Plant-based diet would reduce agricultural land use from 4 to 1B hectares
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
For some reason it's ok to criticize someone's eating habits, but not their reproductive ones.
It's not a problem in the developed world. And it's not a problem in the best organized of the developing. So population control would amount to developed nations regulating poor nations' populations' reproduction, which is a difficult campaign to run on.
For some reason yes... like remember the guy with the funny looking mustache?
The problem is everyone who makes some form of this argument tends to think it's the other people there should be fewer of.
Anyway your other point is great: the rich and socialist countries are naturally controlling the population by reduced birth rates, so when someone mentions a comment like that they specifically mean poor and / or brown people.
To get 'natural' population reduction, we need a worldwide policy of wealth, health care, and sexual education. For the last point, it's important to note that it requires deprogramming. To be very blunt, the Catholic Church has brainwashed generations to reproduce as much as they can. That damage has to be undone.
>> To get 'natural' population reduction, we need a worldwide policy of wealth, health care, and sexual education. For the last point, it's important to note that it requires deprogramming. To be very blunt, the Catholic Church has brainwashed generations to reproduce as much as they can. That damage has to be undone.
So I'm a racist for bringing up population as an issue, but you get to point to policy solutions and blaming religion?
Thanks.
Anyone that thinks that "population control" is a good idea is a eugenicist inviting genocide. You would have to be racist to suggest it without seeing it as violent and evil.
There's no wiggle-room here. You made a Hitler-tier suggestion on how we deal with human beings living on this Earth. Reflect upon what you said a little and reconsider how you view the third world.
I don't think anyone reasonably accused you of racism.
The reality of demographics mean population control amounts to rich, predominantly white nations telling poor, predominantly brown nations to have fewer kids. The problem isn't race per se. It's the racial discrepancy making most solutions politically untenable.
Nobody argues that the USA is overpopulated and needs population control, but tons of people argue that the entire continent of Africa is overpopulated and needs population control. It couldn't be more obvious that demographics play a role in who has population control enforced, and who doesn't.
You could just as easily allow people from "overpopulated Africa" to move to the USA and balance things out, but it would be easier for racists to force abortions and sterilizations on Africans than allow black-skinned immigrants to relocate into their communities.
If you're deliberately trying to prevent certain demographics of people from being born, that's genocide. This notion that genocide requires mass-murder is ignorant and dangerous. Eugenics is genocide, full stop.
And no, "population control" cannot ever be implemented equitably, don't even start.
China [1]. Famously. Also, contraceptives.
It does of course get turned into "this politician want to abort poor peoples babies", but unfortunately that's where we are at as world.
I do agree this should be part of the solution.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/09/05/bernie_sa...
edit: while I was typing this the parent got compared to Hitler, so there you go. Simply making birth control available is not eugenics, that is what I have heard people suggest
The USA throws away nearly as much food as it eats. Resource availability isn't the issue - resource distribution is.
And since when was it uncommon for people to criticize people's reproductive habits? Eugenicists have been trying as hard as possible to keep black and brown people from reproducing for centuries now, and ethno-nationalists view race mixing as a mortal sin.
Generally we stick away from these kinds of arguments, due to how morally reprehensible they are. If you think the world was better or easier to manage when there were only 3 billion people on it, that's purely a matter of opinion, but there's literally only one way we ever go back to that population size, and that's through genocide, so no, we don't entertain these ideas.
Exponential grow will overtake any and all efforts that reduce a problem by a constant factor like the 4x proposed by changing eating habits.
> This is an important insight from this research: cutting out beef and dairy (by substituting chicken, eggs, fish or plant-based food) has a much larger impact than eliminating chicken or fish.
My intuition is that this harm reduction is surprisingly doable for most omnivores, because it doesn't require going full vegan. Or going on a harm reduction meal plan on, say, all weekdays would make 80% of the difference.
Eliminating all the meats as options for core components of dishes all at once is a radical and major change.
Eliminating just a couple of them, ie beef or red meat, getting used to it and probably learning a couple veggie main dishes to replace the variety makes the next step easier.
Then cut back on a next meat or dairy item once the first step became normal. Repeat.
This worked for me, and at the start I didn’t even think I’d go all the way. I just wanted to stop eating red meat since it seemed the least efficient.
It seems to imply that right now we CAN'T grow enough vegetables because the animals take up all the space. This is not true. It's a matter of supply and demand; there is enough supply for vegetables on the market at the moment, so instead land is used for soy and animals / animal feed, because that's what the market wants.
Similarly, if demand for meat lowers, less soil will be used for that kind of thing.
Anyway thank you for coming to my TED talk, usual disclaimers apply such as: Armchair wisdom, not a farmer, not a global economist, not an ecologist, etc.
