We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.
Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet.
Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are intended for direct human consumption. I couldn't find an exact breakdown for soybean use, but on my farm ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical. Corn is primarily intended for animal consumption.
A little back of the napkin math and you get somewhere around 35% of the output after a four year rotation on my farm being intended for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows.
The rotation is important to maintaining soil health and keeping disease at bay. I don't see that going away, save further technical advancement, so you'd probably just see the corn shift to something like biofuels if animals weren't eating it to maintain the rotation to grow the human food.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ... and 77% of it is used for livestock: meat and dairy
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.
While true, we are talking about cropland, not agriculture land (e.g. pastures). Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.
Other arable land is used for animal feed production, and together with grazing land represents the other 77% of agriculture land (37 mil. km2), which supplies only 18% of global calories and 37% of proteins.
Those 23% (11 mil. km2) of agriculture land, crop land, is currently producing 82% of global calories and 63% of proteins.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...
Right, and since we're only talking about cropland, that 77% has no relevance to the discussion. That it keeps coming up is rather bizarre. Indeed, if you keep pounding a square peg into a round hold hard enough it may eventually go in, but one sure does look silly for doing it in the first place.
> Eloff: ... won't need to raise animals or food for animals ... we could rewild huge parts of the Earth
> randomdata: probably not ... 36% of the cropland is used for animal food ...
Even if we kept all the arable land for human consumption (to compensate for missing meat, assuming the lab-grown meat will take some time to scale) we'd have 3.3 billion hectares of pastures to rewild/reforest. Or we could reforest those 35% of arable land we use for growing animal feed and instead use a fraction of pastures for nuts/fruit production.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-pasture
Forests cover 40 mil. km2, and animal agriculture takes 37 mil. km2. Majority of plant-based foods is produced on 11 mil. km2. By switching to plant-based we could increase forest cover from 40 mil. km2 to 70+ mil. km2.
"We might even address the very real disaster scenarios presently threatening the world with questions like these: "What if you could make a simple and compassionate change in your life that would increase available farmland, increase available clean water, reduce rainforest destruction, reduce greenhouse gas production, reduce the threat from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, decrease land and waterway pollution, prevent creation of ocean dead zones, end your participation in the deaths of sentient individuals and increase overall human health by switching to a plant-based diet? Would you do it?” This is the reality we actually live in, and this is the choice each one of us faces."
https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-would-eat-meat-on-a...
OFF-TOPIC: we should reforest some deserts/barren areas as well
https://www.renewmethod.com/post/what-is-arable-land
"Arable land is classified as land that can be plowed for the purpose of growing crops."
Please, look at the graph one more time.
Wrong.
> ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical
Wrong.
> around 35% of the output ... for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows ...
Wrong.
> Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.
Wrong.
> Your own link suggests that only 23% of agricultural lands are suitable for cropland.
Wrong.
> Arable land includes meadows, pastures, etc. Animals can (and do) eat from those lands, but cropland is more specific
Wrong (in the context of) https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...
> Your weird tangent ...
It's called logic. I give up.
Your split of 60/40 human/animal split for soybeans is accurate on a calorie basis. I just though I would add some color as to why it is the case… the beans are split.
That's the 40% I referred to. Crushers, while generally less profitable, are a better fit for my poorer ground. I lumped this in as animal food to keep things simple, but you're right that there is also human uses. You could write books about the subject if you want to capture all the details and nuance.
The 60% are food grade (IP) soybeans, which generally end up as things like tofu, soy milk, along with other foods where the soybean seeds are eaten whole (more common in Asian countries). I was growing 100% IP soybeans for a while, but as mentioned before wasn't having much luck on my poor ground so had to introduce some less resource intensive crushers into the mix to keep things sustainable.
Are IP beans kept moist or sold dry?
That still has to be in the millions or billions of acres globally. No?
While local conditions don't perfectly extrapolate to the world, remember that 100% of my acres grow human food when observed over the span of more than one year. The 35% animal food production seen in a single year is the outcome of the crop rotation.
Certainly, I'd be far more profitable if I could reliably grow beans for human consumption over and over and over, but Mother Nature is a harsh mistress.
