I think those meat replacements are good for people who have just become vegan as they give you a sense of familiarity, but after a while you realise that it’s possible to eat a delicious vegan diet that doesn’t consist of mega-processed things trying to be meat.
https://twitter.com/business/status/1594742995647070214?ref_...
I don't have any ill effects from tofu either.
When mixed with water it transforms into a firm gel after heating, or it can be used to create extremely resilient emulsifications.
It’s practically flavourless, so it works well. I’m not convinced it passes through the GI tract with no impact whatsoever, but it appears so far to be relatively benign.
It’s nothing like sawdust or a filler, though. It’s also somewhat expensive so it wouldn’t be a good option for filler. My 500g bag was around $25, but if you wanted to use actual sawdust, well I think you could get that for close to nothing.
It seems fairly benign, but it can’t be digested and it isn’t clear to me if we have gut flora which can break it down efficiently.
I enjoy throwing together little experiments in a similar vein to beyond meat or impossible burger products, but it feels too much like a lab experiment to eat regularly. My kids like “meat balls” with spaghetti, so I tend to make that and otherwise I’m gravitating back towards whole food-based garden burgers.
A weird thing about beyond/impossible is that while they appear moderately healthier than real meat from some perspectives… They are still pretty trashy. I can’t not feel like I’m making a bad choice, even if it’s home made, and at the end of the day I just want to feel good (mentally and physically) about my food.
This is a qualitative/irrational assessment and not a quantitative/rational one, especially considering that fat consumption got a wrongfully-deserved bad rap for decades thanks to unethical lobbying by the sugar industry.
I’d argue (based on the best dietary research the world has produced) that saturated fats do deserve a bad rap, and most refined fats are also worth minimizing in a diet. Are all fats bad? Not at all, we should eat them. We’d die without them. Are saturated fats and refined plant fats worth including in our diet? Arguably no, not at all. Incidental consumption of them is more than enough and intentional consumption becomes problematic quite quickly.
I’m not aware of any outcomes-based studies spanning the globe which indicate that a high fat diet serves most people well as far as long term quality and quantity of life. On the other hand, there are several, and more all the time, showing the opposite.
The valid “fat is actually okay!” data almost exclusively comes from whole-food based studies. However, those which position saturated fats as safe or healthy are typically of poor designs. One example off the top of my head is one which put vegetarians on an extremely high coconut oil diet and meat eaters on a lean meat diet. The results? Eating meat is better for your cholesterol! Surprise?
I couldn’t make this stuff up. In fact, someone likely paid people a lot of money to make it up. The irony is that it uses the truth (saturated fat raises blood lipids) to indicate that this truth is actually false. If saturated fat was bad, wouldn’t the intersection of meat eaters and vegetarians look different? It must be okay. Makes a great headline!
I agree that the sugar lobbying is absurd and harmful to society, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice to believe there isn’t a massive and busy lobby behind fats as well. Why wouldn’t there be? Look at how many studies around animal products and fat are funded by associates of the food processing industry.
And yet the best studies we have clearly have no commercial agenda behind them, they typically took years or decades of work, yet they’re hastily discounted by all kinds of people.
diet is a fairly complex topic and it's a shame that most doctors don't get more than a single course in nutrition. I read a paper like this (which is related to our discussion) and the raw complexity is just... difficult to boil down into a variety of good food choices sometimes: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000871
Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.
If this idea was new to you then maybe have a look at these sources, or do some other searches
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-and-proce...
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...
"There is evidence showing an association with certain types of food processing and poor health outcomes (especially highly- or ultra-processed foods). This association applies mainly to ultra-processed foods that contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthful fats."
From the second one. Maybe you confused my position?
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/impossible-burger-vs-be...
Have you ever for example looked at how many vitamins are destroyed 50%+ just be heating food and even minerals become less absorbable.
All the enzymes get killed by heating over merely over 45deg C.
The fats also change during heating.
The proteins change during heating.
Then there is the Maliard reaction which is a reaction of carbohydrates + protein which creates a totaly new byproduct (this is eg why bread browns).
Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad.
Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vitamins) is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.
You waste much more by not cooking them.
On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.
Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.
Clarify what you become deficient in by consuming a cooked apple.
This frankly reeks of naturalistic fallacy.
I didn't quite realize until I met one of those "carbs are worse energy sources" guys at a job
Cooking makes some things edible that weren't before. Just because it doesn't work on an apple in the way you are imagining doesn't mean much.
I'll also note that many folks think of baked apples as sugar-laden desserts and fresh apples as eaten plain. Nevermind that folks add apples to savory rice dishes and nevermind that folks dip fresh apples in caramel sauce. You need more than the descriptions of "baked" and "raw" to denote health.
