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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.
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
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.
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
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...