I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible.
This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.
There is no need to go from one extreme to the other. This is about eating "less" meat.
People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited.
This is still the case in poor countries.
In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing.
We now eat too much meat, and also consume too much dairy (adults don't need to drink any milk and many don't digest it well, by the way). If people just stopped eating meat at every meal or every day, consumption would drastically drop without too much of a change in daily life.
One solution would be measures to increase prices but that is a political minefield.
>adult don't need to drink any milk and many don't digest it well, by the way
Never understood the obsession with drinking milk on its own (though I never liked the taste of it myself either). There's plenty of calcium to be found in other sources: kale, leafy greens, almonds, fortrified grains, beans/pulses etc.
You're missing one solid reason to drink milk: some people like it. Most of the stuff we eat today is actually not about nutritional needs.
And your argument can always be reshuffled. Swap milk with any one of the items you listed and one by one you can disqualify all of them from consumption. Variety is a good thing, meaning something should be eliminated because it's no good, not because there are alternatives.
There's no requirement or recommendation to cover your daily needs with the least varied diet.
Of people I know who have reduced animal consumption, drinking cow milk and having it on cereal is one of the first things to go.
In the early days soy milk was about the only alternative. Now there are so many dairy-free milk alternatives to try. The proliferation of grocery shelves is a testament to their growing popularity.
This is a very niche reason, but one of the classic diets for beginner weight lifters who want to gain weight is to add a gallon of whole milk a day to their existing diet.
For people that are trying to consume more calories and protein, I don't know of an alternative that combines comparable calorie & protein density, low cost, ease of consumption, and zero preparation time.
More generally, I think that one of the big challenges with plant based diets is a lack of easily available calorie and protein dense foods. (I'm not saying its impossible to get enough calories and protein as a vegan, even as a bodybuilder. Just that it is not nearly as easy.)
I haven't heard of this and I know a good number of weight trainers. Doesn't this give people massive squirts? Can anyone digest a whole gallon of milk in a day? Gross
I think you are referring to Mark Rippetoe’s suggested diet in his book Starting Strength. In which case, it is worth mentioning that this is suggested for skinny, 18 year old males and to be followed for the duration of the training program (months)
That's not exactly true, he's just some buff guy that is strong. He doesn't even look big compared to bodybuilders, regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size.
His 'record' deadlift was 360kg, worlds strongest men all pulled 420kg+ this year. Arnold was in that class back in the 70's.
EDIT: After some research people are saying his european world records were all accomplished before he became vegan in 2011.
> That's not exactly true, he's just some buff guy that is strong. He doesn't even look big compared to bodybuilders, regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size.
So, because he's a strong buff guy, while "not looking big compared to bodybuilders" (category in which he has not been competing since 1999), and as "regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size", it's not "exactly true" that he's one of the top weight lifters ?
> His 'record' deadlift was 360kg
GP never said "top deadlifter". None of his records are about deadlift. Not sure why you mentioned it.
> EDIT: After some research people are saying his european world records were all accomplished before he became vegan in 2011.
One of the strangest things to me about lunch in the Netherlands: adult men drinking milk with their meal, this meal sometimes consisting of a chocolate hundreds and thousands sandwich O_o
That is hilarious because I love to drink milk with sweet pastries and my girlfriend also thinks drinking straight milk is disgusting. It's hard to explain why, but I think the main reason is that I am not super into sweets and milk seems to counteract the sweetness. I also get heartburn frequently and milk tends to help my stomach not feel terrible like it would if I ate a sweet pastry by itself.
>Never understood the obsession with drinking milk on its own
It's something that's been consumed for millennia. There are societies based on pastoralism where milk is a huge part of the diet. I'd hardly classify it as being an obsession.
>It's something that's been consumed for millennia. There are societies based on pastoralism where milk is a huge part of the diet. I'd hardly classify it as being an obsession.
Obsession is probably the wrong word, but I'd still be curious as to the history behind it (and how long it continued into adulthood). Especially given its association with and place in a juvenile diet.
Given the extreme we are in yes, going to the other extreme would be a good thing. And even then, not enough. This is just one of the multiple changes that humanity need to bring about. I don't think people should be prohibited from eating animal products, but those who have the will to remove it completely from their diets would definitely be having a much higher positive impact on the environment.
I will never go vegan or vegetarian but I mostly limit meat to only dinner and in smaller portions. My grocery bill is much smaller, it's healthier, and better for the environment overall.
Pushing a full-blown switch to veganism as the only solution is not pragmatic.
My grandmother told me that before the second world war for a typical peasant family in Belarus the meat meant a single chicken 2-4 times in a month for the whole family. Only on big celebrations few times in a year people could afford to slaughter a pig or a caw. Even eggs were considered expensive. Milk was more available as most families had a cow. The real staple food was potato and bread.
In cities meat was more available as workers typically earned more. Option to eat meat each day was considered a luxury.
I think we should be pointing to science - which to date it hasn't been adequately done relating to diet, to see what diet is optimal, and how that varies per group whether that's by blood type, DNA/ancestral data, or other - while taking in the particular sensitivities of each individual as part of the research vs. making the reference points based on a structure of scarcity of what was available based on what people could afford; also having an idea of a person's current health state, how healthy their GI tract is and overall system needs to be taken into account as to how they may or may not respond to different diets - including not limited to how we're only just beginning to understand how gut bacteria and within the whole GI tract can strongly impact outcome.
Its interesting to hear anecdotal stories like these because they contradict the conventional wisdom nowadays that says you have to eat meat as protein every day - clearly that wasn't the case in prior centuries.
what was the life expectancy? what was the standard of living? trying to call back to 1930s belarus as an example to live from is crazy. It doesn't even logically follow that we should avoid meat because poor farmers in belarus didn't each much.
This post demonstrates the success of marketing "protein is meat". Such that when someone mentions reducing meat consumption, someone else thinks they are referring to a low-to-no protein diet.
Protein in terms of protein / calorie ratio of food tilts protein sources to meat and dairy. Easy way to compare foods and meals is to compare grams protein per 100cal of a given item. Things like meat, cottage cheese, yogurt, etc., top the charts.
So if you want to maximize for protein consumption without putting on fat mass, you tend to look for meat, dairy, and things derived from them (whey protein isolate).
The controversy is about whether humans need gargantuan amounts of protein.
Your post is assuming protein is very important, and thus it’s important to maximize protein per calorie.
The post you’re responding to is discussing the fact that any time vegetarian or vegan diets come up, people launch into criticisms that are based on the assumption that humans needs lots more protein than occurs in vegetables.
One issue I've seen when assessing some of the vegetarian or other plant-based diets proposed has been neglecting to account for protein. Most men at least don't enjoy the muscle loss associated with eating a low-protein diet, which is what the implementations I've seen often look like.
That said, Americans are predominantly overweight and obese. A diet high in protein but low enough in total overall energetic content is an excellent recipe, when paired with weightlifting and a few days of cardiovascular activity, for improving musculature and eliminating fat.
A scientific example demonstrating this point, entitled "Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial": https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609
I find posts about vegan/vegetarian lifestyles to heavily vote in lockstep. People don't like it when someone points out that something that seems to confirm their bias actually contains no logical argument.
Tone is something you read into things, as much as is written into them. If someone is responding because of a perceived tone, it would be wise of them to consider if they're being as aggressive as they accuse the other side of being.
Also, I dont mind being downvoted, I just wish someone would provide a logical argument in response.
You know that lifestyle where everyone was poor, sickly and died at a younger age, that's a totally better lifestyle!
Here's some stuff they conveniently left out that my Polish grandparents told me. In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions. People hunted a lot back then. Rabbit, deer, etc. So, they would supplement game for livestock. Because game meat is not considered desirable by civilized society.
Oh and fish. In eastern Europe, fish. Like always. It's cheap as shit and plentiful. It's also not considered meat because of Lent. Which is stupid. Fish is meat. Grow up. That's why people say they don't eat meat, but still eat fish. It's a catholic concept.
The idea that the old world ate less meat is misleading. They ate less prized meats. Today we consider top round off a cow as a cheap cut. That use to be a Christmas roast for many poor families.
Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you. Even when I did it with my then girlfriend for a year. My bloodwork went to total shit and I always felt like crap.
This whole article and crap is just a bunch of power hungry assholes in the UN appeasing to childish hippies who never picked up a book outside the metaphysical section.
> Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you.
As far as I can tell, this is completely false. Vegan diets do a lot of things well: reduce salt, saturated fat, and cholesterol intake, for example. Vegetarian / vegan diets improve cholesterol, blood sugar levels, and other things.
Here's some citations of studies and papers that demonstrate vegan diets are better for you:
The consensus of scientific evidence seems pretty clearly in favor of plant-based diets. The evidence is as clear as the world being round or climate change being real.
Truth is that there's very little consensus on this, it's all politics at the moment. You have pro-vegans and pro-meat/keto tribes, and they all have their claims and proofs. My own purely anecdotal experience is that actually both approaches work just fine, if done in a sensible way.
The only politics is when you look at dozens of studies on NIH and say "it's all politics" and counter with your anecdotal experience. This is like denial of climate science. Stop doing it. I'm not part of any tribe but the science tribe. Eating meat is unambiguously worse for the environment and worse for your health than non-meat diets. The scientific theory and studies on the subject are clear.
And I eat meat. Chowing on a burrito al pastor as we speak.
There are no studies that show that a diet where one consumes animal products occasionally like 2-3 times per months is worse for health then pure plant diet. This is even when one does eat meat, one eats it a lot. Apparently body is able to recover from any negative effects of animal products within 10-14 days. And one avoids a potential for deficiencies like B12, iron, K2 that one may run on a pure plant diet unless one is careful. And even for environment it can be better if the animal products on those days come from slaughtered caws that are grass-feed on land where growing grains etc. is impractical.
So the problem is really not the meat, but it’s amount.
> You know that lifestyle where everyone was poor, sickly and died at a younger age, that's a totally better lifestyle!
That’s not because of lack of meat.
> In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions.
When my grandmother was dying in the hospital we sat and talked. I aske what their meals had been like back in the 20s. Every part of every dish has animal protein or fat in it. The turnips were seared un lard, the turnip greens had bacon in them. The biscuit was made with lard too, and yes there was always some pork chicken or beef on the plate. Roots and leaves are healthy and should be most of the volume of our food, but grass fed animal fat is great for getting the remaining calories and animal protein absorbs so much better than pea or rice.
In this traditional rural diet "extra protein" (in addition from what protein you get from potatoes and grains and legumes) is mainly supplied by dairy and eggs.
However, slaughtering a pig or two once a year in the autumn also doesn't imply eating pork once a year, for a single family a single pig provides a quite large amount of various cured/smoked/dried meat products that are consumed over the winter, so you still have some meat products (not in large quantities though) on most days.
Not for poor people, those better situated would eat it more often. More importantly, people were not eating just steaks, but all parts of animals, so (in case of my grandparents in Yugoslavia) they'd eat a chicken or pork on Sundays and holidays, but on other days they'd perhaps have a cooked meat and bone marrow from a soup, or fried liver, or stew made from Sunday's leftovers. Also eggs, milk, cheese and other dairy products, that were affordable to everyone.
what do you think the standard of living in balarus before the second world war was, and do you think people would accept it now in belarus let alone the the US?
Its odd to call back to 1930s eastern europe for an example of how to live. There are many arguments to make against meat etc but 1930s belarus is not one that logically follows.
A challenge that I could see with convincing people to adopt a more plant based diet is that there is a carbon cost associated with shipping food across the country, but in many parts of the US a plant based diet might be much less appetizing if it is restricted to local crops. For example, much of the country wouldn't have access to citrus fruits, bananas, pineapples, or avocados.
Maybe a solution would be to tax food based on how long it was shipped but to exempt fruits and vegetables from the tax.
Na, that's a red herring. We can reduce our meat consumption and not replace it with anything. Americans are over consuming food, we can definitely reduce meat intake without needing to replace it with foods shipped in from out of county.
Also, most of the US population is around the coasts. Shipping a bit of food inland to the people there isn't that big of an impact.
Eh, best to start with stop wasting food, then go with proper calorie count diet. Food waste in America is pretty bad. The gov already does PSAs to try bringing attention to the matter.
Well, solution would be to tax carbon, not the specific field. I don't see the reason and disagree to accept meat tax without banana tax. Carbon footprint should be taken into account the same way fuel cost is taken.
This isn't exactly true. The greenhouse gas emissions from shipping, say, bananas, pales in comparison to emissions from even local grass fed beef.
Shipping things that spoil quickly or need refrigeration, obviously, will be less efficient. But on average, plant-based food sources will be significantly more efficient, even if shipped further, than meat ones.
>and also consume too much dairy (adults don't need to drink any milk and many don't digest it well, by the way)
How much is "too much"?
We don't need to drink tea or coffee either; do you propose getting rid of those too?
For those of us who have no problems digesting it, what exactly is the problem with eating yogurt or drinking milk? Sure, consuming too much of those probably isn't good, but you can say that about literally any food.
For people who don't digest it well, then of course I'd suggest not drinking it. The same goes for any other food: if you're allergic to peanuts, don't eat them. If you're allergic to shellfish, don't eat them. If you're allergic to bananas, don't eat them. If you're lactose-intolerant, don't drink milk unless you really like the taste and want to add lactase enzyme.
I do agree that Americans in particular eat way too much red meat, but I think some people give dairy a hard time when I don't think it's that much of a problem compared to many other things. Most adults don't drink a lot of milk anyway; usually "dairy" for adults means eggs, cheese, yogurt, etc. I don't see the health problems with dairy the way I see with red meat either. For improving public health, we should instead be reducing how much red meat people eat, plus also reducing or eliminating stuff like HFCS, refined sugars, refined flour, alcohol, etc.
>One solution would be measures to increase prices but that is a political minefield.
What they should do is just eliminate the tax breaks that unhealthy industries enjoy.
no the question is do we support from the "west" that everyone gets the same share of the cake which means we have to change dramatically our way of living or do we want to keep it for ourselves.
If every CN or IN guys lives on the same standard as we in EU/USA the world will be gone in 60 seconds.
Let discuss on that level instead of picking out all kind of less relevant topics each time.
Unfortunately I had no luck finding the actual OECD reports, though (aside from the "
Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2019" report, but that seems to just compare each country to the global average, rather than talking about different types of subsidies)
"[...] animal products and feed", straight from the image. Sadly, no distinction. I would assume that it's mostly subsidies to feed. I am unable to find any sources on subsidies to meat directly.
I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
> I am unable to find any sources on subsidies to meat directly.
Yeah, I searched around a bit (even outside of the US) and I'm having difficulty finding any proper data to back up or refute it. That's a pity, would have been nice to know either way. The best I found was data on subsidies given to individual farmers in my country (I'm not in the US), but unless I scrape the site and aggregate and categorise the data, its not really useful (and doing that is too much work for me).
> I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
Absolutely. I don't even mind animal products receiving subsidies, I'm not vegetarian and certainly not vegan, but I do hope that non-animal products get a large chunk of the subsidy pie, personally.
Sure, I'm in favour of moving subsidies away from these too. Corn is largely used for animal feed (and also unhealthy stuff like HFCS) and the modern diet is much too overloaded on corn, wheat and soy and its making us unhealthy. Wheat or wheat derivatives are also added as a filler to many foods, which, as someone who has family members who have celiac disease, is pretty frustrating. There are plenty of non-animal products that it might make sense to encourage. As I said, I'm not against subsidising animal products, but I suggested reducing it because the UN said we should eat less meat.
And if you don't want to wait for the government to require this you can already start today.
