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Artificial meat is the most important thing anyone could be working on right now. Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

"don't eat hyper processed foods" is a horseshit shorthand. It's types of processing that are problems, not the simple fact that food has been prepared. Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?

> eat moderately

This literally doesn't mean anything. Moderate is not an amount, or a composition.

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Processed foods is mostly just a collective term for food with high amount of preservatives, food additives, heat treatment, cold treatment, grinding, emulsifying, and other mechanical force being applied.

Each step changes the food in ways that can have benefits but also drawbacks. Turn an apple into apple juice concentrate and then add water and what you have is not an apple. You got an apple-inspired surgery drink with almost none of the food properties of an apple. If people tried to reconstruct the apple using food additives, the result could even look like a physical apple and possible even fool people into thinking they are eating one, and yet it would not be an apple with the microbes, fibers, vitamin, minerals, skin and other parts for which makes an apple an apple.

A 10-step recipy that you cook at home might include some aspects of an identical finished product that you could have bought at the store, but in general I suspect it has fewer of the destructive steps. Those that you do yourself might also be less effective, as one don't usually intend to have left overs that can remain in the fridge for several months with no change.

> food with high amount of preservatives, food additives, heat treatment, cold treatment, grinding, emulsifying, and other mechanical force being applied.

I.e. the kinds of steps you cannot perform in your kitchen yourself, because you lack the necessary hardware and expertise. Home cooking is amateur-level food processing. It's still details of the individual steps that matter for whether the end product is healthy or not.

As a shorthand, it has nonzero informational value, but it's really blaming the wrong thing - it's not processing as a concept that's problematic, it's particular decisions made by companies releasing food products. The closer you are to raw ingredients, the less opportunity there is for businesses to screw with the food (optimizing for profitability over nutrition).

Yeah, it's not the "processing" of it. It's that one of the steps in the process of almost all "processed" food is: "Add a ton of salt and sugar".

It's not the processing, it's optimizing for getting your dumb starving brain in your fat meat puppet to go "More of that. Now." that is a problem.

Processing is just a word, and not even that bad as shorthand. But here come the word thinkers and now it's heretical to... what? Let food see the inside of a factory? Big stainless steel vats are what make you fat? Word thinkers, man. That's a bigger problem than sugar.

Instinct Hacking food?

Our 'natural' hamburger is already being 'processed' by well- and long-bred cow 'laboratories' on 'factory farms'. Tipoff: the burgers don't look or smell like grass (or whatever cows eat these days, besides antibiotics and meat and bone meal).

The big question, of course, is how much methane these 'laboratories' will produce! ';-)

This list is not super “convincing”: Water, pea protein*, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Why is there a laxative in my fake meat?

“100% free range grass feed beef” is a lot more convincing.

Do you take issue with any particular ingredients, or is the implication just "long list bad"?

What are you calling a laxative?

Yes, I am not interested in a meat flavored veggie protein shake that is made of seed oils, costs more and is less nutritious. It’s disgusting. I don’t know who the market for it is, I’d sooner eat tofu than overpriced corporate crap with heavy processing and industrial refining. What is the benefit? Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

If the issue is seed oils, then by all means make that case. There are arguably convincing points to be made in that area.

Implied outrage at long ingredient lists is not constructive.

I didn’t post his list.

Implying an ingredient which is made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals since the underlying implications is that plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than mean isn’t more constructive if you’re trying to convince others to eat non meat products.

Right? It's like "I want to start eating less meat". "OK, here's something that sorta kinda looks and tastes like burger or nuggets". "No, but I want to start eating vegetables". "Yeah, yeah, don't worry, this thing is made of vegetables".

So, prior to the veggie burgers and soy nuggets you were hooked on low quality meats in beef burgers and chicken nuggets, and now you are to remain hooked on low quality vegetables in bean burgers and soy nuggets.

Or rather, you are to remain hooked on the products of the same industry that has been destroying the planet and the developed world's diets for generations. And suddendly, the products of this same industry are not just not junk food anymore, they are healthy alternatives that don't harm the environment!

> I don’t know who the market for it is

People who think their is a demographic for only binary choices when it comes to diet it seems; I'm convinced the SV bubble thinking applies here. I highly recommend the series 'What you will eat next' [0] wherein they actually visit and prepare the meats, to their satisfaction.

But honestly I grew up eating tofu (it's delicious when prepared correctly as it will take the flavour of anything you make) and if you think using small amounts of animal protein (pork in this case) alongside with tofu to make Mapo Tofu isn't a better solution than these absurdly wasteful proposed solutions: I'm talking about you.

The degree they go to over-complicate and recreate a poor solution that we've been using for 10,000+ years (Agriculture) but have only recently fucked up--conventional chemical, and feed lot, factory based farming--is the epitome of clutching at straws to find a solution to a problem.

People bemoan things like Bitcoins POW energy intensity when plant based meats have probably have a larger carbon footprint than that and they were started around the same time simply because of the need for so many inputs and the likely chance they are derived from those very same sources the decry.

In short, I think renewable Ag is quite honestly the most effective solution to climate change and restoring balance to the damage we have collectively done the Earth by a significant margin--but by no means should be the only one--because of the scale and scope of it's immense size: it's the largest Industry, the FOREX is only larger because it includes commodity trading from Ag and currency exchange from within it.

Food education is perhaps the most vital thing we can do when trying to confront this solution with any sanity, something I think is entirely lost when what is required comes up because it's so visceral: we've spent most of our time as a species just trying to have enough calories to survive, we've gone to war for salt to preserve what little food we had so it's an expected response. But if we do not make progress in this domain and create solutions I sincerely think it will lead to the dystopia we've heard from water wars (the more serious issue in my view).

