Carbon footprint for meat is significantly higher because you have to grow the plans and feed it to the animals, and moving up a trophic level is usually ~10% efficient. It's much more efficient to consume the plants directly.
So do many of the animals ^_^ at least it's my understanding that corn stalks are fairly useless as animal feed, and due to subsidies, corn is the primary feedstock for animals and humans alike in the US.
Right so we replace the production of the plants we can't consume directly with ones we can. It's not like we're forced to produce non-consumable plants. We do it because we need to feed the consumable animals.
You make that sound like swapping out a machine on a production line. For some places, you simply can't grow plants that we can consume directly.
A lot of land doesn't receive enough water/sun, has poor soil, or is on such a steep slop that cultivating it is not worth the effort. The most efficient use of that land would be grazing land.
As for being "forced to produce non-consumable plants", we are. We can't eat the entire bell pepper plant. We're producing stems, leaves, and roots as byproducts, things that animals actually can eat.
Right so that land becomes unproductive land and can return to its natural state or be used for other needs. And that is fine since we don't need as much farm land to sustain a non-meat society.
You're intentionally confusing waste material with primary purpose. That's dishonest. If we could feed all the livestock we need with waste material we would since it would be a lot cheaper for the producers.
Why? It's perfectly productive once you let some goats on that land and then eat the goats.
> And that is fine since we don't need as much farm land to sustain a non-meat society.
Should we switch to a completely potato agriculture then? If your argument against meat is waste, then we should go towards whatever crop has the highest yield per acre. Why waste all that acreage, water, and fertilizer on kale and broccoli?
> You're intentionally confusing waste material with primary purpose. That's dishonest.
You're missing the point, which is that we're by necessity creating all this other material that can be used to feed animals as a necessary byproduct of creating the grains to feed the animals. The proportions don't work out as neatly as you think.
> If we could feed all the livestock we need with waste material we would since it would be a lot cheaper for the producers.
Incorrect. On a grain diet, livestock fatten more quickly and are ready for the market sooner. Pasture raised livestock is a thing, and requires less capital and investment. It just takes longer for the livestock to be ready for market and the meat is tougher and gamier.
>Why? It's perfectly productive once you let some goats on that land and then eat the goats.
Because it isn't needed for food production anymore.
>If your argument against meat is waste
My argument against meat isn't waste. Less waste is a benefit but not a primary reason.
>You're missing the point, which is that we're by necessity creating all this other material that can be used to feed animals as a necessary byproduct of creating the grains to feed the animals.
I've read this a few times and I keep reading it the same way "We produce waste that can be used to feed animals as a bitproduct of producing feed for animals?"
>Pasture raised livestock is a thing, and requires less capital and investment.
And tons more cleared grassland. Like an unsustainable amount.
> I've read this a few times and I keep reading it the same way "We produce waste that can be used to feed animals as a bitproduct of producing feed for animals?
My point is that we don't need to produce feed for animals, they do fine just on pastureland.
The way we currently raise grains is problematic enough as it is, requiring huge fertilizer inputs[1] which require petrochemicals. Eating grains is not a sustainable alternative - if we raised grains for human food, might as well feed animals and get some steaks out of it.
>And tons more cleared grassland.
The great plains did not need to be cleared. They were perfect pastures for grazing animals, not the modern monoculture of grains.
> and the ones that we do, we consume only a tiny minority of the plant (most of the time)
So do the animals. The soy and wheat we feed the animals is a tiny portion of the plant... so what? If we have 1000 calories of wheat, it's better to feed that to a human, than a cow; The cow will only produce 100 calories of meat for the same grains that we would have eaten.
Not really. Cows, goats, sheep raised somewhat naturally eat grass and leaves and twigs, things we cannot digest. They can also eat the parts of the tomato that we don't eat, such as the stalks and leaves.
If you're talking about feeling animals with grains, the way we grow grains is even more problematic, with huge amounts of petroleum and water inputs.
> Cows, goats, sheep raised somewhat naturally eat grass and leaves and twigs, things we cannot digest
That's correct. The problem is, 99% of our animals in america are not raised that way [1]. They are raised eating soy, wheat, and corn. Grass is more expensive, so it's not used.
Nit: grass is less profitable. The expense of grass is nothing, but it takes longer to raise the livestock to pasture weight and the meat is less marbled and gamier in texture, which drives the price down.
"Genetically engineer plants to grow in unideal conditions, and then formulate those into recipes that taste like cows" sounds more difficult than "Grow cows, eat cows"
Interesting to see if the company actually shifts it's culture.
My wife is vegetarian so I'm exposed to quite a bit of different sources of veggie protein. My concern is that the fake meat stuff is actually kind of expensive compared to meat. If it was cheaper I can see more folks move in that direction.
1. It's expensive because people with more money are more likely to be vegetarian.
2. We don't pay for the true cost of meat, i.e. green house gas emissions, water usage, transportation costs, etc....
In a lot of the Western US, water usage is based on decades-old interstate compacts, where future water rights are based on a use-it-or-lose-it system. I'm not necessarily in favor of the extreme unregulated end of the free market either, but the system as it stands seems to me to be a market distortion that incentivizes people towards heavy water-usage activities (ranching, raising of water-heavy feed crops like alfalfa), rather than what a purely free market would apportion.
What isn't paid for is the cost of feed. Corn is the major foodstuff of both birds and, sadly, commercial cows. Corn is subsidized to below the cost of production by the US government.
Transportation is not paid for, really, because the highways are maintained without usage fees.
I'm a vegetarian and I buy fake meats ('cause I miss meat). My theory about why they are relatively expensive is that vegetarianism is seen as "healthy" and people think that healthy things need to cost more than non-healthy things. Kind of "If it's cheap, it can't be healthy".
And that's a win-win for the companies producing it, and why I think there has recently been a surge in startups making fake meat!
Just to add to this, there's also #3: lack of scale. IIRC Beyond Meat has also stated that with comparable scale they could match the price of similar beef products. Marketing speak or not, I'm inclined to believe it since it's clearly a niche market right now, and vegan products like Just Mayo that have achieved scale like Just Mayo are very cheap -- enough to convince low-end, mass market establishments like 7-11 to default to it.
More evidence: price of tofu is more comparable to meat in places with more Asian and international cuisines. E.g. tofu is cheaper here in at my Manhattan Whole Foods than in my southern hometown's supermarkets, despite most foods being more expensive. Even cheaper in Asian supermarkets.
I'd worry about phytoestrogens as well. There are compounds in plant based foods that must be consumed in moderation (as all things). A vegetarian diet is superior in many ways to the modern western diet, but not without its own risks/disadvantages.
It also doesn't taste like meat. I will happily eat a vegan meal that tastes good. I'll eat meat that tastes good. But I just don't see a point in buying a "soy chicken schnitzel" which does not taste like chicken at all. Why should I be interested in that product in the first place?
Hopefully one day we'll get to actually replicating the taste properly. Or growing meat synthetically. I'm happy to move to either.
Replicating the taste is the wrong way to go about it. Vegan food can taste just as good as meat and cheese, but it will never taste like meat and cheese because it's not meat and cheese.
Agreed. People should stop going for a veggie burger that tastes like a beef burger. Instead, compare a beef burger to completely different, high quality, vegan meal like a veggie green curry, tikka masala, or burrito.
(note: I'm a chef of a fine dining restaurant, so take this how you will).
Telling people to change won't work. But at the same time, people in my position(available to influence flavours of a region), should do our part in not restricting ourselves to animal products.
This I have seen happen over the past 10 years, the amount of reduced meat or no meat items on my menus has increased, as well as doing more to use sustainable products.
On a side note about these types of foods: don't look at the bottom of the restaurant chains to see the future trends. They will only cater to the safe bets(huge cheap steaks and battery style farming practices), due to their low margins.
It took me a long time to get to a position where - as the head chef - I could experiment with a large portion of my menu being more land friendly(which for me is reduced meat based portions, higher quality locally sourced ingredients and more renewable products).
