We talk about that a bunch! I agree, though it's possible before that we'll figure out how to combine plant products in ways that make them taste very similar to meat. Impossible Foods is already impressively close.
> though it's possible before that we'll figure out how to combine plant products in ways that make them taste very similar to meat
I think the major barrier to mass adoption of this will be convincing the masses that they should try it. Too bad it can't be marketed as meat, at least not for long before getting caught.
In principle, it's possible that plant-based meat substitutes could become cheaper than real meat, simply because raw plants are always cheaper per calorie than meat. So the question is whether the conversion from raw plant to meat substitute can be done for cheap enough.
Actually, I'm thinking of some of my, uh, close-minded relatives who would refuse to eat such a thing out of 'principle.' The only way to convince them would be to trick them for several years.
Why doesn't a billionaire just buy up 95% of all the factory farms and start converting them to free range, while lowering output and raising prices? Why don't we as a society subsidize the cost?
Would save a lot of lives from suffering.
Whatever argument you make against this can also be made in favor of making more cramped prisons and working human prisoners to the bone.
Capitalism is designed to exploit externalities, including animal welfare as well as antibiotic resistance.
So can advocates of capitalism admit that it needs to be regulated? How would factory farms have been abolished under anarcho capitalism? How would child labor or sweatshops be abolished? They say that under the NAP there would be no coersion, but clearly there is.
They say private ownership of animals will prevent their extinction, like commercial bees. That may be true but what about their welfare?
A better answer is hiding in your posts. It's that: We believe that humans, even criminals, have dignity and should be treated decently despite their wrongdoings. The argument, then, is that we could extend that "deserving of decent treatment" to animals.
It doesn't need a billionaire to make this happen (which is why you're confusing me), it just needs culture to change.
Does unregulated Capitalism have the mechanisms to abolish such things with time? If there remain even 10% of meat eaters who want to pay $1 for a hamburger, who can stop the factory farms??
The only thing I can think of is a billionaire buying all the animals the way slaves were redeemed for money in some countries. After that no competing farms could start because they wouldn't have the animals to start with.
Not sure how serious your suggestion is, but one quick answer is that a lot of the factory farms are owned by billionaires and publicly traded ag conglomerates who are making good money and wouldn't just need the capital back, they'd need an investment that gave the same steady returns.
Seems like a good plan, but the problem is that the available land is scarce and we only have one planet.
So we'll have to choice either to undig (and uncontaminate) the fertile lands under the roads and streets in the urban areas, that is a way;
or instead burn the last forests and give our precious natural areas to the pigs, literally. The pressure to ocuppy still relatively intact areas and the last protected sanctuaries for biodiversity would be irresistible and inescapable.
And is a wrong (but much repeated) idea than we'll stop the suffering. Is just that they are conveniently dismissing the suffering caused to the ecosystems. "Gazillions" of savage animals, plants, trees and fungi will suffer inmensely if we scalate the solution to all our cattle.
I'm all for lab-grown meat but I do question if you'll ever fully satisfy the meat lovers. In my opinion, a better approach would be a hybrid meat/fake meat option which would still make a huge dent in factory farming but appeal to the palates of those who love their cheeseburger.
If we can cut down "real" meat consumption by even half, you could in theory make all cows free range.
Okay. I was wondering if you thought the labelling would turn people off. (America has a lot of random fear-of-science. See: anti-GMOs, anti-vaccine, anti-evolution sentiments.) Or maybe that it would be that people wouldn't actually be able to reocognize what cut of meat it was from, and it would be some kind of uncanny valley problem. Or a kind of macho attitude like "if a pig didn't die, it doesn't count as breakfast". (I've seriously heard a guy say that!)
Yeah, if you're only concerned about taste/texture/juiciness, I think that's the easiest concern. lab grown meat is still the same muscle cells. I would bet a lot of money that it's going to taste awesome.
It's even better. Unless you really want to have it attached to a rib, or fat chunks in between for some reason, I believe it's going to be the best quality steak meat. Basically a mass produced perfect filet.
>America has a lot of random fear-of-science. See: anti-GMOs, anti-vaccine, anti-evolution sentiments.
these sentiments are not random when you consider the history of Monsanto, of DuPont, the tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. You don't need to look far to find reasons to distrust global corporations and governments.
