially an economies of scale issue. But plant based beef should really be half or less the cost of actual beef in the long run.
Otherwise the whole premise is totally pointless, other than for taste for vegetarians.
I would switch all my beef consumption to impossible if the cost were significantly lower.
From an investment perspective it seems kind of poor, given that there are already two players and likely more down the road. Will not be able to bear high margins on these kind of items. Cool that some are willing to fund the R&D even though returns are likely to be poor, though!
Competition will bring price down in longer run either way.
> I would switch all my beef consumption to impossible if the cost were significantly lower.
Is the cost significantly lower in non-subsidized markets like Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Norway? Or do Impossible and Beyond charge more in those markets?
In theory, in a competitive market, margins will decline over time and goods will be sold close to at cost. This is especially applicable to grocery/food where margins are razor thin.
If we assume the inputs to impossible are significantly cheaper than beef, then cost of impossible should be significantly cheaper too.
But you're right, subsidies distort the equation. If somebody can chime in with what the level of beef subsidy is, but I'm doubtful it's enough to offset using vegetables over cattle. Should be an order of magnitude cheaper in a free market, once production is scaled up appropriately.
It seems (maybe unsurprisingly) complex to put an exact number on the cost of a non-subsidized hamburger. However[1], the US gives $38 billion per year in beef subsidies, and less than 1% of that amount for vegetable production. I found a couple links [2, eg] which claim $30-50 per pound of beef, if subsidies are removed. There are also some discussions to be found [3] of the cost of additional externalities.
[edit : one can also try a simple-but-probably-wrong end-to-end estimate... Divide $38B by 325M to get $116 per person. Then divide by 57 pounds of beef consumption per person per year [4] to get ~$2 per pound. A quick search finds ~$4 per pound for ground beef, so one may naively guess the subsidies add up to at least a 33% discount.)
Nestle has an operating profit margin of 17.5%. That's pretty good. Maybe it's possible for Beyond/Impossible.
Also, if capital costs of building a plant are low relative to yearly revenue, say 10%, even at profit margins of 5%, over 10 years you got 5x of returns, and that's without counting other ways of raising capital.
Hopefully soon. The problem, I as understood it, was that there was some ingredient in the Impossible Burger that wasn't approved in the EU, and Impossible hadn't done the necessary paperwork to get it approved. But now, in theory, there shouldn't be anything stopping the UK from allowing them.
Still no. My guess is that they have hit regulatory issues in coming to Europe. Food standards are generally much higher here (including UK having still essentially the same EU regs), and while I doubt Impossible are doing anything bad, I suspect they are doing things different enough that it's hard to "prove" to regulators.
While I'd love to be buying Impossible's products, I'm generally glad for the high standards.
I've replaced much of my meat eating with Impossible (very available and relatively affordable at $5.99 in Trader Joe's in the US). Mainly for environmental/ethical reasons.
Ground impossible meat is as good as real ground beef IMO, though it took me a while to realize that you need to salt/spice it just as you would real meat too! ie. if you put straight ground beef on a grill, it'll taste a little bland. Same with the fake meats.
I've tried it. It doesn't taste terrible. It's clearly not meat, however.
I'm biased (chicken farmer), but to me it seems quite strange to think that some highly-processed factory-produced meatlike substance could ever come close to matching the nutritive quality of well-raised and processed meat.
Factories are in general not well-known for producing healthful food.
It's mostly soy protein powder and sunflower and coconut oil, with a multivitamin and a few other minor ingredients tossed in. Some are spooked by the presence of soy or the idea of isolated vitamins, and I would personally love to know a little more about the specific processing of the sunflower oil, but otherwise it's fairly unexceptional.
I enjoy impossible burgers. They grill a little different and don't release as much juice, but the end result is still tasty, and definitely tastier than cheap, higher-fat burgers.
As for the ground impossible meat, my only negative feedback is that it's a poor candidate for use in boxed dinners (like Hamburger Helper), because the addition of too much liquid ruins the illusion: it starts to dissolve into its constituent vegetable powders.
But heck, I recently found the burgers flagged with a modest discount at Costco that made them cheaper than the beef burgers, per unit!