Both ways of preparation have their merit.
BTW, enjoyability is an important and underestimated factor in nutrition. (Unfortunately abused by the food industry.)
On one hand, the faux meats sound quite risky, but in the other hand they are under extreme scrutiny like no highly processed food before them, so they might not actually be bad at all.
But as humans we can't read every study for every ingredient. We have to use heuristics to guesstimate a healthy diet. Reducing (not eliminating) processed foods is a decent one. Same goes for including protein, increasing fiber (so whole wheat instead of the cake americans call "bread"), including veggies.
The complexity of digestion rivals that of cryptography. And the same caveats apply.
Ultraprocessed foods, let's say a [plant] burger, are the food equivalent of "roll your own crypto".
Less processing = fewer things we break without knowing we broke them. I'm in no way actually arguing against cooking.
This would take a fair bit of time and space to explain in general, but if you have specific questions I'll do my best to address them.
Nutrition pretty much by definition requires a lot of simplification to allow people to make quick decisions on food choices, and so broad rules that are mostly right are pretty useful (and pretty much the basis of how most diets work).
Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like?
Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc).
None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms).
But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it.
For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
So your comment makes no sense at all.
The bigger issue is vitamins, in particular B12. But that's easily fixed with a daily multivitamin.
I don’t want to know how anybody gets actual, non-supplemented B12 nowadays. Many foods add a B12 in the form of cyanocobalamin. We evolved in a world where bacteria left B12 on nearly every surface left out long enough. But nowadays we clean our food and it shouldn’t be present. People will say they get it from the organ meat of certain animals - because that’s where those animals collect the B12 in their environment.
Notably, I avoid cyanocobalamin like the plague. It releases small amounts of cyanide into your liver upon processing. It’s also not particularly bioavailable. There are better B12s and I wish food would leave me to choose it myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathyrism
Being very cautious before to include an unlimited amount of peas in your diet seems a wise move.
The commonly consumed pea types (yellow, sweet, snap, snow) have no risk of causing Lathyrism. Only wild peas pose a risk and those are outright banned in most nations. (notable exception, india, where it is part of several common dishes).
The fact that wild peas are much more dangerous does not remove the danger from common sweet peas (of any kind or color, Is the same species). Is a matter of how much of it you eat, and if you allow enough days between meals to detox.
It depends also in "how" you eat it. If you mix it with cereals or not (hint, you should) and even in "where" you cook it.
You are spreading FUD.
The link you've provided is yet another study on wild peas (grass pea is a wild pea, Lathyrus sativus, just a different name).
Show me the study that links sweet pea, Lathyrus odoratus, consumption with Neurolathyrism.
The only danger to eating sweet peas is when you eat them in combination with eating wild peas. [1]
The pea types I listed do not cause lathyrism without being mixed with Lathyrus sativus.
By common pea or sweet pea, I mean the green common edible one. Pisum sativum = Lathyrus sativus a species that is known to cause the disease currently if eaten in big amounts. Is Lathyrism is happening still today. In a few parts of the planet, India basically. And is a serious irreversible condition, not much unlike paraplegic. Maybe it has a different name in English. Dunno.
Lathyrus odoratus, is the Fragrant sweet pea, a small species with huge flowers that smell really well. It has tiny peas that are not really edible -in big amounts- (all are "edible" in very small quantities) and of course, as most Lathyrus it causes lathyrism. is just that is a different case of Lathyrism, affecting bones instead nerves if I remember correctly.
Lathyrus sativus is also referred to as the “white pea”. Because it’s white.
I know sativus and sativum look the same but that doesn’t mean they are the same plant.
Here’s an article with photos of Lathyrus sativus. [1]
If I may inquire, are you from india? If so, then yes, you probably do have to be more aware of the peas you are eating. From the articles I can find it sounds like Lathyrus sativus is banned in india but still somewhat commonly sold. That’s not the case where I’m at in the US. You cannot accidentally get Lathyrus sativus here because nobody is selling it.
[1] https://india.mongabay.com/2019/05/toxic-debate-rages-on-ove...
Yep. The International Plant Names lists 33 synonims for Pisum sativum L. and 16 for Lathyrus sativus L. and none of them coincide. Botanical names are changing all the time, and is not straightforward sometimes.
So you were right and I was wrong. I stand corrected. Thank you for getting me out of my mistake.
Taken from wikipedia entry on Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score [1]:
- Chicken has a PDCAAS of 0.95
- Soy has a PDCAAS of 0.92
- Black beans have a PDCAAS of 0.74 (highest legume)
- Other beans and legumes have a PDCAAS of 0.70
- Wheat (seitan) has a PDCAAS of 0.42
Facts:
Soy has good enough nutrients to make a valid claims for it without throwing away valid science.
