People Don't Get the Link Between Meat Consumption and Climate Change (2016) | Hacker News Reader

People Don't Get the Link Between Meat Consumption and Climate Change (2016)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

46 pointsantouank111 comments

Actually, I think you'll find that people just really like the way meat tastes.

It's more than that. People are very attached to their food choices, they put a lot of personal stock in what they eat. Food is an essential, ancient part of culture and society.

You not only have to convince people to get over the taste, but you also have to convince people to get over the cultural importance of meat-based foods. Not so hard and some families, but probably serious challenge and many others. "Thanksgiving turkey", "Christmas ham", "high holidays brisket", what have you.

The ones you mentioned are sporadic, celebtratory meals though; the main meat consumption is still the day-to-day stuff. Chicken sandwiches and such.

True, but people are attached to their chicken sandwiches, too. For most people in the US, at least, sandwiches (with a few specific exceptions) are supposed to contain meat. What else would you have, rabbit food on a bun?

Today I just ate one with tofu cooked in sauce and green beans (yeah soy has its own problems, at least in europe where we don't produce it).

But you can also have beans / chick pea or even greens baked into fritters.

I always liked the eggs mayo combo (adding tomato cucumber or whatever), but this is not vegan.

I mean, to be completely honest with you, at this point I do not want to eat a sandwich at all.

No worries, I don't envy your prejudices and close mindedness, and I have no doubt that our world won't leave you much choice later on :)

I'm pretty sure even in the hypothetical brave meatless future I will not be compelled to only eat recipes that work much better with meat.

You're not going to have a Tbone steak without beef, it's true. So you can't have a beef burger without beef, but you can have other flavors of sandwiches that are absolutely tasty too (and can be as fat and unhealthy as meat options btw). Also many recipes do work without meat : I do a kick ass lasagna and stuffed tomatoes. Anything with minced meat basically is not that much reliant on the meat for taste and can be easily replaced with textured soy (closest in taste but also seitan or beans or whatever).

But then again, I don't understand how one can hate food before even trying it, and how one can be so adverse against acting towards a brighter future for everyone, here by having meatless meals more often.

edit : Luckily, I just saw that while you're the most adamant, you're also the single user with such a behavior on this thread, so I still have hope that others will be more receptive.

I don't think you're really following me. There are any number of meatless foods I like -- for instance, pasta with sauce (well, not vegan, and the sauce might have fish broth or something, but still), steamed or stir-fried green vegetables, ma po tofu (usually has pork but it can work without it), whatever. But I find the idea of a sandwich with tofu in place of meat repellent and I'd really rather just give up on the sandwich and have a recipe designed from the start to be vegetarian, rather than one designed to have meat but with a lousy substitute.

> I don't understand how one can hate food before even trying it

Are you completely without the power of imagination? Do you need to try it to know whether you would like pizza with marshmallows and miniature Snickers bars on top?

Culture can change. Meat consumption in Belgium is down more than 16% over 4 years: http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20171103_03168897 (in Dutch). This coincides with several vegetarian and 'flexitarian' campaigns.

See also: the Netherlands becoming a bicycle country thanks to a sustained effort over several generations.

I think we should consider a rule that everybody who wants to eat an animal, has to kill it themselves. At least that will solve the mental disconnect between reality and food consumerism.

If there is an app for that, ok. Otherwise I will only eat chicken, since space is limited around here.

All that would happen is people would quickly aclimate to killing their dinner. We did it for humdreds of thousands of years, it’s part of our genetic make up.

That was never our primary source of food though.

Yes, because it was too expensive, but it has always been a significant dietary compenent. Most people historically have eaten meat when they could get it, and for most of them the slaughtering of the animals was very few degrees of separation from them. Either they did it themselves, someone in their family did it, someone they directly employed did it or they bought or traded for it directly from someone who did it.

Absolutely! And everybody who wants to type a message on HN, has to build his keyboard himself. And his computer. And the internet.

I like to imagine that the internet was better way back when it was kinda sorta that way.

Yeah and if you want light you should have to slaughter a whale and extract the oil yourself.