Compared to a fast food burger I it's no worse than the meat they use for those burgers. Compared to a burger from a high quality burger joint it's not close.
For dishes where you're already using lower quality ground meat as 'bulk' I can absolutely see it competing. The main problem is that it still costs a fair bit more than the low end meat it has a reasonable chance of replacing. Once it gets to a price point where McDonalds can sell their Impossible Big Mac for $1 cheaper than their meat Big Mac, then I think things will really start to change.
Only tried patties / burgers. Depending on the size of the patty it's as good as the best fast food burger or as a medium-grade (not medium in a sense of "medium rare") gourmet burger.
You should absolutely eat it hot though, once it cools down it's a a bit less good.
Overall it's pretty amazing and can work as a substitute for meat.
It doesn't give you the meat heaviness, which some people may consider a downside, but I personally consider it an upside. I can't imagine having a 1/2 lb burger and then doing sports even 2 hours later. I'd just feel gross and heavy.kj With Impossible burger sports would be totally, well, possible.
It’s a great replacement for beef for taco meat. With all the chili seasoning it is as good or better than real beef. You really can’t tell much of a difference. We haven’t tried it as burgers yet (we mostly eat turkey burgers anyway).
I do also wonder how the food safety compares. Ground beef has a large risk of e-coli and needs to be thoroughly cooked. Presumably plant-based food doesn’t have the same level of danger. Although I imagine if left unrefrigerated anything with that much nutrition in it would quickly become dangerous to eat.
The spicy Italian Beyond Meat sausage - either barbecued or fried - makes a really nice hot dog. I've lost count of how many I had this summer.
Edit: On the bad side - Canadian A&W featured Beyond Meat chicken nuggets. These tasted nothing like chicken. They weren't inedible, but not a good approximation of even the low quality nugget meat.
Haven't eaten meat in over 30 years. Had an Impossible burger at a fancy Manhattan restaurant one night, and the next to balance it out from Bareburger, to make sure it wasn't just how it was prepared. Never want one again as it made me feel I was eating meat. I love Beyond however, and keep a freezer full of their products at hand. Not so realistic.
Their food product is gross and makes me ill. There’s something “off,” about it. Maybe it’s just the BK burger they supply. Don’t know. But I do know it provokes an intestinal protest in me.
What are the barriers to entry here? There are already hundreds of processed food companies. I fear that the difference between a reasonably nice tasting plant based burger and one that cooks like meat will be marginal in the long run.
Instead of addressing the problem of monopoly and factory meat, let’s drive towards Roman latifundia and pretend that soy, peas and coconut/palm oil are meat.
The correct solution to providing affordable protein for the world is to use nuclear power to desalinate seawater and irrigate the Sahara Desert to turn it into a vast grassland that can support a billion cattle.
The plain fact of the matter is that humans evolved on an almost exclusively meat-based diet and to this day thrive on an almost exclusively meat-based diet.
Not only are plants toxic for humans, but widespread agriculture results in the loss of insect life, due to the massive use of insecticides, which in turn contributes to the loss of bird life due to the loss on insect life.
Plant-based diets are terrible for human health and terrible for the environment, what with all the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. The sooner we come to our senses and massively invest in regenerative herding the better off we'll be as a species.
We should all be eating mostly red meat every day, with maybe a bit of fruit here and there -- this is by far the healthiest diet both for the human body and for the Earth as our home.
And no, I'm not trolling -- this is my sincere and deeply-held belief.
I'd honestly be really interested in seeing references. These are some strong statements, I'm searching for research on what you're claiming, but so far it does not appear to agree.
I really wish I could do this for you. But you see, collecting all references will end up taking several days of my time. But you can start with these 2 people here:
> irrigate the Sahara Desert to turn it into a vast grassland that can support a billion cattle.
There are currently about a billion cows[1], and these produce 14.5% of green house gases[2] (in the form of methane, measured as co2-equivalent). Doubling that would not be very good.
