Students ate less meat for 3 years after hearing talk on environmental impacts | Hacker News Reader

Students ate less meat for 3 years after hearing talk on environmental impacts

phys.org

25 pointssetgree26 comments

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd... (Just 12% of people in the US account for half of all beef consumed in the US.)

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 ("Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming")

> Disproportionate beef diets were consumed by 12% of individuals, but accounted for half of all beef consumed. Males were more likely than females (p < 0.001) to consume these diets. This relationship was seen in all bivariate and multivariable models. Older adults, college graduates, and those who looked up the MyPlate educational campaign online were less likely (p < 0.01) to consume a disproportionate beef diet. While almost one-third of reported consumption came from cuts of beef (e.g., steak or brisket), six of the top ten beef sources were mixed dishes: burgers, meat mixed dishes, burritos and tacos, frankfurters, soups, and pasta. Efforts to address climate change through diet modification could benefit from targeting campaigns to the highest consumers of beef, as their consumption accounts for half of all beef consumed.

Emphasis mine.

Mmm now I want a steak. A properly cooked cowboy ribeye is truly the most delicious food around, and no amount of “education” and “outreach” will convince me otherwise.

Big fan of cultured meat (I have the occasional annual steak treat but am mostly vegetarian), but I wouldn't mind if someone at the intersection of skilled and obsessed performed a gene drive across the bovine population to prevent reproduction, sunsetting factory farming of that livestock. Existing herds retire out, and we move on to the next problem(s). You're just pulling the far future forward, depending on the trajectories you're looking at.

You sound literally insane. You realize that right? You sound like a genocidal megalomaniacal crazy person out of some scifi movie. You’re not Thanos, this opinion is crazy, and it’s not socially acceptable for you to espouse this opinion.

Big yikes. Your ability to get a ribeye and phasing out a type of livestock is no more genocide than crop rotation or other agriculture policy. You're eating the cows and you're calling not being able to get cows genocide. They're cows! 36 million are slaughtered each year in the US.

> Mmm now I want a steak. A properly cooked cowboy ribeye is truly the most delicious food around, and no amount of “education” and “outreach” will convince me otherwise.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7256495/ ("Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010–2020) evidences": "It seems evident that human dietary habits regarding meat consumption in general, and red meats and wild meats in particular, should be significantly modified downward, as much and as soon as possible.")

https://ffacoalition.org/articles/massive-environmental-impa... ("The Massive Impact of Factory Farming on our Environment")

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-gre... ("Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production, study finds")

From The Guardian piece in my top comment: "Beef production is a huge climate crisis driver, and a new study says only a small percentage of the country does most of the eating"

In the face of climate change, factory farming, and all of the externalities beef livestock brings (for a luxury animal product), I do not believe I am the crazy one. You might consider reflection on your idea and entitlement that an inability to get a steak is genocide. Read the room and consider who is actually "insane". The human advocating for responsibility? Or the entitled person demanding whatever they please (fearful of "the anti meat lobby" in another comment below [1]). And which mental model got us to a global climate crisis? I challenge you to dig deep and understand how your mindset in aggregate contributes to the problem. The house is on your fire and you're asking to be passed the marshmallows.

This thread is so meta with regards to the post, education, and rationalization.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38130741

You sound literally insane. You realize that right? You sound like a head-in-the-sand nameless crowd extra from a period drama. You have no pearls to clutch, your projection is crazy, and it’s not socially acceptable for you insist on everyone else sharing your worldview.

/snark

God I hate "you-statements" so much. It's not that every time someone starts a statement with "you" is manipulation, it's just that every time someone goes to manipulate and control someone else, they make a lot of "you-statements". And the statements almost always empty of worthwhile meaning, frequently filled with ad hominem attacks, that make it trivial to just... hold up a mirror, pointing it back at the speaker with barely any modifications.

Be better. Especially about things you give a shit about.

It’s not unreasonable. Someone just straight up advocated for releasing a disease to sterilize all of the cattle in the world. This is an objectively crazy thing to say.

This doesn’t require careful reasoning or thoughtful consideration. I’m tired of people using rationalization to advocate for horrible evil things. “Being better” means calling out people that are insane, there are deleterious paths of thought that are destructive to society and we shouldn’t entertain them at all.

