Plant-based foods are almost always significantly more efficient to produce than meat since you no longer need to grow all of the food to feed an animal for its entire life.

From another article ( https://www.cnet.com/news/impossible-burger-2-0-tastes-like-... ):

> But Impossible Foods can produce a burger using a fourth of the water and less than 4 percent of the land -- and emit one-tenth of the greenhouse gases -- than a conventional burger, Brown said.

So yeah, we might still destroy forests to make veggie burgers, but it'll be 1/25th of the forest destruction (if you believe the numbers).

The rolling hills of Wales and northern England are never going to be great for crops, but they are perfect grassland for feeding cattle and lamb.

The grass hills are beautiful, it would be a great shame to see them converted to crops. I would argue they won’t be, and therefore the cattle raised on them is effecient.

Decreasing meat consumption would dramatically decrease the amount of land amount used for crop agriculture, not increase it. 85% of the UK's landmass is grazing land and crops grown specifically as animal feed[1].

In 2010, the British livestock industry needed an area the size of Yorkshire just to produce the soy used in feed. But if global demand for meat grows as expected, the report says, soy production would need to increase by nearly 80% by 2050. [2]

From a completely theoretical standpoint, if humans were to stop consuming meat we would actually need to close 1000's of crop farms, not open them on rolling hills, even when accounting for our dietary increase in plants. I'd therefore argue that it's a shame the land has to be used for agriculture at all. Better would be to maintain them as national parks and the like.

[1]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378017...

[2] (PDF WARNING) https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2017-10/WWF_Appet...

More national parks! As a recreational hiker and walker that would be a dream. I'd go vegetarian myself if it guaranteed even 50% more parkland.

The problem as I understand it is that while cattle are often raised in such places - grazing on open grass plains which could not support other crops - they are usually transferred to feedlots later in their life, where a significant portion of the nutrients used to support them come from corn, soy, etc, which do come from croplands.

So in our current system it does appear that cattle, even if they occupy some grassland space which could not be more efficiently used, do inevitably use resources which could be more efficiently used to feed humans directly.

But of course humans have been changing that landscape for millennia to graze livestock on it - it was much more forested before we arrived, and could be again.

The demand for, and thus price of, feed crops will decrease if we largely switch from real meats to plant-based substitutes, so there will be less economic incentive to grow crops on those rolling hills, not more. They could still be used to raise livestock (we're probably not going to eliminate 100% of meat and animal products from the market), or just returned to nature.

If we got to a place where most of the cow & lamb feed comes from open range grazing we'd be in a fabulous place.

It's much the same in the Alberta plains. You'd have to dramatically alter the ecosystem to grow a variety of crops there.

It's easy to win the argument that plant-based foods are more efficient to mass-produce than CAFO meat, but you might need to be careful generalizing; pigs and chickens fed forage and scrap are supposedly pretty efficient as well.

(I have no idea if there's an efficient way to scale beef).

> I have no idea if there's an efficient way to scale beef

If you're interested, https://twitter.com/drsplace is a good follow. She writes and cites a lot on this topic (because she is employed by the beef industry).

Efficiency and scalability are not the same thing. Does forage not have high land requirement? If there were a massive demand for scrap, would it be met by something other than scrap farming?

No, the point of forage is that it does not spend arable land generating crops for livestock. That's the meaning of the term.

We're so far from that being even close to a problem that I feel it's a bit disingenuous to see it repeated so often when vegetarianism comes up. There's a whole lot of meat we can cut out of our diets without any of that becoming a problem.

(And of course, if the soy that is currently fed to cattle is fed to humans directly, we can feed quite a few more humans from that than that cattle currently can, without needing to use more resources. That's not to say it does not come with its own problems, but they're unlikely to be as severe as the ones we get with meat anytime soon.)

The cattle need to be fed too, and they don't turn their food into meat very efficiently. That's why replacing meat with plant based alternatives is (almost) always a huge gain in efficiency, in terms of resource use.