Lab-made synthetic flavors* are readily distinguished from non-lab flavours. Getting lab-made flavors right must be an easier problem than growing a steak in the lab... and we still still can't do it.
* a.k.a. artifical and natural flavours - the only difference between artificial and natural is the starting ingredient in the synthesis
Idk, I'm not convinced. You're comparing two very different processes--- artificial flavors are a matter of organic chemistry and if we [humans] are guiding the process, then we have to get every single fraction of chemicals exactly right.
Whereas, when you have cells, you already have a system that grows and does the chemistry via it's own enzymes. The dream is that you "just add sugar / water / salt" and it'll grow. I'm not saying that there won't be problems. (Like, maybe the meat tissue think that it's stressed or has been cut, if it's exposed to water/air? Maybe stressed tissue will taste bad or produce bad hormones?) But they will be very very different problems.
Okay, fair enough. Do you agree that getting factory farm meat to taste as good as pastured meat is an easier problem?
As an example, given a pastured chicken, a factory chicken, and a lab chicken, is it easier to get the factory chicken to taste like the pastured chicken, or to get the lab chicken to taste like the pastured chicken?
I have never tasted a factory chicken that compares to a pastured chicken, and I'm skeptical about whether it's possible. But nevertheless I believe that's an easier problem than getting the lab chicken right, which of course implies that in my opinion a good-as-pastured lab chicken is exceedingly difficult.
But I'll readily agree we can make something that most humans would identify as meat in the lab and that a large number of them would be happy to eat it. After all, people enjoy eating all sorts of processed food as it is.
Given this, I guess the real question is, can you make a lab chicken taste as good as a factory chicken? I don't know, probably...
Exactly that. One of these days, someone will give me a choice between a normal, horrifyingly-grown slab of meat and a slightly-more-expensive-but-ethically-grown one, and then we'll see who's a hypocrite!
I'm all for lab-grown meat but I do question if you'll ever fully satisfy the meat lovers
I dunno, how much worse could it be if it is substituting the meat in, say, a McDonalds hamburger? By the time the cheese and special sauce are added, does anyone notice the difference? Sure, one might have special occasions when you go spend $200 for a real, dead cow dinner. But I’ll bet most meat consumption isn’t in the form of “slab of ribeye” but ground up to be unrecognizable Taco Bell meat and chicken nuggets. I’m also willing to bet the person placing the order at Taco Bell is not in meat conisseur mode, but in “fill the hole so the grumbling sounds stop” mode.
One great thing I foresee with lab grown meat is that the discussion changes. Suppose you can get your labgrowns to be cheaper yet indistinguishable from the meat that was once part of a sentient being. In that world you have to be especially sadistic to still want slaughters variant.
By the way, if anyone who reads still consumes dairy: that stuff is undermining your health. Replacements are getting close, and given that the replacements are WAY more healthy it is just not the same story as meat. (Similar, but less convincing, case can be made for eggs)
If lab grown meat can "in the future" make a dent in slaughtered meat consumption (can attract "us" away), then plant-based dairy alternatives should be able to do so today.
And they do -- https://www.google.nl/search?q=dairy+consumption+is+down -- all over the western world. Their best strategy: sell it to new markets of people that are, unlike those of European decent, much more likely to be lactose intolerant.
It seems the meat and dairy industry is subsidized by the government. One source[1] quote $38 billion yearly while only $17 million goes to the fruit and vegetable industry (The US).
Shifting subsidies to greener and more ethical industries would be a good start. The "fake-meat" improves all the time and if it actually were cheaper (in-store) than the meat option things could start to happen. Typically that's not the case[2]. Probably due to a combination of scale, subsidies, willingness to pay amongst vegans and health concerned customers and store policy (key product might be sold at very low margins/loss to attract customers)
Estimates of the external cost caused by the meat industry (health, pollution) is also quite high. Special taxes can be used here, while cutting taxes on better products.
Just pointing out an unintended consequence I saw in a cartoon:
As soon as nobody farms cows for meat, milk, and leather, cows will become an endangered species/extinct because nobody will pay to keep them alive. And there's not much space where they could survive on their own in the wild.
