World’s Top Beef Supplier Approves Methane-Busting Cow Feed
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Wish the article had included this info about what exactly it is, but it seems like most articles these days are written for someone with a kindergarten level understanding of science.
Interestingly if you do this to a young calf it seems to change the microflora that develop in the digestive system, perhaps permanently even.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect may have only been coined 19 years ago, but this type of problem has been with us basically forever.
The group that’s limited by either cost or because they’re saturated has to be orders of magnitude larger. So I see this as an awesome bit of progress.
Please do correct me of my assumptions are wrong, though.
I get that most picanha-branded meat is advertised as originating from Brazil, but if you really want to contribute to protecting the Amazon forest, why not boycott the real source of the problem, Brazilian originating meat?
You can also go to your local butcher, and ask for a picanha cut of any local cow. That way you can still enjoy picanha, without worrying about the Amazon.
Maybe search for other names as well, in US it's apparently unknown: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picanha
"In the United States, the cut is little known and often named top sirloin cap, rump cover, rump cap, or culotte. Instead, North American butchers generally divide this cut into other cuts like the rump, the round, and the loin."
The definition of advertising is to change behavior, it is done daily for lots of reasons. Why not let people choose? Let's not prescribe outcomes, but instead enable evolution.
I.e., let's keep poor people poor.
We have an ongoing tragedy of animal abuse, groundwater and air pollution, and various health problems -- all because of people's addiction to meat.
(that said, I don't believe the physiology of domestic dogs really lends itself to "good meat", certainly not as efficient as domestic pigs, so raising dogs as food doesn't really make sense)
Only animals I'm against eating is hominids like apes, monkeys and humans. And that is only because of pathogens.
Which can be reversed by eating a plant based diet. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466936/
If not for the planet, then for your health.
The last thing we need is to turn cheeseburgers into a political statement.
You want to make real progress?
Don't pick fights with hourislate's barbecue--it sounds like a great time.
At least in the US, there's no chance of convincing more than a tiny minority of people to give up cheeseburgers and barbecue.
But on the other hand, if you promote non-meat dishes from around the world (falafel, shakshuka, black bean tacos, pastas, you get the idea) it's entirely possible for the average person who eats meat every day to switch for a few meals per week, whether they're motivated by climate, health, or just really liking tacos.
And take a hard look at restaurant portion sizes. In a lot of cases they've doubled since the 1980's.
It's easy to imagine this as a 25% reduction in meat usage, without picking a losing battle against backyard barbecues.
What I find hard to understand is this: if you want to eat meat, why would you choose to eat a meat substitute? If you don't want to eat meat, why would you choose to eat a meat substitute?
How many people are there that really want to eat fake meat? Or fake anything, for that matter?
Apparently, Impossible meat are fortified with micronutrient as well.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the problem with ultra processed food is not the processing per se, but the poor nutritional profiles.
1. https://www.cnet.com/health/nutrition/is-the-impossible-burg...
Found a number of different perspectives [1], [2], [3] [4] [5]
Most alarming was the presence of GMO, and soy & glyphosate connection alleged by testing from Moms Across America [6] found in both varieties (They are anti-GMO and anti-vaxx in the pre-covid term, using the original vaccine defintion). A vegan response by The Reasoned Vegan to these allegations and testing can be found at [7] which raised questions about the overblown testing hyperbole by Moms Across America. Consequently, I don't have a strong opinion on the veracity of the testing.
However, given my biases towards organic, grass-fed and away from both soy, GMO, and feedlot/grain cattle, the Chiropractor Dr. Pompa best captured a nuanced view with which I concur. [8] I say this because I've known many vegans, and the one I dated expressed concerns around the negative implications of a heavy soy diet that led to her to cut out all soy, and head more towards a raw food diet.
[1] https://blessingfalls.com/2019/08/14/plant-based-impossible-...
[2] https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/lab-produced-mea...
[3] https://www.eatthis.com/news-impossible-meat-ingredient-may-...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanabandoim/2019/12/20/what-the...
[5] https://www.gmoscience.org/2019/06/25/rat-feeding-studies-su...
[6] https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/gmo_impossible_burger_posi...
