How to lower the price of plant-based meat

Lowering the subsidies over time and eliminating the power that the animal agriculture industry has over politics would do a lot to increase the number of plant-based eaters.

Are we going to have people paying for the "externalities" of all the products they consume?

For example, the people who buy a new phone every year or half (this habit causes a significant amount of pollution, so-called "e-waste"). The people who drive their car everywhere. The people who fly a few times a year. The people who use computers (more e-waste). The people who wear clothes made of synthetic fibers and use plastic-based implements. The people who burn wood, coal or oil for central heating. The people who use electricity (the major producer of greenhouse gas emissions is power production). The people who read books printed in paper produced by felled trees. The people who consume plant-based products whose production is responsible for deforestation, soil depletion, acidification of soil, etc etc. The people who eat fish. The people who eat soy (major contributor to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest). etc etc.

Are we only going to make meat eaters pay for their "externalities"?

I don't know why more people aren't trying to sell this to the "free market" crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat should cost more than it does, not just in the sense of "you're not paying for the true environmental cost", but also in the sense of, "you're not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product."

The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein's growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren't determined just by the free market. That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.

And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I'm not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn't pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we've all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.

For example, let's say we have another potato-famine style event. Even a bio-engineered attack that takes out a crop or crops.

We could scale back meat production and use the crop capacity we use to support the "meat pyramid" to feed people directly until the crisis has passed.

Subsidizing crop capacity might make strategic sense. Sort of like how the just-in-time production pipeline ran into a wall with respect to mask shortages at the start of the pandemic.

The problem is that most of the cows in the world live in India, Africa and South America, regions which have relatively low carbon intensity per capita. In the developed world, agriculture accounts for on average ~10% of carbon emissions, half of which is from cows. Targeting methane makes a small difference in rich countries and on a global scale places an unfair burden on the poorest countries, and politically, severely hurts the perception of climate protection advocacy among farmers, who are no doubt smart enough to know that fossil fuels are responsible for eight times as much greenhouse emissions as they are, and who are generally an extremely sympathetic constituency, cf. recent Indian protests.

In rich countries, transportation and thermal processes based on fuel burning account for the lion's share of greenhouse gas pollution and rightly deserve the spotlight. The outlier is China, which is rapidly expanding meat production along with its transition to a more industrialized economy. Purveyors of meat substitutes might consider taking the Chinese market more seriously, since they have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

The OP does touch on the subsidies by suggesting the producers rely more on soy and corn, which are heavily subsidized, and as are used as animal feed and thereby constitute a pretty major source of the meat subsidy. While not about externalities, I think they could have pointed out the reasons corn and soy are so cheap compared to other plant sources are in large part a result of government policy.

But ONLY if externalities are also fully priced & included for all other products - cars, plastic crap shipped from China, aircon, ... otherwise that kind of legislation is simply discrimination against meat-lovers.

I would think it’s more efficient to get protein from bugs than to go through all the complicated manufacturing process to get “fake” meat, which is very far from being a raw/natural product.

In agricultural, we have added carbon which starts out as natural gas. It then get used to create synthetic fertilizer. The fertilizer is used to grow feed crops, which then the animals eat. The manure is then either dumped or kept for creating new bio gas or sold to organic farms that uses it as an alternative to synthetic fertilizer. The organic farms can then sell feed to more farms, but at lower and lower yields given the same input carbon from the first synthetic fertilizer, or crops that people eat.

One alternative is that each instance pay for carbon it handles, in which case we don't care if carbon is added or not. We could also tax the first instance where the carbon is introduced to the system. A different system could attempt to tax what we find to be the incentive for the system.

Personally I would tax the externalities of synthetic fertilizer because that is instance where extra carbon get added, and it solves part of the controversial issue of biomass production being labeled as carbon neutral when using fertilizer. It will also make animal feed more expensive for factory farms, while grazing animals farms in low population areas can benefit from being more ecological to the environment.

If I am asked to replace meat with plants, these plants have to compete with meat.

I think you are completely wrong.

People eat meat because they like the taste and the texture, but at the same time everyone knows that meat is produced by killing animals, and that it's much less sustainable than vegetarian food.

If you want to get people to switch to meat alternatives, you have to keep everything that's great about meat (taste, texture, proteins), while removing everything that's bad about meat (slaughter, livestock industry).

