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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

The environmental problems don't come from cattle or pork or palm trees themselves, they're caused by massive industrial levels of production that modern civilization needs. To truly substitute pork this industry will have to become as massive as the pork meat industry is now. And that means, among other things, a huge increase in already high demand for coconut and palm tree oil - which will certainly reflect in 3rd world countries jumping the wagon and clearing even more rain forests, and even more rare species will be endangered. So we just replace one problem with another.

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I like to think in the framework of "you're never really solving any problem, you're just replacing a bad problem with a slightly less bad problem". My speculation is that Impossible Pork (or any other such product) would be just that – a slightly better problem to have compared to the current pork meat industry.

Yes, sourcing ingredients for plant-based meat alternatives still takes resources and, given enough scale, that demand will have negative environmental impacts... But growing plants is still an order of magnitude better than farming animals.

Literally an order of magnitude. The maximum trophic efficiency between two steps in the food chain is 10% so for a pound of meet you need at least 10 pounds of plant feed. In order to supply the world with meat, we're already growing far more than enough. The problem is the distribution of crop species since humans can't eat just corn and alfa-alfa. Processed meat substitutes might be able to redirect those existing animal feed crops towards feeding us directly and making good use of less fertile land.

You don't feed palm oil to pork though

pork can't eat

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>The maximum trophic efficiency between two steps in the food chain is 10% so for a pound of meet you need at least 10 pounds of plant feed.

This seems to be contradicted by [1]. It says that beef it typically 6:1 (plant feed: meat) and chicken is typically 1.6.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

Reading that Wikipedia article I wondered whether it was possible to have an FCR (feed conversion ratio) of less than 1. And indeed it is! https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00K8MQ.pdf Of course, the livestock are consuming highly processed, energy rich feed, but so do humans.

OTOH, none of this means that the same amount of net calories are available to the human. FCR is not the same thing as trophic efficiency. In particular, as per the above explanation, FCR is often calculated using wet mass of the output but dry mass of the input.

All that said, the conversion efficiencies for chicken and farmed fish are still amazing.

If/when it becomes necessary, I'm sure Beyond/Impossible would figure out alternative ways of producing coconut/palm oil. And the meat industry astroturfers would come out again to fear-monger about how it's too artificial.

Every food-stuff solution is a problem with a perpetually growing population, as encroaching on land and increasing use of resources is certain. In fact every person represents a carbon footprint and that extends beyond just food, but everything they consume, all the infrastructure they use. That is the unsustainable part of the equation. Strangely the mainstream view is shifting away from the GDP as the cradle of economic prosperity, and yet, policy is still to double-down on growth.

The only way to reliably (and amicably) decimate global population growth, and therefore growth in the West, is eliminating global poverty and allowing universal access to contraceptives everywhere. If you achieve this, it doesn't matter what people eat or do; and arguably, it only matters currently in terms of how it impacts the pace of environmental destruction, not whether or not it gets destroyed.

It just doesn't get into peoples heads that more converts to green slime will not save the world.

> To truly substitute pork this industry will have to become as massive as the pork meat industry is now.

Meat has 2 levels though, you need the industry to feed the pork too. If you skip that step and directly feed us, that's much less production.

> And that means, among other things, a huge increase in already high demand for coconut and palm tree oil

If it does require more coconut and palm tree oil, then that's what we will fix next.

Assuming what you say is true. Removing all that animal suffering (and animal to human disease vectors) is huge!

If vertical farming becomes widespread we could free a lot of land from farms and use them to produce palm oil. Besides that plant based food is more efficient than meat based, as meat based you need to feed the animal and then eat the animal

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