While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers:
- The texture is off
- Maybe they cook strangely
- Potentially less taste
But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter. No one needed to die for you to eat it.
> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.
I have a small cattle property, we run on hill country with diversified ecosystem, mixed grass and bushland. We have a heap of native animals living across the property. And at the end of the day the steers do get sent of for slaughter after 18 to 24 months + we kill feral pigs when they get in large numbers.
While cropping properties they tend to be monoculture, very little native animal presence. The spray like buggery wiping out insects with all that flow on effect (and to be fair we spray too, herbicide only and never pesticides and far less frequently). Also the cropping properties tend to shoot 'pests' heavily. We don't mind a few kangaroos and ducks type thing about but cropping properties are very serious about deterring and killing anything that hits their property.
And to be clear, I'm not having a go at you. I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position, and my family actually try to do more vegetarians meals. While at the same time I'm not sure plant based options are so devoid of killing, only the end product is one step removed.
This is a complicated topic, with multiple responses, but I'm only going to touch on one specific aspect of it. Reducing violence in regular farming is an admirable goal that people should strive towards. It's also worth talking about the environmental costs of ingredients like palm oil, and it's worth talking about the human costs of products like cocoa.
I don't mean to diminish any of that at all, it's all worth paying attention to.
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. So it's not really like eating meat is ever going to result in less death. We would need to move entirely to free-grazing cattle, which frankly, I do not believe is scalable enough or cost-effective enough to meet food demand.
I know people who are not vegetarian or vegan, but who care very deeply about animal welfare, and who care a lot about where their beef/pork/chicken is sourced from. I admire that, I am not going to shame anyone for caring about anything. My own opinions about killing animals aside, at the very least ethically sourcing meat is miles better than not caring at all. But I no longer believe that's something that's feasible to expect most people to do; in a weird way I think going vegetarian is easier for many people than figuring out where their burger at a restaurant came from. And where factory farming is involved, getting rid of meat allows us to engage directly with the costs of farming and eliminate one of the extra steps (cattle) that are layered on top of that process.
There was a post of the front-page of reddit a few days ago saying that most Americans are lied to about the fish they are buying in restaurants and supermarkets. I think it hilarious when people like me, urban dwellers, tell me to my face they only buy meat from some small butcher because they only trust him, or some variation of that story. Truth is, we have no idea where our food comes from, labels lie, and sellers have all the incentive to manipulate the truth.
"I think it hilarious when people like me, urban dwellers, tell me to my face they only buy meat from some small butcher because they only trust him, or some variation of that story."
I bought half a pig some time ago; I have a copy of his (probably 'her'?) earmark here next to me on my desk. I get an invitation each year to go watch it when it goes out to pasture for the first time that year. I can choose to have the half delivered to me as a carcass, for me to do my own butchering, or I can choose to have it processed (and I can choose to give away the parts I'm not going to eat, like the blood sausage and the processed head, tails and ears (for which I don't know the English word - it's a grayish slab, often eaten on rye bread here in North-Western Europe; that is, when it's eaten at all, I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who eats it).
Anyway, my point is - it's very much possible to know exactly where meat comes from with small farmers/butchers, even for urban dwellers, to the point that I looked the animal that I ate a part of last night in its eyes several times.
> for which I don't know the English word - it's a grayish slab, often eaten on rye bread here in North-Western Europe
In British English, that would be "Head Cheese" or "Brawn", or at least head cheese is likely to be a similar product, made from the animal's head, that's the only thing I can think of. I've never eaten it and it's regarded as kinda gross.
Fromage de tête in French, if you can get over the idea of it, it's well worth trying it. When it's well made with good quality ethically sourced meat (we used to do the same and buy a pig with neighbours and then process it), it's super tasty.
Yes that's it, after some Googling it turns out that the word I had in mind is a regional word and the 'official' word is the literal translation into Dutch of 'head cheese'.
There is a simple solution to this: buy it local. It might solve all issues with the meat (how do they feed these animals, etc.) but you at least know where it comes from.
I know it's not possible for everyone, but there is currently a big surge in local farm shops. I'm lucky enough to have a farming cooperative in my town where i can order weekly food from local farms and shops. I eat mostly vegetarian, but it's nice to have an option for some decent meat once in a while.
Local does prevent harm to animals. Local also does not change the metrics on how resource-intensive the product is (lentils are so much more env friendly than meat it's not the same league).
> decent meat
In my world that does not exist. "Decent" is just the level of harm/destruction that you're willing to accept.
> 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 world mostly don’t eat is grain fit for human consumption."
"What most livestock in the world mostly eat is grass and other forages and crop ‘wastes’ and by-products."
Additionaly:
> This study determines that 86% of livestock feed is not suitable for human consumption. If not consumed by livestock, crop residues and by-products could quickly become an environmental burden as the human population grows and consumes more and more processed food.
There is a legitimate usage of livestock, they can graze in areas not suitable for crop production (especially sheep and goats). They can consume and digest plant matter that we cannot (which is the whole point of utilizing livestock in the first place).
I think in general (as an American) we eat too much meat. And the consumption needs to go down (and it's been staying flat which is saying something). But I think that livestock has a very useful purpose of converting non-crop farmable lands and plant based byproducts into useful food.
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.
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.
It may be unusable as crop fields, but grazing it often prevents it from developing into a richer ecosystem that might be able to support a greater variety of wildlife and sink more carbon dioxide.
A rather extreme example of this somewhat famously happens down in Brazil, but there's also a not completely off-the-wall hypothesis that this phenomenon also at least partially explains the Little Ice Age. IIRC, the basic goes that the American peoples relied heavily on a version pasture-based livestock agriculture, which involved limiting the growth of forests in order to ensure plenty of grassland for large bison herds. The wave of plague that killed people off after European contact meant that the pasture land was no longer being maintained, and began to revert back to forest. This, in turn, sucked so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it altered the world climate.
I would argue that you can't point to a single source like that in ecology.
Grasslands are the way they are due to draught as well. They have dry periods, and during these they catch on fire and the whole thing burns down.
> "A grassland can become either a desert or a forest if conditions like temperature, amount of rainfall, how often fires occur and how many herbivores live in these areas change. As more and more trees grow in a grassland, it is sometimes called a savanna."
I have noted that the best way forward would be to create stricter eutrophication laws and tax artificial fertilizers produced from fossil fuels. This would feel very contradicting to vegetarians and vegans, but factory farming would be hit comparable much harder and it would directly address the environmental factors of factory farming without harming biodiversity.
A complicating factor in this discussion is that a large portion of the feed to cattle comes as a by-product from ethanol production in things like bio fuel. The process result in about 1/3 of the original crop becoming fuel, 1/3 becomes feed, and the rest is waste/water. With more and more focus on producing bio fuel, a natural result is the creation of more feed as a by-product.
>and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming.
I don't know how to find data but I thought that "grain-fed" cattle largely don't exist outside the USA (chicken/pork are different), so the only crop farmed is hay. And that may not impose as heavy costs as other crops?
Netherlands is the 2nd largest argricultural exporter [1], and has heavy factory animal farming that are all fed farmed crops. Very little grazing for meat animals.
Factory farming is where the majority of our meat comes from, and I've seen no evidence that direct crop farming would result in more small animal lives lost than the meat industry in its current form. I also see little to no evidence that efforts to reform the meat industry are likely to succeed, the "ethical meat" movement is smaller than the vegetarian movement by most measures I can find, and far more susceptible to marketing lies (cage free eggs are not particularly much of an improvement over caged).
If you want to personally find a local butcher where you look your cow in its satisfied, well-lived eyes before it dies, and you want to argue with people about their ingredient supply chain every time you eat out or buy a frozen dinner or go to an office party, then fine, you do you. But I think it's somewhat naive to argue that's a model that can realistically work for most people. For the majority of consumers, vegetarianism would be both less expensive and less difficult.
And I just think it's strictly inaccurate to say that small animal deaths would increase if the meat industry in its current form went away. I don't see any evidence of that, not enough cattle/chicken/beef is raised on grass to make that a realistic claim.
I think the argument "all consumption of food kills animals, therefore no food is truly vegetarian/vegan, therefore there's no moral distinction between quote-unquote vegan food and factory-farmed meat" is a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
It's definitely true that just switching over to plant-based foods and away from animal-based foods won't solve all the issues, it's also worth noting that a lot of cattle, at least in the US, are not raised on a foraging model, so most feed that cattle consume come from plants raised elsewhere, which are going to largely be those same cropping properties. And, further, the amount of feed to raise cattle mean that those cropping properties have to grow significantly more product than if they were producing for plant-based foods.
I do have a lot of respect for smaller cattle operations that run an ecologically sensitive operation, such that the land is used in a way that sustains itself and the cattle on it. It's just that, those are the exceptions, at least in countries like the US.
While not as efficient as if we'd eat that grain directly, it doesn't seem terribly inefficient, and it may reduce the number of individuals that need to be born & die. (Of course under a stark analysis of whether to have cattle at all, the conclusion could be different, so the question is what analysis you're using this info for). Anyway, if on top of that you subscribe to the hypothesis that grain is not good for human health, grain-finishing may do net good.
From what I understand grain used for animal feed is of a poorer quality and can't be used to make bread. And so it's essentially a waste product (usually because of rain just before a harvest).
I won't claim to be an expert, this information was given to me by an arable farmer friend of mine.
Meanwhile “More than half the U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans.”
Your anecdote makes it sound like animal feed is just a fixed waste cost of growing food for humans.
Correct but at the same time, the grain production wouldn’t be there if humans were the only market for grain and that grain being produced is not for human consumption. No one should think that people are going hungry because grain is being fed to livestock. Our food needs are met by agriculture.
I don't get the feel that you're having a go, no worries :)
I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the animals we intend to eat.
Secondly, and this is argument I don't make often because its _really_ not popular (but you seem like a great person so I'm happy to share!), I just don't think animals exist to provide or serve us. They are their own beings, and we are ours. Personally, I don't care if someone treats their animals like absolute royalty. If we kill them, or we forcibly impregnate them and remove their children so we can have their milk, it's wrong to me. But again, this is not an argument many people are swayed by, so I don't generally mention it.
we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals
But... we can raise food and dairy animals on a combination of natural range grazing and agricultural byproducts that otherwise need to be disposed of (e.g. cotton seeds, almond hulls, distillers' and brewers' spent grains, etc.)
Right, but "Let's not eat any animals at all ever" is a different target than "Let's raise and kill animals in a way that's ecologically sustainable and humane". I'd argue that working towards #1 is actively working against #2.
The other factor that I don't quite get about think-of-the-animals vegans is this: What exactly do you think is going to happen to all those cows and chickens if the entire world becomes vegetarian? Are people going to keep them as pets? No -- they're simply not going to exist. Isn't it better to have free-range chicken and cattle, which have happy little animal lives, and then are quickly and painlessly killed, than to have (almost) no chicken and cattle at all?
Uhm ... I would personally say yes. First of all, the "painlessly killed" part is pretty wishful thinking/rationalization on your behalf. In many cases, the killing is not at all painful.
Of course the other part makes for a pretty good ethical debate. Is it better to live a miserable life and die and early and unnatural death than it is to never be born at all? There is no right answer, but I myself feel like I wouldn't wish that kind of life on ANY conscious being. Is that a life you would want to life?
Last, none of the think-of-the-animals vegans, as you so nicely put it, would kid themselves about what were to happen to the already existing farm animals, should be stop/greatly reduce our collective meat intake. They are already doomed. They were doomed the second they were given birth to, which brings us back to the original part. Most of us think-of-the-animals vegans would prefer if we could stop doing that going forward.
I'm sorry to shake up your picture of happy little animal-life living chicken and cattle, frolicking on a green meadow, until one day they drop dead and become happy little meals. That is among the most delusional view of modern farming I can think of. Don't buy into the pictures companies put on their products. And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.
> And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.
Right, but this goes back to my first paragraph. I would argue that most people do not have the moral effort to entirely give up meat voluntarily. There is some subset of people who are willing to make inconvenient life choices out of consideration of the lives of animals. You can convince these people to become vegans; or you can convince these people to only buy ecologically sound and minimum-suffering animal products. (For the sake of argument, let's call these "ethical" animal products, even though I know you may not agree with that label.) The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products. The smaller the market for "ethical" animal products, the less incentive there is for people selling animal products to try to do so "ethically".
> Is that a life you would want to life?
Imagine a future where some hyper-intelligent alien species has taken over basically most habitable places in the galaxy, including the most habitable places on earth. We are unable to understand nearly any of these aliens' motivations or thought processes, much less their technology, and unable to offer them anything of value in terms of economic production: there is nothing we can do that they, or their machines, can't do better.
There are a few "reserves" for humans on earth where we're allowed to live "wild", but these are overcrowded and have no natural resources other than sunlight and (relatively poor) soil: all the minerals of value are extracted by the aliens.
But, there is one thing we can offer them: we ourselves are a delicacy, and some of the aliens at least are willing to pay a high price for the chance of consuming (whatever that means -- nobody's quite sure if it's eating or something else) a healthy 30-year-old human.
These aliens aren't ethical enough to let us spread throughout the galaxy on our own terms; but they are ethical enough not to do anything we haven't consented to.
So there's always an open offer, available between the ages of 12 and 18, to any human: to stay in one of the "human reserves", or enter the "cattle" program. If you're on the cattle program, you have freedom of movement through many places in the galaxy. Your health is taken care of, and there are lots of opportunities to socialize with other humans, to learn from them, to express art or music or whatever; but, the vast majority of you will, at the age of 30, be quickly killed and consumed by the aliens.
Particularly healthy men may be allowed to live longer for "captive breeding" programs (if they consent to do so); and many women will have the option to enter a "captive breeding" program as well, in which they bear children every two or three years until they're 40.
Children raised in the captive breeding program are also given the option, between 12 and 18, of going to the "human reserve" to live out their life there as well as they can.
So, here's the question: You're about to turn 18. Life in a human reserve is little better than stone age, since there are no natural resources upon which to build technology. Do you live out your 50 or 60 years (average life expectancy without advanced health care) in the freedom of a stone age society? Or do you travel the galaxy, having advanced technology and medical care, until you're 30?
Of course some people would chose to live in freedom; but I'm pretty sure there would be a pretty big uptake for being eaten.
I'm pretty sure cows, if they could be made to understand the proposition would be the same way. A handful would prefer to live in the wild, getting their own food, having no health care or shelter or protection from predators; but most would probably choose the life of free-range cattle, ending in death.
> The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products.
Ok, good. In my mind, it goes no killing > ethical killing > unethical killing. I would try to maximize the amount in the no killing camp. I think I know what you're getting at overall, but I feel like this is in very speculative territory. I doubt that more people going vegan actually increases the amount of unethical killing, but I have nothing to back that up. I don't think you have anything to back it up either, which is why I think this won't lead anywhere. You have a hypothesis, I have a different one. I can only say that from experience, most people "move up" in the camps I defined above. I know I had no trouble destroying a few cheeseburgers just a few years back. At some point I started reflecting, and figured well it's best to buy from a butcher. It took a few years until I was no longer able to rationalize that either. I know pretty much only eat meat if I'm at my grandma's :) That is just to show I'm not religiously vegan, and I'm not trying to make people feel bad for the choices and rationalizations they make.
Regarding your short story: I appreciate the amount of effort you stuck into it, but I'm afraid you lost me throughout. There is just too much presupposing going on, which makes it a little difficult to apply to our ethical dilemma. For one, it completely disregards that we grew these animals in such a way that they're for the most part not able any longer to survive in the wild. I want to believe that the meat you buy comes from cows that had a life equivalent of us having traveled the galaxy and have expressed art and music throughout. But to me this reads like you yourself want to believe that the animals that had to die for your dishes had lives so good that given the choice, they would do it all over again.
This is simply not the case for 90%+ of all meat that finds its way onto a plate. And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.
> And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.
Is this based on your own experience with pasture-raised farm animals, or reading in your own feelings into it?
My great aunt raised sheep for a while, and I spent a couple of summers as a farmhand. From what I can tell, those sheep lived reasonably happy sheep lives. Ewes had babies that grew up with them in the flock. They all hung out together in a big flock; they were rotated around a number of different fields on a regular basis, fed hay and other feed as supplements, given a shelter to stay and regular medical care. The rams were kept separate from the ewes most of the time so that births happened in a predictable fashion; but other than that, the sheep were given what sheep need.
Where I live now I'm a short drive from free-range cows and chickens too; the cows seem about as happy wandering round fields eating grass as the sheep did.
I've certainly seen depictions of factory farming that make me sick; I'd be happy to have those kinds of practices banned. But I don't see what my great aunt did as unethical at all: if anything, I think the lives of those sheep did have value, and the world was a better place because of their little sheepy lives than it would have been entirely without them.
My own view is that grazing animals (cows, sheep, goats) are an excellent thing to have when you have land where human-relevant nutrition won't grow. Those sheep wandering the Scottish (and Welsh, and Lake District) hillsides, eating some of the fairly few plants that will grow in that soil (and climate) is a fairly smart thing to do (given a high level of control, given the total reshaping of those landscapes caused by overgrazing in past).
Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).
It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.
That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.
I don't think vegans are going to convince the rest of us to give up eating meat overnight. At most there would be a gradual shift to vegan ism over a period of years. If that happened you'd see a similar gradual drop in meat production to match falling demand.
You can "trivially" solve that by increasing the cost of the meat: if "non-humane" animal raising was forbidden, as a mental exercise, what would happen other than prices going up?
Before the expansion of animal farming (60-100 years ago), meat was usually Sunday-lunch material in most of the world.
I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?
> I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?
Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for a living, you’re a merchant of death in my book.
I absolutely respect your choices and your opinion, but I don't understand them. Is the wolf diabolically evil? No cash involved of course. Is that the issue? What if I hunt the animal and kill it and then consume it, like the lion, the tiger, the hawk, and the dolphin? Is the hunter morally superior to the farmer who raises a steer, providing clean water, well grassed pasture, and then kills in a humane manner for personal consumption? Is that diabolically evil? What about the middle man who makes some cash bringing the meat product to someone else who can use it. Is that where the evilness enters the picture?
I am asking the fundamental question. I will agree completely that large scale food production has some real problems with animal treatment. I'm not defending or commenting on that. I'm just trying to understand the moral judgements associated with consuming another animal, as is done at just about all levels of the food chain in the natural world. Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
I'm not even 100% vegetarian myself but looking at how animals are treated repulses me, watch this video and tell me what you think about good and evil again (nsfw): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O15Owo7jGtU
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I think you missed the entire point of the comment you're replying to. It specifically mentions breeding and slaughtering animals, this has nothing to do with wolves or hunters
> Is the wolf diabolically evil?
Do wolves have a sense of good and evil ?
Do wolves talk about the ethical and moral implications of breeding and slaughtering millions of animals every single day ?
> Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
A lot of people in the west eat meat two or three times a day, sometimes from multiple animals during the same meal, we didn't evolve to do that at all. We didn't evolve to sit all day in front of a computer, but here I am. We didn't evolve to use cars but we almost all do. Using evolution as an argument for anything usually is a very poor choice....
I personally have no issue with the idea of killing to eat, the problem is everything else in the process. We don't have to treat amimals like we do, we don't have to eat so much meat every single day
But killing is not humane if the individual does not want to die.
Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.
Why are then humans comparing themselves to obligate carnivores like lions, tigers to justify their actions?
Why are they looking at their natural bodies to justify the actions? How come when it comes to taking a life of another animal for sustenance, sustenance that can be achieved without the kill, they do not want to lift themselves up and draw a line between nature and themselves?
There are many things that come naturally yet we do not want to mimic that.
> Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.
Didn't that leap in evolution come from being able to control our food supply to the point where we were able to consume energy at such an efficient rate that we evolved emotion, rational thought, society, etc?
It could be argued that now we've achieved that we should be looking at the next stage of evolution, which may be mulch made into fake meat loaded with salt and preservatives, or even growing laboratory meat; but surely the reason we're here and having this discussion at all is because of our domestication and consumption of animals. It seems a circular argument to say that's immoral.
Are we really evolved enough to move past that? We are certainly domesticating ourselves as every generation goes by, we see that from the massive decline in human-to-human violence over many millennia, and so a reduction in violence toward animals could also be seen in that evolutionary sense. I'm not convinced we're at a point where we're ready to 100% wean ourselves off animals for food. It certainly comes with its own set of problems.
> Is the wolf diabolically evil? ... What if I hunt the animal and kill it and then consume it, like the lion, the tiger, the hawk, and the dolphin?
As much as I respect the intelligence of those animals, what a remarkably low bar to measure ourselves against. May as well justify manslaughter and rape as while we're at it. Drawing a line that arbitrarily suits certain primal desires and justifying it by pointing at animals is how we move backward, not forward.
This is such a good point to make. Us humans should definitely strive to hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.
Also, it's a hell of a difference between the wolf, who has to kill in order to survive, and the man, who just has to choose something else to eat in the supermarket or restaurant. Justifying ones choice by comparing oneself to a wolf is incredibly flawed. No one here would bat an eye if, for whatever reason, people have to hunt and kill in order to sustain themselves, like some tribes probably still do. We wouldn't call them evil for it. What can be called evil on the other hand, is the systematic raising, torturing, and killing of billions of animals every year. Because it's needless. We could easily survive without it, but we choose not to, because bacon. I get it, it's delicious. But at some point it becomes very questionable, and I'm even setting aside the sustainability aspect.
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 aren't dolphins. We have the capabilities to make the choice and don't kill and still survive. All it takes is changing ones habits a bit. We also have the capabilities to understand and decide that rape is wrong, and most people don't do it. Can you imagine what it would sound like if an accused rapist would point to dolphins as defense?
I'm not trying to set a standard for you. All I want to say is that pointing at other animals to justify our behavior is flawed and something we should be above as a species as a whole.
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.
animals do not have a concept of good and evil so why would we apply it to them?
I think looking at how things in the animal kingdom work and using that as a justification for our actions is a very low bar. We have the cognitive and emotional ability to understand that things like murder/rape/etc. are wrong do we not? If you just take a small step from that and recognize the sentience of animals, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to afford them the same respect.
PS: I think the idea of good/evil is pretty reductionist to begin with, but I understand it's a common way of looking at things
They don't have words for it but if you've met shelter dogs or animals that have suffered abuse, they definitely understand the concept of evil. I have a rescue pig that I adore but he doesn't trust men because he lived a life of abuse. I can only assume that he sees men as evil, even if he can't make that statement. Some things are just natural. Humans seem to think we have a superior understanding of all things but some things are immutable truths and natural law. They don't require calculus to understand, just to describe.
