I think it's really interesting that you view changing the eating habits of millions of people "easy".
We've known and broadly accepted that smoking is bad since 1964[1]. Yet new people start smoking every year. Even in countries where packaging displays disgusting pictures showing the long term results of smoking.
To me it seems unlikely that relevant parts of the world will become vegan in the short term, or that cattle farmers will pivot to something else. But I do often see that "green" initiatives that also save companies money are adopted quickly. Not all farmers may care about emissions, but needing less feed (and thus saving money) seems like an easy win. Hopefully all these small gains will add up.
Oh I didn't mean to say that changing people to go vegan is easy.
Just that going vegan is an incredibly simple solution, and itself super easy.
I probably wouldn't be vegan if it weren't for all those tasty vegan meat alternatives.
Just now I had a german "currywurst" made from wheat protein that tastes indistinguishable from the meat original.
It actually tastes "better" becauese you don't get the "joyous experience" of biting onto a piece of bone or onto some chewy piece of atery or god knows what... shudder
The issue here is specifically with beef, so going to an extreme like vegan is way past the reasonable change line.
Eating more shrimp/seafood, chicken, pork, etc instead of beef would be just as effective without all of the extra work necessary to ensure people are getting necessary amounts of protein.
Asking everyone to go vegan is selling a lifestyle and a belief system, not solving a problem.
This reasoning is flawed in the same way recycling is flawed: it puts all the responsibility on individuals to change their behaviour rather than government or industry using their greater leverage to change the system itself.
And it'll work just as well.
If you want to stop people eating meat, the solution is to tax it so that the price of the good reflects its true cost. But that ain't gonna happen. So the least we can do is clean up the production and supply chains to reduce those externalized costs.
What makes you think that it's not going to happen?
It's already happening to such a degree that diary and meat farmer interest groups are HEAVILY lobbying the EU, to make it as difficult as possible for replacement products.
We might as well put our efforts into cleaning up these roadblocks/corruption to a brighter future.
And why can't we do both?
Expect individuals to go vegan, expect governments to support the development of vegan substitutes.
Have people take the bike instead of cars more often, but have a carbon tax on flights.
Because I like solutions that are possible, and I can't think of many things more difficult than changing people's behavior.
We can't even convince the public to wear face masks in public and that vaccines are safe, and you're telling me that it would be trivial to make everyone go vegan? Even discussing this is pointlessly filling the atmosphere with more CO2.
I actually happen to think that our civilization will inevitably become vegetarian, but it won't happen within my lifetime, and in the meantime, some scientists have found a cheap way to reduce methane emissions. That's awesome! Stop pissing on their work.
It doesn't solve the problem of dealing with water runoff pollution. Or air pollution (seaweed is not a 100% reduction). Or ethical problems with wellbeing of animals. Or health concerns of eating too much meat.
How will we fix the topsoil damage caused by industrial monocropping without grazing animals? We only have a few decades left before our petrochemical dependent agricultural system will be impossible to sustain.
Also, rebuilding topsoil with grazing animals has a side benefit of being a carbon sink.
Have you seen an image of a factory farm? They don't fix the soil. They ruin it more by having too many animals in a small space.
I'm fine with having smaller amounts of animals in open spaces that goes around and take care of the fields, but today's animal agriculture doesn't take care of that.
This is utterly false. About 20% of livestock feed is fodder crops and grains. The rest is grass, leaves, and plant matter by-products such as crop residue, oil seed cakes, etc. All things that are inedible to humans.
The world is not going to go vegan. Humans eat meat. No greenhouse argument will ever change this. This is worthwhile research, as is cultured meat and other options. Evolving the tech of raising and cultivating animal protein to eat is important work.
I guess you meant "some humans eat meat", or else I cannot be human by your definition, and I sure look like one.
But then, some* humans also kill each other, rape their children (etc). But no one was trying to describe what some humans do/did but what they should better do if we're trying to live in a peaceful and sustainable world. Why should we care that some people eat meat? I don't care that some people burn their own houses unless it threatens mine or my neighbors'.
