If this is really interesting enough to discuss on HN, the story should link directly here, not to the blogspammed version on Care2.
The actual Impossible Foods response is savage and sort of entertaining. I'm not a fan of Impossible but my respect for them went up a notch after reading this.
I'm not that poster but I am not a fan of Impossible Burgers because they're weird vegetable patties. That said you can eat what you want, but I agree that this company won me over today, politically at least. I doubt I'll try their burger.
It's an uncanny valley of food. It tries so hard to simulate meat that it emphasizes its fakeness. Personally I prefer a simple vegetable patty that's not trying to be what it is not.
I thought all veggie patties to date have fallen into the "uncanny valley of food," whereas the Impossible patty is intended (and purported) to cross it entirely.
People eat too much meat. The closer meat alternatives taste to actual meat, the more people will switch. So I strongly support innovation in this space.
The best I’ve had are nut cutlets or nut burgers. Stuff based on chickpeas can be great, basically a falafel burger. Falafels are awesome. There used to be a cafe on Charing Cross Road in London that did great vegetable fritter, served in a pita bread with salad, hummus and chillis.
Those are all fine foods, for me it’s not that veggie alternatives to meat don’t exits. They do and some of them are fantastic. It’s about variety. Giving up meat fur me would be a bit like giving up all nut cutlet/falafel type stuff and all other meat except chicken. I’ve not tried these new faux meat burgers, but will when so get the chance.
> MAA calls itself as a non-profit, but make no mistake: This outfit is a supplement-pushing e-commerce company that collects and sells consumer data. By MAA’s own admission, it gets a commission on sales of supplements from other affiliates -- and none of the bogus products it pushes have been evaluated or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration or any other governmental authority.
Glyphosate is commonly detected at these low levels in
both organic and non-organic foods. In fact, the minuscule
levels of these chemicals that were detected in both the
Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger were less than
1/1000 the limit set by EPA for glyphosate residue in dried
pea (8,000 ppb) and soybeans (20,000 ppb), respectively.
They were even almost 100-fold lower than the glyphosate
limits set by USDA for ORGANIC certification of pea protein
(400 ppb) and soy protein (1,000 ppb) - ie, the glyphosate
levels measured in both products would easily pass the
glyphosate-residue requirements for organic certification of
soybeans or peas, respectively.
What does 11.3 ppb [=11.3 ug/kg] mean in terms of how
much glyphosate plus AMPA would be present in one
4-oz.(113g) serving of Impossible Burger? The answer is
1.3 micrograms [11.3 ug/1000g x 113g].
This is almost 1000 times lower than the no significant risk
level for glyphosate ingestion (1100 micrograms per day)
set by California Prop 65. The safe daily limits for
glyphosate exposure set by FAO/WHO and the EPA are
much higher.
Why do they even bother answering allegations? If the other group believes whatever they believe in, any answer or evidence will only bolster their claims because they are already way into the pseudoscience camp.
I don't like the taste of it but by golly I am going to support these new fangled vegan stuff: they are doing the right thing.
Without GMOs a billion people in India will not be alive today. So let's not give these people any more attention than they deserve.
Unfortunately, reason isn't at play here. It would take just a fraction of customers for the restaurant chains, supplied by Impossible Foods, to express fear of the burger's contents to cause chains to drop them. Large corporations are notoriously risk-averse. Even if people in the companies believe it's complete nonsense they aren't going to gainsay customers' fears.
Impossible Foods isn't in a financial position to have the restaurant chains pull out. So they're trying to "take control of the narrative". It was an absolutely fantastic response. They kept it factual, with a bit of sarcasm, and turned the light on the "mom's group". Kudos to whomever thought up the strategy and wrote the response.
The problem is that if those voices are the only ones talking, eventually people who don't know better are going to start believing them. They need some ammunition against such stupidogenic propaganda.
> Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
I should have explained my comment. It's about a strain called IR8 that yields more rice per hectare. This saved so many lives in India and elsewhere. And yes I am thinking of Norman Borlaug.
In that you're familiar with the metaphor I'm puzzled that you find it inappropriate. Where did it stray? One's silence when faced with an allegation where denial of a material allegation is appropriate is often construed as being "pregnant with admission" of the allegation.
"Mom's Across America" is a well known science denying hotbed who stoke fear of GMOs, chemicals, and vaccines.
They don't care whether or not glyphosate is safe or not. They care that impossible foods is getting headlines, and they want to get a piece of it by introducing FUD.
Impossible is 100% right to do a hard reply to this. These people aren't interested in honest debate or product safety and the world needs to know it.
> An additional benefit is that H2 Elite generates an electron-rich potential (-ORP) in the water (you can measure it!). This rare property is uniquely found in fresh, raw living foods and juices, mothers milk and many of the world’s healing waters.