And that is exactly what this new generation of plant-based alternatives are focusing on, and given their popularity compared to earlier attempts, I think they're on the right track.

Quick question: Are you yourself a vegetarian or vegan?

A common stigma with vegan or vegetarian diets is that of the food not being as good or limited and having something that compares to meat is a plus because it brings light to the endless possibilities in food and texture that a vegan diet without animal meat really has...

a: FOOD especially : solid food as distinguished from drink

b: the edible part of something as distinguished from its covering (such as a husk or shell)

The same as with milk. Nobody had problems with coconut milk until dairy lobby started fearing plant milk competition. And when one buys oat yogurt they know exactly what they'll get and what to compare it with. Or do you think fat free or lactose free cow milk yogurt shouldn't be called as such, since it's its own thing?

How we name things is important and naming things by their appearance and function is completely fine and useful and has been done since ever. Things like turkey ham or turkey bacon aren't new inventions.

The US meat industry is fighting that battle.[1] So far, they're not winning. In the EU, dirt farmers have been able to prevent the use of the term "organic" for hydroponic farms, though.

We can live up to great flavors vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

There's a bright future ahead for new classes of junk foods. Plant-based bacon flavored chips, coming soon to a convenience store near you.

[1] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2021/02/03/Highly-...

But this new fake meat stuff reduced my meat intake significantly. It’s is FANTASTIC for replacing low-quality meat in a lot of cases. I have no need for ground beef/turkey/pork if I have beyond meat ground “beef” in a lot of cases. It’s a straight substitute, and I wouldn’t have thought about it that way if it was posed more narrowly.

That's an anecdote, but I don't think I am an edge case, many people have tried an Impossible Burger who had little to no interest in trying a vegetarian burger.

I think the main reason for assigning the name to these plant based substitutes is to give the public a better understand of it uses and that its a valid substitute. To me, both meat and milk are generic names and its just a matter of time before expanding the definition becomes a non issue

[0]https://www.ecowatch.com/eu-vegan-dairy-law-2650162992.html

But I'm pretty sure you're wrong -- I doubt that these companies would be selling these premium meat-replacement products with the word meat if they didn't have lots of market research on it.

It tells you what you can use the things for -- the impossible and beyond products can be used to replace ground beef in pretty much any recipe, and will do the job. People can use it immediately with the recipes and cooking techniques they are familiar with, it makes the product comfortable and familiar instead of a new thing that requires them to adjust their palettes and learn new cooking techniques.

I think you're right that someone who has committed to a meat-free diet doesn't want or need the label meat. (but they'll buy the stuff anyway if they like it and can afford it, they are kind of a captive market). But when you say "meat consumption reduction" -- if every meat eater replaces say 20% of their meat consumption with this stuff, it would be a gigantic reduction in animals killed (for those who care about that). Assuming there is less greenhouse gas and other ecological damage from these meat replacements, a gigantic reduction in that too.

I dont think you can lump together committed vegetarians with ominivores who may replace a portion of their consumption with these products. Perhaps an ever-increasing portion, perhaps eventually they will become vegetarians. But calling the non-animal-based stuff "meat" is squarely aimed at current omnivores -- and it seems hard to argue that it won't work when it is literally working, as the OP outlines in talking about market share and grocery space. Burger king is selling impossible burgers because they can sell them as burgers; and if they tried instead introducing some new product that isn't meant to resemble a beef burger but is just some kind of "vegetarian food", I guarantee it would sell less not more.

As a meat eater, these recreations are a joke. They can just about compete with chicken nuggets. I don’t like nuggets. So I’ve come to regard them as inedible. Same goes for vegan “cheese”. Bleurgh.

And the thing is, I love falafel. There’s bound to be plenty more plant-based patty things. Veggie dishes that don’t pretend to be something they’re not are delicious. Give me baked onions, baba ghanoush, and celery all day.

>We can live up to great flavors vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

But that's a whole thing altogether. That's like completely missing the point. You aren't going to get meat eaters to switch to plant-based meat patties if they taste like vegetables or fruits.

The problem, really, is to increase the textural variety of plant-based proteins. Currently you have bean products on a spectrum from soft tofu to faux-chorizo, which taste essentially like beans at varying levels of chewiness. (Generally, the two ends of this spectrum are my favorites.) The interest in meats depends at least somewhat on there being a variety of textures (fish, chicken, pulled pork, ground beef); producing just one texture only gets you so far.

