only 29% more expensive is still criminally cheap for meat prices. meat and dairy subsidies have made a western world where i typically need to pay the same or more for a vegggie burger than a meat one.
29% should be more like 70%.
If the meatless option is 29% cheaper, the meat option is .29/(1-.29) = 41% more expensive, not 29%. Meatballs in the article are .41/(1-.41) = 69% more expensive than plantballs, which is close to your target number.
I remember the days when a veggie cheeseburger was a grilled cheese sandwich. Progress.
this math hurt my head, but i thank you
Never too late to get better at anything. I’ll give it my best shot, but if it still doesn’t make sense, ask an LLM to explain anything that doesn’t make sense, and keep digging, and you’ll know it inside and out.
Basically, if the price was p currency units and is now 29% off, the price is now p-.29p = (1-.29)p currency units (by the distributive property). The old price is .29p currency units higher than the new price, and as a fraction of the new price, that is .29p/[(1-.29)p] higher. The p’s cancel out, so this fraction does not depend on the starting price. Write that fraction as a percent (per 100), and you get your answer.
It’s not obvious when looking at it. Numbers can be inconvenient.
Same with alcohol-free beer and other drinks. Somehow they always cost considerably more than regular ones.
They don’t make the drink and then pour in rubbing alcohol at the end.
Non-alcoholic versions of drinks cost at least as much to produce (many cost more because they’re removing the alcohol at the end of the process), and they’re way less popular, so the economies of scale makes the alcoholic versions cheaper per unit.
thing with that is that they actually have to produce those drinks normally and then remove the alcohol, so the process is actually more expensive and labor intensive. at least thats what i heard on the radio one day, im no expert.
You have to feed the yeast enough to make the beer which gets at least a few percent alcohol, otherwise you’d just have porridge.
Don’t forget the cross subsidies from co-products.
If ground beef (aka beef mince in the UK where this story is running) is the cheapest trimmings that remain after all of the expensive cuts have been processed, it’s entirely possible that the low price for this byproduct is partially subsidized by the high prices for the premium product (expensive steaks, moderate expense whole cuts). Plus things like hides for leather.
For now, the plant-based competition is aiming at the types of meat that are easier to mimic or replace with plant-based foods. And unfortunately, those happen to be the cheaper types of meat. If we get to the point where there is significant plant-based competition to filet mignon, that product will have a lot more room to work with in being price competitive.
Pricing inputs get complicated, and government subsidies are only a piece of the picture.
what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said. im posing that without the heavy subsidies, we would see a more accurate consumer pricing, that remains true. of course there are other factors involved, that goes without saying.
what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said.
Not every reply to a comment is intended to do that.
well forgive me, but it seemed like there was a tone of correction happening, my bad.
No worries. I just think pricing dynamics are neat and I wanted to talk about them.
meat and dairy subsidies
That has been proven to be incorrect: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/meat-subsidies
Removing the subsidies would rise the prices by cents.
Raw food - any food - is dirt cheap. Most of the costs is the chain of logistics (and that every middleman takes their cut).
A plant should have been way cheaper than meat to begin with. Who do they think they’re fooling?
Just of the top of my head here are some possible ideas to explain why not:
- Meat subsidies
- Meat substitutes require more processing and additional ingredients
- Meat sells a lot more than meat substitutes hence the whole chain benefits more from economies of scale
- Animals raised for meat can extract nutrition from plants and parts of plants which humans cannot (for example cattle can actually break up the fiber in food and extract nutrition from it, which humans cannot), plus they can eat plants which are far more hardy than most plants grown for human consumption. Some will also eat other animals which humans do not, such as insects.
I doubt it’s just one of those things that is responsible and suspect it’s a mix of those and maybe more.
Meat and dairy are heavily subsidised
I don’t know about your country, but here in Poland “meat subsidies” are targeted at improving animal welfare or insurance (e.g. from avian flu for poultry). I fail to see how it is a problem?
This is correct, however:
You need to also take into account that plants are just the primary ingredients and it needs a lot of intermediary steps during manufacturing.
I say this not to say you’re incorrect but just to be a more complete picture so it’s unassailable
what are you on about? don’t you know it’s far cheaper to grow a bunch of plants and then feed it to an animal for a long period of time while that animal grows and then harvest that animal for a small portion of the calories it consumed?
If it is the same process I saw years ago they extract something from vegetables that is what gives blood its color and taste, and that is the the sauce that make it taste like meat, and that process, I guess, is expensive at least in part because plants have very little of this compound.
Fake meat is expensive because greedy capitalists know they can charge more for it, simple as that.
