Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to lower the price of plant-based meat

us14.campaign-archive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 679 posts

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

#381

Post by pinot »

bsdz wrote: post #171
slacka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chickens are very good reactors for turning carbohydrates into protein. The remnant wiring from my chemistry and biology classes tells me this is impossible. Did a little digging and no animal seems capable of this feat.[1] Chickens are fed a mix of cheap grains, like wheat and corn that are ~16% protein.[2] What they are is efficient at turning this protein into body mass/eggs. [1] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a…

In the UK a popular plant based "meat" is Quorn. I believe that is grown by an organism that is fed glucose. The glucose is predigested maize starch. So perhaps not a single organism but two to make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium_venenatum

You still need a nitrogen source. They are using the glucose energy to turn nitrogen (ammonia in this case) into protein.

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

#382

Post by pinot »

travisporter wrote: post #364
diziet wrote: post #358

From an athletic or 'health' perspective, these plant-based meat substitutes have way too high fat content. You can get 93+% lean beef with 3-4 grams of fat per 20~ grams of protein, or even higher with game meat. None of the plant proteins appeal to a healthy eater, with the high coconut/canola/sunflower oil content.

I see it as them trying to compete with meat. Impossible has higher cholesterol content than beef right now, but I have a feeling this will change as the industry matures.

Plant-based foods cannot have cholesterol.

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

#383

Post by danShumway »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #139
Dylan16807 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And skim milk is 85 and 8, while soy milk is 130 and 8. So I agree that different kinds of 'milk' have wildly different nutrition, but it's not really about dairy vs. non-dairy.

Yes, the problem is not dairy vs. non-dairy, it is with feeding kids who have been weaned a vegetarian or vegan diet in general. For instance, the following is a recent study (July 2020): Vegetarian and Vegan Weaning of the Infant: How Common and How Evidence-Based? A Population-Based Survey and Narrative Review Background: Vegetarian and vegan weaning have increasing popularity among parents and families. However, i…

That's certainly an interpretation of that study. Here's another one.

> Almost half of parents (45.2%) claim that their pediatrician was unable to provide sufficient information and adequate indications regarding unconventional weaning and 77.4% of parents reported the pediatrician’s resistance towards alternative weaning methods.

> Our results show that alternative weaning methods are followed by a significant number of families; in half of the cases, the family pediatrician was not perceived as an appropriate guide in this delicate process.

In other words, nearly half of parents who try vegetarian weaning report that their pediatricians stop helping them or are unable to give them adequate/informed nutritional advice, and unsurprisingly, parents who no longer have adequate access to health resources and information struggle to raise healthy kids.

This isn't an argument against vegetarian weaning, it's an argument for educating pediatricians so they're not shrugging their shoulders when people ask them how to keep their kids healthy.

----

It's also really important here to distinguish between vegan and vegetarian weaning. You're lumping them together when the paper doesn't. Its take is:

> Vegetarian weaning with appropriate guidance from family pediatricians or nutritional experts is possible and it should not be opposed.

> Vegan weaning should be discouraged because serious damages (slow growth, rickets, irreversible cognitive deficits, cerebral atrophy, and also death) have been demonstrated.

This is something that kind of annoys me when it comes up in these conversations. The health risks of veganism and vegetarianism are very different. Being vegan requires paying attention to your food intake, it requires doing some research, because the United States food system is not built around that concept. The risks aren't common knowledge and fewer foods are fortified to deal with problems that vegans face. But being vegetarian is comparatively much, much easier to do, and you're much less likely to make a mistake and end up with a deficiency if you go down that route. They really shouldn't be talked about as if they have the same levels of risk.

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

#384

Post by pinot »

ninetax wrote: post #208

One method not mentioned is the usage of bio-processing to produce proteins identical to those coming from animal products using only genetically modified microbes. The advantage here is that you're getting as close to the real thing as you can.. Actually there's no difference from the real thing at the protein level- though fats and things need to be added back from imitation sources to re-assemble to thing you're i…

For the large-scale tonnage using bioscience to create protein is incredibly capital, energy and water-intensive.

