I'm no expert, but I expect land is different in different places. There are different sources of feed. Someone changes a supplier or a farming practice, and it changes a number in a spreadsheet, and you'll get a different answer.
Accounting gets complicated enough with money. When you're doing science it's much more difficult.
This sounds like the sort of thing that scientists and economists can debate for decades. I'm certainly not going to trust some unsourced numbers in a press release.
The burger is made primarily from Soy. Soy accounts for 2/3 of global protein feed. Humans eating directly from livestock's primary food source is likely to be much more efficient at a global scale.
Where did you get soy is the primary food source for cattle?
This article recommends no more than 20% soy in cattle’s diet. The article is from last year. [1]
>Researchers have found that when the oil content of the ration exceeds 7 percent, it can be toxic to the microbes in the cattle’s rumen and decrease digestibility. Too much oil in cattle rations will lead to scours (diarrhea), cessation of rumen fermentation and, eventually, death.
“Because of these limitations, the recommended upper limit of feeding would be about 20 percent of the ration,” Hoppe says. “Practical feeding levels are probably more like 2 to 3 pounds per head per day. At this low rate of supplementation, soybeans provide an excellent source of protein and energy.”
Interesting, this might be why soy is pressed for its oil before being used as cattle feed. The resulting patties are used as feed and the oil byproduct is sold.
It is not feasible for a farmer to buy feed during the lifetime of the animal. It’s the reason they have huge pastures for grazing during warm months. During winter they are usually fed hay.
All beef is grass fed period. Some are finished at the end with corn or other dense grains (your soy patties).
I am not sure about california, but I can confirm that Texas beef is essentially all grass-fed. This is from observation and from speaking with ranchers I know. Grass-fed also has a better taste, in my opinion.
There is nowhere near enough grass to feed nearly all Texas cattle to marketable size in Texas. Nearly all commercial cattle are bred and born in Mexico from US genetic stock and transferred to the US for fattening with cattle feed because it is cheaper to breed in Mexico and feed in the US. Last I checked only about 3% of US beef was fully grass fed. So it's fully possible you know some grass fed ranchers, but it's unlikely that the second biggest export in Texas is possible without massive amounts of cattle feed. Grass fed beef tasting better is subjective but the costs associated with the process appear to dictate that to consumers it's something they are willing to pay for.
It takes energy to process soya into an edible patty. It does for meat patties as well, so I am curious about the comparison (eg. a soy patty takes x Kw to make, a beef one takes y Kw).
Where I think meat has an advantage is that "we" don't need to use energy to make the patty taste good, the cow does that naturally using the feed. But a soy patty needs all sorts of things added to it and we need to use energy and water to actively process it into something edible.
If we were just eating the soya beans as we pulled them out of the ground, it would be far more sustainable. But beef tastes great right off the cow! Soya is quite bland.
It's more efficient to ship grain than cattle, and most cattle still requires feed to get to market size. The whole mythos behind cattle drives was to get them to a location for slaughter and shipping. The same exact thing you said about cattle is the same as grains, except cows require more water external to the grass.Cows also require maintenance above what crops typically do as well. Ranchers are very good at what they do, however it's still a ton of work. Farming is slowly becoming significantly more automated, which is a good thing as less people are interested in becoming farmers.
Your right I probably should have disclosed that I previously worked there but it's fairly clear from my post history so I figured it didn't matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This may be the current case, but it doesn't, indeed shouldn't, be so. It just happens that in the US, CAFO's are the best (financially) way to raise beef cattle.
In any case, livestock's primary food source should never have been soy beans.
Soy contains phytoestrogens which certain populations (e.g. women pregnant with male fetuses) may be advised to reduce intake of or avoid. Something to keep in mind as meat replacements become more popular - that it may not be a one-size-fits-all solution.
I recently looked into the literature and I think the evidence is ambiguous [1]
If you've found some clear evidence supporting your case, could you point me in the right direction?
Complete bogus, please abstain from spreading this misinformation. Unlike animal products which contain actual hormones active in humans plant products have an negligible effect and you would have to consume impossible amounts for the smallest of effects. Further, phytoestrogens actually benefit humans
From what I understand, the phytoestrogens take the place of real mammalian estrogen, but our bodies don't process it like real estrogen, so its actually good for men who want less estrogen. It acts almost like an estrogen blocker.