When Sweden voted to outlaw the latter, a Swedish friend of mine revealed he had lost his virginity that way years earlier. Without passing absolute moral judgement (pro or con) on either type of human-bovine interaction, I cannot see how the latter is relatively worse than the former, which is why his revelation caused me to attempt veganism for a bit (I failed, vegan cheese is no substitute for the real thing).
Right, I'd expect the same thing as with horses and other work animals: once the tech makes them obsolete and the current generation dies out, they'll still be around, but for more niche, boutique uses (racing, riding around the ranch, visiting schoolchildren), not the dystopia they had been put through before.
Many people (/me included) already buy sustainably-raised meat direct from farmers. It's better tasting and often cheaper than meat in the supermarket.
Yes. However, the magnitude of the decrease is significant and it seemed that it would interest people, as it has, to see the numbers involved in the decline for horses.
Given how many megafauna we've already wiped from the face of the earth (most of them), and the utterly ridiculous idea that cows would ever become extinct if we didn't eat them, that argument seems completely disingenuous.
I won't believe for a second that people are seriously concerned about the fate of the Bos Taurus species in a discussion about factory farming, or eating meat in general
If the current alternative was growing in a box until ready to be eaten, then sure. It does look like a great short term improvement. Provided we're not planning to stop there.
Am I the only one who wonders how what the actual difference in suffering is in free range vs. factory farming? There might be a lot of projection going on - people imagining themselves in the same circumstance as the animals and missing the mark because of the differences between our sense of life and that of other animals.
As an example, I once spoke to a person who thought the movie _The March of the Penguins_ was horrific because the penguins just stood there week after week in the freezing cold doing nothing. That may be perfectly fine for a penguin. It might even be like what a adept meditator would experience in a life of meditation.
Animals aren't totally different than us. We share a lot of similarities biologically, and even in our brain structures. It's safe to assume that herd animals need a decent amount of space to roam around, and that crowding is stressful and possibly causes mental illnesses.
This is even more true of animals like pigs. Imagine dogs living their lives out in kennels. Also consider the change in behavior in zoo animals when their habitats are redesigned to more closely resemble their native habitats.
Thanks. That really has me wondering about the penguins now. Hundreds of thousands of years and evolution has made no accommodation for their emotional well being.
Why would evolution make an accommodation for their emotional well being if the penguins are fit enough in their environment to pass their genes on?
That being said, I have no idea what it's like to be a penguin, or how much they suffer. I did watch March of the Penguins and it seemed the males huddling together deep in Antarctica during the winter were uncomfortable.
Chickens peck at themselves when caged and cows get stuck on fences trying to retrieve their calves when the calves are separated from them. It's not that difficult to see the suffering in factory-farmed animals.
There is ample documentation of the difference in behaviors between factory-farmed animals and free range. People aren’t just making this up.
But as an aside, I’d argue that you’re bordering on the “Africans don’t mind the heat of the cotton fields” line of thinking to make ourselves feel better about owning slaves. Like with the animals, even the slightest bit of effort in the way of research will tell you that’s not true.
Looking through the different approaches on the list, I am missing one large one. Fishermen are currently throwing away a majority of caught fish because people only buy a very small selection of species (which also differ between nations). We could more than double the amount of fish meat that get eaten without changing the number of fish being killed, and yet for mostly cultural reasons we don't.
While I'd rather see mass fishing stopped entirely (and I don't eat fish, or any other meat, on ethical grounds), that's a valid point. I often think of the fact that lobster was once considered trash, or only to be consumed by the lowest classes, and only through an effective marketing campaign did it become a luxury food.
But, realistically, many ocean ecosystems are already on the brink of collapse. Merely increasing production won't save those ecosystems; though maybe it'd stave it off for a few years. Our industrial economies have produced seemingly limitless consumption and waste.
When you add up all of the wasted food at every stage of our agricultural systems, it is staggering. It's not just fish that's being wasted, it's everything. Solving the waste problem is more boring than growing meat in a lab, but it might be more effective at reducing hunger and reducing ecological destruction.
The waste problem in the other points of the production chain is indeed massive and solvable. The idea that fresh produce is sent to stores only to have a fraction being bought is a massive waste in both food and introduction of additional middle man. Online markets for food could fix this, but I have yet to see one that can compete on prices. It might happen once transport costs go down.