Buy only locally farmed organic meat. Don't go to fast food places or restaurants that don't specifically declare that their meat is organic and local.
Speaking as someone who took the same stance as the commenter you're replying to, reduced meat consumption was indeed a side effect in my case without it being a conscious choice - mainly due to cost and inconvenience.
Good point, thanks. The 60% number cited above does seem oddly specific, like it would come from a concrete source. Though as others in this thread have pointed out, methane seems to be less of an issue than it's sometimes made out to be.
The 60% is indeed what we studied for cows here in Switzerland. It is clearly related to the amount of time they live longer (18 instead of 11 month). You can check the source here: http://www.eaternity.org/blog/smart-chefs-research-results
No. Don't buy meat. Buy beans. Buy tofu. Hell, buy Beyond Burgers. We don't need meat. It's bad for the planet, bad for your health and it goes without saying, bad for the animals.
I agree. Few years back I bought some tofu sausages to try out how they taste. They tasted interesting but not like real sausages. Definitely not a good replacement. Even if I made myself eat them because of moral reasons, ignoring how they taste, many people would still avoid them. As long as meat tastes better than its alternatives, people will use it. We need to bring good meat alternatives to the masses. The theoretical advantage that artificial meat has is the lower amount of resources needed. Over time, because of this it can get much cheaper than real meat, at least if you don't factor in skewing of the market due to government subsidies. Then, if they truly have comparable tastes, people will naturally choose those alternatives.
This seems like the best strategy: If you force people to become vegan by law without giving good alternatives, you just make them angry at people who want to stop climate change. If you nicely ask them, some will switch but most won't. So I believe the best way forward is to invest into meat alternative startups and help them make their product as widely used and as cheap as possible.
Our studies have shown, that about 10% are first movers (willing to give up benefits, to become climate friendly eaters) and 80% will go with the default when it is acceptable. The last 10% would still need to be coerced actively by some kind of restriction.
10% is a lot. It's enough to swing an election. And no idea what the 80% would think. Also, I'm interested in global solutions, not ones that are effective in one country only. Globally, there are varying degrees of support for fighting climate change. Especially third world countries want growth and say it's the responsibility of developed economies to fight it because we have polluted so much historically. The goal is to make it impossible for Bolsonaro to sell his meat to any country in the world.
How about we make it impossible for Trump or Merkel or Abe or Xi Jinping to sell their coal-powered production to any country in the world?
The question is rhetorical and is meant to show that 1) this proposal is not a “global solution”, as punishing a single country would hardly make any difference; and 2) you’re personifying a country’s exports, associating them to an administration you disagree ideologically with, to make it sound evil, and that is not rational nor productive.
I just meant Bolsonaro as an example. Part of the goals of his government is to expand the meat industry and people in that industry love him. This has nothing to do with disagreeing or not disagreeing with him.
TL;DR: In my opinion meat analogues will not convert meat-eaters to vegetarians, problem is that switching to vegetarian diet requires rather big cultural change on our eating traditions.
I hear where are you coming from, though IMHO it's a problem with lack of knowledge/tradition/culture of producing vegetarian/vegan meals.
If you would say that you're vegetarian to my grandparents, they'd imagine that you eat vegetable salad all the time, with occasional baked potatoes for hot meal, they cannot imagine a meatless meal.
From my experience people tend to think that there must be a 1 to 1 replacement for meat foods: steaks, sausages, cutlets, burgers, meatballs, etc.
IMHO usually great vegetarian dishes (tasty, easy to make, not expensive, etc.) are mostly different set from meat dishes. It requires a cultural shift, which is insanely hard to change in general western population, where it's common and expected to have ham/bacon sandwich for breakfast, meatballs and spaghetti for lunch, steak for dinner, and beef burger or ribs on a bbq on a weekend.
You need a completely different set of dishes to change that meat eating tradition and IMO tofu sausages, cheap soy steaks and other meat analogues will not convert meat-eaters to vegetarians (fingers crossed for Impossible meat projects to change that).
> The theoretical advantage that artificial meat has is the lower amount of resources needed. Over time, because of this it can get much cheaper than real meat, at least if you don't factor in skewing of the market due to government subsidies.
Subsidies are really skewing prices of animal vs plant based products.
Where I am from pork is around 5-6€/kg, chicken 3.5-5€/kg, beef 10-30€/kg, milk 0.5-1€/l.
There is no substantial price difference (mostly), which is spectacular to me. How it's possible to sell 1 kilo of chicken breast for 3.5€ is spectacular to me, when freaking beans cost around 3-4€/kg. How do they grow that chicken, when it's clear as a day that it requires probably an order of magnitude more resources compared to growing beans. I wouldn't even go how government is bending backwards for milk producers with tax incentives to keep prices "competitive", and I have no idea how pork is not 20-50€/kg, when every other year there's some disease, which requires to kill and destroy all pigs in farms in 500km radius.
> You need a completely different set of dishes to change that meat eating tradition and IMO tofu sausages, cheap soy steaks and other meat analogues will not convert meat-eaters to vegetarians (fingers crossed for Impossible meat projects to change that).
This is exactly what I was reffering to. The current alternatives are not motivating enough for people to switch, but with good meat alternatives like impossible/beyond meat we should see trend changes.
It feels to me that the approach "just change your culture" has been tried out and has mostly failed because most people in the west have not switched. It requires a lot of political/moral conviction for people to switch. Good meat replacements will I think change this and make it easier for people to eat less meat while keeping their culture.
It's interesting that the fate of our existence on this planet and the future of our descendents is all about whether or not we manage to make plant matter tasty enough.
I agree that people think you need meat alternatives because they lack the knowledge of how to make a plant based meal.
I agree with GP that most people don't care what a meatless meal could look like, culturally they just want meat each meal and will only consider an "impossible" substitute.
If we must change our impact on the environment, maybe it doesn't matter that people have a cultural desire to wait on impossible standards for substitutes and to continue harming the environment in the process. I don't know how important it is to change now, but if it critical then I'd be fine with something like rationing meat or some creative ideas towards forcing drastic change.
Also, maybe your grandparents can't imagine meat only once a week, but my grandparents certainly can, not because of current habits but from the great depression. They grew up on farms and had animals but they had more plants and usually ate the plants, only rarely they would slaughter animals for meat. Most meals were plants and that was the most normal thing in the world.
I assume meat at every meal is an extremely recent phenomenon and I think culturally we can easily move on from it, if we take the necessary measures.
Thanks for this well thought out comment. It's sad that it's getting downvoted. I agree that the replacement strategy isn't going to get us anywhere. It's a novelty. It's like people going on fad diets. They'll do it for a few months, feel accomplished, and backslide into their old habits. Going plant-based is a lifestyle change, it's something to own and be proud of, just like having a healthy workout routine.
Meat taste comes mostly from salt and souses. People who tried home-made sausages or grilled meat without any of those complained that it tasted like nothing. The problem with tofu sausages is that one just cannot add that much salt as to meat without making it feel too salty.
That acquired taste can be reset if for 2-4 weeks one avoids any product with added salt or sugar. Then tofu and many other products including plain meat without any additives will taste much better.
This is simply not true. I often it "raw" meat without adding salt or any sauce. There are some meats which taste pretty to close to nothing but this isn't even close to the case for most meats.
There is a famous recipe of winning a cocking competition. Just add more salt and sugar. So for quite a few people that defines a taste. But if for some reasons one do not exposed to that, then I suppose food without salt or sugar tastes normally.
you can repeat it as often as you want, its not true. You're pretending meat is water and doesn't have anything of its own to flavor it, and that's just not true.
You won't convince people by lying to them about the flavor of things you want them to buy. They'll label you a liar and move on.
Something tasting better is not the same thing as the original tasting like nothing. Meat with good seasoning tastes better then no seasoning but that has absolutely nothing to do with you claiming meat tastes like nothing.
Impossible Foods directly disagrees with you (they say it comes from heme) and they have food scientists working for them.
Tofu dogs never taste like meat, ever. If you wait 2-4 weeks you're just creating a new habit, not approximating meat in any way.
Your comment, while potentially a healthy choice, certainly isn't an accurate description of meat taste. And meat eaters everywhere can recognize this because we have all tried the other products and it doesn't taste close, even after 2-4 weeks.
"Combining isotopic evidence from ground surface measurements with the newly calculated fire emissions, the team showed that about 17 teragrams per year of the increase is due to fossil fuels, another 12 is from wetlands or rice farming, while fires are decreasing by about 4 teragrams per year. The three numbers combine to 25 teragrams a year -- the same as the observed increase"[1]
The 'cows farting' story is not a major methane source.
I don't have a source at hand, so grain of salt and all that... I read somewhere that grass-fed cows also produce a lot less methane than corn-fed cows.
What you're citing here is numbers for previously unexplained emissions, not total emissions.
I.e. there was major uncertainty that scientists were measuring more methane than they expected, and these scientists tried to figure out where it comes from.
The only thing your argument says is that for methane emissions from meat production apparently scientists had a pretty good idea about the numbers.
From the article: “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”
For the most part I now only eat meat, eggs, cheese, some nuts, and non-starchy vegetables. Mostly meat, and mostly very fatty meat like Pork belly. At 40 years old i've never been healthier as an adult - I don't buy the argument that meat is bad for you.
I believe the government already has the right and power to control what people eat. People form the government, and people (ideally) choose the people to hold that power.
In part I, too have the right to control what people eat through voting.
There’s an established precedent in (American) law that it’s generally okay to forbid an action but it’s not okay to mandate an action. For example, you can stop people from driving without a license, but you can’t make everyone get a license.
Yeah, and that’s part of why it was so controversial. On top of that, op seemed to be suggesting making it illegal - as in go to jail - not having a penalty, which is substantially different.
If it damages the world or society, then why not? Would you say that I have the right to eat pets? Humans? Animals (or plants) that are on the brink of extinction?
There are plenty of valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat.
By pets what do you mean? Is it ethical for me to have a cat, when cats are obligate carnivores that not only have to eat meat but also independently kill billions of birds a year? Is it not okay for me to eat a chicken but it's perfectly ok to own a python or boa and feed it live mice?
Cows are not killing the planet. They are one of the few things you can raise that doesn't require pesticides or chemical fertilizers. They and other ruminants are important parts of grassland ecosystems.
The megafauna that existed on planet Earth just 200, 500, and 12,000 years ago were far more numerous than the number of livestock cows today.
This reductionist mindset about the environment that doesn't even attempt to quantify trade offs or factor for the important role livestock plays in crop production is beyond tiresome.
We also happen to need meat for healthy brain function. We need lots of Omega-3 fatty acids the kind that animal foods only provide and plants are not as healthy as they're made out to be. They have tons of oxalates, phytic acids, and inflammatory agents that harm human health in large doses. Not to mention the absurd amount of carbs we already consume from plant based foods.
> This reductionist mindset about the environment that doesn't even attempt to quantify trade offs or factor for the important role livestock plays in crop production is beyond tiresome.
I'm not the one who wrote the UN report on climate change that recommends reducing meat consumption. Maybe take it up with the UN instead.
> Not to mention the absurd amount of carbs we already consume from plant based foods.
Speak for yourself. I eat a plant-heavy low-carb diet (I do eat fish, eggs and meat too).
But... you're not replying to what I was saying and that is that there are perfectly valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat. I didn't say anything about not eating cows or whatever, you took my comment out of context, which was simply "There are plenty of valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat." The first paragraph was simply giving examples of reasons that various people might have to do so.
Uhhh.. the person implied that I was saying cows are killing the planet, I simply stated that I never said that, the UN did, so take it up with them instead of me. Why are you are you taking what I said out of context?
> Name one.
Are you just replying without reading the thread? My very first message named a few. I never said they were good reasons, but they are reasons nonetheless.
> Cows are not killing the planet. They are one of the few things you can raise that doesn't require pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
True in theory. Not in practice. Unfortunately most beef we eat doesn't come from grass fed animals. And if we were to convert the entire industry to grassing only, we wouldn't have enough land to produce the same quantity of meat. Which would imply exactly reduced meat consumption.
Yes it does. Beef cows spend the majority of their lives in pasture. Very little of it is spent on a feed yard. It's not even always profitable to send a beef cow to a feed yard for finishing so it's not always done. Even there, most of their diet is a mix of hay and grain. Think of it, grass is free while grain must be paid for, so it doesn't even make economic sense. The manure collected and composted at feed yards serve as fertilizer for crops. And no, we don't eat enough meat. We are eating way too many carbs and artificial foods that are destroying our health. Meat is one of the healthiest things you can eat.
>Is it ethical for me to have a cat, when cats are obligate carnivores that not only have to eat meat but also independently kill billions of birds a year?
Properly-kept housecats stay inside and don't kill any birds. I suspect the vast majority of those bird deaths are caused by feral cats, not pets (though of course, most ferals probably are or descend from pets that were abandoned or escaped). Our society could be doing a better job with dealing with feral animals like this, because they are bad for ecosystems; they're basically invasive predators.
Bird-killing aside, the environmental impact of pets is actually pretty staggering. It's probably worse for dogs too, since they're much larger animals on average.
>The megafauna that existed on planet Earth just 200, 500, and 12,000 years ago were far more numerous than the number of livestock cows today.
Citation needed. Yes, there were millions of buffalo on the American plains 1000+ years ago, but a quick Google search shows there's over 94 million cows in America today. Also, from what I've read, there are more plains now than in the past, because forests were destroyed by humans to make grasslands.
It's depends on which society. It certainly damage the society who perfer to eat meat.
Right is something that you or someone else has to fight for it. If you prefer to eat meat you have to fight for your right, likewise with the non meat eater.
You can't legally eat the meat of other humans in most (all? not sure) countries. You're not allowed to buy the meat of certain animals in certain countries, due to cultural norms (dogs) or due to protection of certain species.
It's an absolutely normal thing that laws regulate or forbid things that have negative effects on society.
Outlawing meat and depriving us life's finest pleasures (eating delicious, succulent meat) would have catastrophic effects on society.
It would wreck havoc on low income people, obliterate all the great meat heavy cuisine of the many immigrants across the USA and Europe, and turn us into weak, dispirited, sanctimonious saps.
That's not entirely true - veganism has made massive strides in the last few years simply because more information is becoming available about the environmental, ethical and (arguably) health issues surrounding our heavy meat consumption.
Millions of people are already voluntarily reducing their consumption and now virtually every restaurant in the UK has vegan options, making it easier for more people to switch.
I live in the outskirts of a relatively small, low-income industrial city and there are signs outside small shops and restaurants everywhere promoting their new vegan menus. A traditional pub near me has no fewer than 14(!) plant-based main courses.
I'd love to see tax incentives that reflect the damage that the meat and dairy industry are doing (ending the massive government subsidies would be a good start), however the changes I've seen in the UK give me hope that the grassroots level can sway public opinion without forcing people to change via legislation.
Local perception versus global reality: Meat consumption is still growing.
This can easily get clouded if you live in a place where you feel a new vegan place opens all the time. But this is very unevenly distributed. The UK is a place where vegan eating is strong, likewise Germany, Sweden and certainly a few other places. But even in very similar countries also in middle Europe - e.g. Denmark, France - vegetarianism is still very unusual.
Informing people might work for some [0]. That's how I reduced my consumption by 90%. If you truly want to do good and people are able to inform you that X is bad then you'll do your best to stop doing X.
Also, good meat is expensive and cheap meat taste like shit so it's a good move for your wallet.