You’re not going to trick me with your “eloquence” and “intellect” and “calls for rationality”. I am being better, and speaking up when I see people talking crazy. Nobody speaking up is how we got into this mess.

> Someone just straight up advocated for releasing a disease to sterilize all of the cattle in the world. This is an objectively crazy thing to say.

"Objectively crazy" is doing a huge amount of lifting in that comment. As someone with a conservative leaving who believes there is an anti meat lobby attempting to brainwash your kids and your right to beef is inalienable, I would ask you strongly consider your position about the control humans have over agriculture and the Overton Window related to that control. We are already using gene editing in production to control our environment.

EDIT: > You’re not going to trick me with your “eloquence” and “intellect” and “calls for rationality”. I am being better, and speaking up when I see people talking crazy. Nobody speaking up is how we got into this mess.

chef kiss The defense rests.

https://www.who.int/news/item/16-05-2023-scientists-in-tahit...

https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/community/em...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/health/gmo-mosquitoes-approve...

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.151...

https://aae.wisc.edu/pdmitchell/2019/10/02/gene-drives-in-wi...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eva.13285

https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/06/crispr-gene-drive-could-suppre...

>(Just 12% of people in the US account for half of all beef consumed in the US.)

There are similar statistics for alcohol consumption/purchases, which makes it difficult to affect change personally and the corporations aren't likely to try to sell less to their highest volume customers...

I stopped eating meat over twenty years ago because of the negative impacts associated with feedlot based meat production that is so prevalent in the United States.

I’ve continued down this path (vegan 16 years this month), not only because of the negatives, but also the positives.

Turns out that my body thrives on an animal-free diet.

I know now that most folks aren’t in the position to adopt such a drastic lifestyle change, but I know now that it is possible.

I didn't read the actual study but based on this article it seems horribly flawed.

The participants who were tracked were imo totaly biased towards this kind of "eat less meat" viewpoint, so to then be suprised that they ate less meat (knowing they would be tracked) totaly destroys any credibility.

Yes, the bias created by being informed is exactly the point of the study.

You're onto something important, but I'd offer a different interpretation. All 'effects' -- the sense of being watched, the activation of prior viewpoints -- are downstream of treatment. Theoretically, the kids who were randomly assigned to the control group had the same biases (in expectation), so all observed effects can be attributed to watching the documentary.

Once I learned how bad meat farming was for the environment I started feeling slightly guilty about eating meat. Definitely didn’t reduce my consumption but I’m more open to a lab grown alternative when it’s available (none of that soybean stuff).

And that's just after a talk about the environmental impact.

Next they should watch a documentary like Earthlings or Dominion that challenge them on an ethical level.

I made sure to teach my children how animals are slaughtered for food because I didn’t want them to get some big surprise when they were older.

They love steak and chicken still. We’ve gone fishing and eaten the fish. I think it’s an important part of avoiding having children avoid the indoctrination of the anti meat lobby to go ahead and get all that out of the way.

The meat industry receives billions of dollars per year in the US from the government, so I don't think you can make the case that we're steeped in anything other than a pro-meat agenda that's so ubiquitous that you can't even film the inside of an animal feed lot. You're just serving your children the status quo indoctrination and patting yourself on the back.

Maybe you can show them the data: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

You keep bringing up how tasty meat is, but I don't see how that interacts with the concerns here since we don't use pleasure as a blank check to permit anything we might want to do in the world. It also might be a cooking skill issue on your part. I recommend this book: https://rainbowplantlife.com/cookbook/ and her Youtube channel. I eat her tofu scramble daily.

Why do you believe that the anti-meat lobby has more sway in society than the meat lobby?

Every time I hear the talk about "environmental impacts" of something, I tend to use/do even more of that thing, just out of spite.

Propaganda is effective on impressionable youth. More news at 11…

You’ve been fed meat propaganda for much longer than environmental propaganda.

I like meat and I do not give a fuck about environment. Earth can burn, with all the people on it, for all I care.

It’s not propaganda, it’s objectively delicious and the best tasting (and hugely nutritious) food for people. My kid vastly prefers steak to ground beef or chicken.

"Propaganda" to encourage people to make other types of healthy choices like eating healthier, eating more fruits/veggies, etc are not nearly as effective, even on impressionable youth

I could find no specifics on the methodology. Is there a link?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00712-1

3-year follow-up to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com