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Comment by pascalxus | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the only way #6 will come true is if the replacement for meat looks, smells and tastes exactly like the real thing and it'll have to be cheaper too.

People all over the world love meat, especially US, UK and the Chinese. I've tried to convince some family members to reduce their meat consumption even a tiniest amount gets a huge amount of resistance. People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.

Impossible meat has a great start and I think their market share will continue to increase. But, there's an immense amount of variety in the meat market and the alternative meat industry still has a huge amount of work to do to address it.

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Faced with a choice between beef or fake beef that tastes exactly the same, most people will just go for the real beef. They don't want the highly processed fake stuff that contains who knows what.

The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.

But what if it's not "highly processed" due to advancements in tech? Personally I would always choose the fake (lab grown or plant based) over the real meat. Real meat and three industrial farming process just has too many ways that the product is prone to contamination, not even to mention the cruelty/ethics. I say this as an avid meat eater as well. I love the taste of meat but I'd switch in a heartbeat once there's an alternative that compares.

This is a bit shocking and I'll get downvoted for it but:

Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.

That statement is factually correct but worded in a way that suggests a misunderstanding of the WHO classification system. "The lists describe the level of evidence that something can cause cancer, not how likely it is that something will cause cancer in any person (or how much it might raise your risk)."

> This is a bit shocking and I'll get downvoted for it but: Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.

I downvoted you not because of what you wrote, but because what you wrote is directly refuted by your (unlisted no less which I find intellectually lazy) source.

Processed meat being a class 1 carcinogen doesn't mean that plutonium = read meat! It simply means there is a likely link between it and cancer. Not that they are equivalent. This statement is scaremongering at best, unsupported by the classification. Also "cancer" is vague, the WHO organization, IARC, listed colorectal cancer as the specific cancer.

Ref: https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

And for red meat being a class 2 carcinogen, they listed as probably not that its known.

From their FAQ:

    This recommendation was based on epidemiological studies suggesting that small increases in the risk of several cancers may be associated with high consumption of red meat or processed meat. Although these risks are small, they could be important for public health because many people worldwide eat meat and meat consumption is increasing in low- and middle-income countries. Although some health agencies already recommend limiting intake of meat, these recommendations are aimed mostly at reducing the risk of other diseases. With this in mind, it was important for IARC to provide authoritative scientific evidence on the cancer risks associated with eating red meat and processed meat.

Note that phrase: "Although these risks are small"

If you want to paint red meat with a broad "bad for humans and whatnot" brush. At least get your facts straight. I can't look at the paper cause its behind the elsevier paywall but it should be here for anyone that can get it.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

I bet the 18% more chance of colorectal cancer listed in the study amounts to for 500 people instead of 4 getting cancer, maybe 5 do now. One of my biggest pet peeves with all of this is the focus on whatever number is higher without contextualizing it.

I'm on your side here, but by what you are saying, doesn't that amount to an additional 600,000 cancer cases just in the USA. Is my math wrong?

That's nothing to sneeze at.

My back-of-the-envelope numbers are close to yours, but I think a very big caveat is the confidence of these associations from epidemiological studies. 18% percent is quite low by most standards. Most epidemiological studies expect 100%-400% to draw strong correlations. Smoking, by example, is in the thousands of percent increase risk.

"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are quite simply out of business." [1]

The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15255093

The 18% and 4/5 in 500 is just an example I pulled out of my butt. I didn’t do a scihub search to find the study but 18% is pretty weak. It’s also more for an assessment at a personal level how much risk you could expect as an individual, which most people care about. Even if that means 600k more cancer patients than before, you’d have to compare that against the null hypothesis to even see if you’re still in the territory of what random chance could arrive at.

An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.

Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.

Repeat after me: “correlation does not equal causation”.

You are being downvoted, but I think that you are totally right. For an awful lot of people, eating meat is a matter of status; it's similar to why many people prefer having big cars even if they are less environmentally friendly.

There is also the fact that plant based diets are still associated to certain ideologies and because of that they will keep being scoffed at by people from opposing ideologies. Sure, you don't have to lean left to be vegan, but the vast majority of vegan people, or people seriously trying to reduce their meat consumption, do lean left (continuing with the car analogy: remember the rolling coal fad).

Dietary choices go way beyond their nutritional value. People feel attached to what they eat, and they will resist change. So, yes, a strong economic incentive is needed, and even worse, it might not be enough.

As someone who isn’t considering giving up my ways, red blooded meat eating American that I am, I actually appreciate vegans to some degree.

As long as there are an appreciable number of them, I will enjoy a greater variety of dishes and ingredients available to me, and oftentimes fresher ingredients too.

