Study of “Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?” by Tad Friend
Study Questions
One. What compelling reason is there for the food industry to create an alternative to animal protein?
We read that raising cattle depletes water and creates greenhouse gas:
Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.
When the world’s one and a half billion beef and dairy cows ruminate, the microbes in their bathtub-size stomachs generate methane as a by-product. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. emissions.
Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.
Two. Why are fake burgers the focus as opposed to fake steak or fake prime rib?
Because 60% of beef is ground up for burgers.
Three. Before Impossible Burger and Beyond Beef burgers, what has been the state of veggie burgers?
They have been a form of punishment for masochists, people who don’t care about their food but are vegan virtue-signalers eager for self-punishment on the road to being a social justice warrior.
We read: “The existing plant-based armory was unpromising; veggie burgers went down like a dull sermon.”
Impossible Burger doesn’t target vegans. It targets meat eaters, so the Impossible Burger is designed to taste, bloody, fatty, salty, and decadent. Anything less is a failure.
As a result of its target consumer, 95% of Impossible Burger customers are meat eaters.
Four. What are some of the technical marvels of the Impossible Burger?
We read that it is more sustainable, is nutritionally superior to beef (higher in protein but also higher in sodium and vegetable oil), has the luxury taste and feel of beef thanks in part to molecule heme, but falls short a bit in the tactile department:
Brown assembled a team of scientists, who approached simulating a hamburger as if it were the Apollo program. They made their burger sustainable: the Impossible Burger requires eighty-seven per cent less water and ninety-six per cent less land than a cowburger, and its production generates eighty-nine per cent less G.H.G. emissions. They made it nutritionally equal to or superior to beef. And they made it look, smell, and taste very different from the customary veggie replacement. Impossible’s breakthrough involves a molecule called heme, which the company produces in tanks of genetically modified yeast. Heme helps an Impossible Burger remain pink in the middle as it cooks, and it replicates how heme in cow muscle catalyzes the conversion of simple nutrients into the molecules that give beef its yeasty, bloody, savory flavor. To my palate, at least, the Impossible Burger still lacks a beef burger’s amplitude, that crisp initial crunch followed by shreds of beef falling apart on your tongue. But, in taste tests, half the respondents can’t distinguish Impossible’s patty from a Safeway burger.
Five. Do meat producers feel threatened by Impossible Burger?
No, they have too deep of an infrastructure, provide too many jobs and have so much diversity of business, including leather and pharm. Currently, alternative burgers are only 0.1% of the burger market.
We read:
Meat producers don’t seem too worried that Brown will rid the earth of livestock by 2035. The three largest meatpacking companies in America have combined annual revenues of more than two hundred billion dollars. Mark Dopp, a senior executive at the North American Meat Institute, a lobbying group, told me, “I just don’t think it’s possible to wipe out animal agriculture in sixteen years. The tentacles that flow from the meat industry—the leather and the pharmaceuticals made from its by-products, the millions of jobs in America, the infrastructure—I don’t see that being displaced over even fifty years.”
Six. In addition to harm to the environment, what health risks are associated with beef eating?
Cancer and cardiovascular disease are two problems. We read:
In the past decade, venture capitalists have begun funding companies that view animal meat not as inflammatory, or as emblematic of the Man, but as a problematic technology. For one thing, it’s dangerous. Eating meat increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer; a recent Finnish study found that, across a twenty-two-year span, devoted meat-eaters were twenty-three per cent more likely to die. Because antibiotics are routinely mixed into pig and cattle and poultry feed to protect and fatten the animals, animal ag promotes antibiotic resistance, which is projected to cause ten million deaths a year by 2050. And avian and swine flus, the most likely vectors of the next pandemic, pass easily to humans, including via the aerosolized feces widely present in slaughterhouses. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found fecal matter in sixty-nine per cent of pork and ninety-two per cent of poultry; Consumer Reports found it in a hundred per cent of ground beef.
Seven. What is difficult-to-attain Holy Grail in making an alternative burger?
Umami. What is this?
We read in Merriam-Webster:
A Japanese scientist was the first to discover the savory taste of the amino acid glutamic acid, which was found to occur in soup stocks made with seaweed. This fifth basic taste - alongside sweet, sour, salty, and bitter - was named umami, meaning "savoriness" in Japanese. Umami can be experienced in foods such as mushrooms, anchovies, and mature cheeses, as well as in foods enhanced with monosodium glutamate, or MSG, a sodium salt derived from glutamic acid.
