This is a common issue for all things vegan, organic, etc. they are always - and I am not exaggerating here - a premium. The issue I think is partially scale and partially subsidies. The only way to get the cost down is if the government stops subsidizing the stuff that’s bad for the environment, starts forcing the externalities to be priced and internalized in their costs, and maybe even uses some tax revenue on these things to subsidize the alternative stuff that’s good for the environment to get the scale up.
I'm in no way a vegetarian. And I'm too set in my childhood-established food biases to make huge changes. (I tried for a year or two. It didn't take.) But the Impossible and Beyond burgers are close enough for me. Could I tell them apart in a patty taste test? Probably. But once it's on a bun with cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot, I don't notice a difference.
So at that point, I'm like, "Cows are nice animals." I have made the acquaintance of a few and I like them. For an equivalent experience, I can either kill the cow or not. So we've been gradually shifting toward the high-grade fake meats. I look forward to further improvements on this front.
It seems to me that this argument isn’t sufficiently strong. The global warming argument seems strong.
Wouldn't be one for much longer.
Wild claim!
Despite all the media coverage on farming/meat industry, coal-powered power plants remain the single most polluting industry in terms of GHG.
Followed by all the hydrocarbon fuel based Transportation and (by a large step margin) the steel industry.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
Effectively if you would stop commuting with a car, reduced AC/Heating to bare minimum and simply bought less 'stuff' (non-essential goods), you would be doing more for the environment than not eating meat.
The unconfortable truth is that once we start discussing these things very few people are willing to curb their 'standard of living', in reality it is a first world luxury not a given right.
Nevertheless if you tell me that we need to curb meat consumption to avoid animal suffering than I am equally on board with you. But the environmental angle in my view is a distraction from the other elephants in the room.
To my understanding, the climate problem is basically one of not having closed loops. For instance, burning fossil fuels is a problem because you’re taking carbon that’s buried underground and pumping it into the atmosphere. So to the degree that meat is a problem, there’s probably a loop we need to close. Energy and transportation are instances of the same burning-fossil-fuels problem that we need to solve anyway.
As for the livestock themselves, I know they produce methane as a byproduct of digestion, but that seems like a potentially closed loop to me. Wasn’t it a closed loop during all the centuries that humans raised livestock before the Industrial Revolution? If so, what changed? The way we produce fertilizer, for one. But we also need fertilizer to grow vegetables, so we need to solve the fertilizer problem anyway. Plus, livestock are also the primary source of organic fertilizer, so maybe they’re part of the closed loop. They sure used to be.
Any food that require artificial fertilizers would have to pay the carbon tax, making carbon-neutral food better in comparison.
The tax system should have a single purpose - Raise funds for government expenses.
This is why the tax system is the mess it currently is. Everyone thinks the solution to their personal "social change" is to "tax whatever they disagree with".
You dont like carbonated drinks, advocate for a "soft drink tax".
You dont like people eating meats, advocate for a "meat tax".
Should we increase the fuel taxes to account for all the diesel used to produce a vegan diet? Besides the farming, there is the water and transportation to account for. Some produce (nuts, avocados) are very damaging on the environment, should we tax them?
Or, is this a "bad tax" because it impacts you?
huh? Maybe in authoritarian countries, but not in countries whose constitutions are geared for individual liberty. Your fascist tendencies are showing.
I definitely don't. Taxing externalities is great and not fascist.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
36% of crops globally are used for animal feed. This climbs to 67% in the USA.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
Livestock eats bulk commodities like corn and grain, which modern mechanized farming has made incredibly efficient. Those staples are grown in regions that don't require irrigation (iowa, kansas, etc). Wheat and corn are already so cheap that they're almost free in the US. Humans get their fill.
It's not like little Johnny can't have broccoli this week because the fat cats are eating burgers.
Look at it from this perspective: Shipping corn and wheat is a relatively efficient way of moving "water" from places that rain a lot to places where it doesn't.
Or the unused manure, nitrogen runoff, methane from cows
How does it compare to other sources of proteins with full amino acid profiles?
Farming Lions for meat would be less economical than farming cows. Farming cows is less economical than farming wheat.
Well, yeah, that's why I'm asking how meat compares to those rather than pure calories sources like corn or sugar cane.
Is it ethical to eat dogs? Some societies do, some don't.
Should we judge lions for eating meats? Perhaps convince them to move to a vegan diet?
What you are advocating is forcing your views on others, and that "price" should be the factor.
What if others don't want you do to do something, would you enjoy having it priced out of your reach?
Why do you "have to convince them" in the first place? wouldn't it be easier to do what makes you happy and keep your opinions to yourself and your like-minded friends?
It is. GP is just saying that different people have different ethics.
There needs to be an economic reason and it doesn’t make sense that an impossible whopper costs more than a whopper.
For that price, I’d rather have a sustainably raised, organic whopper that tastes the same or better.
I think veggie food is cheaper (rice and beans) it’s just this synthetic fake meat stuff that costs more.
As a small incremental expense, a veg burger has to be a lot cheaper than a meat burger for people to choose it consistently. The taste is a minor issue once you load it up with ketchup, pickles, special sauce, etc.
Whereas more expensive things like solar panels or electric cars, only have to be a little cheaper to make a meaningful marginal economic difference to most people.
I'm definitely in their target market. I'm willing to pay a modest premium for what they're offering. And at cost parity, I'll buy their product a lot.
What’s the mass market business model for “pretty good, minimally processed, reasonably healthy, low cost burger alternative”? Institutional? Workplace? Schools? Prisons? Dollar store frozen food section? Food cart?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a plant based meat company to hope they can accomplish something similar. Wikipedia tells me (I’ve made no effort to verify this) that instant noodles were also originally sold above the price point of the normal noodles they were replacing.
In a way, it’s like the debunked story of the expensive NASA space pen versus the cheap cosmonaut pencil.
Of course, the facts of that story are that private investment, not government spending, came up with an advanced solution, and that pencils really were a potential problem in spacecraft due to fragmentation and flammability. In popular perception, though, the original false story remains very convincing.
Not many of us are going to space regularly. Cheap pencils and pens own the market that matters.
If a fake meat company wants to make a meaningful difference on the environment, they need to cut the cost sharply and make something that can take the mass market.
Similarly, there were people in the 1970s and 1980s who wanted computing to be available to the masses. That now exists, but the road that led to it wasn't a direct one. The original Macintosh was the equivalent of $6500 bucks today. Was that the right price? In one sense no, because most people couldn't afford to spend good-used-car kinds of money on a computer. But it was the right price in that it was enough money to sell a bunch of units, establish a market, and help fund their R&D going forward. Which over time led to today's world of ubiquitous cheap computing power.
Every few years a lawsuit or accusation about the absence of meat comes up in the media cycle, Taco Bell and Subway are favorite targets. If I hear that Taco Bell is selling non-meat tacos as meat tacos and people are enjoying them, to me that's good news and they should be encouraged to share their tactics.
Food that is cheap, nutritious, palatable, and doesn't cause a lot of damage in its production is good. We should use whatever tactics we can. Compromising any of these too much is not good.