I aspire to be a good vegetarian — we simply don’t eat any meat at home, although we do consume some stuff like Impossible Burgers now and then, a plant-based meat alternative. I can believe that plant-based foodstuff have significantly lower environmental impact, but then I read this claim by the Good Food Institute, and my skeptical ganglion started sending alarms.
Plant-based meat has, on average, 89 percent less environmental impact than traditional meat across all impact categories. Furthermore, plant-based meat’s environmental impact is 91 percent lower than beef, 88 percent lower than pork, and 71 percent lower than chicken.
Overall, plant-based meat uses 79 percent less land, 95 percent less water, and produces 93 percent water pollution [I assume that’s an error…93% less maybe?]. Efficient, low-impact meat alternatives also produce 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 89 percent less air pollution.
That’s lovely. Amazing. Let’s quit killing cows, pigs, and chickens and start murdering soybeans. I can believe it’s better for the environment…but that much better? I tried tracking down how they calculated those numbers, and couldn’t find a detailed methodology, or even a peer-reviewed paper — it’s mostly corporate in-house stuff.
Unfortunately, I also found this on Wikipedia.
In 2018, GFI participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, receiving funding and strategic support. Y Combinator lists “cellular agriculture and clean meat” as one of its funding priorities, stating that “the world will massively benefit from a more sustainable, cheaper and more healthy production of meat”.
GFI has ties with the effective altruism movement, having received endorsements and financial support from several effective altruism-affiliated organizations. For instance, Open Philanthropy awarded GFI with several major grants in support of its general operations and international expansion, totalling $6.5 million as of August 2021.
Sam Harris’ Waking Up Foundation recommends GFI as one of its top charities.
Yikes. Suddenly, they have even less credibility.
I’m still going to consume plant-based meat, but now I have no idea how beneficial the stuff is, and I don’t trust the techbros touting it.
I do have one nagging question, though: if it uses so few resources, relatively speaking, how come processed soy protein and GMO yeast are so much more expensive than slaughtered cow? So it’s a new technology and is still working up economies of scale, but does silicon valley love it so much because somebody is profiting heavily from it?
I find the use of clean as an adjective for food to be unconvincing and offputting. The word already has a well established meaning. I guess their attempt to hijack organic didn’t work out so well.
A question I ask a lot. I get downvotes, but never answers.
Another peeve of mine: lab-grown meat. Many people seem to feel that the price is going to come dow to the point where it can challenge traditional meat. It’s not gonna happen.
Tissue culture is difficult and expensive.
The amazing part of a cow is the digestive system, which turns low-grade grazing into tasty beef.
“The amazing part of a cow is the digestive system”
Yes, exactly. On the one hand, it is true that a cow might have to eat ten pounds of food for every pound of milk or edible meat produced. On the other hand, when you grow, say, corn for human consumption, all we eat is the kernels (which make up maybe 10% of the plant), but if you feed it to a cow, she eats the whole thing. Not to mention grass and hay, which humans can’t digest at all.
If we really want to replace cows, tissue culture of meat isn’t the way to go. What we need to do is make a fermentation/digestion system that replicates a ruminant’s digestive tract, and turns all this cellulose-rich plant matter into something that humans can eat. Granted, the smell of a cow’s rumen contents is currently incredibly foul, but with some work we should be able to make it into something at least as good as sauerkraut or kimchee.
timothyeisele, creating edible protein by fermentation is already being done. See Fermotein
I think that a significant amount of the costs of the current plant-based meat substitutes are caused by the significant amount of processing required to turn those cheaper raw materials into meat-like products. Although cows require a fair bit of management, turning them into food is a pretty straightforward process.
Also marketing, hype, and investor payback. Those too. Mostly those.
Our company did some work for a plant-based meats startup. They came out of ‘stealth mode’, sold a crapload of shares just after the impossible foods hype-cycle started winding down, and then went bankrupt stiffing most of their vendors (including us). C’est le capitalisme. The founders and initial investors did quite well out of the deal, of course, and have no doubt moved on to riding the next wave of hype. Probably something-something-AI-something, or maybe ‘vertical farming’, leveraging their ‘expertise’ to start some new fake company to sell to suckers.
We saw the same thing in the weed industry here, post legalization – lots of companies that sprung into existence solely to build a credible-looking grow operation and sell it to
suckerssophisticated investors. Those ones we got paid in advance, since the fraud was so obvious. Lots of funny stories buried under NDAs there.[Data]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9936781/
We just need to switch to insect base protein, no? I mean, people eat shrimps and they are basically sea cockroaches.
I used to eat Boca burgers and Boca chili and Boca facon. I never had an Impossible burger. I can’t say I’m vegetarian as I just had some chicken wings from Publix but I lean more that way. At least in the excessive fiber consumption department. Trying to make up for what JP isn’t eating with his carnivore diet. Ideally I consume egg whites, salmon, and cheese as animal products and veggies make up the remainder of my diet. Doesn’t always work out that way.