Your example of evil just seems like the animals having a sense of danger to me. Animals usually instinctively will try to avoid danger. This doesn't require them to have a concept of evil.
What's your definition of evil? If an animal finds a specific set of traits to be characteristic of something that's dangerous and/or likely to inflict harm, is that not the definition of evil?
We wrote these things down so that we describe them to each other. The concepts already existed. We didn't invent evil, we defined it but it was already there. We've also used arguments like this to separate ourselves from what consider be lesser, to distance us from our actions. This is mental gymnastics though.
Whatever you have to do to feel ok about eating a chicken is fine but pretending we have some better sense of self than anything else feels like hubris. If our position in the world is truly better because we can articulate out feelings and we're smarter, why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
good and evil is a moral concept. Unless you believe in moral realism (which you would have a hard time proving) then yes, we did invent evil. You could probably snag yourself a Nobel Prize if you could prove morality is objective and that animals have an awareness of it.
> why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
This is exactly the kind of point you would have to bite the bullet on if you were to be logically consistent and made arguments for meat eating being ok because you believe animals are intellectually/morally inferior. If you believe a cow is ok to eat because they are not as smart then you would have to be ok (being logically consistent) with eating anything that is not as smart as you such as the mentally handicapped.
This comment is a fantastic example demonstrating why everyone hates vegans[1]. I'm all for everyone being more aware of where and how their food is made. If you come out of it choosing not to consume certain categories, that's fantastic. But the moment you start demonizing others for not making the same choices as you, you become an anti-social and dislikable person, and one that's not conducive to building a better society that moves forward positively. (This applies to politics and the woke movement too)
The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty. Very few people would say with a straight face "Yeah, I like that humans farm and kill animals so I can enjoy a juicier dish". All of us omnivores do that, but only few ones will face that reality happily. The rest of us will just blame the messenger.
>The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty.
Speak for yourself. When I hear vegans try to act like I'm a horrible person on par with people that murder humans like someone did elsewhere in this thread, I don't feel guilty. I simply thing its a ridiculous thing for them to say.
I'm going to leave it at that because unlike that person I don't feel the need to say inflammatory things to someone that has made different choices about what they want to eat.
I'm all for ensuring that animals are treated as well as possible and for regulating the industry to ensure that happens. When I hear about people doing abusive things to livestock I get as mad as any vegan. It should be severely punished.
I can also get behind the idea that we should eat less meat. Its healthier and I can easily see the point that eating a large amount of meat for every single meal like a lot of Americans do it needlessly gratuitous.
Some of my favorite meals are vegetarian meals, but I mean like chickpea or lentil curry and stuff like that. Fake/simulated/lab grown/artificial food is going to be a hard pass for me until it gets good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Actually, most people throughout human history have done just that. Being squeamish about seeing animals getting killed is a pretty modern development, at least outside nobility.
And even today, most people in the world likely still participate occasionally in the slaughter of animals, as this is still routine in all rural areas of the world, even in the US and Europe.
Yeah, I perfectly know. But at the same time we used to beat children (and in some places and some persons still do) to educate them and now this is not welcomed anymore. So, society changes, morality changes over time, things we didn't do, now we do. Things we didn't have the tech to do, now we do have and that can lead to further changes in our morality.
I don't have any real data to prove my point but I think that many people would not like to watch how a cow is killed and transformed into steak. But nobody has problem watching as someone picks apples from a tree, or how a press creates olive oil.
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.
I'm a vegan and I try to be respectful to non-vegans and their choices but moral decisions implicitly contain moral judgements. If I think eating animals is wrong and you eat animals there is no way around me thinking that you are doing something wrong. I don't need to harangue you about it, which in any case is not at all effective as a method of persuasion, but usually I don't need to for people not to like it. I expect most of the anger towards vegans is because of that implicit (and to be fair in the case of some vegans explicit) moral judgement.
Opposition to an assertion--and make no mistake, it's purely an assertion--of moral superiority isn't anger. Reaction to haranguing born of that same assertion can be anger, but that's a different matter.
I think if the 'campaigning vegan' spent more time trying to espouse the virtues of reducing meat intake than the, frankly, bullying approach I often see, I suspect they'd have a larger impact on the issues they feel are important.
A statement like:
"Have you thought of eating meat one day less per week?"
Followed by:
"benefits the climate because..."
or:
"Have you thought of buying your meat from <insert local farm with good animal welfare>"
followed by:
"benefits the animal because..."
Is a lot more likely to have a positive impact over:
"you're the same as a murderer"
Perhaps, just perhaps, the meatatarian would realise that the non-meaty food they have one day per week is pretty good, and worth expanding to more days. Even these small changes could have a positive impact on animal welfare and climate if enough of us did it.
People don't hate vegans. They hate preachy jerks. Hyper bacon eaters are just as annoying. Nobody wants to talk about your religion, no matter what it is.
serious question to consider it from the other side: if a/the holocaust was occurring in your country and people turned a blind eye to it, would you softly ask those propping it up to discontinue or would you be more empassioned about it? This is the view that some vegans have with respect to the current treatment of animals. Whether you choose to acknowledge it that way or not, I can completely understand why some people adopt "bullying" tactics, conciously or not, especially when some people palm them off as "hippies" or the like
Well... look up things like “cow eating chicken” or “deer eating bird” on YouTube. Not saying it’s common, but “never” is perhaps too strong a word. And of course I really meant it in a larger sense, not the direct ruminant/person relationship.
Oh because it was in the middle of a drought, and it was pretty clear that the only reason that it was eating meat was due to a severe lacking of anything else to eat
This is such an untenable moral ground... The death we offer animals is orders of magnitude better than nature subjects them to, almost without exception.
If we could offer them a better life as well, as we once did, I would have 0 moral qualms about our meat eating.
I don't necessarily agree with the earlier poster but how we slaughter the animals isn't really the issue they have. If aliens came and promised to provide for you for your whole life but on your 30th birthday they would kill you painlessly would you take that deal? What gives us the right to impose that kind of deal on other living beings?
Cows are opportunistic omnivorous and will eat meat if its small enough to be swallowed whole. They don't have much of an instinct to hunt, they not have the teeth to cut large animals into parts, nor do they have the stomach acid or immune system to eat partially rotten meat. There is nothing however to stop them from eating small amount of fresh meat, such as the very young of other animals and insects.
Farmers raising livestock are diabolically evil merchants of death? I usually reserve that level of vitriol for the military industrial complex, global arms dealers, etc... not a family with some cows...
I've been feeling more conflicted about consuming meat lately, but it's blanket assertions like this that trigger my inner libertarian hard, and I come out swinging. There is considerable evidence suggesting meat consumption contributed significantly to our cerebral expansion (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477?mob...). Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development. Humans are alpha predators, more so than any other animal in the world. We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival. Eat solely plants without supplementation and you will become deficient in B12 and iron (amongst other things, contributing to early age mortality). I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health. So call me evil, I see myself as a pragmatist, more in touch with nature than you are. I recognize the alpha predator in myself. I lift weights, consume lean, well sourced and organic meat. I've hunted and eaten what I've killed as my forebears. I'm resilient and healthy. If that makes me diabolical I'll take it.
Human evolution is poorly understood, and the assumption that any choice $X supposedly made by early humans led to our forefathers’ anamolously rapid brain development is flatly speculative.
> Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development.
Complete and utter speculation.
> We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival.
Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way.
B12 doesn’t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12.
> I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health.
I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I’d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you’d like to see what really happens on factory farms.
Whether that specifically is speculation or not, it is a fact that we have adapted to live off of both meat and plants, and are some of the best known generalists (in terms of adaptation), among large land-dwelling animals. Other apes are much better at specific things that help them do what they do (specialists). We're just different, and we gradually became to be that way. There are specially adapted humans as well, less-speculatively as a result of rare rich protein sources like fish, milk. By extension, it's also probably inarguable that certain groups of people would have disappeared completely had it not been for the capability of them to adapt, bioculturally, to a changing world or simply changing circumstances. By saying their claim about meat and big brains is "Complete and utter speculation", you're at least implying that there's very little substance to the claim, and that you have a better explanation with more than a documentary to point to. But why is it that we're not competing with other apes at this moment? Why are we well-adapted to eat animals? Do you have a more substantial proposition?
Zero speculation regarding the diets of chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas (well studied and documented) [1].
[2] B12 sources up until it was possible to synthesize in the 60s were exclusively from animal products. Also, if you're even vaguely predisposed to anemia, you will likely struggle getting enough hema-available iron from plant sources without supplementation.
Glad you are able to live off of entirely soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. For a lot of people, this isn't sustainable. Would love to see your bloods, discuss athletic performance and energy.
Actually, there are top of the line athletes with a vegan diet. It's not very popular, but that is probably because being vegan is not popular.
The B12 source argument has recently been solved as well. Most animals source their B12 from micro-organisms in the soil. If humans stop washing their food excessively, this would fix the B12 intake problem.
The nature argument falls apart quicker because we're mainly talking about the massive animal breeding complex we have built where we force breed billions of animals specifically to kill them. If a cow could kill you (in self defense), they would, but most of these cows are never given the chance.
It's not one step removed, it's 90 steps out of 100 removed, right?
The important part here is the consumption of resources, 90% less land/water/energy also means 90% fewer animals that had to die for the product.
(Also we could enforce more environmental protection measures while still being able to feed everyone.)
To raise cows, you need crop. So real burgers already include the suffering from cropping, even more so because you need a lot more crop per calorie of you have a cow between you and the plant.
Now I want to emphasis that guilt is not a good reason to start with beyond meat.
The desire to try to do a nice thing can be, but as a vegetarian, it's important that people are not pushed out of meat because of some negative emotion.
I'd rather have happy meat eaters than frutsrated veggies.
But give it a try, just for curiosity sake.
I like the taste of BM, but find them hard to digest.
Also remember it's still process food, and organic free range steak is likely healthier.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment"[1]
The key parts being "seeks to" and "as far as is possible and practicable". Veganism is not about being perfect (that's impossible), and although some might speak as if it is, they should not be taken seriously.
What we do know is that striving for a more vegan way of living is unequivocally less harmful for sentient beings and I and many others think that is a very noble endeavor.
> I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.
This is true, the produce farmers kills pests insects and animals to produce crops at high volume.
The issue for me is scale. You need to feed the farm animals which leads to more soy and grain being produced which leads to more death.
I also can’t guarantee that the produce farmer or the farm owner is vegan which means I might be indirectly supporting animal agriculture multiple steps removed.
That way of thinking provides no viable solutions. I can at least control myself and know that I am taking steps to minimize harm.
Firstly, thank you for preserving some of the natural ecosystem on your farm. That is a tricky choice to make but from what I see driving about you are in a minority.
You take a drive from Melbourne to Sydney and you get to see the effect of livestock farming, it's been completely denuded of natural vegetation everywhere where it's flat enough to smash down.
The destruction is right there in front of your eyes. Knocking down scrub for cattle farming wipes out the natural environment, there are some species where it does good for them or kangaroos and birds that like open grasslands but for everything else it's really bad.
Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide you get the same thing.
Australia knocked down more open forest in the last four years than they did in the Amazon - 90% for beef farming.
You can grow crops on a much smaller area, without even mentioning organic crop growing where you don't use chemicals to wipe everything out.
Anything we do will have an impact on the rest of our eco system, even if we just ate wild berries you'd find someone complaining about the beetle you stepped on while walking in the woods. But putting everything in perspective I doubt cropping comes anywhere close to animal slaughtering in term of crime against nature.
I think anyone will agree that modern industrial agriculture comes with its own set of problems.
This is a good point about finding good recipes that use less animal products.
It seems like there's a lot of focus on replacing meat with something else pretending to be meat but I don't know that you're going to bring many people around that way. Vegetarian food needs to be good in it's own right, and it absolutely can be, but that generally means going beyond your grandma's copy of "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook".
Really appreciate this perspective and the info. But I do think we shouldn't let perfection be the enemy of good here. Anything that moves the needle in the right direction should be encouraged.
> I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position
Actually vegetarians follow a diet along traditional lines (dairy okay, meat nay), they are not so much into moral positioning. Vegans are the ones making an ethical stance: "no animals harmed for me whenever I have the choice"
Hence vegans dont wear wool/silk/leather, dont go to zoos/animal races, and dont consume eggs/dairy.
As a vegetarian maybe I can provide some insight to my position.
The reason I consume dairy and eggs is because I think that fundamentally dairy and egg (honey too) production CAN be ethical, whereas I think intentionally killing an animal for food can never be ethical. I'm aware not everyone shares the same opinion - but for me, killing a conscious being for food is not something I want a part in, even if it had a great life before the slaughter.
However I should also note that I carefully select dairy and eggs I consume, only from organic, free range farms that I've researched. I choose the vegan option if I can't be sure of the provenance of the dairy/eggs. In practice I'm vegan most of the time and consume very little dairy/egg.
I do think I might become some form of vegan in the future though, once I've thought about it more.
However, there are a whole bunch of moral inconsistencies in my position. Per calorie, harvesting certain crops probably kills more conscious beings than certain types of fishing. And I'm not sure certain water creatures (bivalves?) even meet the threshold of consciousness, yet I nevertheless would refuse to eat them.
There are a lot of difficult moral issues at the edges that I think most people ignore. For me, the overall goal of my diet is to try and find a balance between providing me adequate nutrition for a healthy life while reducing overall negative moral and ecological impact to everything that isn't me.
Not to be condescending, but I practiced the exact same mental gymnastics for many years. I used the exact same reasoning ("can be ethical"). I also did select organic/etc eggs and dairy.
Buttt... This lead to people believe that I was okay with dairy/eggs, and when others picked for me I had a hard time rejecting.
And dairy and egg producing animals are hurt big time: children taken away, caged, slaughtered, selectively bread to have unnatural bodies (hen only lay ~12 eggs per year in nature vs. 300+ for domesticated variants). This is maybe worse than wild animals being killed.
After 12+ year vegetarian I went vegan 7+ years ago. I regret not doing so earlier.
TL:DR; 1) loss of nutrients and problems for the hen when they lay unnatural amount of eggs.
2) lot of issues to these hens such as loss of calcium, yolk and other items stuck inside and causing infection
3) killing these hens when they stop laying eggs (and therefore the implication that their life was only to serve you and treat them as a resource.)
That said, since there are so many vegans out there that don’t have any medical problems, do you think the health problems you face when not eating dairy and eggs are because you are not eating certain food groups? Perhaps a health exam will find out if you have some nutritional deficiencies?
>That said, since there are so many vegans out there that don’t have any medical problems...
Where is the data tracking the health of these 'so many vegans'? All of my lifelong vegan friends ran the gamut of health problems from Hashimoto's Disease and other thyroid-related issues, to severe obesity, seemingly from the highly processed food-like-products they ate. Most though were chronically under-weight, and had to take several supplements. Of course, I only know 8 vegans personally and well enough to comment on.
Canada just added an explicit recognition of grazing land into our carbon tax program for just this reason. Not only are pastures incredibly better for native plant/animal conservation (in North America) than crop fields but native grasslands are also incredible carbon sinks:
Over the last couple of years my wife and I have been adopting what I jokingly refer to as a "local-etarian" diet. Essentially we've been paying attention more to how our food is sourced (trying to buy meat from folks like you!) rather than trying to cut out anything specific.
My take away from that experience specifically in the US is that if you want to be sustainable/humane/etc. the best effort to effectiveness ratio is probably just to be a vegetarian. Finding and vetting sources for meat in much of the US is not easy.
Most normal grocery stores simply don't stock anything resembling what you describe and even at our local Co-Op, the choices can be pretty inscrutable. Do I want the "We've ticked all the boxes to be labeled 'Organic'" or "We're Amish, so you should totally trust us" or the "We're too small to bother with fancy packaging or certifications"? It's hard to say, though generally we lean towards the last option.
You make an interesting point I have not considered before. I think it analogous to the argument that even electric cars have emissions, as almost all of them are charged on grids that are dirty. I personally think in both cases (vegetarians, electric car drivers), the first order benefit of not directly eating animals or burning gasoline exceeds the second order harms. Plus, one can pressure local utilities/politicians to clean up their electricity or only purchase from farms that do the least animal harm (though it's hard to entirely avoid).
Also not trying to have a go at you, thanks for the insightful comment.
Small cattle and typical burger meat are different. That said, do you think small cattle would scale replace factory style production? I doubt it.
Furthermore: Cows are not perfect machine and eat plants - you have to grow more plants for to make a meat burger than you have to make a pea protein burger. So if cropping is bad for animals, farming meat requires more of that too. You could argue your cows eat different, but what do most cows eat? For mass market, fake burgers are simply better for land use, water use, animal welfare, emissions, environment, and even health.
> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
The problem I have with this argument is that it always seems to me to focus on the life of the animal, but not on the death of the animal.
All animals eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we slaughter animals, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to starving to death, being eaten alive by insects, being hunted and terrified by a predator etc).
So, I think that it is important how the animals are grown (factory farms are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of food). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the slaughter of animals who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of their species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
All humans eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we would be able to murder other humans, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to dying of cancer, stroke, being murdered in a car crash, etc.)
So, I think that it is important how the humans are grown (prisons are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of labor). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the murder of 25 year old people who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of the human species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
First of all, most humans in society die relatively peaceful deaths (and this proportion would increase if we supported euthanasia, which I am in favor of in certain cases).
Second of all, humans form powerful attachments to their kin and peers, and the death of a human brings great and lasting sadness to all other humans in their group. This is not something observed with cattle and most other animals (though there are exceptions), except for short periods of time.
Thirdly, there are some admittedly specieist arguments to be made in favor of the value of human cognition as compared to that of a cow or pig or any other animal that currently exists on Earth. At the very least, you could say that every human has the potential of being a great artist or otherwise improving the lot of all current and future humans (and perhaps even cows) in a way that an individual cow does not.
The leading causes of death are diseases, cancers, dementia, road injuries, etc. These are inarguably more "horrifying" deaths than how we could kill people with methods such as those used for euthanasia, which is the point the original comment was making.
If a human has no friends, and their death would not bring great and lasting sadness to other humans, is it ok to murder them?
If a human is mentally or physically incapable of improving the lot of other people, and is in fact a burden on society, is it ok to murder them?
A minority of people are caused distress by having their children vaccinated because they think vaccines cause autism. Should we stop causing suffering to this minority by stopping all vacciantions? Or is it ok to cause suffering to humans who are minorities because they are minorities?
When people choose not to be vaccinated, they endanger those who are unable to be vaccinated. Foregoing vaccination harms others.
The normalized consumption of animal products endangers all people due to the impact it has on the environment in which we live. We are currently living through yet another pandemic caused by the consumption of animals. We are currently dealing with the effects of climate collapse worldwide, helped along by inefficient resource usage for things like animal agriculture.
Consuming plants instead of animals is a trivial change to make both at the individual and societal level and does not harm others.
|Second of all, humans form powerful attachments to their kin and peers, and the death of a human brings great and lasting sadness to all other humans in their group. This is not something observed with cattle and most other animals (though there are exceptions), except for short periods of time.
straight up false. cattle mourn death and seperation from their calves very obviously, for days. Heres just a small example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Woulyd9NWFM&list=PLtc3iQTP5E... some cursory googling will support this. Whos to say they dont carry that burden for the rest of their lives? I only show outward emotion for a brief time period after a death, but I certainly have sadness for a long time after and it would be hubris to think something as intelligent as a pig or a cow would be unnaffected enough to justify that for 5 minutes of taste
To those downvoting: do you believe that dogs are able to mourn when their companions die? There are myriad examples of this occurring. If so, do you believe that dogs are the only animal capable of this?
Plants are not conscious and do not feel pain. But even if your argument is in good faith and you genuinely believe that the plight of plants is equivalent to the suffering of animals, then that is still an argument for veganism, as producing a kilo of animal flesh requires several kilos of plant matter, thus increasing the total amount of suffering relative to simply eating plants directly.
Humans are animals. Humans do not feel pain differently from other animals. Humans do not suffer differently from other animals. This is why intentionally causing animals like cats and dogs to suffer is illegal and viewed as abhorrent. The only reason this is not extended to other animals like cows and pigs is convenience.
The vast majority of animals raised to be killed and eaten are fowls, pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats. No, humans do not feel pain differently than these animals any more than they feel pain differently from cats or dogs.
Sorry for being rude. No, my [non-]argument wasn't in good faith - it was in response to a parody comment, after all.
But you seem serious this time. The problem with that line of reasoning is: sure, you can (quite literally) weigh the pros and cons of veganism like you did. But why stop there? To sustain a kilo of human flesh you still need several thousands of kilos of plant matter. The ultra-utilitarian solution surely must be getting rid of human flesh? Now I'm not so sure your previous comment was really a parody.
Given that plants aren't conscious and do not feel pain, any line of reasoning that is predicated on the assumption that plants are conscious and feel pain is irrelevant.
Your argument is just antinatalism, but for farm animals. Every animal will suffer in its life. Eradicating an entire population to reduce suffering is pretty extreme. Other arguments for veganism, like the environmental one, are much more palatable.
I think you could make the argument that it's possible to ethically raise animals in a way where it's a good deal for both sides, as long as an animal suffers less than it would suffer in nature. If causing unnecessary suffering is unethical, then the opposite should be a moral imperative, so this simple mathematical argument leads to the conclusion that ethically raising animals should be morally superior to veganism.
The extension of this argument exposes the absurdity, as it would imply that we go out and domesticate nature. Stop lions from killing their prey in the Savannah, etc... and convert them to a vegetarian diet.
This is something I do wonder, though. Is that absurd. Is it actually absurd. Might that not actually be what the morally and ethically correct course of action is.
We know nature is cruel. We know nature is absolutely horrendous and horrific. Why do we just accept that as a given?
Why does domestication sound absurd? It's not usual, but also not unprecedented. Homo sapiens had domesticated itself into eating vegetable burgers, after all.
I agree - I definitely think that how we treat deer in the UK as a food source and as a wild population is a sensible way of 'farming' animals.
My only concern is with domesticated stock. Cows couldn't possibly survive in nature, and would suffer greatly, for example. If we're concerned with raising animals for food that also live enriched lives, do we also have an obligation to breed them in ways that enrich them?
