and replace it with what?
In reality it is the poor who are most affected by climate change, diseases, lack of food safety... If the people really cared about poor folks they would be arguing for more regulations, higher taxes, against credit card programs and lots of other things which effectively end up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
Over in Scotland their national dish is haggis, which is a bunch of organ meats minced up, and then they add in some oats to bulk it up and make it go further.
There are solutions to use more of the animal and stretch it. I almost never hear about people eating organ meats in the US anymore. People just find factory farmed cuts at rock bottom prices.
The invention of fire revolutionized eating, the invention of agriculture revolutionized access to food at a fundamental level, the invention of refrigeration and freezing vastly expanded the reach and safety of food from point of harvest to dinner table, and the past century or so has dramatically democratized the kinds of food a person can choose to eat.
This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter, humanity demands and strives for better eating. Any proposal to change how we produce food must accept it must co-exist with continued improvements to eating.
With 70% of the west being obese or overweight I think the pendulum swung way too far.
> This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter
When did factory farms meat become quality ?? I think you're mistaking quantity and low price for quality.
You'd have to be blind to not see how the quality of food decreased in the past decades, my grandparents ate much less meat but almost everything was local
The computers we have at home and in our pockets are inferior in quality to enterprise servers and mainframes, but everyone has computers and nobody is willing to go back to simple Casio calculators and slide rules.
The meats we have at home are inferior in quality to artisan meats, but everyone has meats and nobody is willing to go back to eating other people's refuse (I'm aware organ meats are perfectly fine food, but let's be real for a moment) and porridge every day.
Our access to food today is nothing short of utterly insane to people just a century ago, and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
> and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
A cancer also won't let go even if it means the death of its host.
Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example, the right analogy would be to trade your $1500 iphone for five $100 backdoored chinese phones of much lower quality and pretend you're happier because you have more
It's not easy to feed so many people so many different kinds of food at a price most people can afford. When I said the past century dramatically democratized our diets, that was achieved by improving the efficiency of production and transport of food to such an extent that was only possible with modern industrial innovations.
>Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health,
And likewise I would argue you guys are ignoring the benefits to and desires of humanity.
>if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
Except that usually is ultimately the question, because inevitably the discussion degenerates into "we can eat <X> instead of <Y>". I'm saying that such conversations will convince noone because it ignores the reality of humans desiring to eat something and whatever else specifically.
>Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example,
The trade off is having a limited diet, possibly enforced from the top down. As I said previously, humanity has striven to widen its diet for as long as humanity has existed. This is a trade off that simply will not receive consensus.
…rightfully noone is willing…
I don’t believe this is right in the moral sense or in a global optimization sense. The world’s people are getting richer and as the world’s population begins to live more and more like Americans the world becomes exponentially more polluted. This will eventually affect us all. The world is becoming a toxic shithole. The right thing to do is to make changes now. But for the reasons you stated this isn’t going to happen. As a species we are local optimization machines and we don’t seek to find the global optimum.
I would strongly advise easing off on your intake of mainstream news media, the real world is quite pleasant out here.
Isn’t it a mathematical fact that if Americans consume exponentially more resources than others then as more people gain wealth commensurate with Americans then exponentially more resources will be consumed? Or do you think Americans are especially greedy in this respect? I had not considered that possibility.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/forever-chemicals-found-us-dr...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/india-new-delhi-air-pollution-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/contaminated-beach-water-coul...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/global-air-pollution-persists-...
None. Go out there and enjoy life, life is way too short to be spending it listening to so-called journalists peddling anger and fear.
EDIT: Looking at your past comments it’s clear you do consume news! What a surprise given your comment.
And human health didn't recover for thousands of years
Out of the 5 vegan and 8 vegetarian options, only the soy protein is cheaper than meat.
I might replace one meal a week with the soy protein, but I'd be concerned about long term effects of phytoestrogen, especially on growing children? Mind you many foods have some hidden soy 'bulk' nowadays.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/ relates to understanding of health benefits/detriments of soy.
Moreover, it is well established research that most modern western diets contain too much animal products. If you think that living vegetarian causes so much problems, you need to explain how many cultures who live almost exclusively vegetarian (e.g. In some areas of India) without significant health problems.
How about beans, lentils, and frozen peas?
That said, I merely posted this data because I looked it up and found it interesting as a comparison.
This likely wont happen in my lifetime. It will only change when the change is forced. When we’ve made too much of the planet a toxic waste dump then people will be forced to change.
It is ultra processed in name, not nutrition.
By the way, humans are the only species drinking the milk of another animal, or after childhood.
That said, plenty of oil free alt milks out there.
Even pigs know when to stop eating
Cows milk is also cooked, and homogenised.
(and cow milk often has similar additives, so this isn't supporting the original claim)
It has 15g of protein per 500ml, a ton of calcium and 350ish calories.
Super nutritious.
It has 18g of protein per 480ml, 60mg of calcium, and 200 calories. (Also 2.4mg of iron and 860mg of potassium)
The only ingredients are water and soybeans.
That's also 1/3 of your saturated fat in a single glass.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Do you also complain about peanut butter ? There is no butter in peanuts
So yeah, plants. It's painful, but we've gone beyond what we can do on this planet.
Any increase in size is coming from deforestation, which is devastating to our planet. [2]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
[2] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/deforestat...
You are discounting civilizations ability to adapt and invent by an absolutely incredible margin that is not supported by our own history of human events.
The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and it is not sustainable that 8 billion people live the way Americans live.
As it stands now the world is already becoming a pollution infested shithole. Imagine what happens when 7 billion more people live like us.
For every rich and wasteful person in the world there is a poor person that lives in scarcity and „offsets“ the wasteful lifestyle. So we’re kind of at a limit when you want to make a genuine effort to continue fighting poverty.