> Who buys this? People that don’t like meat but want to feel good about eating junk food that’s vegan and is a poor imitation of it?

Sadly, yes, I cooked professionally and my career took me to kitchens in the US and in Europe (alongside my horticulture apprenticeship in Biodynamic Ag) and I even spent time at a renown Vegetarian and Vegan restaurant in the US, and the lengths we went to make 'hamburgers' or 'crab cakes' that were kind of like them but not really was absurd! The amount of oils and other inputs you need for this to be even remotely resemble the texture of the real thing is so absurd, they act as binders or fillers to satiate what is otherwise a starving person.

There isn't enough time to discuss this topic in it's entirety, but yes... this was my conclusion and while I've worked in more acclaimed and busier kitchens since then I was outright shocked at was at best misguided idealism, or more often, outright blatant self-righteous ignorance from the end consumer: and this was from someone who dedicated a significant portion of my adult life to finding viable ways to lower meat consumption add increase vegetable consumption.

Everything changed when one of regulars had a stroke in the dining room one day during service and I simply could not participate in the operation any longer--a cause I'd later find out after I left was unrelated as he was an older professor from the nearby university but he ate most of his meals at our restaurant for years. He and an older couple (who ordered the same meal everyday) came for dinner service 5-6 days a week at the same time.

I think this is simply chemical corps doing the VC model of diversifying their portfolio to fund things that may have a slight chance at playing a part in the inevitable decoupling from this model. They're flush with cash from subsidies, bailouts, corporate welfare and have the media channels and access to influencers: so what are a few billions in R/D that are using their pre-existing reagents, proteins or binders if they can shoe-horn their products into fastfood chains and tell everyone they are saving the World doing it?

If they're successful they'll make their margins competitive from IP after creating the demand and make it up over a few years (decades?) with 'strategic' dividends as leaders in the newly established plant-based meat Industry.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbyoZ2KetYo

Thanks for your post. You understand my point, these disgusting processed foods are nothing but junk food with no animal produces no different from oreos, crescent rolls, and rice-a-roni which will not inprove your heath but it will taste good. Seeing it from the corperate side isn't suprising, its just embarassing how people fall for meat is bad, so this heavily processed food that costs more and has worst nutrition and is less digestable is better.

https://www.drugs.com/mtm/methylcellulose.html

I think I’ve made vegan chilli with a similar length list of ingredients.

Which ones are laxatives?

False equivalence.

Using 5 different beans is different from using something like HFCS, hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil, and industrially separated rice protein and pea protein, unless you think we should equate ingredients such as quinoa and benzoic acid.

Expeller-pressed canola oil is explicitly not "hexane refined hydrogenated rapeseed oil". Also no HFCS.

These are examples of products that are vegan and are commonly found in vegan food. So do you equate the industrial separating of plant protein from grains as the same as a white northern bean?

No, they aren't equivalent. But that's not an argument against eating isolated plant proteins.

Yes it is. It is a legitimate reason against eating heavily processed food including plant proteins, and you have made zero legitimate arguement against it, saying no its not is an invalid point.

I'm not even trying to argue that anything is good to eat here. This comment chain, since the ingredient list of a Beyond burger was posted, has amounted to pointing in the vague direction of that list and things like it and saying "Ew! Too many ingredients. Too processed".

The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing. Implying a previously single ingredient which is now made of overpriced heavily industrially processed mixtures of grain and beans mixed with flavorings and chemicals gives the underlying implication plant based foods suck and need corporations to heavily process them until it’s bearable to eat despite its worst nutrition and higher cost than meat.

It isn't nebulous, its expensive, disgusting, heavily processed, who is this marketing well to? Vegans, normal people who love expensive processed food? Who is this for? Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around. They will never adopt it, the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it, most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat, and the meat eater won't think highly of it either. Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once, but not take it seriously.

> Using many processed ingredients to replace one is a valid reason why its not appetizing.

No, it isn’t? That “one” ingredient is just a thousand in disguise. Even aside that there are lots of scary-sounding chemicals in all living things just to keep us alive: Is the beef hormone-fed? Does it have BSE because it was fed ground-up other cows? Antibiotic abuse for weight gain? And so on.

> Its a expensive frankenstein "food" with poorer nutrients that no normal people will willingly accept when there is real meat around.

It’s no more of a “Frankenstein food” (a term I previously only associated with GMO) than, e.g. Snickers candy bars, which are wildly popular.

> They will never adopt it,

Perhaps, perhaps not. But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

> the heath concious vegan that buys from whole foods will look down on it,

Sone will, some won’t. The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

> most vegans say they hate meat and won't eat things that taste like meat,

Do they? I don’t know what meat tastes like. But then, I’m not even vegan, I’m a vegetarian (who avoids cow milk yes, but not derivatives).

> and the meat eater won't think highly of it either.

You might not — you might even have tried one of them in order to make a fair comparison, though you’re writing in a way which suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater — but I have accidentally cooked vegan meals for people who are normally heavy meat eaters and they’ve complemented me for it. It feels like you’re projecting to claim that of most people.

I suspect most people won’t care, assuming it’s cheap enough. How much do these things cost in Burger King or McD or wherever?

> Most people who ate it or will eat it as a novelty once

Wouldn’t be surprised. Most new things oversell and under-deliver.

But I wouldn’t write them off, either.

Snickers bars are also disgusting heavily processed crap that has no benefits to the consumer. Popularity isn't a metric of success, obesity, the use of IE6, Windows, Intel graphics, and being infected with coronavirus is for instance popular.

>But IMO failure is more likely to come from alternative non-meat (or vat-meat) than because of what you’re objecting to.

