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Hello and welcome to Technically Speaking, where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest, share
knowledge and satisfy some curiosity. I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Ellie and Jasmine to talk about fake meat and meat Alternatives how they're made and if they're better than just meat from an animal and so to start off with early what meat substitutes do you eat and why so I have got into these meat substitutes because I'm trying to be better about the fact that the climate is on
fire the world is burning all of these things and I still want to make the recipes that I know and like but I want to make it in more sustainable way so I've got into porn a lot a lot of corn especially um corn dinosaurs which I was never into chicken nuggets really but a corn dinosaur is delicious and fun and dinosaur shaped so I've also got into what the clerk which is a great title for any fake meat company which is I think the most chickeny not chicken meat alternative a few other
ones I like the heck vegan or vegetarian sausages they're pretty good I think they're made with peas and I mean if it's a fake meat I will give it a go I like to see how close they are to the real thing and I like to make the recipes in the same way so it's the if it's a close alternative then I'll use it fair enough so it sounds like you do a bit of experimenting with your diet in your meals I think
that's fair to say I like to mix up also I'm quite a cheapskate so if I see a fake meat alternative is cheaper than a meat product I will usually buy the fake meat and see what it tastes like and they are often cheaper I see every time I've looked it might just be that I'm quite limited where I live but they're always more expensive and I always find it odd that something that's essentially grown in a big vat in a factory is more expensive than an animal that's been roaming
around the field for however long and if they are meant to be more environmentally friendly if they have fewer greenhouse gas emissions associated with the fat grown meat Alternatives I feel like there should be more of an incentive to eat than they should be a lot cheaper than the meat in that case yeah I find that they are usually but then I I wouldn't buy beef anyway so I'd probably maybe I'm a bit out of touch as to how much it's actually costing uh maybe I'll have another look
it's been a while since I lasted Jasmine what about you do you eat meat or meat alternative products so I've been they're just like I think it's going to be 10 years this year I don't eat meat because I don't like the taste or texture of it that also means that I'm kind of a very chill veggie so I don't particularly care if I'm using a utensil and it's touch me or there's a dish it's got some meat I'll just eat around the meat I will eat meat if I have to so if I'm in a place where
it's really hardly vegetarian or my mum forces me to eat some fish I will eat the meat so you will if yeah I just don't like it fair enough I'll tell you one thing I don't like about washing up on a day where we've had meat in the evening meal which is the only time I eat meat it's a lot greasier than our vegetable based dishes most of our veggie based dishes are beans and lentils so similar to earlier I like eating the dishes I normally eat but I just like if I'm making a spark Bowl I just
use lentils and some oil rather than putting like minced beef in it I've got a really good beef burger recipe so I think I wouldn't really miss a lot of meat from my diet if we didn't buy it anyway and the main reason I go for the beans and lentils root is I feel more in control of what I'm eating rather than thinking someone's put a thing through a factory like they've taken some peas and they've processed the protein out of it and then done something else to it so I don't
really know what's happened to those peas or those beans whereas at least if I buy just a packet of beans from the supermarket I assume that they've just been grown and then dried and packaged so uh it's interesting to see we've all got different reasons for doing what we do oh yeah I do think the beans and the lentils is a good option like I do try and throw in some chickpeas every once in a while and they are much cheaper and I do love a POI lentils spaghetti bolognese pretty
good yeah and they last a lot longer when you're storing them it's one of the reasons we started eating more beans and fewer meat based dishes was because the start pandemic my entire household suddenly had to self-isolate and we refused to Panic by before that knowing we had enough food in the house and it would mostly be Bean based and then we came up with some good recipes on one plus of the pandemic and being forced to stay at home for two weeks and eat beans so I
was saying that the the meat alternative products or the fake Meats as you might want to call them yeah basically just a pea or a bean or something starts off as a protein-rich vegetable based sauce and then it's been filled about with in some way essentially by chemical Engineers is what I think you're always getting up to stuff yeah yeah give them a texture and taste similar to me and all right what's really in it how nutritious is it so do you guys pay attention to what is in