Insofar as they are making choices that benefit them, they also make choices that benefit me.

Where they lose me, and this isn’t all vegans, but the ones that lose me are the ones that try to convince me that I am a bad person for the dietary choices I make. Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. The ones that make me want to go out and eat two steaks just to stick it to them are the ones that want to take away my choices or introduce sin taxes onto meat. I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that. I would argue such a fair tax is entirely theoretical, but in theory, it could work out. The ones that want to punish me specifically are the ones I can’t abide.

When someone introduces me to an entirely vegetarian dish or vegan dish that I like, I’ll probably add it to my menu and start making it myself, and I usually don’t modify it to add any additional protein. Good food is good food and I actually like tofu and some of those veggie patties on the market. I like them for that they are, not for what they pretend to be. It come down to making a different choice as to what to eat for dinner, rather than making a compromise.

Today, January 1st 2020, I’m not even thinking about lab grown meat. Maybe I’ll prefer it on January 1st, 2030, or maybe I’ll be paying a premium for my steak, or maybe the price of my premium cut steak will actually fall after checking against inflation and I’ll be eating even more steak. Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties. Vegans that practice veganism for dogmatic, ideological and religious reasons certainly aren’t going to win me over in ten or a hundred years by preaching to me though.

I make choices. Vegans make choices. Everyone makes choices. I think that’s a pretty good state of affairs.

This is probably the most balanced comment about meat-eating I've ever read.

I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities.

Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop enjoying the things humanity has worked for a long time to achieve. Instead we should think about how we can make technology work better together with the environment and enable even more comfort and prosperity. Not force us to go back, rather find ways of moving even further forward.

I think the main issue is that money alone won't stop the greenhouse gasses from entering the atmosphere.

We just need to stop flying so much, and stop eating as much meat.

It's unfortunate and inconvenient.

Increased price pressure would incentivized a bit more ingenuity. There’s a number of things that are cheaper to purchase a replacement for than to maintain and repair. That has its pluses and minuses, but you could change up the cost equation, and plow the extra revenue into reforestation and artificial reef construction.

There are so many nice dishes that don't have or need meat. I think a large thing is that people don't experiment much with their food. I have to travel a lot for work and especially in Asia and Africa, there are tons of dishes which are easy to make but very rich in flavour and much more 'refined' (in my opinion) than having a slab of meat on my plate. I sometimes think I want a steak, but after 2 bites I start thinking how much better that would've been 1/3 of it in an Indian curry (which of course is blasphemy but I'm not religious or from India) or in a thai curry dish. And once you properly make it into a dish which is one melange of integrated tastes, the 'real meat' thing becomes far less pressing. Same with meat in potato oven dishes, Lasagna or Pizza => unless you are into those overkill hard tastes (which I personally don't like), you can learn to cook them without meat while they still have the texture and taste for (open minded) meat eaters.

A slab of meat like steak will be many years before that comes from a lab for a decent price. But worked into a nice curry or some usages for sausages etc, I say we are close or even there already.

It’s all about the spices and sauces. Doesn’t matter if you’re cooking steak or tofu, it doesn’t have to be boring.

Well some people, including the young me, would send steaks with spices and sauces back. I liked them thick, bloody and without anything. Somehow I always thought that most cooks put way too much salt on really good meat so I asked, in restaurants as (annoying) little boy, to leave the salt and spices and would send it back if it had any. It was a short phase I guess. Now I find it boring.

But you are right; you can make exciting food with mostly anything. Even, god forbid, veggies! (seems that angry meat eaters are also dead against anything that resembles a vegetable; they eat the steak, leave everything else on the plate).

> I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that.

Kudos to you, but this opinion would make you exceedingly rare among people for whom eating meat is an identity issue.

> Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties.

It's less about you individually than the economic policies that enable the mass production and consumption of meat. Beyond the science, which pretty convincingly make the case that industrial meat is behind a huge amount of environmental damage, the politics of this are very much about personal beliefs about whether or not that situation should continue in the same form, or be biased more towards plant based foods (via the carbon/ghg tax you proposed). And politics are grounded for better or worse in beliefs and dogma, just like religion.

A GHG tax is one that prices in externalities and will hurt trade over long distances in more or less equal measure, I’m not the biggest fan of it because I fear it would be used for policies other than mitigating the effects of a changing climate, but it would at least raise the price of everything from leaves to meat to automobiles to fish to computers and candles and essentially anything that is industrially produced or raised or caught. The net effect is to depress the purchasing power of everyone, and possibly, maybe even likely making the repair of a widget more price competitive with the replacement of a widget. I wouldn’t be able to buy as much meat with my current grocery budget, but I also wouldn’t be able to buy as much spinach or apples or garam masala or coffee without increasing my grocery budget. This would be true of anyone and everyone within a jurisdiction that actually implemented it properly.

