Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meatless is the new “low fat” boogieman. Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc. All of the “problems” with meat are market issues. Animal welfare issues are due to industrial farming practices, which will get worse if the industry declines. Land use and environmental issues…
> Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc. > The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives. I think you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none. Those newer alternative meat products are not the basis of a healthy plant-based diet - they are treats tha…
It is much cheaper to operate a couple of large national-scale factories to produce plant-based meat alternatives with mostly automated equipment and minimal regulatory oversight. Meat processing either needs to be regional, which is higher cost, or national, where limitations or capital costs of automation require a large pool of unskilled labor. You "fix" factory farming by enforcing labor standards at the processing layer that make concentrated, high throughput meat processing uneconomic. The result would be changes in how the industry functions and higher prices. (ie. market forces)
Those same market forces would ultimately drive more plant-based calories in diets and probably healthier eating habits. Factory farms exist because USDA policy since the 70s have been focused on slowing inflation in food prices. That policy ultimately drives alot of unsustainable practices, from factory farms for livestock, to the long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, to the transfer of topsoil from the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio river watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. 50-100 years from now, our descendants will be returning to regional agriculture at very high cost as midwest production fails and climate change breaks the environment the supports the magnificent bounty of the California central valley and Colorado watershed.