While it is not my experience at all, I understand that some folks have certain negative opinions of Beyond Burgers, and other fake meat/imitation burgers:
- The texture is off
- Maybe they cook strangely
- Potentially less taste
But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter. No one needed to die for you to eat it.
> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.
I have a small cattle property, we run on hill country with diversified ecosystem, mixed grass and bushland. We have a heap of native animals living across the property. And at the end of the day the steers do get sent of for slaughter after 18 to 24 months + we kill feral pigs when they get in large numbers.
While cropping properties they tend to be monoculture, very little native animal presence. The spray like buggery wiping out insects with all that flow on effect (and to be fair we spray too, herbicide only and never pesticides and far less frequently). Also the cropping properties tend to shoot 'pests' heavily. We don't mind a few kangaroos and ducks type thing about but cropping properties are very serious about deterring and killing anything that hits their property.
And to be clear, I'm not having a go at you. I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position, and my family actually try to do more vegetarians meals. While at the same time I'm not sure plant based options are so devoid of killing, only the end product is one step removed.
This is a complicated topic, with multiple responses, but I'm only going to touch on one specific aspect of it. Reducing violence in regular farming is an admirable goal that people should strive towards. It's also worth talking about the environmental costs of ingredients like palm oil, and it's worth talking about the human costs of products like cocoa.
I don't mean to diminish any of that at all, it's all worth paying attention to.
However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming. So it's not really like eating meat is ever going to result in less death. We would need to move entirely to free-grazing cattle, which frankly, I do not believe is scalable enough or cost-effective enough to meet food demand.
I know people who are not vegetarian or vegan, but who care very deeply about animal welfare, and who care a lot about where their beef/pork/chicken is sourced from. I admire that, I am not going to shame anyone for caring about anything. My own opinions about killing animals aside, at the very least ethically sourcing meat is miles better than not caring at all. But I no longer believe that's something that's feasible to expect most people to do; in a weird way I think going vegetarian is easier for many people than figuring out where their burger at a restaurant came from. And where factory farming is involved, getting rid of meat allows us to engage directly with the costs of farming and eliminate one of the extra steps (cattle) that are layered on top of that process.
It's definitely true that just switching over to plant-based foods and away from animal-based foods won't solve all the issues, it's also worth noting that a lot of cattle, at least in the US, are not raised on a foraging model, so most feed that cattle consume come from plants raised elsewhere, which are going to largely be those same cropping properties. And, further, the amount of feed to raise cattle mean that those cropping properties have to grow significantly more product than if they were producing for plant-based foods.
I do have a lot of respect for smaller cattle operations that run an ecologically sensitive operation, such that the land is used in a way that sustains itself and the cattle on it. It's just that, those are the exceptions, at least in countries like the US.
I don't get the feel that you're having a go, no worries :)
I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the animals we intend to eat.
Secondly, and this is argument I don't make often because its _really_ not popular (but you seem like a great person so I'm happy to share!), I just don't think animals exist to provide or serve us. They are their own beings, and we are ours. Personally, I don't care if someone treats their animals like absolute royalty. If we kill them, or we forcibly impregnate them and remove their children so we can have their milk, it's wrong to me. But again, this is not an argument many people are swayed by, so I don't generally mention it.
It's not one step removed, it's 90 steps out of 100 removed, right?
The important part here is the consumption of resources, 90% less land/water/energy also means 90% fewer animals that had to die for the product.
(Also we could enforce more environmental protection measures while still being able to feed everyone.)
To raise cows, you need crop. So real burgers already include the suffering from cropping, even more so because you need a lot more crop per calorie of you have a cow between you and the plant.
Now I want to emphasis that guilt is not a good reason to start with beyond meat.
The desire to try to do a nice thing can be, but as a vegetarian, it's important that people are not pushed out of meat because of some negative emotion.
I'd rather have happy meat eaters than frutsrated veggies.
But give it a try, just for curiosity sake.
I like the taste of BM, but find them hard to digest.
Also remember it's still process food, and organic free range steak is likely healthier.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment"[1]
The key parts being "seeks to" and "as far as is possible and practicable". Veganism is not about being perfect (that's impossible), and although some might speak as if it is, they should not be taken seriously.
What we do know is that striving for a more vegan way of living is unequivocally less harmful for sentient beings and I and many others think that is a very noble endeavor.
> I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.
This is true, the produce farmers kills pests insects and animals to produce crops at high volume.
The issue for me is scale. You need to feed the farm animals which leads to more soy and grain being produced which leads to more death.
I also can’t guarantee that the produce farmer or the farm owner is vegan which means I might be indirectly supporting animal agriculture multiple steps removed.
That way of thinking provides no viable solutions. I can at least control myself and know that I am taking steps to minimize harm.
Firstly, thank you for preserving some of the natural ecosystem on your farm. That is a tricky choice to make but from what I see driving about you are in a minority.
You take a drive from Melbourne to Sydney and you get to see the effect of livestock farming, it's been completely denuded of natural vegetation everywhere where it's flat enough to smash down.
The destruction is right there in front of your eyes. Knocking down scrub for cattle farming wipes out the natural environment, there are some species where it does good for them or kangaroos and birds that like open grasslands but for everything else it's really bad.
Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide you get the same thing.
Australia knocked down more open forest in the last four years than they did in the Amazon - 90% for beef farming.
You can grow crops on a much smaller area, without even mentioning organic crop growing where you don't use chemicals to wipe everything out.
Anything we do will have an impact on the rest of our eco system, even if we just ate wild berries you'd find someone complaining about the beetle you stepped on while walking in the woods. But putting everything in perspective I doubt cropping comes anywhere close to animal slaughtering in term of crime against nature.
I think anyone will agree that modern industrial agriculture comes with its own set of problems.
Really appreciate this perspective and the info. But I do think we shouldn't let perfection be the enemy of good here. Anything that moves the needle in the right direction should be encouraged.
> I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position
Actually vegetarians follow a diet along traditional lines (dairy okay, meat nay), they are not so much into moral positioning. Vegans are the ones making an ethical stance: "no animals harmed for me whenever I have the choice"
Hence vegans dont wear wool/silk/leather, dont go to zoos/animal races, and dont consume eggs/dairy.
Canada just added an explicit recognition of grazing land into our carbon tax program for just this reason. Not only are pastures incredibly better for native plant/animal conservation (in North America) than crop fields but native grasslands are also incredible carbon sinks:
Over the last couple of years my wife and I have been adopting what I jokingly refer to as a "local-etarian" diet. Essentially we've been paying attention more to how our food is sourced (trying to buy meat from folks like you!) rather than trying to cut out anything specific.
My take away from that experience specifically in the US is that if you want to be sustainable/humane/etc. the best effort to effectiveness ratio is probably just to be a vegetarian. Finding and vetting sources for meat in much of the US is not easy.
Most normal grocery stores simply don't stock anything resembling what you describe and even at our local Co-Op, the choices can be pretty inscrutable. Do I want the "We've ticked all the boxes to be labeled 'Organic'" or "We're Amish, so you should totally trust us" or the "We're too small to bother with fancy packaging or certifications"? It's hard to say, though generally we lean towards the last option.
You make an interesting point I have not considered before. I think it analogous to the argument that even electric cars have emissions, as almost all of them are charged on grids that are dirty. I personally think in both cases (vegetarians, electric car drivers), the first order benefit of not directly eating animals or burning gasoline exceeds the second order harms. Plus, one can pressure local utilities/politicians to clean up their electricity or only purchase from farms that do the least animal harm (though it's hard to entirely avoid).
Also not trying to have a go at you, thanks for the insightful comment.
Small cattle and typical burger meat are different. That said, do you think small cattle would scale replace factory style production? I doubt it.
Furthermore: Cows are not perfect machine and eat plants - you have to grow more plants for to make a meat burger than you have to make a pea protein burger. So if cropping is bad for animals, farming meat requires more of that too. You could argue your cows eat different, but what do most cows eat? For mass market, fake burgers are simply better for land use, water use, animal welfare, emissions, environment, and even health.
> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
The problem I have with this argument is that it always seems to me to focus on the life of the animal, but not on the death of the animal.
All animals eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we slaughter animals, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to starving to death, being eaten alive by insects, being hunted and terrified by a predator etc).
So, I think that it is important how the animals are grown (factory farms are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of food). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the slaughter of animals who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of their species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
All humans eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we would be able to murder other humans, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to dying of cancer, stroke, being murdered in a car crash, etc.)
So, I think that it is important how the humans are grown (prisons are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of labor). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the murder of 25 year old people who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of the human species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
I think you could make the argument that it's possible to ethically raise animals in a way where it's a good deal for both sides, as long as an animal suffers less than it would suffer in nature. If causing unnecessary suffering is unethical, then the opposite should be a moral imperative, so this simple mathematical argument leads to the conclusion that ethically raising animals should be morally superior to veganism.
I think this is a vague line of reasoning. We want to give animals quality of life, because it’s a humane thing to do, but also slaughter them, which is inhumane. So which is it: is the life of animals just as important, or less?
The same line of reasoning can be applied to humans. We can have really shitty deaths categorised as ‘old age’, yet euthanising is controversial.
If you give a cow a choice between being a gazelle and getting eating by a lion or a cow and being fed and taken care of but eventually being killed, which would they choose? If you gave a cow a choice between the elimination or decimation of its entire species (cows have been altered to be not fit for nature) which would they choose? It’s not as cut and dry as you would think. There are definitely people who would pick to eliminate the entire human race. See
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_M... , so maybe we would have voluntary cattle extinction movements as well.
A belief that birth/procreation is a negative is known as antinatalism.
I really enjoy both BeyondBeef and Impossible Burger.
My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture.
The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I would never complain about a Beyond Meat spicy sausage in my Italian food. The sweet Italian version tastes almost like a breakfast sausage to me.
For Impossible Burgers, I feel like the taste is virtually 100%. I don't actually know, if I were eating an impossible burger on a bun with the fixings, if I could tell you it was an impossible burger. The only thing they would lose on is the texture and maybe the color. The texture is more... chipped(?) than ground beef, so looking at a patty (probably easier with an 8oz than a 4oz) is pretty obvious, but man, the flavor is great.
Like I said, I eat either one of them as my first choice whenever they're sold at a restaurant.
FWIW, I thought the Impossible Burger clearly tasted like heavily processed legumes, not like meat. I grew up in one of the major legume growing regions of the US and was raised on them in a part of the world where the local food culture knows how to get the most out of them. It is very satisfying when done right, and I eat far more than the average American to this day, but no one would confuse it with meat. Impossible Burger etc tastes like overly processed legumes with some chemical-y overtones.
