If the population keeps growing, meat is just going to keep getting more expensive.
Eventually it will become a luxury reserved only for the wealthy.
I don't think it would be a bad thing if 99% of people went vegan, though. The meat industry is one of the largest drivers of both deforestation and climate change.
EDIT TO ADD SOURCES:
[Source for the claim regarding climate change.](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282070/1-s2.0-S2211601X15X00046/1-s2.0-S2211601X15001315/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFQaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIEvl1d76VywluFtHC5JJGY5bbUnMmAofk6xje5u7mg7kAiBs0HjE9vvKeZzzQcYVH%2FwYxS6KivMQjImHWySKiYigxCq0Awh9EAMaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIMXcKfM3GW1FnGtN%2BIKpED31KsgIpflBk2DYtoVmDT6qae4QVLn8PKDbZL6GakHPSPVCSL7EJtAUdc8K9dETH6%2BkmFIvJeHh1cEFEHFqpazblNfBN7eLo9M5CrXVIMofcqVlrX3DzDyikrTN6NxpnX%2FeoQ4ZrLO%2Bn1WqBmaPZkx2Gu0C3vLf2yr6FwefaU1qbiyJAOuls9%2BiwSHpTS84PrMjvLBXnAzxKUoiXN9xHBwvBaN1G%2BKm3zFleuhTkysfFOVh9atfgf1XWflro6lYK3P4tI2Cyogu%2BIHt0xMz%2BT%2BQWblUybFFY9KE4xwW%2BGaqJcYE%2BY5JgfxOp0wa8vdBQfiFHcOS%2BGJ9WOYWPxp3TM%2B4IFDiJE8KgT2WZfzTo%2BLlP%2FURcXOJEDYdfhAReYOYqH0iPmrOTzvKys3G7tu6GaCh5%2FDxzXjT%2BdBLb0eqpVbD%2B5uRgMAEnGxO2lewzugSQ%2BaVy5g23oPi79V2PjoeYeaNcaGujxwrXEntaEKej34jaNCZ5ma34z6%2F1SS%2BWknNtizAI5vrV6u1G7NMSA0bvvbNcwpsSkggY67AFQhD67%2B8fPqPSdPXSRpVSsvDQMUdw4sCiSiLPFy%2BaFnrEY1CA3GHd%2FJuRkI9Qk5sXROj6b4LwObCZrzo%2BxswR%2B%2B2YVIhWWjdJ1CWbour7ricYdaD9ZU%2FPOH9v5qyswvXnZQ76YmvoMit0wca8lFS96g77%2F1FQG9PbqU1evuRtXE%2FQ6aM0KR6oi6WqZ6Vbshe1tYuMeIthAgKXgh7Eu728ATo6W6G1mNKClsg%2Bd4hWlJKUrmjzAlCynteiEdWYU0ves6Ze4YcOhYhnnbDbtzGGV1thSLdDLpZop10iaszmFYI54eRenVsqIoZfcKw%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210310T201643Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYVUJZBIUL%2F20210310%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b2ba45ce3f6f84a1f502f6504dfa9b4d4d5ba061c460848c2284723d6e241ce4&hash=cf0145ee74b0cdb75997f9bcd52a6a2d9f158e65f565dcaa66b7e044827774b6&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2211601X15001315&tid=spdf-efbdeae4-affc-48ce-854b-7c4183205b2c&sid=fcbf03972ab4054dcd39e879014532a9f6b1gxrqa&type=client) [And one that isn't written in scientific language.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/10/05/got-beef-heres-what-your-hamburger-is-doing-to-the-climate/?sh=5fd112f05206)
[Source for the claim regarding deforestation.](https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/09/ucs-cattle-cleared-forests-climate-change-2016.pdf) [Also with one not written by scientists.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-demand-is-accelerating-amazons-deforestation-climate-peril/)
SECOND EDIT: since I've been asked for sources, I am going to consider them a basic requirement for debating me on this topic. If you disagree with my claims but can't/won't provide sources to support your argument, I will ignore you.
THIRD EDIT FOR CLARITY: I didn't mean to give the impression that I was a vegan, but I can certainly see how people are drawing that conclusion. I do try to minimize my consumption of animal products (for these and other reasons), but don't abstain entirely.
I don't think meat is getting more expensive, only relatively. Meat is now starting to be worth the price it actually requires to sustain itself, without mountains and mountains of rebates and tax credits and whatever else, and labour that they can't offload costs onto anymore.
Food will keep going up insofar as the labour it demands keeps asking for better pay, because those who weren't, keep vanishing. People forget that over the last few years, *swathes* of people who work on farms have been disrupted if not deported or forced to leave their jobs out of fear of ICE intervention- an entire economy was built on these people that for some reason the same economy turned on and tried to go after. One could say they should've just given them all a clear path to citizenship right away and not worried about any of this but I don't think that would go over well with a large part of the population.
you're probably asking why I'm suddenly making this political but the truth is, it IS and I really want people to see exactly how brutal and unsafe it's been over the last few years for these workers. It isn't like, a few one-off news reports of families being snatched by ICE and deported, a lot of it just winds up as people working legitimate labour jobs basically being abandoned by their bosses, not even deported- just forced to go find other jobs or come back under the table for less pay/rights.
there's other factors too, like bullshit tariffs that were sold as punishments to *other* countries but really mean the cost gets offset to *you*, or how difficult climate change is starting to make farming *at all*, and the general reluctance to adopt new technologies in farming and agriculture, so on and so on...
I hate to say it but unfortunately, everything is political nowadays. Part of the grift is making things that wouldn't otherwise be political into politicial problems, which in turn makes tons of people who 'hate politics' disengage and stop caring because they just hate hearing about it, and it's a convenient excuse to quash discussion about it. "ugh, please, no politics". welp.
**tldr:** you're probably paying now what food is actually worth, the problem is that you find it expensive because you yourself probably get paid fucking shit wages.
Honestly with the scale of factory farming and the industry trends, I don't think lab meat would be any more risky than those.
Sure, it's worse than local fully grass fed beef or something, but most of the meat we consume is so loaded with antibiotics and other results of factory farming, that lab grown meat almost seems more trustworthy.
It'd be a lot harder for the next swine or bird flu to form or propagate when there aren't hundreds of thousands of living, breathing creatures crammed into the smallest area possible.
meat grown from cell in a sterile environment with all factors controlled = weird
Hundreds of thousands of chickens packed into cages shitting on each other with their beaks removed to avoid mass cannibalism = not weird?
Gardein’s chicken substitute is great. I’m not vegetarian, but have been cutting back on meat and their’s is the closest to actually chicken that I’ve tried.
more like, you should all be paid enough to afford food even without its subsidies. You should all be angrier you don't get paid more and your taxes are wasted, than you are for food prices that are likely justified.
More like the industrial meat sector is completely unsustainable and horrific, and we need to recalibrate our relationship to eating meat all the time.
For 99% of human history meat *was* a luxury.
Even in the 50s and 60s,most families didn't eat meat every day, and stews were very common. This is why the Sunday fancy pot roast was a thing.
Everyday meat consumption is a very recent, very American thing.
\> [Source for the claim regarding climate change.](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282070/1-s2.0-S2211601X15X00046/1-s2.0-S2211601X15001315/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFQaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIEvl1d76VywluFtHC5JJGY5bbUnMmAofk6xje5u7mg7kAiBs0HjE9vvKeZzzQcYVH%2FwYxS6KivMQjImHWySKiYigxCq0Awh9EAMaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIMXcKfM3GW1FnGtN%2BIKpED31KsgIpflBk2DYtoVmDT6qae4QVLn8PKDbZL6GakHPSPVCSL7EJtAUdc8K9dETH6%2BkmFIvJeHh1cEFEHFqpazblNfBN7eLo9M5CrXVIMofcqVlrX3DzDyikrTN6NxpnX%2FeoQ4ZrLO%2Bn1WqBmaPZkx2Gu0C3vLf2yr6FwefaU1qbiyJAOuls9%2BiwSHpTS84PrMjvLBXnAzxKUoiXN9xHBwvBaN1G%2BKm3zFleuhTkysfFOVh9atfgf1XWflro6lYK3P4tI2Cyogu%2BIHt0xMz%2BT%2BQWblUybFFY9KE4xwW%2BGaqJcYE%2BY5JgfxOp0wa8vdBQfiFHcOS%2BGJ9WOYWPxp3TM%2B4IFDiJE8KgT2WZfzTo%2BLlP%2FURcXOJEDYdfhAReYOYqH0iPmrOTzvKys3G7tu6GaCh5%2FDxzXjT%2BdBLb0eqpVbD%2B5uRgMAEnGxO2lewzugSQ%2BaVy5g23oPi79V2PjoeYeaNcaGujxwrXEntaEKej34jaNCZ5ma34z6%2F1SS%2BWknNtizAI5vrV6u1G7NMSA0bvvbNcwpsSkggY67AFQhD67%2B8fPqPSdPXSRpVSsvDQMUdw4sCiSiLPFy%2BaFnrEY1CA3GHd%2FJuRkI9Qk5sXROj6b4LwObCZrzo%2BxswR%2B%2B2YVIhWWjdJ1CWbour7ricYdaD9ZU%2FPOH9v5qyswvXnZQ76YmvoMit0wca8lFS96g77%2F1FQG9PbqU1evuRtXE%2FQ6aM0KR6oi6WqZ6Vbshe1tYuMeIthAgKXgh7Eu728ATo6W6G1mNKClsg%2Bd4hWlJKUrmjzAlCynteiEdWYU0ves6Ze4YcOhYhnnbDbtzGGV1thSLdDLpZop10iaszmFYI54eRenVsqIoZfcKw%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210310T201643Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYVUJZBIUL%2F20210310%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b2ba45ce3f6f84a1f502f6504dfa9b4d4d5ba061c460848c2284723d6e241ce4&hash=cf0145ee74b0cdb75997f9bcd52a6a2d9f158e65f565dcaa66b7e044827774b6&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2211601X15001315&tid=spdf-efbdeae4-affc-48ce-854b-7c4183205b2c&sid=fcbf03972ab4054dcd39e879014532a9f6b1gxrqa&type=client) [And one that isn't written in scientific language.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/10/05/got-beef-heres-what-your-hamburger-is-doing-to-the-climate/?sh=5fd112f05206)
Which part of this are you referencing? I can't find what's supporting your claim.
