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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)

#751

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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.

This is not at all how it’s done. I encourage you to watch footage of how cows are killed in factory farms. It often takes several attempts to kill the cow, even with a bullet to the head. Their throats are often slit while they are alive. There is pleeenty of footage of exactly this in Dominion. I suggest you watch it.

Well that sucks, not how we did it when I was a kid.

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

#752
post #209

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All food is processed. Cows are genetically engineered. There's no reason to be afraid of simple chemistry. Cranks like Michael Polian have made a fortune selling FUD with no science. Just read a label. Boxed food with a ton of salt and sugar is probably not good for you whether it's corn syrup or agave nectar. Similarly, boxed fiber and protein is perfectly fine. Buying locally is not scalable and fails to take adva…

Real meat is lindy. Fake meat is not. We won't know until multi-decade studies have been done on the health effects of a fake meat diet.

"Fake meat" is an epithet. It's a meat substitute made of real food. None of the ingredients are remotely dangerous. People have been eating tofu and seitan for centuries. We know very what the effects of vegetarianism and veganism are. Some nutrients like iron and B12 need to be looked after but otherwise you can have robust good health.

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

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern humans don't go back literally millions of years. If one were to look at how humans evolved then looking at "Comparative Anatomy of Digestive System of Carnivores, Omnivores, Herbivores, and Humans" to me implies a strong bent towards fruits and nuts. Personally, I think whatever could be eaten got eaten. The consensus of the IPCC is that we should eat less meat. Food has extremely strong cultural significance…

I arrived at this conclusion both from personal experience (I've tried all the apparently reasonable diets) and the scientific data. Nuts are barely digestible. Our digestive system doesn't look like a herbivore / fruit eater at all. Surely we've had some, but that's not what we're build for. I think we're like dogs, we can survive on a diversity of foods (and get sick from some of them) but we thrive on meat. That's…

Dogs can synthesize vitamin C and we can't.

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

#754

This is a phenomenon that all too often suffers from the distaste of ruinous empathy [1] and moral superiority. I personally don't care why/how [you] _feel_ about this product. Stories about morality and feelings in the alt food market are insufferable and immediately invoke an epic eye roll. I care about what I eat in this order: 1. Is it healthy? 2. Does it taste good? 3. Is it sustainable? Fake meat, at this point…

Are you referring to the Beyond Burger at Burger King or Beyond Meat in the grocery? I ate the former today and think it tastes pretty good (I don't miss the real-meat Whopper at all.)

P.S. I think your reference to radical candor is unnecessary; how does it further your 3 points? At the same time, thank you for pointing out this managerial meme; a tangential response since you brought it up: you do realize that the opposite of ruinous empathy is depraved indifference, right? How can we be sure that in critiquing Beyond Burger support as ruinously empathic, you aren't shielding your readers from valid concerns that choosing Real-Meat Whoppers over Beyond Meat Whoppers is immorally indifferent?

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

#755
post #535

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Who is us on that regard? Who decides the standard?

Sorry, that is my personal expectation that I would hope the majority of the world would agree with, but I'm not trying to decide that standard for you. You do you. It's cheesy, but the with great power comes great responsibility quote kind of holds up the way I see it. We pretty much dominate every other species, but we shouldn't pick and choose traits of other species in order to win arguments. We aren't wolves, we…

It's always very strange for me to hear this argument made. It seems you've elevated yourself above the other animals, and I gather, plants as well. Why do you believe that you are anything but another mammal, intricately woven into the biosphere and the food chain? Life eats life. This is the reality. You are an animal. You eat life. The plants that vegetarians and vegans are eating, also ate life. The microbes and fungus that fed the plants, also ate life. To pretend plants have no feelings, emotions, and capability to communicate intelligently (especially plants much much older than humans) is a common mistake, and one made out of lack of observation, and human hubris.