That is a pipe dream that doesn't exist, you are saying it will fail because of 3D printed steaks that will cost 30 cents every 10 lbs and be 100% equal to steaks. Comparing it to a fantasy replacement isn't useful.

>The big four (fat/carb/protein/fibre) ratios won’t put anyone off, especially not people who might otherwise go for Quorn burgers.

Quorn is nearly 90% of a pressed fungus with ingridients such as egg white and flavors, not a frankenstein mixture of highly refined oil, peas and rice.

>suggests to me you have an identity of being a meat eater

I don't eat junk on purpose, I will eat whole foods that include meat, yet you self identity as a vegetarian but you don't see me saying you identity as one in italics disparagingly. Your small sample bias doesn't change the fact its nothing more than a novelty, and reenforces it, They will never replicate your cooking as a habit, and comparing junk food to most vegan food is fitting in nutrition but if your bar for quality vegan food is to compare it to snickers and the cost and nutrition of McD and Burger King I will not partake in eating junk food no matter how few animals are in it. The so called "food" they made is disgusting.

> Popularity isn't a metric of success

It literally is. Especially given the context of this particular thread.

That you disagree is confusing.

Why aren't you simply eating the most popular food and popular omnivore diet then? Meat is very popular so why not appeal to that logic and eat heavily processed meat?

You seem to be conflating successful with good, in both directions.

Success is popularity, and popularity is absolutely a metric for success. If this product is popular, it is necessarily successful. You are explicitly denying this specific thing.

All of the food items currently sold (at least around here), on an individual and personal basis for the consumer, basically fine. The fact that a normal person has a bad diet does not alter this, as the products themselves are not the issue, the aggregate is (and indeed one of the issues with the normal person’s diet is too much red meat). Many dietary options exist, both those subsets which are and are not individually fine for the consumer, including a lot of foods you’re rejecting.

Because the individual foods are all safe, the questions society now has to consider are: (1) ethically, do animals have intrinsic value, or are they things we can just exploit without care? And (2) what are the non-personal consequences, e.g. pollution, land and water use, habitat destruction, and crop diversity to avoid all the issues that monocultures bring.

These two are independent, any given thing (not just meat and non-meat human products, also the food which feeds livestock) can be good or bad on each and either the same or different on the other. And it’s a spectrum for each sub-part of those two big bullet-points, not a Boolean. I’m vegetarian (and try to reduce milk consumption) because I want to err on the side of assuming too many minds might be sentient than too few, but note that despite this belief my comments do not denounce “meat is murder” or similar slogans, because that’s not something other people find relevant, rather they find it annoying.

Likewise, I am not arguing against meat (and leather) by saying it is disgusting and therefore nobody would eat (wear) it, because while I find it disgusting even on a conceptual level, I can clearly see that most people don’t.

Meat is popular, meat is successful. The only way to replace meat is to make something more popular. That is success. If I was working in that sector, that would literally be my metric for success.

But you aren’t discussing on that level, you’re going “ewww pea protein, nobody can possibly want to eat that” like your body wouldn’t do a similar chemical reaction if you ate peas.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that, insofar as a Beyond burger is bad, it's because of some specific ingredients or processes. It's not substantive to just post the ingredients, or make nebulous allusions to them being gross or un-nutritious.

But your point is not right though! When you cook at home you put in the stuff you want to eat, that tastes good and nourishes you, and that's the point of food.

But the ingredients in highly processed foods are not there to feed you, or even to make the products tasty. They're there to accommodate the production process (eg emulsifiers), to increase the product's transportability and shelf life (preservatives), to make the product more appealing to the senses (colorings, flavorings etc) and, more worryingly, to hook you with huge amounts of salt, fats and sugar, that you don't find in base ingredients like potatoes or beans.

These added ingredients replace and crowd out the actual food you need and want to eat. That's the point, yes? The Harvard article I quoted above says it clearly: "Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients".

That's because they must be high in ingredients that are not "fiber and nutrients" and are there to improve the ability of the product to be sold, but not to nourish you. Because the primary goal of such over-processed foods is not to feed you, but to sell well.

Am I getting my point across? Whether fake meats are nutritious or healthy is not the industry's concerns. So it will not optimise for those properties. The industry's concern is to sell its stuff. So it will optimise for that. And if that ends up feeding its consumers unhealthy shit, so be it. That's the same industry that's been selling over-procssed, unhealthy, environmentally damaging junk food made of meat for years. It's now doing the same thing with plants. Nothing has changed.

No, I don't see the point you're trying to get across.

To keep using the Beyond burger example; you imply emulsifiers are no good. Is sunflower lecithin problematic? Methylcellulose is kind of another one here, but it's literally insoluble fiber, something you imply is problematic for a food to be missing. The only ingredients that might be present as preservatives I can see are salt and vinegar/lemon juice. Are they problematic in the amounts used? Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

Now, if we were talking the emulsifiers being PGEs, sodium benzoate as a preservative and red #40 for colour, then maybe there would be a better case for not eating Beyond burgers. Or maybe canola oil simply isn't what you consider to be healthy. Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

> Is beet juice a problematic colourant?

"Problematic colourant"? Of course it's problematic. Because it's a colorant. For food! Why do you need to add color to food?

> Point is, the problem is what specifically is present or missing. Not whether it fits into some ill-defined notion of processed.

But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing. In particular, nutrients that you need to have in your food and stuff you don't need to.

Is it the fact that it's a general classification rather than a case-by-case analysis that is bothering you? Would you prefer it if there was a long list of foods with an annotation "processed", "ultra-processed" etc with a small discussion of what's in them that shouldn't be in there and what's not in that should?