This is it. I'm in agreement with Anthony Bourdain here about vegetarian food in most places. If I lived in India, in particular Punjab it would be far easier to be a vegetarian because stuff actually tastes great (better than meat!) but elsewhere it's hard. Being half decent isn't good enough, the vegetarian food has to taste as good as or better than meat. The worst is places where the idea of a vegetarian meal is taking the meat out of a burger and feeding people the bun and lettuce.

Or worse, replacing it with a substitute meat that "tastes just like meat!" (N.B.: it tastes and has a mouthfeel nothing like meat)

In this context, dairy consumption is also linked to climate change (just like meat is), because it’s the same animals (cattle) who are bred and raised to produce dairy (excreting methane and CO2) and then slaughtered in a fraction of their lifespan when their milk production drops.

If you want to lower your carbon footprint below that of a vegetarian, going vegan is one way to do it.

P.S.: Watch the documentary “Cowspiracy”.

Meat is cheap. AND it's not up to individuals to make the broad policy changes needed to affect climate change. That's done by governments. People will follow suit. If there's a tax on meat, less meat will be eaten. To put the onus on individuals to make policy decisions is preposterous.

Exactly. Price in the externalities, and people will make better choices.

Yeah, choices like voting the "meat tax party" out of office.

While I agree these are not popular enough to get elected on or to introduce and no one wants to commit political suicide. Hell even wildlife protection or ecological associations barely mention these subjects as it drives people away from donations.

If it's not popular enough to get over the finish line in elections how's it supposed to sudden gain so much traction that everyone changes their lifestyles?

You can try and tax your way to culture shifts but since we aren't all Homo economicus it is often not as effective as directly appealing to morality and individual responsibility.

Grassroots movements and citizen created advocacy orgs (non-profits, etc) can be a big part of what often causes government to make policy changes.

But you are right that the primary focus should be on facilitating effective policy change for such issues.

I do think there is some value in individual change as an agent of broader cultural change, but this is much harder to assess. Part of my reasoning is that policy change will likely fail without some corresponding cultural change as well. I'd like to learn more about this complex dynamic though...

In the end, policy change is definitely necessary to successfully defense against large, negative externalities.

People still don't get that haphazard false equivalences weaken trust in media.

I live in the rural south. The cows in my lumpy unfarmable backyard eat grass. How is it a harmful practice? I can't convert grass to a complete protein source. Any link between wild game and climate change? Fishing?

Articles like this are alienating to the average person. Why not use this opportunity push more ethical options? Grass fed Beef, Wild game, carbon neutral feedstocks, locally produced, sustainable practices. Then your readers have a clear path to less harmful alternatives before converting to the 3 square soylents of the future.

Rural north-west here, same issue. I get it, there are some cattle ranches which would turn my stomach, but the average ranch around here is hundreds of acres of unfarmable (or unprofitable to farm) land dedicated to a few hundred head of cattle (i.e. you don't see the cattle most of the time).

They're oddly beautiful spaces to look upon, compared to the mechanical oddity (circular fields in a square plots) that is the modern farm.

I'm not educated on the statistics, but how much of the total meat consumed (let's say beef in the US) comes from the big bad farms? Is it possible to convert over to only healthier grass pastures?

I'm a meat eater who is happy to pay more and cut down, just wondering how feasible it is.

Feasibility for the individual is a matter of being able to afford meat that is currently 50 - 100% more expensive per comparable cuts.

Feasibility for society is complex. Where I live, grass fed cattle is mostly grown on short term leased land. Sellers and long term speculators of farmable land make cash on its interim usage for cattle. Non-feasible.

In Australia and NZ, there are huge chunks of the country suitable for raising livestock, not suitable for land development or plant farming. There's more livestock than people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50MbPACZF-4 Australian outback cattle farmers mustering with helicopters

If you're interested in a research-backed analysis of how much impact various solutions to global warming would have, http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank is a good reference. "Plant-Rich Diet" is #4 on the list.

Only the elite should have access to meat in order to stop climate change, the rest will have to do with soybased fake meat substitutes. It's healthier too!

This is rather true.

That's far from the only possible solution, although it is essentially the one you create if your solution is to just jack up the price of meat.

Meat is a big one, but its the #3 - #5ish big one depending on how you look at things (at an individual westerner vs. other lenses).