Tell that to BeyondMeat bag holders. -99.10% return in 5 years, the greedy capitalist pigdogs.
Haha I didn’t know that, that’s sorts funny, rip to them
Or maybe because stupid prols are paying premium and letting themselves get fucked
Agree but if there isn’t another option what else can they do
I can chime in here (I work in plant based meat). It should be but it’s not. Why… Lots of reasons. But basicly it’s split between animal based meat is artificially cheap and plant based meat costs a lot to make. A lot of the costs (for the good brands) are in the flavorings.
It will only be cheap with large economy of scale factories
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Genuinely I might end up going vegan for mostly financial reasons
There’s some good vegan recipe communities here on lemmy if you want some inspiration
Thanccs :3
And 90% of them tend to be shit that tastes or looks good.
I have some ugly, tasteless tofu ready instead. Now to figure out how to season it to make it edible without overdosing on it.
And I still had to include 4 eggs. It’s more ethical than eating the animal itself, but still…
Had to reread that like 5 times to realize you were not saying that you thought those were bad recipes
That’s 90% of the problem. People can’t read, get upset, bring on the mob, torches, and pitchforks.
I say shit anyway.
I love vegetarian food but they can pull eggs and dairy from my cold dead hands. I will never give either of those up ever.
Ironically, I hate eggs, unless they are like Pancakes or cakes, I love cheese/milk, but I cannot live without Vitamin B12, and I feel reinforced defeats the point. There’s some unstable ones from microorganisms on certain mushrooms. You can’t predict if it is present or not, which is a problem.
I secretly tried to go full vegan, though I would be open to eating meat and such, I didn’t want to DEPEND on anything that walks, I wanted vegeterian to be the food basis.
I also do thing it is a good practice to practice non-harm (issue with the animals themselves, I do NOT enjoy knowing something has to die or be exploited for me to eat, I do not want to live that way), but I also want to get away with it by using fake meat like Tofu, without doing the whole “I’m vegan you fucking carno-murderhobos!”. I want to pretend to be a carno, I’d also eat roadkill, so long as I don’t depend on it (it is more about resources and safety than purely ethics, ethics too though).
Vegetarian but when I don’t have my kids I’m kinda already there. It’s so good for your heart health as well btw. There’s no where for your fibre intake to go but up. I would suggest talk to a nutritionist though because you will very likely need a supplement or two there are some vitamins/minerals that are just hard to get from vegetable sources at the volume you get from meat.
This image always upsets me. I really don’t think Ronnie O’Sullivan deserves this treatment. At least not that I know of.
I don’t know who that is.
I thought the MAGA clowns were going to import Argentinian beef to lower the prices in the USA? Oh the fuck well. Zero sympathy, you voted for the BS.
MAGA importing beef… to the UK?
You mean donkeys?
Omg we need this in Argentina
lol what you guys need is a decent government Anna voters who aren’t complete morons
When Beyond Beef switched from v2 to the v3 (w/ avocado oil), my wife and I tried it and were like, “THERE IT IS! They finally fucked up a good thing, as predicted…”
But after eating v3 for several months and lucking my way back into a box of v2 at Costco, I can firmly say that v2 was kind of shit.
You just have to season your Beyond Burgers now, is all. You didn’t have to before. At least we never did.
V2 was awful. And so salty it made my skin tingle.
V3 is like night and day.
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Agreed on all counts. I had already tried them all as I wanted to favor plant based meat on an ecological basis, but my daughter became a vegetarian so I been methodically trying everything on the market and Impossible is better in the beef-like category for sure.
I tried the Impossible pre-made burgers at home and they tasted like rubber gloves or something, so we haven’t tried them again since. What do you season yours with?
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Not the person you replied to, but I season them exactly as I would any other burger and they come out pretty good. I will note that they are picky in how they are cooked (not the actual ground beef isn’t), but you can’t cook them quite the same. If you overcook them, the texture/taste call off a cliff.
I think Quorn has been cheaper than meat for ages. But then it doesn’t taste as good, so I stopped buying it years ago.
The Beyond stuff is way more than beef costs. £4 for 250g vs £2.69 for the same amount of meat. And that’s the 5% fat beef as well.
The bolognese sauce costs me more than the meat in any case, not to mention the gargantuan amount of cheese we put on lasagne.
You shouldn’t be paying that much for Bolognese sauce, it is cheap to make and tastes better.
Supermarket brand sauce is like 70p, but it tastes shit. And tbh, the good stuff is 3 quid, and it’s worth paying that over chopping and stirring stuff for an hour.
