>So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too.
The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. It's not unhealthy either, much more thermodynamically and land mass efficient, even cruelty free if you believe in that.
It's just that the almost only meat diet has taken over the planet.
We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
> We need to find sustainable alternatives that are better than the foods they replace. Just like we need electric cars that are better than internal combustion engines
That's already happening though. Meat eaters still don't seem to care. I'm a recent vegetarian and the food I eat now tastes better, is often more nutritious, and is easier to make.
The better alternatives are here. Oat milk! Wow! Have you tried it? I knocked vegan cheese forever because it sucked. But you know what? They are starting to make some that is better than some 'real' cheese. Indian food. Baked/BBQ tofu is amazing.
I've had veggie burgers in CA and WA that beat a 'regular' burger by a mile. Try Souley Vegan in Oakland for one. Wowza. Better than any meat burger I've ever had.
Not all vegetarian food is sustainable, I know. But it's better. I'm vegetarian for the taste more than anything really. It's not a sacrifice!
I think a lot meat eaters would be absolutely shocked at how delicious and healthy a lot of vegetarian food is now.
> Only a few will make personal sacrifice for the common good.
??? I didn't make a 'personal sacrifice' to become vegetarian. It's a literal animal sacrifice every meal the other way around! Vegetarian food isn't a sacrifice. What the world needs is to convert more to veggies is to squash the idea that becoming vegetarian means making a sacrifice.
For most people that's simply not an option. But, if all people were eating just a little less meat, that would be an incredible improvement already.
I believe we better fight down the meat problem with small steps, especially by creating more delicious plant based food for the mainstream, creating an alternative that is really hard to resist because it tastes so good.
From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
> We eat way too much meat, but strict vegetarianism and especially veganism does not scale to the whole population of the planet - animals are simply too efficient at converting what we can grow everywhere but can't eat (grass mostly) to what we can eat. Simply, an exclusively plant based diet would require the elimination (by starvation?) of who knows, 90% of the world population?
Which is not true at all, most meat is cow beef, pig and poultry fed with grains. Grains that we have to grow, and take land and water away from growing other things that could feed us directly.
This would only be true if everyone ate grass-fed beef - which would be premium and 10x more expensive- and a lot more goat and similar that can be fed low quality grass.
> We don’t need animal protein to be happy and healthy and live long lives.
i doubt you can speak for everyone in the world. There's no doubt some people can do this, but there's obviously a large number who cannot. They like the taste of meat.
The solution cannot be to not eat meat. The solution should be to capture all the externalities of making meat, and adding it to the cost of meat (i suppose this should apply for all products and services, not just meat). Then people who choose to eat meat would pay for all externalities properly, and there would be no problems.
> We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.
Define need.
I don't live to be a drone guided by some moral principles of other human who has the same rights as I do.
If I want meat - I will eat it regardless of whether I need it or not.
> And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.
I hear the same mantra for last 10 years.
> There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.
You forgot psychological factor. While the bucket of fried chicken is rarely as pretty before cooking as they display it, but in the end it is 100% meat. If we're talking about some plant surrogate, most people would probably puke at the thought of eating this. I certainly wouldn't enjoy it.
> vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large
That is just a question of habit and education. If you are used to veggie food, the meat is not appealing to you. Tastes are things we build, not stuff we are born with.
Vegetarianism will not become a norm, if it does, because of one factor only. For such a strong cultural habit, you need several factors. It may happen under a combination of the following:
- meat production is costing too much ressources (land, water, energy, etc) compared to the food it produce
- meat production does manage to feed the growing propulation;
- mass meat production will revealed to be more and more unhealthy, either by nature, because of the artificial products we use for it, or because of the pollution it causes;
- it's effect on global warming will trigger a similar reaction as the one we had about CFC.
I doubt it though. I see more and more people consumming less meat around me, I'm a vegetarian myself, but I can't see a shift happening any time soon.
BTW, morality is a very weak factor. It never stopped people to drink and do something stupid, it never stopped people from bying iphones built by children, and it never made them choose a proper president.
> All I had to do to drop my meat consumption by 80-90% was to live with someone who introduced me to plenty of tasty meatless cuisines and meat alternatives.