In pricing out the tax, you would need to compute the global warming potential of the emissions for every piece in the supply chain, as well as their half life to measure their short term and long term impact and finally put a price on all of that. You could limit it to certain classes of emissions to keep it simpler, but you would want to cover all the known major transportation, industrial and agriculture emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and so on.

As there seem to be very few comments actually defending the ethical vegan standpoint here I go.

Vegans who ask for „sin taxes“ don‘t want to piss you off, they simply have the belief (and actually quite well justifiable so) that meat consumption leads to quite a lot of suffering in the world. You don’t seem to be opposed to taxes on ghg emissions - presumably because you believe that they cause suffering. Why is it not reasonable to also punish/tax other behavior that causes suffering? Do you really believe that animal suffering doesn’t count?

I would really encourage you to reflect your position on this and maybe revise towards being more forgiving towards people who simply care about the suffering of animals.

Your assumption is wrong. The tax I would support is entirely theoretical and would raise the prices of all industrial products on the market from all forms of food to all forms of textiles and all forms of computers and machinery. I suspect that if it were ever implemented properly to begin with, it would become a target to steer into a kind of sin tax or luxury tax by doubling the rate on this or that product or zero rating it for others, so I can’t say I necessarily even would support it. Show me a policy proposal and I’ll say “maybe”.

Suffering doesn’t enter into it, but I don’t like subsidies. If the problem with climate change is that my lifestyle is being subsidized because the “true cost” isn’t in the purchase price, I’ll pay it, but so should everyone. I’ll be paying more for meat, but I’ll also be paying more for spinach, and coffee, and spices, and salt, and clothes, and every single industrial good that I buy. And so would everyone, because the net result would be to see the purchasing power of everyone decrease. I can live with that if you can, even factoring in my dietary preferences, I’m willing to bet money I have a lower net contribution to climate change than most in my country.

Sure, parent comment made a faulty assumption about your policy preferences and the reasons you have for them. In responding to this grievance, you've entirely missed their point: the consumption of meat is above all else a moral issue—yes, a sin—and making other lifestyle choices of below-average ecological impact do not make up for it.

I could elaborate, but I don't expect to change your mind; you've already stated outright that you're determined not to. In any case, I'm not here to cast blame on you personally for eating meat. I still do it, too.

It's a shame about your stubbornness, though. You seem to be smart enough to engage in careful, reasoned analysis about a complex issue. In fact, I'd wager that you'd scoff at an anti-vaxxer or a Holocaust denier who shared the strength of your convictions. Of course, scientific and historical truth are a little more objective than basic moral principles—but when it comes to the way animals are manufactured in America today, not by much.

I didn’t engage his point because I’ve taken it as a given that we’ll have to agree to disagree. There’s too much conviction on both sides to take that one in any meaningful direction. To some, to you and to the one I replied to, it is a moral issue. I’m not going to convince anyone that it isn’t a moral issue anymore than they will convince me that it is.

There isn’t a lot that is objective, even scientific and historical truths are often less scientific, less historic and less truthful than we think they are. I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be. In return, I don’t accept that the choices they have made are morally superior to my own. They’re just living their lives according to their beliefs and I don’t want to take that away from them, nor do I want them to take away my choices nor to be punished for them. Life is too short, fleeting and full of suffering and choices to start making choices for other people. I do not, and I would wager you do not, have the status, position or occupational license to cast judgements upon others that aren’t our children, charges, employees or elected representatives. Even these limited forms of subordination have their limits.

> I’m not going to convince anyone that it isn’t a moral issue anymore than they will convince me that it is.

This is really unfortunate. An anti-vaxxer knows that it’s a question of science, just as a Holocaust denier knows that it’s a question of historical record (even if they lack the scientific/historical literacy to see through the counterfactual narratives they’ve bought into). There’s insurmountable conviction on both sides—but one is right and the other is not (for all practical purposes, as elusive as objective truth is).

To refuse to even consider the moral angle—I’d be tempted to call it bad faith, but I don’t get that impression from you at all. Rather, it seems to be this:

> I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be.

Taken to the extreme, the live-and-let-live / agree-to-disagree philosophy exhorts us to put down difficult questions simply because they are difficult (or seem unactionable), and to simply accept the status quo for what it is. But the moral implications of your actions do not go away simply because you choose not to examine them, or because they were the default configuration presented by the time and place you were born in.

---

You’re right though; I’m not qualified to pass moral judgment on anyone, and that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a moral question. Moral virtue isn’t a contest or a report card.

