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Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

nytimes.com

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Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#571

Post by iopq »

sph wrote: post #497
froggychairs wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat. What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground. Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several y…

> We know red meat isn’t healthy. I think you mean we have studies of dubious quality blaming red meat. And scores of people repeating the same trite arguments. It's the same people that brought to you salt causes high blood pressure and saturated fat causes atherosclerosis, pushing the low fat craze and the obesity epidemic. Sure, meat is bad, go eat hyper processed fake meat.

Consuming a lot of heme iron is proven to be bad for the heart. Red meat contains heme iron in great amounts.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23708150/

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#572

Post by wakeupcall »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #101
gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…

I’m vegan, converted about four years ago so I ate meat for decades. I ate impossible burgers for a while after Burger King got them, because there is some nostalgia/novelty in going to a fast food joint. But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger o…

Not a vegan, but I went to several places that served some veg patties that I really enjoyed. It didn't attempt to taste like meat, but it was just as enjoyable.

After this I tried several of these alternatives just to look for different flavors. Beyond meat really smelled weird when cooking, and while somewhat acceptable in taste I can totally share the stomach weirdness.

This didn't prevent me to keep trying other stuff. "Impossible meat" I was never able to find yet. But as other have said, the major issue is that all the alternative options cost _more_ than actual beef where I live. This makes it a luxury option.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#573

Post by marliechiller »

johnnymorgan wrote: post #554
ajmurmann wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own. I greatly enjoy the flavor of meat, but feel like a serial killer when I think about the animal suffering and to a lesser extend carbon emissions. While I also get a slightly odd feeling in my stomach from Impossible beef (doesn't happen with their cyber chicken), it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger without feeling like I just tortured a puppy.

Go organic, with inflation the premium on organics isn't barely there now. It's a better quality of product and doesn't send their cows to feedlots. I've seen industrial farming and it's not pretty, but more than anything it products a pretty crappy product now compared to organic. You eat a lot less as the quality leaves you satisfied.

That doesnt solve the problem of slaughtering a sentient being for 5 minutes of taste pleasure which I think he was trying to avoid

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#574

Post by unwind »

ianai wrote: post #504
mike_d wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would be very compelling if your body only needed calories to survive. Meat is the most efficient way to deliver proteins and essential amino acids. You should also dig into the concept of bioavailability.

This is debunked. Tofu is incredibly protein dense - on par or surpassing chicken breast. Without looking it up and subjectively, tofu also seems to be digested very easily. There’s also seitan and the beans. Nuts also exist but have fat/protein ratios that tend toward uncomfortably high. (If what your eating has macros that approach the fat content in nuts to other nutrients that’s pretty high and should be noted.)

Tofu is incredibly protein dense - on par or surpassing chicken breast.

According to Wikipedia and Google, tofu [1] has 8% protein, while chicken [2] has almost 31%.

Is there some more finesse required in the exact variety of tofu that you mean?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu#Nutrition_and_health

[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicken+breast+nutrition+100...

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#575

Post by fsloth »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #570
fsloth wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as impossible as you make it sound IMO, I would guess it's more a matter of pricing. If plantburgers and plantdogs where considerable cheaper than meatburgers and hotdogs I would guess people would follow the money and shift to consuming the plant based alternative if they were otherwise close enough.

Well, we're running that experiment right now with soaring meat prices and it looks like you're wrong. Turns out if you make one type of meat more expensive then people just switch to a different kind of meat. If you make all meat more expensive, people buy cheaper cuts and get creative with how they prepare it. My bet is that if you make it prohibitively expensive then people will get creative about sourcing their m…

I'm not 100% sure it's a product issue and not a market positioning issue. Current gen "new fake meat" veggie brands try to position themselves at premium, which looks like the wrong place to be in. At premium fake meats loose to meat, hands down.

It's like you are trying to position fish sticks on the same slot as fresh salmon.

Huge marketing campaign, target low price segment - that would be the market experiment I would be really interested in.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#576

Post by Cannabat »

pvaldes wrote: post #514
Cannabat wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed. Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other…

> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.

> Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore.

This is just silly. I can't imagine an internally consistent worldview that would assert something like this. Of course natural biomes are valuable regardless of the presence of cattle. Besides, modern cattle are domesticated creatures and don't even really have a native (i.e. not man-made or facilitated) environment.

The assertion regarding soy fields is at best a misunderstanding of the actual data regarding land use, or at worse, a meaningless tautology.

For those who don't have time to click and read the link in the other reply by user vnorilo, I'll just quote the relevant paragraph:

> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#577

Post by lucasverra »

sammalloy wrote: post #428
King-Aaron wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an omnivore but still like to have the odd non-meat option, and I'm the same. I find the impossible (etc) burgers are just.. weird. I really prefer having a felafel if it's available!

Not a bad choice. A great falafel reminds me of a veggie shawarma.

Everything that is (centuries) old is new again!

PS : soaked portobello mushrooms veggie burger is a delicatessen

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#578

Post by pvaldes »

cogman10 wrote: post #544
pvaldes wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.

Cattle do not eat solely from a meadow. Even if cows are free range, that's generally only a spring to fall state, in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay). For factory farmed cattle (which is the most common) the situation is far worse. An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?

> in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).

To have hay in winter you still need a meadow of high grass that will burst with life in spring, and cattle is excluded from this areas. Hay don't require pesticides or weedkillers. Traditional farming areas double its purpose as small natural reserves, even in winter. (Not all is nice, we could have a forest there instead, but is still better than modern agriculture for a mile).

> An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?

This is a false equivalence.

The correct question would be: "how much soy consume the number of people that could be feed with this cow".

The error is understandable because many of this movements are focused in the individual, and equality among individuals. This is just one way to study ecology, but not the more interesting or rewarding one, and sometimes leads to plain wrong conclusions.

A cow can produce until 88lbs of milk a day. Having 12000 L of milk by cow in a lactating season is not uncommon, and some can reach 20000 L of milk. And this without talking about the meat and the leather.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#579

Post by marliechiller »

TylerE wrote: post #509
xorfish wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets If everyone were to switch to a vegan diet, global agriculture land use would be reduced by 75%.

Water and pesticide usage is way more problematic than land usage.

correct, which is even more reason to try to reduce animal consumption as they make up a massive proportion agriculture required just for their feed

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#580

Post by barrell »

vnorilo wrote: post #532
pvaldes wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.

The bulk of soy production is for cattle feed. https://ourworldindata.org/soy

This is quite a red herring. The bulk of soy production is waste, that we have managed to use for cattle feed, because they can upcycle it into consumable nutrients.

If we got rid of all cattle, we would not reduce the amount of soybeans grown by 77%, just our utilization of what is grown.

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