> Indeed, despite the growing popularity of synthetic meats such as Beyond and Impossible Burgers, along with a 2020 poll indicating that one in four Americans says they’re cutting back on meat consumption, domestic demand has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. (According to a report by agricultural research firm CattleFax, U.S. per capita beef consumption in 2021 was the highest it’s been in 33 years.)
Synthetic meats are not the only way (or the best way) how to replace meat in your diet.
If you'll try plant-based diet (of course done correctly), after some time your gut bacteria will adjust and you won't even miss meat taste (and even maybe distaste meat smell).
This is a completely false statement.
Something more accurate and less opinionated might go something like
"Intensive meat farming (like any intensive farming) is contributing to harmful factors impacting the earths atmospheric and biodiversity conditions".
This article (and every other one I have seen like this) bases most of its evidence on deforestation:
"The expansion of land for agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss."
What this doesnt take into account is the millions of people who buy their meat from local sustainable non-intensive farms. Not contributing to deforestation, or diversity loss at all.
A much fairer outlook than demonising all meat consumption would be to promote import taxes on meat. If we all stopped buying meat imported from south america, there would be no reason for the locals there to keep clearing forest to raise more cattle.
Educating people on food miles and sustainable sources is the way to achieve this goal, not telling people that eating meat is killing the planet.
> What this doesnt take into account is the millions of people who buy their meat from local sustainable non-intensive farms. Not contributing to deforestation, or diversity loss at all.
And those lands where the animals graze were not forested previously?
"... the Knepp Wildland project in West Sussex, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as a way to reconcile meat and wildlife. But while it’s an excellent example of rewilding, it’s a terrible example of food production.
If this system were to be rolled out across 10% of the UK’s farmland and if, as its champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each person here with 420 grams of meat a year, enough for around three meals. We could eat a prime steak roughly once every three years. If all the farmland in the UK were to be managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal a day (one 30th of our requirement) in meat, and nothing else ..."
> Educating people on food miles and sustainable sources is the way to achieve this goal
Transport, processing, retail & packaging is a miniscule part in CO2 production compared to land use change & farming. This argument is probably just a deflection tactic from the meat industry. More info in links below.
Love it when people get up in arms about this sort of stuff.
> Why are we subsidizing this?
Realize that your opinion is in the vast minority of the populations.
Im not saying either way is right here, Im just saying that most people disagree with you and that would go to explain why things that you want are not on the general agenda of governments.
"For 10,000-20,000 years, native people used fire annually as a tool to assist in hunting, transportation, and safety.[7] Evidence of ignition sources of fire in the tall grass prairie are overwhelmingly human as opposed to lightning.[8] Humans, and grazing animals, were active participants in the process of prairie formation and the establishment of the diversity of graminoid and forbs species. Fire has the effect on prairies of removing trees, clearing dead plant matter, and changing the availability of certain nutrients in the soil from the ash produced. Fire kills the vascular tissue of trees, but not prairie species, as up to 75% (depending on the species) of the total plant biomass is below the soil surface and will re-grow from its deep (upwards of 20 feet[9]) roots. Without disturbance, trees will encroach on a grassland and cast shade, which suppresses the understory. Prairie and widely spaced oak trees evolved to coexist in the oak savanna ecosystem.[10]"
> He had always been good at math, so he put together a formula—a proprietary algorithm that he loves talking about but declines to explain in detail, saying only that it “measures the supply of cattle every day and determines that if we buy a certain percentage of cattle, we have a seventy percent chance of winning.”
There’s a whole other science to cattle pricing so hard to tell what he’s hinting at. Cattle are priced using either cash pricing, or grid pricing, or formula pricing. Sounds like he working formula pricing to his advantage
11 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadEating beef means killing the planet faster. [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets]
Synthetic meats are not the only way (or the best way) how to replace meat in your diet.