In the future, we may well learn that people were eating meat and some continue to do so. Just like some people still commute by horse.
*I realized that the easiest way to curb climate change is simply to stop eating meat. I'm healthier and can cook more dishes than ever. Why would the world not go vegan? I can't find a good reason except "because I believe so". Then, again, more and more people become vegetarian so we can only bet.
IMHO price (or price/"performance") is a serious consideration for the actual food choices of many people, much more in practice than what they would say it is.
Currently, meat substitutes are effectively a premium product - however, if (when?) they would be available at half the price of animal protein, then I believe meat consumption worldwide would decrease a lot even if people's preferences would not change. Cultural norms would shift eventually, but that's slow, and price changes can happen and affect change much faster.
Artificial chicken stuffed with soy and other fillers can't be long term indistinguishable to your body.
I wish you lasting health, but fear you are suggesting we all gamble on the oversight and benevolence of the food industry by eating even more processed, engineered foods than even Doritos or Taco Bell as your main protein source(s).
Yes, industrial food does bad things to produce large amounts of chicken, but there are quality farmers still in business, and I'll take a real, dead bird, fish or cow (and occasional pig, though harder to defend) any day over engineered replacement proteins.
Over-processed food is nothing new, and the issues with it won't go away just because you ditch the animal ingredients.
I'll happily eat a vegan meal made from fresh and locally produced ingredients and prepared by a skilled chef. The vegan "burgers" and "sausages" from the store? I won't touch them any more than I'd touch frozen chicken nuggets or fish fingers.
It’s not anti scientific to include a prior assumption that the food industry will suppress relevant data about the health implications of processed food. They have a long track record of doing this. I’d argue that this is actually a more rational Bayesian approach to the problem...
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I can't eat a lot of fats due to a bad pancreas, but I'm also B12-deficient and anemic. Doc asked me to eat more red meat on occasion, so I try to about once a week.
As an attempt at an alternative, I tried one of the popular substitutes. I tried it before my ... "pancreatic situation" was known to me. It made me sick for days. Vomiting, other digestive issues I won't list, and incredible abdominal pain and sourness of my stomach resulted.
I've even seen similar reports in various Vegan forums.
Those substitutes are filled with canola (and other) oils to add body, flavour, and characteristic "juiciness".
I'm intrigued by lab-grown meat, but those pea and soy meat substitutes are not viable. They're not even close to a viable substitute. Eating a steak or some bone marrow once a week or so keeps me feeling like I'm an alive human being, which I have to say is nice having been close to the alternative.
I take 1 1000% daily reccomended dose per day, as per consultation with my doctor.
Together with D3, Folic Acid, and Iron.
Most people are vitamin deficient, meat eating/milk drinking or not, unless you actively substitute.
It's all the same stuff anyways.
B12 is produced by bacteria living on the ground. Which would normally bio accumulate in livestock.
Howeve since most livestock is fed with silo feed, theyd too get B12 deficiency, if it wasn't substituted.
So you have the choice of eating B12 directly with a lot of control over dosage, or have the livestock swallow the pill for you.
Seems like an inefficient intermediary step.
It's not enough. And uptake is a complex process, it's not as simple as supplement with a given isolate. Unfortunately, not every human body will adhere to a textbook case where a single supplemental pill or shot does the trick. If it did, I'd be in a better way.
As it is, I'm working on staying ahead of any problems B12 and anemia can cause me down the line. I'd rather not reach the point of others I've known who have to have regular blood transfusions to stay alive and prevent their minds and bodies from eroding.
I'll stick to my physician's word and millennia of evolution on that one, if it's all the same to you.
And please, show me some respect: you must know that consuming a complex of nutrients through a food source is not the same as ingesting a copious amount of an isolate. It's certainly not akin to an animal "swallowing a pill" for me.
Where's that American aim of being #1 ("exceptional") in ways like "ethically good" or "world leader taking the world into a better future"? Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?
> Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?
Why is the burden on me? That's never been explained by all the climate religionists out there. When the west does something it's bad. When everyone else does it, they get a pass?
