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Comment by trifit | Hacker News Reader

Can’t agriculture workers be retrained to work in other fields? The general consensus seems to agree that our climate is a priority. Now if only there was a way to make those plant burgers tasty

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It would also be interesting to see a breakdown on those jobs: it wouldn’t surprise me if many were slaughterhouse workers, who in turn are overwhelmingly undocumented and egregiously underpaid relative to the labor they perform.

Retraining makes intuitive sense to me, but I’m neither a farmer nor an economist. From my lay-perspective, it stands to reason that we’ll need even more plant burger factory workers (and general plant agricultural labor) as demand increases.

The hard problem is making these products have the same nutritional profile of beef, even the low quality one

It's not going to happen anytime soon, just like Soylent isn't goings to replace meals for regular health concious people

This is my concern also.

>Now if only there was a way to make those plant burgers tasty

As bill (the same guy that funded this paper) said [1]"You can get used to the taste difference"

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gat...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/03/bezos-gates-back-fungus-fake...

[3] https://www.totallyveganbuzz.com/news/bill-gates-alt-dairy-s...

>DM-D and MH acknowledge additional funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

I've found "vegan meat" to be an interesting microcosm of the entire problem. We allowed our standard of living to exceed what we can sustain as a civilization. And we don't culturally know how to "lower our collective standard of living" in a graceful way. To an extent where we are giving up and our only hope is to "make it taste better" and trick people into thinking a downgrade is an improvement.

This entire article's complaint is an echo of this. We can't fundamentally re-work the underpinning expansionism and expectation of monotonic improvement underpinning the fabric of our society gracefully, we just have to hurt people until they accept living on less. Why re-train when you can just let them starve/die of preventable disease. We have to build a culture of "retraining" of "here is a new thing you can do instead". Without that, the only real decision is which people in what order people get hurt, how often and by whom.

The problem with your "retraining" idea is we've all seen Snowpiercer. We're in the back of the train and we know what you're doing up in front.

That is a clever argument and I like it. It calls out the root problem is that in our implementation of capitalism, we don't feel like we are saving the world for ourselves, or even out children, but for the corporate overlords. We have only spite left to offer, not charity or hope.

To oversimplify it, "I'll preserve coal jobs" (not exact quote) was a vote-winner a while ago. It's incredible that there's a political party holding the world hostage with its temper tantrum of "If the other side wants it, we're against it!", but hey, that's how it currently is.

If I can take the outrage down a notch, political parties survive and thrive on opposition, especially in a two party system. "If the other side wants it, we're against it" is the motto of both American political parties. A voting system that could encourage a multiplicity of political parties, reducing the attractiveness of pure opposition, would be a huge improvement to American politics.

> there's a political party

"A" political party?

Perhaps it's a commentary on how similar the US political parties are. The tone of the comment suggested the commenter is from the US, and thus the US is the only place :-)

Yeah it amuses me how the Democratic and Republican parties and their politicians are so similar practically speaking, but the party-goers(?) scoff at this and try to explain how different they are. I assume to make themselves feel better for voting for one or the other.

Wouldn't want the wrong lizard to get in.

I think they taste as good or better than 90% of fast-food burgers. If you top them with pickles and sauces and veg, then it almost doesn't matter what the "meat" tastes like. Plant-based will likely not ever replaced actually high-quality beef, but that's not what most people are eating.

My go-to plant burger is to caramelize some onions in soy sauce and melt a slice of cheese, then a dollop of Korean chili paste. Tastes great. I also make meatballs with Italian seasoning, air fried, then finished in marinara. It's the kind of recipe I used to make with frozen supermarket ground beef and using Impossible Beef doesn't really make a difference. It's not identical, but it doesn't matter. Still tastes good.

A medium-rare prime rib is only ever going to come from a real cow, but I eat that maybe once a year.

Now if only there was a way to make those plant burgers tasty

Have you tried Impossible ‘meat’? It’s nowhere near replacing a steak (yet?), but to me (a meat eater) it’s as good as the average burger. I will choose it instead of beef for that application nowadays.

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