What's in it? "it is a carbon-rich, alkaline liquid, with lignite-derived trace organics and essential trace amino acids". Mmm, lignite-derived organics. I think this is just water.
I love that they claim completely unspecified "health benefits" of -ORP (but "not on the scale of molecular hydrogen) while deriding the previous claims of also unspecified "health benefits" from pH of water (high pH or low pH?).
And that the ingredients list in the text doesn't match the ingredients list in the image of the bottle.
I agree that your assessment is fact- and history-based and don't know why you are being downvoted. Their claims are groundless, and a distraction from a lot of the real health issues that actually plague society.
I'm still completely baffled by people like this. Why do they even exist? What do they have to gain by spreading misinformation about something like an alternative-meat burger? Are they just incredibly stupid? Do they value getting headlines over the health and wellbeing of people? What is it? I'm completely lost here.
Go and read the response from Impossible Burger. They take the MAA article and highlight the sections with their direct response. It becomes clear that they do not care about the accuracy of their claims.
I wouldn't discount glyphosate just because Moms Across America is a radical or delusional organization.
I don't care about teams or taking sides. All I care about is my health. If Glyphosate is safe, there needs to be a lot of experimental evidence supporting that conclusion.
Glyphosate has been in use since the mid 70s, or just under 50 years, and it has been studied by nearly every health organization in the world. There is ample evidence that it is safe.
This isn't helpful. I don't like use of pesticides and I think there's a reasonable controversy to be had about the dangers of Glyphosate.
But the environmental impact of meat production is so enormous desastrous, we should welcome every possible alternative. Whatever the Glyphosate (and GMO) concerns are, they are tiny in comparison.
Kind of like the conspiracy theory that some conspiracy theories are made up by governments to make theorists look ridiculous, sometimes I wonder if science-blind anti-GMO sentiment was manufactured by these big agriculture companies to draw legitimate attention away from truly studying the pesticides we're using.
That was the first thought I had when I saw the title of the organization "Moms Across America". Sounds like it was named by a corporate team of lawyers, PR and Marketing professionals for politically charged yet monetarily motivated attacks against "ankle biter" companies.
This comment really struck me. I've personally always found the anti-GMO crowd to be nonexistent by every metric I have available to me, but I've always assumed I'm just not seeing it wherever it is. The most extreme opinions I ever encounter on the subject are the occasional individual merely wondering out loud if GMOs are bad for you.
I'm curious as to where you live. I'm in SF, and a substantial number of my friends and acquaintances use "non-GMO" as a synonym for "healthier," in the same way some use "organic". Do you mean the more militant anti-GMO crowd? If so, I guess you're right that I've never met anyone who cares more than "I just think non-GMO is better and do my best to make choices supporting them."
The only strong opinions that I've heard are from farmers, and that's more about the economics than anything else. Let's face it, nobody gives a flying hoot about what farmers think.
If I were pushing the implication soy, potato and coconut oil as a healthy alternative to anything, I would make sure to have good opposition PR in place to cast people who question the product as crazy.
Impossible is very careful to emphasize the environmental mumbo-jumbo and avoid any mention of health beyond the standard nutritional data on their website, while implying that it's better. It's similar to supermarkets that package chicken in white and green trays, empathize "hormone free" and merchandise it next to the organic chicken.
> I don't like use of pesticides and I think there's a reasonable controversy to be had about the dangers of Glyphosate.
There's an important economic perspective to pesticide use: farmers are going to be doing whatever they can to kill enough pests to protect their crops and get a satisfactory yield/ROI.
That means that, the more effective a pesticide is, the less of it they need to use; and the less effective a pesticide is, the more of it they need to use. Since the dangers to humans/other animals come from the amount of pesticide left on something after washing, the seemingly-equivalent "less, more-powerful" pesticide is actually much less dangerous than "more, less-powerful" pesticide, because it's more likely to be completely removed from the end product.
If we ban the most effective pesticides, the alternative is using more of the less-effective pesticides to get an equivalent effect. Which means getting food that likely has more pesticide left over on it.
This also applies to "organic" food: "organic" pesticides are less effective, so they use more of them, so "organic" food ends up having more pesticide left on it than non-"organic" food.
So, if you're not a fan of pesticide in the sense that you're not a fan of eating pesticide, then you should want farmers to be equipped with as powerful a pesticide as possible.
This assumes that all pesticides have the same effects at the same dosages in humans, which would be surprising if true.
Sure, the more potent the pesticide, the less growers need to use, and the less residual pesticide ends up ingested by people. But it's impossible to say anything about the relative harm of a small residual amount of potent pesticide versus a larger residual amount of less potent (and chemically different) pesticide.