We read:
It’s easy enough to replicate some animal products (egg whites are basically just nine proteins and water), but mimicking cooked ground beef is a real undertaking. Broadly speaking, a burger is sixty per cent water, twenty-five per cent protein, and fifteen per cent fat, but, broadly speaking, if you assembled forty-two litres of water you’d be sixty per cent of the way to a human being. Cooked beef contains at least four thousand different molecules, of which about a hundred contribute to its aroma and flavor and two dozen contribute to its appearance and texture. When you heat plant parts, they get softer, or they wilt. When you heat a burger, its amino acids react with simple sugars and unsaturated fats to form flavor compounds. The proteins also change shape to form protein gels and insoluble protein aggregates—chewy bits—as the patty browns and its juices caramelize. This transformation gives cooked meat its nuanced complexity: its yummy umami.
Eight. In addition to the difficulty to achieving mouth feel, nutritional standards, and the elusive umami quality, what other challenges do alternative burger companies face?
One could be biological evolution. We may be hard-wired to crave animal meat. Eating meat can be a way of machismo signalling for greater reproductive success.
We read:
Maple Leaf Foods, a Canadian company, is building a three-hundred-million-dollar facility in Indiana to make alternative proteins. But its C.E.O., Michael McCain, told me, “The human body has been consuming animal protein for a hundred and fifty thousand years, and I honestly think that’s going to continue for a really long time.”
Climate change, which now drives our hunt for meat substitutes, originally drove hominids to turn to meat, about two and a half million years ago, by making our usual herbivorean foodstuffs scarce. Eating animals added so much nutrition to our diets that we no longer had to spend all our time foraging, and we developed smaller stomachs and larger brains. Some scientists believe that this transformation created a powerful instinctive craving. Hanna Tuomisto, a Finnish professor of agricultural science, recently wrote, “This evolutionary predilection explains why eating meat provides more satisfaction compared to plant-based food and why so many people find it difficult to adopt a vegetarian diet.”
An inborn meat hunger remains a hypothesis; meat is the object of many human urges, including the urge to construct all-encompassing theories. In the book “Meathooked,” Marta Zaraska writes, “We crave meat because it stands for wealth and for power over other humans and nature. We relish meat because history has taught us to think of vegetarians as weaklings, weirdos, and prudes.” The anthropologist Nick Fiddes goes further, declaring, in “Meat: A Natural Symbol,” that we value meat not in spite of the fact that it requires killing animals but because it does. It’s the killing that establishes us as kings of the jungle.
Ethan Brown, of Beyond Meat, suspects that nibbling plant patties doesn’t exude the same macho vibe. A bearded, gregarious, six-foot-five man who played basketball at Connecticut College, he has retained a squad of athlete “ambassadors” to help dispel that perception. When I visited Ethan at the company’s offices, in El Segundo, California, he pointed me to a 2009 study of Ivory Coast chimpanzees which suggested that males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success. “Men usually give women the meat first, at dinner, before the sex—you want to be a protein provider,” he said. “Do you think if you take a woman out and buy her a salad you get the same reaction?”
It’s worth noting that the Neanderthals, who subsisted almost entirely on meat, were outcompeted by our omnivorous ancestors. In any case, Ethan told me, meat no longer serves its original purpose, and “we can use the expanded brain that meat gave us to get us off of it.”
Eight. For Beyond Meat, what are the 4 arguments for replacing beef burgers?
We read:
Ethan said that he launched Beyond Meat to mitigate meat’s effects on “human health, climate change, natural resources, and animal welfare—we call them ‘the four horsemen.’ ” One consequence of this compendious mission, with its attention to people’s health—and to their concerns about health, warranted or not—is that Beyond, unlike Impossible, uses only ingredients taken more or less directly from nature.
Nine. What is a good summary of the challenges in making an alternative burger?
Soy is associated with dangerous hormone disruption.
Pea protein tastes like cat urine.
Wheat protein has an awful texture that can create a gag reflex.
Vegetable burgers have more sodium and oil than beef burgers.
Evolutionary hard-wiring may make people crave beef.
The cost of a “tech burger” for producer and consumer remains high.
