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

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461–470 of 947 posts

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

#461

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It's not that the line is drawn 'in theory'. It's that they think they've drawn it in the right place (usually humans on one side and everything else on the other). I think this is pretty empirically wrong and I don't think humans are likely to get it right. Even ignoring that, there's still the suffering issue. There is objectivity at drawing the line to the left of neural nets.

If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food? What then? I'm sure you h…

Watch the documentary Earthlings and tell me those animals are not suffering.

Watch a slaughterhouse video, cows fighting for their life, pigs screaming and shivering out of fear.

Animals have the same pain receptors as us.

Carl Sagan was right... they are too much like us.

If you take a completely logical and humanistic approach to this, then you’d realise that factory farming is barbaric and unnecessary.

Most humans don’t need meat anymore to survive... it’s purely for pleasure and we just happily ignore the associated cost with that.

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

#462
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…

> In Germany there is a growing demand for vegan products, and this demand seems to be very strong, because every grocery store has a growing number of vegan products lately.

As somebody who used to live there, I think this has more to do with the Zeitgeist. Most Germans feel nowadays that one should cause no harm, no offensiveness, and be completely environmentally & socially sound. Which sounds great on paper, but I've found it a recipe for a soul-draining society of "holier-than-thou" people. I do not mean this in the mean sense towards you, but it is one of the reasons I moved from there.

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

#463

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.

That is incorrect, B12 is abundant in nutritional yeast

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

#464
post #51

Their stuff is good. Here in the UK every supermarket chain now has their own vegan ranges putting out stuff almost (admittedly not quite) as good, priced very competitively. Even a couple of years ago that simply wasn't case. Random stray thought I had earlier is how interesting things are going to be when we move further away from emulating existing meat products, and become more comfortable eating plant-based stuf…

BBQ Pepsi Burgers.

The future is beautiful.

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

#465
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the documentary Cowspiracy is operating with massively exaggerated numbers (it claims meat is responsible for more than 50% of ghg emissions, it's explained on the wikipedia article of the film). Real numbers from credible sources are that greenhouse gas emissions from the meat and dairy industry are around 15%. Which is large enough to take this problem seriously, but it's still far away from those cla…

The 15% is globally also. In the US it's as low as 7% (all of agriculture is 10% - directly from the EPA website). We buy a 1/4 a cow from a local farmer once every six months. It's a pretty low impact way eat meat.

7% isn't necessarily better, it could just mean USA adds more additional unnecessary GHG emissions to their agricultural production.

I can't quite recall from the IPCC reports but isn't logistics, particularly shipping, far bigger a contributor. Not that we can only address the biggest contributors. So perhaps shipped soya/maize/whatever is worse than local meat?

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share this view but also add that I’d like to reduce the cruelty to the pig or any animal. We all die and are food for something eventually. But not everyone gets a good existence and I wish they did. If the pig gets to roll around in some nice mud and sunbath for a few years that will make me feel better. I don’t care if the pig wouldn’t do the same for me, but I wish it would.

We have a mini pig that lives with us. I think the parent's comment is vastly underestimating pigs. They're very sweet, empathetic animals.

I had cousins that raised cows until the butcher needed them. This was a long time ago and I’m not sure how the arrangement came about. But they raised the cows as pets and the cows expressed happiness at seeing humans. They were basically giant dogs. And everyone was sad when they had to send a cow to the butcher.

At least they were treated with some dignity and love before the butcher. I wish that system was scalable because it’s hard to view the food industry the same way after looking animals in the face. But I still think it’s morally acceptable to eat them. They are so domesticated, what purpose would they serve if not for food? They can’t be reintroduced into the wild without harm to themselves or the environment.

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To the second point, you say meat provides "far more" nutritional value than any plant. Maybe, maybe not. (I think "not", but I'm open to being wrong about that.) Every anthropologist: Human brain development skyrocketed and were able to maintain them when meat became a regular staple to their diet. Just pick any documentary or book on the evolutionary development of humans. Any! I'm tired of hearing this same bulls…

>The one thing I agree with vegans is the fact they want people to get the processed trash out of their diet. Except, i don't think i've yet met a vegan that doesn't consume ultra processed soy and or gluten based products. All these meat alternatives are ultra processed to make them resemble meat. They're made of ultra processed protein and vegetables, spices and additives to improve taste, colour and texture and to…

> Except, i don't think i've yet met a vegan that doesn't consume ultra processed soy and or gluten based products.

Yea, the term "vegan" is pretty silly and meaningless, since it only describes what you don't eat.

I'm fond of the whole-foods-plant-based diet (which is a vegan diet) and is more in line with what you're describing—eating real food. Avoiding processed junk.

While I think eating local is a decent rule-of-thumb good thing, it's also overly-simplistic. Bananas are often used as an example. They're obviously not local to the U.S., and are shipped from long distances. But the environmental impact of bananas is minuscule (not to downplay the other political and agricultural issues with banana plantations).

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

#469
post #166
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, this isn't the whole picture and it super misleading. Just because humans survived with a particular diet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been healthier had they eaten meat. You can't just point to historical populations who didn't have widespread access to animal products and be like "see they lived." I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are fine from a health perspective but this isn't e…

It's not just that vegetarian diets are "fine" - there's actually a wealth of evidence that a meat-free diet is far healthier - in terms of risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and various forms of cancer, for example. https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/

Fyi, the creator of that website (Dr. Gregor) can be pretty biased. If you google reviews of his books (from other doctors) you'll see that he sometimes leaves out important details from the studies he cites.

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

#470
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the cow.

The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us. Let's treat them as humanely as possible, while not pretending they're something they're not. If you want to help animals, let's tackle the issue of rewilding and reforestation more seriously.

What makes rewilding / reforestation a better focus for helping animals? I'd have thought the current situation dire enough that one would want to focus on the low-hanging fruit like regulations against the current cruelties and elimination of "Ag-Gag" laws.
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