Beyond Meat S-1
sec.gov
sec.gov
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
They taste better than grocery store meat too.
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.
[1] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/ [2] https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/live-animal-transport/
"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"
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Is that the least cruel option?
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.
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.
Not only mammals - corvids are known to do that too.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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;
http://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-ther...
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.
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
Here's one more: http://meatheals.com/
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
- 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."
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.
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”
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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..
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).
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?
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.
When others are afraid, be brave, etc...
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.
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.
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'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.
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.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.
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.
But then there are hundreds of marketing articles saying that some vegans are disgusted how "real" of a meat this taste like. Pure lies.
(Besides, that part can always be tuned... )
Fake meat - non starter (same with mylks).
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".
This is why I now cook entirely without oil.
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...
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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, 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.
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.
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.
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)
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us... has more background.
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)
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)
Most of the scientific research[0] points towards plant based diets being the best thing for us.
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.
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.
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" ?
And it's not like the standard american diet has been doing a lot of favors for most people's health.
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
https://newfoodeconomy.org/plant-blood-soy-leghemoglobin-imp...
(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...)
vs
Beef
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.
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!
I will also be avoiding any "burger" that is sugar loaded with maltodextrin.
If I listed the ingredients of a homemade cake, would you also put "vs Beef" next to it?