Yeah I don’t get the whole “replace meat with a vegan steak” idea.
Just prepare a delicious Dahl, the recipe of which has been around for hundreds of years!
They’re not made for people like us who have been veggie or vegan for years and have learned to cook with pulses, legumes, etc. They’re designed for people who want to cut back or give up meat but have to break the cultural training that every meal needs meat. Also they allow casual food places that don’t have professional chefs like pubs, cafes, etc to have quick and easy veggie options on the menu.
I think there’s a more commercial aspect to it. It’s cheap processed food, and in fact it’s often cheaper than meat-based processed foods. The real offense is that they charge more for it.
As someone who has seen both made, I think the prices are what you’d expect against materials and work involed. Plant-based meats require more ingredients, with more sourcing, and more processing. And then fewer are made and sold overall (economics of scale).
And people don’t realize, the subsidies hurt a lot of the manufacturing chains that are pricemakers for the meat. Ranchers have to pay the infamous feed tax when they sell their meat, which funds one of the biggest subsidies in the farming world, only paid out to the largest factory farms. Because mega-factory-farms can’t actually afford to charge the prices that ranchers charge, what after all those massive bonuses the top couple people make.
Plant-based meats require more ingredients, with more sourcing, and more processing.
You’re just using an animal to perform the processing instead. I wonder why poultry or beef isn’t required to list all of the antibiotics or growth horomones that those animals were fed as included ingredients.
You’re just using an animal to perform the processing instead
Which they do efficiently. There’s no grass in the resulting meat, or feed, or sunlight. That’s why they’re not on the ingredient list. And water is in everything.
I wonder why poultry or beef isn’t required to list all of the antibiotics or growth horomones that those animals were fed as included ingredients.
Per the Iowa Farm Bureau, because there ARE NO antibiotics or residue in the resultant meat. An ingredient is something actually in the product. Nobody says there’s gasoline in your food vegetables because of the harvester, or insects in your vegetables because… well there actually are!
As for growth hormones… nobody has to say there’s growth hormones in it because they’re everywhere. Beef from a hormone-treated cow has thousands (to millions) of times less growth hormonesthan many plant-based products like peanuts or soy flour. Nobody has to list Estrogen on soy milk.
They produce meat more efficiently than any artifical process, especially any process line using nuclear medicine (what businesses are trying now).
And for what it’s worth, there is no other mechanism that converts indigestible starches into highly digestible proteins efficiently.
It’s not like everything put into an animal is converted into edible flesh, not even a tenth of it is.
The typical chicken caloric conversion rate is 2-5x. That means 10000 calories of feed produces 5000 total calories that are higher quality than the feed was, about 2000 of those calories is meat, where the remaining 3000 is used for other purposes, like creating broths. This is incredibly, miraculously efficient.
Real-world numbers seem a bit better. 100-320kcal/day (more in winter and as they grow) per day in feed, and produce 2500 of straight meat after 40 days. That looks like more like 4x conversion than 5x.
Egg-laying chickens have a ramp up (where you feed them but they don’t produce eggs), but then produce an egg almost daily. That’s 80 calories in eggs for 260-340 calories in feed. (so almost 100% return on the extra cals). And yes, you can still eat the chicken when she’s too old to lay eggs. She’ll just be a bit more tough.
So if you’re comparing the production of meat to burning gasoline, then no chicken is not as efficient. If you’re comparing it to any food-related process (or hell, many mechanical processes), it’s downright jawdroppingly good.
Compare to corn. Only 10% of the calories in a typical grain crop are edible by humans. You’ll never guess what we use most of the other 90% for.
Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers? Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh? Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow. I don’t know why you think I’m advocating for such a process.
It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture. You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs). I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix. I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people, this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.
Things like Impossible Burgers, absolutely. I tried one once and it was so much like an actual meat burger it grossed me out. But I will make a seitan corned beef to put in a Reuben sandwich just because it’s an awesome sandwich.
Hmm I was 27 years a meat eater, advocating for meat consumption in the face of a vegan mate. Saying things like “we need a little bit of meat in our diets…they’re killed humanely…etc”
Took me one moment of realisation, then I dunno, I just tried, not even that hard, vegan 7 years now.
I can see that the transitional foods are a good stepping stone, but imo, the second you see inside the animal agriculture industry without any blinders on (biases), you’ll choose to act within your life, if you have the compassion/empathy to.
If someone sees the reality of what goes on behind closed doors and continues to consume animals in much the same way, it says more about that persons internal morality than anything else.
