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The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the environmental impacts have been g

• vortegne 6y ago
  > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant Completely wrong
  • kleton 6y ago
    What is one plant that contains menaquinone or eicosapentaenoate?
    • chickenpotpie 6y ago
      Sauerkraut, buckwheat, fermented soy
    • vortegne 6y ago
      Are you eating a lot of liver? Because if not, you're not getting that much of menaquinone anyway. And there's plenty of it in plant-based foods, as pointed out by the other commenter. As for omega-3, I believe it's been a few decades since we found it in a ton of different seeds, nuts and oils.
  • xwdv 6y ago
    Pound for pound, it cannot be denied meat provides more nutrition than the same amount of plants.
    • krastanov 6y ago
      Pound for pound of CO2 (or water, or other resources) it can not be denied that plants provide more nutrition than meat.
    • chickenpotpie 6y ago
      Why is nutrition per pound your metric? Doctors don’t advise that we eat x pounds of food a day. Also this is easily disprovable. A vegan multivitamin is thousands of times more nutritionally dense than meat, but i don’t eat 2 pounds of multivitamins a day.
      • arcturus17 6y ago
        Not OP but as someone who lifts heavy weights and often needs 3-4000kcal a day, but doesn’t have a huge appetite, I do care about nutrient density. To me vegetarian diets are not practical because of how much food I would need to eat to hit my macros compared to an omnivore diet.
    • Voloskaya 6y ago
      Do your beliefs forbid you from having more than 250g of food in your plate at a given time? If not that's not quite relevant.
    • mdorazio 6y ago
      This is like saying pound for pound lead is more dense than iron. It's a useless comparison. Meats have some nutritional content that plants have less of, and plants have some nutritional content that meats have less of. Look up comparisons between beef and broccoli, for example.
    • veonik 6y ago
      Are we also considering the pounds of plants that the animal had to eat to grow to such a size? I should imagine it takes quite a lot of food to raise a one ton cow for slaughter. At least one ton of plant material as food, right? To produce how many pounds of meat? 750lbs seems reasonable. So if you had 2750lbs of plant food for yourself, vs just the 750 lbs of meat -- which has more nutrients? (I do not know the answer myself, but I can see where it could be argued that meat is not more nutritious, pound for pound)
  • arcturus17 6y ago
    Probably exaggerated and imponderable, as it really depends on how you would rank such a thing. But it is really nutritious in that it packs a great density of protein and micronutrients.
    • ben_w 6y ago
      Lentils, tofu, peanuts, and seitan are 25%, 20%, 28%, and 80% protein by weight. Meat is about 26%, according to WolframAlpha. Not that you actually need very many grams of protein each day to be healthy.
      • arcturus17 6y ago
        I find seitan and tofu completely unpalatable, and I can’t rely on eating hundreds of grams of peanuts to fill my protein needs. Lentils are fine... I lift heavy, which I believe is integral to my good health (the evidence on the health benefits of strength training is overwhelming). You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence. Designing 3000-4000kcal diets high in protein without meat is entirely possible, but highly impractical.
        • ben_w 6y ago
          The diet you’re describing also has a significantly higher calorie intake than most people’s exercise level can balance. If I ate that much, I would be fat not fit. (Also: I just picked four ingredients I just happen to have; there are others).
        • danans 6y ago
          > You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence. Specialized athletic hobbies like powerlifting are sort of irrelevant to discussions involving reducing GHG emissions by scaling up plant based meat substitutes. Niches like that aren't the target market.
          • 6y ago
  • brailsafe 6y ago
    Do you have something more substantial to add? I do imagine that to match meat on a value per gram measurement, you'd have to have either spend way more or be lucky with where you live, but something to check would be great.
