You have everything here so completely backwards it's going to be tricky to unwind. Meat production has been massively subsidized in America for decades, resulting in terrible outcomes in every way- massive emissions contributing to climate change, polluted rivers and lakes, antibiotic resistant bacteria development, obesity, heart disease, colon cancer. As people have become aware of all these negatives, more people are choosing to eat less meat. There have been no meaningful regulatory changes to feed crops, although the world would surely be a better place if some of the existing subsidies were removed.
The meat industry has long relied on (often illegal) immigrants to work in butchering and meat packing plants, under unsafe conditions for low pay. Covid and increased border patrolling have disrupted this labor supply, making them cut back even further on safety, resulting in a couple plants experiencing predictable problems from years of cutting-corners.
Finally, Americans drastically overestimate their need for protein, due to decades of marketing campaigns, going back to steroid-injecting bodybuilders & athletes claiming that their muscles were due to "eating protein" because they couldn't publicly admit it was due to injecting anabolic drugs.
There is pretty clearly a desire to cut overall consumption X% among the proles to fight climate change, meat and transportation in particular. There's some effort to come up with technological substitutes but at the end of the day, this desire is strong enough that a "war" is being fought culturally, politically, economically with subsidies, whatever it takes to make it happen without causing a revolt among the working class, cause as of today the substitutes are too expensive or inadequate and quality of life will take a hit as a result.
Obviously the solution is to increase our resource usage. If we had abundant clean energy (e.g. nuclear, maybe even wind/solar) none of this would be a problem.
Which premise, and how so?
"Obviously the solution is to increase our resource usage. If we had abundant clean energy (e.g. nuclear, maybe even wind/solar) none of this would be a problem."
I fail to see how this solves all our problems. How does this replace things like metals, plastics, all agricultural products, over fishing, deforestation, etc?
There is certainly a lot of change happening around the meat sector and supporting supply chains.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23156862/meat-dairy-egg-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/emotion-...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220720-why-insects-are-...
Maybe I'm missing something, but the former sounds far more like a conspiracy theory to me, while the latter can be stated pretty matter-of-fact-ly, like your links prove. "War on protein" sounds so dramatic, like there are people in the background scheming, wanting to deprive us of certain nutrition and subsequently rule over us.
But perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Personally, protein-deprivation is not really that far up on my list of fears. And for the record, I'm not against eating meat (or animal based protein, for that matter) per se. We're just eating far too much of it.
A more cynical take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0
This kind of thinking, is exactly the propaganda you'd use if you personally had a big incentive for an inefficient system to continue, but needed a lot of other people to fight and die in order to have any slim chance of coming out ahead of the future changes.
To get less melodramatic and more boringly factual: a carbon tax would increase our quality of life, spur economic growth and generally be good for everyone who hasn't put their life savings into fossil fuels.
The fact that people are so worried about quality of life, but refuse to absorb that simple fact is a worry.
Sure, but there's a difference between a carbon tax and food policies that restrict naturally produced meats from being available to the average person. I think a carbon tax is a great path forward, personally, and I'd like to see us figure out national laws that allow for rooftop solar to be viable without allowing utilities and municipalities to ruin it. Point solar, EVs/Ebikes, and other ways to reduce or offset the needs to use fossil fuels for energy are huge boons that people are already economically incentivized to pursue (and would be even more incentivized by a carbon tax), but other policies often prevent them.
Beef should remain, the way truffles remain: as a delicious feast food, not as everyday staple. At least until growing bovine muscle tissue in vats becomes mainstream, I mean.
Most people don't just eat a crustacean whole like you would have to with "land bugs". They harvest the meat from the shrimp / crab / lobster and eat the meat.
You can extract some meat from large beetles, locusts, etc, much like you can from crabs. But even locusts are much smaller than crabs, which makes that onerous.
You can eat larvae which are mostly meat, and some grow large enough, comparable to shrimps. Actually, some people in Africa already eat them for a long time. Would be a harder sell for Europeans, though.
In a society of limited resources and competition, anything that is seen as noncompliance with the greater good could mark an individual as extreme. There's a herd mentality, and anyone outside of the herd's "normal" will be targeted. We already see it (right or wrong) with smokers, fur coats, etc.
"People are living longer and longer, but I worry that given what one has to do to get there will make them so insufferable,"
I personally think this is mostly a myth. I feel that much of the improvements are due to healthcare improvements in drugs, treatment options, etc. Society level life expectancy is most heavily improved by reducing mortality of younger people. We continually see better treatments for childhood illnesses, better safety equipment (car seats and such), even things like narcan for drug OD in young adults. Midlife care for things like strokes and heart attacks are better now too. The main point is, there are a lot of people around today who wouldn't be if it weren't for medicine or the recent improvements in medicine. The natural lifespan has been long (70+ yr) for a very long time. Due to medicine and technology/machine improvements more people are getting there now. And I'm highly skeptical of the studies claiming stuff like "a soda cuts a day off your life". Have an occasional soda... who cares! Drink 3 day... well, that's not good, but I don't think we can quantify it (especially due to genetic variances, like how many smokers never get lung cancer).