I'm hesitant to believe you've had modern, high quality (or even moderate quality) meat-replacements. My girlfriend is vegan so I've been exposed to an array of options, and there are plenty that I would have never even guessed weren't meat had I not already known. There are members of the vegan community that won't even eat some meat-replacements because it tastes and feels too much like flesh and it grosses them out. Granted, part of that effect likely comes from not exposing oneself to meat for extended periods of time, but the technology really is making rapid progress. Getting some big, mainstream money behind it is only going to accelerate that process.
It doesn't always even come down to technology either, you just have to know some of the methods. Prepare a jackfruit the right way and it becomes delicious seasoned shredded chicken. Textured vegetable protein can become seasoned ground beef just as easily. Yeah, the flavoring plays a big role in those cases (which it often does for meat-replacements, to be fair), but it does in many situations with meat preparation too e.g. adding cumin to make taco meat, marinading your meats, slathering them in BBQ sauce, etc.
The question here is whether that "modern, high quality meat-replacement" is equally as affordable as meat (within reason). If so, show me where I can get it. If not, I likely won't reallocate my budget.
Gardein Breakfast Patties[1][2] retail for $3 at my grocery store and regularly have $1-off in-store coupons. Even the macros are solid. Everything else I've tried from Gardein has been excellent as well, and this is far from the best stuff out there.
I wish I had an answer for you, I'm really honestly not too educated on the subject. I just know that there are more expensive and better reviewed meat-replacements out there than what I've personally bought in the store. That being said, Gardein is no slouch. I've also been to The Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Twin Cities Veg Fest and the quality of meat-replacements (and cheese-replacements) at both those places were on a whole other level.
This problem has nothing to do with vegan foods. The problem is that meat and dairy benefit from government subsidies. This might be because of lobbyists, but that's none of my business.
if they can make affordable plant based chicken that's as tasty and protein-packed as real chicken and veg beef that's as good as real beef, then I'm 100% in.
the biggest problem with non-meat foods (for me) has always been with their macros. I can get 32g of protein with nearly zero fat or carbs from 4oz of chicken for less than $2 a serving. Last I checked, this was not possible with alternative food.
My wife is vegetarian and I eat meat analogues typically one meal a day. For almost all applications Mock duck, seitan, soy-based chicken are all inferior substitutes for their meat counterparts. They're less flexible when cooking, don't absorb flavors as well, and are generally either chewier or stringier than real meat.
I have a lot of hope for lab-grown meat, but there's still a lot of progress to be made for meat analogues.
Here's a list written by a guy who wrote a book on the economics of meat production in the US. (Yeah, it's on the PETA web site, but somehow the 'i just really like big Macs' crowd doesn't get around to doing research on food in the same way...)
His top-line number is that a $5 burger would cost $13 without various subsidies, funded by $38B or year in subsidies to the meat industry.
I also found claims that removing subsidies would eventually lower prices by allowing competition from countries without subsidies. But my guess is there's a limit to bottom price globally given current tech, regulations, tariffs, and land availability. And it's difficult to know where that is relative to subsidizes process in the US...
The purported subsidies of $38 billion per year divided by the 50 billion burgers per year that everyone seems to think Americans eat (including this author) is less than $1 per burger.
I had the same outlook as far as taste goes. I really think it is just our palette being trained to love this type of food. After switching to a vegan diet, I do not crave meat whatsoever. I really enjoy all of the dishes I would have never eaten otherwise.
The company Tyson invested in stacks up quite well to conventional meat.
http://beyondmeat.com/
Animal agriculture seems to me like one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment. "You mean you birthed whole animals, let them grow for two years, fed them all the while, just to kill them, chop up their remains, and ship that to people?" Plant based protein and maybe even more so cultured/clean meat (e.g. http://www.memphismeats.com/) seem likely to totally replace how we do things now.
I would argue the difference here is we could just, you know, eat the plants but we don't want to. 36% of US corn goes to feed animals for meat and dairy (3%-40% efficient). [1] There would be significantly more food to go around if the plants were just eaten directly.
It would be more like if there were plows at the time that operated on solar but nobody wanted to use them, and instead, decided to tie horses to the plows because they would rather.
Had a hard time working farm subsidies into the analogy.
If we all lived in 3 foot by 7 foot cubes it would cost a great deal less to heat our homes as well. Just because a more optimal way to do things exist doesn't mean anyone actually wants to do it. I enjoy eating meat, thus I will continue to do so.
The difference is one's uncomfortable, the other you're just used to. Plants are no less tasty, they're just different. I eat meat too, I'm just saying.
Sketch out a model of the evolution of dietary preferences in the ancestral environment (esp post-fire) and you will quickly see this is an insane thing to believe.
Fair, I could restate that not as 'no less tasty' but 'tasty in their own right'. Though there are also plenty of societies that are primarily vegetarian, as in South India, and I don't see them running for the nearest meat market due to the insane flavor advantages of a good cut of meat.
Meat is extremely tasty but I am not going to just eat meat. Similarly with vegetables, I love cauliflower and broccoli but at the end of the day I need variety.
Just because one is very tasty doesn't mean it makes the other any less desirable.
On the same topic, it's ironic how we lump "meat" into a single category. How the animals are raised and fed has a huge effect on the flavor and taste of the meat.
If McDonalds hamburgers disappeared I wouldn't even notice. If I am not able to buy grass fed ribeye from a local farm I'd be very disappointed.
I doubt corn wants to be farmed and eaten either. Should we stop the use of antibiotics to preserve the lives of billions of bacteria? You see its not a matter of caring about life when you boil it down. The majority of vegans are pro choice for example. This is a matter of where you draw the line. You may move that line a little bit further down the food chain than I but all mammals must kill to survive.
> we could just, you know, eat the plants but we don't want to.
You're really arguing something separate here. We can't eat a lot of plants that animals can. 36% of corn goes to feed animals for meat, but what percentage of corn is inedible for humans? (husks, leaves, cobs)
There's a reason we don't domesticate carnivores - we're not creating any more food sources. We don't compete with things that digest cellulose.
I believe that corn stalks and husks are not particularly good feed for livestock, they're very low protein (3-4%) and thus usually have to be supplemented. Ideally, it would be mulched back into the ground to prevent erosion and soil depletion, AFAIK.
Those endless fields of corn in the midwest are feed corn, not corn on the cob. They're destined for processed food or to feed animals. Soy isn't all that much different. What would have to happen is that we start planting something else, that's more immediately edible.
How are you going to do aseptic technique and metabolic regulation rate for less energy than skin+immune system and a liver? Anyone who's ever cultured mammalian cells knows that you toss the medium with most of the carbon source remaining because it's gotten too acidic with lactate. Turns out that livers are a really energy-efficient way of keeping cells alive.
It's not clear to me that humans are going to think of a more efficient way to turn energy and matter into food in the next century.
We could potentially alter the animals into something that would be hard to recognize, but that'll be an evolution of animal husbandry, not something that will leave us bewildered at animals.
What do you see that indicates we're going to make massive leaps beyond what animal life has already provided in turning sunlight and air into useful lipids and proteins?
Livestock can subsist on plants, like wild grasses, that are unpalatable or even inedible to humans. These plants often grow on "unarable" land that won't support human crops. For millennia, humans raised livestock on pasturing lands, seemingly without harming the environment too badly. What stops us from doing that now?
I suspect the real problem is closer to wasting arable land, water, shipping (with all of those environmental externalities), etc. on growing crops that aren't used to directly feed humans, and government subsidies that hide the true cost of corn-fed livestock from consumers.
Yes, and the high demand for animal based proteins has been a large cause of deforestation. Also, beef and other livestock produce a large portion of green house gas emissions.
We don't need to use that land though. If we're not feeding livestock then we don't need near as many crops to support ourselves so let the unusable land return to the wild.
Also if you want to use scrub land to feed your livestock you're going to need a lot of it like in Australia.
>For millennia, humans raised livestock on pasturing lands, seemingly without harming the environment too badly.