OP's idea is batshit, but worth noting that a doubling of the cattle population doesn't necessitate a doubling of emissions. Actually, your second link kinda goes into this. It's written by an animal agriculture advocate who recommends improving the efficiency of, rather than reducing, animal agriculture.
You don't get to propose a suite of projects to negate their costs. Because we're not some hive mind working with singular purpose. So:
Last time I checked cattle used more water and more land than alternative sources of calories. You want us to eat meat, subsidies for cattle then? That's going to produce less calories at greater land and water use.
You want to terraform the desert? The word "terraform" is no sweet nothing. Talk about destruction to the environment. My goodness.
You want us to use nuclear reactors for energy? I do understand that desire. But you propose to install this in the Sahara? The place with tons of low value land and way too much sun? Might I propose an alternative energy source that is currently beating nuclear at price per watt in CLOUDY areas?
The Sahara used to be the breadbasket of Europe, full of water, plants, animals, ... before people fucked it over circa 2000 years ago. It would be nice to get it back.
Citation needed. With a quick search, it looks like the Sahara has been dry for about 5400 years, with a wet-dry cycle going on for millions of years caused by changes in the Earth's orbital axis.
>The plain fact of the matter is that humans evolved on an almost exclusively meat-based diet
At one point in our evolutionary chain (that of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens), sure. At other points (Australopithecus) we were exclusively vegetarian. For much of our history (that of Homo habilis and more recent Homo sapiens) we've eaten significant amounts of both plants and animals.
I'd love to see a source for the claim that plants are toxic for humans. Considering that many humans eat exclusively plants, and that those people seem to have lower all-cause mortality rates than people with otherwise similar characteristics [0], I suspect that that could only be true if you're using a very non-standard definition of "toxic."
What does processed even mean lol, all food we eat is extremely human modified, all that matters is whether it's healthy or not and I don't think that the meat alternatives are any worse than meat
One formal definition is the NOVA food classification system, which distinguishes between levels of food processing. These meat alternatives would be classified as "ultra processed", together with oreos and McNuggets. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980017000234
I am honestly surprised there is so momentum behind Impossible or Beyond. Both are ultra processed foods, and their health and environmental implications are unclear. They are also not great substitutes for real meat - they simply don't have the same taste profile, although I will acknowledge it is not as far off as previous attempts at vegan burgers or other such products. I think they are good as their own type of product and don't mind the taste though. Are these really going to replace traditional meat products? In my mind, no. But investors seem to be taking that bet.
> Both are ultra processed foods, and their health and environmental implications are unclear.
I think people may be confused about who Impossible and Beyond are marketing to. They are not marketing to people who don't want to eat a cheeseburger because it's too processed or even because it's meat. They are marketing to people who primarily want something that tastes good - not identical to meat, but delicious - and would secondarily prefer non-meat if it is available for equivalent taste. Whether something is "processed" or not doesn't come into it. Not everyone cares about how healthy or natural a food is.
You can tell this because their marketing doesn't in any way promote their food as being particularly "natural" aside from being made from plants. It's all focused on how good it tastes and looks. On their homepage (https://impossiblefoods.com/ as of this writing), Impossible Foods' first three pitches for their product are:
1) It tastes like meat and is delicious.
2) It's better for the environment.
3) It's better for the environment.
You say their environmental impact is unclear - I don't think that's true. It is extremely difficult for even the most intensive plant-based food processes to come close to the environmental impact of meat. Even almond milk, for example, which is an environmental disaster due to its water use, is immensely better than animal milk.[0] Even if Impossible were only half as good for the environment as meat, it would still be enormously beneficial to consume Impossible preferentially, and I suspect it is much better than that.
> Are these really going to replace traditional meat products? In my mind, no.
They certainly won't replace things like whole-muscle cuts of meat. But as costs for meat rise, I could see them edging out the ground meats they intend to replace in a lot of areas. I could also see them being in an ideal position to design and produce non-animal or lab-grown cuts of meat for consumption. There are already some companies doing this: https://kuleana.co/ for example. If I were an investor, that's the bet I'd be making.
