Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Society collectively picking that
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition,
We’ve had a surge of green energy investment in large part due to rising energy costs. Ironically enough, it’s the fossil fuel industry that created these skyrocketing electricity costs.
But the real run away investment has been in socialist states that dictate the market. Not market states that leave investment to the whims of investors.
It would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years
Then get off your ass and do it. You’ve clearly got the genius to run a multi billion dollar expansion. Give Sysco a call. Let them know you’re going to revolutionize the agricultural industry by the end of the decade.
Don’t waste time talking to me. Go go go! The world is at stake!!!
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice. Western societies currently demand animal meat over plant meat by a wide margin, even though plant meat can oftentimes be cheaper. To be clear, I think subsidized/free low-carbon emission food for the hungry would be awesome, but it’s not what was being argued. My point was that good alternatives exist currently at either price parity with real meat, or are sometimes even cheaper, and they are not chosen by consumers over animal meat.
The last segment of your comment is odd, sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire by their bootstraps if they happen to comment on how effortlessly multinational corporations seem to acquire investment capital.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush to be distributed with existing low cost transportation and supply systems, then it is to find investment capital for large-scale power production with thin profit margins and an inefficient multi-year long waiting list of connection approvals, and where any new public infrastructure needed to support any new private energy project must be paid for one the projects in line (the first one willing to put up the cash, making them all wait to see if someone else will go for it).
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice.
They regularly by cheap heavily subsidized ground beef and fried pork/chicken because it is cheap. In many cases, meat is cheaper by weight than equivalent vegan options (particularly fresh vegetables) entirely because of our land use policies and agricultural subsidies. Put alt-meat on the shelf at a price point below trad meats and you’ll see consumers shift accordingly. Right now, ground beef sells for under $5/lb while Impossible Beef sells for around $7/lb.
sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire
Again, you frame this as an individual choice rather than a public policy. Homeless people aren’t homeless because they failed to become millionaires. They’re homeless because the cost of housing exceeds their income. If you handed everyone in the country a $1M check, they’d still be homeless, because private real estate would price itself above these newly-minted millionaires ability to buy in. By contrast, if a municipality or state expands the stock of public housing, nobody needs to increase their income in order to house the homeless.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush
Great. Then go out and do it. Get Impossible Beef under the Possible Beef price point. Then watch how quickly the public adopts the alternative.
Quorn (an excellent vegetarian meat alternative grown from a fungus) has been around since the 1980’s, and is at price parity with animal ground beef. It has never been more popular than animal meat. Seitan made from vital wheat gluten at home is $1.80 a pound, and can replicate a side of ham, beef, or roast chicken with different flavorings. It is not popular among non-vegetarians or vegans in the west, even the impoverished, despite its low cost. The most expensive Tofu is cheaper than ground beef with comparable protein content, and can be an excellent tasting alternative. Lentils can fill in for ground beef (though not comparable in taste to meat alternatives) and provide far more protein content per dollar than ground beef can provide.
I agree that factory farming combined with subsidies are artificially making animal meat affordable enough for mass adoption, and that if those practices were ended, people would be forced to switch away from it as a main source of food. This is a similar quandary to gasoline.
But even with those subsidies, there are vegetarian options that are currently cheaper than real meat, yet are not chosen by the consumer.
The issue is not purely economics, but cultural. People could, right now, choose the cheaper, healthier, ethical, and environmental option, but they do not. Another user here in this thread literally told me they would not consider switching away from meat because the alternatives were not perfect replacements, and were not inclined to try impossible even after being informed it has advanced to be a 1-to-1 replacement. It was not economic. In their own words:
“Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up. I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.”
Consider that the wealthier people in the world could afford to choose a slightly more expensive meat alternative, but they do not. The middle class can afford a slightly more expensive meat alternative, they do not. The poor could opt for cheaper plant meat alternatives, they do not. Anyone could choose to simply eat less meat, or cut out red meat at the very least (the most emissions) in favor of chicken or fish, but they do not.
Demand for red meat increases with the economic wealth of a nation. Only India bucks that trend somewhat due to having a culture of vegetarianism. My point is that despite having access to viable alternatives, even if made so similarly that it is hard to tell the difference, people choose not to adopt them, even though a collective consumer choice would drastically help our chances at surviving climate change.
I can’t speak to Quorn, although I’m a big fan of portobello mushrooms. By weight, it has not been my experience that mushrooms are cheaper than ground beef or chicken. But also, to say mushrooms aren’t a popular and common part of the modern diet… that’s obviously not true.