For millennia most people wouldn't be getting access to 200lbs of meat a year. There was also a lot fewer of us to feed that much meat to.
People who don't have meat based diets tend to not agree that meats taste good(after some time if they were heavy meat eaters before). So the solution is to start kids on meat free diets and keep them on them then within a generation most people won't think meat tastes as good as plants. Problem solved.
I'd love to see studies on that. My personal anecdotal experience has not been that nor has it been that for friends and family who have tried vegetarianism/veganism, but it'd be heartening to see that there is documented proof that we can shift.
I've switched the majority of my caloric intake over to Soylent but I still end up craving meat, for example.
1. Soylent is the majority of my caloric intake, so cut out the passive aggressive bullshit I'm trying to make meaningful contributions here.
2. I'm stating the major hurdles that need to be crossed for mainstream adoption. We will not see major shift without an alternative that people want to embrace both ethically and in flavor. Bacon is obsessed over for a reason; people don't want to give that up. We simply won't see a major shift without meat substitutes tasting like meat.
plants have higher protein and less sodium than meat on avg. Although they do have a lower amino acid count and calorie count, that just means a more diverse plant based diet is in order.
Did you read that article? Do you understand the context it's coming from? This article is a call to grass-feed cows, not stop having cows.
Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.
I did read the article and it lists multiple inefficiencies. And I didn't claim that the article was about halting factory beef farming, so I'm not sure where you got that from. There is one line in there about Americans meeting their protein and fat intake requirements if cows were solely fed on grass.
Great rant on humans eating grass, but what does that have to do with anything? No one is saying you need to eat grass. The article is about the direct human consumption of grain vs. production of grain, feeding and growing cows, slaughtering them, shipping them, then consuming them.
Actually, a lot of the perennial food crops we do or could eat are adapted to environments containing ungulates or other animals, and there are a number of nutrient problems and pathogen vectors that wouldn't be as much of an issue if the land was being judiciously (rotation) grazed.
What will end up being seen as crazy is locking them all up in a barn and burning fossil fuels to bring the food to them instead of them using their own legs, all for another 20% body mass and giant meat portions (think: steak, chicken breast).
"You mean you planted that whole acreage with seed, let them grow, watered and fertilized them all the while, just to cut them down, chop them up and ship that to people?"
That's a very American thing to grow crops and ship them off to other farmers to feed their animals.
Most meat animals (or at least goats, sheep, and cows) worldwide feed on whatever grows on the ground (whether that be turnips, grass, or something else).
And then 50 to 100 years after that people will look back on with bewilderment. "You mean you planted whole seeds, let them grow for months, watered them all the while, just to kill them, chop up their leaf, and ship that to people?"
The problem is, that's not what's happening. Not everyone who eats cows are getting them from people who treat them as nicely as I guess you claim to. Further, why waste food and water on cows when humans can just eat and drink that themselves? Why raise a cow and then shoot it in the head when you can just, you know, eat plants.
I'd argue it's great for the cow! Think about it they're doing really well as a specie, never before in history they were so successful and enjoyed such high numbers. Their population has simply sore, that however cannot be said about most other species. Also Daniel Dennet gave a TED talk about this. [1]
If aliens arrived tomorrow and took half the humans to another planet to farm their meat would you think that was great for those humans because we are now a multiplanetary species?
That would be terrible, but if they did that to the cows or plants I wouldn't object. Cows don't understand what's happening to them we would! Unless we wouldn't as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand "the meaning of life" etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?
I don't believe this is as true as you seem to think.
Supposing someone proved to you with some future subjectivity-detecting tricorder that cows do understand all they go through, will you change your mind about the humane bullet method?
Yes and then I'll use my transporter to beam myself to the past to right all the wrongs.
> cows do understand all they go through
Also you seem to be exaggerating a bit, what do you exactly mean by all? Are you talking about their entire life or just when they're about to be slaughtered, because I think for most parts cows have a pretty happy life. The slaughtering could be done more precisely and quickly but that's really just negligence on the part of some bad actors and not something that is inherently difficult to fix.
So it should be perfectly all right to raise humans for slaughter then, as long as we can manage to keep them unaware that they are going to be slaughtered until the last moment?
If cows killed other cows I'd think there was something wrong.
"Cows don't understand what's happening to them, we would! Unless we wouldn't, as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand 'the meaning of life' etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?"
> Animals shouldn't suffer either if they're raised right.
This is not possible at-scale.
Also, do you really think that giant corporations, that would willingly throw humans under the bus by the truckload to save a few dollars, give a crap about the suffering of an animal? Especially an animal that is slated for the slaughterhouse anyways?
Just look at how they react to undercover videos that expose illegal practices behind their closed doors. They immediately start lobbying for industry-specific laws that make it illegal to do undercover investigative journalism of their industry (the so-called AgGag bills).
They can't even stay within the letter of the current (and fairly lax) laws on how they are supposed to operate, and when exposed find it more logical to (attempt to) make it illegal to expose their crimes rather than to just stop committing said crimes.
So to me this makes it even lesser of a problem namely all we have to do is fix the legal system and stop them from lobbying aggressively instead of most of the world population all of a sudden changing its diet entirely.
Your solution here is laughable. A couple of points:
1. I mentioned that the current laws are lax for a reason. There really isn't much in the way of controls over animal agriculture other than things that might affect public health and safety. Getting all of these companies to play ball with the current legal environment will not get us anywhere near where we would need to be.
2. The idea that "all" we have to do is prevent them from lobbying and enforce the current laws is hopelessly naive and not a light undertaking. (Especially in areas where this industry is the main industry / employer). You're also ignoring all of the government subsidies that are already poured into this industry. The government has been in bed with this industry for a long time.
Why do you not believe in the political system and the power that comes with that? We the people can change laws if we choose to, to sit on the bench and cry foul however will not get you anywhere. You live in (presumably US) the freest country in the world and want to take things in your hand while not believing in democracy and convincing your fellow citizens to see eye to eye with you on issues like this? No one said changing the system is easy it takes dedication and effort if you truly believe evil companies are the problem force them to follow the law if you think the laws are in adequate lobby for new ones. Political passivity is not the answer. I highly recommend reading Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier [1].
Let's say I were to describe a living thing, that despite having no nerves or brain we could identify, responded to favorable stimuli in ways we could easily describe as a "favorable response" -- for example, the presence of usable energy would provoke the movement of appendages towards that energy source, and the presence of unfavorable or damaging stimuli would provoke an "unfavorable response", such as pulling appendages away from negative stimuli. As far as we could tell, the intelligence in this thing was perhaps entirely distributed throughout the creature rather than relying on a centralized processing center metaphor for thought. It doesn't seem to think in any way that we can easily translate, and for a very long time, we didn't even recognize they responded to stimuli at all -- but that's our fault.
This creature also can't make head or tails of us we presume, our experiences of the universe are simply too entirely different. We have a few appendages, bilateral symmetry, and a mix of sensory organs -- mostly in the same appendage stalk as our central thought organ. Perhaps instead of our familiar mix of sense, this creature had an entirely different set that prioritized entirely different things -- perhaps instead of taste, the organism had some alternate way of assessing chemical composition, instead of sight, it had thousands of narrow-band EM sensing organs on the end of each appendage. Perhaps its digestive system was on the outside, a little like ours, but also turned inside out, so it merely had to have external contact with usable nutrients, not ingest it. Perhaps it transported nutrients around without a central cardiopulmonary organ but using nothing but capillary action, lungs were distributed on the underside of each of the EM sensing organ and it's "blood" didn't rely on metals to bind to Oxygen but instead was simply a nutrient stew. What if the bulk of its carbon (sure, its carbon-based) came not from food, but was simply pulled out of the air?
Let's suppose this being had no mouth or way of making noise, but communicated with its fellow species using various chemical exchanges, for example, suppose one of the creatures was attacked, it might release warning chemicals into its environment letting others of its species prepare themselves by pulling back appendages, or reducing the flow of its internal blood analogue. Or perhaps when mature members of the species learned of new sources of nutrients, they might share those nutrients with young members of the species through this exchange network. Perhaps the way this species "screams" is by releasing a gas into the air that warns others nearby.