Instead of these abstract hypotheticals about efficiency, we can just look at the price.

>At Hopdaddy in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Impossible Burger (using the original recipe) goes for $12.25. A classic burger made of Angus beef with the same basic toppings costs just $7.25.

Price has nothing to do with efficiency.

You have a strange notion of efficiency if you think something that takes more resources to produce is also more efficient...

I believe this is an urban legend? Anyway, most crops don't convert to protein any better than cattle.

Crops are also not perfectly efficient, but it's simply replacing two chained instances of inefficiencies with one.

Instead of

Crops -> Animal feed -> Cattle -> Meat -> Eat

you have

Crops -> some processing -> Eat

Then there's the 92% of grazing land that doesn't grow crops. That's a clear win for cattle.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization [1] "just less than half the world's usable surface is covered by grazing systems" and "Grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef and about 30 percent of the world's production of sheep and goat meat."

Doesn't seem like such a clear win for cattle. They do note that "For an estimated 100 million people in arid areas, and probably a similar number in other zones, grazing livestock is the only possible source of livelihood.", so not everyone might be able to afford a vegetarian diet, but 91% of beef seems replaceable.

[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/X5303E/x5303e05.htm#chapter%202:%2...

No it's not. Only a tiny fraction of cattle are solely pastured. Each beef cow, even if pastured for the first year (which is typical) requires literally tons of high-calorie corn and or soy feed to bring it up to slaughter weight. Guess where that feed is grown.

Besides, the range land you're talking about isn't needed for crops anyway. We have more than enough arable land to grow crops for direct human consumption.

Beef is fattened on feedlots before slaughter, the exception is gourmet beef, which I doubt many people eat regularly.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/feedlots-...

Are you talking about all the land that used to be rainforest?

Here is a really great article that covers a lot of ground in terms of what food is most efficient for protein both in terms of land & CO2.

https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agricultur...

EDIT: sorry here is the better link:

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-and-seafood-production-consu...

I don't know where you're getting your information, but it's not correct.

I've been under the impression that plant-based proteins take up less land than does animal-derived protein[0][1][2]. I could go on with the citations. So yes, replacing everything with plant-based protein would be vastly better.

Edit: Vastly better than Beef*

[0]https://www.wri.org/resources/charts-graphs/animal-based-foo...

[1]https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899434/

Generally, most of that forest destruction is to grow soy beans for animal feed. Feeding the soy beans directly to humans is far more efficient, so, if more people adopt TVP instead of meat, you'd expect a drop in land requirements.

You go ahead and spend your money on that stuff. But in a free market, soy-based protein is going to be a hard sell.

According to TFA, the Impossible Burger 2.0 has reached parity with meat-based burgers. It seems unlikely that they'll just stop innovating, so they might eventually produce a soy-based burger that tastes better than meat at the same price. If that happens, it's game over for meat.

It'll still be a burger - or ground burger product.

What if I want a well-marbled aged beef ribeye?

Or if I want to smoke a pork shoulder or brisket?

Those kinds of products are going to take some time before they become manufactured from plant-based sources (or before they are "grown" - indeed, the first versions of that nature are likely to be too lean, which will be a real problem, especially for taste and texture).

We have them in local joints - at a 50% premium. Not gonna take over at that price.

"but trying to replace everything with vegetable stuff is not going to work in the long run."

But we have to eat... what do you recommend we replace our protein intake with?

I suggest other plant protein sources, like soy or pea. Wheat, in particular, has a terrible amino acid profile for humans [0].

Aside from making it so that anyone with coeliac can't consume their burgers, it's just not as effective for humans as animal protein. Pea and soy, however, are nearly as effective and much better for the earth/environment.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3887888

The incomplete protein thing is a myth [1]. The amino acid profile of single ingredients is almost never a concern in practice, because meals nearly always contain complimentary proteins. It's actually really difficult to avoid complimentary proteins if you have anything like normal dietary habits. Furthermore, it's not even necessary for every meal to provide all essential amino acids, as long as your diet isn't chronically deficient in any of them over time.

