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

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821–830 of 947 posts

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

#821

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Respectfully, you and most people have no clue what plants experience. There were those studies published in recent years that suggested plants "scream" when they are being eaten or destroyed, presumably to warn other plants.

We don't know what anything or anyone else experiences internally. But we know enough to make some good guesses. Plants lack a brain, the organ responsible for thoughts. There's no more reason to think they have thoughts than a cell inside your body, or a computer. All three can process stimuli and communicate. "Screaming" is editorializing for page views. They found some plants will produce an ultrasonic click every…

> They found some plants will produce an ultrasonic click every few minutes when dry or when cut.

By the same logic, I suppose rocks "scream" when they are dropped on the ground.

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

#822
post #649

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This is what I don't understand about companies planting trees to offset their fossil fuel CO2. Our problems are heavily caused by carbon being dug out of the ground and released. A tree just means that the carbon will be released at a later date

It's mostly feel-good greenwashing, as far as I can tell. Bill Gates recommends a company for doing offsetting that actually pulls carbon out of the air and sequesters it underground, removing it from the carbon cycle: https://climeworks.com/subscriptions It appears to cost ~$1/kg, but I'm guessing that will come down substantially if they're able to scale it up.

Well, a tree removes quite a lot carbon for quite a long time. Just let it grow for a century or so.

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

#823
post #37

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I agree that this is important, and less meat consumption is good, but I am kind of upset that the entire American culinary experience is being reduced to "burgers, pizza, and fried chicken." I say that because most of the articles on meat alternatives are written from the perspective of "if only Americans can stop eating hamburgers!" First off, in terms of global solutions, that isn't going to fly. Try going to Ital…

You're in the minority though - there appears to be 50 billion hamburgers eating in the US every year which is about 150 per person. Meat substitutes are a transitionary item - for those used to eating meat. I've been vegan for 35 years and rarely cook with them (tempeh and tofu are the only things that come close). I get plenty of protein from vegetables, beans etc. and the thought of eating a mock meat just doesn't…

> in the US every year which is about 150 per person.

Is the average person in the US really eating 3 hamburgers per week?

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

#824

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Thanks for cutting back. The gradual approach is better than trying to change overnight. Veganism is pragmatic, not dogmatic.

When there’s a hierarchy of “legged animals >> fish > plants”, it is dogmatic.

I don't fully get what you mean, can you clarify?

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

#825
After trying both Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat, without the stuff being drenched in sauce and other burger ingredients, just the plain "meat", I must say that I don't like it one bit. It smells like canned cat food and taste nothing like real meat to me.

I will switch to fake meat when I'm unable to sense any difference between something like a Greater Omaha ribeye and a fake substitute, not a day before :)

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

#826

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Do you have something more substantial to add? I do imagine that to match meat on a value per gram measurement, you'd have to have either spend way more or be lucky with where you live, but something to check would be great.

Meat already is one of the most overpriced foods out there if we're talking about nutritional value. If you're not buying complete trash meat that is of course. Take for example potatoes. Dense in calories, has almost all of the nutrient groups you need and is dirt-cheap. Nutrition is a very unclear science for now, but the fact that meat has this godlike status of an apex food is definitely a product of lobbying and…

It costs me about $3-7 for a single cheaper cut of steak at my local store, which according to a cursory search, probably yields 30-70g of protein. 1 potato, while very cheap, is only going to contain 2g of protein, and at most I could probably eat 3 in one go. Certainly, I'd get other vitamins and minerals from both, which is why I'd have both in the same meal. How much are you spending on meat? An occasional indulgence in that area for me would maybe be a $20 steak, or a big burger.

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

#827

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Kind of a win-win-win. Companies like it if they can just press soy or peas and fats into patties, environment likes having less bottom of the barrel meat farms, animal welfare is better at the high end farms, maybe the veg patties are a bit healthier(?).

I'm very skeptical that these patties are healthier. I'm guessing that in 5 or 10 years it'll come out that eating them regularly is terrible for your system and it'll be like the margarine/butter debate. I don't have evidence for this but I'm very curious to see

They are not healthier in terms of fat/protein/nutrients. They do lack some of the cancerous elements of meat production (nitrates). But the big win is that they are made from plants and cost far less to produce while removing the animal cruelty and greatly reducing the risk for disease spread (because of not using animals). Seeing as we are in the midst of a pandemic caused by meat eating and we’ve had several other smaller pandemics we believe were caused by meat eating that seems like a big win for the future (hiv originated with bushmeat, h1n1, mad cow disease).

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

#828

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Beef is a net positive for the environment while "vegan" mass-produced cash crops are a net negative. Beef can (and does) graze on natural pastures that would have been otherwise ruined and turned into something useless.

If only we ate grass fed beef exclusively. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Seems a heck of a lot easier to motivate people to feed their cows on land nobody wants anyways than to invent "vegetarian meat".

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

#829
post #330
post #59

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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…

As I understand, there are places where you can just put cows and they feed themselves off the land. But there is also a tremendous amount of deforestation happening because those lands are then used to grow food for cows that are in other locations. I find it amazing how well avoiding eating meat aligns good things: - less animal suffering - less pollution of air, water, and land - less waste (inefficient way to get…

Vegetables probably don’t have enough calories to replace meat, unless by vegetables you mean grains and legumes.

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

#830

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> Wild pigs, while omnivorous, eat mostly plants and extremely small animals That's almost certainly because they aren't very good predators (ie minimal opportunity to hunt in an evolutionarily advantageous manner). > why not eat little girls yourself Because humans don't do that, so we're not interested in justifying that behavior. Also there's an obvious lack of symmetry there - it's no longer an inter-species inte…

The difference is again in whether there is a good reason to do something, or not. There is no good reason to toture e.g. someone's house cat, so it would cause unnecessary suffering. There is a good reason to kill another animal to eat it: to eat it. But again that does not justify torturing the animal before eating it.

I think that still leaves open the issue of humans hunting animals for sport. For example, if someone enjoys hunting lions, is that "a good reason", in the same way that someone enjoying torturing a house cat is "not a good reason"?

Fortunately I think there is a simple resolution to this question, in that torturing animals is heavily associated with (if not predictive or causative of) a tendency to harm humans too, and so it should be forbidden for that reason alone.

Similarly, it is justified to ban specifically hunting which leads to extinction of rare animals on the basis that the existence of these animals is part of the common cultural heritage of humanity and therefore no one has a right to prevent future generations from enjoying it.

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