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

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921–930 of 947 posts

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

#921
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One estimate probably includes shipping emissions for food and one doesn’t would be my guess. Of course, plant based burgers might not reduce total final product shipping emissions but they might reduce a lot of the intermediary shipping emissions since cattle require feed. Also, there’s that thing where we apparently ship chicken to china to be cleaned and then back sometimes? That seems bad, but I don’t really know…

And the plants used for vegan meat replacements need fertilizer, transportation, processing and so on. Emission wise, bulk and container shipping are among the most efficient means of transport on a per unit basis. And that is without taking any emission reduction plans into account.

That may be so but it can never be as efficient as not shipping it halfway across the world twice in the first place!

Of course that’s a big change, to bring those jobs back to the States of course with tons of implications and potential outcomes.

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

#922
post #909

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good point. Not sure if they're allowed to grow for that long, I think some options are on timberland. But if they are, it seems like a reasonable short-term help.

In order to be usable, you 10+ years anyway. And in case you don't burn the wood, the CO2 stays out of the CO2 cycle for even more years anyway.

And by planting the right kind of trees, we could even go a long way to repair and safe our forests which are suffering from climate change and monocultures.

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

#923
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite. The reason cows produce more methane is precisely because they eat grass.

When the herd eat grass it stimulates grass growth and grass is a huge carbon sink. there is a cool ted talk about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

If you put the grass where nothing grew before, like a desert. The situation in reality is the opposite: people make forests into grassland.

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

#924
post #589
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really strange argument. Even though you wouldn't exist if not for your parents, but you would still probably agree that they shouldn't have you for dinner?

When animal smugglers are caught at the border, the police has to handle the animals. They can't release them into the wild, they can't repossess and sell them because of the unknown health risks and costs, and they can't keep them at the border for all time. The most common result is thus to kill them. Similar when there is an dangerous pandemic among animals, the most common response is to kill all the sick and tho…

Yes, they kill them, but the meat is burned or otherwise destroyed, it is not going to be eaten.

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

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to kill an animal to mount its head on a wall- you can wait for it to die. The reason people don't do that is because they want to display those heads as trophies. I think there is an ocean of difference between killing an animal to feed on its flesh, and killing an animal purely for enjoyment, or for bragging rights. Feeding is necessary. Bragging about what a big hunter one is, is not. Anyway I think…

That ocean doesn't seem very wide to me. If someone is eating an animal's flesh rather than plant-based food, presumably they are doing so "purely for enjoyment" of the taste of that flesh, especially if the animal flesh is more expensive. I don't see why enjoyment of the taste of an animal is any better reason to kill it than enjoyment of the "sport" of hunting it or enjoyment of the bragging rights of having killed…

I say in another comment that humans like to eat meat because meat is a very good food for humans. What we like and don't like to eat depends on our biology and is tuned to drive us to find the food we need to survive, and thrive. So I don't believe you can decouple enjoyment _of food_ from the needs of a biological body- and so you can't sensibly speak of "purely for enjoyment".

On the side, this biological drive to feed is of course tuned for a different era, before technological civilisation and it leads to excesses today, e.g. the over-consumption of sugar, and the over-consumption of meat, particularly in _some_ parts of the world (e.g. the Americas and Western Europe). I certainly agree with the adage "eat food, mostly plants, not too much". But "mostly plants" means "also some meat". A little meat, we do need to eat for a balanced diet and a healthy life.

In any case, the desire to kill an animal to show off one's hunting prowess is rather on a different level to biological needs. Nobody _needs_ to kill an animal for sport in order to stay alive. Everybody needs to eat. That is the ocean of difference I refer to in my comment.

I'm not convinced that if more people grew up hunting, they would accept recreational hunting more- I think the opposite would be the case. I believe that people in the developed world, today, are so far removed from the reality of raising and killing an animal to take its meat, that they have lost all sense of perspective on the matter. I believe that this distance from the act of killing has caused people to adopt extreme views, like veganism (though not necessarily vegeterianism, more broadly), or a complete indifference to the fate of animals. If more people had direct experience of hunting -or farming- and slaughtering animals, I believe we would see many fewer embracing these extreme views.

I don't think it's possible to decouple morality from the opinions of a specific culture. Morality is not a universal. For example, some human societies practiced cannibalism, even advanced societies like the Aztecs. There is a book that I love, "The true history of the conquest of new Spain", written by one of Hernan Cortez' conquistadores, Bernal Díaz del Castillo [1]. In the book, he describes the horror of the Spanish at the everyday cannibalism of human sacrifices by Aztecs and also the self-mutilating cult of the Aztecs' priests. People in different historical times have found very different things acceptable or unacceptable. We can't really hope to find "a bright moral line, without reference to a specific society's opinion" for anything from within the perspective of having been born and raised in a particular socieity, in a particular point in space and time.