Ten. What is a good summary of why we need to stop eating beef?
We are ruining our climate at a rate that is equivalent to mass suicide.
We can’t feed meat to the world population by 2050.
We need to stop animal cruelty.
Beef creates heart and rectal disease.
Sample Critique of Vegan Burgers
The viability problem with alternative burgers like Impossible Foods’ version is a matter of whole vs. processed foods. Is the Impossible Burger a whole food? Clearly, it is not. It is a highly processed food thing larded with oil and sodium, so that anyone like myself aspiring to good health is going to stay away from any kind of Frankenstein Patty. If we want to stop eating beef, then we need not replace our “old girlfriend” with her inferior twin. We need to start anew with no such baggage. Therefore, while the Impossible Burger is a sort of bait and switch, offering a more environmentally-friendly version of a burger, it is not a viable alternative to beef because it is still junk food and should not be looked at as a desirable food for healthy eating. At best, it should be looked at like pizza, an occasional foray into a “cheat meal.”
Response to the Above
While I will concede that the oil and sodium used in vegan burgers are not ideal, feeding the world’s burger appetite with Impossible Burger and other alternatives is a good thing because we need to curtail the greenhouse emissions from cows, we desperately need to save water that is used in raising cows, we need to discourage animal cruelty, and we need to forge paths of feeding the world with sources that can accommodate our planet’s population explosion.
Sample Thesis That Defends The Game Changers
Since animal cruelty and attacking our environment for the sake of beef burgers are both unacceptable, we have to find a powerful marketing campaign to make plant-based burgers a viable replacement for meat. We can and must do this by making plant-based burgers cool in terms of elevated social status, macho in terms of appealing to “the Joe Rogan bros,” and affordable so that the regular consumer can buy what are now overpriced vegan burgers. Looking at the effective vegan propaganda in the documentary The Game Changers, featuring professional fighter James Wilks, is an effective model for this marketing campaign.
Sample Thesis That Refutes the Above
The claim that we should rely on “powerful marketing” to appeal to “Joe Rogan bros” is an absurdity that makes a mockery of a critical thinking class’ Three Pillars of Argumentation, logos, ethos, and pathos. It is illogical to promote a processed burger soggy with canola oil and sodium, thus a violation of logos. It is not credible to reference the slick albeit highly flawed propaganda piece The Game Changers, thus a violation of ethos. It is demoralizing to promote processed foods as a substitute for succulent beef burgers, thus a violation of pathos.
Another Sample Thesis
That we should encourage plant-based burgers using similar rhetorical strategies in The Game Changers is not at all a violation of The Three Pillars of Argumentation. On the contrary, making more powerful branding can indeed be performed while adhering to the top-notch pillars of ethos, logos, and pathos. It is logical to pave ways for alternative proteins to meat as animal products can no longer meet the demands of the world’s growing human population, thus logos. It is credible to find ways to provide plant-based burgers that offer more protein than their beef counterparts, thus ethos. It is inspiring and ethically sound to find plant-based proteins to spare the torture that is inflicted on cows and other animals, thus pathos.
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Raw Deal Study Guide
Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat by Chloe Sorvino
The purpose of looking at Chloe Sorvino’s Raw Deal is to examine ways the Netflix documentary The Game Changers has a worthy goal: to persuade us to pivot from animal protein to plant protein.
The goals and the stated problems are legit in the movie. The problem is how the movie presents a lot of their case through misrepresentation, faulty interpretations, and logical fallacies.
But to be fair, we have to look for the movie’s strong case against the animal protein industry.
Working in a Meat Plant Is Hell
Chloe Sorvino begins with the wretched working conditions of a pork plant during the COVID-19 crisis with workers slaughtering 1,100 pigs an hour in close quarters, coughing on each other, not being allowed breaks, working overtime, and in a state of exhaustion. They were in a super-spreader job site.
So many meat workers were dying from COVID that at one Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, the workers had a betting pool on how many workers would die.
If we saw what went on in a meat plant, we’d be disgusted by meat. Our eating of meat is based on denial of the reality of what happens in an industrialized meat setting.
The pandemic hurt the supply chain so that meat prices skyrocketed in a world where demand for meat is getting higher and higher.
People want their meat. They don’t care how they get. They don’t want to know how they get it. But they want it and they want it as cheaply as possible.