Problematic as in negative health consequences. If there aren't undesired consequences, what is the problem?

I like to add turmeric powder to my rice for the sole purpose of colouring it. Is that some travesty? Is my rice now ultra-processed?

>But this is what the standard you don't like is doing. It's classifying food according to what is present or missing.

No, that's explicitly not what it's doing. It tries to classify things by level of processing. The fact that the examples given often don't fit their criteria only serves to make it look more ridiculous.

Makes me wonder how the soy mince I used in the chilli was made from the soybeans. Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from. Or the creatine I put into chilli (the packet says to put it in water and drink it, but it’s nowhere near soluble enough so I put it in food instead).

> Benzoic acid and its salts are used as a food preservatives

Why would I bother? And objecting to a preservative is like objecting to refrigerators. If refrigerators didn’t exist, I’d put something like that into my chilli, no problem.

Real meat doesn't require you to research that or worry about it. No thank you to some weird expensive frankenstein food to replace a single ingredient with poorer nutrition.

A functioning food regulatory body is why I don’t worry about it and didn’t bother researching those things before happily eating.

Perhaps regulators don’t function where you live? But if so I wouldn’t trust the meat (well I’m veggie but same point; nor dairy or anything else) either.

Why do you keep asserting that Beyond Burger has worse nutrition? I’ve not seen anything to justify that.

They approve coca cola and candy bars, will you eat and drink nothing but them since the food regulatory says they are safe?

Meat doesn't have carbs and has more digestable protein. I am not eating more expensive heavily processed fake meat with carbs and lower quality protein.

That’s like saying cars are death traps for the occupants, then responding to evidence they’re regulated for safety by asking someone who drives if they’d drive into a harbour. (And to continue the analogy, your other comments would be “Nobody would ever buy these! They’re expensive and worse than running!” while ignoring the demonstrably large market. And I guess I’d be a cyclist?)

I’m happy to eat only things that are regulated, even if not to then further limit myself to the specific subset your tangent is going to now. Don’t put words into my mouth to try to argue against something I didn’t say.

If you don't want to use an appeal to govnerment authority for what you can eat, then don't bring up food regulators if you don't want to take it to its logical conclusion of uselessness. The government approved it, so you don't worry? Why think for yourself when the govnerment can tell you whats good for you? Why do reseach, its approved, you don't have to use that precious brainpower and can happily eat everything the government tells you to.

> Or the oil extracted from whichever vegetable vegetable oil is made from.

Extra virgin olive oil, for instance is extracted only from olives and only by mechanical means. Basically, what you need is a lot of weight, that's all. No heat, no catalysts, reagents, emulsifiers etc. In theory, you could make it at home, but you'd need a certain setup like a millstone or two and a team of pack animals or half a dozen strong young men to turn it.

But that's how it's made anyway: press olives, collect oil.

Which is, I suppose, why it's considered one of the best quality oils you can get and as far as can be from ultra-processed stuff like hydrogenated vegetable fats and the like.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian. This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate

Way less than replacing fossil fuels. Unless you're against killing animals for moral reasons, artificial meat is not "the most important thing anyone could be working on right now".

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

You wrongly assume people in general want to or need to be vegetarian. We evolved to eat and digest animal based foods.

Drastically reducing the consumption of real meat, especially beef, would have an impact on our greenhouse gas emissions comparable to making all planes and ships carbon neutral

I didn't know these numbers, so I had to look them up:

* Ships are responsible for 90% of international transport, their CO2 emissions accounting for approximately 2.2% of the global total of such emissions [0]

* Aircraft are responsible for 1.9% of greenhouse gas emissions (which includes all greenhouse gases, not only CO2) and 2.5% of CO2 emissions [1]

[0] https://orbit.dtu.dk/files/158911010/Working_Paper_4_Emissio...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

Yes, yet that doesn’t make it any easier to change peoples dietary preferences.

That is an enormous lie.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... Agriculture in total is 10%. Transportation is 29%

That seems pretty comparable.

If you consider 10% to be 29% it certainly is very comparable.

Comparable doesn't mean identical. It means they exist on the same scale, or are of similar magnitude. Obviously that's subjective to an extent, but a factor of 3 is only half an order of magnitude - sufficiently similar that "enormous lie" seems a rather unfair description.

Nearly 300% difference is a huge and fitting description of a huge lie. 10% is also all agriculture, not just bovine production, and even if you removed trucks in transportation, I am sure its not going to be similiar at all.

Emissions in Transportation are dominated by road transport, which I didn't include. Road transport is responsible for about 70-80% of all transport emissions.

See for example [1] for a more detailed breakdown. They list Aviation as 1.9% of total emissions, Shipping (by ship) as 1.7%, Livestock & manure as 5.8%. So by those numbers planes and ships add to 3.6, much less than the 5.8 of livestock (and that's not including use of energy or transport for livestock).

1: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

That data is from 2016. It’s rather outdated. That amount of percentage change is rather low for the disproportionate impact it would have, its like convincing others to use a raspberry pi 3 for a gaming desktop to use less energy but ignore the hvac that can be replaced with more efficient energy usage with less of an impact.

With data from 2020 the comparison would be unfair and even worse, look e.g. at chart 2 in [1] about how transportation emissions changed in recent years. I can't find good worldwide numbers newer than 2016, but my statement should have plenty of margin to hold for a couple of years after 2016.

> That amount of percentage change is rather low for the disproportionate impact it would have

That's the neat thing about artificial meat (what this whole thread was about): at its best it promises to slash the need for livestock without requiring any change in consumer behavior. The consumer shouldn't even notice that it's not real meat they are eating.

Of course there's impact on farmers, but that's no different from the petroleum industry being harmed from the move to EVs.

