How sustainable are fake meats?
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
We’re also not seeing a clear economic picture in Canada and the USA because subsidies/tax breaks/etc can significantly transform the final costs of something like milk or beef in a grocery store.
My kids like the fake meats, but I’m pretty content with whole grains and legumes covering most of my protein requirements. Once you get over meat, you almost never think about it and the substitutes seem unnecessarily unhealthy (they’re kind of like savoury junk food with a ton of salt and saturated fat).
I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.
It's part of the disconnect that industrialization and urbanization has brought. People don't really understand agriculture or agriculture policy anymore.
Things like adding iodine to salt; iron, thiamin, and niacin to bread; extra vitamin D to milk. Federal stockpiles of various types of food from grain to cheese. All done to improve the general health and wellbeing, and as a measure of insurance in the event of war or disaster.
The only thing most people on the internet seem to know about today is the old politician's cry of "We're paying farmers not to grow food!" Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. When the farmers go out of business, you have no food.
It's not ideal. It's not perfect. But it's worked, and has kept America fat and happy for almost a century. Try to understand more than what's right in front of you.
Or to assure a minimum well being for the population. A good economy is just a means for the goal of providing well being the citizens.
Even if keeping people fed increased labor cost over letting them starve, we should still keep people fed.
"Frustrating" is by itself vague, so I agree with your point. I meant: frustrating for having an informed conversation about how a changing world and a changing climate suggest a changing diet. Past subsidies to animal agriculture make it easier for people to now dismiss new plant-based foods as fringe and not for them, because of their cost.
Plants high in protein are easier to preserve, cheaper to grow, cheaper to transport, can be stored with less energy, the list goes on.
It seems like we do this entirely because most of us think it tastes good. There’s no reason we couldn’t sustain ourselves on a fraction of the meat, dairy, and eggs that we have now.
I do wonder what I’m missing. There must be more to it.
* Order vegetarian when eating out. Non-western cuisines do incredible food that doesn't have any meat in it.
* Only buy meat + eggs from a local farm that effectively does things "small batch". Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.
* Try to eat less in general.
I don't know if I'll ever personally break from eating meat. But I do think that paying prices that are actually related to the cost of raising the animals, and doing so from a place that actually lets them live a pleasant life before slaughter feels better.
I've been pretty successful with the opposite, only getting meat when I eat out / special occasion and not stocking it in the house.
If you're willing to use freezers you can even stock up for quite a long time (some places will even let you pick the cow and process it for you and give you all the meat).
Where I live it’s not better. The average piece of meat comes from a slice of hell in some feedlot or crowded enclosure, labelling laws make it look okay, and people carry on and eat it. Butchers selling nicer meat have variable suppliers and, when I was eating meat, I’d notice over time that supplier quality was gradually decreasing and never increasing. Like they started with these great ideals and eventually had to give in and be able to reliably get a product and a decent margin off of it. Meat is a major casualty of the race to the bottom.
That reminded me of a childhood memory. We didn't have a farm, but we had few animals (sheeps, chickens, rabbits). One year my father decided to buy a piglet from a spring fair. Me and my brothers were thrilled, it was playfull and curious (not like sheep, who were rather booring), kinda like a dog. My father also really liked to take care of it. I remember that he even applied some soothing cream on it after a rather bad sunburn. But in the end it was still bought and raised for meat. My father had always been a guy that slaughtered animals for other people in the neighborhoud, pigs also. But this one really got under his skin. He did still slaughter it, but sweared to never raise and kill a pig himself. It reportedly was kinda like killing a puppy.
After a few years we had a bad slaughter day in which one pig survived a bullet to the head and started making some of the most horrifying movements and screams I’ve ever heard.
We were all aware that we’d killed a sentient creature that we cared for. Not much unlike killing our dogs. We talked about it several times over days and weeks, here and there over months, then not much from then on. We never got pigs again.
Somehow it took me another 15 years to stop eating animals. It blows my mind that I was able to keep it up after that day – it was so gory and brutal, and simultaneously entirely unnecessary. We ate those pigs because we liked it, not because we needed it.
