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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.
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.
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
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.