Legislation and enforcement only played a partial role in reducing the rate of driving while intoxicated. DWI was still normal and socially acceptable for decades after we started banning it. We changed our attitudes, we stigmatized the behaviour, we created new norms, we invented the concept of the "designated driver". Millions of people had to be the first person in their bar to say "just a club soda, I'm driving", the first to say "don't you think you've had enough?", the first to take the keys out of their friend's pocket and call them a taxi.

It's absurd to think that we can solve the problem of antibiotic resistance just by personally giving up meat, but it's equally absurd to think that our own choices are irrelevant. Collective problems are just individual problems at scale; the solutions are also the aggregate of lots of small individual actions. Eat less meat, buy better meat, lobby grocers and restaurant chains to sell antibiotic-free meat, write to your representatives, inform your friends and family about the issue - it all helps to move us in the right direction.

Back in the 70s getting pulled over drunk was punished like running a red light (i.e. a nominal fine). The punishments were ratcheted up to now where a DUI results in a 10k fine in some states and an immediate license suspension. With life altering punishments for getting caught, drunk driving reduced significantly and the culture of determining a DD emerged so people could continue to get hammered.

In the UK, the standard penalty for drink-driving has been the same since the early 70s - a 12 month driving ban and a modest fine for the first offence, a three year ban for a second offence and a possible prison sentence of up to 6 months for further repeat offences.

The penalties haven't changed in years, but the rate of drink driving has fallen drastically. What has changed is the culture. Persistent campaigning from both government and grassroots organisations has made drink driving completely unacceptable. Today, it would be considered perfectly reasonable - perhaps even admirable - to call the police on your own friend if you know that they're drink driving. There's now far less proactive enforcement of drink driving laws, because it's not a common enough offence to warrant random testing and the police expect to get tip-offs from the public. It's seen as a foolish and selfish thing to do, a marker of personal weakness, a sign that you're some kind of alcoholic.

It still wouldn't be considered honorable here to turn in a friend for drunk driving (unless it was obscenely over the limit). It would be mainly considered a failure of friendship that you didn't confront them and instead called it in.

Even in rural Ireland there was a relatively recent backlash because they could keep driving home drunk down the side of the road with the hazard lights on.

Also, with a 12-month ban in the UK, they must not have been enforcing it much because it wouldn't take long to have most of the drunk drivers banned. So my suspicion is that enforcement increased as well. People rarely fall for propaganda alone when there is nothing that makes it concrete.

My point is that some types of problems are more amenable to personal activism (participation in wars come to mind) while other types of problems (shared-resources/commons) have different effective solutions (taxes, legislation, democracy et. al.)

Antibiotics is actually a fairly minor benefit to the meat industry, so it's a winning strategy assuming significant popular support.

[1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

I thought it was universally acknowledged that boycotts, generally, don't work, because you can almost never find and coordinate enough people that care.

Can you be a conscious consumer on all aspects of your consumption, can anyone?

overall it makes sense to reduce meat consumption, because if you look deeper in reasons for antibiotics use in meat industry, mainly it is used as a consequence of high demand for meat, to reduce risk of diseases in overpopulated farms, while feeding animals growth hormones and stuffing as much food as possible to ensure quick growth, so yeah, if people would reduce consumption, then supply would adjust accordingly, and then even organic meat producers would become viable option to meet demands.

Everybody agrees we should drive carefully, and everybody agrees we should not revert to pre-antibiotic treatment of infections. How did we address the former? Through moral admonition and personal prudence? (That was a rhetorical question)

10 points for griffindor.

Or people just ignore stupid, unenforceable laws and net respect for the law as an absolute is decreased.

  It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield

There's a demand for meat, hence an industry working to supply (and profit-off-of) it. Encouraging people to eat less meat is making a difference.

These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.

I say that anything less than that is worse than useless, because we're spending wasted effort (mindshare, attention) when time is, to the best of our knowledge, running out.

