The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.
There is also the fact that plant based diets are still associated to certain ideologies and because of that they will keep being scoffed at by people from opposing ideologies. Sure, you don't have to lean left to be vegan, but the vast majority of vegan people, or people seriously trying to reduce their meat consumption, do lean left (continuing with the car analogy: remember the rolling coal fad).
Dietary choices go way beyond their nutritional value. People feel attached to what they eat, and they will resist change. So, yes, a strong economic incentive is needed, and even worse, it might not be enough.
As long as there are an appreciable number of them, I will enjoy a greater variety of dishes and ingredients available to me, and oftentimes fresher ingredients too.
Insofar as they are making choices that benefit them, they also make choices that benefit me.
Where they lose me, and this isn’t all vegans, but the ones that lose me are the ones that try to convince me that I am a bad person for the dietary choices I make. Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. The ones that make me want to go out and eat two steaks just to stick it to them are the ones that want to take away my choices or introduce sin taxes onto meat. I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that. I would argue such a fair tax is entirely theoretical, but in theory, it could work out. The ones that want to punish me specifically are the ones I can’t abide.
When someone introduces me to an entirely vegetarian dish or vegan dish that I like, I’ll probably add it to my menu and start making it myself, and I usually don’t modify it to add any additional protein. Good food is good food and I actually like tofu and some of those veggie patties on the market. I like them for that they are, not for what they pretend to be. It come down to making a different choice as to what to eat for dinner, rather than making a compromise.
Today, January 1st 2020, I’m not even thinking about lab grown meat. Maybe I’ll prefer it on January 1st, 2030, or maybe I’ll be paying a premium for my steak, or maybe the price of my premium cut steak will actually fall after checking against inflation and I’ll be eating even more steak. Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties. Vegans that practice veganism for dogmatic, ideological and religious reasons certainly aren’t going to win me over in ten or a hundred years by preaching to me though.
I make choices. Vegans make choices. Everyone makes choices. I think that’s a pretty good state of affairs.
Vegans who ask for „sin taxes“ don‘t want to piss you off, they simply have the belief (and actually quite well justifiable so) that meat consumption leads to quite a lot of suffering in the world. You don’t seem to be opposed to taxes on ghg emissions - presumably because you believe that they cause suffering. Why is it not reasonable to also punish/tax other behavior that causes suffering? Do you really believe that animal suffering doesn’t count?
I would really encourage you to reflect your position on this and maybe revise towards being more forgiving towards people who simply care about the suffering of animals.
Suffering doesn’t enter into it, but I don’t like subsidies. If the problem with climate change is that my lifestyle is being subsidized because the “true cost” isn’t in the purchase price, I’ll pay it, but so should everyone. I’ll be paying more for meat, but I’ll also be paying more for spinach, and coffee, and spices, and salt, and clothes, and every single industrial good that I buy. And so would everyone, because the net result would be to see the purchasing power of everyone decrease. I can live with that if you can, even factoring in my dietary preferences, I’m willing to bet money I have a lower net contribution to climate change than most in my country.
I could elaborate, but I don't expect to change your mind; you've already stated outright that you're determined not to. In any case, I'm not here to cast blame on you personally for eating meat. I still do it, too.
It's a shame about your stubbornness, though. You seem to be smart enough to engage in careful, reasoned analysis about a complex issue. In fact, I'd wager that you'd scoff at an anti-vaxxer or a Holocaust denier who shared the strength of your convictions. Of course, scientific and historical truth are a little more objective than basic moral principles—but when it comes to the way animals are manufactured in America today, not by much.
There isn’t a lot that is objective, even scientific and historical truths are often less scientific, less historic and less truthful than we think they are. I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be. In return, I don’t accept that the choices they have made are morally superior to my own. They’re just living their lives according to their beliefs and I don’t want to take that away from them, nor do I want them to take away my choices nor to be punished for them. Life is too short, fleeting and full of suffering and choices to start making choices for other people. I do not, and I would wager you do not, have the status, position or occupational license to cast judgements upon others that aren’t our children, charges, employees or elected representatives. Even these limited forms of subordination have their limits.
