Brexit humour
- Thread starter alex04w
- Start date
M-J-G
Member
- Location
- Limousin
A bit of Gilbert and Sullivan for the more cultured amongst you.
- Location
- Limousin/Charentes toad land
Brilliant 
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
- Location
- Northumberland
Not related to this section,but could you put up a written article by an Edward Lucas in the comment section of todays Times.Would be worth hearing other Forum members views on it.Thanks.
kfpben
Member
- Location
- Mid Hampshire
Lorry drivers stuck in Brexit traffic jams may cause rise in ‘dogging’
Ministers working hard to prepare for a no-deal Brexit have been dogged by an unlikely new problem with 25 days to go. Officials planning to ease any congestion on the transport links to Dover have encountered the potential for an embarrassing issue: a rise in “dogging”.At the Conservative Party con
www.thetimes.co.uk
Yet another benefit to Brexit!
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
This one? Brexit humour wrong section really. But think you can copy and paste with the TFF pages, so leave it with you.
ED LUCAS
october 7 2019, 12:01am, the times
Meat is off the menu as hi-tech rivals thrive
edward lucas
New plant-based substitutes for animal protein will be much cheaper, healthier and greener
Share
Save
My German friend opened a small bottle. “Sniff that.” The scent of newly cooked sausages filled my nostrils. “We can make the smell,” he said. “But we can’t do the taste. Yet.” That was 1984, in the offices of Melchers & Co, a Bremen-based trading house with decades of experience in essential oils and flavourings. The prospect gripped me. For 35 years I have dutifully tried every vegetarian substitute for meat. Fibrous lentil burgers, tasteless tofu and rubbery Quorn (made from fungus) all failed to grab me. Vegetarian food is delicious. But not when it is pretending to be meat.
Last month in Washington my taste buds finally caught up with my nose. I was in Kramerbooks, the American capital’s bookshop-cum-bar-cum-café, which serves the new Impossible Burger — a meat-like patty made mainly from soya, wheat and potato proteins, coconut fat and yeast-based flavouring. This looked, smelled and tasted like meat: crispy on the outside, succulent without being greasy, chewy but not gristly. The sizzle in the kitchen was authentic too. All five senses were satisfied. So was my wallet: at $14 it cost the same as a posh burger made from wagyu beef. Most importantly, it cleared my conscience. Eating animals is not just mildly unhealthy. It is bad for the environment. Most rearing practices (even leaving aside slaughter) involve stress and harm — lots of it in the cases of pigs and chickens. The main reason for eating meat is selfish pleasure: it tastes nice.
The Impossible Burger removes that argument. When the company starts selling in this country, I can’t see why I would want to buy any processed meat product ever again. When the next generation of products arrive — reproducing the texture of steak and chicken breast — my meat-eating days will be largely over.
So too, soon, will the meat industry. The new foods are produced in factories, which are inherently cheaper and more efficient than animal husbandry. Industrial meat production — factory farming — has already reached the limit of its efficiency: making the products cheaper involves horrible trade-offs involving cruelty, abuse of antibiotics and pollution.
Impossible Foods is just beginning to sell its products, and only in the United States and Hong Kong. Having started in restaurants (chiefly Burger King), it has just begun retail grocery sales, priced at the very top end of the market — the equivalent of $12 per pound, or about £21 per kilo. But consumer interest is startling. Since its debut in Los Angeles on September 20, in the Gelson’s Markets chain, the plant-made mince has been the bestselling packaged item, outselling its beef rivals in both volume and revenue. Customers are subject to an un-American 10-pack limit.
Other companies are hurtling into the market too. The food giant Kelloggs is launching a product called Incogmeato. The share price of Beyond Meat, backed by Bill Gates, has risen six-fold since it went public in May. It is launching a “PLT” burger (made with pea protein) via McDonald’s in Canada. Future products will be tastier, cheaper and more varied. The new wares have barely started reaping the rewards of mass production, specialisation and further innovation, such as precision fermentation. Next up will be animal protein cells grown in labs — shrimp is a likely early contender. The conclusion is inescapable. As prices fall, quality rises and availability increases, food technology will do for cows (soon) and other animals (later) what the mechanisation of transport did for horses.
A new study by RethinkX, a think tank, forecasts that plant-based competitors will be five times cheaper than animal proteins by 2030, with more price falls after that. They will eventually cost the same as sugar. By 2030 the quantity of beef mince consumed in the US will have shrunk by 70 per cent, and the steak market by 30 per cent. The number of cows will be halved. The dairy industry will be bankrupt: the flavour and protein content of milk will soon be reproduced with biotechnology; the value of agricultural land will plummet.
But doom for farm animals and the industry that depends on them will be matched by joy for the planet. Making an Impossible Burger, the company reckons, consumes a twentieth of the land, a quarter of the water and less than a twelfth of the fertiliser required by its dead-cow counterpart, while emitting only an eighth of the greenhouse gases. The RethinkX study forecasts that 60 per cent of American farmland will be available for other uses, such as reforestation. That could fully offset US greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.