Wheat protein is easy to complete. This is acknowledged at the link you gave:

> when combined with other food proteins such as legumes, oil seeds or animal products the proteins of wheat exhibit excellent nutritional complementarity.

Lysine is the limiting amino acid in wheat protein. Lysine is easy to find in other places, and wheat protein can be made fully complete using half as much pea protein, for example. A single 20 g portion of wheat protein similar in size to one impossible burger contains over a quarter of the RDA of lysine [2]. Nearly any other protein you consume in a day will easily provide the rest, even with sensible vegan diets.

1 - https://www.forksoverknives.com/the-myth-of-complementary-pr...

2 - https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Wheat_flour%2C_whole-grain_nu...

It depends on your protein needs and goals. Survival is different from optimal performance.

Not sure what you mean by "optimal performance". Your body needs a finite daily amount of each essential amino acid for tissue growth and repair. If you're an athlete you might need more at times, and some health problems can cause usage of particular aminos to spike, but the requirement is always finite. Consuming more than those amounts has no proven benefit (unless that protein is meant to displace calories from carbs or fat, which is a completely different topic).

Optimal daily intake of all essential amino acids is easy to achieve with any sensible dietary habit, even for very active adults. If you're consuming adequate protein each day, given your activity level and health, then the amino profile of your protein intake is completely irrelevant unless your diet is really goofy.

I'd encourage you to read that Forks over Knives article.

I’ve seen a lot of results regarding net protein synthesis with respect to amino acid profiles, and in general, higher concentrations of specific amino acids were tied to greater synthesis. (Especially Leucine through mTOR.) Is this misleading somehow?

Yeah, leucine is a bit of a hot topic among the intermittent fasting crowd because of its apparent ability to arrest fasting-induced autophagy. Some amount is clearly critical for anabolic signaling, but the evidence I've seen indicates that extra dietary leucine (in excess of typical consumption) has no effect on actual muscle synthesis [1].

There is compelling evidence supporting supplementation of some conditionally essential amino acids such as carnosine (perhaps vis-a-vis beta-alanine) and glutamine. There's also increasing interest in restriction of specific amino acids, namely methionine, for anti-aging and cancer treatment.

But all this talk of supplementation and restriction, outside of what occurs naturally in foods, stands in opposition to the dietary notion of protein completeness. My hope is that it will eventually lead to more appropriate and flexible measures of dietary protein quality.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844186

Even with all that being said, it would still make sense to make sure a burger is a source of complete protein - you know, just like the original article. Closer to optimal food, fewer worries, greater value, etc. etc.

So, is the IB 2.0 a source of complete protein or not? I'm asking this from a pure "what's the spec sheet here" point of view.

The problem is that your usage of the phrase "complete protein" doesn't really make sense here. Three impossible burgers do in fact provide complete protein for a whole day, meaning they provide the RDA of all essential amino acids for an average adult.

And that would be true even if the burger consisted only of wheat protein. The listed ingredients include protein from wheat, soy, and potato, so it's quite possible that the amino profile is close to optimal. But again, that doesn't really mean anything in practice, unless you want to try to survive on just a couple of impossible burgers per day.

In other words, scrutinizing amino acid profiles has almost no benefit in a practical diet. Even if you're a vegan, if you eat a sensible amount and variety of protein during the day (grains, beans, nuts, etc) then your daily amino intake will be readily completed.

> that doesn't really mean anything in practice, unless you want to try to survive on just a couple of impossible burgers per day

You're not wrong, but I think you're taking a very narrow view here. There are situations when having a good source of complete protein is important. E.g. you're working out and you need to increase the muscular mass. In that case, you better make sure your main source of protein is indeed complete.

The real world is annoyingly diverse sometimes.

No, you really don't. I know the completeness thing is ingrained in nutrition lore and seems to make good sense, but it almost never actually matters.