Ironically, I think it would be far more appealing if they didn’t try to make it simulated meat and leaned into its strengths. Vegetarian burgers that don’t pretend to be meat taste better. Legumes that are expertly processed as a protein, without trying to be meat, taste better. The Impossible Burger falls into the same category as “fat-free mayo”; trying to maintain the pretense ultimately produces a poor experience.
I am an accidental vegetarian most days but I won’t eat Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger. The products taste unpleasantly synthetic. If I wanted to eat legumes, I can create something far better tasting for much less money. If I want a burger, I’ll eat a burger — marketing aside, the gap is still very wide.
Totally agree on Impossible Burgers. Like the GP, I also try to avoid eating meat due to animal welfare concerns. That, said, I've tried going vegetarian multiple times before and honestly I felt awful - I'm naturally very slim and not particularly energetic to begin with, and when I was on a vegetarian diet I felt totally lethargic.
With Impossible Burgers, though, it really tastes and feels like I'm eating a real burger. It completely satiates my desire for meat, and it makes my body feel "good" from an energy perspective.
While I sympathise with the argument, I think that it's a mistake to push this aspect front and centre.
There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.
The people I've spoken to about Beyond/Impossible and similar fake-meats all tend to think of it as something for vegans/vegetarians, because that's how this type of product has been presented for decades.
"Oh, you're having a BBQ? Fred's partner is a veggo, better chuck on some mushroom burgers or something"
It's a tough push to convince people that this isn't meant for vegans/vegetarians wanting meat, but a product for meat-eaters wanting to reduce their meat intake, but not necessarily wanting to give up their ability to have meals that taste like what they're used to.
Pushing from that angle, I would argue, is likely to have a bigger impact than saying "Think of the poor cow that had to get murdered for your burger!".
I disagree. While there will no doubt be friction, people should be confronted with the reality of their choices; long term we can't preserve their bubble of ignorance, might as well address it now
>There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.
I'm going to be as neutral as I can be in this comment.
I don't think that's something that should stand in the way; it depends if we're coming from a philosophical perspective, or a political perspective. Arguably, some harms should not be tolerated in civil society - and I think the moral vegetarian case (as expounded by philosophers of all stripes) does some work towards that.
My point is that we can name a variety of behaviour that a large proportion of society engages in which are also harmful. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to convince them, nor to discourage those behaviours through the softer power the government has available to it - higher taxation on meat agriculture and the end of subsidies for meat agriculture being examples. I have met very, very few moral vegetarians who wish to outright ban meat production, at least immediately.
How did the population in general become acclimatised to other things we now see as immoral[0]? Would that work for moral vegetarianism? I don't have the answers to those questions, but I'm sure someone has discussed it previously. Eating meat is an ancient tradition - even older than that - but so were other moral norms, such as the prohibition of homosexuality.
We very, very frequently shame other people on the basis of their conduct as regards morality - the principle of moral judgements. Most (though not all) philosophers argue this is beneficial to society if morality is worth talking about at all. We still shame adultery for moral reasons. What would it take to bring meat production, or even consumption, to a similar level of disdain?
[0] See any of: slavery, marital rape, revenge porn, CSEM, regulations against abortion, regulations against homosexuality, child marriage, Jim Crow laws - and that's just considering the Western world.
For my part, I enjoy fast food burgers (think Wendy's, Burger King, etc...). These burger patties are not exactly rare Kobe beef. Once you put that thing on a bun, add cheese, slather it in sauce, etc... I don't find the difference in the patties very noticeable. I notice how fresh the lettuce is more than the patty.
I eat plenty of meat, so I don't have an anti-meat agenda. But, for me, for fast food burgers, I may as well choose a less environmentally damaging, and yes, more animal friendly, alternative, because it hardly makes a difference.
The nutritional profile of a fast food beef patty is actually quite excellent, especially once you factor in the cost. The same cannot be said of the fake meat alternatives.
I guess the difference would be though, that without the demand for meat, those cows would likely never have lived at all. 99%+ of all cows alive are used for human agriculture.
From the perspective of any living creature, I generally think of existence as a positive good versus non-existence. I know I certainly would rather come to a violent death at a young age than have never been born at all.
I think there's a plausible argument that modern factory farming is so horrific that it's worse than non-existence. But a cow raised with a decent quality of life, and slaughtered humanely for its meat does not seem worse for animal welfare than eliminating the entire existence of the cow.
(Of course I realize there's ecological and health arguments for giving up meat, but purely talking along the dimension of animal welfare.)
Do you view the millions of existences prevented by contraception the same way? Those humans also don’t exist for entirely preventable reasons …
This seems like an on its face absurd and pointless argument to me. In these scenarios we are basically talking about unborn hypothetical future cows and from that perspective your argument makes no sense at all.
Cattle would obviously continue to exist in some form, even with a greatly diminished population – so we are not even talking about extinction.
Is the fact that compared to 100 years ago the US horse population shrank by 50% (due to reduced demand) a great tragedy? Obviously not. Obviously.
Factory farming normalizes extreme violence and exploitation. It teaches humans it’s acceptable to profoundly harm and neglect living creatures for profit. I have to imagine this has highly negative spillover effects on society at large. It’s making our society more depraved than it otherwise would be if we just grew plants for food.
Or, consider animal agriculture’s role in deforestation of the Amazon, in massively polluting our planet, and in being a breeding grounds for zoonotic disease transmission, etc.
IMO “allowing” a cow to live the entirety of its early life as a confused, neglected, and often tormented slave doesn’t offset a single one of those evils.
If we all moved to impossible beef, cattle populations would plummet. However, despite popular perception, for most of its life before slaughter, a cow is raised in large open ranges for grazing, like in the California foothills. Only the last parts of their live do they get put into crowded feedlots for "fattening", which might be described as inhumane. Perhaps, it would lead to the advent of wild cattle in the California hills, as land owners stop caring.
This argument comes up almost every time and it has never made any sense to me. Yes, you would rather live than never have been born. That's because you're alive right now, you can have and express that feeling. Someone who doesn't exist will not care even in the slightest, because they can't.
I ended up becoming vegetarian for a while due to some video that was released years ago of factory farm workers abusing animals. I found myself unable to eat meat without bursting into tears.
In time, and in part due to how complicated this ecosystem actually is (as explained by a few other replies here) I ended up settling on eating vegetarian “most of the time” and buying meat sourced from ethical places with better conditions when I do.
But it was surprising to me how threatened most people were when I was strictly vegetarian.
I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.
That said, I continue to have a great appreciation for the industry of meatless meat.
Although at this point, IMO, Impossible Burger is the gold standard, and after trying it once, eating any other burger (including Beyond) just doesn’t cut it.
I think a lot of people have that reaction to something like veganism for a couple reasons:
1. You are a constant reminder of their choices, the impact of their choices and their ability to make different ones
2. Eating food is a very base level need and the idea of moralizing that can elicit strong responses
3. I do think some people are genuinely afraid that vegans will prevent them from eating what they love (similar to democrats taking away guns or something)
> I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.
When I've witnessed these debates they're much like 2a. A vegetarian uses some moralizing and hyperbolic language to express how deeply they care about a cause and people either feel threatened or insulted by the language.
To frame that even more concisely, it's like when pro-life people use moralizing and hyperbolic language about abortions in front of people that believe in them or have had one.
My general takeaway from watching these issues is that moralizing, hyperbolic language or other subtle uses of shame, guilt, etc do not yield good results and often create backlash in response to the strength and travel that that kind of rhetoric has. Basically, we need to get better about how we talk about those issues if they're to be considered at all.
Another common theme is usually one side in this debate has some camp within it's interest that is advocating for cancellation, and if you're not actively talking down cancellation both internally and externally to your interest group then you are perceived as showing by proxy approval via inaction.
Irish person here with a couple of random facts:
- Ireland is one of the larger per-capita beef producing countries
- Beef lobby is quite powerful
- Our local Chipper / Take Away / "Fish & Chips" shop sells Beyond Meat burgers
- As a meat eater who grew up on a beef farm, I can say they look and taste amazingly good... 95% as good as a real burger.
Most cattle are treated well in Ireland, living outside on fresh grass (live exports aside). My main concerns are global resource depletion, biodiversity, deforestation and climate change.
We're beginning to see a real sea change in this meat eating country, meat-free products are popping up everywhere and not just marketed at vegans / hipsters.
Cattle are treated well in Ireland, and sheep too (comparatively). However, pigs and chickens are treated terribly, and we have a total cultural blindspot to it. We have nothing to be proud of when it comes to animal welfare.
This is probably not a popular opinion, but less environmental impact is actually more desirable to me than "no violence against animals". As far as I understand it, these sort of "animal protection" slogans only serve to make human beings feel better about ourselves, and as such could easily make us forgive (and forget) the massive amount of resources we consumed if not depleted on this earth. Simply by supplying for this huge amount of population, we have taketh away the right of other animal's possibility to have a thriving population. The human race thrived on a bloody ground, and we need to recognize that.
It seems hard to make sense of your objection here other than as a statement that past acts that might be considered wrong were how we got to where we are today. I don't think it's unreasonable to acknowledge our history while also recognize we shouldn't repeat the wrongs of the past.
But... that’s actually a product of the industrialization of meat production. It’s like justifying climate change because ‘oh well, we’ve done until now so might as well keep going’.
In reality people are OK with violence against animals because when they think about animal products they just picture a slab of meat they pick up from the freezer at the supermarket. If they realized what feeds the process that ends up in that neatly packaged sirloin, I’m pretty sure they’d have a different reaction than ‘meh’.
(And again, I fish and hunt so it’s not like I’m some bleeding-heart hippie who can’t take violence against animals. I just think that we should all be less cavalier about meat intake, which after all is a very recent phenomenon)
The main moral problem with meat consumption, to me, is not the killing - everything dies, you're right. It's rather how awfully the animals are treated both throughout their leaves, and also (in most cases) the slaughter process. It's really a horror show, and far worse than their natural lives would be. Not a life anyone would willingly be born into.
Almost all meat comes from such inhumane factory farms with terrible conditions. For the animals treated the worst (chickens) there seems to be almost no moment of their life without suffering. They're even bred with genes that guarantee pain (due to extremely fast growth and egg laying cycles), because that makes it cheaper.
If we had higher standards, this moral argument would be less concerning. But the standards needed to treat animals at least passably well would make meat far more expensive, which is not politically palatable. Better meat alternatives are the best path forward here.
You have a valid point; killing an animal in order to eat it is not immoral, assuming you don't let anything go to waste. Factory farming, on the other hand, has nothing to do with how nature works. It's all about who raises the animals and how.
It' the same thing with the environmental aspect. If the animals graze all their lives then it might even have a positive effect on CO2 uptake in the long run, and it definitely is required for some biomes to survive. But, again, factory farming isn't exactly natural.