Personally, I think that valuing all life as sacred is what comes closest to a true moral universal. This might surprise you, but my point is that valuing life means accepting the fact that life on Earth is made to consume other life to preserve itself. In order to survive, every living thing on the planet must eat some other living thing. Well, except for plants that do us all a big favour of underpinning the great food chain with their ability to feed directly on the rays of the sun. Everything else- we must eat each other; and plants. In any case, I believe also that valuing life above all else means that we should only take what we need. This means eliminating excesses like industrial food production and mass consumption, for instance, and certainly it means reducing the suffering of the animals we kill for food to what is absolutely unavoidable.

Hunting for sport is absolutely avoidable and I don't think it comes close to killing for food.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_D%C3%ADaz_del_Castillo

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

#926
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to criticise you here at all, but since you don't eat meat mainly to reduce animal suffering, why are you okay with dairy? The dairy industry arguably abuses and mistreats animals far worse than the meat industry. Full disclosure: Vegetarian for 10 years, eat fish occasionally and have recently been trying to cut out dairy (but it's tough).

Probably because I’m new to it (about a year), it’s hard, and I’m imperfect. Cutting milk I think would be easy (decent alternatives), but losing cheese would make things a lot more difficult.

I understand, believe me, I do, I guess I just brought it up as a warning not to do what every new vegetarian (including myself) has done:

Use moral arguments to try to convince people that being a vegetarian is a more ethical choice.

I think the sentiment applies to vegans as well, even if the impact isn't as direct. If everyone started consuming non-meat/non-dairy products, the socio-economical and agricultural effects of things like soy, almonds, etc will be egregious as well.

We need to look at non-cruel and sustainable sources of food, but at the industrial level, not at the individual.

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

#927
post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not as bad as it looks. Half those ingredients are sub-ingredients. It's like you making something like chili and using salsa. You'd then need to add all the ingredients of the salsa to your chili ingredients. With the sub-ingredients removed it comes down to this: ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, LOW-MOISTURE PART-SKIM MOZZARELLA CHEESE, TOMATO PASTE, COOKED SEASONED PIZZA TOPPING (MADE WITH PORK AND CHICKEN, BHA,…

I'd rather see the expanded list of ingredients in my chili and salsa. I'm sure it wouldn't look nearly as bad as the list above.

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

#928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pizza would be illegal in the Uk. BHA and BHP are banned over here

This appears to be untrue, based on a cursory google search.

"The flavor enhancers and preservatives BHA and BHT are subject to severe restrictions in Europe but are widely used in American food products."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/well/eat/food-additives-b...

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

#929
post #641
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…

Wheat, yeast, water Tomato, basil, oregano Milk, cultures Salt, oil. Whatever pepperoni is made of. Did I miss anything?

Sugar for the base.

I made pizza yesterday, it was pretty much the above. I also added Tabasco for fun.

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

#930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully it's been already established that animals experience pain and that it's bad. Even the veterinary community created guidelines for pain management in animals [0]. But let's say the above wasn't the case, basically your argument seems to be that because animals can't think about thinking, the pain they experience isn't bad. But luckily there are a few thought experiments you can do: If you have a dog, what…

And cockroaches run away when you try to squash them. And some plants furl their leaves when you touch them. Not convinced by your argument. Also that might be one of the dumbest experiments I've seen in a while. As if pigs can't use their noses (and heavily rely on them) to sense where food is, ignoring what their inferior eyes are telling them.

It's stated in the study[0] that the pigs were not locating the food by smell.

But ignoring that test for a moment, you haven't really responded to any of the other points.

Or how would you respond to the fact that our law acknowledges that animals experience pain.

Your line of reasoning is a logical fallacy that a lot of us make.

But that line of reasoning has allowed major atrocities in the past, i.e. objectifying other sentient beings or comparing them to lower forms of life like cockroaches, justified their immoral actions.

Holocaust survivors are drawing comparisons with what is happening in the factory farm industry to what happened to them in concentration camps [1].

IIsaac Bashevis Singer said: ‘For the animals, life is an eternal Treblinka,’. It's a bitter pill to swallow if you look at it from that perspective.

I know winning arguments might be important here on HN, but I'm not sharing this information to win arguments.

I'm encouraging you to watch Earthlings and to see how your humane side reacts to what you see. Do you really agree that it's OK how we treat other non-human animals, just because we can't prove (yet) that they don't experience pain like humans do? What if they experience it even more severely - hence why they scream when we hurt them.

But you might just not care about animal cruelty. If so, do you care about our biosphere[2] or do you care about the people having to work in the factory farm industry. Slaughterhouse workers experience PTSD. Could you work in that environment - killing and gutting hundreds of animals?

Future humans most likely will claim that the way we treat farm animals is immoral[3], the same way we say that slavery in the past and now is immoral.

Moral progress is important - it's what makes us human.

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[0] Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...

[1] https://jewishjournal.com/mobile_20111212/108867/

[2] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme...

[3] Dietary Requirements of a Starfleet Officer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA

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