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

#561

Post by m3at » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

DamnYuppie wrote: post #27

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…

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…

Wild life mammals are simply negligible compared to our livestock: https://xkcd.com/1338/

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

#562

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

zests wrote: post #512

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…

Think about it. Cows release carbon based green house gasses. Where does that carbon originally come from? Plants absorbing carbon based green house gasses. I'm not saying that they cancel out, but there must be some consumption of carbon from the atmosphere in order for cows to produce carbon. If you're an environmentalist trying to convince people to support your cause, you aren't going to talk about the carbon tha…

If we were just talking about the CO2 exhaled by cows I would agree. Plants consume CO2 to grow, cows release a lot of that CO2 back into the atmosphere. It's a closed loop (if we ignore all the energy we spent on farming).

The problem is that cows also release a lot of methane. Methane is carbon based (CH4), but it acts very different from CO2. It decays faster, but it a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It's around 80 times more potent in the first 20 years, or 25 times more potent in the first 100 years. So having plants absorb CO2 only for cows to turn it into methane is pretty bad on the timescales we care about.

It's not necessarily the biggest of the problems with cattle, but it's worth preventing on its own.

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

#563

Post by themolecularman » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

wzdd wrote: post #481

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. The way I think of it, pigs are very intelligent, more intelligent than dogs. However, humans are more intelligent. If pigs were more intelligent, pigs would eat humans. And that's not a figure of speech. Pig would eat us if they could. They wouldn't stop and think, gee, does this little baby human girl cry because it doesn't want to be eaten, maybe…

> I don't see any problem with eating meat, given that I'm an animal and some animals eat other animals' meat. Some animals rape other animals in packs, have territorial wars resulting in killing for nonfood reasons, and torture and/or kill other creatures for sport. Some animals eat their young if possible. Juvenile females are impregnated and give birth as soon as it is biologically possible. Some animals keep slav…

> I have yet to see a justification for eating meat better than "I like it, and I can". Weak as that is, it is by far the strongest argument out there.

Culture? Cuisine?

I think a lot of people that have food as a strong central part of their culture may even identify with it. It may simply not be immoral in any sense of the word.

But aside from that, "art" for lack of a better way of putting it? Cuisine? Chefs make beautiful art and sometimes it's with meat.

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

#564

Post by bredren » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

krrrh wrote: post #421

BitwiseFool wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preface: I'm a hypocritical omnivore who likes animals. If meat alternatives and lab grown meat become cheap and indistinguishable from real sources, I predict that within the span of two generations our descendants are going to look back on us as immoral savages. I use cognitive dissonance and distance from how my food is made to get over how horrible industrial farming is and how brutal life can be for livestock. T…

I imagine this sentiment is often from seeing documentaries about the worst conditions in farming, and the general cosseting away from life and death that most of us have enjoyed. But the farms and ranches I grew up around, and that I buy most of my meat from, never seem that brutal when I’ve visited them, and the animals seem well cared for and mostly doing their own thing on the pasture most of the time. I wanted t…

I’ve never watched one of those documentaries. My views on this shifted in part due to personal experiences with animals and the shooting of Harambe.

I do not doubt what you’ve observed however the scale of the process virtually guarantees suffering.

The United States slaughters over 30 million cattle per year. If one out of 500 [1] slaughters falls on a range from major pain to unimaginable cognitive experience of trauma, it’s pretty bad.

It says nothing of mishaps and disease resulting from their keeping.

While some feel relative intelligence is not a good way to determine suffering, pigs are regarded as one of the smartest animals on the planet. As another HN friendly example, pigs demonstrate self-agency: they can use a joystick to manipulate a cursor. [2]

The US slaughters over 75 million hogs a year. Run the same stats and you end up with a commanding species that is nothing short of barbaric.

I agree with the comment upthread, that in due time our cruelty to animals in this time will be one of our great shames.

[1] I think suffering is likely far more common than this, but for HN perspective, here are some estimates in bugs per lines of code: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56043694

[2] https://escholarship.org/content/qt8sx4s79c/qt8sx4s79c.pdf?t...

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

#565

Post by narrator » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

jredwards wrote: post #191

hannob wrote: 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…

I watched Cowspiracy. It was not convincing. It used numbers that seemed wildly exaggerated on their face, even before doing follow-on research. It also seemed designed to be emotionally manipulative more than informative. Maybe I don't watch enough documentaries, but it had a youtube conspiracy theorist vibe to it, rather than a measured, investigative approach.

Any time there's a vegan angle to a scientific study or a documentary the standard of proof for me is much higher because these causes are often pushed for animal rights reasons.

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

#566

Post by belorn » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:17 AM UTC

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…

When it comes to the climate I have two primary problems:

1: We use fossil fuels (natural gas) to create artificial fertilizers. We use manure from cattle to create organic fertilizers. The production of artificial fertilizers is seen as positive for the environment while the production of organic fertilizers is seen as an negative.

2: When we use artificial fertilizers to grow crops which get used to produce bio fuel we call it carbon neutral. Cattle eating grass is in contrast seen as a major if the largest contributor to climate change.

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

#567

Post by lurgburg » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

matkoniecz wrote: post #549

zests wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about it. Cows release carbon based green house gasses. Where does that carbon originally come from? Plants absorbing carbon based green house gasses. I'm not saying that they cancel out, but there must be some consumption of carbon from the atmosphere in order for cows to produce carbon. If you're an environmentalist trying to convince people to support your cause, you aren't going to talk about the carbon tha…

Note conversion of C02 into methane. If methane has bigger effect than the same amount of coal within C02 then your argument fails. > While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. > In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Cha…

A somewhat surprising corollary: if you have methane and you can burn it, it's better to do that than vent it directly.

(Of course, better still to leave it in the ground, if that's where your methane is coming from...)

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

#568

Post by ska » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #453

ska wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are wrong, it seems, but the science is hard. You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some k…

The hard part of modern diet isn't macro composition, it's measuring caloric requirements and sticking close to them over long periods of time. Macro composition can help with that, but eating way too much of the perfect diet is still going to be bad.

Sure, we understand "too many calories is bad" also, but that wasn't my point. A lot of conflicting claims about macro composition are made for example, and it's really hard to definitely dismiss them (or even answer how much it matters) mainly because we don't understand it well enough.

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

#569

Post by lr4444lr » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

DamnYuppie wrote: post #27

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…

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…

From what I read, the contribution of factory farming feed is substantial. Dunno what bison and African wildlife were eating but cows fed a diet that had even a small amount of kelp reduced the methane in their flatus substantially.

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

#570

Post by illirik » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

fosk wrote: post #559

m8s wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ingredients ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, AND FOLIC ACID), WATER, LOW-MOISTURE PART-SKIM MOZZARELLA CHEESE (CULTURED PART-SKIM MILK, SALT, ENZYMES), TOMATO PASTE, COOKED SEASONED PIZZA TOPPING MADE WITH PORK AND CHICKEN, BHA, BHT AND CITRIC ACID ADDED TO HELP PROTECT FLAVOR (PORK, MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, WATER, TEXTURED SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SPIC…

How on Earth did we end up having so many ingredients in what essentially is just pizza. The food industry really has gone too far by over-processing everything.

A lot of it is due to the "frozen" part of frozen pizza. There's a ton of what amounts to materials science happening in your frozen pizza. Find a local pizza joint that makes their dough from scratch and bakes in a brick oven, and you can cut down on that ingredients count by an order of magnitude.