At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense.
Fixing the corruption (both democratic and republican parties) in our our political would end up helping the environment a lot. That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system. It will never happen, the elites have won that war.
One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.
- which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment.
This shows that the problem is not simply corrupt legislation and lobbying, but a de facto symbiotic relationship between the meat industry, federal immigration authorities and border coyotes to maintain artificially low prices.
> which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment.
That's well-known about the meat industry. The problem with suggesting it as a reason to avoid meat in favor of vegetable-based food is the same is well-known to be true of agriculture generally.
Good point, though when speaking of "intolerable working environments," many employees of slaughterhouses suffer from PTSD and drug/alcohol addiction, and also become more likely to be domestic abusers: https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/31/how-killing-animals-everyday-...
It takes considerably less labor to farm vegetables than to farm vegetables and feed those vegetables to animals and also take care of those animals. So vegetable prices may go up, but considerably less so when compared to meat.
Crop labor has also seen a lot more automation in general than meat labor over the last several decades. Some crop farms are almost entirely automated (and International Harvester and other brands think that Level 3 self-driving tech alone puts them on a path to nearly full automation in the next decade or so), though obviously things vary based on which crop.
On the other hand, slaughterhouses generally haven't seen any automation and other than size/scale mostly still resemble their counterparts from previous centuries.
Got a source for that? I've never been involved in commercial vegetable farming or large-scale cattle raising, but small-scale ranching is really not that labor intensive in my experience.
Scale seems to be exactly the problem. Industrial scale crop farming is highly automated. There aren't similar automations as you scale up cattle, and slaughterhouse work/butchering includes several skilled labor tasks with no similar skilled labor equivalents in vegetable farming.
Wouldn't the relationship between the meat industry and federal immigration authorities be the opposite of symbiotic? Federal immigration aims to curb the illegal immigration off of which (we reasonably alledge) the meat industry is profiting. Surely this is evident by the inclusion of "border coyotes" in the alleged symbiotic relationship?
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.
I totally get this, and have similar feelings. But I try to remind my self what Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are competing with: meat. They have similar saturated fat profiles to their "real" alternatives.
I look at these meat alternatives as mostly beneficial for:
1. Meat eaters looking to eat more sustainably, but continue eating burgers and sausages and whatnot occasionally
2. "Cook out" situations where you can bring a good veggie burger and not be a total social weirdo eating grilled corn by yourself. And it's a good conversation starter, and others are usually intrigued enough to try, and impressed after having done so.
Why do you guys think saturated fat is bad for you? Certainly when fried it's much much healthier as it doesn't decompose into cancerous aldehydes. The science on this is very tainted so I would be very careful about assumptions here. Are there other things apart from saturated fat you are worried about?
It doesn't support your argument. "Replacing SAFA by cis-polyunsaturated fatty acids was associated with significant CHD risk reduction, which was confirmed by randomized controlled trials."
"In prospective observational studies and randomized controlled trials, higher total SAFA intakes were not associated with higher incident CHD events or mortality, but replacement nutrients were not taken into account."
So I see the conclusion as a mixed bag:
"Although higher SAFA intake might increase CHD risk by increasing plasma LDL-C [70], recent meta-analyses of prospective observational studies [1, 71, 72] reported that when compensating nutrients were not taken into account, SAFA intake was not associated with CHD or stroke mortality, all-cause mortality, or myocardial infarction. Two large, independent, prospective cohorts of US men and women confirmed this result [73]1. In a prospective Dutch cohort, higher total SAFA consumption was related to lower risk of ischemic heart disease, but not to CHD risk [74]. In another Dutch cohort, a positive association was observed between CHD risk and palmitic acid, but not total SAFA intake [75]."
So the study you quote has lots of different outcomes as if the science is very difficult and under different conditions different results are found.
Good evidence is given by the global burden of disease project. Funded by Bill&Melinda Gates, over 2000 scientists aggregated 15‘000 publications into the largest epidemiological study. Addressing 14 health risks concerning your diet into actual life years lost (DALY) respective per region, age, gender. Unsaturated fats is not the biggest contributor, but nevertheless.
Closest thing I could find on that site that matches this description is the second chart on this page. [1] It shows diets "low in poly-UN-saturated fatty acids" as 11th-highest risk factor, contributing to less than 1% of the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost.
I'm not sure that a diet low in unsaturated fats can be conflated with one with high saturated fats. They tend to come from different sources (vegetables, nuts, and fish vs. meat, butter, and eggs, respectively).
Also, please do not make it this difficult to source your claims - the link you provide is to a homepage for an entire decades-long project full of results and reporting. This is incredibly annoying and unconstructive to the discussion.
