Tyson Foods CEO: The Future of Food Might Be Meatless

That's not really saying much, is it? How about a nice burger made with well-marbled ground chuck? Much harder to replicate the flavour and texture of that.

http://www.peta.org/living/food/10-things-wish-everyone-knew...

His top-line number is that a $5 burger would cost $13 without various subsidies, funded by $38B or year in subsidies to the meat industry.

I also found claims that removing subsidies would eventually lower prices by allowing competition from countries without subsidies. But my guess is there's a limit to bottom price globally given current tech, regulations, tariffs, and land availability. And it's difficult to know where that is relative to subsidizes process in the US...

See, for example, https://projects.propublica.org/killing-the-colorado/story/w...

Transportation is not paid for, really, because the highways are maintained without usage fees.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it does make the playing field unfair.

Most meat animals (or at least goats, sheep, and cows) worldwide feed on whatever grows on the ground (whether that be turnips, grass, or something else).

It's an abomination against nature, in the public eye.

I'm sorry, but you are quite wrong.

There are mobile slaughterhouses that cater to this exact market: A farmer raises a couple cows, the mobile butcher slaughters the animal and process the meat into individually wrapped packages. Then they freeze it all and it lasts them a full year till they repeat this process.

Do you need me to find you some youtube videos to prove it?[1] It's common enough that they custom outfit vans specifically to make this job easier (add a power hoist, and pull-out work tables). The butcher drives the van from customer to customer.

You need to meet some more rural friends to see other ways that people live. And BTW I'm not convinced that this is a cheaper way to get meat, instead they do it for the "back to basics" feel, and for the quality of the meat. That's not going to change just because some lab can make some meat.

> Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?

Depends where you live. Some places could, some could not. Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.

[1]Edit: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mobile+meat+sla...

If we go back to our origins the savannah was probably occasionally full of delicious four legged protein just waiting for us to run it down and eat it.

Except that every one of those things still exists! Smallpox doesn't exist, but other diseases such as syphilis do.

So that actually demonstrates exactly the opposite of the point you were trying to make.

Monarchies is an especially bad example because they still exist precisely because people are unwilling to stop a tradition that has gone on that long.

Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.

I suspect the real problem is closer to wasting arable land, water, shipping (with all of those environmental externalities), etc. on growing crops that aren't used to directly feed humans, and government subsidies that hide the true cost of corn-fed livestock from consumers.

You're really arguing something separate here. We can't eat a lot of plants that animals can. 36% of corn goes to feed animals for meat, but what percentage of corn is inedible for humans? (husks, leaves, cobs)

There's a reason we don't domesticate carnivores - we're not creating any more food sources. We don't compete with things that digest cellulose.

Let's say I were to describe a living thing, that despite having no nerves or brain we could identify, responded to favorable stimuli in ways we could easily describe as a "favorable response" -- for example, the presence of usable energy would provoke the movement of appendages towards that energy source, and the presence of unfavorable or damaging stimuli would provoke an "unfavorable response", such as pulling appendages away from negative stimuli. As far as we could tell, the intelligence in this thing was perhaps entirely distributed throughout the creature rather than relying on a centralized processing center metaphor for thought. It doesn't seem to think in any way that we can easily translate, and for a very long time, we didn't even recognize they responded to stimuli at all -- but that's our fault.

This creature also can't make head or tails of us we presume, our experiences of the universe are simply too entirely different. We have a few appendages, bilateral symmetry, and a mix of sensory organs -- mostly in the same appendage stalk as our central thought organ. Perhaps instead of our familiar mix of sense, this creature had an entirely different set that prioritized entirely different things -- perhaps instead of taste, the organism had some alternate way of assessing chemical composition, instead of sight, it had thousands of narrow-band EM sensing organs on the end of each appendage. Perhaps its digestive system was on the outside, a little like ours, but also turned inside out, so it merely had to have external contact with usable nutrients, not ingest it. Perhaps it transported nutrients around without a central cardiopulmonary organ but using nothing but capillary action, lungs were distributed on the underside of each of the EM sensing organ and it's "blood" didn't rely on metals to bind to Oxygen but instead was simply a nutrient stew. What if the bulk of its carbon (sure, its carbon-based) came not from food, but was simply pulled out of the air?

Let's suppose this being had no mouth or way of making noise, but communicated with its fellow species using various chemical exchanges, for example, suppose one of the creatures was attacked, it might release warning chemicals into its environment letting others of its species prepare themselves by pulling back appendages, or reducing the flow of its internal blood analogue. Or perhaps when mature members of the species learned of new sources of nutrients, they might share those nutrients with young members of the species through this exchange network. Perhaps the way this species "screams" is by releasing a gas into the air that warns others nearby.

Mating and reproduction depends on the species, but there are sexes. Species members have various life-stages that include an infancy analogue, a childhood analogue (with growth spurts), a sexual maturity stage and many even have old age. Some species can reproduce on their own, others require symbiotic species to help facilitate reproduction.

If creatures like this dropped out of space in a spacecraft we'd call them aliens and see if we could learn their language and their technology.

Would you think of this creature as something that can suffer?

All I've described are plants.

> How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?

Animals require more energy to raise than plants in general. However, animals can be raised on food stock that both:

a) humans can't eat

b) grows where human ready food plants don't grow well

> Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?

Yes, as well as other various chemicals and treatments from chemicals that kill non-desirable plants to chemicals that kill non-plant animals, to chemicals that kill fungi or bacterial infections. Plants even get viruses.

> What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?

Very difficult to ascertain. The world will have animals in it one way or the other. But nearly all domestically raised plants and animals are the product of thousands of years of engineering and intense cultivation. For example, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and gai lan are all human engineered variations of the same plant. This plant only occurs naturally in very specific ecological niches. One could argue that the millions of acres dedicated to growing these mutants are millions of acres where the natural ecology is permanently damaged. But humans have been at the cabbage game for a few thousand years, it would be impossible to know what nature would have intended for that land.

Similarly, cows are famously highly domesticated food, clothing, labor and milk animals with few close wild cousins due to about 11,000 years of intense selective breeding. But there's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world. If we stopped eating cows today, there'd still be 1.5 billion cows. It's obviously not ethical to just kill them all. Is it ethical to deny them natural breeding rights as well? Cows appear to take pleasure in their offspring, would it not be a slow genocide to simply end their line? We can't ask cows, they don't talk, just as much as plants don't, but we know they have emotions and moods, can be happy, excited, fearful or sad. Would a cow feel sad if it knew it could never have calves?

So do the animals. The soy and wheat we feed the animals is a tiny portion of the plant... so what? If we have 1000 calories of wheat, it's better to feed that to a human, than a cow; The cow will only produce 100 calories of meat for the same grains that we would have eaten.