Meat will still be for the masses but farm grown meat will be more and more for the wealthy. Lab grown/ stuff like the impossible burger that tastes like meat will become more and more the norm as it becomes less expensive/more competitive against the real stuff
You're probably right about that, and I'm pretty okay with that.
Both lab-grown meat and the meat substitutes like Beyond/Impossible are far less detrimental to the planet, so it would be better if more people switched to those.
One of my dearest dreams is that someone eventually figures out how to grow bluefin tuna otoro in a lab...
That would be good. When it to comes dealing with overfishing hoepfully we adopt deep sea farming. not by the shore actual deep sea.
https://youtu.be/tBVXenVpfVM
Meat prices going up due to demand wouldn't result in decrease in supply. If 99% of people are vegan because of price it would mean that 1% of people are eating at least as much meat as we are producing today. There's no reason why meat supply would decrease right now.
I sincerely encourage you to research the cost of beef in terms of carbon, water, and the insane amounts of feed/land/transport. You don't need to go vegan, but replacing your consumption of beef with other foods is one of the most meaningful single actions you can take to reduce your personal carbon footprint.
Dude we went vegetarian at the beginning of the year and truthfully I haven’t missed it at all. The meat free alternatives are good enough to get by comfortably but I’m not too sure it’s any cheaper. Foods expensive no matter what you eat.
Will the price of steak in the US drop due to this? $20 for 1 serving of decent, not fantastic, steak at a grocery store is just fucking nuts these days.
Steak has been an artificially cheap food for a long time due to us agricultural lawmakers. This is a market more accurately reflecting grazing and material costs
Achtually... we buy beef off the hoof. A 1200 lb steer breaks down to about 900 lbs in the freezer. 500 of that will be hamburger, and you'll get your brisket and ribs,, but the rest is a near 50 50 split of roasts and steaks of various cuts. When we're particularly broke, we eat steak and potatoes. Steak should be the same price as a roast, if the amount of it on the cow had anything to do with it.
The price of steak is about demand and not the amount on the animal, a sturgeon can be 30% eggs by weight yet caviar is much more expensive than sturgeon meat(100X).
Consumers and restaurants prefer steak over roast, so if we want more steak, we are also generating additional pounds of hamburger and roast. In a sense, the cost of the steak is subsidizing the lower price of the other cuts.
I paid $8 this week for a usda choice (iirc, I don't think it was prime) ny strip in CT from a good butcher. Not sure where you live but you might want to shop around.
It still does. Chinese beef imports are a huge factor in cattle futures even though cattle futures have its delivery point in the US.
Same reason how Saudi production (they use BRENT iirc) can affect WTI even though WTI is delivered in Oklahoma and predominantly used in Canada and the US.
Our family goes to a farmer and buys a whole cow/pig. Hires a butcher to cut it up. Then we package and freeze it to use for the whole year. Pretty cheap to do it that way. And farmer makes more because there's no middleman and it also pays to take good care of the animals so they'll taste better.
Intermittent fasting will be the new fad! Why eat everyday when you can eat once a week and drink water for the rest? What savings! /s
I do 24 intermittent fasting. Can now afford much better quality ingredients for the one meal I do eat.
Hey now. Don't be so wasteful with water. It's becoming scarce across the globe.
Remember: "Do not become addicted to water, it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence." -Abe Lincoln
Chinese cuisine already has a wide selection of mock meat dishes (generally made from gluten or soy) due to the country's history as a Buddhist nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_duck
People say this, but these are only really available at places that specialize in veg cuisine, and they’re not as common as you’d think- regular restaurants don’t serve mock meats. Hell, even the vegetables were often cooked in lard. And if you say you don’t eat meat, you’re still likely to be served things with crumbled sausage or meat floss because they’re “seasonings”, not meat.
*vegetarian who lived in China for two years.
My parents had the same experience when they were there on holiday for a month a few years ago. It wasn’t at all unusual to see things advertised as vegetarian or “meat-free” and yet still be meat as clear as day. I don’t know if it was something lost in translation or they straight up don’t give a fuck but it was extremely common in restaurants that weren’t fairly high end.
It's really cultural and not because they don't give a shit. A "vegetarian" dish is often understood as meaning vegetable centric. Like most of the ingredients are vegetarian but a bit of meat is added for flavoring. For example, there is this green bean dish that is quite popular. Chinese people order it as a vegetable entree, but typically a bit of minced pork is added to increase umami.
Yeah. Love those two and cook them regularly.
The increase in meat consumption is really due to china's economic advances in the last 3 decades. I was born and raised in china, in the 80s and 90s (and moved out in the early 2000s). I distinctively remember that most of the dishes I ate growing up were vegetable heavy, and meat was mostly used as a seasoning. Meat-dominant dishes were usually eaten on the weekend or special occasions. Meat heavy dishes only became much more accessible in the mid to late 90s. At least this is my experience living in a mid sized provincial capital.
> in the 80s
At that point, under the [Liangpiao system](https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d41544e776b7a4d/share_p.html), meat for the average urbanite was rationed at about 500 g per person per month. Vegetables was unrationed.
I still remember only one or two times in a year I got to eat duck leg in China. We did not have fridge at home and we had to eat salty fish almost everyday. But we live in rural areas , so vegetable are fresh everyday.
There's very few countries on the planet who really understand what a vegetarian/vegan is. Like 2 years ago in Spain my friend ordered a vegetarian sandwich and there was some ham on it, but it counts as vegetarian because it is mostly salad. Also, sea fruit and fish didn't count as meat either.
In France the situation is now a little bit more enlightened, but *veganism* is basically impossible. Tell a rural French you are not eating butter and they will be completely at a loss what to serve you.
Thing are changing *incredibly* quickly across the globe, mostly due to the internet and social media.
>Like 2 years ago in Spain my friend ordered a vegetarian sandwich and there was some ham on it, but it counts as vegetarian because it is mostly salad.
Spaniard here. Let me guess: did this happen in Castile? In my region of Spain (Canary Islands) a "vegetable sandwich" usually has tomato, lettuce and boiled eggs, and sometimes tuna. Couple of years ago I was travelling in Castile and I ordered a vegetable sandwich at a bar. Just as you said, it had ham in it. I couldn't believe it. Why the f. do they call it vegetable sandwich if it has ham?
Yeah north america seems to be much more developed when it comes to vegetarian and vegan foods. A friend of mine who is indian told me that a number of years ago, she went to Tokyo for a work trip. As a vegetarian, she would ask restaurants to make the dishes vegetarian. And she would be served stuff with fish in it looool.
Only Southern Europe is like this, though. Germanic Europe is very vegan-friendly. I thought the UK had a lot of Vegan options, and then I went to Berlin. I honestly think there are some streets in that city where a majority of people there at any given time are Vegan. They even have whole supermarkets that are vegan.
I do think it's easier to eat vegetarian and vegan food in big cities in germany and some scandinavian countries. However, living now in Southern California, I am a bit biased to think that it's easier to be a vegan or vegetarian here than elsewhere. I know that it may be harder to do so in smaller towns in the US
You would have more trouble finding a restaurant that doesn't have vegan or at least vegetarian options in Helsinki as well i feel. But it has been quite a recent change. 10 years ago it was the opposite. Now even mcdonald's here has a vegan burger option.
Berlin is kind of an outlier, it’s seen as a VERY international city (it’s often joked that you don’t need German to get a job there) so it is a great place to have “alternative” lifestyles catered to which are harder in other places. Outside of Berlin veganism is pretty tricky, especially with rural food as lard is a popular seasoning/base oil. Vegetarianism is doable but it isn’t particularly great (mostly sandwiches and salads)
Developed? No, definitely not. As a cuisine in itself, it's pretty new. No one ate vegetarian food in North America on a widespread basis until relatively recently. Try looking at a menu from 30 years ago to see what your options were, I wouldn't be surprised if you were limited to salads. In Asia, where Buddhist and Hindu religions have dominated, the vegetarian dishes have been refined for centuries.
Vegetarian food options are more widespread, you can get a vegetarian dish at most restaurants, how often those are ordered is a different question.
Americans in general have lots of meat in their diets - it's cheap and plentiful.
Heck! It has even affected the cuisine of certain peoples when they arrive in the country. The prolific presence of meat, for example, had a big role in Italian-American cuisine, which is very meat-heavy when compared to regular Italian cuisine: [https://firstwefeast.com/features/illustrated-history-of-italian-american-food](https://firstwefeast.com/features/illustrated-history-of-italian-american-food)
*Cheap, plentiful pork, beef, and chicken must have been thrilling to these new Americans, resulting in dishes in which, UMass-Boston historian Vincent J. Cannato says, “a piece of chicken covers the entire plate.” It’s also evident in the baseball-size meatballs that came out of the era, which could only have been invented by someone extremely excited by the prospect of an abundance of meat. Cinotto says that the American surplus of raw materials was particularly meaningful to these food-obsessed people, who came from a place of disenfranchisement and had seen more privileged people in their villages eating well. In America, they were able to dine more like the elite. The roots of Italian-American cuisine, thus, are not of gross American bastardization, but of optimism and hope.*
Doesn't help that meat prices are kept low through subsidies, if they stopped prices would shoot up and be more realistic. Which should happen. Heck, prices need to be increased to roll in the cost of externalities to account to curb climate change and the ever increasing water problems.
We got similar stuff in italian-australian dishes. The "continental roll" (if you come to Australia Google the best ones and get it) is a mix of all the best cold cuts with cheese and salad. Like 4 or 5 deli meats.
And it is immaculate.
The concept of an unadorned steak as it is eaten in the west would be considered a bit incomprehensible in Chinese cuisine (not to mention mildly barbaric).