Mating and reproduction depends on the species, but there are sexes. Species members have various life-stages that include an infancy analogue, a childhood analogue (with growth spurts), a sexual maturity stage and many even have old age. Some species can reproduce on their own, others require symbiotic species to help facilitate reproduction.
If creatures like this dropped out of space in a spacecraft we'd call them aliens and see if we could learn their language and their technology.
Would you think of this creature as something that can suffer?
All I've described are plants.
> How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?
Animals require more energy to raise than plants in general. However, animals can be raised on food stock that both:
a) humans can't eat
b) grows where human ready food plants don't grow well
> Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?
Yes, as well as other various chemicals and treatments from chemicals that kill non-desirable plants to chemicals that kill non-plant animals, to chemicals that kill fungi or bacterial infections. Plants even get viruses.
> What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?
So until we can give a precise, reductionist definition of what suffering is - and enumerate all that can/can't experience it - then animal treatment is not an ethical question? Given a hammer and a choice to hit either a kitten or a rock for $10, what distinctions between the two would you make to help your decision? I think a central nervous system and/or an analogue for a response that we recognize as pain are a decent starting point.
What proportion of meat-based meals are eaten instead of plant-based meals specifically because of that lack of human ready plant food being available?
Do the bacteria which are targeted by plant antibiotics pose a similar risk to humans as the bacteria that affect livestock such as pigs?
It might be ethical to euthanize a majority of cows etc., if it could be done instantaneously, painlessly, and somehow without creating humanitarian or environmental issues. It would have to be a perfect hot swap, though.
When technology and space exploration allows, I would also support simply relocating these Earth species en masse to other customized planets where they can live/suffer/die in more natural or "fair" terms without our systematic interference.
How long something has been around is often a good way to determine how much longer it will be around in the future.
I'd be willing to bet that humans will stop driving cars much sooner than they stop farming. Humans have been practicing animal agriculture for a long time...
On the other hand, animal agriculture on the scale we see it today is massively different than anything that was seen 100+ years ago. Trying to say "people raised cattle 100 years ago" is much different then talking about ranchers with 1000-strong cattle herds or industrialized "factory farms."
> How long something has been around is often a good way to determine how much longer it will be around in the future.
Might be some correlation there, but probably it's mostly unrelated. We did many things for a super-long time then stopped, because we found something better. For example, we used horses to get around for millennia.
We've done animal agriculture for a long time, but once something better comes around, we'll switch - and food technology is getting very close, and has other benefits too (helps against global warming, etc.).
But just like riding horses, eating animal products will never go away completely, of course.
>How long something has been around is often a good way to determine how much longer it will be around in the future
This mode of (purely statistical) longevity argument is the "Doomsday Argument". The classic version is about predicting how much longer human civilization might endure. The crux of it is that there's only a 5% chance that we're currently in the first 5% of humanity's total timeline, and a 95% chance that we're in the last 95% of it.
If we assume that 60 billion humans have been born so far, it can be estimated that there is a 95% chance that the total number of humans ever will be less than 20 × 60 billion = 1.2 trillion. Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1,140 billion humans will be born in 9,120 years.
> Animal agriculture seems to me like one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment.
Really? It's not like we've been doing that for 5,000 years or something. But in 50 years they'll be like "What were you doing for the last 5,000 years?"
Animal agriculture is not going to be one of those things. In fact I can guarantee you that even if we figure out a meat replacement people will still eat animals in 100 years. Something that's been done for 5,000 years doesn't get stopped that quickly.
As evidence look at how many people want to "go back to the farm", and raise their own animals. On the surface, why? It's harder and more expensive. Yet, people want that anyway.
> Something that's been done for 5,000 years doesn't get stopped that quickly.
Doesn't this prove too much?[1] Plenty of things were common for millennia before they suddenly weren't. Eg: Monarchies, slavery, beasts of burden, and diseases such as smallpox.
> they suddenly weren't. Eg: Monarchies, slavery, beasts of burden, and diseases such as smallpox.
Except that every one of those things still exists! Smallpox doesn't exist, but other diseases such as syphilis do.
So that actually demonstrates exactly the opposite of the point you were trying to make.
Monarchies is an especially bad example because they still exist precisely because people are unwilling to stop a tradition that has gone on that long.
> Monarchies is an especially bad example because they still exist precisely because people are unwilling to stop a tradition that has gone on that long.
I'm not sure that's the reason; perhaps the largely-symbolic monarchies of Europe, but the substantive monarchies in the world are actually mostly quite newly established.
> As evidence look at how many people want to "go back to the farm", and raise their own animals. On the surface, why? It's harder and more expensive. Yet, people want that anyway.
No one is "going back to the farm" to raise their own cattle, which they slaughter themselves, for a steak. It also doesn't scale to the "buy cheap steaks and grill a steak for lunch every day" level that some people do. Just the reduction to "I'll have one steak per year" is a significant departure from where we are now (which is a significant departure from where we were 100 years ago[1]).
[1] Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
> No one is "going back to the farm" to raise their own cattle, which they slaughter themselves, for a steak. It also doesn't scale to the "buy cheap steaks and grill a steak for lunch every day" level that some people do.
I'm sorry, but you are quite wrong.
There are mobile slaughterhouses that cater to this exact market: A farmer raises a couple cows, the mobile butcher slaughters the animal and process the meat into individually wrapped packages. Then they freeze it all and it lasts them a full year till they repeat this process.
Do you need me to find you some youtube videos to prove it?[1] It's common enough that they custom outfit vans specifically to make this job easier (add a power hoist, and pull-out work tables). The butcher drives the van from customer to customer.
You need to meet some more rural friends to see other ways that people live. And BTW I'm not convinced that this is a cheaper way to get meat, instead they do it for the "back to basics" feel, and for the quality of the meat. That's not going to change just because some lab can make some meat.
> Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
Depends where you live. Some places could, some could not. Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
> You need to meet some more rural friends to see other ways that people live.
Your rural way of living does not scale to the number of people we currently have living on Earth. It also does not scale to meet some people's current consumption patterns, which is one of my points.
> Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
"Warrior culture" does not scale to 8 billion people. You can't use this as justification to continue to eat meat while ignoring the negative externalities around its production.
Now you've decided to talk about what people should do.
That's an entirely different topic.
By the fact that you've moved the goalposts, I take it you acknowledge my point that eating animals is not: "one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment"?
"Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?"
If we go back to our origins the savannah was probably occasionally full of delicious four legged protein just waiting for us to run it down and eat it.
My grandmother used to but chicken in instalments... This is in the UK in post war years before the US flooded Europe with battery farmed chicken. This led to the 'Chicken Tax' (see SUV/Trucks). My grandmother would only eat chicken on special occasions, a birthday, a wedding anniversary etc.
Easter has this 'egg theme', again, eggs were not a year round thing. Available at Easter and sometimes later in the year if chickens had a 'second brood'.
So, no, 100 years ago meat was scarce and valued, not wolfed down without a second thought.
"Hunting down animals on the savannah" doesn't scale to 8 billion people. Especially if your goal is that each of those 8 billion people needs to have access to the full variety of every possible type of meat, prepared in every possible way... for cheap, and in massive quantities.
The future is in algae based proteins. They contain all essential amino acids, naturally anti inflammatory and have no known allergens.
The taste profile problem will be solved eventually and algae based chemical compounds as taste and color additives will be omnipresent in our foods in 5-10 years.
@sethbannon you should also consider investing in algae based meat alternatives. (I.e. Solazyme / TerraVia)
Keto and Paleo are constantly growing. I personally think we'll head in the direction of "to-fit" dieting (through genetics, personal experimenting, etc.).
It'd be foolish to keep swinging back and forth on the USDA/HHS "one size fits all" legislature.