As with climate change, there are a handful of bad actors and contrarians claiming that the science is tainted. But for the better part of a century, we've known that saturated fats are linked to heart and cardiovascular disease. It's frustrating that this misinformation is so readily spread, as it literally causes people's early death—including one of the early vocal adherents to it, John Atkins, who suffered several heart attacks and congestive heart failure before having a stroke that ultimately lead to his death.
From the article: "Taubes and Attia advocate a low-carb diet much like Teicholz; however, they have hired researchers who disagree with them to conduct groundbreaking nutrition studies."
They sound like right hacks. I'm not sure if you think the sugar industry paying for studies is great either, which a lot were.
We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can sometimes be filled with baked potato, corn on the cob, some quinoa thing, but it's not as satisfying and gets boring. We don't like buying processed foods, and soups without meat are nearly a no-go for me. But hey, I'm limiting consumption so I guess I'm doing my part.
Yeah, as a vegetarian I can do some awesome things with lentils, but I remember the days when I could rub some spice on a pork chop and throw it on the grill and then have something boxed and starchy on the side and have a pretty decent meal.
Meanwhile, a good lentil stew is a much more involved project. Much less home-made veggie burger patties which have dozens of ingredients and elaborate preparation processes.
Going full vegan is even harder, because cheese is a pretty good shortcut to making hearty food.
I felt similarly to you when i first decided to try eating mostly vegan a few years back. One of my go-to meals was a cheese sandwich. It tastes great, you can't beat the speed of prep and it's not completely unhealthy. But now i realize there are plenty of other fast things that hit the spot that actually i already knew how to make but i never really saw as go-to meals before.
Here are some examples.
I know it's a punchline these days, but i grew up in the 80s eating avocado toast. You want more flavor? Just spread some marmite or vegemite.
The Tex-Mex take is to smash that avo with corn chips and salsa. Miss the cheese? Put some silky tofu. Think of it like queso fresco. Hey, you can also slice it on tomato with vinegar to make caprese salad.
What about beans on toast? If you're not a bread person, something i used to cook in my student days is can of beans, can of creamed corn, garlic, chili, soy, the end. It's hearty. It only takes 10 minutes. I still cook variations on that, sometimes with no corn or different beans. I like using sesame seeds to thicken it up, or pumpkin seeds for a different texture.
I also leverage peanut butter when i am feeling lazy. Spread it on some seaweed rice crackers for savory. You can put it on bread with sliced banana for sweet.
Real peanuts are great too. They are literally the first thing i throw in the wok. Oil. Peanuts. Garlic, ginger, chilis. Then the vegetable or mushroom or tofu or whatever. Or not, because just seasoned peanuts will go fine on top of whatever other vegan thing where you feel you're missing some crispy, oily, goodness.
There really is so much, and i think a lot of it is stuff most people already eat. I think the problem is that people tend to think of incidentally vegan dishes as somehow not being "real" meals, but that's a cultural bias that can be unlearned.
I agree. I am not actually vegan, as I occasionally eat meat (love the taste still), but I try to reduce meat and dairy as much as possible.
Kenji of SeriousEats does a vegan-month every year and claims that he enjoys it because he focuses on dishes that taste exciting, but happen to be vegan.
It's not as hard as you might imagine. Cheese is great because it's an umami bomb. However, there are other umami bombs out there (tomatoes being one!). As many people have said, though, it's all about the knowledge. A miso garlic sauce is insane, and easy to make, but very few people outside of Japan know about it. I'm not really sure exactly where the umami gets in, but fermented hot sauces are also amazing for filling out flavour (it could be the fermentation). To cook good vegan food it's not actually much harder, but you practically have to learn to cook all over again. (Was vegan for 10 years... hopes people enjoyed my cooking as much as I did... no guarantees ;-) ).
I think the trick to reducing food prep labor is larger batches. Maybe that means you eat the same thing 4 or more times in a week. Or maybe that means you freeze some of it for later. But it doesn't really take any more work to make a 3x batch of lentil stew than it does to make the regular sized batch.
> Meanwhile, a good lentil stew is a much more involved project. Much less home-made veggie burger patties which have dozens of ingredients and elaborate preparation processes.
Really? I never thought that to be the case. To me, making a stew of lentils is just as easy as cooking meat. Sure, depending on the type of lentils it may take longer, but then there is red lentils which takes 20 minutes of cooking. It really is simple, I do not see why people make it sound like as if it was magic. Also... what do these meat eaters eat their meat with? Or do they eat meat on its own?