Roughly in order it goes

  - having more kids than adults (population growth)
  - living in a single-family detached home (land use sprawl + hvac inefficiency)
  - owning a car
  - flying
  - eating red meat (particularly beef & lamb)

So yes by all means, eat less red meat, but after you've moved to a multi-unit building and sold your car and stopped going to conferences.

For context, a six ounce ribeye steak is the co2 eqiv (really its methane) of 330g of emitted carbon. That is almost the exact same number of grams it costs to drive an electric vehicle on an average u.s. grid mix 2 miles. Gas burners more like 1 mile.

So ditch the car and enjoy the steak.

Oh, good news, you can just ditch the car and walk several miles to everywhere you need to go. Again, telling people to just start living like they're Benedictine monks is not a serious solution to the problem.

With better land use patterns you wouldn't need to walk that far. I can walk to dozens of restaurants without going more than half a mile.

Even single family house neighborhoods can have a decent selection of restaurants and grocery stores within a short walking distance if we get rid of the stupid zoning rules that strictly segregate residential and commercial uses.

Even if that's what the doctor ordered, so to speak, it's hardly a matter of individual initiative.

> having more kids than adults (population growth)

Good news on that point is that the number of children in the world already peaked several years ago. The continuing population growth is now being driven solely by life expectancy increases. Growth in lifespans in developed countries seems to be running out of steam, so once developing countries have caught up we would expect population growth to stop fairly soon afterwards.

Currently, most communications around meat and climate change are in the category of ‘the pointing finger’, thereby creating guilt, shame, and stigmatization among committed carnivores, and activating psychological mechanisms of denial and downplay.

Stating that eating meat is ‘bad’ therefore doesn’t seem to work that well.

Consumption and lifestyles therefore tend to be shaped more by people collectively than individually. The most effective strategies thus engage people in groups...

One of my master students, Lena Johanning, translated this idea by developing postcards that humorously depict "flexitarian" superheroes on the front, with an invitation for a veggie dinner on the back, coupled with some amazing fact about meat and climate change.

So their answer is to convert "carnivores" with a Vegan Timeshare Sale Luncheon? =D

What the other people don't get is that going vegan/vegetarian is NOT the correct answer.

Absolutely, the only stronger decision one can take is having one child less. But as this is not considered by most, limiting meat to one or two meals a week would already be a good step forward

I think taxing carbon output and passing policies to more quickly facilitate the switch to renewable energy would be more effective.

This wouldn't rely on individuals making large changes to their life all on their own.

This is a useless article with a serious vegan bent.

Humans cannot survive as vegans, and suggesting so is a pretty backwards thing given that these are basic scientific facts; so called "healthy vegans" often are taking supplements that they believe are vegan when they are in fact animal-sourced, or they are using algae-based products that are often highly contaminated as a nature of their production.

Literally, the headline might as well be "People Still Don't Get the Link Between Humanity's Existence and Climate Change, And All Humans Should Die".

In addition, they are unable to illustrate a link between humanity's actions and climate change and just take the meme for granted. More and more evidence continues to mount that indicates the large scale climate trends are entirely driven by the sun (something that outputs 384.6 YW, strikes us with 174.0 PW of that, and the current human energy need is 18.0 PW), and the pollution of humans (which is undeniably bad, and maybe the second largest driver behind modern diseases; but does not sufficiently change the Earth's albiedo to explain the trends over the past 100+ years) has very little to do with it.

On top of this, the continued use of crops that are a mismatch with our animal herds would actually have helped their climate change argument, but they purposely ignored it to instead focus on pushing a vegan agenda. As in: stop using corn and other toxic feed crops, and instead grow nutrient dense foods to feed animals instead.

The discontinuation of corn and cereal grains as cash crops (through methods such as ending costly government subsidizes and letting corn and grain-focused farms collapse under the free market, as they should) would do far more to reduce the pollution and (already small) effect on climate change than trying to get non-vegans to accept a lifestyle incompatible with the biology of humans.

The vegan religion continues to ignore basic facts about humans, the evolution of humans, and what humans require to survive and thrive, so I have no clue why Scientific American would allow themselves to become a mouthpiece for something that has no basis in science.