I was curious about cultured meat, which I think PETA condones, but it is banned in my “Free” State of Florida. I’d try it if available, but Desantis is too much of a cowardly punk:
https://apnews.com/article/florida-lab-grown-meat-ban-1613765b1750119ff265fb3c5c56e2aa
With cultivated meat the cattle flu would be less an issue.
It depends. But basically, most soya is fed to animals. Humans eating it directly is more efficient. But there are definitely better alternative sources of protein than soya. The way we cultivate animals for food is in general terrible for the environment (a lot of that is down to the way we do it) and a danger to human health (because it breeds antibiotic resistance and exposes humans to lots of infectious agents).
Read George Monbiot, if you want more details. He is unusual for a journalist, in that if he is wrong, he will tell you. He also is totally transparent about where his funding comes from. But his main criticism of eating meat, is that it is a waste of land. He thinks we will eventually be able to produce animal protein and fats in a laboratory using microorganisms. (Not growing actual meat – which is more complicated and expensive to do).
Those numbers are about what we see for beef versus other meats. Turning beans into something as resource-intensive as chicken without just growing an animal is a feat, but I guess that’s what good ol’ capitalism is good at.
John Morales, remember in the OP when PZ described trying to find the source of those claims? The paper you have quoted provides no reference at all for that 50% figure, and it does not even get mentioned again outside of the abstract. Add to that the problem that environmental impact is far too complex to be boiled down to a single number, and it makes the claim look hyperbolic.
It is always a good idea to do a PubMed search for medical papers as you have done here, but it still requires a certain amount of critical appraisal to determine if the paper actually answers the question. There is an appalling amount of bad research pumped into the literature base, sometimes even in highly competitive journals. One of the best indicators in my experience of a bad paper is to check a few of the references for some of the claims — you would be astonished how often the referenced paper either doesn’t address the question at all or gives a flat contradiction to what it is being reported as finding.
chrislawson, what I found notable was the 50% figure, which is quite a lot less than the claimed figures the OP references.
Stands to reason, given the relative trophic levels of the inputs, I think.
[and yes, Elsevier]
The beef numbers people see are usually unfair to beef, for various reasons. For example, water used by cattle doesn’t stop existing. The cow urine waters plants in the field almost as much as if the cow weren’t there.
If it helps you feel better, Impossible Foods was started by an academic and doesn’t have any relationship (AFAIK) to the Effective Altruism ghouls. We buy their products, too.
While plant based meats are more expensive than standard ground beef, the averaged cost of beef over all the cuts/qualities you get from a cow isn’t much cheaper from what I’ve seen.
Bruce @14
The amount of water used to grow the feed for the cattle is what is being referred to when comparing environmental impacts. I guess one could compare the amount of cattle urine produced by the cattle fed to 100 people to the urine produced by 100 people that ate vegetarian diets as a way to determine environmental efficiency, but I think that would not be efficient…
John@13–
Elsevier owns some of the top journals in the world, including The Lancet and Cell, and most of the criticism aimed at Elsevier is about their exploitiative business model rather than the quality of their journals. Having said that, they have not been nearly as vigilant as they should be about keeping poor quality journals off their roster or acting on unethical behaviour by rogue editors. Sadly, this does not make Elsevier any worse than most of the other major scientific publishing houses.
Evolve your appendix back into a caecum. Problem solved for your descendants.
Or do the woke version of Warhammer 40K Marines and make a caecum implant. You likely have some of the related developmental pathway still.
=v= Impossible’s “secret sauce” is a “heme” made from GMO algae, which makes the product seem bloody. They originally swore up and down that no GMOs ended up in the burger. Then they got a huge deal with Burger King, started sourcing Roundup-Ready® soy, and started sending out Monsanto PR materials about how this is fine.
My “beef” with the product is that it has replaced perfectly-adequate veggie burgers at a higher price.
@21–
It does seem weird to talk up the meaty qualities of the heme molecule when it exists in plants as well (and indeed, their GM wheat got the gene from soy beans). I’m not sure why they felt the need to make a heme-carrying wheat when they could have just used soy in the first place, or mixed in leghemoglobin concentrate derived from soy. Possibly the main attraction was being able to patent the wheat.
Given the last few comments, I adduce the (rather aspirational, ahem) converse approach:
Toward Photosynthetic Mammalian Cells through Artificial Endosymbiosis
(Sunbathing sustenance!)
[all gabble to me, actually]
A photosynthetic mammalian cell is a neat idea and has turned up in a few science fiction stories, but the problem is that you need an awful lot of surface area to maximise energy return from photosynthesis, which is why trees have leaves. One (rough) estimate I saw was that humans would need 20x our surface area to meet our energy needs. Another suggested 4x, but only at maximal theoretical photosynthesis efficiency which is not likely to be achievable.