And yes, that applies to vegan food production as well.
Your not wrong or anything but I think the general counter argument here is that because something is deemed to have always happened or to happen in nature does not automatically make it right. There’s a term for the argument “appeal to nature” which sort of fits here, you can use this to justify all kinds of things.
The Beyond Beef burgers that my local burger chain (Grill’d) sell are pretty good, too. They’re a little drier than a good beef patty and a bit sweeter, but if you told me it was beef I think I would believe you, albeit not cooked perfectly.
My understanding is that popular opinion says Impossible is even closer, though I haven’t tried it personally.
> but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
You know that plants are also living, feeling beings? Though not sure about being individual but that's highly subjective.
The cycle of life is that some trees harvest the sun, and then it's a fish-eat-fish kinda world.
Vegan meat is not important because it doesn't kill animals (it'll kill plants, and hence this is purely emotional/subjective). But because it could be very sustainable. There is a reason why Japanese eat vegetables, fish and pork. They have a large population on a tight island. They have to do otherwise. (they also drive very small compact cars/mini-vans).
I agree with you, that is especially the case for burgers that are usually not made of particularly refined meat. I’m still "old style" and enjoy a piece of steak but less than once a week. I still need to cut down on ham… decrease in meat consumption is rational. It’s mostly a matter of habit, and people hate changing those.
I do have one valid complaint with Beyond Burgers. I am a fan of meat. I like meat. I love a good cheese burger.
And Beyond Burgers actually taste fine. Not amazing, not “just like beef” but not bad. I can eat a Beyond Burger and feel satisfied.
My problem with Beyond Burgers or Beyond products as a whole is that they STINK! Bad! When cooking. I don’t know why but cooking a beyond burger stinks up my kitchen worse than my cats litter box freshly pooped in.
> But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
In my opinion, the most important thing is that it is considerably better for the environment due to the reduction in emissions, water and land. Don't get me wrong, no violence against animals is a benefit too, but to me it's not the number one reason to try imitation meat.
I have indeed tried them, and they aren't as nice as a real beef burger in my opinion. And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation. (Of course, you can certainly reduce cruelty if you move away from a US-style factory farming model).
Looking forward to seeing how the technology develops, but yeah. It hasn't changed my habits yet.
So if some day an alien race arrives and starts farming humans for sandwich meat just because they like the way we taste that's fair play as far as you're concerned?
>And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation.
I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
A funny anecdote: my wife and I have removed most meat (apart from occasional fish) from our diets for a variety of reasons (health concerns, sustainability, and animal cruelty).
Do you know which concern resonates most with my 10 year old daughter? Absolutely none of them. She is aware of the issues, and appears to be a conscientious person in the abstract, but when confronted with the option of eating an animal in the moment she simply doesn't care at all.
Are adults more empathetic? Maybe. But fundamentally I think that by the time something makes it to your plate, it's simply too far removed from where it came from for any of these considerations to resonate with most people.
We've considered trying to show her Okja [0] to see if it has any effect on her perspective. I know it was at least partially instrumental in causing me to reconsider factory farming.
> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
When I was about fifteen it occurred to me that while that's true, those animals wouldn't be alive at all without us raising them for food. So it seems to me that the goal should be raising them in good conditions without cruelty. At least to my way of thinking, as someone grateful to my parents that I exist, that's better than no life at all.
There are plenty of other solid reasons to eat less meat, but this argument never worked for me.
I actually like the beyond burgers. If they weren't more expensive than a beef burger, I'd eat them.
Which is still a lot less death and suffering than factory farming livestock produces. (Aside from the fact that growing cattle to eat requires a lot more acreage under cultivation--to feed the cattle--than growing plants to eat.)
It's impossible to feed people without causing some death. But that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize it.
This rhetoric only convinces those people who already feel sympathetic to animal-rights arguments. But for example, a significant slice of the world’s population are adherents of religions that downright ordain slaughtering an animal at times, and they will only be alienated by your argument.
Consequently, I feel like health and environmental arguments are better ways to get people to limit their meat intake.
> Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter.
This is the only thing that matters, to the contrary. Previous attempts at fake meat have not done as well as Beyond and Impossible precisely due to the fact that the vast, vast majority people actually don't care where their meat comes from, they only care about the taste. Yes, on surveys they might say they care about not harming animals, but this is not true in practice, they don't put their money where their mouth is by stopping eating meat.
Indeed, the true innovation of Beyond and Impossible was focusing exclusively on taste and marketing that up front rather than the moral aspects, because people don't care.
> I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
I understand what you mean by violence and I don't want to come across as a stickler just for sport, but if we are taking a hard ethical stance based on principles we need to be precise with categories. Two of which is most important;
1. category of animals include humans
2. category of violence include any suffering inflicted knowingly e.g. being overworked in a sweatshop, psychological violence etc.
If we accept above categories, our supply chain, not only for food but for pretty much everything we consume, unfortunately do incur violence on humans. As such, if someone takes a principle on requiring no violence against animals, they must also be concerned with everything they consume or use, not only what they eat. I am not saying they shouldn't not eat meat if they didn't do the other, I am saying they shouldn't claim a position from principle.
In fact if they made either these two arguments they would be perfectly consistent; argument of convenience "not eating meat is more convenient than not using an iPhone", or argument of priority "not requiring violence against other animals is more important to me than humans". But still they couldn't occupy a principled stance of no violence against animals.
i don’t understand why you think this is a huge gotcha. most vegans are oriented around harm reduction, not absolute minimization. otherwise, they’d just kill themselves. there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.
What you're saying a little silly, given that if people had decided to stop eating cows 20 years ago, the cow I ate a part of today would never have gotten to exist in the first place. An argument that cows are abused and are better off never existing would be a reasonable one.
The cow that you ate today most likely lived its whole life in a cage no much bigger than its body, inside a huge facility reeking of feces and death and ate an atrocious diet, only to be killed at the perfectly calculated time to maximize profit.
I'm a meat eater. Heck, I hunt (and eat what I hunt) and even I can tell you that your argument is ridiculous.
I mostly agree with you and personally love beyond ground "beef". However, it is going to be a long time before we replace meat. The only way is if we can produce it cheap enough that it literally costs an average person more to buy conventional 85/15 ground beef.
That's interesting. Can you give me your job? I mean, there are millions of people all around the world who are living in poverty and you are occupying a job that they could have had. There are many people who commit suicide because they no longer have any economic opportunities.
I like how modern people can pretend they don't live in the real world because it is hidden behind abstract complexity. Life is a competition with every living thing. You can pretend that it isn't while you order your uber eats and massively overpriced food, but you are only doing so due to some kind of psychological need.
The further you get into the city, the further you get into the lives of rich people, the more you see this "please think of the animals" attitude, because you become so removed from reality that you think the world is completely different to what it actually is. The irony is that you are in the most privileged place, taking the money that other people could have used, and using it to buy overpriced burgers.
I tried impossible burger once. Wanted to like it for all the good environmental / ethical reasons. However, it just tasted nutty to me, like somebody had ground up some nuts that had a visual appearance very similar to ground beef. Tasted nothing like meat to me.
See I think Impossible comes as close as you can get right now but Beyond definitely has weird taste/texture qualities. I get an aftertaste with it I do not with Impossible.
Beyond sausage (an easier endeavor because of how much work fennel and casing do), however, is excellent.
Well said! I am a vegetarian for much the same reasons. I think that compassion is a solid reason beyond the environmental and health reasons. As technology enthusiasts we should be driving new ways of producing food that cause the least harm.
I get the intention but wouldn't it be better to just forget the taste of it if you're doing so for the sake of the animal's suffering? To put it bluntly, the suffering ends, but the taste of suffering is still delicious...
Burgers and sausages are some of the most detached ways to eat meat. While a steak has bones, a burger is much more abstract. There is probably a good anthropological theory behind this.
And it's still overpriced. For being a bunch of soy or whatever, I'd expect it to cost a fraction of meat. I'd rather have fewer real burgers than transition to faux food.
I don't get why exact taste of burgers is so important to some people.
I can stomach burgers from McDonald's if I haven't eaten them in few months. But if I eat them more than one or two times a week they very quickly start to taste like the garbage they are.
It's really dreadful form of food and I was assuming people eat it as last resort when they are really hungry. Not that they indulge in them because the specific flavor is so unique and wonderful.
I always prefer a wrap. But fries and mcmuffins with egg and bacon are super tasty.
I actually enjoy trying out a variety of vegetarian and vegan foods for this exact reason - just to see how they compare with the meat based ones and how good they are overall. Frankly, it's gotten to the point where most of the food that i buy myself is vegetarian, just because of how many of those options are out there.
That said, it's not a black and white issue, as people sometimes like to view it as - if most people simply treated meat as something to only enjoy rarely (say, once a week or a few times a month) or something for special occasions, then we'd make significant progress in that regard already!
Alternatively, perhaps people should see how their meat is made, or try doing it themselves, to get a greater appreciation for the amount of resources that it takes to produce any (as well as maybe get a bit more empathy towards the animals in some ways). Personally, i've gone hunting with my dad, have gutted animals in the forest, helped bring them home, skin them and cut the bones, all just to enjoy some meat. That's not to say that it'd bear much relevance to the lives of most people, but it's certainly a very humbling experience.
Edit: In the words of Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I'm actually curious about how others view a more moderate stance on the issue of nutrition - one that calls for gradual changes.
Given that my income is dependent on rare earths, which usually are mined by slaves, and the independence of my homeland is directly dependent on the US being a global hegemon, I've got far more serious moral issues to resolve before I'll have time for animals. Don't get me wrong, I love animals, but there are far greater fish to fry first.
honestly I don't really see the point of eating a burger that doesn't taste or feel like a burger. I'd prefer to eat meat less often than try a subsitute
every one of the fake meat products upsets my stomach. I think TVP is the culprit. If I ever decide to forgo meat, I would just skip the fake meat products entirely
If there wouldn't be an economic incentive to keep animals alive, their land would be reporposed to crops/housing and a lot of animals would be slaughtered pointlessly.
When they develop advanced societies and agriculture, and dietetic institutions verify that they can live full healthy lives without meat, then yes I’ll expect them to go at least vegetarian
It is very easy to understand. People like Bill Gates who is a big investor in artificial meta are lobbing for normal eat and fish to be banned one way or another.
That it, people eating the way they always had eaten have other people wanting to force them to do something. That triggers reaction in the opposite sense.
Those technologies should prosper on its own, and they will be if they are cheaper or more nutritious. Over time they will.
