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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

I've been eating more plant based burgers because meat is unsustainable. Carbon emissions from meat are more than all the planes, trains, and automobiles combined. Water required to make 24 hamburgers will fill a pool. Meat is simply an inefficient way of making the calories and proteins we need.

I still eat meat, I've just started moving to more plant based products.

Mark Rober has a good coverage of this in his video "Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger (to save the world)": https://youtu.be/-k-V3ESHcfA

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This is really the goal of Impossible Foods. It’s to transition to a sustainable future by winning over consumers who prefer meat, and can only be persuaded by taste.

I hope they manage to get the price down, then it will be competitive in the long run.

It's not a charity, their goal is to make money.

You can do both at the same time. If Impossible could actually succeed in making a meat alternative that tastes as good as meat, but is cheaper (e.g. because they don't have to waste a bunch of energy growing an entire animal), then they could be poised both make a ton of money (by being a major player in the global food market) AND help end factory farming/animal consumption (by providing a superior product).

Furthermore, this is such a research heavy endeavor, you need upfront capital to fund it, which means it would be hard to structure as a non profit. Structuring as a for profit is the right move, and it doesn't mean what they're working towards isn't a good cause, or that they are somehow ethically compromised.

They have a niche product that requires a lot of up-front investment; getting it cheaper than mass produced beef is a pipe dream. They're out to make money from price-insensitive vegetarians, which means prices will stay high. The only way this will change is with some sort of government action to raise the price of beef for consumers, but that isn't going to happen because this is a democracy; beef is popular and veggie burgers are a niche product. Even vegetarian dictators don't expend their finite political capital on issues like this.

> Even vegetarian dictators don't expend their finite political capital on issues like this

I would be 1000x more supportive of such an effort than, say, Duterte's brutal drug war.

I believe the expectation is that as they scale plant based burgers, they become less expensive than beef.

The stated goal of the founder is to replace meat consumption. Why would you create a charity for that? That makes no sense. You need to create a whole new industry, and yes, it has to pay for itself.

It's now known that adding a 3% concentration of a specific algae/seaweed to a cow's diet reduces their emissions by something like 80%+: "New Long-Term Study Could Mean More Sustainable Burgers" - https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces...

So the current harm that is used as the primary reason [allegedly] for the push to reducing meat consumption (global climate change) becomes a moot point and actually a relatively very low added cost if needed to start mass producing and farming seaweed to add to a cow's feed; if this isn't part of the conversation of those pushing for beef alternatives, then realize they are ideological and not critically thinking - and may have ulterior motive, even if that's simply trying to generate/drive profit for their own industry of plant-based products.

Compared to plants (3000 gallons for one bushel) cows dont use much water either.

The Mark Rober video asserts that 24 hamburgers use "a pool full of water". The same amount of water can make 75 loaves of whole grain bread and 30 jars of peanut butter (roughly the same calories and protein as the burger), feeding someone for almost a year.

Do you have a citation for "cows don't use much water"?

Meat isn't particularly cheap, especially now.

Plant-based meat substitutes are very expensive, and simply cannot take market share to make a dent in meat production, at current prices.

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