I don't really find this kind of simple ethical calculus convincing, but I would say that a world where some people continue eating meat and keep raising cows, pigs, chicken, sheep, goats and other animals that would die off if they weren't consumed seems better to me than a purely 100% vegan world. On the other hand, as someone's personal choice instead of worldwide decision, I don't think it seems plausible that being vegan is "less moral" than being an ethical farmer.
> a world where some people continue eating meat and keep raising cows, pigs, chicken, sheep, goats and other animals that would die off if they weren't consumed seems better to me than a purely 100% vegan world
I'm not a vegan, but I've heard this argument before and find it to be confounding. Are we saying that livestock suffer less because they are safe in the knowledge that their species is being conserved? Why would a non-human animal have this kind of existential rumination? (Excuse the pun) And let's say this concern is of real importance, if factory farming ended do you think wild populations of cows, goats, etc. would go completely extinct? (Keep in mind people keep animals as pets, so that's also another means of conservation)
I don't have an argument I find perfectly convincing myself for this either. I can mention that the ultimate value of life is propagation and survival, so most likely this is the consideration that gives me this feeling, but I explicitly called this a feeling and haven't claimed it is a clear rational argument.
As for wild populations, I'm not sure, but my understanding is that most cows have been bred to produce more milk than their calves eat, and that their udders become painful if not milked; and that sheep's hair tends to similarly grow much more than in wild breeds, leading to major problems if they are not sheared by humans. I may be wrong, and even if I'm not they may still live long enough to breed and perhaps reverse these artificial adaptations in a few generations.
I have encountered what appeared to be a domesticated sheep that had gone wild in a nearby nature reserve. Its hair had grown to smother its face, and when we startled it it began running in random directions, only to headbutt a tree and continue on another random direction. I can't imagine that it would be about to survive well in this state, so you're probably right. Though it somehow had been surviving, nonetheless
I think this is a vague line of reasoning. We want to give animals quality of life, because it’s a humane thing to do, but also slaughter them, which is inhumane. So which is it: is the life of animals just as important, or less?
The same line of reasoning can be applied to humans. We can have really shitty deaths categorised as ‘old age’, yet euthanising is controversial.
This is the very thing I completely disagree with. All living things die, and almost all animals die by being killed by other animals.
Why is it "inhumane" when this killing is done by a human with a sharp knife or electrocution, but it is "humane" when done by a wolf tearing at their throat, or by insects eating them alive?
And euthanasia of people is controversial for many complex reasons, but it is relatively well accepted by most secularists for cases of extreme pain, at least, which is how animals normally die.
No, the alternative is to not to keep breeding farm animals in the billions, which is a major cause for natural habitat loss [0].
Instead have more R&D into creating meat like substances that doesn't require to kill an animal and doesn't require such a huge carbon footprint - and we are getting there slowly.
And that's the mission of Ethan Brown (Beyond Meat founder) - he said you won't be able to change the culture of meat eating, but if you offer people something that's as good or better and cheaper then people will switch.
Again, the main question really is why inflict pain and kill an animal if you don't need to?
We are not hunter gatherers anymore.
The above comment excludes people who still need to eat meat to survive.
> If we had fully lab grown meat that was identical to the real thing. How many of us would convert? In theory, we all would.
Why would we all, even in theory? If we could farm animals humanely, grazing them in areas where crops anyway can't be planted, letting them range, giving them a good life where they don't fear predators, don't freeze to death in winter or die of hyperthermia in the summer etc., and then kill them humanely (by which I mean, with as little pain as possible) when we decide, why would that be less moral than killing off the entire species (more or less) and living off lab-produced meat?
Even if it would be possible for the farmed animal to really have a fulfilling life (which I don't think is possible in the current, industrialized world), there are still humans who are caring for the animals, there are humans who are killing and dissecting them, and they too are affected by the inhumane process, and I think our empathy should extend to them too.
> which I don't think is possible in the current, industrialized world
This is a concern I share.
> there are still humans who are caring for the animals, there are humans who are killing and dissecting them, and they too are affected by the inhumane process, and I think our empathy should extend to them too.
As far as I know, farmers don't suffer any kind of psychological damage from caring for and slaughtering animals, and haven't throughout human history. Again, factory farm workers are a different problem.
Then you should watch the Dark Side of Dairy documentary.
A farmer started to cry and asked for the camera to be turned off - when he was asked what happens to the mother and baby cow.
Or look on Youtube farmers talking about 'There is a person in there' when talking about their farm animals. Or farmers who have given up on exploiting animals and switched to different kinds of farming.
This is a good read. Not very emotional, but good description of one of the jobs. One interesting bit: "the vast majority of farmers don’t do it. They might be rearing the livestock for meat and understand that the animals’ ultimate destination is an abattoir, but that doesn’t mean they like killing.... It’s the same as with an old dog: they could do it themselves, but they can’t."
Would you actually get meat of a quality good enough that people would want it if you did that?
Currently, most meat-producing animals are overfed and killed young. Would an animal that gets fed a healthy diet and killed once it's had a long and fulfilling life actually produce meat people would want?
If you give a cow a choice between being a gazelle and getting eating by a lion or a cow and being fed and taken care of but eventually being killed, which would they choose? If you gave a cow a choice between the elimination or decimation of its entire species (cows have been altered to be not fit for nature) which would they choose? It’s not as cut and dry as you would think. There are definitely people who would pick to eliminate the entire human race. See
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_M... , so maybe we would have voluntary cattle extinction movements as well.
A belief that birth/procreation is a negative is known as antinatalism.
I really enjoy both BeyondBeef and Impossible Burger.
My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture.
The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I would never complain about a Beyond Meat spicy sausage in my Italian food. The sweet Italian version tastes almost like a breakfast sausage to me.
For Impossible Burgers, I feel like the taste is virtually 100%. I don't actually know, if I were eating an impossible burger on a bun with the fixings, if I could tell you it was an impossible burger. The only thing they would lose on is the texture and maybe the color. The texture is more... chipped(?) than ground beef, so looking at a patty (probably easier with an 8oz than a 4oz) is pretty obvious, but man, the flavor is great.
Like I said, I eat either one of them as my first choice whenever they're sold at a restaurant.
I thought this way too until the Beyond/Impossible burgers. Before them, the garden burgers and similar options mostly got a "why bother?" reaction from me. Give me a dish that is meant to be vegetarian, not something trying and failing to replicate a meat dish.
But I also love a good burger. To each their own, of course, but a well cooked burger (well cooked, not well done) made with quality meat.. it's hard to top. And that's the thing with Beyond and Impossible - while they don't hit the level of top tier burgers, they're actually "close enough" to the taste and texture of real beef that I actually enjoy them as a burger, not just as a burger substitute.
And being close enough is massively important. You aren't going to get the world to go vegetarian on ethical appeals. But plant-based meats that are able to get close enough, especially if they can end up priced cheaper than meat, will provide a much easier transition to less meat consumption. And hey, it doesn't even need to mean that people go to 100% vegetarian; significant reductions would help a lot.
Fellow vegetarian take: I stopped eating meat for environmental reasons, not because I disliked the experience of eating meat, and while I was never a big meat eater, there are definitely some meat-containing foods I miss from time to time, a good burger being one. I think a well-made black bean burger can be really great, and without priors I'd probably say better than fake meat, but for whatever reason it doesn't pull the nostalgia levers for me, so I do like an impossible burger every now and then.
More importantly though, I don't really thing I'm the target audience (nor are you). I think it's more like, say, my parents: generally environmentally conscious (retrofit their house with a heat pump, etc.), but have established dietary habits that have kept them from making big changes specifically around meat. I think if you were able to offer them something indistinguishable from the real thing, though, they'd be totally down to swap it out at a barbecue or whatever. Personally I think getting 50% of Americans to cut their meat intake by 20% is way easier than getting 10% to give meat up entirely, especially with good alternatives, and the outcome is the same. Worth a shot, I'd say?
> it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about
As others have replied already, pure vegetarians aren't the only audience for these products. You have plenty of people (like myself) who still enjoy meat but will happily opt for the replacements when available because of the environmental/ethical/health benefits, and I'm sure they've also lowered the barrier to entry for many people making the leap into full vegetarian diets for the first time.
I've been finding myself opting for the Impossible/Beyond options on menus more and more lately (even at fast food joints, e.g. Starbucks or Burger King), and I'm grateful for the options being there.
I don't get what you're trying to say. Of course people like the taste, but why pretend to eat meat? We all know it's not the same. I'd rather have a real version of something I like than a fake version of something I miss.
It’s simple - we like eating what we grew up eating. For me, those are the dishes and ingredients my mom made, the restaurants near home made when I was a kid etc. Nostalgia/memory is an important component of taste because I figure it’s evolution’s way of saying “you ate this and didn’t die. Eat some more!”
I’ve never eaten a beef burger. I tried an Impossible Burger. It just tasted ... I don’t know. Not meh, not great, not bad. Just different. I’d eat it again if someone offered but I wouldn’t seek it out.
But I totally get why people who’ve had 1-2 beef burgers their whole lives love that taste. I’m the same way with a good cheese omelette or a paneer dish.
My thought is it's for people who are meat replacing rather than being vegetarian.
I agree with you about so many foods to choose from.
For me as a vegetarian it's an absurd thing wanting to eat something that tastes like animal but it's a taste thing so it's just a subjective view of mine.
As an omnivore it’s because burger is delicious. If I can get the burger without the cow I’m down. Frankly forget about what they’re replacing, they just taste pretty good. Just a round puck of yum.
As someone who tries to eat more vegetarian food - and is succeeding better at it every week, burgers are the only thing I use cow meat for. There just is no substitute when you want a proper burger.
I've tried portobello, chicken, pork, chickpea, you name it.
But when I want a burger, the only thing that actually works is minced cow meat - and Impossible/Beyond Burger. They're still a bit hard to get (usually sold out) and expensive, but we're getting there.
I want my children to live in a world where eating 4-legged mammals is an expensive delicacy, not an everyday occurrence or something you can get for $1 from McD.
Lab diamonds are adding impurities to mimic natural diamonds. Electric guitars are more popular than theremins. Photoshop lets you paint with brushes.
These are all examples to show that when we are given a technology that allows us to access any point in a high-dimensional space of possibilities, humans will explore it starting from what they already know.
There are probably points in food space much better than what we have already, but it's going to take us a while to find them.
People are vegetarian for a number of reasons. Personally, I really enjoy the taste (which includes the mouthfeel!) of meat, but I'm vegetarian for a number of reasons and have been for 13 years now. I don't think I'd want to go back to eating a meat/fish/etc. every day even if it were possible to do so in an entirely vegetarian manner, but having another thing that I enjoy eating sometimes is nice.
I don’t get it either, as someone who is not a strict vegetarian but also doesn’t eat a lot of meat. For someone that really loves meat, they are going to be supremely disappointed by that product. Similarly, I think most vegetarians would be be disappointed by that product. (I greatly prefer traditional veggie burgers.)
It fits a weird market niche. I think most people that buy it would be better served with really great (non-fake-meat) vegetarian food and the occasional bit of quality meat when they really want it, which would provide a superior eating experience all around and approximately achieve many of the same objectives. I don’t know any vegetarians that really eat the fake meat; most of the people I know that eat it seem to treat them as “offsets” for when they eat real meat.
I'm a vegetarian that eats the fake meat and I'm glad it exists even if it's not perfect.
I love hamburgers and for me, it's the biggest loss after becoming a vegetarian. Impossible is the closest I can get to recreating that experience.
I switched to vegetarian because of the animal suffering/morality angle. I have for a long time felt that it was the right thing to do, but I liked eating meat so it was hard for me to do it. The pandemic gave me an opportunity to make the switch and be more consistent.
I will go vegetarian for months at a time but the challenge I have isn’t meat per se but that most vegetarian cooking has a strong bias toward sweet/sour/starchy kinds of flavor profiles, which I dislike. As in, for example, I literally never eat fruit because I’ve don’t like the flavor. I can see how the Impossible Burger is an alternative to that but it isn’t the only solution. It did take me years to collect and develop enough recipes that are highly satisfying that don’t have that character though, so it does offer a default.
While I strongly agree with the angle of minimizing animal suffering, I am also pragmatic because I grew up in very rural agricultural communities. All large-scale agricultural kills loads of animals, that is the nature of the thing. When you buy plant products that carnage is merely less obvious and a bit more wasteful (the animals that die usually aren’t eaten by people). Feeding 8 billion people and animals dying go hand-in-hand, even when everyone is vegetarian.
I’m also pragmatic in the sense that this doesn’t change easily or quickly, but there’s a difference between incidental animal death due to plant agriculture and raising animals for slaughter. I think the goal is suffering reduction - anything that moves the needle in that direction is a good thing.
I'm not yet vegan/vegetarian, but I am making my way there.
> I really don't get why people are so focused on realistic meat replacement.
100% this. I enjoy Impossible as an independent food, I have it whenever I see it on the menu. The taste and texture are a couple of shades off from beef, but that's more variety at the end of the day.
It's almost a mistake calling it a meat replacement.
FWIW, I thought the Impossible Burger clearly tasted like heavily processed legumes, not like meat. I grew up in one of the major legume growing regions of the US and was raised on them in a part of the world where the local food culture knows how to get the most out of them. It is very satisfying when done right, and I eat far more than the average American to this day, but no one would confuse it with meat. Impossible Burger etc tastes like overly processed legumes with some chemical-y overtones.
Ironically, I think it would be far more appealing if they didn’t try to make it simulated meat and leaned into its strengths. Vegetarian burgers that don’t pretend to be meat taste better. Legumes that are expertly processed as a protein, without trying to be meat, taste better. The Impossible Burger falls into the same category as “fat-free mayo”; trying to maintain the pretense ultimately produces a poor experience.
I am an accidental vegetarian most days but I won’t eat Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger. The products taste unpleasantly synthetic. If I wanted to eat legumes, I can create something far better tasting for much less money. If I want a burger, I’ll eat a burger — marketing aside, the gap is still very wide.
To each their own. I completely disagree, in that the Impossible Burger, and to a lesser degree the Beyond Burger, are the first vegetarian products I've eaten that completely satiate my desire for meat, and I really like the taste with good seasoning, ketchup and mustard.
I've eaten many veggie burgers previously, whether they be bean, soy, or mushroom based, and always after eating one I felt like it tasted OK, but I was left wanting a steak even more.
The preparation may matter. For example, I don’t put ketchup and mustard on my burgers, which will probably disguise a lot of the processed legume taste. I don’t use strongly flavored sauces.
For reasons I don’t understand, some of the most satisfying unintentionally vegetarian food I’ve eaten has been in the agriculture regions of the US, like the Palouse, where legumes are ubiquitous local crops. Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than with fake meat.
It’s a marketing gap. A lot of vegetarian cooking is biased towards a sweet/sour/starchy flavor profile; people that don’t like those flavors in their food generally are on their own, the alternatives are not well represented.
> Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than with fake meat.
It’s impossible not to ask. Could you share any recipes or dish preparation tips?
I lived in the rural Palouse growing up. That region is responsible for producing a lot of the lentils, dry peas, chickpeas, et al in the US. There is a wide range of local cuisine in that region based on those ingredients that is absurdly delicious that I’ve never seen anywhere else. There are a lot of recipes online but they are materially different. There are distant analogues of some of it (e.g. falafel or some Indian cuisine) but it is pretty different from that. This was home food on the farms.
The thing to understand about legumes is that some of them, with appropriate preparation, can constructively absorb prodigious quantities of salt and fat. For example, you can fry lentils, which are delicious on their own (I think these are eaten in the Middle East), but that can be a prep step for further processing. Many people make cakes or patties, often pan frying them. Addictive as hell and salty, and you can’t eat a lot of it, but it tastes amazing and various forms are sometimes used as a meat alternative e.g. with eggs for breakfast.
The caveat, which I’ve learned the hard way, is that there is quite a bit of non-obvious knowledge on how to process the legumes for these dishes, and it has multiple stages. Texture and consistency control, as well as the interplay of oil and water, is not trivial. Lentils are the most complicated but also the most interesting, but the multiple processing steps are more work than is convenient. I left when I was a kid, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out by trial and error. When I travel back there, local restaurants still serve these kinds of things. I could basically eat this stuff every day and never miss meat. They also make some interesting sauce/gravy type preparations from legumes, which are similar to things I’ve had in Germany (probably adapted, the population there is ethnically German).
They have variants of all these things based on lentils, chickpeas, and dry (split) peas, which are pretty different in practice.
I’ve also done a fair amount of work adapting classic Indian vegetarian food concepts to completely different European food contexts and use cases. These creations have been immensely popular; my prodigiously carnivorous friends request them.
Totally agree on Impossible Burgers. Like the GP, I also try to avoid eating meat due to animal welfare concerns. That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic.
With Impossible Burgers, though, it really tastes and feels like I'm eating a real burger. It completely satiates my desire for meat, and it makes my body feel "good" from an energy perspective.
> That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic.
The same thing happened to me when I first tried going vegan. It wasn’t until I went through a major effort at planning my meals — to the point of making an outright diet plan for myself — that I was able to make veganism work for me.
From your description, it sounds like you were eating too little calories.
You're right about meal planning. I also think that if you're going to cut out an entire food group you should phase it out. You eat food every single day. You have to find something that works long term for you.
A key thing is that some folks have boring "meat and potatoes" taste, with no interest in moving beyond that. My parents are old-timers living in the Irish countryside. When I was growing up in the early 80s, you couldn't get one-tenth the stuff I now eat a daily basis. I became a vegetarian by first developing a love for cooking (especially Indian). When you have a wide range of tastes, and the supermarkets stock everything you need, it's easy to find alternative to meat. Otherwise, it takes a long time to expand your tastes and learn what to actually do with ingredients. My mother walks around the supermarket at the weekend, and still picks up the same old things she used to get in the 80s. She wouldn't know what to do with 90% of the herbs and spices on my shelf. So asking her to cut out the one tasty part of her daily meal is pointless, not to mention unhealthy (she would have low b12 and iron).
If I were a meat eater planning to go vegetarian I would avoid cold turkey (not a pun). Phase it out. Maybe start with the biggest greenhouse emitters (cow), or the most intelligent (pig). Maybe give up fowl and fish last. Rather than see it as a limitation, start by learning how to cook one new meal every week that is nutritious, tasty and also meat free. Also, if someone else is doing all the hard work (ie: you're in a restaurant or ordering delivery) use that as an opportunity to try different things that don't have meat. Indian food is great for this because it's not just "meat and potatoes without the meat" or their vegetarian food is amazing. But you might need to develop a taste for it.
For some people it might take a year, but if you think about it as expanding your tastes, perhaps it won't feel like a chore, and you won't feel like you've given up anything (especially now that you can fall back on the decent meatless burgers/sausage you can get nowadays).
It's funny to me how people talk about iron being a problem on a vegetarian diet. I've been a vegetarian for a decade or so now and my iron level is consistently at the very high end of the normal range. I don't do anything special to achieve this.
Same. I'm a vegetarian and I'm in perfect health. But if someone is extremely lethargic all the time, it's usually either iron, B12 or calories (rarely the latter). Also, some people become vegetarian and simply do it wrong. I know a girl who is vegetarian for icky reasons, ie she is disgusted by the idea of eating something's spleen/veins/anus, and it just stops her from eating any meat. But she's similarly icky about vegetables. Hates all kinds of things. She's low on iron, is constantly sick and lethargic.
While I sympathise with the argument, I think that it's a mistake to push this aspect front and centre.
There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.
The people I've spoken to about Beyond/Impossible and similar fake-meats all tend to think of it as something for vegans/vegetarians, because that's how this type of product has been presented for decades.
"Oh, you're having a BBQ? Fred's partner is a veggo, better chuck on some mushroom burgers or something"
It's a tough push to convince people that this isn't meant for vegans/vegetarians wanting meat, but a product for meat-eaters wanting to reduce their meat intake, but not necessarily wanting to give up their ability to have meals that taste like what they're used to.
Pushing from that angle, I would argue, is likely to have a bigger impact than saying "Think of the poor cow that had to get murdered for your burger!".
I disagree actually - I think the animal suffering morality angle is the best argument for most people (as long as it's done in a way that isn't too adversarial).
Most people don't care about the environmental costs, we do lots of things that have environmental effects because we like them and think it's worth it.
Impossible and Beyond, while good, are still noticeably worse than beef to me. The animal suffering bit makes me accept that it's worth it. The environmental use isn't as compelling (imo).
I disagree. While there will no doubt be friction, people should be confronted with the reality of their choices; long term we can't preserve their bubble of ignorance, might as well address it now
Um... Now you sound like the one who is ignorant. Not everyone thinks killing an animal for food is some terrible blight on the world. I have zero issues with it and no amount of "but they're living things and so cute" is going to change that fact.
It's exactly this type of nonsense that gets people to turn away from meat like products. We don't need a lecture about sad little animals every time we order a delicious smash burger.
I think it is useful to distinguish between 'killing an animal for food' and 'rearing billions of animals each year in factories in conditions in which they suffer, and subsequently killing them for food'.
Factory farmed animals does look like a terrible blight on the world to me - what makes you think it isn't?
I like the idea of gene editing to remove brain stems, although that still leaves us with the input/output issues (feed, methane etc), which perhaps we can also engineer away.
If animal suffering doesn't bother you, does human suffering?
Victorian factory owners might use a similar argument to support using child labour to make cheap goods which the common man can afford; that doesn't mean that child labour is good.
I mean, its not always ignorance. I understand meat has massively more impact on the environment in many metrics. I still enjoy meat products and tend to eat them from time to time. There's things I enjoy about those products, even though there are externalities. If there's a product out there which can offset most of those externalities and still satiate that same kind of experience, I'll pay a few more bucks for it. Hopefully, many more similar people to me will as well, and maybe we'll even make it cost effective to offset most of that highly impactful meat eating with something that more people find agreeable.
Its way better for the environment if I never purchased a car or even a bicycle and I just walked everywhere. My environmental impact would probably be lower. But in the end I'm going to buy some kind of vehicle, because I enjoy what buying a car gets me.
Its way better for me to never eat meat, but in the end I enjoy what eating meat gives me. I can massively reduce my impact on the Earth living naked foraging berries and roots and never traveling farther than I can walk but in the end there are things I enjoy and will end up doing them despite the externalities. I'm going to own an air conditioner and I'm going to run it. This has externalities and would be better for the environment if it was never made and was never run. I'm going to own a refridgerator and run it. This has externalities and would be better for the environment if it was never made and never run. I'm typing this on a computer which will eventually go into a landfill and probably become some trace amount of toxic waste. In the end, I still managed to get usage out of it and find value from it while its useful. The only way to have no impact on the Earth is to never exist.