Am I morally superior to a 19th-century plantation owner? (Were all slaveowners equally bad?) If I were raised in his family, as part of that society, what reason do I have to believe I’d do any different? If the answer is “none”, then why do we study history? and what makes me better than that guy?

It's not within my power to change the way things are. But the willingness to consider that the way things are isn't right might be a start.

I considered the morality of eating meat for a decent portion of my life. The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical vegetarianism is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most violent and violently omnivorous apex predator to ever grace the Earth. If there’s a landmass we haven’t walked, it’s because it is literally underwater having been foreclosed upon by some glacier or the Ocean, and we’ve walked some of those lands too once upon a time.

If the way things are isn’t right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can’t change it without violently changing what it means to be human, so you essentially have to have humans become something other than human, and that doesn’t seem like a winning survival strategy in the long term.

When we’re not eating God’s creatures, we’re burning down the forests and fields they live in and pouring concrete over them so we can sleep better at night in little towns and villages and hamlets with other people who participated in the festivities, or at least their ancestors did, or at least they bought the house from someone whose ancestors did etc. We also do it to grow more food, all those plants we’ve selected for over the entire history of agriculture that we’ve deemed to be beneficial to us to keep around? We burned down other species, even to extinction with no regard as to whether the burning mass over yonder was plant or fungus or animal flesh or insect.

I can’t seriously consider ethical vegetarianism or ethical veganism a serious argument for not eating meat because it goes so deeply against the violent nature of humanity that it disregards what we are entirely. Given it is probably the most defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, it is a fairly massive characteristic to overlook.

I can seriously consider reasons for eating less meat that include things like “this meatless dish is delicious”, only you don’t emphasize the meatless bit, or “methane emissions are a pretty serious concern, is there something we can do about that?” or “cows actually use up a large amount of resources that might be better spent on something else.”

I can consider those seriously, I just don’t think they’re winning arguments. But, at least they’re willing to try to work with the nature of the beast rather than against it. People who consider themselves “ethical vegans” can make a better case than starting from a position that eating meat is morally wrong, even if you believe it! It’s okay to believe something like that, I don’t agree with you, but so long as you or someone else isn’t trying to use state force to enforce their belief on me, I think we’ll get along just fine.

Yeah, you should really have a look at the youtube video I linked to in my sibling comment. What you buy into with your position is the right of strong or the law of the jungle which is something we as humanity have been trying to overcome and shown to be less effective than cooperation.

If you don't buy into this for your own species, why do you cling to this world view in relation to other species? Have you ever considered that the universe is evolving and old practices which have worked at one point can/should be replaced by more effective ones? Just because we had cruel practices at one point, doesn't mean we should hold on to them if we notice that there are better alternatives.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond here, especially when your ultimate position is a foregone conclusion. I share your pessimism about the overall trajectory of human progress, and there are parts of me that believe that the destructive patterns of human settlement are themselves an expression of the unique but entirely natural phenomenon that is our species. Finding optimism in spite of these facts is an exercise in mental contradiction.

But I am curious to know what you think: couldn't you have made this same argument about slavery two hundred years ago?

"The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical emancipation is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most hierarchical, socially stratified, and conquest-driven species to ever grace the Earth. If there's a people that hasn't been dominated by another, it's because they're so remote as to be beyond the reach of civilized society.

"If the way things are isn't right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can't change it without violently changing what it means to be human..."

Again, I'm not saying you should stop eating meat. I'd like to, but even I haven't. I'm also not saying that I would have asked a 19th-century plantation owner to just give up his slaves voluntarily. But I think the Civil War was the single most defining struggle in the building of our nation's moral character. Would you rather live in the America we have, or in the alternate-universe America where our great-grandparents skirted this question so that they could "live and let live"?

The point that I was trying to make is to try to show you that I am pretty sure that you actually do care about moral questions in the case of climate change (on the surface you seem to argue it’s a matter of justice and paying for the true cost of your actions but the very reason that carbon is being priced in the first place (and you accept that price) is that it causes suffering in the world, right? You wouldn‘t accept an arbitrary oxygen tax, would you?) but somehow don’t extend that concern to the suffering of animals. However, similar to how scientists have shown that ghg emissions cause human suffering, scientists have shown that factory farming causes animal suffering.

Of course you can have reasons for denying the importance of animal suffering but most of those accounts are easily shown to be inconsistent and simply self-serving. People who accept animal suffering as real and probably a bad thing tend to have a much easier time to articulate a consistent world view. If you don’t agree with that claim show me how I am wrong and coherently articulate why the suffering of animals doesn‘t matter... it’s really surprisingly difficult to not reach for arbitrary distinctions like „they are not human“ but have substantial arguments grounded in empirical evidence that justify your opinion.

