> The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.
I think you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none. Those newer alternative meat products are not the basis of a healthy plant-based diet - they are treats that actually are marketed towards meat eaters. Ask any veg/ans you know what they eat as staples; it's not expensive Impossible or Beyond burgers, but tofu, tempeh, beans, legumes, and seitan.
I also doubt that the problems with meat can be fixed at its current scale. A trope in the vegan community is every meat eater has a neighbor raising organic grass-fed cattle on acres of land that he lovingly slaughters.
The reality is, almost all animal agriculture in the US is factory farming style CAFOs.
[0] "Using data from the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, which was released this month, it is estimated that 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are raised in factory farms"
Cattle especially are not grass fed, they are stuffed with corn, soy, and other food grown at a rapid clip with petro fertilizer. There is not enough grazing land in the country to produce meat at the scale it's consumed here.
[0] https://plantbasednews.org/culture/factory-farms-study/
You can dive into the USDA numbers yourself here.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Full_Re...
It is much cheaper to operate a couple of large national-scale factories to produce plant-based meat alternatives with mostly automated equipment and minimal regulatory oversight. Meat processing either needs to be regional, which is higher cost, or national, where limitations or capital costs of automation require a large pool of unskilled labor. You "fix" factory farming by enforcing labor standards at the processing layer that make concentrated, high throughput meat processing uneconomic. The result would be changes in how the industry functions and higher prices. (ie. market forces)
Those same market forces would ultimately drive more plant-based calories in diets and probably healthier eating habits. Factory farms exist because USDA policy since the 70s have been focused on slowing inflation in food prices. That policy ultimately drives alot of unsustainable practices, from factory farms for livestock, to the long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, to the transfer of topsoil from the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio river watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. 50-100 years from now, our descendants will be returning to regional agriculture at very high cost as midwest production fails and climate change breaks the environment the supports the magnificent bounty of the California central valley and Colorado watershed.
This whole paragraph is exactly right, and exactly why factory meat is set to rapidly lose market share to plant-based substitutes. The market forces are unstoppable.
I'll add that the lesson of COVID's meat processing labor disruptions will not be lost on retailers and retaurant chains.
"Of the 1,315,051 farms with livestock, 18 percent (237,821 farms) were farms with confined livestock types (i.e., farms with 4 or more animal units of any combination of fattened cattle, milk cows, swine, chickens and turkeys, or appeared to be raising veal or heifers in confinement). These 237,821 farms accounted for $79 billion in gross livestock sales, which was 80 percent of gross livestock sales for all farms."
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs14...
I don't quite follow.
What happens to businesses with fixed or declining demand? Consolidation.
The bigger players start scooping up the weaker ones. Bigger players have more regulatory muscle. There are a thousand examples... aircraft is probably a decent one. You used to have Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell, Douglas, etc... Now you have Boeing as "Team USA", who has the political and market power to do things like ship airliners that crash for avoidable reasons.
But I'm assuming he means that with a reduced demand for meat, it would mean that factory farms are going to have to find ways to reduce costs. And they're already doing their best to operate at the bare minimum. So any cost cutting measures will come at the expense of animal welfare.
We want the cheapest meat - don't care how. Caring for an animal's welfare is counter to that.
If demand for meat goes down it means environmental damage is reduced and fewer animals have to be born, which means fewer animals have to suffer.
I don’t really buy it.
You just have to ask yourself why AG-GAG laws exist.
Oat/Soy/Almond milk in most cases is a sugary flavored drink with a little less sugar than a soft drink. It's marketed with dubious health claims as a substitute, including paid placement on dairy shelves to imply that it is in fact a dairy product.
We call Coffeemate "non dairy creamer", Yoohoo a "chocolate flavored drink", SunnyD "orange drink", cut-up whitefish with red dye "imitation crab". Why should oat water be any different? Why is it important for the private equity people who own Oatly, or the Diamond Nuts people who own Califa, or Coke and Pepsi to market nut/oat based products as milk?
>> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a personal recommendation not endorsed by the HN guidelines, I suggest responding to the point a commenter is actually making, rather than a point that is often made on the same "side" of an issue, but that that particular comment is not currently making. Specifically, the comment above said nothing about product naming "fooling" anyone.
>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I stand by my comment. It is a good response to what they said. I cited multiple examples of the same thing happening commonly in food naming to prove how their argument thta this is some PR narrative is wrong.
Edit: this is clearly different from a company marketing a product alternative, such as margarine (for butter) or Impossible Burgers (for ground beef).
Why would they? Do frankfurters contain frank? Do danishes contain da?
Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc.
All of the “problems” with meat are market issues. Animal welfare issues are due to industrial farming practices, which will get worse if the industry declines. Land use and environmental issues are all about the market conditions, which are literally putting sustainable meat and dairy business out of business.
The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.