I'm about 10-20 minutes away from it right now. Ain't had Baby Jacks. Might have to try it. Far as Memphians, yeah there's just a handful of us that I've seen. Gonna have a Memphis HN get-together one day with all of us.
You didn't recognize any of the names or the place either? Also, the whole fight against animal cruelty is a little strange if they're from one of the U.S.'s BBQ capitals surrounded by farmland. I know very few vegans out here.
This is the perfect example of Silicon Valley hubris: farming animals is bewildering and barbaric, so obviously this New Thing™ that didn't even exist two years ago will totally replace what humans have been doing for the past ten thousand years.
A cow's rumen is amazing. You can feed a cow almost any vegetable matter and they will grow and produce milk and meat. Chickens and pigs are more particular but in terms of energy in to food out, are still very inexpensive and easy to manage. Cell cultures require sterile laboratory conditions, growth factors and very specific nutrient requirements.
A largely plant-based diet, sure, that is what most (but not all) of our hunter gatherer ancestors ate, but I doubt cell cultures will ever get within even a order of magnitude of the efficiency of growing and eating real animals.
But animals spend a lot of energy making products other than consumable protein. They require a lot of land and water and fuel even if housed in close quarters. And you have to tend them which is labor intensive. And ship them around to be finished and slaughtered.
If energy costs rise to a certain point and technology becomes good enough (including automation) I'd expect protein from whole animals to be considerably more expensive than lab grown.
The exception maybe being strictly grass fed beef on land that isn't useful for much else. But that won't have the taste people expect and might not actually be as good as the lab grown stuff.
According to random people on the internet plant based protein isn't as good your for cat as animal based protein. Why couldn't that be the same for humans?
In case I am wrong about this being sarcasm, the reason cats need to eat meat to survive is that they don't naturally synthesize taurine like most mammals.
As a consumer, I do care about the footprint of my meat based protein, although I don't want to give up eating meat.
As a chef, if they can get marbling in, I'm excited for the different styles we could create.
Note: a plant based reactor (sorry I couldn't remember the term, the seed for the meat to grow with), has been mentioned a few times as becoming close to ready, which would bring the costs down a lot.
yep, vat interests me as well since I am not sure of the amount of carbohydrates in plant based proteins. Lentils and beans for example have good amount of protein, but also tend to have a lot of carbs.
I don't see the problem with this, considering the methane output and grain requirements. (Note my family use to run a large cattle fa in Australia, I can see how this would effect them. )
What heartens me is that the shift towards plant-base protein can be gradual while still having a large impact. Ingredients like ground beef make up the majority(?) [1] of beef sold and there are already good plant based simulacra on the market [2] with more coming soon.
I have my doubts we'll see anything marketable and cost competitive that could compete with larger cuts of meat in the next decade, but I could see a near-term future where Taco Bell is using a 50/50 beef/plant "meat" in their food with that ratio shifting away from animal products with time.
You are missing the point of OPs post. The premise would be that we as a society would be accepting of meat alternatives and a company like Taco bell may market this way.
I'd have to disagree on that. I've had most fake meats on the market. The closest that comes to real meat is Quorn, and that's only for poultry and such. There's just something off about most meat substitutes.
I agree that there's nothing out there that can simulate a grilled steak, but I don't think you're going to notice the difference between real ground beef and the fake stuff in a Taco Bell taco.
I don't think you're going to notice the difference between real ground beef and the fake stuff in a Taco Bell taco.
That's not really saying much, is it? How about a nice burger made with well-marbled ground chuck? Much harder to replicate the flavour and texture of that.
Honestly, if all you do is just stop eating beef, you'll cut your footprint from meat by more than half. A serving of chicken takes about 20% of the resources of the same serving of beef.
Lighter cuts of meat combined with the right spices are a gateway to lots of interesting dishes with less or even no meat.
You'll get roughly the same amount of meat from 1 cow as you will from 200 chickens. Worth considering if pounds of flesh per life is a factor in your decision.
Grandparent is likely talking about environmental effect per amount of meat produced. Cows are much worse than chicken in that regard because of all the methane that they're farting out.
No one's contesting that, but you can't only consider environmental impact when the differences in animal welfare are unfathomably worse for chicken meat production - easily orders of magnitude worse per pound of meat.
Anyone thinking of trading beef consumption for chicken for one ethical reason (environment) should really be aware of and consider all ethical implications first. I strongly believe people underestimate the harm chickens go through (beef cows are treated pretty well, unlike chickens), let alone understand the number of chickens they eat per year.
Definitely forward looking to invest in food intake in general rather than just meat. That being said, I thought the future of meat itself was "lab meat" i.e produced in growing vats, rather than on farms. The other thing is balance, if your source of plant protein is skewed to one thing like Soy, there is the risk of the body not being used to the other things in Soy --it's not like Chinese when they eat anything other than rice, have the protein as the main dish or portion --it's mostly a side dish and not the main source of nutrition.
This is just shareholder value. Scaling meat has so many problems, but if you can sell fake meat at meat prices suddenly there is so much more profit margin to be returned to shareholders.
I do not believe for 1 second that Tyson cares about health, environments, farmers or the well being of animals.
> "We just got to the point last year where the consumer is demanding [the elimination of antibiotics in the food chain] and wants transparency."
The only reason your animals need antibiotics is because they're living in overcrowded cells eating the wrong food (they're ruminants, corn/soy is not their food), covered in fecal matter etc. etc. A small number of animals per acre , lots of sunlight (ultraviolet light) and proper waste disposal (bugs, rains, etc).
>"I do not believe for 1 second that Tyson cares about health, environments, farmers or the well being of animals."
I haven't followed Tyson - is there something they've done in recent history that has particularly contributed to the skepticism? Or is this more general "all corporations-are-evil" skepticism?
> I do not believe for 1 second that Tyson cares about health, environments, farmers or the well being of animals.
In which case we should all marvel at the virtues of capitalism and the free market, which take our selfish desires, and convert them into environmentally and communally beneficial actions.
> In which case we should all marvel at the virtues of capitalism and the free market, which take our selfish desires, and convert them into environmentally and communally beneficial actions
I'm never sure whether people are writing sentences like this ironically, or whether they're unaware how much like Maoist propaganda it sounds.
"Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein)."[0]
The cost of meat is kept artificially low in the USA because bribed/corrupt polititions keep giving meat producers free or cheap water grants, etc. Ironically, in another article thread on HN it was mentioned that it would cost $50B to repair dams in the USA, and I think that is about what the government gives to meat producers.
Solve the epidemic corruption of public elected officials and a lot of other problems would be resolved.
I think this is pretty cool. I don't think it will eliminate meat from diets, but it offers more variety and choices. Most plant-base meat substitutes are pretty terrible. But I'm not even sure why they exist, plants are already pretty great. Consider Chipotle's sofritas, lots of people who swear by meat love it...and that's because it tastes good.
My meal tonight also had no meat in it (another tofu dish), but used some fermentation of the soybeans (Doenjang [1]) to create an incredibly savory and rich soup stock. I'll probably eat a burger tomorrow, but I don't see these other foods as penalty foods and I'll often choose them over the meat foods because they taste good, not for any other reason.
It's a bit like buying a Tesla, it's a no compromises great car, not a penalty box like the market tried to push for years. Great vegetarian food doesn't even have to be labelled as vegetarian, it just has to be great food and people will choose to eat it.
Ignoring the arguments for taste (subjective), animal welfare (agreed to a large extent), and environmental impact (also agreed), there's still the issue of protein bioavailability. Plant-based protein is simply inferior in this regard. I still eat a mostly plant-based diet and look forward to the day when that parity problem is solved.
Incidentally, if anyone has a suggestion for an egg substitute that doesn't taste like crap and has similar nutritional content, I'm all ears. Eggs are pretty ethically dubious in my book, too.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadWe can't consume most plants directly, and the ones that we do, we consume only a tiny minority of the plant (most of the time).
You make that sound like swapping out a machine on a production line. For some places, you simply can't grow plants that we can consume directly.
