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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)

#331

Post by acituan »

__jem wrote: post #296
acituan wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals. I understand what you mean by violence and I don't want to come across as a stickler just for sport, but if we are taking a hard ethical stance based on principles we need to be precise with categories. Two of which is most important; 1. category of animals include humans 2. category of violence include any suffering infl…

i don’t understand why you think this is a huge gotcha. most vegans are oriented around harm reduction, not absolute minimization. otherwise, they’d just kill themselves. there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc. either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.

> i don’t understand why you think this is a huge gotcha ... most vegans are oriented around harm reduction

Avoiding a true scotsman fallacy aside, the OP was strongly centering their argument on "no violence against animals". If you deem pointing that out a gotcha, so be it.

> either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.

I think assuming that the length of the causal chain lightens one's responsibility is a fallacy. By that token a drone operator would have less ethical responsibility than a boots-on-ground marine, a stockholder would be less culpable than a laborer for the consequences of market activity, and consumers would always be the most innocent as by definition they are the end users of any causality chain.

People's tendency for going after only what is most salient creates the most difficult ethical problems.

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

#332

Post by atweiden »

dcolkitt wrote: post #76
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…

I guess the difference would be though, that without the demand for meat, those cows would likely never have lived at all. 99%+ of all cows alive are used for human agriculture. From the perspective of any living creature, I generally think of existence as a positive good versus non-existence. I know I certainly would rather come to a violent death at a young age than have never been born at all. I think there's a pl…

Factory farming normalizes extreme violence and exploitation. It teaches humans it’s acceptable to profoundly harm and neglect living creatures for profit. I have to imagine this has highly negative spillover effects on society at large. It’s making our society more depraved than it otherwise would be if we just grew plants for food.

Or, consider animal agriculture’s role in deforestation of the Amazon, in massively polluting our planet, and in being a breeding grounds for zoonotic disease transmission, etc.

IMO “allowing” a cow to live the entirety of its early life as a confused, neglected, and often tormented slave doesn’t offset a single one of those evils.

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

#333

Post by [deleted] »

DistressedDrone wrote: post #198
MPSimmons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy both BeyondBeef and Impossible Burger. My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture. The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I wo…

As a vegetarian, I really don't get why people are so focused on realistic meat replacement. Like, there are other things to eat. I especially don't get why people want the texture of red meat like beef patties. So you like... soft food? There's no arguing tastes, it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about.

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by sedatk »

neuro_image2 wrote: post #298

I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devastation. I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products: 1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be…

> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?

I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.

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

#336

Post by lambdaba »

ipaddr wrote: post #170

I'm generally surprised no one brings up the negative health benefits of processed foods. It is not healthier to get rid of meat only to replace it with high salt chemically processed food that tastes like meat. It seems like we are going backwards. You know what uses less greenhouse emissions, less water and less land? The orginal plant based food that gets processed into a beyond burger. If you really care about th…

Seed oils are toxic. These fake "meats" are the some of the worst processed foods around. It's sad people are being duped once again by the food industry and medical establishment. This will only further worsen the awful health of the population.

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

#337

Post by mosselman »

Spooky23 wrote: post #125
raidicy wrote: post #32

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

No, and that’s why the fake meat companies are very careful from not mentioning anything about health benefits, and instead stress carbon nonsense and naturalness of ingredients. Impossible is legume flour and coconut oil. Legume flour is rough on the gut, and coconut oil is 90% saturated fat, way more than butter. Beyond is soy and coconut. If you have a moral or other objection to meat, go vegetarian or start eatin…

If you are planning on eating an amount of burgers where their nutritional value matters, you should have a critical look at your diet.

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

#338

Post by lambdaba »

gnicholas wrote: post #179
adrian_mrd wrote: post #152

Whilst the environmental and animal welfare benefits of many of the ‘fake’ meats (Beyond, Impossible, Vegetarian Butcher, etc) are noble and important, in the spirit of ‘full’ lifecycle analysis, it is important to also consider just how processed (ultra processed) these products are and the potential impacts this has in the human health domain. And the research on ultra processed foods is rather clear, they are ‘bad…

I'd be curious to know which ingredients are the most worrisome. I don't eat much Beyond or Impossible at this point, but I could see myself eating a lot in the future if they made lower-fat options (more like ground turkey than ground beef). But I don't want to eat something that is made out of unhealthy ingredients. What should I look out for?

Seed oils. See Dr. Cate Shanahan.

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

#339

Post by jamil7 »

imgabe wrote: post #257
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…

All living things die and are eaten by other living things. This isn’t wrong, it is the way nature works. Would you have every living thing just...stay alive forever? That’s not going to happen.

Your not wrong or anything but I think the general counter argument here is that because something is deemed to have always happened or to happen in nature does not automatically make it right. There’s a term for the argument “appeal to nature” which sort of fits here, you can use this to justify all kinds of things.

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

#340

Post by blux »

neuro_image2 wrote: post #298

I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devastation. I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products: 1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be…

One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs (~2m40 people reacting to what you will see; ~3m23 the actual footage)

To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US.

Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here.

Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world.

So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way.

Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.

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