It is like illustration ideas in Spain. People that read were accepting those ideas on their own until Napoleon came and wanted to impose the ideas by force. The reaction against the invader made those ideas(and the people that supported them) not only to not to prosper but go back(and the people expelled from the country), because they were the ideas of the invaders.
I love technology, and as entrepreneur and engineer have always managed innovation. I believe it it the future, but because I know innovation well I also know the drawbacks.
Early products tend to have bugs on them. When we create something knew I expect those like Elon expects their new rockets to explode. When those bugs are related to health it means people die.
And we don't really know what those bugs are. The world in incredibly complex. For example autism or cancer, leukemia, and allergies in young people are skyrocketing.
We know it is related to microorganisms in the gut and we also know that we are killing those microorganism like fungus, bacteria and virus that were beneficial to humans.
We started spraying roundup and other products thinking the world was super simple. And it is not, eliminating all insects, fungus and bacteria that were with us for millions of years will have consequences and secondary effects we could not predict.
Over time all our food will be grown indoors and cultured bacteria will do everything for us like cotton, vaccines or paper. But trying to accelerate the progress by coercion could backfire.
Compared to grass fed beef fake meat generally involves the killing of many more animals, due to the way industrial grains and vegetables are produced.
From a cruelty perspective probably the best thing to eat is free range Buffalo, but whale or elephant could potentially be better.
Considering how many animals whales kill, especially blue whales, we could be doing the planet a massive service by hunting them to extinction.
The burgers are full of stuff I wouldn't consider to be food. That's why I don't eat them (regularly at least). I don't think being violent to my own body is a good substitute for violence against animals.
> Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals
Isn’t this disingenuous because the endgame will be the genocide of almost all farm animals. If they’re so environmentally unfriendly, can’t look after themselves, serve no purpose because they’re no longer food then why would we let them live and continue to breed them.
So there will still be some final suffering until we remove these species from the earth.
Obviously we as a race are responsible for creating animals that can’t look after themselves but to hold up the environment argument makes killing them all the greater ethical choice.
But why would you want to replicate the outcome of a slaughter if that part of the process upsets you?
Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?
For me eating things in their most natural forms seems more appealing. I don't know what is in beyond meat but avoiding processed anything seems like a more healthy strategy.
> Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?
I’ve been “vegan” for the better half of a decade and I don’t think this is confusing at all: because it’s familiar and it tastes good.
Familiarity and tastes can change over time, but it takes time and effort, and people are already putting effort into being open-minded when they try a veggie burger instead of a beef burger.
Sure, a quinoa salad might be healthier, but most people aren’t choosing between a cheeseburger and some ultra-healthy vegan cuisine.
We should aim to make these choices easy and comfortable instead of criticizing folks for taking baby steps in the right direction.
I like how burgers taste, so I want to eat them. But I don't want an animal to experience horrific treatment and slaughter just for the taste, so I seek it out in plants. That makes sense, no? I can like the salty, fat taste but opt-out of the subjugation and slaughter of another being.
Because we are natural meat eaters and still have strong cravings for meat even if we don't eat it. Eating a close facsimile can help those satisfy those cravings and avoid a rebound to eating real meat.
While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".
We are, at the very least, decades away from having a complete enough understanding of nutrition to safely replace the nutritional value of beef with a substitute fake beef product. Once we accomplish that, there are some second-order effects to worry about, like increasing single-path reliance on complex agrochemical supply chains to meet basic nutritional needs.
It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.
> It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals
This is untrue, as the animals you are eating are fed and raised on plants, which are harvested with the machines that potentially kill the field animals. So even accounting for that, fewer animals will die.
Also, animals tend to migrate out of fields during harvesting, and relocate (which is still not good! But better than being ground up by machines)
>It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.
Your net consumption of plants is reduced when you reduce your consumption of animals, friend. How do you figure it would cause the death of more total animals?
>While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".
People get along just fine eating only legumes and grains and a few other plants sprinkled in.
As far as I understand it you can have a perfectly suitable vegetarian diet without much effort (note: vegan is trickier and very hard for babies). If you want to maintain your current meat/“meat” consumption then we are still many years off lab meat being cheap and accessible enough yes.
The intent of beyond burger, I think, is not to be a meat substitute every time you would currently eat meat, but instead a nice tasting treat food. Sure, it’s salty and full of saturated fats, but I only have them once a month.
Where do you draw the line between animals and plants? Plants are a form of life. Is it the pain? What is it about animal pain that is morally objectionable? Because humans can feel pain too, therefore animal pain is also bad? Assuming we grant that, what if animals were put to sleep before being killed? Does that then make it okay? I find the whole "violence against animals" argument to be incredibly hand-wavy and without substance.
I draw the line in that I don't eat anything with a central nervous system. I don't doubt a biologist might make me reconsider my understanding of a CNS, but I've always found it a clear line for me personally.
So many animals die at the blades of the harvester. Also, the reason the argument fares poorly is likely due to the fact that it’s devoid of reason and couched entirely in emotion. Emotion is powerful and important, as it is part of our humanity. But it’s not a good basis for argument, given its fickle and poorly understood nature.
Less animals stand to die at the blades of the harvester when one chooses to stop eating animals altogether. You can't eliminate suffering, but you can take active measures to reduce it.
Maybe you can say more about what you disagree with, then, rather than writing off the comment as a bad argument. I don't think it was that bad or emotional, personally.
I believe the phrase you're thinking of is "so open-minded that your brain falls out." It's still just a way to put someone down for caring about others, but at least the metaphor works.
And you wonder why people can't take absolutists seriously. The marketing power of the moral superiority concept is no new thing. Pivoting the crux of success of your ideology around an incredibly poor burger filling makes no sense either.
In the UK restaurants are being allowed to reopen in 10 days. In London there are an incredible density of steak restaurants which happen to already be booked out completely.
I think your appeal to squeamishness around slaughtering animals will feel entirely cringeworthy to most emotionally intelligent persons.
The person you're replying to has a different opinion from yours and you seem very offended by it. It hasn't got anything to do with lockdown in London, how booked steak restaurants will be there, or how much the "emotionally intelligent people" cringe. This all feels like non sequitur or ad hominem.
I eat meat with no plans to stop and I don't have a problem with the comment you're replying to.
It is not squeamishness. I have killed animals for food with my own hands and being part of people killed in war. I would like to not do it when I have the opportunity.
I'm generally surprised no one brings up the negative health benefits of processed foods. It is not healthier to get rid of meat only to replace it with high salt chemically processed food that tastes like meat.
It seems like we are going backwards.
You know what uses less greenhouse emissions, less water and less land? The orginal plant based food that gets processed into a beyond burger.
If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything? That get's shipped nationwide / worldwide that creates factories, chemical waste, greenhouse gases. Buying locally and growing locally really helps the planet. Going to burger king and getting an absolute burger instead of a whooper is just pretending.
All food is processed. Cows are genetically engineered. There's no reason to be afraid of simple chemistry. Cranks like Michael Polian have made a fortune selling FUD with no science. Just read a label. Boxed food with a ton of salt and sugar is probably not good for you whether it's corn syrup or agave nectar. Similarly, boxed fiber and protein is perfectly fine. Buying locally is not scalable and fails to take advantage of the climate advantage of different geographies.
> There's no reason to be afraid of simple chemistry
Food chemistry is one of the most complicated chemistries ever. Not only we can't simply construct an argument of safety from first principles but also nutrition labels hardly makes an exhaustive list of the contents and processes involved. Not even mentioning the labeling regulation quirks.
> All food is processed.
This is reduction to absurdity. Even if genetically engineered, the process of cell divisions that end up being a living cow is so complicated that it would lend itself more readily to a claim of integrity, one much stronger than a decade old factory assembly process of dead nutrients. We've co-evolved with the former process for millions of years and created the latter in the last several decades in the name of profit maximization.
That's not what processed food means. A slice of steak from a GMO cow is not processed food, except inasmuch as slashing a knife is a process.
Furthermore, more or less traditional cheese is not considered "processed food" in that context even though it is definitely processed for a long time and with significant effort. Nor is wine or sauerkraut for that matter.
Thanks, this is the most underrated answer. Selling processed food as one solution to climate change is genius marketing BS but still just BS. It reminds me of Soylent, Juicero and the like.
If you care about the environment, your health and animal well being then just eat less animal product (you need some anyway), buy only local food (local meat) and above all stop wasting so much of it.
Just a few decades ago people knew what they were eating, no processed food in any way. They were raising their livestock in their yard, they knew their single sheep / pork / cow and poultry and respected them. At some point you need to eat and kill them, people getting shocked by this have just become brainwashed or oversensitive. Go spend some time in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe, they're laughing at this nonsense trend.
>If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything?
If I'm really going to be dead within 100 years, why am I doing anything?
Lots of reasons, but the easiest is because it's more enjoyable than the alternative. Who cares if a plant burger is heavily-processed? I like it and I don't have to think about whatever died to bring me my meal.
Yes, it would be better if I grew my own lentils and only ate homemade dal. But that's not realistic for most people, and from a health and environmental perspective, it seems like it's hard to do worse than red meat.
Seed oils are toxic. These fake "meats" are the some of the worst processed foods around. It's sad people are being duped once again by the food industry and medical establishment. This will only further worsen the awful health of the population.
You seem to throw all food processing into the same pot, so to speak. Humans have an under-developed digestion system. Why? Because they can pre-process their foods to compensate. They know that some plants are poisonous unless cooked, for example.
And obviously, few food-processing factories or bulk shipping methods of ingredients cause enough greenhouse gasses that you can just eat local meat instead, if you care about your footprint. Saying that none of this is solving a real problem is wishful thinking.
About once a month I have a huge craving for a burger, so I’ll eat a Beyond burger. It’s worse than eating veggies but it helps keep me vegetarian. Without it, I’d probably eat a real burger to satiate my meat craving. Since I’m an all-or-nothing person (major personality flaw), eating meat once a month would turn into a slippery slope. Beyond meat helps to keep me on the vegetarian straight and narrow
Health is not the reason these products exist. I buy them because I want an unhealthy treat that doesn't have the same ecological or animal rights impacts as beef.
If 10% of whopper sales switch to impossible whoppers, that's a big deal, and foods like this can provide a bridge to consumers who have never considered vegetarianism.
I do buy or grow local food, I'm a vegetarian myself. Your view is, in my opinion, too black and white. There's serious momentum around plant based meals, and that's making even more plant based foods available elsewhere.
I think this is a counterproductive view. Gas turbines are bad for greenhouse gas emissions, but the fact is that gas turbines have displaced coal generators in many places in the US reducing net emissions.
Are gas turbines a part of a zero emissions electricity grid? No of course not. But are they an improvment on what's happening today? In some cases yes.
Ultimately you're right, eating locally grown plant based diets would be better for an individual, but you're also wrong because the beyond burger is a hell of a lot better than the food it's replacing in most cases.