One of the failings of The Gamer Changers and anyone promoting a vegan lifestyle is underestimating the powerful biological, cultural, and familial forces that encourage meat eating.
When we celebrate as a culture and as an extended family, we usually kill an animal and barbecue it.
I’ve had students from all over the world tell me that when a distant uncle or cousin arrives, an animal on the farm is slaughtered.
Couples tell me that when they celebrate an anniversary or a job promotion, they go out to eat steak and lobster; they don’t eat at Tofu Bowl.
Eating meat is a sign of wealth, power, success, and family closeness.
The vegan “meat” industry is tiny, less than 1% of the meat that Americans consume.
Vegan meat was hot for a while, but by 2022, it started to cool off.
Laura Reiley’s Washington Post article “Alt-meat fever has cooled. Here’s why” explains the challenges the alt-meat industry faces.
Plant-based meat, heralded by many as the death knell to Big Meat, appears at this moment to have dealt only a flesh wound.
The promise of high-tech meat substitutes prompted a frenzy of celebrity investment and red-hot IPOs in 2019. The pandemic saw significant consumer curiosity and a stampede of newcomers in the category, including entries from the world’s largest food and meat companies, with Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue, Hormel, Nestlé and others leaping into the fray.
Analysts wrote about the hunger for meat, dairy and egg substitutes among “flexitarians” — non-vegetarians looking for easy swaps to do less harm to the environment, animals and their health. Executives poured in from other multinational food companies to nab top jobs in the nascent industry; fast food giants added plant-based offerings with much fanfare.
But then things slowed down. Meteoric growth in 2020 flattened in 2021 and retail sales have dropped more than 10 percent in the past year. Beyond Meat, the Los Angeles-based purveyor of plant-based burgers, crumbles, nuggets and such, saw its stock prices plunge nearly 80 percent from its peak, and last month the company announced it would lay off about 19 percent of its workforce. It’s not just Beyond: Meat giant JBS SA announced in early October it was shuttering its two-year-old Planterra business in the United States and closing its 190,000 square-foot Colorado facility, and McDonald’s has tabled its idea to roll out the McPlant burger nationally.
***
The author explains that this reduction in Alt-Meat is happening when we are having a climate crisis from greenhouse emissions resulting from livestock and a health crisis from heavy meat consumption.
The world doesn’t care. The world wants real meat.
She writes:
Meanwhile, the world’s appetite for meat continues to grow. The global consumption of meat has more than doubled since 1990, reaching over 339 million metric tons in 2021, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that will rise to 374 metric tons by 2030.
Here are five reasons the market for alt-meat has cooled.
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Vegan Meat Costs Too Much
With inflation, consumers are less willing to spend extra on a premium-priced item,” such as meat substitutes, said Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for Consumer Reports.
One of the reasons beef was an attractive place to start for new plant-based meat companies was because beef is expensive. Alt-meat’s high prices wouldn’t be as glaring. With time, analysts predicted, beef prices would stay high while plant-based meat got cheaper, as companies scaled up and paid off their start-up costs. But price parity remains elusive. Plant-based beef is still twice as expensive as conventional beef and plant-based chicken is four times as expensive as conventional chicken, said Emma Ignaszewski, associate director of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes alternatives to traditional meat.
***
Vegan Meat Is More Processed Than Real Meat
Reiley explains:
Product manufacturers have convinced consumers that alt-meat is better for the environment and reduces animal cruelty, but they haven’t convinced consumers that it’s healthier for them, said Peter Saleh, managing director and restaurant analyst at equity research firm BTIG. People are motivated by self-interest, and until they are convinced it’s better for them, alt-meat will remain a niche product, Saleh said.
Conventional meat also has become synonymous with protein, and protein is, for many people, something you can’t have too much of, said Julie Guthman, a sociology professor at University of California at Santa Cruz.
“There are negative associations with fats, carbohydrates and sugar, but protein has been this unscathed macronutrient for a very long time — it’s associated with vigor, strength and masculinity,” she said.
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Bioavailable Nutrition
Not only is vegan meat highly processed, but it also contains unhealthy oils, and the protein that it contains is only about 40% as bioavailable or digestible as animal protein.
One of my students tried to be a vegan and within 8 months, clumps of her hair fell out, her skin turned green, and she felt weak and on the verge of passing out while working out in the gym.