Whereas drinking cow's milk, for example, is high in estrogen because its from it comes from a large female after giving birth.
The estrogen in beef is actual, mammalian estrogen. Which would you expect your body to interact most within digestion? Of course it’s going to be the stuff that’s closest to it.
The FUD being spread around soy is ridiculous.
Other nutrients that tend to be harder to find in plants than animals also tend to be more poorly absorbed than their animal counterparts. B12, iron, d, zinc, etc.
I would not expect a better reaction from actual, mammalian estrogen. It doesn't work that way with opioids: carfentanyl is a whole lot more powerful than dynorphins, enkephalins, endorphins, endomorphins and nociceptin.
Also, quantity matters. Plants might produce a lot more than mammals do.
In any case, the breast growth on males is no joke. That is just the affect on adults, who are far less susceptible than babies. However it works, soy is a serious hazard and should have the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status removed.
It sounds like you didn't read the report or check the references on page 26.
I recommend reading this paper and coming to your own conclusion about "almost no doubt". Within sustainability science, there is little debate about the lack of efficiency to produce protein via cows.
That's more impressive, and yet, as a non-expert, I still don't know how to evaluate whether the calculation is bug-free. Do you? I guess I'd have to track down all the references and build my own spreadsheet? There are some spreadsheets listed in the references, but it seems like a complicated task.
Just to nit-pick one little detail, it seems to treat all land the same: "Significant decreases in land occupation also follow from a shift away from animal-based foodstuffs. The VEG and VGN occupy 70% and 79% less land than the MUD, respectively (VEG = -63% and VGN = -74% for isocaloric diet comparison)."
But, prime farmland and grazing for grass-fed beef aren't the same, so adding them up and taking a percentage seems dubious. (I'm also skeptical of estimates with no margin of error.)
Given that no single scientific paper is definitive (you need to read the literature) I don't see how to come to a conclusion on any of this without a whole lot more work than I'm going to put into it for an online discussion.
While I don't have a basis for saying the most common take on things is wrong, the way I think of this is: what's the likelihood that we'll see a new study that proves the opposite of what most non-experts (or even experts) currently believe?
In the case of nutrition, economics, and ecology, my rough answer is "rather high". (Consider Piketty and spreadsheet errors.) And answering this question combines all of them. If being right matters, I'd hedge my bets.
Most people aren't heavily invested in Impossible Foods, so bet-hedging basically means letting them do their thing and seeing how it turns out. I look forward to trying their new product.
I'm just quibbling with "no doubt". Just like being an expert in most subjects is unnecessary, being doubt-free is unnecessary for most people in most subjects, and I think most conversations would go better if the true believers (and radical cynics) backed off a bit and acknowledged uncertainty.
While I take your point that there is always some uncertainty involved sometimes it is just not that productive to reinforce doubt... otherwise we would never move forward.
Look at climate change... are we 100% certain? Of course not but there is overwhelming evidence that is just prudent to act even for the faint possibility of being wrong.
Same here... logic (how could be creating a living thing to slaughter it and eat it be more effecient than processing and eating the feed itself? That would mean raising an animal with all its (unnecessary) complexity was more efficient than our focused industrial processes...) and evidence (e.g., scientific studies and calculations) very much point to the direction that production of meat alternatives would be much more environmentally friendly (at scale).
I don’t think this is so much about “true believers” but there is simply a lot of evidence pointing in the direction that this is really something that could improve the world in many dimensions.
But you are certainly right that like any other pursuit this should be done dillegiently and with care. If you have specific criticism of some evidence that should be discussed... However, there is no need to be overly sceptic and lay bricks on the road if there is no credible evidence pointing in that direction (In this case baseline skepticism doesn’t seem to hold up against the available evidence at this point). Change will be difficult and reinforcing doubt might delay the development and roll out of viable products at high costs to environment and animals.
Until we stop wasting farmland growing crops for cows their is zero difference between crop land and farm land.
