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Should Plant-Based Meat Replace Beef Completely? (pbs.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader tcd004 writes: Is beef still "what's for dinner?" Plant-based meat substitute startups say they could provide enough protein to feed the world using only 2% of the land on Earth, dramatically reducing the resources required to create beef products. And adopting plant-based burgers could help reduce heart disease, protect water resources, and stop deforestation. But Beef producers say no laboratory can beat a steer's ability to turn plant-based nutrition into tasty protein, and animals are the best source for natural fertilizer to grow crops. There's a coming war for your dinner plate. Who will prevail?
But so far there has NOT been a good substitute in terms of taste, texture, and nutritional value.
I'd pin my hopes on vat-grown beef before a plant-based option.
Plants are living things too, what makes you think that its ok to eat plants but not animals?
Some unjustifiable belief that animals are more important than plants?
I don't have the answer, but this is not it
Lots of people eat meat because it tastes good, not because of the protein.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Give children plant-based meat, and they wouldn't live lone enough to become an adult.
Fixed that for you. Humans require meat.
The author wants us decide for the world what they should do.
How about those who want artificial beef eat that, and those who want genuine beef eat that.
Let's not make rules for others, because bit by bit it will erode our freedoms.
On average humans who eat beef with a quality and varied diet grow strong.
A generation of smart people who can study, do sport and who are on average healthy.
Consider a population over a generation who was on a more restricted diet?
Stunted, weak, effeminate, sick. Lacking in the nutrition to grow strong and to an average normal level given good nutrition.
Ensure your population gets good food. Beef, fruit, vegetables, clean water. Access to education and sport.
Why weaken and force a generation of healthy people into malnourishment if a nation has a normal food production system?
Go to a shop, buy some vegetables, fruit, some beef and enjoy a varied and balanced diet.
Farmers are able to and happy to fill shops with a wide variety of quality organic food and meat. Enjoy all kinds of different nutritious food without been told what to eat.
If a person wants to be vegetarian or reduce their beef consumption, great for them. Share the recipes and the lifestyle.
No need to change food laws and ban beef.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
People should eat what they want. They want beef, they pay for beef, they should get beef.
What kind of world asks people to accept a sad substitute for real food? Why should we all agree to lead impoverished lives, generation after generation, forever?
So we can go to environmentalist heaven? I'd rather not.
Meat is the most calorically efficient food on the planet. Does one suppose omnivores/carnivores evolved and spread so pervasively for no reason?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But so far there has NOT been a good substitute in terms of taste, texture, and nutritional value.
I'd pin my hopes on vat-grown beef before a plant-based option.
Exactly. I question the ability to produce a lot of other nutrients beside just the meat proteins.
But reading the transcript, that was a 100 percent vegan mutual masturbation session. Worse than the people that come on and bleat about how awesome it is to eat insects
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I suppose you're right in a sense. Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder. Mmm..
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
So I'm a farmer, but I must confess that the beef producers are wrong about the natural fertilizer thing. The fact is that all food (human or animal) removes nutrients from the soil in which they grew. Cattle concentrate some nutrients in their manure which can be placed back on the land, but the nutrients that go into the beef itself end up in human waste products. If those are not recycled, they are removed from the farm land, and must be replaced with nutrients from another source, usually mined in the form of minerals like phosphate.
Either way you look at it, to get sustainable food production, we must recycling all organic waste, even human waste, back into farms and fields. If this loop is closed, then obviously plant-based proteins are going to be our best, most efficient bet.
I for one have no problem with replacing meat with plant proteins if we can get the taste and texture somewhat good. I'm in favor.
... Plant base diet is much more adapted for human...
Vitamin B12 says otherwise.
The diet requiring less supplementation (or ideally none at all), i.e. naturally providing all necessary nutrients, would logically be the one most adapted for humans.
There are very good arguments that the state of our fellow humans today isn't due to available calories, it's due to the way we've messed with the form of those calories.
The drawback of plant-based substitute meat is that you have to put all your faith in corporate food engineering, and that industry has demonstrated on more than one occasion that they will not only take a casual attitude to towards the health of their customers, but will also actively cover up known concerns with their products.
Replacing beef with plants will do *nothing* for the starving nations of the world, because we can already feed them three times over. Source.
World hunger is not a production problem, it is a distribution problem. It will not be solved by eliminating meat from anyone's diet.
At the headquarters of Denali National Park, there is an exhibit on caribou. They do not have an easy life. Four fifth of the calves never make it to adulthood, mostly falling to predators who rip them apart and eat them alive. The survivors are plagued by swarms of biting flies and parasites that burrow tunnels in their haunches before they are weakened by age or disease, and ripped apart by a predator.
This contrasts with responsibly raised farm animals, who have room, board, and medical care, live much longer than their cousins in the wild. They certainly die more humanely than being eaten alive, in fact they die more humanely than most of us do hooked up to machines.
I grew up in the country and saw how wild animals lived. I suspect that most animal rights people’s experience with animals is limited to dog, cats, and zoos.
While on a bus at Denali, we saw a fox walk by with a bloody squirrel dripping from his jaws This was a revelation to my wife who was raised in a genteel suburb. From the oohs and aahs it caused it seemed to be a revelation to most of the passengers.
While I certainly back humane treatment of captive animals,. I think at the further end, animal rights people, isolated from nature, are projecting their human selves on animals.
There is nothing magical about meat, it's just chemicals. I doubt there is any nutritionally useful chemical in meat we can't already mass produce cheaply.
Stuff like Coenzyme Q10, hydroxocobalamin (B12 as it occurs in meat), L-carnosine, Taurine etc. are not common in vegan diets ... but you can just fortify the food.
There's no need for total vegetarianism. Almost everyone in the developed world - which is fast becoming a lot more of the world than it once was - eats far more meat than is required to maintain health. Just cut it back.
Right. Because they never keep cows in sheds/pens and feed them corn.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Funny how different people all get lumped into the same categories by morons who can't help but oversimplify everything in their futile attempts to understand the world.