Technically it can be extracted from the same seawater it's running off into, but IIRC that hasn't been demonstrated in a cheap enough way yet.
Living in central Berlin (Mitte), one of the most expensive parts of the city, it feels the opposite is happening.
Everything here is vegan or vegetarian at least.
Even a steak place next door to where I live has vegan plates.
On that note: it made me sad that all the dramatic changes you listed omitted the suffering of animals.
People think of robber barons twirling the mustaches when they picture the 1%, but for global topics, the 1% even includes people who are considered "poor" by western standards.
And, like the robber barons twirling mustaches people picture for their local 1%, you can't extrapolate any good data off of them.
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People in the west are so wealthy that choosing to be vegan has become a status symbol, but when you hear "world gets richer", you need to be picturing people who can't afford a choice.
Both my parents grew up in villages where beef was like a few-times-a-year luxury, and of course as their villages have gotten more and more modernized, newer generations can't even imagine such a thing.
Now their country has KFCs...
However, many things that are now common where adapted by the broad populace because they wanted to copy/be as fancy as the 1%.
On of the most prominent examples is probably the British accent. ;)
You feel that way because you're disconnected from the poor being referenced by "living in central Berlin"
I don't like posting videos but this one goes through several points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
None of these belong in the desert, if anywhere.
They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.
If Tobacco industry can hang on, Meat industry is not going away any time soon. Also a change of this kind can come only gradually, if at all.
We can't just tell all the farmers to go and take a Python bootcamp.
1) Still not real meat, hence is only considered by a limited target consumer
2) Is still relatively new to the mass-market. Hence still isn't at it's lowest price point.
At least where I'm from the companies make way more profit from their vegan substitutes then their equivalent meat products.
These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with... for months or years, depending on the animal.
It might be true in places without massive animal farms, but that's usually connected to more human attention which would make it even more unlikely.
How many people are living off of grass?
It's usually a special feed, which is composed of corn, often bones and other substances.
Either way, forgive me for being extremely doubtful. While its true that past catastrophes averted are no guarantee of future catastrophes averted, modern history has shown a remarkable tendency towards people heading off the worst of a given doom scenario before it becomes reality. Add to that the observable tendency of people to emotionally be attracted to particularly awful predictions even if their behavior indicates them as believing otherwise in practice, and the the skepticism about most doom scenarios like the one you mention is a good idea.
All data in our world today across the board indicates improving human standards of living and this has been going on for a long time. No concrete evidence shows a trend in the opposite direction to anywhere near a severe enough degree to assert the starvation of billions, or even millions. Problems exist, sure, and there are many dangerous environmental trends, but even these don't concretely establish anything like what you describe.
Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailable forms, for one), which will likely be much greater than simply letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. This is to say nothing of the long-term testing that should be done on any such product — whether it promotes cancer, leads to misfolded proteins, thereby jetting new and interesting prions into the population, etc. The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements?
> letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does.
Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiotics and hormones play a role in at least some, but perhaps most? They also emit C02 which we'll eventually have to pay for. And more generally animal farming is a (the?) primary source of new diseases already. I wouldn't expect "lab" grown meat to do any worse there, but perhaps better. Still, it is something new and new always carries some risk. But
> The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
It was also marked by dramatic increases in quality and quantity of life.
This is very much dependant on the country. For example, New Zealand beef is about 96% pasture fed, Australia is about 66% pasture fed, and Brazil seems to be about 90% pasture fed.
Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.
Granted it might be much harder to have the initial infection happen in the first place since it's just a chunk of meat in a lab (no animal to walk around and get injured or otherwise interact with the environment, no poop, no lungs etc).
It will be interesting to see this technology develop.
With beer and other fermented stuff, the fermentation is a disinfecting process. For example people used to make really weak beer to drink instead of potentially drinking dirty water with something in it that would make you sick.
I do not think they will be able to compete economically with the backyard chicken, for example; but I'm not worried that they can't produce a safe product.
Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?
At least for that aspect, I’d think the protection is less relevant. I would be very curious how that’s handled with other meats, like lab grown beef. I’d be more hesitant about lab grown beef, if the cooking instructions prevented cooking it rare.
The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat
Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.
