I am not getting this. Highly processed foods are the source of all problems and people cheer up for synthetic food!
Meals more often revolve around beans, legumes, tofu, tempeh, seitan. I think since many meat eaters are less familiar with cooking meals around these, they assume vegs are just subbing meat 1-to-1 with foods like Impossible Burger, Tofurkey, Quorn.
More often they are a food for convenience, special occasions like cookouts, specific recipes, or they happen to be the only option at a restaurant. Some I've known have used them as sort of an aid to transition to a plant based diet, if they happen to have cravings for meat.
However it's great to have more choices, and seeing brands like these in store gives more visibility to veg diets. (It's weird to me that this is the case, when the whole produce isle is vegan, but that's the way it is in a meat-by-default culture).
If it's just straw men... nothing is black and white - the same people who say boo to "synthetic foods" (which is obviously a massive scale too) are not the same people who say "meat production is bad for long-term human survival". The issues are complex and overlap in weird ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-...
Oftentimes it's not even intentional. e.g. An ingredient supplier from China delivers whey tainted with Cadmium, this gets mixed into a protein shake powder. Nowhere on the ingredients is Cadmium and the company producing protein shake powder had no intention whatever of producing Cadmium-laced shakes.
This type of thing has occurred multiple times quite publicly in pet foods. Contaminated cat food made from contaminated Chinese ingredients killed an ex coworker's cats years ago, if memory serves the contaminant was Melamine.
An effective means of protecting ourselves from these industrial errors is to avoid eating industrially manufactured foods altogether.
There was a case back in I believe it was the 80s where a red food dye was being derived from Coal tar. When the process worked flawlessly, there was no problem. But the dye was found to be carcinogenic, because the process, as one would expect, had a non-zero error rate. The public reaction to this news is what led to red M&Ms being deprecated for years, even though they supposedly didn't use the red dye in question. Which is the only reason I even know the story. I presume there are many instances of this kind of thing occurring that manage to fly under the radar.
Soylent was in the news fairly early on with contaminated China-sourced ingredients as well.
An even more recent incident has been chopped romaine lettuce as supplied to fast-food chains like Chipotle. Some supplier had contaminated heads with e.coli, the processor then spread the contamination to a much larger scale as they consolidated supplies from multiple farms, chopped it all up, then shipped it out.
By simply avoiding consumption of chopped lettuce, a minimal amount of processing, one significantly reduced the probability they would be exposed to the e.coli.
You seem to have an issue with globalization, not processing.
What does globalization have to do with chopping lettuce on an industrial scale that disperses pathogens across massive batches?
It doesn't matter where the consolidated lettuce came from, the real problem is that it was processed.
Furthermore, in the example I'm referencing, which was thoroughly covered in the US news as the CDC got involved, we were dealing entirely with domestic suppliers from California and Arizona. But I don't see how that is relevant in the least. The problem is that the stuff was processed in aggregate.
I don't want to have to link to the site guidelines, since I'm sure you're aware that this isn't a particularly nice thing to say :/
> What does globalization have to do with chopping lettuce on an industrial scale that disperses pathogens across massive batches?
Chopping the lettuce had nothing to do with E. Coli getting in it; the problem was that the lettuce came into contact with it after being picked. The reason why it ended up getting to a lot of people was because of improvements in transportation and preservation allowing it to be distributed further, not because it was processed.
Processing expanded the contamination substantially increasing its reach to consumers, while also making it more difficult to narrow down which supplier had introduced the contamination.
From the consumer's perspective, by simply avoiding processed lettuce they significantly improved their chances of consuming untainted lettuce.
Talking health here. Nothing to back it up, just common sense about cholesterol and different fats.
Both require, well, processing. I would assume the meat one requires more energy to make.
What matters is how it is processed.
Edit: I believe that there's definitely a potential version of the future where corpse eating will be looked at the same way we look at cannibalism now.
I have not seen meat recommended as food to give newborn infants, ever. They don't even eat solid meals!
The point you were making was clearly "we're feeding newborns dead 'corpses'", so I felt the need to make sure your appeal to emotion was at least somewhat factually correct.