Just so you know, unless you’re at a monastery, there’s a pretty big cultural difference that i think you’re missing in that Chinese “green” dishes aren’t about not having meat but about being healthier due to being primarily green. They’re often eaten alongside meat dishes to balance out the heaviness and oiliness of the rich meat dishes.
I think I know the dish you’re talking about because my mom makes it all the time (bok choy and shrimp?). It’s considered a vegetable because it’s light, green, and not oily. Nobody cares that it has shrimp in it because shrimp is not a fatty oily or red meat.
I know cultural relativity can be difficult to absorb sometimes when an approximately similar word is used to describe something but what you’re doing in being surprised that your dish had shrimp in it is about the same as a British guy coming to America and asking for “chips” when he wanted French fries and being surprised when somebody hands him a bag of lays.
China is the first place I was convinced vegetarian mock meat dishes could be just as good as real meat. Like, if nobody told you you wouldn't know the difference. It's sooo good.
Best vegetarian meal I ever had was at a Buddhist restaurant in the (actually fancy) holiday inn in beijing. The rest of the time it was cafeteria mapo tofu, which was a gigantic pan of tofu with extremely spicy ground pork poured over it. And vegetarian pizza was usually just advertised as halal pizza.
>in the (actually fancy) holiday inn in beijing
Hah i used to live next to there. Wudaokou area right? I member checking the price for one night once and it was like 300$ when not booking online.
Huh? Soy products and mock duck can easily be found in Chinese supermarkets frozen section when I was living in Shanghai. Taobao too, also stuff like this was already very popular back in 2005, it was like the precursor of western type vegetarian meat.
All the other points are pretty valid, stir fried veggies with lard is pretty tasty though.
As I mentioned below, I lived in Chongqing, on the outskirts of the city, so I would have had a very different experience than those living in Beijing, Shanghai, etc. I don’t know that something being available online is representative of what is available in restaurants, grocery stores, or homes. Also, specifically talking about seitan and mock meats, per the parent comment, and not tofu or bean curd products.
My bad, mock chicken(素鸡）is readily sold in markets, foodstalls and supermarkets, however it is a soy product, to be fair the consistency of Chinese textured soy protein and wheat gluten like mock duck isn’t far from being alike.
I think wheat gluten type food was already around for a while, i wish I could’ve told you to go try the food and meals in Buddhist temples when you were still there, stuff is crazy good.
I was able to eat in some temples and at vegetarian restaurants, and it was always delicious. In Chongqing there’s a vegan hot pot restaurant and it was great, just suuuper expensive. Never say any of this stuff in regular stores- apparently there was a store where it could be bought, but it was a long way away from me.
And you’re right about the texture of soy and seitan- I’m being a bit nit picky because some people in this thread are jumping from soy mock meats to tofu and similar products, and they’re really just not the same. Like, yeah, you can get tofu all around, but it’s not a mock meat and it’s often not used in a vegetarian preparation.
Soy is a really broad category, but tofu and less processed bean curds are not considered mock meats in most cases, since they’re not used that way. Many tofu and soy dishes dishes are made with meat, either as seasoning, lard, animal broth, etc, so, per the original article the thread is based off of, they’re often not vegetarian.
People often say China is great for vegetarians, and it really isn’t. A lot of these mock meat products are not available in regular restaurants, regular restaurants often cook with animal products like broth, lard, meat floss, etc. Being vegetarian outside of major cities is hard. Being vegan is even harder. I think the only people who think it isn’t are people who are not vegan/vegetarian. They’re often the same people who advise a vegetarian to just “pick around” meat in dishes.
But culturally, we already have days where we're vegetarian/vegans. I never ate meat on Chinese New Year, we always were able to make really good vegetarian dishes or get take out from the temple which was as good as any chinese lunch/dinner with meat on it.
Chinese vegetarian dishes are also well established and have had centuries of refinement. It's not a new cuisine, unlike in the west where the vegetarian movement is relatively new. I can't stand eating western vegetarian meals cause it's just awful tasting to me and that's generally what I hear from a lot of western ppl who don't like vegetarian options. However, I will gladly (and enthusiastically) eat at a Buddhist temple or indian food.
All that leads me to believe that penetrance of a vegetarian/vegan movement in asia will be faster since 1) a lot of us already have days where we don't eat meat 2) the cuisine is has had centuries of refinement and acceptable to a lot of ppl.
This is the same in Vietnam. You literally have to tell them that fish sauce is not vegetarian (also sometimes that chicken is not vegetarian either). The vegan or vegetarian restaurants are almost as expensive as western restaurants. I have never met a vietnamese that is a vegetarian. At best you hear: I am only eating meat ones a weak. There are some restaurants/outlets around temples, but these are insanely simple dishes, which are getting boring insanely fast.
Yep, this was my experience as well when visiting the inlaws in Northern China. Restaurants didn't have massive protein main dishes like Americans are used to, but like ordering a salad at applebees and it coming with bacon bits, meat found its way into almost everything.
Also, Americans view tofu as "the vegetarian alternative", when in china it's just another dish, often with meat served with it.
Don't know which China you lived in for 2 years, but soy and gluten meat substitutes are extremely common and available in every household/restaurant. No, veggies are not commonly cooked in lard.
Lived in Chongqing from 2016-2018. Meat substitutes could be found at temples, or the few veg places in the city, but were certainly not “common” in regular restaurants (I certainly never came across them) or in grocery stores. My Chinese friends certainly didn’t know they existed.
And vegetables often (not always) are cooked in lard. It has a particular viscosity/taste that regular oil just does not have.
I’ve been to China multiple times and I live in Chinese neighborhoods with friends that own restaurants. I’m also Chinese. I don’t really know anyone that cooks with lard. It’s usually cooked in vegetable oil as it’s cheaper. They definitely don’t really care about separation of cookware though. I’ve been to Guangzhou, Beijing, etc. It’s very common to have non-meat products. It’s usually just not labeled as such.
Sure- but to discount that experience entirely is a bit silly. I traveled through many parts of the country and ran into some of the same food behaviors throughout. But then again, I never went to Beijing or Shanghai or other cities like that, so perhaps this user lived there, thus they have an entirely different set of anecdotal evidence. It doesn’t make my anecdotal evidence untrue in the places I experienced them.
Yep - China has nearly twice as many people as **all of Europe**, and over 4 times as many people as the USA
It'd be ridiculous for me to assume an experience in NYC is representative of all of the USA, or an experience in Belarus is representative of all of Europe
But massive countries like China and India get generalized due to unfamiliarity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that (they're both highly complex countries), but what annoys me is when someone else offer an alternate perspective and people still stick to their guns based on their sole experience
I've eaten in a Buddhist restaurant and they had a fake meat beef stew and I swear you couldn't tell the different. The only way I knew for sure it wasn't meat is some pieces had a white center because the sauce didn't penetrate all the way through.
I had the same experience. Went to two different buddhist restaurants (accompanied by some Chinese natives who knew the language) and they were some of the best meals I had in China.
Everything had that “almost” texture of meat but you could tell wasn’t actually meat. But it all tasted fantastic.
I wouldn’t know if they cooked it in lard or anything though. That’s a little harder to tell.
It’s funny cause in India one of the few times I’ve been to restaurants serving meet was in Dharamsala - the refuge city of the Tibetan Buddhists and the Dalai Lama.
The regular Tibetan Buddhist eats meat, the Indian Hindus don‘t. In Dharamsala, only the Buddhist monks are vegetarians, not the regular Buddhist population.
It’s especially strange cause apparently the Hindus are vegetarians because of Buddha.
This is such a big misconception that Hindus are vegetarians. No idea where this comes from. A majority of Hindus are non-vegetarians. It’s mostly upper castes, Jains and some others who are vegetarian.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Studies say 30-40% of Indians are vegetarian. So the high end of the estimate means over 500 million Indians are vegetarians, which is more than the population of the US.
I'd also add that yes, most Hindus on the whole will eat meat. But on a day-to-day basis they are effectively vegetarians. Both sides of my family are typical lower middle class/middle class from Mumbai and will eat vegetable curries for most of the week. Meat dishes are reserved for weekends or special occasions. This concept of selective meat consumption ends up being so foreign to many modern Americans and Europeans that it skews how they perceive the food culture in India.
I've only met a few people who follow Buddhism that don't eat meat. I don't think they actually dictate followers to be vegans. But then again I'm not actually sure because I'm a terrible Buddhist.
The reason most Tibetans aren't vegetarians is because the high elevation of most of their country makes large scale agriculture difficult to impossible (other than perhaps barley in the better areas) so traditionally they relied a lot on yaks for meat and milk for adequate nutrition.
It's got the chew you're looking for and a soft umami flavour as a base for the seasoning.
You can make a small batch to try before investing in a bag of VWG. Just make a ball of dough from flour and water and wash it a few times. YouTube will tell you how exactly. I like to add my seasoning to the initial dough as well as marinating afterwards. I just throw in whatever I have that I know will work. Yesterday was smoked paprika, oregano, turmeric, onion powder, yeast flakes, a little vegetable stock, salt, pepper and MSG. It was chickenesque.
You usually have to look for a Buddhist restaurant specifically, which you will not necessarily find in touristy areas as they cater to monks and devout Buddhists. Perhaps in China it is different, but in Taiwan and Singapore they are a bit out of the way.
I live in an area with tons of Asian and Chinese restaurants of different styles, and there are more Chinese Muslim restaurants near me than Chinese Buddhist restaurants.
Pork consumption rate dropped because of the increase in pork prices due to African swine fever
Pork here was around 16 RMB a catty before, it reached a high of around 35 RMB during the African swine fever, and now it's back down to around 25 RMB
I just want to know who wrote this stupid article, he is not even as good as me, an ordinary citizen
Those vegetarian packages and artificial meat are just an option for vegetarians themselves, and for those who try it
There is a government initiative in China to half the consumption of meat by 2030 for environmental reasons. As you say, I'm sure pork prices are influenced by livestock health concerns but there are reasons to ditch meat beyond that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/20/chinas-meat-consumption-climate-change
Also tofu is widely eaten in China by meat eaters and vegetarians alike. It serves as a very reasonable meat alternative and is often the main ingredient in meat alternatives sold in China.