People who eat meat aren’t the target audience. The target audience are people who don’t eat meat but still go to MacDonalds or Burger King, it’s a growing segment, and don’t worry, noone is going to try to force you or others like you to join, but just like there are likely 90% of the clothing brands out there that you don’t care for but are still hugely successful, it’s ok that you aren’t in the target audience, they can still be successful.
Why would I pay more for fake meat than I could pay for the real meat?
imo if vegans want to push their food as a legitimate lifestyle, they should stop trying to imitate meat products. It's a self-defeating premise, an admission that vegan food doesn't taste as good, but "we can make it taste as good as meat with enough hard work and science!"
If you want veganism to catch on, the correct argument is to say, straight up, with full confidence, "this is fully capable of tasting as good or better than meat all on its own!" And working to come up with delicious meals that embrace and utilize the flavors of veggies. Otherwise this will always be second best.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadWhy are we subsidizing soy crops anyways? Soy is terrible for your health. It contains loads of phytoestrogen and allergens. We are reliant on exporting the crop because it's not a part of the typical american diet. It's just bad news altogether.
However, I am skeptical of all of the claims about soy particularly if you eat it as only part of your diet.
That said Beyond Meat doesn't contain soy. Impossible does though.
https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/beyond-beef
I'm not proposing all production in the US switch to soy crops, and your argument seems pretty disingenuous to me
Impossible Foods is a drop in the bucket compared to tofu, but, there are too many calories of soy grown in the US to feed them all to humans. That's also true for corn.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9888630/
I believe that most artificial meat consumers would argue that it's impossible to kill and eat animals ethically. After all that's why they choose to eat the more expensive artificial meat instead of the real deal or no meat at all.
Have you ever seen how many foals are chewed up in a combine?
IMO much more ethical to directly kill an animal vs. indirectly destroy its habitat or kill it accidentally (and then fail to use the carcass).
I know we must engage in good faith but the soy scaremongering sure does seem coordinated.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/soy
I'm going with zero.
Where do you live that stray horses or donkeys are roaming into crop fields at harvest time?
But I think intent makes a difference.
Mice killed by farm equipment are accidental side effects with some ethical implications which most of us choose ignore.
Livestock raised for slaughter is a different ethical question entirely.
(Meat eater here. I do find it to be the natural order of things, but I am aware that I could justify slavery and sexual exploitation by the same logic, and that makes me pretty sure I'm giving myself a pass on the meat thing.)
I eat meat, too. I'm... mostly okay with that. But I'm told that pigs are smarter than cats, and that makes me a bit squeamish. Natural order sure is a slippery slope. It is human nature, I hope, to aim to be better than our nature.
Thank goodness for that!
I’d be very interested to hear how you use your axioms to argue the opposite. I’m happy to share mine but don’t want to taint your thought process before you’ve had time to fully consider the problem.
Look at the research.
> the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
https://css.umich.edu/publication/beyond-meats-beyond-burger...
The environmental destruction wrought by gigantic, inhumanely scaled monocrop farming is direct, immediate, obvious, and worthy of huge mobilization to resolve.
Instead, we hear, as you say here, that if the carbon emissions are low, it's Great For The Environment!
And what do you think the animals are fed with?
If you're going to have 8 billion people eating meat do you really think there's going to be less environmental impact growing the food for the animals + the impact of the animals themselves compared to just growing vegetables?
I feel like meat scales even worse due to efficiency losses
My cows are fed exclusively grass, right to finishing.
My pigs and chickens are fed mixes of locally-sourced corn, oats, barley, peas, and lentils from organic growers. And they supplement with grasses and broadleafs because we raise 'em on pasture.
Well-raised, environmentally reasonably-fed animals cost lots of money.
Meat is basically the healthiest thing people can eat.
If you just take the pasture-raised cows alone, the grass grows itself and large herbivores are a natural part of the environment here--the environment and its polyculture would be harmed by their removal.
I hope it will outcompete cheap, monoculture-soy fed, medicine pumped, densely grown and factory slaughtered cheap meat.
The second is far more common than the first. As you said, good meat from well-raised animals is expensive.
So not the awesome and expensive steak you may eat from time to time, but the cheap meat in fast-food, the chicken-wings, burgers, lasagnas, pizzas, tacos, currys and more.