Bro how expensive are tomatoes in the UK for bolognese to be that much more expensive than the meat to put in it?
lol fucking where??? Im in a major city in Canada and a lb of beyond or impossible is like $10+ An impossible whopper has come down in price but it’s still more expensive than a regular. Thats always been the issue with plant based beef, even though it’s made of soy, it costs me double what beef does, so I don’t blame poor people avoiding it
In Tesco apparently.
it doesnt cost double, youre just being charged double. the prices only make sense due to the colossal subsidies from the animal agriculture lobbies
Briefly, Beyond Burger burger patties were cheaper in a (U.S.) Costco than the equivalent Morton’s patties.
It got me to try their v3 forumula… and its actually really good. You have to grill the snot out of it, but it’s good.
Beyond Meat is at the point where carnivores won’t notice unless you point it out to them.
Which is one of the reasons a lot of vegetarians I know don’t like it, it tastes like they remember meat tasting and grosses them out.
Nostalgia is a hell of a thing and it applies to food too. I went veg a few years back and sometimes I want that texture and flavor a cheeseburger provides and beyond or impossible patty hits the mark close enough. I think it really lowers the barriers to entry for that kind of dietary restriction. Now if I could find a good substitute for bacon I’d be in heaven but everything I’ve tried tases like cardboard or like those stale beacon bits.
I think the latter paragraph is too generalized. As a vegan I’m delighted if I find a product that tastes like I remember my favourite meat dishes tasted.
Yeah, no, I refuse to eat anything that has “versions” and my diet is limiting consumption of anything that needs a formula to make. Those are not indicators of food fit for human consumption.
(Before someone calls me names, I’m on plant-based)
They’re specifically trying to emulate food people know (like burger patties). In that context, I think versioning makes sense: “this is our 1st attempt, our second is closer, our third is…”
And it’s something you buy if you specifically want emulation.
You aren’t wrong: direct, less processed diets are better. I’m just saying that this food is for a more narrow purpose.
I predicted this a few years ago while at the same time saying “I hope I am being a pessimist”. I really didn’t want this to be how plant based meat alternatives became more popular.
It’s always been cheaper than the actual meat. It’d be weird if it wasn’t.
it most often isnt, and it IS weird. pretty simple tho, its just bc of subsidies to dairy and meat
just bc of subsidies to dairy and meat
That has been proven to be incorrect: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/meat-subsidies
Removing the subsidies would rise the prices by cents.
Raw food - any food - is dirt cheap. Most of the costs is the chain of logistics (and that every middleman takes their cut).
I mean beyond meat production process is famously industrial and complex; there’s even South Park episode on it where Cartman agrees to eat it because it’s the same unhealthy factory made slop that he’s used to.
Now, for the beyond meat oil use. They apparently dropped refined coconut and canola oil in favour of avocado oil. And oh boy, avocado oil production is almost as bad as if Nestle owned all of it, but at least it should be healthier than coconut/canola mix, right? And then most avocado oil is fraudulent soybean/sunflower/other mixes.
And then there’s also avocado oil deforestation/water use etc.
My points are:
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Beyond Meat is slop; let’s not switch processed cold cuts for a sludge.
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you’re better off (health-wise and climate wise) making different bean patties (chop 'em, freeze 'em, shape 'em, cook 'em) and lowering your red meat intake than switching to beyond meat.
The process around meat is no less industrial either. Whole food plant-based diets come out ahead health wise of course, but the research comparing animal meats to beyond show beyond coming out ahead for health
In terms of environmental effects, processing is not a major factor at all. It’s hardly a minor one either
For most foods — and particularly the largest emitters — most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green) and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers — both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods.
[…]
Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.
No.
She bases that information on LCA. LCAs are bullshit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016724002511
Tldr; they are self reported, aggregate data globally and treats the whole globe uniformly, instead of looking at local qualities; and Beyond Meat conviviently for them does not provide even that data for it’s whole supply chain. That means for example that the total carbon footprint of beef of worst industrial farms is applied across all beef produce, even though industrial farms deliver only about 13% of beef worldwide.
Generally I recommend the linked article, they explain why Beyond Meat and similar are just wasting your time at best, or sinister capitalist trick at worst.
Again, the way forward is:
Whole food plant-based diets
and interim is switching feedlot farming and similar to
Furthermore, framing animals as unilaterally less efficient than plants assumes that neither animal production systems nor meat consumption habits can be pushed in more sustainable directions. However, abundant options to make animal-sourced foods more sustainable could be explored, including agro-pastoral, agro-silvo-pastoral (mixed crop-livestock-forest), and regenerative agriculture systems (Costa et al., 2018).
