Host David Roberts speaks to Bruce Friedrich about how fake meat, plant based or lab grown, can reduce our land use substantially, reduce emissions substantially, and end or reduce the cruelty of animal agriculture. Notably, Friedrich contends that fake meats could end up on a learning curve to bring down the price of these meat alternatives to be cheaper than the real stuff. Much in the same way that we got better at making solar panels and flat screen TVs to the point where those items are magnitudes cheaper than they were just 10 years ago.
Friedrich, a vegan himself, chooses to lump plant based imitations together with the more controversial (but possibly more marketable) lab grown animal tissues for purposes of conversation, particularly when it comes to the economics.
Note, this is primarily an environmental tech podcast. And while the host, David Roberts, wishes he had it in him to go vegan, he has had to settle for reducitarian as he, like many, is weak. Much of the conversation is through the environmental lense, but the content is still valuable to this community.
I’m a meatietarian. I love a good burger. I do, however, also love planet Earth. My first impossible burger experiment was awful. The restaurant didn’t cook the damn thing! Was like, “Well, that was a disappointment!” Several years later, A&W had a deal on their veggie burger, and it was great! (A&W Canada, so don’t complain to me if they run it in the States.) Ask me to switch to those burgers in exchange for not dying of heat death or mass fire in the next five to ten? Yeah, sold.
I’ve had amazing vegan beyond hurgers and terrible ones in restaurants. Some were perfectly grilled, others were soggy and gross. Some restaurants simply don’t know how to grill beyond burgers, and don’t care to try to learn.
I don’t think like >90% of people give a shit at all about climate … affordability, however, is very important. In the US, subsidies would have to change, we would have to stop using tax money to offset the costs of beef production and put that towards vegan alternatives. And that will never happen, the government is captive to the beef trust, etc.
The inherently smaller investment of calories to produce either “veggie meats” or cultivated meats does mean that if we get the manufacturing process down, we can produce food cheaper than animal farmers ever could, with less land used, with fewer middlemen. All things that our capitalistic overlords desire.
oh of course, and it’s such an enticement that meat products at least since the 1970s have been cut with TVP to produce a cheaper product … most people don’t realize they’ve been eating fake, plant-based meat their whole lives
but without massive shifts in the wealth and power away from the animal ag companies that have so much influence on politics and our government, I don’t see vegan meats becoming a thing
Taste and texture parody is super easy if you use some real meat in the mix, as Friedrich points out. The tricky part is getting the public to understand this to be a transparent, thoughtful initiative instead of a sneaky profit boosting method. It would be a reducitarian’s dream though.
Umm… Where are you? Half my circle of friends are near panic about the fact that half of our country is now on fire every summer…
I live in the US, which is admittedly not a climate-focused culture.
Even though Americans tend to be aware and concerned about climate issues, they don’t tend to see it as a high priority relative to other issues:
from: https://news.gallup.com/poll/643850/seven-key-gallup-findings-environment-earth-day.aspx