Soy and corn is mostly grown in the Midwest, using aquifer water that is being rapidly and permanently depleted. Not only is monocropping as a strategy for feeding the nation unwise on its face, but it will ultimately lead to food insecurity In 30-50 years as desertification of the Midwest starts to be a thing.
The monocrops you mention as a problem are largely used to feed cattle today: about 80% of land used for agriculture produces feed for livestock, most of it single crops like corn and soy – despite only contributing to about a fifth of the calories we consume. And it's not like we can greatly expand production either, we already use about half of all habitable land for agriculture.
The tail wags the dog in the thinking here. “Scaling” fast food price hamburgers is the problem.
It’s a problem on a bunch of levels. It’s not scalable because we’ve changed the definition of food. The best farmland in the world lay fallow because we’ve committed to growing vegetables in the desert and raising ruminants in pens, because it’s more efficient to the small cartels of processors who drive the status quo.
I am not convinced that this is true because it necessitates raising an animal for the sole purpose of slaughtering it. Though I realize that many will have a different measure of "ethical", I would say that these products are most certainly the way for me.
But also many lifetime vegetarians, so probably able to adapt away from the craving.
> I would literally pay double not to cause an animal to suffer ever again.
Think of it this way. It's not about _you_ it's about the _animals_ suffering. It's a selfless thing to do and fairly simple. Most foods are not animals they're plants! It gets easier.
Are you really saying that slaughtering animals is more "compassionate" than growing meat synthetically? And are you saying that the massive environmental cost of factory farms makes it more "integrated" with nature?
It's like you're deliberately trying to attach a negative connotation to synthetic meat by using the words "corporate lab".
Literally all first world amenities originate in a corporate lab! Are you suggesting we stop taking COVID vaccines because they were developed in Pfizer's corporate lab?
What do you propose we do instead to curb the world's desire to eat meat? You say "factory farms are terrible". Yes they are! And synthetic meat is the only way factory farms will go away.
I don't have any economic answers, however I think the vegan vision of a human race separate from nature is very scary, and not separate from one where we eradicate the natural world through industrialization.
I wish they added strains of imperfection that get stuck in your teeth or something.
I'm also trying to be as vegan as possible, but mainly for health reasons. Though after starting that, I now also think there's ethical reasons. Funny how that works.
Our family decided to adopt a more vegetable based diet and buy more ethically sourced local meat, especially beef and pork. The unit cost is higher but we spend about the same by eating smaller portions.
Substituting food like a burger for food like a burger isn’t doing much other than some warm fuzzy stuff.
I like Beyond just fine (but I prefer Dr. Praegers, so not exactly representative of the American public) but Impossible is enjoyable in its own right as a marvel of technology.
Just tried the nuggets for the first time this week - truly indistinguishable, aside from being a bit more consistent than real chicken.
Impossible's marketing is actually the same as Beyond: "we were first to have a great replica!" No doubt the next competitor will say the same thing.
I just tried them 30 minutes ago with some picky children. They could immediately tell something was amiss and wouldn’t eat more. I thought the chicken nuggets were adequate but the texture was smushy.
Otherwise the whole premise is totally pointless, other than for taste for vegetarians.
I would switch all my beef consumption to impossible if the cost were significantly lower.
From an investment perspective it seems kind of poor, given that there are already two players and likely more down the road. Will not be able to bear high margins on these kind of items. Cool that some are willing to fund the R&D even though returns are likely to be poor, though!
Competition will bring price down in longer run either way.
Is the cost significantly lower in non-subsidized markets like Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Norway? Or do Impossible and Beyond charge more in those markets?
If we assume the inputs to impossible are significantly cheaper than beef, then cost of impossible should be significantly cheaper too.
But you're right, subsidies distort the equation. If somebody can chime in with what the level of beef subsidy is, but I'm doubtful it's enough to offset using vegetables over cattle. Should be an order of magnitude cheaper in a free market, once production is scaled up appropriately.