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

#756

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How is any of that true for lions and not true for humans? I eat to survive as well – if I did not eat, I would die. I have also evolved to eat meat, as lions have. Environmental concerns I think should be excluded from this offshoot of the conversation, which is spawned from ethical concerns about killing animals, not environmental concerns.

> How is any of that true for lions and not true for humans? I eat to survive as well – if I did not eat, I would die. I have also evolved to eat meat, as lions have. The difference is that humans can process plant materials into what is needed whereas lions cannot. The humans/lions analogy breaks down because most of us do not live in the Serengeti fighting for survival. The ethical dilemma is: are you eating to liv…

Do you understand that the vast majority of humans are eating to live? No, most humans could not afford to be vegetarians or vegans. Most humans, although not in the Serengeti as you put it, are in fact, fighting for survival. Most humans choose meat, because it's nutritionally dense and depending on how it was raised, provides a 'full protein' unlike plants. Nevermind the obvious health issues involved with eating "process'ed plant materials" that your body is not at all designed to eat.

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

#757
post #579
post #439

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I turned vegan after watching Game Changers: https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/ It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan. The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating…

Where do you get your b12 then? It’s excreted by bacteria and cleaned off in processing. Then, in most functional foods, put back in place as cyanocobalamin. But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it. So again, where do you get your b12? Is it cyanocobalamin?

> But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it.

Very small amounts.

I don't see much evidence that people should be scared of cyanocabalamin (smokers potentially excluded), but of course if it's something you're worried about there are supplements that are based on adenosylcobalamin and methylcolbalamin instead.

I'm sure some people will disagree with me on this, but I would not personally recommend going vegan without taking a B12 supplement. Yes, there are fortified foods now, but I sort of feel like it's safer. Honestly, it's something that non-vegans should at least kind of think about as well, since... a non-trivial number of non-vegans are also B12 deficient. But the more straightforward way to sort this stuff out is to just get a blood test and then ask a doctor.

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

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming. This is incorrect. Cattle is fed primarily on grass. They are grain finished to increase weight at the end. A lot of that space is unusable as crop fields. Also a lot of animal feed is based off of plant byproduct, corn husk, wheat "What most livestock in the…

What the OP is talking about mostly is factory farming, where cows will likely not eat very much grass, and where animals will not be free to graze. I think most people would agree that traditional livestock farming is a much better system, ethically and environmentally, but it would struggle to meet global demand.

> but it would struggle to meet global demand.

Probably correct. I guess meat consumption should go down.

However as someone who has worked on farms and even studied farming at least here in Norway there is plenty of room for increasing meat production from traditional farming, it just isn't economically viable in most cases.

I personally could agree to see meat prices rise 10 or 20% overnight if I knew the price difference would go to the farmers and especially if more of it went to the ones who use their resources reasonably.

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

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define violence against animals please? If there wouldn't be an economic incentive to keep animals alive, their land would be reporposed to crops/housing and a lot of animals would be slaughtered pointlessly.

Very NSFW and serious trigger warning: https://youtu.be/yPQYxYt3zmI Here is what I mean by violence against animals

And you think that's the default? You know how many people/farmers actually care about animals?

The exception doesn't make the rule.

( My dad was a veterinarian. So I have a lot of personal experience on the subject, under belgian law ofc)

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably not a popular opinion, but less environmental impact is actually more desirable to me than "no violence against animals". As far as I understand it, these sort of "animal protection" slogans only serve to make human beings feel better about ourselves, and as such could easily make us forgive (and forget) the massive amount of resources we consumed if not depleted on this earth. Simply by supplying fo…

But... that’s actually a product of the industrialization of meat production. It’s like justifying climate change because ‘oh well, we’ve done until now so might as well keep going’. In reality people are OK with violence against animals because when they think about animal products they just picture a slab of meat they pick up from the freezer at the supermarket. If they realized what feeds the process that ends up…

Human beings, by our continued existence, whether you consume animal products or not, have driven the world uninhabitable for a plenty of wildlives. Even if we don't slaugther livestocks anymore, it can hardly be considered an improvement to the wild world
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