They exist to be an ultimate authority, and that constrains them from presenting a compromised position, even if that compromise is something people find widely acceptable. The USDA simply isn't in a position to guarantee enough safety in this case to balance against their liability.
Safety is compromise. Eating rare steak is risky, but most of the risk is mitigated. Getting sick from eating rare steak is, itself, rare.
The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.
Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?
Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.
Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.
Ideally the production process would include something analogous to the immune system to make it more robust. For certain contaminants simple outcompetition by probiotics might suffice.
Chickens' immune systems are quite fallible, and they do not keep the chicken in a sterile state. Chickens are full of dangerous bacteria despite having an immune system.
Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years, you can't beat that. And btw, I'll rather starve than eat anything syntesized that can be made, cheaper and for sure tastier, naturally.
There's an amount of suffering "required" for the production of both of these things. A diamond itself is not screaming in agony as we prepare it for use, but there's a human cost involved.
[0] i.e. from the algae trapped in it when it formed
Say synthetic wood as your example, I would be willing to bet that a dedicated system that extracts CO2 for the carbon and combines it with water to make cellulose could be made more efficient than any type of photosynthesis. You can sell carbon credits and oxygen on top of that too.
Potato blight? soon to be available for: meat!
Lab grown meat will have the same problem assuming the cells have little to no genetic diversity. Even if grown in a sterile environment, they could become susceptible to a blight-like organism (virus, bacteria, fungus, etc) once on grocery store shelves.
I know it isn't on quite the same scale as literally cloning the cells, but livestock isn't a very deep gene pool. Lots of selective breeding, by the same mindset that gave european nobility weak chins.
Removing the sentience from cows does reduce animal suffering, though I wonder if other things couldn't be done to preserve genetic diversity. Like maybe breeding oysters without ganglia, as they are barely alive to begin with. Farmed oysters are also better for the environment than wild ones.
For that purpose. Photosynthesis is horribly inefficient for any use other than making more plant.
Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the life of the entire organism and just growing the meat directly could absolutely be less energy intensive.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
To say nothing of the animal suffering involved, we currently expend ~10x the calories we get from the beef producing it (IIRC). If we could get even to 5x that'd be a huge environmental win.
Edit: Looking it up, beef sits at 25x, and chicken 9x. So, a lot of room for efficiency improvements.
from this anecdotal source: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sbfn6b/c...
1lb of grass to humans = 32kcals / lb
1lb of grass to cows = 800kcals / lb
800/32 = 25x
Assuming you grow something other than grass on that pasture to eat (also assuming it isn't marginal land which makes up 2/3 of agricultural land), wouldn't that other plant extract approximately the same amount of calories from the sun? And wouldn't the bioavailability of that plant also be lesser than that of meat?
Second, farm animals are not 100% efficient in absorbing calories and converting them to meat calories, so the 25x going from grass to beef is meaningless, assuming you were attempting o make some connection to my 25x figure on beef production efficiency.
Third, agricultural land is not all used for meat, and I'd need a source for that 2/3 being marginal figure. Looking it up I see ~2/3 (60%) of ag land is used for beef, but it is not all marginal. Beef is the main cause of Amazon deforestation for example.
Forth, if we just go by land use to globally consumed calories, cows, despite using 60% of ag land, only make up 2% of consumed calories. If we make an absurd assumption that 50% of all calories come from non-farmed sources, that still leaves 40% of ag land producing 48% of the world's calories in comparison, which would include non-beef meat as well.
Finally, just because the land wouldn't have much use to humans if we didn't use it for cows, doesn't mean it wouldn't benefit the planet, and us, if we stopped using it for such.
Whether it can be done entirely using solar is another question, but free-grazing animals that only consume energy from local grass are not anywhere near prolific enough to feed the entire planet.
Cost goes beyond the labor (which is what I am taking your comment to focus on)
2. Again, pastures are already there, nothing else is on them.
3. Perfect, that's more jobs, but I know small family farms with 100 head of cattle with no extra ranch hands.
4. Not really, unless they are very large farms, but at very large scales making artificial meet will have challenges too, much more complex than shoveling shit.
> 2. Again, pastures are already there, nothing else is on them.
