I've gone vegetarian, except for a single grass fed animal I bought from a local farmer. (I live in a city, it was easier than I thought it would be to connect with a farmer out in the rural part of my state.) The transition was way, way easier than I thought it was going to be. I didn't guilt myself when I made mistakes, just stopped eating meat unless I was sure the provenance of it was sustainable and free from cruelty.
There's so much amazing vegetarian cuisine, and things like the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger both fill that 'gotta have a burger' feeling. I hope we see more like them, and I'm really looking forward to being able to try 'clean meat' from some of the labs who are exploring that.
> (I live in a city, it was easier than I thought it would be to connect with a farmer out in the rural part of my state.)
I wish that more people would realize how easy this is! Plus, the quality of the meat you'll get (even if you aren't overtly buying the best possible) simply blows anything you find in the supermarket away.
Here's what I've been doing with 4 friends for years now: every year, we go in on buying an entire cow from a local rancher. We have it butchered and packaged, then we each get a quarter. That's a huge amount of meat (a single cow gives us in the neighborhood of 600 lbs of butchered beef) -- enough to last for a year, including giving some away as gifts. I swear, even the hamburger from that is far superior to the best cuts I've had elsewhere.
To do it our way requires buying a large freezer, of course.
How much is the full cow?
Does the rancher vacuum seal the individual pieces for you, or do you pick up 600lbs of meat and have a meat packing party?
Any other details?
Because I'm concerned with the end price including butchering, my memory of the cost breakdown details is not ironclad. Take these numbers with a grain of salt. The price varies from year to year, but we tend pay in the neighborhood of $3-$4/lb live weight. An adult live cow tends to weigh around 1,500 lbs, iirc.
All in, including butchering, there isn't a lot of saving here -- per pound of finished meat, we end up paying on the low end of supermarket prices.
However, and I can't emphasize this enough, the quality exceeds that of much more expensive meat. I never understood what vegetarians were talking about when they mentioned the "smell of death" on meat until the first time I bought it like this. The meat I buy doesn't have that smell, and once I encountered the difference, I absolutely understood what the vegetarians were saying.
The rancher doesn't butcher or package the meat. The rancher will deliver the cow to a local outfit that does that (and freezes the finished meat). We select what cuts we are most interested in, what cuts we want ground, and so forth. Then when it's done, we just show up with a truck to pick up the packages. They're packaged just like you get from most other butchers, wrapped in plastic with an outer wrapper of waxed butcher paper.
The only "party" aspect to it is that none of us has enough freezer space to hold an entire cow, so we have to coordinate so that we can divvy up the packages and take them to each of our homes immediately.
I should mention the other nice thing about doing it this way -- we (or one of us, really) actually go to the ranch to make arrangements and select the animal. That means that we can see with our own eyes that the animals were treated well, are in good health, and so forth. Doing this has made visible an awful lot of what used to be invisible and mysterious. In terms of feeling good about the process and intellectual curiosity, this is invaluable.
I've been involved in this from a relative and gotten it wrapped in butcher paper (waxed one side). It works pretty well at keeping the moisture sealed (avoiding freezer burn), but you could do vacuum sealing (or maybe even just ziplock bagging) for some improvement.
We paid ~$6.50/lb for our animal, which was a grass fed, organically raised animal. That's obviously high for ground beef, and obviously low for filet mignon. About 40% of what you take home is ground beef by weight (the way we had our animal broken down.)
The butcher broke it down into packages, each package double wrapped in plastic and paper and deep frozen. I have to go pick up 600lbs of meat, then parcel it out and deliver it to my friends (or have them come pick it up.)
This post actually reminded me, I've been meaning to try out a meat delivery service that one of my city's local chefs runs (he does farm to table dining). They partner with local farms that treat their animals well and do weekly deliveries. Prices for beef seem to be pretty reasonable, cheaper than both the butcher shops near me.
Our total cost was $2940, which included the cost of the animal, the butchering, the kill fee, waste disposal fees, and all relevant taxes. We estimated 415-480lbs of meat take home from that animal.
In talking shop with the rancher we deal with, he gets a lot less per cow at wholesale auctions than in individual sales. On the other hand, wholesale auctions cost him less to do. Per cow, it costs him a lot more time and effort to sell one cow at a time rather than 100.
That said, he did say that his highest profit margins are with individual sales rather than wholesale. And, like any professional in their field, he really enjoys the chance to educate ordinary people (particularly us city-slickers) about his business.
> ... with 4 friends for years now: every year, we go in on buying an entire cow from a local rancher.
With the current global adult (ages 15-64) population of approximately 5B your method would need 5B/4 = 1.25B cows. The current global cattle population is about 1B [0]
I miss the days when comments on Hacker News focused on hacking and startups instead of scoring Internet virtue points.
Aside from this figure being totally irrelevant (billions of humans don't like and don't eat beef; the parent is probablya heavy beef eater even by US standards), here's a thought. If the parent is right and the quality is higher, maybe there is an opportunity to build a service which connects people with local ranchers so everyone can do this. That would keep commerce local and reduce the emissions involved in transporting beef around the world.
But no, let's fixate on neo-Puritan finger wagging in every topic on every forum on the Internet. god forbid we have ideas to make things better without judging people for their habits.
You're assuming that those 4 people consume all the meat themselves and don't share any of their meals with their family or in other ways re-distribute a portion to other people.
I'm with you. I haven't eaten red meat or birds for going on 25 years now and though I do enjoy a good salmon burger, I honestly prefer a beyond burger when I can find one (trying to cut down on the fish, for health and over-fishing reasons).
I still periodically eat meat, as I mentioned I did work with a local farmer to buy a whole beef. But it's something special and deliberate -- should we make one of our roasts? We don't have very many, so each one is precious. We use all the bones we could get to make stock, etc. Try to really appreciate the one animal we've had harvested for our family, but still eat vegetarian or vegan on the vast majority of days (90-95%+ of our meals are probably vegetarian these days.)
I would love it so much if there were a majority of meat-eaters like you. I personally am not against meat-eating: only unnecessary suffering as you have explained well in your parent post. I have great respect for those like you, who truly take care to both limit their intake, and source their meat from genuine cruelty-free farms.
This. I haven't eaten red or white meat since January of 2018. I don't mind people eating it, I don't cast judgement and I try not to have my personal choice influence large group decisions on where to eat. But people who eat meat egregiously from mass production sources do have choices and I wish more people thought about the options and consequences, even if minor. The OPs approach saves so much pollution and risk to our environment, I commend that and truly respect the conscious decision to bring meat back to a point of appreciation and delicacy vs right to copious overconsumption in the name of more protein.
I have a friend who describes himself as "meegan". He's straight-up vegan in terms of his regular diet (not because of ethical issues, but because he feels better eating that way), but if he's eating out or at a friend's house, and they're not serving vegan fare, he'll eat whatever is on offer.
With all due respect, I disagree. A vegetarian who almost completely follows their diet, is in my opinion a vegetarian the same way as a vegan who almost completely follows their diet is in my opinion a vegan. Why? 1) Defeatist approach (perfectionism) does not work 2) What matters is how the person identifies 3) There are hurdles to overcome when going vegetarian/vegan. These can be related to health, financials, logistics/availability, social situations where an exception could be made, the environment which can be at odds. Should anyone be interested I can give ample amounts of examples for each of these.
> I'm sorry but you shouldn't call yourself a vegetarian.
I understand your point, but I don't entirely agree. I think if someone's primary diet is vegetarian, calling themselves that isn't unduly misleading even if they eat meat on occasion.
But it may be a difference between being "vegetarian" in terms of participating in a movement and being "vegetarian" just because you prefer to eat that way.
I'd have to agree. She has a plant-based diet, but "being" a vegetarian is an ethical stance against animal meat for food. She could also say, "my diet is primary vegetarian", which moves the position from her to her diet choices.
Most farmed salmon eat a diet heavy in fish meal, derived from wild caught but "undesirable" fish. Eating farmed salmon may not harm wild salmon populations directly, but they still have an impact on wild fish stock. Eventually, there could very well be food competition between wild salmon and farmed if fisheries continue to seek fish meal from wild sources to feed an increasing population of farmed fish.
In the PNW wild salmon is usually only about 40% more per lb and definitely worth it. Also most of it is pretty sustainably fished in Alaska (though in the puget sound region the population is reduced from what it should be). You shouldn't eat it raw but it tastes incomparably better cooked
I'm the first one to admit that the line is fuzzy.
I read this story [1] by Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden interview fame), and I realized that I was not ok with gestation crates for pigs, or the practices espoused by the industrial farming of any animal.
I do not object to raising animals and eating them, but I do object to essentially keeping them in brutal, squalid conditions. Animals should have access to the outdoors, be allowed to pursue their own social connections, have enough space to stretch and exercise, have feed that's natural and high quality, and generally exist in a comfortable way.
Totally acknowledge that's my own definition. It's an arbitrary line in the sand to say, "Killing an animal is ok, causing suffering to an animal before killing it is not".
I just... read the article and couldn't stomach letting any of my money flow to companies that would think that sort of behavior was ok.
I'm following pretty much the same definition with you. Compassion In World Farming [1] also campaigns (more or less) along these lines. So you're definitely not alone.
CIWF also operates in the US, but the campaigning in Europe seems more extensive. It is shocking the amount of abuse the animals may go through just to save us pennies. E.g. I was shocked to read about live animal transport conditions [2], only to have them slaughtered in another country.
That theoretical distinction makes sense to me, but I don't see how it would be possible to support one kind of animal agriculture and not the other with purchasing habits. When most consumers don't distinguish provenance, demand for animal products is fungible.
What I did: stop purchasing meat from the supermarket. Stop eating meat at restaurants.
Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef.
It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.
Apropos of just shootin' the breeze, could you have also met the animal? I wonder if that would make a further difference. I eat meat, but I put my hand up and say that if I ordered a steak in a restaurant and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order.
I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.
Totally. Not every farmer will let you, but I definitely had the opportunity. (My farmer gave me the choice between three animals.)
I think the 'bashing it with a rock' is sort of the thing I'm trying to avoid. My farmer brings a USDA butcher to his site to kill the animal (the kills are done away from the pasture space). The offal is removed there. If you want the tongue, heart, liver, etc. you show up on slaughter day and cart them away.
The carcass was then taken to a local butcher shop, where it was processed into steaks, ground beef, roasts, etc. at my direction -- how thick did you want steaks, how big did you want roasts, etc.
Being involved in this way is surprisingly intimate -- seeing the animal, being on the farm the day of it's slaughter (though I did not witness the slaughter), and working with the butcher to define how it will be broken down taught me so much more about how my food is prepared than anything you'd get from the grocery store.
I've been following this thread and it's gotten me curious. I can't help but wonder - do you have some kind of personal connection to this farmer? How does one source a farmer, let alone one that is willing to let you meet the cow, be there on slaughter day, etc. These are all things that are foreign to most people.
No personal connection at all. I cold called around. My local farmers markets publish a guide of local farmers. [1]
I just put together a spreadsheet with all the farms within 50 miles and visited a few websites/made a few calls. Some farmers had already sold their beef for the season, others weren't grass fed, etc. Eventually I narrowed the candidate pool down to two or three and asked if I could come see their farms. One farmer said no, so I went with one of the others.
> For a more personal connection, I'd start at the local farmers' market.
I agree. The farmer's market was my entryway. At ours, local ranchers are present and selling their meats. There is a huge wealth of knowledge about what exists in your area at a farmer's market. Not just for meat, but for everything.
I once took a survival course and during it I had to kill a rabbit with my bare hands, skin it, process the meat, cook it, and eat it. I definitely wanted to make sure the animal suffered as little as possible, but I was in no way deterred. Most people through human history have killed their own food from time to time. It's not really a big deal.
I've caught, killed, and eaten fish before. It was certainly an interesting experience and teaches you a lot about yourself and the world to experience killing the animal you're willing to eat. I haven't done it with any bird or mammal, but do want to some day; mostly to prove to myself I'm not a hypocrite for being willing to eat meat but not kill it.
Yep. I've killed several smaller animals and processed them, etc. Not a huge deal to me.
I've yet to kill or process a whole cow, though I've broken down primals/subprimals.
I'm not sure how I would do if it was an animal I had raised. If I'm a farmer or rancher with a few dozen or hundreds of heads of cattle, probably no different. If it was a single cow... I might have trouble.
Everyone is different, though. Even some people I know who eat plenty of meat can't stand to look at processed carcass.
I don't mean this as an insult, because I think I would be the same way. I think what you described is a very privileged position of someone who has likely never felt real hunger. I acknowledge I might have the same feelings you describe about raising a single animal for food. Particularly for species that are more emotive. But that's because I too have a historically unfathomable variety of options and privilege.
> and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order.
So would I, but maybe for different reasons. Aside from the method of killing (bashing the poor thing with a rock seems unnecessarily cruel to me), killing my food would be something better done well in advance of mealtime, not once I've sat at the table.
In general, though, I don't think that I'd have an issue killing my own food. That's hypothetical, of course, since (outside of fishing) I've never had to do that.
I really admire your efforts, but "Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends" is a really tall ask for many people I would argue.
I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
It's not a widespread practice, but it's more common than I expected when I started looking into it. EatWild[1] maintains a directory of meat and dairy farmers that sell directly to consumers, they seem to have most of the US covered. Anecdotally I've also purchased humanely raised meat/eggs through CSAs that aren't listed here and offer smaller amounts than an entire animal.
[1] http://www.eatwild.com/index.html
I agree, but I don't think they were doing much beyond stating their own goals and methods. As a guide to what you can do and how you can attempt to go about it, I think it serves well.
> I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
I imagine some butchers might provide cows where you can check the providence, at least in more populated areas. It wouldn't be quite as cheap as a cooperative project, but it would almost definitely be less time consuming, and supporting a free market for this good has additional benefits.
I have done this for years. Its as simple as
1. Buying a deep freezer
2. Check local forums for ranchers, or use a sustainable ranch that will ship, like corner post meats.
3. Enjoy while being thankful for the life of the animal, the effort of the rancher, and the ethics observed by everyone in the chain.
It's not like the animal is going to live forever if you don't kill it. In nature animals are often eaten alive by predators, die from disease, starvation and get horribly injured in competition for mates.
A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
If you go down this rabbit hole deep enough you can begin to question whether life itself should exist.
What we do know for sure is that the animal would not have lived the same life if it weren't captive.
>A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
I don't think we can objectively say this. We have no idea what these animals want. Our humanity for these animals lives is nothing short of projection, purely because we have no idea what they want.
Animals like chickens lack self awareness and the ability for future planning. They operate on instinct. We can prove this. Thus, they also don't know what they want--outside of the immediate satisfaction of an instinctual urge.
They do feel pain and hunger however. In the wild, these animals suffer more pain and hunger. In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
I swear most of the arguments against proper free range farming are grounded in either:
a) A fallacious appeal to nature, ie. the false presumption that just because something is "natural" it is automatically better
or
b) Projection of human awareness and emotional intelligence onto other species
Are factory farms more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes. Is nature more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes.
> Stop ascribing human-like emotions and awareness to other species.
Well, take a monkey, orca, elephant, dolphin, etc. and it would be hard not to. Sure, many farm animals fall below that level, but they're not bugs either. Many mammals have some basic language, care for their young, give distress calls, migrate, find shelter, etc. which seems to indicate at least some level of future planning whether innate or not. And many intelligent mammals have been seen grieving the dead or rescuing animals from danger.
> In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
Yet philosophy courses still exist... Because it's not as simple as that. For some, life is more than just the reduction of suffering. And there are a million other ways to answer "why we exist" or "how we should live".
For animals, we don't know. I think it's absurd to say we're giving them a better/easier/happier life on a farm or out in the wild. We don't know.
Taking zoos as an example though (which is a similar form of captivity, except they don't kill their animals), most people don't think it's a better life, except in the case where the animal is so weak, sick or unable to care for itself that it couldn't hunt in the wild.
Tons of prey animals are reintroduced to the wild, without concern that they might be eaten (some will), but in the hopes that many will survive and reproduce.
So, I guess if your goal is to ensure that the most number of animals lead a somewhat confined life away from predators until they're done growing, farms make sense. If your goal is to ensure that animals get to experience life in their native habitats including the ability to mate and get eaten, then farms aren't so good.
UK has relatively high livestock and animal welfare basic regulation, and in addition it has a certification scheme (that works out about 25% more expensive), run by the "Royal Society for Protection of Cruelty towards Animals". They base their standards as much as possible on academic measurements of stress and natural behaviors. One thing to note is that animals tend to get ill the more 'unhappy' their existence is - and this is argued as one of the reasons there is no need to chlorinate chickens from UK and very little food poisoning risk from fresh produce.
Anyway, the RSPCA will actually certify chickens that are not able to 'free range' (these days it means ability to go outside occasionally) Their advice is it doesn't seem to be of great importance to chickens, unlike stocking density, temperature and conditions inside the barn, and even the introduction of 'toys' like beachballs which some are observed to play with. RSPCA workers are commonly regarded as genuine and professionally experienced their charge of, preventing cruelty towards animals.
How? Just because they demonstrate instinctual behaviour in some circumstances doesn't mean they lack self awareness or the ability for future planning. Humans also demonstrate instinctual behaviour.
What they want is pretty obvious if you've ever actually been around any of these animals. They want what you want: food, sex, comfort, entertainment - in that order.
Your argument would be valid if they were humans. They are not. I fail to understand why they should be treated as such.
And if we consider animals equal to humans, do we send them to jail if they behave badly? Do we prevent them from being murdered by other animals? Isn't it utterly hypocritical to let animals die by starvation in the wild while preventing farming? What is even the natural habitat of farmed animals like a cow?
What happens to a dog that bites a human? In many countries they get euthanized.
Cows as we know them wouldn't exist without farming (for leather, meat, milk). As meat eating reduction is something that will never happen over night, they simply are going to become protected, nearly extinct species that live in few sanctuaries (charity).
Without artifical insemination numbers are very manageable. Remaining, existing population would be eaten till numbers are low enough.
Not sure what OPs requirements are, but mine are along these lines:
"If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]."
-Thomas Sittler. "How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?"
His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals.
I think this is more an argument for an eventual plan to deal with wild animal suffering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering), not an argument that whatever we do to free-range animals is acceptable because it's no worse than the suffering wild animals experience. Of course it's not very pragmatic for humanity to make a dent in that problem in the near future, especially without causing externalities, but just because it's hard doesn't mean the alternative is to say "they all have shit lives anyway, who cares what we do with them?"
>His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals
The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article:
"If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.
I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists."
This article starts with a false premise: "Vegans are against the suffering of animals."
But really the point, at least for myself as a vegan is that "Vegans are against the suffering of animals at the hands of humans."
Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
Wildlife suffering happens with or without humans, but humans active choose to breed and kill animals when we don't necessarily need to. We could just not do that.
>Wildlife suffering happens with or without humans, but humans active choose to breed and kill animals when we don't necessarily need to. We could just not do that.
You don't support humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows, because you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending? What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole? That would then be lessening the suffering of animals in the hands of humans.
>Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
It seems to me that a vegan's idea of helping animals/climate is to disconnect from the situation entirely. That might allow for avoidance of responsibility and a moral high-horse, but economically, it isn't realistically helping to lay the groundwork for lessened suffering and a cleaner environment.
> You don't support humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows, because you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?
I'm always amazed when this argument is raised. I can't fathom anyone actually believes more life, for the sake of life, is "better". It strikes me as a bad faith argument. There is a colossal difference between ending a life and preventing one from happening.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
About 21.8% of the world's population is vegetarian [1]. Let me flip your question: Do you think if those billions of people began consuming meat, the world would be the same? Of course not. Assuming meat production could rise to fit this 21.8% increase in demand (it likely couldn't), the planet would be much worse off. So, yes. Although an individual's choice to not eat meat doesn't do much, in aggregate, it's massively important. "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
> I'm always amazed when this argument is raised. I can't fathom anyone actually believes more life, for the sake of life, is "better". It strikes me as a bad faith argument. There is a colossal difference between ending a life and preventing one from happening.
There are indeed such people. Depending on your particular flavor of utilitarianism, it's a pretty reasonable to conclude that the best things you can do in your life are to A) ensure that there if more life in the future; and B) work to make sure that life is happier than present life.
It basically comes down to how much weight you place on two factors. The first factor is the weight of pleasure (aka happiness, contentment, joy, pick your favorite single word) vs suffering. The second is the weight of present vs future beings.
If you think pleasure outweighs suffering and you are future-oriented then the best possible world is achieved done by increasing the number of happy sentient beings in the universe.
If, OTOH, you believe, as I do, that the negatives of suffering are much stronger than the positives of happiness and you heavily discount future not-yet-existent beings, then you want to focus on eliminating suffering in the present and you should be fairly skeptical of future increases in sentient beings.