Its nice having the option to do things which give most of the same experience while reducing the externalities. I'll buy the refrigerator which is more efficient. I'll buy the right size AC system for my home to cool it as effectively as possible I'll maintain all my appliances to give as long as a serviceable live as possible. And I'll buy what gives me similar experiences to what I enjoy for food that reduces my impact on the Earth.
Mate, you're the one who lives in a bubble. Natural food eaters have no problem killing animals for food. We've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years and we're not going to stop now because you live in a first world country where you have time for imaginary problems.
>There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.
I'm going to be as neutral as I can be in this comment.
I don't think that's something that should stand in the way; it depends if we're coming from a philosophical perspective, or a political perspective. Arguably, some harms should not be tolerated in civil society - and I think the moral vegetarian case (as expounded by philosophers of all stripes) does some work towards that.
My point is that we can name a variety of behaviour that a large proportion of society engages in which are also harmful. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to convince them, nor to discourage those behaviours through the softer power the government has available to it - higher taxation on meat agriculture and the end of subsidies for meat agriculture being examples. I have met very, very few moral vegetarians who wish to outright ban meat production, at least immediately.
How did the population in general become acclimatised to other things we now see as immoral[0]? Would that work for moral vegetarianism? I don't have the answers to those questions, but I'm sure someone has discussed it previously. Eating meat is an ancient tradition - even older than that - but so were other moral norms, such as the prohibition of homosexuality.
We very, very frequently shame other people on the basis of their conduct as regards morality - the principle of moral judgements. Most (though not all) philosophers argue this is beneficial to society if morality is worth talking about at all. We still shame adultery for moral reasons. What would it take to bring meat production, or even consumption, to a similar level of disdain?
[0] See any of: slavery, marital rape, revenge porn, CSEM, regulations against abortion, regulations against homosexuality, child marriage, Jim Crow laws - and that's just considering the Western world.
> How did the population in general become acclimatised to other things we now see as immoral[0]?
Pretty much all of our examples in that list of things have direct human victims. Its far easier to get people to realize things are immoral when there are direct human victims. Eating meat usually doesn't have direct human victims, so it is harder to get most people to agree its immoral.
For my part, I enjoy fast food burgers (think Wendy's, Burger King, etc...). These burger patties are not exactly rare Kobe beef. Once you put that thing on a bun, add cheese, slather it in sauce, etc... I don't find the difference in the patties very noticeable. I notice how fresh the lettuce is more than the patty.
I eat plenty of meat, so I don't have an anti-meat agenda. But, for me, for fast food burgers, I may as well choose a less environmentally damaging, and yes, more animal friendly, alternative, because it hardly makes a difference.
The nutritional profile of a fast food beef patty is actually quite excellent, especially once you factor in the cost. The same cannot be said of the fake meat alternatives.
Nutritionally meat alternatives stack up well against fast food beef. With the added benefits of fiber and lack of cholesterol and saturated fat.
The costs have to do with scale and government incentives. Plant protein is clearly cheaper to produce than animal protein.
>Plant protein is clearly cheaper to produce than animal protein.
Cheaper for who? Cheaper how, in terms of monetary cost?
I raise most of my vegetables and all of my meat. There's a reason I can't raise all of my vegetables, and it has everything to do with cost. It is vastly more expensive in terms of my time, water, space, soil nutrients to raise my family's vegetables, vs. letting my animals raise themselves on the vegetation that grows naturally. I'd like to add, that I eat many wild plants that modern Americans consider "weeds", and include them in this equation.
Fiber is unnecessary unless you eat too much undigestible plant matter and cholesterol is not as simple as “it’s bad”. Most men are cholesterol deficient.
> Fiber is unnecessary unless you eat too much undigestible plant matter
I am not exactly sure how to parse this. Could you explain?
> and cholesterol is not as simple as “it’s bad”. Most men are cholesterol deficient.
LDL cholesterol is pretty bad given that they build up in your arteries causing arteriosclerosis. I think it is pretty well understood that saturated fat found in animal products as well as dairy products raise LDL levels. Fiber reduces cholesterol levels in addition to aiding in regulating metabolic function.
> I am not exactly sure how to parse this. Could you explain?
Much of plant fiber is approximately indigestible to humans. The primary benefit of consuming insoluble fiber is to more rapidly push the other insoluble fiber that’s sitting in your intestine out. If you don't consume fiber in the first place there’s no problem. There are no clear nutritional benefits to consuming fiber. Anyone saying you will have bowel problems if you don’t eat fiber is (literally) full of shit. It’s more like you should eat a lot or none at all (I prefer the latter).
> LDL cholesterol is pretty bad given that they build up in your arteries causing arteriosclerosis
It’s not that simple. If you look into it, the cholesterol studies that boil down to “LDL bad” are excessively simplistic. The current best knowledge suggests that the implications of blood cholesterol content are A) better analyzed in relative (LDL/HDL ratio) rather than absolute terms B) highly dependent on genetic factors. There are large populations where cholesterol has a totally different effect on heart disease risk.
Every single piece of historical advice based on nutrition “science” of the form “X common metabolite is bad” has been completely wrong despite being widely accepted. “Fat is bad” was widely accepted for decades. Apply the appropriate skepticism here.
Production of several hormones, including testosterone, is rate-limited by cholesterol availability. Endogenous synthesis in humans is too slow to support sufficient T synthesis. This is likely the origin of the archetype of the manly meat eater, which is almost culturally universal.
I guess the difference would be though, that without the demand for meat, those cows would likely never have lived at all. 99%+ of all cows alive are used for human agriculture.
From the perspective of any living creature, I generally think of existence as a positive good versus non-existence. I know I certainly would rather come to a violent death at a young age than have never been born at all.
I think there's a plausible argument that modern factory farming is so horrific that it's worse than non-existence. But a cow raised with a decent quality of life, and slaughtered humanely for its meat does not seem worse for animal welfare than eliminating the entire existence of the cow.
(Of course I realize there's ecological and health arguments for giving up meat, but purely talking along the dimension of animal welfare.)
Do you view the millions of existences prevented by contraception the same way? Those humans also don’t exist for entirely preventable reasons …
This seems like an on its face absurd and pointless argument to me. In these scenarios we are basically talking about unborn hypothetical future cows and from that perspective your argument makes no sense at all.
Cattle would obviously continue to exist in some form, even with a greatly diminished population – so we are not even talking about extinction.
Is the fact that compared to 100 years ago the US horse population shrank by 50% (due to reduced demand) a great tragedy? Obviously not. Obviously.
You've missed the argument - the argument is we have prevented the existence of millions of humans without blinking, many of whom would probably rather exist.
Once we've one that, killing off large numbers of animals is an academic point. Who cares if we kill them by preventing their existence or giving them years of life then killing them? They're the lucky ones who got to be born. If you gave me a choice, I'd rather die and be eaten than never have existed.
I would also rather have been born and die horribly (which may yet happen) than be one of the uncountable infinity of humans who never existed to breath the air.
Is there a quality of life tipping point at which you would rather never have been born? If you were offered a life consisting entirely of pain and suffering, would you accept that?
If the quality of life is *not* an issue, we could logically maintain that we are morally obliged to maximise the number of beings brought into life -- however short and horrible that life may be -- because any form of existence is preferable to non-existence.
If quality of life *is* an issue, we should strive not to bring beings into existence that are likely to have a particularly low quality of life. The suffering of factory farmed animals may be great enough to say it would be better that they never existed rather than they were born into a short life of imprisonment and suffering.
The compromise position then would be to breed them so they didn't suffer. It'd probably be good for the meat quality too.
The idea there is a moral issue here is suspect. It is obvious I, personally, don't want to be factory farmed. It isn't obvious that factory farming is a moral problem.
It is all moot anyway, vat-grown meat is going to be more hygienic, cheaper and all-round better once they work out the kinks. But it might result in the near or total extinction of cattle.
I hope cellular agriculture will help reduce real meat consumption, and decrease overall suffering. Breeding out the ability to suffer is also desirable.
Do you not think that factory farming causes suffering? Causing avoidable suffering seems like a moral issue to me.
I, personally, do not care if factory farming causes suffering and support cheap, nutritious and convenient food by whatever means is necessary. The people who want to ban it are insensitive threats to human comfort IMHO.
But if it is a problem that needs to be solved, breeding the animals to enjoy it is a much easier solution than synthetic meat. We've had the technology to change animal behaviour through breeding for longer than we've had history. If people want them to get a kick out of being caged and slaughtered then that is doable. easier and would have been faster to accomplish than growing meat in a jar, anyway. I think it is a waste of time, but it is better than laws restricting food production.
I did, that was what I said in the comment. There isn't an issue with a pill preventing millions of humans existing. And that is worse than factory farming, because it affects humans. Ergo factory farming isn't a moral issue.
With some tweaks to taste, that is the argument you are responding to. The bit after the "because" depends on the person's moral framework.
Factory farming normalizes extreme violence and exploitation. It teaches humans it’s acceptable to profoundly harm and neglect living creatures for profit. I have to imagine this has highly negative spillover effects on society at large. It’s making our society more depraved than it otherwise would be if we just grew plants for food.
Or, consider animal agriculture’s role in deforestation of the Amazon, in massively polluting our planet, and in being a breeding grounds for zoonotic disease transmission, etc.
IMO “allowing” a cow to live the entirety of its early life as a confused, neglected, and often tormented slave doesn’t offset a single one of those evils.
There was an article on Slate Star Codex that examined this issue in detail. The conclusion was the opposite - basically that life is worth it even if living in extremely poor conditions - as evidenced by accounts of human survivors of e.g. concentration camps (the majority still wanted to continue living, and even engaged in normal human activities like love and procreation).
"Continuing to live" is a very different state than "being brought into existence," and I struggle to see how the desire for the former implies the latter. You can't ask anyone who was never born if they would prefer to have been created, nor can someone who was created observe what it would have been like to have never been born. It's difficult to even conceptualize non-existence!
If we all moved to impossible beef, cattle populations would plummet. However, despite popular perception, for most of its life before slaughter, a cow is raised in large open ranges for grazing, like in the California foothills. Only the last parts of their live do they get put into crowded feedlots for "fattening", which might be described as inhumane. Perhaps, it would lead to the advent of wild cattle in the California hills, as land owners stop caring.
This argument comes up almost every time and it has never made any sense to me. Yes, you would rather live than never have been born. That's because you're alive right now, you can have and express that feeling. Someone who doesn't exist will not care even in the slightest, because they can't.
I ended up becoming vegetarian for a while due to some video that was released years ago of factory farm workers abusing animals. I found myself unable to eat meat without bursting into tears.
In time, and in part due to how complicated this ecosystem actually is (as explained by a few other replies here) I ended up settling on eating vegetarian “most of the time” and buying meat sourced from ethical places with better conditions when I do.
But it was surprising to me how threatened most people were when I was strictly vegetarian.
I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.
That said, I continue to have a great appreciation for the industry of meatless meat.
Although at this point, IMO, Impossible Burger is the gold standard, and after trying it once, eating any other burger (including Beyond) just doesn’t cut it.
I think a lot of people have that reaction to something like veganism for a couple reasons:
1. You are a constant reminder of their choices, the impact of their choices and their ability to make different ones
2. Eating food is a very base level need and the idea of moralizing that can elicit strong responses
3. I do think some people are genuinely afraid that vegans will prevent them from eating what they love (similar to democrats taking away guns or something)
> I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.
When I've witnessed these debates they're much like 2a. A vegetarian uses some moralizing and hyperbolic language to express how deeply they care about a cause and people either feel threatened or insulted by the language.
To frame that even more concisely, it's like when pro-life people use moralizing and hyperbolic language about abortions in front of people that believe in them or have had one.
My general takeaway from watching these issues is that moralizing, hyperbolic language or other subtle uses of shame, guilt, etc do not yield good results and often create backlash in response to the strength and travel that that kind of rhetoric has. Basically, we need to get better about how we talk about those issues if they're to be considered at all.
Another common theme is usually one side in this debate has some camp within it's interest that is advocating for cancellation, and if you're not actively talking down cancellation both internally and externally to your interest group then you are perceived as showing by proxy approval via inaction.
Irish person here with a couple of random facts:
- Ireland is one of the larger per-capita beef producing countries
- Beef lobby is quite powerful
- Our local Chipper / Take Away / "Fish & Chips" shop sells Beyond Meat burgers
- As a meat eater who grew up on a beef farm, I can say they look and taste amazingly good... 95% as good as a real burger.
Most cattle are treated well in Ireland, living outside on fresh grass (live exports aside). My main concerns are global resource depletion, biodiversity, deforestation and climate change.
We're beginning to see a real sea change in this meat eating country, meat-free products are popping up everywhere and not just marketed at vegans / hipsters.
Cattle are treated well in Ireland, and sheep too (comparatively). However, pigs and chickens are treated terribly, and we have a total cultural blindspot to it. We have nothing to be proud of when it comes to animal welfare.
No argument here... my comment was more to say that meat-free burgers can be a success even in a country that has a high opinion of beef... This is a positive development IMHO.
If you told Irish people 10 years ago that their local chipper would be selling meat-free burgers, they'd have thought you were mad...
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 for this huge amount of population, we have taketh away the right of other animal's possibility to have a thriving population. The human race thrived on a bloody ground, and we need to recognize that.
It seems hard to make sense of your objection here other than as a statement that past acts that might be considered wrong were how we got to where we are today. I don't think it's unreasonable to acknowledge our history while also recognize we shouldn't repeat the wrongs of the past.
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 in that neatly packaged sirloin, I’m pretty sure they’d have a different reaction than ‘meh’.
(And again, I fish and hunt so it’s not like I’m some bleeding-heart hippie who can’t take violence against animals. I just think that we should all be less cavalier about meat intake, which after all is a very recent phenomenon)
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
The main moral problem with meat consumption, to me, is not the killing - everything dies, you're right. It's rather how awfully the animals are treated both throughout their leaves, and also (in most cases) the slaughter process. It's really a horror show, and far worse than their natural lives would be. Not a life anyone would willingly be born into.
Almost all meat comes from such inhumane factory farms with terrible conditions. For the animals treated the worst (chickens) there seems to be almost no moment of their life without suffering. They're even bred with genes that guarantee pain (due to extremely fast growth and egg laying cycles), because that makes it cheaper.
If we had higher standards, this moral argument would be less concerning. But the standards needed to treat animals at least passably well would make meat far more expensive, which is not politically palatable. Better meat alternatives are the best path forward here.
You have a valid point; killing an animal in order to eat it is not immoral, assuming you don't let anything go to waste. Factory farming, on the other hand, has nothing to do with how nature works. It's all about who raises the animals and how.
It' the same thing with the environmental aspect. If the animals graze all their lives then it might even have a positive effect on CO2 uptake in the long run, and it definitely is required for some biomes to survive. But, again, factory farming isn't exactly natural.
And yes, that applies to vegan food production as well.
i think this and the sport part of it is the worst of all. there is this popular show on youtube that everyone loves. celebrities eating hot wings. just a small bite and they throw it to trash. no one bats an eye, it is part of the culture.
Your not wrong or anything but I think the general counter argument here is that because something is deemed to have always happened or to happen in nature does not automatically make it right. There’s a term for the argument “appeal to nature” which sort of fits here, you can use this to justify all kinds of things.
The Beyond Beef burgers that my local burger chain (Grill’d) sell are pretty good, too. They’re a little drier than a good beef patty and a bit sweeter, but if you told me it was beef I think I would believe you, albeit not cooked perfectly.
My understanding is that popular opinion says Impossible is even closer, though I haven’t tried it personally.
> but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
You know that plants are also living, feeling beings? Though not sure about being individual but that's highly subjective.
The cycle of life is that some trees harvest the sun, and then it's a fish-eat-fish kinda world.
Vegan meat is not important because it doesn't kill animals (it'll kill plants, and hence this is purely emotional/subjective). But because it could be very sustainable. There is a reason why Japanese eat vegetables, fish and pork. They have a large population on a tight island. They have to do otherwise. (they also drive very small compact cars/mini-vans).
I agree with you, that is especially the case for burgers that are usually not made of particularly refined meat. I’m still "old style" and enjoy a piece of steak but less than once a week. I still need to cut down on ham… decrease in meat consumption is rational. It’s mostly a matter of habit, and people hate changing those.
I do have one valid complaint with Beyond Burgers. I am a fan of meat. I like meat. I love a good cheese burger.
And Beyond Burgers actually taste fine. Not amazing, not “just like beef” but not bad. I can eat a Beyond Burger and feel satisfied.
My problem with Beyond Burgers or Beyond products as a whole is that they STINK! Bad! When cooking. I don’t know why but cooking a beyond burger stinks up my kitchen worse than my cats litter box freshly pooped in.
> But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
In my opinion, the most important thing is that it is considerably better for the environment due to the reduction in emissions, water and land. Don't get me wrong, no violence against animals is a benefit too, but to me it's not the number one reason to try imitation meat.
I have indeed tried them, and they aren't as nice as a real beef burger in my opinion. And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation. (Of course, you can certainly reduce cruelty if you move away from a US-style factory farming model).
Looking forward to seeing how the technology develops, but yeah. It hasn't changed my habits yet.
So if some day an alien race arrives and starts farming humans for sandwich meat just because they like the way we taste that's fair play as far as you're concerned?
>And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation.
I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
My interpretation was more: nature doesn't have morality, animals don't have morality, other animals aren't worried about killing each other, the only reason we are worried about it is because we are projecting the horror of death that comes from being a cognizant being onto animals that are unlikely to even have a concept of "death", so it's not a moral conundrum for an animal that has evolved to eat meat (humans) to eat meat.
Or, said another way: if animals being killed to be eaten is inherently bad, should we not be trying to replace the diet of all lions on earth with BeyondMeat too?
I also find it a frustrating American-centric/urban-centric point of view that 'killing animals is bad', when I (among others) have grown up in areas where it's a basic part of life to farm/hunt meat for survival.
I think that’s because the American urban centric view looks at where the meat comes from in the US and it’s not equivalent to hunting on a farm. It comes from factory farms that are pretty sickening when you see videos and pictures. Sure maybe some folks in rural areas or hunters are similar to what you described but 95% is factory farms in US supermarkets.
Also part of the point is that in this culture it’s not for survival. If you need it to survive that’s a different story and not what most people dislike. However US consumers have a choice, so why not make the best of it. Choose meat from sustainable farms or just avoid it.
>I also find it a frustrating American-centric/urban-centric point of view that 'killing animals is bad'
This isn't really even an American centric view. It might be a silicon valley centric view or Upper class suburbs of America centric view. But the fact of the matter in most of America, the working class areas, the rural areas, etc. There are absolutely no moral qualms about hunting, or killing animals or eating meat.
I grew up in an area with "traditional" slaughter techniques. Basically a hog is tied down and its throat is slit, while alive, the animal's heart pumps the blood out into a bucket. This ensures the blood doesn't remain in the meat, which makes it taste gamey. The screaming and thrashing of the pig will haunt you for days but the meat definitely tastes better.
Anyways, I dislike the utilitarian/primitist argument because you can justify any number of cruelties with an appeal to nature. Cats play with their food all the time so why can't we torture animals for fun?
Humans should ponder the morality of killing animals because we have the will and ability to do so.
We certainly are lucky to live in a society of plenty where we can make the moral decision on how or what we eat. I don't have any negative thoughts against people who completely opt out of eating meat for that reason.
But just to comment on your first point, we would never let an animal suffer like that when we grew up. A quick shot to the temple to switch it off immediately, and then cut and hang the meat to bleed out worked just as well for us.
Don't get me wrong, we were always taught to minimise any suffering and to give our livestock the best/healthiest/least stressful lives possible, and to treat them with dignity when you needed them for food.
My first point is that this type of cruelty is just a basic part of life and survival for the people who practice it. You would condemn it as cruel just as some would condemn you for killing an animal with a gun. I'm just saying it's a rather arbitrary line to draw. How much cruelty is too much and for what purpose? Why would you draw a neat line around your actions and call it moral, then say that anything outside that line is overly cruel?
Note that in my story I did eat the meat - I may have understated how delicious it tasted. Freshly butchered pork made this way is unlike anything I've had in North America. Is killing for sustenance more moral than killing for sport, or for taste?
I don't pass judgement on people who hunt or slaughter animals this way, but I don't buy the idea that killing animals is simply a part of life and above moral consideration - or for that matter GP's argument, that it's perfectly moral to kill animals for food because it's as nature intended.
No! Lions eat to survive and do not have choices due to evolution. Humans on the other hand can choose how to source their nutrients.
I don’t believe that animals eating animals in an abstract sense is wrong. The problem for me is necessity and scale. We don’t need animal protein to survive and the scale of the death and environmental harm is too much to ignore.
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 live or living to eat?
In the past we needed to eat animals to survive, so there was a purpose for animal farming. Now that we don't need animal sourced proteins we are consuming mainly for ignorance or human pleasure.
As we improve the technology and the fidelity of plant based and/or synthetic products improve it will be more clear that we don't need to keep killing animals to satisfy our taste buds.
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.
> No, most humans could not afford to be vegetarians or vegans.
There are large vegetarian human populations such as people in parts of India.
>Most humans, although not in the Serengeti as you put it, are in fact, fighting for survival.
Humans fighting for survival cannot choose things freely. I am going to go out on a limb and claim that the majority of the HN audience can make choices.
> Most humans choose meat, because it's nutritionally dense and depending on how it was raised, provides a 'full protein' unlike plants.
You can’t have it both ways the humans fighting for survival cannot afford “well raised” meat.
There are plant sources that provide complete proteins by themselves and others can be combined easily to provide complete proteins.
> Nevermind the obvious health issues involved with eating "process'ed plant materials"
You do realize that beef is essentially processed plant materials? Meat is not magic. We can adopt better alternatives, but we choose not to do so.
>There are large vegetarian human populations such as people in parts of India.
This is a common fallacy. There are at least a couple of studies that show the negative health effects of "vegetarian" Indians after they moved to the US. They were very surprised to find that despite eating the same things as they would in India, their blood work would come back with nutritional deficiencies and contribute to poor overall health. Why? Because they were never vegetarians. In India, food production was very much local for these people, and they were often or always eating vegetables that were picked the same day, in or near the same place they lived, the vegetable plots were not sprayed with pesticides (like they would be in the US), and so they consumed a fairly large amount of animal (insect) flesh as a result. Secondly, a very small minority of the total human population is vegetarian, and for very good reason. If you listen closely, your body will tell you what you need to ingest. We were made to eat everything around us...we should continue to eat everything around us.