Try this as an exercise: Suppose you're a 100kg power lifter targeting 1.5 g per kg body weight protein intake (which is at the lowish end of common protein recommendations for athletes, resulting in 150g protein per day in this case). Suppose you don't want to eat anything but beans. Only beans, breakfast lunch and dinner. You make sure you get your 150g of protein per day from beans, which is a lot of beans, but well worth it because you love beans.

By your criteria, your main protein source is horribly incomplete, and I would agree. But now tell me, will you actually end up deficient in any essential amino acids? The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, probably not. Lets briefly look at the numbers:

The limiting EAA in most pulses is methionine. Sometimes tyrosine is low as well, but let's stick with methionine. That means that the only EAA deficiency possible with your bean-only diet is methionine. To get 150g protein you'll need around 600-800g of beans, depending on the type of bean, which yields between roughly 1.2 and 1.8g of methionine, again depending on the type of bean (I'm using USDA data for lentils and pinto beans for this example).

So the question is, is 1.2-1.8 g/day of methionine enough? As far we know, yes, that amount of methionine is at or at least near the amount that your body can use in a day. I've never seen evidence that any amount over that range is of any benefit, any excess over utilization being either oxidized for its caloric value, or excreted. There is evidence that some athletes need more than 1.5 g/kg/day of protein, but this is based on increased oxidation of all dietary amino acids, rather than higher utilization of specific EAAs [1]. So if you need more protein, you can just eat more beans.

In other words, your 600-800g bean-only diet probably gives you complete protein each day. But even if it didn't -- if you somehow turned out methionine-deficient -- then you could easily "complete" your daily protein intake by eating another serving of beans. Or an egg.

Now suppose you're not an athlete, but just a schmuck like me, eating a more typical 0.8 g/kg of protein. Now you're eating only 80g of protein, and thus only around 0.6 to 1.0 g of methionine per day. Now you might end up methionine-deficient, but even here the evidence is thin, and all you'd have to do to correct it is eat an egg or two. Or more beans. (Interestingly, there is great interest in methionine restriction as an anti-aging and anti-cancer strategy, so methionine deficiency is decidedly a rare and speculative condition).

Does this make sense? Do you see how easy it is to consume complete protein each day? This is a specific example, but the arithmetic works out for grain-heavy diets just the same. All you need to do is make sure you're getting the daily amount of protein recommended for your athletic activity level. As long as you do that, you're highly unlikely to be deficient in any EAAs, even on a whack diet. You can live your whole life unaware of protein completeness or amino acid profiles, and your body will never know the difference.

1 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nbu.12215, Protein intake for athletes and active adults: Current concepts and controversies

Dear lord, this is typical HN stuff. Highly analytical, focused on a very narrow point of view, and completely useless in practice.

The world outside the pixel matrix is a very different thing.

Hmmm... well I'm out of ammo :)

If you're ever interested in learning more, I'd say just try running some numbers yourself. Pick a diet with some "incomplete proteins", and then figure out what specific EAA deficiencies might result. Try to use at least a semi-realistic diet. See if you can do it.

The Impossible Burger is designed to use environmentally friendly ingredients that can scale. I don't understand what your issue is.

I’m suggesting they simply use different plant protein to do so.

Would you consider wheat protein to be the only kind that can scale? If so, why?

Beyond Meat, another meat-substitute company, uses soy and pea protein:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat

Quinoa is also an excellent source for a full amino acid complex. It has substantially higher Lysine content then that found in other grains.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1546052

The question you're replying to isn't the one being asked. Also, per the article, the current iteration of the Impossible Burger is no longer wheat-based.

Unless the Impossible Burger is exceptionally inefficient to produce, that's still a huge win. An acre of land can produce about twenty times as much edible protein from soy as from beef.

> trying to replace everything with vegetable stuff is not going to work in the long run.

I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. People need to eat.

Maybe cattle farming (plus fertilizer and methane recovery) in near-Earth orbit O'Neill Cylinders will be the answer?