>About 21.8% of the world's population is vegetarian [1]. Let me flip your question: Do you think if those billions of people began consuming meat, the world would be the same? Of course not. Assuming meat production could rise to fit this 21.8% increase in demand (it likely couldn't), the planet would be much worse off. So, yes. Although an individual's choice to not eat meat doesn't do much, in aggregate, it's massively important. "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
My point is NOT "if everyone practiced vegetarianism, climate change would be unaffected." I completely agree with you that the world would be a better place if "everyone were to suddenly switch to being vegan." The point is that in aggregate, not much is ever going to change in the short term, and to believe otherwise is wishful thinking. We have a large sample size of folk who simply don't care about the well being of animals, and a smaller portion of folk who do. That portion hasn't actually changed much over time, even though information about animal farming practices has because much more readily available [1]. It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
> "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
> I completely agree with you that the world would be a better place if "everyone were to suddenly switch to being vegan." The point is that in aggregate, not much is ever going to change in the short term
How does social change happen? It is slow. But it has been happening. Not only are people becoming vegetarian or vegan, but those options are increasingly seen as valid, occasional choices for meat eaters as well.
> It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.
Yeah, but that article doesn't exactly undermine our points because the poll was only for 1,000 people, and even then the actual Gallup poll says:
1) Vegetarianism is slightly higher among Americans under 50 than among those who are older.
More younger people are vegetarian. This will shape social attitudes for decades.
2) Sales of plant-based food grew 8.1% in 2017 alone and exceeded $3.1 billion last year, and plant-based alternatives to dairy products are soon expected to account for 40% of dairy beverage sales. [...] it appears Americans are eager to include alternatives to animal products in their diets but are not willing to give up animal products completely.
Every single plant-based product people choose to buy means slightly less demand for animal products.
>This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.
Can you help me to understand where i contradicted myself?
The article you posted claims that, since animal non-existence is "preferable" to animal suffering, the ethical choice is to euthanize / sterilize as many animals as possible. But you claim after you post the article that the actual better outcome is that animals are brought into existence by humans should be given better lives before they are killed by humans.
>since animal non-existence is "preferable" to animal suffering, the ethical choice is to euthanize / sterilize as many animals as possible.
The article isn't seriously suggesting to euthanize /sterilize as many animals as possible; I would suggest you reread it. It's using that as an example to point out the moral conundrum that vegetarians undertake when they become vegetarian rather than just "anti-factory farm".
Regardless, I don't claim to align with the article in its entirety - just the idea that animals which have much better lives than their wild counterparts are morally suitable for eating. But yes in continuation of this we should strive for the best lives possible for said animals.
> It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat
There's no reason we can't do both!
> A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
I'm sorry. I'm not trying to mock you. I interpreted your argument as a classic "make perfection the enemy of good" argument. It's fantastic you are making efforts to do your part.
> you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?
You're forming the question again in the same way as the article:
"You think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?"
When really the question is:
"You think it's better that humans choose not to bring animals into existence in order to kill them is better than humans choosing to bring animals into existence in order to kill them?"
And yeah, I think it is better not to breed animals just to kill them, when we could also not.
> What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole?
False dichotomy: poor factory farm conditions vs. better factory farm conditions. There is also the option of no factory farms at all, which would be the least amount of suffering at the hands of humans.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
Actually, it's in the top global climate change causes, so, yes. And there's an avalanche effect of not having to grow 9 times the crops to feed the livestock: less pesticide runoff, less land needed to grow food so less incentive for deforestation and overall habitat destruction, less hauling and shipping required which burns less fuel...
Honestly: do you really think you're doing the animals a favor by raising them in factory farms? You really care about these cows and pigs, so you eat them? Would you be willing to pay the cost - the real cost, not including subsidies funded by taxpayer dollars - for them to have long, nice, natural lives? Because meat is already expensive, and it's artificially cheaper, and the animals only live about 10% of their natural lives. Chickens can live about 8-10 years but are killed at about 18 months when their egg laying starts to diminish. Cows are killed around the same time, but can live up to 20 years.
Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
>False dichotomy: poor factory farm conditions vs. better factory farm conditions. There is also the option of no factory farms at all, which would be the least amount of suffering at the hands of humans.
When it comes down to it we can just agree to disagree on this point. I believe in a more intermediate future where meat comes from animals that, yes, while being bred for consumption, are happy animals that lived happy lives; lives which would be better than any lack of existence. I believe most meat eaters would realistically support this future as well - if not through their purchasing power then at least potentially by law. Lastly, I believe that getting to this future is through strong support of farmers who have already achieved it.
>Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
This might surprise you but actually I would be inclined to say yes. I would absolutely chose that life over no life [1]. Have you raised farm animals before? They generally feel safer and less agitated in a "pen" of sorts because they view it as protection. They get to socialize all day - and don't usually have to worry about predators or food. Humans aren't motivated by the same environmental dynamics as cows or chicken.
You don't live a happy life being raped and having a child taken away at birth so that milk can be produced for humans. All animals cannot live "happy" lives. Demand won't allow it. There is no future where all animals can be happy and the level of meat consumption can stay the same.
So you would choose to live a happy 15 years and then die. Unfortunately most animals that we farm cannot and do not live happy lives, and they don't get a choice. You would more realistically be living to 15 until slaughter with torture, rape, and your children being taken away to further the cycle. Never existing seems better. There is another option though, not raping, torturing, and slaughtering for humans to consume. Humans won't wither away without animal products.
In the not so distant past slaves were given "happy" lives by there owners. They were lesser beings so they should be happy to be alive at all right?
>There is no future where all animals can be happy and the level of meat consumption can stay the same.
I'm not in disagreement with this...just because you're cynical about the future of husbandry doesn't mean I can't be optimistic about it. I'm unsure how repeatedly stating facts about the worst of the current state of factory farming is going to change my mind about how we can potentially lessen demand and migrate production from factory farms through not supporting them. It's actually the exact same concept as becoming a vegetarian but with different expected results.
How will a future where are animals that humans consume leading happy lives decrease demand? Doesn't decreasing demand counter your point about creating more lives being a better thing, since that would lead to less lives?
Even if I was optimistic about farming being able to have animals leading happy lives, it would still ignore many negative factors dealing with animal consumption:
1. The environmental impact from animal consumption would increase if all animals lead happy lives and consumption stayed the same.
2. Dairy products could no longer be produced as that would lead to unhappy animals
3. The sustainability of eating animals, we produce feed for them, and then we eat them. It would make much more sense to only produce feed for us.
As you're on hacker news I assume you're familiar with the trolley problem[1], by factory farming animals we are falling into the same ethical dilemma, we've chosen to pull the lever - but it's not clear in this scenario if we're actually saving lives, this is more of a trolly problem where there are five people tied down on each line, but someone offers you 1000$ to pull the lever and send it down the other line[2]. We are shifting the responsibility for these animal's deaths onto our hands so that we can benefit with yummy meat, so I find the argument above to be immensely weak.
The consideration that animals may become extinct if they aren't useful seems a more worthy one, but less valid in the modern world.
Also, I'm not vegan or vegetarian - I am internally content with my moral and ethical choices regarding meat and have carefully considered them.
[2] Assuming that person's motivations are opaque, if we know they want to save or specifically kill someone then the problem gets miles more complex - if it makes it easier, maybe imagine a piece of china on the track that the train will go down - so your choice is five people or five people and some nice china.
If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing, that's as free from cruelty as you can get. If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem, since the animal would never be born without farming.
I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use. Once consciousness emerges, there is an innate desire to remain alive and to be free from suffering. Even if we could give animals a wonderful life in our current capitalist system, and then kill them without their awareness, we'd still need to justify (from a philosophical standpoint) why it would be immoral to do the same with a human animal.
> I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use.
That would make sense, since GP said:
> If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem.
So if vegetarians used the argument that lacking life is cruel, then vegetarianism would be cruel, right? It makes perfect sense (given GP's point) that they don't use that argument.
You're the third replyer that writes as if they disagree about this while making the same point. I'm wondering if I'm reading this wrong, or if GP edited their comment just before I loaded the page.
I suppose that argument could be used to justify killing some hermit unbeknownst to them. Most people, however, are connected socially, and killing them would make others suffer.
Lacking life isn't a remotely useful metric for cruelty, or every minute decision anyone has ever made is responsible for an infinite number of states of the universe not happening.
But they were the first one to mention anything resembling that metric. There's no reason to bring it up unless you think someone uses that metric, or alternatively as a straw man to argue against.
> If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing
How do you measure this? How do you know for certain that what you're eating had no idea it was about to die when it did?
How do you know animals don't experience existential suffering, similar to how humans experience it? Why do you believe that humans are in control of their livestock's emotional state, even when they provide the best environment for them?
You can't know. You can know what acute suffering looks like and try to avoid it.
You can observe animal behavior and say, "They appear not to be suffering from existential dread beyond what they would in the wild", you may be able to measure cortisol levels in the meat. But you'll never know for sure.
I think you two agree. They said that if that is your definition of cruelty, then vegetarianism can't help you. Not that the lack of life is cruel. You're being cynical with someone who didn't even say one side was right and the other is wrong.
I guess this is a good place for a rant for some down votes. The concept that death is cruel is ridiculous to me. EVRYTHING DIES, every animal in nature either dies of starvation, freezing to death, dies in a conflict with their own species for breeding rights, or gets to be attacked and eaten alive by a predator. The entirety of nature revolves around life and death struggles. Dying isn't cruel, to think so is a rejection of nature itself.
That being said there are quicker and better ways of taking an animals life, the quicker and less painful the better. I will categorically state that for me how they live is more important than how they die. I don't agree with many of the practices in the production of chicken, pigs, cows, and yes even farmed fish and generally try to avoid them.
Not going to downvote you as everyone has an opinion, but this argument is ridiculous. If you're saying everything dies so it doesn't matter, why is it wrong to kill another human? And dying isn't cruel (or the problem - once I'm dead I probably won't care exactly how I died), it's humans killing them that's the problem for people like me.
The fact is it's completely unnecessary. We don't need meat and we waste far too many resources rearing cattle and other animals just to kill and eat them.
Using your logic, everything we do can be considered an unnecessary waste of resources. We don't need the internet and cars and air conditioning and plane travel and television and houses and land ownership and governments and militaries, etc. etc.
To continue down your slippery slope, you'll find the only proper way to live is to revert to the woods and live as a hunter-gatherer society.
Where you chose to draw the line is just as arbitrary as where the OP chooses to draw the line. To claim yourself as morally superior is ridiculous.
It's not 'arbitrary' to weigh the cost of an activity against its benefit just because it's hard to quantify them. Most vegetarians would eat meat if their lives depended on it, and most people today consider it unacceptable to euthanise profoundly disabled humans. But different attitudes prevailed in the past. Perhaps the slope is not that slippery.
I mean, I understand where you're going but it's adsurd. Most people if they don't have a car or internet access would suffer some detriment to their life be it social, work related, etc. Everything you mentioned provide benefits to society for existing.
Not growing meat? The big disadvantage to that would be we'd no longer be able to enjoy the taste of meat and the farmers would probably need to find something else to farm.
Some further thoughts in two different directions (I don't personally have a settled opinion here):
1. Not only does everything die, many things naturally die as food. Being a victim of carnivores is a perfectly normal thing in nature. So even if you don't feel comfortable justifying killing animals in general with "everything dies," it should certainly justify killing animals for food. (BTW, my understanding is that halal- or kosher-certified meats are slaughtered very humanely/painlessly, so if you're worried about suffering and not death, sticking to those isn't a bad choice.)
2. Although things happen in nature, that doesn't mean they're not cruel, and as humans, we have the option of being more humane than nature. While many early humans would also have starved, frozen to death, or been eaten alive, we think it's pretty not great for modern-day humans to be subject to such a fate and we often think it's a moral obligation for society to prevent that from happening. So why should we not also save animals from their fate in nature instead of perpetuating it?
How does your argument not apply to eating human beings, say those who would objectively have had a painful life, by first giving them a quality life before slaughtering them?
Seems pretty fair. Imagine you are in the Matrix and eventually when you die, it wasn't actually your real death, it was the harvesting of your meat in the real universe above. They gave you a pretty decent ride, eh? At some point we all have to admit we don't have full control of the universe - and we hope the universe will treat us kindly. Unfortunately, the universe itself, and the powerful within it, can become muddled - when men determines fate of others, as if they are Gods, then one must question their allegiance to `going with the flow.` It seems like most of us are only happy going with the flow of the all-powerful universe, not his second rate stooges... Pretty sure most vegetarian philosophy comes down to - if you want to act like a God when it comes to determining other's fates, be the God you'd want for yourself.
There is a distinct difference between being born naturally, or living a kind life free range, and suffering for a short period, than being bred for industrial purposes. Industrial breeding usually means male and females of the species are separated and artificially inseminated, the mothers are separated from their offspring, male animals are routinely killed or used for young meat, female animals are forced into often crowded conditions and given antibiotics and hormones to grow faster. This is not the pleasant life, it is slavery from the beginning with a most cruel end.
Not to mention that the breeds we raise for mass production are now Frankenstein creations that could never survive in the wild. A lot of broiler chickens can’t even walk because they’re so top heavy.
Ending life is not necessarily cruel...how about for veterinarians utilizing euthanasia? Let's say you have an animal that's 95% going to die sometime within 12-24 hours. If your client can pay $5000, which they can't usually, the chances improve to 50% chance of living. In most cases, for money or for suffering, euthanasia is the least cruel option, as it's vastly more affordable and a painless, harmless process.
Euthanasia and factory farming are apples and oranges. Cows can live up to 20 years, but are often killed at 18-24 months. They aren't killed with euthanasia, but panicked and terrified, with bolts to the skull and slit throats, right after seeing several other cows killed that way. Their lives before that are often miserable to keep costs down.
Cows aren't panicked and terrified, the hormone release from that would result in poor quality meat that has to be discarded. The slaughterhouses are humanely designed thanks to people like Temple Grandin. The cows are calm until the end.
I still find none of the vege meals are as satisfying as plain old chicken, etc.
Tofu is flimsy, tempeh kinda goes that direction, but not close. Fake burgers are absolutely gross and near vomit inducing. Quinoa has weird flavour of ashes or smth.
Some indian peas, etc are OK, but I find it's best to stick to pure vege meals (not substitutes) and eat meat when I want to.
There was a mindset shift similar to what you describe that made it easier for me -- stop pursuing replacements for the meat in the dishes you already eat, and instead discover new dishes. Indian and Thai cooking, for instance, has a long history of delicious vegetarian dishes. Look at some of the rich foods developed by some of the poorest people and there's a whole culinary world there.
Once I did that, and understood how to spice ingredients, then I circled back to my previous habits a bit.
Agreed, you have to stop trying to find a vegan steak that bleeds like the real thing, that's really critical to finding great veg & vegan food (science experiments like beyond meat aside)
I've gone heavy on mediterranean style cooking, which is not strictly vegetarian, but might use 1-2oz of meat for a whole dish. Meat just kind of dwindled on our shopping list. It's delicious food, and it's really hard to go back to meat & potatoes now.
Indian is incredibly good, but it's been harder to learn.
The problem that I have is generally a social one. I live in a pretty progressive city, but even then it's a pain in the ass to order veg at many restaurants and get anything that doesn't suck. Many places do have at least one solid option, but there are a ton where a veg offering is still just an afterthought.
And I'm in one of the most veg friendly cities in America. Eating out in many many places is practically impossible as a vegetarian. Especially many parts of Europe.
Have you tried the Impossible burger? I've had it at some restaurants (lots of other flavors at play) and it feels like meat, and with the other flavors it tastes very similar to a burger.
> unless I was sure the provenance of it was sustainable and free from cruelty
This is what I'd really like to see mainstream restaurants take up. Even in London, restaurants that position themselves as healthy (such as Pret or EAT) have maybe one or two organic things on their menu. I'd really like to see them take a stand against the conditions that animals are raised in. There are plenty of vegetarian or vegan options, but what if you just want some meat that wasn't raised in a factory?
Yeah. I should probably write a blog post going through all this...
Keep in mind, I selected for the highest quality meat I could find -- organic, grass fed, grass finished, small farm raised, etc.
Step 1: Find farms. I used my local farmer's market as a jumping off point, they publish a local farm guide.
Step 2: Ensure the farmer meets your criteria, get information on cost and availability. Most farmers had this info on their websites or were a single call/email away. Farmers, btw, are generally not technologists. Some farmers will let you come by. Others won't.
Step 3: Pay your down payment and wait. I put $400 down, and I waited a couple months for my harvest date.
Step 4 (Optional): On harvest day, I could come collect the organ meat (tongue, liver, heart, etc.) if I wanted them, directly from the farm.
Step 5: Pay the farmer -- I paid about $2000 to the farmer at this point.
Step 6: Contact the butcher with your cut sheet. An animal has a number of different cuts that are mutually exclusive -- prime rib vs ribeye steaks, filet mignon/new yorks vs tbones, etc. The butcher will walk you through this.
Step 7: Wait again. The butcher hangs the animal for a few weeks, then processes it via your cut sheet. I think this was 3-4 weeks for me? It was around the holidays, so they were slammed.
Step 8: Pick up your beef, pay the butcher. Be prepared to fill your car with coolers, and fill the coolers with beef. I picked up ~415-480lbs of beef and bones, and paid the butcher ~$550. Every cut was packaged, neatly labeled in white paper, and I stacked them into coolers and drove off.
Step 9: Deliver to your friends. I split my order into 1/8ths and delivered to friends. We kept 1/2, some friends took 1/4, some took 1/8th, and some further split their 1/8th with other friends. (For my own sanity, I refused to subdivide below 1/8th.)
1/8th is about 50-60lbs of meat, which packs a medium sized freezer above/below a fridge. Be prepared and clean that freezer out in advance!
Step 10: Find lots of recipes. Share recipes. Explore global culture through your food. I discovered key wat, a spicy Ethiopian beef stew, because I wanted to go beyond just the meat and potatoes from my midwest history.
This is why I love being Norwegian. Sustainable and cruelty free farming is the norm. So personally I wont stop eating regular meat until lab meat becomes available.
I disagree. My eating choices have resulted in the deliberate slaughter of a single animal (to the best of my ability to track this) over a 1.5 year period. I've refused all meat except the meat that comes from that animal, and even then I eat it only rarely. I will refuse meat from other sources -- friends and family, restaurants, prepackaged foods, cheeses with rennet, gelatin, etc.
Being a vegetarian or not has fuzzy boundaries and many denominations. It's much, much simpler for everyone involved to view me as vegetarian, even if it's not a strict, 100% no meat for years definition.
Half of cow meat in UK comes from used dairy cows. Every dairy cow has to give birth 8-12 times and over half of those born calfs are boys. As they are no use otherwise, they get slaughtered immediately after they are born for their tender meat. By eating diary of any kind you're doing as much harm to animals as you'd by directly buying steak. You're also doing more harm to your body as quality meat is better for health (still bad) than cheese.
"Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in: at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein"
There's some pretty questionable stuff going on in that article.
First, it's highly specific to Australia, where the impact of Eurasian cereal farming is profoundly negative, because they're nothing like the native grasses. That could probably be mitigated by not growing Eurasian grains in giant monoculture farms, in favor of edible native crops. There are something like 6,000 native plants in Australia that are edible by humans; very few of them are farmed commercially or have even been thoroughly investigated for that purpose.
Also, it then goes on to say "If more Australians want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed." This is a very questionable assumption. Generally switching from commercially-raised meat to a plant-based diet results in a lower food-crop consumption profile. This is because meat animals are frequently raised, or at least fattened during the terminal months of their lives, on human-edible crops (in the US it's almost solely corn).
Anyway, I get the impression that article is someone playing devil's advocate / provocateur, which is not something I have a lot of time for. There are lots of solid, peer-reviewed articles [1] investigating the ecological impact of plant vs. meat-based diets; there is a wide consensus that plant-based diets are significantly more sustainable. There are probably places on earth where that's not true, and perhaps Australia is one of them, but it's not broadly true for most of the planet.
WTF, most animals that are farmed are fed agricultural produce - crops that are cultivated. It's simple math that it's inefficient to grow crops -> feed the animals -> eat the animals. There's efficiency loss at every step. Are you seriously claiming that eating meat is better than being vegetarian?
The vast majority of meat is not 100% grazed. You have a point, but it's largely a theoretical one. If one can find a source of meat that is 100% naturally grazed then they could probably go through similar effort to eat non-meat products produced in minimally destructive ways.
If there was free trade and corn wasn't fed to animals there would be enough meat and health and wealth for everyone.
Humans need 250grams of protein a day, some can come from plants, some from eggs, some from animals.
