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?

Comments

Educational thing

[hcs_$reboot]

Give children plant-based meat, and they wouldn't like beef meat once they became an adult.

My Punch List on the Subject

[AlanObject]

* It is likely your last cucumber sandwich killed as many animals as your last hamburger.

* Humans were evolved to eat meat. To be fully vegetarian you would need a much longer digestive tract in which you could ferment plant matter like a gorilla or cow.

* Zinc, B12, and about a dozen other micro-nutrients that are NOT optional are hard to get for a vegetarian and impossible for a vegan. Popping a bunch of dietary supplements is a poor substitute and no way to live.

* There has never been a sustained human population that was fully vegetarian.

* The way we treat food animals is cruel, horrific and unconscionable. This is one area where the militant vegans and I see eye to eye. It has to stop.

* Cattle and other food animals can be easily raised on land that is not farmable. Too rocky too steep or soil where only grasses grow. The animal secretions help the ecosystem build more fertile topsoil. Other species live with cow pastures whereas plant agriculture tends toward monoculture where everything but the desired crop is poisoned and killed.

That's off the top of my head. I have a couple dozen more points but I am done for tonight.

Re:Article is manipulative

[blue trane]

"A preference test is an experiment in which animals are allowed free access to multiple environments which differ in one or more ways."

You must learn to speak the cow's language before your test is valid.

Re:Educational thing

[Ol Olsoc]

Nope, only some populations are genetically equipped for a vegetarian diet. For the rest, lack of meat causes brain shrinkage and mental disorders.

This. There is a long out of print book by Mark Vonnegut called "The Eden Express" Mark suffered from Schizophrenia in the early 1970's, and much of his problems were based on a vegetarian diet. After stabilizing him with Thorazine and shock treatments, he went on a normal diet, and with vitamin supplements, became a normal productive person.

I tried vegatarianism in the early 1980's, and while I didn't go any crazier than I am now, it severely fucked up my digestive system. Fortunately, going back to a normal diet reset my intestinal flora.

That's vegetarian -- vegan diet is far more harmful.

I have always thought that a vegan starts out with trying to define everything in life as good or bad (this is a bad thing to do, and leads to bad mental outcomes) So they embark on a journey to try to ensure that everything they do is good.

Killing animals is bad, especially the cute ones, so eating their "corpse meat" is likewise bad. So they stop. That Chicken didn't give you permission to eat it's eggs, or that cow it's milk or the honey we callously steal from the innocent bees. So that is verboten.

So they embark on this completely irrational and artificial and un-natural diet of only things they have determined are ethically "good".

My reply to them is that just who are they to set themselves up as arbiter of what is good and bad.

All life is precious, from the lowest bacteria to yeasts, to plants, to animals. And unless a human being somehow becomes a chemoautotroph, and can surgive by directly taking minerals and digesting them, the human does not live unless the human kills another life form. No way around it. The vegan is no less a killer than the meat eaters they consider below them.

Obesity linked to excess meat in diet

[GreatDrok]

Personally I don't eat meat any more but you just have to look at the trends of the last few decades and the increasing availability of cheap mass farmed meats and the death of the traditional butcher shop to see the impact our current eating habits have on us. If we returned to meat being more of a treat we would be a lot healthier than we are but the meat industry has convinced everyone that they must eat far more meat than they actually should and worse, they have scaled up production to appalling levels inflicting terrible short lives on the animals people are eating.

I visited the USDA-MARC in Nebraska some years back and they are busy breeding animals to produce more meat with less food input and in shorter time because that's what the farmers want. The product of this intensive farming doesn't taste good compared with grass fed animals but people want (or have been convinced they want) a lot of cheap meat. Whatever technology can do to improve our diets and reduce the mistreatment of animals has got to be good. I wouldn't go so far as saying people can't eat meat, but I have to say that the amount of abuse I get from people who do eat it because I won't shows that they clearly know they're the ones on the wrong side of the fence.

Re:If it's a good substitute, it should replace be

[hey!]

There's grass-fed beef. It won't satisfy people who don't eat meat for ethical reasons, but it does have less environmental impact than feedlot fattened beef.

On the other hand it's leaner, and the flavor is different and takes some getting used to. It also take somewhat more land to grow a set number of pounds of beef -- although that land isn't cultivated. Also the USDA has stopped attempting to police the term "grass fed" so you can't quite be sure whether you're actually getting grass-finished beef now. All beef cattle forage for grass at some point in their lives so you could be getting anything.

That means going with meat from a local farmer -- which is terrific in terms of quality and environmental impact, but costs a lot more on a per-pound basis.