Of course you can have reasons for denying the importance of animal suffering but most of those accounts are easily shown to be inconsistent and simply self-serving. People who accept animal suffering as real and probably a bad thing tend to have a much easier time to articulate a consistent world view. If you don’t agree with that claim show me how I am wrong and coherently articulate why the suffering of animals doesn‘t matter... it’s really surprisingly difficult to not reach for arbitrary distinctions like „they are not human“ but have substantial arguments grounded in empirical evidence that justify your opinion.
In the end my goal was not to convince you of becoming vegan (that’s generally a quite difficult task due to current societal indoctrination) but to simply make you reconsider how you view vegans who actually care about animal suffering. It’s a totally reasonable position and it’s generally much more coherent and aligned with evidence then other positions. Even if you don’t care, you don‘t need to judge other people who do.
For what it is worth to you, I purchase the best meat I can find and afford at the local market. The more room to roam, the better. Absolutely no hormones, pointless antibiotics, or other growth techniques that degrade the meat. I’m under no illusions that what I purchase is cruelty free though, it’s livestock which was raised for slaughter, from a species that was cultivated to be raised as livestock, slaughtered and turned into various meat and leather products.
I buy better meat because it tastes better, I don’t do it to spare the animal. I advocate for better farming practices where possible because I want better and more pervasive products to be available and at a lower cost and to more people.
I do in fact care more for the lives of people than I do for most animals. I don’t care for needless deaths, nor do I like unnecessary cruelty, but when I eat an animal, it wasn’t needless or pointless. It lived until it died, and was recycled into my body. I too will live until I die and am recycled into other living creatures.
Laying it out, I sound more callous than I intend, but I don’t know that there’s a less brutal way to put any of that and keep it honest, but more than sounding callous, I don’t want to be or sound like a hypocrite, even unwittingly.
Thank you for engaging me, actually laying out my views allows me to solidify in my own mind what it is I’m thinking, and figure out how to communicate it better the next time.
Would be interested to hear your reply to that :)
This is really unfortunate. An anti-vaxxer knows that it’s a question of science, just as a Holocaust denier knows that it’s a question of historical record (even if they lack the scientific/historical literacy to see through the counterfactual narratives they’ve bought into). There’s insurmountable conviction on both sides—but one is right and the other is not (for all practical purposes, as elusive as objective truth is).
To refuse to even consider the moral angle—I’d be tempted to call it bad faith, but I don’t get that impression from you at all. Rather, it seems to be this:
> I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be.
Taken to the extreme, the live-and-let-live / agree-to-disagree philosophy exhorts us to put down difficult questions simply because they are difficult (or seem unactionable), and to simply accept the status quo for what it is. But the moral implications of your actions do not go away simply because you choose not to examine them, or because they were the default configuration presented by the time and place you were born in.
---
You’re right though; I’m not qualified to pass moral judgment on anyone, and that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a moral question. Moral virtue isn’t a contest or a report card.
Am I morally superior to a 19th-century plantation owner? (Were all slaveowners equally bad?) If I were raised in his family, as part of that society, what reason do I have to believe I’d do any different? If the answer is “none”, then why do we study history? and what makes me better than that guy?
It's not within my power to change the way things are. But the willingness to consider that the way things are isn't right might be a start.
If the way things are isn’t right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can’t change it without violently changing what it means to be human, so you essentially have to have humans become something other than human, and that doesn’t seem like a winning survival strategy in the long term.
When we’re not eating God’s creatures, we’re burning down the forests and fields they live in and pouring concrete over them so we can sleep better at night in little towns and villages and hamlets with other people who participated in the festivities, or at least their ancestors did, or at least they bought the house from someone whose ancestors did etc. We also do it to grow more food, all those plants we’ve selected for over the entire history of agriculture that we’ve deemed to be beneficial to us to keep around? We burned down other species, even to extinction with no regard as to whether the burning mass over yonder was plant or fungus or animal flesh or insect.
I can’t seriously consider ethical vegetarianism or ethical veganism a serious argument for not eating meat because it goes so deeply against the violent nature of humanity that it disregards what we are entirely. Given it is probably the most defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, it is a fairly massive characteristic to overlook.
I can seriously consider reasons for eating less meat that include things like “this meatless dish is delicious”, only you don’t emphasize the meatless bit, or “methane emissions are a pretty serious concern, is there something we can do about that?” or “cows actually use up a large amount of resources that might be better spent on something else.”