For example:
> Grass-fed beef seems like the environmentally-friendly option. Hormone-free chickens do too. Yet intensive livestock farming in feedlots often has a lower environmental cost, despite a higher price when it comes to animal welfare.
I'm not an expert in this space, but I do know that terms like "organic", "grass fed", "free range", and others can have wildly different meanings depending on the farm and how they're regulated. For example, "free range" doesn't necessarily mean that chickens are able to walk around a farm; it just means that there is "access" to an outdoor space. The links I clicked on in that article didn't seem to really account for any of this and set up a comparison. The one about feed seems to compare the environmental impact of mass feeding with "organic" feed compared to industrial feed. But that's not applicable to my situation.
I understand this as an ethical argument, but are you assuming any "small batch" operation is more sustainable?
If I care about their experience it seems really bizarre to kill them unless I absolutely need to. So far I’ve found no evidence that I do need to, and I’ve actually come to enjoy not eating them. I’ve become far better at cooking and it’s way easier to afford high quality ingredients.
I genuinely believe it’s great that you prefer to source food from places that at least make an effort to provide better experiences to the animals. That alone is a huge step forward for animals as well as people. I hope more and more people make the same effort.
As for our happiness, why does eating meat bring anyone happiness? If it's simple, fleeting pleasure at the cost of a sentient creature's life, it doesn't seem worth it. Pleasure is nice too, but there are better things and better ways to find pleasure than through consumption. Really, the world is filled with countless ways to enjoy myself that don't require the suffering or killing of sentient creatures.
Eating all kinds of foods brings me happiness. They also nourish me better than meat, so meat isn't even necessary. Meat is one small group of foods, and everything else is this massive world of other foods to enjoy. They almost all come at a smaller cost than meat does, financially, environmentally, and psychologically speaking.
That's the gist of it. I get a lot of pleasure from caring for animals. I take time out on my morning walk to pet cats, watch the birds, so on. I dive in the ocean to see what the marine life is doing, record footage to share with people. These things bring me far more joy than a pork chop or a steak. So why choose the steak? If I'm to do that, I have to pretend that it doesn't carry the environmental and external costs of suffering and death. I have to tell myself that I wouldn't rather care for that cow. That's not true of any animal. I'd rather it had a chance to live and thrive, just like I want to.
Some people believe animals don't have the capacity to suffer and that they're lower beings than humans. I see no evidence to support that, other than the very weak "we can't possibly know" or "they aren't as intelligent". These are irrelevant to me. They are more like us than they are different in the vast majority of ways. Hell, we can live with pig lungs in our bodies. An octopus can solve puzzles, as can a raven. Cows mourn when their calfs are taken away. Dogs develop rich relationship with their families, human or otherwise.
You can say no, none of this is evidence that animals are like humans, or that they're sentient. But again, I don't see much evidence suggesting they aren't.
So, the logic is that animals suffering and dying to get on my plate doesn't make me happy. It brings me a lot of sadness. I enjoy other foods just as much, so that then is the logical path forward for me.
I don't criticize others for eating animals. I did for a long time. I raised animals, I hunted them, I fished for them, all of that. It took me almost 40 years to arrive here. If you eat meat and you don't care if animals live or die, suffer or otherwise, that's your call and I'm not for a moment condemning anyone's choices or beliefs.
Thanks, this was the question I came to ask about the why is my fake meat more expensive than ground beef at the grocery store.
As a meat eater, this has been my philosophy. If you’re gonna go vegetarian, just go for it. Vegeterian food is delicious and there’s so much choice! Entire cultures of amazing natively vegetarian foods with no need for weird meat substitutes.
Personally, legumes don’t have the right macros. Neither do fake meats. Cottage cheese and greek yogurt make better meat substitutes imo.
No need to go full vegetarian. No need to eat cows every day. Balance
I never understood this meme. What exactly is the philosophy? A philosophy of how others should partake in a lifestyle that you don’t?
