> A pack of two 113g Beyond Burger plant-based patties costs £4.30, or £19.03 per kg, at Tesco, while a pack of four 113.5g Finest beef steak burgers is priced at £4, or £8.81 per kg, at the retailer.
The less tasty, less satisfying, less nutritious, fake version costs more than twice the price of the real thing. That's a tough bubble to keep inflated.
There are plenty of people who are not ideologically vegan who might still buy something like a beyond burger based on cost, flavor, the belief that it is “healthy”, “green”, etc.
developed a (flawed) system of ecological accounting (they are all are) which tried to track back the environmental impact of everything back to the energy content of sunlight (water, for instance, needs sunlight to fall somewhere to evaporate water, drive winds to blow it around, so it falls in the form of rain) where the currency is called “embodied energy” or “emergy”.
When you do such an accounting you are able to directly account for certain things but not for other things and you take the dollar value of what you can’t account for and convert it to emergy by multiplying it against some factor.
Odum’s original sin is that you can’t really compare different impacts with the same currency (how do you compare 1 ton of PFAS to 1 ton of CO2 to an endangered species?) but I think the “money for what you can’t itemize” bit is important and has the corollary that crazy expensive things aren’t green. The money goes somewhere and if means a well-paid employee can afford a big SUV or an investor flies business class to South Africa, it has an impact.
The person who is a vegan has a wide range of choices too such as old generation fake meat (I still like Boca Burgers and Quorn) not to mention less processed alternatives like chick peas, tofu, tempeh, etc.
My wife laments that our food co-op went from offering bulk lightly processed foods (nuts, teff, brown rice, …) to an increasing panoply of crazy-expensive vegan and organic foods that often not even that healthy when you consider they are loaded with added sugar, oils and similar ingredients as well as ultra-processed in various ways.
Personally don't like older meat substitutes, they just taste like compressed vegetables to me. I like impossible, but beyond is decent too. I just don't get them that often (but I didn't buy burgers that often when I ate meat).
I personally don't give a shit about the "processed" stuff, that word is meaningless to me
Is this down to a drop in "meat alternatives" overall as a market, or is Beyond Meat just being out-competed by other brands? The article doesn't seem to say.
The less tasty, less satisfying, less nutritious, fake version costs more than twice the price of the real thing. That's a tough bubble to keep inflated.