>Humans fighting for survival cannot choose things freely.
As someone who's struggled for survival most of my life (and continues to do so), I assure you, I've had plenty of choices. Maybe we're talking about a different type of survival or struggle though.
>You can’t have it both ways the humans fighting for survival cannot afford “well raised” meat.
I grew up in Eastern Europe during the "dark days". We were fighting for survival. We raised pork, chicken, turkey, duck, rabbit in the heart of the city, as did most of our neighboors. Was it "well raised"? Hmmm, probably not by your standards, but it kept us alive when the stores were literally empty. We certainly couldn't afford the nice cuts, we sold those to the professional class (the type you find in this HN thread it seems).
>There are plant sources that provide complete proteins by themselves
I read a lot about nutrition and studies on proteins, microproteins, short and long fibers, etc. I have yet to find a study claiming a plant source can provide the amino acid range necessary to create a complete protein. In fact, I've not read a serious study ever claiming that a plant protein, is at all the same as an animal protein. Same goes for fiber, probably a much more important aspect for mammalian health. A calorie is not a calorie. A protein is not a protein. Anyways, we're getting off track. Meat contains fats in amounts that are critical for human development. Some plants can contain some fats, but once again...a plant fat is not an animal fat. They're not interchangeable.
>You do realize that beef is essentially processed plant materials?
Not sure why all this talk of beef? I brought up meat, and meat seems to equal beef only in the American mind set. Most of my red meat consumption is goat and pork. I raise and grow about 90% of my and my family's food (some years 100%), and am intimately aware of what meat, fungus, plants, microbes are and are not. Let me assure you, meat is not essentially "processed plant materials". If you believe there's something in likeness between a cut of goat meat that's been raised on forest browse and pasture, and American white bread or breakfast cereal, I believe you're mistaken. That's a very reductionist view, and one that is not supported by any scientific research I've read.
I'm hearing a lot of arguments here brought up that seem very similar to the arguments made 50-70 years ago by stock farmers who claimed that cows and pigs can't possibly feel or think anything. Now its my vegan friends claiming that plants can't possibly feel or think anything. I wonder what fallacy humans will come up with in 50 years time.
> the vegetable plots were not sprayed with pesticides (like they would be in the US), and so they consumed a fairly large amount of animal (insect) flesh as a result
This doesn’t make any sense. When you eat/cook vegetables, you don’t leave insects on it. You actually wash the vegetable. What you are suggesting is gross and so u healthy.
What do you mean by this? Some things that will give someone a stroke is sitting in front of a computer screen all day, eating highly processed carbs and other "food-like products".
No, my family and I eat everything. Most often right out of the ground without washing. Nobody in my family is on any prescriptions, and no chronic illnesses. Bugs are your friends. Microbes are not the enemy.
> I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
Pretty much everyone needs to kill things to live, even vegetarians (thousands of baby plants were killed to make every loaf of bread). Theoretically there are fruitarians who don't, but my understanding is that is not a sustainable diet and many famous frutarians regularly cheated.
Yes. It’s the cycle of life. Biologically, I am a carnivorous animal, so are you. We simply possess the faculties to choose not to be in a reasonable way, but it doesn’t stop the fact that nature/universe/god/whatever made you to eat the life out of other animals.
Doesn’t bother me either.
Side note: This is beyond the convo of the merit in how we do this today. Whole different convo.
A funny anecdote: my wife and I have removed most meat (apart from occasional fish) from our diets for a variety of reasons (health concerns, sustainability, and animal cruelty).
Do you know which concern resonates most with my 10 year old daughter? Absolutely none of them. She is aware of the issues, and appears to be a conscientious person in the abstract, but when confronted with the option of eating an animal in the moment she simply doesn't care at all.
Are adults more empathetic? Maybe. But fundamentally I think that by the time something makes it to your plate, it's simply too far removed from where it came from for any of these considerations to resonate with most people.
We've considered trying to show her Okja [0] to see if it has any effect on her perspective. I know it was at least partially instrumental in causing me to reconsider factory farming.
> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
When I was about fifteen it occurred to me that while that's true, those animals wouldn't be alive at all without us raising them for food. So it seems to me that the goal should be raising them in good conditions without cruelty. At least to my way of thinking, as someone grateful to my parents that I exist, that's better than no life at all.
There are plenty of other solid reasons to eat less meat, but this argument never worked for me.
I actually like the beyond burgers. If they weren't more expensive than a beef burger, I'd eat them.
I hope this will get better, I would (and do when possible) pay more for free range, ethically raised meat products. I imagine producers will follow the money if enough people think that way.
We're lucky that kale isn't the only plant-based option. The vegan culinary tradition has existed for centuries. Seitan was invented as early as the 6th century in China.[0] And western vegan culinary traditions have evolved rapidly in the last 10-20 years. The reduction of plant-based diets to just eating salad is not grounded in the reality of those who are plant-based.
The way cows get plant matter is a lot less environmentally costly than the way humans get plant matter. Their standards are a lot lower than ours. Humans don't like to eat scrub-brush and corn husks.
Not sure this is true if you're looking at free-range though. There are many places which are not very amenable to growing crops fit for human consumption, but are more than adequate for growing the grasses (and more) that ruminant digestive systems (e.g. cows) can easily digest.
So if you're growing soy on deforested land as a base for your "cruelty free" burger, it is very possible that this has damaged the original ecology (and killed living things) more than having grazing cattle would.
> Not sure this is true if you're looking at free-range though. There are many places which are not very amenable to growing crops fit for human consumption, but are more than adequate for growing the grasses that ruminant digestive systems (e.g. cows) can easily digest.
Exactly. It's not like animal husbandry and meat-eating developed as some kind of ostentatious wasteful consumption. It's a way of converting inedible plants into edible meat.
Sure, totally, but how many of us live in places where we have access to the cows but not non-animals foods that can sustain us? Virtually none. So while its true that human beings ate meat for good reasons for a LONG time, its not really something that most folks need anymore.
Is it true that everywhere we have cows we can also grow soy or wheat or whatever? No, definitely not. Does that matter? No, definitely not.
This argument - which I see often - ignores that land doesn’t have to be used for growing crops or grazing. Leaving some land wild allows biodiversity which has quite literally unquantifiable benefits now and far into the future. Using less land in total let’s us leave more land wild, and/or to put solar panels on it, or put it to other uses that may be beneficial.
Further, some of that land which is unsuitable for growing crops used to be - and was degraded by growing crops or grazing. Further degrading and depleting it doesn’t do us any favors.
Land doesn't have to be used for anything, unless you want to do things.
The point is that grazing is much less destructive to the original ecology than farming, so it's not clear that 1 acre of farming is better than 100 acres of grazing.
I might be misguided here, but AFAIK grazing doesn't "deplete" the land at all (and might even improve the land with manure / etc), where as farming absolutely does unless you're careful about it.
Right, but I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that Beyond Burgers don't scale better – people are merely pushing back against the idea that we should eliminate all consumption of meat and that all methods of raising such are objectively worse than such alternatives.
> More crops are grown to feed the livestock than people
This is entirely misleading. More plant biomass goes to animals than people, but very little of it is human-edible and much of it consists of byproducts of human plant consumption (e.g. corn husks).
You hear this BS all the time e.g. with soy. Yes, the "majority of soy" goes to cattle but that's because humans won't eat soybean meal. The economic impetus to grow the soy in the first place still comes from humans. If they were only feeding it to cattle it wouldn't be profitable.
Which is why "at least nothing had to die" as an argument falls apart pretty quickly as a reason for eating Beyond Meat burgers. Pretty much everyone has different lines on which animals they find acceptable to kill, and I don't think that most people care too much if an animal that has been bred specifically to be eaten ends up getting eaten. If people want to try the sympathy route to get people to switch to a plant based diet, I think they'd have better luck bringing up the poor living conditions frequently found in factory farming.
True, however proponents for animal cruelty don't often* factor in the destruction of natural biodiversity, and generally only care about the 'big' animals that they can 'see'.
*Edit, removed the blanket generalisation. I know a lot of people do care about broader biodiversity, it's just not quite as commonly seen.
There is only so much natural arable farmland on earth. If everyone is vegetarian, I'm not sure it would sustain current populations, without requiring deforestation/etc. There are many places in the world where people are sustained by animals like cows and goats which are able to eat things humans can't digest on their own.
Which is still a lot less death and suffering than factory farming livestock produces. (Aside from the fact that growing cattle to eat requires a lot more acreage under cultivation--to feed the cattle--than growing plants to eat.)
It's impossible to feed people without causing some death. But that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize it.
This rhetoric only convinces those people who already feel sympathetic to animal-rights arguments. But for example, a significant slice of the world’s population are adherents of religions that downright ordain slaughtering an animal at times, and they will only be alienated by your argument.
Consequently, I feel like health and environmental arguments are better ways to get people to limit their meat intake.
> Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter.
This is the only thing that matters, to the contrary. Previous attempts at fake meat have not done as well as Beyond and Impossible precisely due to the fact that the vast, vast majority people actually don't care where their meat comes from, they only care about the taste. Yes, on surveys they might say they care about not harming animals, but this is not true in practice, they don't put their money where their mouth is by stopping eating meat.
Indeed, the true innovation of Beyond and Impossible was focusing exclusively on taste and marketing that up front rather than the moral aspects, because people don't care.
Even this syndrome (not an actual allergy but sensitization via tick vector) - is extremely rare. few cases per million.
10% of the mediterranean basin is allergic to some sort of plant food (and that prevalence is growing).
Primary allergy is to LTPs, lipid transfer proteins - which means those people be likely allergic to at least one of many components of this burger. In 70-80% cases such reactions are usually systemic and often severe.
In short: this burger can put 5-10% of the population in Spain, Italy, Greece on an ambulance.
Alpha-gal is extremely rare and introduced exogenously (via a tick bite). Natural (i.e. not caused by an identifiable medical condition) meat allergies in humans are exceedingly rare, whereas natural plant allergies are exceedingly common.
> I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
I understand what you mean by violence and I don't want to come across as a stickler just for sport, but if we are taking a hard ethical stance based on principles we need to be precise with categories. Two of which is most important;
1. category of animals include humans
2. category of violence include any suffering inflicted knowingly e.g. being overworked in a sweatshop, psychological violence etc.
If we accept above categories, our supply chain, not only for food but for pretty much everything we consume, unfortunately do incur violence on humans. As such, if someone takes a principle on requiring no violence against animals, they must also be concerned with everything they consume or use, not only what they eat. I am not saying they shouldn't not eat meat if they didn't do the other, I am saying they shouldn't claim a position from principle.
In fact if they made either these two arguments they would be perfectly consistent; argument of convenience "not eating meat is more convenient than not using an iPhone", or argument of priority "not requiring violence against other animals is more important to me than humans". But still they couldn't occupy a principled stance of no violence against animals.
i don’t understand why you think this is a huge gotcha. most vegans are oriented around harm reduction, not absolute minimization. otherwise, they’d just kill themselves. there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.
> i don’t understand why you think this is a huge gotcha ... most vegans are oriented around harm reduction
Avoiding a true scotsman fallacy aside, the OP was strongly centering their argument on "no violence against animals". If you deem pointing that out a gotcha, so be it.
> either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.
I think assuming that the length of the causal chain lightens one's responsibility is a fallacy. By that token a drone operator would have less ethical responsibility than a boots-on-ground marine, a stockholder would be less culpable than a laborer for the consequences of market activity, and consumers would always be the most innocent as by definition they are the end users of any causality chain.
People's tendency for going after only what is most salient creates the most difficult ethical problems.
It's usually a refrain that comes as a leftist critique of liberals. Generally liberals believe that more thoughtful consumption can solve ills of capitalism while leftists do not. The same idea gets recycled without the critique to mean "nothing you do will reduce the harm you intend to reduce so you're doing that for no reason."
He means that nothing should exist, because life means death, existence means suffering. I honestly don't see the relation to capitalism because consumption is literally just spending for utility and consumption can be absolutely anything, it can be sustainable or not.
What you're saying a little silly, given that if people had decided to stop eating cows 20 years ago, the cow I ate a part of today would never have gotten to exist in the first place. An argument that cows are abused and are better off never existing would be a reasonable one.
The cow that you ate today most likely lived its whole life in a cage no much bigger than its body, inside a huge facility reeking of feces and death and ate an atrocious diet, only to be killed at the perfectly calculated time to maximize profit.
I'm a meat eater. Heck, I hunt (and eat what I hunt) and even I can tell you that your argument is ridiculous.
I mostly agree with you and personally love beyond ground "beef". However, it is going to be a long time before we replace meat. The only way is if we can produce it cheap enough that it literally costs an average person more to buy conventional 85/15 ground beef.
That's interesting. Can you give me your job? I mean, there are millions of people all around the world who are living in poverty and you are occupying a job that they could have had. There are many people who commit suicide because they no longer have any economic opportunities.
I like how modern people can pretend they don't live in the real world because it is hidden behind abstract complexity. Life is a competition with every living thing. You can pretend that it isn't while you order your uber eats and massively overpriced food, but you are only doing so due to some kind of psychological need.
The further you get into the city, the further you get into the lives of rich people, the more you see this "please think of the animals" attitude, because you become so removed from reality that you think the world is completely different to what it actually is. The irony is that you are in the most privileged place, taking the money that other people could have used, and using it to buy overpriced burgers.
I tried impossible burger once. Wanted to like it for all the good environmental / ethical reasons. However, it just tasted nutty to me, like somebody had ground up some nuts that had a visual appearance very similar to ground beef. Tasted nothing like meat to me.
See I think Impossible comes as close as you can get right now but Beyond definitely has weird taste/texture qualities. I get an aftertaste with it I do not with Impossible.
Beyond sausage (an easier endeavor because of how much work fennel and casing do), however, is excellent.
Well said! I am a vegetarian for much the same reasons. I think that compassion is a solid reason beyond the environmental and health reasons. As technology enthusiasts we should be driving new ways of producing food that cause the least harm.
I get the intention but wouldn't it be better to just forget the taste of it if you're doing so for the sake of the animal's suffering? To put it bluntly, the suffering ends, but the taste of suffering is still delicious...
Burgers and sausages are some of the most detached ways to eat meat. While a steak has bones, a burger is much more abstract. There is probably a good anthropological theory behind this.
And it's still overpriced. For being a bunch of soy or whatever, I'd expect it to cost a fraction of meat. I'd rather have fewer real burgers than transition to faux food.
I don't get why exact taste of burgers is so important to some people.
I can stomach burgers from McDonald's if I haven't eaten them in few months. But if I eat them more than one or two times a week they very quickly start to taste like the garbage they are.
It's really dreadful form of food and I was assuming people eat it as last resort when they are really hungry. Not that they indulge in them because the specific flavor is so unique and wonderful.
I always prefer a wrap. But fries and mcmuffins with egg and bacon are super tasty.
It's quite possible. Then again most of them are made of beef all beef (except for raw) just tastes dreadful for me, so I don't have high hopes that tasty burgers exist.
I actually enjoy trying out a variety of vegetarian and vegan foods for this exact reason - just to see how they compare with the meat based ones and how good they are overall. Frankly, it's gotten to the point where most of the food that i buy myself is vegetarian, just because of how many of those options are out there.
That said, it's not a black and white issue, as people sometimes like to view it as - if most people simply treated meat as something to only enjoy rarely (say, once a week or a few times a month) or something for special occasions, then we'd make significant progress in that regard already!
Alternatively, perhaps people should see how their meat is made, or try doing it themselves, to get a greater appreciation for the amount of resources that it takes to produce any (as well as maybe get a bit more empathy towards the animals in some ways). Personally, i've gone hunting with my dad, have gutted animals in the forest, helped bring them home, skin them and cut the bones, all just to enjoy some meat. That's not to say that it'd bear much relevance to the lives of most people, but it's certainly a very humbling experience.
Edit: In the words of Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I'm actually curious about how others view a more moderate stance on the issue of nutrition - one that calls for gradual changes.
Given that my income is dependent on rare earths, which usually are mined by slaves, and the independence of my homeland is directly dependent on the US being a global hegemon, I've got far more serious moral issues to resolve before I'll have time for animals. Don't get me wrong, I love animals, but there are far greater fish to fry first.
At this point I can't tell if you're a parody account or not but I'll bite: how exactly do you plan on forcing omnivorous animals (bears, etc) from eating meat?
I don't. Do you think it's likely that obligate carnivores will be able to live full, healthy lives without eating meat? I don't. But you can, and I can.
I hold anyone who can live that way to do so, as I see it as a moral obligation to reduce suffering when possible, regardless of species.
Do you seriously think I'm proposing that we force these animals to survive on plants alone?
honestly I don't really see the point of eating a burger that doesn't taste or feel like a burger. I'd prefer to eat meat less often than try a subsitute
every one of the fake meat products upsets my stomach. I think TVP is the culprit. If I ever decide to forgo meat, I would just skip the fake meat products entirely
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.
These are all industry standard practices throughout the world. This is how the majority of meat is produced. If you find it abhorrent, then you find most animal products abhorrent.
Nope, they follow many or all of the extremely problematic standards that are commonplace in the US and Australia. Don’t worry, the EU has published the guidelines for what is considered humane slaughter, so you can verify it for yourself like I did.
Also, what did you think of the film? Those are _exactly_ the methods that the EU has approved.
I agree, we should _definitely_ update the laws, which is exactly what many organizations are trying to do, like the Humane League.
And I don't doubt that these are not your experiences, and that you've seen far more humane examples. There are many, I'm sure. But the cases of animals being treated as they are in Dominion are not uncommon at all. Like I said, they represent the standard industry practices.
The question then simply becomes when is enough enough? How many animals need to be treated that way before we reject factory farming entirely? Or eating animals entirely?
I _do_ know how many people care about the animals, and it's a lot! Me, you, and probably most folks we know. But it's because I care about them that I don't eat them, and I invite you to do that with me so we can make sure the stuff we see in Dominion isn't only uncommon, but unheard of.
When they develop advanced societies and agriculture, and dietetic institutions verify that they can live full healthy lives without meat, then yes I’ll expect them to go at least vegetarian
It is very easy to understand. People like Bill Gates who is a big investor in artificial meta are lobbing for normal eat and fish to be banned one way or another.
That it, people eating the way they always had eaten have other people wanting to force them to do something. That triggers reaction in the opposite sense.
Those technologies should prosper on its own, and they will be if they are cheaper or more nutritious. Over time they will.
It is like illustration ideas in Spain. People that read were accepting those ideas on their own until Napoleon came and wanted to impose the ideas by force. The reaction against the invader made those ideas(and the people that supported them) not only to not to prosper but go back(and the people expelled from the country), because they were the ideas of the invaders.
I love technology, and as entrepreneur and engineer have always managed innovation. I believe it it the future, but because I know innovation well I also know the drawbacks.
Early products tend to have bugs on them. When we create something knew I expect those like Elon expects their new rockets to explode. When those bugs are related to health it means people die.
And we don't really know what those bugs are. The world in incredibly complex. For example autism or cancer, leukemia, and allergies in young people are skyrocketing.
We know it is related to microorganisms in the gut and we also know that we are killing those microorganism like fungus, bacteria and virus that were beneficial to humans.
We started spraying roundup and other products thinking the world was super simple. And it is not, eliminating all insects, fungus and bacteria that were with us for millions of years will have consequences and secondary effects we could not predict.
Over time all our food will be grown indoors and cultured bacteria will do everything for us like cotton, vaccines or paper. But trying to accelerate the progress by coercion could backfire.
Compared to grass fed beef fake meat generally involves the killing of many more animals, due to the way industrial grains and vegetables are produced.
From a cruelty perspective probably the best thing to eat is free range Buffalo, but whale or elephant could potentially be better.
Considering how many animals whales kill, especially blue whales, we could be doing the planet a massive service by hunting them to extinction.
The burgers are full of stuff I wouldn't consider to be food. That's why I don't eat them (regularly at least). I don't think being violent to my own body is a good substitute for violence against animals.
> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals
Isn’t this disingenuous because the endgame will be the genocide of almost all farm animals. If they’re so environmentally unfriendly, can’t look after themselves, serve no purpose because they’re no longer food then why would we let them live and continue to breed them.
So there will still be some final suffering until we remove these species from the earth.
Obviously we as a race are responsible for creating animals that can’t look after themselves but to hold up the environment argument makes killing them all the greater ethical choice.
But why would you want to replicate the outcome of a slaughter if that part of the process upsets you?
Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?
For me eating things in their most natural forms seems more appealing. I don't know what is in beyond meat but avoiding processed anything seems like a more healthy strategy.
> Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?
I’ve been “vegan” for the better half of a decade and I don’t think this is confusing at all: because it’s familiar and it tastes good.
Familiarity and tastes can change over time, but it takes time and effort, and people are already putting effort into being open-minded when they try a veggie burger instead of a beef burger.
Sure, a quinoa salad might be healthier, but most people aren’t choosing between a cheeseburger and some ultra-healthy vegan cuisine.
We should aim to make these choices easy and comfortable instead of criticizing folks for taking baby steps in the right direction.
I like how burgers taste, so I want to eat them. But I don't want an animal to experience horrific treatment and slaughter just for the taste, so I seek it out in plants. That makes sense, no? I can like the salty, fat taste but opt-out of the subjugation and slaughter of another being.
I’m exactly like you, I love the taste of meat and I love animals. Whenever it is an option I choose beyond/impossible meat. That means virtually no one has to die for me that day.
I think that’s really cool, and I appreciate then “whenever it is an option” but. It’s so easy to see it as a black and white issue rather than a continuum where small actions make a large impact. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Because we are natural meat eaters and still have strong cravings for meat even if we don't eat it. Eating a close facsimile can help those satisfy those cravings and avoid a rebound to eating real meat.
This "natural" argument does not make sense. You know what else is natural? Rape. Men are natural rapist, they like to have sex with any woman, if they have carving to do it, its all ok if they do it.
Yes we are better than that, and you are better than this at reading comprehension. Please re-read my post and recognize that my point is to avoid killing animals. Your analogy is absurd and the opposite of what I am saying.
While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".