Currently what happens is that corporations lobby governments to protect local food markets under the guise of food security so that grass fed meat cannot be imported from sparse populations with lots of pasture into dense populations short of pasture.
The dense population then gets obese and mentally ill on corn-fed local beef while the corporations profit from the margin between feeding an animal corn or feeding it grass while sidestepping the cost of negative externalities. A hectare (10,000 sq m) of corn will grow 30 tonne of corn in a year, a hectare of pasture will grow 16 tonne of grass in year on the same land. The corn progressively wrecks the land and needs to be replanted every year. The pasture is perrennial and preserves the carbon content of the soil which is a massive and under reported component of the carbon cycle. 10kgs of grass or corn make 1KG of meat. Humans already have a surplus of corn, they are currently turning it into biofuel.
If you factor in the soil preservation then pasture plus grazing animal is the most economically viable sustainable option because double yield of corn comes at the price of the health of the soil and the humans and the animals that it's fed to. Look at the skeletal record around the time of it's invention for the associated decline in health despite the calorific surplus. Look at why corn fattens cattle.
If land is put to it's best economic use the problem slowly corrects itself as the human population naturally declines with improved standards of living.
If you were able to buy grass-fed hormone free argentinian or south african or russian mince in Walmart at true cost the world and the US would be healthier and wealthier. The invisible hand works as long as negative externalities are acknowledged truthfully but there is a lot of profit in obscuring them.
There is also lot of room for trees around pastured land to offset the methane and sheep produce less methane than beef plus non inflammatory milk plus wool.
Firstly, that's ridiculous, vegetarians are definitely a minority on HN. And secondly, that's ridiculous, the people on that website are attributing all kinds of unrelated things to a "carnivore diet". Are you seriously trying to suggest that it's a cure-all?
Holy sh!t never heard of doTERRA before..just went down the rabbit hole..Why is there so much https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking in today's economy? So many hucksters, copycats, and fraudsters. Is it inevitable symptom of unbridled capitalism?
> Firstly, that's ridiculous, vegetarians are definitely a minority on HN.
Pointless observation (I said HN has increasingly gotten vegetarian/ vegan [-biased], and not that vegetarians are a majority).
> And secondly, that's ridiculous, the people on that website [http://meatheals.com/] are attributing all kinds of unrelated things to a "carnivore diet".
What "unrelated things"? Do you care at all about your fellow humans beings enough to read through the reports on that website to realize these people are reporting curing whatever ailment they had prior to giving carnivore diet a try?
> Are you seriously trying to suggest that it's a cure-all?
Given that "cure-all" means "a hypothetical substance believed to maintain life indefinitely; once sought by alchemists." and I find zero mention of "cure-all" in meatheals.com - methinks your inferring this impossible conclusion should make a perfect example of that quality "ridiculousness" you are oh-so-fond of injecting in the conversation so as to stop any and all intelligent thinking. Ain't life grand!
Not a vegetarian here, but I'm really excited about companies and products in this space. There's a lot of very poor quality meat out there that can easily be substituted by these products for cost, nutrition and environmental reasons. The way I describe the Impossible Burger to friends that haven't tried it is "If I invited you to a BBQ with decent store-brand frozen patties and randomly inserted Impossible patties, you probably wouldn't notice".
I have a general prediction about these products though: I think they'll follow the broad development of art and games. Initially they will work very very hard to produce something that is as close to meat as possible, just like gaming worked very hard at photo-realism for many many years. But once they reach close enough, people will actually get bored and new and more interesting meat-like products, which traditional meat could never produce, much the same way gaming gave up photo-realism and many hit games started taking on more artistic qualities.
>If I invited you to a BBQ with decent store-brand frozen patties and randomly inserted Impossible patties, you probably wouldn't notice
They're usually compared to fast-food burgers. Supermarket frozen patties might as well be legacy veggie burgers, considering they're full of soy protein and have a completely un-meatlike texture.
I actually prefer the Griller Prime[1] by Morningstar to every veggie burger, even including the Impossible Burger.
The key, which my mom used to yell at me for, is to put the burgers in an actual toaster(not a toaster oven) on high until they are crispy and sizzling.
It is divine!! (Saying this as a vegetarian whose tried hundreds of burgers.)
Prime grillers have egg whites in them though. But normal Morningstar grillers do not. But normal grillers are no where near on the taste charts..
I expect that at some point, it will be possible to grow meat from any given set of human DNA. At this point, I see two things:
1) Lines of celebrity meat. One might be able to look forwards to, for example, an Angelina Jolie steak.
2) Middle class (well, by then the middle classes won't exist - let's just say "rich people") dinner parties in which the hostess serves her guests herself. On a plate.
Is it cannibalism if it was never part of a whole human, but was instead grown in a vat?
I've been vegan for 15 years, and I've tried all sorts of veggie burgers and mock meats available. Some of them are good, but pretty easy to tell they are not meat. When I first had the Beyond Burger last year (just plain with 2 thin slices of bread) it brought back a very strong memory of how meat used to taste. I wonder if most meat eaters would be able to tell it's not meat on a blind test.
I'm curious to try the Impossible Burger, but I haven't seen it in my area yet.
As a meat eater, I've had mixed results with Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger. With real meat, it's pretty hard to mess up a burger; if it's anywhere from medium rare to medium well, it's still going to be a pretty tasty burger. The current burger substitutes require a much more narrow window before they just don't taste very good. That said, I'm extremely bullish on these; they're already great and they're only going to get better from here.
I've had overdone Beyond meat that just has the texture of rubber before, so can confirm it has a narrower window. I imagine that's why the Impossible Burger is only available in restaurants: it's easier to control the experience.
So much of short-term adoption of these is tied to marketing and time, but their long-term success strikes me as a foregone conclusion.
In marketing, they will need to get past a latent psychological hurdle and in time, waiting for the crotchety older folks who insist, no matter what, on a "real burger." Both things are related to the living generations who have grown up with "real burgers."
I genuinely can't imagine an outcome where these don't become commonplace. Not going to predict that they're going to replace beef or anything, but it won't be weird to get a meat substitute burger from Wendy's or the like.
You can already get them from places like White Castle, so I'd say you're right. What I'd really like to see is for the price to drop to a bit below that of the beef patty to help entice people to switch.
With real meat, it's pretty hard to mess up a burger; if it's anywhere from medium rare to medium well, it's still going to be a pretty tasty burger
I must have high burger standards. One of the reasons I don't cook them often is all the work it takes to make sure they turn out well. Right thickness, right meat, narrow temperature range, cast iron... most home made burgers, including backyard grilled, are so dry & bland you can't eat them without lots of ketchup/mustard/BBQ.
I am happy to see a bit more options out there. I do wish the pricing were better. It seems a bit silly to me that meat replacements actually cost MORE than the meat they are replacing. I don't know how efficient the process of extracting protein from soy or peas is, but it should be better than actually raising, butchering and distributing meat if we're to use it as a replacement.
I'm allergic to legumes though, so will continue to consume fish, eggs and meat.
Long-term pescatarian here: the beyond burger is to me the most delicious of all "i'm not meat and never will be" fake meat products. The impossible burger on the other hand disturbed me: I tried it twice at 2 different locations in NYC to make sure, and both times I felt like I had meat. I still remember the smell of the blood-like heme. I did not enjoy it. I'm not sure the impossible burger is a good idea for vegans/vegetarians. I welcome it for healthier options for meat eaters however.
I'm a burger lover who tolerated the soy burgers better than a lot of folks in school. They tasted like crap, though. Unlike meat in many ways. It was all these HN comments that made me try the Beyond Burger. It was different.
It looks more like meat, sizzles like meat, seemed to have texture of meat, and mostly taste like meat. Not quite meat, though! I'd say main difference, which could've been how it was cooked, was that it was soft and crumbly. It about fell apart vs how most burgers are solid. That's a drawback for most but better for a certain niche in my testing. I might try to sell them that finding, though, given it would expand their market.
I am not vegetarian, but I like Beyond Meat and eat it pretty often, especially their sausage. But in my opinion it doesn't really taste or feel like meat at all. I'm OK with that, but if they really want to "fool" meat eaters, I think they have a ways to go.
A&W was our go-to fast food hamburger place even before beyond meat burgers as their veggie deluxe burger was already fairly good, though I'd still order a meat burger.
Now we both get the beyond meat burger and I honestly can't tell the difference between them and their standard meat patties. Granted, that's a lower bar than fresh ground beef coming off a barbecue, but still impressive.
I'm a pretty shameless meat eater (I know...), and tried the Beyond Burger at Carl's a while back out of curiosity (not an outfit I visit often, I do try to stay local at least).
Granted that Carl's loads their stuff up with ridiculous amounts of sauce as a way to mask their crappiness, but still ... I don't think I'd be able to reliably tell the difference in a blind test.
Given a good burger from a high quality pub and grill or similar, I might be able to.
But as far as I care, that can just become an occasional treat, as it pretty much is now. I'm waiting for a little more word on the nutritional science of these things, but once they look good there, I'll be happy if they replace my regular burger patties pretty much everywhere.
I've never bought (individual) stock before but I'm sorely tempted to buy some of this a few days after it becomes available. Absent some Theranos-level fuckery, I expect that these guys (and their competitors) are going to be huge.
> I've never bought (individual) stock before but I'm sorely tempted to buy some of this a few days after it becomes available. Absent some Theranos-level fuckery, I expect that these guys (and their competitors) are going to be huge.
Same for myself. I think this industry will be massive. Never bought individual stocks before. I don't know where to start.
I've been Vegan for a year or so, and I tried the Beyond Burger the other day (in the UK, and I never seen Impossible Burgers over here so I haven't tried) and yeah it was actually pretty good but it was a lot more 'loose' than I'm used to with an actual burger.
For me, meat tastes amazing if I'm honest.. And I've noticed I tend to prefer burgers that aren't pretending to me meat. In a local pub the other day I had a red pepper and spinach burger that was amazingly crispy on the outside.
I tried the impossible burger last week, from a local chain called Super Deluxe which aims to reproduce the basic burgers from In-n-out (and mostly does quite a good job). I could tell it wasn't meat, but it was a near thing. The texture was just slightly too soft. Otherwise it wasn't half bad.
What did surprise me was the aftertaste. I get a fairly strong aftertaste when I eat chicken, for example, but not beef. I'm certain not everyone experiences that, and I've never had an explanation. Interestingly, after the impossible burger I got the same strong aftertaste. That may be a clue I can use to identify what causes it to happen for me.
I'd have another one, but I do prefer the beef version a little, and I don't often go to Super Deluxe so when I do it's going to be the real deal.
I agree, it's not a life-changing burger, but it's quite a good substitute and both filling and attractive. This picture from Kenji Lopez-Alt shows how attractive it is to compared to processed beef patties:
I bought the impossible burger at White Castle but didn't like it since they cooked it too "rare" for me (I generally like ground beef well done/no pink, not for health reasons, just an appetite thing). It's weird to see a non-actual-meat burger with pink in the middle! It tasted like a rare burger.
- Subway should have leaned into their use of soy in their deli meat [1] and came in from the high end with it being the more expensive, high end, healthier, better for the environment product
- There should be high end burger chain which give you an eighth of a pound real meat burger patty for taste reasons and an eighth of a pound vegetarian patty for health and environment reasons. If everyone switched to such a solution, we could could our greenhouse gas emissions from burger production in half. In all honesty, this comment is based on superficial skimming of the following article/Beyond Meat press release [2].
In fact, the Asian means of eating tofu is fundamentally different from the vegitarian way of eating tofu. The Asian means of preparation is typically 75% tofu and 25% is meat for taste. When you go 100% tofu, its no wonder most people won't touch it.
"Producing Beyond Burgers uses 99 percent less water, 93 percent less land, creates 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 46 percent less energy than producing beef burgers, according to a September report commissioned by Beyond Meat."
>There should be high end burger chain which give you an eighth of a pound real meat burger patty for taste reasons and an eighth of a pound vegetarian patty for health and environment reasons.
I do this at tasty burger in boston. (order one meat burger and one veggie burger.) Shake Shack has a Shake Stack which is their meat burger topped with a deep fried mushroom burger. I'm not sure either of these is much healthier than eating pure beef, but the combo of the two patties is quite good (and presumably more eco-friendly).
The idea came to me when my takeout order was mixed up and I got a veggie burger. On my third bite, I thought, not bad, but this could use a little beef flavor.. (Shake shack came up with it independently)
We have a vegetarian restaurant in town that deep fries everything, leaving me wondering about the health value..
That’s a fairly strange reading of the US data. It’s only true because of the USA’s massive use of emissions in other parts of their lives. In non-relative terms it’s still a huge reduction & if we can get in front of developing nations eating of ruminants it would pay large dividends.
I don't know what's "fairly strange" about it. Meat consumption, for Americans, does not make up a big fraction of our CO2 footprint.
Globally it's quite significant, but "get[ting] in front of developing nations eating of ruminants" is a much more politically fraught issue than doing the same in the U.S. My brother and I are 3-4 inches taller than my dad, because we grew up on a meat and dairy rich American diet, versus the rice and lentil-based diet my dad grew up with in his village in Bangladesh. Help me figure out the right messaging for what we should tell Bangladeshis that they shouldn't eat meat now that they're finally getting to be able to afford it.
As to the other components of GHG emissions--those are ramping up outside the U.S. as well, explosively so. Food delivery services are becoming quite popular in Dhaka. Help me figure out the messaging for how we tell Bangladeshis they can't have drive-through Starbucks and avocado toast like western people.
Directly from your link “Worldwide, livestock accounts for between 14.5 percent and 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. The percentage is lower in the United States in part because our overall greenhouse gas emissions are so much higher than other countries: In the United States we emit 16.5 metric tons per person per year compared to a worldwide average of about five metric tons. Most of America’s emissions come from power plants and transportation, with each accounting for a third of the total.”
We emit 3x the emissions as everyone else. The fact that relatively meat is smaller than other places isn’t interesting. It’s lost in the statistical wash of our extreme usage but accounts for a large portion in real terms.
There is virtually no evidence that suggests calories from meat are better for your health than other protein but ruminant protein especially is carbon intensive. So the message is straightforward western countries moving to plant based protein decreases inequality in comparison.
>My brother and I are 3-4 inches taller than my dad, because we grew up on a meat and dairy rich American diet, versus the rice and lentil-based diet my dad grew up with in his village in Bangladesh.
No, your dad is likely shorter due to basic malnutrition. Malnutrition is caused by lack of appropriate macro and micro nutrients, irrespective of their source. Studies have shown that properly nourished vegetarians, vegans and meat eaters grow to the same height.
Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here. You see the exact same phenomenon among the U.S.-raised kids of Bangladeshis/Indians/Pakistanis from very comfortable families. The kids are way taller than parents who did not suffer any malnourishment back home. Just because it is theoretically possible to construct a vegan diet that results in the same growth as a diet including meat and dairy doesn't mean it's easy to do so with the kinds of foods readily available in the developing world.
First, you originally claimed meat as a factor (apparently still after an edit). Second, a vegetarian can eat dairy products. Finally, the only working link above is pretty much worthless (122 participants who were asked questions, measured, and checked again in 3 years) as it does not capture final adult height.
>Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here.
For sure, just like debating about meat consumption and pivoting to just dairy consumption as proof...
You need to remove the semi-colons from the link above. Three different studies showing that milk consumption results in taller children.
As to your second point--the issue under debate here is not meat consumption, but rather the CO2 emissions of animal agriculture. So we're talking about telling Bangladeshis to be vegans, not merely vegetarians.
Huh, these numbers really disagree in a couple places.
Nevertheless it seems like the most important way to minimize CO2 is to focus on grains, and that milk, eggs, poultry, pork, and fish aren't all that bad compared to the average vegetable.
And milk's easy to budget for, two cups a day is only 10% of a kid's calories.
Taller is not necessarily healthier. Cows milk is designed to bring a cow to adult size in one year. It has a very different composition than human milk. There is a lot of evidence that feeding that kind of rocket fuel for growth to humans has some serious downsides. Drinking milk in teenage years, for example, raises the risk of prostate cancer by 300% later in life.
It is, however, closely linked to status, especially in the developing world. Telling Bangladeshis they shouldn’t eat meat because Westerners blew the global CO2 budget is... problematic.
I don’t have the source for the 300 figure at hand now. I’ll try to find it again. Here’s a video review with links to sources that goes a lot deeper into the issues.
I'm Bangladeshi, from Dhaka. Trust me, no one is interested in getting drive-through. Dhaka is the traffic capital of the world, it's always a cost-benefit calculation to go out onto the road because you'll be spending extreme amounts of time stuck in traffic, inching along, burning gas. To get a Starbucks or a sandwich? Forget that.
What is becoming popular in Dhaka is, as you said, food delivery services which are mostly by scooter because of obvious reasons. For delivery, you're not going to order a sandwich, again for obvious reasons.
There's a huge argument for how worldwide culture is influenced by what's trendy and popular in Europe and NA. For a heartbreaking example, see the state of the Ganges river, in India— millions of kg of plastic, all of which looks awful and eventually washes into the ocean:
Historically when the people disposed of their waste into the river, it was feeding the ecosystem, but that's not the case any more now that they've inherited disposable plastic everything from the West. It's easy to turn a blind eye and say "yeah well, our plastic trash in North America is being properly land filled, so who cares— this is a problem for India to solve." But it's not that simple, of course: we exported the problem to India, and I think it's on us to figure out what the solution looks like too, and model it in our daily use so that it's reflected in the cultural exports (TV, movies, etc).
You see this same basic pattern for a lot of things, where the emerging middle class in a growth economy looks at their English-language media/entertainment for cues on what their next life upgrade should be, and some is mostly good (cell phones, clean water, organic food), but a lot is bad-to-horrible, at least from an ecological standpoint (single use plastic, personal automobiles, overseas vacations).
> Help me figure out the right messaging for what we should tell Bangladeshis that they shouldn't eat meat now that they're finally getting to be able to afford it.
Are you trying to say we shouldn’t save the world from environmental destruction because it might be awkward to ask some people to switch to fake meat?
How about this messaging: “we are destroying the world, we need to stop”
You're not going to "save the world from environmental destruction" by telling people to give up meat, because as India and China (not to mention Africa) develop, meat will become a minor component of their CO2 footprint just as it is in the United States. The anti-meat messaging will be seen as both stupid (because it won't help) and hypocritical ("how about we continue to eat meat, and Americans take their turn living the way Bangladeshi subsistence farmers used to live").
> You're not going to "save the world from environmental destruction" by telling people to give up meat
No, but by convincing people to give up meat, to travel less, to stop using disposable everything, to institute a carbon tax, etc. etd. you just eventually might. As 'Pfhreak wrote elsewhere in the thread, this is not a problem of finding 60%-there solution; it's a problem of repeatedly applying 0.5% - 3% solutions. Every component of CO₂ footprint is a minor one.
Also, don't forget the US is extremely good at exporting its culture. It seems whatever fad happens there, very soon half of Europe does it too, and a lot of other places aspire to it. Doing something in the US is likely to have quite big impact outside it as well.
Modulo the wars a sudden and strong carbon tax would likely start.
We're our worst problem in this fight :/. Outside HN, whenever I mention online or offline that carbon taxing is good and we really need more of it, people look at me like I'm crazy and/or call me communist. Regular people here in Poland seem to universally think along the lines of "look at our gasoline places, it's so expensive [compared to the US], most of it is taxes already, and you want to add extra tax?!".
> Regular people here in Poland seem to universally think along the lines of "look at our gasoline places, it's so expensive [compared to the US], most of it is taxes already, and you want to add extra tax?!".
You could suggest changing the road taxes or exempting gas from VAT at the same time as implementing a carbon tax. It would actually come out cheaper, if we can get the carbon capture price down to $100/ton or less (some estimate $60/ton is viable).
Your final point is the big deal. If western countries largely move to vegetable based meat, not only do we win in real terms we get a huge moral argument. Which is worth a lot.
I feel like you and Rayiner might be talking past each other. I read him to be saying that the moral argument you'd get from cutting meat wouldn't be worth much, either, because the US would still be emitting multiples more GHG than developing countries, even if they drove overhead from meat farming to zero.
But that’s the thing, if that’s his argument I disagree as well.
Simply put no matter what the reason to oppose meat consumption in the US still holds up. It’s a great improvement in real terms & it provides a stronger moral argument.
3% is a big deal. This isn't a problem with a single big lever that suddenly solves 60% of the problem. We're going to be looking for opportunities to reduce by 1% here, 0.5% there.
So far as I can tell, that number is speaking directly to methane emitted from livestock which is not where the majority of livestock emissions come from. It’s more related to the fossil fuel usage and transportation costs.
