Disclosure: I'm an investor in Memphis Meats
Most meat animals (or at least goats, sheep, and cows) worldwide feed on whatever grows on the ground (whether that be turnips, grass, or something else).
Poultry is going to be almost all feed. Along with Pork.
Those are the 3 biggest sources of meat by far.
(http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/napoleon-of-nott...)
Seems like a good argument.
Admittedly, it would be tremendously hard for me to be a vegetarian. Im a T2 diabetic. Grains, starches, and sugars are all bad for me.
It's an abomination against nature, in the public eye.
Really? It's not like we've been doing that for 5,000 years or something. But in 50 years they'll be like "What were you doing for the last 5,000 years?"
Animal agriculture is not going to be one of those things. In fact I can guarantee you that even if we figure out a meat replacement people will still eat animals in 100 years. Something that's been done for 5,000 years doesn't get stopped that quickly.
As evidence look at how many people want to "go back to the farm", and raise their own animals. On the surface, why? It's harder and more expensive. Yet, people want that anyway.
Doesn't this prove too much?[1] Plenty of things were common for millennia before they suddenly weren't. Eg: Monarchies, slavery, beasts of burden, and diseases such as smallpox.
Except that every one of those things still exists! Smallpox doesn't exist, but other diseases such as syphilis do.
So that actually demonstrates exactly the opposite of the point you were trying to make.
Monarchies is an especially bad example because they still exist precisely because people are unwilling to stop a tradition that has gone on that long.
I'm not sure that's the reason; perhaps the largely-symbolic monarchies of Europe, but the substantive monarchies in the world are actually mostly quite newly established.
No one is "going back to the farm" to raise their own cattle, which they slaughter themselves, for a steak. It also doesn't scale to the "buy cheap steaks and grill a steak for lunch every day" level that some people do. Just the reduction to "I'll have one steak per year" is a significant departure from where we are now (which is a significant departure from where we were 100 years ago[1]).
[1] Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
I'm sorry, but you are quite wrong.
There are mobile slaughterhouses that cater to this exact market: A farmer raises a couple cows, the mobile butcher slaughters the animal and process the meat into individually wrapped packages. Then they freeze it all and it lasts them a full year till they repeat this process.
Do you need me to find you some youtube videos to prove it?[1] It's common enough that they custom outfit vans specifically to make this job easier (add a power hoist, and pull-out work tables). The butcher drives the van from customer to customer.
You need to meet some more rural friends to see other ways that people live. And BTW I'm not convinced that this is a cheaper way to get meat, instead they do it for the "back to basics" feel, and for the quality of the meat. That's not going to change just because some lab can make some meat.
> Do you think that the majority of people 100 years go could afford the variety and quantity of meats available to them today?
Depends where you live. Some places could, some could not. Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
[1]Edit: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mobile+meat+sla...
Your rural way of living does not scale to the number of people we currently have living on Earth. It also does not scale to meet some people's current consumption patterns, which is one of my points.
> Especially warrior cultures ate a lot of meat.
"Warrior culture" does not scale to 8 billion people. You can't use this as justification to continue to eat meat while ignoring the negative externalities around its production.
Now you've decided to talk about what people should do.
That's an entirely different topic.
By the fact that you've moved the goalposts, I take it you acknowledge my point that eating animals is not: "one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment"?
If we go back to our origins the savannah was probably occasionally full of delicious four legged protein just waiting for us to run it down and eat it.
Easter has this 'egg theme', again, eggs were not a year round thing. Available at Easter and sometimes later in the year if chickens had a 'second brood'.
So, no, 100 years ago meat was scarce and valued, not wolfed down without a second thought.
I'd be willing to bet that humans will stop driving cars much sooner than they stop farming. Humans have been practicing animal agriculture for a long time...
Might be some correlation there, but probably it's mostly unrelated. We did many things for a super-long time then stopped, because we found something better. For example, we used horses to get around for millennia.
We've done animal agriculture for a long time, but once something better comes around, we'll switch - and food technology is getting very close, and has other benefits too (helps against global warming, etc.).
But just like riding horses, eating animal products will never go away completely, of course.
This mode of (purely statistical) longevity argument is the "Doomsday Argument". The classic version is about predicting how much longer human civilization might endure. The crux of it is that there's only a 5% chance that we're currently in the first 5% of humanity's total timeline, and a 95% chance that we're in the last 95% of it.
If we assume that 60 billion humans have been born so far, it can be estimated that there is a 95% chance that the total number of humans ever will be less than 20 × 60 billion = 1.2 trillion. Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1,140 billion humans will be born in 9,120 years.
What will end up being seen as crazy is locking them all up in a barn and burning fossil fuels to bring the food to them instead of them using their own legs, all for another 20% body mass and giant meat portions (think: steak, chicken breast).
It'd be foolish to keep swinging back and forth on the USDA/HHS "one size fits all" legislature.
