Impossible Foods Responds to Glyphosate Allegation
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The actual Impossible Foods response is savage and sort of entertaining. I'm not a fan of Impossible but my respect for them went up a notch after reading this.
Do you have anything written up on why? I haven't heard anyone say that yet.
What's weird about their patty?
And what's stopping you from trying?
People eat too much meat. The closer meat alternatives taste to actual meat, the more people will switch. So I strongly support innovation in this space.
Those are all fine foods, for me it’s not that veggie alternatives to meat don’t exits. They do and some of them are fantastic. It’s about variety. Giving up meat fur me would be a bit like giving up all nut cutlet/falafel type stuff and all other meat except chicken. I’ve not tried these new faux meat burgers, but will when so get the chance.
> MAA calls itself as a non-profit, but make no mistake: This outfit is a supplement-pushing e-commerce company that collects and sells consumer data. By MAA’s own admission, it gets a commission on sales of supplements from other affiliates -- and none of the bogus products it pushes have been evaluated or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration or any other governmental authority.
Awesome response by IF. (Also, their burgers are pretty damn good; enough to make it way, way easier to do the right thing.)
Interesting.
Well said.
I don't like the taste of it but by golly I am going to support these new fangled vegan stuff: they are doing the right thing.
Without GMOs a billion people in India will not be alive today. So let's not give these people any more attention than they deserve.
Impossible Foods isn't in a financial position to have the restaurant chains pull out. So they're trying to "take control of the narrative". It was an absolutely fantastic response. They kept it factual, with a bit of sarcasm, and turned the light on the "mom's group". Kudos to whomever thought up the strategy and wrote the response.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you don't have any evidence to back up this hyperbolic claim.
It doesn't help your case by making up data especially when you're denigrating psuedoscience in the same breath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
> Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/man-who-saved-billio...
They don't care whether or not glyphosate is safe or not. They care that impossible foods is getting headlines, and they want to get a piece of it by introducing FUD.
Impossible is 100% right to do a hard reply to this. These people aren't interested in honest debate or product safety and the world needs to know it.
> An additional benefit is that H2 Elite generates an electron-rich potential (-ORP) in the water (you can measure it!). This rare property is uniquely found in fresh, raw living foods and juices, mothers milk and many of the world’s healing waters.
And this extremely safe "Restore". https://shop.momsacrossamerica.com/collections/health-soluti...
What's in it? "it is a carbon-rich, alkaline liquid, with lignite-derived trace organics and essential trace amino acids". Mmm, lignite-derived organics. I think this is just water.
And that the ingredients list in the text doesn't match the ingredients list in the image of the bottle.
So let us sell you some for low cost of $60!
Is this a new way of selling snow to Eskimo?
But seriously, these kinds of “truth blogs” do more harm and spread FUD that undermines public support for environmentally beneficial food sources.
http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2016/11/1746-zen-honeycutt...
Essentially they want you to buy in to the idea that no one else can be trusted besides them.
I don't care about teams or taking sides. All I care about is my health. If Glyphosate is safe, there needs to be a lot of experimental evidence supporting that conclusion.
But the environmental impact of meat production is so enormous desastrous, we should welcome every possible alternative. Whatever the Glyphosate (and GMO) concerns are, they are tiny in comparison.
The only strong opinions that I've heard are from farmers, and that's more about the economics than anything else. Let's face it, nobody gives a flying hoot about what farmers think.
If I were pushing the implication soy, potato and coconut oil as a healthy alternative to anything, I would make sure to have good opposition PR in place to cast people who question the product as crazy.
Impossible is very careful to emphasize the environmental mumbo-jumbo and avoid any mention of health beyond the standard nutritional data on their website, while implying that it's better. It's similar to supermarkets that package chicken in white and green trays, empathize "hormone free" and merchandise it next to the organic chicken.
Reference, please.
In case you haven't seen what industrial plants agriculture looks like nowadays:
https://www.ecowatch.com/europes-dirty-little-secret-morocca...
The anti-meat propaganda is getting obnoxious. The most sustainable agriculture is one in which the soil is fertilised with manure and rotated livestock, because grazing animals keep the soil healthy and meat keeps us healthy, because we are omnivores.