[edit : one can also try a simple-but-probably-wrong end-to-end estimate... Divide $38B by 325M to get $116 per person. Then divide by 57 pounds of beef consumption per person per year [4] to get ~$2 per pound. A quick search finds ~$4 per pound for ground beef, so one may naively guess the subsidies add up to at least a 33% discount.)
[1] - https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
[2] - https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-the-average-pound-of-beef-...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/the-true-cost-of-...
[4] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183539/per-capita-consum...
Also, if capital costs of building a plant are low relative to yearly revenue, say 10%, even at profit margins of 5%, over 10 years you got 5x of returns, and that's without counting other ways of raising capital.
A lot depends on scale, and meat has scale.
Just a question of valuation and ROI on a longer timescale. BYND stock seems wildly overvalued if you consider the very long run, for example.
You can't have a tech like multiple on a food/grocery product and expect a good long term return.
Vast majority of people will not buy meat alternatives if they are more expensive than meat.
On the other hand, if you can bring cost well below meat, many will choose it for economic reasons alone.
https://impossiblehq.com/impossible-foods-lawsuit-statement/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254588
While I'd love to be buying Impossible's products, I'm generally glad for the high standards.
Ground impossible meat is as good as real ground beef IMO, though it took me a while to realize that you need to salt/spice it just as you would real meat too! ie. if you put straight ground beef on a grill, it'll taste a little bland. Same with the fake meats.
I'm biased (chicken farmer), but to me it seems quite strange to think that some highly-processed factory-produced meatlike substance could ever come close to matching the nutritive quality of well-raised and processed meat.
Factories are in general not well-known for producing healthful food.
As for the ground impossible meat, my only negative feedback is that it's a poor candidate for use in boxed dinners (like Hamburger Helper), because the addition of too much liquid ruins the illusion: it starts to dissolve into its constituent vegetable powders.
But heck, I recently found the burgers flagged with a modest discount at Costco that made them cheaper than the beef burgers, per unit!
For dishes where you're already using lower quality ground meat as 'bulk' I can absolutely see it competing. The main problem is that it still costs a fair bit more than the low end meat it has a reasonable chance of replacing. Once it gets to a price point where McDonalds can sell their Impossible Big Mac for $1 cheaper than their meat Big Mac, then I think things will really start to change.
I found impossible tastes more like real meat, reminded me of a cheap frozen grocery store patty
To me Beyond tasted less like real meat but had a better flavor/spices
You should absolutely eat it hot though, once it cools down it's a a bit less good.
Overall it's pretty amazing and can work as a substitute for meat.
It doesn't give you the meat heaviness, which some people may consider a downside, but I personally consider it an upside. I can't imagine having a 1/2 lb burger and then doing sports even 2 hours later. I'd just feel gross and heavy.kj With Impossible burger sports would be totally, well, possible.
I do also wonder how the food safety compares. Ground beef has a large risk of e-coli and needs to be thoroughly cooked. Presumably plant-based food doesn’t have the same level of danger. Although I imagine if left unrefrigerated anything with that much nutrition in it would quickly become dangerous to eat.
Edit: On the bad side - Canadian A&W featured Beyond Meat chicken nuggets. These tasted nothing like chicken. They weren't inedible, but not a good approximation of even the low quality nugget meat.
Instead of addressing the problem of monopoly and factory meat, let’s drive towards Roman latifundia and pretend that soy, peas and coconut/palm oil are meat.
I want to like it, but honestly I would rather just eat a salad.
The plain fact of the matter is that humans evolved on an almost exclusively meat-based diet and to this day thrive on an almost exclusively meat-based diet.
Not only are plants toxic for humans, but widespread agriculture results in the loss of insect life, due to the massive use of insecticides, which in turn contributes to the loss of bird life due to the loss on insect life.
Plant-based diets are terrible for human health and terrible for the environment, what with all the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. The sooner we come to our senses and massively invest in regenerative herding the better off we'll be as a species.
We should all be eating mostly red meat every day, with maybe a bit of fruit here and there -- this is by far the healthiest diet both for the human body and for the Earth as our home.
And no, I'm not trolling -- this is my sincere and deeply-held belief.
https://shawn-baker.com/about/ http://www.ketotic.org/
Their talks do cite many references.