We already did the industrial revolution. We already went through the long process. They have free wins - they don't need to design new processes or methods - they have plenty of money.
They have the wrong priorities.
Instead we can sit here and pat ourselves on the back for not using plastic straws, because save the turtles or some absolute crock, while 4 or 5 countries in asia produce almost ALL of the plastic trash in the oceans.
For how much we spend, we can easily afford (aka minimal change to our lifestyle) to make electricity carbon-free in five years of we wanted to. We could charge trucking their true cost of road destruction and it would save us money and reduce CO2. We could allow dense housing neighborhoods (not force, just allow!)
There are many things we could which even save money, make people some happier, and help the climate... but we don't.
The per-person consumption of electricity and oil - along with the CO2 emissions due to our lifestyle in the US is higher than just about every country in the world. WE are the ones that need to cut back.
It's due to many reasons, and Americans are cutting back. Our CO2 emissions have steadily been dropping for decades. the US and Europe have been solving environmental problems. Since the US has started to lower global CO2 emissions have more than doubled. That's mostly due to Asia. Their per capita emissions continue to rise and rise and rise, that's even with their booms in population.
All coal plants produce the same amount of CO2, the dirtyness is inly related to micro-particles.
The richest countries are the reason for climate change. We've lived way past what is sustainable for a hundred years, and now you want to blame it on somebody else?
Sure, everything but taking personal responsibility...
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Going Vegan."
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Ride a bicycle."
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Live in a solar powered minihome."
""But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Don't reproduce/have kids."
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. No plastics."
I am a huge environmentalist, and I've adopted large swathes of these policies personally. As MIB said, a person is smart, rational, and reasonable, but PEOPLE are scared, stupid, and crazy. They are lazy, apathetic, ingrained in habit, and tired.
Global warming in particular should be pursued in a multifront effort. No one can prognosticate and see "this is where we put ALL our efforts". To succeed it needs to be a combined, iterative, democratic process of research, technology, education, and cultural advancement.
> But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient.
Making ~99% of people vegans is anything but easy, cheap, and mildly inconvenient. In fact, it is impossible (until we manage to replicate meat in the lab).
Your view is ridiculously myopic; I will not and most people will not stop eating meat anytime soon. It is a simple fact and you must accept it before trying to solve this. Real solutions are something like the article describes.
To put things in perspective, I'm still trying to convince the in-laws to recycle basic things like paper and plastic instead of simply burning it in a barrel in the back-yard, and to recycle glass and metal instead of just throwing it in the bin. Because, you know, recycling is "mildly inconvenient".
So you say that it's more extreme to eat beans than to raise animals by feeding them beans to then slaughter them to eat them?
I've read somewhere recently that you need 16kcal of feed to produce 1kcal worth of chicken. That's a 16 times loss in efficiency that requires a lot of plants to feed to the chicken that could have been consumed by humans.
There is no fundamental need to get energy from fossil fuels specifically, we just have to work at getting replacements for all scenarios.
Nutrition is an entirely different thing. First of all, it is a very fundamental cultural and personal thing. Meat and dairy products have an important nutritional value, which isn't easily replaced, especially not by local foods in many regions. And except for the fossil fuels used in farming (both for meat and plant production), it is carbon-neutral. The problem with it are rather matters of scale and over consumption, so yes, the idea to just reduce meat consumption sounds like a very good idea overall.
Meat makes human healthy like no plant based protein does.
Also, in terms of non processed stuff, the highest protein-to-calories ratio is Chicken Breast, lentils don't even come close (if you need 180g of protein, chicken breast will cost you 800calories while lentils will 2400cal).
Now I'm not aware whether eating chicken contributes as much CO2 as beef, but if it doesn't, why not tell people to switch to chicken instead of plant based stuff.
Livestock contributes to 15% of all greenhouse gasses. But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient. Going vegan.
This has the added benefit of protecting threatened ecosystems in the rainforrest and seas.
We could then spend that energy on the difficult stuff. Fast tracked rollout of renevables and interrim energy storage.