Soy is not surpassing chicken breast in PDCAAS, or red meat.
Eggs and dairy literally break the scale and are by far the highest ranking whole foods on a PDCAAS basis.
Seitan and beans are terrible in comparison in terms of PDCAAS, with you needing to consume nearly 2x the amount of protein from the former to compete with the later.
Opinions:
As far as fat goes, keep in mind tofu has a 1:2 fat:protein ratio. Chicken breast is 1:20+. This reason is the reason a lot of people herald chicken breast
Overconsumption of soy can lead to health implications
Soy does not have enough leucine to trigger the MTOR pathways to build muscle. If you are having soy post workout, you need to consume 45-60g of protein, vs just 20-30g of protein from animal products
Red meat has literally everything you need to live. Throw in a little carbs and fiber too and you can run at peak performance without worrying about anything in your diet.
Biases:
I've been relentless about my diet for 10 years and have tried everything. This includes vegan, vegetarian, keto, carb cycling, protein sparring modified fasts, you name it.
This year I started eating an animal based diet and not only do I feel great, my TDEE went from 2400 to over 3700. This means while I used to eat 2400kCal to maintain my weight, I now have to eat 3700 to maintain my weight, and I feel fantastic while doing so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correcte...
That sounds pretty comparable from your chosen metric.
However, it's also misleading to claim it's debunked then point to seitan and beans as viable alternatives, or warn against fat content immediately after comparing tofu to chicken.
Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
Are there areas where you don’t?
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
I think the answer must be yes for everyone here. We are choosing to use (and pay for) the internet and electricity when we could instead be buying food for people who have none. We participate in Western economies which prey on the economies of the developing world.
I think it's important to also think about the definition here of 'sentient' and the definition of 'harm'. Is it 'harmful' to build houses, when otherwise animals would live in the fields/forests? Is it 'harmful' to burn fossil fuels for energy? Do you refuse to use electricity which has come from fossil fuel sources?
Is 'sentience' the right point to draw the line? How would you respond to findings like this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.13065, which comes to the conclusion that the assumption that plants are not sentient may be flawed?
You make great points about exploitation that we all benefit from.
As for plants, I think it’s possible, however raising animals requires even more plants to be killed.
And I’m not sure plants experience pain the way animals do. And if I had to choose, it seems animals are more capable of experiencing pain and suffering.
Because I wake up refreshed, have steady energy throughout the day, and can focus on solving complicated tasks throughout the day. I'm happier and healthy than I've ever been.
> Are there other areas of your life that you optimize for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings?
Almost every area of my life is at the expense of other sentient beings. I use energy that probably comes from coal that is fueling the war. I use an iPhone that has a battery that was probably made from slaves in china, built from materials sourced from slaves in mines in Africa. If you're checking hacker news, I'm assuming you are optimizing for your own personal preferences at the expense of other sentient beings.
I'd like to change some of that. The are more effective ways of doing so than just opting out of society.
> Are there areas where you don’t?
Chicken and pork are actually my favorite foods. I don't eat them because I think as livestock they're a net harm to the environment.
I don't kill spiders in my house, they're happy to cohabitate.
I have a dog, I sacrifice hours a day to make sure he is happy and healthy.
Happy to answer any other questions
Do you desire to protect your dog or dogs over other animas capable of the same or greater social and emotional experience?
Why not eat dogs?
In your view, if a lion and a hunter both kill a gazelle, have they both committed the same moral violation?
The philosophy makes no sense even if you start with the assumption that animals are on the same moral plane as people that does not preclude or discount eating them out of preference because animals already do that. If you want to argue for veganism use a less combative prideful argument. For example I'm not vegan or vegetarian but I heavily reduce my meat consumption for environment and health reasons, less than 2 times a month and I want to go lower. Talking about the nuance and difficulty that comes with eating less meat and overcoming them should be inline with the, moral pride based better than you attitude you have. And it should be something you are seeking not trying to derail because your goal is to get people to eat less meat.
One need not conflate “combative” with confronting.
As for other animals, I know that they suffer, feel pain, and have a desire to live.
I do not know if they have the capacity to decide what to eat.
We humans, however, do.
And, the vast majority of meat being eaten is from animals that are vegetarian.
According to Wikipedia and Google, tofu [1] has 8% protein, while chicken [2] has almost 31%.
Is there some more finesse required in the exact variety of tofu that you mean?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu#Nutrition_and_health
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicken+breast+nutrition+100...
I have tried vegan (whole foods only) for months, and I have real trouble with legumes, not just normal gas, and my blood work went crazy. Triglycerides shot up for one.