In the end my goal was not to convince you of becoming vegan (that’s generally a quite difficult task due to current societal indoctrination) but to simply make you reconsider how you view vegans who actually care about animal suffering. It’s a totally reasonable position and it’s generally much more coherent and aligned with evidence then other positions. Even if you don’t care, you don‘t need to judge other people who do.

I won’t judge them for caring, I won’t even judge them, but I do find being preached at to be generally unenjoyable and I don’t enjoy the company of people who wish to preach to me rather than engage me. You’ve engaged me, but that’s not what I have come to expect from vegans who are of an evangelical type, and I say that without it meaning to be disparaging, merely descriptive.

For what it is worth to you, I purchase the best meat I can find and afford at the local market. The more room to roam, the better. Absolutely no hormones, pointless antibiotics, or other growth techniques that degrade the meat. I’m under no illusions that what I purchase is cruelty free though, it’s livestock which was raised for slaughter, from a species that was cultivated to be raised as livestock, slaughtered and turned into various meat and leather products.

I buy better meat because it tastes better, I don’t do it to spare the animal. I advocate for better farming practices where possible because I want better and more pervasive products to be available and at a lower cost and to more people.

I do in fact care more for the lives of people than I do for most animals. I don’t care for needless deaths, nor do I like unnecessary cruelty, but when I eat an animal, it wasn’t needless or pointless. It lived until it died, and was recycled into my body. I too will live until I die and am recycled into other living creatures.

Laying it out, I sound more callous than I intend, but I don’t know that there’s a less brutal way to put any of that and keep it honest, but more than sounding callous, I don’t want to be or sound like a hypocrite, even unwittingly.

Thank you for engaging me, actually laying out my views allows me to solidify in my own mind what it is I’m thinking, and figure out how to communicate it better the next time.

Thanks for your reply. It's good to see that you reflect your own thinking and attempt to articulate a coherent position. If you enjoy this type of engagement, I can also recommend you the following short youtube video (~3 min) with a philosophical thought experiment that turns the table on you and asks whether you would still hold your position in that case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUz6Rj5oo4.

Would be interested to hear your reply to that :)

I elaborated the reasoning behind my statements in another comment to your child comment. Would love to hear your response!

I just got home, I got some chores to finish up, but I see your comment and I will read and respond.

I don't think they necessarily eat meat and drive big cars because of the need to signal their ideology. I agree that their ideology means they don't care about their impact on the environment, which means they don't have the incentive not to drive a big car or eat meat; since they don't have disincentive, the positive reasons to do those two things win out.

I think you're absolutely right that the status symbol aspect of meat consumption is going to be a large factor in people's decision-making.

That said, there are inflection points at which certain products switch from being seen as status symbols into more questionable signals - wearing fur springs to mind as one example.

I don't think it's at all guaranteed that traditional meat would end up in that category; it's a long way from it currently. But it's within the realm of possibility.

Fur is a fashion meat is a core pillar in many cultures and changing that will take longer than 10 years.

>Fur is a fashion meat is a core pillar in many cultures and changing that will take longer than 10 years.

I think you are probably right... but I want to bring up the counterexample of smoking.

I mean, smoking was never as widespread as eating meat, but I feel like there was a tipping point in the '90s, where it went from something almost every red blooded american would do to something very rude and even forbidden in most indoor spaces.

Smoking became... divorced from manhood.

I remember as a kid I had an IT job; sort of an internship type deal fixing computers for the local county department of public health. I got credit for going to this job instead of taking the last two classes of the day in high school; There was nobody else in the building who wasn't old enough to be my parent. It was so much fun.

I remember when the city passed the 'no smoking in bars' ordinance. The office was super excited. a few people (who I'm pretty sure never went to bars) said they were going to the bar after work. (I was maybe 16, and not invited) I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now that I'm old, I go to bars, too... and you know? I probably wouldn't if they smelled the way they smelled walking past them in the '90s.

Some friends and I ran a weekly poker game at a local bar for a few years in the mid-00s, before an indoor smoking ban was implemented here. Every night when I came home, my clothes absolutely reeked of smoke, I couldn't even hang them inside my apartment.

It doesn’t help that I get headaches when I eat my garden grown tomatoes. No such reaction to eating a ribeye. How tall will my children grow up to be on a plant based diet? I want my children to grow up to be stronger than those around them.

>How tall will my children grow up to be on a plant based diet? I want my children to grow up to be stronger than those around them.

Well, oxen manage to be strong as an ox on a 100% plant-based diet. Giraffes get pretty tall too.

Lions, sharks and polar bears are also very strong, on a carnivorous diet. What does that says about human nutrition? Absolutely nothing.