these meat alternative products that you're eating and yeah so whenever I'm buying or choosing which product to buy I'm usually looking at the nutritional information not necessarily the ingredients but I'm looking at what has more protein low fat low carbs and like sometimes you'll be surprised by when you're looking at a packet of fake meat exhausters or Vega sausages and they're mostly carbohydrates and you're like no no that's not what I want but I guess if they
are vegetable based you'd think there would be a lot of carbs in a vegetable based thing complex yeah they were but if you want to like have it kind of like replicating like a fake sausage versus a real sausage like it should still be like mostly protein you eat meat because it's a source of protein not because it's like a good source of carbohydrates and fiber that is true but then again some eat based sausages I would suspect have a lot of things in that aren't
meat derived yeah they're really cheap ones yeah I gotta say the only sausages we buy are from the local butcher and I live in Cumbria where we hatches yeah you got the good ones my favorite fake sausages are I think Brands called cauldron they're Cumbria sausages I just like the herb mix in those sausages and they've got a good protein content because I need to get my protein what about you rally do you sort of sit there looking at the the packaging
might want the clock and whoever else and say oh well that one's got like 10 protein that one's got 20 I am very surface level I think I don't compare protein levels at all but I do always like to see like what it's made of like if it's not made of meat how are they making it so I think the main ones I come across are soya protein is like a base pea protein seems to be everywhere and then obviously corn is like a special mold or a fungi or something
that they must grow in a special way because I think corn have the like patent or the like Monopoly on just using that and I see soy and I see pee a lot but then I don't see this corn fungus in other products so that one's quite interesting to me I feel like it's a mystery how they're actually making it corn in terms of like how you craft the garage like fake meat corn to be what's known as a microbial protein microbial biomass producing the bioreactor so
it's like different to like the other steak Meats which are like plant-based proteins which have been processed to have the same texture as meat products this is chemical engineer speaks yes yes so the bioreactor is basically you have some biological material I think it's some like a soil fungus isn't it for corn I think so there's they don't give you much information I think there's some fermentation involved in making quality so that's made to buy right I just hope my biological
thing doing its biological stuff yeah produce a protein presumably whereas the the ones that make they take a raw product and they start stripping things out I guess in a different chemical engineering process yeah so when you look into how different companies who produce the steak meat products and sell to supermarks in places it's quite hard trying to find exactly what processes they use but in general you take you'll isolate out the vegetable protein and
you then basically do different stuff to it so different types of like pressure heating cooling processes to get it into the texture that kind of resembles different types of meat products so if you want something that's like a mint so if you want something that's a bit more like kind of like a Burgery texture or something that's a bit more dense for a sausage or try to get whatever the texture of that bacon is and so you have to find a decent fake bacon oh I've met I've tried
many options yeah that one's tricky so then you do that then you add different products to it so like flavor's the main one but also coloring agents so in a lot of products are probably mimicking like red meat products so Burger sausages beetroot's a key ingredient just to get that ready color yeah I have packets with me because I've been saving my this episode so I have one for better naked
which is delicious plant based mints and that does contain beetroot powder its main ingredient is pea protein and then just salt water between B12 and zinc and iron and little things like that and then the other one is meatless Farm mints and that also does have beetroot extracting so you may be unknowingly eating not a beetroot if you're not eating me another thing about all these technique products is that a lot of the products like have different minerals and vitamins
added to it so vitamin B child I think it's quite commonly added to a or it's just like enriched in a lot of the fake meat products just because when you're starting off with like just the vegetable protein like there's not that much nutrition in it in terms of like minerals and vitamins you need to add stuff to it so it's not just protein I mean I can't just be sustained on Tiny peas you powder mushed into a different sausage scenes try B12 is one of the ones that I'd heard
