[roland00]

How so?

The cost of soybeans is a lot cheaper to make an artificial burger (once they get the R&D down) than feeding the same soybeans to a cow and getting roughly 1:10 the calorie weight due to energy pyramids. You can get roughly 200 kg of protein per acre per year, while cows it is roughly 19 kg of protein per acre per year.

Of course this is talking future costs, for we are still perfecting artificial plants / proteins that taste like meat even though we been "branding" veggie burgers since the 1980s and the food science goes back hundreds of years prior to that.

[catmanjan]

Are the soybeans they're feeding to cows interchangeable with human consumption soybeans?

[Maakuth]

Probably the logistics for feedstock is more lax when it comes to hygiene than you apply for food, but the plant matter is to my understanding the same.

[cute_boi]

yea. Most soy is feed to animals which could have been used to feed many hoomans. I don't think beef etc are sustainable.

The problem is government is subsidizing animal product but not plant based product due to corporate politics.

https://gentleworld.org/as-we-soy-so-shall-we-reap/

[raisedbyninjas]

1. Energy efficiency doesn't translate to costs of patty raw materials. Cattle can graze on uncultivated land, getting that portion of food for virtually free. There are other added costs to cattle farming outside of feed.

2. There are many costs to a cooked burger outside the cost of the patty.

[3131s]

> Energy efficiency doesn't translate to costs of patty raw materials. Cattle can graze on uncultivated land, getting that portion of food for virtually free. There are other added costs to cattle farming outside of feed.

Every time someone says this, but it's like 97% of cattle in the US that are crop-fed.

[JamesBarney]

A lb of soybeans is cheaper than a lb of meat. But that that is a small percentage of the cost of delivering a mcdonalds burger to a customer.

There is the cost of the bun, the condiments, the transportation, employees, real estate, advertising, paying people to ensure consistent quality, etc...

Even if the soybean burger was free you wouldn't see a 25x relative price movement in the cost of a soybean burger relative to a meat burger.

[Animats]

Only recently, though, did it start tasting like meat. Or at least like fast food burgers. That's what Beyond Meat and Impossible have done. Impossible adds heme, which tastes like blood. They're both biochemistry companies.

Impossible burgers have no health advantage over meat, and much more salt, but they're trying to improve on that.