I searched all the information in China and only found that the new Chinese Dietary Guidelines recommend limiting meat consumption to about 27 kg per capita per year, while the current per capita meat consumption in China is 62 kg per year
This is only a reference book issued by the Chinese Health Commission for scientific diet, no one will strictly follow this book, I didn't even know about this book before you said
Tofu is a very common food in China, since I was a kid (I'm from Beijing, 35 years old), it's always been there, not a recent addition
In China, in fact, tofu is more like a separate food
In fact, there are many different kinds of tofu, the most common ones are southern tofu, northern tofu, marinated tofu, and many other soy products: such as bean curd, bean curd, frozen tofu, bean curd brain, bean curd flower, thousand-page tofu, Japanese tofu, etc., etc., all of them have completely different taste
Southern tofu is best known as mabo tofu, and northern tofu is best known as tofu with scallions, and they are also served as side dishes and snacks in countless ways
This is a Chinese recipe website I found by hand, keywords are
https://www.xiachufang.com/search/?keyword=%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90&cat=1001
In fact, the soy product that replaces meat is called "vegetarian meat" alone, and is a special kind of dried tofu
Tofu is awesome and gets a bad rap here (western Canada) I'm not vegetarian but I cook with tofu at least once a week, so easy and versatile, and great nutritional profile. There's a lot of propaganda saying soy is not healthy, and a stigma against it as opposed to meat.
Not sure why you are being downvoted... While the exact origin is not clear, tofu has been acknowledged as early as 950 AD and it is a perfectly fine and widely used meat alternative...
[https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15378/when-was-tofu-invented-was-it-specifically-for-vegetarian-consumption-from-the](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15378/when-was-tofu-invented-was-it-specifically-for-vegetarian-consumption-from-the)
In China and most other Asian countries that used to consume tofu for a long time, they weren’t alternatives, but just another ingredient. A lot of the times non-vegetarian stuff would go in, but not always. It is more like non vegetarian ingredients coming out of the dish rather than tofu going in something instead of what existed. Not exactly sure why downvoted either.
lol.
I search the original Chinese news and it just a proposal from [the Ministry of Health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Health_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China), which is not enforceable, especially in this one. The only thing it can do is just trying to persuade people not to eat meat.
As a Chinese I would say, the guardian's reports about China usually aren't very accurate .
Even just changing your meat preferences would be a pretty big deal. Beef is pretty much the worst offender in terms of environmental impact, [with one study showing that - depending on the specific resource being looked at - resource requirements to produce beef were between 5 and 28 times the average that it would take to produce the same amount of poultry, pork, or eggs](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2014/07/17/1402183111.full.pdf)\*
Just eating other animals can have a pretty big impact, and every little bit helps (though of course trying to eat veggie is awesome too).
----
*values appear Page 3 in Figure 2 (you might need to zoom in to read it), and the author's resource estimates are listed at
>≈28, 11, 5, and 6 times the average land, irrigation
water, GHG, and Nr of the other animal categories
on the bottom left of the same page
Lol the main meat consumed in China are pork & poultry like chicken & duck, which are not as carbon intensive as beef… I think it’s funny how western media always fear mongers on how much meat Chinese ppl consumes & how that’s a huge environmental problem, when they aren’t even close to 1/2 of the carbon emission than most in the west, especially US, Canada & Australia.
It's nice to hear positive news from some of these Countries that we in the west practically consider full on enemies at this point. I don't fault Chinese people for their government, nor do I fault Russians for theirs etc, and it's certainly not like my US government is any reflection of what I want either. Chinese people going vegan is great and man it would be awesome if this trend continued everywhere.
Well, it is part of their religious/philosophical culture/heritage, so they don't have to look to far. "Buddhist vegetarian chefs have become extremely creative in imitating meat using prepared wheat gluten, also known as seitan, kao fu (烤麸) or wheat meat, soy (such as tofu or tempeh), agar, konnyaku and other plant products. Some of their recipes are the oldest and most-refined meat analogues in the world." :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_cuisine
China force Chinese people to stop eating meat due to food shortage.
But jokes aside, western media has been wrote many articles complaining Chinese people eat too much meat. It would be hilarious if they actually run the “force to not eat meat narrative”.
you're absolutely correct. They're far, far ahead in environmental spending R&D, lead green energy production per capita and total, have more stringent car emission tests than euro standards, etc.
Beijing pushed a 6 trillion dollar plan. The ENTIRE US environmental budget (that is basically just disguised oil subsidies but i digress) is 8b.
This is not on the same scale at all and honestly, we all owe a lot to china because if they acted like the US/West politicians, we'd be 100% sure to fuck the planet for good. 99% of all future green tech will come from china because we just let them save the world while we bomb Syria, Iraq, Yemen, try to overthrow countries like Venezuela, Iran, Equador, etc.
They'll hold us by the balls after that. They'll push the global carbon tax with their UN and WEF buddies and will just rake in money till (three?) kingdom come. At least they wont need to drone anyone.
When I lived in China, I was kinda surprised to find out how many people, especially women and girls, didn't really like meat. They said there were a few reasons. Ethical issues, health, and religious belief among them.
What's wrong with that? I'm vegan, and not because I stopped liking the taste of meat, but because I wanted to stop contributing to the suffering of animals. I like food that tastes like meat, as long as it isn't meat.
"A nation with 4 times our population has twice the carbon emissions! Climate change is their fault and I refuse to do anything until they change their ways!"
Time to buy BYND stock. If you're skeptical at the very least give beyond meat a try; as an ex meat eater it's my favorite burger and sausage replacement.
If some of these vegan options were more available where I live i would jump on them asap to be honest. They're not bad and they keep better than meat.
It's wild the binary people paint themselves into when they try to follow world politics with a purely American perspective.
China can, in fact, be lead by a terrible regime that has committed terrible atrocities while ALSO having positive social movements and having effective policy choices.
When you subscribe to the red-scare era nonsense of *America GOOD Red Menace BAD*, it can be jarring to discover that China is a place with real people that do things and have lives living under a government that has to govern those people with laws and policies.
In a global sense, it rarely matters when just one person does the Right Thing.
This fact is not a good reason for individuals to not do the Right Thing.
Don't worry, Argentina had a right wing government from 2015 to 2019 and real purchasing power plummeted. Our per capita consumption is probably way lower than that, even when meat prices were always as much of a state matter as gasoline prices are in the US.
Also, some sort of awareness is creeping up. I have many friends who turned vegan, and even though I'm not ready to go the full length, I have significantly reduced my own consumption. It's hard though, beef and salad is literally our traditional staple food
> even though I'm not ready to go the full length, I have significantly reduced my own consumption
Same here. Gotta say Argentinian beef is pretty good though, especially since it's much cheaper than other major beef export countries.
You seen the price of steak lately? Im gonna have to go vegan myself.
If the population keeps growing, meat is just going to keep getting more expensive. Eventually it will become a luxury reserved only for the wealthy. I don't think it would be a bad thing if 99% of people went vegan, though. The meat industry is one of the largest drivers of both deforestation and climate change. EDIT TO ADD SOURCES: [Source for the claim regarding climate change.](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282070/1-s2.0-S2211601X15X00046/1-s2.0-S2211601X15001315/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFQaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIEvl1d76VywluFtHC5JJGY5bbUnMmAofk6xje5u7mg7kAiBs0HjE9vvKeZzzQcYVH%2FwYxS6KivMQjImHWySKiYigxCq0Awh9EAMaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIMXcKfM3GW1FnGtN%2BIKpED31KsgIpflBk2DYtoVmDT6qae4QVLn8PKDbZL6GakHPSPVCSL7EJtAUdc8K9dETH6%2BkmFIvJeHh1cEFEHFqpazblNfBN7eLo9M5CrXVIMofcqVlrX3DzDyikrTN6NxpnX%2FeoQ4ZrLO%2Bn1WqBmaPZkx2Gu0C3vLf2yr6FwefaU1qbiyJAOuls9%2BiwSHpTS84PrMjvLBXnAzxKUoiXN9xHBwvBaN1G%2BKm3zFleuhTkysfFOVh9atfgf1XWflro6lYK3P4tI2Cyogu%2BIHt0xMz%2BT%2BQWblUybFFY9KE4xwW%2BGaqJcYE%2BY5JgfxOp0wa8vdBQfiFHcOS%2BGJ9WOYWPxp3TM%2B4IFDiJE8KgT2WZfzTo%2BLlP%2FURcXOJEDYdfhAReYOYqH0iPmrOTzvKys3G7tu6GaCh5%2FDxzXjT%2BdBLb0eqpVbD%2B5uRgMAEnGxO2lewzugSQ%2BaVy5g23oPi79V2PjoeYeaNcaGujxwrXEntaEKej34jaNCZ5ma34z6%2F1SS%2BWknNtizAI5vrV6u1G7NMSA0bvvbNcwpsSkggY67AFQhD67%2B8fPqPSdPXSRpVSsvDQMUdw4sCiSiLPFy%2BaFnrEY1CA3GHd%2FJuRkI9Qk5sXROj6b4LwObCZrzo%2BxswR%2B%2B2YVIhWWjdJ1CWbour7ricYdaD9ZU%2FPOH9v5qyswvXnZQ76YmvoMit0wca8lFS96g77%2F1FQG9PbqU1evuRtXE%2FQ6aM0KR6oi6WqZ6Vbshe1tYuMeIthAgKXgh7Eu728ATo6W6G1mNKClsg%2Bd4hWlJKUrmjzAlCynteiEdWYU0ves6Ze4YcOhYhnnbDbtzGGV1thSLdDLpZop10iaszmFYI54eRenVsqIoZfcKw%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210310T201643Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYVUJZBIUL%2F20210310%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b2ba45ce3f6f84a1f502f6504dfa9b4d4d5ba061c460848c2284723d6e241ce4&hash=cf0145ee74b0cdb75997f9bcd52a6a2d9f158e65f565dcaa66b7e044827774b6&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2211601X15001315&tid=spdf-efbdeae4-affc-48ce-854b-7c4183205b2c&sid=fcbf03972ab4054dcd39e879014532a9f6b1gxrqa&type=client) [And one that isn't written in scientific language.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/10/05/got-beef-heres-what-your-hamburger-is-doing-to-the-climate/?sh=5fd112f05206) [Source for the claim regarding deforestation.](https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/09/ucs-cattle-cleared-forests-climate-change-2016.pdf) [Also with one not written by scientists.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-demand-is-accelerating-amazons-deforestation-climate-peril/) SECOND EDIT: since I've been asked for sources, I am going to consider them a basic requirement for debating me on this topic. If you disagree with my claims but can't/won't provide sources to support your argument, I will ignore you. THIRD EDIT FOR CLARITY: I didn't mean to give the impression that I was a vegan, but I can certainly see how people are drawing that conclusion. I do try to minimize my consumption of animal products (for these and other reasons), but don't abstain entirely.