[0] growing amount of people saying "I want to fight climate change but can't do anything myself"
Never going to happen without leadership to force people to change. People are too stuck in their ways, even though meat agriculture is terrible for these reasons:
- antibiotic resistance
- air, water and soil pollution
- climate change
- inefficient calorie, phosphorus and land utilization
- pandemic evolution
- and of course cruelty to animals
Eating meat is a choice to doom yourself, everyone else and the planet. No amount of gradual incrementalism, hand-wringing incentives or rationalizations/self-delusions can substitute for vital action.
A matter of philosophy. Which is more important: the continuation of civilized human society, or democratic ideals?
Personally, I'm not actually sure. The human race, like all things, is ultimately doomed so surely some consideration for values outside those of mere survival is necessary.
Whenever I worry about someone bioengineering a plague for humans to save the planet, the pragmatist in me realizes they could just do the same against cows and only end up being remembered as half evil.
> I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely.
Illuminating the moral quandary of meat consumption helps. It worked for me. Nobody had to ask me nicely, they just needed to help me to think about it and be self-reflective.
Even if you believe there to be ethical meat consumption (a notion I find dubious in modern life), people can reduce consumption and have a big impact. Modern commercial meat and dairy production is a horrible process and most people are so insulated from it that you get used to thinking meat is just this product that comes from a factory.
> Nobody had to ask me nicely, they just needed to help me to think about it and be self-reflective.
My theory is that you have to be ready / have to already, deep down, made that decision and then just needed a little push. Since this is a major topic in many societies with vegetarians and vegans proselytizing, I doubt that the majority of meat eaters aren't aware - they just don't come to the same conclusions or like it too much to quit.
But most people don't see a general ethical issue with eating meat. We are omnivores after all. Hell, our hunter gatherer ancestors ate more meat than we do. Though, higher quality. It's the same with seeing a wolf eat a deer. Think they care? Same with a chimp finally catching a monkey and eating it (now those are horrifying videos to see, especially since chimps love eating monkeys). Snake to a mouse. Fox to a hare. Cat to a bird. Shark to a seal. Cheetah to a gazelle. Osprey to a fish. At that, a lot of herbivores also kill and eat other animals (ground nesting birds being the popular victim). Mostly for the calcium in their bones. But still.
But if broccoli could scream would you stop eating it? Circle of life. Just the way it is.
However I do agree, there are a lot of commercial farming practices that need to be ended. Even if it means higher prices.
A lot of people have a problem with eating dog meat.
Wolves that eat deer don't also breed them to the point where they contribute to climate change. Hunter gatherer folk don't breed them to a point where they are a significant factor in climate change.
As carnivores wolves don't really have a choice to not eat meat. You do, though. With a couple of different choices at the supermarket or simply ordering different choices on the menu, you can help cut down our global emissions.
Though I don't think it should be illegal unless slaughtering other animals is illegal too. I think our disgust with the idea of slaughtering dogs highlights our arbitrary ethical inconsistencies when it comes to eating meat.
To be fair, a lot of western civilizations consider dogs to be a higher life form than people.
Hunter gatherers ended up doing that once they figured it out. Civilization didn't magical come about. Hunter gatherers decided to start animal husbandry as a way to keep a surplus food supply. Then they became "civilized".
I heard that choice arguement before. No. I've done the vegan diet for about 1.5 years. That's when depression, anxiety, bone and muscle problems popped up. My bloodwork was shit and I felt like doom and gloom. I snuck off from my girlfriend, who forced me into it, with a friend and he peer pressured me to drink a glass of milk and eat a steak. I did shit myself silly that night, but it felt like I was actually awake and the brain fog was gone. We broke up a few months later because I made a lovely red thai curry with murdered chicken instead of tofu.
By the way, look up how many ground nesting birds and rabbits die during grain and soybean harvesting. Those combines are just pure murder.
Don't you think the current age of high depression and high anxiety is oddly correlated to the recent rise of "meat bad, tofu good", is a bit interesting? So no, I don't have a choice. From personal experience. Difference is, I never made existential excuses for the depression, anxiety, fatigue and brain fog. I did it for tail...which really wasn't worth it.
> By the way, look up how many ground nesting birds and rabbits die during grain and soybean harvesting. Those combines are just pure murder.
Most soybeans grown are consumed by livestock [0]. A lot of wheat is also fed to livestock [1]. We'd need a lot less if we as humans ate it directly instead of eating the animals that eat it.
I don't know what your diet was like, but this is not my experience (7 years in), and it is the position of the American Dietetic Association that vegan diets, when planned well, are healthy [2].
Now, let's say that even with good planning, you are still unhealthy on a vegan diet. That does not mean you couldn't be healthy on a vegetarian diet, or a diet that has drastically reduced meat consumption. The less meat we eat, the better for the environment.
If all fruits and vegetables screamed and all animals scream, what would you eat?
If you're going to say starve to death, ha! The one thing westerners underestimate is starving and what it does to you. See how long you can go without eating. I've done a 5 day fast, with intents for a 10 day. Yes, I failed on that.
Take a wild guess what you crave the most. And it ain't plant fiber. Its muscle fiber. We live in the land of plenty that allows choices. Part of the exact problem we are running into. It's easy to say meat bad when you get fruits, veg and grain imported to you. Stuff you didn't really work to get. Because, out of personal experience, farming is hard ass work. And I dare anyone to try zero emissions large scale farming. Grab a scythe and harvest grain. Have fun with that.
What I'm getting to, it's always been a fact of life. It takes less effort to raise pigs and live off their flesh than it is to take care of a few acres of grain, veg and fruit.
What I can't stand, people not in the agriculture business or lifestyle pretending to be the ultimate authority. Grow all your own food, then you can have an opinion. Until then, don't pretend like you know what you're talking about. It's easy for anyone to wave their hand and say "everyone should live in this method because I say so".
"But if I spend all my time farming, I wont have time to do xyz"
Yea, that's the reason why our farming systems are as they are.
How would you survive if everything eadible could scream? Also, not sure why the screaming part is important. Plants are alive, too and they do feel pain. They just can't express this, similar to autists.
> How would you survive if everything eadible could scream?
That would certainly change the conversation. But given that there is dubious support for plants "feeling" pain in a sentient way, I don't see much reason to entertain it.
That said, my diet is mostly fruit, nuts and seeds anyway.
You'd still choose plants, because otherwise you're eating animals that themselves must feed on plants. Even from a coldly mathematical perspective you cause less suffering eating plants than animals.
> While i understand it sucks for you but for many people factory including me, factory farming is awesome and animal suffering is not important at all.
A rapist could make a similar case about how awesome the vagina feels. That the woman doesn't like it is not all that important. If you think about it, it's just some body parts touching, women really blow it out of proportion. And hey, animals do it. Why should the government limit my freedoms?
For some reason, meat consumption (i.e. slaughtering, factory farming, etc.) is one of the only topics where it's more or less socially acceptable to say "well, I like it, and that's all I care about. Ethics are personal btw."
Sadly, I think the only thing that will make a big impact in changing people's consumption will be related to antibiotic resistant mass-contamination events.
A few back to back meat recalls in the US got me to try vegetarianism 8 years ago. The animal welfare element only developed after I started learning about the new diet I was on.
It also helps to promote stories of very healthy vegetarians (especially pro athletes). My favorites were Carl Lewis, Herschel Walker, and Venus Williams. There are many more out there.
The key is to find decent, not too complex recipes. Dropping a slab of meat on the grill is so easy and results in such a tasty primary component of a meal; but making an interesting vegetarian meal requires more effort (at first). Once you know some good recipes, you get to the point where the only time you miss meat is when you're at a festival and you smell barbeque :).
Absolutely! I think you hit the nail on the head. I went to an Israeli restaurant the other day, and (I'm guessing?) all the meat was kosher (read: expensive). Their menu prices seemed to be exactly how they should be. Vegetarian options were in the ~$7 range, and meat dishes were in the $35 range. This kind of pricing still makes meat dishes accessible to anyone that wants them, but gently nudges behavior in a more sustainable direction.
I hate when I go to Qdoba and the same bowl with Impossible meat is $9.99, while beef or chicken is $7.99. So now I have to pay more and eat less healthy?
Nutritionists vary on the following aspects, as the research isn't definitive, so I'm not going to give an opinion, just list the facts: the new meat alternatives have less protein, more sodium, more carbs, and more saturated fat. Take that as you will.
That's a good idea, but eating less meat is even better, because that can reduce 8Gt CO2/yr. Banning private jets would not reduce 8Gt CO2/yr. It is important to be quantitative here.
Sorry, but this is really cheap criticism that detracts from the main point. Of course, their private jets (if they have them) should be banned, sure. But this is an invisible blip on the radar compared to the climate impact of the meat industry (or air travel in general).
Such messages only cause people to postpone the need to take real action. And we need to take real action now if we even want a chance to dampen the effects of climate change (let alone reverse it).
No one is taking your meat away. The most plausible implementation is to make meat slightly more expensive. People do respond to incentives. People with strong meat preference (like you seem to be) can continue to eat meat, but people with marginal meat preference will switch.
While the aviation industry, and as you point out low capacity flights in particular, is a major perpetrator for high CO2 emissions, the food industry is the number one area where your average consumer can make a big impact.
I agree with you that governing bodies should be putting more pressure on the excesses of the wealthy and on industry, but changing industry practices and consumer behaviour are not mutually exclusive, especially when we should be doing everything we can on all fronts to overcome this crisis.
Why? The emissions of a few individuals can be far higher than sustainable and it can still give a net-positive effect when their influence on society is great enough.
If their higher emissions aren't at least indirectly necessary for their high influence on society, then while it may be sustainable and net-positive, it isn't necessary justifiable because better options exist.
People with a "high influence on society," however that's measured, can't just do whatever they want because their existence is still net-positive.
Yes, I know they're work related. I'm raising the point that the emissions may or may not be necessary for their positive influence on society. For instance, I think we'd have a hard time substantiating a claim that people only use private jets when the added productivity (or satisfaction, comfort, etc.) increases their positive influence by an amount proportional to the extra emissions of their private jet flight compared to a normal commercial passenger flight.
In fact your defensive reaction is much more representative of the problem: that people find it so hard to accept that in order to avoid their children's lives being significantly worse than the lives we enjoy today, they may have give up a few fking burgers
I'm doubtful that much change can come from personal choices made by consumers. It seems to me that it would require tremendous energy and commitment from a very large number of people to significantly reduce the global demand. It seems to me that it's much more effective to raise the price or to reduce the supply (something like quotas or cap-and-trade).
Can anyone point me to examples where my thinking is wrong, where changes came from the demand side?
Changing the demand side is fundamentally what marketing does. It’s how Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola and any big worldwide brand came into existence, by convincing consumers to choose their product over the alternative.
Well, boycotts are a pretty good example. Those seem to change corporate behavior pretty frequently actually. That being said, i'm very skeptical of this type of demand-side strategy, in this particular area.
You would need to get a large part of the global population to do it though, say 50%. And the prices for meat would go down, so you would need to convince the other half of the population not to increase their consumption.
Meat is disproportionately consumed in western countries, so, even a change only in those countries would have a big impact. Eg, China consumes half the meat per person of the US, and India just 5%.
As far as China goes that’s purely because it’s not all at first world levels of consumption yet. In any coastal city where people are roughly as prosperous as Poles or Romanians people eat first world amounts of meat. And telling people they can’t eat meat will not garner support for the government, whether in India, China, Indonesia or any other developing nation. Not eating meat is either an ethical or a religious stance and on a global level the ethical stance is marginal. People who can afford to eat meat do, and do so regularly.
The Chinese could become more environmentally conscious when climate change will become an even more serious problem for them. In the meantime, starting to cut consumption on our end is still useful, and would give us a much better stance if at some point we'll have to negotiate reductions on their part.
It's not quite that simple though. China has 4x the people as the US, so even consuming half as much meat per person, they'd still consume twice as much meat.
Isn’t the face of the earth mostly shaped by our consumer choices (including where you put you pension and savings). Everything else (like military, etc.) does only contribute minor. Who else if not us?
I think I agree, though personally (not as a counterexample), this only targets the environmental aspect of avoiding meat and leaves behind the ethical decision around animal consumption to some degree. While reducing subsidies and other benefits would go a long way here as well, there are still some animal byproducts that have a relatively low ecological footprint and effecting changes to these through legislation still seems premature and heavy-handed in the current political climate in most any country.
It seems to me that for those considerations, bringing new perspectives to consumers to try and influence their choices at the store is one of the only practical options for now.
This is exactly what is proposed. "It would be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect". "Appropriate incentives" is a policy, "less meat consumption" is simply the result.
A lot of people seem to equate this to “they’re telling me to stop eating meat” and then fail to do anything: really, anything you do helps. Eat meat with every meal? Try skipping it for breakfast. Eat it every week? Try every other week. Nobody’s asking you to stop completely, at least not yet. (But if you want to, go right ahead!)
The difference is that you don't consume butter in 250g quanities in a single sitting. Even if butter is worse the consumption patterns for butter are not those of beef.
Yes that is the point. If you account for calories, proteins and fats (as essential nutrients next to let’s say water and dry weight), butter doesn’t look that bad. It is still worse than average, so - check: app.eaternity.ch
Commonly and economic allocation is done. Each food is attributed those emissions to the share they have caused it by the money that was spend for it by the consumer. The question is: why was there a additional cow in the first place. Part of it was the butter.
I've replaced butter with margarine in a lot of cases since I just didn't taste a difference when having it under something hearty and tasty. Easy win.
I have become an 80% vegetarian - meaning I try to avoid meat completely, but I am not "strong" enough and end up eating a (usually small) piece of meat, once every week/second week.
It took me at least one year to achieve this, because meat is so prevalent in our society. A friend of mine was in India recently and he said he did not miss meat at all since the non-meat dishes were so great. I think a lot of it is just how good the quality of vegetarian dishes is.
I'm similar. Only eat meat if I go out at weekends or if there's some left over that needs to get used up. My wife and I almost entirely cook for ourselves and it's pretty easy to make nice vegetarian meals. I do a fair amount of weightlifting and like to get the protein in - quorn, soy, tofu, lentils and eggs are key. I also supplement daily with whey protein shakes and creatine. It's a bit of a hassle and sometimes I find myself dying for a nice bit of lamb or steak, otoh it's good to pay this level of attention to one's diet.
Yes, living in Berlin I feel spoiled. When I was in South Korea, most of the time there was nothing vegetarian on the menu, in Berlin you have multiple vegan options and even more vegetarian options.
I believe restaurant options are very important since people learn from those and mimic them at home. We need restaurants to offer more vegetarian and vegan dishes for people to see that they can have a rich (IMHO richer) diet without meat.
I don’t know how to nudge the restaurants though. Lower tax on organic/sustainable food can be one thing, or even better subventions for such restaurants and produce. But most importantly the meat and dairy industry needs to get under real supervision. Governments all around the world have been looking away for far too long.
> I don’t know how to nudge the restaurants though
Visit and ask for vegetarian or vegan dishes. Move on if there is nothing worthwhile; let the staff know if you've liked a particular dish or find the selection too limiting. Demand drives supply.
In the Netherlands the vegetarian option used to be a boring salad with goat cheese. Nowadays not having decent meat-free options means you can't compete with the rest. This is something only the cheaper restaurants aimed at lower socio-economic classes can afford to do (but only for now). The reason for this discrepancy is that this class of people (mostly blue collar workers and their families) tends to lag behind the rest of society a bit as habits shift towards more healthy alternatives (smoking is another example).
Years ago i remember someone making a joke that the best way to promote veganism was to only buy vegan products at Aldi. The point was to avoid this kind of bourgeois trickle down veganism.