It's odd enough to tell others what to prefer, but it's not clear what the impact of "As a meat eater" is supposed to have.
"As a straight man, my philosophy is if you're gonna be gay, just be gay this certain way." —It's nonsensical to me.
Sounds like how the vegan people at work would comment on other people's lunches.
In other words, if you're telling people which foods to prefer, and you don't even have an ethical angle on it, what exactly are you doing?
The “as a meat eater” part signifies that I’m not vegetarian which seems like an important distinction in this context.
Macros are an interesting thing. I’m far more interested in micros though, and various plants have them more than any animal foods. The balance of macros I get is reliably sufficient to stay healthy, I almost never need to think about it.
I suppose if you’re a body builder it might be appealing to eat animal products, but you can still swing it with plants.
> contrast of energy and resource expense between plants and animals is staggering, even if you’re comparing a less demanding animal like chicken.
I would like to see this study[0][1] repeated for various types of beans and legumes:
> Pork, chicken, eggs, and dairy were all pretty similar, but beef was a different story. Compared to the average of the other four, beef required 28 times the area of land per calorie, 11 times the water for irrigation, six times the nitrogen fertilizer, and it resulted in five times the greenhouse gas emissions For reference, they calculated similar impacts for potatoes, wheat, and rice. Compared to the average of those, beef’s footprint ballooned to 160 times the land, eight times the water, 19 times the nitrogen fertilizer, and 11 times the greenhouse gas emissions. Per gram of protein, the story is largely the same except that potatoes, wheat, and rice have less of an advantage due to their lower protein content.
The math listed in the article doesn't completely check out, e.g. they imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] require 160x (beef:plants) / 28x (beef:chicken) = 5.3x times (chicken:plants) as much land as [potatoes, wheat, rice], which makes sense, but also imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] 8x (beef:plants) / 11x (beef:chicken) = 0.72x times (chicken:plants) as much water as [potatoes, wheat, rice]. It's not thermodynamically possible for chickens to use less water per calorie than their feedstock. I never opened the actual study[1] though, I'm assuming they have reasonable results inside the study.
I also think that analysis vs. protein is more relevant than vs. calories -- which is why I think they should be compared against high-protein plants like beans and legumes.
0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef-has...
What are your protein/calorie goals, and how are you meeting them with grains and legumes? I have to take pea protein and on top of that eat a lot of eggs because otherwise I can't imagine getting enough protein just from beans and oats. If you avoid oxalates, it becomes even more difficult.
Personally I often have vegetarian dishes in eateries or when ordering take-out, when available - it is probably just me, but none of those really feel "worse" than meat, nor do I find myself feeling like I'm missing out on it. Even when having fast food, a pea/bean based burger patty feels good enough to me and is a similarly enjoyable experience to a meat based one.
That said, I still sometimes have meat (and other animal products) as well, given that I'm not educated enough or don't feel competent enough to nail down what exactly my dietary requirements might be, though talking with a GP and getting blood work done every now and then can be at least a bit helpful in that regard. Still, there is a certain comfort in having fried eggs or something like that once a week, although some suggest that many of the oils used in cooking might also be worse than olive oil.
For the majority of people, the quote by Michael Pollan is probably decent advice:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
(note: adjacently to this topic, carnivorous pets also still enjoy a diet with lots of meat in it, currently no good "compromise" there, their dietary requirements have to be taken into account as well and messing about with those feels unwise)
> I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.
I've heard that Dominion from 2018 can be rather eye opening, though viewer discretion is advised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(2018_film)
Personally, I've also gone hunting with my father and have helped dispose of the guts, carry game back home, skin the carcass, cut/snap the bones and so on. I'm not saying that everyone needs to do that, but partaking in the process of preparing meat (even in a farm setting) is a humbling experience. Maybe not enough to "scare" one away from eating meat, but definitely enough to make one reconsider how much meat they consume.
Source; grew up in a hog-raising family in big-ag country.