The healthiest I have ever felt, and the best my blood work has ever been, was eating 1.5lbs of grassfed beef every day (with lots of roots and leaves too).
I can do vegetarian pretty easily, I process eggs and dairy well, but both of those foods are designed to trigger rapid growth in young organisms. I'm not growing anymore so I tend to pack on fat with them.
My chosen middle ground is to get my protein from fish (Cobain said they don't have feelings) and dinosaurs(they had their time). I feel little kinship to cows, grew up around them, but it isn't efficient, even if I feel physically better eating them.
There are plenty of studies showing large populations of vegetarians suffering vitamin deficiencies, so thriving is quite a stretch. Here is one example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29446340/
I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.
The form of sugar in fruit isn’t quite as bad as some, and all the fiber helps it be absorbed more slowly but there is still a lot of it many.
An apple has a much sugar as 6oz of Coke. Lots of nutrients too, but 23g of sugar is… a lot.
https://www.instagram.com/jamesbebbington/?hl=en
http://www.inspiredlife.org/richard-harpham/item/35-james-pr...
What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed.
Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other creatures than non-animal agriculture simply due to the additional land requirements. It is far easier to accept the less harmful industry.
There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering:
- Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought
- Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers.
- Only eat meat you have personally killed in the most humane way possible
- Vegetarianism
- Veganism
- Fruitarianism
- Starve to death?
Telling people that their principles or feelings are wrong is rarely a great way to convince people, it just makes you look obnoxious in debates.
On the second point, I agree, if in person I wouldn't make such a statement in that way because reactions are immediate and you're within immediate awkwardness. But on the internet, you read a statement and then you will emotionally react, but can then go research more, ponder, deliberate and choose whether you respond emotionally, matter-of-factly, not at all, etc. I think that's great and in a sense encourages some more provocative honesty that we dance around in the flesh.
Maybe you must eat factory farmed meat, fine, it's not for me to say. But that's not most people. Most people can do with reducing their meat intake, and it isn't hard. It's not like you are in the wilderness hunting or anything. You just go to the grocery store and buy veggies and beans and stuff.
Furthermore, for some people, eating meat from a factory farm is orders of magnitude more difficult than eating a strict plant based diet. Maybe that's easy for you - not for me.
Finally, while nature may indeed be cruel, we do not need to be.
The idea that killing animals is more cruel than not is to ignore ecology.
Factory farms and industrial meat is certainly another story. But I wanted to point out that cruelty is not so black and white. It’s similar to the cat people that feed strays — makes them feel good, but it makes the problem worse which is more cruel than simply not feeding the strays.
I strongly disagree with this. If there were no humans participating, and deer ended up overpopulated, and then starved, would there be any issue? Of course not, this is just how nature balances itself.
That "killing an animal directly via hunting" is more cruel than "letting the populate self-correct via natural processes" is not a matter of common sense - it's not something we all agree on. There is an implication that we know better than the universe and I'm not convinced that is the case.
> Wild pigs are another significant environmental nuisance. They reproduce rapidly and cause massive destruction wherever they go. Seems like managing those populations without eating the meet is worse ethically.
I assume you are referring to feral pigs, which are not wild in the sense that a native creature is. They are domesticated pigs which have ended up in foreign environments. Whether hunting them is appropriate or not, I'm not sure.
Nowadays, though, we have gotten ourselves in a pickle, by eliminating the natural predators in many environments in which deer thrive naturally, or have adapted to. Via our own lack of foresight, consideration for the planet as a whole, or even some degree of self-serving malice, we have created a really tricky problem.
I do agree we ought to work on this issue. Hunting is probably the best, most practical solution we have, but only because I believe we should try to fix what we have broken, not because it is somehow less cruel. A less practical but far less cruel solution may be a sterilization program for the invasive populations.
Each particular deer is, though. And if you were one, given a choice between getting shot and starving to death, which one would you prefer?
Is the humane way to kill an animal the same way one would humanely kill a toddler without consent of the parents or child?
If not why not, when we consider animal have at least the intelligence, will to live, social connections and capacity for suffering as children?
One can argue the cruelty of eating animals regardless - but there very much is a difference between tightly caged factory farming, pumping animals with medicine constantly because the conditions keep them sick all the time, and raising animals in a healthy environment.
Halal one.
> Is the humane way to kill an animal the same way one would humanely kill a toddler without consent of the parents or child?
Interesting wording.
> If not why not, when we consider animal have at least the intelligence, will to live, social connections and capacity for suffering as children?
When we will be able to ask that kind of a contest?
PS. I know, animals has some signs of intelligence. But for me this measure of intelligence is not enough for not willing to eat it. And referring to parent poster, I really think there is some ethics in eating only those meat which has been killed by me, but I only have a chicken farm when I want to eat not only chicken.