We’ve gone way beyond pasture just “being there” to rely on for animal agriculture at the rate we do it. Look at BLM grazing rates which are there to pay for renewing the grassland but to rate limit how many animal graze or the grassland would be destroyed. Amazon in Brazil is also being cut back constantly to create new pasture land
> 3. Perfect, that's more jobs, but I know small family farms with 100 head of cattle with no extra ranch hands.
If doing things inefficiently just to create jobs is a good idea, we might as well ban shovels and backhoes and make everyone dig with spoons
A large part of America was already grassland. Many other parts the land aren't great, but cattle can still graze over it even with really sparse or dry vegetation.
> If doing things inefficiently just to create jobs is a good idea, we might as well ban shovels and backhoes and make everyone dig with spoons
I'm talking about families raising cattle on their private land and continuing to do so, not about banning shovels, backhoes, or meat.
a large part of America was already grassland, but that doesn't mean it can handle infinite herds, hence the BLM grazing fees[1]. This is also ignoring the fact that I was referring to pasture land globally when I included references to the Amazon.
>I'm talking about families raising cattle on their private land and continuing to do so, not about banning shovels, backhoes, or meat.
Private land means nothing when you say "Perfect, that's more jobs". You should talk about how inefficiency is acceptable if it spreads work across more small businesses then, and I will argue with you on that point. I care 0% about family's keeping their small businesses together if it means the rest of us have high prices. If those families take more money to create the same amount of food as a large scale farm, then I give zero shits if they lose the family farm. I would prefer that an enterprise takes over, produces food at a lower cost, and then sells me food at that lower cost due to the competition that capitalism causes.
Could you please explain to me why I should care about the family farm asking for my tax dollars to subsidize them while they complain that my liberal lifestyle is unacceptable and should be prevented by law?
[1]https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-and-forest-service-ann...
How many unique species that evolved over tens of millions of years have been lost forever, in the last 50 years alone, due to clear-cutting in Brazil?
How much clean water and topsoil has been polluted and washed away?
How much carbon has been released? How much suffering from butchered animals?
I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this.
It is very efficient form the POV of $/calorie. But it is terribly inefficient from a hectare/calorie.
The purpose of modern industrial agriculture was to free up labour for industry. It has been a huge success in that.
Applying technology to the food production system is IMO a good idea. I think we should be sensible. Using robotics and regenerative agriculture has huge potential to increase production, increase the quality of land husbandry, and sequester carbon in retained topsoil.
Applying technology to growing meat in vats? It is hard to see how it could improve the situation. The one thing it does is free the consumer from being part of a killing chain. I can see no reason to believe that it will improve the system in any other respect. I retain an open mind about that, but am yet to be convinced.
If you do not want to be part of a killing chain, perhaps the best way is to become a vegetarian rather than open a factory?
It's probably only efficient because farms don't have to cover the cost of their methane+CO2 emissions and water usage+pollution. I'd like to see these subsidies eliminated.
Easy -- think for yourself!
Easier to get rid of all the useless eaters. Are you sure that doesn't include you?
2) you are assuming (because you externalize / push onto the future generations the cost) that grazing is the most efficient means for meat tissue production. I doubt it is. If artificial meat can beat cows wandering around eating grass for three years by a substantial margin, which I think is theoretically possible, then grazing will be a niche production.
This technology is desperately needed for climate change mitigation, on the scale of electrification of consumer transport. It's not just the methane and farming, it's also all that land that could be used as carbon sinks and biodiversity.
https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...
The big issue is that the world wants meat. If we can reduce the carbon footprint by 1/10th, which I think is possible, then it will be a very good think for a sustainable human race.
Let me fix this for you:
> Down here in Brazil you basically destroy a million square kilometers of old growth rainforest, give the animals it's vaccines, and let them graze for a few years
Uruguay’s environment is massively altered by wide-scale cattle raising [1]. The savannahs are being destroyed, deforestation lowering water tables and effluence and run-off contaminating what groundwater remains. They’re great places to rear cattle. That doesn’t mean they have no environmental impact.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Urug...
I heard of the pampas in Argentina before I think through literature from Jorge Luis Borges. I never knew that Brazil intersected with that region down at the southern tip https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampa.
