We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

This is where I stopped reading. How can somebody claim to be on the cusp of disrupting a market when they evidently don't understand the consumer? Nutritional equivalence will not bankrupt the cattle industry.

I saw lots of talk about the meat industry, not a word about dairy. (Admittedly only read the executive summary.) I've seen quite a lot of this over the past year or two: Lots of "we're going to end cattle farming" when all they're really talking about is beef. Industrial dairy operations are horrible: carbon intensive, noisy smelly and cruel, but I don't see anyone claiming to have synthesized dairy replacements, and without that, the cattle business is in no serious danger.

No experience with them. I think they might just be riffing off some trends that may be emerging now and projecting them out. I’ve definitely wondered at this disruption as well. I think it’s a good avenue to supplant protein production with more environmentally friendly processes.

Thought the same thing; sounds like marketing copy

try looking at the linked report, it has about 116 references.

Did you not read the actual report?

Beyond Meat has never claimed to be a healthier alternative to meat and it's a bit of a straw man to comment like they did. I also don't see many margarine induced illnesses or deaths. Everything is fine in moderation.

What’s wrong with oils though? And if canola is bad why can’t they switch it out for olive oil?

Not many people like to talk about this point because it seems off mode but those things made me quite sick. I was disappointed because I’m always in for a good burger no matter what it’s made with. (Don’t extrapolate that on me please!)

There were several threads on r/vegan that spoke to the same symptoms, but with only vague guesses to the cause—like the oils.

There is a lot of hubris displayed in the world of nutrition when any scientists I’ve spoken to in the research (rather than product) space seem to conclude that there isn’t enough known about the complex interactions that occur in our bodies when we eat a “whole” food utilizing the variety of compounds and their structured forms/proportions to say whether or not we can realistically and safely just supplement them yet. I’ve always been told, sure go ahead and supplement but just eat the food as well. Just don’t over eat. And eat mostly real food, shy away from processed stuff.

What is your source that margarine is more unhealthy than red meat? And what do you mean by "healthy" anyway?

There is no consensus that seed oils are "terrible for us". Though as in all things nutrition it's easy to find a fringe voice that claims a position. Canola is considered a fairly healthy oil, obviously in moderation. Some fear-monger about hexane extraction however the Beyond Meat burger expressly uses pure pressed canola with no chemical extraction.

Having said that, by far the overwhelming position on the "non meat burgers" is of environmental/reduced animal suffering positions. I've seldom (actually never, thinking about it) heard it pushed for health reasons.

username scotch_drinker :/

Red meat is a likely carcinogen and processed meat is a known carcinogen.

Oils in general, even extra virgin olice oil are not health foods (which is a common misconception).

Beyond burguers are not healthy, they are junk food. Plant-based junk food, but still junk food.

If people are looking to learn how to eat healthy, the science say's its whole food plant-based. Don't eat plant extracts like oils, you need to eat the whole thing.

Eat peas and not pea protein isolate, eat olives and not olive oil. And so forth.

Just because something is plat-based does not make it healthy, Oreos are plant-based for example. Does anyone think they are healthy?

It's about the perception of the public on certain foods, that is very hard to break as its built on decades of conditioning via advertising and pop culture.

Fast food has never been a cornerstone of healthy living, and I reckon few people eat hamburgers at home.

The real benefit, in my mind, is not removing the staple treat of fast food from the market, while vastly reducing our need to farm red meat.

I would posit adoption of plant based diets "under the hood" of fast food (and hopefully restaurants) is one of the easiest, most effective ways of dramatically reducing red meat consumption. This has an enormous impact. Most cropland is used for livestock feed, and 1/3 of ALL US LAND is used for pasture.

This is why a plant based diet is on the top 10 ways to fight global climate change (4. Plant-rich diet), and starts to remove incentives for slash-and-burn agriculture (5. Better tropical forest health). Growing a lb of meat requires significantly more land, water, (and therefore fertilizer, etc), than the equivalent macros from plants.

"That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target. "

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/if-everyone-ate-beans-ins...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

https://www.drawdown.org/the-book

Next we should tackle ethanol (1/3 of corn yields go to ethanol).

Any "well it may not be better for you" argument against this approach does seem to ignore that we believed red meat was bad for you for decades and we still spend so much of our resources growing red meat.