1: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/transport...

>That's the neat thing about artificial meat (what this whole thread was about): at its best it promises to slash the need for livestock without requiring any change in consumer behavior. The consumer shouldn't even notice that it's not real meat they are eating.

They know. That is the hope, but the plant based ones are disgusting. If you're talking about the bovine serum derrived one, you're assuming a 1:1 replacement that is equal in price. Manure is used to fertilize plants, it is used as a fuel in india, and can be used as a substrate to grown mushrooms but its benefits are ignored since solutions aren't really being suggested, only the complete removal of cows is acceptable.

All these problems are wealthy problems, the poor are not going to have this impact them, and it will cost too much for it to reach the masses.

This is largely a red herring. The entire world could become vegetarian overnight and emissions would only be reduced by a couple percentage points. Reducing oil dependence is a far more fruitful endeavor to pursue.

"reducing oil dependence" is hardly a singular task. "Reduce Meat consumption" would rank lower than "make electricity production less dependent on coal, natural gas and oil" but higher than "find a viable alternative fuel for ships".

Luckily we have enough people and resources that we can work on multiple problems at once

We already have nuclear as an alternative, it’s just not being used.

Using buffalo instead would lower emissions, use less resources and give healthier meat but the war against beef isn’t really looking for solutions, it’s trying to fit the abolishment of rudiments as the only acceptable method.

In the UK under rationing during WW2, during which people ate very little meat, the health of the population soared. Mortality dropped, both in infancy and old age. Children grew taller and heavier.

Also during WW2, occupying Germans removed all animal livestock from Norway - so Norwegians had to survive on wholegrains, legumes, fruit and vegetables. Deaths from strokes and heart disease plummeted almost immediately. After the war, the consequent return to eating animal products saw the previous levels of disease return.

We eat far more protein than we actually need today.

A lot of things were rationed in WW2. What definitively points to excess meat as the culprit?

>In the UK under rationing during WW2, during which people ate very little meat, the health of the population soared. Mortality dropped, both in infancy and old age. Children grew taller and heavier.

Okay but is it because of eating very little meat, or because of rationing itself? Looks like it's simply because a lot of people got a steady and stable supply of calories and vitamins/minerals, not anything to do with meat.[0] . In other words rationing + more meat could have easily produced even better results. Meat, after all, is an excellent nutritional choice.

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/9728

edit: wowza typos

They were worried about famine, people were starving and children didn’t get proper nutrition and were prone to more disease, girls stopped menstruating. Some Norwegians were lucky and grew their own food including animals. The fact your cited the malnourishment of these unfortunate people as a citation to justify your propaganda of poor nutrition and eating habits is evidence that nobody should take you seriously, it should only be seen that your dreadful beliefs as the opposite of what to do unless they agree with your advocacy for stunted children, non menstruating females, and being prone to illnesses such as diarrhea, pneumonia and meningitis, which will kill them before heart disease and they won't live long enough to have a stroke either.

https://www.kubenarendal.no/Eydehavn/undervisning/barndomung...

You cannot make absurd claims like yours without any source whatsoever. Please link it below.

We evolved to do a lot of things we no longer tolerate, and we have invented many things that do better than evolution.

As for “need”… what is good for one human is often very different to what’s good for humanity — tragedy of the commons, Nash equilibrium, there are many examples.

And as a vegetarian, I’m an existence proof that it’s fine, though not any evidence of it being better or worse than an omnivorous diet.

> We evolved to do a lot of things we no longer tolerate

Such as?

Food hygiene is the big one, in this case. We used to eat whatever we could hunt and kill (or gather) without knowing what bacterial infections looked like, much less how to eliminate the pathogens. Even cleaning bowls and cutlery is only possible after the invention of those things, and soap is much more recent, circa 5000 BC according to a quick Google (and then apparently used for curing ailments rather than as a general thing? IDK how much to trust first hit on the web).

Do you think you'd die if you were to eat with your hands off the floor? Rich Western citizen probably have weaker immune systems than people living in the middle of the jungle, but they're all the same species, it's not a matter of "we've evolved to need to eat with a clean fork."

Even the Rich Western person is much more resilient than you think they might be. You can survive, perhaps not thrive, off half rotten carrion if need be. Evolution works on much bigger timescales.

> Do you think you'd die if you were to eat with your hands off the floor?

No, that’s putting words into my mouth.

I’m saying we won’t tolerate bad hygiene, not that it will kill us, and our floors are generally quite clean these days anyway.

Food poisoning is however a thing, and from what I’ve heard (never had it myself) quite unpleasant.

> We evolved to eat and digest animal based foods.

I doubt we evolved to eat large quantities of (mostly low quality processed) meat two or three times a day though, that's a very very modern lifestyle.

“Low quality” “Processed”

These words are meaningless.

Eh... so a chicken breast and a hot dog sausage are the same ?

The beef from the farm across my parents' house is the same as an antibiotic fed beef from a large scale US exploitation shipped over the atlantic ?

A frozen burger patty vs a locally sourced beef piece minced by your local butcher ?

A bag of dehydrated potatoe crumbs vs home made mashed potatoes ?

An apple and a banana vs an industrial sugar and preservative ridden compote ?

I know removing or altering the meaning of words is a big trend these days but it seems dishonest to not see the difference here. I honestly think you'd have to be severely uneducated or straight up lying not to see it

So your gotcha is that he or all meat eaters equate hot dogs and chicken breasts and you’re trying to call him uneducated or a liar with this genius logic?

No gotcha, read the comment I'm replying to. “Low quality” “Processed” definitely have a meaning

There’s a lot of implications you’re making, like a frozen beef patty is never higher quality than one that is from a butcher. Your examples aren’t convincing.