[7] https://thereasonedvegan.com/2019/07/24/lies-about-roundup-i...
[8] https://drpompa.com/cellular-detox/meat-substitute-burgers-a...
I'd be willing to give it a go for a few things, like burgers, but only if nutritionally they are close to like for like. (there is also a medical reason behind this for me personally, as I have reactive hypoglycemia and avoid all but the smallest carb intake).
I'll also add, our family doesn't actually eat much red meat - it's more of a treat, with chicken and pork far more common at our table than beef or lamb. Partly for health reasons, partly for cost reasons.
They look okay, but they don't brown in the pan and worst of all, they smell very very foul. You open the packaging and want to immediately put in in the garbage bin.
Taste is okay-ish, if boring and bland, but the smell disqualifies it.
I understand there are brands that don't have that problem (or less of it), but after two disasters I'm currently eating real meat when I want some, but try to limit it.
Better an honest vegan/vegetarian substitute than a "it has to look like meat, no matter what" substitute.
Soy shreds can be a good substitute for some uses of minced meat, for example.
Of the 2 (Impossible and Beyond), the visual cooking profile is far better on Impossible. Their fake blood leads to the expected color change. Beyond starts out kind of brown, and its harder to tell when what stage of done-ness it is at.
Beyond feels more like meat, in terms of the fat. Impossible tends to stick because its not fatty enough, but Beyond feels like a "real" burger in that respect.
Of the 2, I like the taste of Impossible more. Seems much closer to real beef.
the thickness of the oil exuded onto the griddle and the difficulty i had cleaning it off was a bit frightening as well... but i don't prepare meat so maybe the real deal is worse?
More to the point, if you want to stop eating meat, why do you have to eat pretend-meat? If you're cutting out a major food group from your diet you're already making a huge commitment in time and effort to eat in a certain way while not missing out on nutrients (so no excuses about how it's simpler to eat fake meat). So why not spend this time and effort to learn to cook tasty, delicious foods, without meat?
Why not spend this time and effort to learn to cook the many traditional dishes of the many world cuisines that are majority vegetarian or vegan, that teem with dishes that are absolutely heavenly, without any animal products in them? Learn to cook Indian, or Mediterranean, or African, or Thai. Learn to cook with olive oil instead of butter, learn to cook succulent, decadent aubergine casseroles and succulent legume dishes. Learn to cook! And don't leave your nutrition to the same old actors in the same old food industry that is destroying the environment and abusing animals with industrial beef (and pig, and chicken) production.
Remember that the biggest investors in meat substitutes are... giant meat and dairy conglomerates. Check out this article:
https://www.just-food.com/features/eyeing-alternatives-meat-...
Recognise any names?
That’s a big claim. Most meat substitutes are ultra-processed food with lots of carbs and a poorer nutritional profile. Did you make other diet or lifestyle changes? Red meat should not impact blood sugars much.
When the expected outcome is “you deny yourself pleasures you want and nothing changes” it’s pretty darn rational to just not bother.
Add Argentina’s population of 45 million to that. And then go ask Pakistanis how they would feel about a “don’t eat beef” law imposed on them.
Because this appears to be advocating for genocide. Or bovinecide (is that the right word)?
<Edit>Apparently this is being taken as an argument for meat eating. It's not, I suspect we will lay off eating animal flesh as a species fairly soon. Just a theoretical question. Something to think about. Because simple "everyone should just XXX!" often have wider implications.
Why don't people give up the meat until this has all been figured out?
In the grand scheme of things, "being eaten" (that is getting killed prematurely) isn't as great a problem as the severe abuse animals undergo before they are killed. If there was a choice to make, I'd rather never exist, than to be brought into existence on a factory farm, confined, abused, rape-inseminated, have my children be taken away, be hauled by a tractor because I can no longer stand up, etc.
Please watch "Earthlings" to better understand the way humans treat animals: http://www.nationearth.com
We see the same issue in the cultivating of mono-culture plants. Instead of using a wide range of different plants and land usage we instead see a overuse of the same plants being force fed artificial fertilizers in order to keep production high, with much of it ending up in the water creating eutrophication. This is a primary reason why a whole ocean, the Baltic sea, is turning into an underwater desert with a lack of oxygen so great that not even many bacterials like to live there. Artificial fertilizers has destroyed more way more land than nuclear fission and nuclear bombs has together.