I live in NL, where traditionally we held cows (for milk and meat) because the ground would occasionally be flooded with salty seawater; grasses would be the only thing that grew. We had regular farms, built within a sea wall. It was only in the past few hundred years that we built said sea wall around the whole country, making things more viable for 'regular' farming.
Removing the subsidies would make burgers and meat in general much more expensive.
I'm envious of people who can just eat whatever they want. They will never understand the anxiety a simple dinner invitation gives me.
It's not a great sensation.
That's kind of normal, isn't it? A lot of people don't cook well.
Every ingredient can be turned into a bland, revolting mush. That doesn't mean it's a bad ingredient.
It has nothing to do with the skill of the chef
It has everything to do with the ingredient.
But you don't understand and you never will. You will think I am exaggerating or being dramatic because you've never experienced it.
If you add these needs into the plant-based idea, how does it look?
EDIT: the beef energy need is ridiculous though, and that should definitely be reduced. My main issue is lamb, because wool is an incredible and useful material, which should get a lot more attention.
EDIT: re "replacement" materials - if you mean plastics, we know how well that is going.
The faux-leather that I'm aware of seeks to replicate leather's look more than its performance. In particular leather tends to last much longer, develop a patina as it gets worn, doesn't melt when burnt, provides protection, etc. On the other hand, fabrics like kevlar and ballistic nylon can replicate some of leather's performance but not its look. Most of these also have the issues associated with synthetic fibers.
Finally, there are semi-niche applications for vegetable tanned leather (which is the more traditional approach to tanning). Vegetable tanned leather becomes flexible when wet and holds its shape when it dries. That allows leather to be formed into shapes (e.g. armour for martial arts or cosplay, holsters and sheaths) and allows it to be tooled. I'm not aware of a faux-leather that acts that way.
Which eventually adds to the mountains of non-bio-degradable plastic waste.
Plant based fabrics tend to have much worse performance than the animal derived alternatives. Granted, that doesn't apply to clothing being worn purely for fashion.
Polymer based fabrics often do not wear well and may have issues with micro-plastics and outgassing.
Regarding leather: if one cares for it, it last decades. No plastic replacement I ever had lasted as long as leather that was occasionally cleaned and greased.
Except in reality, leather is more or less a fast fashion item that comes and goes. People buy them and toss them as their fashion tastes dictate, again, its not the 17th century. Its very rare to have a leather coat you wear daily for decades. Even in poorer countries is expensive to get and treated mostly like a vanity item. Alternative fabrics and materials work just as well and they both end up in a landfill after a few years anyway. Also the leather industry is abusive and exploitative towards workers and exposes some of the most vulnerable people to carcinogens and poisons needed to "work" leather. Is your vanity item worth all this suffering?
Go to a sheep farm, and watch the sheering. That PETA campaign was complete bs; most sheep actually await and enjoy being free from their fluff.
EDIT: too many replacements are plastic, which is adding to the accumulation of plastic garbage.
This?
You could also watch Dominion where the sheep section at 1 hour 11 minutes does not show happy sheep waiting to be sheered.
My mum knitted me a hat and scarf out of wool (mixed with synthetics because 100% sheep wool is not ideal), it's great.
My hiking boots are made mainly out of leather, synthetics are no alternative. My day to day ones are synthetic though.
Good quality leather products are expensive; your statement on them being "fast fashion" is only relevant if you're rich, or if it's shit fake leather.
Also, good quality synthetics as a replacement for animal products, the 'outdoor' stuff, is prohibitively expensive - moreso than an equivalent animal product.
Not everyone who wears a leather jacket it looking for fast fashion junk that will be thrown away in a few years. There are a lot of people who take a "buy it for life" approach to their clothing.
And there are a multitude of negative health impacts with high meat consumption as well.
And there's also the catastrophic moral failing: a staggering amount of inevitable abuse of sentient creatures when we look across the modern practices of growing animals for human consumption.
Anecdotally, I have Dutch family that kept sheep for a long time. They said the cost of shaving off the wool is often higher than the value of the wool.
Gaining efficiencies in one respect is nice. Can't disparage that. But you can't do so across the board if demand for goods and therefore resources will keep climbing. Think of consumer choices as a mere multiplier for their carbon footprint, because we all have one. Even almonds are suspect now because of the obscene level of water they require in California.
Gains in efficiency like this slow down land encroachment, but they don't stop it. I'm not going to participate in a race to the bottom of being the most efficient cog possible with minimalist consumption (I mean, I consider myself relatively minimalist) when it's plain that my contribution is not ultimately what matters.
Try something that isn't a hamburger. I can recommend curries, they have more flavor than any burger you've had.
(also re: flavor, most flavor in meat comes from seasoning anyway, it's the textures and fat content that the meat replacements can't get quite right yet)
Has anyone seen this movie? No idea how scientifically accurate it is, but I enjoyed it
This is my main problem with the opening argument: most animals are multi-use, unlike most plants.