To go back to marine ecosystem, those that are on the brink of collapse is so mainly because of 3 causes. Pollution, invasive species, and over overfishing towards specific fish stocks. Both invasive species and overpopulation caused by eutrophication could actually use an increase in fishing in order to increase biodiversity, but a common element in both is that no one want to pay for it. To my knowledge it actually common problem in many fresh water lakes.
Yes, there are a few "trophic highways" in the sea. Carrion eating animals is one of them, and lobsters are one of its members.
On the other hand fishermen do not discard so many small fishes as previously. Our cats and dogs will eat that.
"ending factory farming as soon as possible" equals at this moment to "killing by famine a lot of surplus humans as soon as possible". We need to produce more food, not less, because we are more people than the year before, not less.
> "ending factory farming as soon as possible" equals at this moment to "killing by famine a lot of surplus humans as soon as possible".
The article is talking about animal factory farming. Eliminating animal factory farming would free up more than enough resources to feed humans directly. The conversion from plant calories to meat calories is not very efficient.
I know it, I can read :-), and is not so easy as you thing.
Animals in animal factory farming can be feeded with things that neither humans nor plants can/would accept directly.
Animal factory farming by-products also are needed to support agriculture. Using human faeces at large scale to fertilize the spoil is not so good idea as using horse, goat, cow or pig faeces (Because human faeces carry more types of human transmisible parasites and more often than faeces in non-human animals).
Agriculture without using fertilizers will not provide the same harvests.
We have only one planet and the only land available yet to put all this cattle (that is apt to breed cattle and not used yet) are the last sanctuaries of biodiversity. We will need to burn the forests if we want to scalate our solution of "freedom for all cows and pigs".
Therefore we must be aware that our shiny plan of liberating resources to feed humans could backfire easily in several parts.
There is not a morally-magic solution for our current problems (and we have big problems). Meat generated in lab will need also resources to grow. We talk about chemical resources, lots of water, sterilization material and lots of energy. And currently is just a very expensive way with the main purpose to provide vegans with a exit way to lie to themselves and eat meat that "is not meat, just a nerveless animal tissue thin as a paper".
>Animals in animal factory farming can be feeded with things that neither humans nor plants can/would accept directly.
So can non-factory animal farms. I don't see how factory farming is better in this aspect than other types of animal farms.
There is a middle ground between no animal farming and factory farming.
>Animal factory farming by-products also are needed to support agriculture. Using human faeces at large scale to fertilize the spoil is not so good idea as using horse, goat, cow or pig faeces (Because human faeces carry more types of human transmisible parasites and more often than faeces in non-human animals).
Factory farming has the unfortunate sideeffect of producing too much fertiliser of the wrong kind. The farms have trouble getting rid of their excess waste.
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/the-dangers-of-usi...
>It is not uncommon that a factory farm will produce more waste than can be absorbed into the soil surrounding the facility.
Because there is such an excess of excrement, it is often over-applied to fields and the nutrients that cannot be absorbed by the soil run off into local waterways.
I don't think most people really care about animals suffering, or not. However, most people do care about themselves and their children.
Long to short, factor farming generates a lot of ground level pollution. Furthermore, those animals also generate a lot of greenhouse gases. Frame the problem in terms of human suffering and more people are likely to pay attention.
Years ago there was a NY Times Sunday magazine feature article on factor pig farming. It was enlightening. Unfortunately, I've searched for it and can't seem to find it. If you can find, do read it.
p.s. Growing crops to be fed to farm animals is also very inefficient. More people would have more food if we all ate less animal protein.
1. Environmental -- For "our children" as you call it. This assumes that countries have gov'ts that give a shit and are not totally controlled by the industry (essentially the mega shareholders)
2. Health -- Plant-based (especially whole plant food) diet is much, much healthier than the a diet that contains several serving of meat/dairy/eggs per week (many have that in a day). This is ALSO an argument for the children, as they will learn from us. (We could not tell kids to not smoke, we have to stop ourselves too!)
3. Ethical -- Whole categories of abuse towards fellow earthlings (poor, women, slaves, lower-caste, captured enemies, etc.) were generally accepted as permissible, yet are now near unanimously condemned. It is not unfathomable that animals --that are currently still being permissibly abused for being of a different species-- may get added to that list.