...but this expectation rarely meets the reality when I order a meat item. Modern consumers have high demands for consistency and convenience, and that usually means adjuncts, breading, blending, and other techniques to account for the uncertainties of agriculture. I think we are still generations away from indistinguishable lab meat, but there are so many advances that are ready for market.
I don't understand why the industry is so determined to R&D that "replaces" all animal consumption when more specific, modest goals (replacing the chicken nugget, replacing the pepperoni) would have a notable environmental improvement.
Quorn have made 'Crispy Nuggets'[1] from funghi for decades. They're a great replacement for chicken nuggets and I feel like if someone ate them without realising they wouldn't question what they're eating.
But I'm still of a mind that if you want to promote vegetarianism, make vegetable recipes taste better; don't make the vegetables imitate something they're not.
You're suggesting it's activism when it's just making a product for vegetarians who still enjoy the taste of meet from time to time.
For instance, some of these replacement items can't be boiled as one might in making a soup. It makes it difficult to complete a meal without refactoring the whole thing in some cases.
Plain meat is pretty... From what I recall typically doesn't have much taste without several additives like salt, butter, herbs typically marinated... You can do all that with the replacements, typically.
Not a judgment on your wife, but sharing for general awareness: I would eat land animals before eating fish again. You can read Outlaw Ocean for a quick look at how awful the seafood industry is. The seafood industry has everything from slavery, abuse, animal population decimation, and more, which is directly supported by anyone who eats seafood:
> Do you know if the fish on your plate is legal? A new study estimates that 20 to 32 percent of wild-caught seafood imported into the U.S. comes from illegal or "pirate" fishing
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/140409-il...
My entire argument above was basically that an invisible hand removing meat from everyday products will be a greater win for the environment than expecting a segment of consumers to go completely vegan.
Option A: grow plants, eat plants.
Option B: grow plants, breed animals, feed plants to animals, give animal antibiotics to survive breeding pens, give animal hormones to grow faster, slaughter animal, eat animal.
I'm not arguing against us eating too much meat. We do! Using land usable for human crop production to feed livestock is incredibly inefficient. But your linked graph is just pushing a narrative that's just not true to that extent.
You’re right, that statistic is misleading. We wouldn’t be using grazing land for anything agricultural if not feeding animals. I definitely won’t use this statistic anymore.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t meant to skew things with that 3% in a disingenuous way. Since I had the number 77 I should have used it though, you’re right.
This has sent me down quite a rabbit hole of understanding agricultural practices, their impacts on the environment, and many other parts of this complex system of how humans sustain themselves.
The information is hard to find, surprisingly. It’s good to get a little closer to the truth, though. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Use weird pesticides on plants you're growing to feed to animals, and not only do said weird pesticides end up in the water supply that's used for other plants being grown to feed to humans, but also they end up in the animals to which you feed the plants, and therefore in the resultant meat. So when pesticides are banned, they tend to be banned for all uses, not just "plants grown for humans" uses.
You also have to use fertilizer, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, spend energy (from fossil fuels) to drive tractors, plows, sprinklers. I'm not even going to start with GMO (the technology and the result is fine, but control companies get when you use them is not).
Soy and wheat production in the United States is concentrated on the Great Plains, and made possible by irrigation sourced from groundwater and artificial fertilizer. Problem: that groundwater is being depleted faster than replenishment, and part of the plains will be desert-like within the lifetime of many HN users. So you're looking at destroying some of the more productive farmlands on earth, and have been destroying the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi delta for decades with massive levels of nitrate pollution.
Most of the problems with meat production are about scale. You can actually utilize the waste products of a 200 head herd of cattle, but 20,000 is an industrial waste site. Likewise, you can't pasture large scales of cattle, and feedlots intensify things like methane emissions, etc.
Pigs and chickens can eat garbage and turn them into meat and eggs.
In central California I've seen cattle gaining weight on high desert scrub. When I look at the land there it looked like inedible, but to a hungry steer, it was quite passable.
The wild pigs there become immensely huge, in large groups - they are a great example of how much edible food there is actually is for animals.
There's nothing on this planet (w.r.t. our diet) worse for the environment than beef. It's King Bad.