um that is only made by animals you can only get it from animal products yeah I guess otherwise you have to synthesize it in all the food products yeah so the thing about B12 is you get it from animals because vitamin B Charles is produced by I think it's a bacteria when cow sheep and whatever animals they eat foods like not been sterilized so like when they're eating outside they'll like naturally just eat some dirt with their food and then gets in their guts that will
then sympathize some vitamin B12 and then over their lifespan they'll accumulate B12 in their slash and then when you eat the cow or the pig or the other animal then you'll get B12 that way but even for like meat eaters because there's just a lot of like exposure during animal and less dark rearing there's lots of exposure to antibiotics pesticides Etc so meat products now actually will have less B12 than they did like 10 20 years ago just because modern hygiene is getting better so
there's less exposure to all the dirt and bacteria does that mean that we would also make B12 if we kind of just lived in the wild yeah I think there are some plant-based foods that have been known to either have Beetle would be very good for like producing u12 and I think there's some kind of mushrooms but I think that's because of the end you'd normally get I just have this image of Laura like roaming around the world like eating mushrooms in the ground and like snuffling up dirt
bacteria or anything but although I grow my own carrots and things and I'm not too careful about how clean they are when I pull them out the ground and then start munching on them I'll give them a bit of a rinse so I probably am getting some soil in my diet anyway you're probably making a little bit of B12 was in Dairy as well right I've gone like the whole heart we've gone vegan so like if I'm not eating that much meat but I'm still drinking milk and eggs like there's got to be
B12 in there yeah I think there is just because like the animal that was producing those not connects they would have like been producing B12 it's like eating a diet that allows them to make B12 in their guts I take a multivitamin every single day so I just like to be extra prepared in terms of making sure I get all my vitamins and minerals I feel like you would know if you were like really severely lacking you'd be at the doctors being like I don't feel very well yeah you
were because B12 is important for the nervous system and also for making red blood cells so if you're deficient in B12 you would definitely know but then you hear people that only ain't like cheese and chips and that's all they've ever eaten for 20 years you don't have to worry about how ill they were but they still seem to be functioning yeah I find this very bizarre like there's a guy on Tick Tock he literally only ate can I get some chips for like the first 20 years and like all
the tick tocks that his girlfriend like trying to feed him like normal food like sweet corn or like really Basic Foods and so how is he still going surely be very under nutritionized malnutritioned another word but you know what I mean if you're living on just like chips and chicken nuggets like I'd imagine you'd be quite fat extremely dehydrated yeah really dehydrated I guess it depends on which of it you eat as well but certain biological processes must not be working very well
like I know your ability to repair Cuts or I don't know how how Vitamin D is made when you exploit yourself to sunlight but that could be something that you're not really good at doing because you're missing so many other nutrients that would help you produce the vitamin D Maybe so I can only use you and they sort of survive so well because they're not really doing much else I might be totally wrong about that though yeah maybe he is eating just other Foods someone's
sneaking them a multivitamin and they're just not cutting that is what they eat yeah I mean I don't know I find it really interesting like I don't compare you know 100 kilograms of beef grams of beef versus 100 grams of like corn mint like I'm not eating the mints for its nutritional value I'm sort of eating it because I don't want to eat the meat so then the alternative is to just eat lentils or whatever but because it's there because it's cheap I was like well I
might as well eat that instead rather than kill a cow that's my that's my very poorly explained ethics behind it that's the cow's purpose in life though that's what they were bred for oh if I'm harsh right but from what I remember from various things I've read along the years or being told is that things like chickens in cairos and sheep look the way they do because humans have bred them for certain purposes yeah that is actually true that is true that is true
the dairy cows like they have to be milked they've been bred that if they don't get milked they will actually die yeah I've heard that as well they just keep producing more more milk and it's got no Outlet cows and sheep like they're really docile in nature because when we were like selectively breeding or picking different characteristics in like the wild wild versions of the cows and sheep uh we kept the docile ones and let them breed and then killed all the ones