The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.
Perhaps an individual animal suffering is less compared to a wild death, but the sheer volume has to count for something.
I'm not entirely serious about this. But I'm curious where the logical flaw is.
There are ~8 billion people living. While some are starving, most of us are eating every day, if not several times per day.
If we assume the average person is eating 2 meals per day, that means 5,840 billion meals per year, or ~185,185 meals per second.
Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip new life into the universe by force for that life to suffer to some degree, its’ life’s only meaning being to be processed for food. There was nothing, now there is. Somehow human kind has decided ethical discussion need not concern animals.
It's factory farms and non-human predators that ignore the subject as much as possible.
Also, there's a lot of homeless people that would live better as my slaves, but you'd probably still rather see them free.
Your comment seems pretty disingenuous though. You're comparing life in the wild to that on a small family farm. Factory farms, especially those that produce poultry, are far more horrifying. There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that many of the drugs (antibiotics and hormones in particular) that we pump our farm animals full of are actively detrimental to their daily comfort.
It sounds to me like your statement was crafted as a defense of your dietary choices rather than an objective assessment of animal wellbeing.
Of course none of this arguing really means anything without some scientific data to back this up. I'd like to see a comparison of cortisol levels and other stress indicators in wild vs factory chickens.
In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.
Wouldn't the logical conclusion than be to eat less and higher quality meat? I mean I have worked on Biodynamic farms with livestock and I can assure you they live incredibly well, and are often eating as good if not better than the the regimen of the cows used for Wagyu, and sometimes even better than some of us farmers depending on the pat of the season.
> In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.
I still think that if the key issue is the poor practice and animal welfare than the only acceptable solution is to eat less and higher quality meat from local and sustainable farms.
This synthetic meat is peak tech-bro, no one who is relying on eating fake hamburger meat on a daily basis is in a position to be taken serious when most Asian diets are mainly vegetarian and have fed populations in the billions for millennia (eg India, China, Japan). The arrogance to believe that the amount of inputs for these fake meats isn't a slight of hand because all the oils, and stabilizers at scale seems on it's face entirely absurd to a more environmentally friendly solution: pasture raised and grass fed cattle replenish the soil and serve as a natural re-vitalization for the soil between crop rotations.
I worked at a highly renown Vegetarian and Vegan place in Boulder, and even tried being both but abandoned it because of how depressed it made me feel wile working a manual labour job and working out/hiking, and I can assure that 80% of the time all were were doing was re-making vegetarian substitutes to meat based dishes rather than focus on the in-season vegetables a menu that reflected that which is what I had done for most of my career in kitchens that served meat and offered veterinarian options.
Ultimately, I think this a reflection of both hyper based capitalism, tons of Vc money cashing in on the immense amount of ignorance regarding food education with clever marketing. At the end Ag can be modeled and scaled in suh a way where it is carbon net-negative if the same amount of capital, time, and incentives were applied to it.
The modern Japanese diet is very, very far from vegetarian. In fact, you'll have a very hard time eating in restaurants if you're a vegetarian in Japan. I guess if you consider fish to somehow be "not an animal", though, it's much easier.
Granted, but Modern anything will often reflect a more meat based diet due to convenience (Lawson's bentos and snacks are amazing!) and despite several lost generations and the rise of the freeta generation(s) an over all higher standard of living as made meat consumption a norm rater tan an exception.
As a fomer cook/chef I can assure I can easily make 5 days our of 7 wit just tasty vegetarian meals rather easily because Japanese is my repertoire, and plant based dashi can be just as good as it's fish based variants (I onsider it a meat protein, albeit a more naturally sustainable one wen done properly/seasonally) thus can build flavour tat way.
By contrast I ave a harder time to do so with Italian which is my other cuisine despite having a more immersed culture experience--I lived and worked in Emilia Romagna wit its abundance of meat based parma options.
With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future. We obviously aren't there yet, so I support efforts that bring us closer to it, even knowing they'll be sub-par for years.
And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.
This presumes so many things, chief among them that plants are neither alive or intelligent, and I can assure both are not true--plants are incredibly intelligent actually and have mechanisms that we should mimic now that only now we have the capacity to observe and measure them.
