I think that can definitely be sustainable indefinitely, but not so long as companies and cultures are unable to make any kind of real concessions to reality. We should not be using plastic. For basically anything. We should never have started. We should barely be using cars. We should never have started. We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. We'd use a fraction of the agricultural area and be healthier to boot. Yet somehow meat being cheap is a god-given right?
I object to lots of things that reality forces me to deal with.
> We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries.
My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically.
Yes, at least some of us believe meat is very important for human flourishing. In strictly measurable health terms, I am extremely healthy, at least according to current medical science, so I'd rather not change my diet.
There were far fewer factory farms and antibiotics 500 years ago, and 95% fewer people. What was sustainable then isn't sustainable now.
If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There is no technological solution - we can barely maintain the pretense of keeping up with all the problems our tech causes. You can buy time (maybe), that’s all. Technological man cannot seem to grasp humility. There is no controlling the world. This article and some other comments go into some great detail.
>might cause minor inconvenience for you.
My current great health is not a “convenience.” It is an incredible blessing and I will fight to maintain the things that seemingly contribute to it.
I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.)
However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
> Red herrings were a staple of the working class diet throughout the year because they were easily cooked (e.g. Idylls of the Poor). Other favourites were cheap and easily obtainable varieties with better keeping qualities than the more vulnerable white fish, including sprats, eels, and shellfish (oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks).
> Consumption of meat was considered a mark of a good diet and its complete absence was rare: consuming only limited amounts was a poverty diet [23]. Joints of meat were, for the poor, likely to be an occasional treat. Yet only those with the least secure incomes and most limited housing, and so without either the cooking facilities or the funds, would be unlikely to have a weekly Sunday joint; even they might achieve that three or four times a year, cooked in a local cookhouse or bakery oven. Otherwise, meat on the bone (shin or cheek), stewed or fried, was the most economical form of meat, generally eked out with offal meats including brains, heart, sweetbreads, liver, kidneys and ‘pluck’, (the lungs and intestines of sheep).
'Urbanites' were the exception, living on or near the land was the rule. If you were lucky enough to live inside the walls of a city you were already rich.
The idea that you could eat meat 7 days per week, whenever and whereever you wanted is a historical anomaly, so don't present it as normal, or even a right. It isn't.
I haven’t find ratio or quantity. But furthermore I find this bit problematic in the context of this conversation.
“ This period was, nutritionally speaking, an island in time; one that was created and subsequently squandered by economic and political forces”
In the light of this last paragraph, it seems incorrect to use this source to qualify the diet or the ( nebulous ) “past”. It seems to apply only for the Victorian era.
That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy. Most people's food subsisted on things you would go outside of your house and forage/barter for. Vegetables, grains, mushrooms, pulses and maybe some small game here and there.
Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.
In the country where my parents grew up, this was their way of life. Small game you would eat maybe once a month, and a livestock would be sacrificed at the end of the year as a treat.
I am honestly not sure where this meme came from. That was sometimes true, for very poor people in places where the population was too high for the amount of land that was seeing agricultural output. For example, this would have been true in parts of the American South amongst the kind of people that were coming down with pellagra, or during the Great Depression. It was manifestly not true during most times and for most people. You can study local diets and records and see it was quite usual to eat meat every single day as the core of at least one meal.
> Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.
Of course people didn't have refrigeration, but that didn't mean that people threw all that meat they couldn't finish away! They used smokehouses (and other methods, of course.) Even in my parents generation, before electricity was common in some areas, everyone had a smokehouse, where meat could be preserved basically indefinitely.
One animal provides quite a lot of meat - for example, a single healthy bull can feed a family for about a year. Of course, it is true that people were not historically eating sirloin steaks every day - the most typical meat-centric dish was a long slow-cooking stew, and very little went to waste. Everyone was eating cuts most people have never touched today.
> Small game you would eat maybe once a month
This seems really uncommon. My friend for example used to eat squirrel every day for lunch. Without knowing anything, I would speculate they were from a country that went through some very hard times in their or their parents generation?
What would be sustainable is returning grazing animals to the Great Plains en masse to regenerate the rapidly-depleting topsoil originally built up by the American bison, but virtually nobody is talking about that because the entire focus is on one thing, CO2.
To be extra precise, human initiated greenhouse gas emissions. My understanding is about half of the emissions are natural and there's little we can do about their emission (but can do about their sequestration). Of course that doesn't/shouldn't stop us from addressing the half we can :)
Read Bill Gates' "how to avoid a climate disaster" for a complete rundown, with receipts.
We have to stop building parking lots everywhere, stop building flat top highrises, stop using concrete and steel, build everything with roofs designed to absorb heat and transfer it into the ground instead of radiate it, tear up a good chunk of the highways, parking lots, and surface streets, plant tons of trees and broad leaf greenery to shield from heat with shade and absorb it, and refill the water tables by pumping water back into the ground. All of which costs a ton of money. And what we should do, damn the financial cost and those who decry it.
Slapping a Mickey Mouse Band-Aid onto a gaping wound that needs seventy two stitches is the equivalent of what people suggest when they say "Well I'll just use renewable energy."
FTFY. Countless people outside the US get along just fine without cars, central heating, and the entire 1B+ nation of India is fine without beef for dinner.