Now i don't know that personal activism and moral campaigning will be insufficient in this case, it just smells that way to me. It also has a certain fragrance of moral superiority and virtue signalling about it, which i guess triggers me, or something.

The problem, as I see it, is one of a questionable food supply or at least a contamination issue, in which case, each person should decide what matters to them, and is how this particular problem is solved in the micro, which in aggregate, does lessen the macro aspect. I'm thinking of cases like cigarettes and alcohol.

However, where this falls apart is that consumers don't always have that info, and even if we slap warnings on things, it doesn't usually help unless there is a very clear line of causality and effect.

For instance, the prop 65 warnings[0], which are essentially useless.

Either way, I do think that individual choice is the first line of defense for issues like this.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(1...

The shared resources is the limited amount we can use an antibiotic before it becomes useless.

The logic of this being that you as an individual might have a small probability of affecting change but if you do that impact is rather big. So the first person not buying an egg doesn’t change the situation but the 50th person does lead to one pallet less being bought (and so on). If you attribute the effect across individuals you arrive at a reasonably high impact each individual choice has. The same argument goes for voting!

[1]: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

Are you saying that no one should do anything good, or encourage others to do anything good, unless it fully solves a problem? I suspect that's not the point you were trying to make, but it sure sounds like that if you read your words.

Of course people should do good things, but in some cases this can lead to a false sense of security ("I'm doing the Right Thing and spreading the good word. Next issue, please!")

Where I live, we used to have signs inside the buses that read "Wait until the buss has left the station to cross the road". This was an effort to prevent accidents, but had no measurable effect other than to take the problem of the agenda for public transport officials.

With shared resource-problems, voluntary action can lead to a prisoners dilemma, where you can get ahead by _not_ doing the right thing, even though everyone is individually better off by doing the right thing.

And yes, a person who eats less meat eats less meat, which is another way to say that you're introducing a non-sequitur about something which is nothing like your bus example.

I'm confused about the person who eats less meat non-sequitur. It feels like you're shoving me around a bit there.

As for the bus thing, the people responsible for reducing deaths around buses are responsible for actually solving the problem. So I agree that they should not do ineffective things like they did in your story. Meanwhile, a person eating less meat is not responsible for making sure that overall meat consumption falls.

So there's no relationship between the two situations, and that's the non-sequitur. Sorry that I didn't get this point across effectively.

And yes, I used his proposal of individual virtue as an "excuse" to raise a point about the role and reason of individual virtue in the topic at hand, it's called "having a discussion." Why should I leave virtuous people alone on the internet? Is he some kind of unassailable saint of meat-moderation who must be protected from non-sequiturs and sequiturs alike?

Whose toes are sore here?

It's far more effective to lobby for regulation than rely on individual action to solve collective action problems.

Your economic argument is naive and pretty wrong, but I'm not going to debate it here because it's not relevant to this sub-thread.

- Vegetarian food is really not that tasty in my opinion. (edit: the kind I can reasonably prepare myself)

- It's very difficult to eat enough vegetarian food for me to meet my Calorie requirements (I target 3500/day).

- Eating a balanced diet of vegetarian food that tastes half-decent requires a substantial amount of preparation, especially if you have carb/protein targets. Non-vegetarian pop-it-in-the-microwave food is plentiful. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

I stumbled along with this for years, trying and failing over and over. One of my best friends became a vegetarian and I watched as he basically dialed down his diet to peanut butter and lentils.

Last year, I unintentionally became mostly-vegetarian entirely by accident: I started drinking Soylent. It's high-Calorie, it's consistent, there are five different flavors (three with caffeine!), each flavor tastes decent enough, and it's not a pain in the ass. Other than the odd takeaway order (two or three times a month, or if I run out of Soylent) effectively zero meat enters my apartment.

My coworkers have rolled their eyes dramatically, but it's pretty good. The bottles get recycled, they come unrefrigerated direct from the manufacturer, and the drinks are (seemingly) made from half-decent stuff. If my office put them in the lunch line, I'd probably stop eating meat at work, too.

(And they're pretty cheap!)

