When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.
Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.
I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.
Soybeans as a commodity can be cheap, but that doesnt mean that an end product made out of soybeans will also inherently be cheap.
The market for soybean based meat alternatives is not that huge, so one of the more expensive aspects of trying to have an end product in an actual brick and mortar store is going to be getting space on the shelf in the first place. Packaging design and maybe some marketing, not to mention creating the actual product itself. All that stuff is expensive even if its mostly soybeans that the end product is made from
Laundry detergent is like 95% water, but it costs far more than if it was actually 100% water
Same. I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of. Soy and oat and other grain based replacements for animal products should be dirt cheap. They’re marketing to hipsters and pricing accordingly. So all that shit about the economy and whatnot? Marketing trash. Make that shit cost what it should and way more people would buy it. Especially with everything going up.
Not sure about soy beans, but you can buy a lot of beans very cheaply. Oats are also very cheap.
Processed foods are always going to cost more, and probably suck. Make your own, meat or vegan it’s going to be better for you, tastier, or both.
You don’t have to buy such products when you are vegan but personally I’d rather be taken advantage of than have non-human animals be taken advantage of and in a much more severe way. People really get thrown off at the slightest inconvenience when it affects them…
Ah yes, the “slight inconvenience” of being poor.
Fair, and expected, but why not both? Why can’t vegan food be profitable and also cheaper than animal-based products? Because of greed taking advantage of people with hearts bigger than their wallets but who will open it regardless and just pay more. The one who is more frugal and doesn’t have as strict of dietary restrictions sees the bullshit on both sides but buys what’s affordable.
I will say this for you vegans… one of you got me curious about oat milk, so I started asking for it at my favourite coffee shop, and I think it makes their coffee better. They push it with new customers, but they serve whole (cow) milk as well. Once I opted for cow milk a couple times, they stopped asking. So I had to mention that I was curious about oat milk. Hoping to push the trend back, where they stop asking me and just do oat milk. I’ll buy oat-based creamer if it’s cheaper/on sale. I want to give it a try at home now. Not because it’s more ethical, but because I found it makes my coffee better.
I like eating meat. I’m not gonna mince words here. But if I found a plant-based alternative I liked and it was cheaper (or comparable), I would get it more, but I have to be careful… because I still need animal protein due to the surgery I got a couple years ago.
Where I live there are little processed vegan options, they are hard to come by/identify, and there are no vegan sections but I’m glad that they are here at all tbh given the state of things. As for prices just like with everything you judge things on a per product basis. If there’s something that costs more than I’m willing to pay I just skip it as I’m not forced to buy certain types of products which are generally not healthy anyway. Not that I disagree about pricing being shitty but you just work with what you have since cruelty is so deeply ingrained in our society it inherently requires effort to minimise it. Just like with privacy for example where you actively need to fight for it. It’s just something you do. Once my current phone is on death bed I will be buying fairphone which is expensive or a similar product out of the same principle.
I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of
Eh, maybe at the beginning when you haven’t adjusted and are looking for one to one replacements for meat. After a while though you just get used to beans and lentils, which are dirt cheap, and tofu and eat more of those then the fake meat products.
A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).
There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.
The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.
Seconding the comment on TVP. It’s shelf-stable, cheap, and can take the place of ground meat in anything where it’s there for the texture, not the flavor. I like it in cottage pie, pasta sauce, and mixed into macaroni and cheese.
What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits?
They want to make money by targeting the smaller market of people with more money. It’s marketing strategy, usually tied to “wellness” - which is a super huge market (almost entirely grifters.)
I don’t have an emotional attachment to meat. I’d like non-meat stuff to be cheaper, and the real costs of meat to be accounted for.
This. I could go vegan today if the fake meat stuff was more affordable. Right now I’m maybe half of the way there.
Now in Belgium, a fake chicken meal with 2 fake chicken fillets is <4€
The cheapest chicken fillets at aldi are 6.50 € for 2.
Here real meat has been increasing for years while plant based stays the same. Ground pork is still cheaper though.