We are, at the very least, decades away from having a complete enough understanding of nutrition to safely replace the nutritional value of beef with a substitute fake beef product. Once we accomplish that, there are some second-order effects to worry about, like increasing single-path reliance on complex agrochemical supply chains to meet basic nutritional needs.
It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.
> It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals
This is untrue, as the animals you are eating are fed and raised on plants, which are harvested with the machines that potentially kill the field animals. So even accounting for that, fewer animals will die.
Also, animals tend to migrate out of fields during harvesting, and relocate (which is still not good! But better than being ground up by machines)
>It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.
Your net consumption of plants is reduced when you reduce your consumption of animals, friend. How do you figure it would cause the death of more total animals?
>While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".
People get along just fine eating only legumes and grains and a few other plants sprinkled in.
> Yes they do. Healthy vegans are way more common than you think. There is nothing unique about meat that can't be obtained from plant-based foods.
You can easily check if a vegan is actually following a vegan diet without cheating, because after a few years they will develop the sunken eyes and hollow collarbones, definitely not looking healthy.
Wait then why do literally none of the staunch vegan people I know look like this? And why does the American Dietetic Association officially state that a vegan diet is completely fine for all stages of life?
> Wait then why do literally none of the staunch vegan people I know look like this?
Maybe your are lying or in denial? I have first hand experience with the cult like properties of the vegan movement. It's very clear from how ex-vegans - people how really tried to embrace veganism, but had to quit because of health issues - are harassed by current vegans, any criticism of the movement cannot be tolerated and ex-vegans are very dangerous as they expose that veganism is not for everyone.
> And why does the American Dietetic Association officially state that a vegan diet is completely fine for all stages of life?
Lobbyism? Research some of the former controversies. The name is Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics now by the way.
Do you have any proof that lobbyism is the cause? Or are you just saying that?
Also would you be interested in having a zoom call with me, or some other vegans, to see that we don’t at all look unhealthy? We can clear this up very quickly, I think.
> Even grass fed beef are fed fodder which is the result of industrial plant agriculture.
Cattle are fed the byproducts of human agriculture that humans refuse to eat. Anything else cattle are fed (scrubland plants, grass, etc.) is extremely low-impact.
> Healthy vegans are way more common than you think.
The vast majority of vegans I know are clearly malnourished. Only the ones who exhibit fairly herculean effort manage to maintain a good physique. OTOH, the vast majority of people I know who maintain an extremely animal-heavy (or animal-exclusive) diet show visible indicators of extremely good health (good skin condition, high muscle mass, good bone development, good teeth, etc.)
> There is nothing unique about meat that can't be obtained from plant-based foods.
Nutrition science is not at a state where we can make this statement conclusively, but what we do know conclusively is that it's at least extremely difficult to get a complete nutritional profile from plants, whereas it's very easy to do so from animal products.
>Cattle are fed the byproducts of human agriculture that humans refuse to eat. Anything else cattle are fed (scrubland plants, grass, etc.) is extremely low-impact.
And there is no reason those byproducts can't be repurposed for other uses. You say this like they only eat byproducts, yet 70% of the soy production in the US goes to feeding cattle.
>The vast majority of vegans I know are clearly malnourished.
How many vegans do you know exactly?
>visible indicators of extremely good health
Visible indicators are a dubious way of measuring health. I also get the sense that you are comparing vegans who aren't interested in personal health to omnivores/carnivores who are. In other words, the vast majority of vegans who aren't interested in their health are ... unhealthy. The vast majority of people I know who eat animal products have high blood pressure and are at least pre-diabetic among other things.
>whereas it's very easy to do so from animal products.
We wouldn't be supplementing dairy with vitamins if this were actually the case. If you're talking about complete proteins then soy, buckwheat, hemp, chia seed, and spirulina fit the bill. If grown locally, quinoa. Already common combinations that make complete proteins are beans and rice, barley and lentils. This isn't anymore difficult than cooking a steak.
If you're talking about vitamins, then I hate to break it to you but you have to supplement even on an animal-based diet.
As far as I understand it you can have a perfectly suitable vegetarian diet without much effort (note: vegan is trickier and very hard for babies). If you want to maintain your current meat/“meat” consumption then we are still many years off lab meat being cheap and accessible enough yes.
The intent of beyond burger, I think, is not to be a meat substitute every time you would currently eat meat, but instead a nice tasting treat food. Sure, it’s salty and full of saturated fats, but I only have them once a month.
I haven't tried any of these beyond burger things yet. I probably will sometime but I'm squeamish about the concept. It makes me think of Soylent Green or weird funguses or whatever.
It's simpler to just use normal ingredients without meat. Corn and beans is a tasty combo that's ridiculously easy to make with an instant pot (electric pressure cooker) and the plants combine to give you complete protein. Dump a cup of dry beans into the pot (20 pound bag from Costco is about 20 bucks and keeps forever), cover with water, close lid and press the "beans" button, and go back to whatever you were doing on your computer. About 40 minutes later (they go by fast since you are paying zero attention to the cooking) there are some loud beeps. Let out the pressure, dump in a can of corn and maybe some spicy pasta sauce, stir and serve. Or do similar with rice instead of corn, add some green vegetables, etc.
The above is quite a filling vegan main course for about $1 per person. No need for techno burgers of insect fritters or any of that weirdness. The instant pot is a life changer-- even more useful than a microwave imho.
Where do you draw the line between animals and plants? Plants are a form of life. Is it the pain? What is it about animal pain that is morally objectionable? Because humans can feel pain too, therefore animal pain is also bad? Assuming we grant that, what if animals were put to sleep before being killed? Does that then make it okay? I find the whole "violence against animals" argument to be incredibly hand-wavy and without substance.
I draw the line in that I don't eat anything with a central nervous system. I don't doubt a biologist might make me reconsider my understanding of a CNS, but I've always found it a clear line for me personally.
So many animals die at the blades of the harvester. Also, the reason the argument fares poorly is likely due to the fact that it’s devoid of reason and couched entirely in emotion. Emotion is powerful and important, as it is part of our humanity. But it’s not a good basis for argument, given its fickle and poorly understood nature.
Less animals stand to die at the blades of the harvester when one chooses to stop eating animals altogether. You can't eliminate suffering, but you can take active measures to reduce it.
One can also choose to consume meat that is not treated with cruelty. It’s more expensive, but does exist.
The “less violence” argument doesn’t hold sway with some. That’s a purely subjective assessment that not everyone agrees with. For example, I don’t consider the slaughter of animals for food to be particularly more violent than the wholesale shredding of plant fibers at harvest.
I think we'll eventually be able to recreate "meat" that is equal to or even better than meat that came from an actual animal. We'll reach a point where "fake" meat tastes better, is healthier for you, and, most importantly of all, is more profitable.
If you watch the footage of pigs being half-stunned, throats slit, and then drowning in a vat of hot blood, and can earnestly tell me you don't see that as cruel, I promise you I will never make that argument again.
It’s how virtually all factory farms do it, which is the vast vast majority of meat that human beings eat. We should make sure we’re comfortable with it before saying it’s humane.
Personally I would love to have a device that would pull carbon out of the air and produce proteins. We are not there yet, so plants are the next best thing.
Veganism is never about absolutism. Veganism is about striving to do the best possible. Can every single human being go vegan? Probably not. But that vast majority can, while living full, healthy, happy lives.
Maybe you can say more about what you disagree with, then, rather than writing off the comment as a bad argument. I don't think it was that bad or emotional, personally.
What part of “ without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible” is not emotional? The words “feeling” and “individual” are purely emotional in this context.
Not everyone agrees with you that raising a farm animal and killing it is in and of itself a form of violence. Certainly many forms of factory farming are absolutely abhorrent and should be eliminated, but saying that what many farmers who raise cattle, chicken, pork and a variety of animals, and do so with respect and care are engaging in a form of cruelty and violence is not an opinion everyone shares.
An animal lives a life that's part of a cycle, it's born, it grows, it has experiences and serves various purposes/functions over the course of its life, and then it dies. The fact of that animal's eventual death is not in and of itself violent, every animal eventually dies.
So how do animals die? They either die from predation, disease, or in this case from a farmer putting it to death; virtually no mammals ever die from reaching their maximum life span out in the wild and the idea that in the absence of farming you'd have cattle and pigs living free and full lives in the wild is simply not a reflection of any real-world environment.
I think it's incorrect to focus on one single aspect of raising a farm animal, its death at the hands of a farmer, and using that as sole characteristic of what it takes and what it means to raise a farm animal and judge the entire system based on that one act.
I can respect your point of view and I think we'd agree that alternatives that are more environmentally friendly and sustainable are a win, but I can't agree with you that as a matter of principle, raising a farm animal and then killing it is intrinsically violent.
Do you still think that if it applies to someone nurturing a dog to adulthood, and then stunning it, slitting its throat, and drowning it in hot blood water? Would you still accept that as the Way Things Are?
I think bringing up dogs is very interesting. Certainly in much of the Western world there is a cultural association between dogs and humans so that presenting that scenario suggests that the dog was likely killed for some kind of senseless or sadistic purpose, after all why would someone just decide to randomly kill a dog?
But plenty of Asian cultures do exactly that, they raise dogs to adulthood, and then kill it and eat that food, and while it may seem repulsive to our culture that's most likely due to different customs rather than due to logical arguments that differentiate between dogs and pigs.
So to answer your question, in principle it absolutely applies to dogs and the Asian cultures that raise dogs and then kill them and consume them is not really any different from Western cultures that raise cows and kill them and consume them.
Maybe to turn the question back to you on the subject of dogs. If I owned a dog as a pet and fed my dog food I purchased from the pet store (as opposed to letting it hunt for food around my neighborhood), am I doing something violent and potentially unethical because dogs eat meat and I purchased meat for my dog that was farmed? I agree this is an absurd scenario, but if your position is that a human killing an animal is intrinsically violent always and in and of itself, then you must conclude that anyone who owns a pet that consumes meat is also supporting a violent and immoral practice, and yet I doubt most people would be willing to stretch their definition of violence to that degree.
In my opinion your scenario is evidence that many of our perceptions on this issue are influenced not by an objective sense of morality and an extensive consideration of ethics, but an emotional and cultural feeling that we are predisposed towards, and then moral justifications are derived after the fact. Furthermore there is emerging evidence that vegetarianism is often not an ethical choice, but a matter of food preference that like many other food preferences, has genetic roots. Some people are just predisposed genetically to favor a vegetarian diet, and it's not like someone would consciously know that their food predisposition is genetic, as if some kind of message would indicate it to them, so I wouldn't be surprised if many vegetarians rationalize their choice by saying it's an ethical decision, when it's mostly a genetic decision.
That said, that doesn't invalidate arguments against killing animals anymore than my predisposition to enjoy eating meat justifies killing animals, but it does shed light on the nature of this argument and that our choices on this issue are not based on reason, however much we may wish they were.
> Furthermore there is emerging evidence that vegetarianism is often not an ethical choice
What is this evidence?
And, you didn’t really answer the question. Would you be fine with my stunning a dog, slitting it’s throat, and boiling it alive? I’m well aware of how culturally acceptable it is in other places, but i’m not asking that. Im asking if you’re cool if I do that to a dog.
I absolutely answered your question fully and honestly and I am disappointed you won't recognize that because it suggests you're not discussing this in good faith. You asked if my position applies equally to dogs and my exact answer was, and I quote:
"So to answer your question, in principle it absolutely applies to dogs..."
If I misunderstood your question then you can rephrase it. If your question wasn't about rational and ethical arguments about meat consumption, but instead personal feelings and emotions, then sure I can fully admit I am personally not cool with you going out and killing a dog because the scenario you present comes with a cultural and emotional context that I am predisposed against having been raised in the Western world.
If the purpose of your argument was that you're against killing animals for emotional reasons, then I actually respect that and have nothing against you feeling that way and encouraging others who feel the way you do to consume a vegan diet.
I think there are numerous benefits to a vegan diet, I just don't think the argument you made that we should choose it primarily on the basis that killing an animal is intrinsically violent in and of itself is a rational argument. It's a perfectly fine emotional and cultural reason to do it, and those are good reasons, but it's not a strong rational reason in so far as the arguments you've presented have not been rational.
Finally to answer your question about genetics, here is some further reading:
I believe the phrase you're thinking of is "so open-minded that your brain falls out." It's still just a way to put someone down for caring about others, but at least the metaphor works.
And you wonder why people can't take absolutists seriously. The marketing power of the moral superiority concept is no new thing. Pivoting the crux of success of your ideology around an incredibly poor burger filling makes no sense either.
In the UK restaurants are being allowed to reopen in 10 days. In London there are an incredible density of steak restaurants which happen to already be booked out completely.
I think your appeal to squeamishness around slaughtering animals will feel entirely cringeworthy to most emotionally intelligent persons.
The person you're replying to has a different opinion from yours and you seem very offended by it. It hasn't got anything to do with lockdown in London, how booked steak restaurants will be there, or how much the "emotionally intelligent people" cringe. This all feels like non sequitur or ad hominem.
I eat meat with no plans to stop and I don't have a problem with the comment you're replying to.
It's funny calling this "being offended" when the original post is offended by the idea of eating meat to the point of calling it unethical.
Not that there's anything wrong with being offended if you think a moral evil is happening, but it's hard to call defending yourself after being accused of evil deeds "being offended by a different opinion"
I completely understand why somebody would consider eating meat unethical. I also understand that people disagree about ethics all the time and it's often not a huge deal.
I know people who feel this way about the ethics of meat and I respect them and their opinions but I don't follow their standards and I don't think they mind, I remain friends with them.
You call it defending oneself but there is nothing to defend. So it struck me as "being defensive".
I'm not offended. I'm examining why their transparent attempt at emotional and moral manipulation is how they are approaching this issue. It's pathetic.
Again. You're attacking them. If you let them express the opinion and move on, nothing happens. But you call them a pathetic manipulator. That to me suggests disproportionate anger and a bit of paranoia. I don't think they're really trying to manipulate you so much as explaining how they feel about it.
It is not squeamishness. I have killed animals for food with my own hands and being part of people killed in war. I would like to not do it when I have the opportunity.
I have killed animals for food with my own hands and don't mind the process. Worst, I prefer a 1000x killing my own food rather than buying highly pre-processed industrial food of dubious quality (and manufacturing process).
The parent comment explicitly and clearly attempts to use an emotionally designed device leveraging people's presumed distaste for distressing animals. An errant assumption.
I'm generally surprised no one brings up the negative health benefits of processed foods. It is not healthier to get rid of meat only to replace it with high salt chemically processed food that tastes like meat.
It seems like we are going backwards.
You know what uses less greenhouse emissions, less water and less land? The orginal plant based food that gets processed into a beyond burger.
If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything? That get's shipped nationwide / worldwide that creates factories, chemical waste, greenhouse gases. Buying locally and growing locally really helps the planet. Going to burger king and getting an absolute burger instead of a whooper is just pretending.
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 advantage of the climate advantage of different geographies.
> There's no reason to be afraid of simple chemistry
Food chemistry is one of the most complicated chemistries ever. Not only we can't simply construct an argument of safety from first principles but also nutrition labels hardly makes an exhaustive list of the contents and processes involved. Not even mentioning the labeling regulation quirks.
> All food is processed.
This is reduction to absurdity. Even if genetically engineered, the process of cell divisions that end up being a living cow is so complicated that it would lend itself more readily to a claim of integrity, one much stronger than a decade old factory assembly process of dead nutrients. We've co-evolved with the former process for millions of years and created the latter in the last several decades in the name of profit maximization.
That's not what processed food means. A slice of steak from a GMO cow is not processed food, except inasmuch as slashing a knife is a process.
Furthermore, more or less traditional cheese is not considered "processed food" in that context even though it is definitely processed for a long time and with significant effort. Nor is wine or sauerkraut for that matter.
Yeah "not considered" processed because it's what people are used to, not because it's safe or natural. Livestock have been genetically engineered via selective breeding for millenia before we knew what DNA was. Unless we have reason to believe that mixing pea protein and heme in sterile vat is actually more dangerous than fermentation, it's FUD. Grilling meat can release carcinogens (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...).
Fortunately, we at least know that meat consumption, specially red meat, is bad for you and a WFPB diet is better. So my suggestion is to use products like beyong as a gateway to a WFPB diet.
> In 2013, Ramsden resurrected another long-lost randomized study, the 1960s-era Sydney Diet Heart Study. Reanalyzing its unpublished data—also stored on old nine-track computer tapes—he found that volunteers who replaced much of the saturated fat in their diet with polyunsaturated fats high in linoleic acid had a higher risk of death from coronary heart disease
Meat, literally millions of years in our evolutionary past VS seed oils barely 100 (more like 50 for mass adoption), but surely "the science" is never wrong nor corrupted. Inform yourself on the history of this with Ancel Keys etc.
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 and a lot of people tie up their identity with it. I can understand that. If they feel that their diet is under attack they see it as life and death for their identity.
I imagine you've picked a side and will seek whatever information or studies suits you; everyone is doing that these days. It's anti-scientific.
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 my n=1 intimate conviction, not one I sought to arrive at, but once I had experience it there's absolutely no doubt in my mind. Naturally I sought the people that had the same experience and they do have the data and the explanations for why, but it's too lengthy to provide here, although I can give hints if you wish.
Oh and australopithecus ate meat, this goes far beyond modern humans. This is why we got smart, because intelligence pays off far more for hunting than for foraging, particularly for an otherwise frail creature.
Sure hints would be good and much appreciated! When you say "our diet doesn't look like a herbivore/fruit eater at all", I see tables like this [1] and it would strongly suggest the opposite. Maybe it's propaganda... I don't know, I should like to see something like a ScienceBrief on it.
In terms of the last thing you said. You phrased it as "australopithecus ate meat"; it seems they predominantly were herbivorous according to wikipedia[2]. Which doesn't preclude eating meat, but could easily be misinterpreted from the way you put it.
I didn't mean to imply that australopitecus was predominantly carnivorous, but I recently found out they had tools for hunting and/or cutting flesh, just to make a point that the trend started much earlier than homo sapiens.
"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.
Thanks, this is the most underrated answer. Selling processed food as one solution to climate change is genius marketing BS but still just BS. It reminds me of Soylent, Juicero and the like.
If you care about the environment, your health and animal well being then just eat less animal product (you need some anyway), buy only local food (local meat) and above all stop wasting so much of it.
Just a few decades ago people knew what they were eating, no processed food in any way. They were raising their livestock in their yard, they knew their single sheep / pork / cow and poultry and respected them. At some point you need to eat and kill them, people getting shocked by this have just become brainwashed or oversensitive. Go spend some time in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe, they're laughing at this nonsense trend.
>If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything?
If I'm really going to be dead within 100 years, why am I doing anything?
Lots of reasons, but the easiest is because it's more enjoyable than the alternative. Who cares if a plant burger is heavily-processed? I like it and I don't have to think about whatever died to bring me my meal.
Yes, it would be better if I grew my own lentils and only ate homemade dal. But that's not realistic for most people, and from a health and environmental perspective, it seems like it's hard to do worse than red meat.
Seed oils are toxic. These fake "meats" are the some of the worst processed foods around. It's sad people are being duped once again by the food industry and medical establishment. This will only further worsen the awful health of the population.
This is all based on awfully bad epidemiological studies. Humans were eating MUCH more meat for most of our evolutionary past. Look how unhealthy we are now, and we aren't eating more meat. We're eating more plant fats and sugar. There is literally nothing unhealthy in eating meat, not more for us than for a lion.
Lions, and our ancestors, ate much leaner grass fed animals compared to our factory-fattened cows and pigs. I don't believe hunter gatherers were eating meat with 15-20% fat content as often as Americans eat burgers.
On the contrary, fat is prized by hunter-gatherers and humans likely had access to much more fat (megafauna) for much of our evolutionary history. Fat allowed us to supply for the high energy needs of our brains. This isn't my own speculation but collated from various sources, I can provide if interested just don't have them on hand.
Yes, it was certainly prized because of its high calorie content and relative scarcity compared to today, when one can have a virtually unlimited supply. That's why it tastes good.
The problem today is not an unlimited supply of meat (for most of the world) but an unlimited supply of sugar and seed oils. And the super / unnaturally sweet fruit, this is what's hacking us.
There is a ton of info, just look around. Also, what is the common ingredient in all processed foods? This is what is making people fat. Omega-6 integrates in body fat, easily oxidized and unstable, rendering our own fat inaccessible for energy, so we're chronically hungry, tired, and inflamed. Than add in sugar and salt for hyperpalability. We've been hacked.
Seed oils are nothing more than industrial waste sold as food for profits.
Just like meat is not toxic, neither is seed oil. I've been eating large amounts (~1000kcal a day) of flaxseed oil, olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, coconut oil and there has been no ill-effect on my cardiovascular or general health at all, after years of doing that.
This orthorexic behavior by labeling certain foods as unhealthy or healthy is the real problem.
Any kind of diet needs to be accompanied by a proper lifestyle. Eating a high calorie diet and then not having any physical activity is just asking for a bunch of metabolic issues.
Particular food item is not healthy or unhealthy, toxic or rejuvenating. It's the lifestyle+diet that can be labeled as healthy/unhealthy.
You're evidently misinformed, I've provided references (see Dr. Cate Shanahan for one) here regarding seed oils. There is no doubt they are toxic. Glad you're healthy, but look around you.
These are the worst ones: Canola, Corn, Cottonseed Soy, Sunflower, Safflower, Grapeseed, and Rice bran.
Also, olives and coconuts are fruits.
This idea that physical activity will balance out an unhealthy diet is wrong and has been proven wrong by decades of people attempting just that. It doesn't work. Once your metabolism is damaged by your diet, no amount of physical activity (if you can muster it) will fix it.
Cyanide in apple seeds is toxic in proper amounts, should I avoid consuming apple seeds, or apples completely?
Toxicity of certain compounds in meat or other foods has nothing to do with the food itself being healthy or unhealthy.
Similarly how antioxidant, vitamin or macronutrient content has nothing to do with that particular food being healthy or unhealthy.
Promoting the idea that a particular food or ingredient is healthy or unhealthy is promoting orthorexic behavior, an obsession over what to include or not include in your diet because of a made up measure of (un)healthiness.
Here's a riddle for you: if seed oils were not toxic, why are mice given seed oils as low as 4-5% of calories in order to cause cancer in the presence of other carcinogens? They don't get cancer with the carcinogens alone, they have to add the seed oils to trigger the cancers.
There are similar studies on meat/Neu5Gc being combined with fibre to reduce the toxicity - more carcinogens present the less fibre there is.
