I am going to stick with bison, thank you!
The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
121–130 of 253 posts
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#122Nope. Last time I checked, not all beef is consumed as hamburgers. The alt meat craze (if there is one) is due to the novelty factor. The interest will decline over time. That said, what does a raw Impossible Burger taste like? A raw hamburger? Imagine wolfing down a raw one in front of a group of unknowing and terrified onlookers.
> Last time I checked, not all beef is consumed as hamburgers. The author of the article explicitly mentions using Impossible Burger for non-hamburger applications: "It looked identical to ground beef, so that’s how I treated it. And that’s how it performed. I made sliders, kebabs, nachos, chili, Bolognese sauce, even a little tartare (note: the company frowns hard on this)."
Not all beef is consumed as ground beef. Happy?
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arby's at least would require a complete rebranding in order to sell this stuff. "We have the meats ^H^H^H^H anufactured plant products!" (I'm not familiar with B&L marketing but presumably they would be in a similar position?) I can also understand Chipotle's point of view on this.
Didn't Arby's just recently release a "meat based vegetable" as part of their marketing campaign.
I felt that the "Marrot" fit in perfectly with their other marketing.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#124The naysayers in the comment thread are missing the understanding that the fundamental technologies driving this are all moving exponentially. Beyond Meat's innovation came from a Stanford professor who is an expert in RNA molecules (he helped them figure out their protein structure/selection), impossible foods is a synthetic biology company. Exponential techs always underwhelm in the beginning but soon deliver more…
Maybe with Impossible Foods, but I don't see anything about RNA here:
> The vegan meat substitutes are made from mixtures of pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil, coconut oil, and other ingredients like potato starch, apple extract, sunflower lecithin, and pomegranate powder with a range of vitamins and minerals. Beef products that "bleed" are achieved by using beet juice
Just sounds like a veggie burger that tastes better, and has a VC-funded marketing budget.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#125Pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil etc are Not food. I would not feed this to my dog. In fact, lined up against a bag of cheap dog food, you might pick the dog food... In a world awash in heavily-processed food, we now add this to the mix and get excited about it. Statements about how "inefficient" cows are in making meat re calories ingested, usually fail to mention that for most of th…
Less than 3% of cattle wander around eating wild grass. Most cattle are fed grains, grass, and alfalfa that was farmed on purpose as cattle feed. If cattle didn't need the grass, the farmer would be growing human food on that land.
Less than 3% of cattle wander around eating wild grass.
True, if you limit the 3% to wild grass. But most cows are still primarily fed grass until their final few months when they are fattened on grain.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#126I'm starting to think more and more that people promoting plant based burgers have either never tasted beef or never tasted a plant based burger. If the main concern is environment I get it and go for it. But if you are claiming that plant based burgers are healthier or tastier you are borderline delusional. Last time I cooked a Beyond Meat burger I noticed it was 30% canola oil. 30% CANOLA OIL, might as well just in…
The flavor is better than most fast food beef patties to me and I have higher standards than the average person. To each his own my friend. Taste is subjective after all. Some people claim that American Cheese tastes good and is the best cheese. It is not really cheese and it doesn't taste good to me.
Read this as "American Chinese tastes good and is the best Chinese" - still works!
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#127Pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil etc are Not food. I would not feed this to my dog. In fact, lined up against a bag of cheap dog food, you might pick the dog food... In a world awash in heavily-processed food, we now add this to the mix and get excited about it. Statements about how "inefficient" cows are in making meat re calories ingested, usually fail to mention that for most of th…
Taking food and washing off the carbs gives you not-food? Grinding up food and putting it through a filter gives you not-food? Come on. "Processing" is very vaguely defined, and doesn't correlate very well with health. You can process food to make it healthier just about as easily as you can process it to make it less healthy.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just B12 vitamins Those require processing, and often times the supplement industry isn't exactly that clean. (I'm looking at you cheap fish oil sups) Also you should consider the efficency of what the equillence of plans would take. (More plants requires more land+water, which requires more infrastructure, more transportation, etc). Also, don't forget about soil quality and erosion. You can't just grow infinitely…
You should really look into this more. We already grow more than enough plants to feed the world. The vast majority of them are fed to livestock. Just like the vast majority of water is used for livestock. Just like the vast majority of antibiotics are used for livestock. Just like the vast majority of land is used for livestock.
It's more complicated than that.
The fact that we grow more than enough food for the world and most people on it go hungry is a political problem, not one related to food going to livestock instead of starving children in Africa.
