Also, I'm curious what the actual impact of it is. One of the main arguments against meat is that it takes a great deal more energy and work to create 1 pound of plant food than 1 pound of meat. From what I've seen, beyond meat uses some sort of manufacturing process to create it. How much energy does it take to ship all those materials and run that factory?
It's about 6 times more energy intensive to order chemicals from new jersey and stir them in a vat than it is to ship live cattle to a slaughter house and butcher them.
Essentially all the cost of feeding and cleaning the cattle is very low, and storage of raw meat after slaughter is very cheap.
Alternatively storing the raw products for fake chicken are incredibly complicated. Furthermore, once the product is produced there is a ton of regulation about its care and handling. What's perhaps most troubling is the risk to workers while producing the product. They require fairly risky industrial tools, and not every manufacturer is really dillagent about providing good guards for people's hands.
The raw products for fake chicken are mostly soybeans or chick peas, hot water, and a mineral coagulating agent. The biggest energy input is for boiling the water and growing the crops.
Cows require 50 times more protein from grain as input than they provide after being slaughtered (you can google this, it's research from Cornell). You are 180 degrees wrong on that point, the cost of feeding them is _very high_. Unless you can genetically engineer them to have more efficient metabolisms, this is a fundamental problem for beef.
I can't tell if you're serious about the last paragraph. Citations would be great, because it's hard to believe that real meat is less regulated than plant-protein based fake meat or that the risk to workers that make it is less than to those working in an industrial slaughterhouse.
I'm not sure that it supports the conclusions that you (and its author) make. For example: (quoting)
"> For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein."
6 << 50. And, a lot of that "plant protein" isn't available to people.
"More than 302 million hectares of land are devoted to producing feed for the U.S. livestock population -- about 272 million hectares in pasture and about 30 million hectares for cultivated feed grains."
Much pasture land is pasture because it isn't all that suitable for other purposes. Unless you eat grass/hay....
"THIRSTY PRODUCTION SYSTEMS. U.S. agriculture accounts for 87 percent of all the fresh water consumed each year. Livestock directly use only 1.3 percent of that water. But when the water required for forage and grain production is included, livestock's water usage rises dramatically. Every kilogram of beef produced takes 100,000 liters of water. [wheat and potatoes take much less]"
It appears that he's counting rain as "use". While technically true, that water can't be used elsewhere. (Grain land is rarely irrigated and pasture almost never is.)
The main point of making this in the first place is to save energy and resources.
The chemicals you're talking about are pea powder, soy, carrot fiber, and flour.
The slaughtering houses have some of the worst working conditions you can find anywhere in the U.S.. I don't think you'll find any casualties for workers who mix some ingredients together in comparison to chopping up cows.
Sorry if it was just joking, but it was kind of hard to tell.