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

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

#385

Post by Badfood »

nkozyra wrote: post #346
henrikschroder wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the parent comment was referring to weird additives and oils Weird, how? Weird, because they have funny names that are hard to pronounce, and are therefore magically "unnatural" and bad for you? Or weird, because their effects on nutrition, digestion, and human health hasn't been widely studied yet?

Both. This pursuit of tasting "kinda like meat" has incurred a lot of odd ingredients most people would normally eschew if they knew the extent of study in human consumption. Plain meat has a much better track record. I don't blame any meat eater for rolling their eyes at this stuff. And the decisions are sometimes odd. Like beet juice being added not for flavor but so it looks like the patty is bleeding. Meat eaters…

Meat has a better track record huh? Basically all cardiovascular diseases are caused by animal products.

Those 'odd ingredients' don't seem so odd to me. Go through the list of a meat alternative one by one, you'll be surprised how mundane they are

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

#386

Post by singhrac »

lhorie wrote: post #378
singhrac wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My disagreement with your comment is based on the words “veggie patties”, which I don’t think really capture what’s going on with “fake meat”. These are not boca burgers, mushroom burgers, or black bean burger (which I eat a lot of), but something that actually (afaict) tastes like meat.

I think there's definitely a gradient in terms of how "meat"-like veggie patties can be. What I take issue with is that instead of offering products for what they are and letting people build their culture around them, it feels like the food industry is essentially operating in tunnel-vision mode and perpetuating what IMHO is a pretty mediocre culinary culture. So while you may get spicy veggie cake hotpots elsewhere…

I sympathize with your viewpoint, having experienced McDonald's in India. My guess is that it doesn't pay to experiment and build a food culture - all the big companies can do is wait for a local success and then try to import it.

Food tastes vary a lot from person and place, so I do think it's very risky. To give you a successful example, poke bowls became popular in the urban US in the early 2010s, and reached my college town around 2015 or so? But my guess is that the locals don't eat there much, just the students. I think it's because people are less adventurous in aggregate than you might think, and the economics don't work out.

See McDonald's international menu, which is in my opinion kind of terrible. There must be something holding them back.

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

#387

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

sitharus wrote: post #351
OJFord wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Impossible Whopper is almost there now. It just needs to get a couple of notches better, and be the same price as a meat Whopper and there'd zero reason to choose the meat Whopper anymore. And if you can get the Impossible one cheaper than the meat one, it will be the default choice, I'm not sure about cheaper , I think that might have some of effects - perceived inferiority, etc.

So much of the population have to eat the cheapest thing possible it'll certainly have an effect. Make it $1 extra for meat, some will take it but many will save the dollar for something else.

I feel it’s not “cheapest” but “easiest” - though the two are inextricably linked: easy leads to cheap.

I wonder if a hole-in-the-wall franchise based on serving Soylent-based food might work - like a Boba Tea or Pho place, but serving insulated mugs of hot Soylent?

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

#388

Post by f430 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #326
f430 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah the whole sustainability issue arises because of our excessive consumption. Just limit your intake by at least 50% or more and then slowly raise it by eating more vegetables. 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 conce…

> 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. The product solves animal cruelty and lots of the customers buy it for that reason, so why should I care very much that the company itself is amoral? > It's even more dangerous now because of the…

> The product solves animal cruelty

explain.

> why should I care very much that the company itself is amoral?

do you realize the paradox of this sentence?

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

#389

Post by hombre_fatal »

m463 wrote: post #96
hannob wrote: 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…

This seems to suggest that you think our meat comes from animals who kinda exist and compete mutually with crops when actually we feed most of our crops to animals.

If there was an ecological disaster that killed crop production, we wouldn't waste it by feeding it to animals for a grossly inefficient luxury item.

It's like when people try to make a "pro-meat" claim by pointing out how much water it takes to grow a pound of almonds, only possible because they never looked up how much water it took to grow a pound of beef.

Post reply on HN