There are currently about a billion cows[1], and these produce 14.5% of green house gases[2] (in the form of methane, measured as co2-equivalent). Doubling that would not be very good.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...
[2] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/using-global-emission-s...
Last time I checked cattle used more water and more land than alternative sources of calories. You want us to eat meat, subsidies for cattle then? That's going to produce less calories at greater land and water use.
You want to terraform the desert? The word "terraform" is no sweet nothing. Talk about destruction to the environment. My goodness.
You want us to use nuclear reactors for energy? I do understand that desire. But you propose to install this in the Sahara? The place with tons of low value land and way too much sun? Might I propose an alternative energy source that is currently beating nuclear at price per watt in CLOUDY areas?
At one point in our evolutionary chain (that of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens), sure. At other points (Australopithecus) we were exclusively vegetarian. For much of our history (that of Homo habilis and more recent Homo sapiens) we've eaten significant amounts of both plants and animals.
I'd love to see a source for the claim that plants are toxic for humans. Considering that many humans eat exclusively plants, and that those people seem to have lower all-cause mortality rates than people with otherwise similar characteristics [0], I suspect that that could only be true if you're using a very non-standard definition of "toxic."
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24898223/
You have been too modest. Actually most of what you said can be relatively easily collaborated by experimentation.
Personally - I've been mostly on a read meat diet for the past decade.
It’s same as people putting water rinsed through oats as a cream substitute, who would no doubt cringe at putting coffeemate in their coffee!
- it's a venture capitalist baby
- people are paid be getting funded rather than selling their product to actual people
because of the two points, you see it promoted online like propaganda because the venture capitalists want their money back, with profit
I think people may be confused about who Impossible and Beyond are marketing to. They are not marketing to people who don't want to eat a cheeseburger because it's too processed or even because it's meat. They are marketing to people who primarily want something that tastes good - not identical to meat, but delicious - and would secondarily prefer non-meat if it is available for equivalent taste. Whether something is "processed" or not doesn't come into it. Not everyone cares about how healthy or natural a food is.
You can tell this because their marketing doesn't in any way promote their food as being particularly "natural" aside from being made from plants. It's all focused on how good it tastes and looks. On their homepage (https://impossiblefoods.com/ as of this writing), Impossible Foods' first three pitches for their product are:
1) It tastes like meat and is delicious. 2) It's better for the environment. 3) It's better for the environment.
You say their environmental impact is unclear - I don't think that's true. It is extremely difficult for even the most intensive plant-based food processes to come close to the environmental impact of meat. Even almond milk, for example, which is an environmental disaster due to its water use, is immensely better than animal milk.[0] Even if Impossible were only half as good for the environment as meat, it would still be enormously beneficial to consume Impossible preferentially, and I suspect it is much better than that.
> Are these really going to replace traditional meat products? In my mind, no.
They certainly won't replace things like whole-muscle cuts of meat. But as costs for meat rise, I could see them edging out the ground meats they intend to replace in a lot of areas. I could also see them being in an ideal position to design and produce non-animal or lab-grown cuts of meat for consumption. There are already some companies doing this: https://kuleana.co/ for example. If I were an investor, that's the bet I'd be making.
[0] https://ideas.ted.com/which-plant-based-milk-is-best-for-the...
People who eat meat aren’t the target audience. The target audience are people who don’t eat meat but still go to MacDonalds or Burger King, it’s a growing segment, and don’t worry, noone is going to try to force you or others like you to join, but just like there are likely 90% of the clothing brands out there that you don’t care for but are still hugely successful, it’s ok that you aren’t in the target audience, they can still be successful.
imo if vegans want to push their food as a legitimate lifestyle, they should stop trying to imitate meat products. It's a self-defeating premise, an admission that vegan food doesn't taste as good, but "we can make it taste as good as meat with enough hard work and science!"
If you want veganism to catch on, the correct argument is to say, straight up, with full confidence, "this is fully capable of tasting as good or better than meat all on its own!" And working to come up with delicious meals that embrace and utilize the flavors of veggies. Otherwise this will always be second best.