A reasonably cheap plant-based mimic of bone broth, Greek yogurt, egg white (protein-based), or parmesan cheese could probably have as much impact as a single meat substiute. A few of these have been made with starches (aquafaba for eggs; various gums for yogurt), but not proteins.

Why would someone choose to eat some mix of pea protein and coconut oil if not to replace meat or make a political statement?

Nutmeats will now be known as nutguts.

I love soy, tofu, cheese, but I do not want to taste or feel the texture of any meat. So I don't think I will ever be eating anything which resembles meat, taste/content/texture wise.

On the other hand, however, I think that keeping things like "chicken", "beef", etc in the names is what is confusing and misleading. I'm a vegetarian but everytime I pickup plant meat and see the words "chicken", etc. on the labels, I freak out.

Can you imagine trying to market tofu as a cottage cheese alternative? In hindsight, it makes way more sense to market tofu as its own thing, and there's a lot of dishes that only work with tofu.

After I got married, my chinese wife related some of her experience with food growing up. In China, they have these veggie cakes that are somewhat similar in texture and seasoning to meatballs, but no one was ever under any impression that they were anything but veggie cakes. They are not marketed as meatballs, nobody thinks of them as meatballs, and yet they are still great.

This idea of trying to market veggie patties as something they are not is very puzzling. It's also a bit sad that it feels like BigFood is trying to tell westerners that they shouldn't get creative with culinary. "Burgers are all you need" is what the messaging sounds like.

Vegetarian patties, mushroom-based recipes, etc can be good and stand up on their own without comparing them to meat, but meat substitutes are good too.

I think if Fake meats aren’t classified as meat they wont get the mind share required to shift people’s habits.

So far my favorite restaurant experience ever was going to Fu He Hui in Shanghai. It's a michelin star vegetarian restaurant, there was no fake meat, but it was extremely flavorful and I keep wishing I could go back.

Ah, yes, the Tesla strategy. Tesla also keeps issuing more shares and has failed to deliver a $20k-$30k Civic/Accord competitor.

What gets me is that I can’t even source tofu that is cheaper than chicken. Chickens are very good reactors for turning carbohydrates into protein.

What??? I don't even consider those older veggie products in the same category as Impossible and Beyond, mainly because I think they taste like shit. Well, not shit exactly, but for me an Impossible Burger can completely satiate my hunger for meat. Morningstar-type burgers do absolutely none of that for me.

This is often repeated nonsense. The reason corn is a popular crop is because it yields the most calories per acre of any crop. Places without crop subsidies grow lots of corn. See Argentina, Brazil, Africa, etc.

People aren't that stupid and the arguments against using the word milk annoy me. I think it's a sign that people are changing their diet and the dairy industry is worried.

To be honest, this sounds like the same controversy as people complaining about almond "milk". I just don't see a lot of evidence that people are regularly accidentally buying vegan food.

Meat has been used to refer to non-animal products for a long time, particularly around nuts. I don't think that the definition has changed as much as people are using a commonly understood term to refer to a category of food that's all used in similar situations and for similar purposes.

meat, n.

1. a. Food in general; anything used as nourishment for men or animals; usually, solid food, in contradistinction to drink. Now arch. and dial. green meat: grass or green vegetables used for food or fodder (see green a. 4). See also hard meat, horsemeat, whitemeat. meal of meat, meal's meat: see meal n. 2 1e.

a900: tr. Bæda's Hist. v. iv. (Schipper) 568 “He eode on his hus & þær mete [v.r. mæte] þyᵹede.”

c975: Rushw. Gosp. Luke xii. 23 “Sawel mara is ðonne mett.”

a1050: Liber Scintill. xlvii. (1889) 153 “Nys rice godes meta & drinc.”

c1175: Lamb. Hom. 135 “Ne sculen ȝe nawiht ȝimstones leggen Swinen to mete.”

c1200: Ormin 3213 “Hiss drinnch wass waterr aȝȝ occ aȝȝ, Hiss mete wilde rotess.”

a1240: Lofsong in Cott. Hom. 205 “Ich habbe i-suneged ine mete and ine drunche.”

a1300: Cursor M. 898 “Mold sal be þi mete for nede.”

c1380: Wyclif Wks. (1880) 206 “Alas, þat so gret cost & bisynesse is sette abouten þe roten body, þat is wormes mete.”

c1440: Pol. Rel. & L. Poems (1903) 185 “Thy mete shall be mylk, honye, & wyne.”

