Earlier quoted context omitted.
That ship has sailed a long time ago with dairy products. Just look at all the nut-based "milks" and "cheeses" and "yogurts".
Evidence of one?
Step into any supermarket...?
How to lower the price of plant-based meat
611–620 of 679 posts
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evidence of one?
Step into any supermarket...?
Referring to milk changing meaning, not the fact that approximately 30 gallons of nut milk can be readily purchased in stores. Just because it happened once doesn't mean a ship has sailed for a general principle.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends. Do you plan to start breeding them relentlessly until 60% of all mammals on the earth are deer? As long as you promise not to do that, we won't have a problem. More to the point, this seems like a misreading of GP's comment. Wyre specifically says that they don't want to impose taxes, that they want to very slowly cut or redirect subsidies instead. So I guess a followup question is, is the government cu…
> That depends. Do you plan to start breeding them relentlessly until 60% of all mammals on the earth are deer? As long as you promise not to do that, we won't have a problem. The number of cows in the world is immaterial to the stated concerns though, since it's not the number of cows that determines the amount of methane produced — it's the amount of biomass they are digesting. So if the number of cows is reduced b…
A couple of problems:
A) different animals produce different amounts of methane. Even among cattle animals, there are efforts to decrease the amount of methane they produce[0]. And nobody is laughing at those scientists and saying, "this is silly, they're still going to eat the same amount of feed so this can't possibly work." It's not just what's digested, it's how it gets digested.
B) if we have fewer cows, we don't need to replace them with the same number of another animal -- the point is we could have fewer grazing animals entirely, because our agricultural industry does not exist in order to feed wolves. We don't need to increase the number of deer by however many thousand times to sustain that ecosystem.
That was kind of my point. If you are planning on keeping the total number of grazing animals constant by massively scaling up the amount of deer, then maybe we have a problem. But why are you doing that?
If you're proposing that the current volume of cows/biomass consumption we have is a natural constant, and that other animals would just move in and take their place -- that's just not the case, we are artificially boosting the number of edible animals in the world, and by extension, we are also artificially boosting the amount of feed produced and consumed. Before the agriculture industry scaled up, we didn't have the volume of corn we currently produce lying around and being mass-consumed by deer. We started producing a lot more corn/grain and then breeding a lot more herding animals that we then fed it to.
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/livestock-ghg-emissions-s...
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to dismiss it outright, but I am mild-to-medium skeptical of this theory. Take a look at some of the recent years of subsidies listed on https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&yr... . It's not just that we prioritize feed crops more than oranges, we also prioritize feed crops more than potatoes and root vegetables. Our corn subsidies are on average over twice as high as our wheat subs…
The strategic goal of having domestic food production and growing specific foods don't necessarily go hand in hand. While it makes a lot of sense to counter a famine with potatoes, in normal times you want to mostly produce what your population consumes. The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. The US produced 330 million tonnes of corn in 2009 [1] and just 55 million tons of wh…
> The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher.
Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it more? Or is it the other way around?
My understanding is that a lot of corn uses were developed in part because of corn subsidies and requirements around ethanol. As corn became an extremely cheap material, people started looking for uses for it. And you can quickly enter a spiral there, where as corn becomes more useful, we subsidize it more, which encourages more companies to figure out how to make more stuff out of corn.
> That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.
It feels like this has looped around and that the current balance of subsidies are no longer about disaster planning. If your starting premise is that we're trying to keep production local (or at least, production capabilities local), and you're also saying that during disaster periods we can pivot to more necessary crops -- then what is the problem with changing how our current subsidies right now are distributed to encourage different crops? What do we lose?
I am skeptical that a dairy farm is going to be able to quickly shift to planting potatoes or grain, it probably doesn't have the equipment or the right land to do that. But taking your argument at face value and assuming they can make that pivot, then we could also collectively decide as a society that we produce too much meat/grain as a nation during times of peace, and we could collectively decide to subsidize local production of more diverse foods. We could subsidize the same number of farmers to produce different things.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. So many non vegetarian/vegan people say stuff like this and it’s just wrong. Or they’ll say “why have a fake burger, can’t you just enjoy vegetarian food, why does it have to be a burger? If you want burger just eat one and stop trying to copy meat, innovate on your own”. It’s just people completely missing the point. If you get fake meat close enough in taste/texture/price you’ll move a large amount of produ…
> If you get fake meat close enough in taste/texture/price you’ll move a large amount of product. But you are not getting them close enough for that. They taste different. They also have different nutritional composition, so if you will just replace meat by then brainlessly you are setting yourself up to failure. Vegetarians who did not eate meat for years claim the taste is similar, but nobody else. And these could…
> But you are not getting them close enough for that. They taste different. They also have different nutritional composition, so if you will just replace meat by then brainlessly you are setting yourself up to failure.
Have you actually tried Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger? If you haven't please do. Just go to your nearest Burger King and order an Impossible Whopper and a regular Whopper and compare them.
They're very close to the taste and texture of real ground beef now, and I think they'll get even better with time, and that they can become as tasty as the real deal, as nutritious as the real deal, and cheaper.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
explain how killing plants is the solution to the subsidized bovine industry's continued production of meats
The former replaces the latter 1:1. That's a solution on the product level. It's not a solution on the systemic level, but that's not what I meant. It's at the same level as "cut your intake 50%", but more effective.
> The former replaces the latter 1:1.
wait what? so everybody is eating grass but being tricked into thinking its meat today? It's going to cause the government to kill subsidies therefore jobs and not get their votes from bovine states?