It was interesting to me leaving Europe and coming to China. In upper class restaurants here, they put meat in everything, even as a "seasoning" in veg dishes. I think it's seen as an indicator of wealth. At working class restaurants the cheapest dishes are all veg, or have only the barest scraping of ground pork or bone stock. I much prefer to eat out here than i did in Europe (and definitely the North America) where meat and dairy tends to be the default option for blue collar grub. I still don't really understand how that works, economically.
In sweden this is called being a Stockholm vegetarian, and it's very much a thing. I know a bunch of people like you, and they all claim that the hardest thing is to not just go "fuck it" and eat meat like they did before.
That’s funny, because I don’t enjoy meat as much as before any more. Before I couldn’t imagine a life without meat. Now, every time I eat it I feel less satisfied. I don’t I ever go back. But who knows.
I saw a quote I liked recently (on a different topic but applies here too): We don't need a few hundred thousand perfect vegetarians, we need billions of imperfect ones.
The UN doesn't have the guts to target the task issue: too many humans. And recommend the only solution: one child per couple until we get down to about half the current population.
1. Not really, the richest x% own and run the companies, and can spend more, but the mass of consumers of the products are spread across the wealth spectrum.
2. The idea to reduce the population based on some metric is a dangerous road to go down on.
3. By definition there will always be a richest 10% regardless of how many humans you get rid of.
> almost all emissions are caused by the richest 10%
I found this: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region but it does not talk about individuals, only countries and regions; it finds that "the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions". According to the graph, 16% of world population in high-income countries are responsible for 38% of global CO2. The richer 51 of the world population cause 86%. I don't think this squares with your statement, even if both "almost all" and "10%" were hyperbole.
Didn't work in China. It actually causes a massive "aging population" crisis, some serious gender imbalances, and some weird economic effects throughout the stack.
I mean, if you must be a film and TV dystopian bad guy, Thanos' idea doesn't work.
Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway.
Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in developing countries along with improving medical services to cut infant mortality (so that parents can be sure their young will reach old age and don't need to play it safe and have many young).
We are getting there slowly, but we could do more.
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
> The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
It is really sad that nothing is done to reduce overpopulation.
Even if the whole world stopped eating meat, by 2050 when the world population will get close to 10 milliards we would produce as much CO2 as now.
All the measures that we could take to reduce the personal impact will just delay the inevitable.
I am excited about the work Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are doing in this space. Creating alternatives with same nutrient content and similar taste but 1/10th the land usage and consuming less of other resources.
Considering the links between meat consumption and heart disease, one would think that you should be more excited that the nutrient content isn't the same.
beyond meat doesn't seem to be doing anything interesting aside from having a slightly better burger recipe than the last guy.
As far as I can tell they've cashed in on the buzz generated by impossible foods, who genetically engineered yeast to produce a plant heme so their meatless meat products taste and cook more like meat.
Beyond Meat just appears to have come to market first, and such gotten more attention. I've tried it a couple times, it was just ok, and not much better than most other decent veggie burger patties. Not groundbreaking and not worth more money than any others.
I haven't tried impossible foods yet. Looking for them.
Impossible burgers aren't available to consumers. IMO Beyond isn't quite as good, but I can get it at the grocery store, and it's still much closer to the real thing than any veggie burgers I've tried other than Impossible. Note that that's not necessarily better than other veggie burgers, just closer to beef. IMO Impossible is even still closer to beef, and also the best burger I've ever had.
Impossible burgers being slower to market did allow beyond meat to cash in, as I said,but impossible burger has an interesting product with the yeast sourced heme.
As I said, beyond is just a veggie burger with a slightly better recipe than the last guy, cashing in on the buzz impossible created before they could come to market.
And now wonder - impossible had a novel product. Beyond has a veggie burger.
I read somewhere that the one meat free day a week initative is laughable and we should really be aiming for one meat day a week. Personally I've switched to a mostly vegetarian diet in the past few years and when I do eat meat it's good high quality meat.
Meat consumption seems like one of the easiest things governments could change to tackle climate change. Unlike cars and travel it's hard to make the argument that humans depend on access to meat so making it 700% more expensive via tax would effectively shift consumption patterns with few if any downsides. If anything it would probably have the excellect side effect of improving public health.
Unlike cars and travel it's hard to make the argument that humans depend on access to meat so making it 700% more expensive via tax would effectively shift consumption patterns with few if any downsides.
The problem is that no politician (perhaps outside green parties) wants to do this, because of the fear of becoming unpopular. We simultaneously need a shift in people's attitudes towards meat.
I have been a vegetarian since I was 17 (I am 37 now). It has always fascinated me that becoming a vegetarian was only very little effort, but somehow people are extremely attached to meat. I never talk about being a vegetarian, but when people find out that I am a vegetarian, they often acts as being offended and having to defend themselves.
We need to show people that there is a middle way where you can still eat meat (e.g. maybe once a week) but still drastically decrease their footprint.
This is the unfortunate truth and it's particularly bad beause the rich western countries that contribute the most to climate change will, in many instances, be the last to feel the effects. This in combination with decmoractic elections has the consequence that iniatives aimed at tackling climate change, all of which will have a negative impact on people's lives(percieved or not), will never be viable politics for any politcian who wants to stay in office.
That's to be expected with increasing wealth in those countries and while I said a lot of western countries need to make adjustment it's also true for growing economies like China and Indias as well.
Government won’t touch it directly - they’d get smashed by meat lobbyists. In Australia, the lamb industry is an aggressive advertiser. Zero chance beef lets it happen in the US. Has to come from other cost pressures. Let steak become even more of a special occasion thing because people can’t afford it all the time.
I personally used to be very concerned about ressource efficiency. With a new doomsday message every day, I decided to make most out of my resources now until some eco-shmock is going to make it unavailable for me. I fly all the time and eat as good as I can. Maybe tomorrow it will be only a memory but that’s more than making a big trip other year and then nothing.
Edit: BTW, this is not trolling. I represent a real niche group with an unknown number of people behaving consciously or unconsciously the same. I think it’s an important information in the discussion. People downvote me because they don’t like that it is happening but it’s real.
It’s like downvoting climate change because you don’t like it happening.
Edit: Rebuilder, that’s a good question. What would change my behavior? I think positive role models could help. Leaders that say we restrict ourselves to meat once a week or even better: here is my CO2 footprint (and please no offsetting bullshit). That’s how it developed over the last 2 years. Etc.
Well, so far I have no kids. My impact on the planet seems to be very temporarily and the damage I do will be forgotten in a hundred years. If I have 1.4 kids (my expected number of kids), it will take a bit longer but still damage is decreasing at fixed resource consumption per person.
Don't get me wrong but I assume your influence is negligible compared to Al Gore's. His work or actions might cause more emissions directly than the average person's but because of his reach and mission, it will be offset at other places (e.g. because three people think twice if they really want to visit their unpopular in-laws over Christmas)
That’s okay. So if he serves as a bad example for me and inspires three others for me to behave well then I can expect to be forgiven too. Overall his effect is still positive and I’m not responsible for my actions. Al Gore is. Or does only his positive contribution get counted?
Can you think of anything that would get you to change your behaviour?
Personally, I think the climate crisis is a great opportunity to give meaning to the lives of everyone alive now, by making survival a great project for our entire societies. A lot of consumption now is, IMO, filling the void of having meaningful long-term goals we can each work to achieve.
Well, that is why it so important that we have the IPCC, and now this special report. Food causes 25-30% of human made GHG emissions. Large part for deforestation, Methan emissions of ruminants and animal feed. Without including the transportation, packaging, etc. in the calculation it is still 23%.
As you can read in chapter 5 of the report.
It’s also worth pointing out that even if you don’t want to reduce the amount of meat you eat, changing the type of meat can have big effects. For example (and ignoring transport to the consumer), lamb produces about 35 kg CO₂ per kg of meat, beef 25kg CO₂ / kg, pork and farmed salmon 8kg CO₂ / kg and chicken 4kg CO₂ / kg.
Yeah chicken is the best farmed animal on CO₂. They burn less themselves because they can cuddle and have it warm. And don’t need to run around. ... in their small cages
As already mentioned in another discussion, the ratio they use for farmed fish is "where the first number is the mass of harvested fish used to feed farmed fish, and the second number is the mass of the resulting farmed fish".
Which makes it much less positive than it first appears.
> makes it much less positive than it first appears.
Take in mind that fish food for aquaculture has a small percentage of plant proteins and oils also. Is unclear if this was included or not in the claimed FIFO ratio, so some of this fish could be really soy (or maybe not). Reality is always more complex than a single numerical value.
this suggests taxing meat as a function of CO2 production, as opposed to price taxation. This would automatically reward local production (the same additional tax for an imported cheaper meat as for a local but more expensive meat, hits the cheaper one harder)
Thank you. Is there a reliable place I can find this information? I have anecdotally been much healthier after incorporating more protein, particularly whole meat (rather than isolated protein) into my diet - fewer illnesses, faster recovery time, better gut health, etc.
How about we don't change the diet but change where the food comes from?
When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are the ones associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
Pastured animals, by definition, don't eat feed coming from the monoculture industrial agriculture that is depleting the soil and consuming all those resources, and which is also used to feed humans, sadly.
> When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
Yes, you are right. I have conveyed my point only half-way and I apologize.
What I meant is that methane is known to have a bigger heating effect than other greenhouse gases, like x28 that of CO2 if I recall correctly. This is used as part of the anti-ruminant argument, when comparing the effect of methane expelled by animals to the rest of greenhouse gas emissions.
However, if you take into account the reduced lifespan, that 28-time increase is definitely less relevant.
> Methane in the Earth's atmosphere is a strong greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) 104 times greater than CO2 in a 20-year time frame; methane is not as persistent a gas as CO2 and tails off to about GWP of 28 for a 100-year time frame
And once you take positive feedbacks into account additional emissions can be problematic even within "short" timeframes.
No matter what you feed them, compared to other livestock animals cows are a fairly inefficient at turning feed into meat, meaning you need to dedicate more land to agriculture when it could be forest instead and thus a better carbon sink.
> There are, as far as I know, regions where the soil is only capable of growing pasture, hard to plant trees in.
I assume that those areas would not be sufficient to cover current meat and dairy demands. If they were there wouldn't be any deforestation or soy fields for animal feed. And non-grazed grasslands is still going to release less methane than grazed lands.
Regarding deforestation and so on, I think we must also take into account that "industrialized" non-pastured husbandry (is that the correct term?) is probably cheaper and easier than the greener alternative.
Sadly, it's usually a matter of profits and not a matter of environmental friendliness.
More than 90% of a beef cow's body weight comes from pasture land grass and hay.
When's the last time the Midwestern plains area of the United States was forest? Before the beef industry, 50-100 million bison roamed the plains. It turns out that ruminants like bison and cows are essential components of a grassland ecosystem.
Yes it is. They are prey animals and they literally evolved to be prey. Incidentally we also killed off most of the major predators around the world so there are few wolves, saber tooth cats, etc to keep population numbers controlled.
> meaning you need to dedicate more land to agriculture
I don't understand why most people have this wrong idea. In a lot of places, the grazing pastures are naturally occurring, they aren't planted there.
It feels like people want to destroy the natural landscape of countries like Argentina, just because it's now fashionable to say they don't eat meat.
Even goats, everyone goes around claiming they have such an ineficient CO2/Kg meat index. Well, around here, goats are fed almost all the year by going into the forest and cleaning the shrubs and small vegetation there... besides feeding the goats for free, it also cleans the forest for free: something we would have to do otherwise in order to prevent fires in the summer.
You can't produce as much meat from pastured animals as with industrial techniques. If humanity went all-pastured, meat prices would go up, many wouldn't be able to afford as much meat as now, and we would have changed the average person's diet.
This would also create incentives to cut down forests to create more "pasture", and that would be pretty terrible.
Er, the results on that are rather mixed and ambiguous and depend more on other factors; but then again, controlling food production and distribution was the main role of most governments in most of history; it wasn't really until the agricultural revolutions that were a key factor in the feudal economic system starting to be replaced with capitalism that some governments could really afford (even in the short-term) not to make that their primary concern most of the time, and even now and even among advanced liberal Democratic “capitalist” (really, mixed economies) states, guiding food production and distribution remains a major role of government, even if the means used involve markets with government intervention through price controls, production subsidies, consumer (means-tested) subsidies, direct government purchase and distribution, aggressive negotiation of agricultural trade deals, etc., etc., etc., rather than transparent direct state direction.
> controlling food production and distribution was the main role of most governments in most of history;
I would say this is simply wrong. Government often capture food production and use it to enrich themselves. Some historical places certainty had a function in distribution as well but this is not the common case.
The waste majority of history, government were primary involved in food production and distribution beyond capturing as much as possible and distribution it to its own armies.
Most of history food for the most part was produced and consumed fairly locally without much involvement of government.
It's good to see them putting the emphasis on eating less meat rather than cutting it out entirely. I do eat meat but I find myself eating less and less these days as non-meat alternatives become more appealing to me. I also don't eat "cheap" meat as I'm concerned about animal welfare. But I do take offense to vegans telling me that I'm evil because I don't fully embrace their choice of lifestyle and I'm sure most meat-eaters feel the same way.
Not all vegans think like this. I'm a vegetarian, but I really don't think, that I am a better person than meat eater. :)
ETA: btw great job making effort to partly cut out meat from your diet. I myself want to become vegan, but I just can't switch immediately. IMO there is nothing wrong with gradual approach.
Maybe we should also stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry close to 1,000,000,000,000$ yearly.
Not saying we should not eat less meat or anything, just saying there might be more we could be doing if our governments weren't corporate/billionairs puppets mostly.
This report doesn't say you have to give up eating meat. It does say we need to reduce our consumption. This might mean eating meat once a week.
We are eating more meat today (at least in the industralised nations of the "West") than in any other time in human history thanks to intensive farming practices. People seems to think that this is the natural state of affairs and that's how we've always consumed meat. But go back a few decades and meat was never available in such abundance and at such cheap prices.
The ugly truth is we're simply too comfortable in our current lifestyles to make any changes that might challenge that comfort. Whether it's flying less (or even stopping altoghther) or eating less meat, the reaction is always resistance and sometimes even anger and outrage.
I've said this before: we love to point accusatory fingers at others for taking too little action over climate issues but never lift a finger ourselves. Are we all a bunch of hypocrites and simply not willing to admit it?
There are depictions of cows and mention of amazon forest. Could this be about fast food industry ? Also need scales of damage for poultry, swine etc, not sensational articles about going from one extreme to the other. I don't eat much beef but do love steak twice a month, is it alot? I don't think so, mostly have chicken bc it is easier to prepare and it seems to be easier to digest.
at any rate i hope to see some scales for this sort of thing.
Springman, as cited in the report did a lot of calculations around this. He ended up with the minimal requirement for the average earth citizen with one portion of red meat per week. Check his definition of a flexitarien diet.
The real culprit is the uncontrolled population growth but nobody wants to talk about that.
Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now.
Eventually we can all be eating grass and rocks and there'd still be too much demand on nature crated by the existence of humans.
The only real long term solution is start limiting population growth drastically. Any crutch trying to limit energy and material consumption will not solve the root cause. (Ofc it still makes sense to cut off the excess and not be wasteful or a resource hog)
Personally I'd like to have only enough people on this planet, so that everyone can be fed and educated and have access to health care, sanitation and all the basic needs.
> Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now.
This is a very strange assumption as UN Population Division predicts peak population at 12B, that is, the current world population will never double. That is business as usual without any intervention. Do you have specific reasons to disagree with UN Population Division?
