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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)

#721

Post by dqv »

xdennis wrote: post #513
shawnb576 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plants to animal to you is 10% efficiency. That cow needs to eat 10 lbs of plant to get the nutrients you’d get from 1 lb.

People don't eat efficiency. They want nutritious and delicious food. No one's mouth waters over kale.

We're lucky that kale isn't the only plant-based option. The vegan culinary tradition has existed for centuries. Seitan was invented as early as the 6th century in China.[0] And western vegan culinary traditions have evolved rapidly in the last 10-20 years. The reduction of plant-based diets to just eating salad is not grounded in the reality of those who are plant-based.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)

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

#722

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #386
dcolkitt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had to scroll 1/3 down the page before finally finding this argument. Simply said, for cows, eating meat means murder. Not eating meat means extinction.

[deleted]

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

#723

Post by dqv »

alentist wrote: post #310
__jem wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism What do you mean by that?

It's usually a refrain that comes as a leftist critique of liberals. Generally liberals believe that more thoughtful consumption can solve ills of capitalism while leftists do not. The same idea gets recycled without the critique to mean "nothing you do will reduce the harm you intend to reduce so you're doing that for no reason."

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

#724

Post by dguaraglia »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #645
dguaraglia wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cow that you ate today most likely lived its whole life in a cage no much bigger than its body, inside a huge facility reeking of feces and death and ate an atrocious diet, only to be killed at the perfectly calculated time to maximize profit. I'm a meat eater. Heck, I hunt (and eat what I hunt) and even I can tell you that your argument is ridiculous.

You obviously didn't read what I wrote.

Yeah, I guess I took it the wrong way. I still feel the OG's point about violence against animal is valid.

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

#725

Post by spenczar5 »

SamBam wrote: post #710
spenczar5 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pastureland makes up 27% of the US; crop land is 18% [1]. What do you mean by "tiny fraction?" Is pastureland different than grassland? [1] USDA National Resource Conservation Service "Range and Pastureland" https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/la...

That is more than I had understood remained, and also a surprisingly high number. Possibly there is an issue of definitions. This site, for instance, calculates that 40% of the US used to be grassland, and it's now under 5%. [1] Possibly there is a difference been "old growth" unmanaged grassland, and "pastureland" that is mostly seeded with purchased grass and clover seed. Certainly the old prairies do not exist in…

I agree that there seems to be some wobbliness in definitions here.

I think your citation must have an error. It says:

> In the United States, only 5 percent of the original grasslands remain; or about 358 million acres.

If I understand this right, it's claiming that there were once 20 * 358M = 7,160M acres of grassland. But the total size of the United States - everything, not just grass - is about 2,400M acres, so that can't be right.

Maybe they mean 5% of an original 358M? But no; the "358 million acres" in that blog post is a link to a conservation group report; the report is definitely saying that there are 358 million acres of grassland in the US today.

Definitely agreed that the old prairies are pretty different, especially in the wet crop-heavy areas like Iowa. But as I understand it, the dryer west, like the Dakotas and Nebraska and Colorado, are not as changed. But anyway, I'm really interested in the original topic - do we still have good carbon sinks? I would think all that pastureland would be pretty good at sucking up carbon and storing it in soil, but I don't know.

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

#726

Post by Bancakes »

darkwater wrote: post #491
arvinsim wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, a lot of people are fine with it. That's why most people don't think about it much.

I don't have any real data to prove my point but I think that many people would not like to watch how a cow is killed and transformed into steak. But nobody has problem watching as someone picks apples from a tree, or how a press creates olive oil.

As long as it's not one of those halal killings, I don't see a problem. Bullet to the head, done. I've rotated spit roast as a child and didn't find it creepy.

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

#727

Post by wittycardio »

twhizzle wrote: post #684
dotsam wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of gene editing to remove brain stems, although that still leaves us with the input/output issues (feed, methane etc), which perhaps we can also engineer away. If animal suffering doesn't bother you, does human suffering?

> If animal suffering doesn't bother you, does human suffering? Things I can’t control or fix don’t bother me.

I mean then you have no moral standing whatsoever and your opinion is irrelevant

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

#728

Post by wyager »

spicymaki wrote: post #273
wyager wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nutritional profile of a fast food beef patty is actually quite excellent, especially once you factor in the cost. The same cannot be said of the fake meat alternatives.

Nutritionally meat alternatives stack up well against fast food beef. With the added benefits of fiber and lack of cholesterol and saturated fat. The costs have to do with scale and government incentives. Plant protein is clearly cheaper to produce than animal protein.

Fiber is unnecessary unless you eat too much undigestible plant matter and cholesterol is not as simple as “it’s bad”. Most men are cholesterol deficient.

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

#729

Post by fooker »

atweiden wrote: post #292
tomcam wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?

> I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right? Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for…

> Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you

You can find YouTube videos of cows eating chickens.

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

#730

Post by wyager »

psychometry wrote: post #676
wyager wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

What are you, some sort of beef industry lobbyist? This is a widely accepted fact among the medical community and supported by reams of evidence. Metabolism has almost nothing to do with this. The link between environmental exposure (red meat, smoking, etc.) and cancer has to do with DNA damage and inflammation. https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2021/03/17/bacon-sa... The rest of your comment is clearly irrele…

Yeah, I’m paid to shill on HN by Big Beef.

“Reams of evidence” for an extremely weak effect more than counterbalanced by nutritional benefits.

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