Tyson Foods Invests in Startup Beyond Meat
wsj.com
wsj.com
The challenges in the alt.ag. sector lie in the development of mass production technology. From the side of the market, consumers need an extra benefit (animal cruelty free products are not enough) in order to be converting. Outside of the startups, the time to maturity is hypothesized to be 5-15 years.
Tyson is a very forward looking company, very much worried about the future of protein food supply. I had the pleasure of meeting some of their folks, and at least the top level very well outlined the problems we are going to face.
Current business model in the sector is focused on high volume production with strong attrition, little regard to animal ethics (low regulations) and consolidation among manufacturers.
Just the numbers make me shudder:
* Livestock produces 18% of greenhouse emissions
* Feed animals occupy 70% of arable land on our planet.
With the classic animal protein supply chain being almost max'ed out in terms of capacity (and energy+matter conversion effiency), we have some grim perspectives here.
Disclaimer: I work in the alt tag tech startup sector.
"Feed animals occupy 70% of arable land on our planet."
If we didn't raise animals on that land it would just go fallow. It's not like we need more land to grow crops.
It is a lot of land occupied by a very recource hungry industry and less efficient industry e.g. you need 100x more water to make animal protein when compared to plant protein. We use 25% of our freshwater consumption for animal protein production - not even mentioning other recourses. With a growing number of people on the planet, efficiency is key.
However, freeing up more land for plants means we could grow the same amount of food using less intensive cultivation techniques, eg. rotating in nitrogen-fixing crops instead of relying on energy-intensive Haber process fertilizers.
This is simply not true. A large amount of rainwater goes to (or would go to) replenishing aquifers, which we use to provide our drinking and irrigation water. Unharvested rainwater is not wasted--it replenishes our natural freshwater storage.
Additionally, not all water used is captured rainwater. Some comes from those aquifers being replenished by rainwater, and some comes from fossil aquifers, which DON'T get replenished on a human timescale and are truly non-renewable.
If all our livestock were grown in places like Wales, maybe the idea of "use it or lose it" holds true, but we've got a lot of cattle sitting atop the Ogallala Aquifer in the US, and you can find similar situations many places where we raise livestock.
It's not very tasty meat.[1] However, it compares favorably with over-processed, over-seasoned real meat, and it's way ahead of most soy-based meat-like products.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/536296/the-problem-with-f...
I'm happy there is a non soy alternative comming as i don't touch most soy based products because they contain a lot of soy protein.
I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan just don't mind having a good and healthy alternative to be able to use if I do need to host those who are or just feel like getting of meat for a few weeks.
Soy isn't "healthy" it's not used as a replacement for food in Asia, it's mostly used in small amounts to add flavour or as a condiment, and it's almost always fermented.
In the west people use unfermented soy as replacement for many type of foods including dairy, meat and wheat in excessive amounts.
What worse is that Soy protein prevents the absorption of other proteins as it contains a fairly large amount of trypsin inhibitors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypsin_inhibitor To render soy "safe" it usually need to be heat treated to break down STI and a several potentially risky amino acids, this isn't viable with all soy products (e.g. milk) or products that already contain soy as an ingredient (you can't microwave a candy bar), and heat treating soy tends to lower it's nutritional value considerably as well as ruin the flavor and the texture in many cases.
But as stated before fermented soy products (various soy sauces, miso etc.) aren't as an issue the fermentation breaks apart most of the potentially risky stuff in soy including STI's and amino acids like Valine (which is causally linked to insulin resistance, while most foods contain valine 10g of soy protein would contain about 400mg of it), honestly the fact that most traditional soy foods are fermented to begin with probably isn't a coincidence.
There's just too much history of soy consumption in Japan, and too much evidence indicating that Japanese people who eat soy have longer/healthier lives than those who never eat soy, that I think there's some stuff we just don't understand about it yet...making it more complicated than simple ingredients like simple sugars (that we know are generally bad) or fiber (that we know is generally good).
I've gone back and forth on avoiding soy; these days I do prefer it fermented, but I'll eat non-fermented soy foods now and then without feeling like I'm taking a big health risk.
Anyway, I don't necessarily disagree strongly with you, and there's probably a good argument that you should prefer fermented soy foods. But, I think the science is up in the air enough to make me think maybe the "smoking" gun really isn't.
Also, black beans, and some other kinds of beans that are commonly consumed whole and without being fermented, contain more of some of the stuff that allegedly makes soy bad for you. So, if you're cutting out soy for those reasons, you also have to cut out black beans, among others. That doesn't feel like a good choice, to me...since those beans have so many healthy characteristics.
No issues with eating some soy, the issue is using soy as a food replacement for dairy, meat and wheat which results in consuming very large amounts of it.
Also non-fermented soy products in Asia are also treated either with heat or chemically (acid, salts, enzymes) which reduces the amount of the risky stuff and are more safer for consumption.
The problem in the west/mass produced food is where raw soy is used as a filler/replacement ingredient without proper consideration for pretreatment.
Also FYI traditional chinese and japanese soy milk is boiled (for a fairly lenghty duration upto 30 min) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_milk, some western brands are not, an easy test to know if it was heat treated or not is to check how much does it foam, if it foams excessively it's likely unboiled cold pressed milk (tho silicone (e is intentional) might have been added as an anti-foaming agent, so in doubt heat it up for 10 min).
