Ending factory farming as soon as possible
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
But, realistically, many ocean ecosystems are already on the brink of collapse. Merely increasing production won't save those ecosystems; though maybe it'd stave it off for a few years. Our industrial economies have produced seemingly limitless consumption and waste.
When you add up all of the wasted food at every stage of our agricultural systems, it is staggering. It's not just fish that's being wasted, it's everything. Solving the waste problem is more boring than growing meat in a lab, but it might be more effective at reducing hunger and reducing ecological destruction.
To go back to marine ecosystem, those that are on the brink of collapse is so mainly because of 3 causes. Pollution, invasive species, and over overfishing towards specific fish stocks. Both invasive species and overpopulation caused by eutrophication could actually use an increase in fishing in order to increase biodiversity, but a common element in both is that no one want to pay for it. To my knowledge it actually common problem in many fresh water lakes.
On the other hand fishermen do not discard so many small fishes as previously. Our cats and dogs will eat that.
"ending factory farming as soon as possible" equals at this moment to "killing by famine a lot of surplus humans as soon as possible". We need to produce more food, not less, because we are more people than the year before, not less.
The article is talking about animal factory farming. Eliminating animal factory farming would free up more than enough resources to feed humans directly. The conversion from plant calories to meat calories is not very efficient.
Animals in animal factory farming can be feeded with things that neither humans nor plants can/would accept directly.
Animal factory farming by-products also are needed to support agriculture. Using human faeces at large scale to fertilize the spoil is not so good idea as using horse, goat, cow or pig faeces (Because human faeces carry more types of human transmisible parasites and more often than faeces in non-human animals).
Agriculture without using fertilizers will not provide the same harvests.
We have only one planet and the only land available yet to put all this cattle (that is apt to breed cattle and not used yet) are the last sanctuaries of biodiversity. We will need to burn the forests if we want to scalate our solution of "freedom for all cows and pigs".
Therefore we must be aware that our shiny plan of liberating resources to feed humans could backfire easily in several parts.
There is not a morally-magic solution for our current problems (and we have big problems). Meat generated in lab will need also resources to grow. We talk about chemical resources, lots of water, sterilization material and lots of energy. And currently is just a very expensive way with the main purpose to provide vegans with a exit way to lie to themselves and eat meat that "is not meat, just a nerveless animal tissue thin as a paper".
Shifting subsidies to greener and more ethical industries would be a good start. The "fake-meat" improves all the time and if it actually were cheaper (in-store) than the meat option things could start to happen. Typically that's not the case[2]. Probably due to a combination of scale, subsidies, willingness to pay amongst vegans and health concerned customers and store policy (key product might be sold at very low margins/loss to attract customers)
Estimates of the external cost caused by the meat industry (health, pollution) is also quite high. Special taxes can be used here, while cutting taxes on better products.
[1] https://www.peta.org/living/food/10-things-wish-everyone-kne... (admittingly not the most objective source)
[2] Based on Norwegian stores
I think the major barrier to mass adoption of this will be convincing the masses that they should try it. Too bad it can't be marketed as meat, at least not for long before getting caught.
Interestingly, consumers are more likely to try out vegan products if they don't say they're vegan on the front of the package...
The NYT article neglected to discuss that iirc
They've made it similar to ground beef I think.
Investors seem to notice too.
"Why Bill Gates And Richard Branson Invested In 'Clean' Meat" https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/08/25/why-bil...
"Richard Branson predicts the world will no longer need to kill animals in 30 years" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/memph...
By the way, if anyone who reads still consumes dairy: that stuff is undermining your health. Replacements are getting close, and given that the replacements are WAY more healthy it is just not the same story as meat. (Similar, but less convincing, case can be made for eggs)
If lab grown meat can "in the future" make a dent in slaughtered meat consumption (can attract "us" away), then plant-based dairy alternatives should be able to do so today.
And they do -- https://www.google.nl/search?q=dairy+consumption+is+down -- all over the western world. Their best strategy: sell it to new markets of people that are, unlike those of European decent, much more likely to be lactose intolerant.
