Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Industry Worries

Re:Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Indus... by tsimionescu on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @03:14AM (#33784923)

I also had this thought once, but then looked it up, and found that it is completely wrong. It's basically like saying "we already eat plenty of fish... We just call em things like beef, pork, and bird meat".

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.

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Re:Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Indus... by TylerE on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @10:55AM (#33789115)

Not true as of about 10 years ago. The taxonomy changed.

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

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Re:Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Indus... by tsimionescu on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @01:02PM (#33790921)

That's still at best relating insects and crustaceans at the level of (most) fish and mammals. I'm also unclear on where this pancrustacea clade comes in, as most Wikipedia articles for specific species don't even list the clade, just the phylum and class - and fish are still the same class as mammals, while insects and shellfish are not.

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.

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Re:Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Indus... by TylerE on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @01:33PM (#33791317)

“ As of 2010, the Pancrustacea taxon is considered well accepted, with most studies recovering Hexapoda within Crustacea.”

Hexapoda are all of the insects.

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