There are similar studies on casein/whey.
These studies do not make meat, milk, cheese or seed oils inherently unhealthy or show that you can't have them as a part of a healthy diet.
edit: doing a quick Google Scholar search I can find a bunch of studies that show positive outcomes after regular consumption of flaxseed (rich in omega 3s) or pumpkin seed (rich in omega 6) oils. These studies do not make these oils healthier.
20g of flaxseed oil (180kcal) contains a bunch of ALA, pick a massively low conversion ration to DHA/EPA of 0.5% or 1% or whatever, and you'll see that you'll get very near if not over the recommended daily amounts of 250-750mg.
Maybe, I don't have the exact figure either but it is known that a specific mutation (which I don't have) is needed for efficient conversion. This is telling that at some rather recent point (agriculture) humans started consuming less animal fats.
Flax doesn't have omega-3, but alpha-linolenic acid, which depending on your genetics you might not be able to convert to omega-3 sufficiently (see rs174547 gene).
Sufficient omega-3 intake doesn't entirely mitigate the ills from omega-6 anyway, and there are other toxins in seed oils as well.
That's people's perception: meat is unhealthy, but now there's this vegetable-based "meat" that's better, tastes just as good and as a bonus it's saving the planet etc.
You seem to throw all food processing into the same pot, so to speak. Humans have an under-developed digestion system. Why? Because they can pre-process their foods to compensate. They know that some plants are poisonous unless cooked, for example.
And obviously, few food-processing factories or bulk shipping methods of ingredients cause enough greenhouse gasses that you can just eat local meat instead, if you care about your footprint. Saying that none of this is solving a real problem is wishful thinking.
About once a month I have a huge craving for a burger, so I’ll eat a Beyond burger. It’s worse than eating veggies but it helps keep me vegetarian. Without it, I’d probably eat a real burger to satiate my meat craving. Since I’m an all-or-nothing person (major personality flaw), eating meat once a month would turn into a slippery slope. Beyond meat helps to keep me on the vegetarian straight and narrow
Health is not the reason these products exist. I buy them because I want an unhealthy treat that doesn't have the same ecological or animal rights impacts as beef.
If 10% of whopper sales switch to impossible whoppers, that's a big deal, and foods like this can provide a bridge to consumers who have never considered vegetarianism.
I do buy or grow local food, I'm a vegetarian myself. Your view is, in my opinion, too black and white. There's serious momentum around plant based meals, and that's making even more plant based foods available elsewhere.
I think this is a counterproductive view. Gas turbines are bad for greenhouse gas emissions, but the fact is that gas turbines have displaced coal generators in many places in the US reducing net emissions.
Are gas turbines a part of a zero emissions electricity grid? No of course not. But are they an improvment on what's happening today? In some cases yes.
Ultimately you're right, eating locally grown plant based diets would be better for an individual, but you're also wrong because the beyond burger is a hell of a lot better than the food it's replacing in most cases.
I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devastation.
I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products:
1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? For example, I recently watched the documentary Seaspiracy which showed the negative effects of commercial fishing. However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily (regardless of any change in behavior on my part or my small circle of influence)?
I think danShumway answered 1) pretty well. I just wanted to add my opinion about 2).
Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.
This is another classic example of Tragedy of the Commons [1].
Outright bans will likely never be feasible at all, though we could (and should) consider banning many of the bad practices that usually come with large-scale factory farming (and publicly funding grants/subsidies for these plant-based alternatives).
I prefer the equivalent but opposite legislation, remove meat and dairy subsidies. I don’t have faith in governments to constantly fine tune subsidies to the right things. Subsidies just become a means for politicians to pass money to their constituents. It took Canada 60 years to stop emphasizing cow milk consumption in their dietary guide, I have very little faith in governments to get things right let alone in a quick iterative fashion.
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 meat still have a B12 deficiency.
80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa!
We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient.
And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.
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.
I'm also a meat eater but have cut down on the amount of meat I eat. I think many of us in wealthy "western" countries don't realise we eat more meat today than in any time of history, thanks to industrial-scale farming and cheap supermarket prices. It wasn't always like this but we're now conditioned to think plentiful and cheap meat has always been the norm.
In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role.
This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards.
"Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why?
To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm."
> 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger.
I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment.
After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.
One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive:
To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US.
Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here.
Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world.
So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way.
Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.
> Pigs are stunned, hanged by their back legs and have their throats cut. What's the problem?
Because the above is obviously very cruel and nobody would like it done to them to say the least? Would you say the same if it was for dogs, cats or horses? The obvious cruelty of the above is only ignored because it's normalised through culture and tradition.
> nobody would like it done to them […] Would you say the same if it was for dogs, cats or horses?
Yes, I would. If an animal needs to be killed, this is one of the most humane way to do this. Where I'm from, a lot of farm animals die more painful deaths (nobody can afford electric shockers there).
This is one of the least painful ways to die. If I had to die and wanted a painless death, I'd choose being stunned with electricity and not feeling anything.
> above is obviously very cruel
Argument "it's obvious" works when something is obvious to the person you're talking to. In this case, it's obvious only to you.
And if "it's obvious" is your best argument, it usually means you don't understand very well why you came to that conclusion. Think about it.
> cruelty of the above is only ignored because it's normalised through culture and tradition
Yes, and it's not normal to you because of your culture and tradition. People's views are formed by culture and tradition, yes, there's no discovery here. If you grew up on a farm and saw animals getting slaughtered since your childhood, this idea wouldn't be so shocking to you.
"If this is inhumane, how should humane slaughtering look like according to you?"
Have you considered the answer is that there isn't a humane way to slaughter and that's why the people in the video had that reaction? Even if you've grown up seeing this, I don't see how you can describe slitting the throat of something that doesn't need to or want to die as humane. It's even more indefensible when there's many meat alternatives now.
I see your perspective, I understand that for some people this feels unacceptable.
But I don't think of it this way. I come from a different background (a less developed region of a less developed country), and we set the bar lower where I'm from, because we have more vital problems.
I consider factory farming inhumane, it's bloody concentration camps and they shouldn't exist.
But small, local farms where we take care of the animals (no sadism, animals walk on the grass, play with their babies and whatnot) and let them live until certain (not too old) age are fine. Taking the lives of other animals to get food is normal. And even after we have good substitutes for meat, I would keep some small amount of farms to keep people used to killing animals for food, and take kids there for excursions to show that it's normal.
(There was a Danish TV show where they were showing naked adults to children and let them any ask questions; to make kids used to thinking that naked body is normal and there's nothing shameful about it. I think we should have the same thing but with killing animals.)
> Even if you've grown up seeing this, I don't see how you can describe slitting the throat of something that doesn't need to or want to die as humane.
I guess, my perspective is more about what you have to do rather than what you want to do. The animal may not want to die at the age of 2-3 years, but sorry, it has to; it's better than nothing and it's way better than what animals get in wildlife. Life is not a carte blanche where you can order anything you want.
Growing those animals for food helps sustain their species. If we don't get their meat, who's going to pay it?
> It's even more indefensible when there's many meat alternatives now.
I think something like this map [1] can explain such a difference between your and my perception of this. You sound like a person with ~2 points on "Survival vs. Self-expression scale". Am I right? The place where I'm form has -0.7 points (yes, it's minus there).
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment?
The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere.
The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.
When I was a teenager I worked for dairy farms helping them with the accounting. A big part of their expenses were antibiotics and antidepressants for the cows that had a calf taken away and they had to stay there producing milk.
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death
The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different.
I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them?
Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake.
What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways.
So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do.
But, let's get to the rest of your question:
> However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily
Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made.
What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products.
We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well.
So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter.
I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.
1) The ethicality of something is not sourced from nature. If this would be the case, then raping would be completely okay as animals doing something like that too, right? It's more coming from empathy, like we don't let people beating or killing each others as you don't want that happened to you as well.
2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly.
Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.
I'm quite torn about the utilitarian argument, that claims that it is justified to kill animals for their meat as long as we give them better lives than they would have in nature.
I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them.
I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.
Since somebody downvoted, I assume for the missing source, here is an excerpt:
"As well as revealing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these new findings demonstrated that switching just one red meat meal to plant-based a week could result in a 23 percent reduction (8 million hectares) in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use, and a 2 percent reduction in the UK’s water use (the same as taking 55 fewer showers per person per year)."
The local burger joint closest to my house is 100% vegan and uses Beyond patties. It’s also, in my opinion, the best burger in town.
I’m a carnivore and would definitely notice the difference in a Pepsi challenge of the patties themselves, but the overall taste and presentation make this place pull ahead of all the meat-based alternatives.
I feel like we’ve crossed a threshold. This was literal sci-fi just a couple of years ago.
I made a conscious effort to develop some vegetarian dishes I could make simply for variety. If nothing else, vegetarian cooking has to do a lot of work to make up for not just leaning on meat as a primary flavor component, but the result is you can get much more diversity and interesting flavors and textures.
It's honestly more exciting to see where we're going to do once we're at "seamless replica" and can start playing with the capability to make brand new things.
There's some really great vegetarian options from world cuisine. I draw heavily on Mexican, Indian, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and southeast Asian cuisine in my home cooking. It's a nice variety and a good challenge to find the simple recipes that don't try to replace meat but instead taste excellent without it.
I really wonder if there are special cooking instructions to make them that might be causing so many restaurants to pull them off the menu.
I've tried several Beyond burgers at various restaurants, and all of them were the worst burgers I've ever had. Dry, tasteless, and chewy - absolutely nothing like real meat. Do a degree that I question if they're all being prepared wrong.
I remember years ago at a bbq, a friend who use to be a short order cook at one point was flipping his burgers. He kept squeezing his frozen patties until the blood or whatever stopped running.
So yeah, if you cook a beyond pattie to the same visual cues as a regular burger in a restaurant in that way, it'll dry out. The instructions on the package are all that's needed. Oil, hot pan, 4 minutes on each side without moving it around and done.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like my experience at all (which is limited to this one place). If anything, the burgers I like are less dry and less chewy than the beef-based competition.
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, barely meets #1, absolutely gets nowhere close to fulfilling #2 for my taste, and seems to fulfill #3. But it tastes like hot garbage compared to actual meat. I'll wait for lab-grown muscle to reach maturity. My taste buds and macros matter more in the meantime.
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?
Yep... people are missing the obvious point that since the taste is so much worse, Beyond Burgers are just NOT going to sell beyond the population of people that value the ethics over the taste.
So you still eat red meat, even though it is classified as a Group 2A carcinogen and is far from sustainable? You clearly only really care about your taste buds.
I'll leave the most relevant parts to commenting here for you:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
100% junk food. These are mostly highly refined oils. All the unhealthy side effects with none of the nutrition, densely packed into real meat.
If you want to be meat free, eat vegetables. Portabella burgers are deoicious, as is grilled eggplant, zuccini, etc. All healthy for you.
The fake meat trend makes us all more unhealthy. If you have issues with meat, work on addressinf the big farm, big ranch industry which needs their agg gag protections and subcidies immediately removed.
They also don’t have the environment in mind. And the price doesn’t reflect the 100x cost in water and 10x cost in emissions. Probably most people ordering at McDonalds are in search of fast, “just good enough” food. Does that mean we can’t push for improving the rest of the situation while keeping some of it the same?
Honestly flabbergasted by the amount of ignorance in this thread, it was definitely not what I expected from the Hacker News crowd.
- Cattle does not eat soy byproducts and soy production is definitely not driven by human consumption. Not by value, not by mass. [1]
- Bison herds did not produce as much methane as today's cattle. [2]
- Cattle does not strictly use land unsuitable for growing crops. Also, this completely ignores any other unwanted effects of having too much cattle (in one area). [3]
- Meat is not always healthier than "processed foods", whatever the latter may actually mean.
When looking for facts on any of this, try to look for scientific papers instead of videos or blogs and do look-up the individual researchers and whom they work for. There's too much at stake here for the companies trying to sow doubt, as evidenced by some of the things I read here.
I like to say beyond meat is like an animal you haven’t eaten yet, but sounds plausible. I think with it framed that way it tastes delicious (if you crave animals). I went vegetarian and crave fake burgers more now than real ones before and Beyond really hits the spot for me. I love the sausages as well. The taco crumbles are a weird texture but I’ve used them in some hash scrambles.
Didn't know they did sausages. That could be a decent market to tackle. We don't typically make burgers at home, but we do often buy simple sausages as a quick meal for the kids. Usually the supermarket choice is premium sausages with more exotic combos (that I like but the kids don't), or basic plain ones which always seem a bit miserable. If we're buying plain sausages, might as well get something like this instead.
From some local fine foods places: chicken/sage/onion, chicken/spinach/pinenuts, duck/veal, lamb/feta, pork/capsicum, pork/fennel, lamb/beef/garlic/rosemary, beef/shiraz, pork/lemongrass/coriander, lamb/sundried-tomato, duck/orange/pistachio. Had some with pinot noir grapes in them once at a grape picking brunch event.
Some of these like pork/fennel or lamb/rosemary, spiced Italian, etc are pretty commonly found for adults at a BBQ in Australia (at least amongst my friends). I grew up eating cevapcici and bratwurst.
But it doesn't take much in the way for herbs/spices for many kids to turn up their noses and the bulk sausages people typically buy for children look and taste very ordinary.
Tbh I prefer Gardein's more traditional soy-based burger in this category. Grills up more nicely imo. I agree that Beyond's sausages are good. Even the fast-food version that Dunkin uses on their sausage McMuffin clone comes out well (they have both meat and Beyond versions). I'm split on Impossible. The fake blood really weirds me out.
So is that comparing against plain red meat with no salt added? Because if so that’s not really a fair comparison because you generally add a decent amount of salt to burger whereas you don’t really need to for beyond
When first giving my 4yo burgers the second or third time I forgot to season the patty when cooking. After one bite he said, "That's not food" and wouldn't eat anymore.
Dopey middle class people who don’t know how to cook buy 95% lean ground beef or turkey, because fat and it costs more. Latchkey kids like me didn’t learn to cook unless we cooked it up ourselves. Dinner was a product.
If you use an appropriate cut of meat (like ground chuck), you don’t really need to salt as the meat has flavor. Salt will bring out more flavor, but you don’t need a lot.
Though meatless burgers like beyond may be good for the planet. I'm not sure, if they are healthy for humans. Each serving seems to be very high in sodium (390mg) as compared to lean ground meat (80mg of sodium) [1]. So, for people with high blood pressure, this might be a no no.
If you're used to so little salt, that makes you an outlier in general, and would definitely make something like beyond meat unpalatable. But I do believe your tastes are very uncommon.
No, and that’s why the fake meat companies are very careful from not mentioning anything about health benefits, and instead stress carbon nonsense and naturalness of ingredients.
Impossible is legume flour and coconut oil. Legume flour is rough on the gut, and coconut oil is 90% saturated fat, way more than butter. Beyond is soy and coconut.
If you have a moral or other objection to meat, go vegetarian or start eating vegetarian meals. It’s healthier and you’ll eat better. Fake meat has all of the health downsides of lousy meat, has inferior taste, and a questionable story around environmental nonsense.
> Fake meat has all of the health downsides of lousy meat
Even cheap meat still has a great nutritional profile compared to vegetables. In fact, meat consumption is quite (economically) progressive because expensive cuts subsidize nutritionally similar cheap cuts.
Venture capital isn’t investing in fake meat because of some love of the earth. It’s a vertical integration play for fast food. Any shift of the demand curve hurts beef producers a lot, and they don’t have the economies of scale that a factory has.
If successful, they’ll be making 50 points of margin on a tray of mush.
We don't know the answer to this of course.
Presumably they did some animal studies to show that huge doses of their product don't obviously damage a mouse.
Generally there is a 30+ year lag time to work out if some lifestyle change is detrimental. Look at smoking, soft-drinks... even more difficult with food products. We err on the side of recklessness by letting these products loose with minimal testing.
Personally I think that the cellular meat products, where they grow actual animal muscle cells in the lab, including seafood, are going to be the real killer product in this space. They have the advantage of true biocompatibility with us, less cringe factor and avoid the need for excessive processing to mimic the real thing. I also think that cellular meat will be cheaper and less resource intensive than plant based products in the end.
My main concern is how the insects are raised. My main thought with this is that if they're using any type of chemicals that it would travel down the food chain to us.
Price per patty is a strange metric. I get that they're prepackaged in patty form but the competing "traditional" product is ground beef which is typically sold in price per pound.
Ground beef is readily available at sub-$3/lb. Plant-based ones like Beyond are over $6/lb. So Beyond is more than twice the price of ground beef.
It gets even worse if you compare it against what I imagine is the most popular meat sold today, chicken breast; that's $1.75/lb in value stores like Sam's Club but is often on sale for less, around $1.50/lb if you pay attention to weekly ads[0]. So in that respect, Beyond meat can be more than four times as expensive!
That may not mean a whole lot to many on this site who are earning six figures but for everyday folks it's a large consideration.
This is my main concern with fake meats. The taste and texture are fine, the price point is acceptable, and I like the idea of not harming animals for my dinner, but I find it hard to believe that something with 20 highly-processed ingredients is healthy for me to eat. I thought I was supposed to be avoiding processed foods.
Nutrition "science" cannot yet make accurate predictions here, but from my perspective there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that no single artificial product yet captures the nutritional profile of real beef.
That nutritional profile also includes increased risk of GI tract cancers among other serious conditions, so I'm not sure what the argument you're trying to make is.
There is no compelling evidence that eating unprocessed beef carries any significant cancer risk.
This claim is obvious a-priori bullshit if you know much about human metabolism. Plain old meat is very rapidly metabolized almost entirely into peptides and absorbed; there is little room for it to cause GI problems. Hence why there are a lot of people with plant-related digestive issues (e.g. celiac) but very few people with beef intolerance, outside of freak allergies like alpha-gal (lone star tick syndrome).
> There is no compelling evidence that eating unprocessed beef carries any significant cancer risk.
Red meat has an IARC classification of 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans. This is based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies, but also (contrary to your claim) mechanistic evidence.
What are you, some sort of beef industry lobbyist? This is a widely accepted fact among the medical community and supported by reams of evidence. Metabolism has almost nothing to do with this. The link between environmental exposure (red meat, smoking, etc.) and cancer has to do with DNA damage and inflammation.
That's probably true. It's probably also true that there are nutritional pros and cons to both. If we could engineer the "ideal" meat for nutrition, it probably wouldn't be exactly the same as real beef.
Whilst the environmental and animal welfare benefits of many of the ‘fake’ meats (Beyond, Impossible, Vegetarian Butcher, etc) are noble and important, in the spirit of ‘full’ lifecycle analysis, it is important to also consider just how processed (ultra processed) these products are and the potential impacts this has in the human health domain.
And the research on ultra processed foods is rather clear, they are ‘bad’ for human health in large quantities.
Some alternatives that are better for the environment AND for human health include: pulled oats from Finland, and fake cheese products made from beans (rather than tree nuts).
Edit: Added… simple tip, read the ingredient list and count the number of ingredients used.
I'd be curious to know which ingredients are the most worrisome. I don't eat much Beyond or Impossible at this point, but I could see myself eating a lot in the future if they made lower-fat options (more like ground turkey than ground beef).
But I don't want to eat something that is made out of unhealthy ingredients. What should I look out for?
The few more steps heavily denatures proteins, potentially creating novel structures in the processing which can have significantly negative effects on humans—cancer or prion catalysts, for example.
Let's not overlook the fact that most cows raised in massive farms are fed a horrible diet and most beef based products - even raw beef - are also processed and have additives.
I'm not saying that Beyond Burger is better or worse, but that pretending all beef is healthy is kind of silly.
Most of the ranch land in my area isn't really suitable for other kinds of agriculture so I don't know if that measure means much. It certainly isn't irrigated and I think the cows give back the water they use.
It definitely was buffalo, still is in some parts. Grass is all that grows and young forest. Cereal and canola crops grow on the more fertile and irrigated sections.
You're right. The water discussed here is just the total rain water that was in the grass the cows ate. Its not taken from aquifers or rivers like you need to irrigating crops.
Does grassland really need to be suited for any kind of agriculture?
The prairies used to be one of the greatest carbon sinks in the world, storing as much or more carbon per acre than most forests. They were also a source of incredible diversity.
Cattle ranching operations transforms that carbon sink into methane gas to warm our atmosphere. And while the water is returned, the energy spend transporting and cleaning it isn't.
How does that calculation work? Prairies were inhabited by huge herds of large grazers: bison. Thats how they stayed as prairies.
There were about 60 million bison on the American prairie before 1800. There are about 90 million cattle in the US across all states - with large numbers outside the bison’s range, in states like New York and Tennessee and California. So - roughly in the same ballpark.
Pasture-raised cattle don’t seem so different to me - but I am not very informed on this topic, maybe I am missing something?
Part of the issue is also that there is simply far less grassland now. The prairies and other grasslands used to be huge, and supported 2/3rds of the number of bovines. Now they're a tiny fraction of the size and supporting 50% more.
That is more than I had understood remained, and also a surprisingly high number. Possibly there is an issue of definitions.
This site, for instance, calculates that 40% of the US used to be grassland, and it's now under 5%. [1]
Possibly there is a difference been "old growth" unmanaged grassland, and "pastureland" that is mostly seeded with purchased grass and clover seed.
Certainly the old prairies do not exist in any meaningful sense. If you ever read Little House on the Prairie you might recall that they traveled for weeks across grassland that was uninterrupted and looked simply like a flat sea of grass for as far as the eye could see.
In any case, even if those numbers are correct it seems like the number of cows is 50% higher and the amount of grassland is about 25% lower (from 40% to 30%).
I agree that there seems to be some wobbliness in definitions here.
I think your citation must have an error. It says:
> In the United States, only 5 percent of the original grasslands remain; or about 358 million acres.
If I understand this right, it's claiming that there were once 20 * 358M = 7,160M acres of grassland. But the total size of the United States - everything, not just grass - is about 2,400M acres, so that can't be right.
Maybe they mean 5% of an original 358M? But no; the "358 million acres" in that blog post is a link to a conservation group report; the report is definitely saying that there are 358 million acres of grassland in the US today.
Definitely agreed that the old prairies are pretty different, especially in the wet crop-heavy areas like Iowa. But as I understand it, the dryer west, like the Dakotas and Nebraska and Colorado, are not as changed. But anyway, I'm really interested in the original topic - do we still have good carbon sinks? I would think all that pastureland would be pretty good at sucking up carbon and storing it in soil, but I don't know.