who were too adventurous and kept wandering away it doesn't sound like a very humankind activity that we would have done yeah in the UK we used to have all different kinds of speeches like we used to have like balls and stuff but then those got killed off because Farmers didn't like the Bulls mating with lab investigated cows the UK is a country that's killed off a lot of their native species so there's no denying that but we're not saying that we want to completely remove
the meat industry like this is not what I want to do in terms of like UK Farmers I know a lot of UK Farmers you know I want to support their industry but also not eating meat is one of the best ways to reduce your climate impact and like is an easy swap for me yeah I around a life cycle analysis of think it's Beyond Burger yeah that was commissioned especially in comparing it to burgers made in the US and what did they say um it was definitely a lot smaller
um impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions yeah corn claims that their mycoprotein takes 95 less CO2 than beef mince to me which I mean there is a quite a hefty reduction do they talk about how they did that calculation this is what I wonder because it's not just CO2 it's CO2 equivalent right so all greenhouse gases and what you often hear is that it's the methane from cows and sheep that's the problem not necessarily just because they're breathing out CO2 when you say
it's a big one but it's also like for me like deforestations uh they've gone to in terms of greenhouse gas emissions if you're considering like where the cows are being brewed this is a big problem in places like Brazil where people are wanting to eat more meat and so they need more land and so they're wiping out big sections of the forest so I guess that means that not all calculations greenhouse gas emissions from the meat industry are comparable because it depends
on where you're getting your meat from and how that land is managed yeah they're usually when you look out the values you do get a really big range depending on like just what the form of practices are so if you had a organic pig farm in the UK it'd be very different to like Factory farmer in like us or in somewhere like China I guess because it's just because the practice are different yeah there's lots of different like globally like even us compared to America compared
to Denmark compared to everywhere everyone's got their own standards of meat rearing it's a shame we can't find out more about that I know most meat sold in UK markets is from British origin certainly the beef anyway that's the other thing as well is food Miles because if you're buying New Zealand lamb like surely the CO2 for getting that to the UK is much higher than you know buying a local lamb joint from your butcher down the road something else to consider looking at the life
cycle analysis of Beyond Burger is water use yeah water use food and Beyond Burger was over 99 less than producing a beef patty of the same maths in the U.S yeah it's because you need to like feed the cow and they'll need a lot of water to grow stuff to feed the cow yeah see again I suppose it depends on how you manage your cows if your cow is just roaming freely and drinking water from a stream and then expelling that water do you need to include that in your calculation or give that
some a natural process does it really matter there is just like a really big variation if you're considering like grass-fed cows versus like cows are just like red in a factory condition yeah and as someone that lives in sort of rural England where I can see the cows and sheep in the fields I always assume that they're just roaming around quite happily they probably are people have water chops in fields for livestock like that's pretty common I think the water use is surprisingly high
but I don't have any figures unfortunately about how much cow drinks a day no we were meant to be talking more about how how meat Alternatives made by I do know that the only real legislation around how minced beef is produced is around how they Market it so how much fat they stay is in there and then I think it's the collagen to what they call meat protein ratio but I don't understand what they mean by meat protein because you get collagen in muscles anyway and they do speculate
that the meat has to come only from skeletal muscles so the muscles that you use to make your limbs move around not necessarily heart muscle or the muscles that are in like your intestine but I just found the whole collagen thing a little bit weird because mussels are made of so many different proteins and collagen is a protein that it seemed like a bizarre thing to have to restrict I think they were doing that purely because collagen also makes tendons in
ligaments and you don't necessarily want that in your minced meat or ground beef if you're in the U.S in a lot of the times what you put in minced meat is obviously not the best cuts of meat it's not that it's not edible it's just it's not light enough to call it like the sirloin steak I think it's older Kettle sometimes as well isn't because I think younger cattle are tastier for like steaks and things yeah the younger flesh is like tender because it has less collagen in it so does that