Lately anti-vaccine "documentaries" like "Plandemic" are following the same outline. Nice production, a few random "experts" and a foregone conclusion from the start.
We also should be looking at growing fruit in labs as well.
Lab grown food probably would allow growing and harvesting from the oceans in unused areas.
The path forward is very simple. There is no convincing/shaming people. Food is at a base level importance for most people and you can't beat meat. Plus the other 4 billion people will start eating more meat.
Every environmental group, every ethical group should be putting it all into lab meat. The reason they don't is quite telling.
I would aim for a tax that makes red meat 7 times more expensive over time. This is based on the idea that most peopple eat meat 7 times a week and by making it 7 times more expensive it would force most people to move to a healthier once a week diet.
The money could be earmarked towards efforts to help people eat a healthy and balanced diet that is mostly plant based. Or it could be used towards investment into lab grown meat.
Of course I don't expect anyone would ever get elected in a decomracy on this platform so I suppose it'll have to remain only a thought experiment.
EDIT: I don't think I expressed myself as clearly as I should've so I'd like to offer two clarifications:
1. I wouldn't propose a 7x increase over night. Instead, much like the Australian tobaco tax, it would be gradual increase(e.g. yearly).
2. I suspect that this tax existing and some of it being invested in lab grown meat research would accelerate how quickly we could have widely available lab grown meat.
Anecdotally my own experience switching to a diet with less meat is that food costs have gone down.
I empathize with the position that any tax on a food item will disproportionally impact the poor. And I agree, everyone should have a baseline level of housing and food accessible to them regardless of their circumstances. But if a food item has huge negative externalities, surely we should do something to limit its appeal and consumption, right?
Cheap meat available to the masses isn't going away. Pandora's Box has been opened, we have to deal with that. The only thing accomplished with making meat prohibitively expensive is pissing meat-eaters off (thus them resenting any environmental reforms even more), and most importantly, making it accessible only to the wealthy.
It's fine to offer healthier alternatives, but don't expect to be moving mountains. Focus more money and effort on lab-grown meat.
There are still health concerns around a diet heavy in red meats, but at least it would address the environmental issue.
As for me, I could probably stand to gain a few kg of weight and exercise more but yes I am generally healthy. My health hasn't changed significantly since I started eating less meat for what it's worth.
There are a lot of people who have no idea about a profession or field and still have opinions (strong ones at that).
> when there are olympian athletes who are entirely vegan and additionally many who are vegetarians.
The point is I don't care that "there are some people that do x without y", you have that in every field in medics system.
"My grandpa smoked till 90 and didn't die." I don't care about your grandpa.
Meat is an important part of a balanced diet, and by raising the price via taxes it becomes unobtainable to those for who meat already is an expensive luxury.
Also your math is weird.
> According to recent studies, the U.S. government spends up to $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, with less than one percent of that sum allocated to aiding the production of fruits and vegetables.
https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
Broadly it would keep food prices stable and encourage healthier alternatives.
Edit: Sorry, I assumed this is a US conversation which may be incorrect. I understand UK is similar, but don't know about the rest of the world.
Assuming your goal is to raise meat prices, the problem is if the US for example stops subsidizing meat it will just mean that people will buy more non-US meat, unless you at the same time slap on an import tariff (which is tricky to do). Taxing meat at the point of sale solves all those problems.
That being said, you should probably also look at shifting subsidies towards making fruits and veg cheaper.
The source in that article goes to the writer of Meatonmics. On their site, they just claim that number without pointing to where or how they get that number.
In 2019 the gov pumped out 22b in subsidies to all farmers across the board. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...
So where's this 38b data coming from? Since the meatonmics agenda is to get rid of meat production, sourcing from them is the same as the health benefits claimed by the The Tobacco Institute.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21232.pdf
It is a huge political issue going back hundreds of years as ranching was arguably the largest driving factor behind the European colonization of the Americas.
https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
Same effect as the tax (it would allow the actual price of meat to rise closer to what it should be), and VASTLY less coercive and prone to being gamed by well-lawyered insiders.
Ending the corn subsidy ends the indirect meat subsidy. It would allow so many problems to start self-correcting.
I agree with others - a tax to make food more expensive is inhumane and immoral. Please update your view on red meat.
Taxes ("sin taxes") disproportionately hurt the poor and financially constrained.
That you're even suggesting making meat 7x more expensive shows that you're not remotely concerned about your ability to provide food for yourself.
I found this to be a well-written article about the topic: https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
This kind of mentality is very much what is going to lead us all down a path of calamity, if we aren't already irreversibly on that slippery path already.