I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devastation.
I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products:
1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? For example, I recently watched the documentary Seaspiracy which showed the negative effects of commercial fishing. However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily (regardless of any change in behavior on my part or my small circle of influence)?
I think danShumway answered 1) pretty well. I just wanted to add my opinion about 2).
Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.
This is another classic example of Tragedy of the Commons [1].
Outright bans will likely never be feasible at all, though we could (and should) consider banning many of the bad practices that usually come with large-scale factory farming (and publicly funding grants/subsidies for these plant-based alternatives).
It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan.
The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating meat still have a B12 deficiency.
80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa!
We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient.
And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.
Where do you get your b12 then? It’s excreted by bacteria and cleaned off in processing. Then, in most functional foods, put back in place as cyanocobalamin. But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it.
So again, where do you get your b12? Is it cyanocobalamin?
I'm also a meat eater but have cut down on the amount of meat I eat. I think many of us in wealthy "western" countries don't realise we eat more meat today than in any time of history, thanks to industrial-scale farming and cheap supermarket prices. It wasn't always like this but we're now conditioned to think plentiful and cheap meat has always been the norm.
In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role.
This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards.
"Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why?
To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm.
> 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger.
I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment.
After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.
One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive:
To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US.
Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here.
Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world.
So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way.
Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment?
The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere.
The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.
When I was a teenager I worked for dairy farms helping them with the accounting. A big part of their expenses were antibiotics and antidepressants for the cows that had a calf taken away and they had to stay there producing milk.
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death
The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different.
I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them?
Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake.
What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways.
So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do.
But, let's get to the rest of your question:
> However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily
Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made.
What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products.
We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well.
So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter.
I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.
1) The ethicality of something is not sourced from nature. If this would be the case, then raping would be completely okay as animals doing something like that too, right? It's more coming from empathy, like we don't let people beating or killing each others as you don't want that happened to you as well.
2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly.
Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.
I'm quite torn about the utilitarian argument, that claims that it is justified to kill animals for their meat as long as we give them better lives than they would have in nature.
I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them.
I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.
Since somebody downvoted, I assume for the missing source, here is an excerpt:
"As well as revealing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these new findings demonstrated that switching just one red meat meal to plant-based a week could result in a 23 percent reduction (8 million hectares) in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use, and a 2 percent reduction in the UK’s water use (the same as taking 55 fewer showers per person per year)."
The local burger joint closest to my house is 100% vegan and uses Beyond patties. It’s also, in my opinion, the best burger in town.
I’m a carnivore and would definitely notice the difference in a Pepsi challenge of the patties themselves, but the overall taste and presentation make this place pull ahead of all the meat-based alternatives.
I feel like we’ve crossed a threshold. This was literal sci-fi just a couple of years ago.
I made a conscious effort to develop some vegetarian dishes I could make simply for variety. If nothing else, vegetarian cooking has to do a lot of work to make up for not just leaning on meat as a primary flavor component, but the result is you can get much more diversity and interesting flavors and textures.
It's honestly more exciting to see where we're going to do once we're at "seamless replica" and can start playing with the capability to make brand new things.
There's some really great vegetarian options from world cuisine. I draw heavily on Mexican, Indian, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and southeast Asian cuisine in my home cooking. It's a nice variety and a good challenge to find the simple recipes that don't try to replace meat but instead taste excellent without it.
I really wonder if there are special cooking instructions to make them that might be causing so many restaurants to pull them off the menu.
I've tried several Beyond burgers at various restaurants, and all of them were the worst burgers I've ever had. Dry, tasteless, and chewy - absolutely nothing like real meat. Do a degree that I question if they're all being prepared wrong.
I remember years ago at a bbq, a friend who use to be a short order cook at one point was flipping his burgers. He kept squeezing his frozen patties until the blood or whatever stopped running.
So yeah, if you cook a beyond pattie to the same visual cues as a regular burger in a restaurant in that way, it'll dry out. The instructions on the package are all that's needed. Oil, hot pan, 4 minutes on each side without moving it around and done.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like my experience at all (which is limited to this one place). If anything, the burgers I like are less dry and less chewy than the beef-based competition.
This is a phenomenon that all too often suffers from the distaste of ruinous empathy [1] and moral superiority. I personally don't care why/how [you] _feel_ about this product. Stories about morality and feelings in the alt food market are insufferable and immediately invoke an epic eye roll. I care about what I eat in this order:
1. Is it healthy?
2. Does it taste good?
3. Is it sustainable?
Fake meat, at this point, barely meets #1, absolutely gets nowhere close to fulfilling #2 for my taste, and seems to fulfill #3. But it tastes like hot garbage compared to actual meat. I'll wait for lab-grown muscle to reach maturity. My taste buds and macros matter more in the meantime.
Are you referring to the Beyond Burger at Burger King or Beyond Meat in the grocery? I ate the former today and think it tastes pretty good (I don't miss the real-meat Whopper at all.)
P.S. I think your reference to radical candor is unnecessary; how does it further your 3 points? At the same time, thank you for pointing out this managerial meme; a tangential response since you brought it up: you do realize that the opposite of ruinous empathy is depraved indifference, right? How can we be sure that in critiquing Beyond Burger support as ruinously empathic, you aren't shielding your readers from valid concerns that choosing Real-Meat Whoppers over Beyond Meat Whoppers is immorally indifferent?
Yep... people are missing the obvious point that since the taste is so much worse, Beyond Burgers are just NOT going to sell beyond the population of people that value the ethics over the taste.
So you still eat red meat, even though it is classified as a Group 2A carcinogen and is far from sustainable? You clearly only really care about your taste buds.
100% junk food. These are mostly highly refined oils. All the unhealthy side effects with none of the nutrition, densely packed into real meat.
If you want to be meat free, eat vegetables. Portabella burgers are deoicious, as is grilled eggplant, zuccini, etc. All healthy for you.
The fake meat trend makes us all more unhealthy. If you have issues with meat, work on addressinf the big farm, big ranch industry which needs their agg gag protections and subcidies immediately removed.
Honestly flabbergasted by the amount of ignorance in this thread, it was definitely not what I expected from the Hacker News crowd.
- Cattle does not eat soy byproducts and soy production is definitely not driven by human consumption. Not by value, not by mass. [1]
- Bison herds did not produce as much methane as today's cattle. [2]
- Cattle does not strictly use land unsuitable for growing crops. Also, this completely ignores any other unwanted effects of having too much cattle (in one area). [3]
- Meat is not always healthier than "processed foods", whatever the latter may actually mean.
When looking for facts on any of this, try to look for scientific papers instead of videos or blogs and do look-up the individual researchers and whom they work for. There's too much at stake here for the companies trying to sow doubt, as evidenced by some of the things I read here.
I like to say beyond meat is like an animal you haven’t eaten yet, but sounds plausible. I think with it framed that way it tastes delicious (if you crave animals). I went vegetarian and crave fake burgers more now than real ones before and Beyond really hits the spot for me. I love the sausages as well. The taco crumbles are a weird texture but I’ve used them in some hash scrambles.
Didn't know they did sausages. That could be a decent market to tackle. We don't typically make burgers at home, but we do often buy simple sausages as a quick meal for the kids. Usually the supermarket choice is premium sausages with more exotic combos (that I like but the kids don't), or basic plain ones which always seem a bit miserable. If we're buying plain sausages, might as well get something like this instead.
Tbh I prefer Gardein's more traditional soy-based burger in this category. Grills up more nicely imo. I agree that Beyond's sausages are good. Even the fast-food version that Dunkin uses on their sausage McMuffin clone comes out well (they have both meat and Beyond versions). I'm split on Impossible. The fake blood really weirds me out.
Readit News
- The texture is off - Maybe they cook strangely - Potentially less taste
But the most important thing about them, and the reason I urge everyone to at least _try_ Beyond Burgers, is they require no violence against animals.
This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
Maybe you think the burger tastes different, or has a strange texture, but I certainly won't try to argue that because it doesn't matter. No one needed to die for you to eat it.
I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.
I have a small cattle property, we run on hill country with diversified ecosystem, mixed grass and bushland. We have a heap of native animals living across the property. And at the end of the day the steers do get sent of for slaughter after 18 to 24 months + we kill feral pigs when they get in large numbers.
While cropping properties they tend to be monoculture, very little native animal presence. The spray like buggery wiping out insects with all that flow on effect (and to be fair we spray too, herbicide only and never pesticides and far less frequently). Also the cropping properties tend to shoot 'pests' heavily. We don't mind a few kangaroos and ducks type thing about but cropping properties are very serious about deterring and killing anything that hits their property.
And to be clear, I'm not having a go at you. I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position, and my family actually try to do more vegetarians meals. While at the same time I'm not sure plant based options are so devoid of killing, only the end product is one step removed.
I don't mean to diminish any of that at all, it's all worth paying attention to.
However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming. So it's not really like eating meat is ever going to result in less death. We would need to move entirely to free-grazing cattle, which frankly, I do not believe is scalable enough or cost-effective enough to meet food demand.
I know people who are not vegetarian or vegan, but who care very deeply about animal welfare, and who care a lot about where their beef/pork/chicken is sourced from. I admire that, I am not going to shame anyone for caring about anything. My own opinions about killing animals aside, at the very least ethically sourcing meat is miles better than not caring at all. But I no longer believe that's something that's feasible to expect most people to do; in a weird way I think going vegetarian is easier for many people than figuring out where their burger at a restaurant came from. And where factory farming is involved, getting rid of meat allows us to engage directly with the costs of farming and eliminate one of the extra steps (cattle) that are layered on top of that process.
I do have a lot of respect for smaller cattle operations that run an ecologically sensitive operation, such that the land is used in a way that sustains itself and the cattle on it. It's just that, those are the exceptions, at least in countries like the US.
I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the animals we intend to eat.
Secondly, and this is argument I don't make often because its _really_ not popular (but you seem like a great person so I'm happy to share!), I just don't think animals exist to provide or serve us. They are their own beings, and we are ours. Personally, I don't care if someone treats their animals like absolute royalty. If we kill them, or we forcibly impregnate them and remove their children so we can have their milk, it's wrong to me. But again, this is not an argument many people are swayed by, so I don't generally mention it.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better.
Now I want to emphasis that guilt is not a good reason to start with beyond meat.
The desire to try to do a nice thing can be, but as a vegetarian, it's important that people are not pushed out of meat because of some negative emotion.
I'd rather have happy meat eaters than frutsrated veggies.
But give it a try, just for curiosity sake.
I like the taste of BM, but find them hard to digest.