The paradox here is that the heroes of the story are science and capitalism — normally seen by the green-minded as the arch-villains. The Impossible Burger’s success stems from genetically engineering strains of yeast to make the “heme” protein. This adds the sought-after meaty taste that has eluded its rivals. It is the financial markets that signal and chase the potential rewards, providing the nearly $700 million raised by Impossible Foods alone. It is competition in the retail and restaurant sector that brings the new foodstuffs to consumers. In the end the big food giants’ muscle (after they buy some of the upstarts) will be what turns niche products into mass-market ones. The militant vegans of Animal Rebellion aim to disrupt London for two weeks, starting today, under the slogan “Kill capitalism not animals”. They are ordering from the wrong menu.
- Location
- Northumberland
Yes,thats the one thanks.Needs to be in the Agricultural Matters section,but i dont know how to do it.This one? Brexit humour wrong section really. But think you can copy and paste with the TFF pages, so leave it with you.
ED LUCAS
october 7 2019, 12:01am, the times
Meat is off the menu as hi-tech rivals thrive
edward lucas
New plant-based substitutes for animal protein will be much cheaper, healthier and greener
Share
Save
My German friend opened a small bottle. “Sniff that.” The scent of newly cooked sausages filled my nostrils. “We can make the smell,” he said. “But we can’t do the taste. Yet.” That was 1984, in the offices of Melchers & Co, a Bremen-based trading house with decades of experience in essential oils and flavourings. The prospect gripped me. For 35 years I have dutifully tried every vegetarian substitute for meat. Fibrous lentil burgers, tasteless tofu and rubbery Quorn (made from fungus) all failed to grab me. Vegetarian food is delicious. But not when it is pretending to be meat.
Last month in Washington my taste buds finally caught up with my nose. I was in Kramerbooks, the American capital’s bookshop-cum-bar-cum-café, which serves the new Impossible Burger — a meat-like patty made mainly from soya, wheat and potato proteins, coconut fat and yeast-based flavouring. This looked, smelled and tasted like meat: crispy on the outside, succulent without being greasy, chewy but not gristly. The sizzle in the kitchen was authentic too. All five senses were satisfied. So was my wallet: at $14 it cost the same as a posh burger made from wagyu beef. Most importantly, it cleared my conscience. Eating animals is not just mildly unhealthy. It is bad for the environment. Most rearing practices (even leaving aside slaughter) involve stress and harm — lots of it in the cases of pigs and chickens. The main reason for eating meat is selfish pleasure: it tastes nice.
The Impossible Burger removes that argument. When the company starts selling in this country, I can’t see why I would want to buy any processed meat product ever again. When the next generation of products arrive — reproducing the texture of steak and chicken breast — my meat-eating days will be largely over.
So too, soon, will the meat industry. The new foods are produced in factories, which are inherently cheaper and more efficient than animal husbandry. Industrial meat production — factory farming — has already reached the limit of its efficiency: making the products cheaper involves horrible trade-offs involving cruelty, abuse of antibiotics and pollution.
Impossible Foods is just beginning to sell its products, and only in the United States and Hong Kong. Having started in restaurants (chiefly Burger King), it has just begun retail grocery sales, priced at the very top end of the market — the equivalent of $12 per pound, or about £21 per kilo. But consumer interest is startling. Since its debut in Los Angeles on September 20, in the Gelson’s Markets chain, the plant-made mince has been the bestselling packaged item, outselling its beef rivals in both volume and revenue. Customers are subject to an un-American 10-pack limit.
Other companies are hurtling into the market too. The food giant Kelloggs is launching a product called Incogmeato. The share price of Beyond Meat, backed by Bill Gates, has risen six-fold since it went public in May. It is launching a “PLT” burger (made with pea protein) via McDonald’s in Canada. Future products will be tastier, cheaper and more varied. The new wares have barely started reaping the rewards of mass production, specialisation and further innovation, such as precision fermentation. Next up will be animal protein cells grown in labs — shrimp is a likely early contender. The conclusion is inescapable. As prices fall, quality rises and availability increases, food technology will do for cows (soon) and other animals (later) what the mechanisation of transport did for horses.
A new study by RethinkX, a think tank, forecasts that plant-based competitors will be five times cheaper than animal proteins by 2030, with more price falls after that. They will eventually cost the same as sugar. By 2030 the quantity of beef mince consumed in the US will have shrunk by 70 per cent, and the steak market by 30 per cent. The number of cows will be halved. The dairy industry will be bankrupt: the flavour and protein content of milk will soon be reproduced with biotechnology; the value of agricultural land will plummet.
But doom for farm animals and the industry that depends on them will be matched by joy for the planet. Making an Impossible Burger, the company reckons, consumes a twentieth of the land, a quarter of the water and less than a twelfth of the fertiliser required by its dead-cow counterpart, while emitting only an eighth of the greenhouse gases. The RethinkX study forecasts that 60 per cent of American farmland will be available for other uses, such as reforestation. That could fully offset US greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.
The paradox here is that the heroes of the story are science and capitalism — normally seen by the green-minded as the arch-villains. The Impossible Burger’s success stems from genetically engineering strains of yeast to make the “heme” protein. This adds the sought-after meaty taste that has eluded its rivals. It is the financial markets that signal and chase the potential rewards, providing the nearly $700 million raised by Impossible Foods alone. It is competition in the retail and restaurant sector that brings the new foodstuffs to consumers. In the end the big food giants’ muscle (after they buy some of the upstarts) will be what turns niche products into mass-market ones. The militant vegans of Animal Rebellion aim to disrupt London for two weeks, starting today, under the slogan “Kill capitalism not animals”. They are ordering from the wrong menu.
just copy the post and paste
