I'm not trying to be glib or intentionally controversial, but: is this a "market correction" for beef not really being as sustainable at recent consumption levels? Is it a bad thing if beef becomes significantly more expensive?
I'm in no way anti-meat, but a lot of people have normalized eating a huge amount of meat per day at ultra low cost, and internalized this as some basic right. Natural consumption of meat is to eat meat sporadically, not 3 times per day.
I'm not questioning whether one likes meat, I do too. I'm saying you don't need it in these amounts nor should you expect it to be this cheap forever.
This is just an appeal to the way things were 70 years ago in the US. Much further back you had Native Americans absolutely eating tons of bison meat in the western US. Other tribes easily got fish for every meal. Others have been heavily vegetarian.
There is no “natural consumption of meat”.
Yes. As you point out the consumption of meat varies greatly across cultures.
Overconsumption of meat can lead to bodily issues as does a lack of particular plant foods. Particular meats are processed/digested in different ways, and have different pros and cons on what it does to your body and health.
So there very much is a "natural" way to consume meat that is most compatible with the capabilities and constraints of our body.
What is recommended/natural is an entirely different concept from what people actually do, which was entirely my point.
I'm imagining a farm household hundreds of years ago, growing their own crops and having a herd of 4 cows, killing one or two a year for lots and lots of meat.
Google says hunter-gatherers got most of their food from meat.
And are crops not unnaturally cheap with modern mechanized farms?
Not judging on the value of thaat diet though. "Natural" doesn't necessarily mean "good"
But increase fertilizer 3-10x and fuel 3-5x and you’re going to adjust in prices. And you’re going to get a new sustainable level.
Btw when I say “sustainable” I mean market conditions, not environment. The environment can likely handle far more cattle, but it requires input (fuel, fertilizer, etc) for us to produce said cattle.
Recall, there used to be millions (probably tens of millions) of bison roaming the Americas. We basically replaced them with cattle. Cattle are constrained to a region and fed food from farms. Environmental wise, I don’t see much issue with cattle (when comparing to other pollutants)
No one wants to accept the push to start eating bugs. Don’t give into the WEF propaganda
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/18/cows-sea...
There’s also an industry emerging, with big pushes from organizations like WEF, to normalize eating bugs [2]. Investors are getting in on this trend too [3]
1. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/12/6/557
2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
3. https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/war-ukraine-big-ag-insect-fee...
For comparison, it would be silly to say we shouldn't normalize eating peanuts because of the allergy risk.
At this point I'll keep an eye out but insects are such a broad and mostly unexplored category that I'm not convinced there's an unavoidable and crippling allergen risk.
From a quick search it appears eating of bugs specifically refers to the WEF push:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
don’t know about the catch phrase or how it’s “anti-woke” but interesting
We don't need to eat bugs. We can just eat less meat, like our ancestors did.
> The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).
https://www.medievalists.net/2022/04/who-was-eating-meat-in-...
Simply put, you have an animal who eats a bunch of veggies. It’s gathering the calories for you. Then when you kill it, you harvest those calories. There are other means of collecting calories (farming grains, milk & honey, etc) but for most of human history (even now) meat was necessary as it contained the calories to survive.
“The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis,” says Lambert. “These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”
Leggett adds,: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that. The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”
The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.
I don't personally think rising beef prices are an issue, though. Nobody is going to starve because they're being priced out of a steak. I will be more concerned if we eventually begin to run short of beef-alternatives, though.