A lot of land doesn't receive enough water/sun, has poor soil, or is on such a steep slop that cultivating it is not worth the effort. The most efficient use of that land would be grazing land.
As for being "forced to produce non-consumable plants", we are. We can't eat the entire bell pepper plant. We're producing stems, leaves, and roots as byproducts, things that animals actually can eat.
You're intentionally confusing waste material with primary purpose. That's dishonest. If we could feed all the livestock we need with waste material we would since it would be a lot cheaper for the producers.
Why? It's perfectly productive once you let some goats on that land and then eat the goats.
> And that is fine since we don't need as much farm land to sustain a non-meat society.
Should we switch to a completely potato agriculture then? If your argument against meat is waste, then we should go towards whatever crop has the highest yield per acre. Why waste all that acreage, water, and fertilizer on kale and broccoli?
> You're intentionally confusing waste material with primary purpose. That's dishonest.
You're missing the point, which is that we're by necessity creating all this other material that can be used to feed animals as a necessary byproduct of creating the grains to feed the animals. The proportions don't work out as neatly as you think.
> If we could feed all the livestock we need with waste material we would since it would be a lot cheaper for the producers.
Incorrect. On a grain diet, livestock fatten more quickly and are ready for the market sooner. Pasture raised livestock is a thing, and requires less capital and investment. It just takes longer for the livestock to be ready for market and the meat is tougher and gamier.
Because it isn't needed for food production anymore.
>If your argument against meat is waste
My argument against meat isn't waste. Less waste is a benefit but not a primary reason.
>You're missing the point, which is that we're by necessity creating all this other material that can be used to feed animals as a necessary byproduct of creating the grains to feed the animals.
I've read this a few times and I keep reading it the same way "We produce waste that can be used to feed animals as a bitproduct of producing feed for animals?"
>Pasture raised livestock is a thing, and requires less capital and investment.
And tons more cleared grassland. Like an unsustainable amount.
My point is that we don't need to produce feed for animals, they do fine just on pastureland.
The way we currently raise grains is problematic enough as it is, requiring huge fertilizer inputs[1] which require petrochemicals. Eating grains is not a sustainable alternative - if we raised grains for human food, might as well feed animals and get some steaks out of it.
>And tons more cleared grassland.
The great plains did not need to be cleared. They were perfect pastures for grazing animals, not the modern monoculture of grains.
[1] (we're running out of phosphorous http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/04/01/phosphorus-essential...)
So do the animals. The soy and wheat we feed the animals is a tiny portion of the plant... so what? If we have 1000 calories of wheat, it's better to feed that to a human, than a cow; The cow will only produce 100 calories of meat for the same grains that we would have eaten.
Not really. Cows, goats, sheep raised somewhat naturally eat grass and leaves and twigs, things we cannot digest. They can also eat the parts of the tomato that we don't eat, such as the stalks and leaves.
If you're talking about feeling animals with grains, the way we grow grains is even more problematic, with huge amounts of petroleum and water inputs.
That's correct. The problem is, 99% of our animals in america are not raised that way [1]. They are raised eating soy, wheat, and corn. Grass is more expensive, so it's not used.
[1]: https://farmforward.com/ending-factory-farming/
Nit: grass is less profitable. The expense of grass is nothing, but it takes longer to raise the livestock to pasture weight and the meat is less marbled and gamier in texture, which drives the price down.
My wife is vegetarian so I'm exposed to quite a bit of different sources of veggie protein. My concern is that the fake meat stuff is actually kind of expensive compared to meat. If it was cheaper I can see more folks move in that direction.
1. It's expensive because people with more money are more likely to be vegetarian. 2. We don't pay for the true cost of meat, i.e. green house gas emissions, water usage, transportation costs, etc....
See, for example, https://projects.propublica.org/killing-the-colorado/story/w...
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it does make the playing field unfair.
Transportation is not paid for, really, because the highways are maintained without usage fees.
And that's a win-win for the companies producing it, and why I think there has recently been a surge in startups making fake meat!
More evidence: price of tofu is more comparable to meat in places with more Asian and international cuisines. E.g. tofu is cheaper here in at my Manhattan Whole Foods than in my southern hometown's supermarkets, despite most foods being more expensive. Even cheaper in Asian supermarkets.
Dairy has a substantial amount of estrogen as well: http://www.livestrong.com/article/554285-does-milk-raise-est...
Although, the evidence that it affects men is also weak.
Hopefully one day we'll get to actually replicating the taste properly. Or growing meat synthetically. I'm happy to move to either.
Telling people to change won't work. But at the same time, people in my position(available to influence flavours of a region), should do our part in not restricting ourselves to animal products.
This I have seen happen over the past 10 years, the amount of reduced meat or no meat items on my menus has increased, as well as doing more to use sustainable products.
On a side note about these types of foods: don't look at the bottom of the restaurant chains to see the future trends. They will only cater to the safe bets(huge cheap steaks and battery style farming practices), due to their low margins.
It took me a long time to get to a position where - as the head chef - I could experiment with a large portion of my menu being more land friendly(which for me is reduced meat based portions, higher quality locally sourced ingredients and more renewable products).
It doesn't always even come down to technology either, you just have to know some of the methods. Prepare a jackfruit the right way and it becomes delicious seasoned shredded chicken. Textured vegetable protein can become seasoned ground beef just as easily. Yeah, the flavoring plays a big role in those cases (which it often does for meat-replacements, to be fair), but it does in many situations with meat preparation too e.g. adding cumin to make taco meat, marinading your meats, slathering them in BBQ sauce, etc.
[1] https://gardein.com/products/breakfast-patties/
[2] http://imgur.com/XUodQQv
the biggest problem with non-meat foods (for me) has always been with their macros. I can get 32g of protein with nearly zero fat or carbs from 4oz of chicken for less than $2 a serving. Last I checked, this was not possible with alternative food.
I have a lot of hope for lab-grown meat, but there's still a lot of progress to be made for meat analogues.
http://www.peta.org/living/food/10-things-wish-everyone-knew...
His top-line number is that a $5 burger would cost $13 without various subsidies, funded by $38B or year in subsidies to the meat industry.
I also found claims that removing subsidies would eventually lower prices by allowing competition from countries without subsidies. But my guess is there's a limit to bottom price globally given current tech, regulations, tariffs, and land availability. And it's difficult to know where that is relative to subsidizes process in the US...
The purported subsidies of $38 billion per year divided by the 50 billion burgers per year that everyone seems to think Americans eat (including this author) is less than $1 per burger.
(But the $38 billion/year is wrong too ...)
The company Tyson invested in stacks up quite well to conventional meat. http://beyondmeat.com/
2. Unless you're on a very specific diet or have some kind of exercise heavy hobby, that is a lot of protein (essentially a day's worth).
Disclosure: I'm an investor in Memphis Meats
It would be more like if there were plows at the time that operated on solar but nobody wanted to use them, and instead, decided to tie horses to the plows because they would rather.
Had a hard time working farm subsidies into the analogy.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...
Sketch out a model of the evolution of dietary preferences in the ancestral environment (esp post-fire) and you will quickly see this is an insane thing to believe.
Just because one is very tasty doesn't mean it makes the other any less desirable.
On the same topic, it's ironic how we lump "meat" into a single category. How the animals are raised and fed has a huge effect on the flavor and taste of the meat.
If McDonalds hamburgers disappeared I wouldn't even notice. If I am not able to buy grass fed ribeye from a local farm I'd be very disappointed.
I was pretty specific about saying animals in my post. Why animals? Because we are known to mourn the death of other animals.
We don't mourn the death of food animals typically so its OK then?
Your criteria are arbitrary, and that's fine for a personal value but you certainly can't expect others to agree with you.
You're really arguing something separate here. We can't eat a lot of plants that animals can. 36% of corn goes to feed animals for meat, but what percentage of corn is inedible for humans? (husks, leaves, cobs)
There's a reason we don't domesticate carnivores - we're not creating any more food sources. We don't compete with things that digest cellulose.