Great, I'm glad that works for you.
> Frankly, cutting meat consumption in half is usually easy and would already take us a very long way if done universally.
That sounds like a good idea, but it's harder to implement than you think, I think.
> If you forced humans to stop eating meat, this would make billions of people very unhappy.
Wealthy billions. The poor ones don't eat as much meat and dairy. And it's a good thing ... if they did, we would need not one, but 4-5 Earths to feed everyone.
Eating meat is a culture. A story we tell ourselves. It cost us all of megafauna, half of our forests, it threatens thousands of animal species with extinction, and it should go. It can't go for much longer if we want to have any future.
> Higher cost of energy
Costs are human construct. Money is just a record in someone's database. Goverments can make as much as they want. It means nothing.
> necessarily means we get to spend less on other things
We will learn what has value when we'll eat the system to the ground.
> While I have no urge to eat food for its ability to imitate meat (so I’m not the target audience anyway)
That's a very short sighted view. This isn't about vegetarianism. It's about the environmental crisis, and the overfishing crisis, that we're currently experiencing at a global level. I don't care whether you are vegetarian or not, we are all in the target market for solutions to these problems. That's what replacement meat and fish are about.
> once we as a species transition fully to lab grown meat
I wish... there are many obstacles to implementing that on the scale and timeline needed. I worry we don't have time to wait for that, while we already have plants that could sustain us completely and easily (82% of calories, 63% of proteins).
> I don't even eat that much meat. I eat it maybe ... once a week?
> I grew up on a Mediterrannean diet and I still cook and eat that way.
Good! And I already said previously if more people had your diet and life-style then we'd be in a much better situation environmentally.
And the next evolution from that would be not having to kill BILLIONS of animals for meat. We can create meat subs from plants, e.g. beyond burgers or wait for meat grown from animal cells also known as cultured meat.
That's all veganism is. No cruelty, death and destruction when it's not necessary.
Let's use our human ingenuity to solve our world's problems.
> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do
This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving.
We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.
>> Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect.
With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).
Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.
Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.
But all other things will never be equal because animal protein costs 10x more energy to produce.
> what will happen to people when for reason there’s a problem in the supply chain of a specific crop or you have a bad year with low yields and the price goes to the roof?
Have you been to a produce department? Most of them in the US could be reduced to 25% their current size and still have 200% the diversity of the meat department. Being unable to find one or more amino acids is just not a problem that vegetarians have.
The problem is constantly having to cook for yourself because vegetarian options at most restaurants (or prepared by well-meaning carnivore friends) are just "leave the meat off" and not designed from the ground up to be nutritional without meat. Cultural change would make it easy.
> Perhaps its just a case of removing subsidies on real meat
Or simply deciding as a society that the horrific torture the modern meat industry engages in is unconscionable. As with cars, once you remove the "necessity"[1] of a consumer choice, the argument for subsidizing it or compromising other values to expand availability disappears. People who prefer real meat over hypothetically indistinguishable lab-grown meat can pay full-price for the environmental and ethical costs; this seems like it'll be more than enough to shift the market.
[1] This is taking for granted the position that abstaining from meat is unviable. I don't see this view changing much.
> Convincing, nutritious, cheap artificial meat could turn the world vegetarian.
I'm not so sure about that. I've recently had the opportunity to try a vegetarian diet for a week. I did not enjoy it, I found the food tasteless and insufficiently nutritious.
But that got me thinking about all the dishes I usually consume which, while not exclusively plant based, are mostly made out of vegetables. All those dishes have a critical animal-based ingredient. The problem? Many of those ingredients aren't desirable by themselves - meat with significant bone and fat parts, pork hooves or ears, animal blood and others. Yet without them, you cannot make those dishes.
I wonder, when we finally arrive at that artificial meat future, will today's "undesirable" parts of beef or pork or chicken become an expensive delicacy? Will it basically wipe out traditional recipes that depend on them? I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a world.
The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. It's not unhealthy either, much more thermodynamically and land mass efficient, even cruelty free if you believe in that.
It's just that the almost only meat diet has taken over the planet.
We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
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