I'm honestly waiting for vegan "researchers" to start trying to use meat eating as an explanation for the magnetic poles rapidly moving away from their traditional positions, the Solar Grand Minimum that we're heading possibly into this solar cycle, the eerily quiet solar surface, the unusually cold weather in the Middle East, AND the thickening of the ice shelf in Antarctica against the widely popularized (and not scientifically based) predictions by Al Gore.

Claiming humanity has this much control over the weather is a bit egotistical. The only time we've successfully done it on a large enough scale to matter, we caused a mini ice age in Europe, and choked London out with thick black (and certainly lethal) smog. In comparison, natural causes such as once-in-ten-thousand-year volcanic eruptions have done more damage.

Evolution doesn't have a purpose. Just because you can eat meat doesn't mean you have to, or that you should. You can have a meat-free, protein-heavy diet.

Most of meat products are so processed that they are indistinguishable from plant-based substitutes anyway. If you try an Impossible Burger without knowing it's plant-based, you wouldn't notice it's not meat.

Beside, are you seriously denying anthropic climate change?

Even if evolution doesn't have a purpose it's pretty clear that meat consumption has been a boost to human evolution.

Also I wonder what kind of meat products you are eating?! If I buy and prepare a steak or some other raw meat it's pretty clearly meat. I also tried vegan sausages and stuff multiple times because of some friends. I NEVER could confuse it for meat.. so forgive me but this argument is totally invalid for me.

Just because something happened in the past and resulted in some benefits doesn’t necessarily mean we have to continue it. For example, the two world wars and their impacts also helped accelerate technological progress to a great degree, but I’m sure nobody would argue that we need more of them. In our current times, and in this century, we’ll have better alternatives that help humankind (if people accept them). Meat will not be a necessity for those living in a globalized world.

>If you try an Impossible Burger without knowing it's plant-based, you wouldn't notice it's not meat.

Bullshit. My mother has tried to pass that product as a hamburger and in a single bite I spat it out and asked her what the hell was wrong with the burger - it has a very un-burger-like aftertaste.

I'm 99% sure people who think the "tastes like meat!" replacements taste like meat have damaged or weak taste buds and literally don't know what meat actually tastes like to many people. Like how a red/green color-blind person wouldn't know what red/green actually look like for most people.

> Humans cannot survive as vegans

Cite your claims. There are plenty of vegans who are very much alive, and most (but not all) research sugests that well planned vegan diets can be healthy for all life stages.

The most important deficiency in a vegan diet is vitamin B12, but that cannot be produced by any animals (or plants) [0]. Commerically the majority of it is made via bacterial fermentation.

[0] http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-B12

Your comment is filled with hyperbole, ad hominems and misinformation, making it seem like you’re angry with vegans for some reason. That has resulted in putting forth claims and beliefs without good enough backing - statements like “vegans can’t be healthy” and like vegan researchers will use meat eating to explain some other totally unrelated phenomena. It would help look at better sources of information. On that front, though not the best, I’d recommend watching this documentary called “Cowspiracy”.

People don't believe the link between meat consumption and climate change.

It seems like one leftist agenda being used to push another leftist agenda and pretty much anyone who isn't down with leftist agendas tunes right out as this is just too far fetched to even consider.

(Not a heavy meat eater myself but not for planet saving reasons. I just don't like a lot of meat sitting in my stomach. Beans and whole grains and fruits and veggies and occasionally a small piece of meat is much better for me.)

People love to neglect grass fed meat. Much of the planet is grasslands that require grazing animals. You put grazing animals on the land, move them around, and that’s it. The only real energy input is the sun.

Compare that to monocropping which requires vast oil and pesticide/herbicide input, displaces local habitats, reduces the biodiversity of the planet.

Where do you move them to during the winter ? Do you fly them to green pastures in the other hemisphere then ? Or maybe you just forgot that 600kg animals won't keep the same meaty and fatty bodyshape if you don't provide them silage or else during the cold seasons ?

Grass fed beef isn't a solution. Cows still produce a lot of methane. http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...

In North America, much of the land now used for grazing cows was formerly occupied by bison (which are so close to cows that they can actually interbred).

I seriously doubt that this caused any significant net change in methane production.

That’s only one metric to compare. That doesn’t take into account the carbon sequestration from manure, topsoil formation, etc. from grass fed animals.