One of those things is a problem with governments. The other is a problem with the cows.
Don't blame the cows if your corrupt government can't keep people from clear-cutting forests.
If you want to know more fun facts, check out Dairy is scary on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI
I posted the quote because I feel like the article's title is click-bait, and has the implied conclusion that plant based "fake meats" are not sustainable, when the opposite is true... real meat is not sustainable.
a) grow plants that humans can eat on soil that will grow them, eat plants.
b) grow plants that humans can't eat, but livestock can, on shit soil that won't support plants that human can eaa, eat the animal.
and in countries that look at the US and go "wow that's fucking barbaric" at their treatment of livestock is generally still the case.
2)most water used is captured rain water
3)lots of feed is byproduct
4)These animals provide fertilizer and natural tilling of the ground
5) the carbon footprint of raising cattle or other animals is infinitesimally small.
Practices that make it more environmentally friendly (ie no giant feces and urine ponds) could be either mandated or encouraged.
Animals are used more for just meat. Hide is used for products. Poop is used for fertilizer. Pig urine is used to reduce carbon emissions in 18 wheelers. Etc etc
Trying to remove a major food staple is idiotic. There could be ramifications that are not known to us for doing this. Just like people trying to get rid of mosquitoes. We don’t have the entire ecosystem mapped out where we can make these changes without consequence.
There's a shit-ton of money riding on that being an answer as companies like Nestle are looking to create vertically integrated markets for nutrition. These huge conglomerates created the sickness of feedlots, etc to kill the labor unions, and are now peddling the cure for the problems they created to you - eat shittier fake products with most of the downsides of the original process.
It would make more sense for heath, economic development, national resiliency and other reasons to invest in small scale agriculture. You'd also see the market address the health issues, as higher prices would reduce consumption.
Once you get used to a plant-based diet the idea of "simulated meat" is absurd and not desire-able.
It's not for everyone; there are people whose cultures or physical needs prevent them from adopting such a diet and far be it from me or anyone else to dictate their diets for them.
However there remains the fact that beef production is unsustainable. Nearly 80% of our plant-based production goes to livestock feed. That's land that could be used to feed humans. And we'd use less land to do so. Instead the US and Canada have been increasing investments in the beef industry which is going to places like Brazil where they continue to slash and burn Amazon rain-forest in order to keep up the increasing demand for livestock feed.
The problem is a demand-side issue. Subsidized access to beef products has led to consumer perception that beef products are an affordable and accessible luxury. If we could even figure out what "sustainable beef" looks like it would be incredibly expensive and hardly available to anyone. The beef industry doesn't want that: it needs grocery and restaurant chains and ever-increasing consumer markets for its products to continue to grow its profits.
Which means continued deforestation, CO2 emissions, and lower sequestration rates.
I think subsidies should be removed and investment in plant-based alternatives continue in order to lower demand without price-shocks and panic. Once people realize how freaking expensive their dietary choices really are we might see the scales tip back. But we won't see that happen if governments and banks continue to artificially prop up low prices.
It's clear a plant-based diet will reduce the land area, water, and fertilizer needed for food production - but if human population grows in response, then you simply end up back where you started - but with the plant production going to feed humans instead of livestock.
There's also the problem of food distribution - many countries rely heavily on imports to meet basic food needs, and the producing countries are typically running high-impact agriculture - double-cropping high-efficiency strains soy, corn, wheat, potato, etc. crops using vast amounts of fertilizers and water (essentially the 'Green Revolution' approach). Abandoning high-intensity agriculture (going back to pre-industrial methods like crop rotation) would cut food production in half at least, leading to global famines. Hence, pushing towards regional independence on basic food production is pretty important, given the uncertain future of climate impacts on agricultural production.