mean like if there's a more collagen it doesn't taste as nice I think it just affects the texture and that's it so yeah I didn't quite understand the full details of why too much collagen in mince meat is bad you can still absorb it into your body as well and still make use of it you have collagen in your body must be a flavor thing it must be a customer demand things isn't it collagen is like all over the place are like looking useful so maybe they will consider like having like extra
collagen Meats yeah I guess there's a limit to how much collagen you'd want in your sausage and beef burger though yeah but if it's the name of looking useful if you're selling it in the beauty industry someone will buy it I mean they sell collagen capsules like if you're gonna ingest it that way might as well just like eat it with a steak does it make a difference if you're eating a steak with extra collagen or you're like smearing it on your face in some kind of fancy beauty face cream
I mean do both do both and take 10 years off your appearance yeah okay one thing I didn't look into or I was thinking of regulations was how you regulate what's in what's in apart from corn it's quite an emerging industry I think corn was invented in like the 1960s in response to a possible we might run out of ways of producing food because the human population is expanding and it still is there's like a big thing about about pulling like
a fake meat sausage sausage yeah but it's about labeling so if like you see if you see a product that has the red sausage on like for quite a few people you'd think of like oh a meat sausage not necessarily like a meat-free sausage so like if you're buying something that says sausage on it thinking it's like a pork sausage then you eat it you're like wait what's this this isn't pork sauce issue be quite upset I kind of feel like if you're just picking up food in a supermarket it sounds
like we all kind of look at what we're eating and think about it I think there's an argument to say well the person buying it should kind of be paying attention to what they're biting yeah I would agree with that and not all sausages are equal I think France banned it didn't they about not using meat terms with veggie style such it has to be meat to be a sausage the existential a crisis of a
sausage like what is a sausage what am I what am I this is like my research of so what actually is me at muscle I was looking at nutritional contents of just minced beef in the supermarket my starting point my research I'm like it's only 20 protein regardless of how much fat is in there and I think it's it's can legislate up to 25 fat in mince meat and apparently muscle is 75 water anyway so the human body is a 75 10 water so it makes sense muscles are also 75 water and then I
think they're only like 20 protein yeah so I'm just looking on Tescos and 100 grams of minced beef has 20 grams of protein in it so yeah it's about the same right yeah because I was kind of wondering well do they just kind of like cut up all the muscle and then adding extra things to it that they don't necessarily have to tell you about because apparently if it's minced beef mince meat they don't necessarily have to specify they've added other things to it really that's what I read
so I find that a little bit odd that's right now but maybe I misunderstood it correctly and maybe I didn't quite understand what they were saying it was some sort of legislative wording thing that the meat industry understands and I'm not in the meat industry so I didn't get but I think skeletal muscles around about one to ten percent fat so they can add extra fat in if you're like up to 25 so maybe that's part of the legislation to make sure people aren't eating too much
yeah so the fat of 100 grams of minced beef is 4.5 grams of fat is that the mean yeah Tesco lean beef steak mint but then if you compare it to something like corn mince so 100 grams of corn has 1.7 grams of fat but then it's only got 13 grams of protein compared to 20 grams in beef so maybe that's the trade-off less protein but then less fat as well fulfill more water in there I guess or more other fluids or things that aren't protein and fat there's a lot of fiber in
corn 7.5 grams of fiber in 100 grams of corn and then in beef there's no fiber yeah that's not a bad thing because apparently very few people eat as much fiber as you're meant to get so maybe in that respect corn is the better option because it sounds more nutritionally balanced like I guess it depends on like how you're eating the meat versus the big meat products so if it's part of a balanced diet then for both of us as nutritions I don't know I don't I haven't eaten
meat in a very long time guys so you don't need to pay attention to it you don't care I feel I really don't know that much about the meat industry how are they getting the mints like what is mint is it just like the leg of a cow ground up or are they adding things back into it I realized how much I do not know about this yeah that's what I tried to look into it it sounds like it's not as hard
as what you might imagine no that's promising you take your animal you cut out the best bits of meat to use as these particular Cuts Like sirloin steak or whatever and then the bits that are left that are meat and not like bone or organs or the head or the feet apparently they're not allowed yeah you take as much of that as you can to make the mince meat and then whatever meat is left clinging to the bones can be mechanically reclaimed and then used to make something else
