What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
We export roughly 40% of our corn in the US, it wouldn't increase beef prices prices much, it'd reduce exports though.
What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?
:-)
Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming).
How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else.
You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".
I'm sure we could produce more meat, raised in more sustainable ways, but that would involve people taking a major decrease in the amount of meat they eat. Modern levels of meat intake are at their highest levels in history. We can easily afford to lower are intake.
I'm also not a vegetarian, just know quite a few and have been around when the arguments come up.
There are 3 motivations why people follow such a diet or lifestyle: environment, animal welfare, and health. It is important to realise the interests of these motivations aren't always aligned.
As an example, consider the difference of impact with regards to eating less cow or eating less chicken. If we'd eat less cow, the Co2 footprint would be lower compared to chicken due to required more land and more methane gas from cows however it'd be good for animal welfare since less cows suffer since one cow provides far more meat than a chicken. Conversely, the bio industry's chicken farm's are very efficient regarding space and size however many more animals per human meal are required so more chicken suffer.
Another example I like is rennet and gelatine. Gelatine is by-product. Not one animal less is going to get killed because you eat a gelatine pudding because there's an excess of gelatine. So avoiding gelatine in order to increase animal welfare is inefficient. Rennet, per whole cheese, very little is required from the stomach of the (male) calve, and males are pretty much useless anyway since you need females for the milk. If you eat cheese with rennet regularly then a very low amount of calves die due to that. However technically, it isn't vegan nor is it vegetarian.
On the other hand:
(1) "meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat"
Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets, (2009): "It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
Health effects of vegan diets, Craig, W., The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, (2009) From the summary: “Vegans are thinner, have lower serum cholesterol and blood pressure, and enjoy a lower risk of CVD. BMD and the risk of bone fracture may be a concern when there is an inadequate intake of calcium and vitamin D. Where available, calcium- and vitamin D–fortified foods should be regularly consumed. … Vegans generally have an adequate iron intake and do not experience anemia more frequently than others. Typically, vegans can avoid nutritional problems if appropriate food choices are made. Their health status appears to be at least as good as other vegetarians, such as lactoovovegetarians.”
(2) meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways
Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Poore J. and Nemecek T. Science, (2018). Example conclusion: meat and dairy provide 18% of calories and 37% of protein, but uses 83% of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits of dietary change. Springmann M. et al. PNAS (2016) “The food system is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which up to 80% are associated with livestock production. Reductions in meat consumption and other dietary changes would ease pressure on land use and reduce GHG emissions. Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.”
And well, I'm not sure if humane slaughter matters to conscious animals. I certainly wouldn't appreciate if someone humanely slaughtered me. And as for the consciousness aspect: The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness 2012. A group of prominent neuroscientists created The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they state their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware in a similar way as humans. “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
EDIT: these points are cribbed from a blog post I wrote on this subject: https://medium.com/@colorado.j.reed/veganism-from-an-enginee...
And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats.
> the healthiest way to eat
I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein.
> meat can be raised in humane ways
"Humane" is a vague word. Some will tell you that slaughtering an animal at all in not humane.
> can be raised in environmentally-friendly ways
This would be really hard for many animals. Show me a carbon-neutral cow.
The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.
That land likely can't be used for anything else, only a small % of land can be used for growing crops.
> The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
Only about 10-15% of US cattle heads are on feedlots at any given time. The food at feedlots doesn't always compete with human edible food, and only represents about 10% of their lifetime food.
Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.
The number of cattle in the US has been steady for decades now (suggesting something of a drop in intake). For purely grass-fed cattle, they're carbon-neutral at this point, because the life of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years, as opposed to CO2, which is 100 years.
Corn-feeding is really the only carbon footprint problem associated with beef.
Last night, I found a gorgeous piece of sea bass from the Falklands - $18 for 5oz. Pan fried it and split it with my spouse. Why? Because it's available and I can afford it.
Disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat relatively little meat.
If I have to spend weeks of effort to identify a quality supplier, pay ten times market rate, and do all my own butchering it's just not worth it.
Have you read about the deforestation from palm oil, canola oil, and coconuts that feed vegans? It's not clear to me eating meat in the USA, especially local meat where I am in New England, is comparatively worse.