If we could change peoples culture in terms in what they eat we could not only have a 100% reduction in methane, but also fix the water pollution, biodiversity, usage of fossil fuels in the food chain, decrease land usage, fix overpopulation and remove invasive species, and feed even more people than we do today. It would also likely taste quite well, especially since taste is heavily influenced by culture.
In contrast one can look at areas which has an overpopulation of seals. People don't eat the meat and the most common use is to generate oil, which is also not very useful in modern days. As such hunters are not very interested to spend time on it and overpopulation is allowed to continue even if it has a known negative impact on bio diversity in an local area.
If one goes into the area of eutrophication, over population of non-cultural acceptable fish is very common. When government create initiatives to address the issue, the caught fish (many many tons of fish) get either turned into bio fuel or animal feed if the cost of transportation allows it. Hard to find a bigger waste of food than that, and it is purely a matter of culture.
Of course, good luck getting the poor or working class to do any of those things. They simply want cheap, appetizing calories.
We need to stop approaching problems by trying to force people to change their habits and preferences. That isn't going to happen.
Also, regardless of the arguments and hand waving from vegetarians, vegans, PETA, etc. we should accept that the vast majority of people are meant to and will always choose to eat meat as part of their diet.
If you want to get people off of conventionally produced meat you need something that normal people actually consider to be appetizing. If fact, it would be even better if they didn't realize any changes were made. The replacement for meat that has any chance of succeeding is ...meat.
Lab grown meat is the only solution with any chance of mass adoption. We can control the inputs, create something more appetizing, cheaper and maybe even healthier. It checks all the boxes vs. some unholy concoction of super processed ingredients marketed as a "meat substitute".
Man, after reading some of these comments I realize how lucky I am to live in a part of the world where we push back very hard when the shrieking, alarmist minority try to force their preferences down the throats of others.
I'm genuinely curious and somewhat open to being persuaded. It's hard for me to see it, but there could be an argument for it.
Or perhaps you feel that those things are a product of industrial scale. If so, can you not conceive any solution that would involve less than 100% reduction?
Unlike CO2, methane breaks down in the atmosphere so it's not an infinitely growing sink, it's a rolling window.
But to attempt an answer: for example, I have rescued pet cats. If I find some arts and crafts use for the plentiful fur I “acquire” when I groom them, no big deal. If I make a commercial enterprise out of this and seek to maximize my profits at the expense of their well-being, that’s bad. There are gradations in between that are bad as well — ones that can easily occur for backyard farm animals, where their welfare and enrichment are very low on the totem pole. Especially if you are slaughtering, which obviously places their welfare very low on the totem pole. I’m avoiding the environmental aspect because it’s inarguably increasing GHG emissions compared to what was originally suggested.
But again, irrelevant for arguments about ideal supermarket habits.
The original proposal was to do something that almost no consumers do: eliminate beef consumption. I was not proposing to change consumer behaviour so much as producer behavior. Of course it would impact consumers significantly in the prices they pay.
If you 're looking for an addiction that harms the environment, then look no further than right in front of your eyes. Right now, you are probably looking at the screen of a smart phone that you will most likely throw away for a new one before the end of the year. You don't need a new phone every year, nor do the many millions of people who buy a new one each year, and yet so they do.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
2. The overwhelming majority of beef production in Brazil is done by small producers that just don't care and are Bolsonaro's main supporters. The main problem with them is not even methane cow flatulence, is deforestation of the rain forest for making pastures.
3. The beef importers that could put some pressure on Brazil (e.g.: European Union) already gave up on importing Brazilian beef (since Bolsonaro began insulting Angela Merkel an Macron's wife).
4. JBS, the main beef processing company in the world, might use this as window dressing and to present a polished image overseas. But they're powerless to inspect how ranchers handle their cattle.
What incentive do they have? Perhaps they should get 'methane credits', or 'methane fines'.
While this is true, the scale and duration of the problem means we need the “right” choices to make short-economic sense at every level from individual farmers up to economic superpowers, and for that to be maintained. If the Nash equilibrium is bad, we get a tragedy of the commons.