    • vortegne 6y ago
      Meat already is one of the most overpriced foods out there if we're talking about nutritional value. If you're not buying complete trash meat that is of course. Take for example potatoes. Dense in calories, has almost all of the nutrient groups you need and is dirt-cheap. Nutrition is a very unclear science for now, but the fact that meat has this godlike status of an apex food is definitely a product of lobbying and marketing, not facts.
      • brailsafe 6y ago
        It costs me about $3-7 for a single cheaper cut of steak at my local store, which according to a cursory search, probably yields 30-70g of protein. 1 potato, while very cheap, is only going to contain 2g of protein, and at most I could probably eat 3 in one go. Certainly, I'd get other vitamins and minerals from both, which is why I'd have both in the same meal. How much are you spending on meat? An occasional indulgence in that area for me would maybe be a $20 steak, or a big burger.
        • vortegne 6y ago
          Sure, if you're chasing protein then potatoes aren't the best choice. Tofu is close in protein content to meat though (about 17%) and is also cheaper, if you don't go for the overpriced hippy tofu. I don't spend anything on meat, stopped eating it a while ago. But when I did, it still wasn't breaking the bank of course, not like I was spending hundreds of dollars monthly on meat. While meat is definitely one of the most delicious foods out there, I don't really miss it that much. The cognitive dissonance wasn't worth it.
          • brailsafe 6y ago
  • Drybones 6y ago
    You can't just say "completely wrong" when it's clearly not.
    • chickenpotpie 6y ago
      You literally just did the exact same thing
      • Drybones 6y ago
        Exactly how?
        • chickenpotpie 6y ago
          "That's completely wrong" "You can't just say somethings completely wrong especially since you're completely wrong"
          • Drybones 6y ago
            Or how about not commenting to statements that aren't completely wrong by saying "completely wrong" when that is clearly debatable.
• bweitzman 6y ago
  How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.
  • tmotwu 6y ago
    Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure, meat offers a different set of nutritional value than vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as you've said.
    • dnissley 6y ago
      Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.
      • tmotwu 6y ago
        There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.
        • dnissley 6y ago
          It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there. What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.
• maelito 6y ago
  > removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. 100% can be split in so many small sums. Each percent is worth taking.
  • ngngngng 6y ago
    Once we remove that 2.6% though, we'll have a whole new 100% to fight against.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      Did you know that while HEPA filters might remove well over 99% of air particulates once that's done you've still got 100% of the remaining particulates in the air? Did you know that if I steal half of your money you've still got 100% of your remaining money? That is a really weird argument.
      • ngngngng 6y ago
        I know hacker news isn't exactly the place for sarcasm (not to mention sarcasm loss over text) but I couldn't resist.
        • max-ibel 6y ago
          I thought you made a good point, actually. I believe its common to just give up a fight like this because it's really never over, and no single step leads directly to perfection. Why recycle when some recycling still ends up in a landfill in India ? Why help a homeless person when there still will be homeless tomorrow? OTOH, most of us are still getting up every morning and go to work.
    • bnj 6y ago
      Just chiming in to say that I personally found this really funny. Similar sense of sarcasm, I guess.
• maelito 6y ago
  > making its contribution to global warming debatable The problem is not only rising emissions in the Last decade, our emissions in 2010 was already way over the climate budgets.
• Voloskaya 6y ago
  Livestock is a real problem. Using US numbers, which has one of the most efficient livestock management in the world make those numbers not too bad at ~4% (that's still a lot, let's be clear), but when you look worldwide the share of GHG attributed to livestock is 14.5%, that's definitely bad [1]. Even if Beyond Meat will have a bigger impact in the US to begin with, this will have a worldwide impact. [1] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/using-global-emission-statistics-distracting-us-climate-change-solutions https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/using-global-emission-s...
  • dnissley 6y ago
    I think you missed the point -- that if you tried to replace meat with plants providing the same nutritional profile, then the impact is far less than anticipated by most calculations.
    • raws 6y ago
      I'm highly dubious of the statement that growing plants to eat them is lightly less polluting than growing plants, feeding them to cattle and then preparing the cattle to eat the meat. Cattle does not sequester CO2 like plants do and emits greenhouse gases. Also uses way more treated water.