A final thing to keep in mind: methane from animals and wetlands is quite different from methane from fossil fuel production, as the latter represents a net transfer of carbon from stable geological deposits to the atmosphere, while the former represents the cycling of atmospheric carbon (CO2) into plant matter, and while those carbon atoms may be burped out by cattle as methane (CH4), they end up oxidized back to CO2 within 10-20 years in the atmosphere. Regardless, cutting the global cattle population by 80-90% makes a lot of sense (this is about what pre-industrial popuations were like). Meat would then be quite expensive, a luxury item, which also makes sense.
Going forward, anytime there is discussion of energy or efficiency of plant vs animal agriculture vs fake meat, etc, if tree crops aren't factored into the discussion then that provides an opportunity to quote No Country for Old Men: "You don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Leaving out that there is the option of growing a tree that produces a cow's weight worth of fats and proteins every year, with little to no inputs, in perpetuity, is a crime of omission.
Just to compare some approximate numbers, 100g of hazelnut contains 17.0g of carbs, 13.7g protein, and 60.8g fat. Walnuts contain 9.9g, 26.1g, and 65.2g, respectively. Whereas 100g of beef contains 0g carbs, 35g protein, and 10g fat. And 100 grams of black beans contains 25g carbs, 9g protein, 0.5g fat.
Further reading -- Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, by J. Russell Smith
Further viewing -- "Nuts as Staple Foods" a presentation by Osker Brown: https://youtu.be/CJpitVC4mzs
Or we could eat like our grandparents used to eat back in the 50s-60s, at least in France meat was still a fairly occasional thing, you bought a good cut of meat every now and then and enjoyed it. Today we chug gallons of processed meat at every meal, most of it being bad on both the nutritional and taste aspect.
I see "fake meat" as a temporary crutch for people transitioning to vegetarianism.
I really don't see the point of these, they barely taste as good as the cheapest frozen meat patty you can find. It's almost like cardboard patties with a hint of burned meat taste, and it costs as much if not more than meat in most restaurants.
You just don't want to. It's very simple: they let you have a burger that mimics meat burgers, and they taste reasonably close for some of us. I love burgers and love some of the fake meat patties since I don't usually eat meat. Simple as that.
It's not like animals have no risks or externalities. What's the critical difference between industrial processing vegetable matter into a fried patty, and a cow organically processing vegetable matter into flesh which is then turned into a fried patty? Cows getting BSE is what made my mother decide I would be "vegetarian at school" back in the late 80s. Overuse of antibiotics in the production of meat gets a significant share of the blame for the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
> I see "fake meat" as a temporary crutch for people transitioning to vegetarianism.
Most people demonstrably don't care enough about even the combination of the ethical, environmental, and the health the reasons for a better diet. Meat substitutes are aimed at most people.
I am much more bullish on lab grown meat which produces actual meat and merely removes the animal as an incubator. If we can get the process of turning some plant matter into actual meat that will be the golden ticket, and people will actually buy this since its actually meat.
Goats or sheep can be raised on land that's completely unsuitable for farming. Pigs and chickens can recycle food-waste into usable protein.
You can make an argument that modern feedlots aren't great for the environment, the animals, or our overall health. But it's a big jump to go from that to "all meat is bad for the environment".
> Many argue that this overlooks the large variation in the footprints of foods across the world. Using global averages might give us a misleading picture for some parts of the world or some producers. If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
Cheap meat was a quality-of-life goal for many governments, pushed by the meat industry. That went way out of balance and negatively affects health and the environment. If tasty and nutritious fake meat gets down to the price of good quality burger meat, it will be a tipping point with many benefits.
But sustainability doesn't determine popularity, and all the efforts taken to increase popularity (i.e. more engineering and more processing) do increase environmental cost. But plant-based foods are still a big win, probably: the business realities of these products mean that true numbers are not disclosed.
btw I hate the term "fake" here - it's not like modern animal-derived food, as consumed in a typical meat-based diet. is somehow "real" or unadulterated. (and for those who hasten to point out that they only eat grass-fed beef, the article notes that its carbon footprint is even higher).
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/05/there...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/boss-hog-t...
Probably the best way to raise beef is small herds on grasslands, but this results in extremely expensive meat. That's more reasonable anyway: meat should be viewed as a luxury item, not a staple.