Also remember it's still process food, and organic free range steak is likely healthier.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment"[1]
The key parts being "seeks to" and "as far as is possible and practicable". Veganism is not about being perfect (that's impossible), and although some might speak as if it is, they should not be taken seriously.
What we do know is that striving for a more vegan way of living is unequivocally less harmful for sentient beings and I and many others think that is a very noble endeavor.
1. https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
This is true, the produce farmers kills pests insects and animals to produce crops at high volume.
The issue for me is scale. You need to feed the farm animals which leads to more soy and grain being produced which leads to more death.
I also can’t guarantee that the produce farmer or the farm owner is vegan which means I might be indirectly supporting animal agriculture multiple steps removed.
That way of thinking provides no viable solutions. I can at least control myself and know that I am taking steps to minimize harm.
You take a drive from Melbourne to Sydney and you get to see the effect of livestock farming, it's been completely denuded of natural vegetation everywhere where it's flat enough to smash down.
The destruction is right there in front of your eyes. Knocking down scrub for cattle farming wipes out the natural environment, there are some species where it does good for them or kangaroos and birds that like open grasslands but for everything else it's really bad.
Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide you get the same thing.
Australia knocked down more open forest in the last four years than they did in the Amazon - 90% for beef farming.
You can grow crops on a much smaller area, without even mentioning organic crop growing where you don't use chemicals to wipe everything out.
Anyone looking at that (nsfw) video and telling me "but what about the insects/pests" have to be trolling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O15Owo7jGtU
Anything we do will have an impact on the rest of our eco system, even if we just ate wild berries you'd find someone complaining about the beetle you stepped on while walking in the woods. But putting everything in perspective I doubt cropping comes anywhere close to animal slaughtering in term of crime against nature.
I think anyone will agree that modern industrial agriculture comes with its own set of problems.
How about just using meat in small quantities, and for seasoning?
A little bit of beef/chicken goes a long way. Most Americans do not need more protein.
I have gotten by with a few pounds (less than 5 lbs) of meat a year.
If a cash strapped, loser, like myself can do it, anyone can.
Actually vegetarians follow a diet along traditional lines (dairy okay, meat nay), they are not so much into moral positioning. Vegans are the ones making an ethical stance: "no animals harmed for me whenever I have the choice"
Hence vegans dont wear wool/silk/leather, dont go to zoos/animal races, and dont consume eggs/dairy.
https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/news/forage-program-aims-to...
My take away from that experience specifically in the US is that if you want to be sustainable/humane/etc. the best effort to effectiveness ratio is probably just to be a vegetarian. Finding and vetting sources for meat in much of the US is not easy.
Most normal grocery stores simply don't stock anything resembling what you describe and even at our local Co-Op, the choices can be pretty inscrutable. Do I want the "We've ticked all the boxes to be labeled 'Organic'" or "We're Amish, so you should totally trust us" or the "We're too small to bother with fancy packaging or certifications"? It's hard to say, though generally we lean towards the last option.
https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/organic-living/w...
Also not trying to have a go at you, thanks for the insightful comment.
Furthermore: Cows are not perfect machine and eat plants - you have to grow more plants for to make a meat burger than you have to make a pea protein burger. So if cropping is bad for animals, farming meat requires more of that too. You could argue your cows eat different, but what do most cows eat? For mass market, fake burgers are simply better for land use, water use, animal welfare, emissions, environment, and even health.
The problem I have with this argument is that it always seems to me to focus on the life of the animal, but not on the death of the animal.
All animals eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we slaughter animals, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to starving to death, being eaten alive by insects, being hunted and terrified by a predator etc).
So, I think that it is important how the animals are grown (factory farms are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of food). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the slaughter of animals who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of their species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
So, I think that it is important how the humans are grown (prisons are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of labor). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the murder of 25 year old people who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of the human species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
The same line of reasoning can be applied to humans. We can have really shitty deaths categorised as ‘old age’, yet euthanising is controversial.
If we had fully lab grown meat that was identical to the real thing. How many of us would convert? In theory, we all would.
In reality, we still covet mined diamonds, so we'll probably still irrationaly claim there's a difference long after there really is.
If you give a cow a choice between being a gazelle and getting eating by a lion or a cow and being fed and taken care of but eventually being killed, which would they choose? If you gave a cow a choice between the elimination or decimation of its entire species (cows have been altered to be not fit for nature) which would they choose? It’s not as cut and dry as you would think. There are definitely people who would pick to eliminate the entire human race. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_M... , so maybe we would have voluntary cattle extinction movements as well.
A belief that birth/procreation is a negative is known as antinatalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
My thoughts are that BeyondBeef has a kind of plastic-y smell, but is almost exactly right in terms of color and texture.
The smell is not concerning to me, but it is distinct for my palette. I still eat it, and don't mind. Aside from the burgers, I also really enjoy the spicy Italian sausages. There is a slightly different taste than pork-based sausages, but I would never complain about a Beyond Meat spicy sausage in my Italian food. The sweet Italian version tastes almost like a breakfast sausage to me.
For Impossible Burgers, I feel like the taste is virtually 100%. I don't actually know, if I were eating an impossible burger on a bun with the fixings, if I could tell you it was an impossible burger. The only thing they would lose on is the texture and maybe the color. The texture is more... chipped(?) than ground beef, so looking at a patty (probably easier with an 8oz than a 4oz) is pretty obvious, but man, the flavor is great.
Like I said, I eat either one of them as my first choice whenever they're sold at a restaurant.
I especially don't get why people want the texture of red meat like beef patties. So you like... soft food?
There's no arguing tastes, it's just weird to me that that's what other vegetarians would care about.
Ironically, I think it would be far more appealing if they didn’t try to make it simulated meat and leaned into its strengths. Vegetarian burgers that don’t pretend to be meat taste better. Legumes that are expertly processed as a protein, without trying to be meat, taste better. The Impossible Burger falls into the same category as “fat-free mayo”; trying to maintain the pretense ultimately produces a poor experience.
I am an accidental vegetarian most days but I won’t eat Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger. The products taste unpleasantly synthetic. If I wanted to eat legumes, I can create something far better tasting for much less money. If I want a burger, I’ll eat a burger — marketing aside, the gap is still very wide.
With Impossible Burgers, though, it really tastes and feels like I'm eating a real burger. It completely satiates my desire for meat, and it makes my body feel "good" from an energy perspective.
While I sympathise with the argument, I think that it's a mistake to push this aspect front and centre.
There's a whole lot of people out there who simply like eating meat, and that it means killing an animal is not particularly a problem.
The people I've spoken to about Beyond/Impossible and similar fake-meats all tend to think of it as something for vegans/vegetarians, because that's how this type of product has been presented for decades.
"Oh, you're having a BBQ? Fred's partner is a veggo, better chuck on some mushroom burgers or something"
It's a tough push to convince people that this isn't meant for vegans/vegetarians wanting meat, but a product for meat-eaters wanting to reduce their meat intake, but not necessarily wanting to give up their ability to have meals that taste like what they're used to.
Pushing from that angle, I would argue, is likely to have a bigger impact than saying "Think of the poor cow that had to get murdered for your burger!".
This is an approach that provides compelling meal options in a manner that scales much better than our traditional livestock methods.
I'm going to be as neutral as I can be in this comment.
I don't think that's something that should stand in the way; it depends if we're coming from a philosophical perspective, or a political perspective. Arguably, some harms should not be tolerated in civil society - and I think the moral vegetarian case (as expounded by philosophers of all stripes) does some work towards that.
My point is that we can name a variety of behaviour that a large proportion of society engages in which are also harmful. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to convince them, nor to discourage those behaviours through the softer power the government has available to it - higher taxation on meat agriculture and the end of subsidies for meat agriculture being examples. I have met very, very few moral vegetarians who wish to outright ban meat production, at least immediately.
How did the population in general become acclimatised to other things we now see as immoral[0]? Would that work for moral vegetarianism? I don't have the answers to those questions, but I'm sure someone has discussed it previously. Eating meat is an ancient tradition - even older than that - but so were other moral norms, such as the prohibition of homosexuality.
We very, very frequently shame other people on the basis of their conduct as regards morality - the principle of moral judgements. Most (though not all) philosophers argue this is beneficial to society if morality is worth talking about at all. We still shame adultery for moral reasons. What would it take to bring meat production, or even consumption, to a similar level of disdain?
[0] See any of: slavery, marital rape, revenge porn, CSEM, regulations against abortion, regulations against homosexuality, child marriage, Jim Crow laws - and that's just considering the Western world.
I eat plenty of meat, so I don't have an anti-meat agenda. But, for me, for fast food burgers, I may as well choose a less environmentally damaging, and yes, more animal friendly, alternative, because it hardly makes a difference.
People saying things like "the texture and mouthfeel is not like real meat", and yet ground beef burgers vary wildly and are also not like real meat.
From the perspective of any living creature, I generally think of existence as a positive good versus non-existence. I know I certainly would rather come to a violent death at a young age than have never been born at all.
I think there's a plausible argument that modern factory farming is so horrific that it's worse than non-existence. But a cow raised with a decent quality of life, and slaughtered humanely for its meat does not seem worse for animal welfare than eliminating the entire existence of the cow.
(Of course I realize there's ecological and health arguments for giving up meat, but purely talking along the dimension of animal welfare.)
This seems like an on its face absurd and pointless argument to me. In these scenarios we are basically talking about unborn hypothetical future cows and from that perspective your argument makes no sense at all.
Cattle would obviously continue to exist in some form, even with a greatly diminished population – so we are not even talking about extinction.
Is the fact that compared to 100 years ago the US horse population shrank by 50% (due to reduced demand) a great tragedy? Obviously not. Obviously.
This argument is so weirdly absurd.
Or, consider animal agriculture’s role in deforestation of the Amazon, in massively polluting our planet, and in being a breeding grounds for zoonotic disease transmission, etc.
IMO “allowing” a cow to live the entirety of its early life as a confused, neglected, and often tormented slave doesn’t offset a single one of those evils.
Simply said, for cows, eating meat means murder. Not eating meat means extinction.
In time, and in part due to how complicated this ecosystem actually is (as explained by a few other replies here) I ended up settling on eating vegetarian “most of the time” and buying meat sourced from ethical places with better conditions when I do.
But it was surprising to me how threatened most people were when I was strictly vegetarian.
I won’t turn this into a political debate with my theories why, but nonetheless most of my circle of friends are animal lovers and I would have expected some degree of empathy with my cause, but most of them acted like I was personally going to sneak into their house and steal all their meat from them.
That said, I continue to have a great appreciation for the industry of meatless meat.
Although at this point, IMO, Impossible Burger is the gold standard, and after trying it once, eating any other burger (including Beyond) just doesn’t cut it.
