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Comment by bransonf | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what the vegetable vs meat market would look like without subsidies.

Imagine a free market where the veggie burger at McD is $1 and the beef one is $5. How many people would opt for the vegetarian option?

Instead, in the market which we have intervened, it’s the beef that cost $1 and the veggie burger $5.

Obesity is driven in part by lack of affordability of vegetables and in terms of resources and pollution (methane), beef is worse. It seems the incentives cater only to our carnal desire and (mostly corporate) cattle ranchers.

I don’t really care for meat all that much, but alas my taxes still go towards that damn $1 hamburger.

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> Obesity is driven in part by lack of affordability of vegetables

The main issue with obesity is cheap sugar, and it comes from plants.

Lack of affordable vegetables is a problem in many depressed areas, the ones with more obesity per capita. This has been studied thoroughly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2789291/

Sure, but that doesn't mean meat is the main culprit to obesity either That is not to say it doesn't play a role, nor the meat subsidies have other adverse effects either.

It's processed foods with added sugars/sweeteners that fuel obesity, and the lack of affordable unprocessed vegetables sure directly worsens the situation. In the US corn subsidies in particular are an issue, as they not only fuel obesity via high fructose syrup but also a third of the corn is used as animal feed, serving as an indirect subsidy to the meat industry.

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. That doesn’t mean that sugar is a vegetable.

Would swapping the beef out of a Big Mac extra value meal (super sized) make enough of a difference that it didn’t make people fat?

Seems like you could attack that thing from a lot of different angles (smaller portions, not including a quart of sugar to drink, etc.) and get better results.

And how healthy are these heavily-processed plant-based patties anyway? French fries are also plant-based, that doesn't make them healthy in and of itself.

Broadly speaking, they're slightly healthier than cheap beef, but not to a degree that's going to change your life by itself.

Putting US obesity calamity aside, a large fraction of Macdonalds' beef sold worldwide is produced in Brazil. Therefore not incentivizing water intensive, methane producing products, AND as a bonus further limiting the destruction of Amazonian ecosystems sounds like a great way to attack it to me?

I remember a great story from a Macdonalds executive in a reddit AMA, who mentioned they had a pilot for a burger recipe which included grilled aubergine. The pilot was really successful and they had great feedback in tasting sessions but then they ran the numbers and quickly realize there wasn't enough world production of aubergine to role out the new burgers in their target markets. That story although funny really gives an insight into the scale and volume of Macdonalds as a business and their non-negligible impact on the world food market.

For me most of Macdonalds taste is in the seasoning/sauces, if they can make a passable smokey flavoured bean/soya patty and suddenly have a ground breaking ecologic impact without even hitting their bottom line, I say more power to them.

The WHO classifies raw meat as potential carcinogenic and cured meats as carcinogenic.

Animal fat is a huge contributor to all sorts of cardiovascular diseases.

Animal meat is loaded with antibiotics.

Yes, both products are heavily processed and you should not make them the core of your diet. But one of them is outright unhealthy.

You are way overestimating the effect of subsidies.

I'll dig up the source later, but some studies show that each hamburger has an $8 subsidy behind it. I don't think the parent comment is way over stating the effects of subsidies.

The pricing of a big Mac in different countries is too consistent for the u.s. to be subsidizing the burger to the toon of a 25x price difference relative to a soybean burger.

come back with sources, right now it's just a claim

The only sources I can find are NGO's with an obvious agenda. Just like the sources that say how much water is used for one pound of beef.

> The only sources I can find are NGO's with an obvious agenda.

How is that a bad thing? Is the CDC untrustable because they have an obvious anti-disease agenda?

If they bend the truth to fit their agenda, then yes.

What evidence is there that anyone is doing that?

Yes! When has anyone ever lied, told only half the truth, misrepresented issues, or omitted important facts to push their agenda?

You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?

Yeah, it doesn't work like that. If you claim someone is lying the onus is on you to prove it, we don't ask people to prove a negative.

I'm not claiming anyone's lying. Just that they probably are.

If I showed you a study on the supposedly benign health effects of tobacco, except that study was funded by Philip Morris, would you trust it until proven wrong? Would you argue "how is their obvious agenda a bad thing?"

Yeah, I'm not sure it should work like that anymore. Trump lied in almost every publicly uttered sentence. Why is the onus still on the media to disprove him? At some point you should not automatically trust an institution like the presidency anymore.

Back to the original question. NGO's repeatedly say a single kg of meat costs 50.000 liters of water. That number in itself is not undisputed. If they don't specify which meat and which country they're referring to, they're lying. Or misrepresenting facts at the least. If they use this argument in a region that has no shortage water, they're abusing this fact to support a narrative. Etcetera.

Great video explanation on the subject from Minute Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDsSnpYZrw

How so?

The cost of soybeans is a lot cheaper to make an artificial burger (once they get the R&D down) than feeding the same soybeans to a cow and getting roughly 1:10 the calorie weight due to energy pyramids. You can get roughly 200 kg of protein per acre per year, while cows it is roughly 19 kg of protein per acre per year.

Of course this is talking future costs, for we are still perfecting artificial plants / proteins that taste like meat even though we been "branding" veggie burgers since the 1980s and the food science goes back hundreds of years prior to that.

Are the soybeans they're feeding to cows interchangeable with human consumption soybeans?

Probably the logistics for feedstock is more lax when it comes to hygiene than you apply for food, but the plant matter is to my understanding the same.

yea. Most soy is feed to animals which could have been used to feed many hoomans. I don't think beef etc are sustainable.

The problem is government is subsidizing animal product but not plant based product due to corporate politics.

https://gentleworld.org/as-we-soy-so-shall-we-reap/

1. Energy efficiency doesn't translate to costs of patty raw materials. Cattle can graze on uncultivated land, getting that portion of food for virtually free. There are other added costs to cattle farming outside of feed.

2. There are many costs to a cooked burger outside the cost of the patty.

> Energy efficiency doesn't translate to costs of patty raw materials. Cattle can graze on uncultivated land, getting that portion of food for virtually free. There are other added costs to cattle farming outside of feed.

Every time someone says this, but it's like 97% of cattle in the US that are crop-fed.

A lb of soybeans is cheaper than a lb of meat. But that that is a small percentage of the cost of delivering a mcdonalds burger to a customer.

There is the cost of the bun, the condiments, the transportation, employees, real estate, advertising, paying people to ensure consistent quality, etc...

Even if the soybean burger was free you wouldn't see a 25x relative price movement in the cost of a soybean burger relative to a meat burger.

Only recently, though, did it start tasting like meat. Or at least like fast food burgers. That's what Beyond Meat and Impossible have done. Impossible adds heme, which tastes like blood. They're both biochemistry companies.

Impossible burgers have no health advantage over meat, and much more salt, but they're trying to improve on that.

Here in India, we do get veg burgers. Those who prefer chicken burgers always goes for that even though it is priced higher(like 10-20% diff) than veg based burgers.

Also, we don't have pork or beef on the menu. Only chicken

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