Hacking Meat: Can technology make us eat fewer animals?

That in addition to how inefficiently the nutritional value of giant animals is generated.

Disclaimer: I eat meat.

(Also, IME there are as many reasons to be vegetarian as there are vegetarians---they all have a slightly different answer.)

"Food production requires application of fertilizers containing phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium on agricultural fields in order to sustain crop yields. However modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years."

Raising animals to eat is a much less efficient use of non-renewable phosphate than eating plants ourselves.

Source: Dana Cordell, Jan-Olof Drangert, Stuart White. 2009. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought. Global Environmental Change, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 292-305.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378008...

I had been doing the low carb thing recently, so I agree with most of this. Unfortunately, the relative scarcity of meat in our history has resulted in our wanting to eat too much of it for our health.

That said, imbalances in our global civilization's distribution of food is a much bigger problem than calories per acre. (I guess one could argue that realistically we need to produce an overabundance of food to compensate.)

Every organism must collect their energy, aminoacid, vitamins themselves rather than stealing from their peers. I am against all eating including eating of vegetables, honey etc and critical of the current earth-based life.

when designing the post-humans we must exclude "eating" for body build-up and energy intake.

>What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat?

It's not a "modern obsession". Varying degrees of vegetarianism have been part of human culture since ancient times. People, especially Americans, are eating far more meat than they did 50 or 100 years ago. There is a greater variation, but the mean is definitely rising.

>Meat is good. It's healthy

Meat consumption (particularly red meat and processed meat) has been linked to higher rates of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and overall mortality in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, some vegetarian populations are extremely long-lived compared to the their omnivorous peers.

>it's very sustainable

Meat eating is not sustainable at our current technological level. Mass production of animals to be slaughtered for our consumption accounts for the majority of human-caused methane production, causes the majority of anti-biotic resistant disease, requires many times the energy expenditure that growing plant-based foods do and is an enormous threat to bio-diversity.

If all the world ate as much meat as Americans, it would be a disaster in terms of public health and the environment both.

>* it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio,

Protein != intrinsically good.

>and it's delicious.

Taste is subjective, but a lot of people would agree with you.

"[...] current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of "CO2-equivalent" greenhouse gases the world produces every year."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenho...

Meat, and red meat in general, has got a bad rap because of various studies linking it with poor health (i.e. cancer and cardiovascular issues).

Personally, I would argue against it. We know from anthropology studies that humans only evolved to our current state because we started to eat larger quantities of meat. Fact is, there is no better source of nutrition and calories when you're looking at foods obtainable from the environment.

In the 20th century, we're in a different situation. Food and calories are easy to come by, to the point that many Westerners are gluttonous and we eat too much. We don't need to eat meat to obtain more calories, removing it as a requirement from our diets.

Vegetarians will argue that their diets have less of an impact on the planet, and that they're healthier overall. You can argue that point either way, but anecdotally, I've met few vegetarians that are actually "healthy." Many do not understand that if you remove meat as a source of protein, you need to supplement it with another source. Vegetarian sources of protein are not very protein-dense, so you need to eat a lot of food to get your daily requirement. Moreover, you need to ensure that you're obtaining all of your essential amino acids, which many plant-products don't provide. That's why Indians, a predominantly vegetarian society, will eat rice with daal. Rice lacks lysine, which daal contains. Together, they are a whole source of protein.

I've personally tried the vegetarian diet, and it's not for me. It's not for everyone. I found that to hit my protein requirements, I had to eat a lot of carbohydrates along with it, which meant a lot of calories.

Right now, I'm overweight, so I'm trying to hack my diet and lose weight in a completely different way. I eat absolutely no carbohydrates. All I eat is lamb (I'm Hindu, so no beef or pork), fish, and poultry. I also eat lots of green vegetables, nuts, mushrooms, and cheeses. Oh, butter and heavy cream too. It's called the ketogenic diet if you're interested.

I've never felt better. No intestinal issues or bloating. I'm losing weight steadily. And I get to eat awesome, healthy meals that taste amazing. And I would bet that my environmental impact isn't all that high. My grocery list is very simple, sticking to the outer corridors of the store.

It's not for everyone. But it works for me. I would bet that most studies that say red meat is bad, didn't control for carbohydrates. The biochemical processes that occur in the body in reaction to carbohydrate intake is likely what contributes to the issues surrounding red meat. Of course, few studies have been done to confirm this because of a general disposition that high-fat diets are bad.

In summary, people are against meat because they keep hearing that it's bad. They don't seek out alternate opinions, and would rather be ignorant than educate themselves.

Meat comes from animals who have pretty miserable lives up until death in the modern factory farm. and then the environmental stress from feeding and transporting livestock is huge. And the protein health benefits comes with some warnings not to eat too much meat! Raw meat is dangerous too, causes much sickness annually. Left over chicken, oops don't touch that.

Tastes great though, so let's grow the world's meat in big vats and the cow can have a well earned vacation. Fair?

The research shows that more than a little meat is not healthy (unless you have no better alternative), and there is no harm in not eating meat at all.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Drink-Be-Healthy-Harvard/dp/074326...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/11/in-the-s...

>>> Migrants are among the poorest workers in the United States. The average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years. <<<

I'm hoping some things changed since 1995, but as someone used to to construction in California and had to compete against dry-wallers earning $3/hour, I am doubtful.

One would have to be very careful in choosing "ethical food," lest they have tunnel vision in only protecting animals, and by their pure nature of replacing lost calories with more vegetables, they encourage more human slavery in the world, and yes... in America.

Possibly it's a US/UK thing - but that's pretty much 100% the opposite of my experience.