Much of the planet lives hand to mouth, and while they of course care about the state of planet in the relatively distant future, they care more that they or their progeny will actually get there at all.
What share of world wide greenhouse gas emissions by cow burbs is it again?
Around four percent?
So Brazil maybe two percent?
And they reduce them by what? Let's say, by half?
That is one percent.
Well Okay...
It's a start.
Sorry, what?
Pigeons don’t produce methane the way ruminants do AFAIK.
And, methane from livestock is only part of humanity’s climate altering activity.
http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php "Table : before 1800 60 million bisons in North America"
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php "There were 93.6 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, 2021, according to the Cattle report published today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)."
I didn't find number for ruminant megafauna in prehistoric times.
Humans are good at cultivating farting animals.
... > Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent.
> The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.
> "It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth," Milo told The Guardian. "When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken ... [0]
I would love to see how that compares to the great bison herds, or the great African savanna migrations
Maybe as an idea, just the food and the fact that bison etc used to have a more active life and varied foods than modern cows meant that they released less methane?
Lastly, ought be noted that methane releases from industrial agriculture are very much under counted and that might need to be accounted into the comparison [1]
[0] https://www-ecowatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch...
[1] https://www-technologynetworks-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/ww...
Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't.
I'm unsure about the fisheries, but the other numbers are debated now.
Until very recent times, the reports of European explorers pushing into the interior of North America were taken as a good proxy for the pre-Columbian state of those areas. We now know that those areas were far more densely populated before 1500 than they were more than 200 years later when European settlers started moving in. European diseases preceded European settlers and completely wiped out much of the continent's population.
AFIK, it's still being debated, but it seems reasonable that: - Predators like wolves kept large herd animal numbers relatively low - Large populations of Native Americans killed those predators but continued to keep the numbers of herd animals low via hunting - Native American population collapse coupled with low numbers of predator species allowed bison herd numbers to explode - European settlers arrived in the 1700s and 1800s and made the mistaken assumption that both the Native American and bison populations they encountered represented the way things had always been.
There are currently about 1.5 billion cattle worldwide, and each one weighs a lot more than 3 pigeons.
Worldwide livestock biomass significantly exceeds worldwide wild animal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/
The current livestock population can only be supported by industrialised agriculture.
Livestock biomass is also artificially increased both by many generations of selective breeding and by a known effect of certain hormones and antibiotics.
The actual methane emissions are a lot more complex than just count or biomass, as demonstrated even by the headline of the link (you wouldn’t see 55%, let alone 80%, if it wasn’t): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Finally, this planet does not actively manage global warming. It goes though glacial and interglacial periods precisely because of the absence of active management. The natural causes of this lead to the pre-industrial cycles, and are why the average temperature of this planet is so much higher than the average temperature of the moon: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%2...
Venus had thermal runaway and the precipitation there is lead rather than water.
Martian winters cause ~25% of the atmosphere to condense into the polar (dry)ice caps.
There are some effects that cause unstable feedback loops though. Rising temperatures trigger several effects that lead to even more temperature rise. Reflective ice caps melt, tundra thaws releasing methane. Frozen methane in ocean sediments melts. Similarly our planet has been through several deep freeze events, far more severe than ice ages. If temperatures drop too much the ice reflects too much solar radiation leading to more freezing.
Do cows/cattle/livestock produce methane? Yes. So do humans.
How did the planet manage? For one, there was a helluva lot less other greenhouse warming gases in total larely due to human's industrial revolution. Once humans found out about using coal/oil/etc, it quickly dwarfed anything ever seen other than volanic eruptions.
The livestock methane argument has always sounded like a BigOil tactic rather than a scientific one to deflect blame, and then championed by someone like PETA to help further their agenda. How significant would livestock methane emmisions be to the climate if ICE pollution was elminitated?
There are claims it's all bullshit (ahem); I wouldn't automatically trust either side.
Feed lot cattle are another story.
It reminds me of people that work out to loose weight... much easier to reduce the amount of calories you take in.
> There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat.
There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.
Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you.