1. You are a constant reminder of their choices, the impact of their choices and their ability to make different ones
2. Eating food is a very base level need and the idea of moralizing that can elicit strong responses
3. I do think some people are genuinely afraid that vegans will prevent them from eating what they love (similar to democrats taking away guns or something)
When I've witnessed these debates they're much like 2a. A vegetarian uses some moralizing and hyperbolic language to express how deeply they care about a cause and people either feel threatened or insulted by the language.
To frame that even more concisely, it's like when pro-life people use moralizing and hyperbolic language about abortions in front of people that believe in them or have had one.
My general takeaway from watching these issues is that moralizing, hyperbolic language or other subtle uses of shame, guilt, etc do not yield good results and often create backlash in response to the strength and travel that that kind of rhetoric has. Basically, we need to get better about how we talk about those issues if they're to be considered at all.
Another common theme is usually one side in this debate has some camp within it's interest that is advocating for cancellation, and if you're not actively talking down cancellation both internally and externally to your interest group then you are perceived as showing by proxy approval via inaction.
Most cattle are treated well in Ireland, living outside on fresh grass (live exports aside). My main concerns are global resource depletion, biodiversity, deforestation and climate change.
We're beginning to see a real sea change in this meat eating country, meat-free products are popping up everywhere and not just marketed at vegans / hipsters.
In reality people are OK with violence against animals because when they think about animal products they just picture a slab of meat they pick up from the freezer at the supermarket. If they realized what feeds the process that ends up in that neatly packaged sirloin, I’m pretty sure they’d have a different reaction than ‘meh’.
(And again, I fish and hunt so it’s not like I’m some bleeding-heart hippie who can’t take violence against animals. I just think that we should all be less cavalier about meat intake, which after all is a very recent phenomenon)
Would you have every living thing just...stay alive forever? That’s not going to happen.
Almost all meat comes from such inhumane factory farms with terrible conditions. For the animals treated the worst (chickens) there seems to be almost no moment of their life without suffering. They're even bred with genes that guarantee pain (due to extremely fast growth and egg laying cycles), because that makes it cheaper.
If we had higher standards, this moral argument would be less concerning. But the standards needed to treat animals at least passably well would make meat far more expensive, which is not politically palatable. Better meat alternatives are the best path forward here.
It' the same thing with the environmental aspect. If the animals graze all their lives then it might even have a positive effect on CO2 uptake in the long run, and it definitely is required for some biomes to survive. But, again, factory farming isn't exactly natural.
And yes, that applies to vegan food production as well.
My understanding is that popular opinion says Impossible is even closer, though I haven’t tried it personally.
You know that plants are also living, feeling beings? Though not sure about being individual but that's highly subjective.
The cycle of life is that some trees harvest the sun, and then it's a fish-eat-fish kinda world.
Vegan meat is not important because it doesn't kill animals (it'll kill plants, and hence this is purely emotional/subjective). But because it could be very sustainable. There is a reason why Japanese eat vegetables, fish and pork. They have a large population on a tight island. They have to do otherwise. (they also drive very small compact cars/mini-vans).
And Beyond Burgers actually taste fine. Not amazing, not “just like beef” but not bad. I can eat a Beyond Burger and feel satisfied.
My problem with Beyond Burgers or Beyond products as a whole is that they STINK! Bad! When cooking. I don’t know why but cooking a beyond burger stinks up my kitchen worse than my cats litter box freshly pooped in.
In my opinion, the most important thing is that it is considerably better for the environment due to the reduction in emissions, water and land. Don't get me wrong, no violence against animals is a benefit too, but to me it's not the number one reason to try imitation meat.
Looking forward to seeing how the technology develops, but yeah. It hasn't changed my habits yet.
I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
Do you know which concern resonates most with my 10 year old daughter? Absolutely none of them. She is aware of the issues, and appears to be a conscientious person in the abstract, but when confronted with the option of eating an animal in the moment she simply doesn't care at all.
Are adults more empathetic? Maybe. But fundamentally I think that by the time something makes it to your plate, it's simply too far removed from where it came from for any of these considerations to resonate with most people.
We've considered trying to show her Okja [0] to see if it has any effect on her perspective. I know it was at least partially instrumental in causing me to reconsider factory farming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okja
When I was about fifteen it occurred to me that while that's true, those animals wouldn't be alive at all without us raising them for food. So it seems to me that the goal should be raising them in good conditions without cruelty. At least to my way of thinking, as someone grateful to my parents that I exist, that's better than no life at all.
There are plenty of other solid reasons to eat less meat, but this argument never worked for me.
I actually like the beyond burgers. If they weren't more expensive than a beef burger, I'd eat them.
Most vegetarianism is not about that animals are killed, it is a protest against the way in which the entire industry functions.
Except all those animals + insects that once inhabited the fields
It's impossible to feed people without causing some death. But that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize it.
Consequently, I feel like health and environmental arguments are better ways to get people to limit their meat intake.
This is the only thing that matters, to the contrary. Previous attempts at fake meat have not done as well as Beyond and Impossible precisely due to the fact that the vast, vast majority people actually don't care where their meat comes from, they only care about the taste. Yes, on surveys they might say they care about not harming animals, but this is not true in practice, they don't put their money where their mouth is by stopping eating meat.
Indeed, the true innovation of Beyond and Impossible was focusing exclusively on taste and marketing that up front rather than the moral aspects, because people don't care.
..but nobody is allergic to meat.
There is a theory that benefits mostly ascribed to keto, are actually due to reduced inflammatory load in the diet.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alpha-gal-syn...
But the environment does matter to me, purely because I selfishly want to live longer and in a better environment.
I understand what you mean by violence and I don't want to come across as a stickler just for sport, but if we are taking a hard ethical stance based on principles we need to be precise with categories. Two of which is most important;
1. category of animals include humans
2. category of violence include any suffering inflicted knowingly e.g. being overworked in a sweatshop, psychological violence etc.
If we accept above categories, our supply chain, not only for food but for pretty much everything we consume, unfortunately do incur violence on humans. As such, if someone takes a principle on requiring no violence against animals, they must also be concerned with everything they consume or use, not only what they eat. I am not saying they shouldn't not eat meat if they didn't do the other, I am saying they shouldn't claim a position from principle.
In fact if they made either these two arguments they would be perfectly consistent; argument of convenience "not eating meat is more convenient than not using an iPhone", or argument of priority "not requiring violence against other animals is more important to me than humans". But still they couldn't occupy a principled stance of no violence against animals.
either way, the causal chain between me and the rotisserie chicken is far shorter than between me and the tiny bit of cobalt in my iphone.
I'm a meat eater. Heck, I hunt (and eat what I hunt) and even I can tell you that your argument is ridiculous.
I like how modern people can pretend they don't live in the real world because it is hidden behind abstract complexity. Life is a competition with every living thing. You can pretend that it isn't while you order your uber eats and massively overpriced food, but you are only doing so due to some kind of psychological need.
The further you get into the city, the further you get into the lives of rich people, the more you see this "please think of the animals" attitude, because you become so removed from reality that you think the world is completely different to what it actually is. The irony is that you are in the most privileged place, taking the money that other people could have used, and using it to buy overpriced burgers.
Beyond sausage (an easier endeavor because of how much work fennel and casing do), however, is excellent.
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Maybe to you it doesn't matter.
I can stomach burgers from McDonald's if I haven't eaten them in few months. But if I eat them more than one or two times a week they very quickly start to taste like the garbage they are.
It's really dreadful form of food and I was assuming people eat it as last resort when they are really hungry. Not that they indulge in them because the specific flavor is so unique and wonderful.
I always prefer a wrap. But fries and mcmuffins with egg and bacon are super tasty.
That said, it's not a black and white issue, as people sometimes like to view it as - if most people simply treated meat as something to only enjoy rarely (say, once a week or a few times a month) or something for special occasions, then we'd make significant progress in that regard already!
Alternatively, perhaps people should see how their meat is made, or try doing it themselves, to get a greater appreciation for the amount of resources that it takes to produce any (as well as maybe get a bit more empathy towards the animals in some ways). Personally, i've gone hunting with my dad, have gutted animals in the forest, helped bring them home, skin them and cut the bones, all just to enjoy some meat. That's not to say that it'd bear much relevance to the lives of most people, but it's certainly a very humbling experience.
Edit: In the words of Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I'm actually curious about how others view a more moderate stance on the issue of nutrition - one that calls for gradual changes.
if we had not interfered with this animal, it would have stayed similar to a gazelle
humans of course favoured a meat to size ratio and strength over agility, for their food and labour, reducing the creature to the cows we have today
If there wouldn't be an economic incentive to keep animals alive, their land would be reporposed to crops/housing and a lot of animals would be slaughtered pointlessly.
Here is what I mean by violence against animals
I wonder what you make of carnivorous animals (cats, lions, tigers and the like)?
Should they also subscribe to your weird moral system?
That it, people eating the way they always had eaten have other people wanting to force them to do something. That triggers reaction in the opposite sense.
Those technologies should prosper on its own, and they will be if they are cheaper or more nutritious. Over time they will.
It is like illustration ideas in Spain. People that read were accepting those ideas on their own until Napoleon came and wanted to impose the ideas by force. The reaction against the invader made those ideas(and the people that supported them) not only to not to prosper but go back(and the people expelled from the country), because they were the ideas of the invaders.
I love technology, and as entrepreneur and engineer have always managed innovation. I believe it it the future, but because I know innovation well I also know the drawbacks.
Early products tend to have bugs on them. When we create something knew I expect those like Elon expects their new rockets to explode. When those bugs are related to health it means people die.
And we don't really know what those bugs are. The world in incredibly complex. For example autism or cancer, leukemia, and allergies in young people are skyrocketing.
We know it is related to microorganisms in the gut and we also know that we are killing those microorganism like fungus, bacteria and virus that were beneficial to humans.
We started spraying roundup and other products thinking the world was super simple. And it is not, eliminating all insects, fungus and bacteria that were with us for millions of years will have consequences and secondary effects we could not predict.
Over time all our food will be grown indoors and cultured bacteria will do everything for us like cotton, vaccines or paper. But trying to accelerate the progress by coercion could backfire.
From a cruelty perspective probably the best thing to eat is free range Buffalo, but whale or elephant could potentially be better.
Considering how many animals whales kill, especially blue whales, we could be doing the planet a massive service by hunting them to extinction.
Also I actually like their taste and texture.
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Isn’t this disingenuous because the endgame will be the genocide of almost all farm animals. If they’re so environmentally unfriendly, can’t look after themselves, serve no purpose because they’re no longer food then why would we let them live and continue to breed them.
So there will still be some final suffering until we remove these species from the earth.
Obviously we as a race are responsible for creating animals that can’t look after themselves but to hold up the environment argument makes killing them all the greater ethical choice.
