Is this really a problem with Beyond Meat or a problem with our policies not correctly pricing meat due to not caring about the environment or animal welfare?
Best example of this is when people say they want to pay "only their fair share of taxes". That's just, not how taxes work...
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
If it's too much you could do it for a smaller area ...
If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
By global average, under 15% of farm revenue is derived from government subsidies. USA is below that, at about 10%. Not sure if I'd call that massive, but that's semantics so it's a little hard to argue against. Does potato agriculture get massive subsidies?
> If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
The assumptions being that 1. potato farming get relatively much less subsidies as beef (and other meat) farming; 2. cost is such a factor in consumption that price change would cause "a lot" of difference. I don't think either are very safe, and as a general statement it doesn't follow that just reducing agricultural subsidies increases ratio of beef to potato (or meat to vegetable): EU subsidies are much higher than US, but USA eats far more beef per capita.
Subsidies go mostly to corn and soybeans. Think those are multipurpose but corn is used to feed livestock, of course. 10 or 15% may be a lot in a low-margin industry, and I don't know how it's split among crops.
No all subsidies are direct. For example, water costs too little in Arizona so foreign companies grow feed stock there to ship home.
If your farm is the recipient of a 15% subsidy, and your margin is only 10%, then the subsidy disappearing means you cannot continue producing the same stock going forward, as you'll be making a 5% loss.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
Every food is less destructive than beef by a ridiculous margin.
And eating any food directly is less destructive than losing most of the calories to grow animal biomass. Beyond Meat is just mixing together plant products directly which is trivially better than growing animals.