What's this now?
And I use this example because I think in end, it's really the consumer that decides, and they won't buy it. Beyond meat sounds fantastic on paper, trust me I was hyped for it back when it first announced. But that first burger just killed it for me, and I think it will for many consumers.
Ordering a classic "veggie" burger at a restaurant, often some sort of bean/mushroom/lentil/whatever amalgam was clearly a massively different product than a beef burger. I thought of it less as a true "substitute" and more of just an acceptable thing to eat. The introduction of beyond meat has been a huge game changer for me. I probably eat 4+ servings of beyond meat products per week now and don't miss meat from my diet at all.
Thankfully, some of these anti-whistleblower laws been overturned by the courts, under the 1st Amendment. I've also heard of some folks being arrested for animal cruelty once the videos got out, but unfortunately it's been the minimal wage workers instead of the owners. It's kinda ironic: you beat your dog and your neighbor sees you, you're gonna get arrested (I think every state/county in the country has anti-animal cruelty laws).
But if millions of cows/pigs/chickens get punched, castrated, thrown, etc., it's ok, because it's not on video and people just don't wanna know. Interesting how the "local" and "organic" labels have become super popular and charge a premium, but Raised Humanely isn't, at least not yet. IMHO, people just don't wanna know.
Some people (my mother-in-law) actually prefers Beyond Burgers to real burgers. I bet it depends on the cooking: you always grill my Beyond Burgers and everyone always loves 'em.
I still remember during the early days of the internet when I watched a 320x240 video of a live pig, tied down and being burned alive by a blow torch. Still remember it, 20 years later.
Note, I actually support fishing and hunting. Especially here in the northeast USA, where there's too many deer because we killed all their predators (bears, coyotes, wolves, etc.). And now they're eating entire forests and getting struck by cars.
And US government bans selling hunted deer meat (venison). I don't understand...
I see these two trend lines and arrive at the opposite conclusion: animal meat is certainly on its way out.
Edit: Also, Beyond Meat is really not great, in my opinion. Impossible however is quite good! I really enjoy meat and one of the best burgers I've ever had (incl. beef burgers) was Impossible from now defunct NYC restaurant Saxon + Parole. If you haven't, I'd also recommend trying seitan. It's not new and flashy and doesn't really try to be mistaken for meat so much as just be a pretty good substitute for it. The nutrition profile on seitan is outrageously good and the price, texture, flavor are all very palatable these days, especially in the right dishes.
Not in my country, actually the opposite is happening.
What does this mean?
> I’ll take my chances with lead.
Probably the most moronic thing I’ve read on HN
> Probably the most moronic thing I’ve read on HN
is the quintessence of what the guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Also, you carried it further (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426030) and that's exactly what we don't want.
Further, I like how it is on skeptics to maintain the high quality tone of a discussion, but the hegemons are somehow not accountable to conventions around civility, wit, and clarity. It's like some people have some kind of luxury-stupidity whereby someone whose opinions aren't officially protected can't afford to be that petulant.
Another commenter here observed it's a war on nitrogen with protein as a casualty, which is pretty consistent given aligned climate change initiatives.
Not at all, It's clearly pretty straight science reporting typical of Ars Technica. That nearly half a million Australians keep backyard chickens is in and of itself interesting, and those people probably want and need to know about lead risk. It may also be worth other urban chicken owners checking their soil and eggs for lead. People who live in cities and keep chickens are likely to read Ars, so it's a natural story for them to run. No conspiracy needed. The call to action is to just get your soil tested.
There is some lead naturally in soil but it’s generally low levels
UMass has a lead in soil fact sheet:
https://ag.umass.edu/soil-plant-nutrient-testing-laboratory/...
“The US EPA has set a safe soil lead threshold limit of 400 ppm total lead using this method. The US EPA also recommends that soils used for gardening fall below 100 ppm total lead. In Massachusetts, the regulatory safety threshold is 200 ppm total lead….To reduce your risk of lead poisoning, the following is advised: Good Gardening Practices to Reduce Lead Exposure
-Locate gardens away from old painted structures and heavily travelled roads.
-Give planting preferences to fruiting crops (tomatoes, squash, peas, sunflowers, corn, etc.).
-Incorporate organic materials such as high quality compost, humus, and peat moss.
-Lime soil as recommended by soil test (a soil pH of 6.5 to 7.0 will minimize lead “
The local context bias is here to stay.
This would include for example, changing an article from a Florida news source saying "diabetes epidemic out of control" to "Florida reports highest level of diabetes in its history" (these are completely made up).
We have a convention to add (year) to mark the date. We should take up a convention to add [context], too; e.g.
[In Sydney] Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead...
I tried that several times, but mods often revert that.
I wonder what @dang thinks about this.
Your comment is such a hot take that it could heat up a hot air balloon.