1477: Norton Ord. Alch. v. in Ashm. (1652) 76 “Without Liquor no Meate is good.”

1578: Lyte Dodoens ii. xlvi. 205 “These kindes of lillies are neither used in meate nor medicine.”

1623: Cockeram ii, “Meate of the Gods, Ambrosia, Manna.”

meat, n.

e. The edible part of fruits, nuts, eggs, etc.: the pulp, kernel, yolk and white, etc. in contradistinction to the rind, peel, or shell. ?Now only U.S. exc. in proverbial phrase (see quot. 1592). Also, the animal substance of a shell-fish.

c1420: Pallad. on Husb. iii. 708 “A stanry pere is seyd to chaunge his mete In esy lond ygraffed yf he be.”

1530: Palsgr. 245/1 “Meate of any frute, le bon.”

a1562: G. Cavendish Wolsey (1893) 30 “A very fayer orrynge wherof the mete or substaunce within was taken owt.”

1592: Shakes. Rom. & Jul. iii. i. 25 “Thy head is as full of quarrels, as an egge is full of meat.”

1613: Purchas Pilgrimage (1614) 506 “Of the meat of the Nut dried, they make oyle.”

1679: J. Skeat Art Cookery 30 “First take all the meat out of the lobster.”

1766: Museum Rust. I. lxxxiii. 370 “Low or swampy grounds don't answer well for potatoes,..the meat being generally scabby, close, wet and heavy.”

1802: Paley Nat. Theol. xx. (1819) 313 note, “The meat of a plum.”

1900: Boston Even. Transcr. 29 Mar. 7/3 “Force through a meat chopper with one-half pound nut-meats, using English walnut meats, pecan-nut meats.”

1902: Fortn. Rev. June 1012 “A bit of crab-meat.”

In the EU, you can't sell a concoction of palm oil, whey protein, fillers, flavors and colorings as "cheese" - you need to label it as "breakfast spread" or something like that.

There are different words you are allowed to use for fruit-based drinks depending on how removed they are from actual fruit.

Why not apply similar standards to the ersatz meat?

should we rename mincemeat since it rarely if ever contains meat anymore?

and what about hot dogs...those don't contain dog do they? do we have to rename those too?

Are we even that there yet, seems like wide marketing died off after innovation in the space churned out one ground beef patty mcnugget meat product after another.

I don't mind deceptive labelling if for mass appeal. I do want meat substitutes that actually behave and taste like meat in more than ground form. It's not viable substitute for vast majority of cuisine from around the world, that's before even getting into delicacies like offal.

I wonder what chronic diseases the next generations will have because of eating so much low-nutrition food.

That said, I think there is room for both. In the hamburger/chicken nugget space, I think plant based is going to keep beating cultured for the next decade - if cultured wins, it needs to figure out fat (afaik it still hasn't.)

We're already so far removed from the way out ancestors ate meat (various organs, connective tissue) and this is yet another step away from that.

Cultured meat seems to be a way to get the real thing without the negative side effects of environment damage and animal cruelty.

Sure, KFC, PizzaHut, etc. have contributed significantly to increases in meat consumption, but isn't that exactly the place to start?

Just like BP, Shell, etc. are diversifying away from fossil fuels, the companies you mentioned likely see the writing on the wall. Considering the fact that they already have supply chains in place to support a significant portion of the population, using them as a proxy to get alternative meats to people at a reasonable cost seems like the path of least resistance.

Agreed, these companies in many ways have despoiled the land as you said but their real motivation is generating profit, they don't necessarily care about the food being low quality, they care that it's good enough for people to buy it and cheap enough to sell it.

If alternative meats drive the same demand, or more, as regular meats and can be sold at similar margins, and as a byproduct the companies can say they're on the alternative meats train, I think you'll see them come onboard.

My parents, who are as far from alternative meat fans as you can find, are in complete alignment that eating meat isn't going to be nearly as commonplace in 30 years as it is today and are interested in investing in alternative meat producers just due to the fact that society is trending in that direction.

Of course you've got the rise of countries coming out of poverty whose populace is going to expect to eat a bunch of meat which is why it's critical that we get economies of scale, distribution, etc. nailed down now before they acquire a real taste of beef grown on an industrial farm, instead we need options for them to buy alternative, or potentially lab grown, meats.