How about a more reasonable approach like making industrial farming practices illegal or just tax those to prevent the abhorrent practices that I also do not like, instead of trying to command and control what people can eat because you don't like it.
Again, I implore you to reexamine what you are espousing and your clearly authoritarian mentality and approach to things because no matter how it manifests itself, it simply will not end well, no matter how it ends.
Of course the big downside is that this would effect the poor to a much greater extent, since they are primary purchasers of this cheaper meat that would disappear from the market.
Meat is kinda safe choice because it contains almost everything that human needs. As long as you mix in meat into at least one meal a day you are mostly covered and you don't need to think a lot about what kind of plants you are consuming.
On the other hand if you go vegetarian, there is no plant that would give you everything you need for your healthy diet. You need to mix and match various plants and you need to keep the balance yourself either through some knowledge or through tradition.
I think really only in India there is healthy large scale tradition of having large part of your diet to be plant based (but supplemented with diary).
So what this means is that if you wanted to convert say Poland to vegetarian diet, most people are just not knowledgeable or intelligent enough to plan their diet and believe me, there is absolutely no tradition of anything close to vegetarian diet here.
Just to make sure, I don't want to say meat is better for you. What I mean is that it is better for you if you have no idea how to choose and prepare stuff to put on your plate.
Deficiencies are real problem and sometimes things like depression or various other hard to "debug" illnesses are caused by lack of a particular nutrient in your diet.
For example, depression can be caused by lack of 5 HTP / tryptophan which has complex additional requirements to be successfully converted to serotonin. If you go cold turkey on meat, it is very easy to overlook this and run into problems without even knowing all this is due to lack of understanding of how to compose your diet correctly.
You can’t have endless population growth forever, it literally violates the laws of physics at some point.
Preventing people from having children?
Sounds pretty misanthropic to me.
Said differently, I hypothesize that it would be more practicable to create policies that influence what we eat and how that food is produced, compared to creating policies that try to reduce population size. If anything, it appears that more advanced countries are competing to gain population so that the machinery of their societies can keep chugging along in the name of growth.
EDIT: elsewhere in the thread I see people comment on multi-use of animals vs plants, and the consequent implication of increased use of undesirable synthetics/plastics if we raise fewer animals. Systems get complex, and their behavior can change drastically in surprising ways if you start fiddling. But fiddling we must.
How about we set the example for those that want to live like us and change our ways. Is it really worth to live for overconsumption and overfeeding ourselves to death? What kind of life are we leading?
Probably not steak and eggs in cheese sauce washed down with a glass of milk.
This means people care more about their tastebuds than ethics.
EDIT: For the downvoters: https://nutritionstudies.org/the-china-study/
Just one example...
https://deniseminger.com/the-china-study/
Natural selection seems to have selected us from ancestors that mostly followed herds of ruminants around and ate them in place of vegetation that we can't digest.
Now imagine there was no hog farms and it was all regular plant crops and/or vegetation.
Bad diets generally do not make people die during the period where they are able to have children. Natural selection has very little effect. Even if it did, the time period it would take for these effects to matter is significantly longer than most people care about when confronting the climate crisis that requires immediate action.
Modern agricultural practices is extremely rough to the land (but getting better). But then again so is modern factory animal raising.
"Currently reading about the military logistics of Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire. It’s fascinating that back then they understood that meat&dairy diets is what made them stronger than their foes who were on primarily grain based diets. "
Red meat being tied to masculinity is big right now (Rogan, Alex Jones, alt-right, etc) and its sad that shoddy arguments are being made like this to keep people from mindfully considering what exactly it means to raise and slaughter all these animals, some of whom are empathic and social mammals just like us. Worse, meat consumption is tied directly to cancer and heart disease. You're not going to be "strong" on chemo and its not "strong" to be dead a decade or two or three before you should because of your poor diet. Not to mention the link to obesity, that often starts in childhood, so a lifetime of being obese also isn't "strong."
Cattle provide more than just food products, From 1 cow hide you can get 12 basketballs OR 144 baseballs OR 20 footballs OR 18 volleyballs OR 18 soccer balls OR 12 baseball gloves. Yes all of those could be made of synthetic materials but I appreciate the natural biodegradable quality of leather products. Belts, shoes, jackets, furniture, steering wheels and on and on...it would add up to lots more plastics in our environment.
Most cattle are currently being fed annual cereal crops to fatten them up quickly, which I agree is a terrible way to go but unfortunately also profitable, but farming cattle on perennial grassland if managed properly actually regenerates the land, increases biodiversity, builds soil,stops desertification and is profitable too.
I think there is truth in the article but it also lacks perspective in some ways.
These guys have lots of examples of where regenarative systems are currently implemented.
I doubt there is much Whale oil to be found unlike the tons of led and cfl bulbs we will see in 150 years from now.