> because cheese is a pretty good shortcut to making hearty food.
Entirely anecdotal, but essentially cutting dairy entirely from my diet has done wonders for me and my wife in more ways that you can imagine. She literally cured her life-long respiratory allergies just from no longer drinking milk / eating cheese. Greek yogurt is fine, for some reason
I’ve been vegan for two years now, and I can unequivocally say that cooking and eating are much easier than when I was constantly having to handle meat, clean up more & cook longer because of worries about food borne illness, etc.
If you do it long enough it gets way easier as your cooking skills and methods adapt.
Some tips I follow:
-I highly recommend a CSA for great vegetables, delivered if possible
-Start a small raised bed garden for greens, cilantro, cherry tomatoes, etc.
-Batch prep veggies and store in bulk (I use cheap rectangular stackable tupperware) for super easy access. Batch prep greens and legumes, store in the freezer, take from freezer to pan.
-When batch cooking, clean veggies with a water and baking soda soak in a large mixing bowl. Just soak for a few minutes and then rinse a couple times
-Using a rice cooker to make grains is much easier than stovetop
-Use walnuts and unsalted nuts (peanuts are great, despite not actually being a nut) with moderation to make foods more substantial, while avoiding processed nut butters and oils
-Use good non stick pans to cut down on oil and cleanup time
-In general, cut back on foods and condiments rich in salt, sugar, fats, and especially processed foods, as they distort your taste palette. It’s a lot like drug addiction...”when I’m not on heroine, life just seems bland!”
-You don’t have to cook veggie meals as thoroughly as meat, experiment with varied levels of freshness and eat raw foods more...less cooking
-simple root veggies are awesome, cheap, hearty, and easy to cook (potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots...all can be boiled)
-Frozen organic blueberries, oatmeal, banana, sprinkling of walnuts, delicious :-)
-I highly recommend a CSA for great vegetables, delivered if possible
I do not. They are (at least where I am) unpredictable in content which increases the burden of planning meals.
> We don't like buying processed foods, and soups without meat are nearly a no-go for me. But hey, I'm limiting consumption so I guess I'm doing my part.
I lean toward the carnivore spectrum but there are a couple meatless soups that I enjoy:
* New England clam chowder
* Corn chowder
* Barley mushroom (though it’s even better with meat)
* Gazpacho
And while I’d never order it if given the option for a “real one”, vegetarian pho was surprisingly good.
This is a weird cultural thing that I encounter every now and then. Some cultures only consider flesh from land animals to be "meat". People from these cultures also often call the diet I would call "pescatarian" "vegetarian".
Not really an example of an easy to make recipe (lots of ingredients), but Yotam Ottolenghi's green gazpacho (made with green vegetables and walnuts rather than tomatoes) does really well when you are entertaining guests. It's listed in his Plenty. It's one of those cookbooks you can find in many homes around the globe due to its popularity — and it's all vegetarian.
Healthiest way to go about it is to go low-fat, high carb. The body uses glucose for energy most easily. Whole-foods plant based diets, as shown in documentaries like Forks Over Knives, have been shown to let people lose weight and reverse diseases like diabetes. A cooked carb like a potato or rice is like 1 calorie/gram, including the water. Oil is 9 calories/gram. Without oil, sheer food volume and fiber will make you feel full. A huge portion of the world thrives on grains and legumes as staples.
Do the math for a potato-only diet. 1 baked potato is 171 calories. 2000/171 is 11.7 potatoes. 11.7*4.3 = 50.3. That's sufficient for a 62.5 kg individual by your 0.8 g/kg standard.
Potatoes are also lower protein than a variety of grains and vegetables (which are low in macronutrients in general).
Men on a 2,000 calorie diet are recommended a minimum of 56 grams of protein.
0.8 per kg is for a generic sedentary lifestyle, with increased activity your needs go up. 2000 calories on a 62.5 kg person is a non sedentary lifestyle.
Moderate levels generally shows up as low albumin levels on a blood test aka Hypoalbuminemia a type of Hypoproteinemia, and is associated with a huge range of symptoms. Westerners generally only get this due to Malabsorption.
> Westerners generally only get this due to Malabsorption
Exactly. It's not really a "protein deficiency" as much as it is a "nutritional deficiency". You can easily get enough protein even if you just eat vegetables (for example) as long as you get enough calories.
Can does not mean will. People do dumb things like get 10+% of their calories from sodas.
The tendency to over eat, eat lots of meat, and have a very sedentary lifestyle are the main reasons it’s uncommon in the west. However, it does still occasionally happen to people due to very poor diets combined with active lifestyles. Healing and inflammation related heath issues can also increase people’s needs for protein.