On the other other hand consuming less of higher quality meat is probably a good thing. You don't really need that much protein. Practically everyone could probably manage an upgrade in culinary quality, healthiness and environmental impact at the same time, but it would take some thought and adjustment.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't eat grass though, so converting grass into cow at a 10% efficiency is far still better than the 0% efficiency you get from, say, licking a lawnmower blade. There's lots of land that's suitable for growing grass and not much else. Why not raise herds of cattle on it? Tasty, renewable, full of calories and nutrients!

Re:Educational thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm a vegetarian and I broadly agree with your logic, except I've got a different take on the evidence...

So they embark on this completely irrational and artificial and un-natural diet of only things they have determined are ethically "good".

Well let's ignore "irrational" because that's a matter of opinion, but artificial and an un-natural are good points in terms of changing what we've evolved to eat.

But then you have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Or earlier it's the David Hume problem of 'Is vs Ought', and how just because something is doesn't mean that it should be that way.

To be clear --- let's imagine the future of petri-dish meat... identical meat, identical protein etc, identical health properties, and it uses less resources than cows and pigs and sheep... it has the potential to reduce both environmental harm, and harm to conscious creatures.

So it would seem that you have to concede that you're talking about a problem of technology, and one that will be addressed in the next few decades.

And even today with high-protein vegan diets (e.g. Frys Vegan Food) it's a matter of money to buy the correct food. It's improved a lot since the 1980s.

So there's no philosophical justification to do things because of evolution if we can satisfy our biological demands in other ways, and there are ways of achieving that (it's not that vegetarian diets are inherently flawed, there are valid choices that are healthy). I've been vegetarian since I was 15, and basically all I do is choose another item on the menu at restaurants, buy fake meat, and I get health checkups and so far everything is fine and it's been over 20 years.

My reply to them is that just who are they to set themselves up as arbiter of what is good and bad.

Well of course we decide that, who else would?

There is no objective measure of good and bad, so of course it's subjective.

I'm not religious so I don't think there is a higher authority, nor do any philosophers (unless they prescribe to a supernatural authority).

So of course it's subjective, and I don't see that self-choice of right and wrong is any criticism... there are people who would like to pretend that they have more authority (gods, popular social opinion, etc.) but these things change and we don't really have any objective measure.

All life is precious, from the lowest bacteria to yeasts, to plants, to animals.

and here's the core of your argument, and I think it's not what vegetarians think at all.

When you walk down the street you will smear bacteria underfoot but no one really considers that (except for extremist Jainists)

Most vegetarians don't think all life is precious, they think conscious life is precious, and specifically consciousness requires a central nervous system (or similar) to transmit signals of damage to other sections. Plants have nothing like that, oysters don't either.

And yes that's a subjective measure but so is everything.

So for me it's like buying sweatshop shoes... I don't like the supply chain of sweat shops or meat so if I'm aware of that (and it's easier to do with meat, it's right there, on your plate) so I choose other options. No health effects if I choose correctly. Better outcomes for global warming.

In summary, I appreciate your comment and I broadly agree with your logic except for some key mistakes that I believe you've made. Meat eaters are fine, but I do think they've made ethical mistakes.

I for one, consume our bovine overlords....

[TiggertheMad]

Well, lets just ignore the moral questions about eating meat for a moment. There is a bigger problem that will likely decide the issue. It takes quite a bit of grain and water to raise animals for food. This isn't a big deal when you have 100 million people on the planet, but it gets to be a problem when the world population climbs towards the 10 billion plus mark.

Assuming that moral views of meat doesn't change, and that science doesn't invent a way to just grow protein in a vat using only sunlight, the cost of the resources required to grow the animals will likely put a hamburger out of reach for a lot of people. So, change is coming one way or another.

Re:If it's a good substitute, it should replace be

[Anonymous Coward]

To say nothing of the unknown long-term consequences. The food scientists SWEAR they'll get it right this time around. Just forget about their utter cockup on transfat in the 60s, sugar in the 70s (Fuck You, Ancel Keys), HFCS in the 80s, eggs-are-death in the 90s, millions of tons of roundup soaking our consumed grains from 2000 onwards (seriously, look at how much growth glyphosate use has had in the last 20 years, including use immediately before harvest to dry the crop). Oh, and just about ALL of this (the push towards veganism included) is tied to the fertilizer industry - otherwise known as the nitrogen-fixation arm of the military-industrial complex.

Food science has always been political and profit-motivated. There is NOTHING in these assholes' agendas about long-term health for a population. The peons are most profitable when they die immediately after retirement or slightly before.

Re: Article is manipulative

[mapkinase]

We are not animals.