> I would think all that pastureland would be pretty good at sucking up carbon and storing it in soil, but I don't know.
I'm unsure, but my understanding is that carbon sequestration of the old-growth "permaculture" of the prairies and other grasslands comes from their extremely deep roots. [1]
I'm not sure what the pastures of a typical large cattle farm look like, and whether their roots travel anywhere near as deep. However, as we're already establishing, I'm not an expert.
What you are missing is that Bison lived off whatever plants naturally grew in the land, and that their numbers declined and increased with the available food supply. The loss of natural habitat and biodiversity alone should be a cause for concern.
My impression was (again! uninformed!) that pasture-raised cattle basically are living off whatever plants naturally grow on the land. Is that not the case?
Of course it is wrong for factory farmed cattle raised in a shed, and for grain fed to cattle right before slaughter to change their meat, but I thought the bulk of their diet was basically unmanaged wild grasses?
That was, indeed, how cattle used to be raised back in the day, with maybe some grain added to their diet to make up for seasonality of plants (after all, cow eating is a year-round business).
Nowadays, most cattle lives confined in a pen, being fed grass and grains depending on the stage of growth. There’s still some very small farmers using the traditional methodology, but the vast majority of the meat you can buy in a supermarket - even fancy ones like Wholefoods - are the product of mass production.
Depends of the volume. Cows don't just drink, eat, and return lovely fertilizer. The huge amount of urine and manure some cow ranches produce is dangerous to the environment around them, and to the ranchers, so their waste actually needs to be removed and processed.
They kind of actually do. The ranchlands nearby my area haven't really changed since they were settled. Windmills and roads are the major change since the 1800's.
Yeah read that too but seriously? You going to spend the energy harvesting and transporting that to the center of the country so cows fart a little less? Meanwhile China still puking out a third of the world's CO2 with no end in sight.
It's good to see these sorts of numbers, especially as a $BYND stockholder. :)
I've had more impossible burgers (from BK) than beyond, and I think I prefer the impossible taste a bit more, but only slightly. In a burger, with other toppings (tomatoes, mustard, onions, lettuce, etc)... the 'non-beef' taste is pretty minimal, in my experience, although I do notice a slight aftertaste. Haven't tried the new "beyond 3.0" which is dropping this week.
As a 'beef substitute' for every day cooking, haven't used it, but had other family members tell me they use the 'beyond sausage' (some spicy italian variation) in their everyday cooking to replace previous sausage use and they love it. They've gone totally vegetarian, have tried multiple meat substitutes over the years and think beyond is generally the best.
Have been trying ways to reduce meat consumption - going for blackbean substitutes in some situations, beyond/impossible burgers when available, etc. Not sure I'll ever go totally 'no-meat' but I do notice I have far less red meat consumption compared to 6-7 years ago.
I agree with another poster that the high sodium is a problem, and is possibly keeping some people away.
Hey, I agree with pretty much everything you just said. One other obstacle that is worth highlighting is that (at least where I am) the cost delta between beyond/impossible and plain-old beef is pretty massive, and the #1 thing keeping me from eating more of it.
I've been trying to eat less meat for environmental reasons, and it's been made much easier because of Beyond Burger.
I personally can't tell the difference between Beyond Burger and a real beef burger, especially when I buy it from fast food chains like Carl's Jr where it is covered in sauce. I've had Impossible Burger several times and I could never get over its smell.
Beyond Sausage Spicy Italian is also a favorite in our household.
I was introduced to the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" some 10 years ago in high school philosophy class, and have been mulling over it ever since. Today I am sympathetic to Dennett's argument in Consciousness Explained: there is no single Cartesian theater, there are several processes in the brain which are the same thing (up to the precision of definition of same) as we internally experience, and many properties we tend to attribute to that features of internal experience, consciousness and "qualia" are myths. My personal favorite hypothesis is that those myths arise from quirks of our ability to talk and think and have a narrative about our experience.
So, if sentience is much less special and much more incoherent phenomenon than the Enlightenment thinkers who made it the crown of the human superiority would have thought, and consequently the whole concept is more akin to teleological physics of Aristotle than an apt name for what really happens ... then attributing moral value to sentience alone seems less compelling take than it initially would seem.
Personally, I find Benjamin Franklin's reasoning to cease vegetarianism quite logical. Animals are allowed to eat animals.
People have always killed other people. Some people even eat other people. And we let them. Have you tried to convince a lion to eat a soy gazelle? I suppose not, because of the strong language barrier. They would probably not digest it very well, as they are real carnivores. My point is, we are capable of having this complex discussion with several points of view and your whole reasoning is "animals eat animals, why shouldnt I?".
That's a lot of bullshit words to justify "meat taste's good".
We're not animals. We can't have it both ways in the ideological spectrum of how we both perceive and interact with the world. Whatever the fuck Ben Franklin said is largely meaningless when you take a few minutes to compare it against the world and reality he inhabited to the one we live in today.
Yeah, I was disappointed in it at first but after becoming vegetarian it's really nice to have it even if it's not perfect. When you have it with all the condiments it's good enough.
It feels like they're on the right track, but after all the hype, I was a bit disappointed too. It has like a slightly odd oiliness that I didn't think I minded at first but ended up finding quite off-putting.
So for awhile I liked it and ate it. Then out of nowhere it turned into a thing that when I eat it I, without getting graphic, let’s just call it extreme digestive issues.
I wonder how frequently that occurs. Or am I just odd?
I've tried Beyond Burgers and I quite like them. Sure it's not the same, but honestly, I don't really care that it tastes the same. I've also tried other burgers that do not try to mimic burgers and just create a new taste... and I also really like them! sometimes even more.
I believe in just reducing meat consumption. I think meat should be a lot more expensive because when you purchase it, you should pay a tax for the environmental impact. That way, hopefully eating meat becomes a luxury, and not something you eat always at lunch and dinner. And even if it does not, at least the money collected from this tax could go into environmental programs.
I’m always surprised to hear folks having such negative opinions of beyond and impossible burgers. I quite like the taste despite it not being an exact beef flavour, and I think the texture is more or less spot on.
It's hard to understand what "99% less impact on water scarcity" means but surely beyond meat can't use less water than vegetables? (since beyond meat is plant based)
One of the ethical trade offs between animal and veg for me is how labour intensive veg is. Back of envelope calculations and equivalent calorie of no mechanically harvested veg (pretty much most things except staples) harm more people than meat production. At the end of the day welfare of people > animals.
After "seapiracy" I don't really think we are addressing the biggest issue here. I would like to know if there's anything like that for fish. I would buy anything that tastes like tuna but it's fully vegetable, or any other fishes. Just give me the same taste on my sushi, please.
Yes, it exists for many year. Ask you local vegan community (as product in this field are very different from place to place). We have several vegan sushi places, and the omnis that I know like the food there very much.
Hey, thanks. I'm aware there are so-called alternatives (Banana Blossom, Tofish and such). Unfortunately, from my experience they don't taste like fish yet.
It's the first vegan burger patty I wouldn't notice it's not meat if not told. I quite liked it. Not completely sold into that extremely processed food idea, but occasionally it's a nice change for regular vegetarian options.
It would be nice if they could develop a low/near-zero carb version of Beyond Burger. Beef doesn't have carbs, while these vegetarian alternates have around 9 carbs per patty. The dream would be able to do keto diet with vegetarian patties.
Personal anecdote. Initially I wasn't interested in trying the Beyond Meat burgers. But recently, I've tried it once at a hotel restaurant and actually thought they tasted alright, so ordered it a few more times after, while I was staying at the hotel. Later the hotel changed the menu and didn't sell them anymore. I've ordered a normal beef burger and actually thought they taste worse than the Beyond Meat burgers. Since coming back home, I've bought the Beyond Meat patties at my local supermarket, and been making the burgers myself.
I'm all for it, I know asking people to stop eating meat is like insulting their mother, but I wish at least they would reduce their intake a little bit. That would make a difference.
If its close enough and the price is lower, people should naturally just choose the cheaper option. If something is 50 percent more energy efficient, surely it could be 50 percent cheaper.
I tried it (and some clones) and for whatever reason both me and my partner get a bloated stomach from it. Very likely not a mental thing as I get this too from Saitan but actually like stuff like quorn or well done tofu.
On the other side I know many of the cows I eat, I don't think they actually suffer other than dying too early.
I have tried Beyond Meat. My concern is changing my diet to lock in with a single vendor selling a patented food product with 30%+ margins.
Is there a reason this amazing, world-changing, sustainable product isn't being sold at a reasonable or better price than ground beef? Tyson operates at 13% margin. Ground beef is 25% cheaper than Beyond.
Compete on price and I will buy it; pretty simple. Otherwise, this all feels like marketing propagande to convince us to overpay to line the pocket of a greedy industrial food manufacturer.
The company is still developing its products, and the extra margin reflects the fact that it hasn't yet been able to amortize the costs as Tyson etc. have with already established slaughterhouses, monopolies on the business to secure their trade and other infrastructure.
Exactly, I agree 100%. Uber had to operate at a loss to disrupt the taxi industry but I switched to Uber because it was always cheaper and more convenient than a cab.
I can not say the same about Beyond Meat with respect to its competitors. It is unfortunate for them.
What would the value be of a company that was the sole provider of all imitation meat to America and was the only meat you could buy because of environmental laws against sale and production of legacy meat.
Land usage is a totally useless metric for the impact of beef production, because we can (and do) raise cattle on land that's basically useless for anything else.
The methane output issue is also pretty much total BS.
First off, there used to be over 60 million buffalo in North America, producing similar amounts of methane. We have only 50% more cows today.
Second, whatever cows don't eat is probably going to be metabolized by fungi, which also produce methane (although it's not well-quantified how much).
Third, the half-life of atmospheric methane is only on the order of 9 years (it's a fairly unstable molecule in an oxidizing environment), so its long-term effect is much smaller than CO2's, even though it's a more potent greenhouse gas.
> simply because the taste
It's about nutrition and health. "Taste" is a strawman.
First, the whole bison vs. cow argument is bunk for a variety of reasons. The diet that roaming bison ate is very different that the beef and dairy cattle eat today. Also, they didn't typically shit in large pools given that they were not animals that we're penned in to the same geographical location and roamed, often over many, many miles throughout the year.
Second, you're looking solely at North America. Cattle "production" is truly worldwide at this point, with beef and dairy cattle farms in many far off places where the animals are not native, and the true reporting of their numbers is grossly under-reported.
And, the whole goddamn thing about fungi is just.. I don't even know where to start with that. The amount of food created to feed cattle is staggering, and without that need in the first place, then the fungi wouldn't need to metabolize and emit methane, even though all of this is just some kind of insane babble. The methane comes from huge pools of manure that can, and more likely is not, properly and sustainably dealt with. There are blighted areas in the US alone where large cattle companies have simply abandoned the areas due to health concerns.
Here's the thing about methane though, when you generate an enormous amount of it, year over year, the cumulative effects of it cooling the planet (you know, melting glaciers, raising sea temperatures) does not really give a damn about the half-life of atmospheric methane. Once those effects set in, they're self-perpetuating and continuing to feed into the same root causes only makes it more difficult to resolve.
Finally, if you think that beef filled with GMO corn is some kind of magical health / nutrition goal post, well, there's nothing I could possibly say to counteract the sheer inanity of that position.
I think Beyond Beef is fine. I don't eat it for "health" reasons, and anyone who eats mass produced ground beef for "health" reasons is just straight up lying to themselves. All of these are comfort foods that we can all sustainbly live without. The decision is whether the slight taste difference is worth the absolutely terrible cost to the environment, and the devastating cost associated with the mass slaughter of sentient animals.
> The amount of food created to feed cattle is staggering
Cattle are mostly fed off grazable plants in agricultural dead zones and byproducts of human ag production. The marginal ecological impact of feeding cows on top of humans is not that significant.
You seem to be operating under this idea that concentration of resources like manure is worse than having the same amount over a larger area. Can you explain your thought process there?
Incorrect, but a common misconception. The Amazon is destroyed to grow soya crops for 2-3 years. After the land has been depleted by soya growth, the farmers will put cattle on it for tax/legal reasons and because they can get a bit more money out of it. The vast majority of the economy impetus for rainforest destruction is due to demand for soy.
Vegetable activists often attempt to divert blame to meat production by saying things like "70% of the amazon soy is used to feed cattle", which is true, but only by mass. Cattle are fed the byproducts of soy production like soy meal that humans refuse to eat. By dollar value, almost all of the soy produced goes to human consumption.
> Cattle are fed the byproducts of soy production like soy meal that humans refuse to eat. By dollar value, almost all of the soy produced goes to human consumption.
This is provably false, see [1]. The page is in Dutch, but surely there are English sources just a quick Google search away too.
Yes, and? We're not using it for anything else. Saving 93% of the arid scrubland we use to raise cattle in the US wouldn't benefit us in any way.
OTOH, growing soy and other plant protein sources used for fake meat requires high-quality land and is extremely taxing on the soil.
As an interesting reference, take a look at how farmers in Brazil use deforested Amazon land to graze cattle only after depleting the soil to grow soy for a few years, at which point it is inhospitable to plant agriculture.
What do cattle eat in CAFOs, and how much of their lives are spent there and how much more do they eat there than when they are younger and smaller? And where does that food come from?
I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that you use "fewer" for discreetly countable things (fewer tables, fewer people) and "less" for continuous things (less rice, less time).
Emissions are continuous. I don't emit one emission now and another emission the next hour.
You are aware of how beef is raised, right? From antibiotics to increase mass, to an unnatural grain based diet, to confinement and CAFOs. Beef you get at the supermarket is far from "natural."
Why can't people just eat vegetables instead? Seriously, I've worked at a renown vegan and vegetarian restaurant and I never understood why people didn't just eat veg/tofu stir-fry instead of having us go through so much non-sense to re-invent a burger or a crabcake? The things took so much effort and were an inferior version to the real thing, not to mention the amount of oils necessary to keep them intact.
The closest thing we had was this creole veg serve with polenta, that had tons of oil and butter in the polenta and the creole veg had been marinated in quite a bit of oil along with the spices to keep them moist throughout service.
I'm an omnivore with a massive conservationist mindset, and did Biodynamic Ag. So I just intermittent fast for 16 hours a day and only eat once a day now that I don't farm any more. But I grew up on cantonese food where protein was used sparingly, and unlike most kids in the West we gladly ate tofu and vegetables all year round in our homemade meals.
Eating unadulterated seasonal veg is way tastier than eating a mushroom burger with absurd amounts of oils and saturated fats and breading, smeared with vegan mayo etc... I never ate anything but the soups at work, as the rest of the menu all had so much more stuff added to it that caused a very noticeable feeling of inflammation--which is typical for vegetarians and vegans.
I've ate those impossible burgers when BK launched them and did side by side with a normal whopper when they were on the 2/$5 promo for a while, and the way I ate them (I sauted onions with korean BBQ sauce and garnished with kimchi and maybe an egg if I really had time) you couldn't tell a difference.
But, as a cook I was always perplexed: why put so much inputs into something (burger) that wasn't meant to be eaten more than once a week?
The real issue to the obesity issue in much of the West is a lack of exercise coupled with over consumption of calories, from all sources be it veg or animal protein, instead of having a burger as a treat once a week: many people, mainly the poor, subsist on this stuff due to the race to the bottom price wars typical in fast food paired with a sedentary lifestyle. But the price factor is not as day and night as it's made out to be if you actually have an education on diets suited for your lifestyle, something entirely missing in the US.
I think post-covid people need to take a very serious look at who was really affected by COVID in the West--I'm aware that India is getting hit hard and they have a mainly plant based diet, but this seems mainly due to an inability to convince it's population to follow lock-down, quarantine, or mask wearing measures and an ability to vaccinate due to an ongoing lack of trust in their government.
Most of the deaths in the West were from the elderly population, and the medically ill with a remarkable concentration on people with diabetes, obesity, asthma as the co-morbidity factors.
I couldn't agree more with you.
However, the following I disagree with:
>The real issue to the obesity issue in much of the West is a lack of exercise coupled with over consumption of calories, from all sources be it veg or animal protein...
I really don't think exercise has anything to do with it. I also don't think the number of calories has much to do with it either. I believe it's largely the type of calorie that's mostly ingested by Americans, especially poor Americans: simple carbohydrates. The processed sugars, processed grains and simple carbs are causing most of the damage to our quickly declining health. Frankly the country and most of the world is addicted to sugars of one kind or another.
I would also like to add, that India is not being hit hard at all. I know this seems counter-intuitive based on the constant bombardment by the main stream media, but India's death toll is significantly under the US, UK, and other countries death tolls (per capita). India simply didn't have a first surge when the rest of the world was at it's apex...it seems it just took longer for Covid to spread through India.
Most estimates of greenhouse gas emissions are misleading. Cows might emit methane and co2, but that carbon came from their food, and that carbon in their food was captured from the air, so it's actually a cycle without net increase in carbon in the air. That's unlike fossil fuels, which bring carbon from the ground into the air and actually increase the carbon in the air in the process. The only real net emissions in the process of creating beef are the fossil fuels burned in the process, from transportation.
This distinction between real carbon emission, and carbon cycle is important because there's misguided notion of how much of a real difference it would make if people stopped eating meat. The decrease in emissions will be offset by a decrease in carbon capture from their food, and the net difference will be much less than assumed.
Moreover, if the process of creating meat replacements requires more fossil fuels to be burned than the natural process of growing food and feeding cattle, it might be that alternative meats are detrimental to the environment. I haven't seen a fair comparison of the net emissions of the whole process, they always count the cows farts without discounting for the carbon capture while growing their food.
>> The only real net emissions in the process of creating beef are the fossil fuels burned in the process, from transportation
I think you are drastically oversimplifying the carbon impact of modern agriculture. Artificial fertilizer production, irrigation, mechanized farm equipment all substantially contribute to CO2 emissions and other serious environmental impacts.
Soil management practices (aka tilling) causing N2O release, digestive methane from cattle, methane, and methane and N2O from manure handling. Fertilizer was lumped in with crop residue burning and rice cultivation in 4th place.
Two of the top three are directly related to animal husbandry, and the rest are heavily impacted by the vast amount of land used to grow feed for cattle in feedlots instead of directly feeding people.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that agricultural impact happens for vegetarian food as well? And lab grown meat also requires the same agricultural costs, there doesn't exist some magic chemistry that creates food from raw materials without agriculture.
I updated my post with some details, but to that point directly it is far, far more efficient to feed people rather than feeding animals to feed people. The vast majority of cattle are raised in feedlots and fed crops from agriculture.
Again you're using sham accounting. Where did that methane come from? From the food. It came into the food from the air. There are again no net emissions. Just like a company requires expenditures to generate revenue. This is misleading. That carbon was borrowed from the air and then returned. Net emission zero. You only increase carbon in the air when you take carbon from elsewhere and put it in the air. Otherwise it's a cycle with net flow zero.
I am pretty sure it's not methane in, methane out. There's a digestive process and bacteria involved that produce methane from sugars and cellulose. So CO2 in via plants, methane (a much more potent greenhouse has) out.
I think you need to research this "sham accounting" idea, maybe do some studies, collect some data, publish in a peer reviewed journal, before you go about spouting it as gospel.
That's true, and I hadn't considered that angle too much.
However, methane's greenhouse effect is 25 times more potent[1] than the one of CO2, so converting carbon to methane is worse than just burning it.
And lastly, farming meat is not neutral either: at the very least, that's land you're not going to use as forest (carbon sink). And then there's the other net emissions.
I think the IPCC is doing a very thorough job at getting accurate estimations. They have many lobbies to go against, which will carefully examine discrepancies on their reports. Like wikipedia, having persons of different opinions and interest cooperate on a report, the report comes out as generally more objective and accurate, as that's the only compromise acceptable by both parties.
Less taste? That's not a complaint I've heard nor experienced. I've always found Beyond burgers to be a bit strange, sure, kinda like the uncanny valley of hamburger patties, but I certainly never found them to be bland.
Have you tried one? This just isn't true. They taste slightly different, but definitely not "less".
If you do it right -- get a nice crust on there, don't overcook it, toast up some decent buns in butter and use good pickles, cheese, etc. -- it's every bit as flavorful and indulgent as a beef burger. (a decent one at least... you're not going to replicate the best of the best, nor should that really the goal)
I think you're being facetious, but I kind of agree— I've found more joy in homemade black bean patties, shallow-fried falafel-based sandwiches, etc. Basically I enjoy it more when it's something clearly different that is filling that role, rather than something pretending to be something else.
I’ve been starting to look for alternatives TBH. I’m really starting to get ‘Reddit 2015’ vibes from the type of knee jerk low quality cynical uninformed comments I’ve been seeing float to the top recently somewhat more frequently than usual.
Not jumping ship yet, but I always like to be ahead of the game a bit.
I just skimmed thru one video, mind giving me us the highlights? The argument that cows water requirements are mostly "green water" (i.e. rain that grows the crops they eat) seemed reasonable to me. So I have to imagine your "pure" garbage is a bit of hyperbole, but I am curious to understand which parts are wrong - hopefully without having to sift through more videos - thanks in advance
At least in the US most of the weight cattle put on comes at the end when they're fed grain in feeding lots. Needless to say this they're not drinking "green water".
There's loads of documentation on this and other points in the video that's easy to find if you're not driving a carnivore agenda the way TIL constantly is on YouTube.
Weird that they concentrate on qualities that are absolutely irrelevant to a burger. When I'm eating a burger I'm thinking about the taste, smell, and it's nutritional qualities, maybe price. Not random environmental stuff.
I believe in humane and sustainable treatment of animals and I do question what it would be like if everyone went vegetarian, wouldn’t that render all those animals useless so it would reduce their propagation and life? Billions of animals would have little to no use to humans-therefore they would not be farmed or bred, there would be no life for them... it doesn’t make sense, to the point it’s almost absurd to analyze.
Isn’t this just another ultra processed food? I actually don’t mind the taste of these meat alternatives but I do wonder what the long term effects are if we suddenly switch our diets to eating significant quantities of things that didn’t evolve alongside us. I think it’s healthy for people to be skeptical.
How a frankenfood can be even considered?! If you want to be vegan or vegetarian, stick with traditional products for your dietary style. The analogy is a recovering cannibal making babies out of carrots and eating them with "clear" consciousness. The company should rebrand to "Beyond Junk"!
- The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste
But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter. No one needed to die for you to eat it.