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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

#741

Post by delecti »

oblio wrote: post #612
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.

The thing is... this is not a solved problem, by far. You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted. Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out…

The entire western market isn't going to simultaneously and instantly stop eating meat. There won't suddenly be a day when all the herds are culled because everyone finally stopped eating meat at once. If it ever happens (I'm hopeful but not optimistic), it will be a gradual process, and industries will have lots of time to adapt.

But even that aside, it's not our duty as consumers to keep eating animals to keep industry able to make shoes and cheese.

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

#742

Post by ipqk »

johnnymorgan wrote: post #550
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.

I never considered this aspect, really good point.

No, it's not a good point. Cows are rarely grown in "meadows". Free-range beef is a minority, and most cow feed comes from monoculture fields. And it takes more monoculture grain to grow a pound of beef versus a pound of vegetables, and it's not even close.

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

#743

Post by healsdata »

crimsoneer wrote: post #668
boppo1 wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper, we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption. Habitual meat eater here. I will never ever trust these products to be right for my body the way meat is. Humans haven’t nailed it in the past with heavily processed foods, why would it suddenly work now? I understand…

This seems like a bonkers thing to claim. You're suggesting that if someone gave you two burgers that tasted identical, one that was real meat and costs £5, and the other that was fake and costs £2, if they were other than that TOTALLY IDENTICAL (other than the fake one being better for the planet), you'd still feel the need to eat the real one? For some sense of perceived...offence?

100% Have we forgotten trans fats in margarine? By all accounts, it was butter but cheaper and "healthier". 70 years later, we realized it was worse for us that natural fats.

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

#744

Post by patrec »

tptacek wrote: post #308
SoftTalker wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.

What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programming languages, only slow implementations" type of argument about the absence of strict logical necessity?

Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like?

Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc).

None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms).

But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it.

For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?

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

#745

Post by Spivak »

Fiahil wrote: post #433
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #278

If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I have at least 8 vegan dishes I can make that are just amazingly delicious . A mushroom risotto, veggie tajine, chana masala, ramen, moussaka, general tso's cauliflour, cuban b…

From a French perspective, American cuisine is bland and unimpressive. Clamping down on meat is not enough, you need to also get around cooking everything in oil, and added sugar (basically, everything about your cuisine).

This seems crazy to me, I can buy unimpressive because that’s a matter of taste and American cuisine is kinda samey but American cuisine is practically defined by “punch the eater in the face with massively over the top flavor.” Like if anything it’s putting too much and too many flavors without thinking too much how they interact.

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

#746

Post by peoplefromibiza »

sweetheart wrote: post #664
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals so basically you want a veggie patty disguised as an hamburger. but there's a catch: agriculture kills as many animals than we do to eat them. You might not see them, but billions of insects, worms, small rodents etc are killed in the process of making agriculture a viable business. Pesticides are not exactly environmental frie…

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too/re...

I am aware of the objections coming from vegans, I really have nothing to say to them other than I am in favour of freedom of worship, but I am also an atheist who tries to stand on the side of the scientific method as much as my abilities allow me, so I think National Geographic and PNAS are a more reliable source of information.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/insec...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

Most importantly: loss of vegetable specie due to mono cultures farmed specifically for humans (tomatoes for burgers, for example - McDonald's is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, purchaser in the world of potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes - or avocados for fancy sandwiches, that consume 300 liters of water to produce a single fruit) is not be underestimated.

As an example, this sentence

> vegans are inflicting far less damage because most of the cereal crops that are mono-cropped (wheat, corn, soy, etc.) are fed to the animals people consume.

is almost completely made up and numbers are greatly exaggerated for propagandistic purpose.

The reason why original Parmigiano cheese is so worshipped by Italians and it's so expensive abroad, is exactly because cows are not fed with crops, bu with natural grass.

The reason why in USA many animals are fed with farmed crops is because crops are subsidized by the govt, making them cheaper than the alternatives.

Another reason why herbivores are fed with crops is because they can eat the remains we can't eat, which is around 85% of the whole plant

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5caca181348cd9...

According to FAO (United Nations Agency for food) "only 13% of global animal feed (all animals for food, including chickens, pigs and cattle) is comprised of grain crops"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

Crops are also heavily subsidized to produce bio fuel, which is not great, I agree, but that has nothing to do with feeding animals or eating their meat.

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

#747

Post by galangalalgol »

SpaghettiX wrote: post #508
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.

Your comment is obviously (to me) someone who hasn't explored any other diet except meat eating (feel free to dispute). There are many people thriving on a vegan diet.

There are, but everyone has different dietary needs too. Some studies found a genetic sequence evolved in asia that confers better utilization of legume protein. Western Europe and eastern Africa evolved lactose tolerance to get protein instead. Up north people got bigger livers to handle more meat consumption.

I have tried vegan (whole foods only) for months, and I have real trouble with legumes, not just normal gas, and my blood work went crazy. Triglycerides shot up for one.

The healthiest I have ever felt, and the best my blood work has ever been, was eating 1.5lbs of grassfed beef every day (with lots of roots and leaves too).

I can do vegetarian pretty easily, I process eggs and dairy well, but both of those foods are designed to trigger rapid growth in young organisms. I'm not growing anymore so I tend to pack on fat with them.

My chosen middle ground is to get my protein from fish (Cobain said they don't have feelings) and dinosaurs(they had their time). I feel little kinship to cows, grew up around them, but it isn't efficient, even if I feel physically better eating them.

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

#748

Post by talldan »

heather45879 wrote: post #727
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.…

Honestly, the best approach is not making “fake” anything—black bean burgers and other home-made options not only taste way better, but they are not highly processed. The more stages in processing a food undergoes, the worse it is for people. It’s really that simple. People are trying to over-science food in my opinion. Sticking to good, wholesome ingredients is the way to go. Support local farmers not some large con…

> black bean burgers and other home-made options not only taste way better

A lot of people making this kind of point, but it's subjective and you have no idea if you're in a majority or not in your preferences.

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

#749

Post by papito »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #678
papito wrote: post #470

The goal should be to eat HUMANE meat if you want to eat meat but can't for ethical reasons. When I was a kid, my gram grams in Ukraine treated our animals like family members. That cow and hog dinner cooked for them smelled so good I wanted to plant my face in it myself. My grandfather even built a sun deck for the pigs. A sun deck. We wanted them to be HAPPY and PLUMPY, and when it was time to get the household thr…

> The goal should be to eat HUMANE meat if you want to eat meat but can't for ethical reasons. To a lot of us, it will never be considered humane to kill something that is perfectly healthy for no other reason than that we want to eat something that tastes a certain way. > When I was a kid, my gram grams in Ukraine treated our animals like family members Think about this for a minute.

This is called "sustenance". They are not your pets. You treat the animals well because they literally feed you through the cold months. People don't understand that in many parts of the world not eating meat is a huge luxury.

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

#750

Post by jwally »

Willish42 wrote: post #347

This post is crowded with responses from people explaining why they hate Beyond meat FWIW, I've always liked Beyond Meat as a "good enough" substitution for a beef burger that's easy to prepare that is close in texture to a real burger - if you use a burger sauce and cheese like most recipes for non-vegans do, it tastes pretty close. I even liked it so much I'd order it at restaurants wherever available and bought a…

1000% this!

IMHO, Health / Nutrition is very K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid), but it feels like so many people get caught in the trap of finding "one weird trick" to keep them lean / healthy and then setting common sense on fire - so long as they obey that rule.

> Vegans are healthier and leaner than Omnivores. Therefore I can eat pastries for breakfast lunch and dinner, and as long as they don't contain animal products I'll lose weight!

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