TL;DR: the meat industry’s misleading messaging campaign + lobbying
I do eat meat (I do acknowledge that this is an ethical and moral failing) but with the plant-based alternatives being so good I have changed my eating habits a lot.
Plant Based is now what I tend to buy as my first choice in the vast majority of cases and I don’t feel that I’ve lost anything in doing so. This is far from a properly consistent moral choice but it has helped me dramatically lower how much animal products I buy.
Classic plant-based recipes are usually better than the ones that try to replicate a burger with plants.
So I try to change habits and eat vegetarian recipes more often. Still like to eat burger, with chicken meat since it has a smaller impact on the environment.
with chicken meat since it has a smaller impact on the environment.
I had assumed that a plant-based burger would be better for the environment than a meat based burger (including chicken) - or am I entirely wrong here? (I guess there is complexity depending on the type of “plant-based” burger and the type of meat and where it was sourced from etc)
Think of it in terms of inputs and outputs. This is drastically simplified with rounded numbers, but gets the point across.
I can take 1 acre of land, add seed, and 500,000 gallons of water. These are my inputs. From that, I get an output of 2000 pounds of grain. I could take that output and eat it myself. Or I could decide I want to grow meat.
If I grow meat, I need another 1 acre of land, another 100,000 gallons of water, and at least half of that 2000 pounds of grain from my first acre. Now I can grow a cow.
It is more efficient in terms of resource utilization to go directly from plant to human, instead of going from plant to animal to human.
I think we should go harder into mycoculture and Insectivory. We can grow mushrooms or other fungus on our plant waste like wood, paper, and food scraps. We can also feed soldier flies, grubs, ants, termites or grasshoppers on farm and food waste.
Insects and fungi are also WAY more efficient than mammals like cows, or reptiles like birds. And they can both use waste material from agriculture without using up resources that we ourselves could use for ourselves.
I’ve never had an actual meat burger so I can’t really say how this compares, but you can have pretty tasty meat-free burgers with plant based ingredients. For instance, a potato based patty, corn fritters, mushrooms all make for tasty meat-patty replacements. What I personally dislike though is those fake meat burgers, like the “Impossible Beef” one. A burger joint here recently got rid of their portobello mushroom burger and replaced it with an Impossible Beef one, so I gave it a try - and it was disgusting. The portobello mushroom one used to be absolutely delish, and I couldn’t believe they replaced something so tasty, with fake beef. In saying that, my meat eating buddy tried the patty and he said it tasted just fine, almost identical to real beef. So it was my vego taste buds that rejected it, and there was nothing wrong with the fake beef apparently…
Anyways, I digress, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can definitely have a tasty burger with plant based ingredients.
Without meat ard other animal praducts many simply can’t consume enough complete protein. Plant proteins apart from hemp are limited in their amino acid profile. Milk, meat and egg are staples for good reason
Milk is another great example of industry influencing diet, it is not a necessary component of people’s diet once they are done being a tiny baby.
Can’t or don’t want to? Cutting meat out is quite easy and more obviously a choice when you instead eat eggs, nuts, varied veggies, and legumes. Heck of a lot cheaper too
People do not actually need much animal protein, certainly nowhere near the amount in American and European diets. Given that, it is not super hard for an adult to get the full compliment of necessary protein from a plant based diet. Milk, meat, and eggs are largely staples due to marketing.
That is just not true. Complete protein isn’t really a problem because you just need to get the amino acids in at some point in the day. It takes much less than you’d think for that. For instance, beans technically are incomplete, but beans and rice are complete proteins.
Plus soy, which is an extremely common plant-based protein, is fully complete on its own
Why is it always plants vs. animals… when what I really hate are insects! Why not eat those? 🌭🦗
But like, not very conscious animals. I wouldn’t have much of an issue with some cow tumoral cells growing uncontrollably in a vat.
I’ve watched bees attempt to problem solve their way out of containers. Our inability to create good tests for consciousness that doesn’t necessarily look like our’s is definitely going to create a good bit of existential horror when we start to develop better testing methods.
A competing interest creating fake grass roots campaigns to point out how unhealthy the competition is doesnt surprise me in the least, but that said I think even without it some of the dip can likely be applied to the novelty wearing off and the expectations of infinite growth.
An impossible burger tastes fine for a veggie burger, but at the end of the day it isnt beef. Combine that with the unfortunate fact that plant based impossible style meat alternatives are more expensive, and inflation and you just have fewer people looking to splurge on something for the novelty.
Personally I dont think I’ll ever stop eating meat all the way, but I do try to reduce my daily consumption so it isnt an all the time thing. When I do have a meatless day it’s usually better served by having actual meatless(or vastly reduced) cuisine and not fake meat. So pizza, pasta with various cheeses, falafel, hummus dip snacks, rice and beans, bean burrito, arroz con gandules, vegetarian curry, veggy noodles, and etc. Likewise Ive talked to vegans and vegetarians who just no longer like meat and prefer their veggie burger taste like a bean patty instead of something that fake bleeds.
Dont get me wrong I agree that plant proteins and lab grown meats are important for eventually reducing meat consumption overall which is better for the environment. Meat eaters like myself would have an easier time eating less meat if there was an easy meat alternative. I just think that there are genuine organic reasons behind the drop in addition to the propoganda and I wonder how much of this now is the other side pulling their own astro turfing because they should be having the exponential and infinite growth that our market seems to demand and anything less than that is failure.
Initial adoption of “impossible” and alternatives was rapid and sudden so I wonder how much of this dip can be ascribed to the age old capitalist issue of expanding too rapidly and then falling off once the novelty wears off.
But yeah in short: Oh yeah big meat is definitely astroturfing, but I suspect there are more factors at play in the sales dips we’re seeing.
When I do have a meatless day it’s usually better served by having actual meatless(or vastly reduced) cuisine and not fake meat
I agree with statement exactly. I will always choose a vegetable based meal that is its own thing instead of something similar to meat. I want it to emphasize the vegetables or grains instead of hiding it. Most of these have generations of people creating these traditional vegetarian or vegan dishes which are great instead of a cheap knock off.
I feel lab grown meat will attack traditional meat consumption much more. Same with actually ethically and sustainable meat creation.
Fake meat isn’t even a cheap knock off, it is a more expensive knock off.
If you took away the government subsidies for meat production the price disparity would vanish.
Processed food may not be the best nutritionally, but it can still be not terrible. Also if we take into account all the hormones, antibiotics, cheap trash food diet, and suffering of living creatures required to support livestock management on a massive scale, what do we end up considering the better choice?
I’m still viewing these foods as in the testing stages anyway. I find the texture and flavor of many of them equal or better than natural proteins. I have nothing against meat consumption, but the current amount the world demands doesn’t seem to be the best option for the planet. Additionally, the scale of meat processing doesn’t seem to be able to support taking good care of the animals or the workers. Fake meat on the other hand had many ecological advantages, and the tech is improving constantly to make it better and cheaper and easier to produce. Scaling up production of a totally manufactured product seems something we can better control than something natural.
I feel there will still be a market for man made meat, especially if climate change limits the ability to support real animals. Once it can reach price parity, people will forget about most of their complaints as well.
people also seems to forget that even meat eaters should not eat it on a daily basis. I’m vegetarian and I enjoy plant-based meat replacements a lot, but I still only eat them once per week, tops.
