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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Meatless is the new “low fat” boogieman.

Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc.

All of the “problems” with meat are market issues. Animal welfare issues are due to industrial farming practices, which will get worse if the industry declines. Land use and environmental issues are all about the market conditions, which are literally putting sustainable meat and dairy business out of business.

The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.

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> Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc.

> The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.

I think you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none. Those newer alternative meat products are not the basis of a healthy plant-based diet - they are treats that actually are marketed towards meat eaters. Ask any veg/ans you know what they eat as staples; it's not expensive Impossible or Beyond burgers, but tofu, tempeh, beans, legumes, and seitan.

I also doubt that the problems with meat can be fixed at its current scale. A trope in the vegan community is every meat eater has a neighbor raising organic grass-fed cattle on acres of land that he lovingly slaughters.

The reality is, almost all animal agriculture in the US is factory farming style CAFOs.

[0] "Using data from the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, which was released this month, it is estimated that 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are raised in factory farms"

Cattle especially are not grass fed, they are stuffed with corn, soy, and other food grown at a rapid clip with petro fertilizer. There is not enough grazing land in the country to produce meat at the scale it's consumed here.

[0] https://plantbasednews.org/culture/factory-farms-study/

You can dive into the USDA numbers yourself here.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Full_Re...

I would love to have the time to dig into those numbers, but for now I'm going to take the sources "Plant Based News" and "The Sentience Institute" with a big grain of salt.

The numbers are there. If you're looking for a digested summary from the USDA itself, here is an old 2002 analysis of the 1997 farm census. With industrial farm consolidation continuing since then I can't imagine it's improved. Key point here is the value of sales.

"Of the 1,315,051 farms with livestock, 18 percent (237,821 farms) were farms with confined livestock types (i.e., farms with 4 or more animal units of any combination of fattened cattle, milk cows, swine, chickens and turkeys, or appeared to be raising veal or heifers in confinement). These 237,821 farms accounted for $79 billion in gross livestock sales, which was 80 percent of gross livestock sales for all farms."

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs14...

Nice example of a pareto distribution. Eighty percent of our meat comes from the roughly twenty percent of factory farms that confine their livestock in tiny cages.

There is no conspiracy. It's a standard industry transform/consolidate play. From a public health perspective, a $1 McDonald's burger made of coconuts/pea/soy/salt is just as bad as the incumbent beef-based product. The capital behind meat alternatives does not give a hoot about animal welfare or anything beyond money... meat alternatives are the new Coke.

It is much cheaper to operate a couple of large national-scale factories to produce plant-based meat alternatives with mostly automated equipment and minimal regulatory oversight. Meat processing either needs to be regional, which is higher cost, or national, where limitations or capital costs of automation require a large pool of unskilled labor. You "fix" factory farming by enforcing labor standards at the processing layer that make concentrated, high throughput meat processing uneconomic. The result would be changes in how the industry functions and higher prices. (ie. market forces)

Those same market forces would ultimately drive more plant-based calories in diets and probably healthier eating habits. Factory farms exist because USDA policy since the 70s have been focused on slowing inflation in food prices. That policy ultimately drives alot of unsustainable practices, from factory farms for livestock, to the long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, to the transfer of topsoil from the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio river watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. 50-100 years from now, our descendants will be returning to regional agriculture at very high cost as midwest production fails and climate change breaks the environment the supports the magnificent bounty of the California central valley and Colorado watershed.

> It is much cheaper to operate a couple of large national-scale factories to produce plant-based meat alternatives...

This whole paragraph is exactly right, and exactly why factory meat is set to rapidly lose market share to plant-based substitutes. The market forces are unstoppable.

I'll add that the lesson of COVID's meat processing labor disruptions will not be lost on retailers and retaurant chains.

So if factory farms reduce or disappear - animal welfare will get worse?

I don't quite follow.

I think the argument is that if you squeeze the meat industry they’re going to get even more desperate to cut costs at the expense of the animal’s welfare.

I don’t really buy it.

Correct, animal welfare in factory farms is already at an diabolical level.

You just have to ask yourself why AG-GAG laws exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag

Right which is why I don’t buy the argument that we can’t reduce people’s meat intake because then meat producers will be forced I tell you to treat their animals worse.

If they disappear, of course they won't be an issue anymore.

But I'm assuming he means that with a reduced demand for meat, it would mean that factory farms are going to have to find ways to reduce costs. And they're already doing their best to operate at the bare minimum. So any cost cutting measures will come at the expense of animal welfare.

The point is - there really is no animal welfare in the factory farm industry.

We want the cheapest meat - don't care how. Caring for an animal's welfare is counter to that.

If demand for meat goes down it means environmental damage is reduced and fewer animals have to be born, which means fewer animals have to suffer.

You'd be surprised at the depths we can sink to if we really put our minds to it.

You're thinking of this as some sort of ethical issue. It's just business.

What happens to businesses with fixed or declining demand? Consolidation.

The bigger players start scooping up the weaker ones. Bigger players have more regulatory muscle. There are a thousand examples... aircraft is probably a decent one. You used to have Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell, Douglas, etc... Now you have Boeing as "Team USA", who has the political and market power to do things like ship airliners that crash for avoidable reasons.

The plant based ones are. But there are some companies that are trying to grow meat out of cultured muscle cells, and that could be an actual solution.

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