again Laura I feel like you should have just like interviewed your your butcher we should have got Laura's Butcher on the podcast that's what they're missing that's like asking what is meat I think he would have just looked at me low or she maybe looked at me like I was a little bit crazy like collagen in its I don't know base form is not meat right but it's just contained within me it's a protein within me right this is when you start to think yeah if I just need protein
it sounds like all proteins are fine so the body breaks them down into the amino acids and they're absorbed and then used to do things and it sounds like it's really matter where those proteins come from as long as you eat a variety of protein sources I think that's fair like I think it's what they say like everything in moderation right like eat a little bit of everything and you're probably covering most things that you need and you're probably just
getting a lot of beetroot as well along the way which isn't the bad thing the important thing seems to be to get some fat in your diet free diets are not good because you have certain vitamins soluble in fats that's the only way you can absorb them if you also have fat in your diet as well and there is some essential fatty acids which the body either can't make them tell itself or it can but in a really inefficient process like the different like
omega-36 yeah the um our National Health Service wonderful people that they are recommend the the claims that vegetable sources aren't as beneficial and as far as I can tell that's because the three different types of Omega-3 the body can make two of them from the one that's found in vegetable sources sounds like a weird recipe vegetable based sauce that sounds delicious I couldn't really find a lot about that research I think I
need to look into that a bit more because I always thought yeah I'll just get some omega-3 from my flaxseed I put flax seeds in pretty much all of my meals now I don't think I've ever eaten a flaxseed maybe that's why I'm going wrong I just take a supplement yes I was just looking at my packets to see that they said anything about omega-3 but they don't but I thought is it omega-3 the one you get from like oily fish yeah
oh eggs okay I'll be all right then I do wonder if I'm like missing out on like secret things I don't know about when I was eating much more meat was I getting more things that I needed or have I cut it out it's actually a good thing because of like antibiotics and meat and all of the like other bad things that are getting put into something oh yeah I kind of wanted this as well and every time I try and look into it I realize how complicated the human body
is the even the research that we currently have although it is a massive amount of it still doesn't know exactly what's happening he doesn't know how we absorb all of these things and then use them in our bodies the advice just seems that we just eat a very diet eat a lot of many different things the other thing is as well like a lot of these vegetarian alternatives are quite new like I don't think there's necessarily the same level of research on these ones like
obviously people have been eating cows and sheep for Millennia but we've not been eating corn sausages for that long comparatively so maybe we don't know the long-term impacts if there will be studies into this there'll be like a cross-section the population taken well it's got to be I think one possible side benefit of the alternative meat industry might be into 3D printing which sounds weird right but growing even weird and say growing body parts in a lab is a genuine medical need
there is definite Research into you know like growing organs yes someone gets injured or gets ill and like you need a heart replacement and there is no donor that is combusted they can grow one for you I do think that is potentially incredible the ability to 3D print an organ and they're like these lab-grown meats as well like you could make a beef burger using beef cells without ever killing a cow fake Meats aren't even really fake meat this goes back to the
what is meat if you can culture stem cells from a sheep and you can make lamb without killing the Sheep because you've just taken a few cells and you've not you know there's no slaughtering process like would you eat a lab-based grown meat would you take the 3D printed heart I would I mean if I was dying I would but you wouldn't want to be the first one do you see if it works if you're dying anyway if it's your last hope you can make medical history yeah and I can see that if the
meat industry is looking to have to 3D print uh just like the muscle fibers so the the fake meat has the same texture is meat from an animal then that doesn't have sort of offshoots into medicine which I think is probably a good thing yeah but I also generally think why are you trying so hard to make something be something that is not there is a moment of that like I see these fake meat and lab-grown meat things and they bleed and I don't I don't need it to bleed I didn't well to
