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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.
Give children plant-based meat, and they wouldn't like beef meat once they became an adult.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
Nope, only some populations are genetically equipped for a vegetarian diet. For the rest, lack of meat causes brain shrinkage and mental disorders. And populations that originated from Europe tend to lack such genes -- and some, like the Inuit, are even more extreme.
That's vegetarian -- vegan diet is far more harmful. Especially for children, to the point of proposed bills that outlaw feeding children vegan.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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
Meat is the most calorically efficient food on the planet.
Look around at your fellow humans. Dense calories was a benefit in the stone age, not today. Even in poor countries, obesity is more common than hunger.
If meat is murder, then lions are mass murderers. Who will bring justice to the savanna?
If lions aren't evil, then no carnivore is evil.
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.
So for health reasons, I have had to change my diet. If you haven't tried this meat substitute, it is amazing....
Seven Grain Chicken Tenders
and you can get them at Target.
Even fast food is becoming plant based. As meat prices go UP UP UP and fast food prices stay at $1.99, they need to use filler in the meat. That filler is SOY bean, which incidentally, had the largest crop ever last year. Also, don't fear the SOY, you won't grow breasts or start singing alto.
Eat less meat, more plants. You will feel better, look better, and cut your cancer risk.
You are outnumbered by vegetarian lifeforms.
Yes, the food that my food eats.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I was given a sample of an incredibly ok faux meat at whole foods a few months back. I don't remember the name of it, because, well, I eat real meat, but it was a very decent beef imitation, and if they can bring the cost down to less than real meat I could see myself eating faux-burgers from now own. (Unfortunately it was like 1.25 times the cost of actual ground beef FROM WHOLE FOODS, which is already an inflated meat price compared to other grocers)
Additionally, we only engage in coprophagia to correct digestive deficiencies.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
* 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.
I get free eggs from the chickens that wander around my yard. If I don't eat them, i'd just have to throw them away because they tend to explode after a few weeks. And you don't want to be in the same hemisphere as an exploded egg.
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.
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I say we start eating the PETA activists and Vegans! :-D
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!
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.
How can vegetarianism persist in India?
You do know that vitamin deficiency is a big problem in India, right?
https://timesofindia.indiatime...
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.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
It's not just the amino acids. There's a whole bunch of stuff in animal products that are lacking in plants. Vitamin B12 is the major example, but also vitamin D and EHA/DHA oils.
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.
We need to consume the animals souls too, in order to revivify our life force. Kind of like space vampires need to do with humans.
It's why most human religious festivals require the death of animals and the consumption of their flesh, for example turkey at Christmas.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Why do we need high energy density foods? Outside of disaster relief situations.
Global warming might be solved by eliminating meat from people's diets, though. The carbon emissions of meat and especially of beef are extremely high compared to plant food, as is the land use. I eat meat because it tastes better and is cheap -- but perhaps it would be a good idea to tax meat for the external effects it has.
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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.
Agriculture is only responsible for 10-15% of GHG emissions, and meat is only a portion of that.
Can't say I trust the agricultural industry either. Your average chunk of limp, fatty beef/pork/chicken/etc. would be barely recognizable as meat to our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Ditto most of our modern flavorless, low-nutrient fruits and vegetables.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Depends on your goals...
If your goal is to create centralized, industrialized, Big Ag food then plant based pseudo meat works great.
If your goal is decentralized, small farm, local economies then pasture based grazing animal based real meat works great.
Frankly, there is no need to call plant based foods meat - that is deception. Call them what they are: Highly processed plant based foods.
I'll take the real thing any day.
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.
That's what they said about the nonsmokers...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
fructose has been shown to be far more efficient of a fuel source for the human metabolism than fat or protein.
Most cells in your body cannot metabolize fructose. Instead, it goes to the liver first, and excess amounts of fructose (typical for a highly refined junk western diet) lead to hypertriglyceridemia, and fat deposits inside the liver tissue itself (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease).
4) Numerous scientific studies prove that a properly managed vegan diet is, at least, adequate, if not superior.
Superior to a standard junk diet. Not superior to a properly managed diet that includes meat, dairy, and eggs.