> I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production.
> The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it
Eh. I'd probably say the meat industry is cost effective because they have a superior bioreactor design: rugged, self-contained, low maintenance, and cheaply replicated. Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.
We have a highly efficient and profitable sector, mainly for the reason that we compete in fairly extreme conditions against subsidised international players.
Note that this process incurred significant pain for many individuals while the industry reoriented and consolidated, and I am not inviting any argument around environmental impacts (which I would contend are bad, but also clearly less bad than other countries).
So yes, "natural" meat can be competitive and efficient without government subsidies.
Southland farmers themselves are saying that if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved.
The backlash even from the introduction of a heavy vehicles tax are representative of how much these farmers think they rely on the unpriced benefits they are getting.
People always say things like this until they are forced to, and somehow find a way.
(Particularly if imports were charged similar tariffs)
That is one of two possible outcomes. The other is that the sector just dies off and relocates to another place on earth, where externalities don't have to be considered, maybe for strategic reason. This has happened many times.
If you want to enact global change, you can't just change yourself, though it's always a good place to start.
And probably a major beneficiary of similar laws currently is meat production and animal welfare laws used to exclude imports.
The net externality is probably positive, and if you want to start evening the slate using externalities then farmers would deserve a subsidy (which is bad policy).
Food is about as high on a supply chain as it is possible to get, and the entire downstream supply chain would count as an externality of the farmer's activity. If farmers didn't produce food we'd all starve to death, but that is absolutely not priced in to how much they get paid.
That's not how it works. There is no fair share. He is saying that farmers are not actually paying the costs they make society incur. Therefore these costs are not priced into the meat they produce which would not be that competitive if that was the case. It's a form of subsidy.
If the external costs were included, consumer would simply be forced to pay for their consumption.
This would give a fair advantage for food that has less external costs.
External costs are also hard to estimate, especially if they is burdened on another species. How much is the suffering of a chicken worth?
So then you get back to the original condition - subsidizing food once again. In fact, this is the reason why they are subsidized in the first place!
If a less lucky person (or what you call poor) receives money, they are still incentivized to spend the money efficiently. With the money they have available now, they can buy less meat but more plant based food than before.
Meat would then become slightly more expensive than plant, but also have a major benefit for products that don't use a lot of water or harms the soil. Aquaculture would get a big boost, as would alternative method of meat production. The use of farm animals as an ecological alternative to using machinery to keep land clear of unwanted vegetation has become a niche method, and increased water and soil regulations would indirect benefit such farming alternatives.
Please, every time someone proposes farmers lead a less cushioned life we get these huge bitter fights from somewhere. They don't also have to exist here. If you have a vested interest and want your subsidies to continue, that's cool! But there's no need to peddle your salty response to it when literally everyone everywhere has already heard them said many, many times.
Jesus Christ... Come spend a week on my farm and see how cushy it is.
Edit: Besides that, a subsidy is a cushion. That's what I was talking about. That doesn't merit this response.
I'm pretty sure they don't pay for the damages caused by the methane and N2O emissions caused by the meat production. "We don't have to care about our externalities" is ultimately a form of subsidy.
https://www.feedstrategy.com/poultry/new-zealands-tegel-poul...
Why would those subsidies matter when you're comparing a cow to a bioreactor? You can stick the cow in a dirty field and have hundreds of pounds of meat a few years later, as dirt-poor herdsmen with practically no captial have been doing for thousands of years. Its equivalent competitor would be a fussy bioreactor in a clean room that would require millions in capital, as well as high-end expertise and labor. Apparently the "food" is also ridiculously expensive.
But the context here is lab grown meat. If you removed all subsidies from traditional meat production, I really doubt meat would become more than ten times more expensive. From the OP:
> This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.
> That’s the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower.
It's worth noting that those numbers are estimates and the facility that is supposed to produce them hasn't been built to validate them.
Compare:
https://www.target.com/p/boneless-38-skinless-chicken-breast...
> Boneless & Skinless Chicken Breasts
> $1.99/lb
https://www.target.com/p/chicken-drumsticks-value-pack-4-28-...
