Plant-Based Meat: By Far the Best Climate Investment, Report Finds - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

• ›

  by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Saturday July 09, 2022 @11:47PM (#62689296)

  the problem is the healthy plant based alternatives taste like shit and the ones that taste ok are packed full of so many additives, salts and processed shit they are bloody awful for you.

  • Re:

    What fast food does yo beef is a crime. I'll gladly let burger King have all the fake meat if I can keep my steak.

    McDonald's has such a hard on for consistency they hide the beef flavor

    Replace all the garbage burgers, it's a good start. And no they aren't supposed to be healthy. That was never a goal.

  • the problem is the healthy plant based alternatives taste like shit and the ones that taste ok are packed full of so many additives, salts and processed shit they are bloody awful for you.

    That's a fairly broad assessment.

    As someone who became a vegetarian 3 years back - and no, I ain't gonna preach and never do - I have tried a variety of such things.

    Many of them do indeed taste terrible and are packed with additives - but no more so, than a lot of products which contain meat.
    Ironically, the same companies are behind the production of both.

    Over here in the UK, it's somewhat of a joke that one of the larger sausage producing companies, Richmonds, who make super low grade processed pork sausage, introduced a line of meat free sausages.
    The joke being, nobody could tell the difference, because their pork sausages contain so little pork.

    One of the better products, is the "Beyond meat" ones - and I will admit, I'm not that much of a fan of those either, but you can do the math on those in terms of whether they are worse for you or not.
    They are totally worse for you than a lean beef steak, but are not as bad for you as mass produced beef burgers.

    A lot of this "meat free" produce that has flooded the market is really just filling a gap in those being "trendy" - the manufacturers have seen a demand and reacted, as they always do.

    If you decide to make the choice to stop eating meat, then why do you continue to chase the idea of eating meat?
    Why even bother with these products?

    Just explore the world of food - and you'll soon find, it's totally possible to have exceptionally tasty and interesting meals, without meat.

    And if you want to continue meat and help save the planet, heck, the answer is so simple it beggars belief - just eat less of it.

    Not exactly rocket science, right?

    • Re:

      Not true. "Pork Sausage" is a regulated product in the UK and has a legal requirement of 42% meat.

      The ones you want to watch out for are the ones labelled things like "British Bangers".

      You think they call them that because the marketing department is having a bit of fun? Nope, it's to avoid the legal requirements that go along with writing the word "sausage" on the packet.

      • Re:

        I think that the USA has conclusively proved that you don't need meat to maintain an obesity epidemic. The sugary drinks & other fatty, starchy foods work just as well, if not even better.

      • Re: maybe one day

        Yup, in the US thereâ(TM)s cheese (from milk, expensive) and thereâ(TM)s âoepasteurized process cheese foodâ which is cheese-like, to be charitable, and apparently manufactured from petroleum.

    • Re:

      If you decide to make the choice to stop eating meat, then why do you continue to chase the idea of eating meat?

      Because a lot people's decisions about whether it's right to eat meat an not related to their desire to eat meat. People are making the decision based on what they believe is best not what they want. Some people don't eat meat because they believe killing animals for meat is unethical. Others because they believe that raising meat to be eaten is so environmentally destructive that it cannot be jus

      • Re:

        The absolute best plant-based burgers are equivalent to a mediocre-to-lousy cowburger. It won't be the end of society if beef goes away, but it's frankly complete bullshit to claim that the plant burgers are as good as the real thing. Only someone who didn't like meat very much to begin with could possibly believe that.

        • Re:

          If you want to claim they're not the same, I'll agree. If you claim they're not as good...well, it depends on what I want at the time. Or possibly we're using a different definition of "best".