A cow's rumen is amazing. You can feed a cow almost any vegetable matter and they will grow and produce milk and meat. Chickens and pigs are more particular but in terms of energy in to food out, are still very inexpensive and easy to manage. Cell cultures require sterile laboratory conditions, growth factors and very specific nutrient requirements.
A largely plant-based diet, sure, that is what most (but not all) of our hunter gatherer ancestors ate, but I doubt cell cultures will ever get within even a order of magnitude of the efficiency of growing and eating real animals.
But animals spend a lot of energy making products other than consumable protein. They require a lot of land and water and fuel even if housed in close quarters. And you have to tend them which is labor intensive. And ship them around to be finished and slaughtered.
If energy costs rise to a certain point and technology becomes good enough (including automation) I'd expect protein from whole animals to be considerably more expensive than lab grown. The exception maybe being strictly grass fed beef on land that isn't useful for much else. But that won't have the taste people expect and might not actually be as good as the lab grown stuff.
We could potentially alter the animals into something that would be hard to recognize, but that'll be an evolution of animal husbandry, not something that will leave us bewildered at animals.
What do you see that indicates we're going to make massive leaps beyond what animal life has already provided in turning sunlight and air into useful lipids and proteins?
I suspect the real problem is closer to wasting arable land, water, shipping (with all of those environmental externalities), etc. on growing crops that aren't used to directly feed humans, and government subsidies that hide the true cost of corn-fed livestock from consumers.
Also if you want to use scrub land to feed your livestock you're going to need a lot of it like in Australia.
>For millennia, humans raised livestock on pasturing lands, seemingly without harming the environment too badly.
For millennia most people wouldn't be getting access to 200lbs of meat a year. There was also a lot fewer of us to feed that much meat to.
I've switched the majority of my caloric intake over to Soylent but I still end up craving meat, for example.
2. I'm stating the major hurdles that need to be crossed for mainstream adoption. We will not see major shift without an alternative that people want to embrace both ethically and in flavor. Bacon is obsessed over for a reason; people don't want to give that up. We simply won't see a major shift without meat substitutes tasting like meat.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.
Great rant on humans eating grass, but what does that have to do with anything? No one is saying you need to eat grass. The article is about the direct human consumption of grain vs. production of grain, feeding and growing cows, slaughtering them, shipping them, then consuming them.
It would be more like if there were plows at the time that operated on solar but nobody wanted to use them, and instead, decided to tie horses to the plows because they would rather.
Had a hard time working farm subsidies into the analogy.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...
Sketch out a model of the evolution of dietary preferences in the ancestral environment (esp post-fire) and you will quickly see this is an insane thing to believe.
Just because one is very tasty doesn't mean it makes the other any less desirable.
On the same topic, it's ironic how we lump "meat" into a single category. How the animals are raised and fed has a huge effect on the flavor and taste of the meat.
If McDonalds hamburgers disappeared I wouldn't even notice. If I am not able to buy grass fed ribeye from a local farm I'd be very disappointed.
I was pretty specific about saying animals in my post. Why animals? Because we are known to mourn the death of other animals.
We don't mourn the death of food animals typically so its OK then?
Your criteria are arbitrary, and that's fine for a personal value but you certainly can't expect others to agree with you.
You're really arguing something separate here. We can't eat a lot of plants that animals can. 36% of corn goes to feed animals for meat, but what percentage of corn is inedible for humans? (husks, leaves, cobs)
There's a reason we don't domesticate carnivores - we're not creating any more food sources. We don't compete with things that digest cellulose.
My guess for why they're named Memphis Meats is ”[a founder's] family also owns a chain of 43 BBQ restaurants based out of Memphis, Tennessee"
You're from Memphis? It's so rare to run into another Memphian on HN.
Plants are alive too.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_war...
I don't believe this is as true as you seem to think.
Supposing someone proved to you with some future subjectivity-detecting tricorder that cows do understand all they go through, will you change your mind about the humane bullet method?
> cows do understand all they go through Also you seem to be exaggerating a bit, what do you exactly mean by all? Are you talking about their entire life or just when they're about to be slaughtered, because I think for most parts cows have a pretty happy life. The slaughtering could be done more precisely and quickly but that's really just negligence on the part of some bad actors and not something that is inherently difficult to fix.
"Cows don't understand what's happening to them, we would! Unless we wouldn't, as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand 'the meaning of life' etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?"
This is not possible at-scale.
Also, do you really think that giant corporations, that would willingly throw humans under the bus by the truckload to save a few dollars, give a crap about the suffering of an animal? Especially an animal that is slated for the slaughterhouse anyways?
Just look at how they react to undercover videos that expose illegal practices behind their closed doors. They immediately start lobbying for industry-specific laws that make it illegal to do undercover investigative journalism of their industry (the so-called AgGag bills).
They can't even stay within the letter of the current (and fairly lax) laws on how they are supposed to operate, and when exposed find it more logical to (attempt to) make it illegal to expose their crimes rather than to just stop committing said crimes.
1. I mentioned that the current laws are lax for a reason. There really isn't much in the way of controls over animal agriculture other than things that might affect public health and safety. Getting all of these companies to play ball with the current legal environment will not get us anywhere near where we would need to be.