Also the ethical reason will have a huge impact on "our children". As we have seen with the other steps we made in awareness, it is totally worth making these steps.
I agree with all those reasons. But the majority of people don't care unless you make it personal. Making the world a better place isn't good enough, it's too abstract. You have to answer "What's in it for me?"
I was replying to a post roughly answering "what's in it for me" by "what's in it for your children". All wanted to show that the 3 main reasons for going vegan/plant-based all have a strong "for the children" side to them.
There's a huge influx of people in the vegan/plant-based communities from very health conscious people. Many of them believe that science is showing that it allows them to live healthier/happier/longer/stronger.
Is that not a good answer to "What's in it for me?" :)
I tend to pick different strategies for the amount of time I have of someones attention.
But you're advocating the one blow will be from the "personal health" angle. With little time on my hands I usually also go for this angle, simply because I believe that all the people who'd want to be vegan/vegetarian "for the animals" would be so by now. The health angle still has a kind of novelty/news aspect to it (while being more personal and urgent then the environment angle).
I really can't fathom the dogmatic line on vegans/vegetarians when it comes to insect farming for human consumption...
They talk about it toward 2:20 (I do like how they had a full transcript and ToC so you can jump around in the audio).
In any case, my take away was that because there might be some chance of a "net negative" life for insects in farms, we shouldn't be looking to replace some of our protein needs by insects.
Given the sheer amount of ecological damage that is being done to the planet with each season of industrial animal farming, I really don't understand why we're not looking at lab-grown insects as the MVP for "lab-grown meat".
The problems needing to be solved to make crickets/mealworm protein a scaled operation that could reduce the demand on chicken/beef/pork are much easier than growing meat in a lab (feel pretty confident in this claim, open to rebuttal).
How many cows would be saved every year if just 1 major fast-food burger joint switched to 50/50 mealworm-beef burgers? Would anyone even notice if Taco Bell switched their taco meat to be 50% ground crickets?
What resources are required to make lab grown meat anyways? Where are they sourced from? What habitats are collapsing to provide the necessary solvents/catalysts/preservatives/energy/etc for whatever solutions it needs to grow in? What are the negative externalities of this lab-growing process? What does that look like at the scale necessary to take even 20% of the current beef demand?
We're twisting our britches over what a cricket or mealworm might feel in a factory farm setting, yet they are basically the perfect little machines for turning carbohydrates, water and air into essential human-accessible proteins and vitamins (crickets have a ton of B12, just like red meat). They're the perfect stop-gap solution until the lab meat is ready for prime-time.
Also, insect-farming waste products are typically just great compost and fertilizer and you could basically grow insects underground (mealworms love the dark) and grow their substrate/feed above them. I think calories/acre would be another useful measurement to look at when trying to evaluate which direction human agriculture should be headed.
Alright, TL;DR - Insect farming is low hanging fruit for alleviating the ecological pressure of factory animal farming which is being ignored for no good reason.
/rant
Thanks for posting this to Hacker News! Very interesting interview covering all aspects of the animal welfare movement. I'm passing on the link to my activist daughters and nieces.
82 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI think the major barrier to mass adoption of this will be convincing the masses that they should try it. Too bad it can't be marketed as meat, at least not for long before getting caught.
Interestingly, consumers are more likely to try out vegan products if they don't say they're vegan on the front of the package...
The NYT article neglected to discuss that iirc
They've made it similar to ground beef I think.
Would save a lot of lives from suffering.
Whatever argument you make against this can also be made in favor of making more cramped prisons and working human prisoners to the bone.
Capitalism is designed to exploit externalities, including animal welfare as well as antibiotic resistance.
They say private ownership of animals will prevent their extinction, like commercial bees. That may be true but what about their welfare?
It doesn't need a billionaire to make this happen (which is why you're confusing me), it just needs culture to change.
Does unregulated Capitalism have the mechanisms to abolish such things with time? If there remain even 10% of meat eaters who want to pay $1 for a hamburger, who can stop the factory farms??
The only thing I can think of is a billionaire buying all the animals the way slaves were redeemed for money in some countries. After that no competing farms could start because they wouldn't have the animals to start with.