(Ironically I'm "deforesting" a former field of small pines to restore it to sheep grazing this year. But I do not think this ecologically destructive: ultimately it would be building soil.)
There's definitely local meat that's fine for the planet. As far as I'm aware, the trouble is the bulk of the market, the high-volume bottom-dollar part of the market. The industrial beef grown on soy & corn. It's the McDonalds patty, not the quarter buck in the freezer at grandma's.
As for your sheep field, pasture is not really the most carbon-rich soil. But, maybe it's not much worse than pine forest. The best are wetlands, bogs, & frequent fire areas.
Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat
> On the basis of the large amount of data and the consistent associations of colorectal cancer with consumption of processed meat across studies in different populations, which make chance, bias, and confounding unlikely as explanations, the majority of the Working Group concluded that there is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat. Chance, bias, and confounding could not be ruled out with the same degree of confidence for the data on red meat consumption, since no clear association was seen in several of the high quality studies and residual confounding from other diet and lifestyle risk is difficult to exclude. The Working Group concluded that there is limited evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat.
Bouvard, V., Loomis, D., Guyton, K.Z., Grosse, Y., El Ghissassi, F., Benbrahim-Tallaa, L., Guha, N., Mattock, H. and Straif, K., 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology, 16(16), pp.1599-1600.
My thoughts on a few of the points raised:
• Does meat cause cancer? I don't think so; I find the arguments unconvincing, and the rebuttals, convincing. In particular see:
- https://academic.oup.com/af/article/8/3/5/5048762
- http://peakhuman.libsyn.com/dr-david-klurfeld-on-meat-not-ca...
• Cow feed efficiency, clearing out forests, etc: Yeah, these forms of raising cattle are bad. I get my beef from here:
The cows eat grass and live in harmony with their environment.
• Humane treatment: If you think killing an animal is inhumane, full stop, then sure, from that perspective, it is always inhumane to eat animals. I respect if you have that belief and are a vegetarian as a result.
But it's not a belief I hold.
Everything that lives is going to die; that's the game. The best we can hope for is to live well and to die well. We can give this to the animals we eat.
(I sometimes think of it like this: If all of Earth were some sort of human farm for aliens, would I want them to go vegetarian, replacing humans with vast fields of grain and synthetic labs growing human-like meat? No, I would not. I'd rather be a farm animal than not exist at all.)
• Demonstrate it works: Well, so far so good for me! I've tried eating vegan, vegetarian, the standard "well-balanced diet" (veggies, fruits, rice, potatoes, a little meat, a little fish), low-carb (veggies, meat), and now, pretty much just meat, with a little of fruit now and then. So far, the meat diet is _by far_ the most amazing for me.
I don't get sleepy after I eat, my stomach feels great, I'm getting stronger and leaner, and I'm still just as excited to eat a piece of meat as I was two months ago. We'll see how it works out with time!
I came to this way of eating because I was experiencing (1) frequent stomach aches (2) tiredness after eating (3) slowly but ever-increasing fatness. So I did a bunch of Googling around and looked at a bunch of accounts on twitter. The stuff I found the most compelling ended up being:
- https://twitter.com/tednaiman
- https://humanperformanceoutliers.libsyn.com
Check 'em out!
Vitamin C also breaks down fairly easily when cooked (necessary or common with a lot of foods).
Iron is a bigger issue where non-absorption of non-organic sources can cause some GI upset.
It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.
It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality.
You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals.
But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.
In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.
Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).
Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...
Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap.
The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.
I don't think thats true - I've known a number of strict vegetarians (vegans?) and they've often problems with low B12 and iron. Eggs/fish a bit of chicken and a bit of meat make it way easier, but the amount required is way less than the amount of meat most people eat. As in many things the answers in the middle imho.
People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.
[0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...
Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable capacity of suffering to mammals. This is considered likely true or at least plausibly true for fish as well, though their brains are sufficiently different from mammals and birds that there's still more research going on to understand it more. Animals that likely have no capacity for suffering are bivalves, for example.
It'll take a lot more research to figure out the concrete answer for those in between (e.g. insects, where the latest I've heard is that the most they can suffer is similar to an annoyance or mild pain from a human perspective).