We might need to discourage CAFOs by cutting the corn subsidies and by raising their environmental taxes, which will raise the price of meat, but we also need to use less pesticides and artificial fertilisers, because we are heavily polluting the soil, the water supply and killing the bees, which should drive up the cost of fruits and vegetables too.
And from ecological, to health and ethical considerations, most pro-vegan arguments (not all) are bullshit. The next time you're happy about not killing animals and being eco-friendly, see this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/songbirds-death-to...
We need to eat less meat, we need to look after animals better and we need to do it in a much more eco-friendly and sustainable manner. We don't all need to go vegan. Going from one extreme to another is never the answer.
Why not?
To be honest, I'm one of those waiting for my promised future superalgae and Euglina's food pills, so...
I think meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger are more likely to preserve cultural heritage in food than a meal replacement, personally.
You might be interested in this submission (which got flagged so as to censor it out of the frontpage at that time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519
>And from ecological, to health and ethical considerations, most pro-vegan arguments (not all) are bullshit.
As an expert in one of these three fields, I can say with certainty that you're just making up these claims from whole cloth to fit your narrative.
Edit: I want to edit this to make clear I'm not just making a claim to authority and saying everyone should believe me. This response was mainly out of frustration at outright nonsense like "meat keeps us healthy" that no health organization in the world is going to subscribe to. I hope people in general are aware enough of some of these issues to detect the problems in the post I replied to and look into some of these questions for themselves.
>ethical
right. because growing billions of animals in inhuman conditions and slaughtering them is humane
>health
don’t feel like linking a source right now but higher red meat and sausage consumption are linked to colon cancer. this is a bit of a weaker point than the others
>ecological
wrong again. 7% of total emissions come just from gasses released by livestock. and about 60% of total ice free land is used to house the livestock and grow feed. [1] meat is just inefficient. 80% of arable land is used on meat and feeding that meat for only 20% of the worlds calories. [2] that just isn’t sustainable if the population keeps growing.
eating meat is fine (arguably) but don’t try and justify it with bullshit. just say you like meat.
[1] http://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
It "looks" bad but do we care about looks more than pollution ? Look at any large scale animal farm, it looks much worse. Any solutions to feed 8b people will be far from perfect, but some solutions have less of an impact
Reducing (not stopping) meat consumption is a very easy way to reduce your carbon footprint, and you can still get all the animal protein you need from dairy, eggs, &c.
> The most sustainable agriculture is one in which the soil is fertilised with manure and rotated livestock, because grazing animals keep the soil healthy
It's true, but the current meat industry is far from that. I'm all for sustainable farms and eating animals that have been reasonably grown and treated. The problem is that so many people eat meat every day, multiple time a day that the industry will never be able to provide sustainable meat. Look at the chicken industry, they grow them so fast that they die of organ failures and other growth related diseases and deformations. There is no soil fertilization coming from the millions of animals that have never been on a field. https://www.aspca.org/sites/default/files/chix_white_paper_n...
> meat keeps us healthy, because we are omnivores.
Omnivore doesn't especially mean meat eater, just animal derived products. People live without meat just fine, the abuse of meat and the consumption of low quality/processed meat has been linked to many health issues on the other hand.
Nowadays I only eat meat when I go out and can spend good money on a quality steak, asian bbq or the like. Your body doesn't _need_ that daily ultra processed bacon, that $1.5/kg chicken or any of the fast food low quality burgers. The current western diets really are a metaphors for humanity; long term self destruction for short term pleasure & convenience.
There's an important economic perspective to pesticide use: farmers are going to be doing whatever they can to kill enough pests to protect their crops and get a satisfactory yield/ROI.
That means that, the more effective a pesticide is, the less of it they need to use; and the less effective a pesticide is, the more of it they need to use. Since the dangers to humans/other animals come from the amount of pesticide left on something after washing, the seemingly-equivalent "less, more-powerful" pesticide is actually much less dangerous than "more, less-powerful" pesticide, because it's more likely to be completely removed from the end product.
If we ban the most effective pesticides, the alternative is using more of the less-effective pesticides to get an equivalent effect. Which means getting food that likely has more pesticide left over on it.
This also applies to "organic" food: "organic" pesticides are less effective, so they use more of them, so "organic" food ends up having more pesticide left on it than non-"organic" food.
So, if you're not a fan of pesticide in the sense that you're not a fan of eating pesticide, then you should want farmers to be equipped with as powerful a pesticide as possible.