How about gorillas they are 4-9 times stronger than a human on a vegetarian diet (some termites and ants) and they are pretty close to humans genes wise

We’re also about 60% similar to bananas by genome.

I think you reinforced their point.

> oxen manage to be strong as an ox on a 100% plant-based diet

What an absurd analogy; cheetahs eat a 100% meat-based diet and they're very fast.

Feed them a well-balanced plant-based diet and they’ll be fine. No guarantees on them being stronger than those around them, because if everyone wants this someone’s got to miss out due to chance ;)

> eating meat is a matter of status

Chicken mcnuggets are barely chicken. The market already demonstrated that "real meat" is a matter of availability and marketing, not a matter status chasing (not that there aren't exceptions, which are a statistical minority).

I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a compelling argument. SMH

I think the OP is taking about beef and pork for making his point.

Does raising chickens even have the same impact as raising cattle on the climate?

Yes, I was thinking mostly about beef. Which seems to be the most environmentally impactful meat, by the way. Pork is less impactful and poultry is even less.

Obligatory wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

and insect protein is even less than that!

but you'd be hard pressed to find people who would substitute their animal protein with insect protein.

Not sure if it’s the brand, but I tried frozen patties based on insect protein here (in Germany, IIRC the producer was dutch). I was excited to try it, but besides being more expensive than beef, it tasted bland. Now with beef, it’s neither frozen not pre-assembled into patties, so that might also be a difference, but for now I’m holding out for lab-grown meat.

>...beef... the most environmentally impactful meat... Pork is less impactful and poultry is even less

This is largely because pork is raised in factory-farming conditions that are awful for the animals, and poultry even more so. Environmental "benefits" are countered by animal welfare drawbacks.

Here is a good analysis, you need to scroll around a bit to find pork and poultry info:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...

I think impact is largely based on lifespan required to rear the animals.

Beef is more carbon intensive, because it takes longer to raise beef cattle (and therefore more resources to feed).

I'd go even further than that and argue that the reason vegan and vegetarian diets have taken off as much as they have is because they became status symbols in the 90s / 2000s.

Even within a much smaller price margin, there'd still be plenty of reasons to make kill-free meat the default preference.

Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers.

There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as opposed to high-methane[0] animal-based meat products. It's not the entire solution to environmental problems by any means, but it's a large opportunity.

A good chunk of meal decision-making comes down to the way that food is marketed and the way that we talk about and discuss our food options.

As determined and evidence-led entrepreneurs and technologists, all of us in the HN community can do a lot to advocate for and influence public opinion and behavior in whatever direction we choose.

[0] - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Hey if they can develop lab-meat cultures with the same(ish) makeup of real meat then yes I'd love that stuff. If I can get the same product but without suffering of animals then I'm 100% on board.

What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.

Consider that "subjects raw plant matter to complicated chemical processes to produce something meat-tasting" is equally true for fake meat factories as it is for cows. Just because the recipe for real meat has come about via evolutionary (and not laboratory) trial-and-error, doesn't necessarily make it healthier.

We've been eating meat for thousands of years.

When you say that you don't know what it's made of, is that because you haven't actually looked it up? The Impossible Foods site goes into solid detail on what goes into their product, more than you'd find on other commonly ingested products like ice cream or whatever where the website is purely an appeal to taste buds. Many of us would be eating daily a variety of things with long lists of ingredients.

What if that long list is the cost of trying to engineer an alternative to something that evolved over millions of years? Why would that matter?

(Typical meat eater here, but interested in trying lab meat sometime.)

I don't buy anything that has a list of ingredients on the package. I buy the ingredients individually.

I think you're right, but there might be another way. What if there were a Tesla-like company? Tesla didn't just produce cars that are better for the environment, they made them awesome in every other way as well.

I imagine that meat will eventually be replaced by lab-grown meat that had been engineered to be as delicious (or moreso!) as the highest grade beef, but perhaps more healthy & cheaper. The fact that it would be better for the environment and animal rights needs to be listed as a benefit, but not the focus.

> Tesla didn't just produce cars that are better for the environment, they made them awesome in every other way as well.

as a former tesla owner, i dispute both of these assumptions.

> ... lab-grown meat ...

tesla builds cars. cars are a recent human invention. cattle on the other hand is a product of millions of years of evolution. i think it will take a bit more time to get lab meat that is as good as the real thing.

On the other hand, those million years of evolution did not select specifically for ”delicious and nutritious”.

It did plus it's healthy (to an extent)

It didn't select to be environmentally friendly. Humans scaled up animal growth fairly recently too, so we hadn't had enough time to figure out pathogen issue and ethics.

