Umm, just eat the plants instead? I don't get fake meat. It is a solution to the wrong problem. Make a small amount of meat sustainable and respectful of animal wellness. Then make the rest of your diet plant based. Done.
Almost the entire point of cultivating different foods is to enjoy different flavors and textures. If something is tasty but expensive, in terms of money or the environment, we should encourage the people that try to make it cheaper. There's no reason to want things to be expensive and rare treats.
The objective here isn't to convert a few people on hacker news, it's to convert billions. "Hey dummies, just eat plants! They were here the whole time!" isn't gonna happen.
When you say "until we fix those problems" you're suggesting a very different strategy from "just" working around it with no notable effort to do anything else.
Now we just need to dump a few million into "JUST EAT PLANTS" billboards and I'm sure the problem will be solved!
Silly food companies, don't they know that consumers were ready to drop all meat eating at a moment's notice?
For America, the fast food industry was really born out of corporate interests and it is unnatural. It's not that eating meat is wrong but the fast food industry that is responsible for our over consumption and maltreatment of bovine stock to meet the demands.
In countries like Japan, France, Vietnam, fast food hasn't caught on as much as locals prefer their traditional diet. Unfortunately some South American countries have completely given way to American fast food lobby groups, in particular Brazil which comes with a huge cost to public health.
You have poorly educated population, corporate greed and unlimited lobbying powers, with limited public healthcare and you are in a man made ticking bomb.
Which is still meat. It might be prepared differently but it's still meat. Which tells you exactly that - meat consumption is not only about forced customs, it's about people legitimately enjoying eating eat. I know a lot of people that do this too, and it's not about being uneducated either.
Killing the animal is not respectful to its wellness.
The whole narrative around sustainability of meat has been completely hijacked by corporate interests who wants to push non-meat as meat.
Their whole goal is to enmesh it at a cultural level so that they can increase sales, not really concerned about the real problem which is cruelty, indifference to the treatment of animals by the bovine industrial complex.
We are simply seeing the usurpation of the latter group by a new commerce-first-pseudo-sustainability industrial complex. It's even more dangerous now because of the misinformation and groupthink by self appointed morality police.