> Asian means of eating tofu is fundamentally different from the vegitarian way of eating tofu. The Asian means of preparation is typically 75% tofu and 25% is meat for taste.
Am from Asia and I've never heard and seen this in my life. Tofu is _never_ mixed with meat. That's a bit of an absurd statement as tofu and meat have nothing in common unless frozen and deepfried (then tofu has a texture of chicken).
Fairly common in Korean cooking from my experience? Usually some stew with tofu and pork and whatnot. Rarely is it eaten on its own except for banchan/side dishes.
Fair reading, but not my interpretation - I believe the GP was referencing using 75% tofu and 25% in the preparation of dishes, not in the preparation of the tofu itself.
Sorry - yes, I meant served with meat, not necessarily ground and blended together. I'm thinking Mapo Tofu (Chinese), Soondubu/Jjigae (Korean), Niku Tofu (Japanese).
I have a stupid question: was there a regulatory change in the recent past that made it easier to file for IPOs? Or is this just a coincidence that all these S-1s were filed around the same time?
There has been a recession in the US +/- 2 years of the end of every decade for the past 160+ years.
That sounds a bit hand-wavey / crystal ball / technical analysis, but has reasons in fundamentals: Several years of collective prosperity decrease risk aversion, low inflation / money targets (thus interest rates) make (over) investment cheap (offices, tall buildings, capital stock, etc), collective memory fades.
Certainly not written in stone, however. A book recommendation covering the above, and influence of such fundamentals in long term financial trends: Irrational Exuberance by Robert J Shiller.
I am not, nobody is ... But a lot of people more knowledgeable than me in this area say it's highly probable we'll have one next year or early 2021. The 'when' don't matter much in this context, alot of people are expecting one and it's coming which makes it an ideal time to IPO
To counter what the others are saying - yes we're at the end of a 10 year market high, but unless VC firms are _entirely liquidating_ their position immediately after the S-1, which they are not, this doesn't to me indicate that a recession is coming. In fact, if anything, the opposite.
I've seen this said before (I forget from who), but I honestly think that over the next few decades meat is going to go through a similar transition to tobacco.
I don't think it's ever going to disappear completely, but I think it's going to become something most people only enjoy once in a while if at all. I also think that meat consumption is going to be viewed in a significantly more negative light over time.
People forget that for much of the 3rd world, meat was an unaffordable luxury. It won't be for much longer as they develop.
Also, meat is a natural part of a healthy human diet. It's unrealistic to think that meat consumption is going to be viewed as tobacco. It's even more unrealistic to think a natural food source like meat is going to be replaced by lab produced processed food.
Your post reminds me of another false vegan trope. Fish is bad for you since it is filled with cancer causing chemicals. Yet, the healthiest and longest living people on earth are fish consuming japanese and mediterraneans.
A healthy balanced diet. Not the unhealthy extreme vegan or carnivore diet. But the natural human diet that all humans have always eaten - omnivore diet.
Okinawan Japanese that had the long life span only ate 3% of their calories from animal meat (fish). And it certainly wasn't the shitty, polluted fish we get today.
All blue zones - areas with people living the longest - have similar diets. So you can eat meat and be healthy, literally one meal per month. That's it.
Why? Do you think global warming considerations are going to be that mainstream? Tobacco has a lot of things going against it - it's bad for you in any amount and it gives off an unpleasant odor that stains fabric and walls. Not much of this applies to meat.
This is overblown and not nearly as well supported by science as you think. Just like how people said for decades that saturated fat is bad for you. It's provably not.
Try leaving some beef around the living room or smearing it across the wall. Smells even worse than cigarettes!
I think the parent comment had a point about morals, not the practical aspects. It is already starting to happen: what will my friends think of my leather jacket, can’t propose a barbecue for a company event, etc etc.
Why would it go through the same transition as tobacco? There is absolutely nothing good about tobacco. Meat however is nutritious, delicious, and healthy. I do agree with vegans that it is resource intensive compared with veggies. I will be happy to consume lab grown meat or veggie based meats as long as they don't have dangerous carbs and still taste as good as the original.
Sorry but no chance. For one it's not actually bad for you. A good meat stew for example is a culinary staple in almost every culture in the entire world and is considered both healthy and hardy. You can't say the same thing about tobacco.
I'll be happy to take another look when they can grow A5 Wagyu beef in a lab and not just trying to make plant matter act like meat.
To be perfectly blunt this entire thread is vegans patting themselves on the back. It's an echo chamber.
Killing an animal on a farm quickly and painlessly is a lot kinder than what that animal would experience in nature left to their own devices. Sadder still is that I suspect that a lot of these farm animals are likely to go extinct when the technology to grow meat in a lab becomes viable and cheaper. Considering how close we are to being able to produce human organs that can actually be transplanted into a live human it's not far fetched to think we'll be able to grow high quality, beautifully marbled muscle tissue of various species in the not too distant future.
I think the whole sector of meat-substitutions would be very successful, can't speak about this specific IPO, because of the state of the entire market right now.
But if many big companies, highly invested in meat are investing in substitutes as well, they are not doing it from moral/humane/environmental reasons, they are just doing it for the money, so for those that are dedicated to this, it seems promising (if they can just survive the punches that "big meat" will send their way)
A&W in Canada has a Beyond meat burger and a Beyond meat breakfast sausage sandwich. I go there semi-regularly (being the best fast food restaurant in Canada in my opinion) and I am astonished - almost every second person in line is ordering the Beyond meat option.
Edit: Important to note that A&W Canada is completely independent from A&W in the U.S.
Also note that the burgers produced by A&W in the U.S. are complete trash almost every time, not comparable to A&W Canada which produces consistently delicious burgers.
So I've had an Impossible burger (from my company cafeteria), but it was probably over-cooked.
Does anyone know where I could taste-test a Beyond burger vs. Impossible burger?
Definitely interested in this space as it's one of the surefire ways we reduce both energy and water, and I have family who are veggie and this makes it easier for me to connect with them.
Yeah, I think I overcooked my Impossible burger as well. It did smell and taste like meat. However it didn't smell or taste like a burger. It smelled and tasted just like Spam. I love Spam, but it's not a hamburger. I'm hoping that this is just due to cooking improperly.
Sounds like maybe you're referring to Beyond Burger, not Impossible Burger? Impossible Burger isn't available in grocery stores yet, and Beyond has sort of a spammy taste to it that Impossible doesn't have (from my perception).
Impossible Burger has been available in stores in the SF Bay Area for what seems like a few weeks now, if not longer. I remember it because it's expensive compared to real meat. I got it at Safeway. It wasn't the Beyond Burger.
That's fantastic if so. Their FAQ still says it's "coming later this year, find it at a restaurant". I follow them pretty closely and haven't seen any press about it.
FWIW, I have never seen an Impossible Burger in any Safeway (or Whole Foods) in the Bay Area. And I somehow doubt they would have just stealth launched an enormous chain without someone noticing; https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Safeway-to-Carry-the-Pla... there are plenty of articles like this about the Beyond Burger getting into different chains.
I remember it due to the price. It was $8.99 for two Impossible burger patties. It's only $5.99 for two Beyond burger patties. It took me a month to get past the $8.99 price point for just two veggie patties. You might be able to find it at the same price point at Whole Foods as well. On that note, Impossible did mention that they were rolling out to supermarkets in 2019.
I believe Carl's Jr. (or 'Hardees', depending on locale) sell a Beyond Meat burger at most locations, now. I'm not sure where you can find an Impossible burger nationally, though.
I haven't found Impossible in my area yet, but this is a big concern for me - trying it out and not knowing if I screwed it up or if it's just not my thing regardless of preparation.
I think that's a reason Impossible has only been available in restaurants so far. (They say they'll be available for retail purchase later this year.) My understanding is you have to be a bit careful when cooking it, so they want to make sure it's cooked by professionals so people get a good first impression.
I think it depends on how you view meat. If you look at both of them as benign foods where taste is the only important aspect, you may like beef more. But if other factors like ethical treatment of animals or greenhouse gas emissions matter to you, these burger substitutes offer a lot without the same negatives.
If I made a creme brulee recipe without having ever tasted it done correctly by someone else, I wouldn't know if the texture/taste was correct.
I have the same fear with the Impossible burgers - I want one cooked the way the company intended, so I know what it's supposed to taste like. Otherwise, my first impression of it might just be due to me over/undercooking it.
This bothers me a lot. I too have had over cooked cafeteria impossible burgers. They pre cooked them with the regular burgers, but these just don’t work like that...
Umami Burger in the bay area (at least the one in SF) has the latest Impossible 2 burger patty. Rosemunde offers the Beyond Sausage, I am unsure of a place that sells the Beyond Burger in SF.
For the philosophically rigorous, Christine Korsgaard has a good newer book[1] on animal ethics and their implications that has significant bearing on some of the comments here. (And she's a rather better thinker than Peter Singer.)
I'm not a vegetarian but I do care about the environment. So I always try to find meats that are sustainably farmed etc, but sometimes it's hard and sometimes I just only have time for a quick fast food meal.
But if they have an impossible burger, I'll get that every time, even if it costs more.
My hope is that over time their costs come down so much that the impossible burger is actually cheaper, at which point I think we'll see a sea change in meat farming. If getting the meat free burger at McDonalds costs less than the meat one but tastes the same, that right there would be huge for the environment.
I recommend watching What The Health (https://www.whatthehealthfilm.com/) - a great doc by the same guys who did Cowspiracy, this time focusing on the health and lobyy aspects of the meat and diary industry.
Negative lobbying is something that fills me with anger unlike any other and not eating meat and diary JUST to stop giving those fuckers my money is reason enough. Of course, there are many other great reasons to do so (animal welfare, environment, health) - and no objectively good reason to eat meat and diary.
And no, reasons such as:
- "We need meat to be healthy"
- "Humans meant to be eat meat historically"
- "I love the taste and this is a free country"
Are either scientifically wrong or not objectively good reasons.
I've tried Impossible Burger once in a some random bar. Was dissatisfied - texture was ok, but had weird after taste.
Also tried to cook some Beyond Meat burgers the other week. The stench was horrible, even my roommates noticed. Topped with mayo, garlic butter, bbq sauce and onions it did kinda hide the horrible flavour, but still I couldn't finish it. I could feel that horrible flavour for a day or two after.
Really had big hopes for it and will definitely try again, but for now it's a joke.
Don't forget they are really selling a wider cknversation/story/narrative/worldview than just the meat. To focus too much on the product itself might therefore be a mistake.
I don't disagree that those are nicer items, I've had them countless times myself.. but I think you may be missing the "point" of Beyond Meat if you solely talk about the taste or macronutrients.
I think the promise they selling is that science can make it better than regular meat (I think it's certainly possible with genetically engineered stem cell meat), but I am not seeing that yet.
I remain a keto advocate but I can understand why vegetarians do what they do and kudos to them for choosing to do it. However, if I have to listen to one more skinny white girl angrily try to convince me that I'm evil because I'm not vegan/vegetarian I might crack and yell back.
All well and good and as someone who doesn't eat meat it's nice to have more options when getting fast food, but at home I prefer the frozen vegetarian burger patties that have been available from Morningstar or Boca as they tend to be much more affordable and have more protein/calorie.
I've always felt quorn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn) got a raw deal. They made some stupid marketing positions, they allowed the agenda to get ramped up around allergy when its ratio of risk is significantly lower than other foods including soy, and they walked into a battery hen issue needlessly.
But the fundamentals look pretty good. Its a bioreactor, it scales, it can use varying feedstock, and its good nutritive value.
TVP which proceeded it, in my highly subjective opinion was crap in comparison. It reminded me of badly cooked stewing meat, when the connective tissue is left behind and the good bits are now in the stock: you don't want to swallow this.. cellophane meat "thing"..
The quorn and tvp era was focussed on protein shortage and we understood how to make chicken things happen in bulk. It was efficient use of animal product to source binder in egg form deprecating the inefficient grazing behind pork, lamb and beef. Chicken farming is pretty intensive. (I'm skirting the moral aspect here)
It wasn't initially about vegetarianism as a holistic view avoiding animal products, as much as fending off starvation from lack of food. If they had found a way to make beef farming productive enough I think they would would have gone there. The input was surplus product from a flour producer. I don't think they were radical vegetarians.
They did subsequently get on the vegan bandwagon but had lost market momentum, and the whole 'fusarium is not a mushroom' and 'you are allergens' kind of killed it for a while.
For people that like to eat healthy, how do you feel about eating something as processed as the "beyond burger?" I get that it's nice to have another option but to me it's hard for me to stomach the ingredients especially with canola being the third ingredient.
Processed is not a bad word when it comes to health. What matters are the ingredients. I'm not aware of any consensus on canola being anything but healthy, but am interested in learning more as canola oil is what I use for cooking.
That being said, like any meat or meat-substitute, I wouldn't consider it a "health food".
I agree with you that the ingredients matter, but I also think as a blanket statement avoiding processed foods is smart.
I think this is a pretty good synopsis of why canola and PUFA's (polyunsaturated fatty acids)are bad. I actually think it's possible that we should be vilifying them on the same level as sugar. https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/pufa-s-the-worst-thing-for-y...
The problem with all oil is that it’s very calorie dense and nutrient poor. A tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories! And since it’s so calorie dense it doesn’t make us feel full.
I've been vegan for a while now and while I think it's a great thing that these products are available I don't think I'll be eating them much myself. I much prefer a lentil curry to a burger but it's nice to have some options when I'm out with friends.
Here comes billions of ideological vegetarianism and virtue signaling dollars. Might as well be a charity. Great business model. Lose money forever to chase a shared ideological purpose for the benefit of investor's ideological salvation.
It's like funding of the building of a church for the PETA crowd.
There's definitely a bit of an arms race going on, and it's unfortunate. I find both products to be very different, and we could stand to have some diversity in the area of alternative meat products.
Off the top of my head, in terms of commercial availability I've seen them at:
Beyond:
- Safeway (both meat patties, and frozen boxed crumbles)
- Del Taco
- Carls Jr.
- Veggie Grill
Impossible:
- Umami Burger
- White Castle
- Smaller retail locations
- pilot w/ Burger King
Beyond also has a lot of products, from sausages, crumbles, and different flavors of meat.
I think Impossible is highly focused on reproducing ground beef.
I think they're afraid that one brand will be so much more successful that the other goes away. Each brand has different flavor, texture, and nutritional profiles so if any of those are particularly important to you then it's hard to make do with one of the other options.
For example, both Beyond Meat and Quorn sell meatless "beef" crumbles. Each has a noticeably different flavor and fairly different nutrition (The Quorn has significantly fewer calories, but less protein for example). I would be sad if either one went out of business because I use them differently.
It's still such a niche market that expanding it right now is the best thing for all the players. Beyond Meat revenue is $33m compared to say Tyson at $33b. The veggie meat market is also a lot less homogenic than meats since everyone makes their own proprietary blends from thousands of possible ingredients. Compared to say cheap chicken where it's impossible to tell brands apart.
The vast majority of Impossible Burger's distribution is in restaurants. I haven't been able to find them in stores. Beyond Burgers, I buy weekly at the local mainstream (non-Whole Foods) grocery. Comes out to about $2.50/burger. Works great for my near-vegan partner, and we can still cook out at home!
I see this as just another way to replace some of the natural food in your diet with a garbage mix of highly processed plants and oils. No thanks, I’ll stick to the food that has created and sustained human life for 1000s of years over a science experiment. If you want to subject yourself to this, go ahead, but it’s not for me.
I am an omnivore, but deeply interested in meat substitutes. Before trying the burger by Impossible Foods, it was my opinion that the patty by Beyond Meat was definitely the best.
I am a big burger consumer, and I tend to rank the various substitute burgers on a scale that indicates how satisfied I feel afterwards, and how accurate the imitation is.
I felt like the Beyond Burger was 8/10 in terms of being as satisfying as a burger, but only 6/10 in terms of being a good imitation.
For an example on why I use the different scales, plant-based patties tend to sear differently than real beef, tending to produce a thin crisp layer. This isn't great in terms of being a good imitation, but it actually has really good mouthfeel, so it increases the enjoyment.
Being 8/10 in terms of satisfaction is a pretty important threshold for me. It is at the level where I can eat one and feel like I ate a burger. Most veggie patties are in the 4-7 range (Gardein is pretty good) in terms of satisfaction, and even lower imitation quality.
When I first had the Impossible Burger a couple years ago, it was 9/10 satisfying and 8/10 imitation. It still had the distinctive plant-based patty crispiness, but the internal texture was much more accurate. This was back when the Impossible was only in a few dozen restaurants in the country, so this was at a nice place in Las Vegas. I got an Impossible and a Wagyu beef burger side by side for comparison. By the time I finished, the most obvious physical difference I'd noticed was that the Impossible burger loses heat much faster than a real beef burger.
In January 2019, Impossible began rolling out their 2.0 recipe, and they are now in hundreds of locations. I got the 2.0 at an upper tier burger place ($20 for a burger) and again did a side-by-side test. The Impossible still lost heat faster than a real beef burger, but the characteristic thin crispy sear on the patty was reduced significantly.
Visually, the inside of the patty was virtually indistinguishable from real beef. It's 10/10 satisfying and 9/10 imitation. I think it's indistinguishable from a Burger King quality burger, but still not quite as hot and juicy as a more expensive gourmet beef burger. I imagine they might be able to just make a less healthy version that is packed full of various oils and whatnot to get that quality.
Once the Impossible Burger rolls out to grocery stores later this year, I will never have to buy ground beef again.
To Beyond Meat's credit, their Beyond Brats are the best veggie sausage I have had, and as far as I know, Impossible doesn't have immediate plans to take on that market. I've found that they have supply chain/production issues with Beyond Brats, though, as they are almost always sold out at the Whole Foods near me.
TL;DR I believe Impossible Foods is going to eat Beyond Meat's lunch
Interesting take. I've always said Impossible tastes more like meat, but has a bad texture match, and Beyond tastes less like meat but has a better texture.
With that said, I think the flavor and quality of Beyond is higher, for me. Impossible still hovers around low-grade, poor texture ground beef. I want them both to be successful because the more options we have the better.
I think Impossible is likely to be more successful targeting current meat eaters, though, so you may be right about their longer term success.
I've found the variance of each burger to be highly dependent on the preparation, so I think a real fair test would be made-at-home side-by-side. I enjoy the Beyond patty made at home on a skillet without much extra besides a bun and catchup and mustard, this says a lot.
Have you tried the Impossible 2.0? It's noticeably better.
I agree that preparation has a huge impact on quality. I once had an Impossible 1.0 that was so badly prepared I ate 1/3 of it and then gave up.
I am wondering if Impossible will come up with a specialized cooker (imagine a waffle press sort of thing, but for burger patties) that will automate temperature management and cook time in order to reduce variability. But I assume their final goal is to just make their substitute cook exactly like real beef.
I’ll have to double check. I had an impossible burger recently but didn’t see the version. It was similar enough to previous ones that it’s safe to assume it was 1.0.
When you compare the Beyond Burger to the Impossible Burger, the Beyond Burger feels like a block of red play-doh. "Meat is red so this must be red."
Don't get me wrong I will still eat it, but the Impossible Burger feels miles ahead, its just that the Beyond Burger feels to have hit the larger markets first.
I can't wait until I can start cooking my own Impossible meat at home, here's to hoping that the Impossible Burger does well at Burger King's trial run.
I like that you and GP like Impossible and dislike Beyond for the same reasons I like Beyond and dislike (too strong of a word, let's just say prefer Beyond) Impossible.
Again, this is why I'm hoping they are both successful.
I've had both and you hit the nail on the head describing internal texture. The beyond burger was beyond awful, the impossible burger was quite good, but neither compare to eg shake shack. It comes down to subjective taste of course. Personally if I want to reduce my meat consumption for the day I'd just opt for vegetarian friendly cuisine like Indian. It's been accommodated for a very long time in history, there are more vegetarians in India than anywhere in the world.
Beyond meat works for financial reasons. Sunlight, pea plant, factory, paddy costs less at scale than sunlight, corn plant, cow, slaughter house, factory, paddy.
It does not work particularly well for dietary reasons. The calorie reduction will reduce inflammation if it is not offset by additional excess calories but the omega 3 fatty acid profile will not compete financially with fatty acid profile of algae or grass-fed protein. The beyond meat diet will therefore lead to more inflammation in the general population and increased rates of chronic illness including diabetes and brain disorders.
A moderate amount of protein and fat from Grassfed animals and oily cold water fish combined with moderate low inflammatory carbohydrate starches and loads of vegetables is the optimum human diet.
Every other diet has a negative externality of increased chronic illness. Health outcomes as measured by life expectancy are not better for the average middle income human who survived to the age of 5 in 2019 than they were for the equivalent dataset living 150 years ago in England.
