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Comment by zozin | Hacker News Reader

HN masses cheering on the success of Soylent Red or Soylent Yellow?? Just eat less meat if you think meat production is bad/bad for the planet, don't cheer on meat substitutes, which are just processed foods made from entirely processed ingredients.

Eating meat for every meal is not good for you, but you can bet that Beyond and Impossible will advertise themselves as something that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Enjoy your industrial slop, I'll just make a salad and eat meat a few days a week.

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The founder of Impossible Foods has said that a major motivator for founding the company is

1. Global poverty is lifting. People around the world are starting to make more money. 2. A big point of pride when your family starts making money is literally putting meat on the table. 3. Our current meat production process cannot scale up to meet that demand.

But, good luck convincing billions of people coming out of extreme poverty that they're simply too late and they should give up on the dream that they can finally have meat too --for the sake of climate change. They are going to demand something. He believes plant-based meat can reach that scale at a tiny fraction of the impact if they can make it acceptably close in quality.

That's something I can cheer for.

I assume you're being downvoted because of the tone of your comment, but this is actually a really valuable point:

> processed foods made from entirely processed ingredients

There's evidence that suggests the degree to which foods are processed (generally) correlates with unhealthiness. And there's also good evidence that meat is unhealthy in various ways.

So, it's difficult to know where the balance would lie: unprocessed meat, vs. processed meat-substitute?

> So, it's difficult to know where the balance would lie

I would expect that soon someone will come out with a plant-based meat substitute that is marketed as "Only five ingredients, made in a kitchen not a factory".

> industrial slop

Do you have a blender? Everything that comes out of a blender is industrial slop by definition. Why shame people because they allow someone to blend and form their food for them?

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