Scrub land filled with cows is obviously terrible for the environment, but so is the wasteland traditional farming creates. We call it insecticide but it really kills off entire ecosystems. Minimizing impact means minimizing the land we use.
The original comment wrote off the report as "some unsourced numbers in a press release" - I aimed to show it was more than that. Impossible has quite the academic rigor.
Agreed - there's plenty of room to interpret the specific numbers.
Sure it's less efficient when compared to high protein crops, but there are vaste acres of land that can't be farmed and can only sustain grazing animals (and then some of those are more feed efficient than others, say, cows vs sheep)
They would need change their model to meat based burgers after they gain market share for their mission to be BS. Profit has nothing to do with it.
What you are proposing would prevent them from building a healthy company that can maximize market share and have the largest possible beneficial impact on the environment. I want them to drive all the meat based competitors out of business.
Why does it have to be this company maximizing market share? Releasing the IP would allow others to do that as well, likely increasing the overall meatless share.
I don’t know since I am not the CEO or even in the industry.
Maybe open source IP model would fail to get critical mass. Maybe the best path forward is to get Burger King as an investor.
If they maximize profits while still being committed to an environmentaly friendly meat replacement, that doesn’t mean they are limiting their impact in any way. It’s just as likely they are maximizing their impact.
I personally don’t care how much money they make, but I do care about the environment and animal rights.
So one reason companies like to vertically integrate with companies that supply the goods/services they use in their products is to open up economies of scale and decrease costs. Ie instead of getting protein from an animal that has to be raised on plants they’re getting protein straight from the plant source. It’s always going to be a cheaper to go closer to the source, “if you can make it work” - in a sane universe without subsidies.
I agree. They "conveniently" forget to state their primary mission: make a bundle for the proprietors (founders, investors, etc). Either in profit or at exits.
While doing that they have some additional missions, which is cool, but in absence of that first point I do agree it comes off as marketing BS.
There's a really handy way to estimate the amount of resources that go into (and thus, the environmental impact of) making a product:
Its price.
When these are significantly cheaper than beef, then it'll be safe to state categorically that they are better for the environment. Until then, it's mostly a game of "pay attention to these metrics that favor my product and ignore the metrics which favor the competition".
but environmental impact is often an externality that isn't included in the price.
If you ignore that, you get all kinds of obviously wrong things: a cheap gas guzzling car is cleaner than a tesla; natgas for electricity is cleaner than nuclear. etc. And worse, when you start talking about tech that hasn't scaled up yet.. if you go back 10 years, you would get: solar panels are worse than burning coal.
The price is not an indicator of environmental impact.
The price of beef does not include the environmental impact so I'm not sure this is a good indicator of the impact of making a product. Beef/Milk in the USA is also subsidized...
Beef is expensive though! I don't think people are reading the grandparent post carefully enough. I think the point is correct.
Obviously at the margins there are costs to environmental impact that may or may not be realized in consumer pricing and there's lots to argue about on the regulatory side.
But in general, if you have to "equivalent" products shipped and produced in bulk, and one costs 4x as much as another (roughly where "beef vs. soy protein" lands for the consumer), it's a really good bet that the cheaper one involved less energy to produce.
Or there are significant fixed costs that have not been amortized - for example, R&D for an entirely new type of burger. It’s very possible that the materials cost (growing ingredients + manufacturing) of the impossible burger is less than the materials costs of a beef burger while still costing more in a store.
Not the person you're responding to, but their grand parent. If you look at food costs at the grocery store, it's pretty clear that a plant based burger which is cheaper than a beef based burger is possible in theory. And I actually believe that this will happen eventually, but I was responding to somebody who was stating categorically that these burgers were more environmentally friendly than beef burgers. My point was simply that that's probably not the case today.
And to speak to your point specifically: if it were simply a matter of reducing per-unit R&D costs by achieving economies of scale, they should be selling below cost so that they can grow unit volume. It's hard to achieve economies of scale when your product is more expensive than the competition.
Impossible has an environmental mission first.
Checkout the sustainability report from 2017 http://www.ift.org/~/media/Food%20Technology/Weekly/IF_Susta...
Or the update from 2018 https://impossiblefoods.com/if-pr/2018-Impact-Update/