The actual chicken fillet is like 1.5x the protein still, but not too bad. My girlfriend is not veggie and I feel financially bad now also when I get meat for her, but she needs very calorie dense foods sometimes because she can’t eat a ton.
non-meat stuff to be cheaper
Beans and lentils are dirt cheap and a great source of protein and fiber.
You might be able to incorporate more lentils and beans. They’re dirt-cheap and fill you up similar to meat.
I always get pre-cooked beans, and red lentils are my go-to for lentils, because they cook quickly and don’t need pre-soaking for reducing their fartiness.
I do a lot of rice and (canned) beans, which is pretty cheap and satisfying.
I don’t have any experience with lentils. My parents never had them because , the story goes, the last time they did my father farted himself out of the bed.
I like cheap and accessible plant-based alternatives. But this doesn’t really sound like that. It’s much closer to “now the poor people have to eat weeds lol”
A distinction without a difference. Let’s subsidize legumes and plant-based products to the same level animal-based parts are subsidized and see which one is cheaper.
Beyond isn’t cheap. It’s super expensive. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’ve never really eaten corpses so that’s probably why.
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.
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.
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?
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
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Instead of trying to switch over to highly processed vegan product that tries to emulate beef or chicken using tons of additives and scientifically engineered flavours and textures … why not just start eating actual wholesome vegetables and legumes with high protein content like lentils or beans.
If the cost of meat products is starting to match the cost of expensive meat substitutes … it probably matches the cost of just eating expensive raw vegetables and beans too.
Humans have been eating high protein vegetables for centuries and it is way more healthier for you than whatever factory produced vegetable mash.
When vegans promote a whole food, plant based diet: “I will only switch when there are drop-in meat and dairy replacements”
Ok then I guess we’ll develop drop-in meat replacements: “why emulate meat? So processed!”
It’s amazing if you’re into WFPB, it’s one of the healthier diets out there. You’re just not the target consumer of these meat replacements. But they’re useful for some people to have a better choice. They’re usually not unhealthier than the animal-based product they aim to replace (see meta analysis ).
Yep. The NOVA clowns can piss off, vegans were talking about whole foods long before they started the moral panic about UPFs.
Most legumes have always been cheaper than meat
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
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
Problem is beef got to expensive to eat anyway. Made it way easier to cut out of the diet. I need this as cheap as chicken and pork.
Don’t worry, all animal products will be going up in price a lot as a result of the oil and fertilizer crisis going on now. The real question is if the planting plans are getting shifted to food crops or if there will continue to be more feed crops, which will lead to famines in the poorer parts of the world thanks to how the markets work.
This would in some ways be good for me. I never thought I could kick the fast food addicition but a bit of price increase was all it took and heck that made it easier to waaaayyyy reduce my beef consumption (although some may debate how much the meat was vegetable based). The struggle to limit meat consumption is the thing which made me take vampire characters more seriously. I used to think it was kinda stupid and they should easily not go after humans but then I realize I would be right there going. Yeah animal blood is so bland. yuck. later though it would be. what! eight fifty for a pint of human. forget it.
Let’s just say that it wouldn’t be the first time that populations who are used to eating a lot of animal products suddenly became healthier.
“Beyond” products taste good, and they’re meat-like but don’t really taste like anything that currently exists, whereas everything I’ve tried from Impossible is pretty much indistinguishable from meat, it’s actually kind of wild.
I’m not even vegetarian (one day) but I was able to cut out red meat entirely thanks to these brands.
Omg we need this in Argentina
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.
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.
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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.
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I’ve been using another “veggie Ground Round” product for ages and ages, or just shredding up and seasoning tofu or other veg protein myself. Always curious to try some new alt, though. :9
After making tofu, something about shredded tofu really saddens me.
What do you mean? Like it’s disrespectful to the tofu?
Yeah. So much work to turn soybean cream into a solid block, and then people turn that beautiful block into tiny bits.
My shredded tofu wouldn’t work without that block, so I appreciate it even if it’s not visible in the final dish.
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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