Is exactly what happens. Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore. Not wildflowers, butterflies, hedgehogs, molluscs or birds. Soy fields have a biodiversity composed of: Soy. Period.
If we got rid of all cattle, we would not reduce the amount of soybeans grown by 77%, just our utilization of what is grown.
Beans are the crop. Everything else must wait until they are ready, and by then it will be basically dry matter. Therefore all except the beans is a residual.
Can still be recycled into more human food by herbivores, but we couldn't do it directly. We can't feed on dry stems, withered flowers or brown leaves.
If you want specific studies I can go look up in the book but it sounds like your asking for further reading, not cited sources.
If anyone wants to engage with the consequences of animal agriculture, this is a great starting point: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/climatechange/doc/FAO%20repor...
What do you imagine we would do with the soy pucks that are produced after extruding the oil?
Also, ruminants need non starchy, fibrous plant materials. I can't speak toward chicken and pork but I don't advocate people eat those.
"86% of the global livestock feed intake is made of materials that are inedible by humans" - Sacred Cow, Diana Rogers, source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241...
Of that last 14% of human edible food, the vast majority is used at the end to fatten up the animals for slaughter.
"Results estimate that livestock consume 6 billion tonnes of feed (dry matter) annually – including one third of global cereal production – of which 86% is made of materials that are currently not eaten by humans. In addition, soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake. Producing 1 kg of boneless meat requires an average of 2.8 kg human-edible feed in ruminant systems and 3.2 kg in monogastric systems. While livestock is estimated to use 2.5 billion ha of land, modest improvements in feed use efficiency can reduce further expansion."
Even the source you are citing agrees that after massaging the numbers as much as possible it's still 3x less efficient to produce calories for human consumption by feeling animals.
I cannot access the full article, but from the abstract that seems to not be congruent with what the study is suggest. Perhaps you are confusing kg for kcal? It could indeed be the fact that it is 3x less efficient by weight.
Given that the article is pointing out that 86% of the feed for animals is not edible by humans, claiming that meat is 3x less efficient calorie wise with these numbers is also making the claim that we are growing plants 2x more calorically dense by meat than weight.
For factory farmed cattle (which is the most common) the situation is far worse.
An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?
This is a false equivalence. The correct question would be "how much soy consume the number of people that could be feed with this cow".
The error is understandable because many of this movements are focused in the individual, and equality among individuals. This is just one way to study ecology, but not the more interesting or rewarding one.
Dairy cows and meat cows are entirely different. Old dairy cows do become meat, but it's very poor meat.
Please also explain how any large monoculture crop is a net gain for diversity?
> Evidence for that rather large claim?
While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:
"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]
"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]
See also:
How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:
> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:
> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meat-consumption-linked-to-t...
[1] http://www.cbra.org.br/portal/downloads/publicacoes/rbra/v42...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/saving-th...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20180928055440/https://globalfor...
> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture is better for biodiversity than crop monocultures. I understand that the truth can be shocking for some people, but there are dozens of ecological studies pointing to the environmental value of pastures and meadows, specially as ecotones.
As the initial plan to demonize cattle failed, now you are silently replacing "non-animal agriculture" by "rainforests" as a straw man to attack the original claim. Sorry, but this was not the point that we were discussing.
"Non-animal agriculture", also known as "Agriculture", has replaced happily as many rainforest hectares as cattle, if not more. Take a look to the fate of Indonesian rainforests
The reason is simple: to produce the same amount of energy (and protein) with livestock as you would with crops, you have to use orders of magnitude more resources and you affect the environment orders of magnitude more: you use more fuel, release more greenhouse gases, use more water, use more land area, destroy more soil, et.c.
And while it might be true that one hectare used for grazing might be more biodiverse than one hectare used for, your example, soybeans. But 85 percent of the world's soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.
I think you need to look up the meaning of the expression "straw man". And about the rainforests: Tropical rainforests are the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems in the world, and right now, huge areas of that rainforests are destroyed for the land to be used to raise cattle.
This is just silly. I can't imagine an internally consistent worldview that would assert something like this. Of course natural biomes are valuable regardless of the presence of cattle. Besides, modern cattle are domesticated creatures and don't even really have a native (i.e. not man-made or facilitated) environment.
The assertion regarding soy fields is at best a misunderstanding of the actual data regarding land use, or at worse, a meaningless tautology.
For those who don't have time to click and read the link in the other reply by user vnorilo, I'll just quote the relevant paragraph:
> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.
I mean if you determine that animals dying for your diet is no good, then make sure you consider the people that might be dying to bring you the goods you haven't checked the source of, or for the stadium you enjoy watching events at, etc.