> Chicken Drumsticks
> $1.29/lb
https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-241001011000
> Whole chicken - $10/kg
https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-schenkel-241110100...
> Chicken drumsticks - $15/kg
https://produkte.migros.ch/poulet-brustschnitzel
> Chicken breasts - $30/kg
https://produkte.migros.ch/bio-pouletbrust
> Chicken breasts (I suspect this is free range) - $58/kg
Raising a cow is only a part of the problem, and it isn't that much harder to raise 10 cows than 1 cow, if you have the acreage. O(log) at the worst.
Butchering and preserving the meat was the O(n) operation, and usually required O(n) resources to salt or smoke, which could be expensive resources depending on your time and place in history.
Refrigeration changed the game, to where we could preserve the meat as fast as we could butcher it. Now instead of spending days or weeks salting, canning, smoking or curing your meat, you can fill a freezer in an afternoon.
> According to recent data from Metonomics, the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables.
What does that work out to per pound of meat output?
The externalities -- both environmental and the poor labor conditions tolerated in the meat processing industry -- are probably a bigger "subsidy" than the budgetary ones.
Yes, but this also means it's going to be huge improvement over "regular" meat - they don't have to reinvent whole animals, just the parts that matter.
I find it weird to postulate deal-breaking fundamental limits for a process that's a strict subset of a process we've been using and improving for thousands of years.
The process that they're talking about isn't anything like the one we've been using for thousands of years. "Lab grown meat" is about growing cells in vats. Very different. It almost feels like trying to make a car cheaper by not having tires and a windshield (and no substitute). Sure you might be able to get something that limps along, but the things you're dropping solve important problems. Trying to grow massive amounts of animal cells with no immune system seems just as foolish.
The way I see it, it's like people were buying cars only to hook stuff up to the alternator to power it, and someone figured maybe we should just build a combustion engine in a box, optimized for electricity generation, so we don't have to deal with the rest of the car.
I don't think that's a good analogy, because it presumes the removed parts were unnecessary for the core function. Trying to find a perfect analogy is a waste of time, but I think yours would be closer to the truth if during their "optimization" they also removed the oil and air filters. After all, who needs those? We're running the engine to covert fuel to power, not filter air or lubricants (but without doing that the engine will get damaged).
With a lot of systems, you can't just remove any component you wish and still have something that functions well. The lab grown meat people appear to have "removed" far too much (i.e. petty much everything).
Meanwhile breeding will be working toward the same end from the other direction: minimizing unnecessary animal components. We have chickens that are impaired by the weight of their own overgrown breasts, and very possibly there are already other organs that are withering away under breeding pressure.
Both directions of advancement are disturbing. I think the breeding program, if it reaches this optimal efficiency conclusion, is probably more disturbing. But also much easier.
If I could eat meat from a creature that I knew felt no pain and basically had no higher emotions at all, I wouldn't have an ethical dilemma over it.
Since this discussion lead into brainless cows, why does that solve the ethics problem? Could it not be argued that it would be even more unethical to breed severly handicapped cows, without ability to experience the world?
This seems like it would strongly apply to modern day humans living in an extremely complex, sedentary, large scale and atomized world. Much more so than cows even!
Do cows have emotions and awareness of the world they live in?
The person who eats a burger and then sends death threats to someone for killing a cat makes a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
More on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat
If yes because it was modified during pregnancy.
What about impregnation said cow with dna modified sperm.
So in your scenario, either cows will suffer from giving birth to brain dead children, or at least, not different from today, because we take their children to get their milk.
Brain dead mothers would be ethically ok to me but … that’s really a really strange thought and I feel that there would be unknown issues like how could you know that your cow is sick like a full bag of bacterias if the cow is not showing suffer ?
What an a odd topic.
It's a dystopian idea - breeding zombie cows that aren't alive on a cognitive level - but you can draw parallels to abortions and pulling the plug on brain dead human patients. As a society we somewhat agree rationally that the lack of subjective experience or cognition renders most ethical concerns moot.
From an emotional/intuitive stand point it still grinds a few gears though. Would we be fine with growing brain dead humans for consumption?