And then you have the vegans. What is more precious? a virus, a amoeba, a bacteria, a prokaryote, a eukaryote, a fungus, a plant, a insect, a arachnid, a cephalopod, an invertebrate, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, a political ally, a community, a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child or a vegan's theory?
Rhetorical question. Human Parents minimise the suffering of their children and expect the favour to be returned in kind.
The choice between animal suffering and decreased probability of the onset of your child's future chronic illness is easy if enlightened. Beyond meat therefore doesn't work for economic reasons and is a fad of unknown duration.
The negative externalities of a vegetarian diet are currently obscured by the corn lobby and any other political factions currently profiting from the sale of inflammatory foods. They love the vegans chipping in. I often wonder if roadkill slowly dying keeps vegans up at night or If they are sleeping through it? And if if they are, how?
As for grassfed animals. Pastured land is marginal for growing starches or vegetables. Solutions are in development for the reduction in nitrate leaching and methane emission. The positive externalities of a low inflammation moderate carbohydrate, moderate protein grass/algae fed diet and the reduction in chronic illness outweigh the negative externalities of the methane. Put nuclear engines in cargo vessels to trade the meat around, methane problem neutralised, global health enhanced.
Food should be judged on it's toxicity to the general population and nothing else. It is the only objective measure and miraculously the economics results in humane farming practice and better human health.
Pretty hard to judge the toxicity of beyond meat and that's why I choose to eat whole ingredients that I process myself. I think they will make some money dependent on flavour, texture, marketing and distribution capability. Although kraft spent 1 billion relabeling their cheese about 10 years back so good luck competing against that. Eventually the human dietary truth will come out and misplaced idealism won't save the business from public knowledge. That could take 20 years but I think the inflammation and dietary literature is going to converge before then.
Your tone is unnecessarily snarky but I don't think you're wrong that these new meat substitutes are probably not as healthy as a more thoughtful plant based diet. I think it's great that they're available but I don't plan to eat them regularly.
As for animal protein being necessary for human health, that's not even true in the ideal natural case, never mind the reality of the horror show that today's factory farmed meats have become.
If you think you can meet global demand for meat with free-ranging grazing cows then you haven't even looked at the numbers and claiming that feeding cows seaweed eliminates the methane issues means you also haven't actually looked at the numbers there.
I disagree. He or she is one of the few intelligent commenters on this thread that is not mindlessly grasping on to this alarming vegan/vegetarian trend. And lo and behold, they are getting downvoted to oblivion.
HN is a fairly intelligent and educated crowd by internet standards. Perhaps it should give you pause that so many such people not only consider veganism not alarming but actually positive. And dismissing it as mindless doesn't really signal debating in good faith on your part or his.
> HN is a fairly intelligent and educated crowd by internet standards.
Yet intelligent and educated people do hold beliefs not based on facts, and are unwilling to be questioned.
> Perhaps it should give you pause that so many such people not only consider veganism not alarming but actually positive.
It gives me no pause whatsoever as I'm not someone that so easily follows the crowd. I simply take it to be the case that veganism is the flat-earth-theory of 2019.
> And dismissing it as mindless doesn't really signal debating in good faith on your part or his.
Good faith on my, and others, part and already have come by and been downvoted into oblivion. Have you been watching this thread?
I simply take it to be the case that veganism is the flat-earth-theory of 2019.
And you wonder why nobody takes your comments seriously. The American Dietetics Association, the largest association of professional dieticians in the world, says vegan diets are healthy and appropriate for all ages:
>> I simply take it to be the case that veganism is the flat-earth-theory of 2019.
> And you wonder why nobody takes your comments seriously.
My cheeky comment, in regards to veganism being the flat-earth-theory of 2019, was in response to your ludicrous suggestion to me that I should blindly accept something silly just because "so many people [...] consider veganism [...] actually positive". And it is nothing to do with my next response (to your follow-up comment of equally no substance re: good faith) that good faith on my, and others, part have already come by and been downvoted into oblivion (furthermore you are totally unaware of this happening).
> The American Dietetics Association, the largest association of professional dieticians in the world, says vegan diets are healthy and appropriate for all ages:
So what? Is the American Dietetics Association your religion, and whatever they espouse is to be taken as gospel?
Just because something is posted on pubmed does not make it a fact.
> Science is on our side.
Hah, nope. Science is _not_ on your side. And posting links to pubmed does not automatically make you scientifically-minded. The American Dietetics Association, and the like, that you so fondly identify with are wont to rely on epidemiological studies (which are not exactly science).
The vast majority of human nutrition research — including the lion share of the research cited in the EAT-Lancet report — is conducted using the tragically flawed methodology of nutrition epidemiology. Nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00105... and here <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337>], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions, most notably Dr. Walter Willett. An epidemiologist himself, he wrote an authoritative textbook on the subject and has conducted countless such studies, including a recent, widely-publicized paper tying low-carbohydrate diets to early death. In my reaction to that study <https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/diagnosis-diet/20180..., I explain in plain English why epidemiological techniques are so untrustworthy and include a sample from an actual food questionnaire for your amusement.
Even if you think epidemiological methods are sound, at best they can only generate hypotheses that then need to be tested in clinical trials. Instead, these hypotheses are often prematurely trumpeted to the public as implicit fact in the form of media headlines, dietary guidelines, and well-placed commission reports like this one. Tragically, more than 80% <https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-... of these guesses are later proved wrong in clinical trials. With a failure rate this high, nutrition epidemiologists would be better off flipping a coin to decide which foods cause human disease. The Commission relies heavily on this methodology, which helps to explain why its recommendations often fly in the face of biological reality.
Science doesn't have the multivariate statistical capability to settle the argument yet. Like I said The literature's converging and if dietitians had anything of value to add why are chronic health conditions escalating. I'm betting on the macro ratios of the pre colonial Polynesian diet, Works pretty well for me. And I can do 40 pressups without any training other than the odd walk and grass fed roast lamb is absolutely delicious and it's biochemistry evolved in synch with mine.But by all means eat the pea goo, it reduces the demand for lamb. Everyone gets freedom of choice to eat what they choose in developed countries, It's a valuable freedom.
I agree that we still have a lot to learn about nutrition. What’s not controversial is that you can be perfectly healthy on a strictly plant based diet. Dismissing vegans as flat earthers or vegan diets as pea goo just makes you sound defensive.
Also, the diet you choose has consequences for the environment and the animals you eat so it’s not simply a matter of individual choices. Red meat in particular has a huge carbon footprint.
It is controversial though. Vegans have higher rates of depression and anxiety than the general cheeseburger eating population which has terrible rates of depression and anxiety. They also have higher rates of auto-immune disorders. The major benefit of their diet comes from toxicity reduction from eating optimised daily calories.
A plant sits in one spot thinking how to poison anything that eats too much of it. An animal moves about consuming as little poison as possible.
Once you're assured of enough calories (which used to limit population growth) the primary solution is to eat some calories from animals that evolved systems for processing plant toxins to minimise your toxic load.
I used pea goo in the comment because I went to the beyond meat website and looked at the ingredients in the impossible burger. The impossible burger consists of about 15 chemical compounds, combined by people highly financially motivated to optimise flavour, texture and colour and the primary component is pea protein. If you can think of a more concise name I'm all ears but it's definitely not a iphone or macbook air.
Vegan's choose pea goo over lamb. That's their choice and some vegan's will have the genetic biochemistry to live healthily on a plant based diet. The general population doesn't share that biochemistry. Veganism is the most environmentally sound option if one's health optimises from the diet. Unfortunately this is not the case for the majority of the population. The average vegan should be admired for their sacrifice, not their logic.
Citation for your claims about depression and immune disorders being more common in vegans? I've seen tons of studies showing exactly the opposite and also anecdotally in every vegan I know.
Plant based diets are highly anti inflammatory which helps a lot with depression. And the mammalian proteins in meat & dairy seem to be powerful triggers for the immune system to start attacking itself.
Can you please share a few of the best studies you've seen on veganism reducing depression and autoimmune disorders, I'm genuinely interested and hope I'm missing something.
I've never understood this convention and it always causes my brain to short-circuit when trying to read it. Is that $22 Million Monies, or $22 MegaMillions
I'm assuming that the shorthand is supposed to be read as: $22 Million
So then I spend the next 5 minutes stuck in a feedback loop of what the hell am I supposed to be thinking.
It's not like exact, but the apostrophus form of Roman numerals used something like forward and backward C’s separated by a vertical bar for a thousand, in place of the conventional M, and this sometimes reduced to something that looked similar to a phi. But calling M a placeholder for that seems accurate, as M was the more common form (and there was also I with a horizontal bar over it, though that seems a later innovation.)
Sorry - I wasn't saying accountants "didn't do it" - just that "they shouldn't"
My pedantic (and massively down-voted post I now notice) was just an expression of my annoyance at mixing syntax.
I'd also have accepted "M" as "a million" and therefore MM being 1,000,000,000,000... but they didn't do that either..
All these replies are from devs and the like who aren't used to how everyone else uses this notation. Everyone in the business world uses MM, it just looks weird because you're not used to it. Different industries use different notations.
If you came to my workplace and used a single 'M' everyone would have the same response here but inverted - how using a single M makes no sense and is inaccurate.
I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli). So using a single M still means thousand, will MM means million.
haha, I completely agree with what you said and I know it was industry-specific term. But despite knowing that, and _STILL_ knowing it meant "$22Million" I still argue with my brain when a little voice says "Mega Millions?"
I was hoping I wasn't the only one, and happy to see a vigorous conversation start because of it. (I inherit Karma in a MLM feedback-loop right?)
>I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli).
That's just silly, _everybody_ knows it stands for cents-per-mile, and how truck drivers are paid. (jk)
It's a finance thing, and it doesn't make sense to continue using it, when you can use k = thousands, M = millions, B = billions, T = trillions, Q = quadrillions and remove all the ambiguity.
You're completely forgetting about non-native English speakers who use the long scale in their native language. They make mistakes or might even not be aware of the difference.
I wouldn't advocate using these abbreviations in a technical document that has safety implications, but in an S-1 it's fine. If you make a mistaken trade because you can't keep your scales straight I don't really have a lot of sympathy. If they don't know the difference in the first place they're not reading this document.
I'm not referring to the metric prefixes. Other than "k" which is well known and commonly used as meaning thousand, I doubt most people would be familiar with the other prefixes. It would seem easier to just use the first letter of million, billion, etc., words which are known by most everyone.
> It would seem easier to just use the first letter of million, billion, etc., words which are known by most everyone.
English is in the minority that uses short-scale, the majority of "everyone" uses long-scale, and would therefore assume a "billion" is 10^12, not 10^9 like you would.
(Which is why you got shot down by the grandparent, the metric prefixes are globally unambiguous, your suggestion is completely English-centric)
ITT: Engineers attempt to armchair-reengineer new standard units for representing millions, billions and so on without understanding the parameters of the problem.
That's not how roman numerals work 22 MM is... 44,000 - though it seems like some Oil & Gas execs never got the memo and were using it as thousand thousands this is... sadness.
I believe the M (in $100M) also isn't based in roman numerals but is a convenient dual meaning of Mega- (the metric 10^6 prefix) and the first letter of million.
It is an awkward notation. Nobody says 100M for $100,000, they say 100K. So why should 100 million be 100MM? It forces people to pause, and think unnecessarily.
Only if by Nobody you mean every person in the oil & gas industry. I find it funny that people get so worked up about different units in different industries. I get that common units would be great for a variety of reasons, but look around - the world can’t even unite on standard units for such tangible things as distance/length. People who work with MM as million are familiar with the vernacular, and it seems unreasonable for them to upend a model that works so a lay audience doesn’t have to pause and think.
I've been in the oil & gas industry for 20 years (IT side of things). We never use MM, I'm looking at last years half year results, and it's "m" across the board.
I'm the opposite. If I see "10M" in financial docs, then I have to pause think about context. If I see "10MM" I'm certain that the author meant "million" and keep on reading.
I can't claim any first-principles logic for it. I use it because it's standard in finance and accounting, which is usually the audience for SEC filings. It's everywhere in finance.
This is probably an unpopular opinion here but I don't think these meat substitutes are sustainable for long term health in humans...our bodies are clearly designed to consume meat (especially apparent when you compare our bodies to those of our mostly herbivore relatives) and by extension we need these nutrients to thrive (not just survive, mind you). I understand the incentive for people to go vegan but people should tread very carefully since it's completely contraire to their evolutionary makeup and that doesn't come without consequences.
You can choose to eat whatever you like but meat absolutely isn't essential. It seems like a lot of people frame the debate as if the only two options are eating meat with every meal or being vegan when there is so much room in between. You can still get plenty of animal protein in eggs and dairy. It's also the case that the typical American eats way too much meat and not nearly enough vegetables. For most people, eating more vegetables and less meat will only be a benefit to their health.
Lots of things are contrary to my evolutionary makeup. My job (I sit on my butt - plenty of articles of late about THAT), my house (we've seen lots about the perils of modern houses in regards to sunlight, particulates, etc), my diet (beyond vegetarianism - modern diets are NOT paleo or any other "whole grains & meats") - pretty much all of it.
Now you make a very good point that these decisions aren't free - there are lots of concerns to care about and you are 100% correct. But saying there are impacts does not mean (1) that we shouldn't consider the change and (2) that NOT doing the change is somehow free of impacts.
Human societies have survived on all different levels on meat intake, from near 100% to 0. Nutrients can be obtained through many different ways, and these meatless meat products often advertise that they are more nutrient dense then their meat counterparts.
I also don’t believe the intention of these products to make everyone vegan, that’s not sustainable by current output. However, our modern society consumes more much then we ever have as it’s so easily obtained and so cheap. So we clearly don’t need this much meat to be healthy. So I happily welcome an decrease in my meat consumption and for society to greatly decrease theirs.
Grant for the sake of discussion that your body is the work of a designer. The designer's design for childbirth is clearly abysmal: fifty thousand American women yearly suffer severe maternal morbidity. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/607782992/for-every-woman-who.... A designer who flunks childbirth should not be trusted with carnivory.
You contradict your first sentence with your second, when you refer to "evolutionary makeup." Do you have a robust definition of "evolutionary makeup" ?
Yep. Like a meat diet, a vegan diet will indeed be perfectly healthy provided it is reasonably balanced. You need to watch a few things, such as B12 intake.
OTOH, there is plenty of evidence as to the negative effects of meat on health - the higher fat intake, for instance, and the increased cancer risk.
If meat is so carcinogenic, why was cancer so uncommon until the last century or so? We are not eating any more meat now than we did a hundred years ago, yet cancer incidence is skyrocketing. So, why do we believe that meat causes cancer?
There have been numerous research studies claiming to tie red meat to cancer (particularly colon cancer), however, these were weak epidemiological studies, and are not representative of results in the field as a whole. The fact is that studies of meat and cancer yield very mixed results. Many studies show no connection at all between meat and cancer, and some studies even show a protective benefit. There is simply no solid scientific evidence to support the belief that red meat increases cancer risk.
This did not stop the World Health Organization (WHO) from proclaiming to the planet in October 2015 that red and processed meats cause cancer. Unfortunately, the WHO report is all smoke and mirrors. To see what I mean, please read my detailed analysis of the WHO report: WHO Says Meat Causes Cancer? http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/meat-and-cancer/
(That's a copy-paste from the originally article that you patently did not care to read)
What other herbivores cook meat before eating it? How do you feel about the amount of kale that goes into one kale smoothie? Were our bodies designed for all these radio waves? The ship has sailed. Evolution will figure it out.
You would like the way they did science in ancient Greece. All abstract, reasoning everything from first principles, lofty concepts uncontaminated by earthly experience
We are capable of eating meat, but our entire digestive system is much more optimized for eating and digesting plants. Much like our primate cousins which eat very little or no meat.
There aren't any "synthetic meat" products. These are plant proteins; and my understanding of the related Impossible burger co. uses a GMO to produce an animal protein within a plant.
No, heme is naturally found in all plants but in tiny quantities, they put the gene for heme into yeast to mass produce it. Read more here: https://impossiblefoods.com/heme/
(Of course, pretty much everything in the US without an organic label is an unholy mishmash of gmos, pesticides approved by captive regulators, and untold gallons of antibiotics. So probably doesn't make much of a difference anyways...)
People are eager to reduce meat consumption in general due to meat's heavy environmental impact, questionable ethics in factory farming, and general unsustainability due to a growing population. Because it's made of commonly available plant-based ingredients like pea protein and canola oil, Beyond meat is highly unlikely to have long-term health effects. Society is advanced enough to properly identify every essential nutrient that comes from meat and recreate it in a plant-based form, so why not replace meat?
Vegetarians and vegans are an expanding market. Some of them still miss eating meat, especially comfort foods like burgers. There is a good article that talks about the research done on the heme used in Impossible Burgers. It talks about the protein, how it's produced, and how it's digested. There was even research done to see how someone with a soy allergy would react to eating heme. Obviously, it's no match for a long term study and the article mentions that but from first glance, it appears to be safe. One thing the article mentions but doesn't expand on is what is in the other 20% of the extract from the heme production.
you seem to be implying that long term health effects are the only or a very prominent reason for making a decision like this - why is that?
taste, environmental well being, anti-cruelty are all potential inputs into the question "should i try a meatless alternative", and i'm sure there are others
Is that how people's diet decisions work, generally? Do you think about the longterm health effects of everything you eat? Maybe but most probably don't or just latch onto the latest thing to eat/not-eat.
Have you ever gone to a baseball game and ordered a hotdog? What's in that hotdog? My guess is most people don't ask. They're always so damn curios to know whats in a veggie burger... but they don't give a damn about what's in a hotdog.
There's a lot of things that the cow eats during its life that don't make it onto that label but do definitely make it into your body. none of the ingredients in the list above scare me. If you still think that beef is better than a plant based alternative for you or the environment you are disillusioned. I'm not vegetarian either
You're buying into the myth that if it's made of plants, it must be better than meat.
The nutrition of Beyond Burger is pretty much on par with the nutrition of beef.
I'm not convinced that consuming "plant based alternatives" is a step in the right direction in dealing with health and environment issues especially when compared to more traditional approach like eating balanced meals using a plate model.
Eating more veggies, on the other hand, yes much better.
> In what way exactly would "eating more veggies" be much better when meat is already the only nutritionally complete[1] food
Easy, meat has no fiber.
Western (read: American) diet consists of over consumption of meat, refined sugar, and processed grains, and woeful lack of vegetables, and lesser extent fruits.
If the value of Beyond Meat is "better for you, better for environment", the health benefits seem dubious at best, and environmentally, I don't know if anyone has compared the impact on a per-oz of beef vs per-oz of beyond meat--though the meat industry at scale has had serious negative impact on our environment (putting it mildly)
Most of us on the western diet, would do better to increase our consumption of veggies.
> Most of us on the western diet, would do better to increase our consumption of veggies.
Yet originally you phrased it as if it were a general truth, so as to (intentionally or unintentionally) have the effect of misleading your fellow humans not born and raised or influenced by dietary patterns of your country, which is what my query was (is) all about.
Vitamin C: No one on the carnivore diet, including those who have been doing it for >20 years (even without organ meats), developed scurvy.
> None of the links you posted have any scientific merit.
Therefore this is such a waste of a sentence (aside from your pulling in scientific authority to back your increasingly senseless beliefs). Ain't life grand!
Which ingredient are you objecting to? You literally listed water and salt there. Do you think there's no water or salt in beef? Do you know what's in your mass-produced beef?
If I listed the ingredients of a homemade cake, would you also put "vs Beef" next to it?
Things that stood out:
They buy this pea protein: https://www.roquette.com/product-overview/proteins-and-deriv.... Have committed to $22MM of protein (from 2 vendors)
Founder owns 6%
Co-manufactured by https://www.clwfoods.com/ and http://www.fplfood.net/ (seemingly typo'ed in the S-1 as FLP)
The burger was 70% of 2018 revenue and 48% of 2017 revenue
Q4 gross margin: 25%, up from ~0% a year prior
R&D: 63 food engineers
There's so much amazing vegetarian cuisine, and things like the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger both fill that 'gotta have a burger' feeling. I hope we see more like them, and I'm really looking forward to being able to try 'clean meat' from some of the labs who are exploring that.
I wish that more people would realize how easy this is! Plus, the quality of the meat you'll get (even if you aren't overtly buying the best possible) simply blows anything you find in the supermarket away.
Here's what I've been doing with 4 friends for years now: every year, we go in on buying an entire cow from a local rancher. We have it butchered and packaged, then we each get a quarter. That's a huge amount of meat (a single cow gives us in the neighborhood of 600 lbs of butchered beef) -- enough to last for a year, including giving some away as gifts. I swear, even the hamburger from that is far superior to the best cuts I've had elsewhere.