Sure, the more potent the pesticide, the less growers need to use, and the less residual pesticide ends up ingested by people. But it's impossible to say anything about the relative harm of a small residual amount of potent pesticide versus a larger residual amount of less potent (and chemically different) pesticide.
Nah, my assumption was that the level of harm scales with the power of the pesticide in humans just as it does in, well, pests. (It's not true, but it's an interesting model to study.)
If we assume that relationship, it should imply that, if your vegetables were never washed once from the farm to your mouth, you'd be getting equivalent levels of harm from more- and less-powerful pesticides, since the amount of them sprayed on the vegetable would be in inverse proportion to their toxicity.
However, once you introduce washing, the amount of the pesticide you remove isn't constant, nor linear.
In fact, some pesticides are non-"organic" precisely because they have chemicals in them that make them more easily washed off!
So the better-engineered (less "natural") pesticides are both originally present in smaller quantities, and reduced in quantity more by washing. You might end up eating none of a synthetic pesticide, whereas an "organic" one might be all over your food even after washing. "None" is very different from even a little.
(Further, there are synthetic pesticides that are entirely safe for humans—or are even considered food by humans—but which are considered non-"organic" because we can only create them via de novo synthesis rather than in a bioreactor. Consider some artificial sugar that the human liver can process but insects cannot metabolize. If we sprayed it on plants, it'd be a "synthetic pesticide." If "synthetic pesticide" looks like that, and "organic pesticide" looks like, say, nicotine, which would you prefer to miss some residue of?)
This is a highly questionable assumption that you'll need to support or abandon. It's as important as your later points about washing.
For example, caffeine acts as a natural pesticide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Natural_occurrence). It kills insects, but humans collectively consume 10 million tons per year.
As another example, diatomaceous earth kills pretty much anything with an exoskeleton through a physical mechanism, but is completely non-toxic to mammals (prolonged breathing is not a good idea, though). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth#Pest_contro...)
It is convenient but erroneous to assume that all pesticides affect humans and pests equally.
Then why are lawsuits that claim those links have been established winning regularly in courts now?
“Proven to be carcinogenic” is a ridiculous claim, refuted by multiple government agencies, including EFSA, Germany, Canada, and the World Health Organization (WHO), who determined that glyphosate exposure in the human diet is unlikely a carcinogenic risk. No regulatory authority in the world considers glyphosate to be carcinogenic to humans at current exposure levels.
https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MonographVolu...
Other studies show the link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
Now, admittedly, I don't have a strong background to stand on here, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise. And I would agree with the overall thrust of Impossible's claims here that this is likely far too low a level to be worried about.
But I'm not sure I buy it that there are no connections, particularly for high levels that are breathed in during farming.
My impression --- again, corrections welcome --- is that glyphosate has been intensively studied, both epidemiologically and in lab studies, and that none of those studies has conclusively linked glyphosate to cancer, even in rodent models, and even at unrealistically high doses.
To your original question: again, it's also important to remember that glyphosate-based pesticides aren't, like, pure aqueous solutions of glyphosate; there's lots of other stuff in there, as there are in all chemical herbicides, and if there's a lymphoma link to Roundup, who knows what the actual causative agent is? The evidence points away from glyphosate being it.
My original question was legitimately not a rhetorical question (although that appears to be how it's been taken). I assume Monsonto has some of the best legal representation out there, so I assumed if they couldn't defend it, the case must be fairly compelling.
I'll put my skeptical hat back on. Appreciate the feedback.
It is all rather amusing, actually.
Causation vs correlation is key in science, but is not the standard used in judging civil litigation.
Great question. The answer seems to be "because Monsanto is now owned by a foreign company".
Before that those claims weren't really winning in the courts.
Probably much more than found in Impossible burgers, but it would be nice to have more research on glyphosate's effects on the human gut. Does chronic ingestion of glyphosate from unwashed raw produce have any statistically significant effect on the human gut?
"The presented results evidence that the highly pathogenic bacteria as Salmonella Entritidis, Salmonella Gallinarum, Salmonella Typhimurium, Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium botulinum are highly resistant to glyphosate. However, most of beneficial bacteria as Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium, Bacillus badius, Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Lactobacillus spp. were found to be moderate to highly susceptible."
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Awad_Shehata/publicatio...