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Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

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Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#551

Post by astura »

Judgmentality wrote: post #530

I'm not asking this to rain on the parade - I love what these guys are doing but I have a question about their process and the ethics of it. So in order to grow the meat, they have to culture the cells in bovine fetal serum, which they get from cow fetuses on their way to slaughter. My question is how much meat is grown per fetus? > Cell-grown meat, I told him, would be spurred on by synthetic serums refined from the…

You entirely missed the context of that quote, which was preceded by "vegan meat replacements today, meat grown from cells tomorrow."

"Cell-grown meat" isn't what Beyond or Impossible are doing - what they are doing is "vegan meat replacements," replicating the taste of meat using vegetable sources. Neither company is trying to grow real meat from cell cultures in a lab, which is what you're talking about.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#552

Post by King-Aaron »

mike_d wrote: post #434
drewg123 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study seems to be comparing cropland to pasture. The problem is that the tradeoff is not between cropland and pasture, but pasture and forest. Eg: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed... Due to increasing demand for meat, we have people burning the forest and releasing all the carbon sequestered in the trees, and reducing the efficiency of the land as a carbon sink going forward.

The majority of the worlds meat is raised in areas where forests do not naturally develop. If all natural meat consumption stopped tomorrow, Brazilians would cut down forests to grow whatever is needed for fake meat. The problem is land is one of the few economically exploitable natural resources the country has to sustain itself.

Case in point: The largest cattle producing station in Australia - Anna Creek - is basically low scrubland.

https://www.entegra.com.au/anna-creek-the-biggest-cattle-sta....

Australian beef is some of the highest quality in the world, and it's almost solely raised in areas that have very low impact on the environment. (Dairy farming is different, of course, because the location of dairy farms is important to have a close proximity to the dairies and thus the consumers).

But unfortunately a lot of people view the US agriculture system as the be-all and end-all, and don't look to the rest of the world that can actually perform fairly low-impact agriculture.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#553

Post by jtdev »

soyftware wrote: post #539
scottLobster wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy ethically sourced/farmed meat (albeit at a premium), and farmed fish in particular is quite sustainable. I would dispute that there are "a dozen" reasons we should not be eating meat. There are perhaps a few practical reasons we should not be eating low-quality mass-market meat (health, environment, animal cruelty), and a few moral reasons we should not eat unethically raised meat. And even those reasons…

Any source of meat is not ethical to the animals. Affordability almost doesn't matter. Staple foods like rice, grains, and beans are staple foods for a reason.

Just because you believe this doesn’t make it true. Do you think a pack of coyotes tearing apart a newborn deer is unethical too? Do you think farming grains and vegetables is without impact on wildlife?

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#555

Post by tspike »

missedthecue wrote: post #534
ip26 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat has high calories per pound. But a cow must eat 10,000 calories of plants to produce 1,000 calories of beef. Chickens need as few as 2,000 calories of plant to produce 1,000 calories of chicken. If they are eating roughage humans can't eat, it's useful. But if we are farming corn to feed cows, we could have been farming something humans (or chickens) can eat instead with less land, fertilizer, etc.

Ok, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand. What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.

> they mostly graze on infertile land

This is true during the first year of life. After that, most cattle are moved to dense feedlots. Further, the infertile land they're grazing on, in many cases, is infertile precisely because of the way it's grazed. In the scenario where herds graze huge tracts of unbroken native grasslands, the result is increasingly fertile soil.

When grazing animals are confined to small lots, the resulting erosion of topsoil and over-grazing reduce the fertility of the land.

> the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans > Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out.

True in many cases, but missing the larger point. This waste would typically be scattered over huge tracts of land, sequester carbon and re-fertilize the soil over long time horizons. Instead, we turn it into methane and artificially fertilize.

> What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.

True, but fails to consider the negative externalities.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#556

Post by d110af5ccf »

bambax wrote: post #540
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. The way I think of it, pigs are very intelligent, more intelligent than dogs. However, humans are more intelligent. If pigs were more intelligent, pigs would eat humans. And that's not a figure of speech. Pig would eat us if they could. They wouldn't stop and think, gee, does this little baby human girl cry because it doesn't want to be eaten, maybe…

That's some flawed reasoning if there ever was any. If the justification for eating pigs is that you're no better than them, and they "would" eat "little girls", why not eat little girls yourself? They would be much tender than adult pigs, and presumably easier to find. Also, how do you know pigs would eat little girls? Pigs that we eat were created by us. They would not exist if not us. Wild pigs, while omnivorous,…

> Wild pigs, while omnivorous, eat mostly plants and extremely small animals

That's almost certainly because they aren't very good predators (ie minimal opportunity to hunt in an evolutionarily advantageous manner).