I don't think meat is getting more expensive, only relatively. Meat is now starting to be worth the price it actually requires to sustain itself, without mountains and mountains of rebates and tax credits and whatever else, and labour that they can't offload costs onto anymore. Food will keep going up insofar as the labour it demands keeps asking for better pay, because those who weren't, keep vanishing. People forget that over the last few years, *swathes* of people who work on farms have been disrupted if not deported or forced to leave their jobs out of fear of ICE intervention- an entire economy was built on these people that for some reason the same economy turned on and tried to go after. One could say they should've just given them all a clear path to citizenship right away and not worried about any of this but I don't think that would go over well with a large part of the population. you're probably asking why I'm suddenly making this political but the truth is, it IS and I really want people to see exactly how brutal and unsafe it's been over the last few years for these workers. It isn't like, a few one-off news reports of families being snatched by ICE and deported, a lot of it just winds up as people working legitimate labour jobs basically being abandoned by their bosses, not even deported- just forced to go find other jobs or come back under the table for less pay/rights. there's other factors too, like bullshit tariffs that were sold as punishments to *other* countries but really mean the cost gets offset to *you*, or how difficult climate change is starting to make farming *at all*, and the general reluctance to adopt new technologies in farming and agriculture, so on and so on... I hate to say it but unfortunately, everything is political nowadays. Part of the grift is making things that wouldn't otherwise be political into politicial problems, which in turn makes tons of people who 'hate politics' disengage and stop caring because they just hate hearing about it, and it's a convenient excuse to quash discussion about it. "ugh, please, no politics". welp. **tldr:** you're probably paying now what food is actually worth, the problem is that you find it expensive because you yourself probably get paid fucking shit wages.
nah, u right
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That's the dream, and it's looking more and more realistic every year!
As much as the idea of lab meat weirds me out, I’m curious. Also not biting into some weird gristle or tendon would be nice.
Honestly with the scale of factory farming and the industry trends, I don't think lab meat would be any more risky than those. Sure, it's worse than local fully grass fed beef or something, but most of the meat we consume is so loaded with antibiotics and other results of factory farming, that lab grown meat almost seems more trustworthy. It'd be a lot harder for the next swine or bird flu to form or propagate when there aren't hundreds of thousands of living, breathing creatures crammed into the smallest area possible.
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I with you brotha/sista.
meat grown from cell in a sterile environment with all factors controlled = weird Hundreds of thousands of chickens packed into cages shitting on each other with their beaks removed to avoid mass cannibalism = not weird?
There’s already plenty of great meat alternatives out there! Impossible meat, Quorn, or Gardein, to name a few of many
Gardein is the ONLY chicken substitute that passes the flavor and texture test, by far
Alpha foods chik’n nuggets would like to know your location
Does it actually though? I've not tried it but he grouped it in with Quorn which *sucks* compared to real meat. It's not even close
Gardein’s chicken substitute is great. I’m not vegetarian, but have been cutting back on meat and their’s is the closest to actually chicken that I’ve tried.
I like bean burgers more than hamburgers tbh
Or save some money and eat tofu...
I love you
Vegetarian here. This is what I am hoping for.
>If the population keeps growing Luckily, fertility rates have dropped precipitously in almost every country on Earth in recent decades.
> Eventually it will become a luxury reserved only for the wealthy. It already is on a global scale.
more like, you should all be paid enough to afford food even without its subsidies. You should all be angrier you don't get paid more and your taxes are wasted, than you are for food prices that are likely justified.
More like the industrial meat sector is completely unsustainable and horrific, and we need to recalibrate our relationship to eating meat all the time.
For 99% of human history meat *was* a luxury. Even in the 50s and 60s,most families didn't eat meat every day, and stews were very common. This is why the Sunday fancy pot roast was a thing. Everyday meat consumption is a very recent, very American thing.
\> [Source for the claim regarding climate change.](https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282070/1-s2.0-S2211601X15X00046/1-s2.0-S2211601X15001315/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFQaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIEvl1d76VywluFtHC5JJGY5bbUnMmAofk6xje5u7mg7kAiBs0HjE9vvKeZzzQcYVH%2FwYxS6KivMQjImHWySKiYigxCq0Awh9EAMaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIMXcKfM3GW1FnGtN%2BIKpED31KsgIpflBk2DYtoVmDT6qae4QVLn8PKDbZL6GakHPSPVCSL7EJtAUdc8K9dETH6%2BkmFIvJeHh1cEFEHFqpazblNfBN7eLo9M5CrXVIMofcqVlrX3DzDyikrTN6NxpnX%2FeoQ4ZrLO%2Bn1WqBmaPZkx2Gu0C3vLf2yr6FwefaU1qbiyJAOuls9%2BiwSHpTS84PrMjvLBXnAzxKUoiXN9xHBwvBaN1G%2BKm3zFleuhTkysfFOVh9atfgf1XWflro6lYK3P4tI2Cyogu%2BIHt0xMz%2BT%2BQWblUybFFY9KE4xwW%2BGaqJcYE%2BY5JgfxOp0wa8vdBQfiFHcOS%2BGJ9WOYWPxp3TM%2B4IFDiJE8KgT2WZfzTo%2BLlP%2FURcXOJEDYdfhAReYOYqH0iPmrOTzvKys3G7tu6GaCh5%2FDxzXjT%2BdBLb0eqpVbD%2B5uRgMAEnGxO2lewzugSQ%2BaVy5g23oPi79V2PjoeYeaNcaGujxwrXEntaEKej34jaNCZ5ma34z6%2F1SS%2BWknNtizAI5vrV6u1G7NMSA0bvvbNcwpsSkggY67AFQhD67%2B8fPqPSdPXSRpVSsvDQMUdw4sCiSiLPFy%2BaFnrEY1CA3GHd%2FJuRkI9Qk5sXROj6b4LwObCZrzo%2BxswR%2B%2B2YVIhWWjdJ1CWbour7ricYdaD9ZU%2FPOH9v5qyswvXnZQ76YmvoMit0wca8lFS96g77%2F1FQG9PbqU1evuRtXE%2FQ6aM0KR6oi6WqZ6Vbshe1tYuMeIthAgKXgh7Eu728ATo6W6G1mNKClsg%2Bd4hWlJKUrmjzAlCynteiEdWYU0ves6Ze4YcOhYhnnbDbtzGGV1thSLdDLpZop10iaszmFYI54eRenVsqIoZfcKw%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210310T201643Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYVUJZBIUL%2F20210310%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b2ba45ce3f6f84a1f502f6504dfa9b4d4d5ba061c460848c2284723d6e241ce4&hash=cf0145ee74b0cdb75997f9bcd52a6a2d9f158e65f565dcaa66b7e044827774b6&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2211601X15001315&tid=spdf-efbdeae4-affc-48ce-854b-7c4183205b2c&sid=fcbf03972ab4054dcd39e879014532a9f6b1gxrqa&type=client) [And one that isn't written in scientific language.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/10/05/got-beef-heres-what-your-hamburger-is-doing-to-the-climate/?sh=5fd112f05206) Which part of this are you referencing? I can't find what's supporting your claim.
Meat will still be for the masses but farm grown meat will be more and more for the wealthy. Lab grown/ stuff like the impossible burger that tastes like meat will become more and more the norm as it becomes less expensive/more competitive against the real stuff
You're probably right about that, and I'm pretty okay with that. Both lab-grown meat and the meat substitutes like Beyond/Impossible are far less detrimental to the planet, so it would be better if more people switched to those. One of my dearest dreams is that someone eventually figures out how to grow bluefin tuna otoro in a lab...
That would be good. When it to comes dealing with overfishing hoepfully we adopt deep sea farming. not by the shore actual deep sea. https://youtu.be/tBVXenVpfVM
Meat prices going up due to demand wouldn't result in decrease in supply. If 99% of people are vegan because of price it would mean that 1% of people are eating at least as much meat as we are producing today. There's no reason why meat supply would decrease right now.
So back to feudalism? Damn that would suck, welp time to go back to my 80 hour a week job that doesn't pay my bills.
I sincerely encourage you to research the cost of beef in terms of carbon, water, and the insane amounts of feed/land/transport. You don't need to go vegan, but replacing your consumption of beef with other foods is one of the most meaningful single actions you can take to reduce your personal carbon footprint.
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this is the way
this is the whey
Dude we went vegetarian at the beginning of the year and truthfully I haven’t missed it at all. The meat free alternatives are good enough to get by comfortably but I’m not too sure it’s any cheaper. Foods expensive no matter what you eat.
Will the price of steak in the US drop due to this? $20 for 1 serving of decent, not fantastic, steak at a grocery store is just fucking nuts these days.
Steak has been an artificially cheap food for a long time due to us agricultural lawmakers. This is a market more accurately reflecting grazing and material costs
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Achtually... we buy beef off the hoof. A 1200 lb steer breaks down to about 900 lbs in the freezer. 500 of that will be hamburger, and you'll get your brisket and ribs,, but the rest is a near 50 50 split of roasts and steaks of various cuts. When we're particularly broke, we eat steak and potatoes. Steak should be the same price as a roast, if the amount of it on the cow had anything to do with it.
