IKEA Will Be Entirely Meat-Free This Christmas
swedesinthestates.com
swedesinthestates.com
I think there's a big difference between supporting customers who want to eat less meat (i.e. offering a veggie option) and removing the meat option entirely. There aren't any statistics on this, but if there's no meat at all, I might leave and go somewhere else. Maybe Ikea could have convinced me to eat less, but I'd likely end up somewhere else with no reduction whatsoever.
I guess it's Ikea's store and it can do whatever it wants, but I personally don't like the idea of some company telling me how to eat because a marketing guy decided it fit well as part of a corporate sustainability initiative.
I am thinking of the parent/child relationship, parents knows what is good for their children so they don't need to ask. Except, in some cases some parents actually don't know. IKEA is treating their customers like children here.
1. Save the company money.
2. Virtue signal how woke the company is.
Is there any way for a person or company to do anything of any good without being accused of this? Probably not. Anonymous commenters on the interwebs loves these types of throwaway accusations.
Actually, now that I think of it, mentioning "virtue signal" and "woke" is really just sending a virtue signal about how you're the truly woke one...
And I'm sending a virtue signal right now about how I totally get what's happening, and you don't, which shows how woke I am...
I don't think this particular hole has a bottom.
The implications for power management are troubling, to say the least.
Vaguely related, I'm not really won-over that everyone cutting meat out of their diet would have a considerable effect on the environment. The overwhelming majority of deforestation is done for crops, not pasture. And off the top of my head the most the majority people contribute to climate change is about 10%. So, sure, everyone stops using cars, and eating meat, etc. ad nauseum, that still leaves governments giving billions in subsidies to the coal and oil industries, etc.
It's a nice gesture, but that's all I'm seeing happening lately. Everyone's making gestures to climate change, but there has been no inter-governmental effort to actually charge, prosecute, and put to use the assets of the people who are responsible for covering up climate change for over forty years. I fear by the time it happens millions will have lost their lives in climate-related disasters.
I'm not so sure this is true. Maybe in the United States. But most of the deforestation happening in the Amazon (which is a major component of climate change) is for meat and leather production.
Relevant quote from Wikipedia: "The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades,[1] has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region,[2][3] or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...
We can roughly consider that the utility value of voting is equal to a formula that looks like: E[voting] = pV - c, where c is the cost of voting (time cost, information cost, etc.), V is the value of your preferred candidate winning over other candidates, and p is your probability of being the pivotal voter. By pivotal voter, I mean that if everyone other than you cast their vote first, and then you cast your vote, the question is would your vote have a capability to change the outcome.
The typical view is that c is small but non-zero, V is reasonably large and by definition positive, but p is infinitesimal. And so, no one should bother voting. And yet, people do vote, an off-equilibrium behavior. And although it could be the case that someone's subjective belief in p is much higher than the true p is, this seems an unsatisfactory explanation because even stupid idiots know that their individual vote is unlikely to make the difference.
There are two major lines of rebuttal to the paradox. The first is that individual equilibrium models are not appropriate for assessing these kinds of questions. The second line of rebuttal is that there must exist other terms in the equation. The most promising of these is that the civic religion we have built around voting (social pressure to vote, personal moral imperative to "do one's part in society", the dumb stickers, how good it feels to stand up for what you believe, etc.) creates a "consumption value" of voting. So maybe the equation is E[voting] = pV - c + d where it is assumed that d >= c for many people, who vote.
I mention all of this because based on your post, p = 0, V = Infinity, c = high, and d = 0. If you are looking for a call to action, all you need to do is consider the great many benefits of changing your d term.
Finally, I think it weakens the approachability of your third paragraph argument (why bother, states should do it instead) that it comes after your second argument (environmentalists don't even help the environment) or your first argument (vegans annoy me because I can't eat gluten, why aren't people listening to me).
That patently ridiculous. There are varigated and complex motivations for voting in general and for voting for a certain candidate or party in particular. It has to do with your sense of identity; self-fulfillment vs passivity; commitment to peers, family, friends; sense of gratitude for past actions by the candidate or the party/movement; and these are all factors which are almost orthogonal to whether the candidate you vote for wins.
Yes, this is true.
I would dispute your distillation of my first paragraph. It is not vegans or vegetarians that annoy me, it is the fact that groups and organizations are choosing to catering first and foremost for people who have fundamentally chosen not to eat something, rather than those who cannot eat something because of a physical disability. It means the interests of rich, abled-bodied people are once again being put above the interests of disabled people (Who are more likely to be poor, because they have invested a significant amount of money in coping with their disability -- as a celiac, for example, bread is 3x the price of normal bread, for a loaf about half the size (this is true for most other grain-based things)).
In any case, as another commenter pointed out, Vox has a good map showing how much of cropland is used for feed and fuel rather than direct human consumption [1].
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
Also you can get enough protein just eating vegetables, fruits, and other grains (and pseudo-grains like quinoa and amaranth.) Spirulina could be another good ingredient, although algae is more fishy than meaty.
I have celiac disease, so am allergic to gliadin. I don't know why you presumed that this encompasses soy, legumes, peas, etc. But given the severe undereducation about these disabilities I can see why you might not have known about it or recognized it at first glance.
Osmosis has a good video on it describing the pathology and full scope of the disease if you care to educate yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXzBApAx5lY
Fortunately it's incredibly cheap to synthesize supplements and you don't need much of it at all, so this is not really a concern for vegans.
https://www.forksoverknives.com/vitamin-b12-questions-answer...
It seems that nowadays humans want to completely redefine what is humanity - all social, cultural, religious values are being discarded altogether or are being completely redefined.
I don’t know whether this is good or not - all I know is that there seem to be political or social movements behind each and every one of these movements and to have band of people redefine and reinforce, by law and through media, an altered version of humanity for our Children is a scary thought for me.
I disagree. We're just more aware of each others' values.
It will prohibitively expensive to raise and slaughter cattle if carbon taxes/cap-and-trade go into effect.
Personally I've completely cut most meat out of my diet and it's made my life a lot healthier. No particular moral reason and I'm not vegetarian, but I could see that kind of change happening throughout society as meat becomes more expensive.
Alternatively, vat meat takes over.
Besides, if this is really the case, then demand will vastly out-strip supply and the price will sky-rocket. No need to try to stop people eating meat; the market would do that.
If nothing else, I'm going to have to maintain or accelerate my consumption of venison, because the white tail population is spiking up.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/cost-plunges-capturi...
Normal people also are very opinionated but don't know the facts.
So a company that was predicated on planned obsolescence, that has littered the planet with disposable flat pack furniture is now going to support "sustainability" by getting rid of meatballs at its fast food lunch counter. Got it.
You can find lots of furniture that uses proper joinery without breaking the bank. Lastly its false economy to buy the same disposable book case every 3-4 years when a well made one can last a lifetime. And they're quite easy to find second hand.