      • mikeg8 6y ago
        When cattle are raised on well managed pasture, there is zero transportation between the cattle and feed, where as all vegetables requires transportation, and more of it pound-per-pound to reach the nutrient value of beef. Cattle only contribute GHG when raised on grain as their digestive systems creates excessive methane breaking down corn. If more people understood how cows and ruminants should work vs how they are currently used in the industrialized feed complexes, they'd realize cows are not the problem, it's how we are using them.
      • leadingthenet 6y ago
        Right, but cattle can be raised where growing plants is impossible, and they can be fed by-products of plant agriculture that is not fit for human consumption. It's really not an either-or, something that I feel is often lost in these discussions. Eating plants and meat is complementary, and has been for all of human history.
• Spivak 6y ago
  I'm always kinda confused when people argue that 3.3% of literally all emissions produced by every activity we as humans engage in seem like it's a small thing. There's not gonna be some magic bullet that will reduce our national emissions by 45% or anything. It's all the result of a bunch of small things added together. And we're at the point where plant based meats and dairy substitutes are good enough in a lot of different use-cases. If we cut our use of animal products to just the dishes that really demand it then we're already way better off. Use milk for your baking, not your cereal. Don't feel bad about having a steak but maybe try the veggie chicken nuggets when you get fast food.
  • maelito 6y ago
    Here in France, a relatively small country, people often say "yes but China" to reject changes. But China is just the sum of a handful of provinces that make up for the same number of inhabitants than France. Each of these provinces could say "yes but the USA".
• nickelcitymario 6y ago
  > The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. This seems to presume two things: 1) That vegans and vegetarians are primarily doing it for the environment. 2) That vegans and vegetarians can't do basic math. To the first point, I'd be fully supportive of plant-based diets even if the only reason was concern over the treatment of the animals themselves. The focus on the environmental benefits is really quite new. Vegetarianism has historically been about animal rights/welfare and/or a commitment to non-violence. The environmental benefits are simply the cherry on the cake. To the second point, you say meat provides "far more" nutritional value than any plant. Maybe, maybe not. (I think "not", but I'm open to being wrong about that.) Nutrition is one of those weird fields in science where there's not a whole lot of agreement about anything. However, the vast majority of nutritionists and doctors are far more concerned with the lack of fruits in vegetables in the popular diet than they are with the lack of meat. The environmental benefits have probably been exaggerated, but growing, distributing, and consuming vegetables is obviously less resource-intensive and less wasteful than meat. I'm somewhat shocked that this could be a controversial statement. I'm NOT saying the benefits are so high as to, say, "save the world" by going veg. There are plenty of people who make this claim, and I'm very suspicious of it. But that's very different from thinking the entire movement is misguided. EVERY movement exaggerates their claims. That doesn't make them misguided, simply prone to hyperbole. (On a side note: I'm not vegetarian. I simply agree with those who are.)
  • mft_ 6y ago
    I'm a fairly recent convert to being mostly (like, >99% of my calories, probably) vegetarian actually due to the health benefits. Environmental and animal welfare concerns are nice bonuses, but weren't enough to make me reach the tipping point, I guess.
    • rtx 6y ago
      Was it baby cow GIFs?
      • roberto 6y ago
        I think you mean "empathy"?
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Artificial meat doesn't have to be plant based. It's entirely possible that we could grow synthetic meat at scale with the same nutritional profile as the real thing.
• mdorazio 6y ago
  I'm less inclined to believe a blog post than I am to believe published & cited articles. Most estimates I've found put overall GHG from diet at about 15-20% of total per capita. And sources like [1] indicate that switching to a plant-based diet cuts that number in half for western countries (the UK in this study). That's 3x your number. Granted, meat substitutes are higher on GHG than eating straight plant-based meals, so it's probably more like a reduction of 3-4% from switching to Beyond or Impossible. But as with any GHG discussion, you have to consider what's actually feasible to do (ex. changing dietary components) vs. really hard (ex. reducing energy inputs to manufacturing) and optimize for the former. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1
  • dnissley 6y ago
    The linked blog post contains a couple dozen citations, fwiw.
