Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

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No, the implications are even bigger than that, because the normalization and adoption will drive costs down. And when meat-substitute burgers are cheaper than meat burgers, and taste as good, they will become the default, and that is going to make a huge dent in the animal industry, which is all sorts of awesome, because the animal industry is all sorts of terrible.

Right now, I'm seeing Beyond and Impossible substitutes at burger restaurants, and it always comes with a couple of dollars surcharge, because it is more expensive. Imagine the day when the meat patty comes with a surcharge, because the substitute is cheaper!

I am always soapboxing about this, but the only way we can meaningfully address environmental or ethical concerns, is by doing it through the economy. The "best" choice has to also be the cheapest choice, because then people will as if by magic choose that most of the time, unlike when you only have people's conscience to motivate them, then the wallet still rules most of the time.

You forget that in America, we'll just bail the farmers out and start shoveling subsidized overproduced meat everywhere we can.

Farmers in Europe and Canada are also heavily subsidized.

Food security. Anywhere paying attention to history knows that you can get starved into submission, so if you don't have food security any money you spent on walls, navies, missile silos etcetera was pointless. So it makes good public policy sense to subsidize local food production and/or have high tariffs on imported food.

In WWII Britain came closest to having to surrender due to food shortages. It didn't have then (and doesn't have now) enough food production to feed everybody, it relies on imports, and during a war that gets tricky. It got down to, I think, one week's rations on hand. If the U-boats had been just a little bit luckier for just another couple of weeks the British government anticipated uncontrollably levels of public disorder and then one way or another surrender.

Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to import staple foods into Japan to this day. The question of whether or not Japan would have surrendered without nuclear attacks is still very much an open one. It's really hard to say what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, but I can say that my mother in law told me that the only reason she survived is because her uncle had a garden and had a few sweet potatoes. Most people that were alive during the war suffers still from ill health as a result of malnutrition at the time. It has given me considerable cause to re-evaluate things I thought I knew.

I'm not sure, but in re-reading what I posted it occurs to me that it's possible to read it as suggesting nowhere else starved (or not as badly as Britain) whereas what I was intending was that Britain's big threat turned out not to be aerial bombardment, rocket attack, or straight-up beach invasion but simply starvation. Invading Britain proved completely impractical, bombing it into submission was too costly to be continued, but starving it was close to working.

Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).

Farming is subsidized pretty much everywhere in the developed world because without it we'd all starve to death.

That cuts both ways. Corn farmers get massive subsidies which amount to subsidies for soy as well due to the popularity of corn/soy rotation (soy, being a legume, has nitrogen fixation properties that improves soil quality.)

There aren't really "both ways" in the sense that the subsidy is equivalent between meat and other uses.

97% of soy meal (itself 80% of the soybean mass) produced in the US is used to feed animals for meat, not for making soy-based meat substitutes:

https://ncsoy.org/media-resources/uses-of-soybeans/

Cheap soybeans makes meat cheaper, but the production of meat is inherently inefficient. If the production of meat substitutes from soy could be made more efficient than the production of meat from soy, then de facto soy subsidies would disincentivize the consumption of meat.

> Cheap soybeans makes meat cheaper, but the production of meat is inherently inefficient.

I think we agree on this.

> If the production of meat substitutes from soy could be made more efficient than the production of meat from soy

It already is far cheaper from an energy-input (hence cost) and carbon-footprint perspective. https://impossiblefoods.app.box.com/s/edwcfyvojzsvzn5d633dxt...

That's why big chains like Burger King are moving to offer something in the space, not out of some ethical obligation about climate change or animal welfare.

The difference is that Impossible and its competitors are making a product competitive with real meat, with nearly the same flavor and texture properties. That's the game changer as it opens a huge market that eschew traditional veggie burgers.

I wouldn't say it's inherently inefficient. It's certainly inefficient to devote the products of cropland to raising animals. But there's a lot of scrub land out there that isn't suitable to intensive farming but where you can still graze cows.

So from an efficiency perspective we wouldn't want to entirely eliminate meat production, just drastically curtail it. But from an animal suffering perspective and a "methane is bad" perspective maybe we do want to eliminate it.

I wouldn't say subsidies would disincentivize meat. I would say they would incentivize both meat substitutes and meat, in an equally proportional amount.

They distort the prices of both soy products and meat, but not by equal proportions - the reduction depends on the distribution of cost components.

Say it takes 50 cents' worth of soy and 50 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of beef, and it takes 90 cents' worth of soy and 10 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of meat substitute. If the effective price of soy falls by 10% due to subsidies (and other costs remain the same), the cost of beef will fall by 5%, while the cost of meat substitute will fall by 9%.

The economics are skewed in the opposite direction, though. It takes many times more soy, water, and energy to produce $1 of beef vs $1 of substitute, because most of the soy you feed the cow is lost to heat and non-edible cow parts.

Once R&D costs of the meat substitute are accounted for, the marginal cost of production is lower. So at the same or slightly lower retail price than meat, an equivalent substitute's profit margin will be huge compared to meat. That's what these firms are after.

And in the long run, industrial scale meat production will take a big hit.

From what I remember reading a while back, 70% of corn in the US goes to animal feed thus making meat a very subsidized industry transitively. Entire US states' agricultural product won't be needed and can be shifted over to other crops, returned to a more natural state, or used for plant based carbon capture. The best industry has some serious competition which will have massive effects up and down the supply chain.

Since you're on your soap box i'll add a talking point.

The number one reason for deforestation in the Amazon is to provide space and resources to farm cattle for beef. My point is, switching to a non animal based burger has larger implications that the overall health of the people eating the burger.

> and taste as good [as meat burgers]

This is a wonderful goal, but I highly doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

I for one welcome the looming cow genocide.

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Or you can tax the negative externalities to account for environmental damage and still allow people to be free.

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