Almost all meat our ancestors ate was processed in some manner. Very rarely did they gnaw it directly off the bone immediately after the kill.

It depends who you ask, but humans have been processing and cooking meat for probably half a million years.

Salted and preserved meats have been sound for a very long time as well.

The processed foods we eat today are probably far higher quality than anything our ancestors ate. I can only assume “quality” here to refer the safety, cleanliness, and purity of the food. I don’t know what else it could mean.

If you think the smoked or salted meat of our ancestors is "processed" in a way that is similar to modern industrial food I think you should dig a bit more.

> I don’t know what else it could mean.

I guess thats the issue then. Preservatives, colorants, added sugars/salts, melting salts, texturants, fake cheeses, and all kind of additives, &c.

Do you ever wonder why more and more people develop food related addictions and health issues ? Why half of the US is obese ? Why diabetes is skyrocketing ?

https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2019/01/03/banned...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211014102038.h...

https://thecounter.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-recla...

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318630#refined-car...

All of which exist in plant based food too.

Overeating is why people are obese, specifically overeating plant based foods. Diabetes isn’t caused by meat, it’s caused by sugar, derived from beets or sugar cane, both plants. I implore you to find me a person that is obese from eating nothing but meat, the same way you can find obese vegans. (It doesn't exist.)

If you care about people's heath, surely you'll tell them to eat more meat.

Or corn! Don't forget corn!

The US produces ~14B bushels of corn each year. That's about 1500lbs per man, woman and child. What did you do with your share of corn this year?

I think most of it is used as feed or sold isn’t it?

Oh, mostly it's cracked into syrup, oil, protein, fibre, dextrose, starch etc. And those things are used in everything - paper, fabric, building materials, other animal feed, plastic...

Corn won early and it won big, so everybody started figuring out what they could make with the cheap stuff. And it turns out, nearly everything.

Fed it to a cow and ate the cow.

That must have been one massive burger!

> All of which exist in plant based food too.

Yeah of course, that's why I think the modern take on vegetarianism/veganism is bs, every trend is corrupted by consumerism and the easiest way to make a profit is selling processed food (mostly byproducts of other industries) with a "vegan" sticker on it

> specifically overeating plant based foods

Can't find anything about that, any sources ? I can find dozen of studies linking meat over consumption to obesity and health issues in general, a few linking plant based diets to lower risk of getting overweight/obese but none linking vegetarianism to obesity.

> Diabetes isn’t caused by meat, it’s caused by sugar

Oh don't worry, they also add sugar to meat based processed food, they add sugar to pretty much everything. Ah, and you're wrong:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14576980/

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/95/3/752/4576709

> If you care about people's heath, surely you'll tell them to eat more meat.

I doubt it, the average american already it 120+kg of meat a year... and it's strongly associated to all kind of health issues already.

https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/1in3cancers/lifestyle-choic...

https://www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.741627.de/publikationen/round...

Adding sugar to meat doesn’t make meat the cause of obesity any more than shooting someone with COVID means COVID killed them.

Neither of them are all meat diets, you just posted articles less that state incorrectly that that eating too much plants and adding meat is proof that meat are the only reason they’re obese and diabetic.

> We evolved

Nutrition is poorly understood so being conservative with changes is reasonable, but making claims about what is and is not good because of the environment we evolved in doesn't make sense at all. Evolving in a specific environment emphatically does not say what you are optimal for, just what you can tolerate acceptably enough to function. That we can function while eating meat is not in doubt and every other claim based on evolution is an appeal to authority to an authority that doesn't support what you say.

Nutrition isn’t poorly understood. If what you said was true, vegans wouldn’t need to take tests to check their micronutrient profile or need so many supplements. You have no evidence to support your claim, there has been 0 vegan civilizations; for good reason. There is no dimension where a vegan does not need to check their iron levels and supplementation is a must: if you care about your health and getting what your ancestors did from meat.

If nutrition is as well understood as you claim when you criticise vegan diets (I don’t know, not my field), then we must also know how to create a vegan food item that can replace meat and dairy, and the question is then one of taste and cost.

They made that a long time ago and achieved it (vegans that supplement), dog food like vegan products like Soylent exists. Although it exists you'll have to convince people to consume it since its not preferable.

So you agree the question is then one of taste and cost.

No.

The cost of soylent is not more expensive, and its taste is not bad. The problem is culture. You don't need to convince a progammmer who doesn't want to leave his computer. Vegans are/were also not convinced by taste or cost, that is not why they are vegan.

If you don’t think it’s a question of taste and cost, why did you say in other threads: “They know. That is the hope, but the plant based ones are disgusting.”, “I ate some quorn, its rather good, but its overpriced and I would never buy the vegan one.”, “I found quorn (made with egg white) to be a 1:1 chicken breast replacement, but its much too expensive to be a real replacement.”, “I am not interested in a meat flavored veggie protein shake that is made of seed oils, costs more and is less nutritious. It’s disgusting.”

I won’t be convinced to eat heavily processed food nor will I become vegan ever. Talking about their taste doesn’t mean it’s why I’m not vegan.

When did this become about you rather than about if society can accept a new food product?

Search "you" in the thread. It has been that way since the beginning, in fact you started the thread doing so.

I don't get the your logic of starting the thread talking about my opinions then asking when it became about me when you are literally talking to me about my opinions the entire thread, posting "So you agree the question is then one of taste and cost." and even dreging comments from other posts about my opinions. It is all about me.