The realities of this world are quite ugly. We've just managed to put a civilized veneer over it
Why make an apple taste like the death of a cow?
For me eating things in their most natural forms seems more appealing. I don't know what is in beyond meat but avoiding processed anything seems like a more healthy strategy.
I’ve been “vegan” for the better half of a decade and I don’t think this is confusing at all: because it’s familiar and it tastes good.
Familiarity and tastes can change over time, but it takes time and effort, and people are already putting effort into being open-minded when they try a veggie burger instead of a beef burger.
Sure, a quinoa salad might be healthier, but most people aren’t choosing between a cheeseburger and some ultra-healthy vegan cuisine.
We should aim to make these choices easy and comfortable instead of criticizing folks for taking baby steps in the right direction.
Just my two cents.
We are, at the very least, decades away from having a complete enough understanding of nutrition to safely replace the nutritional value of beef with a substitute fake beef product. Once we accomplish that, there are some second-order effects to worry about, like increasing single-path reliance on complex agrochemical supply chains to meet basic nutritional needs.
It's also worth keeping in mind that living off plants generally kills more total animals (although smaller animals) than living off medium-large animals.
This is untrue, as the animals you are eating are fed and raised on plants, which are harvested with the machines that potentially kill the field animals. So even accounting for that, fewer animals will die.
Also, animals tend to migrate out of fields during harvesting, and relocate (which is still not good! But better than being ground up by machines)
Your net consumption of plants is reduced when you reduce your consumption of animals, friend. How do you figure it would cause the death of more total animals?
>While I assign pretty significant utilitarian value to "stop eating animals", it still falls a few orders of magnitude short of "provide for the health and wellbeing of humans".
People get along just fine eating only legumes and grains and a few other plants sprinkled in.
The intent of beyond burger, I think, is not to be a meat substitute every time you would currently eat meat, but instead a nice tasting treat food. Sure, it’s salty and full of saturated fats, but I only have them once a month.
Exactly there: between animals and plants.
Ex: "Donuts are bad for you because they are sugary" "Well, apples have sugar in them too! Should I stop eating them as well?!"
Some good-faith discussion can often surface that tacit reasoning.
And you wonder why people can't take absolutists seriously. The marketing power of the moral superiority concept is no new thing. Pivoting the crux of success of your ideology around an incredibly poor burger filling makes no sense either.
In the UK restaurants are being allowed to reopen in 10 days. In London there are an incredible density of steak restaurants which happen to already be booked out completely.
I think your appeal to squeamishness around slaughtering animals will feel entirely cringeworthy to most emotionally intelligent persons.
I eat meat with no plans to stop and I don't have a problem with the comment you're replying to.
It seems like we are going backwards.
You know what uses less greenhouse emissions, less water and less land? The orginal plant based food that gets processed into a beyond burger.
If you really care about the planet why are you buying processed anything? That get's shipped nationwide / worldwide that creates factories, chemical waste, greenhouse gases. Buying locally and growing locally really helps the planet. Going to burger king and getting an absolute burger instead of a whooper is just pretending.
Food chemistry is one of the most complicated chemistries ever. Not only we can't simply construct an argument of safety from first principles but also nutrition labels hardly makes an exhaustive list of the contents and processes involved. Not even mentioning the labeling regulation quirks.
> All food is processed.
This is reduction to absurdity. Even if genetically engineered, the process of cell divisions that end up being a living cow is so complicated that it would lend itself more readily to a claim of integrity, one much stronger than a decade old factory assembly process of dead nutrients. We've co-evolved with the former process for millions of years and created the latter in the last several decades in the name of profit maximization.
That's not what processed food means. A slice of steak from a GMO cow is not processed food, except inasmuch as slashing a knife is a process.
Furthermore, more or less traditional cheese is not considered "processed food" in that context even though it is definitely processed for a long time and with significant effort. Nor is wine or sauerkraut for that matter.
If you care about the environment, your health and animal well being then just eat less animal product (you need some anyway), buy only local food (local meat) and above all stop wasting so much of it.
Just a few decades ago people knew what they were eating, no processed food in any way. They were raising their livestock in their yard, they knew their single sheep / pork / cow and poultry and respected them. At some point you need to eat and kill them, people getting shocked by this have just become brainwashed or oversensitive. Go spend some time in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe, they're laughing at this nonsense trend.
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If I'm really going to be dead within 100 years, why am I doing anything?
Lots of reasons, but the easiest is because it's more enjoyable than the alternative. Who cares if a plant burger is heavily-processed? I like it and I don't have to think about whatever died to bring me my meal.
Yes, it would be better if I grew my own lentils and only ate homemade dal. But that's not realistic for most people, and from a health and environmental perspective, it seems like it's hard to do worse than red meat.
If you are going to not care about any life in 100 years why should you concern yourself with thoughts of death now?
The problem here is that everyone takes the info they want and discards the rest.
Eating meat is not problematic, if done moderately. But nowadays there is not such moderation. There is meat in every meal.
Fake burgers are probably not healthy too, but this is not proven yet.
Just be moderate with what you eat.
And obviously, few food-processing factories or bulk shipping methods of ingredients cause enough greenhouse gasses that you can just eat local meat instead, if you care about your footprint. Saying that none of this is solving a real problem is wishful thinking.
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If 10% of whopper sales switch to impossible whoppers, that's a big deal, and foods like this can provide a bridge to consumers who have never considered vegetarianism.
I do buy or grow local food, I'm a vegetarian myself. Your view is, in my opinion, too black and white. There's serious momentum around plant based meals, and that's making even more plant based foods available elsewhere.
I think you could do better by simply eating more veggies and cutting red meat consumption.
Are gas turbines a part of a zero emissions electricity grid? No of course not. But are they an improvment on what's happening today? In some cases yes.
Ultimately you're right, eating locally grown plant based diets would be better for an individual, but you're also wrong because the beyond burger is a hell of a lot better than the food it's replacing in most cases.
Vat-grown meat may have a future, but fake meat does not.
I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products:
1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? For example, I recently watched the documentary Seaspiracy which showed the negative effects of commercial fishing. However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily (regardless of any change in behavior on my part or my small circle of influence)?
Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.
Outright bans will likely never be feasible at all, though we could (and should) consider banning many of the bad practices that usually come with large-scale factory farming (and publicly funding grants/subsidies for these plant-based alternatives).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan.
The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating meat still have a B12 deficiency.
80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa! We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient.
And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.
So again, where do you get your b12? Is it cyanocobalamin?
and how much of that is marginal land that can't be used to grow crops?
In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role.
This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards.
The joy of veg:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fe...
From the article:
"Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why?
To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm.
"I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger.
I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment.
After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs (~2m40 people reacting to what you will see; ~3m23 the actual footage)
To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US.
Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here.
Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world.
So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way.
Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.
Pigs are stunned, hanged by their back legs and have their throats cut. What's the problem?
If this is inhumane, how should humane slaughtering look like according to you?
The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere.
The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.
It really shocked me.
The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different.
I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them?
Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals.
> Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered?
I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake.
What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways.
So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea.
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically?
Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do.
But, let's get to the rest of your question:
> However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily
Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made.
What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products.
We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well.
So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter.
I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.
2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly.
Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.
I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them.
I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.
I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.
"As well as revealing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these new findings demonstrated that switching just one red meat meal to plant-based a week could result in a 23 percent reduction (8 million hectares) in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use, and a 2 percent reduction in the UK’s water use (the same as taking 55 fewer showers per person per year)."
https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/07/swapping-one-meal-day
I'll leave the rest to the reader to come up with the conclusion.
I’m a carnivore and would definitely notice the difference in a Pepsi challenge of the patties themselves, but the overall taste and presentation make this place pull ahead of all the meat-based alternatives.
I feel like we’ve crossed a threshold. This was literal sci-fi just a couple of years ago.
It's honestly more exciting to see where we're going to do once we're at "seamless replica" and can start playing with the capability to make brand new things.
I've tried several Beyond burgers at various restaurants, and all of them were the worst burgers I've ever had. Dry, tasteless, and chewy - absolutely nothing like real meat. Do a degree that I question if they're all being prepared wrong.
So yeah, if you cook a beyond pattie to the same visual cues as a regular burger in a restaurant in that way, it'll dry out. The instructions on the package are all that's needed. Oil, hot pan, 4 minutes on each side without moving it around and done.
1. Is it healthy?
2. Does it taste good?
3. Is it sustainable?
Fake meat, at this point, barely meets #1, absolutely gets nowhere close to fulfilling #2 for my taste, and seems to fulfill #3. But it tastes like hot garbage compared to actual meat. I'll wait for lab-grown muscle to reach maturity. My taste buds and macros matter more in the meantime.
[1] https://www.radicalcandor.com/faq/what-is-ruinous-empathy/#:....
P.S. I think your reference to radical candor is unnecessary; how does it further your 3 points? At the same time, thank you for pointing out this managerial meme; a tangential response since you brought it up: you do realize that the opposite of ruinous empathy is depraved indifference, right? How can we be sure that in critiquing Beyond Burger support as ruinously empathic, you aren't shielding your readers from valid concerns that choosing Real-Meat Whoppers over Beyond Meat Whoppers is immorally indifferent?
Great priorities!
Dead Comment
If you want to be meat free, eat vegetables. Portabella burgers are deoicious, as is grilled eggplant, zuccini, etc. All healthy for you.
The fake meat trend makes us all more unhealthy. If you have issues with meat, work on addressinf the big farm, big ranch industry which needs their agg gag protections and subcidies immediately removed.
- Cattle does not eat soy byproducts and soy production is definitely not driven by human consumption. Not by value, not by mass. [1]
- Bison herds did not produce as much methane as today's cattle. [2]
- Cattle does not strictly use land unsuitable for growing crops. Also, this completely ignores any other unwanted effects of having too much cattle (in one area). [3]
- Meat is not always healthier than "processed foods", whatever the latter may actually mean.
1: https://nieuwscheckers.nl/nieuwscheckers/soja-voor-veevoer-i...
2: https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs...
3: https://www.wur.nl/upload_mm/f/8/f/86d216c6-5b3c-4058-acb3-5...
When looking for facts on any of this, try to look for scientific papers instead of videos or blogs and do look-up the individual researchers and whom they work for. There's too much at stake here for the companies trying to sow doubt, as evidenced by some of the things I read here.
Impossible is the real burger king in this category
[1] <1lb beef, 1tsp cumin, 1tsp smoked paprika, 1/2tsp garlic powder, 1/2tsp chili powder, 1/2tsp salt, 1/2tsp pepper
https://www.thespruceeats.com/lithuanian-potato-sausage-veda...