The UN Population Division have underestimated population growth for decades and base their projections on the assumption that fertility will converge on a steady state. This is evolotuniariliy illiterate. People who have more children will have children who have more children.
The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
What we are currently seeing in absolute numbers is a huge number of people with a lower growth rate out-reproducing a lower number with a higher growth rate in the past.
Education, available contraceptives, low child mortality (yes, low mortality as that makes having children less of a gamble and therefore you can get away with having fewer) automatically lead to lower fertility rates.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region: "When aggregated in terms of income, we see in the visual below that the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half (low and lower-middle income) only 14%. The very poorest countries (home to 9 percent of the global population) are responsible for just 0.5 percent. This provides a strong indication of the relative sensitivity of global emissions to income versus population. Even several billion additional people in low-income countries — where fertility rates and population growth is already highest — would leave global emissions almost unchanged. 3 or 4 billion low income individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2. At the other end of the distribution however, adding only one billion high income individuals would increase global emissions by almost one-third."
There's a good case to be made for humans being primarily meat eaters for much of our history and only eating plants as an alternative to starving - we certainly haven't had time to evolve to eat a vegetarian diet. Agriculture has only been around for a small fraction of our history and the skeletal record clearly shows how disasterous it was for our health.
The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are backed up by some very poor science and may be seriously unsuitable for humans and for children in particular, nutrition-wise. Animal agriculture is not even a major source of human emissions so to call for changes to our natural diet seems very premature.
I do recommend the studies of the global burden of disease project as an authority for what is healthy [1]
Springman, cited on chapter 5 of the report, goes into depth relying on those evidences for modeling the potential diets. [2]
That is what the IPCC references. Great work, published in nature, peer reviewed and pretty solid science.
Our stomach pH is very low, comparable to carrion eaters and some carnivores.
"It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Our requirements for DHA and B12 indicate a diet rich in both - both found almost exclusively in animal foods
We wean our young for a very short amount of time compared to other apes.
"Our model indicates that carnivory has a specific and quantifiable impact on human development and life history and, crucially, explains why Homo weans so much earlier than the great apes."
Impact of Carnivory on Human Development and Evolution Revealed by a New Unifying Model of Weaning in Mammals
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
We do require B12, but "found almost exclusively in animal foods" leaves out something important. B12 is produced by bacteria, and is found in natural, untreated water sources, as well as dirt. Our bodies are adapted to preserve B12 in a very elaborate way, (because it is a water-soluble vitamin), meaning that we can survive on the trace amounts found in untreated water and the dirt that sticks to vegetables. This is not to say that I'm recommending drinking untreated water or not washing vegetables. Vegans should absolutely supplement.
Like the article says, there's debate over whether this is enough, as the conversion is very inefficient. As I understand it, ALA and LA compete for the same pathway, meaning that excess of LA intake (an omega 6 fatty acid, abundant in nuts and seeds, and of course oils processed from them) will reduce our body's ability to produce DHA, so a human eating prehistoric diet would likely have a better conversion ratio than on a modern diet. Also, there's apparently evidence that if we don't eat a lot of DHA, our bodies convert more of our dietary ALA to it to compensate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20861171
But even taking all this into consideration, I'm not very sympathetic to arguments from nature. There's a big difference between saying "primal humans did X" and saying "modurn humans need to do X to be healthy". Even taking everything you said as given, there's overwhelming evidence that meat consumption is a big factor in for modern chronic health problems like heart disease and cancer. Eating whatever you can get your hands on (meat, eggs, fish, insects) makes sense when you just need enough calories to survive and reproduce, but that's not the problem now. We suffer from diseases of abundance. A plant-based diet with B12 and DHA supplementation is much healthier than an omnivorous one.
From an evolutionary perspective, we have evolved: we use tools and process nearly anything we eat anyway. Plants are the only thing we eat with minimal preparation, and only some of those.
When was the last time you had raw beef? for me, it was beef tartare a few years ago...
Raw grain? Nope, that's all processed, either by boiling, or grinding and turning into something else.
Homo Erectus was thought to have subsisted on raw meat. There's evidence of intestinal parasites that suggests such a diet.
Apparently, at some point, we decided to cook our meat, which reduced the parasite load and removed the need for low pH comparative to other carnivores.
But not too long ago, humans did eat some raw meats. Primitive hunters sometimes ate raw hearts, and drinking fresh blood was not unheard of. 1,000 years ago, the Mongols would sometimes nick their horses and drink blood to sustain them on long journeys.
It's also usually prepared in some way, whether it's flash frozen or treated with vinegar.
But, I guess my point is that the evolutionary argument doesn't really make sense in a world where we evolved tools and have been eating processed food for a long, long time.
Also, evolution happens a lot faster than people give it credit for. Something I read somewhere is that the genes for lactose digestion only started remaining "switched on" in adults like 8,000 years ago, and yet a third of the world now has this gene.
That's a really short time! That's not far from when we develop writing (around 6,000 years ago).
Paleontologists believe that it was the shift from fruits and nuts to a high protein diet of meat that allowed our brains to grow dramatically compared to other primates. We are omnivorous, and our bodies require a certain amount of plant matter ideally, but clearly meat is an integral component of a healthy human diet.
Sounds like a big ol' Paleo-esque Appeal to Nature argument.
> The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are backed up by some very poor science and may be seriously unsuitable for humans and for children in particular, nutrition-wise
Care to provide evidence to back that up? Your broad, evolutionary talking points and observations on stomach pH in your other response hardly backs up your strongly worded supposition.
Plant based diets have been practiced by not insignificant portions of the population beginning in the 6th-century BCE with Buddhism and Hinduism[1]. An estimated 20-40% of India is currently vegetarian[2]. Not sure "fad" is an accurate descriptor.
I'm sure you'd have a hard time refuting the unending amount of "poor science" that shows plant based diets are effective for longevity, treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure[3]. The AICR recommends a plant based diet to prevent cancer[4], and ten other major Nutritional Organizations recognize the health benefits[5].
"It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.
These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes."[5]
>Plant based diets have been practiced by not insignificant portions of the population beginning in the 6th-century BCE with Buddhism and Hinduism. An estimated 20-40% of India is currently vegetarian. Not sure "fad" is an accurate descriptor.
In terms of human history, he's right. 6th-century BCE was not very long ago at all: that's less than a mere 3000 years. Humans have been around for over 2 million years.
Also, he's right about the skeletal record: archaeology shows that humans lost about 1 foot of height when they switched to agriculture. Yes, much of India is vegetarian, but Indians tend to be pretty short, but then when they emigrate to western nations and adopt more western diets, their kids end up dwarfing them.
I am Indian, I am vegan and was brought up vegetarian and I am not short. I am a foot taller than my parents. It has nothing to do with approximating western diets and everything to do with proper nutrition, vegetarian or not.
> everything to do with proper nutrition, vegetarian or not
Exactly. It's like the unending articles that point to negligent "vegan" parents as the cause of child deaths/underdevelopment when they fed them super extreme, restrictive diets that just happen to be able to fit into the rules of veganism. You can get poor nutrition and technically follow the rules of many diets, but that isn't necessarily a reflection on the diets themselves, but on poor nutrition awareness.
> In terms of human history, he's right. 6th-century BCE was not very long ago at all: that's less than a mere 3000 years. Humans have been around for over 2 million years.
3000 years is certainly long enough to take something out of "fad" status. I would challenge you to find another diet that follows specific rules that has been around for longer.
> Also, he's right about the skeletal record: archaeology shows that humans lost about 1 foot of height when they switched to agriculture.
Again - making broad, sweeping evolutionary correlations does not an argument make. You have absolutely no idea what specific shifts in eating, living or working habits resulted in skeletal changes. These are the same weak arguments proponents of the Paleo and Atkins diets make. Could you make a case for dietary changes effecting our evolution at the time? sure. Could you point to vegetarianism as the cause? Good luck with that.
> Yes, much of India is vegetarian, but Indians tend to be pretty short, but then when they emigrate to western nations and adopt more western diets, their kids end up dwarfing them.
Yet again with the generalizations. If we humor this for a moment, there is a much stronger argument for the correlation[3][4][5][6] of poverty levels[1] and height[2] than there is for levels of vegetarianism. In fact, there is data to show the opposite[7][8]. Poor diet in general results in impaired growth, not vegetarianism. I'm not even sure what you could argue would be missing in a vegetarian diet that would effect bone growth as most point to calcium in milk and vegetarians can drink milk...
Drinking milk is a Western thing, and not normal in India. Also, vegans don't drink milk at all; they're morally opposed to using animals products like that (eggs too), so they want to eliminate that as a calcium source.
>Our stomach pH is very low, comparable to carrion eaters and some carnivores.
Hmm... this is how you get into an argument where people talk past each other. You may be correct when it comes to that little nugget of information, but when it comes to the larger context, that piece of information will not make sense to someone who has other contradicting pieces of information. ( for example a vegan who thinks that humans ought to have huge canines to be a carnivore).
Anyway it's unfair of me to critique your style/content of your argument without offering an alternative. How about this?:
Ask the person who is into the 'plant based' belief to conduct an experiment of eating only meat for 2 months and then report the results. i.e if both of you agree that most 'science' and 'research' is flawed. Of course it goes without saying that you too should have performed this experiment on yourself.
Side note - I have been carnivore for 6 years ( 99% of my diet is red meat, eggs and dairy ).
Almost all conventional/industrial agriculture (plant or animal based) is unsustainable due to the external inputs required (70% from fossil fuels for growing corn! [1]), soil depletion incurred [2], and just plain shipping things around. [3]
The alternative is local regenerative agriculture [4], which the Rodale Institute [5] and a recent Quantis (non-peer reviewed) studies [6] point to being potentially carbon net negative due to carbon soil sequestration via regenerative grazing. It also appears to be more economically sustainable [7][8] and can provide competitive yields [8].
For those interested in reading more, I found a couple pretty lengthy (peer-reviewed) academic reviews on the topic to be pretty fascinating:
Teague, W R. “FORAGES AND PASTURES SYMPOSIUM: COVER CROPS IN LIVESTOCK PRODUCTION: WHOLE-SYSTEM APPROACH: Managing Grazing to Restore Soil Health and Farm Livelihoods1.” Journal of Animal Science 96, no. 4 (April 2018): 1519–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skx060.
Pretty, Jules. “Agricultural Sustainability: Concepts, Principles and Evidence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1491 (February 12, 2008): 447–65. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2163.
Pearson, Craig J. “Regenerative, Semiclosed Systems: A Priority for Twenty-First-Century Agriculture.” BioScience 57, no. 5 (May 1, 2007): 409–18. https://doi.org/10.1641/B570506.
The point is that conventional agriculture (eg, with industrial inputs) is literally unsustainable - there is a 56% food gap in the coming decades. [1]
Also, there's plenty of evidence that small, sustainable farms are both more efficient (in inputs, and land) and more productive in total caloric terms that mono-cropped industrial farming. In the Pretty review I referenced, Table 3 shows the "adoption of agricultural sustainability technologies and practices on 286 projects in 47 countries" increased average % increase in crop yields from 22% to 146%. [2]
Per the FAO [3], globally, small farms continue to dominate in food production and their food production (and economic sustainability) would be improved via an "ecological intensification" approach. [4]
We're creatures of habit. The pattern of breakfast, lunch and dinner means I'm usually "hungry" before breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I was feeling hungry about dinner time a while back, but I couldn't decide what to eat so I skipped. I woke the next morning and didn't feel hungry at all. That seemed odd to me. So I skipped breakfast and ate lunch only (same portion size as normal) and continued to do so for six weeks. I felt great. Workouts strong, focus and concentration improved. I saved a bunch of time and money.
After that did a 13 day fast (zero food). Day 3 sucked, but the 10 that followed where really eye opening in a wholly positive way. I do a lot of boxing, and I didn't stop during this fast. I thought it would suck but I had tons of energy and lots of speed. At the finishing lime, the first morsel of food (some roast pumpkin) was savored and tasted incredible. It gave me a new awareness and appreciation of what and how much food I need to maintain maximum performance.
I know i could eat a LOT less than I do in a year and be as or more healthy and contribute to a healthier environment. We just have to break the habit. That's really hard given the social culture of eating.
Great comment. I too have experienced great benefits from fasting. Humans evolved under conditions of food scarcity. I think we are actually ‘designed’ to be fasting most of the time.
The scarcity concept is one I really connect with also. A bit extreme, but there's a 30 day water fast (supervised) that's meant to be life changing. From what I recall the believe is that eating as a coping mechanism stores that trauma in the lipids. 30 days burns through it all.
I'm a faster too and have more energy as well. No more energy drain after a big meal. Another advantage of fasting is that you spend less time on food. Our western society involves a lot of time on food(breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks).
Yeah the time saved surprised me also. No more "hmmm what to eat for... " only one meal a day. I was surprised to learn how much time I spend thinking of either what to eat, or eating or digesting it in a food coma :)
I believe you're right. We didn't evolve to eat regular meals, but rather to gorge when there was abundance, then starve/fast during the in-between periods. Probably water was the one thing that we had regularly from day to day.
I've moved to a calorie-limited diet, myself, and the effects on my health have been dramatic. My acid reflux has subsided; it disappeared when I went low carb for a month and has not come back, even though I've added fruit carbs back in to my diet. I'm down over 20 pounds, and hoping to lose another 20 or so, while at the same time working out and replacing fat with muscle mass.
We can be healthier, if we try. Unfortunately, our modern societies, especially here in North America, encourage excessive eating with all of the sad results that are evident if you go out in public and observe the clinical obesity that is commonplace.
Congrats on shedding those pounds! Must be feeling great. I always found it a pain to consume enough vegetables. Then I had my wisdom teeth removed and couldn't eat for a week. I blended a ton of good veggies into a mash to get some nutrients. Even now (many years later) I still blend those veggies. Nutrition hacks! :)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadThis would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.
People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited.
This is still the case in poor countries.
In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing.
We now eat too much meat, and also consume too much dairy (adults don't need to drink any milk and many don't digest it well, by the way). If people just stopped eating meat at every meal or every day, consumption would drastically drop without too much of a change in daily life.
One solution would be measures to increase prices but that is a political minefield.
Never understood the obsession with drinking milk on its own (though I never liked the taste of it myself either). There's plenty of calcium to be found in other sources: kale, leafy greens, almonds, fortrified grains, beans/pulses etc.
And your argument can always be reshuffled. Swap milk with any one of the items you listed and one by one you can disqualify all of them from consumption. Variety is a good thing, meaning something should be eliminated because it's no good, not because there are alternatives.
There's no requirement or recommendation to cover your daily needs with the least varied diet.
In the early days soy milk was about the only alternative. Now there are so many dairy-free milk alternatives to try. The proliferation of grocery shelves is a testament to their growing popularity.
For people that are trying to consume more calories and protein, I don't know of an alternative that combines comparable calorie & protein density, low cost, ease of consumption, and zero preparation time.
More generally, I think that one of the big challenges with plant based diets is a lack of easily available calorie and protein dense foods. (I'm not saying its impossible to get enough calories and protein as a vegan, even as a bodybuilder. Just that it is not nearly as easy.)
Dairy in particular can be source of inflammation. One of the benefits of the vegan diets for athletes cited is a fast recovery time after workouts.
That's not exactly true, he's just some buff guy that is strong. He doesn't even look big compared to bodybuilders, regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size.
His 'record' deadlift was 360kg, worlds strongest men all pulled 420kg+ this year. Arnold was in that class back in the 70's.
EDIT: After some research people are saying his european world records were all accomplished before he became vegan in 2011.
> That's not exactly true, he's just some buff guy that is strong. He doesn't even look big compared to bodybuilders, regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size.