So we'll have to choice either to undig (and uncontaminate) the fertile lands under the roads and streets in the urban areas, that is a way;
or instead burn the last forests and give our precious natural areas to the pigs, literally. The pressure to ocuppy still relatively intact areas and the last protected sanctuaries for biodiversity would be irresistible and inescapable.
And is a wrong (but much repeated) idea than we'll stop the suffering. Is just that they are conveniently dismissing the suffering caused to the ecosystems. "Gazillions" of savage animals, plants, trees and fungi will suffer inmensely if we scalate the solution to all our cattle.
If we can cut down "real" meat consumption by even half, you could in theory make all cows free range.
Yeah, if you're only concerned about taste/texture/juiciness, I think that's the easiest concern. lab grown meat is still the same muscle cells. I would bet a lot of money that it's going to taste awesome.
these sentiments are not random when you consider the history of Monsanto, of DuPont, the tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. You don't need to look far to find reasons to distrust global corporations and governments.
* a.k.a. artifical and natural flavours - the only difference between artificial and natural is the starting ingredient in the synthesis
Whereas, when you have cells, you already have a system that grows and does the chemistry via it's own enzymes. The dream is that you "just add sugar / water / salt" and it'll grow. I'm not saying that there won't be problems. (Like, maybe the meat tissue think that it's stressed or has been cut, if it's exposed to water/air? Maybe stressed tissue will taste bad or produce bad hormones?) But they will be very very different problems.
As an example, given a pastured chicken, a factory chicken, and a lab chicken, is it easier to get the factory chicken to taste like the pastured chicken, or to get the lab chicken to taste like the pastured chicken?
I have never tasted a factory chicken that compares to a pastured chicken, and I'm skeptical about whether it's possible. But nevertheless I believe that's an easier problem than getting the lab chicken right, which of course implies that in my opinion a good-as-pastured lab chicken is exceedingly difficult.
But I'll readily agree we can make something that most humans would identify as meat in the lab and that a large number of them would be happy to eat it. After all, people enjoy eating all sorts of processed food as it is.
Given this, I guess the real question is, can you make a lab chicken taste as good as a factory chicken? I don't know, probably...
meat tastiness * degree it affects me > immorality of killing animals * degree it affects me
I dunno, how much worse could it be if it is substituting the meat in, say, a McDonalds hamburger? By the time the cheese and special sauce are added, does anyone notice the difference? Sure, one might have special occasions when you go spend $200 for a real, dead cow dinner. But I’ll bet most meat consumption isn’t in the form of “slab of ribeye” but ground up to be unrecognizable Taco Bell meat and chicken nuggets. I’m also willing to bet the person placing the order at Taco Bell is not in meat conisseur mode, but in “fill the hole so the grumbling sounds stop” mode.
Investors seem to notice too.
"Why Bill Gates And Richard Branson Invested In 'Clean' Meat" https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/08/25/why-bil...
"Richard Branson predicts the world will no longer need to kill animals in 30 years" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/memph...
By the way, if anyone who reads still consumes dairy: that stuff is undermining your health. Replacements are getting close, and given that the replacements are WAY more healthy it is just not the same story as meat. (Similar, but less convincing, case can be made for eggs)
If lab grown meat can "in the future" make a dent in slaughtered meat consumption (can attract "us" away), then plant-based dairy alternatives should be able to do so today.
And they do -- https://www.google.nl/search?q=dairy+consumption+is+down -- all over the western world. Their best strategy: sell it to new markets of people that are, unlike those of European decent, much more likely to be lactose intolerant.
Shifting subsidies to greener and more ethical industries would be a good start. The "fake-meat" improves all the time and if it actually were cheaper (in-store) than the meat option things could start to happen. Typically that's not the case[2]. Probably due to a combination of scale, subsidies, willingness to pay amongst vegans and health concerned customers and store policy (key product might be sold at very low margins/loss to attract customers)
Estimates of the external cost caused by the meat industry (health, pollution) is also quite high. Special taxes can be used here, while cutting taxes on better products.
[1] https://www.peta.org/living/food/10-things-wish-everyone-kne... (admittingly not the most objective source)
[2] Based on Norwegian stores
As soon as nobody farms cows for meat, milk, and leather, cows will become an endangered species/extinct because nobody will pay to keep them alive. And there's not much space where they could survive on their own in the wild.