I can consider those seriously, I just don’t think they’re winning arguments. But, at least they’re willing to try to work with the nature of the beast rather than against it. People who consider themselves “ethical vegans” can make a better case than starting from a position that eating meat is morally wrong, even if you believe it! It’s okay to believe something like that, I don’t agree with you, but so long as you or someone else isn’t trying to use state force to enforce their belief on me, I think we’ll get along just fine.
But I am curious to know what you think: couldn't you have made this same argument about slavery two hundred years ago?
"The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical emancipation is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most hierarchical, socially stratified, and conquest-driven species to ever grace the Earth. If there's a people that hasn't been dominated by another, it's because they're so remote as to be beyond the reach of civilized society.
"If the way things are isn't right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can't change it without violently changing what it means to be human..."
Again, I'm not saying you should stop eating meat. I'd like to, but even I haven't. I'm also not saying that I would have asked a 19th-century plantation owner to just give up his slaves voluntarily. But I think the Civil War was the single most defining struggle in the building of our nation's moral character. Would you rather live in the America we have, or in the alternate-universe America where our great-grandparents skirted this question so that they could "live and let live"?
If you don't buy into this for your own species, why do you cling to this world view in relation to other species? Have you ever considered that the universe is evolving and old practices which have worked at one point can/should be replaced by more effective ones? Just because we had cruel practices at one point, doesn't mean we should hold on to them if we notice that there are better alternatives.
A slab of meat like steak will be many years before that comes from a lab for a decent price. But worked into a nice curry or some usages for sausages etc, I say we are close or even there already.
But you are right; you can make exciting food with mostly anything. Even, god forbid, veggies! (seems that angry meat eaters are also dead against anything that resembles a vegetable; they eat the steak, leave everything else on the plate).
Kudos to you, but this opinion would make you exceedingly rare among people for whom eating meat is an identity issue.
> Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties.
It's less about you individually than the economic policies that enable the mass production and consumption of meat. Beyond the science, which pretty convincingly make the case that industrial meat is behind a huge amount of environmental damage, the politics of this are very much about personal beliefs about whether or not that situation should continue in the same form, or be biased more towards plant based foods (via the carbon/ghg tax you proposed). And politics are grounded for better or worse in beliefs and dogma, just like religion.
In pricing out the tax, you would need to compute the global warming potential of the emissions for every piece in the supply chain, as well as their half life to measure their short term and long term impact and finally put a price on all of that. You could limit it to certain classes of emissions to keep it simpler, but you would want to cover all the known major transportation, industrial and agriculture emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and so on.
I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities.
Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop enjoying the things humanity has worked for a long time to achieve. Instead we should think about how we can make technology work better together with the environment and enable even more comfort and prosperity. Not force us to go back, rather find ways of moving even further forward.
We just need to stop flying so much, and stop eating as much meat.
It's unfortunate and inconvenient.
That said, there are inflection points at which certain products switch from being seen as status symbols into more questionable signals - wearing fur springs to mind as one example.
I don't think it's at all guaranteed that traditional meat would end up in that category; it's a long way from it currently. But it's within the realm of possibility.
I think you are probably right... but I want to bring up the counterexample of smoking.
I mean, smoking was never as widespread as eating meat, but I feel like there was a tipping point in the '90s, where it went from something almost every red blooded american would do to something very rude and even forbidden in most indoor spaces.
Smoking became... divorced from manhood.
I remember as a kid I had an IT job; sort of an internship type deal fixing computers for the local county department of public health. I got credit for going to this job instead of taking the last two classes of the day in high school; There was nobody else in the building who wasn't old enough to be my parent. It was so much fun.
I remember when the city passed the 'no smoking in bars' ordinance. The office was super excited. a few people (who I'm pretty sure never went to bars) said they were going to the bar after work. (I was maybe 16, and not invited) I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now that I'm old, I go to bars, too... and you know? I probably wouldn't if they smelled the way they smelled walking past them in the '90s.
Chicken mcnuggets are barely chicken. The market already demonstrated that "real meat" is a matter of availability and marketing, not a matter status chasing (not that there aren't exceptions, which are a statistical minority).
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a compelling argument. SMH
Does raising chickens even have the same impact as raising cattle on the climate?
Obligatory wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
This is largely because pork is raised in factory-farming conditions that are awful for the animals, and poultry even more so. Environmental "benefits" are countered by animal welfare drawbacks.