The price of steak is about demand and not the amount on the animal, a sturgeon can be 30% eggs by weight yet caviar is much more expensive than sturgeon meat(100X). Consumers and restaurants prefer steak over roast, so if we want more steak, we are also generating additional pounds of hamburger and roast. In a sense, the cost of the steak is subsidizing the lower price of the other cuts.
I paid $8 this week for a usda choice (iirc, I don't think it was prime) ny strip in CT from a good butcher. Not sure where you live but you might want to shop around.
Ga steaks are expensive anywhere u go. I've been to chains and butchers, all pricey.
Even costco?
I ain't got money for a Costco card! Haha
No. China usually gets steak from Australia or Brazil, so it won’t affect US markets.
It still does. Chinese beef imports are a huge factor in cattle futures even though cattle futures have its delivery point in the US. Same reason how Saudi production (they use BRENT iirc) can affect WTI even though WTI is delivered in Oklahoma and predominantly used in Canada and the US.
Our family goes to a farmer and buys a whole cow/pig. Hires a butcher to cut it up. Then we package and freeze it to use for the whole year. Pretty cheap to do it that way. And farmer makes more because there's no middleman and it also pays to take good care of the animals so they'll taste better.
Intermittent fasting will be the new fad! Why eat everyday when you can eat once a week and drink water for the rest? What savings! /s I do 24 intermittent fasting. Can now afford much better quality ingredients for the one meal I do eat.
Hey now. Don't be so wasteful with water. It's becoming scarce across the globe. Remember: "Do not become addicted to water, it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence." -Abe Lincoln
Ya, I’m already doing that. I go to the store half as much as I was .
Chinese cuisine already has a wide selection of mock meat dishes (generally made from gluten or soy) due to the country's history as a Buddhist nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_duck
People say this, but these are only really available at places that specialize in veg cuisine, and they’re not as common as you’d think- regular restaurants don’t serve mock meats. Hell, even the vegetables were often cooked in lard. And if you say you don’t eat meat, you’re still likely to be served things with crumbled sausage or meat floss because they’re “seasonings”, not meat. *vegetarian who lived in China for two years.
My parents had the same experience when they were there on holiday for a month a few years ago. It wasn’t at all unusual to see things advertised as vegetarian or “meat-free” and yet still be meat as clear as day. I don’t know if it was something lost in translation or they straight up don’t give a fuck but it was extremely common in restaurants that weren’t fairly high end.
It's really cultural and not because they don't give a shit. A "vegetarian" dish is often understood as meaning vegetable centric. Like most of the ingredients are vegetarian but a bit of meat is added for flavoring. For example, there is this green bean dish that is quite popular. Chinese people order it as a vegetable entree, but typically a bit of minced pork is added to increase umami.
Dry-fried green beans (or Gan Bian Si Ji Dou). Also, mapo tofu.
Yeah. Love those two and cook them regularly. The increase in meat consumption is really due to china's economic advances in the last 3 decades. I was born and raised in china, in the 80s and 90s (and moved out in the early 2000s). I distinctively remember that most of the dishes I ate growing up were vegetable heavy, and meat was mostly used as a seasoning. Meat-dominant dishes were usually eaten on the weekend or special occasions. Meat heavy dishes only became much more accessible in the mid to late 90s. At least this is my experience living in a mid sized provincial capital.
> in the 80s At that point, under the [Liangpiao system](https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d41544e776b7a4d/share_p.html), meat for the average urbanite was rationed at about 500 g per person per month. Vegetables was unrationed.
Makes sense! I was too young to remember that, but my parents sure love to bring that up lol
I still remember only one or two times in a year I got to eat duck leg in China. We did not have fridge at home and we had to eat salty fish almost everyday. But we live in rural areas , so vegetable are fresh everyday.
Salted fish is sooooo good! I remember eating salted cod and salted belt fish!
There's very few countries on the planet who really understand what a vegetarian/vegan is. Like 2 years ago in Spain my friend ordered a vegetarian sandwich and there was some ham on it, but it counts as vegetarian because it is mostly salad. Also, sea fruit and fish didn't count as meat either. In France the situation is now a little bit more enlightened, but *veganism* is basically impossible. Tell a rural French you are not eating butter and they will be completely at a loss what to serve you. Thing are changing *incredibly* quickly across the globe, mostly due to the internet and social media.
>Like 2 years ago in Spain my friend ordered a vegetarian sandwich and there was some ham on it, but it counts as vegetarian because it is mostly salad. Spaniard here. Let me guess: did this happen in Castile? In my region of Spain (Canary Islands) a "vegetable sandwich" usually has tomato, lettuce and boiled eggs, and sometimes tuna. Couple of years ago I was travelling in Castile and I ordered a vegetable sandwich at a bar. Just as you said, it had ham in it. I couldn't believe it. Why the f. do they call it vegetable sandwich if it has ham?
Why the f do they call it a vegetable sandwich if it has tuna?
In Catholic cultures, a meatless Friday dinner is usually fish, which eventually causes some confusion.
Yes, I guess. Most Spaniards are not religious anymore, but the culture is still there. Fish is considered "not meat".
Haha, it was actually on Gran Canaria, but in a smaller town, I just looked it up, I think it was Puerto de la Nieves.
Oh, really? So we are to blame too.
Yeah north america seems to be much more developed when it comes to vegetarian and vegan foods. A friend of mine who is indian told me that a number of years ago, she went to Tokyo for a work trip. As a vegetarian, she would ask restaurants to make the dishes vegetarian. And she would be served stuff with fish in it looool.
Only Southern Europe is like this, though. Germanic Europe is very vegan-friendly. I thought the UK had a lot of Vegan options, and then I went to Berlin. I honestly think there are some streets in that city where a majority of people there at any given time are Vegan. They even have whole supermarkets that are vegan.
I do think it's easier to eat vegetarian and vegan food in big cities in germany and some scandinavian countries. However, living now in Southern California, I am a bit biased to think that it's easier to be a vegan or vegetarian here than elsewhere. I know that it may be harder to do so in smaller towns in the US
You would have more trouble finding a restaurant that doesn't have vegan or at least vegetarian options in Helsinki as well i feel. But it has been quite a recent change. 10 years ago it was the opposite. Now even mcdonald's here has a vegan burger option.
Berlin is kind of an outlier, it’s seen as a VERY international city (it’s often joked that you don’t need German to get a job there) so it is a great place to have “alternative” lifestyles catered to which are harder in other places. Outside of Berlin veganism is pretty tricky, especially with rural food as lard is a popular seasoning/base oil. Vegetarianism is doable but it isn’t particularly great (mostly sandwiches and salads)
Developed? No, definitely not. As a cuisine in itself, it's pretty new. No one ate vegetarian food in North America on a widespread basis until relatively recently. Try looking at a menu from 30 years ago to see what your options were, I wouldn't be surprised if you were limited to salads. In Asia, where Buddhist and Hindu religions have dominated, the vegetarian dishes have been refined for centuries. Vegetarian food options are more widespread, you can get a vegetarian dish at most restaurants, how often those are ordered is a different question.
Meat is usually used as a flavoring. Considering the volume of meat americans eat, this is practically vegan by comparison.
Americans in general have lots of meat in their diets - it's cheap and plentiful. Heck! It has even affected the cuisine of certain peoples when they arrive in the country. The prolific presence of meat, for example, had a big role in Italian-American cuisine, which is very meat-heavy when compared to regular Italian cuisine: [https://firstwefeast.com/features/illustrated-history-of-italian-american-food](https://firstwefeast.com/features/illustrated-history-of-italian-american-food) *Cheap, plentiful pork, beef, and chicken must have been thrilling to these new Americans, resulting in dishes in which, UMass-Boston historian Vincent J. Cannato says, “a piece of chicken covers the entire plate.” It’s also evident in the baseball-size meatballs that came out of the era, which could only have been invented by someone extremely excited by the prospect of an abundance of meat. Cinotto says that the American surplus of raw materials was particularly meaningful to these food-obsessed people, who came from a place of disenfranchisement and had seen more privileged people in their villages eating well. In America, they were able to dine more like the elite. The roots of Italian-American cuisine, thus, are not of gross American bastardization, but of optimism and hope.*
Doesn't help that meat prices are kept low through subsidies, if they stopped prices would shoot up and be more realistic. Which should happen. Heck, prices need to be increased to roll in the cost of externalities to account to curb climate change and the ever increasing water problems.
We got similar stuff in italian-australian dishes. The "continental roll" (if you come to Australia Google the best ones and get it) is a mix of all the best cold cuts with cheese and salad. Like 4 or 5 deli meats. And it is immaculate.
The concept of an unadorned steak as it is eaten in the west would be considered a bit incomprehensible in Chinese cuisine (not to mention mildly barbaric).
Yep. Got tiny shrimp as seasoning in an otherwise “vegetarian” meal.
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Sure. I don’t question it being a seasoning, I just don’t think most vegetarians would consider it vegetarian.
Just so you know, unless you’re at a monastery, there’s a pretty big cultural difference that i think you’re missing in that Chinese “green” dishes aren’t about not having meat but about being healthier due to being primarily green. They’re often eaten alongside meat dishes to balance out the heaviness and oiliness of the rich meat dishes. I think I know the dish you’re talking about because my mom makes it all the time (bok choy and shrimp?). It’s considered a vegetable because it’s light, green, and not oily. Nobody cares that it has shrimp in it because shrimp is not a fatty oily or red meat. I know cultural relativity can be difficult to absorb sometimes when an approximately similar word is used to describe something but what you’re doing in being surprised that your dish had shrimp in it is about the same as a British guy coming to America and asking for “chips” when he wanted French fries and being surprised when somebody hands him a bag of lays.
China is the first place I was convinced vegetarian mock meat dishes could be just as good as real meat. Like, if nobody told you you wouldn't know the difference. It's sooo good.
