Plant-Based Meat: Amazing For Many Reasons
Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take on plant-based meat products, including assessments of the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat, both of which, to me at least, are almost indistinguishable from meat from cows.
It’s interesting to see how these companies promote themselves. When I stopped eating red meat a few decades ago, I’d explain to anyone who’d ask me why: It’s better for me, it’s better for the planet, and it’s better for the cow.
Fortunately, the plant-based meat industry doesn’t have to keep repeating these three assertions, because virtually everyone accepts them already. Moreover, by making these claims, one only stirs up the wrath of meat-lovers who enjoy ridiculing heath-conscious people, environmentalists, and animal rights advocates. It’s like Hillary Clinton’s describing Trump supporters as “deplorable”: no upside and a ton of downside.
There is a strange resemblance here to renewable energy advocacy, in that there are many benefits of phasing out fossil fuels, and it really doesn’t matter which one you accept as most important. In particular, there is no reason whatsoever to talk about climate change, since, incredibly, some people still don’t accept the validity of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Fortunately, there are very few people who don’t believe in cancer, terrorism, national security, and war.
The situation is the same with plant-based meat. It doesn’t matter which of the three you happen to find important. Just pick one. And enjoy; it’s fabulous stuff.
Craig,
There’s nothing wrong with promoting corporations or products you find attractive, especially when you have a pecuniary interest it the enterprise, although it might be more honest if you declared your vested interest.
However, when you combine a personal preference with being aligned to unrelated advocacy you damage the credibility of not just yourself, but the other causes you advocate.
In doing so you damage support and alienate the vast majority of the general public, making life unnecessarily difficult for others to gain support for other environmental causes.
If you like synthetic chemical meat substitute, that’s great ! You’re entitled to eat what ever you think is best for your own diet. You are certainly entitled to decide your opinion.
What you are not entitled to do is decide your own “facts”!
Plant based foods do not contain all the nutrients necessary for human (especially children) health. Humans evolved as omnivorous and can’t synthesis metabolic essentials such as vitamin B12 etc, without eating substantial quantities of animal product.
The list of ingredients in meat substitutes, which you recoiled from in horror, also need to be considered, (MSG in particular). What’s even more disturbing is your willingness, in your ideological enthusiasm, to simply ignore irrefutable evidence rendering your claims unsupportable, instead relying on vague slogans and articles written by committed vegetarians.
You have become an excellent example of why “Green Political Parties” all over the world are losing influence and relevance.
Your claim “the plant-based meat industry doesn’t have to keep repeating these three assertions, because virtually everyone accepts them already ” is absurd ! More than 90 % of the Western World population eat meat.
Even some dedicated and influential vegetarians look askance at the list of ingredients used in “Impossible Food”.
But, hey, I’m not knocking and excellent idea to make money from those who believe it’s fashionable to trendy to buy synthetic food substitutes, that’s the consumers right to choose.
Just don’t pretend it’s somehow morally virtuous.