Doing so would have the benefit of generating massive amounts of innovation in how food is produced while, hopefully, reducing relative and absolute greenhouse gas emissions.

If you could do it anaerobically, that would help on the energy front, but there's big limit on volumetric efficiency (cell density/tankturn) of anaerobic.

For aerobics, maintaining lab-scale OTRs in 200m and larger reactors is very very power-intensive. kLa is a power-law relationship with power-input

Agreed — but it's an apples to oranges comparison you're making. Highly processed foods of all sorts have added oil.

A more productive line of questioning would compare game meat with whole food plant based alternatives like raw soybeans and lentils. I say this because my hangup with veganism used to be exactly yours here. I used to think there was no way to get adequate macros with vegan food, but it's definitely possible to hit your target macros with determination. Key to turning the corner in my understanding was realizing the fiber content (in grams) must be subtracted — at least in part — from the total carbohydrate content.

Most legumes are essentially a 1:2 ratio between protein:carbs, with negligible amounts of fat. Assuming a target intake of 1.4-1.6g of protein per kg bodyweight, you can readily hit your macros even on a calorie restricted diet (~1600 kcal).

Well, from a health perspective, what you really want as your main drive is high, low omega 6 vs omega 3, high quality fat, relatively low protein and the least carb you can do. Carb is not evil per se, a carb+protein based is, it leads to type 2 diabetes, and pave the way to cancer and cognitive dysfunctions, the key thing in those disease being recurrent and close insulin spikes.

A beef with <5% of fat is a nutritional non-sense, this whole 'eat the least fat possible' fable needs to die.

But otherwise I agree with you: plant-based meat-like patty is the worst you can eat (referring to their current recipes that are loaded with omega 6).

Almost the entire point of cultivating different foods is to enjoy different flavors and textures. If something is tasty but expensive, in terms of money or the environment, we should encourage the people that try to make it cheaper. There's no reason to want things to be expensive and rare treats.

The whole narrative around sustainability of meat has been completely hijacked by corporate interests who wants to push non-meat as meat.

Their whole goal is to enmesh it at a cultural level so that they can increase sales, not really concerned about the real problem which is cruelty, indifference to the treatment of animals by the bovine industrial complex.

We are simply seeing the usurpation of the latter group by a new commerce-first-pseudo-sustainability industrial complex. It's even more dangerous now because of the misinformation and groupthink by self appointed morality police.

Now we just need to dump a few million into "JUST EAT PLANTS" billboards and I'm sure the problem will be solved!

Silly food companies, don't they know that consumers were ready to drop all meat eating at a moment's notice?

Killing the animal is not respectful to its wellness.

The article has nothing about the tech, so you shouldn't be so demanding that people talk about the tech in this particular comment section.

I know how it is, I ate meat at one point too. I had thought that as an elite athlete it was necessary to do so, but now five years without any meat I am stronger than ever. I have never had one of these weird "meat" burgers though.

Americans... eat tofu, tempe, soybeans, long beans, mushrooms, seitan, nuts, kale, seeds, and more for protein and otherwise consume a lot of fruits and vegetables. American food culture is broken and if you live there you need to do everything possible to break away from it, otherwise you'll end up fat and sick like most Americans are.

Mouth feel is heavily dominated by fat, but also texture. I don't know if the cell culture meat lays down muscle fibre the same way actually being a leg of a grazing animal does. Tvp tried to emulate this with spun fibre complexes, I never found it very compelling.

It's not really surprising meat substitution targets ground beef, ground chicken and the like.

I’d love to buy my own self contained steak 3D printer for $10k

I don't get excited about meat for the environmental impact, but rather for the health improvements.

They'll keep eating BBQ wagyu beef, don't worry. But if that's indeed the future they want for us, in the words of Tucker Carlson (PBUH), "I am totally happy to set your system on fire and blow it up".

However please don't compare the modern industrial meat production with anything like farming from, say, 500 years ago, or with ancient hunting. Modern meat production is brutal (for necessary cost reasons) and hugely destructive to the environment.

Which is a good example how "natural" and "been around for thousands of years" does not equal "is good for the environment".

Cows don’t just graze, in fact mostly they’re raised on the same staple crops which humans eat.

Then you don't know what you're talking about. Both are definitely true, despite the meat industry's best efforts to delude you.