My time in tech notwithstanding, I have a background and careers in both the Life sciences and spent time on farms and cooking in kitchens and it became very clear to me at a young age that Life feeds on Life [0].
So long as you live in this physical Universe you have to take in the elements of another living being in order to not die and the best one can do is be considerate and take this responsibility. You can abstract this all you want but the end is that this must take place in order for your body to continue to stay alive.
I'm a total glutton by nature with an incredibly fast metabolism and I have in earlier and darker periods of my life over-indulged in both food and drink, but I soon realized that despite thinking I was 'deserving' of it I felt ill every time as body had been optimized and used to intermittent fasting and nourishment rather than over eating and drinking everyday like it was my last day on Earth.
> With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future.
See above, but I will add that I have ever since I started to farm and focus on farm-to-table cuisine I formed a deep respect for every meal I eat (plant or animal based), it came at an immense cost (that I think everyone should experience) after having done the back breaking labour to grow and slaughter animals that I then ate or sold in the market(s). I can assure you that what you are advocating for is the fantasy, and most undesirable, aspects of my trans0humanist leanings. When one eats it is more than just input and output, and when we address that way it is no surprise our Western Developed nations are incredibly sick, depressed and despondent and that the 1-2 biggest killers in developed nations are food related (heart disease and diabetes).
> And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.
I cannot see myself enjoying Life at all if we deny that food is and has been the reason why our very constitution as Homo Sapiens has pushed us this far along the evolution scale; such that we have tamed and evolved alongside with dogs, ventured and conquered this planet and sadly have gone to war with our very own (eg salt wars) in order to be able to feed ourselves and our tribes. I refuse to see how we wouldn't lose a very fundamental part of our psyche and the Human experience if we lost this and to be honest I'd be the first to resist that: given how lonely and depressed became when COVID struck and they couldn't go to their favorite restaurants and longed so much for those days that they would even risk getting sick in order to return speaks volumes: also worth noting is that despite front line workers like doctors and nurses being so exposed to COVID patients, even without PPE, it was cooks, farm workers and meat processors who had the highest number of deaths [1] in the US!
Putting on my pedantic hat on: Having done all 3 at some stage of my culinary career it has long been taken for granted the sacrifice and risk some of us have and will continue to go through in order to fulfill this vital role in Society; I just wish most would take it more serious and see how fundamental it is the Human Condition and a part I would be despondent if it ever went away.
0: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14460785-Life-feeds-on-life-by-De...
1: https://qz.com/1962493/a-new-study-shows-occupations-with-th...
I think that's hard to say. But I also think "the alternative" to farmed life is somewhat ignored by vegans/peta activists.
On the one hand, as you say, death is more painful by the claws/teeth of a predator; that is certain. But life itself with little shelter (but usualy some) is the natural state of afairs for most mammals. To say that that is suffering is to say that life itself is suffering, which I think is counterintuitive as suffering is evolutionarily a means of preasuring an animal to escape from the suffering. Not to say that isn't possible. It's hard to say if the natural resiliance (assuming it exists) that mammals have to little shelter and food carries over to say being croweded into small enclosures.
If anyone has any (scientific) articles on this topic I would be interested.
Animals aren't people though. I think it's important to avoid unnecessary suffering or cruelty, but it's also important to be able to eat them.
You're either constantly at risk from hordes of relentless and effective slasher-murder-cannibals (to put it in human-focused horror movie terms—they're not really cannibals when it's one species eating another, of course) and will very probably be killed and eaten by one before you can die of other "natural causes", and every moment you're not on high alert is a moment you're more likely than normal to abruptly be murdered, or you're in one of those movies where aliens or vampires or something are farming you for whatever reason, typically in such horrible conditions that you really might prefer to take your chances with the super-murderers out in the wild.
It's all very pretty to look at when you're at the top but IMO Lovecraft's works, or films like The Thing, really capture the underlying reality of what life is, fundamentally. Incomprehensible, brutally savage, and horrifying, mostly. One of those things you kinda have to try not to think about too much (which is one of the ways it's all a bit Lovecraftian—not healthy to contemplate actual-reality, rather than our illusions about it, in this case).