It also doesn’t take into account the massive energy use (and therefore, carbon release) of fertilizing, seeding, irrigating, harvesting and processing feed for conventional cattle.

So in total, I would expect grass fed meat to be much better than conventional meat, and possibly better than if we were to just eat crops directly.

Science is not a leftist agenda.

I agree. However, what the article claims to be is not science.

Oh I'm not suggesting it is. Just stating what I think people believe.

Grrr, paywalled research articles.

I have some questions that maybe someone who has read the paper (or has access to it may be able to find out).

The abstract talks about Outstanding effectiveness and fairly positive effectiveness, what was the scaling they used? (Great, good, neutral, bad, awful? or something else)

Similarly, it talks about correlations with motivational and cultural factors, were these identified at all?

And what was the methodology/measure for the effectiveness rating?

People Still Don't Get the Link Between the Number of People on this Planet and Climate Change

(I hardly eat meat these days, but nothing will help if the population continues to grow at the same rate)

In Which Eastendguy Obfuscates the Much Stronger Nature of the Link Between Profligate Western Meat Consumption Patterns and Climate Change

"Much Stronger Nature of the Link"

Citation needed. I would bet my money that growth of population and urbanization has bigger impact than meat industry.

That's exactly why the rule of 72 should be thought more often. Just seeing how quickly the population can double at the current growth rate is an eye opener.

72 / 1.1 = 65 Years

Meat isn't the problem, endless growth is.

Do regions with most growth also eat most meat, per capita?

When we look at the 3 countries with the most growth in combination with meat consumption (data from wikipedia)

1. China 58.2 kg/person and year

2. India 4.4 kg/person and year

3. USA 120.2 kg/person and year

There are very big differences that have more to do with culture and income rather than growth.

sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

No.

Population growth doesn’t remain static. It’s not going to double in the time frame you’ve projected. In fact, it’s not going to reach that figure for much longer, if at all.

Hans Rosling’s talks (on TED and YouTube) throw a lot of light on the peak population we’d likely reach, the reasons for those and also what we can do to control it (the key is educating girls). He died some months ago, but his talks and work are engaging and illuminating.

I don’t get the connection either. The United States with 4% of the world’s population produces a lot of CO2. India with 4 times the number of people produced half as much.

China with 4 times the number of people now produces twice as much as the US. China’s CO2 surged in the past two decades.

Finally, does this have anything to do with meat?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

A lot of China's CO2 production is to create goods that are purchased by the US and other developed countries. http://m.pnas.org/content/107/12/5687

And yes, some 15% of humans' GHG production can be attributed to meat.

The first line states this:

“CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the primary cause of global warming”

China uses almost much coal as the rest of the world combined:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16271

That chart seems to correlate with China’s emission increases:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that a lot of China's coal use is to power factories that export goods to the US. If China used anything other than the cheapest energy for their factories, you would be seeing "made in India/some other country more willing to pollute to save us a few cents" a lot more in Wal-Mart.

Depends which area. Europe is dying out with a fertility rate in most parts of much less than 2.1 as required for sustained population. https://jakubmarian.com/fertility-rate-by-region-in-europe/

Population will not continue to grow at the same rate. The global population is expected to level off within 100 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...

Trying to fix climate change as an individual consumer is hopeless.

It's like saying recycling is useless because no one recycles. You have to start somewhere

Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

Strong statement - any data to back it up?

> Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

I would disagree. There is a benefit to keeping these materials out of a landfill.

Saying we should just throw everything into a landfill because that uses the least energy is not considering the other benefits of diverting waste from the landfill.

The damaging effects of modern landfills are so low as to be effectively negligible.

But nonetheless, depletion of that resource or resources will slow down? Energy could be harvested from renewable energy for recycling? Bottom line for me sounds better for our world then mining new till we run out of something?

Yeah, it's not like waste is going to end up in landfills or oceans anyway.

Always recycle aluminum though!

As mined materials start to get more scarce, their prices will rise, and mining companies will have increased power over markets. You can see recycling as a kind of "intertemporal power smoothing", depriving mining companies of future economic power by reducing the rate at which materials are mined. Economic concentration of power imposes tremendous externalities, most of which are felt by ordinary people in the form of price increases and political disenfranchisement due to lobbying and outright corruption.