  • NoOneNew 6y ago
    So, animals being alive is the general problem now when it comes to climate? At that, the greenhouse gas problem in livestock fed artificially large amounts of grains has been solved by introducing a small amount of seaweed to their diet. That's been kind of a non-issue for the past few years as more and more commercial feeds have seaweed included already. Just because you're not in the agriculture industry doesn't mean other people aren't doing actual good and change for the better.
    • kekebo 6y ago
      Do you happen to have a source for this?
      • NoOneNew 6y ago
        Let me google that for you: "seaweed livestock feed" But here, Yale, have a blessed day. God speed. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-cows-to-belch-less-methane https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c...
• Bang2Bay 6y ago
  May be anecdotal, but four generations prior to me and myself have all be vegetarians with no sign of deficiencies. and many lived 90 yrs + . and I know many families who ate meat only once a month or approx '10 meals a year'. meat is over hyped.
• akiselev 6y ago
  > Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. Methane (molecule for molecule) contributes far more to the greenhouse effect than CO2 so without knowing how much of those gases are from transportation versus digestion, it's hard to tell how much actual impact it has. Focusing on the GHG statistic also ignores the many other ecological effects of animal agriculture like runoff and forest clearing that has significant effects on our carbon stores and oxygen producers like plankton and trees. At the same time, both transitions would create domestic deficiencies in critically limiting nutrients [White & Hall 2017; Liebe et al. 2020], which is not unexpected given that Animal Sourced Foods are valuable sources of essential nutrition [see elsewhere]. Cows need more essential amino acids from their diets than humans do and the overlap between the two needs is almost 100%. They can't synthesize atomic minerals so they're just a delivery device for nutrients we'd get from other sources anyway. Obviously I'm not suggesting we all switch to a diet of alfa alfa but the whole point of the climate crisis is that our way of life is unsustainable; something has to change and I think most people rather it be diet, even if we lean more on synthetic alternatives, than the total population. This argument made sense a hundred years ago when overwintering was a real concern and transportation wasn't fast enough to deliver unspoiled fresh food so people had to convert inedible plants to edible food. (I'm ignoring the difficulty of getting a large group of people to switch away from culturally important or locally available staples, which is what that nutrition argument hinges on, because that seems to be the weakest link in the face of an existential threat)
• omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  YMMV, but it's much more than 2.6% in the US. Livestock is 40% of of ag's GHG emissions. https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#agriculture/allgas/source/current https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#agriculture... And ag is ~10% of US emissions https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/allgas/econsect/all https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/... So eliminating livestock would reduce emissions by 4%. With that said, 4% is still low, but it doesn't account for all the GHG emissions needed to grow feed for livestock, nor does it account for other things like transportation of that feed, energy used in processing by the industrial sector, and so on.
  • shepting 6y ago
    Yes, and much of the non-livestock emissions from agriculture is from growing plants to feed to livestock!
    • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
      And process it, and transport it, and process and transport the meat after we've slaughtered the livestock. Part of meat's increased GHG emissions are because their are so many more steps in bringing it to market and because it doesn't last as long. Most plants are harvested, cleaned/processed, and transported to market. Livestock generally needs feed, which is harvested, cleaned/processed, and transported to the livestock, and after livestock is slaughtered, it needs to be cleaned/processed, and transported to market, and on top of that it tends to go bad faster.
  • yxwvut 6y ago
    You're conflating domestically produced GHG emissions with domestically consumed products' emissions. As a toy example, suppose we grew no animal products in the US and imported all our meat. Your method would conclude that switching to plant-based diets would have no effect on GHG emissions since livestock represents 0% any of our agricultural GHG emissions.
    • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
• diego_moita 6y ago
  > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant Bullshit, the kind of lies that the meat industry loves to spin. Nutritional value is not one single measurable thing. And even protein contents (meat's most common nutrient) when measured per gram can be higher in soy and derivatives than in some meats (e.g: pork but and shoulder). When measured by calories other legumes (beans, chickpeas, lupini) beat most meats. The only nutrient not often found in plants is B12 vitamin. But it can be bought cheap as a nutritional supplement.
  • serverholic 6y ago
    Not all plants have complete proteins. Also there are other nutrients that are hard to get on a vegan diet like EPA and DHA.
  • elktea 6y ago
    The protein you get from meat is a different collection of amino acids than the protein you can get from plants or soy.
    • diego_moita 6y ago
      True, but you can combine plants to get the same collection (e.g: beans with bread). Also, the overwhelming majority of amino acids is not important. For nutrition only the 7 essential amino acids matter (the ones not made by our metabolism).
• TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant Meat provides far less nutritional value than was collectively contained in the plants used to produce it.
  • elktea 6y ago
    Humans can't eat livestock feed or grass though.
• tryitnow 6y ago
  Those items just address the carbon issue (and 2.6% is still quite a bit), they don't address the issue of the massive land footprint that livestock requires. Where's the evidence that meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant? And there have been a lot of studies showing that high consumption of red meat and processed meats are not helpful to health. I'm a meat eater and I'd love to feel better about my love of steak and burgers, but sadly I just don't see the evidence.
• bjtitus 6y ago
  TLDR: There is no "popular crusade" telling people to end all meat consumption which will somehow leave you nutritionally deficient. Hundreds of millions of people eat vegetarian diets around the world and numerous studies show the benefits of reducing red + processed meat consumption. Replacing fast food burgers with plant based alternatives could be a good option for people with decreased availability of plant based alternatives to meat. > The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. The only "popular crusade" is the universal dietary guidance against the excessively high consumption of red meat in the western diet. There are mountains of evidence showing links between higher red meat consumption and increased risk of the top killers in many western societies (heart disease, colon cancer, etc.). [1] [2] [3] There's a quick summary from the Harvard School of Public Health for those who don't want to pour through the published studies: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee... You cite many studies here about the environmental effects of meat production and exactly 0 citing the nutritional or health aspects of meat consumption. Meat can contain valuable nutrients but hundreds of millions eat vegetarian diets around the world and many other sources (nuts, legumes, fish, etc.) can provide these nutrients in better forms. All major health organizations recommend limiting red and processed meat consumption below what the average American diets currently consist of. Replacing fast foods with plant based alternatives doesn't seem like a bad thing at all when you consider that meats and grains are the only things Americans are consuming over and above the dietary guidelines – at 140% of the recommendations [4]. Given that Heart Disease is the number one leading cause of death in the United States, shouldn't we be prioritizing alternatives which reduce the intake of high-glycemic carbohydrates? There have been many studies covering plant-based alternatives which back this up. [5] [1] Battaglia Richi E, Baumer B, Conrad B, Darioli R, Schmid A, Keller U. Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies. Int J Vitam Nutr Res. 2015;85(1-2):70-8. doi: 10.1024/0300-9831/a000224. PMID: 26780279. [2] Salter AM. The effects of meat consumption on global health. Rev Sci Tech. 2018 Apr;37(1):47-55. doi: 10.20506/rst.37.1.2739. PMID: 30209430. [3] Abete I, Romaguera D, Vieira AR, Lopez de Munain A, Norat T. Association between total, processed, red and white meat consumption and all-cause, CVD and IHD mortality: a meta-analysis of cohort studies. Br J Nutr. 2014 Sep 14;112(5):762-75. doi: 10.1017/S000711451400124X. Epub 2014 Jun 16. PMID: 24932617. [4] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58334 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery... [5] Vatanparast H, Islam N, Shafiee M, Ramdath DD. Increasing Plant-Based Meat Alternatives and Decreasing Red and Processed Meat in the Diet Differentially Affect the Diet Quality and Nutrient Intakes of Canadians. Nutrients. 2020 Jul 9;12(7):2034. doi: 10.3390/nu12072034. PMID: 32659917; PMCID: PMC7400918.
