While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.
A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.
[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.
A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.
[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).