I'm not super strict about it, so it ends up between 3000 and 3750 most days. The Soylent makes it a lot easier because you're not constantly eating. Even something as simple as using half and half instead of skim milk in your coffee adds up.

Edit: but yes, I work out quite a bit.

P.S. Good luck on a vegetarian diet with a 3500+ caloric intake. You'll be eating all day.

Nuts and nut butters make this very easy. Just 1/4 cup of almond butter, for instance, is over 350 calories.

I'm not a vegetarian but I have cut out a lot of meat and maintained a relatively high (3000+) daily caloric intake without any difficulty.

Almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds.

It's kind of hard work eating 3500 calories of just meat, eggs and cheese. Whereas that amount of bread, pasta, sweets, and other nominally vegetarian foodstuffs can be easily wolfed down.

https://www.peta.org/living/other/vegan-bodybuilders/

You can definitely get 3500 calories per day on a meat-free diet, although it may take a bit more effort.

I work a day job, I don't have time to give a shit about most things, least of all adjusting my entire diet for activist ideology, let alone reading enough about these micro topics to get actionable data from. I have trouble just sticking to a solid routine every single day. If I possessed the power to just change my shit up for arbitrary disconnected reasons like lowering global antibiotics research, then I'd already have the mental fortitude to be a billionaire.

Would personally rather donate to a foundation that is able to accomplish the same goal on a larger scale. Our efforts should be focused on the rich putting their efforts into these things.

I never vote with my wallet. If I vote with my wallet and it costs me 2 hours to go across the city to get an item that's 14-16% of my day lost to acquire just one item in my life because I had the luxury of 'making a statement'.

In order to do that though, you have to vote vith your er... vote.

You don't need 3 meals a day.

If you are at all open-minded about eating less meat, you should also (if only for your own health, fitness and longevity) open your mind to eating fewer meals.

Eating less[1] is one of only two things I have ever done[2] that made a noticeable impact in my health, fitness and athletic output.[3]

[1] Total calories are actually about the same since I have an exercise regimen that requires a floor on calories, but feeding window is reduced (sometimes dramatically) putting me into a fasted state more than half of my life.

[2] The other was shifting almost 30% of my caloric intake to almonds, walnuts, almond butter and sunflower seeds.

[3] I am a competitive BJJ player.

Traditionally or historically (?) fish isn't seen as meat. And not just for religious reasons. My guess is people saw them as so different from land animals they were not classed as meat in the minds of our ancestors.

You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce how fast it's burning: Spit into it sometimes!

---

Structural problems cannot solved with individual behavior.

Structural problems can be solved when 1. individuals bond together and affect policy or 2. when a new technology emerges.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to explicitly seek out “better” meat?

Anyway, I agree, definitely no need to eat meat more than once a day, if not every other day etc.

Think about it this way: if the number of meat eaters halved overnight, meat would be really cheap for a while, then a bunch of producers would go out of business and prices would rise again, and prices would stabilise again once production was half what it used to be.

Lobbying for regulation would be a more effective use of your time. Or something that converts individual action into collective action with an enforcement mechanism, like group shaming - but it's hard to get these to spread reliably.

The more obvious failing point might be the fact that as the price of meat goes down, people (e.g. in developing countries) who weren't able to afford meat now can afford it and so consumption goes back up, so actually the production doesn't go down, instead standards drop as the consuming population becomes even less discerning as to the way the meat is produced. Grr.

Eating less meat isn't necessary to accomplish that at all. US consumers, as one example, are managing to force a large change upon US meat companies through pressure about health consequences, thanks to a long campaign of education by numerous groups and government agencies. Just five years ago you couldn't find antibiotic free chicken at most Walmart grocery stores, now every one of them carries such, with the major producers like Tyson all gradually switching over.

I don't buy industrial beef neither and only eat high quality beef that is certified to have had a good diet and no hormones or antibiotics.

I don't eat cheap Brazilian chickens neither.

