Consumers can choose to buy meat from local sources that are ethically raised and at a scale that doesn't negatively impact the local environment. Yes, that will probably cost more then what's at the grocery store. But do we need to eat meat every day, week, or month?
To put all the responsibility on the meat industry, policy, and the government is in my opinion the wrong approach. I think we should be educating consumers and influencing change through the scale of economics.
The critical threshold is people having equivalent options. If meat substitutes become indistinguishable they are going to explode across the market, just look at the adoption of filler in many food segments.
Most social change comes from the ground up, not the top down. Companies like Tyson aren’t inherently evil, they just prioritize profits. Tyson is investing in meat replacements right now because customers have said they want them.
In my opinion the absolute overriding ability to create change in the world is to create a superior substitute and evangelize the fuck out of it.
Want a meat free future? Do everything you can to seek out, consume, and tell everyone you know about amazing meat-free substitutes. Hand out Impossible Burgers for Christmas (or your chosen holiday). Tweet recipes and YouTube videos showing great results using the product. Become a meat-free fanboy and worship at that alter of awesome tasting non-meat.
It’s a lot less onerous than the holier than thou criticism and orders of magnitudes more effective — if the product is worth its salt.
If the substitutes suck, they will not catch on. The early adopters (zealots) will pay a huge premium to obtain a premium quality substitute and then economy of scale can drive everything from there.
The vast majority of the world will not buy meat if a better, cleaner, safer, tastier, cheaper, and sexier alternative is available. Everything about how we make and package meat is pretty gross (can you say pink slime without cringing?) but the end product is insanely delicious and our brains go wild for it. Replicate that.
“Abstinence education” is not going to win on remotely the same order of magnitude, and mostly is just plain annoying.
That is to say, the vast majority of humans can not afford to sacrifice not eating meat to get their protein, due to a combination of inavailability of suitable substitutes of equal or greater quality, and also the perceived quality of life sacrifice, the associated mental, emotional, and social costs of doing this.
For people whose diet and indeed lifestyle is established in part as being meat-eaters, switching is costly in more ways than just financial. And even if a theoretical diet could substitute for the missing meat which costs the same or less, in practice a satisfying entirely non-meat diet for most meat eaters would be expensive in time and money to achieve.
It’s not clearly an ethical win to demand all of humanity to pay the cost to switch when a better alternative is possible; go out and do the fantastically hard work of inventing a better non-meat. So good that it’s not a cost but a benefit to switch to it. And then (almost) everyone will.
I see huge parallels between this and, for example, electric vehicles. Forcing everyone to switch too early is extremely costly. But through technical innovation practically everyone will drive electric because it’s so much better for them.
In Nature wisdom and necessity converge, while in an artificial setting, they often diverge.
Under evolution (in the prehistoric epoch just before the evolution of Homo Sapiens) the "wise" course of action was always the same as the necessary. Non-sentient living beings choose the optimal course of action to the limit of their abilities (due to evolution.)
It was only once we evolved our higher-order thinking and communication abilities that it became possible to generate contexts (cities and farms) wherein the right thing to do diverges from the necessary thing to do. We have fooled our own "bio-computers".
I think we need a kind of civilization "reset". I don't mean a violent upheaval, rather we should develop lifestyles that are ecologically harmonious without giving up technology.
One possibility is a system of food production called "Permaculture" which I like to describe as "applied ecology". Speaking to your point:
> So if the ethical thing to do is ever not the most convenient, humanity is doomed.
The ethical (in the sense of ecologically sound) is fun and convenient. It's fun to live in harmony with Nature. I think we can cure civilization of its discontents.
I agree that there is a problem. But once again, pointing at individuals is not productive. Changes like this have to happen at a more centralized level. People (and businesses) will follow the path of least resistance and as long as producing and consuming meat is the easiest path, that's what most people will do.
Also bear in mind that not all protein is created equal. If wheat gluten wasn't low in lysine, I'd eat a lot more of it.
1. "healthy" doesn't mean living a long life free of ailments. It means achieving your standard of athletic performance as a hobby.
2. "challenging" doesn't mean difficult. It means doing some research, buying more tempeh at once and maybe freezing it, or just buying a protein supplement.
That's already too much. I can do that, and you can do that. Our jobs are to research things and then implement them. Most people will not or can not do this. Expecting them to is a waste of time.
The way to solve this would be to de-incentivize meat production on the supply side, and encourage food distributors to fortify food with micronutrients that are commonly missing in vegetarian diets (vitamin B12, calcium, etc). Anything short of this is not going to do much except turn people off from being vegetarian.
I'm still learning this stuff myself. But from the things I've read so far, vegans (especially the WFPB variety) can have difficulty getting: Vitamin B12, calcium[0], iron, and possibly a balanced amino acid profile if they have elevated protein requirements. A diet too high in carbs and too low in fat and protein can also cause long term problems like candida overgrowth and hormonal imbalances.
I agree that none of this matters as long as people can eat meat. They will if they can.
Yes, that's a decent summery. Populations would be less healthy if meat just suddenly disappeared with no other changes. Although, in the United States at least, we massively over-consume meat to the detriment of our health. But we rely on it as a source of many micronutrients that we otherwise wouldn't get by default.
Additionally, these changes will never happen without regulatory changes on the supply side to artificially drive up the cost of meat production.
It still takes "gourmet" vegetarian food to compare to regular meat.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/animal-vs-plant-protein
https://vegfaqs.com/important-vegan-amino-acids/
Just looking at lysine:
> There’s no official RDA for lysine, but according to research, you typically want to aim for about 12 mg per kg of bodyweight.
> For example, a 170 lb person needs 924 mg per day, or more.