If we can cut down "real" meat consumption by even half, you could in theory make all cows free range.
meat tastiness * degree it affects me > immorality of killing animals * degree it affects me
I dunno, how much worse could it be if it is substituting the meat in, say, a McDonalds hamburger? By the time the cheese and special sauce are added, does anyone notice the difference? Sure, one might have special occasions when you go spend $200 for a real, dead cow dinner. But I’ll bet most meat consumption isn’t in the form of “slab of ribeye” but ground up to be unrecognizable Taco Bell meat and chicken nuggets. I’m also willing to bet the person placing the order at Taco Bell is not in meat conisseur mode, but in “fill the hole so the grumbling sounds stop” mode.
Yeah, if you're only concerned about taste/texture/juiciness, I think that's the easiest concern. lab grown meat is still the same muscle cells. I would bet a lot of money that it's going to taste awesome.
these sentiments are not random when you consider the history of Monsanto, of DuPont, the tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. You don't need to look far to find reasons to distrust global corporations and governments.
* a.k.a. artifical and natural flavours - the only difference between artificial and natural is the starting ingredient in the synthesis
Whereas, when you have cells, you already have a system that grows and does the chemistry via it's own enzymes. The dream is that you "just add sugar / water / salt" and it'll grow. I'm not saying that there won't be problems. (Like, maybe the meat tissue think that it's stressed or has been cut, if it's exposed to water/air? Maybe stressed tissue will taste bad or produce bad hormones?) But they will be very very different problems.
As an example, given a pastured chicken, a factory chicken, and a lab chicken, is it easier to get the factory chicken to taste like the pastured chicken, or to get the lab chicken to taste like the pastured chicken?
I have never tasted a factory chicken that compares to a pastured chicken, and I'm skeptical about whether it's possible. But nevertheless I believe that's an easier problem than getting the lab chicken right, which of course implies that in my opinion a good-as-pastured lab chicken is exceedingly difficult.
But I'll readily agree we can make something that most humans would identify as meat in the lab and that a large number of them would be happy to eat it. After all, people enjoy eating all sorts of processed food as it is.
Given this, I guess the real question is, can you make a lab chicken taste as good as a factory chicken? I don't know, probably...
Would save a lot of lives from suffering.
Whatever argument you make against this can also be made in favor of making more cramped prisons and working human prisoners to the bone.
Capitalism is designed to exploit externalities, including animal welfare as well as antibiotic resistance.
So we'll have to choice either to undig (and uncontaminate) the fertile lands under the roads and streets in the urban areas, that is a way;
or instead burn the last forests and give our precious natural areas to the pigs, literally. The pressure to ocuppy still relatively intact areas and the last protected sanctuaries for biodiversity would be irresistible and inescapable.
And is a wrong (but much repeated) idea than we'll stop the suffering. Is just that they are conveniently dismissing the suffering caused to the ecosystems. "Gazillions" of savage animals, plants, trees and fungi will suffer inmensely if we scalate the solution to all our cattle.
It doesn't need a billionaire to make this happen (which is why you're confusing me), it just needs culture to change.
Does unregulated Capitalism have the mechanisms to abolish such things with time? If there remain even 10% of meat eaters who want to pay $1 for a hamburger, who can stop the factory farms??
The only thing I can think of is a billionaire buying all the animals the way slaves were redeemed for money in some countries. After that no competing farms could start because they wouldn't have the animals to start with.
They say private ownership of animals will prevent their extinction, like commercial bees. That may be true but what about their welfare?
They talk about it toward 2:20 (I do like how they had a full transcript and ToC so you can jump around in the audio).
In any case, my take away was that because there might be some chance of a "net negative" life for insects in farms, we shouldn't be looking to replace some of our protein needs by insects.
Given the sheer amount of ecological damage that is being done to the planet with each season of industrial animal farming, I really don't understand why we're not looking at lab-grown insects as the MVP for "lab-grown meat".
The problems needing to be solved to make crickets/mealworm protein a scaled operation that could reduce the demand on chicken/beef/pork are much easier than growing meat in a lab (feel pretty confident in this claim, open to rebuttal).
How many cows would be saved every year if just 1 major fast-food burger joint switched to 50/50 mealworm-beef burgers? Would anyone even notice if Taco Bell switched their taco meat to be 50% ground crickets?
What resources are required to make lab grown meat anyways? Where are they sourced from? What habitats are collapsing to provide the necessary solvents/catalysts/preservatives/energy/etc for whatever solutions it needs to grow in? What are the negative externalities of this lab-growing process? What does that look like at the scale necessary to take even 20% of the current beef demand?