I am willing to pay an energy premium today in order to avoid that human rights premium in the future. You may not be so willing, but I would urge you to consider that position.

As price rises, recycling will be more advantageous and will compete with mined materials reducing their future economic power by the same amount as it would if you recycle now.

The maximum effect of your policy will be to delay the moment when recycling becomes economic advantageous, and waste money/energy until then.

Good point. I guess we have solar as an example of that, but solar was also heavily subsidized by the US gov't.

As traditional mining becomes more expensive, recycling certain metals becomes the new mining.

Also, certain plastics are very easy to recycle, so it's already profitable, I suppose.

Otherwise, you can see landfills as future mining sites, when technology improves.

I don't disagree in principle, "Be the change you want to see in the world" and all that, but climate change from an individual level to me seems silly, or perhaps overwhelming. I have stopped really worrying about it in the Dr. Strangelove sense because it's out of control. We're supposed to sort our plastics and papers and yet all of our options available for purchase have been shipped, at least in part, from across the Pacific Ocean? There's airplanes littering the skies yet I'm supposed to worry about putting my banana peels into a compost bin? I actually don't understand. I feel like a lot of business decisions are made that we, as peons, have no say in that affect the overall biosphere a lot and then we're made to feel bad about it. "Ride your bike!" "Recycle!" "Don't forget to turn your lights off when you're not in the room!" Meanwhile: Fracking. ookay...

On topic: I have little doubt there's a strong link between climate change in general and the production and consumption of livestock.

It makes you think about it and sensibilize to it. Which probably failed by you considering :

>On topic: I have little doubt there's a strong link between climate change in general and the production and consumption of livestock.

The most common cow diet at the moment is 50kg of corn + 3 kg of soy + maybe 10kg (dry) of hay. Everyday. Do you think this grows out of the blue or uses arable land ? Also Europe imports soy (from southamerica mostly) to feed cattle. Add the transport costs & pollution and what have you and you might get a glimpse of how eating 100g of beef is producing way more GHG than 100g of beans.

I don't get what you mean. It doesn't seem like you actually disagree with the snippet you're quoting, yet it seems like you're trying to refute it.

I can't read, sorry :p

Right, yeah. If I jumped off a building tomorrow, thereby ending my carbon emissions forever, it would make zero difference.

If policy dictated through incentives or exise taxes on not recycling then people will recycle.

If people were recycling and asking for change then the policies would be implemented.

I guess it's a matter of taking our own responsibilities or not

Correct, I think it would be more effective having this change on a production level where farmers and scientists possibly work together to make meat production more sustainable by for example beter utilizing and extending grass lands in barren regions. Trick is to not make the meat more expensive...

What's needed is a carbon tax. Yes this will make meat (among other things) more expensive, but it is generally offset by the tax savings.

Yea because taxing carbon will magically get rid of it! \o/

Strawman. No one is arguing that it would magically get rid of carbon. However, incentives and prices work. If we had a global tax on carbon that accurately reflected the externalities, carbon emissions would plummet.

Why not ?! It seems the most effective way to change peoples habits is still prices.

If it's more expensive the less eco friendly ways of making meat will be consumed instead.

Such as? You think if meat in the US doubled or tripled in price there’d be a black market that would overwhelm those gains? I really doubt that you have any evidence for that.

I mean the bio meat market for example. Here (netherlands) any bio product is more expensive on average, and the cheaper non bio products are cheaper, so guess what meats are consumed more?

I'm guessing that you mean "organic" here (since e.g., the French word for organic foods is "biologique").

You're talking past each other because he is imagining some kind of more sustainable meat coexisting with traditional production in the market and you're imagining only this new kind of meat being available for purchase.

If you fob off prices to consumers you do risk creating a two-tiered society where the one class consumes just as much meat as ever and the other no longer has it, which doesn't seem like an ideal/equitable solution.

Yeah it's as hopeless as voting. Do you vote?

More specifically, it's as hopeless as voting in a planet-wide election.

So until we have the latter, or a forum with enough authority to have the effect of the latter, voting isn't a valid comparison.

Which is a shame as voting is actually quite effective sometimes.

It’s worse than that: it’s voting in a centuries-long election with no specific endpoint where everyone votes multiple times a day, and each vote costs them a little bit.

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