• tomstoms 6y ago
  Sorry stopped reading at “ Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant” Edit: Vote it down all you want. The statement isn’t getting any less idiotic
• windexh8er 6y ago
  Aside from the questionable source laid out here, the statement that: > Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant... ...is pure nonsense. Vitamins, minerals, fiber. Considering you can't get any fiber from meat is just the start of how biased some have been influenced by misinformation.
  • elktea 6y ago
    Fibre isn't a nutrient though. It's waste. We have a very low capability to ferment it verses other apes.
    • windexh8er 6y ago
      Please stop spreading misinformation and maybe educate yourself on the need for fiber in a healthy diet [0]. [0] "Dietary fiber: Essential for a healthy diet - Mayo Clinic" https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/fiber/art-20043983 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
      • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        There are people who are strict carnivores and are perfectly healthy, just like there are people that are strict vegans and are perfectly healthy. Calling fiber essential seems wrong on its face.
        • windexh8er 6y ago
          If you wouldn't mind providing some research to support your agenda that would be great. Here's a list of reference research done at Harvard Medical around the health benefits of fiber and in other cases where it showed no positive improvement [0]. A statement like: > Calling fiber essential seems wrong on it's face. ...to me seems rather ignorant given your prior claims. [0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/fiber/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/f...
• luc_ 6y ago
  You should flip through some pages of "How Not To Die" by Michael Greger some time...
• rsj_hn 6y ago
  This isn't a crusade against meat, it's a crusade between Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as to who will capture the (niche) alt-beef market. McDonald's signed an agreement making BM their preferred supplier of fake beef, so Impossible is put at a disadvantage. Absolutely none of this replaces any real beef with fake beef, or even results in less real beef eaten or sold.
  • LegitShady 6y ago
    Here's the flip side - Beyond meat makes basic veggie burgers. There's nothing special about them you couldn't make without the recipe. Impossible foods has the yeast sourced heme thats supposed to make it taste and cook more like meat. That's patented, and not easy to replace. So BM can be in every McDonalds for a year and then be replaced by a McFakeMeat Burger and there's nothing they can do. Impossible actually has a product you can't make. In the long run I think Impossible is better food. The question is always one of price.
    • rsj_hn 6y ago
      Yup, we don't know what price concessions McDonald's obtained. Really these press releases don't provide a lot of info and are not very good news sources. I also think there is a good chance MCD will announce their own fake beef product in the future. At least that's what I'd do if I were them -- they probably know a lot more about food science and also know their requirements well.
    • wenc 6y ago
      There's also the question of taste. I've tried both Beyond and Impossible, and the latter is simply much more delicious. I've tried Burger King's Double Whopper and Impossible Whopper side by side, and even though the Impossible doesn't taste like real meat, I was surprised how good it tasted. So much so that I would have no problem forgoing real beef and going with the Impossible Whopper. (I have since returned to BK many times and have just gotten the Impossible Whopper) Beyond doesn't inspire that kind of reaction. It's just like any old veggie burger.
  • creinhardt 6y ago
• yboris 6y ago
  As I understand, there are places where you can just put cows and they feed themselves off the land. But there is also a tremendous amount of deforestation happening because those lands are then used to grow food for cows that are in other locations. I find it amazing how well avoiding eating meat aligns good things: - less animal suffering - less pollution of air, water, and land - less waste (inefficient way to get calories) - better health (assuming you substitute meat with vegetables and not highly-processed food)
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Vegetables probably don’t have enough calories to replace meat, unless by vegetables you mean grains and legumes.