I disagree. Evolution has created signals -- "tasty" -- for things that are good for us. Fats, salts, and sugars are comparatively rare in a wild environment, and thus they taste good.

Sure, but that's us evolving, not the animals, right? We have made quite a few other nutrient-dense foods that hack those signals. Evolution did not make cheese or chocolate in all these years, because it doesn't target our palate, rather the other way around. (Notable recent counterargument is the selective breeding of cattle for food, but that's thousands, not millions of years.)

I don't think the evolution of cattle is a good indicator of the difficulty of creating great plant protein products.

I think this is inevitable if #1 is true. It may seem politically infeasible now, but if governments get really serious about climate change, then the price of many meats but especially beef will increase significantly, and that alone will give the fake beef a cost edge.

I guess there's no reason veggie meat wouldn't become much cheaper than real meat. It takes a lot less resources to grow a bushel of soy or wheat or GMO super-grain than a quarter pound of a cow.

It takes basically no resources to graze cattle on grasslands. Plus, as a bonus it sequesters carbon and creates topsoil.

Most of the meat we eat doesn’t come from cattle on grasslands.

Grass fed cattle produces more methane than grain fed thoug (and methane is a much worse greenhouse gas).

But it does (possibly) help sequesters carbon.

The truth is that it's hard to tell which is better, but neither is great environmentally.

it’s hard to say whether grass-fed or grain-fed beef is better for the Earth – in part because they’re both pretty bad.

“No matter how you slice it,” he wrote, “eating beef will never be the greenest thing you do in a day.”

He cites an estimate by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan that producing 2.2 pounds of beef emits more greenhouse gases than driving 155 miles.

Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s study of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption in Oregon found red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprint of all the foods Oregonians eat.[1]

(Needless to say the Cattlemen’s Association dispute these, and claim it only (?) produces 2.8% of greenhouse gases in the US).

[1] https://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/which-is-greener-gras...

Methane is short lived in the atmosphere. Also, North America historically had about 300 million ruminants, before human intervention: bison.

The other issue is we’re basically running out of topsoil. Modern agriculture is an extractive process, and the result is we have maybe 60 years left until the topsoil is gone and we can’t grow any more crops.

Indeed, methane is shorter lived than CO2 on the atmosphere. Taking that into account:

The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84.[5][6] That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 32 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

Time to Google "lab grown meat"

> Faced with a choice between beef or fake beef that tastes exactly the same, most people will just go for the real beef.

How can you say that with certainty? There isn't any fake beef that tastes similar that I am aware of.

People tend to choose what they are familiar with over the new/unknown.

> If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef

Ironic choice to use McDonalds "beef" as the example of real meat.

Australian McDonalds beef patties contain exactly three ingredients: Beef, salt, pepper. That's it.

Interesting. Did a little reading. It does seem that in the last few years, McDonalds has cleaned up it's food a bit.

As someone from the UK who has tended to eat meat a lot in the past - I do agree with your reading of culture in the UK historically.

But I also think it's remarkable how quickly public opinion in the UK has been shifting with regard to environmental concerns.

Traveling by train as opposed to air travel, reduction of single-use plastics and plastic packaging, and reduced-meat diets all feel like much more common discussion topics and lifestyle choices than they were even five years ago.

Shops and restaurants have also shifted to meet changing demands. There have been mistakes (incentives around long-life plastic shopping bags haven't worked out exactly as planned) but overall it feels like a wave of change.

Perhaps, but fashions change fast. I remember the first environmentalism craze of the 90s, it didn’t last.

1. trends come and go.

2. we all live in our bubbles.

both meat consumption and air travel have increased YoY over the past 25 years in the UK.

and sticking with the UK, current estimates point to an almost 100% increase in air passenger numbers in the 2030s, and Heahtrow still being in the top ten busiest airports in the world.

anecdotally, my flights have increased 2x every year for the past 5 years. this year it's been 50 flights, 40 of which intercontinental (no train availability).

Good food for thought, thanks.

From a little more digging to try to break out of my bubble, here are some reading references:

Of beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and fish -- only poultry has seen any broad increase in expenditure by UK households over the past few years (and slim, at 2%); all others have decreased or remained the same[0]. I'm not claiming that's related to environmental concerns directly but it shows some changes in behaviour.

Air travel passenger numbers are certainly on the rise[1], although interestingly the number of flights ('air travel movements') appears to be somewhat more muted. Even so, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation have certainly increased a lot since the 1990s.

Brexit and the prospect of a high-spending majority UK government could both have impacts on these over the next decade, no doubt - but in what direction I'm not sure.

[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-p...

[1] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

If an effective carbon tax is introduced (see #1) then the price of meat will rise astronomically, which will make reduced consumption inevitable.