So a cup of soybeans providers 1.33 grams, oats, lentils and any bean at least a gram per serving.
Oatmeal for breakfast, nuts for a snack and a mix of vegetables with some beans or tofu for dinner and you exceed the RDA for every one of those amino acids you've listed. All healthy things you should be incorporating into your diet anyway (fiber rich). So while a single food may not meet the RDA alone, it seems very easy to meet with a combination of common foods in a plant based diet.
Not to mention nutrients that are supplemented in vegan diets often are also supplemented in omni diets (B12 in meat and Vitamin D in milk, for example, are only because of supplementation and fortification).
> It certainly doesn't taste as good, especially if you don't want to take tons of time cooking. > It still takes "gourmet" vegetarian food to compare to regular meat.
I had plenty of terrible meat meals and many amazing vegan dishes. I would say the standard American diet lacks a lot of knowledge about tasty ways to cook plants, but they do exist and they aren't hard. Ethiopian and Indian cooking, for example, have a strong tradition of plant based dishes that are easy to make. Many other cuisines can easily be adapted.
I'd say that's pretty subjective. I haven't missed meat from a taste perspective. The smell actually starts to get a little bit repulsive when I go for months without it.
The rest of your point is very relevant though. I supplement with whey protein. But if it wasn't for that, I'd really be struggling to hit amino acid targets. Being an athletic vegan is borderline impossible in my opinion.
There are a great number of vegan athletes that disagree. E.g. Patrik Baboumian, one of the strongest people alive, is vegan. America's best Olympic weight lifter (maybe not currently but has been), Kendrick Ferris, is vegan. Keep an eye out for the release of the moving "The Game Changers" [1] for more.
Agreed that it's really hard to be an athletic vegan, but seems doable if you hit these amino targets and still supplement with pea protein or something.
As a species we have a very heavy karmic payback coming and these kinds of attitudes are a big part of the reason.
Also you don't need tempeh. Beans are available everywhere, just as nutritious, and dirt cheap.
...Yeah pretty sure that's not the reason. Vegetarian meals are usually more colorful and better for photos, bacon is a very boring photo.
It's the taste. Tempeh is a decent bacon substitute, beans are not. I feel like I'm missing some sarcasm here or something.
To pretend things like taste don't exist makes your argument disingenuous and makes anyone likely to dismiss your arguments right away.
If you're going to boil it down so simply, there are cruelty free sources of meat, and since you choose to ignore that and your only argument is cruelty... I'm just going to ignore everything else you say, because the one area I do understand, I understand you're making stuff up about.
Blaming individuals for a demographic problem is not productive. It doesn't seem like you read that part though...
> Most societal changes are brought about by individuals with the courage to question something that is wrong but socially normalized.
[Citation needed]
The truth is that most sweeping societal change is driven by a central government and always has been. Everything from the transition to city-states, the industrial revolution to civil rights. Individuals convince their central governments to act, but you can't just convince an entire population to change their mind without a monopoly on violence.
Are people "forced" to celebrate Valentine's day? Are they "forced" to wear blue jeans? Listen to either rock OR pop OR rap OR country?
Demographic == culture. We eat meat because we eat meat because we ate meat, for ten thousand years.
Do you blame a child for their "choice" of religion? Do you blame a family that drives to work over taking the bus, which sucks 4 hours extra out of their day because they live in Pocatello, Idaho and don't have much of a transit system?
You realize people enjoy bacon for the flavor, right?
There's an analogy to livestock in there if you look hard enough.
While it is true that a largely plant based diet is probably a good idea, all throughout history being healthy has implied that humans go for a large variety of food sources - conditional on what is available.
As omnivores, we need many nutrients from diverse sources. Good quality protein that is difficult or impossible to get from "local plant sources" in many places. High quality fat, which is also difficult to get from plants in many places and certain Vitamins.
The constraints here are wealth, logistics and locality. In Western countries, plant based diets are a good alternative. But good luck sourcing everything locally or not relying on expensive supplements in many areas where humans live!
China is a poor country. So are many other places. Restricting dietary choices is simply not feasibly for them.
Eating meat can be considered an unnecessary luxury for some areas of the world, true. But not everywhere.
But just for the sake of argument let’s say that a small amount of meat is helpful or even necessary. We’re still far far away from the amount of meat people just casually and thoughtlessly eat every day in most developed countries, which also necessitates all the horrible cruelty and environmental destruction of our current farming methods.
So if for whatever reason you feel like you need to or deserve to keep eating meat, you can still cut way down and make sure the meat you eat doesn’t come from doing things to animals that would have you sent to jail for doing to a dog.
You can get all the nutrients you need from a whole foods plant based diet. No one need ever get heart disease or stroke, simply switch to a whole foods/plant based diet.
Animals get their protein from plants. Eating meat is just eating recycled proteins. If you want to get high quality original protein, you need to eat meat. Vegetables and Beans are extremely high in protein (over 15% of calories come from protein!). Just check out this calculator which shows all the nutrients normalized on a per calorie basis: https://kale.world/c
This is going to sound shocking, but the following is all true. and if you ask the people who actually do the research on this stuff, you'll see that it's right: In the last couple decades protein needs have been grossly exaggerated. The media has brain washed us into thinking that we need vast amounts of protein. You actually only need 5%, according to the WHO. I know some countries will say 10%. In any case, It's almost impossible to not get enough protein from plant based whole foods.
Any meat under any circumstances? This makes your argument seem broad to the point of being useless. You're talking about a specific system, much like one can criticize ICE automobiles for many valid and specific reasons, but those reasons don't apply to the entire concept of motorized transportation.
Agriculture is one of the prime reasons for deforestation (and in some countries, pollution), while pasture doesn't really need arable land.