There is an amazing animal, the sea slug Elysia chlorotica, that eats algae and absorbs the chloroplasts into its own cytoplasm. The main evolutionary advantage of this seems to be camouflage as the green chloroplasts allow the animal to blend in with sea plants. But it does mean it has working chloroplasts that photosynthesize. Exactly how much metabolic advantage this gives is not well understood.
Guess what the sea slug looks like? A large, flat leaf. Hard to tell if this was evolutionarily driven by camouflage, photosynthesis, or both.
@25 chrislawson
The problem of photosynthetic mammals is comparable to solar-powered vehicles.
This thing supposedly runs primarily on solar, and so rarely needs charging. But it doesn’t look like a conventional car, and does not have the range nor speed of a battery-centered car.
Aptera
One can also have a battery-centered vehicle, but add solar panels to boost its range. Take this scooter for example, which claims to get an extra 18 miles per day due to its panels (under some assumed conditions which are not reported). The battery-based range is stated to be 37 miles per charge.
Solar scooter gets 18-mile range boost without burning your legs
This article about solar paint hints that it might be possible to do the same for most EVs in the future, if you choose to believe it isn’t just hype.
Mercedes-Benz’ solar paint could make plugging in EVs a thing of the past
Figure 5 in this paper gives some idea of the difference between plant-based meat and dairy alternatives and the animal-based products. I know some of these authors and trust the work. in PNAS.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120584119
Getting consumers to demand vegetable products as a substitute for meat is a herculean task.
Not only is meat seen as “manly/cowboy” but it is a huge status symbol of wealth and power. Vegetables and grains are seen as as “feminine/weak/poor”.
So, the price is being set high to create a the illusion that this is a high value item. The marketers are scared that if this were priced below regular hamburger, no one would want it.
Weird rational I know, but it is reality
There’s also a quality issue with non-Beyond/Impossible meat substitutes. I tried a veggie-hotdog brand, Ives or something similar, and it simply was no substitute for the real thing. It tasted more like the bun around it than like meat. AFAICT, either it’s priced not much above the meat version but of poor quality, or it’s Beyond or Impossible and is priced significantly higher. (I’ve not had either so I can’t speak to their quality.)
My issue with most meat-substitutes currently on the market is that they’re so packed with fats and nitrates that they’re no healthier than eating an actual hamburger patty or sausage.
Well, they are for the currently-used pig or steer or chicken or sheep that provide the actual meat, microraptor.
No offense to the farm animals, but I place my health as a higher priority over theirs.
Of course, eating a (mostly) vegetarian diet while skipping the meat substitutes means that both of the farm animals and myself end up healthier.
After over a half-century of being compelled by social pressure to be a ‘red-blooded, red meat eating ‘murican” it’s difficult to break the old indoctrination and mental mindset of being a carnivore. We are trying to be as vegetarian as possible. We also are trying to eat foods that have few ingredients and don’t have over-processed ingredients. But, ‘processed soy protein and GMO yeast’ and a bunch of other chemistry set additives make the veggie burgers and other vegetarian meat ‘substitutes’ much less desirable.
Also, the idea of lab-grown “cellular agriculture and clean meat” is a farce. We all know that whenever people are involved in the production and processing of food, there will be some who (usually out of ignorance of hygiene or sloth) will contaminate it and people will be sickened and likely some will even die.
the corrupt corporate owned sheople will never learn, or be diligent at keeping us safe. Whether its from guns or contaminated food or a murderous for-profit health care ‘industry’.
@9 Jim Brady wrote: The way we cultivate animals for food . . .
I reply: That brought up the ‘invisible’ problem of the massive amounts of methane cows produce (from both ends). Also, the disease and antibiotics endemic to the ‘cattle industry’. And, the horrible contamination of our water with the massive amounts of disease carrying insects spawned and fed by massive ‘feed lots’.
Don’t forget all the ‘pink slime’ in almost every pound of ground beef!
All that inspires us toward a vegetarian diet.
One more thought and then I’ll stumble off my soapbox:
Even though it is tempting to regress to my ‘red-blooded, red meat eating ‘murican” past behaviors, I have not bought ‘vegetarian meat substitutes’ for almost a year. I and my family are content with getting lots of flavor and nutrition without having to pretend to still be carnivores.
You know, another thing I’m seeing bandied about lately is that we should be raising pythons for meat over cows and chickens, because pythons require less water and space. I don’t know the numbers, but as pythons are carnivores rather than herbivores or omnivores, it seems like even with a reptile’s metabolism they’d be overall a more resource intensive source of protein than current livestock what with all the food and water their prey require. Plus the greater amounts of bioaccumulation in their tissues.
Just when you thought this blog couldn’t get more horrifying: From Morales link @6
Yum.
I’m now envisioning PZ being torn between vegetarianism and succumbing to peer pressure and adopting an arachnid lifestyle.