When Sweden voted to outlaw the latter, a Swedish friend of mine revealed he had lost his virginity that way years earlier. Without passing absolute moral judgement (pro or con) on either type of human-bovine interaction, I cannot see how the latter is relatively worse than the former, which is why his revelation caused me to attempt veganism for a bit (I failed, vegan cheese is no substitute for the real thing).
Ending factory farming would likely actually increase the variety of cows and other animals, which will generally help their health.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12516/how-common...
For bovines it's likely to be even larger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#Breeding_of_aurochs-li...
I found myself reading this list several times. Intriguing how we have "no wilds" left for soo many of our "favorite" animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals
I won't believe for a second that people are seriously concerned about the fate of the Bos Taurus species in a discussion about factory farming, or eating meat in general
As an example, I once spoke to a person who thought the movie _The March of the Penguins_ was horrific because the penguins just stood there week after week in the freezing cold doing nothing. That may be perfectly fine for a penguin. It might even be like what a adept meditator would experience in a life of meditation.
This is even more true of animals like pigs. Imagine dogs living their lives out in kennels. Also consider the change in behavior in zoo animals when their habitats are redesigned to more closely resemble their native habitats.
That being said, I have no idea what it's like to be a penguin, or how much they suffer. I did watch March of the Penguins and it seemed the males huddling together deep in Antarctica during the winter were uncomfortable.
(but there are ~hundreds of similar vids if not convinced)
But as an aside, I’d argue that you’re bordering on the “Africans don’t mind the heat of the cotton fields” line of thinking to make ourselves feel better about owning slaves. Like with the animals, even the slightest bit of effort in the way of research will tell you that’s not true.
But, realistically, many ocean ecosystems are already on the brink of collapse. Merely increasing production won't save those ecosystems; though maybe it'd stave it off for a few years. Our industrial economies have produced seemingly limitless consumption and waste.
When you add up all of the wasted food at every stage of our agricultural systems, it is staggering. It's not just fish that's being wasted, it's everything. Solving the waste problem is more boring than growing meat in a lab, but it might be more effective at reducing hunger and reducing ecological destruction.
To go back to marine ecosystem, those that are on the brink of collapse is so mainly because of 3 causes. Pollution, invasive species, and over overfishing towards specific fish stocks. Both invasive species and overpopulation caused by eutrophication could actually use an increase in fishing in order to increase biodiversity, but a common element in both is that no one want to pay for it. To my knowledge it actually common problem in many fresh water lakes.
On the other hand fishermen do not discard so many small fishes as previously. Our cats and dogs will eat that.
"ending factory farming as soon as possible" equals at this moment to "killing by famine a lot of surplus humans as soon as possible". We need to produce more food, not less, because we are more people than the year before, not less.
The article is talking about animal factory farming. Eliminating animal factory farming would free up more than enough resources to feed humans directly. The conversion from plant calories to meat calories is not very efficient.
Animals in animal factory farming can be feeded with things that neither humans nor plants can/would accept directly.
Animal factory farming by-products also are needed to support agriculture. Using human faeces at large scale to fertilize the spoil is not so good idea as using horse, goat, cow or pig faeces (Because human faeces carry more types of human transmisible parasites and more often than faeces in non-human animals).
Agriculture without using fertilizers will not provide the same harvests.
We have only one planet and the only land available yet to put all this cattle (that is apt to breed cattle and not used yet) are the last sanctuaries of biodiversity. We will need to burn the forests if we want to scalate our solution of "freedom for all cows and pigs".
Therefore we must be aware that our shiny plan of liberating resources to feed humans could backfire easily in several parts.
There is not a morally-magic solution for our current problems (and we have big problems). Meat generated in lab will need also resources to grow. We talk about chemical resources, lots of water, sterilization material and lots of energy. And currently is just a very expensive way with the main purpose to provide vegans with a exit way to lie to themselves and eat meat that "is not meat, just a nerveless animal tissue thin as a paper".
So can non-factory animal farms. I don't see how factory farming is better in this aspect than other types of animal farms. There is a middle ground between no animal farming and factory farming.