We're twisting our britches over what a cricket or mealworm might feel in a factory farm setting, yet they are basically the perfect little machines for turning carbohydrates, water and air into essential human-accessible proteins and vitamins (crickets have a ton of B12, just like red meat). They're the perfect stop-gap solution until the lab meat is ready for prime-time.
Also, insect-farming waste products are typically just great compost and fertilizer and you could basically grow insects underground (mealworms love the dark) and grow their substrate/feed above them. I think calories/acre would be another useful measurement to look at when trying to evaluate which direction human agriculture should be headed.
Alright, TL;DR - Insect farming is low hanging fruit for alleviating the ecological pressure of factory animal farming which is being ignored for no good reason. /rant
As soon as nobody farms cows for meat, milk, and leather, cows will become an endangered species/extinct because nobody will pay to keep them alive. And there's not much space where they could survive on their own in the wild.
I won't believe for a second that people are seriously concerned about the fate of the Bos Taurus species in a discussion about factory farming, or eating meat in general
Ending factory farming would likely actually increase the variety of cows and other animals, which will generally help their health.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12516/how-common...
For bovines it's likely to be even larger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#Breeding_of_aurochs-li...
I found myself reading this list several times. Intriguing how we have "no wilds" left for soo many of our "favorite" animals.
When Sweden voted to outlaw the latter, a Swedish friend of mine revealed he had lost his virginity that way years earlier. Without passing absolute moral judgement (pro or con) on either type of human-bovine interaction, I cannot see how the latter is relatively worse than the former, which is why his revelation caused me to attempt veganism for a bit (I failed, vegan cheese is no substitute for the real thing).
Long to short, factor farming generates a lot of ground level pollution. Furthermore, those animals also generate a lot of greenhouse gases. Frame the problem in terms of human suffering and more people are likely to pay attention.
Years ago there was a NY Times Sunday magazine feature article on factor pig farming. It was enlightening. Unfortunately, I've searched for it and can't seem to find it. If you can find, do read it.
p.s. Growing crops to be fed to farm animals is also very inefficient. More people would have more food if we all ate less animal protein.
1. Environmental -- For "our children" as you call it. This assumes that countries have gov'ts that give a shit and are not totally controlled by the industry (essentially the mega shareholders)
2. Health -- Plant-based (especially whole plant food) diet is much, much healthier than the a diet that contains several serving of meat/dairy/eggs per week (many have that in a day). This is ALSO an argument for the children, as they will learn from us. (We could not tell kids to not smoke, we have to stop ourselves too!)
3. Ethical -- Whole categories of abuse towards fellow earthlings (poor, women, slaves, lower-caste, captured enemies, etc.) were generally accepted as permissible, yet are now near unanimously condemned. It is not unfathomable that animals --that are currently still being permissibly abused for being of a different species-- may get added to that list.
Also the ethical reason will have a huge impact on "our children". As we have seen with the other steps we made in awareness, it is totally worth making these steps.
Peace.
There's a huge influx of people in the vegan/plant-based communities from very health conscious people. Many of them believe that science is showing that it allows them to live healthier/happier/longer/stronger.
Is that not a good answer to "What's in it for me?" :)
But you're advocating the one blow will be from the "personal health" angle. With little time on my hands I usually also go for this angle, simply because I believe that all the people who'd want to be vegan/vegetarian "for the animals" would be so by now. The health angle still has a kind of novelty/news aspect to it (while being more personal and urgent then the environment angle).
As an example, I once spoke to a person who thought the movie _The March of the Penguins_ was horrific because the penguins just stood there week after week in the freezing cold doing nothing. That may be perfectly fine for a penguin. It might even be like what a adept meditator would experience in a life of meditation.
This is even more true of animals like pigs. Imagine dogs living their lives out in kennels. Also consider the change in behavior in zoo animals when their habitats are redesigned to more closely resemble their native habitats.
That being said, I have no idea what it's like to be a penguin, or how much they suffer. I did watch March of the Penguins and it seemed the males huddling together deep in Antarctica during the winter were uncomfortable.
But as an aside, I’d argue that you’re bordering on the “Africans don’t mind the heat of the cotton fields” line of thinking to make ourselves feel better about owning slaves. Like with the animals, even the slightest bit of effort in the way of research will tell you that’s not true.
(but there are ~hundreds of similar vids if not convinced)