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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

There's an impressive lack of humility here. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future. I challenge the authors to construct a longbets.org wager on the above. I wonder if spelling out verifiable details and putting a significant amount of cash on the line would soften their certainty a bit. If the terms of the bet reflect the assurance in the executive summary I'd be willing to take the other side of it.

Even if they're completely accurate about the benefits and the economics, I think they're greatly underestimating the canalization of human food choices.

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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'm too lazy at the moment to look up a link but fast food restaurants are already adopting these faux-beef burgers and people love them.

yes, but i doubt that cost-parity alone will get people to stop eating meat. there has to be more than that. the popularity of these alternatives is an indicator but not everyone primarily eats burgers.

there is also still the general problem with all processed foods being less healthy than naturally grown foods...

From the report:

> The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins

This is about more than nutritional equivalence. The meat in a burger is usually the most expensive component so artificial proteins could lead to a reduction in the price of a burger by approximately 5x.

Also, naturally grown food means different things to different people. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, much of the naturally grown food we consume now is produced in a vastly different way than it would have been 100 years ago, sometimes to the detriment of nutritional value.

A farmer friend of mine opines: "organic just means bugs have crawled over it before you eat it"

The rise of veganism, mostly on ethical grounds, shows that nutritional equivalence may in fact be a minority concern, and that the ethics of "cruelty-free" eating supercede all nutritional concerns.

I’m not big on organic produce per se, but the other side of that argument would be non-organic just means your food has been lathered in chemicals that the insecticide industry puts a lot of money into “proving” isn’t carcinogenic and destroying the food chain in other ways.

It’s easy to see bugs, it’s not so easy to see or ever know the externalities of invisible chemicals.

Put another way, “organic means a bug was able to crawl over your food without dying”.

If the bugs eat the crops, there isnt any crawled over food left.

I like that. I'll tell him when I see him next :)

I think the cost will decline rapidly while the quality (in general and in how closely it resembles real meat) will increase. Even if people prefer to eat animal flesh the economics will drive mass consumption to faux-meat, IMO.

> there is also still the general problem with all processed foods being less healthy than naturally grown foods...

Yer preachin' to the choir: I'll never eat these franken-burgers for love nor money.

The thing is that the faux-beef burgers are good, but different. I don't see them as being a beef replacement as much as another choice of food available. Many fast food restaurants offer other options beyond beef, like chicken, pork, and fish burgers. People also love those options, but beef remains a viable industry regardless. The faux-meat industry has a lot of potential to be viable, but it is not clear why that it is at the cost of another industry. There is room for both.

That's not even technically an anecdote, let alone data, but here's a more accurate description of what's "already" happening: A vanishingly small fraction of fast-food restaurants are taking small steps to experiment with offering faux-beef burgers as an additional menu option for the small percentage of their customers who might want that.

In the cold light of morning...

Here we go: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/Plant-Bas...

> A number of fast-food chains have introduced plant-based meat alternatives in recent months, partnering with meatless companies Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods.

> They are reacting to consumers' increased appetite for those foods: from April 2018 to April 2019, the plant-based retail market has registered 11% growth, according to data published on the Plant Based Foods Association website.

- - - -

Or this: https://www.starherald.com/news/nation_world/impossible-burg...

> Impossible Burger debuted on store shelves earlier this month, immediately becoming the No. 1 product sold at some of America’s favorite grocery stores -- and remaining the top performer ever since.

> Since its Sept. 20 debut, Impossible Burger has remained the No. 1 packaged item at Gelson’s 27-unit chain. Since its launch, Gelson’s has sold more Impossible Burger than all types of ground beef from cows, based on both revenue and total number of pounds sold.

> “No one could have predicted this level of pent-up demand for Impossible Burger,” said John Bagan, Gelson’s Chief Merchandising Officer.

- - - -

I think we are at the base of the "hockey-stick" curve and that meatless meat is about to eat beef's lunch.

I highly doubt your last paragraph. Meatless would have to be clearly better on at least one axis that matters to customers, and not significantly worse on any other axis. I don't see that happening.

(And don't bother to say "no animals harmed". That isn't an axis that matters to customers of beef.)

The value of the US plant-based meat retail market is still less than 2% of the value of the US animal meat retail market. I think it would be incredible if this were the base of the "hockey-stick" curve, it would fundamentally transform what agriculture looks like in the United States; but there are a lot of reasons to think that growth will slow substantially before the two markets are even in the same ballpark.

I’ve had the impossible whopper. It was fine. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. I also probably won’t buy it again because there isn’t really any reason to.

Eating less meat is enough reason for me, so if I somehow end up at a Burger King, I would quite probably buy it. (Note that I plan to continue eating meat, just less of it.)

How about if it cost half the price of the regular burger?

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 snark intended, but the article mentions "dairy" four times.

Addendum: Actually, you might be talking about the discussion here, rather than the article...

If anything, the large and fairly mature market of dairy replacement (soy almond milk etc) shows how crazy this article is on meat. I've been vegan myself, but to think just because the market now has an alternative to an animal product that everyone will stop using the animal product is crazy.

The dairy replacement market, while mature, doesn't do a very good job of competing directly with the dairy industry. Non-dairy milks cost easily twice what the dairy milks do.

It's not even possible to buy a gallon jug of soymilk. They simply don't exist.

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