American has a rich, diverse, and passionate food culture that includes many whole foods and innovations created there. A lot of processed food is eaten, but so are a huge variety of unprocessed foods.
Replacing animal products with plant protein (beyond burger, impossible burger, many others) is an excellent trend for many reasons, with the potential environmental impact being the foremost benefit in my opinion. I look forward to the day where lab grown and/or plant protein sources are much more mainstream.
And lastly, "Monsanto soy and chemistry" is a ludicrous implication that plant based protein sources are somehow inherently scary or even that they're worse than mass-agriculture raised animal products.
The point still stands. Why would you replace a meal made out of plants with basically the same plants run through a blender and their ingredients extracted by some odd process? Especially if there are concerns regarding the health implications this might entail.
An yes those genetically modified plants are somewhat scary not only for the plants themselves but the awful business practices of the companies producing them. I never said that antibiotics laden mass animal production is any better.
I hope that the eating habits would change towards less animal products. Which would make much more sense then replacing those with artificial products for basically no reason other than habit.
What matters is (lack of) toxicity, harmful, LD50, food safety. 'Artificial' however does not and should not imply any of that.
As for
> Is it only me or is this whole preprocessed food stuff the most American thing ever?
I wouldn't say so. There's innovation regarding this throughout the world.
On top of that, cutting down on meat saves the environment. Is saving the environment an American thing...?
I'd wager that fast food is mostly an American invention, but it got picked up throughout the rest of the world. Like preprocessed food it isn't good or bad per definition.
Of course, the official meaning of the world "natural", as it relates to the list of ingredients on a package, has been diluted to be meaningless, as you say.
It's been restricted to be meaningless, IMO. If we go by your definition of artificial, then a lot of what doesn't qualify as "natural" on food labels isn't artificial either. Many "chemicals" added to food are substances that we've evolved to deal with. GMOs in particular aren't artificial by this definition, as they're mostly about making some food contain stuff that was previously found in other food.
Convenience. I use my blender twice a day. I need 3000 calories a day to maintain a BMI of 22 and to get that from all plants would be lots of work. I’ve eaten 2000 calories of lentils in a day - not pretty.
Doesn’t that basically apply to any sort of cooking process at all? It’s all an artificial transformation of food.
Well I first heard of pea protein from vegan bodybuilders. Bodybuilders need extra protein. Protein without the carbs is useful. I think whey is probably a better idea, since it's been around long enough Galen recommends it for weak constitutions, but I'm not a vegan.
I have no idea what the "food industry" uses it for; presumably a replacement for soy meal, which really shouldn't be fed to people. Then again, pea protein soaked in glophosate probably shouldn't be either.
I have a question about this. Aren't all vegetables that we eat now are 'genetically modified' by humans. There were no ancient tomatoes or ancient okra.
Is there implication that GMO's that were made in lab are more scary?
I don't even really have an issue with GMO, but I find the arguments promoting it are often conflating different issues which just seems to muddy the debate and in my opinion seems to create more distrust.
A Native American friend put it thus: Veganism is a choice we can afford to make in modern society. If you were a Lakota living on the plains 500 or 1000 years ago, your choices were to eat buffalo or starve.
The USA is, indeed, one of the most prosperous countries in the history of ever, and one of the boons of that is we get a smörgåsbord laid out before us every day, a veritable cornucopia of foods from different sources of varying quality. It has turned us into picky eaters indeed, a luxury virtually unaffordable for most of human history.
Plant-based protein is no better, from the health and nutrition context, than animal-based protein. They can even be worse; for example, plant nutrients often suffer from low “bioavailability”—which means that they are hard for us to extract, absorb, and utilize[1].
More on animal protein: http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/food/meats/
[1] https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/micronutrients-mental-health/
That's like telling folks to simply eat wheat instead of bread or to eat oatmeal instead of the cereal flakes made from it. These aren't things that you can simply substitute: Pea protein gives variety of texture and allows folks to eat food they grew up with even though they no longer subscribe to that diet. Yes, there is room in the diet for both things, just like there is room for both bread and cracked wheat and other whole grains. There is more to food than simply nutrition and glossing over this is a fault that needs addressed.
And it is obvious that you've not eaten it.
If you disagree with these things... don't eat them. Simple as that.
Having worked for an accounting shop specialised in cow farms I can assure you that one of the main bills is antibiotics and food supplements. Also cow food is usually highly specialised.
More like this https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3265/3239157183_91c5fbc582_z.j...
Highly processed foodstuffs have:
1) longer shelf life,
2) more easily controllable composition,
3) fewer ingredients, which lessens risk of lawsuits,
4) more flexibility to allow for addition to other foods.
Those four advantages combine to help producer recoup costs and avoid negative publicity. Maximize profits, minimize risks; whatever comes out as a result is the "food" product.
I do not care about vague, unspecified concerns regarding what is "natural" or "processed".
Bring on the processed pea-mush that doesn't suffer as it dies.
Sure they don't really have muscles, so they don't thrash around like animals, and they don't make noise or cry out when they are killed.
On the other hand, when they are wounded they do make chemical compounds to resist predation and to signal to nearby plants that predators are present (e.g. salicylate). This seems vaguely parallel.
Is the moral worth of plant suffering lower because it isn't close enough in form to human suffering?
If we were to encounter a truly alien species, how would you know whether or not it experienced suffering?
When someone is curious about something it is most appropriate to just respond to what they asked instead of second-guessing their motives.
I could imagine other alternatives. I knew a fruitarian once (before Notting Hill came out). I suppose you could try and engineer auxotrophy into human cells. I went to a conference once where some people earnestly (but naively) proposed it.
