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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

Same in the E.U. we have billions of subsidies for milk and meat. Many countries like germany also have a tiered VAT system, where basic foods are taxed lower, there is a base line tax and some luxury items are taxed higher.

Thanks to lobbying meat and cow-milk are taxed as basic foods, while vegan alternatives are taxed as luxury items.

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Meat and milk are basic foods.

And vegan alternatives are not?

Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history and still is in most parts of the world. Given the environmental impact of Meat and Diary in terms of CO2, Methane, Water usage, and Deforestation we should heavily reconsider our nonchalant view of them as a cheap commodity.

Dairy is much less of an environmental concern than beef (not sure about chicken). If the concern is animal welfare, then yes it's still a horror story in many ways, but not everyone who is pushing away from meat has the same reasons.

> Meat was a luxury product not eaten every day for most of history

And nobody want's to return to those dark ages.

This devil's alliance between veganism and environmentalism is what put me off environmentalism. Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.

If you care about environmentalism then you should resonate with the fact that 68% of the Amazon is Burnt for pastures for Cattle Farming. 28% is Burnt for Agriculture, of which 60% is for soybeans, of which 77% are shipped overseas for livestock feed.

That means at least 80% is burned for livestock or livestock feed. Since part of the palm oil and other plant produced is also used for livestock feed that number probably closer to 85%.

See:

https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Fern%2...

Your proposed solutions simply don't add up. Air Travel makes up 2.5-3.5% of all GHG emissions, Air Conditioning makes up 3.94%. Livestock makes up a whopping 18%.

So even banning all air travel and air conditioning, would only give you the same reduction on GHG emissions as eating 40% less dairy and meat.

So cutting meat and dairy from your diet is one of the easiest ways to cut your CO2 footprint massively. And it's actually just a minor inconvenience once you get used to plant based cooking, calling vegan cooking "dark ages" is ridiculously overdramatic, considering that e.g. indian food is often vegan and delicious.

See:

https://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf

https://academic.oup.com/af/article/1/1/19/4638592

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2022/nrel-shows-impact-of-co....

If we can't eat all the meat we want without destroying the planet, that tells me we need to manage down the population, not the standard of living. I'm not willing to give up one single shred of my standard of living to this braindead cram as many people as possible on the planet challenge.

Good news! We're on our way to do both, scale down the population AND the standard of living!

If meat is causing people to burn down the amazon, then don't eat meat produced from the Amazon. There is a reason why for example here in Sweden the price of imported beef from Brazil tend to be about half the price of locally produced beef. Local producers has to follow regulations and laws that Brazil producers do not.

I will generally advise that people avoid buying any products from countries who has a history of burning rain forests to produce (or we can call it subsidize) cheap exports. Similar for cheap products created from child labors, military conflicts, sweatshops, or forced labor camps.

I think you missed the bit where 77% of farmland is used for feed export. Your beef might be produced locally, but the feed for that beef, was produced on deforrested land.

While I don't expect a lot of feed is exported to Sweden, the same rule applies. Don't buy products which use imports from Brazil if those imports are created from burning down the Amazon. It would be the same as buying a locally produced shirt created from cotton that child labor picked (which was a scandal with a major Swedish clothing company).

> Climate change can be softened by banning airplanes, air conditioning, and other things we don't need, not by banning food.

you mean softened by removing things you dont use.

Look at the moment no one is banning meat. There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers. I'm not vegan, and like most people I really wish vegans weren't the noisy shouty face of environmentalism.

But, if you want change, people have to, well change. There are a few routes to that, one is price change (inflation is helping with that, stuff that requires a lot of energy to produce, ie feedlot meat and greenhouse based veg) are rising in price more than less refined or forced food stuffs.

Subsidies could be re-directed to different parts of the farming ecosystem (but that's politically challenging)

or you can outright ban things, but again thats also challenging.

> There is a reasonably amount of evidence to suggest that the kind of meat consumed and the volume might be the cause of various cancers.

No, there isn't any reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that. Vegans get cancer at the same rate as non-Vegans.

Nitrates in preserved meats have a correlation to higher rates of cancer. [1]

Lung cancer however, you are right.

I'm not vegan by the way, I really like salami. just less now.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30850575/

Eating meat is essential but airplanes and AC aren't?

There are parts of the world that are uninhabitable without AC, and I know tons of people who don't eat meat, but virtually everybody in developed countries flies. My partner's family lives at the other side of the planet so banning airplanes means she would never get to see her sisters again.

Living in an "uninhabitable" place is extremely environmentally damaging right?

Almost every human civilization is extremely environmentally damaging in some way. Much of the global North would be uninhabitable without heating for a proportion of the year.

Limiting ourselves to places we can occupy (and actually work/produce) year round without environmental control would mean basically killing off a significant chunk of the planet's population and telling loads of whoever is left that they need to leave behind their homes and move.

Compared to eating less meat, that seems to be a much bigger ask.

Around 60% of people in germany fly less than once a year. A third never flies. I expect that to be similar in other european countries. A lot more people eat meat.

> air conditioning

Keep your hands off my AC. I’ll go vegan before I sleep in a pool of my sweat nightly.

Same goes for vegetables. That being said, animal milk drinking is not something new at all. And in "traditional" setup, milk availability is massive improvement nutritionally/health wise over no milk.

That's a false dichotomy. These days we put so many nutrients artificially into the feed of livestock, e.g. B12, that we might as well skip the whole livestock step and just take a vitamin pill every morning.

Most people have a vitamin-D deficiency, most vegans that I know of at least take care of making sure that they get enough supplements.

> And in "traditional" setup, milk availability is massive improvement nutritionally/health wise over no milk.

only if you can process lactose. A large amount of people can't. Plus, "traditional" farming is highly dependent on location.

Invention of agriculture through industrial revolution is not most of history. Meat would have been very much an ordinary thing to a hunter gatherer.

There is also lot of other food.

if these things are to be basic, then what constitutes a non “basic” food?

Traditional or basic?

Meat wasn't a staple food 100 years ago, it was too expensive for regular people. Same with milk, if you didn't own a cow, you just didn't drink it. You drank some sort of ale.

And their livestock werent perpetuately pregnant. They made abt 1/10th the milk they do know.

My grandfather was a kid at the end of the Great Depression. One of the stories which blew my mind growing up was that he ate beef basically twice a year, when his cousins on a small dairy farm culled the herd.

His mother kept chickens, so they had eggs - to the point that as an adult he never eats them because he got sick of them by the time he graduated from high school.

Yep, (western) people are acting like meat is a human right and a staple day to day food.

My grandparents were the first generation in my country who started to have regular access to meat after WW2. Before that it was either a rare thing and much of the "meat" they ate was offal.

Pea soup was 99% peas and a small chunk of smoked meat added for flavour.

Meanwhile billions of people live perfectly normal lives eating legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts) for protein.

I think some people misconstrue traditional with today's sensationalized Food TV marketing. Which tradition are we even talking about? The world has never had this much access to food. We eat like almost every culture's royal family every night of the week, and pretend like it always been this way.

That is not true. All food in the supermarket is taxed the same.

We do not need fake meat. We just need to stop these subsidies and import tax on meat.

Providing people with alternatives is never a bad thing.

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