PS: People also very rarely get scurvy via avoiding or over cooking all their sources of vitamin C for months. Occasionally taking a multi vitamin covers most nutritional issues except for macro nutrients.
I was 200 lbs when I cut out sugar and complex carbs from my diet - no more pasta, potatoes, also no bread. I lost 20 lbs fairly quickly. For carbs I still ate sweet potatoes and brown rice. To fill some of the hunger from lower carbs intake I ate high fat avocados. Fastest weight I ever lost. Dairy was fair game though. It's amazing how bloated bread makes your body. Once I cut bread I never again felt bloated.
This way you are missing maybe 90% of the soups of the world. Maybe try some exotic spices - I used to hate tomato soup from our school canteen with passion, but once I tried a properly spiced variant in Nepali Himalayas, things were never the same again (for the better) and I love it these days (I mean the Nepali version)
In context, I meant the lazy soups we make always contain meat and still taste good. I can put like 4-5 ingredients in an instant pot and be done. Are there similar low effort meatless soups, without hunting down exotic spices? I love good Thai and Indian curries and such, always open to new flavors at restaurants, but at home I'm just not willing to go through that kind of effort, as I kind of despise cooking but am too cheap to eat out often.
If you buy the curry paste, Thai-style curries are ridiculously easy to make: you can basically just dump the paste, coconut milk, a bit of water/broth, fish sauce (or soy sauce, or even just salt), a tiny bit of sugar, and whatever vegetables and other ingredients into a pot and cook for 10 minutes. Daal can be similarly easy to make, though you usually at least have to sauté some onions, ginger, etc first before throwing everything into the pot.
If you're okay with seafood, my wife and I really like this[0] Lohikeitto recipe (Finnish salmon soup). If that seems a bit too heavy, I've made a variation where I reduce the butter, skip the heavy cream, and add harissa (or sub whatever combination of warm spices) for a lighter, spicier soup that tastes just as good.
Love buying Thai curry pastes for quick curries. Also I know the grandparent poster asked for easy recipes, but if you want one that's ridiculously involved (~30 min of prep if you're really quick, and ~3 hours of intermittent watchful stirring) but also ridiculously tasty, check out beef rendang. Lovely, very spicy, 'dry' curry with incredibly tender beef.
Hah, I've made this before and didn't know what it was called! I had it at a local Thai restaurant under the name "Kua tender beef", and decided to try to replicate it at home. It's so delicious! I wouldn't call it "ridiculously involved" (I've made phõ from scratch), but yeah, it's a bit labor intensive.
Soup stocks are always going to be easier because of the umami. You can even just get boullion cubes and your are pretty much good to go. For Japanese cooking, ichiban dashi is ridiculously easy -- though the katsuobushi is very, very difficult to make: really you need a professional to do it for you :-)
I have found that with vegan soups, you have to change the way you approach making soup. You don't start with a heavy, umami stock and add a few things to it. Instead, you have to layer flavours. So, it's not necessarily harder, but you have to know how to do it.
One surprisingly ovo-vegetarian soup is garlic soup. There is a good description in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Child, et al, but from memory: Boil a peeled head of garlic. Remove the garlic. Whisk in a home made aoli (sp? -- virgin olive oil mayonaise). Add salt. It's truly a surprisingly good soup. You could probably devise a vegan version, but you need to find a way to emulsify the oil.
A vegan soup that I often have with somen noodles (thin wheat noodles) is soy milk (yes, really) mixed half and half with a light vegetable broth, chili oil, and fried garlic (a trend?). Whisk in a light, sweet miso to taste (or you can use a naturally fermented soy sauce, but I like the miso better). You can also add a dash of sesame oil, or mix in defatted sesame hulls.
I'd write some more, but it's been quite a while since I did any vegetarian cooking and my memory is not that great! But, definitely there are lots of amazing vegetarian soups that are relatively easy to make if you know how.
If you don't use chicken stock there isn't much of an umami component. That doesn't really bother me, but Better Than Bouillon or just a bit of Marmite can give it a little umami boost.
Indian dals can pretty easy as well (if you consider them to be soup). The simplest don't need much more than cumin and mustard seeds, which I wouldn't call exotic. There are a huge variety of them and obviously they can get much more complex.
On the slightly more complex side, I also like vegetarian chili and Tuscan white bean soup. I think chili tastes better using whole dried peppers, but if you have chili powder you can throw it together much more quickly.
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.
Beyond Meat is competing with freezer aisle foodstuff and there it handily wins out in just about every category (price, taste, nutrition), even if objectively it's unhealthy for you.