Seitan is awful. If you’re looking that hard for a protein substitute, just eat beans. Jesus Christ.
Tofu is everywhere. Probably the most popular vegetarian option in the country by now. East Asians love it. West Coast liberals love it. But you really need cooking oil to make it work (which is expensive and really requires a full kitchen to use). And, again, not meaningfully cheaper than chicken legs or thighs.
None of these compare to staples like rice, corn, and beans, which regularly go for under $1/lb even in our inflated food markets.
People could, right now, choose the cheaper, healthier, ethical, and environmental option
People regularly revert to staples when the price of food climbs. But that’s not an ethical choice, its an economic one.
Fast food also has a huge impact on the prevailing diet. As goes McDs, so goes the nation. And the agg industry has a huge influence over McDs, through their own propaganda campaigns to smear meat alternatives as unappealing.
But even beyond that, impossible/beyond substitutes continue to track at prices comparable to beef, especially when you use industrial preservation (pink slime) in transit and storage.
Demand for red meat increases with the economic wealth of a nation.
Wealth per capita, sure. But we’ve been consolidating our wealth for the last two decades. And, also, ecological collapse.
You’re not really understanding my argument. Those alternatives exist and people eat them, I’m saying that societal demand for animal protein is not plateauing nor shrinking; that means people are not choosing those alternatives over animal meat if the meat is available and affordable. That results in more greenhouse gases and water usage that is unsustainable.
They exist in confined locales with very limited marketing and circulation. They are meat-alternatives as an aesthetic lifestyle choice, not material changes in cost of living. They certainly aren’t bulk distributed as part of a public campaign to address malnutrition, backfill food deserts, or offer an alternative to cheap and poisonous fast food franchises.
You keep coming at this as an individualist. “People can just pick the other thing”. No they fucking can’t. Shouting “eat less meat!” out the window of your Tesla as you drive over the overpass that abuts an impoverished neighborhood, because you don’t like what people are shopping for at the local 7-11 is fucking clueless.
Ignoring the enormous impact that Big Agg lobbyists have on what food ends up in school cafeterias or budget grocery store shopping aisles is, similarly, cloistered.
people are not choosing those alternatives
People are already choosing rice and beans as a consistent substitute for higher priced food. If you really want to decouple the population as a whole from the meat manufacturing process, you need to address the manufacturing process and stop getting angry at random people.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
We’ve had a surge of green energy investment in large part due to rising energy costs. Ironically enough, it’s the fossil fuel industry that created these skyrocketing electricity costs.
But the real run away investment has been in socialist states that dictate the market. Not market states that leave investment to the whims of investors.
Then get off your ass and do it. You’ve clearly got the genius to run a multi billion dollar expansion. Give Sysco a call. Let them know you’re going to revolutionize the agricultural industry by the end of the decade.
Don’t waste time talking to me. Go go go! The world is at stake!!!
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice. Western societies currently demand animal meat over plant meat by a wide margin, even though plant meat can oftentimes be cheaper. To be clear, I think subsidized/free low-carbon emission food for the hungry would be awesome, but it’s not what was being argued. My point was that good alternatives exist currently at either price parity with real meat, or are sometimes even cheaper, and they are not chosen by consumers over animal meat.
The last segment of your comment is odd, sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire by their bootstraps if they happen to comment on how effortlessly multinational corporations seem to acquire investment capital.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush to be distributed with existing low cost transportation and supply systems, then it is to find investment capital for large-scale power production with thin profit margins and an inefficient multi-year long waiting list of connection approvals, and where any new public infrastructure needed to support any new private energy project must be paid for one the projects in line (the first one willing to put up the cash, making them all wait to see if someone else will go for it).
They regularly by cheap heavily subsidized ground beef and fried pork/chicken because it is cheap. In many cases, meat is cheaper by weight than equivalent vegan options (particularly fresh vegetables) entirely because of our land use policies and agricultural subsidies. Put alt-meat on the shelf at a price point below trad meats and you’ll see consumers shift accordingly. Right now, ground beef sells for under $5/lb while Impossible Beef sells for around $7/lb.
Again, you frame this as an individual choice rather than a public policy. Homeless people aren’t homeless because they failed to become millionaires. They’re homeless because the cost of housing exceeds their income. If you handed everyone in the country a $1M check, they’d still be homeless, because private real estate would price itself above these newly-minted millionaires ability to buy in. By contrast, if a municipality or state expands the stock of public housing, nobody needs to increase their income in order to house the homeless.