Do you work for beyond meats or for fake meat industry? You sound exactly like a lobbyist. Ignorant of their commercial interests and completely brainwashed by their cultural narrative.
You know not everybody shares your dull sense of taste right? You know people can taste the difference and they have no plans of accepting the future you fantasize right?
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and another person who completely misses the point, and don't understand why people eat meat. Which delicious vegetarian dishes offer the same taste and texture as meat dishes?
My point is that you shouldn’t expect the taste pr texture of meat if you’re not eating meat. Find vegetarian dishes you like instead. That’s what I did when I was a vegetarian. There is enough delicious vegetarian food to last you a lifetime.
> My point is that you shouldn’t expect the taste pr texture of meat if you’re not eating meat.
This is completely ridiculous.
From your comments, and from other obvious vegetarians/vegans in this thread, there's a weird sense of "sour grapes" combined with some sort of martyr complex.
You're angry, because you've sacrificed to be vegetarian, and now terrible horrible meat-eating people like me can just swoop in, eat stuff that tastes like meat, and be vegetarian without any sacrifice! Without any hassle! Without any virtue signaling possibilities whatsoever! THE HORROR!
Look at this subthread. It's full of people who like meat and eat meat who are singing the praises of these new meat alternatives. And then there's you, and people like you, contrarians who complain that people "shouldn't" like these meat alternatives because "we're missing out on real delicious vegetarian food".
I'm not going to stop you from eating and enjoying your little salads, so why the hell do you have an opinion on what I should and should not eat? Other than the fact that you're losing your moral superiority that you're currently enjoying?
Why else would you encourage people who like meat to eat more meat? Because you want to keep feeling superior. That's what this is really about.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyway I didn't say that ministers are elected as ministers, but to my knowledge for someone to be appointed a minister they must be elected into parliament. That might be the case in certain countries, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_Kingdom says: "In the United Kingdom's parliamentary system, the executive is not separate from the legislature, since Cabinet members are drawn from…
Are you sure this is the case, about the Austrian Independents? It's not very clear from the wikipedia articles on the persons and on the institutions. In any case, it looks like the Austrian ministers are figurheads without real political power, or so I gather from the relevant artice on wikipedia: Austrian presidents gladly accept that their role is that of figureheads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_A…
You misread "president" as "minister" and ignored the fact that (at least) Italy often has expert cabinets, and this whole discussion is pointless anyway since at most what we would be able to establish is that the EU Commission's democratic legitimacy, if any, is through three levels of indirection, which is not a lot of legitimacy.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder what I said in the above comment that started this. You don't like meat, eating meat disgusts you, you don't understand how people can like meat, and yet you butted into this discussion with your completely unfounded opinion on whether or not other people actually like meat or not. You also seem to think that people liking cooked meat somehow means they actually don't like meat, as if liking raw meat is th…
To get back on track here: I am trying to debunk the idea that “[p]eople eat meat because they like the taste and the texture” which you commented after a parent said that “calling plant-based things "meat" [is] a terrible idea” . To quite: > We can have all kinds of flavors for these products, instead of "meat" flavor, not having to "live up to" the meat taste, and mouth feel. We can live up to great flavors vegetab…
> You started this debate by stating as a matter of fact that people “like the taste and the texture [of meat]”. I am trying—albeit really poorly—to say that that simply isn’t true.
The popularity of these products, compared to the multitudes of veggie patties that came before, proves you wrong.
The market for these meat-tasting meat-textured vegetarian alternatives is much bigger than the market for veggie-tasting bean patties, because there are a lot more people who like the taste and texture of meat than people who like the taste and texture of bean patties.
If it were not so, these new products would have failed as horribly as the ones that came before. But they're not, because the closer they get to the taste and texture of meat, the more popular they become! Why? Because people like the taste and texture of meat!
I understand that you are sad and angry and upset that people like the wrong food, and that people should like the right food, just like you do! But you're in the minority opinion on this one, so suck it up, buttercup.
> I won’t be eating the Beyond or Impossible products because, honestly, they suck compared to the alternatives.
The one thing that comes through in this discussion, which I also laid out in another subtree, is your intense food snobbery.
These new meat alternatives technically make people vegetarian, but they're doing it "wrong", so they're not "real" vegetarians, they're not yet enlightened to the glorious "infinite" tastes and textures of real vegetarian food. So if these horrible lowbrow troglodytes could just go back to eating real dead cow meat, people like you can go back to feeling smug and morally superior again, and then everything is right in the world and you don't have to descend from your ivory tower to scold the masses again.
Get outta here.
Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure this is the case, about the Austrian Independents? It's not very clear from the wikipedia articles on the persons and on the institutions. In any case, it looks like the Austrian ministers are figurheads without real political power, or so I gather from the relevant artice on wikipedia: Austrian presidents gladly accept that their role is that of figureheads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_A…
You misread "president" as "minister" and ignored the fact that (at least) Italy often has expert cabinets, and this whole discussion is pointless anyway since at most what we would be able to establish is that the EU Commission's democratic legitimacy, if any, is through three levels of indirection, which is not a lot of legitimacy.
I did indeed misread "president" as "minister", but I don't agree with you that "indirection" (i.e. appointment of officials by elected officials) is "not a lot of legitimacy". It may not be "a lot of directness", but I'm not concerned about this any more than I'm concerned that, e.g. police officers or judges are appointed, rather than elected (certainly in the places I've lived).
Edit: I don't agree that there is as much indirection as you say, either. You brought up two examples of interim governments where ministers were not elected. You haven't given any examples where this happens in er, ordinary? governments and I don't believe there are any in the EU. But I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.