Checking the micronutrient profile is important and it does a lot, but absolutely 0 nutritional specialists will claim to you that this will solve your nutritional problems. That is why they tell you to have a "diverse" diet: It's a hedge against the fact that at the end of the day they have no idea what to do. All they can do is check a few markers and hope for the best.

There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to. Environmental concerns can be improved over time. It's a primary food type everywhere it can be gotten, and everywhere else is trying desperately to get more. Artificial meat will always be a minor alternative.

> There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat

Are you sure you see absolutely no reason to stop eating meat? You may need to read the parent comment again, a few are cited, including the "need to kill billions of animals every year" you didn't address.

Whether those reasons are sufficient to stop eating meat is a separate matter.

> we're not going to

> Artificial meat will always be a minor alternative.

I need a crystal ball, can you tell me where you got yours?

Where’s your crystal ball that says artificial meat is a larger alternative or it’ll be 1:1? Most people are poor and can farm themselves instead of relying on corporations to feed them.

I have not stated that. That's the point: I have not attempted to take a guess at the future and stated this guess (or my wishes) as a hard fact.

> There's absolutely no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to.

Most people in the west definitely eat too much and too low quality meat. In Germany it's pretty much the norm to eat two meat based meal a day, if not three. Meat in the US is an abomination, both in term of quality and amount consumed. No reason to stop eating meat altogether but plenty of reasons to start eating less of it

I personally reduced my meat consumption by about 80% and mostly eat a vegetarian diet based on non processed food, I feel as good as ever, my performance in the gym didn't decrease, there is no reason to eat as much meat as we do really, it's purely cultural. I don't have anything against meat morally speaking, I still get a nice piece of it whenever I can when I'm eating out, I just cut the garbage quality meat (aka 80% of what's available in supermarkets)

> no reason to stop eating meat, and we're not going to

What if lab grown meat was significantly cheaper than animal-sourced meat? Because that could very well happen in the future, animal production isn't exactly cheap or effective.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Which part of the world? The US? Eastern Europe? South America?

The barrier to "convincing" and "cheap" are very high.

Seitan, tofu, lentils and tempah have long fit this criteria so it’s not exactly high. It just hasn’t happened and it won’t happen just because some tech nerds who assume it hasn’t already happened decide you can do it with Frankenstein food by heavily processing it and using enough food flavorings to mask its plant origins and convincing you to pay more for a worst product.

I don't consider any of those "replacement meats," they're foods in their own right. Falafel fits the bill as well, maybe mushrooms.

The real problem is scale. We're much more likely to develop a microbial or fungal nutrient sponge that's far easier to manage (and probably better for you + the environment) than develop some sort of highly advanced fake meat extruder.

One of the biggest issues really is momentum. It will be 20-30 years before a technology can compete with a guy in muddy jeans on a tractor. We are disrupting the fossil fuel industry, but that industry is only really about a hundred and fifty years old. The agricultural industry is nearly ten thousand years old, and it's experiencing its own renaissance with the advent of IoT.

Why not?

I ate some quorn, its rather good, but its overpriced and I would never buy the vegan one.

I bought the vegan one before I left the UK (can’t find it in Berlin). It’s not great, but not terrible. (Vegan cheese however, has been terrible every time I’ve tried it).

Now I’m using tofu or soy mince or similar depending on what meal I’m making. Those do need flavour, not having much of their own (unless bought pre-flavoured, smoked tofu works well).

I don't see how any of those examples are anything like a meat replacement. Just because something is high in protean doesn't make it a meat replacement. That makes it a protean replacement.

What is your idea of a meat replacement?

At the very least it should mimic the texture and taste (to a close enough degree) of the meat it is trying to replace. Otherwise it is not a replacement, it is an alternative.

I don't call chicken a beef replacement.

I think that taste can artificially induced easily with seasonings (remember stuff like bacon salt?). The texture of seitan and some seasoned tofu are very convincing, but I found quorn (made with egg white) to be a 1:1 chicken breast replacement, but its much too expensive to be a real replacement.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

Then, by definition, it's not meat. Please, let's keep calling things with their proper name!

"Sometimes I'll cook a dish with a lot of steps at home; am I supposed to assume that the 10-step food I cook at home is less healthy than the 2-step?"

If your kitchen looks like a kitchen and not a chemistry lab or oil refinery and you're starting with things that are identifiably food, you're probably good to go either way.

And while I'm no expert on the full cycle of meat production in he US, animals are routinely grazed on land that is unfit for modern, large-scale row cropping. I'm not saying that's the only way to turn soil and sunlight into plants, but it does seem to be the predominant one.

It isn't clear cut to me that taking that land out of productive agricultural use and shifting the need to yet more industrial agriculture is a huge win. If somebody has done that math, I'd be very interested in seeing a source. And to be clear, I'm more than prepared to believe that it's a net win. It's pretty well established that cows create a lot of methane and that all the progress with seaweed-based supplements is dubiously applicable to free ranging livestock.

> If your kitchen looks like a kitchen and not a chemistry lab or oil refinery and you're starting with things that are identifiably food, you're probably good to go either way.

Well, the flip side is that if your kitchen looked like a chemistry lab, you'd be able to make better food. The difference between cooking and chemical process engineering is that the latter actually cares about quality of outcome.

There's a lot to be concerned about with what the food manufacturers are optimizing their products for, but reducing it to "processed = unhealthy" or "chemical sounding names in ingredient list = bad" is just like saying that the only real art is finger painting, everything else is not art.

It depends how many of those 10 steps involve cramming the food full of extra sugar, fat and salt. With industrially processed food, that's almost inevitably a big part of the processing. Industrially processed food wouldn't have to be so unhealthy, but it is consistently enough to make it a pretty accurate heuristic for how healthy food is.