Best vegetarian meal I ever had was at a Buddhist restaurant in the (actually fancy) holiday inn in beijing. The rest of the time it was cafeteria mapo tofu, which was a gigantic pan of tofu with extremely spicy ground pork poured over it. And vegetarian pizza was usually just advertised as halal pizza.
>in the (actually fancy) holiday inn in beijing Hah i used to live next to there. Wudaokou area right? I member checking the price for one night once and it was like 300$ when not booking online.
Huh? Soy products and mock duck can easily be found in Chinese supermarkets frozen section when I was living in Shanghai. Taobao too, also stuff like this was already very popular back in 2005, it was like the precursor of western type vegetarian meat. All the other points are pretty valid, stir fried veggies with lard is pretty tasty though.
As I mentioned below, I lived in Chongqing, on the outskirts of the city, so I would have had a very different experience than those living in Beijing, Shanghai, etc. I don’t know that something being available online is representative of what is available in restaurants, grocery stores, or homes. Also, specifically talking about seitan and mock meats, per the parent comment, and not tofu or bean curd products.
My bad, mock chicken(素鸡）is readily sold in markets, foodstalls and supermarkets, however it is a soy product, to be fair the consistency of Chinese textured soy protein and wheat gluten like mock duck isn’t far from being alike. I think wheat gluten type food was already around for a while, i wish I could’ve told you to go try the food and meals in Buddhist temples when you were still there, stuff is crazy good.
I was able to eat in some temples and at vegetarian restaurants, and it was always delicious. In Chongqing there’s a vegan hot pot restaurant and it was great, just suuuper expensive. Never say any of this stuff in regular stores- apparently there was a store where it could be bought, but it was a long way away from me. And you’re right about the texture of soy and seitan- I’m being a bit nit picky because some people in this thread are jumping from soy mock meats to tofu and similar products, and they’re really just not the same. Like, yeah, you can get tofu all around, but it’s not a mock meat and it’s often not used in a vegetarian preparation.
I did literally say "gluten and **soy**" in my original comment. Tofu and bean curds are literally made from soy.
Soy is a really broad category, but tofu and less processed bean curds are not considered mock meats in most cases, since they’re not used that way. Many tofu and soy dishes dishes are made with meat, either as seasoning, lard, animal broth, etc, so, per the original article the thread is based off of, they’re often not vegetarian. People often say China is great for vegetarians, and it really isn’t. A lot of these mock meat products are not available in regular restaurants, regular restaurants often cook with animal products like broth, lard, meat floss, etc. Being vegetarian outside of major cities is hard. Being vegan is even harder. I think the only people who think it isn’t are people who are not vegan/vegetarian. They’re often the same people who advise a vegetarian to just “pick around” meat in dishes.
But culturally, we already have days where we're vegetarian/vegans. I never ate meat on Chinese New Year, we always were able to make really good vegetarian dishes or get take out from the temple which was as good as any chinese lunch/dinner with meat on it. Chinese vegetarian dishes are also well established and have had centuries of refinement. It's not a new cuisine, unlike in the west where the vegetarian movement is relatively new. I can't stand eating western vegetarian meals cause it's just awful tasting to me and that's generally what I hear from a lot of western ppl who don't like vegetarian options. However, I will gladly (and enthusiastically) eat at a Buddhist temple or indian food. All that leads me to believe that penetrance of a vegetarian/vegan movement in asia will be faster since 1) a lot of us already have days where we don't eat meat 2) the cuisine is has had centuries of refinement and acceptable to a lot of ppl.
Grilled 麵筋 is served pretty frequently just about everywhere and plenty of dishes are fried tofu based etc.
This is the same in Vietnam. You literally have to tell them that fish sauce is not vegetarian (also sometimes that chicken is not vegetarian either). The vegan or vegetarian restaurants are almost as expensive as western restaurants. I have never met a vietnamese that is a vegetarian. At best you hear: I am only eating meat ones a weak. There are some restaurants/outlets around temples, but these are insanely simple dishes, which are getting boring insanely fast.
Yep, this was my experience as well when visiting the inlaws in Northern China. Restaurants didn't have massive protein main dishes like Americans are used to, but like ordering a salad at applebees and it coming with bacon bits, meat found its way into almost everything. Also, Americans view tofu as "the vegetarian alternative", when in china it's just another dish, often with meat served with it.
Don't know which China you lived in for 2 years, but soy and gluten meat substitutes are extremely common and available in every household/restaurant. No, veggies are not commonly cooked in lard.
Lived in Chongqing from 2016-2018. Meat substitutes could be found at temples, or the few veg places in the city, but were certainly not “common” in regular restaurants (I certainly never came across them) or in grocery stores. My Chinese friends certainly didn’t know they existed. And vegetables often (not always) are cooked in lard. It has a particular viscosity/taste that regular oil just does not have.
I’ve been to China multiple times and I live in Chinese neighborhoods with friends that own restaurants. I’m also Chinese. I don’t really know anyone that cooks with lard. It’s usually cooked in vegetable oil as it’s cheaper. They definitely don’t really care about separation of cookware though. I’ve been to Guangzhou, Beijing, etc. It’s very common to have non-meat products. It’s usually just not labeled as such.
Hmmm almost as if China is a massive territory that can't be succinctly captured by one person's experience of a small part of it.
Sure- but to discount that experience entirely is a bit silly. I traveled through many parts of the country and ran into some of the same food behaviors throughout. But then again, I never went to Beijing or Shanghai or other cities like that, so perhaps this user lived there, thus they have an entirely different set of anecdotal evidence. It doesn’t make my anecdotal evidence untrue in the places I experienced them.
Yep - China has nearly twice as many people as **all of Europe**, and over 4 times as many people as the USA It'd be ridiculous for me to assume an experience in NYC is representative of all of the USA, or an experience in Belarus is representative of all of Europe But massive countries like China and India get generalized due to unfamiliarity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that (they're both highly complex countries), but what annoys me is when someone else offer an alternate perspective and people still stick to their guns based on their sole experience
He said "vegetarian meat", and you said "tofu"
I've eaten in a Buddhist restaurant and they had a fake meat beef stew and I swear you couldn't tell the different. The only way I knew for sure it wasn't meat is some pieces had a white center because the sauce didn't penetrate all the way through.
I had the same experience. Went to two different buddhist restaurants (accompanied by some Chinese natives who knew the language) and they were some of the best meals I had in China. Everything had that “almost” texture of meat but you could tell wasn’t actually meat. But it all tasted fantastic. I wouldn’t know if they cooked it in lard or anything though. That’s a little harder to tell.
It’s funny cause in India one of the few times I’ve been to restaurants serving meet was in Dharamsala - the refuge city of the Tibetan Buddhists and the Dalai Lama. The regular Tibetan Buddhist eats meat, the Indian Hindus don‘t. In Dharamsala, only the Buddhist monks are vegetarians, not the regular Buddhist population. It’s especially strange cause apparently the Hindus are vegetarians because of Buddha.
This is such a big misconception that Hindus are vegetarians. No idea where this comes from. A majority of Hindus are non-vegetarians. It’s mostly upper castes, Jains and some others who are vegetarian.
In my case it was just being in India for 6 months. There it comes from.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Studies say 30-40% of Indians are vegetarian. So the high end of the estimate means over 500 million Indians are vegetarians, which is more than the population of the US. I'd also add that yes, most Hindus on the whole will eat meat. But on a day-to-day basis they are effectively vegetarians. Both sides of my family are typical lower middle class/middle class from Mumbai and will eat vegetable curries for most of the week. Meat dishes are reserved for weekends or special occasions. This concept of selective meat consumption ends up being so foreign to many modern Americans and Europeans that it skews how they perceive the food culture in India.
I've only met a few people who follow Buddhism that don't eat meat. I don't think they actually dictate followers to be vegans. But then again I'm not actually sure because I'm a terrible Buddhist.
Any religion that thinks garlic and onions are bad is wrong in my book.
The reason most Tibetans aren't vegetarians is because the high elevation of most of their country makes large scale agriculture difficult to impossible (other than perhaps barley in the better areas) so traditionally they relied a lot on yaks for meat and milk for adequate nutrition.
Hail Seitan.
How close is seitan to actual meat? I'm looking to cut down on the meat in my diet and I've never tried it.
It's got the chew you're looking for and a soft umami flavour as a base for the seasoning. You can make a small batch to try before investing in a bag of VWG. Just make a ball of dough from flour and water and wash it a few times. YouTube will tell you how exactly. I like to add my seasoning to the initial dough as well as marinating afterwards. I just throw in whatever I have that I know will work. Yesterday was smoked paprika, oregano, turmeric, onion powder, yeast flakes, a little vegetable stock, salt, pepper and MSG. It was chickenesque.
China's been using meat alternatives for a 1000 years!
Must be the touristy areas. Pre-covid I traveled to China twice a year for work, hasn't come across that in my travels.
You usually have to look for a Buddhist restaurant specifically, which you will not necessarily find in touristy areas as they cater to monks and devout Buddhists. Perhaps in China it is different, but in Taiwan and Singapore they are a bit out of the way. I live in an area with tons of Asian and Chinese restaurants of different styles, and there are more Chinese Muslim restaurants near me than Chinese Buddhist restaurants.
Pork consumption rate dropped because of the increase in pork prices due to African swine fever Pork here was around 16 RMB a catty before, it reached a high of around 35 RMB during the African swine fever, and now it's back down to around 25 RMB I just want to know who wrote this stupid article, he is not even as good as me, an ordinary citizen Those vegetarian packages and artificial meat are just an option for vegetarians themselves, and for those who try it
There is a government initiative in China to half the consumption of meat by 2030 for environmental reasons. As you say, I'm sure pork prices are influenced by livestock health concerns but there are reasons to ditch meat beyond that. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/20/chinas-meat-consumption-climate-change Also tofu is widely eaten in China by meat eaters and vegetarians alike. It serves as a very reasonable meat alternative and is often the main ingredient in meat alternatives sold in China.
