I am a member of a financial site called Seeking Alpha, and they posted a transcript of an interview with Impossible Food’s CEO who predicts that the meat industry will be obsolete in 15 years. What say you youngsters?
The Segway was going to revolutionize our transportation. The DVR was going to destroy Hollywood. Blockbuster was going to close most cinemas. Netscape was going to capture the web. So, a factory manufactured food high in sodium, chemicals, and premium priced will destroy thousands of years humans buying and eating meats. Heck, even in "Fiddler on the Roof," the richest man in town was the butcher.🙂 I’m betting on Lazar Wolf.
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Impossible meat will never have the nutrition profile and macro-nutrient profile of meat.
High carb diets are being clearly shown to be very unhealthy and I expect this to change the food choices of Americans
Turning vegetables and grains into faux meat has a horrible environmental and carbon footprint. Although cattle are currently vilified for environmental issues, the impact of things like impossible meat and corn into ethanol is actually a far worse environmental and carbon footprint.
9 grams of carbs in 4 oz of "meat" is high. Especially when you add hamburger bun. Especially when we now know that decreasing fat and increasing carbs is a massive contributing cause to the explosion of obesity and type 2 diabetes. And the vegetable and legume proteins in Impossible Meat don't have the same profiles as the proteins in animal meat. which is another issue.
Humans evolved because of cooked animal meat. It is one of the key things in our development into Homo sapiens.
My third point is .... maybe debatable. The fossil fuels required to grow and harvest an acre of vegetables, grains, beans, etc is actually quite significant. Not even accounting for the processing of that in a factory into Impossible Meat.
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In fifteen years the only food available will be soylent green, I thought everyone knew that.
Well, unless COVID-19 turns us all into flesh eating zombies next year. Which, if you think about it, is just moving the calendar up fourteen years....
It’s not COVID-19 but the experimental vaccine that will cause the zombie apocalypse. In the meantime I sit between murder hornets coming from the north, and genetically engineered mosquitos coming from the south, either of one might also contribute to the end of life as we know it....
People don't like it when I say I have ten to fifteen years left. But based on family history that's it, unless I'm some freak of nature. Hmmm, maybe I do have more time!
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15 years? No. 50? Maybe. To riff a little onComfortablyNumb 's point, many of us are in our 50s and above. We're gone in less Thant 50 years... so the question really is what the zoomers (under 25 set) think and eating meat seems less and less popular there mostly for ethical reasons.
Next up is cost. Scale helps that and it won't be an issue if the sector they're in makes it.
Environmental cost... well let's say it's a wash. But people can eat something that tastes just like meat without killing millions of beings. A lot of people, especially if they're raised to be sensitive to this, might say "OK, that's fine"
Cultural issues will, I think, be hardest to overcome. Look at us. We don't just do pulled pork or brisket because it's tasty but because grilling and smoking is a quintessentially American thing to do. Of course, it's not JUST an American thing either. That will be REALLY hard to get folks to give up.
Technical issues.... Impossible can do burger 'meat' well right now. But steak? roasts? etc.... nope. They'll need to replicate those too, in order for his prediction to become anything close to real. Interestingly, I've heard there are attempts to get meat (beef, I think) to be grown artificially in the lab. That overcomes this issue and even the 'it's not real beef' complaint. Would I eat a lab grown steak that's real beef, prime quality? Hell yes. To me, that's the best of both worlds. Real beef, no need to kill something, probably way less environmental harm.
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When I was in elementary school I lay awake at night aghast that acid rain was going to be all of our undoing. Then it was the ozone layer. Then all signs pointed to an imminent ice-age. And all the while the Soviets were itching to blow me up. But if they try to take my meat...
I suspect real meat will become cool again with the kids in a decade or so. Food is cyclical, and as more folks get better on meat, or worse on engineered meat, meat will come back big. I hope that it gets more responsible in response to market forces, to facilitate it's survival.
But I don't buy it. There will always be demand for meat animals. Aside from them being tasty, there's an ancestral pleasure in eating them. Celebratory even.
My kids and two of their 3 spouses eat red meat - newest son in law eats whatever comes off my grill, otherwise just chicken or fish. I tell my daughter she has to train him.
One thing that also may occur is the way we go about sourcing our food. Large cattle, pig and chicken operations have their draw backs to the environment for one. If you've ever been to a large cattle feed lot you know what I mean. If you're a hunter or fishermen you know that the sustainable wild life population is certainly something that is coming back thanks to conservation, largely as a result of the hunting and fishing communities.
Bison, for instance, once roamed the central plains in the millions. As we know they were almost wiped out a century ago. Now they are coming back. Same with deer. When I first moved to Texas, the red fish population (one of our prime bay fish species) was nearly extinct. With good conservation measures, largely through the efforts of the CCA, the population has made a comeback.
The obvious point here is that responsible resourcing and improved conservation techniques can and should be used to supply us with an alternative source of protein. Does that mean higher prices and less availability? Probably in the short term but it should be utilized and an augmentation to our current way of delivering meat.
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