          FWIW, I'm not a vegetarian. But most burgers aren't sold on "tastes like meat". They're sold on convenience. Sometimes I want something in that form factor that's food, but I'm not particularly after meat. In that case something based around nuts, mushrooms, and celery can fill the bill nicely, and it keeps bette

          • Re:

            Most burgers don't compete on whether they taste like meat because they are made out of meat. That's true even at McDeeznutz. Only the plant-based ones have to do that, because the majority of people want a burger to taste like meat. And they do! They explicitly talk about how like a meatburger they are. They are under no illusions about what most people actually want.

    • Re:

      The issue for a lot of people with going meat-free is that it greatly reduces options and increases preparation time for food. It also requires more effort to meet the nutritional requirements people have.

      People often don't have a lot of time to spend preparing good anymore. The days of the wife staying home to cook are long gone, these days both partners probably work full time, maybe with childcare on top. Modern life is the problem, in other words.

    • Re:

      Three years is not very long to learn vegetarian cooking. I am still learning after more that forty years. For example, one thing I learned a long time ago is that soybeans, just soaked and simmered, taste pretty horrible. One the other hand, unflavoured TVP mince, which is made from soybeans, is very useful. You can flavour it with a home made vegetable stock. There are some pulses which generally taste nice when simmered and served with a flavoursome sauce. Red kidney beans are good. Chick peas take a lot

    • • Re:

        It won't be rat, but it could be pretty much anything not derived from animals...
        Vegetables don't taste like or look like meat, you have to do a lot of processing to make them vaguely meat-like.

        Fresh vegetables in their original form are great, but heavily processed vegetable by products designed to look like meat? no thanks.

      • Re:

        worry if I was getting a rat-tail pie

        I know, right? it's the best but but you hardly ever get it.

  • Re:

    They try too hard to be "like meat".

    So everything is based on making a simulation of meat - by looks and texture, etc. - because that what matters in the supermarket. Once you've bought it, how well it tastes doesn't matter. I'm serious, it actually doesn't matter shit.

    Because there's two kinds of people who buy this garbage. a) people like you and me who are thinking "let's try it out, maybe I can do something for the environment" and b) fanatics

    a) will buy this shit once and never touch it again. So it on

    • Re:

      I agree it's most exciting for investors. The people who deeply care about living in harmony with nature, well some of them just herd cattle around the grasslands in Africa. Something like that.

      It was what, 1900s ish that they invented hydrogenation and realised they coukd make fake fats, and early advertising industry did a lot around selling the stuff. The copywriters used to work writing religious magazines and they devised advertising around the new fats being clean and pure and healthy, whilst demonisi

  • Re:

    They taste close enough but no one cares for the planet enough to make minor changes for it.
    Everyone just proposes that others change.

  • Re:

    The most palatable analogues are in my opinion the high moisture extruded strips of soy protein. One example for sale here for instance has soy protein, some natural flavour concentrate (ie. something glutamate rich), sunflower oil, B12 and salt (1g per 100g) as ingredients. Shame about the goitrogenics in soy, but other than that the ingredients and processing are pretty mild.

    • Re:

      that is sarcasm right? but just in case, you do realise 1g per 100g is extremely high salt content, anything over 400mg is considered high. daily TOTAL salt intake is recommended to be between 1.5 and 2.5g.

      • Re:

        That's salt content, not sodium content.

        It's not any more than I put on chickenbreast/thigh when I pan fry it.

  • Re:

    Even worse is vat-grown "meat". Here's how I understand the drawbacks... 1) It lacks the nutrient profile of animals that evolved 2) It's specifically tailored to making muscle meat - the most common thing marketed - without organs 3) Growing a cell culture is notoriously tricky. D'you imagine that when it's mass produced, they'll toss a batch if it's "a little off"? 4) The energy in chemical inputs are likely to make plant based protein seem like a good deal, ecologically. 5) And it's likely that it

    • Re:

      The only slightly ethical way to source meat is to rear it yourself, even then where do you get your initial animals if not the unethical mass market? Continually impregnating cows and slaughtering most of the calves, grinding up rooster chicks, stressful mass transport before killing them... even the most ethical commercially farmed meat is pretty unethical. Hunting? Well I'm sure bambi loves starving to death after you shot mom. But nature is cruel too you say? That's no excuse and you know it. Embrace y

  • Re:

    Yeah I too pass judgement on everything based on something that I tried 20 years ago.

    Seriously go out and try them. Not every processed shit tastes good, not every healthy alternative tastes bad. There are not so many options out there that any singular statement you make sounds asinine. It's like saying "meat" tastes bad, ignoring that we could be talking about a filet mignon, or a fucking undercooked bat in China (trust me bats do not taste good, take it from a try anything once kinda guy).

  • • Re:

      Human beings aren't "meant" to do anything, but we can survive just fine on a mostly-meat diet if we get enough greens as well. You literally need nothing else but meat and leafy greens, and of course water.

• India (Score:5, Informative)

  by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Saturday July 09, 2022 @11:49PM (#62689300)

  A nation with 30% vegetarians and 70% who eat meat but not everyday. It is able to support a much larger population on the same land mass than if people ate meat everyday. Heck its able to export food. If everyone started eating meat everyday it would have to import food like China does.

  • • Mostly desert? Don't know where you got that from. The biggest desert in India, the Thar Desert, is less than 5% of the total land area of India. Monsoons regularly douse the majority of the country with some parts of the country receiving the highest rates of rainfall in the entire world.

    • Re:

      Come on, dude. The Real McCoy would know that India isn't any fucking kind of a desert. Have you seriously never heard of monsoon season?

    • Re:

      India has the most amount of arable land of any country in the world. US comes a close second. Russia, Canada, Australia, Brazil, China all have a lot of mountains, deserts, forests (land too poor for crops) but when it comes to land you can grow crops on , India is no 1.

      • That seems far fetched...

        I'm gonna have to ask you to cite a source on that claim. Sure there's probably good land to grow crops on in India but with a population density as high as they have I very strongly doubt they have more available arable land as the US.

        Not to mention India is a smaller country than the US in terms of territory with a decent amount of their North taken up by the world's largest mountain range.

        • Re:

          CIA world Factbook.

          
          
          Also Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

  • • Re:

      Those numbers are suspect given that the govt gives out free food to everyone below poverty line. Cite a source.

• by mkwan ( 2589113 ) on Sunday July 10, 2022 @12:02AM (#62689328)

  These kind of articles are misleading. They claim that meat is bad for carbon emissions, then only quote numbers for beef emissions.

  Beef emissions per gram of protein are 7-8x higher than pork, chicken and farmed fish, and 5x higher than dairy. So meat, in general, isn't as bad for the environment as they claim. Only beef is.

  • These kind of articles are misleading. They claim that meat is bad for carbon emissions, then only quote numbers for beef emissions.

    Beef emissions per gram of protein are 7-8x higher than pork, chicken and farmed fish, and 5x higher than dairy. So meat, in general, isn't as bad for the environment as they claim. Only beef is.

    It's somewhat of a moot point you make, as pork & chicken are still worse than plant based meat in terms of emissions.

    But this is only part of the story.

    Intensive farming practices have led to huge increases in environmental pollution.
    Factory chicken farming, in particular, can be devastating to the environment if planning regulations are left unchecked - which they usually are.

    Have a look at stories about the River Wye in the UK.
    Over the decades, the volume of chicken farms that have sprung up in the area, have all but killed the river.

    The waste produced by the chickens is spread on fields as manure, which then gets washed off the land, into the rivers.

    Nature can cope with a reasonable volume of such waste, it cannot cope with the volume it gets in areas such as this.

    This is an issue that isn't restricted to just one region of the UK, nor to just chicken farming - it's a global issue.

    Intensive farming of livestock can result in pollution which decimates river systems.

    Is it preventable? Sure. Is it prevented? Sadly not.

    • Re:

      Unfortunately everything you say also applies equally well to plant based farms. Hint: We don't douse our animals with fertiliser, the pollution of which is a major source of problems for your own decimated river systems, and in some cases even coastal ocean regions.

      The reality is farming practices need to change across the board (or we need to egg on Putin a bit more and maybe when a few bombs get lobbed around the world and the population drops by half then we'll be a sustainable species on this planet, a

  • Re:

    Beef is not really bad either. It produces methane, and? The fucking methane would be produced same way by rotting plants.

    It is basically a zero sum game, with the only problem: the level is higher if more cattle is risen. But that is a constant level, not an increasing one.

    The only other thing where cattle/beef is an issue to climate change is the transportation of the meet with trucks, and thats it.

    • Re:

      I would like to see a proof of that. The bacteria in a cow's gut, that produce methane as a result of digesting grass, are not the same as the bacteria that break down dead plants, or at least, I don't think so. How much methane would an area of grass with no cows grazing produce, compared to the same area heavily grazed by cows. My experience of a non-grazed area of grass (a local common) is that you don't get piles of rotting stuff, whereas heavily grazed pasture is plastered with bovine waste product.

  • With regenerative agricultural practices where cattle are grazed wisely over natural grasslands the healthy soil that is restored sequesters many tons of atmospheric CO2. So the practice is a net good for the planet.

    • Re:

      So Africa? Most of the rest of the world was forested in human memory, until we cut down the forests. Even more of the USA was forested, and natives burned down forests to increase range for Bison.

    • Re:

      Ah yes, those mythical regenerative cows with fusion reactors in their fifth stomach. Regenerative farming is a scam and relies on fertilizer inputs from real farms by proxy, usually through chickenfeed. The chickens get supplemental feed from real farm and fertilize the soil.

      With fossil fertilizer input and low density of cattle you can build up organics in the soil, big whoop, nothing regenerative about it. The only sustainable farming uses humanure.

  • Re:

    And also there are so many other factors. Beef/cows do produce meat, yeah, but also milk and cheese, which are also difficult to replace.
    And the elephant in the room is that no single place is the same: I live in the mountains where cultivating anything is not interesting (too many rocks for plowshare, too many slopes for tractors, season to short for an interesting yield, not competitive with lower nearby lands); but it's easy to let cattle and sheep and goats roam, milk them and eat them. Little effort, s

  • Re:

    The problem is that as people become more prosperous, they tend to eat more beef, in preference to meats that have less of a land and greenhouse gas impact, such as pork and chicken. There is also the problem that beef, which used to be a weekly treat for moderately prosperous families before WW2, is now considered an everyday item in the diet, and in increasing quantities.

  • • Re:

      And let's not forget Porky, his lady friend Petunia and Hampton.

    • Re:

      Pigs are smart, smarter than dogs. Also far closer to humans than cattle hence the use of pig heart valves in transplants. If you are not comfortable eating Fido , you should not be comfortable eating Miss Piggy.

      • Re:

        I'm not at all sure that pigs are closer to humans than cattle. I think they're at the same cladistic distance. (Could be wrong, didn't check. They're definitely not close.)
        The reason for using pig heart valves is that they're the right size, raising pigs is a well studied process, and there isn't any great social outcry about it.

        OTOH, the transplanted pig heart is a good indication that they aren't THAT far removed. Do note, though, that the heart came from a genetically modified strain of pigs that ha

• I find referring to plant based meat substitutes as "meat" is deceptive (translation: IT IS A LIE)
  The meat industry needs to take this to court for deceptive business practices.

  If people wish to eat it, more power to them.

  I've tried it.
  I'd rather starve.
  Also the fact that, with all the chemicals and additives used to simulate meat texture and taste, it's arguably LESS healthy for you than meat.

  • Re:

    You're far from alone. I still remember the meat shelf at the market at the worst of the pandemic. Everything was gone, except for processed plant crap marketed as "meat" that was fully stocked.

    When options are "that crap or nothing", most people choose nothing.

  • Re:

    It's weird to see people on a technology site freaking out about chemicals and additives. Also you probably don't want to know what's in most processed meats. By processed I mean just about anything you buy at a grocery store. If you're not driving down to a farm and having them slaughter the animal there for you you're getting some chemicals. Pink slime is just the beginning.
    
    As for calling them meat you know we call the insides of most savory fruits a meat right? As long as the ingredients are clear on

    • Re:

      Ah, you're using a non-standard definition of a critical word again.

      If you buy a raw steak or filet or ground beef / pork / poultry, that's not processed. It needs to have something more done to be called processed: https://www.bbc.com/news/healt... [bbc.com]... and in that sense, "plant-based meat" is a heavily processed food, it's just not processed meat in the usual sense of "meat". And, as others have pointed out, plant-based meats have lots of unhealthy fats and sodium and other things. Plus they might be ha

    • Re:

      No, that's completely ass-backwards. It's weird to see people on a technology site not freaking out about chemicals and additives. Tons of the approved food additives have serious drawbacks. I had to stop eating Costco "croissants" (which aren't really) because they started to make my stomach foam up — all fucking day. It turns out there's an enzyme commonly used in croissants which has been implicated in multiple health issues [sciencelearn.org.nz] and to which you can become more sensitive over time. I'd use one as the b

    • Re:

      "If you're not driving down to a farm and having them slaughter the animal there for you you're getting some chemicals"

      Even if you go down to the farm and pick out your moving meat, you don't know where it's been and what it's been eating. The farmers themselves use chemicals and frequently do not even know what chemicals drift in from the outside.

  • Re:

    I was a vegetarian for a decade. Some of the pseudo-meats are pretty decent, some are terrible, and this means that if you want to eat meat substitutes you need to do significant research and testing. I didn't actually find that I craved meat substitutes, though.

  • Re:

    There've been a few tries to cut down the deception, but largely it's gone the other way.

    I agree with everything you said, but I don't think we'll manage to end this scam. Maybe the best is to get on the bandwaggon and accelerate it, so that the proponents think they've got a winner and they don't need the deceptive marketing anymore?

  • Re:

    I can guarantee you that you would not rather starve.
    If you think that, you just never experienced actual hunger.

    • Re:

      Let's just say you don't want to make bets on ANYTHING you've just said.

• My friends who have tried the "impossible burger" have not been impressed. The idea of cultured meat is more appealing.

  • Your friends may be biased. Frankly, I can't tell the difference between the Impossible Whopper and the regular Whopper. I don't know if that says how good the Impossible Whopper is, or how bad the regular one is, but they are very close. Instead of relying on your friends' opinions, why don't you try one yourself?

    • Re:

      Yes, against bullshit.

      It's obviously the latter, as anyone who has had a good burger knows. There are no good fast food burgers, there are only fast food burgers which are not completely horrible. And the whopper is not among them. Whatever "seasoning" they put on it to make it taste like a real burger is fake as fuck. After I eat one, I'm still burping up smoke additive while I'm eating dinner.

      I've tried one and it's edible but underwhelming, which does make it a good substitute for a shitty fast food burg

    • Re: Basically soy burgers from the school cafeteri

      If you put an Impossible burger and a fast food burger on a plate there would of course be a difference. But one you put it on a bun with lettuce, tomato, pickles, cheese and Special Sauce the difference is not dramatic. Iâ(TM)ll eat an Impossible burger anytime.

• Go to Burger King and order an impossible whopper. You'll find it's pretty much indistinguishable from a real one. And it'll have the benefit of zero cholesterol (cholesterol only comes from livers) and a little bit of fiber too (fiber only comes from plant matter).

  • cholesterol only comes from liveers
    
    In a word, no [wikipedia.org]. Cholesterol comes from most animal foods, with liver being higher in cholesterol than most of them.

  • Re:

    What kind of moronic statement is that? Not that I don't like liver, but eating a cheeseburger does not entail eating liver, at least in most reputable eateries.

  • Re:

    There are no benefits to that. Eating cholesterol doesn't raise your cholesterol count, you numpty. That was a lie perpetrated by the processed foods industry, whose products do raise your cholesterol. In fact, if you literally eat lard, it will lower your HDL counts. We learned all this back during the Atkins diet craze, because the only time we spend money on basic health research is when there's money in it.

• The real problem the climate has is with our dependence on perpetual economic growth, which is mostly underpinned b perpetual population growth.
  Until we figure out how to live with a steady state population, we are never going to solve climate issues. regardless of the technology we use to produce energy and feed ourselves.

  Sooner or later, we will run into hard limits for this planet, and growth will have to stop - even if we colonize Mars and all the other planets in the system, there's only so much material that can be brought back and forth, so although human population may continue growing off Earth, there will be a limit on Earth. We have to decide where we want that limit to be - and how few resources there will be per person to share is acceptable.
  Right now that would be about 9300 sqm or 2.3 acres per person - just under 1 hectare. Most of that land is not very productive land, with only 180 sqm of it arable land and which is gradually getting polluted. Your average global living space of 20 square meters is built on the very best most productive part of it.
  Do we want to wait until these values are half that per person. or a quarter of that per person?

  I'm not saying we need to start putting in population control measures - the population growth in some parts of the world is curbing by itself naturally - certainly in the west, and in japan they actually have a shrinking population. Currently this scenario is looked at as a total disaster.

    We have to make more use of the population we have - allow people to keep working if they want to, and get rid if ageist policies that discriminate against older employment, and figure out a better way to distribute our resources so that investors. innovators and entrepreneurs still get rewarded for their efforts, but not to the ludicrous extent where you have the top level management now earning 300x what the average employee earns, compared to the 70's when it was about 30x
  All that said, I still like a steak every now and then. I really hope the guys working on growing those from scratch figure out how to do it, so I don't have to eat tofu burgers.

  • Wherever you raise the standard of living and give women control over their fertility, population declines. Oddly, a lot of human females object to being treated as baby factories.

    By the way, 100% agree that it would be really neat to be able to grow steaks in vats. I don't particularly want to kill cattle, but I do love a steak every now and again.

    • Re:

      If only more people took that attitude, we would not be in the (cow)shit now. I don't expect people who are used to eating meat to suddenly become vegetarians. The message about meat should be quality rather than quantity. This policy would include meat-free days, and treats of good meat cooking.

      My armchair economist/psychologist analysis is that excessive meat consumption is a symptom of displaying conspicuous wealth. There is a great deal of wasteful resource use that could be attributed to that. A busine

    • Re:

      As a father of 5 I totally disagree with women choosing fewer babies. Women will have babies and lots of them if they have a stable life at a young age. So a man with a good job and a house. The fact that most women will want a man with a better education than themselves, that it takes young people into their late 20s now to have a stable career and the median age of buying a first house is now over 30 in most of the western world means that women who plan their family don't have their child till they a

  • Re:

    The problem is that you are fixated on the ideas that are incorrect. I get it, humans have been farming for thousands of years so your brain can't process that there are other ways to make nutrients and food. The fact is we don't need farms at all.
    1. Food can be grown indoors stacked powered by nuclear energy.
    2. Food (proteins, carbohydrates) can be synthesized chemically with enzymes, bioreactors, or other methods.
    A human needs about 2500 watts of energy per day in proteins and carbohydrates. A sma

  • Re:

    Population in 1st world countries has been stable or even declining for a few decades now, yet the economy keeps growing.

    I'm with you that "growth" as a religion is a huge problem. I'm with you that there are already too many people and they keep getting more and that's a problem. I don't think the two are as closely connected as you say.

  • Soylent Green

    Did they do a study on how much CO2 emissions will be cut by eating the rich? I'm pretty sure it is far more effective than impossible burgers.

  • Re:

    I totally agree with that, but I do not know of a solution. I could just say that people should stop being so greedy, but I can't see that being a part of any government policy, including socialist governments.

    I would dispute that. The heavy consumers in the wealthy industrial world are actually experiencing population decline, which is indicated by an increasingly aged population. There is plenty of evidence the middle income majority of industrial economies have enjoyed a massive increase in resources pe

• From a purely linguistic standpoint it's offensive to the palate: there's no such thing as plant-based meat. It's not meat, by the very definition.

  • Re:

    I suppose the researchers are correct then.

    Imaginary things are best for the environment.

• Stop calling it meat. People who want meat wonâ(TM)t eat it and people against meat donâ(TM)t want meat.
• Meat isn't the problem, the problem is the amount of meat we consume. The meat industry has brainwashed us to believe that we need to eat huge portions of meat at each of our multiple meals every day, where six to eight ounces is more than enough, unless you're a body builder. I've tried the fake meat, and, to me, it has a vinegar or chemical taste that is overpowering, and I find the texture is nothing like real meat.

• Quite simply, neither of the best known "meat substitutes" are, in fact, anything like meat. "Bean burger" is about the best I could say about them -- and there is no solid meat version at all (no rib roast etc).

  The headline "Plant-Based Meat:..." is of course ridiculous (the summary correctly adds the word "substitute") - the only "plant based meat" that is available is created from ingredients like grains and alfalfa etc, processed by processing plants commonly referred to "cow", "sheep", "pig", "chicken"

• Not really keen on phytoestrogens in my food, thanks.

• We had meat balls made out of soy 40 years ago. They tasted terrible that time, they also taste terrible now.

• I'd rather we stop pretending that individual action is the solution and go after heavy industry and billionaire's private jets and yachts which pollute far more than individuals do.

  • Re:

    So you can happily carry on your own little bit of wasteful consumption, because you are just one ordinary person, and don't have as much impact as some wealthy person. If individual people show they don't care, why should their elected representatives care? Why should industry produce more sustainable products, if there is no demand for them?

• A report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has revealed that investments in plant-based meat alternatives lead to far greater cuts in climate-heating emissions than other green investments.

  The Boston Consulting Group is a global management consulting firm that does a lot of work for fossil fuel companies.

  They are also known for doing business with Angolan diamond companies and oil exploiters Sonangol and are closely associated with Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

  They think it's a good idea for you to stop eating those nice rib eyes and New York strip steaks and hamburgers as long as you keep pumping that petrol. Shocking.

• • This comment reminds me that surveys showed when people were told that CFLs save money on electricity bills, people favored them more, but when they were also told CFLs were better for the environment, that made conservatives like them less. So if you want conservatives to switch to meat substitute, don't tell them they would be helping anyone else by doing switching.

    • Re:

      Not a shocking revelation. When something is good for the environment that usually means it's worse in some other way but you should look past it. It's like telling someone that a food is healthy will probably make them like it less: conditioning.

      • That's not the reason though. The far right is defined by a lack of empathy, and people who lack empathy see being kind as a weakness rather than a virtue.
        Conversely, the far left sees being strong as being a bully rather than a virtue, so they cause their own issues. Only empathy combined with strength is conducive to good leadership.

        • • • • Re:

                Think I'll need a breakdown of 'charities' by category.

                For example, I'm fairly confident that these pious right wingers aren't giving huge amounts to a charity to help out gay people.

                On the flipside, I knew a guy who was so proud of his Christian charity, where he spent donations to go overseas and try to convert people. He didn't talk about food aid or anything else, he just spoke of missionary work in and of itself being a worthwhile charity.

                There's good work done, but there's also a lot of 'fluff' in ch

    • Re:

      Every time you eat an impossible Burger a blue haired girl cries.

    • Re:

      Guess what. I'm what you might call a moderate conservative and what do I do?

      I drive an electric car, live in the woods and use solar+wood and electric to heat our house (using double air heat pumps with extremely high effectiveness ratio) yet I wouldn't eat "plant based meat" because it tastes like ass.

      Don't paint everyone with the same brush, please.