So, because he's a strong buff guy, while "not looking big compared to bodybuilders" (category in which he has not been competing since 1999), and as "regular protein eaters at the gym are his same size", it's not "exactly true" that he's one of the top weight lifters ?
> His 'record' deadlift was 360kg
GP never said "top deadlifter". None of his records are about deadlift. Not sure why you mentioned it.
> EDIT: After some research people are saying his european world records were all accomplished before he became vegan in 2011.
2012 Doesn't count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian
(Cow) milk just seems to have an unpleasant aftertaste to me. I get on well with oat milk, though.
It's something that's been consumed for millennia. There are societies based on pastoralism where milk is a huge part of the diet. I'd hardly classify it as being an obsession.
Obsession is probably the wrong word, but I'd still be curious as to the history behind it (and how long it continued into adulthood). Especially given its association with and place in a juvenile diet.
Trying to go to an extreme is counter-productive because people won't follow.
Convincing people not to eat meat at every meal or every day has a much higher chance of delivering significant results quickly.
What's another solution?
People will keep slaves if it's legal.
Stopping the use of tax payer dollars to help people eat meat seems not that much of a minefield compared too?
I will never go vegan or vegetarian but I mostly limit meat to only dinner and in smaller portions. My grocery bill is much smaller, it's healthier, and better for the environment overall.
Pushing a full-blown switch to veganism as the only solution is not pragmatic.
In cities meat was more available as workers typically earned more. Option to eat meat each day was considered a luxury.
Where's the logical argument?
The premise seems valid: just because you can "survive" off of a low-to-no protein diet doesn't mean it should be espoused.
So if you want to maximize for protein consumption without putting on fat mass, you tend to look for meat, dairy, and things derived from them (whey protein isolate).
The controversy is about whether humans need gargantuan amounts of protein.
Your post is assuming protein is very important, and thus it’s important to maximize protein per calorie.
The post you’re responding to is discussing the fact that any time vegetarian or vegan diets come up, people launch into criticisms that are based on the assumption that humans needs lots more protein than occurs in vegetables.
That said, Americans are predominantly overweight and obese. A diet high in protein but low enough in total overall energetic content is an excellent recipe, when paired with weightlifting and a few days of cardiovascular activity, for improving musculature and eliminating fat.
A scientific example demonstrating this point, entitled "Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial": https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609
Tone is something you read into things, as much as is written into them. If someone is responding because of a perceived tone, it would be wise of them to consider if they're being as aggressive as they accuse the other side of being.
Also, I dont mind being downvoted, I just wish someone would provide a logical argument in response.
You know that lifestyle where everyone was poor, sickly and died at a younger age, that's a totally better lifestyle!
Here's some stuff they conveniently left out that my Polish grandparents told me. In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions. People hunted a lot back then. Rabbit, deer, etc. So, they would supplement game for livestock. Because game meat is not considered desirable by civilized society.
Oh and fish. In eastern Europe, fish. Like always. It's cheap as shit and plentiful. It's also not considered meat because of Lent. Which is stupid. Fish is meat. Grow up. That's why people say they don't eat meat, but still eat fish. It's a catholic concept.
The idea that the old world ate less meat is misleading. They ate less prized meats. Today we consider top round off a cow as a cheap cut. That use to be a Christmas roast for many poor families.
Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you. Even when I did it with my then girlfriend for a year. My bloodwork went to total shit and I always felt like crap.
This whole article and crap is just a bunch of power hungry assholes in the UN appeasing to childish hippies who never picked up a book outside the metaphysical section.
Citations needed.
As far as I can tell, this is completely false. Vegan diets do a lot of things well: reduce salt, saturated fat, and cholesterol intake, for example. Vegetarian / vegan diets improve cholesterol, blood sugar levels, and other things.
Here's some citations of studies and papers that demonstrate vegan diets are better for you:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/
Several more listed at https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies#sect...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26508743 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25684089 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23695207 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16164885
The consensus of scientific evidence seems pretty clearly in favor of plant-based diets. The evidence is as clear as the world being round or climate change being real.
And I eat meat. Chowing on a burrito al pastor as we speak.
So the problem is really not the meat, but it’s amount.
That’s not because of lack of meat.
> In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions.
This sounds like eating less meat?
However, slaughtering a pig or two once a year in the autumn also doesn't imply eating pork once a year, for a single family a single pig provides a quite large amount of various cured/smoked/dried meat products that are consumed over the winter, so you still have some meat products (not in large quantities though) on most days.
Its odd to call back to 1930s eastern europe for an example of how to live. There are many arguments to make against meat etc but 1930s belarus is not one that logically follows.
Maybe a solution would be to tax food based on how long it was shipped but to exempt fruits and vegetables from the tax.
Also, most of the US population is around the coasts. Shipping a bit of food inland to the people there isn't that big of an impact.
Overconsumption is generally less than 10% of their caloric needs, so they can't just drop a large source of nutrition.
Reducing waste would dramatically help the environment.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/18/american...
Shipping things that spoil quickly or need refrigeration, obviously, will be less efficient. But on average, plant-based food sources will be significantly more efficient, even if shipped further, than meat ones.
Global warming due to greenhouse gas is a reason to go to the "other" extreme?
It's only a political minefield because of corporate influence (dictation?) in politics.
How much is "too much"?
We don't need to drink tea or coffee either; do you propose getting rid of those too?
For those of us who have no problems digesting it, what exactly is the problem with eating yogurt or drinking milk? Sure, consuming too much of those probably isn't good, but you can say that about literally any food.
For people who don't digest it well, then of course I'd suggest not drinking it. The same goes for any other food: if you're allergic to peanuts, don't eat them. If you're allergic to shellfish, don't eat them. If you're allergic to bananas, don't eat them. If you're lactose-intolerant, don't drink milk unless you really like the taste and want to add lactase enzyme.
I do agree that Americans in particular eat way too much red meat, but I think some people give dairy a hard time when I don't think it's that much of a problem compared to many other things. Most adults don't drink a lot of milk anyway; usually "dairy" for adults means eggs, cheese, yogurt, etc. I don't see the health problems with dairy the way I see with red meat either. For improving public health, we should instead be reducing how much red meat people eat, plus also reducing or eliminating stuff like HFCS, refined sugars, refined flour, alcohol, etc.
>One solution would be measures to increase prices but that is a political minefield.
What they should do is just eliminate the tax breaks that unhealthy industries enjoy.
If every CN or IN guys lives on the same standard as we in EU/USA the world will be gone in 60 seconds.
Let discuss on that level instead of picking out all kind of less relevant topics each time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
From the same wikipedia page, a bit above what you linked, there's also this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meat_Atlas_2014_subsidies... showing how many billions are spent on animal product subsidies.
Unfortunately I had no luck finding the actual OECD reports, though (aside from the " Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2019" report, but that seems to just compare each country to the global average, rather than talking about different types of subsidies)
I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
Yeah, I searched around a bit (even outside of the US) and I'm having difficulty finding any proper data to back up or refute it. That's a pity, would have been nice to know either way. The best I found was data on subsidies given to individual farmers in my country (I'm not in the US), but unless I scrape the site and aggregate and categorise the data, its not really useful (and doing that is too much work for me).
> I'm all for removing subsidies to monoculture agriculture.
Absolutely. I don't even mind animal products receiving subsidies, I'm not vegetarian and certainly not vegan, but I do hope that non-animal products get a large chunk of the subsidy pie, personally.
Sounds like a win win to me.
Buy only locally farmed organic meat. Don't go to fast food places or restaurants that don't specifically declare that their meat is organic and local.
Interesting. Do you have a source? I don't see a good reason for this off the top of my head.
No. Don't buy meat. Buy beans. Buy tofu. Hell, buy Beyond Burgers. We don't need meat. It's bad for the planet, bad for your health and it goes without saying, bad for the animals.
This seems like the best strategy: If you force people to become vegan by law without giving good alternatives, you just make them angry at people who want to stop climate change. If you nicely ask them, some will switch but most won't. So I believe the best way forward is to invest into meat alternative startups and help them make their product as widely used and as cheap as possible.
The question is rhetorical and is meant to show that 1) this proposal is not a “global solution”, as punishing a single country would hardly make any difference; and 2) you’re personifying a country’s exports, associating them to an administration you disagree ideologically with, to make it sound evil, and that is not rational nor productive.
I hear where are you coming from, though IMHO it's a problem with lack of knowledge/tradition/culture of producing vegetarian/vegan meals.
If you would say that you're vegetarian to my grandparents, they'd imagine that you eat vegetable salad all the time, with occasional baked potatoes for hot meal, they cannot imagine a meatless meal.
From my experience people tend to think that there must be a 1 to 1 replacement for meat foods: steaks, sausages, cutlets, burgers, meatballs, etc.
IMHO usually great vegetarian dishes (tasty, easy to make, not expensive, etc.) are mostly different set from meat dishes. It requires a cultural shift, which is insanely hard to change in general western population, where it's common and expected to have ham/bacon sandwich for breakfast, meatballs and spaghetti for lunch, steak for dinner, and beef burger or ribs on a bbq on a weekend.
You need a completely different set of dishes to change that meat eating tradition and IMO tofu sausages, cheap soy steaks and other meat analogues will not convert meat-eaters to vegetarians (fingers crossed for Impossible meat projects to change that).
Anecdotal example from the same thread on Indian vegetarian cuisine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652404
P.S. I very much agree with you on this:
> The theoretical advantage that artificial meat has is the lower amount of resources needed. Over time, because of this it can get much cheaper than real meat, at least if you don't factor in skewing of the market due to government subsidies.
Subsidies are really skewing prices of animal vs plant based products.
Where I am from pork is around 5-6€/kg, chicken 3.5-5€/kg, beef 10-30€/kg, milk 0.5-1€/l.
Whereas soy-almond milk 1.5-3€/l, soy meat analogues 5-15€/kg, mushrooms 3-15€/kg, etc.
There is no substantial price difference (mostly), which is spectacular to me. How it's possible to sell 1 kilo of chicken breast for 3.5€ is spectacular to me, when freaking beans cost around 3-4€/kg. How do they grow that chicken, when it's clear as a day that it requires probably an order of magnitude more resources compared to growing beans. I wouldn't even go how government is bending backwards for milk producers with tax incentives to keep prices "competitive", and I have no idea how pork is not 20-50€/kg, when every other year there's some disease, which requires to kill and destroy all pigs in farms in 500km radius.
This is exactly what I was reffering to. The current alternatives are not motivating enough for people to switch, but with good meat alternatives like impossible/beyond meat we should see trend changes.
It feels to me that the approach "just change your culture" has been tried out and has mostly failed because most people in the west have not switched. It requires a lot of political/moral conviction for people to switch. Good meat replacements will I think change this and make it easier for people to eat less meat while keeping their culture.
I agree with GP that most people don't care what a meatless meal could look like, culturally they just want meat each meal and will only consider an "impossible" substitute.
If we must change our impact on the environment, maybe it doesn't matter that people have a cultural desire to wait on impossible standards for substitutes and to continue harming the environment in the process. I don't know how important it is to change now, but if it critical then I'd be fine with something like rationing meat or some creative ideas towards forcing drastic change.
Also, maybe your grandparents can't imagine meat only once a week, but my grandparents certainly can, not because of current habits but from the great depression. They grew up on farms and had animals but they had more plants and usually ate the plants, only rarely they would slaughter animals for meat. Most meals were plants and that was the most normal thing in the world.
I assume meat at every meal is an extremely recent phenomenon and I think culturally we can easily move on from it, if we take the necessary measures.
That acquired taste can be reset if for 2-4 weeks one avoids any product with added salt or sugar. Then tofu and many other products including plain meat without any additives will taste much better.
You won't convince people by lying to them about the flavor of things you want them to buy. They'll label you a liar and move on.
Tofu dogs never taste like meat, ever. If you wait 2-4 weeks you're just creating a new habit, not approximating meat in any way.
Your comment, while potentially a healthy choice, certainly isn't an accurate description of meat taste. And meat eaters everywhere can recognize this because we have all tried the other products and it doesn't taste close, even after 2-4 weeks.
The 'cows farting' story is not a major methane source.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-led-study-solves-a-met...
I.e. there was major uncertainty that scientists were measuring more methane than they expected, and these scientists tried to figure out where it comes from.
The only thing your argument says is that for methane emissions from meat production apparently scientists had a pretty good idea about the numbers.
http://meatheals.com/ https://justmeat.co/
But even if you think it's not bad for you, it's bad for:
- the environment - bad for people having to work in slaughterhouses killing and gutting animals all day - bad for the animal
In part I, too have the right to control what people eat through voting.
There are plenty of valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat.
Cows are not killing the planet. They are one of the few things you can raise that doesn't require pesticides or chemical fertilizers. They and other ruminants are important parts of grassland ecosystems.
The megafauna that existed on planet Earth just 200, 500, and 12,000 years ago were far more numerous than the number of livestock cows today.
This reductionist mindset about the environment that doesn't even attempt to quantify trade offs or factor for the important role livestock plays in crop production is beyond tiresome.
We also happen to need meat for healthy brain function. We need lots of Omega-3 fatty acids the kind that animal foods only provide and plants are not as healthy as they're made out to be. They have tons of oxalates, phytic acids, and inflammatory agents that harm human health in large doses. Not to mention the absurd amount of carbs we already consume from plant based foods.
I'm not the one who wrote the UN report on climate change that recommends reducing meat consumption. Maybe take it up with the UN instead.
> Not to mention the absurd amount of carbs we already consume from plant based foods.
Speak for yourself. I eat a plant-heavy low-carb diet (I do eat fish, eggs and meat too).
But... you're not replying to what I was saying and that is that there are perfectly valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat. I didn't say anything about not eating cows or whatever, you took my comment out of context, which was simply "There are plenty of valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat." The first paragraph was simply giving examples of reasons that various people might have to do so.
Appeal to authority.
> There are plenty of valid reasons to restrict what people are allowed to eat.
Name one. Sounds very tyrannical to me.
Uhhh.. the person implied that I was saying cows are killing the planet, I simply stated that I never said that, the UN did, so take it up with them instead of me. Why are you are you taking what I said out of context?
> Name one.
Are you just replying without reading the thread? My very first message named a few. I never said they were good reasons, but they are reasons nonetheless.
True in theory. Not in practice. Unfortunately most beef we eat doesn't come from grass fed animals. And if we were to convert the entire industry to grassing only, we wouldn't have enough land to produce the same quantity of meat. Which would imply exactly reduced meat consumption.
Properly-kept housecats stay inside and don't kill any birds. I suspect the vast majority of those bird deaths are caused by feral cats, not pets (though of course, most ferals probably are or descend from pets that were abandoned or escaped). Our society could be doing a better job with dealing with feral animals like this, because they are bad for ecosystems; they're basically invasive predators.
Bird-killing aside, the environmental impact of pets is actually pretty staggering. It's probably worse for dogs too, since they're much larger animals on average.
>The megafauna that existed on planet Earth just 200, 500, and 12,000 years ago were far more numerous than the number of livestock cows today.
Citation needed. Yes, there were millions of buffalo on the American plains 1000+ years ago, but a quick Google search shows there's over 94 million cows in America today. Also, from what I've read, there are more plains now than in the past, because forests were destroyed by humans to make grasslands.
Please open a history book.
Right is something that you or someone else has to fight for it. If you prefer to eat meat you have to fight for your right, likewise with the non meat eater.
You can't legally eat the meat of other humans in most (all? not sure) countries. You're not allowed to buy the meat of certain animals in certain countries, due to cultural norms (dogs) or due to protection of certain species.