To do it our way requires buying a large freezer, of course.
All in, including butchering, there isn't a lot of saving here -- per pound of finished meat, we end up paying on the low end of supermarket prices.
However, and I can't emphasize this enough, the quality exceeds that of much more expensive meat. I never understood what vegetarians were talking about when they mentioned the "smell of death" on meat until the first time I bought it like this. The meat I buy doesn't have that smell, and once I encountered the difference, I absolutely understood what the vegetarians were saying.
The rancher doesn't butcher or package the meat. The rancher will deliver the cow to a local outfit that does that (and freezes the finished meat). We select what cuts we are most interested in, what cuts we want ground, and so forth. Then when it's done, we just show up with a truck to pick up the packages. They're packaged just like you get from most other butchers, wrapped in plastic with an outer wrapper of waxed butcher paper.
The only "party" aspect to it is that none of us has enough freezer space to hold an entire cow, so we have to coordinate so that we can divvy up the packages and take them to each of our homes immediately.
I should mention the other nice thing about doing it this way -- we (or one of us, really) actually go to the ranch to make arrangements and select the animal. That means that we can see with our own eyes that the animals were treated well, are in good health, and so forth. Doing this has made visible an awful lot of what used to be invisible and mysterious. In terms of feeling good about the process and intellectual curiosity, this is invaluable.
The butcher broke it down into packages, each package double wrapped in plastic and paper and deep frozen. I have to go pick up 600lbs of meat, then parcel it out and deliver it to my friends (or have them come pick it up.)
I’d love to know what direct to butcher retail prices are.
In talking shop with the rancher we deal with, he gets a lot less per cow at wholesale auctions than in individual sales. On the other hand, wholesale auctions cost him less to do. Per cow, it costs him a lot more time and effort to sell one cow at a time rather than 100.
That said, he did say that his highest profit margins are with individual sales rather than wholesale. And, like any professional in their field, he really enjoys the chance to educate ordinary people (particularly us city-slickers) about his business.
With the current global adult (ages 15-64) population of approximately 5B your method would need 5B/4 = 1.25B cows. The current global cattle population is about 1B [0]
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...
Aside from this figure being totally irrelevant (billions of humans don't like and don't eat beef; the parent is probablya heavy beef eater even by US standards), here's a thought. If the parent is right and the quality is higher, maybe there is an opportunity to build a service which connects people with local ranchers so everyone can do this. That would keep commerce local and reduce the emissions involved in transporting beef around the world.
But no, let's fixate on neo-Puritan finger wagging in every topic on every forum on the Internet. god forbid we have ideas to make things better without judging people for their habits.
I have a friend who describes himself as "meegan". He's straight-up vegan in terms of his regular diet (not because of ethical issues, but because he feels better eating that way), but if he's eating out or at a friend's house, and they're not serving vegan fare, he'll eat whatever is on offer.
It seems like a rational way to go about it.
and then
> still periodically eat meat
I'm sorry but you shouldn't call yourself a vegetarian.
I understand your point, but I don't entirely agree. I think if someone's primary diet is vegetarian, calling themselves that isn't unduly misleading even if they eat meat on occasion.
But it may be a difference between being "vegetarian" in terms of participating in a movement and being "vegetarian" just because you prefer to eat that way.
Same is true for a number of other staples: Tilapia, Shrimp, Catfish, etc.
That said, similar to land based CAFO's you don't really want to know what they're fed (o;
Do you mind if I ask what your requirements for this are? At the end of the day, isn't ending life cruel, no matter the means?
I read this story [1] by Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden interview fame), and I realized that I was not ok with gestation crates for pigs, or the practices espoused by the industrial farming of any animal.
I do not object to raising animals and eating them, but I do object to essentially keeping them in brutal, squalid conditions. Animals should have access to the outdoors, be allowed to pursue their own social connections, have enough space to stretch and exercise, have feed that's natural and high quality, and generally exist in a comfortable way.
Totally acknowledge that's my own definition. It's an arbitrary line in the sand to say, "Killing an animal is ok, causing suffering to an animal before killing it is not".
I just... read the article and couldn't stomach letting any of my money flow to companies that would think that sort of behavior was ok.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
[1] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/ [2] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/live-animal-transport/
Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef.
It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.
I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.
I think the 'bashing it with a rock' is sort of the thing I'm trying to avoid. My farmer brings a USDA butcher to his site to kill the animal (the kills are done away from the pasture space). The offal is removed there. If you want the tongue, heart, liver, etc. you show up on slaughter day and cart them away.
The carcass was then taken to a local butcher shop, where it was processed into steaks, ground beef, roasts, etc. at my direction -- how thick did you want steaks, how big did you want roasts, etc.
Being involved in this way is surprisingly intimate -- seeing the animal, being on the farm the day of it's slaughter (though I did not witness the slaughter), and working with the butcher to define how it will be broken down taught me so much more about how my food is prepared than anything you'd get from the grocery store.
I just put together a spreadsheet with all the farms within 50 miles and visited a few websites/made a few calls. Some farmers had already sold their beef for the season, others weren't grass fed, etc. Eventually I narrowed the candidate pool down to two or three and asked if I could come see their farms. One farmer said no, so I went with one of the others.
[1] http://www.pugetsoundfresh.org/
For a more personal connection, I'd start at the local farmers' market.
I agree. The farmer's market was my entryway. At ours, local ranchers are present and selling their meats. There is a huge wealth of knowledge about what exists in your area at a farmer's market. Not just for meat, but for everything.
I've yet to kill or process a whole cow, though I've broken down primals/subprimals.
I'm not sure how I would do if it was an animal I had raised. If I'm a farmer or rancher with a few dozen or hundreds of heads of cattle, probably no different. If it was a single cow... I might have trouble.
Everyone is different, though. Even some people I know who eat plenty of meat can't stand to look at processed carcass.
I think that's an excellent point. I suspect that nearly everyone, if faced with actual starvation, would be able to kill their own food.
So would I, but maybe for different reasons. Aside from the method of killing (bashing the poor thing with a rock seems unnecessarily cruel to me), killing my food would be something better done well in advance of mealtime, not once I've sat at the table.
In general, though, I don't think that I'd have an issue killing my own food. That's hypothetical, of course, since (outside of fishing) I've never had to do that.
I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
I agree, but I don't think they were doing much beyond stating their own goals and methods. As a guide to what you can do and how you can attempt to go about it, I think it serves well.
> I personally would likely struggle to convince anyone I know to enter some kind of cooperative livestock purchase/kill/process/store arrangement. As a matter of curiosity, how willing is the average livestock farmer to enter into such an agreement with private individuals?
I imagine some butchers might provide cows where you can check the providence, at least in more populated areas. It wouldn't be quite as cheap as a cooperative project, but it would almost definitely be less time consuming, and supporting a free market for this good has additional benefits.
With my friends, it was "Hey, anyone want to buy 50lbs of meat? It's $XYZ dollars per 50lbs. 50lbs is about one medium freezer full."
I put out the call to about 20 people, and got 5 very interested people, and about 5 maybe next times.
They taste better than grocery store meat too.
A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
If you go down this rabbit hole deep enough you can begin to question whether life itself should exist.
>A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life.
I don't think we can objectively say this. We have no idea what these animals want. Our humanity for these animals lives is nothing short of projection, purely because we have no idea what they want.
Animals like chickens lack self awareness and the ability for future planning. They operate on instinct. We can prove this. Thus, they also don't know what they want--outside of the immediate satisfaction of an instinctual urge.
They do feel pain and hunger however. In the wild, these animals suffer more pain and hunger. In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
I swear most of the arguments against proper free range farming are grounded in either:
a) A fallacious appeal to nature, ie. the false presumption that just because something is "natural" it is automatically better or b) Projection of human awareness and emotional intelligence onto other species
Are factory farms more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes. Is nature more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes.
Well, take a monkey, orca, elephant, dolphin, etc. and it would be hard not to. Sure, many farm animals fall below that level, but they're not bugs either. Many mammals have some basic language, care for their young, give distress calls, migrate, find shelter, etc. which seems to indicate at least some level of future planning whether innate or not. And many intelligent mammals have been seen grieving the dead or rescuing animals from danger.
> In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that.
Yet philosophy courses still exist... Because it's not as simple as that. For some, life is more than just the reduction of suffering. And there are a million other ways to answer "why we exist" or "how we should live".
For animals, we don't know. I think it's absurd to say we're giving them a better/easier/happier life on a farm or out in the wild. We don't know.
Taking zoos as an example though (which is a similar form of captivity, except they don't kill their animals), most people don't think it's a better life, except in the case where the animal is so weak, sick or unable to care for itself that it couldn't hunt in the wild.
Tons of prey animals are reintroduced to the wild, without concern that they might be eaten (some will), but in the hopes that many will survive and reproduce.
So, I guess if your goal is to ensure that the most number of animals lead a somewhat confined life away from predators until they're done growing, farms make sense. If your goal is to ensure that animals get to experience life in their native habitats including the ability to mate and get eaten, then farms aren't so good.
Not only mammals - corvids are known to do that too.
This falls under A) fallacious appeal to nature.
You're suggesting that living is nature is the better way to live simply because it is natural.
But if your goal is to let animals roam free in their native habitats then captivity on farms probably doesn't seem like the better option to you.
How? Just because they demonstrate instinctual behaviour in some circumstances doesn't mean they lack self awareness or the ability for future planning. Humans also demonstrate instinctual behaviour.
And if we consider animals equal to humans, do we send them to jail if they behave badly? Do we prevent them from being murdered by other animals? Isn't it utterly hypocritical to let animals die by starvation in the wild while preventing farming? What is even the natural habitat of farmed animals like a cow?
Cows as we know them wouldn't exist without farming (for leather, meat, milk). As meat eating reduction is something that will never happen over night, they simply are going to become protected, nearly extinct species that live in few sanctuaries (charity).
Without artifical insemination numbers are very manageable. Remaining, existing population would be eaten till numbers are low enough.
"If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]."
-Thomas Sittler. "How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?"
I think this is more an argument for an eventual plan to deal with wild animal suffering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering), not an argument that whatever we do to free-range animals is acceptable because it's no worse than the suffering wild animals experience. Of course it's not very pragmatic for humanity to make a dent in that problem in the near future, especially without causing externalities, but just because it's hard doesn't mean the alternative is to say "they all have shit lives anyway, who cares what we do with them?"
The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article:
"If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.
I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists."
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-p...
But really the point, at least for myself as a vegan is that "Vegans are against the suffering of animals at the hands of humans."
Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
Wildlife suffering happens with or without humans, but humans active choose to breed and kill animals when we don't necessarily need to. We could just not do that.
You don't support humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows, because you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending? What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole? That would then be lessening the suffering of animals in the hands of humans.
>Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.
That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
It seems to me that a vegan's idea of helping animals/climate is to disconnect from the situation entirely. That might allow for avoidance of responsibility and a moral high-horse, but economically, it isn't realistically helping to lay the groundwork for lessened suffering and a cleaner environment.
I'm always amazed when this argument is raised. I can't fathom anyone actually believes more life, for the sake of life, is "better". It strikes me as a bad faith argument. There is a colossal difference between ending a life and preventing one from happening.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
About 21.8% of the world's population is vegetarian [1]. Let me flip your question: Do you think if those billions of people began consuming meat, the world would be the same? Of course not. Assuming meat production could rise to fit this 21.8% increase in demand (it likely couldn't), the planet would be much worse off. So, yes. Although an individual's choice to not eat meat doesn't do much, in aggregate, it's massively important. "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
There are indeed such people. Depending on your particular flavor of utilitarianism, it's a pretty reasonable to conclude that the best things you can do in your life are to A) ensure that there if more life in the future; and B) work to make sure that life is happier than present life.
It basically comes down to how much weight you place on two factors. The first factor is the weight of pleasure (aka happiness, contentment, joy, pick your favorite single word) vs suffering. The second is the weight of present vs future beings.
If you think pleasure outweighs suffering and you are future-oriented then the best possible world is achieved done by increasing the number of happy sentient beings in the universe.
If, OTOH, you believe, as I do, that the negatives of suffering are much stronger than the positives of happiness and you heavily discount future not-yet-existent beings, then you want to focus on eliminating suffering in the present and you should be fairly skeptical of future increases in sentient beings.
My point is NOT "if everyone practiced vegetarianism, climate change would be unaffected." I completely agree with you that the world would be a better place if "everyone were to suddenly switch to being vegan." The point is that in aggregate, not much is ever going to change in the short term, and to believe otherwise is wishful thinking. We have a large sample size of folk who simply don't care about the well being of animals, and a smaller portion of folk who do. That portion hasn't actually changed much over time, even though information about animal farming practices has because much more readily available [1]. It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
> "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt"
A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...
How does social change happen? It is slow. But it has been happening. Not only are people becoming vegetarian or vegan, but those options are increasingly seen as valid, occasional choices for meat eaters as well.
> It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.
This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...
Yeah, but that article doesn't exactly undermine our points because the poll was only for 1,000 people, and even then the actual Gallup poll says:
1) Vegetarianism is slightly higher among Americans under 50 than among those who are older.
More younger people are vegetarian. This will shape social attitudes for decades.
2) Sales of plant-based food grew 8.1% in 2017 alone and exceeded $3.1 billion last year, and plant-based alternatives to dairy products are soon expected to account for 40% of dairy beverage sales. [...] it appears Americans are eager to include alternatives to animal products in their diets but are not willing to give up animal products completely.
Every single plant-based product people choose to buy means slightly less demand for animal products.
Can you help me to understand where i contradicted myself?
The article isn't seriously suggesting to euthanize /sterilize as many animals as possible; I would suggest you reread it. It's using that as an example to point out the moral conundrum that vegetarians undertake when they become vegetarian rather than just "anti-factory farm".
Regardless, I don't claim to align with the article in its entirety - just the idea that animals which have much better lives than their wild counterparts are morally suitable for eating. But yes in continuation of this we should strive for the best lives possible for said animals.
There's no reason we can't do both!
> A disingenuous attempt at mocking me, considering I have taken large steps in my own life toward vegetarianism. I just hold realistic rather than idealistic hopes for the future of omnivores and the environment they derive their food sources from.
I'm sorry. I'm not trying to mock you. I interpreted your argument as a classic "make perfection the enemy of good" argument. It's fantastic you are making efforts to do your part.
You're forming the question again in the same way as the article:
"You think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?"
When really the question is:
"You think it's better that humans choose not to bring animals into existence in order to kill them is better than humans choosing to bring animals into existence in order to kill them?"
And yeah, I think it is better not to breed animals just to kill them, when we could also not.
> What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole?
False dichotomy: poor factory farm conditions vs. better factory farm conditions. There is also the option of no factory farms at all, which would be the least amount of suffering at the hands of humans.
> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?
Actually, it's in the top global climate change causes, so, yes. And there's an avalanche effect of not having to grow 9 times the crops to feed the livestock: less pesticide runoff, less land needed to grow food so less incentive for deforestation and overall habitat destruction, less hauling and shipping required which burns less fuel...
Honestly: do you really think you're doing the animals a favor by raising them in factory farms? You really care about these cows and pigs, so you eat them? Would you be willing to pay the cost - the real cost, not including subsidies funded by taxpayer dollars - for them to have long, nice, natural lives? Because meat is already expensive, and it's artificially cheaper, and the animals only live about 10% of their natural lives. Chickens can live about 8-10 years but are killed at about 18 months when their egg laying starts to diminish. Cows are killed around the same time, but can live up to 20 years.
Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
When it comes down to it we can just agree to disagree on this point. I believe in a more intermediate future where meat comes from animals that, yes, while being bred for consumption, are happy animals that lived happy lives; lives which would be better than any lack of existence. I believe most meat eaters would realistically support this future as well - if not through their purchasing power then at least potentially by law. Lastly, I believe that getting to this future is through strong support of farmers who have already achieved it.
>Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?
This might surprise you but actually I would be inclined to say yes. I would absolutely chose that life over no life [1]. Have you raised farm animals before? They generally feel safer and less agitated in a "pen" of sorts because they view it as protection. They get to socialize all day - and don't usually have to worry about predators or food. Humans aren't motivated by the same environmental dynamics as cows or chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huT5__BqY_U
So you would choose to live a happy 15 years and then die. Unfortunately most animals that we farm cannot and do not live happy lives, and they don't get a choice. You would more realistically be living to 15 until slaughter with torture, rape, and your children being taken away to further the cycle. Never existing seems better. There is another option though, not raping, torturing, and slaughtering for humans to consume. Humans won't wither away without animal products.
In the not so distant past slaves were given "happy" lives by there owners. They were lesser beings so they should be happy to be alive at all right?
I'm not in disagreement with this...just because you're cynical about the future of husbandry doesn't mean I can't be optimistic about it. I'm unsure how repeatedly stating facts about the worst of the current state of factory farming is going to change my mind about how we can potentially lessen demand and migrate production from factory farms through not supporting them. It's actually the exact same concept as becoming a vegetarian but with different expected results.
Even if I was optimistic about farming being able to have animals leading happy lives, it would still ignore many negative factors dealing with animal consumption:
1. The environmental impact from animal consumption would increase if all animals lead happy lives and consumption stayed the same.
2. Dairy products could no longer be produced as that would lead to unhappy animals
3. The sustainability of eating animals, we produce feed for them, and then we eat them. It would make much more sense to only produce feed for us.
The consideration that animals may become extinct if they aren't useful seems a more worthy one, but less valid in the modern world.
Also, I'm not vegan or vegetarian - I am internally content with my moral and ethical choices regarding meat and have carefully considered them.
[1] If not, see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
[2] Assuming that person's motivations are opaque, if we know they want to save or specifically kill someone then the problem gets miles more complex - if it makes it easier, maybe imagine a piece of china on the track that the train will go down - so your choice is five people or five people and some nice china.
That would make sense, since GP said:
> If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem.
So if vegetarians used the argument that lacking life is cruel, then vegetarianism would be cruel, right? It makes perfect sense (given GP's point) that they don't use that argument.
You're the third replyer that writes as if they disagree about this while making the same point. I'm wondering if I'm reading this wrong, or if GP edited their comment just before I loaded the page.
How do you measure this? How do you know for certain that what you're eating had no idea it was about to die when it did?
How do you know animals don't experience existential suffering, similar to how humans experience it? Why do you believe that humans are in control of their livestock's emotional state, even when they provide the best environment for them?
You can observe animal behavior and say, "They appear not to be suffering from existential dread beyond what they would in the wild", you may be able to measure cortisol levels in the meat. But you'll never know for sure.
Nobody's arguing this, are they?
If you do believe this, then I hope you're breeding rats, rabbits, and insects as fast as possible!
I'm saying it's a pointless statement and trying to demonstrate its ridiculousness.
That being said there are quicker and better ways of taking an animals life, the quicker and less painful the better. I will categorically state that for me how they live is more important than how they die. I don't agree with many of the practices in the production of chicken, pigs, cows, and yes even farmed fish and generally try to avoid them.
The fact is it's completely unnecessary. We don't need meat and we waste far too many resources rearing cattle and other animals just to kill and eat them.
To continue down your slippery slope, you'll find the only proper way to live is to revert to the woods and live as a hunter-gatherer society.
Where you chose to draw the line is just as arbitrary as where the OP chooses to draw the line. To claim yourself as morally superior is ridiculous.
Not growing meat? The big disadvantage to that would be we'd no longer be able to enjoy the taste of meat and the farmers would probably need to find something else to farm.
1. Not only does everything die, many things naturally die as food. Being a victim of carnivores is a perfectly normal thing in nature. So even if you don't feel comfortable justifying killing animals in general with "everything dies," it should certainly justify killing animals for food. (BTW, my understanding is that halal- or kosher-certified meats are slaughtered very humanely/painlessly, so if you're worried about suffering and not death, sticking to those isn't a bad choice.)
2. Although things happen in nature, that doesn't mean they're not cruel, and as humans, we have the option of being more humane than nature. While many early humans would also have starved, frozen to death, or been eaten alive, we think it's pretty not great for modern-day humans to be subject to such a fate and we often think it's a moral obligation for society to prevent that from happening. So why should we not also save animals from their fate in nature instead of perpetuating it?
Is that the least cruel option?
https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png
Tofu is flimsy, tempeh kinda goes that direction, but not close. Fake burgers are absolutely gross and near vomit inducing. Quinoa has weird flavour of ashes or smth.
Some indian peas, etc are OK, but I find it's best to stick to pure vege meals (not substitutes) and eat meat when I want to.
I'm looking out for stem cell meat to come out.
Once I did that, and understood how to spice ingredients, then I circled back to my previous habits a bit.
I've gone heavy on mediterranean style cooking, which is not strictly vegetarian, but might use 1-2oz of meat for a whole dish. Meat just kind of dwindled on our shopping list. It's delicious food, and it's really hard to go back to meat & potatoes now.
