The way forward on that issue is to develop synthetic meat products that can out-compete animal meat on economical/ethical/environmental dimensions.
Tax-payers are currently paying for people to get cardiovascular diseases.
This is exactly what Bill Gates seems to want to do.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Should-We-Eat-Meat
The arguments for why he wants to do it are in the article to one of the repliers to my OP.
> ?—one solution would be to ask the biggest carnivores (Americans and others) to cut back, by as much as half. -- Bill Gates, the pink glasses guy
Other solutions are miracle agricultural and technological breakthroughs. He's ignoring scientific facts when it comes to energy conversion from sun to plants, the long time of investment return of \w+ponics technologies and transition costs. The largest energy and efficiency gains can be made by improving logistics, everything else is set in stone by the laws of physics.
Yeah, I'll praise the synthetic meat, but really, 2048 - year of massive oceanic ecosystem collapse, due to pollution and the number of species going extinct directly because of the animal agribusiness is heavily increasing. Not to mention Amazon rainforest and similar issues. The damage is already done, there's no turning back. What Bill Gates is doing is just more damage and accelerating the process. This problem cannot be solved in 20 years time, it might be the case that it should have been solved by now to avoid the catastrophic side-effects.
> asceticism never works as public policy.
Yeah, me the first-world ascetic not eating meat. This statement makes no sense. Asceticism can in no way be compared to removing products from animal sources.
Let's ignore the first world, let's concentrate on the developing India+Africa.
India would have a food crisis if 40% of its population weren't vegetarians.
Why not encourage plant-based diets instead of pushing, through his Foundation the meat, dairy and eggs?
The guy is irrational. There's nothing more about it.
Not to mention the global environmental benefits, etc.
[1] http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-mi...
Food is more than just a means to an end, it's also a core part of human culture. We can't expect to fix cultural issues with money alone, even if philanthropists made it very easy to live a vegan lifestyle there would still be people who chose to eat meat regardless. It has to be a cultural change to stand a chance in succeeding, it's up to us as individuals to make this change.
I believe a lot of people would quit the luxurious flesh eating habits if someone as Bill Gates says he's a vegan and just states his reasons.
Yes, it would be a pretty hypocritical statement since he's probably having a bigger footprint than most of the people on the planet but still, he shouldn't force his meat-dairy-eggs culture onto the impoverished nations of Africa. He's doing exactly that, stating also that there are enormous health benefits to eating meat - being surely wrong.
From just energy perspective it's level-2 diet. Level-0 would be picking berries, trees, hunting animals etc., Level-1 is raising plants, level-2 is raising plants to raise animals.
From an energy perspective it is entirely irrational of him to support this in developing world.
No, Bill knows what he's talking about. Animal-based foods are the most nutritious foods for humans. Beef liver, for example, is one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat, outclassing vegetables in every way save fibre content.
Animal consumption is an evolutionarily and culturally significant behaviour. Arguments about energy usage aren't enough to overcome these things.
My estimate is that it's probably equivalent to several families dining on protein rich, nutrient rich grains throughout the whole year.
Your arguments that appeal to tradition, history, and culture, cannot be considered rational arguments. They also aren't derived from morals (product of rationalism). They are empty.
I wonder how did the Chinese solve their food crisis, I guess it was raising billions of cattle to feed their hungry people beef liver?
It's a luxurious food, not necessary, and given Bill's arguments - he obviously is missing the point. Given the recent WHO report and thousands of papers, including the discovery of mechanistic-molecular processes, causal link to meat consumption and heart disease (LDL cholesterol), they are just papers away from finding the causal link between cancer and meat consumption (sugars found in animal flesh alone). Given the huge amount of evidence it is not rational to call it a healthy food.
Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.
Same will happen with dairy and milk, for dairy there are also hundreds of papers linking consumption with iron and calcium deficiency.
Claiming that meat, dairy and eggs is good food for developing nations is irrational, incorrect and contrary to the majority of evidence available.
Linking cigarettes with lung disease was done decades before they decided to make laws to ban the marketing. Thousands of papers were written, and everyone was denying it, because cigarettes were the cultural thing of the first-world countries. Call to tradition isn't a rational argument.
Cows eat food humans can't. That's the entire point of having them!
In some places they feed them other things, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Given all the evidence there should be no meat, milk and eggs in the diet of developing countries.
How does a growing economy cope with costs of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer?