It's an absolutely normal thing that laws regulate or forbid things that have negative effects on society.
It would wreck havoc on low income people, obliterate all the great meat heavy cuisine of the many immigrants across the USA and Europe, and turn us into weak, dispirited, sanctimonious saps.
Citation needed
Disputed:Phytoestrogens(soy) increases estrogen levels.
Which makes me think. I wonder how much meat would people eat naturally, if they were note exposed to an image of a BigMac on every corner.
Millions of people are already voluntarily reducing their consumption and now virtually every restaurant in the UK has vegan options, making it easier for more people to switch.
I live in the outskirts of a relatively small, low-income industrial city and there are signs outside small shops and restaurants everywhere promoting their new vegan menus. A traditional pub near me has no fewer than 14(!) plant-based main courses.
I'd love to see tax incentives that reflect the damage that the meat and dairy industry are doing (ending the massive government subsidies would be a good start), however the changes I've seen in the UK give me hope that the grassroots level can sway public opinion without forcing people to change via legislation.
This can easily get clouded if you live in a place where you feel a new vegan place opens all the time. But this is very unevenly distributed. The UK is a place where vegan eating is strong, likewise Germany, Sweden and certainly a few other places. But even in very similar countries also in middle Europe - e.g. Denmark, France - vegetarianism is still very unusual.
Also, good meat is expensive and cheap meat taste like shit so it's a good move for your wallet.
[0] growing amount of people saying "I want to fight climate change but can't do anything myself"
- antibiotic resistance
- air, water and soil pollution
- climate change
- inefficient calorie, phosphorus and land utilization
- pandemic evolution
- and of course cruelty to animals
Eating meat is a choice to doom yourself, everyone else and the planet. No amount of gradual incrementalism, hand-wringing incentives or rationalizations/self-delusions can substitute for vital action.
Personally, I'm not actually sure. The human race, like all things, is ultimately doomed so surely some consideration for values outside those of mere survival is necessary.
Wonder why people have such negative views of environmentalists.
Illuminating the moral quandary of meat consumption helps. It worked for me. Nobody had to ask me nicely, they just needed to help me to think about it and be self-reflective.
Even if you believe there to be ethical meat consumption (a notion I find dubious in modern life), people can reduce consumption and have a big impact. Modern commercial meat and dairy production is a horrible process and most people are so insulated from it that you get used to thinking meat is just this product that comes from a factory.
My theory is that you have to be ready / have to already, deep down, made that decision and then just needed a little push. Since this is a major topic in many societies with vegetarians and vegans proselytizing, I doubt that the majority of meat eaters aren't aware - they just don't come to the same conclusions or like it too much to quit.
But if broccoli could scream would you stop eating it? Circle of life. Just the way it is.
However I do agree, there are a lot of commercial farming practices that need to be ended. Even if it means higher prices.
Wolves that eat deer don't also breed them to the point where they contribute to climate change. Hunter gatherer folk don't breed them to a point where they are a significant factor in climate change.
As carnivores wolves don't really have a choice to not eat meat. You do, though. With a couple of different choices at the supermarket or simply ordering different choices on the menu, you can help cut down our global emissions.
It's now illegal in USA.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/13/eati...
Though I don't think it should be illegal unless slaughtering other animals is illegal too. I think our disgust with the idea of slaughtering dogs highlights our arbitrary ethical inconsistencies when it comes to eating meat.
Hunter gatherers ended up doing that once they figured it out. Civilization didn't magical come about. Hunter gatherers decided to start animal husbandry as a way to keep a surplus food supply. Then they became "civilized".
I heard that choice arguement before. No. I've done the vegan diet for about 1.5 years. That's when depression, anxiety, bone and muscle problems popped up. My bloodwork was shit and I felt like doom and gloom. I snuck off from my girlfriend, who forced me into it, with a friend and he peer pressured me to drink a glass of milk and eat a steak. I did shit myself silly that night, but it felt like I was actually awake and the brain fog was gone. We broke up a few months later because I made a lovely red thai curry with murdered chicken instead of tofu.
By the way, look up how many ground nesting birds and rabbits die during grain and soybean harvesting. Those combines are just pure murder.
Don't you think the current age of high depression and high anxiety is oddly correlated to the recent rise of "meat bad, tofu good", is a bit interesting? So no, I don't have a choice. From personal experience. Difference is, I never made existential excuses for the depression, anxiety, fatigue and brain fog. I did it for tail...which really wasn't worth it.
Most soybeans grown are consumed by livestock [0]. A lot of wheat is also fed to livestock [1]. We'd need a lot less if we as humans ate it directly instead of eating the animals that eat it.
I don't know what your diet was like, but this is not my experience (7 years in), and it is the position of the American Dietetic Association that vegan diets, when planned well, are healthy [2].
Now, let's say that even with good planning, you are still unhealthy on a vegan diet. That does not mean you couldn't be healthy on a vegetarian diet, or a diet that has drastically reduced meat consumption. The less meat we eat, the better for the environment.
[0] https://www.drovers.com/article/usb-promotes-us-soybean-meal...
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
Again, this is in the scenario where we accept meat consumption is indisputably ethical. The way we get our meat is arguably a much bigger problem.
> But if broccoli could scream would you stop eating it?
Yes?
If you're going to say starve to death, ha! The one thing westerners underestimate is starving and what it does to you. See how long you can go without eating. I've done a 5 day fast, with intents for a 10 day. Yes, I failed on that.
Take a wild guess what you crave the most. And it ain't plant fiber. Its muscle fiber. We live in the land of plenty that allows choices. Part of the exact problem we are running into. It's easy to say meat bad when you get fruits, veg and grain imported to you. Stuff you didn't really work to get. Because, out of personal experience, farming is hard ass work. And I dare anyone to try zero emissions large scale farming. Grab a scythe and harvest grain. Have fun with that.
What I'm getting to, it's always been a fact of life. It takes less effort to raise pigs and live off their flesh than it is to take care of a few acres of grain, veg and fruit.
What I can't stand, people not in the agriculture business or lifestyle pretending to be the ultimate authority. Grow all your own food, then you can have an opinion. Until then, don't pretend like you know what you're talking about. It's easy for anyone to wave their hand and say "everyone should live in this method because I say so".
"But if I spend all my time farming, I wont have time to do xyz"
Yea, that's the reason why our farming systems are as they are.
This is a red herring, though. They don't.
> It takes less effort to raise pigs and live off their flesh than it is to take care of a few acres of grain, veg and fruit.
This is dubious, but my point is not that I farm, but that I find commercial farms more ethical than commercial meat production.
That would certainly change the conversation. But given that there is dubious support for plants "feeling" pain in a sentient way, I don't see much reason to entertain it.
That said, my diet is mostly fruit, nuts and seeds anyway.
Just because it is "natural" doesn't make it right. Nature is a cruel bitch, remember.
Why is that dubious ? Ethics is personal. For me, consuming meat is ethical. Unless I'm forced to not eat meat then I won't stop.
You may want to consider the broader implications of using this reasoning.
> While i understand it sucks for you but for many people factory including me, factory farming is awesome and animal suffering is not important at all.
A rapist could make a similar case about how awesome the vagina feels. That the woman doesn't like it is not all that important. If you think about it, it's just some body parts touching, women really blow it out of proportion. And hey, animals do it. Why should the government limit my freedoms?
For some reason, meat consumption (i.e. slaughtering, factory farming, etc.) is one of the only topics where it's more or less socially acceptable to say "well, I like it, and that's all I care about. Ethics are personal btw."
Government consist of people, because to this group of people, its in their best interest, its ethical for them to not allow rape.
Does the government care about this rapist freedom ? No, in their perspective its wrong.
So whichever side that can force other to comply (persuasively or physically) get to decide the ethics.
In the case of rape, the government get to decide whether you can rape.
A few back to back meat recalls in the US got me to try vegetarianism 8 years ago. The animal welfare element only developed after I started learning about the new diet I was on.
It also helps to promote stories of very healthy vegetarians (especially pro athletes). My favorites were Carl Lewis, Herschel Walker, and Venus Williams. There are many more out there.
The key is to find decent, not too complex recipes. Dropping a slab of meat on the grill is so easy and results in such a tasty primary component of a meal; but making an interesting vegetarian meal requires more effort (at first). Once you know some good recipes, you get to the point where the only time you miss meat is when you're at a festival and you smell barbeque :).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...
The govt's behavior is not motivated by climate.
Such messages only cause people to postpone the need to take real action. And we need to take real action now if we even want a chance to dampen the effects of climate change (let alone reverse it).
Me eating meat is an even smaller blip, why bother with taking my meat away?
The truth is that you have to lead also by example or you’re not credible.
I agree with you that governing bodies should be putting more pressure on the excesses of the wealthy and on industry, but changing industry practices and consumer behaviour are not mutually exclusive, especially when we should be doing everything we can on all fronts to overcome this crisis.
1. UN officials are traveling by private jet
2. Private jets are worse for the environment than the meat industry
I presume you have evidence of the above that lead to your suggestion?
People with a "high influence on society," however that's measured, can't just do whatever they want because their existence is still net-positive.
Think Mrs. Merkel going to a climate summit vs. someone going to the same place to take a selfie for their followers.
In fact your defensive reaction is much more representative of the problem: that people find it so hard to accept that in order to avoid their children's lives being significantly worse than the lives we enjoy today, they may have give up a few fking burgers
Can anyone point me to examples where my thinking is wrong, where changes came from the demand side?
It seems to me that for those considerations, bringing new perspectives to consumers to try and influence their choices at the store is one of the only practical options for now.
The restaurant industry reports that profits are up for restaurants serving plant-based meat options, so more restaurants are trying it.
Every meal is a vote.
Indeed, in fact the report's authors are keen to stress that this is not the case.
It's way worse than beef.
One kg butter blasts 24kg CO2 into the air before it gets to you, with beef it's around 13kg.
It took me at least one year to achieve this, because meat is so prevalent in our society. A friend of mine was in India recently and he said he did not miss meat at all since the non-meat dishes were so great. I think a lot of it is just how good the quality of vegetarian dishes is.
I believe restaurant options are very important since people learn from those and mimic them at home. We need restaurants to offer more vegetarian and vegan dishes for people to see that they can have a rich (IMHO richer) diet without meat.
I don’t know how to nudge the restaurants though. Lower tax on organic/sustainable food can be one thing, or even better subventions for such restaurants and produce. But most importantly the meat and dairy industry needs to get under real supervision. Governments all around the world have been looking away for far too long.
Visit and ask for vegetarian or vegan dishes. Move on if there is nothing worthwhile; let the staff know if you've liked a particular dish or find the selection too limiting. Demand drives supply.
In the Netherlands the vegetarian option used to be a boring salad with goat cheese. Nowadays not having decent meat-free options means you can't compete with the rest. This is something only the cheaper restaurants aimed at lower socio-economic classes can afford to do (but only for now). The reason for this discrepancy is that this class of people (mostly blue collar workers and their families) tends to lag behind the rest of society a bit as habits shift towards more healthy alternatives (smoking is another example).
It was interesting to me leaving Europe and coming to China. In upper class restaurants here, they put meat in everything, even as a "seasoning" in veg dishes. I think it's seen as an indicator of wealth. At working class restaurants the cheapest dishes are all veg, or have only the barest scraping of ground pork or bone stock. I much prefer to eat out here than i did in Europe (and definitely the North America) where meat and dairy tends to be the default option for blue collar grub. I still don't really understand how that works, economically.
2. The idea to reduce the population based on some metric is a dangerous road to go down on.
3. By definition there will always be a richest 10% regardless of how many humans you get rid of.
I found this: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region but it does not talk about individuals, only countries and regions; it finds that "the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions". According to the graph, 16% of world population in high-income countries are responsible for 38% of global CO2. The richer 51 of the world population cause 86%. I don't think this squares with your statement, even if both "almost all" and "10%" were hyperbole.
I mean, if you must be a film and TV dystopian bad guy, Thanos' idea doesn't work.
Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in developing countries along with improving medical services to cut infant mortality (so that parents can be sure their young will reach old age and don't need to play it safe and have many young).
We are getting there slowly, but we could do more.
This is incoherent. You can’t converge on extinction. Any population that doesn’t even replace itself will die out rapidly.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
> The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
As far as I can tell they've cashed in on the buzz generated by impossible foods, who genetically engineered yeast to produce a plant heme so their meatless meat products taste and cook more like meat.
Beyond Meat just appears to have come to market first, and such gotten more attention. I've tried it a couple times, it was just ok, and not much better than most other decent veggie burger patties. Not groundbreaking and not worth more money than any others.
I haven't tried impossible foods yet. Looking for them.
As I said, beyond is just a veggie burger with a slightly better recipe than the last guy, cashing in on the buzz impossible created before they could come to market.
And now wonder - impossible had a novel product. Beyond has a veggie burger.
Meat consumption seems like one of the easiest things governments could change to tackle climate change. Unlike cars and travel it's hard to make the argument that humans depend on access to meat so making it 700% more expensive via tax would effectively shift consumption patterns with few if any downsides. If anything it would probably have the excellect side effect of improving public health.
The problem is that no politician (perhaps outside green parties) wants to do this, because of the fear of becoming unpopular. We simultaneously need a shift in people's attitudes towards meat.
I have been a vegetarian since I was 17 (I am 37 now). It has always fascinated me that becoming a vegetarian was only very little effort, but somehow people are extremely attached to meat. I never talk about being a vegetarian, but when people find out that I am a vegetarian, they often acts as being offended and having to defend themselves.
We need to show people that there is a middle way where you can still eat meat (e.g. maybe once a week) but still drastically decrease their footprint.
Edit: BTW, this is not trolling. I represent a real niche group with an unknown number of people behaving consciously or unconsciously the same. I think it’s an important information in the discussion. People downvote me because they don’t like that it is happening but it’s real.
It’s like downvoting climate change because you don’t like it happening.
Edit: Rebuilder, that’s a good question. What would change my behavior? I think positive role models could help. Leaders that say we restrict ourselves to meat once a week or even better: here is my CO2 footprint (and please no offsetting bullshit). That’s how it developed over the last 2 years. Etc.
They’re not “your” resources: they’re shared among everyone, including future generations.
> My impact on the planet seems to be very temporarily and the damage I do will be forgotten in a hundred years.
As far as we know, this is not how climate change works.
EDIT: also note that he has 3 rich kids. Is this more eco friendly than eating meat?
Personally, I think the climate crisis is a great opportunity to give meaning to the lives of everyone alive now, by making survival a great project for our entire societies. A lot of consumption now is, IMO, filling the void of having meaningful long-term goals we can each work to achieve.
No need to worry!
I'm vegan btw.
If you really want to have an impact while still eating meat, just stop eating beef/lamb altogether
The amount of food and water needed to produce 1kg of beef meat is just insane
Eat poultry or fish instead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
>Cattle is the worst at something like 15:1. Aquaculture, specifically tilapia and catfish, is good at under 2:1
Which makes it much less positive than it first appears.
Take in mind that fish food for aquaculture has a small percentage of plant proteins and oils also. Is unclear if this was included or not in the claimed FIFO ratio, so some of this fish could be really soy (or maybe not). Reality is always more complex than a single numerical value.
When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are the ones associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
Pastured animals, by definition, don't eat feed coming from the monoculture industrial agriculture that is depleting the soil and consuming all those resources, and which is also used to feed humans, sadly.
Cows fart.
And it's not nearly as dangerous as publicized.