There's a world of vegetarian options outside of the preprocessed fauxmeats (including the entire produce section).
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.
Regular veggie burgers and other products (not trying to imitate meat) are usually really good. They should embrace the fact that they can include a vast array of vegetables and spices. Example: Morningstar farms has a chickpea burger I really like. Also it's much cheaper than Beyond products. I share your concern about the Beyond products (and other vegetarian products); if I want a ton of saturated fat, I'd just eat meat. Chicken and fish are healthier than Beyond.
A society that eats less meat (or none) is inevitable given time, for both moral and practical reasons of health, scarcity and environmental impact. We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy. Just providing food options people enjoy without meat will reduce meat consumption without pushing a moral agenda that often receives hysterical responses.
Disclaimer: I eat meat, though I've been eating less for the above reasons.
>We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy.
That just isn't realistic; you'll wind up with a lot of really unhealthy people eating food they hate. Not everyone is good at cooking, and one big reason veganism is so unpopular is because it's so hard to make anything that tastes good with it. Meat is easy to cook, even for people who aren't very good at cooking. And veganism is generally unhealthy, because most people aren't dedicated or good enough at it to get the proper nutrition, so they leave out critical nutrients, whereas with meat it's really easy to get everything you need (like iron).
Expecting the whole populace to get good at cooking vegan food is like expecting the whole populace to become very skilled at C++ programming (including template metaprogramming). It isn't going to happen.
If someone makes vegan pre-made meals that can just be microwaved, that would be different.
Your vision of the world is really quite dystopian.
Cooking is a basic part of human life and has been for millenia.
Comparing it to C++ programming is absurd.
Once the true costs of meat are priced in, people will figure it out. They're not going to just starve, chucking a few things in a pot is not some great hardship.
The viewpoint that cooking is some super difficult thing seems to be prevalent on Hacker News.
If anything, cooking vegetables is far easier than cooking meat, because it's difficult to get it wrong. Meat can go bad far more easily, requires cooking properly, etc. By contrast most vegetables can be eaten raw, or 'chuck it in a pot and boil it and wait a bit'. Add spices and oil. Done.
> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.
What? I make stew of any legumes and it does not require more skills than cooking meat.
I read some study somewhere, which says eating meat makes you more sexually attractive and your features are developed better if you eat meat.
If there the case, I don't think you can convince people to not eat meat because it's like telling them to stop using makeup or stop making efforts to become mor handsome/beautiful
> You want to find a rare issue with bipartisan support? Try raising the price of food and seeing how people like it.
Food stamps are designed to raise the market clearing price of food as a subsidy to agriculture (they’ve since become a means-tested welfare program as well, while retaining the original purpose); they have fairly strong political support, which definitely shows a partisan divide.
The Dairy Price Support Program and other agricultural price support programs likely continue to exist despite having the sole purpose of raising the price of food; were raising the price of food the kind of third-rail you are trying to imply, there would be a bipartisan consensus against such programs that would make it impossible to retain them.
Farm subsidies started during the New Deal. I believe one effect of those subsidies was to maintain a reserve of farm capacity that was used in WWII to provide needed food aid to our allies, including the Soviets.
> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients
No, why? Not at all... My cooking skill level is knowing how to use a
stove. What good ingredients do you mean? In my experience cooking
meat is always the hardest part.
> At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense.
Unfortunately, in my experience when I bring this up the typical response us that I must be a socialist.
In America, saying anything unAmerican is "socialist". So advocating things like much stricter gun laws, more public transit, or ending tax breaks and other giveaways to large politically-connected corporations are unAmerican and therefore "socialist" in American parlance.
> That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system
We do have a chance. It's not going to be long until a critical mass of individuals understand that democracy is a system that legitimizes coercion, and that taxation is theft and generates poverty. We just need one more generation until that happens.
When people reach that conclusion, they will move their money away from fiat currencies and they will move their information into distributed systems (eg. blockchains).
By consequence they will make states and coercion not viable. Without the ability to control currencies, states go bankrupt and can't even pay for people to steal your money.
Welcome to anarcho-capitalism, while I wait for the downvotes.
If putting your money in crypto prevents you from paying taxes, it's you who'd go to jail. If any government saw a dip in taxes, they'd just pass a law requiring an "internet driver's license". Then require your wallet number. Such licenses are already common, outside the US.
So, less anarcho anything. More jail time, and then forced labor, and then one again paying taxes.
Fixing the corruption (both democratic and republican parties) in our our political would end up helping the environment a lot. That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system. It will never happen, the elites have won that war.
One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.