If everyone in the world would eat the recommended USDA diet (mostly backed by industry and totally not healthy for you) we'd need another Canada to sustain us all [4]. By the way, most of the grasslands are man-made and we should try and reforest those areas to combat losses in biodiversity and climate collapse. Furthermore about a third of all fresh drinking water (not rainwater) is used for cattle [5].
[1]: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0812.htm / https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=defor...
[2]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/carrying-capacity-overshoot-and-spe...
[3]: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment
[4]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[5]: http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/02/18/4-billion-people-...
When a fighter jet is hit by a bullet, it releases chemical compounds to stop its fuel from exploding, and signals nearby forces that threats are present.
The reaction to damage alone does not suggest something is capable of suffering. There are other considerations, and there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).
So walk me through this, I'm curious how you know whether or not plants have experiences? How would you know whether any arbitrary life form (or object, since you brought up fighter planes) has experiences? What method allows you to make this determination?
Starting from the basics: life is just complex, carbon-based nanotechnology. There's nothing we know that suggests cells are anything more than complex machines. There's nothing suggesting that if you put a bunch of cells together, you get something more than a complex machine. From the other end, we're only sure that conscious experience happens in human brains, though through structural and behavioral similarity, we may assume some degree of conscious experience in a lot of animals. Going this route, around smaller insects you may start to wonder whether what you're looking for is more like a machine, or more like a feeling thing capable of experiencing emotions. Plants are biologically less complex than insects, and have no identifiable "locus of cognition".
I mean, you have to note that when guessing whether or not something can experience emotions, we're projecting our own mental states based on that thing's phenotype. Look how works of fictions - pictures, movies, even textual descriptions in books - can make you feel compassion towards a rock, or a car. A skilled writer could rephrase my fighter jet example in a way that would make you actually feel sorry for it. This means our intuition is not a good judge here. Past that, the best we have (AFAIK) is heuristics, like "has no brain/brain-level complexity = probably can't have experiences".
It's fine to restrict yourself to a diet consisting only of locally grown, organic, whole foods, and to never eat meat from a chicken whose résumé you can't review first. Just be aware that you are making your food security dependent on the conditions of your region.
This applies to both cities and remote towns in the countryside. Ensuring safety and stability is often a larger priority than freshness.
I.e. The remote town of 500 people 6 hours away from Salt Lake City won’t have the scale or shelf life to accept fresh kale from the California Coast. Processing helps bring these people food safely and conveniently.
Everything does not have to powder in a bucket, but if say 80% of what was sold in a grocery store was, the world would be a much better place.
You are free to buy your old fashion food, and I will enjoy my Huel.
This doesn’t strike me as a particularly reasonable argument. There are plenty of enjoyable things that are bad for you, those around you, or in this case, the whole planet (cigarettes, slavery, rolling coal, etc.) What would it take for you to care about “methane farting cows”?
Aside: Cows actually don’t fart much. Most of the methane they produce comes out the other end as a burp.
My contention is with the vocal minority of extremists who evangelize plant-only diets as the only right way to live, even though they aren't necessarily better. These people resort to less effective, morality based arguments to sway others (let's face it, most people care more about eating tasty food than saving the environment), indicating that their real concern isn't moving the needle on meat consumption, it's asserting their moral superiority in order to gain status among their peers.
A pragmatist would use effective tools to reduce the average person's meat consumption by 75% and that would solve a lot of problems. They'd cook healthy vegetable heavy dinners for their friends, or maybe promote pork/chicken instead of beef since those generate fewer emissions. A fanatic proclaims that the only solution is eliminating all meat consumption, and the fate of the earth is on the line.
Most plants require significant genetic editing (in form of 10k+ years of selective breeding), processing (milling, soaking, cooking) and adding secondary plant products just for taste (spices) to be palatable. Not to mention need for aditional fat and emulgators.
Most of plants, even after 10k years of selective breeding, are toxic for us in some way. Even simple green leafy vegetables are full of oxalic acid.
On top of that, modern agriculture approach of artificial fertilizing, and high nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels in dirt that is starved of other nutrients through constant yearly use, results in changes in plants where they contain higher % of simple carbs, while not having normal levels of other micronutrients.
No hunter-gatherer group in the last 2 million years of evolution has exceeded 50% of caloric intake being plant-based, and only some small groups near ecuator have managed to get close to 50%.
During the most recent part of our evolution, part that has made us human, we have evolved to eat predominantly meat diet. Agriculture sidestepped that, and coopted evolutional remnants of a time 50-60 million years ago, when our ancestors were 5kg proto-monkey frugivores.
High-carb plant-based diets are undoing of evolution. Human brains, and general human stature, have been getting smaller during the last 20k years, accelerating in the last 10k.
Again, why is that? There are countless other moral issues (some of which I mentioned in the gp post) that most of us cringe when thinking they were contentious debates in the past. What makes eating beef different?
The implication that people behave morally to gain status among their peers is, frankly, childish. As if the only reason people aren't setting children or fire, murdering one another, stealing cars, etc. is to "gain status". No—I encourage you to realize that some of us actually believe in doing what we think is the right thing. I assure you, veganism garners far more criticism and bizarre hatred than it does admiration.
Why has everything to be some powder in a bucket or some goop in a tube?
It is so strange that people replace animal products with chemistry.
I can understand not to eat animal based products on moral or environmental grounds but replacing those with Monsanto soy and chemistry does not strike me as the proper way to do it.
Do you think the bucketized bean protein powder extracted from peas might be bad for you? Well eat the freaking peas I bet those taste better as well.