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Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

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Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#91

Post by dqv »

sidlls wrote: post #73
sweetheart wrote: post #36

While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers: - The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. This is not an argument that fairs well…

So many animals die at the blades of the harvester. Also, the reason the argument fares poorly is likely due to the fact that it’s devoid of reason and couched entirely in emotion. Emotion is powerful and important, as it is part of our humanity. But it’s not a good basis for argument, given its fickle and poorly understood nature.

Less animals stand to die at the blades of the harvester when one chooses to stop eating animals altogether. You can't eliminate suffering, but you can take active measures to reduce it.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#92

Post by purephase »

wyager wrote: post #29

Land usage is a totally useless metric for the impact of beef production, because we can (and do) raise cattle on land that's basically useless for anything else.

Completely ignores the methane output issue which is a huge contributor to global warming.

Also, killing billions of sentient beings simply because the taste is a bit off, but let's all just ignore that.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#94

Post by wyager »

psychometry wrote: post #67
wyager wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nutrition "science" cannot yet make accurate predictions here, but from my perspective there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that no single artificial product yet captures the nutritional profile of real beef.

That nutritional profile also includes increased risk of GI tract cancers among other serious conditions, so I'm not sure what the argument you're trying to make is.

There is no compelling evidence that eating unprocessed beef carries any significant cancer risk.

This claim is obvious a-priori bullshit if you know much about human metabolism. Plain old meat is very rapidly metabolized almost entirely into peptides and absorbed; there is little room for it to cause GI problems. Hence why there are a lot of people with plant-related digestive issues (e.g. celiac) but very few people with beef intolerance, outside of freak allergies like alpha-gal (lone star tick syndrome).

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#95

Post by pfranz »

flatline wrote: post #28
tashoecraft wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is that comparing against plain red meat with no salt added? Because if so that’s not really a fair comparison because you generally add a decent amount of salt to burger whereas you don’t really need to for beyond

I never add salt to ground beef patties, am I unusual in this respect? They taste fine without, especially when you add all the toppings.

When first giving my 4yo burgers the second or third time I forgot to season the patty when cooking. After one bite he said, "That's not food" and wouldn't eat anymore.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#96

Post by seoaeu »

swader999 wrote: post #54
raidicy wrote: post #32

Genuinely curious; is eating something processed like this better than eating regular unprocessed ground meat?

Better nutrition? I'd be surprised.

Though from googling it also seems that they're not substantially worse.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#97

Post by batiudrami »

wyager wrote: post #71
sweetheart wrote: post #36

While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers: - The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. This is not an argument that fairs well…

While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans". We are, at the very least, decades away from having a complete enough understanding of nutrition to safely replace the nutritional value of beef with a substitute fake beef product. Once we accomplish that, there are some second-order effects…

As far as I understand it you can have a perfectly suitable vegetarian diet without much effort (note: vegan is trickier and very hard for babies). If you want to maintain your current meat/“meat” consumption then we are still many years off lab meat being cheap and accessible enough yes.

The intent of beyond burger, I think, is not to be a meat substitute every time you would currently eat meat, but instead a nice tasting treat food. Sure, it’s salty and full of saturated fats, but I only have them once a month.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#98

Post by throwawaysea »

Isn’t this just another ultra processed food? I actually don’t mind the taste of these meat alternatives but I do wonder what the long term effects are if we suddenly switch our diets to eating significant quantities of things that didn’t evolve alongside us. I think it’s healthy for people to be skeptical.

Re: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)

#100

Post by ipaddr »

ivalm wrote: post #80
elktea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one needed to die for you to eat it. Except all those animals + insects that once inhabited the fields

Cows are fed by plants that grow on the same kind of fields, except cows need to eat many pounds of food to generate one pound of cow.

And we need to eat many pounds of cow.

Or many more pounds of plants to generate a pound.

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