>Animal factory farming by-products also are needed to support agriculture. Using human faeces at large scale to fertilize the spoil is not so good idea as using horse, goat, cow or pig faeces (Because human faeces carry more types of human transmisible parasites and more often than faeces in non-human animals).
Factory farming has the unfortunate sideeffect of producing too much fertiliser of the wrong kind. The farms have trouble getting rid of their excess waste.
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/the-dangers-of-usi... >It is not uncommon that a factory farm will produce more waste than can be absorbed into the soil surrounding the facility. Because there is such an excess of excrement, it is often over-applied to fields and the nutrients that cannot be absorbed by the soil run off into local waterways.
Long to short, factor farming generates a lot of ground level pollution. Furthermore, those animals also generate a lot of greenhouse gases. Frame the problem in terms of human suffering and more people are likely to pay attention.
Years ago there was a NY Times Sunday magazine feature article on factor pig farming. It was enlightening. Unfortunately, I've searched for it and can't seem to find it. If you can find, do read it.
p.s. Growing crops to be fed to farm animals is also very inefficient. More people would have more food if we all ate less animal protein.
1. Environmental -- For "our children" as you call it. This assumes that countries have gov'ts that give a shit and are not totally controlled by the industry (essentially the mega shareholders)
2. Health -- Plant-based (especially whole plant food) diet is much, much healthier than the a diet that contains several serving of meat/dairy/eggs per week (many have that in a day). This is ALSO an argument for the children, as they will learn from us. (We could not tell kids to not smoke, we have to stop ourselves too!)
3. Ethical -- Whole categories of abuse towards fellow earthlings (poor, women, slaves, lower-caste, captured enemies, etc.) were generally accepted as permissible, yet are now near unanimously condemned. It is not unfathomable that animals --that are currently still being permissibly abused for being of a different species-- may get added to that list.
Also the ethical reason will have a huge impact on "our children". As we have seen with the other steps we made in awareness, it is totally worth making these steps.
Peace.
There's a huge influx of people in the vegan/plant-based communities from very health conscious people. Many of them believe that science is showing that it allows them to live healthier/happier/longer/stronger.
Is that not a good answer to "What's in it for me?" :)
But you're advocating the one blow will be from the "personal health" angle. With little time on my hands I usually also go for this angle, simply because I believe that all the people who'd want to be vegan/vegetarian "for the animals" would be so by now. The health angle still has a kind of novelty/news aspect to it (while being more personal and urgent then the environment angle).
They talk about it toward 2:20 (I do like how they had a full transcript and ToC so you can jump around in the audio).
In any case, my take away was that because there might be some chance of a "net negative" life for insects in farms, we shouldn't be looking to replace some of our protein needs by insects.
Given the sheer amount of ecological damage that is being done to the planet with each season of industrial animal farming, I really don't understand why we're not looking at lab-grown insects as the MVP for "lab-grown meat".
The problems needing to be solved to make crickets/mealworm protein a scaled operation that could reduce the demand on chicken/beef/pork are much easier than growing meat in a lab (feel pretty confident in this claim, open to rebuttal).
How many cows would be saved every year if just 1 major fast-food burger joint switched to 50/50 mealworm-beef burgers? Would anyone even notice if Taco Bell switched their taco meat to be 50% ground crickets?
What resources are required to make lab grown meat anyways? Where are they sourced from? What habitats are collapsing to provide the necessary solvents/catalysts/preservatives/energy/etc for whatever solutions it needs to grow in? What are the negative externalities of this lab-growing process? What does that look like at the scale necessary to take even 20% of the current beef demand?
We're twisting our britches over what a cricket or mealworm might feel in a factory farm setting, yet they are basically the perfect little machines for turning carbohydrates, water and air into essential human-accessible proteins and vitamins (crickets have a ton of B12, just like red meat). They're the perfect stop-gap solution until the lab meat is ready for prime-time.
Also, insect-farming waste products are typically just great compost and fertilizer and you could basically grow insects underground (mealworms love the dark) and grow their substrate/feed above them. I think calories/acre would be another useful measurement to look at when trying to evaluate which direction human agriculture should be headed.
Alright, TL;DR - Insect farming is low hanging fruit for alleviating the ecological pressure of factory animal farming which is being ignored for no good reason. /rant