That said their both missing vitamin C [edit: after cooking], so you need a more diverse diet anyway.
If your nutritional understanding is at the level of “fat and cholesterol are bad” you should not be giving dietary advice.
You appear to be approaching this from a USDA-poster style of nutritional reasoning (please do not do this), so I’ll make two heuristic arguments:
Why do you think, everywhere in the world except where there are social taboos on beef, poor people who eat chicken will preferentially switch to beef consumption when their standard of living improves enough to permit it?
Is the peptide and vitamin distribution of human flesh closer to that of a cow, or that of a chicken?
People may for example need on the order of μg/day of Bromine, Arsenic, Nickel, Fluorine, Boron, Lithium, Strontium, Silicon and Vanadium based on organic compounds containing them, but the need is slow low their plentiful in any reasonable diet. So sure, if you where building a food synthesizer from inorganic compounds then nutrition is quite complex, but in terms of diets people generally self regulate quite well with cravings often occurring should a deficiency develop.
Start looking for what’s not either sufficiently plentiful in most foods or synthesized by the body and you end up with a rather short list. Vitamin C is mainly an issue because it’s destroyed by cooking, and even then people can literally go months without developing systems even with zero vitamin C. Thiamine is another one that became an issue when people started eating a lot of white rice, but again it’s food prep not the plant that’s the issue. Many arguments around optimal diets exist, but the original quote was safety not say Olympic athletes.
So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, no there isn’t a significant nutritional benefit to beef over chicken.
> switch to beef
Because beef is tasty. It’s the same reason people don’t need to be convinced to eat chocolate.
I note that your statement is appropriately very strongly hedged.
> So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet,
Dietary “science” has one of the lowest standards of rigor of any field, in the same ballpark as psychology. Until we have accurate computer models of every metabolic pathway in the human body, I’m not going to trust papers that are like “actually you can just eat soy and seitan and be fine” (incidentally, the counterfactual study got funding approval from vegan activists and seventh-day Adventists!). Also, “in the context of a normal diet” is another pretty big hedge - “normal” diets are terrible.
In any case, when we’re talking about nutrition, since the state of research is so bad, we’re basically stuck with a priori reasoning and Bayesian observation, and after applying those two, my observation is that people who eat only ruminants and fish and stuff look really good and are strong and healthy, and the exact opposite is true for people who eat only vegetables, and this doesn’t really impose a big update on my prior derived from what I know about pre-agriculture food sources in these people’s evolutionary environments.
> Because beef is tasty.
As you point out, when your body makes something taste better than something else, it’s probably because it’s doing a better job of meeting your nutritional needs. If two foods were abundant in the evolutionary environment, I expect taste to be reasonably well-calibrated in terms of causing me to eat the nutritionally optimal distribution of foods.
Ruminants and birds were both abundant in my evolutionary environment. So what does it say that ruminants taste so much better?
Modern dietary science is quite different from it’s starting point. We know enough for soldiers, inmates, etc to eat exactly the food provided and be healthy. That’s the basic benchmark for success.
> it’s probably because it’s doing a better job.
Many birds are quite tasty, chicken however wasn’t part of our evolutionary environment. It also breaks down in the wider context, evolution would be adjusting things based on the overall diet and lifestyle of our ancestors which based on available evidence was quite different from our own.
Chickens are easy to farm which is why their so common, but they aren’t that representative of other bird species.
People have been shown to live on fresh beef alone for extended period without suffering scurvy.
Paradoxically, adding other might actually introduce the need for additional vitamin C.
People don’t need much vitamin C to avoid scurvy, a healthy person can skip it for about 3 months without significant issue.
Edit: Saying a food is healthy or not IMO really a question of how well it fits into the widest selection of current diets and lifestyles. Drinking say 1oz of sea water it generally fine and if people where frequently salt deficient then it could be considered healthy, but as insufficient salt intake is not a common problem and excessive salt intake is occasionally one I don’t think we can really consider sea water as healthy.
Similarly dietary cholesterol has minimal impact on most people, but overall excess is more generally going to be an issue simply due to the small population that is at risk. As such I think we can say lower cholesterol chicken is a net positive overall unless we know more about the specific person involved.