And babies past a few months of age are pretty remarkably intelligent, albeit still a bit uncalibrated.
But if you probe into it, I believe you'll find it's an artificial distinction that rather quickly falls apart. If your moral values ascribe negative value to the suffering of, say, both a human and a dog, then the only consistent viewpoint is to ascribe negative value to any suffering of a materially similar quality -- i.e. what matters on a moral level is the capacity of suffering for the species or individual.
There's a few uncomfortable thought experiments you can think through on this topic. E.g. you can imagine genetically engineering a human as dumb as a chicken, or perhaps a traumatic brain injury causing that, but with their mental capacity for suffering just as intact as yours or mine. Would their suffering count for less? Why would it?
As for chicken vs. whale, it may be the case that a chicken suffers less than a whale. More primitive intelligence may imply more primitive suffering. But what if it doesn't for this case? How confident can you be it does imply that, given both how chickens react to pain and stress and the neurological research that's been done on them? And even if it less, by how much? A factor of two, ten, forty, a thousand?
Those questions may seem too philosophical, but they can't be ignored in the face of a recommendation to eat 40 extremely-poorly-raised chickens per year instead of 1 reasonably-well-raised cow. And given all we know of animal cognition, it's reasonably to assume chickens have a lower capacity to suffer (and also to assume it's the same -- there's still uncertainty), but not so much lower that that calculus is anywhere close to being worthwhile.
Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef).
Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another.
If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
In fact, I'd probably start there, since it's probably the first type of meat that could be made cheaper than the real thing, and it's a total luxury good that most people never get to experience, so it's not really competing with the real thing in most peoples' minds. Similar to the Tesla business model, start with the high margin stuff and move down as you ramp up volume and start getting efficiencies of scale and more R&D.
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
Your animal suffering point has merit. But what the article is talking about is simply growing enough food to feed more people, so that's what I am addressing. However, I think that this is just another symptom of the same thing. Factory farming is only necessary if we need to feed multiple billions.
Many environmentalists say that even the current world population can't afford Western middle-class quality of life.
Efforts to limit population growth are already in place but it's mostly occurring in parts of the world too poor to do anything about it. We don't "want" higher population but short of some kind of massive neo-colonial invasion there's no way to stop it.
What makes you think we (we as in those of us who see reduction as a focus on environmentalism) disagree with this? We are, indeed, already too many, meaning that we should reduce further, and further, and not just be content with our current numbers, and certainly not allow those numbers to keep growing.
The city I was born in, Montpellier, grew from 100k inhabitants in 1960 to 270k in 2018. It turned from beautiful Haussmann style architecture surrounded by crops of vines and wild countryside land to a nightmare of concrete towers, oppressive modern architecture ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Pierres_... can you look at this and not feel overly disgusted?), overgrowth of suburbs around it to the point where we need to travel much further to see any wildland and a homeless problem ala san francisco that keeps getting worse and worse as we fail to build as much as necessary to fulfill the need of our constant growth and and rents and property costs keep growing beyond more and more out of reach of the average french man living there.
It is not just about CO2 emissions like what people on the left side focus on so much. It is about quality of life itself. Or lack thereof induced by letting things go on like this.
You are right, current numbers are horrendous and more than the earth could withstand if everyone had western middle class style economy, as even western countries have too much population. It isn't solely poor countries that should reduce their numbers. Encouraging people to sterilize in France would be a great thing too.
If you can show me how eating meat directly correlates to a better quality of life, I'll be gobsmacked.
You may enjoy eating meat, but that doesn't mean it's making your life better/easier. Besides the nutritional side (which is complex, but let's just agree that you can make cases both for or against eating animal flesh as helping your diet and wellness) the agriculture industry is responsible for approximately 9% of US carbon emissions and livestock account for about 3% all by themselves[1]. Changing that could possibly affect your quality of life (assuming you aren't planning on dying in the next 10-20 years before the impact of that starts mattering).
Overall, eating meat is at best likely a net-neutral on your quality of life, even including how much you love eating a burger.
1-https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
But sure, maybe that's not in their long term best interest. And unfortunately, humans are, on average, very bad at optimizing for their long term best interest vs. short term.
I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.