Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
Impossible Foods produces a convincing burger: it looks like meat, it smells like meat, it tastes like meat, it bleeds like meat. And yet, it’s not meat. No part of this burger has ever been anywhere near an animal. Later this year, Impossible Foods plans to sell burgers in select restaurants in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, just to give people a taste. (Video by Katherine Wells, Lucy Wells) (Source: Bloomberg)
In order to deal with the amount of waste produced by factory farms, operations often store manure in in-ground holes, called lagoons, or apply the waste to the ground as fertilizer. But because factory farms are dependent on packing the greatest number of animals into the smallest possible area, the waste that ends up spread onto fields is likely being applied to lands that are already saturated with animal waste from the operation itself or from another factory farm. In North Carolina, for instance, factory farms that produce hogs and chickens are often clustered tightly on the same watershed, making it difficult for fields to properly absorb the excess manure that is spread on the ground.
As for nutrition, three ounces has 220 calories, 13 grams of fat, 11 grams of saturated fat, 21 grams of protein, and 470 milligrams of sodium. The same amount of 80 percent lean ground beef has about the same calories and protein, and more total fat. But the Impossible Burger is higher in saturated fat and sodium. ...The company seems to be more concerned about the environment than nutrition, though. It claims that it can make the Impossible Burger with 95 percent less land, 87 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, and 74 percent less water than it takes to produce a beef burger.
Animal agriculture puts a heavy strain on many of the Earth’s finite land, water and energy resources. In order to accommodate the 70 billion animals raised annually for human consumption, a third of the planet’s ice-free land surface, as well as nearly sixteen percent of global freshwater, is devoted to growing livestock. Furthermore, a third of worldwide grain production is used to feed livestock. By 2050, consumption of meat and dairy products is expected to rise 76 and 64 percent respectively, which will increase the resource burden from the industry. Cattle are by far the biggest source of emissions from animal agriculture, with one recent study showing that in an average American diet, beef consumption creates 1,984 pounds of CO2e annually. Replacing beef with plants would reduce that figure 96 percent, bringing it down to just 73 pounds of CO2e.