What is the problem you are referring to?
This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable.
> There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets
“Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much.
Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc.
Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems.
Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...
Even if this is true, it’s tremendously misleading because (globally) vegetarian populations tend to be quite poor.
And, of course, there is a bidirectional causality with poor people getting bad food, which stunts their development, which keeps them poor.
Not by any reasonable definition. Americans consume more meat per capita than any nation on earth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...)
I'm guessing you're basing that statement on the article you shared showing that 70% of calories consumed by Americans come from plant-based sources.
1. I believe your calorie-percentage data points more to the high amount sugar and corn syrup in the standard American diet. Those two plant-based, calorie-dense ingredients skew the data. A McDonald's chicken nugget value meal with a regular Coke has a high number of plant-based calories due to the Coke, but it is pretty far from being a vegetarian meal.
2. Calling 70% vegetarian "practically vegetarian" really stretches the definitions of both words. Most Americans consume meat with > 2 meals per day.
70% plants is absolutely “practically vegetarian” compared to, say, a diet consistent with the pre-agricultural evolutionary environment of most Americans. Personally, in excess of 90% of my caloric intake comes from animals (and I am visibly and medically healthier than 95% of Americans, even health-focused herbivores, as are people I know who eat similarly).
Longer term surviving examples tended to have a higher meat based ratio largely because they lived on islands or in more marginal areas. However, looking at land area and population density estimates adjusts the ratio significantly.
Some of this needs to be inferred from things like Native American tribal densities and is further confused as diseases decimated native populations throwing off those density estimates. Still the idea of our ancestors eating a primarily meat based diet seems to be a mistake.
You’re telling me my snow-bound ancestors were eating vegetables in the dead of winter, prior to the advent of agriculture?
On top of this mercator projections seriously distort people perceptions of how much land is near the equator vs the north. Africa is 11.73 million square miles with minimal snowfall outside of a few mountains, Europe is 3.9 million square miles. Combine that with warmer areas providing more food and it’s likely the majority of early modern humans never experienced significant snowfall.
This is complicated by ice ages, but people didn’t spend a lot of time on on near glaciers until very recently. Lack of food and warmth where huge issue before relatively advanced though still Stone Age technology.
Another way of thinking about this is to compare animal biomass per square mile in say Mongolia with Ghana.
... you sure about that?
What did the Okinawans get most of their calories from? Sweet potatoes.. how much animal protein in their diet? 3 percent https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living...
If you eat enough calories per day from real plant foods - getting protein deficiency is impossible.
Of course government action is better than individual action. But why not both? Signal your discontent by removing yourself from the meat market.
No.
> Or are you saying "my contribution is just a drop in the bucket, so I may as well continue eating meat?"
Compared to, say, global shipping, meat itself is a drop in the bucket.
> Of course government action is better than individual action.
I wish this were sarcasm.
> But why not both?
Because the promoted alternative (soy) makes people docile and easier to control. No, thank you.
This is a bold empirical claim. Do you have any credible reasons to believe this that you could share?
According to this, livestock & manure are 5.8% of the total, while shipping is 1.7% of the total: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
IIRC the actual level of change we need to achieve long-term stability is something like 99%-99.9% reduction (depending on the gas, CH4 != CO2). If so, we’d have to eliminate about half of shipping emissions even if we eliminated 100% of the emissions in every other sector, but that’s even worse for your argument as it also means we have to eliminate 5/6ths of all livestock & manure emissions if we eliminated 100% of everything else.
This is impossible to attain though.
I wish people would stop pretending we have a choice to do nothing because the whole thing is just going to be too inconvenient.
Uhuh, we just need to wait until you stop reading dystopian books and will leave your basement.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But we do? There's no pretension here, no action is always a choice. That doesn't mean that we will be free from the consequences of course. I think many people are betting, consciously or not, on the fact that we can keep going like this until the day they die and then they won't have to care about the consequences.
Also: while I wasn’t thinking of this when I wrote the previous post, if carbon capture powered by non-fossil sources turned out to be useful (but not so useful to give us the exact opposite problem), that’s still a success.
Personally I want to stop buying meat. I'll probably start hunting once or twice a year and fill a freezer.