Fast-food beef is retired dairy cows and flavorings made in a lab.
Gross.
Many people don't know or don't care.
There are enough people that do care to significantly impact their bottom line though. For better or worse.
Quite so if you hold cows sacred or are otherwise opposed to using animal products - I’m neither it’s not that different to McDonald’s not disclosing that their french fries contained beef flavouring. I’m neither and it can sound trivial, but a lot of people are and really care about this kind of thing.
Agreed but the only tangible and actionable issue I see with a fast-food burger is health. That should be addressed first and foremost. Consumption of beef is not going away otherwise. If we want to reduce beef consumption then get the government to recognize the national security risk of fast food and tax it to oblivion. Healthy beef is far more expensive. More expensive equals a reduction of consumption whereas shaming people will most certainly backfire.
If the governments started heavily taxing the fast-food grade beef then the demand will drop as a side-effect. When the demand drops we can focus on smaller, healthier regenerative farms and ranches thus reducing our dependency on fragile logistics of our current just-in-time shipping systems.
As a side note and a side benefit that I care about, this will mean less of the massive cattle ranches like Harris beef ranch in California. It is difficult to find the drone footage of these ranches because the cops will be on scene within 2 minutes of someone showing up with a drone attempting to exposing how cruel these animals are treated.
Damn, this day is ruining me. Took me way too long to realize that the title has beef-less written, not bee-less.
Anyway, Fast Food-Franchises are IMHO the perfect breeding-ground to raise lab-grown meat to success. Most of their meat is processed to a degree, that you can't taste the original texture or figure out their real source of it. And they are one of the biggest sellers for meat. Removing this chain will be a big service for environment.
Look, I honestly don't care --- I actually think it's laudable to put less commercially desirable meat to use, in the same way I think it's a good thing to use transglutaminase to stitch trim and offcuts into chicken nuggets --- but I can't find a single source that suggests culled dairy cows are a significant input to fast food. I can find direct statements from chains that preclude it. I've concluded that it's just not the case. We don't have to agree, but if you've got a source, I'll read it.
the economic argument has always been the strongest in my eyes, and it's unstoppable. animals are a huge liability health wise, pollution wise, environment wise, activism wise, logistic wise, etc. most companies don't care about all that stuff at the surface level, but it all translates into dollar signs, which they do care about.
as soon as the economic-taste-weirdness function reaches a certain point, i'll expect you'll see these cheap fast food options convert more and more fractions of their products (right now many use fillers already) to fake meat, eventually replacing it entirely alongside offering reduced prices for these products, while leaving meat generally as a higher priced option signaling disposable income (sort of like Argentinian beef or w/e is today)
I must be vague, but my friend works at a fast food chain's corporate office and said that their strategy team was the one pushing for alternative meats for supply chain alternatives more than dietary preferences.
Creating "actual beef" used to be fairly expensive, but, over the decades, companies have found out how to produce it for as cheap as possible, while still earning billions in profits, without consumers feeling as though beef is expensive. That efficiency comes with time. Plant-based meat is still in its infancy by comparison. So, even though the costs to consumers is high, the amount of profit the plant-based companies earn may be similar, or even lower than, what the beef industry earns.
Then there's Beyond itself. Striking a deal with McDonald's likely involved a lot of time and money — and then the "McPlant" product immediately failed. If you're going to convince Americans that plant-based meat is good, meeting them where they're at with fast food may seem like a good idea. But the type of people who find themselves in the McDonald's drive-thru, and the type of people who will pay extra for plant-based meat, is a tiny sliver of the theoretical burger Venn Diagram.
Now, you could call that grossly mismanaged, or you could call it the best possible shot they had at catering to a wide audience and breaking out of the niche vegan market. But the fact is, the product failed. Where can they possibly go from here to continue growth?
I agree. If the cost is low enough and it tastes, looks, smells the same, the fast-food giants will push it through. People who don't care too much that their meat is highly processed already today, probably won't care tomorrow either
The idea isn't meant to appeal to us, as neither you nor I consume fastfood enough for it to matter.
But plenty of people do, and it drives the meat markets whose over abundance of meat related products drive other markets that keep this horrible cycle of slaughter going.
Weaning people off meat at the fast food level is great way to start IMO.
You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter.
Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.
If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.
Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.
Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
So, some years ago, Temple Grandin wrote a set of standards and McDonald's adopted it and they buy so much beef that it became the de facto new standard for the beef industry. And it's a set of standards that helps beef producers succeed rather than a "gotcha" trying to find who is guilty.
And that's the way you make the world a better place. Not by looking for new and creative ways to nail "bad guys" to the wall after you started from an assumption of guilt.
I don't like this article. I don't like it at all. My feeling is that it was written as an emotional response to the pandemic and it is getting traction on HN for the exact same reason.
People are stressed out and they are looking for a villain to go after. It won't fix the real problem -- the pandemic -- but that's how people tend to behave in a crisis.
And it's a slippery slope towards a more draconian world. It doesn't make things better.
I think the intended audience is current meat eaters. Based on the marketing materials I've seen, it seems they're trying to push the fact that it's a much more land and water efficient way to make burgers.
It's arguable whether it's possible to slaughter cattle humanely; personally I'm skeptical. As for why most cattle isn't raised more humanely, it's because it's cheaper not to.
Not really. I would wager most consumers are actually under the impression fake meats are in some way healthier.
The article is not particularly well-written or informative, but I don't think they're making a straw man argument.
Fast food companies will try to market this stuff as in some way healthier, because that's what will sell.
Unfortunately, opposition to animal cruelty and anthropogenic climate change just aren't great motivators of consumer behavior.
Yet. I wouldn't be surprised if consumer preferences shift and it becomes profitable to market meatless meats as more humane and better for the environment.
Is this really the thing you want to pick and argue about? About whether it is hyperbole or not to call the stuff that is NOT the subject of this article, low quality?
Why do you even care. They can "quality" up their meat all they want but in the end they are still a fast food chain that primarily sells buckets of meat. I don't need a citation to think that is disgusting, and if you don't then go take that argument somewhere where it's on topic. Jeez.
So they're actually doing the right thing in 2019 and replacing part of their product with non-meat. I hope it goes all the way, or at least make meat be the expensive "special occasion" option.
Kissing up to the cattle industry. Only an true idiot would think plant based is the same as beef or meat. This is strictly cozying up to beef industry and their lobbyists. This type of thing is an everyday occurrence in Texas.
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