How about just asking them to make the obvious choices they don’t have to think about or research as much? As an example, switching to plant based meat alternatives like impossible meat or quorn. Not only are they a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, they also haven’t skyrocketed in price like real meat has, so they might even save money.
Or at least cutting out red meat and replacing it with impossible. That requires very little thought for both environmental, ethical, and health gains.
I doubt you’ll get much traction on that. Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up.
While you may consider it a 1 to 1 replacement, and while I’ve no doubt it’s gotten closer to real meat than it was when impossible burgers first came out, I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. I also may be wrong in this, but as far as I know, it only replaces ground meats and processed meats like burgers and chicken nuggets. It isn’t a product that can replace steaks, roasts, shanks, or ribs. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.
As a fellow life long heavy meat eater with a picky palate, I can attest that impossible ground meat is genuinely indistinguishable from animal ground beef. If you were served a dish containing it without being told it wasn’t animal meat, I think you would be hard pressed to pick up on it.
I have tried many, many alternatives, including TVP, Soy curls, beyond beef, etc. They all had an off flavor that I found unappealing unless heavily masked. Impossible’s current formulation has none of those drawbacks, and requires no recipe modifications to obtain perfect results. They do have a steak-bite now, which is also extremely good, but they do not make a full sized steak product. For that, you could try Meati, which is made from mushroom, and is also very good in my experience.
Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up. I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.
I’m probably not saying anything here you don’t already know, but I still want to emphasize that unless the earth becomes rapidly depopulated by an insane amount on a timescale that would require genocide to achieve, the reality is that the quantity of meat we farm to make it affordable for average people is simply incompatible with a live-able biosphere.
The meat of it is, we realistically cannot prioritize the pleasurable minute flavor or texture of a particular foodstuff if doing so results in the destruction of organized human civilization as we know it, along with the extinction of tens of thousands of species and plants.
If we as a species reject a low-emission plant based alternative that is 95% similar to the the planet destroying and horrifically unethical animal based product purely to get that last 5% of the experience, then… Those people are choosing death in the same way a smoker chooses to smoke, but instead of just killing themselves, they doom their children and the rest of humanity with them.
We have to be willing to make concessions to survive the future we have made for ourselves. Animal meat unfortunately must be one of the concessions.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying in my other posts. Yes, we need governments to regulate companies to make them do the right thing, but if not farming cattle is the right thing, companies want to sell cattle products, and consumers want to eat cattle products, in what world is the government going to do the right thing? Education and attitude adjustment that acknowledges the need for change is prerequisite for anything to improve.
How about just asking them to make the obvious choices they don’t have to think about or research as much? As an example, switching to plant based meat alternatives like impossible meat or quorn. Not only are they a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, they also haven’t skyrocketed in price like real meat has, so they might even save money.
Or at least cutting out red meat and replacing it with impossible. That requires very little thought for both environmental, ethical, and health gains.
I doubt you’ll get much traction on that. Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up.
While you may consider it a 1 to 1 replacement, and while I’ve no doubt it’s gotten closer to real meat than it was when impossible burgers first came out, I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. I also may be wrong in this, but as far as I know, it only replaces ground meats and processed meats like burgers and chicken nuggets. It isn’t a product that can replace steaks, roasts, shanks, or ribs. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.
As a fellow life long heavy meat eater with a picky palate, I can attest that impossible ground meat is genuinely indistinguishable from animal ground beef. If you were served a dish containing it without being told it wasn’t animal meat, I think you would be hard pressed to pick up on it.
I have tried many, many alternatives, including TVP, Soy curls, beyond beef, etc. They all had an off flavor that I found unappealing unless heavily masked. Impossible’s current formulation has none of those drawbacks, and requires no recipe modifications to obtain perfect results. They do have a steak-bite now, which is also extremely good, but they do not make a full sized steak product. For that, you could try Meati, which is made from mushroom, and is also very good in my experience.
I’m probably not saying anything here you don’t already know, but I still want to emphasize that unless the earth becomes rapidly depopulated by an insane amount on a timescale that would require genocide to achieve, the reality is that the quantity of meat we farm to make it affordable for average people is simply incompatible with a live-able biosphere.
The meat of it is, we realistically cannot prioritize the pleasurable minute flavor or texture of a particular foodstuff if doing so results in the destruction of organized human civilization as we know it, along with the extinction of tens of thousands of species and plants.
If we as a species reject a low-emission plant based alternative that is 95% similar to the the planet destroying and horrifically unethical animal based product purely to get that last 5% of the experience, then… Those people are choosing death in the same way a smoker chooses to smoke, but instead of just killing themselves, they doom their children and the rest of humanity with them.
We have to be willing to make concessions to survive the future we have made for ourselves. Animal meat unfortunately must be one of the concessions.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying in my other posts. Yes, we need governments to regulate companies to make them do the right thing, but if not farming cattle is the right thing, companies want to sell cattle products, and consumers want to eat cattle products, in what world is the government going to do the right thing? Education and attitude adjustment that acknowledges the need for change is prerequisite for anything to improve.