Admittedly, it would be tremendously hard for me to be a vegetarian. Im a T2 diabetic. Grains, starches, and sugars are all bad for me.
It's an abomination against nature, in the public eye.
We could potentially alter the animals into something that would be hard to recognize, but that'll be an evolution of animal husbandry, not something that will leave us bewildered at animals.
What do you see that indicates we're going to make massive leaps beyond what animal life has already provided in turning sunlight and air into useful lipids and proteins?
I suspect the real problem is closer to wasting arable land, water, shipping (with all of those environmental externalities), etc. on growing crops that aren't used to directly feed humans, and government subsidies that hide the true cost of corn-fed livestock from consumers.
Also if you want to use scrub land to feed your livestock you're going to need a lot of it like in Australia.
>For millennia, humans raised livestock on pasturing lands, seemingly without harming the environment too badly.
For millennia most people wouldn't be getting access to 200lbs of meat a year. There was also a lot fewer of us to feed that much meat to.
I've switched the majority of my caloric intake over to Soylent but I still end up craving meat, for example.
2. I'm stating the major hurdles that need to be crossed for mainstream adoption. We will not see major shift without an alternative that people want to embrace both ethically and in flavor. Bacon is obsessed over for a reason; people don't want to give that up. We simply won't see a major shift without meat substitutes tasting like meat.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.
Great rant on humans eating grass, but what does that have to do with anything? No one is saying you need to eat grass. The article is about the direct human consumption of grain vs. production of grain, feeding and growing cows, slaughtering them, shipping them, then consuming them.
What will end up being seen as crazy is locking them all up in a barn and burning fossil fuels to bring the food to them instead of them using their own legs, all for another 20% body mass and giant meat portions (think: steak, chicken breast).
Most meat animals (or at least goats, sheep, and cows) worldwide feed on whatever grows on the ground (whether that be turnips, grass, or something else).
Poultry is going to be almost all feed. Along with Pork.
Those are the 3 biggest sources of meat by far.
(http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/napoleon-of-nott...)
Seems like a good argument.
Plants are alive too.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_war...
I don't believe this is as true as you seem to think.
Supposing someone proved to you with some future subjectivity-detecting tricorder that cows do understand all they go through, will you change your mind about the humane bullet method?
> cows do understand all they go through Also you seem to be exaggerating a bit, what do you exactly mean by all? Are you talking about their entire life or just when they're about to be slaughtered, because I think for most parts cows have a pretty happy life. The slaughtering could be done more precisely and quickly but that's really just negligence on the part of some bad actors and not something that is inherently difficult to fix.
"Cows don't understand what's happening to them, we would! Unless we wouldn't, as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand 'the meaning of life' etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?"
This is not possible at-scale.
Also, do you really think that giant corporations, that would willingly throw humans under the bus by the truckload to save a few dollars, give a crap about the suffering of an animal? Especially an animal that is slated for the slaughterhouse anyways?
Just look at how they react to undercover videos that expose illegal practices behind their closed doors. They immediately start lobbying for industry-specific laws that make it illegal to do undercover investigative journalism of their industry (the so-called AgGag bills).
They can't even stay within the letter of the current (and fairly lax) laws on how they are supposed to operate, and when exposed find it more logical to (attempt to) make it illegal to expose their crimes rather than to just stop committing said crimes.
1. I mentioned that the current laws are lax for a reason. There really isn't much in the way of controls over animal agriculture other than things that might affect public health and safety. Getting all of these companies to play ball with the current legal environment will not get us anywhere near where we would need to be.
2. The idea that "all" we have to do is prevent them from lobbying and enforce the current laws is hopelessly naive and not a light undertaking. (Especially in areas where this industry is the main industry / employer). You're also ignoring all of the government subsidies that are already poured into this industry. The government has been in bed with this industry for a long time.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/books/beyond_fear/
How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?
Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?
What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?
Let's say I were to describe a living thing, that despite having no nerves or brain we could identify, responded to favorable stimuli in ways we could easily describe as a "favorable response" -- for example, the presence of usable energy would provoke the movement of appendages towards that energy source, and the presence of unfavorable or damaging stimuli would provoke an "unfavorable response", such as pulling appendages away from negative stimuli. As far as we could tell, the intelligence in this thing was perhaps entirely distributed throughout the creature rather than relying on a centralized processing center metaphor for thought. It doesn't seem to think in any way that we can easily translate, and for a very long time, we didn't even recognize they responded to stimuli at all -- but that's our fault.
This creature also can't make head or tails of us we presume, our experiences of the universe are simply too entirely different. We have a few appendages, bilateral symmetry, and a mix of sensory organs -- mostly in the same appendage stalk as our central thought organ. Perhaps instead of our familiar mix of sense, this creature had an entirely different set that prioritized entirely different things -- perhaps instead of taste, the organism had some alternate way of assessing chemical composition, instead of sight, it had thousands of narrow-band EM sensing organs on the end of each appendage. Perhaps its digestive system was on the outside, a little like ours, but also turned inside out, so it merely had to have external contact with usable nutrients, not ingest it. Perhaps it transported nutrients around without a central cardiopulmonary organ but using nothing but capillary action, lungs were distributed on the underside of each of the EM sensing organ and it's "blood" didn't rely on metals to bind to Oxygen but instead was simply a nutrient stew. What if the bulk of its carbon (sure, its carbon-based) came not from food, but was simply pulled out of the air?
Let's suppose this being had no mouth or way of making noise, but communicated with its fellow species using various chemical exchanges, for example, suppose one of the creatures was attacked, it might release warning chemicals into its environment letting others of its species prepare themselves by pulling back appendages, or reducing the flow of its internal blood analogue. Or perhaps when mature members of the species learned of new sources of nutrients, they might share those nutrients with young members of the species through this exchange network. Perhaps the way this species "screams" is by releasing a gas into the air that warns others nearby.
Mating and reproduction depends on the species, but there are sexes. Species members have various life-stages that include an infancy analogue, a childhood analogue (with growth spurts), a sexual maturity stage and many even have old age. Some species can reproduce on their own, others require symbiotic species to help facilitate reproduction.
If creatures like this dropped out of space in a spacecraft we'd call them aliens and see if we could learn their language and their technology.
Would you think of this creature as something that can suffer?
All I've described are plants.
> How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?
Animals require more energy to raise than plants in general. However, animals can be raised on food stock that both:
a) humans can't eat
b) grows where human ready food plants don't grow well
> Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?
Yes, as well as other various chemicals and treatments from chemicals that kill non-desirable plants to chemicals that kill non-plant animals, to chemicals that kill fungi or bacterial infections. Plants even get viruses.
> What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?
Very difficult ...
What proportion of meat-based meals are eaten instead of plant-based meals specifically because of that lack of human ready plant food being available?
Do the bacteria which are targeted by plant antibiotics pose a similar risk to humans as the bacteria that affect livestock such as pigs?
It might be ethical to euthanize a majority of cows etc., if it could be done instantaneously, painlessly, and somehow without creating humanitarian or environmental issues. It would have to be a perfect hot swap, though.
When technology and space exploration allows, I would also support simply relocating these Earth species en masse to other customized planets where they can live/suffer/die in more natural or "fair" terms without our systematic interference.
I'd be willing to bet that humans will stop driving cars much sooner than they stop farming. Humans have been practicing animal agriculture for a long time...
Might be some correlation there, but probably it's mostly unrelated. We did many things for a super-long time then stopped, because we found something better. For example, we used horses to get around for millennia.
We've done animal agriculture for a long time, but once something better comes around, we'll switch - and food technology is getting very close, and has other benefits too (helps against global warming, etc.).
But just like riding horses, eating animal products will never go away completely, of course.
This mode of (purely statistical) longevity argument is the "Doomsday Argument". The classic version is about predicting how much longer human civilization might endure. The crux of it is that there's only a 5% chance that we're currently in the first 5% of humanity's total timeline, and a 95% chance that we're in the last 95% of it.