> This assumes that all pesticides have the same effects at the same dosages in humans
Nah, my assumption was that the level of harm scales with the power of the pesticide in humans just as it does in, well, pests. (It's not true, but it's an interesting model to study.)
If we assume that relationship, it should imply that, if your vegetables were never washed once from the farm to your mouth, you'd be getting equivalent levels of harm from more- and less-powerful pesticides, since the amount of them sprayed on the vegetable would be in inverse proportion to their toxicity.
However, once you introduce washing, the amount of the pesticide you remove isn't constant, nor linear.
In fact, some pesticides are non-"organic" precisely because they have chemicals in them that make them more easily washed off!
So the better-engineered (less "natural") pesticides are both originally present in smaller quantities, and reduced in quantity more by washing. You might end up eating none of a synthetic pesticide, whereas an "organic" one might be all over your food even after washing. "None" is very different from even a little.
(Further, there are synthetic pesticides that are entirely safe for humans—or are even considered food by humans—but which are considered non-"organic" because we can only create them via de novo synthesis rather than in a bioreactor. Consider some artificial sugar that the human liver can process but insects cannot metabolize. If we sprayed it on plants, it'd be a "synthetic pesticide." If "synthetic pesticide" looks like that, and "organic pesticide" looks like, say, nicotine, which would you prefer to miss some residue of?)
As another example, diatomaceous earth kills pretty much anything with an exoskeleton through a physical mechanism, but is completely non-toxic to mammals (prolonged breathing is not a good idea, though). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth#Pest_contro...)
It is convenient but erroneous to assume that all pesticides affect humans and pests equally.
The anti-meat propaganda is getting obnoxious. The most sustainable agriculture is one in which the soil is fertilised with manure and rotated livestock, because grazing animals keep the soil healthy and meat keeps us healthy, because we are omnivores.
We might need to discourage CAFOs by cutting the corn subsidies and by raising their environmental taxes, which will raise the price of meat, but we also need to use less pesticides and artificial fertilisers, because we are heavily polluting the soil, the water supply and killing the bees, which should drive up the cost of fruits and vegetables too.
And from ecological, to health and ethical considerations, most pro-vegan arguments (not all) are bullshit. The next time you're happy about not killing animals and being eco-friendly, see this:
Kind of funny you have zero citations of your own other than a single story (not a study) about how some plants are grown somewhere.
>And from ecological, to health and ethical considerations, most pro-vegan arguments (not all) are bullshit.
As an expert in one of these three fields, I can say with certainty that you're just making up these claims from whole cloth to fit your narrative.
Edit: I want to edit this to make clear I'm not just making a claim to authority and saying everyone should believe me. This response was mainly out of frustration at outright nonsense like "meat keeps us healthy" that no health organization in the world is going to subscribe to. I hope people in general are aware enough of some of these issues to detect the problems in the post I replied to and look into some of these questions for themselves.
right. because growing billions of animals in inhuman conditions and slaughtering them is humane
>health
don’t feel like linking a source right now but higher red meat and sausage consumption are linked to colon cancer. this is a bit of a weaker point than the others
>ecological
wrong again. 7% of total emissions come just from gasses released by livestock. and about 60% of total ice free land is used to house the livestock and grow feed. [1] meat is just inefficient. 80% of arable land is used on meat and feeding that meat for only 20% of the worlds calories. [2]
that just isn’t sustainable if the population keeps growing.
eating meat is fine (arguably) but don’t try and justify it with bullshit. just say you like meat.
> In case you haven't seen what industrial plants agriculture looks like nowadays:
It "looks" bad but do we care about looks more than pollution ? Look at any large scale animal farm, it looks much worse. Any solutions to feed 8b people will be far from perfect, but some solutions have less of an impact
Reducing (not stopping) meat consumption is a very easy way to reduce your carbon footprint, and you can still get all the animal protein you need from dairy, eggs, &c.
> The most sustainable agriculture is one in which the soil is fertilised with manure and rotated livestock, because grazing animals keep the soil healthy
It's true, but the current meat industry is far from that. I'm all for sustainable farms and eating animals that have been reasonably grown and treated. The problem is that so many people eat meat every day, multiple time a day that the industry will never be able to provide sustainable meat. Look at the chicken industry, they grow them so fast that they die of organ failures and other growth related diseases and deformations. There is no soil fertilization coming from the millions of animals that have never been on a field. https://www.aspca.org/sites/default/files/chix_white_paper_n...
> meat keeps us healthy, because we are omnivores.
Omnivore doesn't especially mean meat eater, just animal derived products. People live without meat just fine, the abuse of meat and the consumption of low quality/processed meat has been linked to many health issues on the other hand.