2. The idea that "all" we have to do is prevent them from lobbying and enforce the current laws is hopelessly naive and not a light undertaking. (Especially in areas where this industry is the main industry / employer). You're also ignoring all of the government subsidies that are already poured into this industry. The government has been in bed with this industry for a long time.
How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?
Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?
What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?
Let's say I were to describe a living thing, that despite having no nerves or brain we could identify, responded to favorable stimuli in ways we could easily describe as a "favorable response" -- for example, the presence of usable energy would provoke the movement of appendages towards that energy source, and the presence of unfavorable or damaging stimuli would provoke an "unfavorable response", such as pulling appendages away from negative stimuli. As far as we could tell, the intelligence in this thing was perhaps entirely distributed throughout the creature rather than relying on a centralized processing center metaphor for thought. It doesn't seem to think in any way that we can easily translate, and for a very long time, we didn't even recognize they responded to stimuli at all -- but that's our fault.
This creature also can't make head or tails of us we presume, our experiences of the universe are simply too entirely different. We have a few appendages, bilateral symmetry, and a mix of sensory organs -- mostly in the same appendage stalk as our central thought organ. Perhaps instead of our familiar mix of sense, this creature had an entirely different set that prioritized entirely different things -- perhaps instead of taste, the organism had some alternate way of assessing chemical composition, instead of sight, it had thousands of narrow-band EM sensing organs on the end of each appendage. Perhaps its digestive system was on the outside, a little like ours, but also turned inside out, so it merely had to have external contact with usable nutrients, not ingest it. Perhaps it transported nutrients around without a central cardiopulmonary organ but using nothing but capillary action, lungs were distributed on the underside of each of the EM sensing organ and it's "blood" didn't rely on metals to bind to Oxygen but instead was simply a nutrient stew. What if the bulk of its carbon (sure, its carbon-based) came not from food, but was simply pulled out of the air?
Let's suppose this being had no mouth or way of making noise, but communicated with its fellow species using various chemical exchanges, for example, suppose one of the creatures was attacked, it might release warning chemicals into its environment letting others of its species prepare themselves by pulling back appendages, or reducing the flow of its internal blood analogue. Or perhaps when mature members of the species learned of new sources of nutrients, they might share those nutrients with young members of the species through this exchange network. Perhaps the way this species "screams" is by releasing a gas into the air that warns others nearby.
Mating and reproduction depends on the species, but there are sexes. Species members have various life-stages that include an infancy analogue, a childhood analogue (with growth spurts), a sexual maturity stage and many even have old age. Some species can reproduce on their own, others require symbiotic species to help facilitate reproduction.
If creatures like this dropped out of space in a spacecraft we'd call them aliens and see if we could learn their language and their technology.
Would you think of this creature as something that can suffer?
All I've described are plants.
> How much energy/resources/time does it take to raise plant food sources vs an analogous amount of animal food sources?
Animals require more energy to raise than plants in general. However, animals can be raised on food stock that both:
a) humans can't eat
b) grows where human ready food plants don't grow well
> Do plants require antibiotics to raise at scale?
Yes, as well as other various chemicals and treatments from chemicals that kill non-desirable plants to chemicals that kill non-plant animals, to chemicals that kill fungi or bacterial infections. Plants even get viruses.
> What are the environmental tolls taken by raising plants vs animals?
Very difficult to ascertain. The world will have animals in it one way or the other. But nearly all domestically raised plants and animals are the product of thousands of years of engineering and intense cultivation. For example, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and gai lan are all human engineered variations of the same plant. This plant only occurs naturally in very specific ecological niches. One could argue that the millions of acres dedicated to growing these mutants are millions of acres where the natural ecology is permanently damaged. But humans have been at the cabbage game for a few thousand years, it would be impossible to know what nature would have intended for that land.
Similarly, cows are famously highly domesticated food, clothing, labor and milk animals with few close wild cousins due to about 11,000 years of intense selective breeding. But there's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world. If we stopped eating cows today, there'd still be 1.5 billion cows. It's obviously not ethical to just kill them all. Is it ethical to deny them natural breeding rights as well? Cows appear to take pleasure in their offspring, would it not be a slow genocide to simply end their line? We can't ask cows, they don't talk, just as much as plants don't, but we know they have emotions and moods, can be happy, excited, fearful or sad. Would a cow feel sad if it knew it could never have calves?
What proportion of meat-based meals are eaten instead of plant-based meals specifically because of that lack of human ready plant food being available?
Do the bacteria which are targeted by plant antibiotics pose a similar risk to humans as the bacteria that affect livestock such as pigs?
It might be ethical to euthanize a majority of cows etc., if it could be done instantaneously, painlessly, and somehow without creating humanitarian or environmental issues. It would have to be a perfect hot swap, though.
When technology and space exploration allows, I would also support simply relocating these Earth species en masse to other customized planets where they can live/suffer/die in more natural or "fair" terms without our systematic interference.