Quit meat if you feel you need to, but don't pretend it makes you a morally better person because 'animal murder,' it's not that simple.
If your interested in killing the least amount of animals, why not go hunting and fishing, that almost assuredly kills fewer than industrialized agriculture. I've replaced almoat all beef all year round in our family with deer venison kept year round in a chest freezer.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that veganism or vegetarianism for most people is very emotional action. Most of the pop media around it focuses on the cuteness of the animal not on the total number of animals killed. and it's ignoring that like in hunting or ethical farming, the animals have a very full happy life.
As a hunter it's interesting seeing this article on HN and seeing no mention of hunting. Also not a bad thing, it's not part of the culture here, but it's interesting to see that bias in the HN culture.
If everyone were to switch to a vegan diet, global agriculture land use would be reduced by 75%.
Dubai opened one about 6 months ago capable of producing over a million kg of leafy greens a year, the largest vertical farm in the world by some margin, and that's just a pilot project.
The “largest vertical farm in the world by some margin” produces less calories than a tiny family farm that can barely afford its own tractor. The largest wheat farm in Canada is over 35,000 acres which means it produces just as much food per day as the largest vertical farm produces per year. That wheat farm isn’t even in the list of top 10 largest farms in North America.
We’re comparing pebbles to continents.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-h...
[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.
> The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.
Pure fantasy. We’ve had vertical farming for thousands of years already - first built by the same Babylonians that grew wheat in Mesopotamia! When’s it going to start snowballing?
It's not just land use, it's every single vector of comparison, like water use, energy use, human labor (ab)use, habitat destruction, etc.
If humanity is the ground of your analysis, meat consumption will fail to present itself as the decisive factor for any vector of comparison. The decisive factor will generally be the elevation of capital or oligarchic social ends over general social interest.
It's a better quality of product and doesn't send their cows to feedlots.
I've seen industrial farming and it's not pretty, but more than anything it products a pretty crappy product now compared to organic.
You eat a lot less as the quality leaves you satisfied.
> wanting to reduce suffering
Bullshit, you don't give 2 shits about that, you want to increase suffering in actual sentient beings.
Which a cow is not. Hence you are in a cult because what else would you call that position??
You are not a moral agent and you don't get to define what others can and can't do when it comes to food production.
Organics is a fantastic way to go, it just shows how full of shit you are to go against that.
Liar.
You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted.
Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out any and all dairy products: cheeses (all 100 million of them), yogurt, regular milk, sour milk, sour cream, whey, etc.
And there's vegan cheese https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancheesemaking
and of course vegan yogurt etc. (you can make yogurt with coconut milk for example)
...and it sucks as a replacement for genuine leather.
My old boss was vegan (or rather his wife was and he was very accommodating of her diet, he would still eat meat outside the home). He would always mention that the fanciest, most expensive vegan cheese option out there set itself apart from the rest with the tagline "It melts!" on the packaging. Vegan cheese has to come a long way to be anywhere comparable to real cheese. The same applies to synthetic leather, by the way.
But if you are looking for something like a slice of cheddar or vegan mac-n-cheese the options are really pretty terrible and all have an aftertaste like you just ate a spoonful of Crisco.
[0] https://miyokos.com/products/classic-double-cream-chive-chee...
I don't think I have ever seen something trying to imitate any really soft (brie) or blue (roquefort) cheeses.
But even that aside, it's not our duty as consumers to keep eating animals to keep industry able to make shoes and cheese.
My point is, what are we going to replace those with? Especially leather & co. They have real life applications, they're not just fads. Plus, will those replacement products be sustainable? Vegan leather is just rebranded plastic, for example.
I'm equally curious, but I don't know the numbers, if replacing plastic packaging with paper/cardboard is environmentally sound. I remember back in the day efforts to reduce paper consumption, I think our sustainable paper production capacity was near its limits.
Even vegan (plastic) leather is significantly better from an environmental and emissions perspective than cowhide leather. The tanning process is not exactly eco-friendly, and neither is raising cows.
What in the flying fuck is "cyber chicken". I'm assuming this is a joke, right!?
You're not getting the flavour of a burger, no matter how hard you try to fool yourself (or make yourself sick). That's why these companies are flailing.
I think the purists are trying to hold a parity argument but the substitute enjoyers are cool with experimentation and want something similar even if it's not 1:1.
What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground.
Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several years running now). We are controlling for exercise patterns too. He’s just replaced his frequent burgers with an impossible patty instead.
This comment is just a wild claim with no evidence and falsely equates “processed” with “unhealthy”
I think you mean we have studies of dubious quality blaming red meat. And scores of people repeating the same trite arguments.