• sjg007 6y ago
  I know it’s McDonald’s but if this is a healthier option cholesterol wise that’d be good.. I mean maybe that’s impossible at McDonald’s but -shrug-
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  Real climate change can only happen with the cooperation of the worlds biggest polluters: China and India.
  • jay_kyburz 6y ago
    China's one / two child policy is doing a lot more for the environment than what we are doing in most western countries. That's a sacrifice I can't image us ever making in our democracies.
  • Freak_NL 6y ago
    So the rest of the world should do nothing until they do something instead of setting an example or starting somewhere? What's the point of this statement? Just keep pointing fingers to the black sheep, and the black sheep will defend itself by saying that it is only fair that it gets to do what the other countries got to do before environmentalism was a thing. Yeah, that'll solve problems. It's defeatist standpoint, and as a statement it only serves to undermine any green initiative not taken in China or India. You could pose it as a question: “But how can we get China and India on board?”, and you might provoke more meaningful responses.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  I'm no biologist, but even assuming all of that blog post's sources are reliable - it is still cherry-picking findings: * Not counting livestock contribution to GHG, but rather an estimate of how much removing it would reduce GHG (which is room for a lot of speculation that is very hard to support). * Preferring a figure taken from a single paper by two individual researchers over the United Nations' official FAO statistic, which is 14.5% of emissions due to livestock lifecycle. * Focusing on how forestation is challenging, while the source acknowledge that the de-forestation is very damaging. * Ignoring the huge amounts of land necessary for growing livestock (Example: ~55 times the area for peas for same amount of protein [1]) * Ignoring the question of the distribution of meat consumption among people in the world today, and the feasibility of a meat-rich diet for everyone. I'm sure there's more, but this is enough not to be very receptive to the claim of misguidedness. PS - Due disclosure: I eat poultry and occasionally other meat. But I am still worried about the environmental impact of its production, with the foremost aspect being de-forestation. [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=15588468 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=15588468
• kleton 6y ago
  It only takes a little bit of bromoform to poison methanogenesis in rumen. It would actually improve feed conversion as well.
• rtrdea 6y ago
  HahahahahhHa
• audunw 6y ago
  > Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. ONLY? That's a pretty damn big percentage for such a small piece of the economy. It feels a bit like saying "removal of Ford vehicles from the road would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6%" .. or whatever it'd be. Of course you can make it sound small if you compere a portion (livestock) of a portion (farming) of the national economy, to all emissions from the entire nation. Plant alternatives would have their own emissions of course, but I think there's a more realistic path to zero emissions. There's some interesting work on reducing methane emissions from livestock themselves (additives to the feed and such), but the path is more challenging.
• andbberger 6y ago
  I'll leave to the other comments to combat the factual inaccuracies here but - there is an inherent and substantial efficiency loss in consuming secondary consumers. There's no getting around that.
• jVinc 6y ago
  Offering alternatives to people who prefer to eat plant based meals rather than meat based ones is hardly a "crusade against meat". I understand you would feel attacked if these corporations were going out and saying "no more meat" in reality, they are just putting 1 or 2 options on the menu which allows people who don't want to eat meat to still eat unhealthy takeaway. No one is trying to force you to not eat meat. But the status Que you are trying to desperately defend has people choosing a vegans or vegetarian diet completely unwelcome at mainstream fastfood restaurants because there is nothing for them on the menu, not even the french fries are vegetarian. And for what purpose? KFC and McDonald is just as happy taking your money and slinging over a burger without a patty as one with one. So why shouldn't they offer plant based alternatives?
• adrianN 6y ago
  A bit of meat is probably a valuable part of a balanced diet. But the average American eats nearly 100kg per year. That's a lot. You don't need to become a Vegan to cut that in half. You can eat a quarter pounder with cheese every day and still only consume 40kg of meat per year.