In many places, climate change will make existing agriculture unsustainable, so there'll be massive upheaval in the industry at the same time.

If that's combined with a cultural movement similar to flugskam, I think drastically reduced meat consumption is possible.

Of course, there'll be counter forces -- likely primarily cultural. "Only libtards don't eat meat" etc. So it goes.

There would likely be unintended consequences to raising the price of meat through a carbon tax. It creates a market for cheaper meat that there will be no shortage of producers or consumers for. How that meat is made cheaper is an open question. It could be through carbon offsets but it could just as well be through worse conditions for the animals or importing the meat from countries where production is cheaper.

The same argument is made against raising the taxes on tobacco products, that "people will smuggle in cigarettes from countries without the tax", but it never seems to actually happen to any significant degree.

People are lazy, and if the only source of cheap meat is the black market of illegally-imported products, only a very small segment of people will bother.

I live somewhere with high taxes on tobacco products and illegal cigarettes are a big problem. It's not a small segment of the smoking population either but it is disproportionately those who are more economically disadvantaged. People are lazy but they are also motivated by economic pressures. It's easy for something like that to become an 'invisible' problem to people who aren't in those economic or social groups while still having severe negative effects on a large number of people.

I buy carbon offsets based on a questionnaire about lifestyle. It works out to about $180-220 USD per year, depending on whether I take a vacation by flying to Europe. If that were factored into prices as a tax I don't think it would count as an astronomical increase.

But perhaps the questionnaire and algorithm from terrapass is deficient in some way. What are you basing your calculations off of?

A quick look at Terrapass, and their individual calculator, doesn't seem include any information about diet? Perhaps I was looking at the wrong one?

You're right. Looking at it again, it doesn't. However, this site says that a vegetarian diet saves about one ton of CO2 per year over an average American diet: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet

That still isn't very expensive in terms of offsets - about $10/year (Terrapass sells the offsets for $4.99 per 1,000 lbs). Why do you think that's astronomical?

I was coming from the other end. I've repeated seen claims that livestock contributes a significant fraction of global greenhouse emissions. eg. most recently, a claim of 17% in this article https://a16z.com/2019/12/30/life-in-2030/ from HN yesterday.

I assumed that eg. 17% of the global total meant the individual allocation would be large, and thus very expensive to offset.

Note that there's a CH4 vs. CO2 conflation in the mix here, which probably doesn't help.

But it still doesn't seem to add up: if I can eat a "meat lovers" diet and that's only $10/year to offset, and it's roughly 15% of global emissions, that'd suggest that around $70/year could offset 100% of global emissions.

Well, no. The difference between an average American diet (2.5T) and a vegan diet (1.5T) is ~$10/yr to offset. In total, a "meat lovers" diet (3.3T) would be about $33/year to offset. If that's about 15%, that works out to about $220/year per individual offset on the high side, which is consistent with what I purchase.

Still not what I would call astronomical.

Yeah I don't see our species evolving into pure herbivores anytime soon. I'm from Africa and the only vegans I know there are either allergic to meat or just can't afford it yet. Eating meat is actually something we work towards aggressively. Meat is also a status symbol, as a result. We will be eating meat for a very very long time.

> People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.

That's the problem; they will say it's not the same even if it is 100% the same. I bake a lot of pizzas for friends and I tend to do real sausage and Beyond sausage and have people taste. I tell them upfront that some are real and some are fake meat but not which are which. Yesterday I did almost 50 pizzas on a hangover party (it's a hobby...) and the most 'angry' meat eaters taste fake when it's real, real when it's fake, but once they think that they have the fake one (even though it was the real one), they simply leave it. And that I really don't understand. Little disclaimer about tasting: I don't load my pizza's up with that 'meatlover' amount of (fake or real) meat. I like subtle tastes, so there won't be a lot of sausage on a pizza.

Tyson changed from a meat company to a protein company. Can make veggies taste like chicken or beef.

I didn't have an Impossible Whopper yet but it costs a lot of money. For $12.99 with a coupon I can gt a family meal of three Whoppers, three cheeseburgers, and 3 fries. I hear the Vegans are mad that the Impossible Whopper is grilled on the same grill as the regular Whooper.

I suppose the reason to turn away from meat eating is to save the environment? Animals exhale CO2 but not as much as factories with smoke stacks burning coal or oil.

Animals also output methane, and there are land-use issues with meat production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

Only a very small segment of loud'n'proud vegans on social media complain about the cooking method of the impossible whopper. And you can have it microwave cooked if you want it to not touch the grill.

It's also funny he compares it to caviar which today is almost all farmed and is as cheap as it's ever been in living memory.

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