be fair I never ate steak very rare either because I didn't want to see it bleed yeah that's a weird thing for me I'm like no I will not buy this if it's gonna like I don't want to see blood unless it's like beetroot juice it all comes back to the beetroot it reduces I don't mind but like if it's actually like bleeding that's kind of weird the appeal for me is that if you're doing it from the cells of the animal without killing the animal then in theory you wouldn't need like a field
full of sheep to have lamins and I'm going to go back to my sort of rural backgrounds and uh given I live literally there are sheep in the field like 20 meters from my house if we're not eating meat from animals what happens to all those sheep what will the British Countryside look like if we don't have as big a meat Industries we do now it's not necessarily a bad thing I don't think I just I just wonder I'm so used to seeing it rewilding that's the whole point is that I'm not trying to
put anyone out of a job necessarily but I think the farming that we do now on a global level is not sustainable we all know that the Earth is in Dire Straits and the Land part of that is habitat loss and land loss for people and farming because we need the food to feed the people and build the cities and all of this but if you could eliminate that need and you could just have one or several factories making labyrin me would that save you on the space and the water with the CO2 production be
less maybe yeah that's the first point actually I guess if people now gradually transition out of eating as much meat given the population is still growing maybe in the industry won't change at all it'll just stay the the same it won't keep growing it will just feed more people be supplemented by things that have grown in advance well that would be for the UK outside of Western countries that meat consumptions going up because people are becoming more wealthy and they want to
eat meat because it's a luxury product so like wouldn't there also be like a market for the UK just explore all their meat overseas I guess you need that Global picture to figure out if we're doing this for climate change reasons and to feed populations then you'd need to have that Global understanding yeah and also if you were to scale up corn to be like the global producer of beef in the same way that cows are or could it scale up would it scale you know because you're still gonna
have to get unlike peas if we're all going to eat pea protein we need to suddenly switch from cows to peas like growing Peas still takes water and resources they're like peas and stuff like it'll probably would be less resources used because like when you're growing peas like you need to grow a lot of peas just to feed a cow to get to the state where you can like then kill it for me whereas if
you just use that directly to feed people then you would end up with like less peas and like soybeans having need to be grown the reason there's so much meat farming around near me is because the land isn't necessarily suitable for any other youth the only agricultural are you so you may as well use that land to have the cows living on it like we shoot they have another purpose which is like you can use them for all but like what other purpose do cows have eyes meat and dairy
so we've started off the conversation is what is in these meat Alternatives and now we're sort of broadening it out to what if all meat Alternatives just completely replace me you don't have an answer we have no clue what will happen because we haven't done the research future episode maybe what would the world look like if the world went vegetarian well cows and sheep only be in like zoos or petting zoos or pets maybe they'll be pets yes I mean people do have pet cows that's
not unheard of yeah I guess that's something we can maybe speculate on in the future as well like what we will be eating and how will be eating and where we get it from so I guess that's uh where we will end this so you guys both eat meat alternative products I prefer just eating actual beans I feel like I understand better where they come from I'm not completely against alternative products corn dinosaurs we were all sort of agreed that ultimately you just want a really varied diet
yeah definitely and if you could look into how a product is made and if there was more transparency in that process I think that would help people make more informed decisions about what they're eating than whether they should be eating it kind of feel like you know if they don't tell you how it's made do you really want to eat it does corn need to be so protective of their product another three of us don't really know what meat is even though we're made of it because they're always
so you can still eat anything because you don't know what's in it yeah pretty much [Laughter] uh marvelous oh on that bombshell please ignore that last piece of advice it's not a very scientific behind us on Twitter if you want to keep chatting about this otherwise we will see you next time for our 50th ever episode and we have something special planned for that one so stay tuned the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they
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