If we assume that 60 billion humans have been born so far, it can be estimated that there is a 95% chance that the total number of humans ever will be less than 20 × 60 billion = 1.2 trillion. Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1,140 billion humans will be born in 9,120 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Really? It's not like we've been doing that for 5,000 years or something. But in 50 years they'll be like "What were you doing for the last 5,000 years?"
Animal agriculture is not going to be one of those things. In fact I can guarantee you that even if we figure out a meat replacement people will still eat animals in 100 years. Something that's been done for 5,000 years doesn't get stopped that quickly.
As evidence look at how many people want to "go back to the farm", and raise their own animals. On the surface, why? It's harder and more expensive. Yet, people want that anyway.
Doesn't this prove too much?[1] Plenty of things were common for millennia before they suddenly weren't. Eg: Monarchies, slavery, beasts of burden, and diseases such as smallpox.
1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/
Except that every one of those things still exists! Smallpox doesn't exist, but other diseases such as syphilis do.
So that actually demonstrates exactly the opposite of the point you were trying to make.
Monarchies is an especially bad example because they still exist precisely because people are unwilling to stop a tradition that has gone on that long.
I'm not sure that's the reason; perhaps the largely-symbolic monarchies of Europe, but the substantive monarchies in the world are actually mostly quite newly established.
No one is "going back to the farm" to raise their own cattle, which they slaughter themselves, for a steak. It also doesn't scale to the "buy cheap steaks and grill a steak for lunch every day" level that some people do. Just the reduction to "I'll have one steak per year" is a significant departure from where we are now (which is a significant departure from where we were 100 years ago[1]).
[1] Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
I'm sorry, but you are quite wrong.
There are mobile slaughterhouses that cater to this exact market: A farmer raises a couple cows, the mobile butcher slaughters the animal and process the meat into individually wrapped packages. Then they freeze it all and it lasts them a full year till they repeat this process.
Do you need me to find you some youtube videos to prove it?[1] It's common enough that they custom outfit vans specifically to make this job easier (add a power hoist, and pull-out work tables). The butcher drives the van from customer to customer.
You need to meet some more rural friends to see other ways that people live. And BTW I'm not convinced that this is a cheaper way to get meat, instead they do it for the "back to basics" feel, and for the quality of the meat. That's not going to change just because some lab can make some meat.
> Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
Depends where you live. Some places could, some could not. Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
[1]Edit: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mobile+meat+sla...
Your rural way of living does not scale to the number of people we currently have living on Earth. It also does not scale to meet some people's current consumption patterns, which is one of my points.
> Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
"Warrior culture" does not scale to 8 billion people. You can't use this as justification to continue to eat meat while ignoring the negative externalities around its production.
Now you've decided to talk about what people should do.
That's an entirely different topic.
By the fact that you've moved the goalposts, I take it you acknowledge my point that eating animals is not: "one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment"?
If we go back to our origins the savannah was probably occasionally full of delicious four legged protein just waiting for us to run it down and eat it.
Easter has this 'egg theme', again, eggs were not a year round thing. Available at Easter and sometimes later in the year if chickens had a 'second brood'.
So, no, 100 years ago meat was scarce and valued, not wolfed down without a second thought.
It'd be foolish to keep swinging back and forth on the USDA/HHS "one size fits all" legislature.
My guess for why they're named Memphis Meats is ”[a founder's] family also owns a chain of 43 BBQ restaurants based out of Memphis, Tennessee"
You're from Memphis? It's so rare to run into another Memphian on HN.
A cow's rumen is amazing. You can feed a cow almost any vegetable matter and they will grow and produce milk and meat. Chickens and pigs are more particular but in terms of energy in to food out, are still very inexpensive and easy to manage. Cell cultures require sterile laboratory conditions, growth factors and very specific nutrient requirements.
A largely plant-based diet, sure, that is what most (but not all) of our hunter gatherer ancestors ate, but I doubt cell cultures will ever get within even a order of magnitude of the efficiency of growing and eating real animals.
But animals spend a lot of energy making products other than consumable protein. They require a lot of land and water and fuel even if housed in close quarters. And you have to tend them which is labor intensive. And ship them around to be finished and slaughtered.
If energy costs rise to a certain point and technology becomes good enough (including automation) I'd expect protein from whole animals to be considerably more expensive than lab grown. The exception maybe being strictly grass fed beef on land that isn't useful for much else. But that won't have the taste people expect and might not actually be as good as the lab grown stuff.
As for animals in the wild it's expected you understand that they are referring to humans.
In case I am wrong about this being sarcasm, the reason cats need to eat meat to survive is that they don't naturally synthesize taurine like most mammals.
It is likely that early humans were insectivores too. Or there was some way to get B12 synthesising bacteria up in the duodenum.
As a consumer, I do care about the footprint of my meat based protein, although I don't want to give up eating meat.
As a chef, if they can get marbling in, I'm excited for the different styles we could create.
Note: a plant based reactor (sorry I couldn't remember the term, the seed for the meat to grow with), has been mentioned a few times as becoming close to ready, which would bring the costs down a lot.
Much like solar etc tanks coal.
Ranching, in particular, will become niche / artisan endeavors.
I have my doubts we'll see anything marketable and cost competitive that could compete with larger cuts of meat in the next decade, but I could see a near-term future where Taco Bell is using a 50/50 beef/plant "meat" in their food with that ratio shifting away from animal products with time.
[1]: http://meat.tamu.edu/ground-beef-labeling/ [2]: http://beyondmeat.com/products/view/beefy-crumble
I'd have to disagree on that. I've had most fake meats on the market. The closest that comes to real meat is Quorn, and that's only for poultry and such. There's just something off about most meat substitutes.
That's not really saying much, is it? How about a nice burger made with well-marbled ground chuck? Much harder to replicate the flavour and texture of that.
Lighter cuts of meat combined with the right spices are a gateway to lots of interesting dishes with less or even no meat.
Anyone thinking of trading beef consumption for chicken for one ethical reason (environment) should really be aware of and consider all ethical implications first. I strongly believe people underestimate the harm chickens go through (beef cows are treated pretty well, unlike chickens), let alone understand the number of chickens they eat per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovascul...
I'd be willing to wager it'll happen in my lifetime.
I do not believe for 1 second that Tyson cares about health, environments, farmers or the well being of animals.
> "We just got to the point last year where the consumer is demanding [the elimination of antibiotics in the food chain] and wants transparency."
The only reason your animals need antibiotics is because they're living in overcrowded cells eating the wrong food (they're ruminants, corn/soy is not their food), covered in fecal matter etc. etc. A small number of animals per acre , lots of sunlight (ultraviolet light) and proper waste disposal (bugs, rains, etc).
I haven't followed Tyson - is there something they've done in recent history that has particularly contributed to the skepticism? Or is this more general "all corporations-are-evil" skepticism?
In which case we should all marvel at the virtues of capitalism and the free market, which take our selfish desires, and convert them into environmentally and communally beneficial actions.
I'm never sure whether people are writing sentences like this ironically, or whether they're unaware how much like Maoist propaganda it sounds.
"Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein)."[0]
I'm plenty squeamish but might just be willing to try mealworm flour. Other ideas: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130514-edibl...
[0] http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e.pdf
Solve the epidemic corruption of public elected officials and a lot of other problems would be resolved.
My meal tonight also had no meat in it (another tofu dish), but used some fermentation of the soybeans (Doenjang [1]) to create an incredibly savory and rich soup stock. I'll probably eat a burger tomorrow, but I don't see these other foods as penalty foods and I'll often choose them over the meat foods because they taste good, not for any other reason.
It's a bit like buying a Tesla, it's a no compromises great car, not a penalty box like the market tried to push for years. Great vegetarian food doesn't even have to be labelled as vegetarian, it just has to be great food and people will choose to eat it.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doenjang
Incidentally, if anyone has a suggestion for an egg substitute that doesn't taste like crap and has similar nutritional content, I'm all ears. Eggs are pretty ethically dubious in my book, too.