Here is a good analysis, you need to scroll around a bit to find pork and poultry info:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
Beef is more carbon intensive, because it takes longer to raise beef cattle (and therefore more resources to feed).
but you'd be hard pressed to find people who would substitute their animal protein with insect protein.
Well, oxen manage to be strong as an ox on a 100% plant-based diet. Giraffes get pretty tall too.
What an absurd analogy; cheetahs eat a 100% meat-based diet and they're very fast.
Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers.
There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as opposed to high-methane[0] animal-based meat products. It's not the entire solution to environmental problems by any means, but it's a large opportunity.
A good chunk of meal decision-making comes down to the way that food is marketed and the way that we talk about and discuss our food options.
As determined and evidence-led entrepreneurs and technologists, all of us in the HN community can do a lot to advocate for and influence public opinion and behavior in whatever direction we choose.
[0] - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.
What if that long list is the cost of trying to engineer an alternative to something that evolved over millions of years? Why would that matter?
(Typical meat eater here, but interested in trying lab meat sometime.)
Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.
I downvoted you not because of what you wrote, but because what you wrote is directly refuted by your (unlisted no less which I find intellectually lazy) source.
Processed meat being a class 1 carcinogen doesn't mean that plutonium = read meat! It simply means there is a likely link between it and cancer. Not that they are equivalent. This statement is scaremongering at best, unsupported by the classification. Also "cancer" is vague, the WHO organization, IARC, listed colorectal cancer as the specific cancer.
Ref: https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
And for red meat being a class 2 carcinogen, they listed as probably not that its known.
From their FAQ:
This recommendation was based on epidemiological studies suggesting that small increases in the risk of several cancers may be associated with high consumption of red meat or processed meat. Although these risks are small, they could be important for public health because many people worldwide eat meat and meat consumption is increasing in low- and middle-income countries. Although some health agencies already recommend limiting intake of meat, these recommendations are aimed mostly at reducing the risk of other diseases. With this in mind, it was important for IARC to provide authoritative scientific evidence on the cancer risks associated with eating red meat and processed meat.
If you want to paint red meat with a broad "bad for humans and whatnot" brush. At least get your facts straight. I can't look at the paper cause its behind the elsevier paywall but it should be here for anyone that can get it.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
I bet the 18% more chance of colorectal cancer listed in the study amounts to for 500 people instead of 4 getting cancer, maybe 5 do now. One of my biggest pet peeves with all of this is the focus on whatever number is higher without contextualizing it.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are quite simply out of business." [1]
The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.
An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.
Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.
I imagine that meat will eventually be replaced by lab-grown meat that had been engineered to be as delicious (or moreso!) as the highest grade beef, but perhaps more healthy & cheaper. The fact that it would be better for the environment and animal rights needs to be listed as a benefit, but not the focus.
as a former tesla owner, i dispute both of these assumptions.
> ... lab-grown meat ...
tesla builds cars. cars are a recent human invention. cattle on the other hand is a product of millions of years of evolution. i think it will take a bit more time to get lab meat that is as good as the real thing.
It didn't select to be environmentally friendly. Humans scaled up animal growth fairly recently too, so we hadn't had enough time to figure out pathogen issue and ethics.
I don't think the evolution of cattle is a good indicator of the difficulty of creating great plant protein products.
How can you say that with certainty? There isn't any fake beef that tastes similar that I am aware of.
But it does (possibly) help sequesters carbon.
The truth is that it's hard to tell which is better, but neither is great environmentally.
it’s hard to say whether grass-fed or grain-fed beef is better for the Earth – in part because they’re both pretty bad.
“No matter how you slice it,” he wrote, “eating beef will never be the greenest thing you do in a day.”
He cites an estimate by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan that producing 2.2 pounds of beef emits more greenhouse gases than driving 155 miles.
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s study of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption in Oregon found red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprint of all the foods Oregonians eat.[1]
(Needless to say the Cattlemen’s Association dispute these, and claim it only (?) produces 2.8% of greenhouse gases in the US).
[1] https://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/which-is-greener-gras...
The other issue is we’re basically running out of topsoil. Modern agriculture is an extractive process, and the result is we have maybe 60 years left until the topsoil is gone and we can’t grow any more crops.
The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84.[5][6] That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 32 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions.
Ironic choice to use McDonalds "beef" as the example of real meat.