It's the same people that brought to you salt causes high blood pressure and saturated fat causes atherosclerosis, pushing the low fat craze and the obesity epidemic.
Sure, meat is bad, go eat hyper processed fake meat.
Those studies were all ideological driven and would never pass replication.
Mongols vs China, diet was a defining factor in the Mongols victories.
Meat and dairy, the dairy gave them tons go vitamin D as well.
Source?
Iirc it was that the figting forces of the various northern chinese states were comprised of conscript peasants whose diet consisted of grain and not much else, which stunted their growth among other things, meaning the mongols were significantly larger and stronger than them leading to certain mythologizing in the centuries afterwards. It probably also didn't help that the conscripted peasants were, well, conscript foot soldiers, wheras the mongols were willing participants on horseback
Bang on, same thing with the Dutch and the Brits when the empire flourished.
Dietary changes drive a lot of these things, more than I think is generally understood and credited.
The Mongols are a very famous example and extreme as you stated the Chinese peasant and soliders mostly had a grain based diet and poor health that came with it.
From just 2 minutes with your paper: "Higher heme iron intake appeared to be significantly associated with a 31 % (95 % CI 4–67 %) elevated risk of developing CHD" --- lmao, loving that 95% confidence interval between 4 and 67%.
Passing those out as proof of real science keeps the disinformation and terrible practice alive. If I had a dime every time a random commenter gave me a link to an epidemiologic nutritional study, I could fund a double blind randomized one myself.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/29/plant-based-... — have fun reading the actual numbers in Tables 2, 3 and 4 of the linked paper.
if normally distributed, two thirds would have elevated risk between 14% and 48%
that is to say, almost everyone has an elevated risk - so I have no idea why you are complaining about confidence intervals
Yet white fish is one of the most recommended heart healthy foods.
You have to be careful when talking about specific mechanisms in terms of Whole Foods. Nutrition can't be reduced down to single mechanisms to provide confident recommendations, and often times results are the opposite of what we would expect mechanistically.
also, it's still lower than red meat, it's on the order of white meat
if you want an iron-rich fish you'd have to go up to bluefin tuna, which does have a red tint to its meat
But some people do not support their habits to be changed and are ready to believe anything that confort their opinions. Even if their habits destroy the planet.
It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy.
Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy.
Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can find 10 studies proving the opposite side.
There is a need.
More importantly, while I like the taste of meat too much to give up on it, I would also very much prefer that it could be had without killing animals. I don't think plant-based meat is going to be the ultimate solution to this - more likely, it'll be the lab-grown stuff. But, either way, it requires investments from the food industry to reach maturity, and those won't happen unless there's a real customer interest. Buying fake-meat burger is a way to express that interest.
https://www.freshprep.ca/orders/11661077/recipes/thai-beyond...
(crustaceans are a good example as traces of them tend to get included into algal based food, but less pleasant sounding examples are e.g. from time to time small worms being in fruited pressed for juice, sound terrible but isn't really that terrible and impossible to avoid without using pesticides which are worse then that by far)
Except that fish are much more closely related to mammals than crustaceans are to insects (same phylum, different class). Here is an example of an animal that is as closely related to a cow as a grasshopper is to a lobster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp
Edit: Even more, dietary preferences tend to focus on a single species. Plenty of people eat chicken but not turkey, or eat pork but not boar. There are even people who eat lamb but not adult sheep. And no one eats wolf or eagle meat. To then come and say "hey, you already eat one arthropod, why not another" is pretty absurd.
I'm not at all against eating insects, I'm just pointing out that the fact we eat shrimp has 0 to do with it.
Either way, while we eat some mammals and birds, we still don't eat the vast majority of mammals or birds, and we barely eat any reptiles or amphibians or fish.
Hexapoda are all of the insects.
PS : soaked portobello mushrooms veggie burger is a delicatessen
Highly under-appreciated IMO.
There must be some special way to prepare it to make it taste good. There's no way I'll take this stuff and make burger patties out of it just like I would regular ground beef.
I'm not the only one either, do a search for "beyond smells like..." and look at the autocomplete results.
Raw ground beef is much more pleasant, though bland.
I ordered a incredible beef pizza thinking it was extra topping or something.
Half way through I happened to eat one of the 'beef' bits by itself and realised it tasted terrible and possibly expired.
I googled it and turned out they sold me a fake meat while advertising it as "<product_name> beef". Which I felt should be false advertising.
The funny thing is I really enjoy falafels and the English brand of vege mushroom paddies. But this fake meat is soulless.
The etymology doesn't really matter, but the french word for cheese refer to how milk is ~processed... "Fromage" -> "Formage" -> "putting stuff in forms". If you think "peanut butter" is confusing... it is called "pinda kaas" in dutch... directly translates to "peanut cheese"!