Places with water shortages don't grow animal fodder like corn (for beef) or soy. (for pork) The Central Valley spends much more of its limited water budget on almonds, walnuts, and pistachios than it does on cattle. There is some corn grown in the central valley, but it's almost all sweet corn for human consumption. Most animal fodder is grown in the Midwest and great planes where they have plenty of water.
Sure, it takes a lot of animal fodder to get a relatively small amount of beef, but you get significantly more animal fodder from one acre of land than you do human food. Remember cattle eat the entire corn plant, stem and all; they can digest cellulose, we can't. Humans either eat very small plants, (lettuce, celery, asparagus) or they eat a tiny portion of the plant. (Fruit or vegetables) Corn plants grow twelve feet tall and are densely packed together.
There are numerous things we can and should do to improve the ranching industry. Banning antibiotics for growth is step zero, antibiotic resident disease is terrifying, and it trumps any and all concerns about food. Stopping agricultural subsidies for corn is the next. Prices should reflect the true cost, not the cost once you've subsidized the externalities. But these are political problems, not intrinsic problems with meat.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#129I'm starting to think more and more that people promoting plant based burgers have either never tasted beef or never tasted a plant based burger. If the main concern is environment I get it and go for it. But if you are claiming that plant based burgers are healthier or tastier you are borderline delusional. Last time I cooked a Beyond Meat burger I noticed it was 30% canola oil. 30% CANOLA OIL, might as well just in…
> Last time I cooked a Beyond Meat burger I noticed it was 30% canola oil. 30% CANOLA OIL, might as well just inject cholesterol and fast forward a heart attack. Yes, the Beyond Meat burger does have a substantial amount of canola oil. But what's this about cholesterol and heart attack risk? Canola oil is one of the healthier oils - it's low in saturated fats and high in monounsaturated fats which are shown to actual…
Canola oil looks good on paper, but there is something very unhealthful about it if my experience is any indication. (I have to eat well or my chronic illness gets worse almost right away.)
I avoid most seed oils, e.g., safflower, sunflower (regardless of how the seed oil is grown or refined) but canola is the single oil I take the most care to avoid. I use olive oil almost exclusively.
I don't have a decent theory about why it is particularly bad for me. Sorry I can't be more informative.
Re: The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry?
#130I'm excited for meat alternatives, but have 3 thoughts on them that I haven't seen mentioned yet (I'm 42): * Nearly all of the rangeland and high desert in the western US was destroyed by cattle and sheep grazing over the past 150 years. This is a billion dollar industry with the emotional buy-in of millions of people so I'm skeptical that it will be reformed in our lifetimes. * My digestive system got wrecked trying…
> My digestive system got wrecked trying to be on a mostly vegetarian diet over several years after the housing bubble popped. The gist of it is that the lectins (and other defense mechanisms in the husks) of legumes and nightshades disrupt the mucus lining of the intestines, which leads to leaky gut and stool getting into the body cavity and blood (leaky gut), which may lead to autoimmune diseases like colitis and a…
Ya sorry, it's a relatively new concept:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319593.php
My feeling is that it's similar to how allergies/cancer/etc often have 2 or more triggers that must coincide to set off the condition.
So for example, maybe people who wouldn't typically have gluten sensitivity (a lectin), ended up with it because they distrupted their gut flora by eating, say, the glyphosate in oats (especially processed oats like Cheerios). It could also happen if they eat compounds not typically encountered in nature, like those present in GMO foods.
Western medicine has a blind spot when it comes to these holistic effects because it tends to mainly study single root causes and cures. We also don't yet have enough long term studies, because GMOs only went mainstream around the late 90s and we're only just today able to start tackling big data with machine learning. But many people were wary of herbacides, pesticides and GMOs because there were no long term studies yet. Unfortunately a lot of unscientific practices got rammed to market during the George W Bush years, and during the dot com boom years before that under Clinton where money trumped public health concerns. Ok and really all through the 80s as well...
For anyone who reads this, and especially vegetarians dealing with IBS, what really helped me was the glutamine powder you buy at any workout supplement shop. Then I laid off legumes and nightshades (especially peanuts and peppers) for 6 months to let my gut rebuild. Use a pressure cooker to break down the lectins in beans, and also try de-husked grains like white rice instead of brown rice, or say sourdough bread over whole wheat bread. Then be aware that the gut is always breaking down and rebuilding, so treat it maybe like red meat or alcohol and try limiting yourself to a day or two of beans/salsa in a row instead of eating them every day. Also the Gundry ProPlant protein powder (hemp, flax, spirulina) helped me. If you're under 40 and don't yet have IBS, you might be seeing other symptoms like puffyiness, weight gain and lethargy that feels kind of like chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. For me, that coincided with discovering I had sleep apnea. I had been chronically tired for as long as a decade.