Summary: Cocktail Party Economics

PEAR Assignment 1: The End of Meat Economics can be defined as the social science that studies the choices that individual, businesses, governments, and entire societies make as they cope with scarcity. An article published by Business Financial Post talks about how, New York restaurant owner, David Chang is serving a new meatless burger that contains zero meat, yet tastes, looks, cooks and even bleeds like real meat. It is made from wheat, coconuts, potatoes and one more special ingredient: Heme. “The heme is natural and identical, down to the molecular level, to what is consumed from a cow,” (Business Financial Post) Veggie burgers might become more common in the future for health reasons, price and the demand for meat. A research firm

The love of meat in the western world has also fallen since 1999 in Canada by a 25%. (Business Financial Post) The consumption of livestock by the year 2050 shows how scarcity and value go hand and hand, stated in the book Cocktail Party Economics, “Scarcity reveals Value.” (pg. 21) The problem is that raising cows is a very inefficient way to make food.

Feeding the cows and needing more energy and water to maintain the farms take up a lot of resources, time and space. “it takes five to 20 kilograms of feed and

15,400 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef.” (Business Financial Post) The space that livestock take up around the world is outrageous, using 25% of the world’s ice free land for livestock grazing and companies are still cutting down forests to make fields for cattle which will only raise the methane gas emissions in the atmosphere. Due to the dwindling forests for more grazing space for cattle, is going to result in more resources being put into maintaining livestock and a negative impact on the atmosphere. This can be explained in Cocktail Party

Economics when it states that, “scarcity is a fundamentally relative term rather than an absolute one.”

such as Mad Cow disease which was a crisis is

Canada’s beef industry in the early 2000’s. “It makes a lot of sense to work with the existing providers of protein instead of opposing them,” says chief executive of New

Harvest, Isha Datar. If lab-grown meat replaces meat entirely we can see a total elimination of methane gas in the livestock industry, (Livestock being the lead producer of methane gas is the world), as well as the huge amount of land used to house livestock. In conclusion, it is clear that the meat industry is facing a downfall in the foreseen future and if they do not change and embrace the fact that other companies such as David Chang’s veggie burger then they will be left behind. Small companies such Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat and SuperMeat are racing to get their

“meat” out of the lab and into production as fast as possible. Seeing that tofu