I'm in the UK so I might have trouble getting them, most of the vegan cheese I have access to is basically the same flavour just in different shapes and forms.
They're really good with no awful side effects or tastes. I like some vegetarian options, but honestly, most of it either tastes nasty or has poor texture.
And I doubt their business is struggling, or that Beyond Meats's fate has them worried.
Big problem though is the required level of processing to take a vague protein slurry and turn it into a glued together nugget means it's only really comparable to the absolute lowest quality, bulk batch, school lunch grade nuggets.
This said, I used to like Quorn before they started stuffing egg (mostly eggwhite) into everything. The real slime mold is great, but where I live it's near impossible to get Quorn products without the egg. They taste as bad as impossible/beyond with their clearly chemical taste.
Going beyond this, mosr vegetarians/vegans find over time that it is much cheaper and actually nicer to go simple, not with the replacements. tofu, seitan or simply vegetable dishes without any of these things. E.g. in a well flavoured bolognese/ragout no one can taste a difference between meat, fake meat or simple hard tofu (mouth feel/texture are clearly different though). And anyone should really try making seitan, it's super fun and easy - basically you just wash a bag of flour repeatedly with warm water.
Beyond doesn’t have the same issue for me.
It's a well known story I've heard of vegetarians going back to eating meat and then getting sick from the meat for some time. This is also why eating foods you're not used to can often make you sick even if they're fine. Your gut microbiome adapts to your diet, and if you suddenly change what you eat you can get indigestion.
From my understanding the beyond/etc "meat" acts like real meat to your body microbiome because it's so similiar.
The odd peculiar taste of these kinds of new plant based burgers can be pretty foul. For me and my partner, the Burger King veggie burger now tastes similar to dish soap.
Bring back the delicious bean burgers and actual normal veggie burgers.
That's interesting - is it a genetic thing like cilantro?
After this I tried several of these alternatives just to look for different flavors. Beyond meat really smelled weird when cooking, and while somewhat acceptable in taste I can totally share the stomach weirdness.
This didn't prevent me to keep trying other stuff. "Impossible meat" I was never able to find yet. But as other have said, the major issue is that all the alternative options cost _more_ than actual beef where I live. This makes it a luxury option.
"Here’s a pesky little chemical called hexanal. If you’ve ever eaten a beyond burger, or any of these plant based products 2.0 (though to be honest, it’s more like they’re on V.46.6.2) and burped 10 or 15 minutes afterwards, and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, wow, ok I definitely just had a meat alternative” you were probably regurgitating this aerosol. Some people think it’s fruity, like green apple, others like mulched grass. At the lab, we had to walk outside to get wafts of it in its pure form, but the minute I opened the cap I knew exactly what this flavour was…. “OLD FRYER OIL, 100%”. It’s metabolized in all manners of organisms through the oxidation of fatty acids, and is… kind of unpleasant?! The point is that while this molecule exists in fava beans, peas, and soy, (the three kings of texturized vegetable protein) when you have a WHOLE FOOD, its there in harmony among all sorts of other volatile compounds, while also being locked away deep inside the beans fibres. It’s the act of processing that concentrated and heightens the presence of off-flavours like these, making the processed foods made from them taste, well, processed. Good with the bad. You can’t concentrate for protein without concentrating other aspects of a plant. There’s always a cost. Now, I will always be a huge proponent for whole foods, made with care, prepared simply. But the realities of grocery store shelves dictate a different truth. People opt for convenience, and sometimes, you’ve got to meet them where they are. My current work at CH has me doggedly hunting down an effect of fermentation I’ve long known intuitively through practice. Certain lactic acid bacteria fermenting their way through legumes don’t just mask, but dismantle this and other problematic molecules. I’m still after the mode of action, but it’s also enough for me to know that age old techniques of fermentation (like soaking ones legumes or grains days in advance of their cooking) can still put to shame the greatest technological “advances” of food science of the past 40 years. Nature is, after all, cleverer than you are. "
https://www.facebook.com/david.zilber/posts/pfbid02CkCY53qDd...
Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
I assume Beyond, Impossible etc use another, more crude/unrefined approach.
> Though IDK what came out of their affair with Bezos, seems it didn't gain traction in the US? Unlike the rest of the world, they're big in LatAm and expanding. I think Australia is their latest successful gig. This isn't a paid endorsement btw, I just like their stuff.
Here they recently partnered with Kraft to make Not versions of their cheese singles (although some would say they weren't really cheese to begin with) and eventually other products. NotChicken is supposed to also make it here relatively soon, but sadly only as patties.
But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger or a garden burger. Those taste light and yummy and don’t leave a weird feeling in my stomach.