Indian is incredibly good, but it's been harder to learn.
And I'm in one of the most veg friendly cities in America. Eating out in many many places is practically impossible as a vegetarian. Especially many parts of Europe.
These [1] by "The Vegetarian Butcher" come close.
[1] https://www.devegetarischeslager.nl/producten/informatie-ove...
This is what I'd really like to see mainstream restaurants take up. Even in London, restaurants that position themselves as healthy (such as Pret or EAT) have maybe one or two organic things on their menu. I'd really like to see them take a stand against the conditions that animals are raised in. There are plenty of vegetarian or vegan options, but what if you just want some meat that wasn't raised in a factory?
Keep in mind, I selected for the highest quality meat I could find -- organic, grass fed, grass finished, small farm raised, etc.
Step 1: Find farms. I used my local farmer's market as a jumping off point, they publish a local farm guide.
Step 2: Ensure the farmer meets your criteria, get information on cost and availability. Most farmers had this info on their websites or were a single call/email away. Farmers, btw, are generally not technologists. Some farmers will let you come by. Others won't.
Step 3: Pay your down payment and wait. I put $400 down, and I waited a couple months for my harvest date.
Step 4 (Optional): On harvest day, I could come collect the organ meat (tongue, liver, heart, etc.) if I wanted them, directly from the farm.
Step 5: Pay the farmer -- I paid about $2000 to the farmer at this point.
Step 6: Contact the butcher with your cut sheet. An animal has a number of different cuts that are mutually exclusive -- prime rib vs ribeye steaks, filet mignon/new yorks vs tbones, etc. The butcher will walk you through this.
Step 7: Wait again. The butcher hangs the animal for a few weeks, then processes it via your cut sheet. I think this was 3-4 weeks for me? It was around the holidays, so they were slammed.
Step 8: Pick up your beef, pay the butcher. Be prepared to fill your car with coolers, and fill the coolers with beef. I picked up ~415-480lbs of beef and bones, and paid the butcher ~$550. Every cut was packaged, neatly labeled in white paper, and I stacked them into coolers and drove off.
Step 9: Deliver to your friends. I split my order into 1/8ths and delivered to friends. We kept 1/2, some friends took 1/4, some took 1/8th, and some further split their 1/8th with other friends. (For my own sanity, I refused to subdivide below 1/8th.)
1/8th is about 50-60lbs of meat, which packs a medium sized freezer above/below a fridge. Be prepared and clean that freezer out in advance!
Step 10: Find lots of recipes. Share recipes. Explore global culture through your food. I discovered key wat, a spicy Ethiopian beef stew, because I wanted to go beyond just the meat and potatoes from my midwest history.
Being a vegetarian or not has fuzzy boundaries and many denominations. It's much, much simpler for everyone involved to view me as vegetarian, even if it's not a strict, 100% no meat for years definition.
http://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-ther...
First, it's highly specific to Australia, where the impact of Eurasian cereal farming is profoundly negative, because they're nothing like the native grasses. That could probably be mitigated by not growing Eurasian grains in giant monoculture farms, in favor of edible native crops. There are something like 6,000 native plants in Australia that are edible by humans; very few of them are farmed commercially or have even been thoroughly investigated for that purpose.
Also, it then goes on to say "If more Australians want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed." This is a very questionable assumption. Generally switching from commercially-raised meat to a plant-based diet results in a lower food-crop consumption profile. This is because meat animals are frequently raised, or at least fattened during the terminal months of their lives, on human-edible crops (in the US it's almost solely corn).
Anyway, I get the impression that article is someone playing devil's advocate / provocateur, which is not something I have a lot of time for. There are lots of solid, peer-reviewed articles [1] investigating the ecological impact of plant vs. meat-based diets; there is a wide consensus that plant-based diets are significantly more sustainable. There are probably places on earth where that's not true, and perhaps Australia is one of them, but it's not broadly true for most of the planet.
[1]: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
Not to mention the greenhouse gas effect of that many cows, which is much higher for grazing cattle.
Humans need 250grams of protein a day, some can come from plants, some from eggs, some from animals.
Currently what happens is that corporations lobby governments to protect local food markets under the guise of food security so that grass fed meat cannot be imported from sparse populations with lots of pasture into dense populations short of pasture.
The dense population then gets obese and mentally ill on corn-fed local beef while the corporations profit from the margin between feeding an animal corn or feeding it grass while sidestepping the cost of negative externalities. A hectare (10,000 sq m) of corn will grow 30 tonne of corn in a year, a hectare of pasture will grow 16 tonne of grass in year on the same land. The corn progressively wrecks the land and needs to be replanted every year. The pasture is perrennial and preserves the carbon content of the soil which is a massive and under reported component of the carbon cycle. 10kgs of grass or corn make 1KG of meat. Humans already have a surplus of corn, they are currently turning it into biofuel.
If you factor in the soil preservation then pasture plus grazing animal is the most economically viable sustainable option because double yield of corn comes at the price of the health of the soil and the humans and the animals that it's fed to. Look at the skeletal record around the time of it's invention for the associated decline in health despite the calorific surplus. Look at why corn fattens cattle.
If land is put to it's best economic use the problem slowly corrects itself as the human population naturally declines with improved standards of living.
If you were able to buy grass-fed hormone free argentinian or south african or russian mince in Walmart at true cost the world and the US would be healthier and wealthier. The invisible hand works as long as negative externalities are acknowledged truthfully but there is a lot of profit in obscuring them.
There is also lot of room for trees around pastured land to offset the methane and sheep produce less methane than beef plus non inflammatory milk plus wool.
Here's one more: http://meatheals.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoTerra
Pointless observation (I said HN has increasingly gotten vegetarian/ vegan [-biased], and not that vegetarians are a majority).
> And secondly, that's ridiculous, the people on that website [http://meatheals.com/] are attributing all kinds of unrelated things to a "carnivore diet".
What "unrelated things"? Do you care at all about your fellow humans beings enough to read through the reports on that website to realize these people are reporting curing whatever ailment they had prior to giving carnivore diet a try?
> Are you seriously trying to suggest that it's a cure-all?
Given that "cure-all" means "a hypothetical substance believed to maintain life indefinitely; once sought by alchemists." and I find zero mention of "cure-all" in meatheals.com - methinks your inferring this impossible conclusion should make a perfect example of that quality "ridiculousness" you are oh-so-fond of injecting in the conversation so as to stop any and all intelligent thinking. Ain't life grand!
I have a general prediction about these products though: I think they'll follow the broad development of art and games. Initially they will work very very hard to produce something that is as close to meat as possible, just like gaming worked very hard at photo-realism for many many years. But once they reach close enough, people will actually get bored and new and more interesting meat-like products, which traditional meat could never produce, much the same way gaming gave up photo-realism and many hit games started taking on more artistic qualities.
They're usually compared to fast-food burgers. Supermarket frozen patties might as well be legacy veggie burgers, considering they're full of soy protein and have a completely un-meatlike texture.
The key, which my mom used to yell at me for, is to put the burgers in an actual toaster(not a toaster oven) on high until they are crispy and sizzling.
It is divine!! (Saying this as a vegetarian whose tried hundreds of burgers.)
Prime grillers have egg whites in them though. But normal Morningstar grillers do not. But normal grillers are no where near on the taste charts..
[1] https://www.morningstarfarms.com/products/morningstar-farms-...
1) Lines of celebrity meat. One might be able to look forwards to, for example, an Angelina Jolie steak.
2) Middle class (well, by then the middle classes won't exist - let's just say "rich people") dinner parties in which the hostess serves her guests herself. On a plate.
Is it cannibalism if it was never part of a whole human, but was instead grown in a vat?
Check out http://bitelabs.org/
Angelina Jolie salami doesn't sound so good; I'll hold out for the steak. Something off the leg, please!
I'm curious to try the Impossible Burger, but I haven't seen it in my area yet.
So much of short-term adoption of these is tied to marketing and time, but their long-term success strikes me as a foregone conclusion.
In marketing, they will need to get past a latent psychological hurdle and in time, waiting for the crotchety older folks who insist, no matter what, on a "real burger." Both things are related to the living generations who have grown up with "real burgers."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/02/burger-king...
I must have high burger standards. One of the reasons I don't cook them often is all the work it takes to make sure they turn out well. Right thickness, right meat, narrow temperature range, cast iron... most home made burgers, including backyard grilled, are so dry & bland you can't eat them without lots of ketchup/mustard/BBQ.
I'm allergic to legumes though, so will continue to consume fish, eggs and meat.
I look forward to trying a Beyond Meat burger / sandwich sometime.
It looks more like meat, sizzles like meat, seemed to have texture of meat, and mostly taste like meat. Not quite meat, though! I'd say main difference, which could've been how it was cooked, was that it was soft and crumbly. It about fell apart vs how most burgers are solid. That's a drawback for most but better for a certain niche in my testing. I might try to sell them that finding, though, given it would expand their market.
A&W was our go-to fast food hamburger place even before beyond meat burgers as their veggie deluxe burger was already fairly good, though I'd still order a meat burger.
Now we both get the beyond meat burger and I honestly can't tell the difference between them and their standard meat patties. Granted, that's a lower bar than fresh ground beef coming off a barbecue, but still impressive.
Granted that Carl's loads their stuff up with ridiculous amounts of sauce as a way to mask their crappiness, but still ... I don't think I'd be able to reliably tell the difference in a blind test.
Given a good burger from a high quality pub and grill or similar, I might be able to.
But as far as I care, that can just become an occasional treat, as it pretty much is now. I'm waiting for a little more word on the nutritional science of these things, but once they look good there, I'll be happy if they replace my regular burger patties pretty much everywhere.
I've never bought (individual) stock before but I'm sorely tempted to buy some of this a few days after it becomes available. Absent some Theranos-level fuckery, I expect that these guys (and their competitors) are going to be huge.
Same for myself. I think this industry will be massive. Never bought individual stocks before. I don't know where to start.
For me, meat tastes amazing if I'm honest.. And I've noticed I tend to prefer burgers that aren't pretending to me meat. In a local pub the other day I had a red pepper and spinach burger that was amazingly crispy on the outside.
What did surprise me was the aftertaste. I get a fairly strong aftertaste when I eat chicken, for example, but not beef. I'm certain not everyone experiences that, and I've never had an explanation. Interestingly, after the impossible burger I got the same strong aftertaste. That may be a clue I can use to identify what causes it to happen for me.
I'd have another one, but I do prefer the beef version a little, and I don't often go to Super Deluxe so when I do it's going to be the real deal.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv7CnCKB5Sw/
- Subway should have leaned into their use of soy in their deli meat [1] and came in from the high end with it being the more expensive, high end, healthier, better for the environment product
- There should be high end burger chain which give you an eighth of a pound real meat burger patty for taste reasons and an eighth of a pound vegetarian patty for health and environment reasons. If everyone switched to such a solution, we could could our greenhouse gas emissions from burger production in half. In all honesty, this comment is based on superficial skimming of the following article/Beyond Meat press release [2].
In fact, the Asian means of eating tofu is fundamentally different from the vegitarian way of eating tofu. The Asian means of preparation is typically 75% tofu and 25% is meat for taste. When you go 100% tofu, its no wonder most people won't touch it.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/01/517920680...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/how-bill-gates-backed-vegan-...
"Producing Beyond Burgers uses 99 percent less water, 93 percent less land, creates 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 46 percent less energy than producing beef burgers, according to a September report commissioned by Beyond Meat."
I do this at tasty burger in boston. (order one meat burger and one veggie burger.) Shake Shack has a Shake Stack which is their meat burger topped with a deep fried mushroom burger. I'm not sure either of these is much healthier than eating pure beef, but the combo of the two patties is quite good (and presumably more eco-friendly).
The idea came to me when my takeout order was mixed up and I got a veggie burger. On my third bite, I thought, not bad, but this could use a little beef flavor.. (Shake shack came up with it independently)
We have a vegetarian restaurant in town that deep fries everything, leaving me wondering about the health value..
We'd be eating less tasty burgers for no real reason. Even eliminating meat farming entirely would only reduce the average American's GHG emissions by about 3%: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/climate/cows-global-warmi....
Globally it's quite significant, but "get[ting] in front of developing nations eating of ruminants" is a much more politically fraught issue than doing the same in the U.S. My brother and I are 3-4 inches taller than my dad, because we grew up on a meat and dairy rich American diet, versus the rice and lentil-based diet my dad grew up with in his village in Bangladesh. Help me figure out the right messaging for what we should tell Bangladeshis that they shouldn't eat meat now that they're finally getting to be able to afford it.
As to the other components of GHG emissions--those are ramping up outside the U.S. as well, explosively so. Food delivery services are becoming quite popular in Dhaka. Help me figure out the messaging for how we tell Bangladeshis they can't have drive-through Starbucks and avocado toast like western people.
We emit 3x the emissions as everyone else. The fact that relatively meat is smaller than other places isn’t interesting. It’s lost in the statistical wash of our extreme usage but accounts for a large portion in real terms.
There is virtually no evidence that suggests calories from meat are better for your health than other protein but ruminant protein especially is carbon intensive. So the message is straightforward western countries moving to plant based protein decreases inequality in comparison.
No, your dad is likely shorter due to basic malnutrition. Malnutrition is caused by lack of appropriate macro and micro nutrients, irrespective of their source. Studies have shown that properly nourished vegetarians, vegans and meat eaters grow to the same height.
As for what to tell Bangladeshi's, maybe try "Bangladesh’s population at risk of sea level rise is predicted to grow to 27 million by 2050" http://icccad.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IPCC-Briefing-f...
Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here. You see the exact same phenomenon among the U.S.-raised kids of Bangladeshis/Indians/Pakistanis from very comfortable families. The kids are way taller than parents who did not suffer any malnourishment back home. Just because it is theoretically possible to construct a vegan diet that results in the same growth as a diet including meat and dairy doesn't mean it's easy to do so with the kinds of foods readily available in the developing world.
>Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here.
For sure, just like debating about meat consumption and pivoting to just dairy consumption as proof...
As to your second point--the issue under debate here is not meat consumption, but rather the CO2 emissions of animal agriculture. So we're talking about telling Bangladeshis to be vegans, not merely vegetarians.
Huh, these numbers really disagree in a couple places.
Nevertheless it seems like the most important way to minimize CO2 is to focus on grains, and that milk, eggs, poultry, pork, and fish aren't all that bad compared to the average vegetable.
And milk's easy to budget for, two cups a day is only 10% of a kid's calories.
It is, however, closely linked to status, especially in the developing world. Telling Bangladeshis they shouldn’t eat meat because Westerners blew the global CO2 budget is... problematic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25527754
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dairy-and-cancer/
What is becoming popular in Dhaka is, as you said, food delivery services which are mostly by scooter because of obvious reasons. For delivery, you're not going to order a sandwich, again for obvious reasons.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ganges+river+plastic
Historically when the people disposed of their waste into the river, it was feeding the ecosystem, but that's not the case any more now that they've inherited disposable plastic everything from the West. It's easy to turn a blind eye and say "yeah well, our plastic trash in North America is being properly land filled, so who cares— this is a problem for India to solve." But it's not that simple, of course: we exported the problem to India, and I think it's on us to figure out what the solution looks like too, and model it in our daily use so that it's reflected in the cultural exports (TV, movies, etc).
You see this same basic pattern for a lot of things, where the emerging middle class in a growth economy looks at their English-language media/entertainment for cues on what their next life upgrade should be, and some is mostly good (cell phones, clean water, organic food), but a lot is bad-to-horrible, at least from an ecological standpoint (single use plastic, personal automobiles, overseas vacations).
Are you trying to say we shouldn’t save the world from environmental destruction because it might be awkward to ask some people to switch to fake meat?
How about this messaging: “we are destroying the world, we need to stop”
No, but by convincing people to give up meat, to travel less, to stop using disposable everything, to institute a carbon tax, etc. etd. you just eventually might. As 'Pfhreak wrote elsewhere in the thread, this is not a problem of finding 60%-there solution; it's a problem of repeatedly applying 0.5% - 3% solutions. Every component of CO₂ footprint is a minor one.
Also, don't forget the US is extremely good at exporting its culture. It seems whatever fad happens there, very soon half of Europe does it too, and a lot of other places aspire to it. Doing something in the US is likely to have quite big impact outside it as well.
We're our worst problem in this fight :/. Outside HN, whenever I mention online or offline that carbon taxing is good and we really need more of it, people look at me like I'm crazy and/or call me communist. Regular people here in Poland seem to universally think along the lines of "look at our gasoline places, it's so expensive [compared to the US], most of it is taxes already, and you want to add extra tax?!".
You could suggest changing the road taxes or exempting gas from VAT at the same time as implementing a carbon tax. It would actually come out cheaper, if we can get the carbon capture price down to $100/ton or less (some estimate $60/ton is viable).
Simply put no matter what the reason to oppose meat consumption in the US still holds up. It’s a great improvement in real terms & it provides a stronger moral argument.
I'm curious, have you actually tried these (especially the newer versions)? Honestly they're getting close to indistinguishable.
Honestly, GHG aside, I'd be excited for when this scales up and becomes cheaper and easier to produce than real beef.
Am from Asia and I've never heard and seen this in my life. Tofu is _never_ mixed with meat. That's a bit of an absurd statement as tofu and meat have nothing in common unless frozen and deepfried (then tofu has a texture of chicken).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_doufu
That sounds a bit hand-wavey / crystal ball / technical analysis, but has reasons in fundamentals: Several years of collective prosperity decrease risk aversion, low inflation / money targets (thus interest rates) make (over) investment cheap (offices, tall buildings, capital stock, etc), collective memory fades.
Certainly not written in stone, however. A book recommendation covering the above, and influence of such fundamentals in long term financial trends: Irrational Exuberance by Robert J Shiller.
How big is your short position?
When others are afraid, be brave, etc...
I think it'll be a fun project to scrape the data and create some visualizations with it. Look out for a Show HN from me if you're interested!
Surprisingly, it doesn't look like the overall number of IPOs is any higher this year than in the past.
I don't think it's ever going to disappear completely, but I think it's going to become something most people only enjoy once in a while if at all. I also think that meat consumption is going to be viewed in a significantly more negative light over time.
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-and-seafood-production-consu...
People forget that for much of the 3rd world, meat was an unaffordable luxury. It won't be for much longer as they develop.
Also, meat is a natural part of a healthy human diet. It's unrealistic to think that meat consumption is going to be viewed as tobacco. It's even more unrealistic to think a natural food source like meat is going to be replaced by lab produced processed food.
I disagree.
https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
https://www.cancertodaymag.org/Pages/Winter2018-2019/Carb-Co...
Plants create carcinogens to defend themselves from being eaten.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/01/228221063/wh...
Not to mention carcinogenic pesticides all over vegan food.
https://www.businessinsider.com/kale-dirty-dozen-contaminate...
Your post reminds me of another false vegan trope. Fish is bad for you since it is filled with cancer causing chemicals. Yet, the healthiest and longest living people on earth are fish consuming japanese and mediterraneans.
A healthy balanced diet. Not the unhealthy extreme vegan or carnivore diet. But the natural human diet that all humans have always eaten - omnivore diet.
All blue zones - areas with people living the longest - have similar diets. So you can eat meat and be healthy, literally one meal per month. That's it.
If the imitations can get good enough and also beat on price to boot, that could seal the deal as well.
This is overblown and not nearly as well supported by science as you think. Just like how people said for decades that saturated fat is bad for you. It's provably not.
I think the parent comment had a point about morals, not the practical aspects. It is already starting to happen: what will my friends think of my leather jacket, can’t propose a barbecue for a company event, etc etc.
I'll be happy to take another look when they can grow A5 Wagyu beef in a lab and not just trying to make plant matter act like meat.
To be perfectly blunt this entire thread is vegans patting themselves on the back. It's an echo chamber.
Killing an animal on a farm quickly and painlessly is a lot kinder than what that animal would experience in nature left to their own devices. Sadder still is that I suspect that a lot of these farm animals are likely to go extinct when the technology to grow meat in a lab becomes viable and cheaper. Considering how close we are to being able to produce human organs that can actually be transplanted into a live human it's not far fetched to think we'll be able to grow high quality, beautifully marbled muscle tissue of various species in the not too distant future.
But if many big companies, highly invested in meat are investing in substitutes as well, they are not doing it from moral/humane/environmental reasons, they are just doing it for the money, so for those that are dedicated to this, it seems promising (if they can just survive the punches that "big meat" will send their way)
A+ product that stores struggle to keep stocked.
It's been a long time time since I've admired a company as much as this one.
Edit: Important to note that A&W Canada is completely independent from A&W in the U.S.