Nowadays I only eat meat when I go out and can spend good money on a quality steak, asian bbq or the like. Your body doesn't _need_ that daily ultra processed bacon, that $1.5/kg chicken or any of the fast food low quality burgers. The current western diets really are a metaphors for humanity; long term self destruction for short term pleasure & convenience.
I'm just glad I got to read this comment before r/vegan showed up and downvoted it into oblivion. Such is the current state of discourse around this subject on HN.
We need to eat less meat, we need to look after animals better and we need to do it in a much more eco-friendly and sustainable manner. We don't all need to go vegan. Going from one extreme to another is never the answer.
Because humans are adaptable omnivores, who can survive if not thrive with just either plants or animals (cf. Carnivory diet). But most food are cultural specific, and it'd be a shame to lose most of it.
To be honest, I'm one of those waiting for my promised future superalgae and Euglina's food pills, so...
If I recall correctly, the Glyphosate cancer allegations come from farmers who inhaled it day in and day out for years - a totally different ingestion model from eating it in small amounts.
They also came from farmers who were using glyphosate solutions that included many other chemicals, and no doubt came into contact with a variety of other pesticides. A direct link between glyphosate and actual illness has not been established.
Beats me. I think Impossible is right when they say:
“Proven to be carcinogenic” is a ridiculous claim, refuted by
multiple government agencies, including EFSA, Germany,
Canada, and the World Health Organization (WHO), who
determined that glyphosate exposure in the human diet is
unlikely a carcinogenic risk. No regulatory authority in the
world considers glyphosate to be carcinogenic to humans
at current exposure levels.
Now, admittedly, I don't have a strong background to stand on here, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise. And I would agree with the overall thrust of Impossible's claims here that this is likely far too low a level to be worried about.
But I'm not sure I buy it that there are no connections, particularly for high levels that are breathed in during farming.
My understanding --- this is from memory, so correct me if I'm wrong --- is that IARC published a report classifying glyphosate as a 2A carcinogen (joining a long list of common substances that occur in food both naturally and as a result of processing), but that the broader WHO did not back this assessment up. Reuters also ran a story based on an earlier draft of the IARC report showing that evidence against the carcinogenicity of glyphosate had been excised from the final report. Importantly, the IARC report was also a survey of previous studies of glyphosate, and the organizations that conducted those studies, like the Agricultural Health Study, disagreed with IARC.
My impression --- again, corrections welcome --- is that glyphosate has been intensively studied, both epidemiologically and in lab studies, and that none of those studies has conclusively linked glyphosate to cancer, even in rodent models, and even at unrealistically high doses.
To your original question: again, it's also important to remember that glyphosate-based pesticides aren't, like, pure aqueous solutions of glyphosate; there's lots of other stuff in there, as there are in all chemical herbicides, and if there's a lymphoma link to Roundup, who knows what the actual causative agent is? The evidence points away from glyphosate being it.
My original question was legitimately not a rhetorical question (although that appears to be how it's been taken). I assume Monsonto has some of the best legal representation out there, so I assumed if they couldn't defend it, the case must be fairly compelling.
I'll put my skeptical hat back on. Appreciate the feedback.
No one cares about the truth. XYZ is identified as a potential carcinogen? It is mostly used to attack a dietary group involving XYZ than to actually cure cancer. You see this liberally happening with red meat, despite questionable evidence towards it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519
The original Roundup case among those lawsuits was careful to avoid going after glyphosate, but rather made the case that other additives found in the Roundup brand were the cause. Which cases are now targeting glyphosate rather than Roundup?
Courts do not require established science to win. They just require deep pockets on the side of the loser. Glyphosate is made by big companies that have money, so if a lawyer can convince a jury they are responsible the lawyer gets a lot of money.
It is entirely different. The residual amount on your food is orders of magnitude smaller than what you'd encounter working with a concentrated solution containing glyphosate.
It seems that at some dosage of glyphosate, the gut microbiome would be altered in a way that would make it more hospitable to pathogenic bacteria and less hospitable to beneficial bacteria. The real question is what is the shape of this dose curve. How much glyphosate is needed to shift the relative proportion of beneficial to harmful bacteria 1%, or 5%?
Probably much more than found in Impossible burgers, but it would be nice to have more research on glyphosate's effects on the human gut. Does chronic ingestion of glyphosate from unwashed raw produce have any statistically significant effect on the human gut?
"The presented results evidence
that the highly pathogenic bacteria as Salmonella Entritidis,
Salmonella Gallinarum, Salmonella Typhimurium,
Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium botulinum are
highly resistant to glyphosate. However, most of beneficial
bacteria as Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium,
Bacillus badius, Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Lactobacillus spp. were found to be moderate to highly susceptible."