Life... finds a way.

Someday, we'll hit a Malthusian bottleneck that we can't innovate our way out of, presumably. However, to date, every time disaster looms, something occurs that kicks the can down the road. It makes it very difficult to take seriously the endlessly repeatedly claims that the world as we know it is coming to an end in the short term - the result of such hysteria seems to be to induce a lot of self-righteous and largely pointless churn, while unheralded technology quietly solves the crisis du jour without fanfare.

I don't even care if they're wrong. It's just good to hear people starting to say hopeful things again.

I'll believe that when our CO2 output per year stops accelerating (never mind when it actually starts shrinking!)

It’s also important that whatever we invent, we gift them to developing countries so that that they orient their country’s development towards a sustainable path without having to go through the carbon hungry middle stage.

A guilty conscience concerning global warming?

People who don't want to personally change their lifestyle seem to frequently look for "magic" solutions at the societal level, often overlooking logic fails in the scenario that is being painted. It's like they imagine if the whole world changes, then I don't have to. Or something.

What would you say if you knew 50% of European produce never saw soil, and was instead growing on top of some chemical "water"? Disruptive "scientific" companies are buying high-quality cheap soil in Eastern Europe and impregnating top layer with their experimental chemical ingredients, leading to prediction the soil will be written off in 20 years; it survived thousands of years, reaching top quality, yet some get-rich-quick companies from Netherlands and Denmark destroy it within a single generation, while shouting "we are green" to their investors. I can't wait until these companies manage to disrupt the whole food production that we end up with famine.

at sea

Or how about the billions more people we will have in the coming decades? Population growth in the global south in addition to crop destabilization due to climate change will be a crisis. This is one possible solution.

Eating "real" food may end up a luxury for most.

My grandmother didn't live to 70.

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

For sure. I mean, claims like:

> The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound. By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt.

This is ridiculous. I'm not going to stop eating beef because of the availability of cheap weird unproven lab-grown protein. I might try the latter, maybe feed it to my pets, but as long as I can reasonably afford to eat real meat, I'm going to do so.

The market that will suffer most is probably going to be the non-GMO organic stuff you mention, because it's already that much more expensive than the cheap stuff, so it will be even harder to justify for most folks, esp. if the lab-grown replacements get endorsed as being Healthy by the right Authorities on the issue.

> fair free market

If we had that there wouldn't be so much meat in the first place. Currently, each year, American taxpayers subsidize the animal food system to the tune of $38 billion.

Keep in mind: logistics and product-market fit are both hard problems.

I used to work in the food distribution system, and regularly witnessed entire dumpsters full of perfectly good food being destroyed.

Consumers, as usual, are the key to changing this. We'd have to change the eating and shopping habits of an entire generation to change this.

Changing the system won't work without changing the way we think about food and food shopping.

You are assuming that fat and sodium are unhealthy.

I suggest the real health problem of beef could be a particular carbohydrate (Neu5Gc) that non-human mammals have Impossible Burgers would avoid this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid

Did you also not read the 90 page research paper on the topic that was linked on the page?

Do you have a source on how "Processed" clearly relates to adverse health effects.

Surprise! Current food is deficient in many ways, and not what our digestion is optimized for.

The opportunity is, to create foods that better match what we need. Instead of eating the random cow we fixed on for our modern meat supply.

I almost didn't click on the link because I didn't care to read another depressing prediction of imminent doom —- so I was pleasantly surprised to see the report was about an optimistic disruption.

Many people have a guilty conscience over how we achieve that incredibly low price. That will be a strong motivator.

It always boggles my mind how cheap chicken is now. A whole chicken, grown, fed, slaughtered, prepared, roasted, and ready to eat at the supermarket for a few dollars.

Yes - this is how impossible foods makes the heme protein which is central to their burger tasting "meaty". There are tons of startups working on this for other food products, but it's well established in other industries. Many pharmaceuticals are produced via synthetic biology, for example.

Something like this? https://solarfoods.fi

Yes.

https://www.perfectdayfoods.com/how-it-works/

Even as those animals destroy the ecosystem?

Food as a Service is basically a restaurant; known for millennia and does not sound disruptive enough.