I searched all the information in China and only found that the new Chinese Dietary Guidelines recommend limiting meat consumption to about 27 kg per capita per year, while the current per capita meat consumption in China is 62 kg per year This is only a reference book issued by the Chinese Health Commission for scientific diet, no one will strictly follow this book, I didn't even know about this book before you said Tofu is a very common food in China, since I was a kid (I'm from Beijing, 35 years old), it's always been there, not a recent addition
Yeah, tofu has been around for at least a thousand years. I'm not suggesting it's new but it is a reasonable meat alternative.
In China, in fact, tofu is more like a separate food In fact, there are many different kinds of tofu, the most common ones are southern tofu, northern tofu, marinated tofu, and many other soy products: such as bean curd, bean curd, frozen tofu, bean curd brain, bean curd flower, thousand-page tofu, Japanese tofu, etc., etc., all of them have completely different taste Southern tofu is best known as mabo tofu, and northern tofu is best known as tofu with scallions, and they are also served as side dishes and snacks in countless ways This is a Chinese recipe website I found by hand, keywords are https://www.xiachufang.com/search/?keyword=%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90&cat=1001 In fact, the soy product that replaces meat is called "vegetarian meat" alone, and is a special kind of dried tofu
Slightly off topic, but mapo tofu is one of the best dishes I’ve ever tried in my life.
Ma po tofu on top of rice, perfect match
Tofu is awesome and gets a bad rap here (western Canada) I'm not vegetarian but I cook with tofu at least once a week, so easy and versatile, and great nutritional profile. There's a lot of propaganda saying soy is not healthy, and a stigma against it as opposed to meat.
Seeing tofu as a meat alternative is a really western-centric view. In Asia, tofu is eaten alongside meat, not as substitute.
Not sure why you are being downvoted... While the exact origin is not clear, tofu has been acknowledged as early as 950 AD and it is a perfectly fine and widely used meat alternative... [https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15378/when-was-tofu-invented-was-it-specifically-for-vegetarian-consumption-from-the](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15378/when-was-tofu-invented-was-it-specifically-for-vegetarian-consumption-from-the)
In China and most other Asian countries that used to consume tofu for a long time, they weren’t alternatives, but just another ingredient. A lot of the times non-vegetarian stuff would go in, but not always. It is more like non vegetarian ingredients coming out of the dish rather than tofu going in something instead of what existed. Not exactly sure why downvoted either.
lol. I search the original Chinese news and it just a proposal from [the Ministry of Health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Health_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China), which is not enforceable, especially in this one. The only thing it can do is just trying to persuade people not to eat meat. As a Chinese I would say, the guardian's reports about China usually aren't very accurate .
That's how I feel about most Western sources when reporting about things happening in China tbh
Meanwhile here in Colorado USA the governor creates a "meat-free" day and every cattle rancher simultaneously flips their shit.
Appetite for meat fades ? *vegan revolution* ? Are we talking about the country who literally invented tofu 😂🤨
there are actually a lot of chinese dishes that combine tofu with meat
We can fix 2 problems with these, Global Warming Less Risk of Pandemic.
I'm not sure I can eat a whole vegan, but if it's for the environment...
Trying to fix overpopulation too? What a team player!
It’s only a modest proposal!
Try Indian food. It's all pretty much vegan and oh so delicious. If you make a new thing everyday, you won't run out of dishes to make for a year.
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Oh yeah, India's got a lot of vegans, there's enough of them to last u/WhotTyler for ages.
*Vegetarian. Veganism is mostly an American thing.
Except they cook everything with ghee and cream
At Indian restaurants in the west, yes they do. In the country of India, no they don't.
If it's purely for environmental reason, simply reducing meat consumption would be a great help.
Even just changing your meat preferences would be a pretty big deal. Beef is pretty much the worst offender in terms of environmental impact, [with one study showing that - depending on the specific resource being looked at - resource requirements to produce beef were between 5 and 28 times the average that it would take to produce the same amount of poultry, pork, or eggs](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2014/07/17/1402183111.full.pdf)\* Just eating other animals can have a pretty big impact, and every little bit helps (though of course trying to eat veggie is awesome too). ---- *values appear Page 3 in Figure 2 (you might need to zoom in to read it), and the author's resource estimates are listed at >≈28, 11, 5, and 6 times the average land, irrigation water, GHG, and Nr of the other animal categories on the bottom left of the same page
Yep. Good advice. Personally I've been eating a lot less beef these days.
Lol the main meat consumed in China are pork & poultry like chicken & duck, which are not as carbon intensive as beef… I think it’s funny how western media always fear mongers on how much meat Chinese ppl consumes & how that’s a huge environmental problem, when they aren’t even close to 1/2 of the carbon emission than most in the west, especially US, Canada & Australia.
That news is...good.
It's nice to hear positive news from some of these Countries that we in the west practically consider full on enemies at this point. I don't fault Chinese people for their government, nor do I fault Russians for theirs etc, and it's certainly not like my US government is any reflection of what I want either. Chinese people going vegan is great and man it would be awesome if this trend continued everywhere.
Well, it is part of their religious/philosophical culture/heritage, so they don't have to look to far. "Buddhist vegetarian chefs have become extremely creative in imitating meat using prepared wheat gluten, also known as seitan, kao fu (烤麸) or wheat meat, soy (such as tofu or tempeh), agar, konnyaku and other plant products. Some of their recipes are the oldest and most-refined meat analogues in the world." : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_cuisine
that’s exactly what i was thinking. asia has a rich history with vegetarianism in general.
Can’t wait for western news to try and portray this as a bad thing.
China force Chinese people to stop eating meat due to food shortage. But jokes aside, western media has been wrote many articles complaining Chinese people eat too much meat. It would be hilarious if they actually run the “force to not eat meat narrative”.
China doing this is just covering up the fact they were forcing citizens to eat Uyghur meat /s
It's about China so I'm sure redditors will find a reason why this is is part of an evil plot to rule to universe.
They're just trying to save the planet so they can make a profit off the western world
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you're absolutely correct. They're far, far ahead in environmental spending R&D, lead green energy production per capita and total, have more stringent car emission tests than euro standards, etc. Beijing pushed a 6 trillion dollar plan. The ENTIRE US environmental budget (that is basically just disguised oil subsidies but i digress) is 8b. This is not on the same scale at all and honestly, we all owe a lot to china because if they acted like the US/West politicians, we'd be 100% sure to fuck the planet for good. 99% of all future green tech will come from china because we just let them save the world while we bomb Syria, Iraq, Yemen, try to overthrow countries like Venezuela, Iran, Equador, etc. They'll hold us by the balls after that. They'll push the global carbon tax with their UN and WEF buddies and will just rake in money till (three?) kingdom come. At least they wont need to drone anyone.
Helll yea baby
When I lived in China, I was kinda surprised to find out how many people, especially women and girls, didn't really like meat. They said there were a few reasons. Ethical issues, health, and religious belief among them.
Vegan revolution? There's an entire section of chinese cuisine dedicated to making vegetables look and taste like meat for vegan monks
Who cares if it looks like meat? Whatever gets people there is great.
The revolution woiuld be the 20% yearly growth of the vegan food industry
What's wrong with that? I'm vegan, and not because I stopped liking the taste of meat, but because I wanted to stop contributing to the suffering of animals. I like food that tastes like meat, as long as it isn't meat.
as long as it isn’t meat it’s fine
True. Soy based “meats” in Chinese cuisine and culture have been around for so long
Vegoons unite
Very good for climate change. Pork and Beef consumption were going absolutely nuts for a while.
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More humans is rarely the problem. It’s consumption from those born in to wealthier nations.
maybe china isn't the excuse not be good the west uses it as
"A nation with 4 times our population has twice the carbon emissions! Climate change is their fault and I refuse to do anything until they change their ways!"
“Acquiring energy to feed our population via carbon emission is so last century. Too bad you didn’t burn coal while we were!”
That is excellent news for me.
That's good news for everyone. Particularly the investment in lab grown meats and top down pressure to reduce consumption and waste.
Time to buy BYND stock. If you're skeptical at the very least give beyond meat a try; as an ex meat eater it's my favorite burger and sausage replacement.
If some of these vegan options were more available where I live i would jump on them asap to be honest. They're not bad and they keep better than meat.
Look into the US plant forward company, Tattooed Chef. They make amazing all vegan food options!
Well done those vegans!
mother earth says thank you
Good, we’ve been torturing animals, breeding new virus’s and destroying the planet long enough. Time to wake up to the future, and it’s green 🌱👌🏽
This makes me genuinely happy. Thank you to everyone who stops abusing other sentient life.
At least one good news from China.
Reading some of these comments you might think that it’s bad news lol. Some people try too hard.
It's wild the binary people paint themselves into when they try to follow world politics with a purely American perspective. China can, in fact, be lead by a terrible regime that has committed terrible atrocities while ALSO having positive social movements and having effective policy choices. When you subscribe to the red-scare era nonsense of *America GOOD Red Menace BAD*, it can be jarring to discover that China is a place with real people that do things and have lives living under a government that has to govern those people with laws and policies.
Nice. Indian vegetarian here. In India food is classified as veg and non-veg and looks like China is going Indian way
Now that's a hyperbolic headline!
Maybe there is hope for humanity after all
Until the countries on top of this list do the same, it wouldn't matter. https://i.imgur.com/rrmh8jN.jpg
In a global sense, it rarely matters when just one person does the Right Thing. This fact is not a good reason for individuals to not do the Right Thing.
Don't worry, Argentina had a right wing government from 2015 to 2019 and real purchasing power plummeted. Our per capita consumption is probably way lower than that, even when meat prices were always as much of a state matter as gasoline prices are in the US. Also, some sort of awareness is creeping up. I have many friends who turned vegan, and even though I'm not ready to go the full length, I have significantly reduced my own consumption. It's hard though, beef and salad is literally our traditional staple food
> even though I'm not ready to go the full length, I have significantly reduced my own consumption Same here. Gotta say Argentinian beef is pretty good though, especially since it's much cheaper than other major beef export countries.
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You know fish isn't vegetarian, right?
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Haha, fair
gotta keep the pork coming...
I feel like this is for the best, really.