> why not eat little girls yourself

Because humans don't do that, so we're not interested in justifying that behavior. Also there's an obvious lack of symmetry there - it's no longer an inter-species interaction, so it no longer fits the template being applied here. Thus that question is more or less off topic in context.

That said, from an evolutionary perspective cannibalism generally isn't an advantageous trait for the overall population (exceptions exist, of course). To the best of my knowledge pigs don't cannibalize one another (or perhaps they do, but again that really isn't relevant in context).

The real issue with such reasoning is (IMO) that it would appear capable of justifying some apparently problematic actions. House cats seemingly enjoy torturing small prey, and would presumably be happy to do the same to us. Yet I would hardly accept that as justification for someone torturing their house cat.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#557

Post by Judgmentality »

astura wrote: post #551
Judgmentality wrote: post #530

I'm not asking this to rain on the parade - I love what these guys are doing but I have a question about their process and the ethics of it. So in order to grow the meat, they have to culture the cells in bovine fetal serum, which they get from cow fetuses on their way to slaughter. My question is how much meat is grown per fetus? > Cell-grown meat, I told him, would be spurred on by synthetic serums refined from the…

You entirely missed the context of that quote, which was preceded by "vegan meat replacements today, meat grown from cells tomorrow." "Cell-grown meat" isn't what Beyond or Impossible are doing - what they are doing is "vegan meat replacements," replicating the taste of meat using vegetable sources. Neither company is trying to grow real meat from cell cultures in a lab, which is what you're talking about.

Oh wow, I was confusing them with another company. Thank you for the clarification.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#558

Post by astura »

kart23 wrote: post #473
jordache wrote: post #392

I tried the impossible whopper. You literally could not tell the difference between that and a normal beef whopper. I realized a lot the attributes of these commercial food products are the additions, like sauce, and toppings that contribute to that precisely calibrated flavor.

Impossible is really good, even the texture is nearly spot-on. However, I've found Beyond meat to give itself away pretty easily, and it has a distinctly chemical-ly, (plant?) aftertaste.

I find the Beyond Meat aftertaste quite pleasing, actually. It taste kind almost herbal to me.

It's been more than two decades since I've had hamburger so I can't comment on authenticity.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#559

Post by fosk »

m8s wrote: post #441
hammock wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when you add up every hot pocket, frozen pizza, slider, hot dog, or chicken nugget, it's hard to argue that most of meat actually being consumed can't be easily substituted. For something healthier and cheaper too! Read the labels more closely the next time you eat that hot pocket or frozen sausage pizza. A large number of these products already have "textured vegetable protein" (TVP) or other meat substitute in the…

Ingredients ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, AND FOLIC ACID), WATER, LOW-MOISTURE PART-SKIM MOZZARELLA CHEESE (CULTURED PART-SKIM MILK, SALT, ENZYMES), TOMATO PASTE, COOKED SEASONED PIZZA TOPPING MADE WITH PORK AND CHICKEN, BHA, BHT AND CITRIC ACID ADDED TO HELP PROTECT FLAVOR (PORK, MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, WATER, TEXTURED SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SPIC…

How on Earth did we end up having so many ingredients in what essentially is just pizza. The food industry really has gone too far by over-processing everything.

Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

#560

Post by tspike »

Spivak wrote: post #483
DamnYuppie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that cooked meat has much higher caloric value than vegetables. To be honest if it wasn't so good for us we wouldn't have evolved to consume it!

Animals bread for slaughter are essentially tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can. They’re used when you reach the limit of your usable farmland but still have grasslands. Yes meat is more caloric than “vegetables” on a per-lb basis but meat gets beat out by oils, nuts and seeds which is why trail mix and unleavened nut breads “lembas bread” exist.

> tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can

Yep, but the devil is in the details. How exactly is that conversion happening and what are the side effects? It takes great care to ensure the outcome is a net positive.

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