I've never heard of soy milk not being cooked. From what I've read, Silk definitely cooks their milk, and so does a company called Sunrich (which has at some point been what's behind Kirkland, Costco's brand)[1]. I haven't really looked into others, but I've read that in order to remove the "bean" taste from the finished product, it requires cooking, and the longer the better. Like you said, though, if it's cooked, it's fine. I personally make my own soy milk.
You said in another reply that tofu and edemame are safe as well. According to Wikipedia, the soy protein in TVP is heated to 150-200ºC[2], which I assume is hot enough to "fix" the soy? Tempeh is fermented, so I guess that's okay too.
I suppose that basically just leaves soy protein powder (and what they're used for, e.g. protein bars) and heavily processed meat substitutes? I don't know much about the former, but given that processed food in general is typically unhealthy, I'm left to wonder if soy is the main issue, or even an issue at all.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd1s179yWGM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textured_vegetable_protein
Edamame beans, which are soy beans, are also commonly consumed without any kind of fermentation. They are just steamed and salted.
Tofu is also not fermented and is very common in Asia and made from soy beans.
Soy milk did not became widely adopted in Asia until they started boiling it, again heat treating.
Tofu is made by coagulating soy milk with acid or salt effectively doing the same process as fermentation/heat treatment in regards to enzymes and amino acids contained within the soy.
So.... wanna try again?
http://www.ehow.com/info_8547477_happens-eat-raw-soybeans.ht...
A soy burger doesn't have to be cooked, it might need to be warm for taste and texture but there is no intrinsic reason why a replacement meat burger has to be grilled or cooked until the core temperature reaches the needed 54-60c like one would be cooking meat.
If you create an already ready to eat patty with large amount of untreated soy protein and unless you fully cook the burger which might not be required or even not recommended to preserve texture/flavor, and even then it's not as simple since the heat treatment process to make soy "safe" is usually longer (and at a higher temperature) than what you would get to by grilling the burger as it was meat.
How is heat treatment fermentation? You earlier argument was that fermentation was the key to keeping Asia safe from Soy, now it is heat treatment.
How is all the soy products consumed in the west not heat treated? Especially considering raw soy bean is not fit for human consumption.
If anyone's interested, I would check out this YouTuber. There are a number of them, but I really like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LItbM2FfSt0. The video is his six month review of veganism (he's been doing it for over a year now).
Anyway, I'm not a vegan or trying to promote the diet/lifestyle. I just want to make people aware that there are plenty of counterexamples[1] to the claims about soy ruining your hormones.
[1] veganbodybuilding.com
Here's a good example of the anti-soy party line: http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/soys-negative-effects
If it is really that bad is hard to say. There are plenty articles online that ask the question "will soy give you man boobs" and surprisingly you'll find Betteridge's law of headlines broken, as there are articles that answer this question in both affirmative and negative.
I'm sorry if I made it sound I was promoting a stance in this matter one way or another, I merely tried to introduce this argument /viewpoint neutrally.
And why not? Growing animals for 300days in very poor conditions while paying pesky humans to take care of them, slaughter them, slice them up and transport them.
You can just mix a couple plant-based ingredients and produce a decent burger instead at a fraction of the cost and time - it scales way better.
Then you have all those reporters with their hidden camera of what goes on in those factory farms - why do you need all that bad publicity anyway.
This is good publicity for them, cheaper to produce, healthier for humans and the environment. I cannot see a downside to this for any company or society.
Depending on the shareholder agreement you will also be bound to additional guidelines to deal with conflict of interests and voting etiquette.
Pretty much there isn't that much mess you can do, the SHA will be defined to protect the company, you can't act against the interest of the company, you can't dump the shares since the other shareholders have the right of refusal and there are 101 other regulations.
You also need to remember that in most cases there is no need of a unanimous vote of all shareholders, public companies usually follow the 51% rule which means that if you control 51% of the shares you control the company. There will not be many cases where company operate without a designated majority shareholder, this would scare of investors, the minority shareholders also don't share in any of the revenue of the company unless the company is sold or a dividend is declared so effectively minority stock is "worthless" in most cases and is only used as an investment.
If you own 49% of the company you would only ever see any money if the company is sold, or the majority decided to grant dividends and you effectively can only sell that stock to the company/majority shareholder unless they refuse it and based on the specifics of the SHA they are also allowed to block sells to other parties.
If the food supply is limiting the population and making it more efficient increases the population, you're back where you started.
Same with any limit to the population.
Edit: here's a source. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility/#correlates-determinant...
Beyond Meat is fairly low on my list of favourite meat alternatives. The texture and taste just aren't quite right, sort of in the uncanny valley, if you will.
My favourite alt-meat product would have to be Quorn.
I'm really looking forward to trying some of the newer alternatives that use plant-derived heme to increase the similarity to actual meat, but as far as I can tell those aren't widely available for purchase yet so who knows how good they'll actually end up being.
Whole Foods Market Inc. this year began stocking them in the meat section of dozens of stores mostly in the mid-Atlantic [...]
Not being from the US, I had to look this up since it sounds like they're stocking veggie burgers in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. They're not, though. :) It's a reference to the state of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and West Virginia (although the exact definition varies, this is from the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states).
So, I learned something today. :)
This, of course, makes sure I do not get around the paywall, since I have disabled that header in my browser. (I dislike the tracking aspect)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
See: "Are paywalls ok?"
However...archive.is is also your friend: