Beyond Burger and Plant Based Meats

Unexpectedly had lunch at a Beyond Burger hamburger restaurant the other day. Didn’t have much taste and I have no reason to go back but then I got curious about healthiness.

Seems to be similar calories and fat content and much higher salt content and highly processed.

A Beyond Burger, however, includes 18 ingredients: water, pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, cocoa butter, mung bean protein, methylcellulose, potato starch, apple extract, salt, potassium chloride, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, sunflower lecithin, pomegranate fruit powder, and beet juice extract (the beet juice give the burger its meat-like “blood”).

fit-560w

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/know-your-value/amp/ncna1068181

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To be blunt. Only idiots really think being vegetarian is healthier. It is a moral choice in diet. Not a healthy one nor an environmental one. I am vegetarian. But people tend to turn off their brains on both sides when it comes to eating vegetarian.

Its all about not wanting to directly eat things with hair/feathers or 2 eyes. Seafood is a variable (strangly enough!).

Being a healthy vegetarian requires a masters degree in nutrition. Its VERY hard and VERY variable. The whole world would be better served just being honest. Its not about killing animals. Growing vegetables kills billions more animal life than typical meat production does.

But we like cows and chickens. Just be honest. We dont like .killing the things we find cute. Many meat eaters wont eat a dog in the west, asia is more realistic on that issue. If its a snail or spider, most people tune out on the logic topic.

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I remember I actually gained weight eating vegetarian and vegan for a short time. There are some really delicious food, but often packed with fat and caloric stuff to make up for the taste. One needs to be more aware doing that.

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Hehe ya. Im 10kg heavier than when i switched too. Its also due to price. Eating quality vegetables all daybis extremely expensive in taiwan (never mind the chemicals). Factory farmed meat is cheap. Therein lies the moral issue.

I was in the pork industry down south a while ago. It is diagusting. Like evil level wrong. Thats what made me vegetarian. If i kill it i will still eat it. But the meat industry in Taiwan is incredibly sick! Hard to justify yummy when one knows how it was produced.

But if it is simply a numbers game on life killed, vegetarians kill more animals than any other group, hands down. Except the rich ones buying organic, naturally farmed stuff for their private chef to whip up :slight_smile:

my food bill before with meat was about 7000/month. Its 11000 nw as a veggie and i dont eat fancy stuff at all…grow lots myself to boot. Vegetarians tend to digest fast and thus eat more volume. Meat sits around rotting for a while so hunger doesnt creep up as fast. Actually quite inconvenient

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Absolutely, vegan and vegetarian food and restaurants often cost more.

Factory farming is very disgusting. Looking forward to the day when meat will be produced on mass by tissue culture. It’s already been done but not on a scale that is affordable yet. Soon I hope.

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The latest episode of South Park addresses this exact topic (and, of course, Randy has the “perfect” ridiculous solution)

I prefer beef burger.

Having said that, Impossible > Beyond.

This is ingenuous especially due to farmland which is dedicated to veg to raise animals e.g soybean in the amazon. And of course fish meal for fish and animal feed.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224412001197

Here’s some numbers regarding climate impact. If we all ate meat everyday (especially pork and beef given the world population) we will fry the earth and also have almost no wildlife left. People who look down on vegetarians are pretty selfish and ignorant because vegetarians have a much smaller impact on the environment and also on animal welfare.

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Care to elaborate on what you saw in the pork industry here?

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Not on the human/corruption side. But otherwise here are some key notes.

Castration with out medicine to improve taste.

Feed is often heavily contaminated with all sorts of chemicals. Even those that made US pork banned here…ironic.

When smaller pigs are sick, following taiwanese buddhist logic, they wont kill them. They leave them out front on the road to die over up to a few days.

On that note. There are special trucks that drive around in taiwan picking up corpses from farms. It is heavily controlled by the gov. If you recall the mass pig disease in taiwan i think 20 years ago which all but completely destroyed the pork industry here. One of the MAIN factors in that disease was actually because of these government trucks picking up dead pigs and driving around to all the farms, very effectively spreading the disease lightning fast.

My firsy farm i used was the inlaws land. During that scare they had a couple thousand pigs killed by the guys in white suits. They were lucky and had land. Hire excavator and dig a massive dead pig grave.

On a more humane note. The raising of them them are almost always ultra confined to the point breeders sometimes cant stand up right. There is an actual job here of picking up the male ontop of the female and helping insert…

The trucks cram them in tight and they often arrive with broken bones. Think 150kg in the back of one of those meth head drivers trucks at a red light…if the cries and screams arent too noticable, the snapping of bones sometimes is.

Lesser priblems such as water contamination from waste and all that but its not high up the priority list.

So on and so on.

Then theres the actual pork as food and the factory and corruption problem.

I stopped eating pork, and only pork, when i was a super meat eater. For many reasons.

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Yes. That argument that raising produce kills insects and vermin whereas cattle are raised on…air, apparently, doesn’t fly the moment a person thinks about it.

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It’s highly processed.

I agree, I’m not a vegetarian but have reduced my meat intake for ethical reasons. I cannot understand how anyone would look down on someone who chooses not to eat meat because they don’t want to eat or hurt animals. They have my respect thats for sure.

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I don’t have time to go into the details now, but the entire (mainstream) argument that you present there is predicated on business-as-usual. Switching off subsidised, polluting factory-farming and replacing it with sustainable mixed agriculture is simply not permitted as a possible solution.

If you’re genuinely interested, I can recommend “Cows Save the Planet”, which sets out exactly how and why conventional agriculture is so destructive and why eating less meat using the same business model will make no difference either to the pollution aspect or to the killing-animals aspect. The TL;DR version is that (as @Explant said) raising conventional vegetables is all about killing things. Vegans, frankly, are either ignorant of the facts, or hypocrites.

That’s only if you completely turned agriculture upside down.

That’s a very big risk to take given the huge population explosion around the world.

How are vegans hypocrites if they don’t want to see animals suffering ?

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Well, continuing to mess up the planet is also a rather big risk. In fact it’s not even a risk: it’s a dead cert. We know for a fact that the present method of farming is going to hit one of several ginormous problems sometime soon, and the only people who will still be smiling are the nutcases running mixed farms.

The point is that, as you said, vegans simply don’t want to SEE animals suffering. The fact that lots of them do suffer, in the process of delivering their tofu burgers to their tables, is ignored. Some of them are cute and fluffy animals too: the same people who protest about rabbits used for medical experiments turn a blind eye (har har) to ickle baby rabbits mangled up in combine harvesters.

Nature runs on death, and the farmer’s job is to manage that in a humane manner.

First, of course animal types matter. Killing cows is definitely not the same as killing ticks or mosquitoes.
Second, being vegan is definitely better for the environment. Animals are not efficient beings, all the energy in the food they eat is not stored nor is it turned into useful energy. So it is way more efficient to eat the plants directly rather than feed them to an animal and then eat said animal.

P.S. not a vegetarian myself but I can see the benefits.

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The word “efficiency” in this context has no clear meaning. Animals are extremely “efficient” at doing what they do. A few million years of evolution guarantees that. Remember that the primary output of an animal - a cow, a rabbit, a snail - is labour and manure, not meat. Meat (the recycling of high-quality materials) is only one of the many methods nature uses to slow the planet’s inevitable increase in entropy.

Seriously, a lot of the wrongheaded thinking about agriculture, plants, and animals arises from a poor grasp of physical principles.

Yes. Thats another good point as cows are fed large amounts of soy, corn, grains etc. I suppose the argument goes with many vegetarians in a sense of direct kill for our direct food product. Essentially the argument that beats all and ends all on a numbers basis is: invertebrates or lab meats will outweigh any current typical meat production method, even now as is.

The discussion is never decided because people argue killing animals is either ok or not. Is it a moral issue of taking a life? If so, what kind of life is your line between ok or not? If they think its not ok, they then say killing ticks and mosquitoes (as per above example) is ok. This makes literally no sense. The issue is with people pretending and being bullshit artists or just ignoring the point. If someone wants to be a buddhist vegan and then kills bugs in the house, fine. But dont preach the save all animals message it wont be practiced at home. Often this is just simple ignorance in understanding what words mean. Like how so many people think eating seafood is vegetarian or eating eggs is vegan. They just arent. Its not a judgment, rather a definition. And misunderstanding of definitions cause a lot of wadted time and effort that could be spent other places.

So for my own personal morals being vegetarian, i feel the treatment of the animal is the main point. I can kill an animal. I can raise an animal. I have done so probably millions of times on both fronts. Now i probably would have a hard time killing an animal i raised. If its cute. That means bigger, fuzzy, 2 eyes etc. Its a connection not so unlike eating your pet dog. It isnt wrong to say i wont kill a fish but i will kill a fly. Just be honest about it. But after breeding flies, roaches, leaches etc i now also have a harder time killing them just simply due to studying their behaviour and life. This is human nature and we should always be true about. We just sound like douchebags if we try to deny it.

So in the end. Many people have no issues with killing insects. Lets say crickets. They eat nearly anything, even more than pigs, they can live in low light, highdensity amd are more environmental in waste management. They can be reared happily in tall indoor spaces making the footprint tiny and their food conversion ratio is pretty respectable. Just that one thing trumps mammals, foul and fish.

It is very very true that growing plant crops (and dredging the oceans) for animal feedstocks is retarded on the highest level.

But using plant crop wastes as a byproduct for feeding things like fungi and insects is a very sustainable way. Like the old style animal integrated farms. Growing a few plant crops on rotation, mushrooms and crickets could feed the world, be sustainable, efficient and supply it all.

Question is, who innovates first? Do customers stop being such picky princesses? Or do companies force upon the consumer something they are not ready for? The end of global warming and all the worlds problems simply rely on the will of the consumer…thats the inconvenient truth!

That all said ive been on a field study with 4 hours sleep these 3 days so appologies if a bit incoherent haha.

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