Great. Then go out and do it. Get Impossible Beef under the Possible Beef price point. Then watch how quickly the public adopts the alternative.
Quorn (an excellent vegetarian meat alternative grown from a fungus) has been around since the 1980’s, and is at price parity with animal ground beef. It has never been more popular than animal meat. Seitan made from vital wheat gluten at home is $1.80 a pound, and can replicate a side of ham, beef, or roast chicken with different flavorings. It is not popular among non-vegetarians or vegans in the west, even the impoverished, despite its low cost. The most expensive Tofu is cheaper than ground beef with comparable protein content, and can be an excellent tasting alternative. Lentils can fill in for ground beef (though not comparable in taste to meat alternatives) and provide far more protein content per dollar than ground beef can provide.
I agree that factory farming combined with subsidies are artificially making animal meat affordable enough for mass adoption, and that if those practices were ended, people would be forced to switch away from it as a main source of food. This is a similar quandary to gasoline.
But even with those subsidies, there are vegetarian options that are currently cheaper than real meat, yet are not chosen by the consumer.
The issue is not purely economics, but cultural. People could, right now, choose the cheaper, healthier, ethical, and environmental option, but they do not. Another user here in this thread literally told me they would not consider switching away from meat because the alternatives were not perfect replacements, and were not inclined to try impossible even after being informed it has advanced to be a 1-to-1 replacement. It was not economic. In their own words:
Consider that the wealthier people in the world could afford to choose a slightly more expensive meat alternative, but they do not. The middle class can afford a slightly more expensive meat alternative, they do not. The poor could opt for cheaper plant meat alternatives, they do not. Anyone could choose to simply eat less meat, or cut out red meat at the very least (the most emissions) in favor of chicken or fish, but they do not.
Demand for red meat increases with the economic wealth of a nation. Only India bucks that trend somewhat due to having a culture of vegetarianism. My point is that despite having access to viable alternatives, even if made so similarly that it is hard to tell the difference, people choose not to adopt them, even though a collective consumer choice would drastically help our chances at surviving climate change.
I can’t speak to Quorn, although I’m a big fan of portobello mushrooms. By weight, it has not been my experience that mushrooms are cheaper than ground beef or chicken. But also, to say mushrooms aren’t a popular and common part of the modern diet… that’s obviously not true.
Seitan is awful. If you’re looking that hard for a protein substitute, just eat beans. Jesus Christ.
Tofu is everywhere. Probably the most popular vegetarian option in the country by now. East Asians love it. West Coast liberals love it. But you really need cooking oil to make it work (which is expensive and really requires a full kitchen to use). And, again, not meaningfully cheaper than chicken legs or thighs.
None of these compare to staples like rice, corn, and beans, which regularly go for under $1/lb even in our inflated food markets.
People regularly revert to staples when the price of food climbs. But that’s not an ethical choice, its an economic one.
Fast food also has a huge impact on the prevailing diet. As goes McDs, so goes the nation. And the agg industry has a huge influence over McDs, through their own propaganda campaigns to smear meat alternatives as unappealing.
But even beyond that, impossible/beyond substitutes continue to track at prices comparable to beef, especially when you use industrial preservation (pink slime) in transit and storage.
Wealth per capita, sure. But we’ve been consolidating our wealth for the last two decades. And, also, ecological collapse.
You’re not really understanding my argument. Those alternatives exist and people eat them, I’m saying that societal demand for animal protein is not plateauing nor shrinking; that means people are not choosing those alternatives over animal meat if the meat is available and affordable. That results in more greenhouse gases and water usage that is unsustainable.
They exist in confined locales with very limited marketing and circulation. They are meat-alternatives as an aesthetic lifestyle choice, not material changes in cost of living. They certainly aren’t bulk distributed as part of a public campaign to address malnutrition, backfill food deserts, or offer an alternative to cheap and poisonous fast food franchises.
You keep coming at this as an individualist. “People can just pick the other thing”. No they fucking can’t. Shouting “eat less meat!” out the window of your Tesla as you drive over the overpass that abuts an impoverished neighborhood, because you don’t like what people are shopping for at the local 7-11 is fucking clueless.
Ignoring the enormous impact that Big Agg lobbyists have on what food ends up in school cafeterias or budget grocery store shopping aisles is, similarly, cloistered.
People are already choosing rice and beans as a consistent substitute for higher priced food. If you really want to decouple the population as a whole from the meat manufacturing process, you need to address the manufacturing process and stop getting angry at random people.