Does anyone know where I could taste-test a Beyond burger vs. Impossible burger?
Definitely interested in this space as it's one of the surefire ways we reduce both energy and water, and I have family who are veggie and this makes it easier for me to connect with them.
https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600190998...
I guess I'll look at some Safeways to see if I can find it, maybe it's in some stealth release or something.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinatroitino/2018/11/08/im...
If I made a creme brulee recipe without having ever tasted it done correctly by someone else, I wouldn't know if the texture/taste was correct.
I have the same fear with the Impossible burgers - I want one cooked the way the company intended, so I know what it's supposed to taste like. Otherwise, my first impression of it might just be due to me over/undercooking it.
[1]: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/fellow-creatures-978...
But if they have an impossible burger, I'll get that every time, even if it costs more.
My hope is that over time their costs come down so much that the impossible burger is actually cheaper, at which point I think we'll see a sea change in meat farming. If getting the meat free burger at McDonalds costs less than the meat one but tastes the same, that right there would be huge for the environment.
I always find the video presentation more insightful.
Edit: Directly linking to the video didn't work.
Negative lobbying is something that fills me with anger unlike any other and not eating meat and diary JUST to stop giving those fuckers my money is reason enough. Of course, there are many other great reasons to do so (animal welfare, environment, health) - and no objectively good reason to eat meat and diary.
And no, reasons such as:
- "We need meat to be healthy"
- "Humans meant to be eat meat historically"
- "I love the taste and this is a free country"
Are either scientifically wrong or not objectively good reasons.
Also tried to cook some Beyond Meat burgers the other week. The stench was horrible, even my roommates noticed. Topped with mayo, garlic butter, bbq sauce and onions it did kinda hide the horrible flavour, but still I couldn't finish it. I could feel that horrible flavour for a day or two after.
Really had big hopes for it and will definitely try again, but for now it's a joke.
(Besides, that part can always be tuned... )
Fake meat - non starter (same with mylks).
But then there are hundreds of marketing articles saying that some vegans are disgusted how "real" of a meat this taste like. Pure lies.
But the fundamentals look pretty good. Its a bioreactor, it scales, it can use varying feedstock, and its good nutritive value.
TVP which proceeded it, in my highly subjective opinion was crap in comparison. It reminded me of badly cooked stewing meat, when the connective tissue is left behind and the good bits are now in the stock: you don't want to swallow this.. cellophane meat "thing"..
It wasn't initially about vegetarianism as a holistic view avoiding animal products, as much as fending off starvation from lack of food. If they had found a way to make beef farming productive enough I think they would would have gone there. The input was surplus product from a flour producer. I don't think they were radical vegetarians.
They did subsequently get on the vegan bandwagon but had lost market momentum, and the whole 'fusarium is not a mushroom' and 'you are allergens' kind of killed it for a while.
That being said, like any meat or meat-substitute, I wouldn't consider it a "health food".
I think this is a pretty good synopsis of why canola and PUFA's (polyunsaturated fatty acids)are bad. I actually think it's possible that we should be vilifying them on the same level as sugar. https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/pufa-s-the-worst-thing-for-y...
This is why I now cook entirely without oil.
https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=133...
It's like funding of the building of a church for the PETA crowd.
Off the top of my head, in terms of commercial availability I've seen them at:
Beyond: - Safeway (both meat patties, and frozen boxed crumbles) - Del Taco - Carls Jr. - Veggie Grill
Impossible: - Umami Burger - White Castle - Smaller retail locations - pilot w/ Burger King
Beyond also has a lot of products, from sausages, crumbles, and different flavors of meat.
I think Impossible is highly focused on reproducing ground beef.
I don't follow, how is competition bad in this case? Sounds like the opposite to me.
For example, both Beyond Meat and Quorn sell meatless "beef" crumbles. Each has a noticeably different flavor and fairly different nutrition (The Quorn has significantly fewer calories, but less protein for example). I would be sad if either one went out of business because I use them differently.
I am a big burger consumer, and I tend to rank the various substitute burgers on a scale that indicates how satisfied I feel afterwards, and how accurate the imitation is.
I felt like the Beyond Burger was 8/10 in terms of being as satisfying as a burger, but only 6/10 in terms of being a good imitation.
For an example on why I use the different scales, plant-based patties tend to sear differently than real beef, tending to produce a thin crisp layer. This isn't great in terms of being a good imitation, but it actually has really good mouthfeel, so it increases the enjoyment.
Being 8/10 in terms of satisfaction is a pretty important threshold for me. It is at the level where I can eat one and feel like I ate a burger. Most veggie patties are in the 4-7 range (Gardein is pretty good) in terms of satisfaction, and even lower imitation quality.
When I first had the Impossible Burger a couple years ago, it was 9/10 satisfying and 8/10 imitation. It still had the distinctive plant-based patty crispiness, but the internal texture was much more accurate. This was back when the Impossible was only in a few dozen restaurants in the country, so this was at a nice place in Las Vegas. I got an Impossible and a Wagyu beef burger side by side for comparison. By the time I finished, the most obvious physical difference I'd noticed was that the Impossible burger loses heat much faster than a real beef burger.
In January 2019, Impossible began rolling out their 2.0 recipe, and they are now in hundreds of locations. I got the 2.0 at an upper tier burger place ($20 for a burger) and again did a side-by-side test. The Impossible still lost heat faster than a real beef burger, but the characteristic thin crispy sear on the patty was reduced significantly.
Visually, the inside of the patty was virtually indistinguishable from real beef. It's 10/10 satisfying and 9/10 imitation. I think it's indistinguishable from a Burger King quality burger, but still not quite as hot and juicy as a more expensive gourmet beef burger. I imagine they might be able to just make a less healthy version that is packed full of various oils and whatnot to get that quality.
Once the Impossible Burger rolls out to grocery stores later this year, I will never have to buy ground beef again.
To Beyond Meat's credit, their Beyond Brats are the best veggie sausage I have had, and as far as I know, Impossible doesn't have immediate plans to take on that market. I've found that they have supply chain/production issues with Beyond Brats, though, as they are almost always sold out at the Whole Foods near me.
TL;DR I believe Impossible Foods is going to eat Beyond Meat's lunch
With that said, I think the flavor and quality of Beyond is higher, for me. Impossible still hovers around low-grade, poor texture ground beef. I want them both to be successful because the more options we have the better.
I think Impossible is likely to be more successful targeting current meat eaters, though, so you may be right about their longer term success.
I've found the variance of each burger to be highly dependent on the preparation, so I think a real fair test would be made-at-home side-by-side. I enjoy the Beyond patty made at home on a skillet without much extra besides a bun and catchup and mustard, this says a lot.
I'm a recent vegetarian (4 years).
I agree that preparation has a huge impact on quality. I once had an Impossible 1.0 that was so badly prepared I ate 1/3 of it and then gave up.
I am wondering if Impossible will come up with a specialized cooker (imagine a waffle press sort of thing, but for burger patties) that will automate temperature management and cook time in order to reduce variability. But I assume their final goal is to just make their substitute cook exactly like real beef.
When you compare the Beyond Burger to the Impossible Burger, the Beyond Burger feels like a block of red play-doh. "Meat is red so this must be red."
Don't get me wrong I will still eat it, but the Impossible Burger feels miles ahead, its just that the Beyond Burger feels to have hit the larger markets first.
I can't wait until I can start cooking my own Impossible meat at home, here's to hoping that the Impossible Burger does well at Burger King's trial run.
Again, this is why I'm hoping they are both successful.
It does not work particularly well for dietary reasons. The calorie reduction will reduce inflammation if it is not offset by additional excess calories but the omega 3 fatty acid profile will not compete financially with fatty acid profile of algae or grass-fed protein. The beyond meat diet will therefore lead to more inflammation in the general population and increased rates of chronic illness including diabetes and brain disorders.
A moderate amount of protein and fat from Grassfed animals and oily cold water fish combined with moderate low inflammatory carbohydrate starches and loads of vegetables is the optimum human diet.
Every other diet has a negative externality of increased chronic illness. Health outcomes as measured by life expectancy are not better for the average middle income human who survived to the age of 5 in 2019 than they were for the equivalent dataset living 150 years ago in England.
And then you have the vegans. What is more precious? a virus, a amoeba, a bacteria, a prokaryote, a eukaryote, a fungus, a plant, a insect, a arachnid, a cephalopod, an invertebrate, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, a political ally, a community, a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child or a vegan's theory?
Rhetorical question. Human Parents minimise the suffering of their children and expect the favour to be returned in kind.
The choice between animal suffering and decreased probability of the onset of your child's future chronic illness is easy if enlightened. Beyond meat therefore doesn't work for economic reasons and is a fad of unknown duration.
The negative externalities of a vegetarian diet are currently obscured by the corn lobby and any other political factions currently profiting from the sale of inflammatory foods. They love the vegans chipping in. I often wonder if roadkill slowly dying keeps vegans up at night or If they are sleeping through it? And if if they are, how?
As for grassfed animals. Pastured land is marginal for growing starches or vegetables. Solutions are in development for the reduction in nitrate leaching and methane emission. The positive externalities of a low inflammation moderate carbohydrate, moderate protein grass/algae fed diet and the reduction in chronic illness outweigh the negative externalities of the methane. Put nuclear engines in cargo vessels to trade the meat around, methane problem neutralised, global health enhanced.
Food should be judged on it's toxicity to the general population and nothing else. It is the only objective measure and miraculously the economics results in humane farming practice and better human health.
Pretty hard to judge the toxicity of beyond meat and that's why I choose to eat whole ingredients that I process myself. I think they will make some money dependent on flavour, texture, marketing and distribution capability. Although kraft spent 1 billion relabeling their cheese about 10 years back so good luck competing against that. Eventually the human dietary truth will come out and misplaced idealism won't save the business from public knowledge. That could take 20 years but I think the inflammation and dietary literature is going to converge before then.
Bill Gates isn't a vegan.
As for animal protein being necessary for human health, that's not even true in the ideal natural case, never mind the reality of the horror show that today's factory farmed meats have become.
If you think you can meet global demand for meat with free-ranging grazing cows then you haven't even looked at the numbers and claiming that feeding cows seaweed eliminates the methane issues means you also haven't actually looked at the numbers there.
I disagree. He or she is one of the few intelligent commenters on this thread that is not mindlessly grasping on to this alarming vegan/vegetarian trend. And lo and behold, they are getting downvoted to oblivion.
Yet intelligent and educated people do hold beliefs not based on facts, and are unwilling to be questioned.
> Perhaps it should give you pause that so many such people not only consider veganism not alarming but actually positive.
It gives me no pause whatsoever as I'm not someone that so easily follows the crowd. I simply take it to be the case that veganism is the flat-earth-theory of 2019.
> And dismissing it as mindless doesn't really signal debating in good faith on your part or his.
Good faith on my, and others, part and already have come by and been downvoted into oblivion. Have you been watching this thread?
And you wonder why nobody takes your comments seriously. The American Dietetics Association, the largest association of professional dieticians in the world, says vegan diets are healthy and appropriate for all ages:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
Science is on our side. Who's the flat earther here?
> And you wonder why nobody takes your comments seriously.
My cheeky comment, in regards to veganism being the flat-earth-theory of 2019, was in response to your ludicrous suggestion to me that I should blindly accept something silly just because "so many people [...] consider veganism [...] actually positive". And it is nothing to do with my next response (to your follow-up comment of equally no substance re: good faith) that good faith on my, and others, part have already come by and been downvoted into oblivion (furthermore you are totally unaware of this happening).
> The American Dietetics Association, the largest association of professional dieticians in the world, says vegan diets are healthy and appropriate for all ages:
So what? Is the American Dietetics Association your religion, and whatever they espouse is to be taken as gospel?
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
Just because something is posted on pubmed does not make it a fact.
> Science is on our side.
Hah, nope. Science is _not_ on your side. And posting links to pubmed does not automatically make you scientifically-minded. The American Dietetics Association, and the like, that you so fondly identify with are wont to rely on epidemiological studies (which are not exactly science).
The vast majority of human nutrition research — including the lion share of the research cited in the EAT-Lancet report — is conducted using the tragically flawed methodology of nutrition epidemiology. Nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00105... and here <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337>], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions, most notably Dr. Walter Willett. An epidemiologist himself, he wrote an authoritative textbook on the subject and has conducted countless such studies, including a recent, widely-publicized paper tying low-carbohydrate diets to early death. In my reaction to that study <https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/diagnosis-diet/20180..., I explain in plain English why epidemiological techniques are so untrustworthy and include a sample from an actual food questionnaire for your amusement.
Even if you think epidemiological methods are sound, at best they can only generate hypotheses that then need to be tested in clinical trials. Instead, these hypotheses are often prematurely trumpeted to the public as implicit fact in the form of media headlines, dietary guidelines, and well-placed commission reports like this one. Tragically, more than 80% <https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-... of these guesses are later proved wrong in clinical trials. With a failure rate this high, nutrition epidemiologists would be better off flipping a coin to decide which foods cause human disease. The Commission relies heavily on this methodology, which helps to explain why its recommendations often fly in the face of biological reality.
(Straight from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190... )
> Who's the flat earther here?
Given that science was never on "your side" in the first place, all you need to do in order to answer this question is to look in the mirror.
Also, the diet you choose has consequences for the environment and the animals you eat so it’s not simply a matter of individual choices. Red meat in particular has a huge carbon footprint.
A plant sits in one spot thinking how to poison anything that eats too much of it. An animal moves about consuming as little poison as possible.
Once you're assured of enough calories (which used to limit population growth) the primary solution is to eat some calories from animals that evolved systems for processing plant toxins to minimise your toxic load.
I used pea goo in the comment because I went to the beyond meat website and looked at the ingredients in the impossible burger. The impossible burger consists of about 15 chemical compounds, combined by people highly financially motivated to optimise flavour, texture and colour and the primary component is pea protein. If you can think of a more concise name I'm all ears but it's definitely not a iphone or macbook air.
Vegan's choose pea goo over lamb. That's their choice and some vegan's will have the genetic biochemistry to live healthily on a plant based diet. The general population doesn't share that biochemistry. Veganism is the most environmentally sound option if one's health optimises from the diet. Unfortunately this is not the case for the majority of the population. The average vegan should be admired for their sacrifice, not their logic.
Plant based diets are highly anti inflammatory which helps a lot with depression. And the mammalian proteins in meat & dairy seem to be powerful triggers for the immune system to start attacking itself.
I don't have one for immune disorders. I apologise but people with multiple sclerosis don't gravitate towards vegan diets.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181302/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6412750/
Can you please share a few of the best studies you've seen on veganism reducing depression and autoimmune disorders, I'm genuinely interested and hope I'm missing something.
Also, low inflammation carbohydrate? Can you show me plant foods that cause inflammation?
I've never understood this convention and it always causes my brain to short-circuit when trying to read it. Is that $22 Million Monies, or $22 MegaMillions
I'm assuming that the shorthand is supposed to be read as: $22 Million
So then I spend the next 5 minutes stuck in a feedback loop of what the hell am I supposed to be thinking.
So MM is thousand thousand's, or million.
The reason it was adopted in finance was because M means thousand, except in English where we adopted M to mean million.
Of course metric units where M = million makes more sense today, though. It's a legacy thing that stuck around.
I can't find a Roman use from quick searching, and the Greeks represented 500,000 with it.
MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1))
Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more.
> MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1))
> Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more.
Tell that to the entire practice of accountancy.
If you came to my workplace and used a single 'M' everyone would have the same response here but inverted - how using a single M makes no sense and is inaccurate.
I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli). So using a single M still means thousand, will MM means million.
I was hoping I wasn't the only one, and happy to see a vigorous conversation start because of it. (I inherit Karma in a MLM feedback-loop right?)
>I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli).
That's just silly, _everybody_ knows it stands for cents-per-mile, and how truck drivers are paid. (jk)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
English is in the minority that uses short-scale, the majority of "everyone" uses long-scale, and would therefore assume a "billion" is 10^12, not 10^9 like you would.
(Which is why you got shot down by the grandparent, the metric prefixes are globally unambiguous, your suggestion is completely English-centric)
I believe the M (in $100M) also isn't based in roman numerals but is a convenient dual meaning of Mega- (the metric 10^6 prefix) and the first letter of million.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us... has more background.
I am yet to see a single ONE setup :-
Organic farm for chickens
Organic farm for cattle
Organic + hydroponic farm for fish
They seem to now DEMAND and DOX and "" PROTEST" against small farms and small butchers
yet never going against LARGE CORPORATIONS or using freedom to join the GREENS or parties to vote
Instead they are using violent and anti freedom action to FORCE everyone else not to eat meat
What ever happened to
OUR CHOICE
FREEDOM
Ability to be left the FUCK ALONE for our choices on REGION, SEX , FOOD and political viewpoint
Now you make a very good point that these decisions aren't free - there are lots of concerns to care about and you are 100% correct. But saying there are impacts does not mean (1) that we shouldn't consider the change and (2) that NOT doing the change is somehow free of impacts.
I also don’t believe the intention of these products to make everyone vegan, that’s not sustainable by current output. However, our modern society consumes more much then we ever have as it’s so easily obtained and so cheap. So we clearly don’t need this much meat to be healthy. So I happily welcome an decrease in my meat consumption and for society to greatly decrease theirs.
Grant for the sake of discussion that your body is the work of a designer. The designer's design for childbirth is clearly abysmal: fifty thousand American women yearly suffer severe maternal morbidity. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/607782992/for-every-woman-who.... A designer who flunks childbirth should not be trusted with carnivory.
You contradict your first sentence with your second, when you refer to "evolutionary makeup." Do you have a robust definition of "evolutionary makeup" ?
Most of the scientific research[0] points towards plant based diets being the best thing for us.
[0]: https://www.pcrm.org/clinical-research
OTOH, there is plenty of evidence as to the negative effects of meat on health - the higher fat intake, for instance, and the increased cancer risk.
Please stop mindlessly spreading this nonsense. Meat is perfectly healthy. http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/
"Red meat was classified as Group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans"
World Health Organisation: https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
There have been numerous research studies claiming to tie red meat to cancer (particularly colon cancer), however, these were weak epidemiological studies, and are not representative of results in the field as a whole. The fact is that studies of meat and cancer yield very mixed results. Many studies show no connection at all between meat and cancer, and some studies even show a protective benefit. There is simply no solid scientific evidence to support the belief that red meat increases cancer risk.
This did not stop the World Health Organization (WHO) from proclaiming to the planet in October 2015 that red and processed meats cause cancer. Unfortunately, the WHO report is all smoke and mirrors. To see what I mean, please read my detailed analysis of the WHO report: WHO Says Meat Causes Cancer? http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/meat-and-cancer/
(That's a copy-paste from the originally article that you patently did not care to read)
(Of course, pretty much everything in the US without an organic label is an unholy mishmash of gmos, pesticides approved by captive regulators, and untold gallons of antibiotics. So probably doesn't make much of a difference anyways...)
And it's not like the standard american diet has been doing a lot of favors for most people's health.
https://newfoodeconomy.org/plant-blood-soy-leghemoglobin-imp...
taste, environmental well being, anti-cruelty are all potential inputs into the question "should i try a meatless alternative", and i'm sure there are others
vs
Beef
I will also be avoiding any "burger" that is sugar loaded with maltodextrin.
The nutrition of Beyond Burger is pretty much on par with the nutrition of beef.
I'm not convinced that consuming "plant based alternatives" is a step in the right direction in dealing with health and environment issues especially when compared to more traditional approach like eating balanced meals using a plate model.
Eating more veggies, on the other hand, yes much better.
In what way exactly would "eating more veggies" be much better when meat is already the only nutritionally complete[1] food?
[1] http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/#i16
Easy, meat has no fiber.
Western (read: American) diet consists of over consumption of meat, refined sugar, and processed grains, and woeful lack of vegetables, and lesser extent fruits.
If the value of Beyond Meat is "better for you, better for environment", the health benefits seem dubious at best, and environmentally, I don't know if anyone has compared the impact on a per-oz of beef vs per-oz of beyond meat--though the meat industry at scale has had serious negative impact on our environment (putting it mildly)
Most of us on the western diet, would do better to increase our consumption of veggies.
Yet originally you phrased it as if it were a general truth, so as to (intentionally or unintentionally) have the effect of misleading your fellow humans not born and raised or influenced by dietary patterns of your country, which is what my query was (is) all about.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728515
Vitamin C: No one on the carnivore diet, including those who have been doing it for >20 years (even without organ meats), developed scurvy.
> None of the links you posted have any scientific merit.
Therefore this is such a waste of a sentence (aside from your pulling in scientific authority to back your increasingly senseless beliefs). Ain't life grand!
If I listed the ingredients of a homemade cake, would you also put "vs Beef" next to it?
https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/