Almost all global meat production happens in factory farms. Especially in developed countries with the highest meat consumption. I will look at the US for an example:
Currently, ‘grass-finished’ beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.[1] Land animal figures use data from the USDA Census of Agriculture[2] and EPA definitions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.[3]
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates
Even if those other methods could magically do much better, which I significantly doubt given the history of those kinds of methods over promising and under delivering, it does relatively little good to look at any other method because they do not come close to scaling to the level of consumption we’re seeing here. A pasture only system could at most come to a small fraction of production. Using 100% of the land, which would create huge deforestation pressures
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that a lot of people that start on things like beyond and impossible end up eventually switching to much more whole plant-based foods in the end anyways. It allow a lot more easy room to bridge to whole foods than starting with just 100% whole food is for a lot of people
I will look at the US for an example By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows
Cool. As the authors of the study I linked wrote, with sources, global stat is <13%.
Example: dairy, 1 liter of milk requires - depending on the method and location -between 19L of freshwater (section 5.2) to almost 3000L, median 196. In USA it starts at ~700L.
99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are
Interestingly average poultry requires less land than average pulses. And there’s this gem from section 5.2 (again, the linked document has further sources) further explaining why LCA or applying US averages globally is wrong.
As another example, that the lowest 10 percentile footprint dairy farms have lower greenhouse gas equivalent emissions than the 90th percentile soy, nut, and oat farm
Using 100% of the land, which would create huge deforestation pressures
Same study, point 4.1.
which I significantly doubt given the history of those kinds of methods over promising and under delivering
5.1 and 5.3 why Beyond Meat and similar are over promising and under delivering, with already established examples that show that the substitutes did not decrease meat/dairy consumptions but added to the total consumption.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that a lot of people that start on things like beyond and impossible end up eventually switching to much more whole plant-based foods in the end anyways.
Citation needed.
I think this is my last post in the thread (and I guess yours too, we seem to exhaust the topic between us).
To sum it up:
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we agree on whole plant based diet being the goal
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we disagree on the interim diet and how to encourage and enable the transition from current meat-based diets
the hayek paper uncritically cites poore-nemecek 2018. I don’t believe they are practicing good science here, either
what a thread to hold on to.
leave me alone
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What’s the carbon footprint of BM? I remember being told it was very high, but hard to find numbers.
Not sure what you mean by BM (I assume Beyond Meat?), but every single plant-based food comes out insanely far ahead from animal based foods
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy. https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Fantastic, thank you for the update. And yes I did mean beyond meat. I happen to think it’s super tasty.
Ew, plant based meat
If you want to go vegan/vegetarian just do yourself a favor and learn how to cook vegetables
South asia and southeast asia have a lot of really good vegetarian recipes
Certainly better than these “meat” at least
ew? its just plants prepared in familiar form factors and flavor profiles. let people enjoy plants the way they want.
Highly processed foods are actually quite bad for human nutrition, the more processed they are the worst.
That’s not specifically a problem for meat substitutes.
I expect that when you’re trying to make plants taste and feel like meat there’s a lot of processing involved as well as a lot of funnily named additives which might or not fall (or latter been discovered as falling) into to the “possibly carcinogenic” category.
Maybe that’s were the previous poster is coming from: best just eat good vegetarian food that’s enjoyable on its own merits than go for highly processed food loaded with additives to try and emulate meat’s flavor profile and texture.
i understand all those generalizations, and i dont take issue with any of them. Im not like super upset at them or anything, just replying to the energy i was picking up. No hate, just wish people would chill about telling other vegans/vegetarians how to eat.
I will agree that aiming for a meat substitute is meh, but I will argue that it is a good stepping stone and also texture variety is nice. not that most plant based meat have good texture tho lol
Food imitation is a brand new field of science developed only within the last 15 years or so. It is incredible that its as close as it is already. And frankly, the share of the population to go vegetarian has never budged before the introduction of these products. Them getting better and cheaper is pretty much the only thing that could move the needle at this point.
Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of overly processed foods, but based on most diets, no doubt there’s a sizable market. If people like it, by all means, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it’s particularly healthy.
I’m not vegetarian, but I do go long periods without buying meat. Beans, lentils, tempeh, mushrooms, and an array of spices and fermented foods easily provide enough umami. Toss some mixture of that atop a rainbow of veggies and bangarang.
I agree with you, for the most part. Fresh veggie stir fry beats beyond burger any day