      • Re:

        I don't know exactly what you ate (or why you know think you've tried them all) but the secret is in the amount of heme. Once we can synthesize heme cheaply in large quantities then it's game over for the beef industry.

        https://www.greenmatters.com/p... [greenmatters.com]

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    Time is an important concept. The price is high now, in the future it will probably come down a lot due to the usual reasons.

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    That's all it would take to remove more pollution than every single car on the entire planet. 15 cargo ships.

    Good lord that claim is absurd. How can you believe something like that?

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    That 15 cargo ship claim is an extraordinary one - and unfortunately, not entirely accurate.
    In 2020, The entire global fleet uses a bit over 200 Million tons of fuel of various sorts, and marine bunker fuel (which is used for heavy cargo ships) accounts for 3.6% of global oil use, vs 48% of the world's oil being used for road transport, of which cars make up about half (26% overall)

    One cargo ship does emit as much sulphur as 15 million cars, due to the use of bunker fuel - the nastiest lowest grade stuff t

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      Do we need to make shipping more efficient? Absolutely!

      Indeed. Given limited resources we're better off making the post-ship shipping more efficient. I did have a crack at the numbers: it takes about as much fuel shipping a washing machine from China to the UK as it does to get it to my house from the depot. I didn't have a good estimate from the container port to the depot.

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    Directly synthesisng proteins and carbohydrates is not currently economically viable in bulk. The raw materials also have to come from somewhere. And then you have to add in all the required micronutrients. Please indicate how this would be possible using less land and other resources and economically viable with current technology. One of the great things with plants is that, to a significant degree, they use free sunlight, air and stuff in the ground to make something we can eat rather than having to rip

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      Plants are only 1% efficient at converting sunlight to carbohydrates.. less when you consider we don't eat 100% of the plant. If we used energy from solar panels or nuclear that would use much less land. As for the raw materials.. where do plants get from? Carbon is in the soil and in the air as CO2 and nitrogen. Water, which plants waste like hell.. is also found easily. Not much else is needed other than some trace elements easily found and extractable from soil, sea water, and rivers?

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        You can just till the soil and plant plants, it's hard to economically compete with that. A bioreactor with GM microbes takes a lot more materials and truly synthetic production of sugars/proteins from just sunlight/air/minerals is an entirely lost cause. We don't have the technology.

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          I actually think that we can do total synthesis of sugars (not the really complex ones) and simple proteins. But it's on a lab scale, and it's not really efficient.

          OTOH, that's not enough to make food. But we can also do total synthesis of vitamins. So it might be possible to actually make a decent food (I'm not talking about tastes, merely sufficient). But I'm not sure. Dietary fibers are also an important ingredient, and I don't know that we can make them.

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        For a lot of crops around the world it doesn't matter if the plants 'waste' the water as it falls out the sky on to them. The CO2 is just there. Plant the right crops in rotation and the N2 might also be there in the soil. If you need to pump water around or manufacture nitrogen for fertiliser, it's very intensive.

        It's a lot of amino acids to make and ensure are in a diet in appropriate quantities. That's really non-trivial.

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      Let me quote it for you...

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    Cultured meat is a boondoggle. Trying to replace all the organs providing the environment for muscles to grow with machinery will create unacceptable nutrient efficiency, it will never approach the cost of butchered meat. By the time we have the engineering to efficiently replace organs with machines, we'll have replicators.

    So for the moment we will just have to extract protein from plants and microbes.

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      "Trying to replace all the organs providing the environment for muscles to grow with machinery will create unacceptable nutrient efficiency,"

      And your evidence of this is what, precisely?

      "it will never approach the cost of butchered meat"

      Wanna bet. Industrial production is quite efficient. That's why we use it as opposed letting nature create it for us.

      "By the time we have the engineering to efficiently replace organs with machines, we'll have replicators."

      Bringing Stargate-SG1 into this is just silly.

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      same goes for factory raised chickens. Boneless skinless chicken breast has about as much flavor as tofu. At least tofu tastes a little like grass.