If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
By global average, under 15% of farm revenue is derived from government subsidies. USA is below that, at about 10%. Not sure if I'd call that massive, but that's semantics so it's a little hard to argue against. Does potato agriculture get massive subsidies?
> If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
The assumptions being that 1. potato farming get relatively much less subsidies as beef (and other meat) farming; 2. cost is such a factor in consumption that price change would cause "a lot" of difference. I don't think either are very safe, and as a general statement it doesn't follow that just reducing agricultural subsidies increases ratio of beef to potato (or meat to vegetable): EU subsidies are much higher than US, but USA eats far more beef per capita.
Subsidies go mostly to corn and soybeans. Think those are multipurpose but corn is used to feed livestock, of course. 10 or 15% may be a lot in a low-margin industry, and I don't know how it's split among crops.
No all subsidies are direct. For example, water costs too little in Arizona so foreign companies grow feed stock there to ship home.
If your farm is the recipient of a 15% subsidy, and your margin is only 10%, then the subsidy disappearing means you cannot continue producing the same stock going forward, as you'll be making a 5% loss.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
If it's too much you could do it for a smaller area ...
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
War, pestilence, famine, and death.
An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".
The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
> However, colonialism never conquered Africa.
As I'm a British national, and the British empire was famously the biggest, my ancestors managed to get up in basically everyone's business in the colonial era.
Even aside from all that stuff we nicked and put in museums, and the war crimes the British government has even been doing some official apologising for, it was the British empire that invented the concentration camp for use against… other colonists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...
My forebears don't get an "it's fine" badge just because the target was, in that case, a different bunch of Europeans from what is now a day-trip away.
> In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
Yes, I know. Everything being awful everywhere before the industrial age doesn't mean what the (in that case Spanish) did was fine, it makes it the equivalent of a drug-gang turf war where nobody holds any of the belligerents in high regard.
I was responding to gp, maybe wrong part of the thread. << "Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world". If this is not justification for war, I don't know what is.
And how do they know in the absence of colonialism, but just trade, these countries couldn't/wouldn't become advanced? I can equally say colonialism is what has left many of these countries in poverty and border disputes.
Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave trade WAS islam. As in, everything else was a rounding error. Even now, because the slave trade is still easily 95% of the entire existence of the religion.
For "some" reason people are now trying to rename it "African slave trade". Not at all to get people to focus on the 1% of slaves that went to work in western colonies in the New World (which is what Americans historically called it).
So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
But they do care if you're trying to drag the entire friend group to a vegetarian restaurant.
In university, a group of friends once decided on heading out to dim sum for a celebration; one of them was Jewish, and ended up basically becoming a vegetarian for a day (since pork is all over the place in that cuisine). It was a source of lighthearted amusement for all and everyone was fully accommodating.
North American food culture doesn't depend on familiarity ("the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted") at all. If anything, being a picky eater is discouraged and a sense of culinary adventure is praised. The service at QSRs has gotten slower in part because of pressure to reconfigure their basic ingredients into new, unfamiliar recipes. (Taco Bell is basically dedicated to this craft — and the greasy ground-beef slop doesn't even really look that different from the black bean slop anyway.)
Which is to say, it's not the meat eaters trying to impose culture on others. Vegetarians and vegans in my experience demonstrate an entirely unjustified persecution complex — the "they'll tell you" stereotype arises from the fact that people simply wouldn't care if it weren't explicitly brought up. That Simpson's episode with Lisa attempting vegetarianism was amusing, but also portrayed a world entirely alien to me.
Yes, North Americans eat a fair bit of meat on average. That's not at all the same thing as the dishes being "created around" the meat. We don't say "meatballs and spaghetti" (I even started automatically typing it the normal way around); substituting the meatballs for ground meat in the sauce is as natural as substituting a different shape of pasta.
Whole pieces of meat have a particular cachet, but this is because it's harder to hide a quality issue this way. Making a patty is missing the point. A hamburger is simply not highbrow cuisine. It's one culturally-established recipe, out of many, which is preferred in the context where it is mainly for convenience as finger food.
The proper vegetarian equivalent to a burger is a vegetarian wrap. (Or veggies on a bun, if the "bun form factor" is contextually important.) The proper vegetarian equivalent to a fancy meal with whole cuts of grilled meat is a fancy meal with artfully plated grilled vegetables.
Sure, but I would say that means vegetarian cuisine has less reason to emulate the form. It's entirely arbitrary. The point of eating a burger is that it's yet another convenient way of getting meat on a bun. (cf. fast-food places describing them as "sandwiches".) The social ritual of eating burgers with friends isn't about seeing the patty extend past the edges of the bun and thinking about the cow. It's about everyone holding something they'll enjoy eating, conveniently wrapped and portable, and chowing down. The burger is recognizable as a "burger" (as distinct from a wrap or a traditional sandwich) from the bun before it's recognizable from the contents. (Which is part of why the marketplace had no problem accepting chicken burgers.)
So anything that holds the vegetables together and keeps them inside a bun ought to work just fine. If our prospective new vegetarian wants the burger filling to taste like (or match texture etc.) a beef patty, that's a personal issue.
These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.
The first thing many new vegans ask is "what do I eat now?" The replacement food comes first, and beyond hits the mark a lot more than seitan does because we don't culturally eat seitan.
And even more so, I think beyond has made it so an entire generation realized they could go vegan. A black bean burger just never hit the same way.
Of course things will Be Different. That's the Whole Point.
I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.
And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans. It's is a product aimed at creating vegetarians/vegans, and that's going to be much harder.
This is just flat-out wrong.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
Every food is less destructive than beef by a ridiculous margin.
And eating any food directly is less destructive than losing most of the calories to grow animal biomass. Beyond Meat is just mixing together plant products directly which is trivially better than growing animals.
Best example of this is when people say they want to pay "only their fair share of taxes". That's just, not how taxes work...