> This would have radical effects on the environment, the climate, and obviate the need to kill billions of animals every year.

Let's agree on the ethical aspect of avoiding to kill animals.

However, regarding the environment we need to look at the actual data and the weight of different activities on global greenhouse emissions:

- Livestock farming : 5.8%

- Road transport: 11.9%

- Heating/cooling offices and house: 17.5%

[0]

So considering the actions we can take right now, we would get much more bang for buck in curbing emissions, by reducing heating and cooling costs in our own homes and avoid car usage, than we would by not eating meat.

For the record I agree that we should stop animal cruelty but specifically on the environment the unconfortable truth is that there are more urgent 'confort' actions you can take right now, very people are willing to leave their car behind or curb their house A/C usage.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#agriculture-f...

Oh, so it would only remove as much in emissions as completely removing half of all road transport in the entire world. Might as well not even bother then.

No, artificial meat is not. Always looking for solutions to the symptoms of the root cause, which is feeding overpopulation.

We don't expect to hit a human carrying capacity, we expect to 'solve' that problem with technology and clever thinking and live anywhere we like forever.

What happens when everyone's eating fake meat, but we've added another few billion people and we need more and more? Bigger factories, larger crops, wider distribution. Then that's the 'problem' and we need a new wonder thing.

Fake meat and all these other engineered solutions (along with large scale monoculture and livestock industries) ignore and completely misunderstand the complexities and resources of the natural world. The ecosystems of soil, insects, plants, climate etc interacting and evolving. We think we're smarter than that and can do better with simple solutions to complex problems, so here we are arguing about not-meat.

> We don't expect to hit a human carrying capacity, we expect to 'solve' that problem with technology and clever thinking and live anywhere we like forever.

Yeah, that's more-less the whole point of technology, and civilization. The alternative is to pack up and go back to living in caves.

Complex systems are there to be studied and managed with intelligent solutions. Not to scare us into trowing our hands up in the air and giving up.

My point is not going about going backwards, it's realising there isn't infinite growth that we just need to solve for

No it won’t. Tofu has existed for centuries and it didn’t, impossible burgers didn’t. It’s hopeful, but in reality it’ll just give industrialized countries with poorer people less access to animal products, while those in 3rd world countries continue to grow chickens.

Neither tofu nor impossible burgers are a convincing replacement of a real piece of meat. They are replacement for processed meat.

Sure, neither of them are ribeye equivalents. But at what cost will people pay for the the fake foods, and what issues will they bring? I'm actually very fond of quorn (with egg white) which I could be convinced is a 1:1 piece of chicken.

> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.

I'm not so sure about that. I've recently had the opportunity to try a vegetarian diet for a week. I did not enjoy it, I found the food tasteless and insufficiently nutritious.

But that got me thinking about all the dishes I usually consume which, while not exclusively plant based, are mostly made out of vegetables. All those dishes have a critical animal-based ingredient. The problem? Many of those ingredients aren't desirable by themselves - meat with significant bone and fat parts, pork hooves or ears, animal blood and others. Yet without them, you cannot make those dishes.

I wonder, when we finally arrive at that artificial meat future, will today's "undesirable" parts of beef or pork or chicken become an expensive delicacy? Will it basically wipe out traditional recipes that depend on them? I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a world.

That is so wrong, it doesnt even need response but here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

There is a commnonly accepted standard about what is (ultra) processed or not. It's called NOVA and it's summarised in the following article:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...

And I quote:

"Ultra-processed foods

Also commonly referred to as “highly processed foods,” these are foods from the prior group that go beyond the incorporation of salt, sweeteners, or fat to include artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. Several processing steps using multiple ingredients comprise the ultra-processed food. It is speculated that these foods are designed to specifically increase cravings so that people will overeat them and purchase more. They are typically ready-to-eat with minimal additional preparation. Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients. Examples are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, chips, and breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets. One study using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that ultra-processed foods comprised about 60% of total calories in the U.S. diet. [4] An association has been suggested between the increasing sales of ultra-processed foods and the rise in obesity. [3]"

In short, ultra-processed food is food that's full of stuff you don't need to eat or you don't want to eat, but that's there to make you buy the product, and keep buying it. It's food whose purpose is not to nourish, but to sell.

>In short, ultra-processed food is food that's [...] there to make you buy the product, and keep buying it. It's food whose purpose is not to nourish, but to sell.

This isn't really supported by the quote you posted. That aspect only gets a mention in one sentence, and even that's qualified by "It is speculated".

The commonly accepted standard is incoherent.

Chips are listed. Not "some" as is qualified for frozen dinners, but just chips. Chips are just sliced potatoes cooked in oil and salted. No "artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability". If you dust some MSG and onion powder on them I guess that technically fits under artifical flavor. But I can do that at home in a couple seconds. Does dusting the same MSG and onion powder on my roasted asparagus make it ultra-processed?

Insofar as chips are an issue, it's that they contain too much fat, or too much salt or something. Not some magical property attached to them in an industrial factory.

There are similar mismatches for their other examples.

As the quote says "Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients". Chips are given as an example of that as are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. Further, "These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets".

Chips in particular are cooked in low-quality oils and highly salted (a pack of crisps in my neck of the woods has about 1.5 to 2% salt). Of course you can do that at home and nobody's stopping you, but chips are sold by the million tons all over the world. Hence the concerns about making peoples' diets a mess.

Right, the problem with chips isn't how processed they are. They're hardly processed at all. It's what is/isn't in them. Nobody would call homemade mashed potatoes ultra-processed, even if they were made to be nutritionally identical to Lay's chips.

I guess properly made sausage is now "ultra processed", despite just being smoked ground meat in a tube with some spices.

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