Yeah I don’t get the whole “replace meat with a vegan steak” idea. Just prepare a delicious Dahl, the recipe of which has been around for hundreds of years!
They’re not made for people like us who have been veggie or vegan for years and have learned to cook with pulses, legumes, etc. They’re designed for people who want to cut back or give up meat but have to break the cultural training that every meal needs meat. Also they allow casual food places that don’t have professional chefs like pubs, cafes, etc to have quick and easy veggie options on the menu.
I think there’s a more commercial aspect to it. It’s cheap processed food, and in fact it’s often cheaper than meat-based processed foods. The real offense is that they charge more for it.
It’s not that they charge more for it, it’s that the price of meat is kept artificially low via farming subsidies and scummy agricultural practices.
As someone who has seen both made, I think the prices are what you’d expect against materials and work involed. Plant-based meats require more ingredients, with more sourcing, and more processing. And then fewer are made and sold overall (economics of scale).
And people don’t realize, the subsidies hurt a lot of the manufacturing chains that are pricemakers for the meat. Ranchers have to pay the infamous feed tax when they sell their meat, which funds one of the biggest subsidies in the farming world, only paid out to the largest factory farms. Because mega-factory-farms can’t actually afford to charge the prices that ranchers charge, what after all those massive bonuses the top couple people make.
You’re just using an animal to perform the processing instead. I wonder why poultry or beef isn’t required to list all of the antibiotics or growth horomones that those animals were fed as included ingredients.
Which they do efficiently. There’s no grass in the resulting meat, or feed, or sunlight. That’s why they’re not on the ingredient list. And water is in everything.
Per the Iowa Farm Bureau, because there ARE NO antibiotics or residue in the resultant meat. An ingredient is something actually in the product. Nobody says there’s gasoline in your food vegetables because of the harvester, or insects in your vegetables because… well there actually are!
As for growth hormones… nobody has to say there’s growth hormones in it because they’re everywhere. Beef from a hormone-treated cow has thousands (to millions) of times less growth hormonesthan many plant-based products like peanuts or soy flour. Nobody has to list Estrogen on soy milk.
Animals do not produce food efficiently. It’s not like everything put into an animal is converted into edible flesh, not even a tenth of it is.
They produce meat more efficiently than any artifical process, especially any process line using nuclear medicine (what businesses are trying now).
And for what it’s worth, there is no other mechanism that converts indigestible starches into highly digestible proteins efficiently.
The typical chicken caloric conversion rate is 2-5x. That means 10000 calories of feed produces 5000 total calories that are higher quality than the feed was, about 2000 of those calories is meat, where the remaining 3000 is used for other purposes, like creating broths. This is incredibly, miraculously efficient.
Real-world numbers seem a bit better. 100-320kcal/day (more in winter and as they grow) per day in feed, and produce 2500 of straight meat after 40 days. That looks like more like 4x conversion than 5x.
Egg-laying chickens have a ramp up (where you feed them but they don’t produce eggs), but then produce an egg almost daily. That’s 80 calories in eggs for 260-340 calories in feed. (so almost 100% return on the extra cals). And yes, you can still eat the chicken when she’s too old to lay eggs. She’ll just be a bit more tough.
So if you’re comparing the production of meat to burning gasoline, then no chicken is not as efficient. If you’re comparing it to any food-related process (or hell, many mechanical processes), it’s downright jawdroppingly good.
Compare to corn. Only 10% of the calories in a typical grain crop are edible by humans. You’ll never guess what we use most of the other 90% for.
Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers? Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh? Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow. I don’t know why you think I’m advocating for such a process.
It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture. You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs). I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix. I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people, this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.
Things like Impossible Burgers, absolutely. I tried one once and it was so much like an actual meat burger it grossed me out. But I will make a seitan corned beef to put in a Reuben sandwich just because it’s an awesome sandwich.
Hmm I was 27 years a meat eater, advocating for meat consumption in the face of a vegan mate. Saying things like “we need a little bit of meat in our diets…they’re killed humanely…etc”
Took me one moment of realisation, then I dunno, I just tried, not even that hard, vegan 7 years now.
I can see that the transitional foods are a good stepping stone, but imo, the second you see inside the animal agriculture industry without any blinders on (biases), you’ll choose to act within your life, if you have the compassion/empathy to.
If someone sees the reality of what goes on behind closed doors and continues to consume animals in much the same way, it says more about that persons internal morality than anything else.