WHO report said 50 grams of processed meat per day significantly increases chances of colorectal cancer (causation proof). 50 grams of red meat correlates with all-cause mortality (causation being published). White meat is filled with cholesterol which is the main cause of heart related diseases.
This is something that from an economic perspective shouldn't plague the developing countries, ignoring the energy needs.
50 grams daily is 350 grams weekly, about 18kg of meat per year per person. USA consumes ~100kg of meat per year per person. China is 50kg - and has just in the last 40 years risen from poverty. Just imagine India doing the same, Africa.
If you think people are being moderate, they aren't. This luxurious culture cannot be rationally apologized.
Go careful. WHO said we now know that processed meat causes cancer. But the risk was tiny, and the increased risk is still tiny.
Yes, I'm quite aware of the results, and authors of that large scale study, and the paper, the same authors published the all-cause mortality study too (also based on 50 grams), which WHO decided not to reference. There's plenty of evidence, WHO is pretty much years behind that evidence, if not decades.
There's nothing to discuss. Yes, the increase is 17%, which given the low chance of colorectal isn't that much of a big deal but the increase is significant, although, cardiovascular disease increase is much bigger, obesity huge.
The moderate "healthy" amount is really vague.
If I were trying to positively influence the developing world, imposing energy/water/resource hungry animal agriculture business wouldn't be a first step. It's irrational to consider it.
> Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.
When the evidence for meat and dairy ends up documented in 5000 papers, I guess the same will happen with them, same thing happened with cigarettes after thousands of papers. It takes time, but the evidence provided is sufficient now.
We waste tons of grains to filter through cows' bodies. Cows produce waste, that waste is used to replenish the land with minerals needed for grain growth.
Now, wouldn't the same thing be possible without filtering that waste through animals, keeping the waste in high amounts, suitable for the grain agriculture?
Of course, there's absolutely nothing magical in cow's butt that produces the necessary fertilizer. You can fertilize land with vegetable waste, producing less pollution and less non-recyclable waste, needing less energy.
The animal component is completely unecessary.
If you're trying to find rationality of these industries look at this narrative.
People hunted animals, they survived because of animals, but why did they do it, instead of just picking berries, raising food?
It was a time-saving heuristic. The animals were free, the animals were collecting nutrients, packing them into their bodies, and all that time was saved for the human. Humans just "collected" the neatly packed nutrients and had concrete savings.
Today, we bring the food to animals, we center everything around their food filtering, from an energetic, sustainable, environmental perspective it isn't equivalent, it's not even close. It is irrational. This irrationality is closely linked with our desire of excessive luxury.
From all the given evidence, dropping this would save us billions if not trillions in environmental cleanups, health-care bills etc.
Currently, there's nothing magical in animals that necessitates our use of them. The magic has disappeared when we snatched the planet.
I don't think you've understood Bill Gates' position in our culture. He's clearly admired as a businessman and as a philanthropist, but I don't see much evidence that people are seeking to emulate his lifestyle choices.
Instead of waiting for Bill Gates to become a vegan, focus your energy on positive changes you can make. For example, want to encourage people to eat more vegetables? Why not start a cookery channel on YouTube that you can use to promote vegan food?
I'm doing plenty of positive changes while waiting and pointing out his irrational argumentation over energy.
One is replying here with a unique opinion.
The other is applying my own engineering skills, tied very tightly to logistics (NP-hard optimization).
Bill Gates is a huge driver for startups and people reinventing the food industry. But his posts on energy never include the biggest luxury of all, the mightiest polluter, the strongest destroyer, the most prolific murderer - the animal agriculture industry. Without it + great logistics, the greenhouse gases emissions he's so eager to reduce would reduce immensely.
When animal agriculture footprint becomes smaller than all traffic combined, when it becomes smaller than all of the heating - then I'll concentrate on other things.
Anyone profiling a program would optimize the big percentages, not the small ones. Having a couple of thousand people watching my region centered vegan cooking videos is nothing.
You're wrong. That's what change from the grass roots looks like.
> "The other is applying my own engineering skills, tied very tightly to logistics (NP-hard optimization)."
Interesting. Is this related to promoting a vegan diet?
It's mathematically crazy that, during a mass shortage of food in some parts of the world, we're feeding a net loss of food in order to eat animal produce.
He's even insane enough to support getting more meat, dairy and eggs to Africa, instead of just bringing the nutrient filled crops.
With his attitude about energy and carbon footprint reduction, there's no way, India, China and Africa live sustainably on a meat filled diet.