Would you rather:
A) live this life that can be ended for your meat at any point
B) hide in the hostile and foreign wilderness of their planet
Sure one might argue that cows are to stupid to understand their fate, but that alien species might argue the same. Also: even the simplest animal suffers when you take their offspring away. Or you might argue that option A is totally acceptable if the aliens are just good enough at keeping us happy.
I have yet to find a rational argument why it should be acceptable to industrially breed and herd other living beings that doesn't boil down to "because we are stronger, smarter or because we can do it", which is not a universal rational argument, unless you argue the aliens are right to herd us as well.
Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.
These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.
When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?
The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.
I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.
If we can agree that ignoring nature, factory farmed animals don’t lead what we would call a fulfilling life, how can we justify bringing trillions of them into existence if we have alternatives? We don‘t have to go too deep into utilitarian rhetoric here, maybe it is better than nature, maybe if you follow that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be right to let animals suffer in nature or have children either. Anyway, I haven’t been able to justify eating meat to myself for as long as I was able to think along these lines.
Maybe not up to human standards, but plenty of animals seek and find shelter as part of their normal life.
> having to fear every sound
Do you think animals fear their own species' mating calls? Or the rain and the breeze? How do you know what animals feel? If you are going to project the human emotion of "fear" onto them, you considered that they might feel humanlike emotions of elation, joy, and satisfaction as well?
> And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.
Human death, including death by common age-related ailments, is often painful and drawn out.
> sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food
"Sheltered" in a coup filled with feces and "vaccinated" so that they do not succumb to the myre of illness in which they live. "Fed" via pellets of the cheapest food that the farm could buy while still sustaining them enough to develop tissue that is desirable for us to eat.
> being knocked out with electricity
I doubt that slaughter at factory farm is often as efficient, quick, and humane as you imagine.
> hardly encompasses more suffering.
Have you ever been, or been close to anyone, who was locked in jail or a psychiatric ward for a long period of time? The mental anguish of captivity is often described as worse than physical suffering.
Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal.
EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m from and I must have conflated it in my mind. I was actually thinking about FBS which is extracted from a slaughtered pregnant cow. So my point still stands.
I’m quite skeptical about this. How do they obtain and culture chicken cells from a horse?
I’m much less skeptical now
The technique is called a "biopsy" and while it does hurt, the animals recover pretty quickly from it. Branding is far more painful.
I have no faith in a regulatory framework being enacted and enforce which will minimize this suffering while keeping businesses profitable.
So it becomes a math game. Either this cow produces the 700lbs of meat in a normal lifetime or with lab meat it produces n tons of meat (depending on how much meat can be produced per sample).
Who knows, maybe this ends up with a few cows living long lives since it's not their meat that matters but rather the quality of the stem cells they produce. But I'm guessing it's more likely these stem cells first get extracted from animals either already butchered or destine for the butcher.
Note that we are talking about the growth medium here, which is used to grow the stem cells into the final product. So it should be the quality—or much rather the quantity—of the extracted serum from the animal (specifically the animal’s fetus or womb).
Not every type of cell or tissue has the same requirements, and things get difficult very quickly as soon as you deviate from the most common cultures. Tissues and non-cancerous (or in technical jargon: non-immortalized) cell lines are usually much, much, much more difficult.
And even if you manage to grow your cells, “serum-starving” will likely happen due to some unknown missing nutrient / factor, which will stress your cells and alter their phenotype. Even if they don’t lose their adherence, undergo apoptosis, or some pathologic autophagy, they may produce all sorts of extracellular vesicles.
FBS is really expensive, and quite mysterious. Nobody really knows what’s in there exactly. [1] Researchers would love to be able to stop using it, because it could mean more reproducible results, and at scale, fewer expenses. Unfortunately, FBS is also unreasonably effective, so we continue to use it still.
[1] This is only a slight exaggeration, but it’s approximately true. Trust me, I know this sounds like a preposterous claim. But this is an absolutely-insane rabbit hole where a lot more research is very-needed. A full characterization of FBS and its effects on cells does not exist, and is much more complex than it probably sounds.