That means that I eat quite less fish and meat than other people, but every time I eat, I enjoy a good product. Also, that makes me not responsible of all the externalities generated by the meat and fish industry.

Know one lake where the price of the overpopulated fish species in it is so low that just transporting it to a cat food factory would be a loosing deal.

  eat wild caught fish

"Wild-caught" claims are only as reliable as the least honest entity in the supply chain.

Has fish a higher risk compared to other products? To my knowledge the food product with highest fraud rate is oil. After that things like honey, and further down we have beef. I have never heard of report in regard to fish, but feel free to point me to such reports.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/puget-sou...

I'm glad to see that parts of the government, specifically one of our US Senators, Maria Cantwell, and some folks in Washington state's legislature, like Kevin Ranker from Orcas Island, are doing the right thing on this issue. Cantwell, being in the minority party in the Senate, can't do much more than angrily issue press releases, and Ranker, being in the majority party in the Washington state Senate, is doing as much as he can—i.e. introduce legislation.

https://www.facebook.com/senatorcantwell/posts/1994659154144...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/puget-sou...

Edit: Apparently, cod may be farmed (1), though I think the idea still stands.

1: https://thefishsite.com/articles/cultured-aquatic-species-at...

That can have it's own (different) set of problems if the fish comes from pollute waters.

Stop eating fish from another continent is another good choice. I live in the North East and do not consume salmon because it is not a fish that lives naturally and wild. Besides some small concentrated areas. I refuse to eat farm raised salmon. So I eat whats local flounder, mackerel, bluefish, muscles and clams. Which is also seasonal. (Sorry we're so spoiled eating Pineapples in Feb during a blizzard.)

You cannot solve a collective action problem by individual action; the incentives for others to cheat means that you are trying to push water uphill.

Meat isn't the only food.

In economics, this situation is called "substitute goods".

Of course meat isn't the only food, but it's delicious and a great source of protein. Sure antibiotics are bad for the system as a whole, but why not go after that instead of boycotting altogether?

Of the people who ski, some would be happy to substitute another winter sport if skiing became less desirable (more expensive or less fashionable). Some would substitute non-winter sports (e.g. go to the California coast instead of Tahoe.)

That's the 'substitute goods' that I mentioned.

If you really love skiing, you're still a part of that economic theory, you're just the inelastic part. You might still substitute something else if skiing became 10x more expensive.

For similar reasons, I’m not interested in going lion hunting for my holidays. It’s harmful. There are other alternatives. So use the alternatives!

Deutsche Bahn helped kick this off by offering some really great combo deals that enticed me to try a different style of ski travel, so how could that be done with food?

Also, vegetarian food can be really delicious. Go to a good vegetarian restaurant some day and order something that sounds tasty - it probably will be and you may not miss the meat as much as you think!

Just don't think that your choice to try and reduce the price of meat will meaningfully affect the use of meat. It's just more meat for me.

During poverty in Yugoslavia my family and I subsisted on a diet of beans and rice. Complete protein in that combo, enough fiber and calories, we didn't die despite eating that for years.

I'm pretty sure ex-Yugoslavia area has a very good geography, if not better than most countries. You can grow soy there, just like in the USA, you can grow corn, wheat, you can raise chickens, you can do practically anything there, olives, oranges, grapes, forest fruit etc.

What do vegetarians elsewhere eat? Is there a place on Earth where it's cheaper to grow protein by feeding protein to animals, or to just eat the protein directly?

I'm not exactly sure where in the world is rice and beans more expensive than meat? If so, then it's heavily subsidized and is not real free market behavior.

I guess by this logic, since Sahara exists, eating food is a luxury.

Your definition of luxury has transformed into a supreme being just so you can call vegetarianism/veganism a luxury.

If you live in the first world, eating plants over eating meat is not a luxury. It's the cheapest form of healthy sustaining food there is.

One of the weirdest things, for me, is to spend a few weeks eating cheap, delicious, and relatively natural food in Latin America, and then returning to the USA where people get excited to buy groceries that are "made with real* ingredients!".