Methane's lifespan in the atmosphere is much, much lower (think two orders of magnitude) than carbon dioxide [0], for example.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
What I meant is that methane is known to have a bigger heating effect than other greenhouse gases, like x28 that of CO2 if I recall correctly. This is used as part of the anti-ruminant argument, when comparing the effect of methane expelled by animals to the rest of greenhouse gas emissions.
However, if you take into account the reduced lifespan, that 28-time increase is definitely less relevant.
> Methane in the Earth's atmosphere is a strong greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) 104 times greater than CO2 in a 20-year time frame; methane is not as persistent a gas as CO2 and tails off to about GWP of 28 for a 100-year time frame
And once you take positive feedbacks into account additional emissions can be problematic even within "short" timeframes.
However, its effects on global warming are greatly exaggerated by environmentalists and/or those with vegan ideologies.
In my opinion, focus should definitely not be on meat consumption.
Anyway, as a disclaimer, I follow a carnivore diet consisting of only animal products. You can expect me to be heavily biased.
There are, as far as I know, regions where the soil is only capable of growing pasture, hard to plant trees in.
> There are, as far as I know, regions where the soil is only capable of growing pasture, hard to plant trees in.
I assume that those areas would not be sufficient to cover current meat and dairy demands. If they were there wouldn't be any deforestation or soy fields for animal feed. And non-grazed grasslands is still going to release less methane than grazed lands.
Regarding deforestation and so on, I think we must also take into account that "industrialized" non-pastured husbandry (is that the correct term?) is probably cheaper and easier than the greener alternative.
Sadly, it's usually a matter of profits and not a matter of environmental friendliness.
When's the last time the Midwestern plains area of the United States was forest? Before the beef industry, 50-100 million bison roamed the plains. It turns out that ruminants like bison and cows are essential components of a grassland ecosystem.
I don't understand why most people have this wrong idea. In a lot of places, the grazing pastures are naturally occurring, they aren't planted there.
It feels like people want to destroy the natural landscape of countries like Argentina, just because it's now fashionable to say they don't eat meat.
Even goats, everyone goes around claiming they have such an ineficient CO2/Kg meat index. Well, around here, goats are fed almost all the year by going into the forest and cleaning the shrubs and small vegetation there... besides feeding the goats for free, it also cleans the forest for free: something we would have to do otherwise in order to prevent fires in the summer.
This would also create incentives to cut down forests to create more "pasture", and that would be pretty terrible.
I would say this is simply wrong. Government often capture food production and use it to enrich themselves. Some historical places certainty had a function in distribution as well but this is not the common case.
The waste majority of history, government were primary involved in food production and distribution beyond capturing as much as possible and distribution it to its own armies.
Most of history food for the most part was produced and consumed fairly locally without much involvement of government.
ETA: btw great job making effort to partly cut out meat from your diet. I myself want to become vegan, but I just can't switch immediately. IMO there is nothing wrong with gradual approach.
P.S. sorry for my broken English.
Not saying we should not eat less meat or anything, just saying there might be more we could be doing if our governments weren't corporate/billionairs puppets mostly.
We are eating more meat today (at least in the industralised nations of the "West") than in any other time in human history thanks to intensive farming practices. People seems to think that this is the natural state of affairs and that's how we've always consumed meat. But go back a few decades and meat was never available in such abundance and at such cheap prices.
The ugly truth is we're simply too comfortable in our current lifestyles to make any changes that might challenge that comfort. Whether it's flying less (or even stopping altoghther) or eating less meat, the reaction is always resistance and sometimes even anger and outrage.
I've said this before: we love to point accusatory fingers at others for taking too little action over climate issues but never lift a finger ourselves. Are we all a bunch of hypocrites and simply not willing to admit it?
at any rate i hope to see some scales for this sort of thing.
Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now.
Eventually we can all be eating grass and rocks and there'd still be too much demand on nature crated by the existence of humans.
The only real long term solution is start limiting population growth drastically. Any crutch trying to limit energy and material consumption will not solve the root cause. (Ofc it still makes sense to cut off the excess and not be wasteful or a resource hog)
Personally I'd like to have only enough people on this planet, so that everyone can be fed and educated and have access to health care, sanitation and all the basic needs.
This is a very strange assumption as UN Population Division predicts peak population at 12B, that is, the current world population will never double. That is business as usual without any intervention. Do you have specific reasons to disagree with UN Population Division?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
What we are currently seeing in absolute numbers is a huge number of people with a lower growth rate out-reproducing a lower number with a higher growth rate in the past.
Education, available contraceptives, low child mortality (yes, low mortality as that makes having children less of a gamble and therefore you can get away with having fewer) automatically lead to lower fertility rates.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region: "When aggregated in terms of income, we see in the visual below that the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half (low and lower-middle income) only 14%. The very poorest countries (home to 9 percent of the global population) are responsible for just 0.5 percent. This provides a strong indication of the relative sensitivity of global emissions to income versus population. Even several billion additional people in low-income countries — where fertility rates and population growth is already highest — would leave global emissions almost unchanged. 3 or 4 billion low income individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2. At the other end of the distribution however, adding only one billion high income individuals would increase global emissions by almost one-third."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643257
The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are backed up by some very poor science and may be seriously unsuitable for humans and for children in particular, nutrition-wise. Animal agriculture is not even a major source of human emissions so to call for changes to our natural diet seems very premature.
I wouldn’t call the world consensus of the IPCC poor science. It is actually the opposite: the best science we have available.
The report goes into depth about the health benefits these diets have also.
That is what the IPCC references. Great work, published in nature, peer reviewed and pretty solid science.
[1]: http://www.healthdata.org/gbd [2]: https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/
1. https://www.theplantway.com/is-vegan-healthy/
To really contribute, it would be nice if you came up with some citations to your claim.
"It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores and omnivores" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Our requirements for DHA and B12 indicate a diet rich in both - both found almost exclusively in animal foods
Evolution of the Human Brain: the key roles of DHA(omega-3 fatty acid) andD6-desaturase gene https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/pdf/2018/04/ocl1700...
We wean our young for a very short amount of time compared to other apes.
"Our model indicates that carnivory has a specific and quantifiable impact on human development and life history and, crucially, explains why Homo weans so much earlier than the great apes." Impact of Carnivory on Human Development and Evolution Revealed by a New Unifying Model of Weaning in Mammals https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
DHA can be produced by our bodies transforming ALA, which is found in plant sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016378271...
Like the article says, there's debate over whether this is enough, as the conversion is very inefficient. As I understand it, ALA and LA compete for the same pathway, meaning that excess of LA intake (an omega 6 fatty acid, abundant in nuts and seeds, and of course oils processed from them) will reduce our body's ability to produce DHA, so a human eating prehistoric diet would likely have a better conversion ratio than on a modern diet. Also, there's apparently evidence that if we don't eat a lot of DHA, our bodies convert more of our dietary ALA to it to compensate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20861171
But even taking all this into consideration, I'm not very sympathetic to arguments from nature. There's a big difference between saying "primal humans did X" and saying "modurn humans need to do X to be healthy". Even taking everything you said as given, there's overwhelming evidence that meat consumption is a big factor in for modern chronic health problems like heart disease and cancer. Eating whatever you can get your hands on (meat, eggs, fish, insects) makes sense when you just need enough calories to survive and reproduce, but that's not the problem now. We suffer from diseases of abundance. A plant-based diet with B12 and DHA supplementation is much healthier than an omnivorous one.
I'd not bet my health and my children's development on a novel way of eating without fantastic proof. Have you got any?
When was the last time you had raw beef? for me, it was beef tartare a few years ago...
Raw grain? Nope, that's all processed, either by boiling, or grinding and turning into something else.
Homo Erectus was thought to have subsisted on raw meat. There's evidence of intestinal parasites that suggests such a diet.
Apparently, at some point, we decided to cook our meat, which reduced the parasite load and removed the need for low pH comparative to other carnivores.
But not too long ago, humans did eat some raw meats. Primitive hunters sometimes ate raw hearts, and drinking fresh blood was not unheard of. 1,000 years ago, the Mongols would sometimes nick their horses and drink blood to sustain them on long journeys.
It's also usually prepared in some way, whether it's flash frozen or treated with vinegar.
But, I guess my point is that the evolutionary argument doesn't really make sense in a world where we evolved tools and have been eating processed food for a long, long time.
Also, evolution happens a lot faster than people give it credit for. Something I read somewhere is that the genes for lactose digestion only started remaining "switched on" in adults like 8,000 years ago, and yet a third of the world now has this gene.
That's a really short time! That's not far from when we develop writing (around 6,000 years ago).
A neuro-scientist from Brazil: https://www.livescience.com/24875-meat-human-brain.html
You can do your own internet search for more such information. It's not proven, but is a widely accepted theory.
> The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are backed up by some very poor science and may be seriously unsuitable for humans and for children in particular, nutrition-wise
Care to provide evidence to back that up? Your broad, evolutionary talking points and observations on stomach pH in your other response hardly backs up your strongly worded supposition.
Plant based diets have been practiced by not insignificant portions of the population beginning in the 6th-century BCE with Buddhism and Hinduism[1]. An estimated 20-40% of India is currently vegetarian[2]. Not sure "fad" is an accurate descriptor.
I'm sure you'd have a hard time refuting the unending amount of "poor science" that shows plant based diets are effective for longevity, treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure[3]. The AICR recommends a plant based diet to prevent cancer[4], and ten other major Nutritional Organizations recognize the health benefits[5].
"It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.
These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes."[5]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism#Ancie...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#India
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/
4. https://www.aicr.org/patients-survivors/healthy-or-harmful/v...
5. https://www.theplantway.com/is-vegan-healthy/
In terms of human history, he's right. 6th-century BCE was not very long ago at all: that's less than a mere 3000 years. Humans have been around for over 2 million years.
Also, he's right about the skeletal record: archaeology shows that humans lost about 1 foot of height when they switched to agriculture. Yes, much of India is vegetarian, but Indians tend to be pretty short, but then when they emigrate to western nations and adopt more western diets, their kids end up dwarfing them.
Exactly. It's like the unending articles that point to negligent "vegan" parents as the cause of child deaths/underdevelopment when they fed them super extreme, restrictive diets that just happen to be able to fit into the rules of veganism. You can get poor nutrition and technically follow the rules of many diets, but that isn't necessarily a reflection on the diets themselves, but on poor nutrition awareness.
3000 years is certainly long enough to take something out of "fad" status. I would challenge you to find another diet that follows specific rules that has been around for longer.
> Also, he's right about the skeletal record: archaeology shows that humans lost about 1 foot of height when they switched to agriculture.
Again - making broad, sweeping evolutionary correlations does not an argument make. You have absolutely no idea what specific shifts in eating, living or working habits resulted in skeletal changes. These are the same weak arguments proponents of the Paleo and Atkins diets make. Could you make a case for dietary changes effecting our evolution at the time? sure. Could you point to vegetarianism as the cause? Good luck with that.
> Yes, much of India is vegetarian, but Indians tend to be pretty short, but then when they emigrate to western nations and adopt more western diets, their kids end up dwarfing them.
Yet again with the generalizations. If we humor this for a moment, there is a much stronger argument for the correlation[3][4][5][6] of poverty levels[1] and height[2] than there is for levels of vegetarianism. In fact, there is data to show the opposite[7][8]. Poor diet in general results in impaired growth, not vegetarianism. I'm not even sure what you could argue would be missing in a vegetarian diet that would effect bone growth as most point to calcium in milk and vegetarians can drink milk...
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-l...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men
3. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-children-height-po...
5. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17880-3
6. https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/76/5/463.full.pdf
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1855500
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9023462
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Hmm... this is how you get into an argument where people talk past each other. You may be correct when it comes to that little nugget of information, but when it comes to the larger context, that piece of information will not make sense to someone who has other contradicting pieces of information. ( for example a vegan who thinks that humans ought to have huge canines to be a carnivore).
Anyway it's unfair of me to critique your style/content of your argument without offering an alternative. How about this?: Ask the person who is into the 'plant based' belief to conduct an experiment of eating only meat for 2 months and then report the results. i.e if both of you agree that most 'science' and 'research' is flawed. Of course it goes without saying that you too should have performed this experiment on yourself.
Side note - I have been carnivore for 6 years ( 99% of my diet is red meat, eggs and dairy ).
The alternative is local regenerative agriculture [4], which the Rodale Institute [5] and a recent Quantis (non-peer reviewed) studies [6] point to being potentially carbon net negative due to carbon soil sequestration via regenerative grazing. It also appears to be more economically sustainable [7][8] and can provide competitive yields [8].
For those interested in reading more, I found a couple pretty lengthy (peer-reviewed) academic reviews on the topic to be pretty fascinating:
Rhodes, Christopher J. “The Imperative for Regenerative Agriculture.” Science Progress 100, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 80–129. https://doi.org/10.3184/003685017X14876775256165.
Teague, W R. “FORAGES AND PASTURES SYMPOSIUM: COVER CROPS IN LIVESTOCK PRODUCTION: WHOLE-SYSTEM APPROACH: Managing Grazing to Restore Soil Health and Farm Livelihoods1.” Journal of Animal Science 96, no. 4 (April 2018): 1519–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skx060.
Pretty, Jules. “Agricultural Sustainability: Concepts, Principles and Evidence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1491 (February 12, 2008): 447–65. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2163.
Pearson, Craig J. “Regenerative, Semiclosed Systems: A Priority for Twenty-First-Century Agriculture.” BioScience 57, no. 5 (May 1, 2007): 409–18. https://doi.org/10.1641/B570506.
[1] https://www.wur.nl/en/show/Can-conventional-agriculture-feed...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture
[5] https://rodaleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/rodale-white-...
[6] https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5831153/
[8] https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/farming-systems-trial/
Also, there's plenty of evidence that small, sustainable farms are both more efficient (in inputs, and land) and more productive in total caloric terms that mono-cropped industrial farming. In the Pretty review I referenced, Table 3 shows the "adoption of agricultural sustainability technologies and practices on 286 projects in 47 countries" increased average % increase in crop yields from 22% to 146%. [2]
Per the FAO [3], globally, small farms continue to dominate in food production and their food production (and economic sustainability) would be improved via an "ecological intensification" approach. [4]
[1] https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/how-sustainably-feed-10-bil...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610163/
[3] https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/industrial-a...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478712/
I was feeling hungry about dinner time a while back, but I couldn't decide what to eat so I skipped. I woke the next morning and didn't feel hungry at all. That seemed odd to me. So I skipped breakfast and ate lunch only (same portion size as normal) and continued to do so for six weeks. I felt great. Workouts strong, focus and concentration improved. I saved a bunch of time and money.
After that did a 13 day fast (zero food). Day 3 sucked, but the 10 that followed where really eye opening in a wholly positive way. I do a lot of boxing, and I didn't stop during this fast. I thought it would suck but I had tons of energy and lots of speed. At the finishing lime, the first morsel of food (some roast pumpkin) was savored and tasted incredible. It gave me a new awareness and appreciation of what and how much food I need to maintain maximum performance.
I know i could eat a LOT less than I do in a year and be as or more healthy and contribute to a healthier environment. We just have to break the habit. That's really hard given the social culture of eating.
I've moved to a calorie-limited diet, myself, and the effects on my health have been dramatic. My acid reflux has subsided; it disappeared when I went low carb for a month and has not come back, even though I've added fruit carbs back in to my diet. I'm down over 20 pounds, and hoping to lose another 20 or so, while at the same time working out and replacing fat with muscle mass.
We can be healthier, if we try. Unfortunately, our modern societies, especially here in North America, encourage excessive eating with all of the sad results that are evident if you go out in public and observe the clinical obesity that is commonplace.