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Back to Raw Deal
Chloe Sorvino writes that today meat demand is up; the cost is up 11%, but there are still shortages: “I realized panic was setting in across mom blogs and beyond,” she writes when her sister asks her if she should get “another chest freezer and stock up on meat.”
With high demand, the centralized meat industry ratcheted up production and over 298 workers died of COVID; 59,000 workers were exposed and “exponentially” spread the virus to their families and the community.
Alt-Meat demand surged to 240 percent in 2020, but now sales are stagnant or in outright decline.
Rural Communities Harmed
We read that “Rural communities are harmed while American waterways, soils, and air get polluted for the benefit of international slaughterhouse billionaires, who now have all the power and little incentive to reshape operations.”
How is meat production a national security threat?
Sorvino writes:
“Yet the crisis for climate change will continue to exacerbate global tensions, and foreign-owned corporations have already been handed the chance to dictate what we eat. That’s how an industry responsible for a large amount of the nation’s protein consumption has become a national security risk.”
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Sorvino is not a vegan:
Sorvino is not arguing to be vegan; she argues that we should consume “far less” meat overall; and she concedes that Alt-Meat costs double the price of real meat.
Secrecy in the Meat Industry
Sorvino asserts that we are harmed by not knowing where our meat comes from and how it’s treated, but the secrecy helps makes the meat industry very rich.
An efficient cattle plant processes six thousand cattle per day; an efficient hog plant processes twenty thousand hogs a day.
Meat and Democracy
Sorvino observes that society can become violent when meat prices are perceived as being too high. Therefore, there are government pressures to work with the meat industry to keep the prices cheap. These arrangements may not be known to you, especially as they regard your safety or the animals’ level of suffering.
Also, when societies grow economically, the first rise in demand is for meat.
Today, more and more Americans want to increase their animal protein consumption. Beef consumption is down; however, chicken consumption has doubled since the 1970s. Walmart is America’s biggest meat seller.
In America, the average American consumes 275 pounds of meat; the average European consumes 170 pounds.
Working Conditions in Meat Plants
A slaughterhouse reeks of ammonia. Workers spend hours on conveyor belts and often work knee-high in animal feces.
Workers commonly suffer repetitive motion injuries, COVID-19, blindness (from ammonia), fingernail disintegration (from ammonia), bad backs, amputations, crushed fingers, “serious musculoskeletal disorders,” hearing loss, burns, skin lesions from dangerous chemicals, bacterial infections, and a higher risk for lung cancer.
As Sorvino writes: “Slaughtering and processing jobs for decades have ranked among the highest for occupational rates of injury.”
Meatpacking workers are nearly twice as likely to get hurt and fifteen times as likely to contract a job-related illness.
Industrial hog farms produce manure lagoons near housing. The lagoons poison the air and create high rates of asthma, elevated blood pressure, headaches, and nausea, in the area.
Hurricanes and heavy rain can cause the manure lagoons to flood, spreading heavy metals in the soil, antibiotics (resulting in antibiotic-resistant disease) and E. coli.
“Globally, 14.5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock.”
Livestock Uses Up Resources
“In terms of human calories produced, industrial meat is highly inefficient. Just 3 percent of the feed consumed by beef cattle is converted into calories consumed by humans. Pork retains 9 percent, while chicken stands at 13 percent.”
Livestock production takes up 70 percent of the annual US soy crop.
“Industrial production of corn and soy strips American soils of nutrients, thanks to artificial fertilizers and other chemicals.”
Drug-resistant superbugs could “be as high as 160,000 a year” from antibiotic-resistant disease spread.
Economic Factors Dictate Your Food Selection
It’s nice to have the luxury of being able to afford the finest food ingredients, but as chef and justice advocate Sophia Roe says, “There’s no such thing as good or bad food when you’re starving.”
To help educate others on food, Sophia Roe uses recipes that use five ingredients or less and that feature frozen or canned ingredients. She uses meat and animal products in addiction to “plant-heavy cooking.”
Sophia Roe makes a criticism against veganism that is not addressed in The Game Changers. She says, “There’s the idea that everybody going vegan will fix the issue. We have to be very mindful with that. Telling everyone in the world they need to go vegan, that’s colonization, cultural erasure.”
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