If you'll try plant-based diet (of course done correctly), after some time your gut bacteria will adjust and you won't even miss meat taste (and even maybe distaste meat smell).
If you're trying to eat healthy, you'll go to the source for the protein (and avoid highly processed food altogether). [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20replace%20meat]
This is a completely false statement. Something more accurate and less opinionated might go something like
"Intensive meat farming (like any intensive farming) is contributing to harmful factors impacting the earths atmospheric and biodiversity conditions".
This article (and every other one I have seen like this) bases most of its evidence on deforestation: "The expansion of land for agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss."
What this doesnt take into account is the millions of people who buy their meat from local sustainable non-intensive farms. Not contributing to deforestation, or diversity loss at all.
A much fairer outlook than demonising all meat consumption would be to promote import taxes on meat. If we all stopped buying meat imported from south america, there would be no reason for the locals there to keep clearing forest to raise more cattle.
Educating people on food miles and sustainable sources is the way to achieve this goal, not telling people that eating meat is killing the planet.
> What this doesnt take into account is the millions of people who buy their meat from local sustainable non-intensive farms. Not contributing to deforestation, or diversity loss at all.
And those lands where the animals graze were not forested previously?
"... the Knepp Wildland project in West Sussex, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as a way to reconcile meat and wildlife. But while it’s an excellent example of rewilding, it’s a terrible example of food production.
If this system were to be rolled out across 10% of the UK’s farmland and if, as its champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each person here with 420 grams of meat a year, enough for around three meals. We could eat a prime steak roughly once every three years. If all the farmland in the UK were to be managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal a day (one 30th of our requirement) in meat, and nothing else ..."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301928] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...]
> Educating people on food miles and sustainable sources is the way to achieve this goal
Transport, processing, retail & packaging is a miniscule part in CO2 production compared to land use change & farming. This argument is probably just a deflection tactic from the meat industry. More info in links below.
[https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0c41fcj.webp - Emissions (in kg CO2e) from the food supply chain – the climate impact of food miles is often a small proportion (Source: Our World in Data/Poore and Nemecek, Science, 2018), linked from ] [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...]
...And we'd save billions in cardiovascular healthcare and gain so much economic productivity! Why are we subsidizing this? [0]
[0] https://www.pcrm.org/news/blog/meat-and-dairy-subsidies-make...
> Why are we subsidizing this?
Realize that your opinion is in the vast minority of the populations. Im not saying either way is right here, Im just saying that most people disagree with you and that would go to explain why things that you want are not on the general agenda of governments.
What the majority thinks is not (always) relevant, or right, or moral, or what will it be in the end.
HN crew should know better and to look at early adopters ;)
Since you're comparing with UK examples i'm going to guess you aren't familiar with the term Prairies, aka grassland. They take up about 1/3 of the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie
"For 10,000-20,000 years, native people used fire annually as a tool to assist in hunting, transportation, and safety.[7] Evidence of ignition sources of fire in the tall grass prairie are overwhelmingly human as opposed to lightning.[8] Humans, and grazing animals, were active participants in the process of prairie formation and the establishment of the diversity of graminoid and forbs species. Fire has the effect on prairies of removing trees, clearing dead plant matter, and changing the availability of certain nutrients in the soil from the ash produced. Fire kills the vascular tissue of trees, but not prairie species, as up to 75% (depending on the species) of the total plant biomass is below the soil surface and will re-grow from its deep (upwards of 20 feet[9]) roots. Without disturbance, trees will encroach on a grassland and cast shade, which suppresses the understory. Prairie and widely spaced oak trees evolved to coexist in the oak savanna ecosystem.[10]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie#Formation
There’s a whole other science to cattle pricing so hard to tell what he’s hinting at. Cattle are priced using either cash pricing, or grid pricing, or formula pricing. Sounds like he working formula pricing to his advantage
https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef/price-trends-comparing-cat...
I've done a lot with identification and tracking cattle, but very little with pricing.