Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut • Hacker News Board

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#211

Post by raws » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #135

sailingparrot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Livestock is a real problem. Using US numbers, which has one of the most efficient livestock management in the world make those numbers not too bad at ~4% (that's still a lot, let's be clear), but when you look worldwide the share of GHG attributed to livestock is 14.5%, that's definitely bad [1]. Even if Beyond Meat will have a bigger impact in the US to begin with, this will have a worldwide impact. [1] https://cle…

I think you missed the point -- that if you tried to replace meat with plants providing the same nutritional profile, then the impact is far less than anticipated by most calculations.

I'm highly dubious of the statement that growing plants to eat them is lightly less polluting than growing plants, feeding them to cattle and then preparing the cattle to eat the meat. Cattle does not sequester CO2 like plants do and emits greenhouse gases. Also uses way more treated water.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#212

Post by omgwtfbyobbq » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

elktea wrote: post #59

drewg123 wrote: post #2

This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan "meat" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by average people and not just dedicated vegans. Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle. (see the docu…

The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the environmental impacts have been greatly exaggerated. See below: Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. At the same time, both transitions woul…

YMMV, but it's much more than 2.6% in the US. Livestock is 40% of of ag's GHG emissions.

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#agriculture...

And ag is ~10% of US emissions

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/...

So eliminating livestock would reduce emissions by 4%.

With that said, 4% is still low, but it doesn't account for all the GHG emissions needed to grow feed for livestock, nor does it account for other things like transportation of that feed, energy used in processing by the industrial sector, and so on.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#213

Post by dnissley » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #153

elktea wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the environmental impacts have been greatly exaggerated. See below: Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. At the same time, both transitions woul…

I'm less inclined to believe a blog post than I am to believe published & cited articles. Most estimates I've found put overall GHG from diet at about 15-20% of total per capita. And sources like [1] indicate that switching to a plant-based diet cuts that number in half for western countries (the UK in this study). That's 3x your number. Granted, meat substitutes are higher on GHG than eating straight plant-based mea…

The linked blog post contains a couple dozen citations, fwiw.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#214

Post by twobitshifter » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #34

DamnYuppie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly don't understand the methane issue. Historically worldwide the # of ungulates is probably well below historical averages. It looks like today we have around 98 million head of cattle in the US. Historically we had bison in excess of conservatively 60 million. This doesn't even begin to count all the animals in Africa. Overall wide life is declining. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194297/total-number-of-c…

> large mammal farts going on now is probably not that much higher than it always has been I believe a big part of it has to do with the feedlot diet— when they're eating a high-calorie diet of mostly corn/grain instead of their natural diet of grass, it puts their digestive system into overdrive. EDIT: I looked into it a bit more after posting this, and it looks like it's not clear-cut— for example, it takes a cow a…

The corn consumed by cattle includes the corn stalks which are more or less the same as consuming grass. Corn is after all in the grass family. The actual kernels of corn increase the calories versus grass, but it’s not like cows are just eating corn off the cob all day long. They need to consume tons of roughage to help with their digestion. I think a good argument is that converting grain and grass to beef is inefficient - if you could have consumed the grain yourself, but the nice thing about cows is that they convert very low calorie foods into high calorie meat that we can consume. If we had to eat what cows do, we’d be chewing all day.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#215

Post by tmotwu » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #147

tmotwu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure, meat offers a different set of nutritional value than vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as you've said.

Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.

There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#216

Post by nine_k » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

harveywi wrote: post #70

submeta wrote: post #40

Just when you think there is no hope for this planet and for humanity something slowly emerges seemingly out of nowhere. Fridays for future was one of those developments that caught me by surprise. Young people fighting for our planet while „angry white men“ claiming there ain’t no climate change. Or take the sudden surge of interest in everything veggy / vegan. In Germany there is a growing demand for vegan products…

Why didn't you consider cannibalism?

Obviously, it still causes suffering, and the supply is even more limited.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#217

Post by wyre » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

dwd wrote: post #151

xnx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burps, not farts, are the primary source of methane: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-so...

There's already a solution in the works... https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/flatulent-...

For this to scale properly it would need to rely on creating a new market for seaweed farms with the purpose of sending to feedlots. I have a hard time imagining this actually happening.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#218

Post by yread » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

cphajduk wrote: post #125

bweitzman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.

I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs. If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.

It's ok you can just drink beer (!1l a day) to get B12

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/

(Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per capita)

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#219

Post by dimitrios1 » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #135

sailingparrot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Livestock is a real problem. Using US numbers, which has one of the most efficient livestock management in the world make those numbers not too bad at ~4% (that's still a lot, let's be clear), but when you look worldwide the share of GHG attributed to livestock is 14.5%, that's definitely bad [1]. Even if Beyond Meat will have a bigger impact in the US to begin with, this will have a worldwide impact. [1] https://cle…

I think you missed the point -- that if you tried to replace meat with plants providing the same nutritional profile, then the impact is far less than anticipated by most calculations.

Plus an even larger issue is soil erosion, which reduces the soil's capacity to act as a carbon sink: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/soil-erosion-decreases-soil...

Returning to the most sustainable method of raising cattle, grazing, (such as simply letting cows graze) is pound for pound the most effective way to greatly reduce the carbon footprint left by industrialized livestock production, and restore soil quality.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#220

Post by ska » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

cphajduk wrote: post #125

bweitzman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.

I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs. If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.

> however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.

That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products of animals that have been eating such plants (or these days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and especially in developed countries is often the easiest one.

It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those plants, or fortify another food more directly.

The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial and water soluble.

It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very difficult.