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How to lower the price of plant-based meat

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Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows and livestock are great for environment. They eat plants and clear vegetation and the poop converts to nutrients in soil. People should demand and buy better meat from better farms with better practices.

There is no way to satisfy the growing demand for meat in a way that is not damaging to the environment. And that's leaving aside any questions of ethics for the animals themselves.

What about pricing in all externalities and letting the price equilibrium find a natural state be removing subsidies? People will only buy what they can afford.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are saying to go downmarket because it will be cheaper Ah, yes, the Tesla strategy. Tesla also keeps issuing more shares and has failed to deliver a $20k-$30k Civic/Accord competitor.

Tesla has also proved the market and accelerated the EV roadmaps of most of the other car manufactures.

True, it's done great things for EVs. It has yet to turn that into a business that's more than nominally profitable, so you should be cautious in using its playbook.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#93
post #30

Interestingly it doesn't even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there's some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn't cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I'm not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)

Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap.

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.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#94
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still sustainable farms, and you can of course encourage more of it by buying your meat from those.

Sure there are, but we don't have enough surface area on this planet to replace industrial meat production with sustainable farms without a vast decrease in output.

The price should go up according to the limited supply. That would naturally deflate demand and allow producers to invest in better processes.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you wrote: > Malnutrition is also an externality. a poster addressed that, and now you have 4 more questions, none related to nutrition - and, hilariously, prefaced by the common but ridiculous "the question is" (implying there's one) rhetorical device. this style of dialog is really tiring.

All the questions are related. I am aware that some people can make it work, but if you remove cheap meat, who do you affect? Poor people. My question is, can poor people also eat a plant based diet with minimal malnutrition risk? All the questions are in reference to that. All I see about plant based diets say the same shit without answering the though questions. They always say, "it's possible to be a health vegan…

It doesn’t get much cheaper and healthier than beans and soy.

I’ve never felt this good before and the secret seems to be fiber in everything, even the protein.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#96
post #30

Interestingly it doesn't even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there's some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn't cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I'm not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)

You know, I wonder if a meat-based production system is a hedge against catastrophic/extinction events.

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.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#97

I disagree with some of the premises. First, I think that the right choice is to pick the right protein for the job, and not choose wheat and soy because of price. Mung beans, for example, are expensive because people aren't growing them. If quantity demanded grows, so will supply and supply chains, which will lower the price. It is possible that mung beans (as an example) are marginally more expensive to grow for so…

The protein yield per acre for soybeans vs mung beans is 6x. No amount of try hard is going to make mung bean protein close in price to soy. 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.

>The protein yield per acre for soybeans vs mung beans is 6x.

While this is probably not too unfair for mung vs. soy, it's important to remember that yield per acre can't always be compared directly across crops that grow in different climates. Tropical climates can average well over 50" of rain per year while cold climates are wet if they hit 25", and the conservation of mass already affects cold-climate growth before taking into account any other factors.

Hence chickens, which can live almost anywhere.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#98
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top poster seems to imply that these are good things.

I am clearly stating that raising cows and livestock for meat are better than industrial crops ground up with food coloring and odd shapes. Eating cow and livestock meat is better for people and environment.

Ah yes. The well-known environmental impact of rectangular shaped foodstuffs.

Seriously, this amounts to nothing more than a Naturalistic Fallacy.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#99
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a democracy.

Like the average EU citizen, I don't remember ever voting for anybody who represents me in the EU and I don't know any of the structures of power of the EU or how they work.

I learned the political structure of the European Union in school, several times, once in middle school, once in high shool, with many repetitions in between. If you haven't learned you might either be older than me (I'm near thirty) or the education system in your country has worse issues than mine, or just not interested in Wikipedia ?

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#100
post #30

Interestingly it doesn't even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there's some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn't cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I'm not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)

>> Interestingly it doesn't even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. 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 t…

Well someone is paying for all those externalities. At least let's try and make it the person who benefits from it. Why not start from meat and go from there.
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