As I see it, if there are no emotions/emphaty then field of ethics has no use.
The relationship between rationality and emotions when it comes to ethics is really complex, and since it's in the realm of philosophy I don't think there are any clear cut answers.
A second way to make it ethical in terms of animal suffering is to effectively start eating road kill. That is, you raise a farm of cows, treat them well, and eat them when they die naturally.
A third way is to raise a farm of cows, anaesthetise them via their food when they're old enough, and kill them in their sleep. It's more debatable than the above but I believe it's ethical as long as it's done right (which it won't be, in practice).
This all of course ignores GHG emissions and loss of biodiversity due to the need to produce large amounts of feed and large uses of land. But speaking strictly from the cow's perspective, I think it is ethical.
For many (most?) animals, predation or starvation is the "natural" way to die before actual old age would be an issue. Many suffer horribly towards actual old age death.
I think this is a children's tale disney style myth we've grown up with.
I would argue that slaughter is more "humane" if done right.
But significantly better to not breed animals for food to begin with, if there is an alternative. Even if the alternative costs significantly more.
We're just much much better at predation than anything else.
I understand you don't eat chicken breast without spices or some sauce but most pieces of meat are pretty good as they are, especially if it has some fat.
Maybe if you grew up somewhere where spices are used a lot you can't enjoy food without them, but that doesn't make your comment true.
When I eat a good steak, I don't want spices on it, because I enjoy the taste of the meat.
Different meats have a wide range of flavour.
As a bonus this same type of technology could work for growing organs and any other biological part.
One benefit I see is lab-grown meat won’t come with misfolded proteins.
After we solve most bacteria and viruses, this’ll be the next thing you solve, and lab-grown meat probably solves it out of the box.
Not compared to a bioreactor. From the OP:
> The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
> Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
> “There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
It's like comparing steel plate to a piece of tissue paper. Sure, an armor-piercing bullet can defeat the plate, but pretty much everything can defeat the tissue paper.
Lets hope not. That's one of the reason why they are so expensive
And silicone that needs that high level of cleanliness is not cheap. Most chips are fabricated on larger/older processes that do not require that high level of cleanliness
That older level of cleanliness is still above a typical pharma factory level cleanliness. (Where there's no laminar air flow and no need for bunny suits, but everything is sterile and consumables like containers, pipes, feedstock is unpacked right before. And there are a number of verification (QA) steps before the finished lot leaves the factory. Just like with chips, just in the pharma/chemical case it can be done in bulk if it's in a homogeneous liquid phase.)
The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. It's not unhealthy either, much more thermodynamically and land mass efficient, even cruelty free if you believe in that.
It's just that the almost only meat diet has taken over the planet.
We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
What we need to do is make the externalities created by farming part of the food price, including the pollution they create. The artificial fertilizers, the fossil fuels, the energy costs, water pollution, eutrophication, the destruction of biodiversity and land usage. All of it need to be part of the price so that it incentivize a change in the dietary culture towards more sustainable production.
Getting people to change their culture is the hard part. Convincing people to eat less meat is like convincing a vegetarian to eat more molluscs. Almost impossible.
If push ever actually comes to shove, bugs are way more efficient than fish. The fact you can’t buy a soldier-fly larva burger even if you want to, makes me think we’re far from peak meat.
Promising technology from aquaculture are algefarming which can be used for carbon capture or ecological alternative for animal feed, seaweed farming which can either be used directly in human diet or as animal feed, molluscs, shellfish and fish farms. Some shellfish are already heavily involved in water treatment and water quality control.
Insect farms in comparison seems more limit in use, and harder in terms of cultural change. There has already existed plenty of cultures that have depended on the ocean for their diet, similar to cultures in the past which primarily depends on vegetarian diet. All that might be required for a cultural shift is a nudge in the right direction with economical incentives.
The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something.
> We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine.
When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#Tot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...
War and famine is what we currently get with the current dietary trend. Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
>In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.
> There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
There is a reason: The probability that they would respond with violence that would spiral into a massive humanitarian crisis.
Remember that the Syrian civil war was kicked off in large part by the prices of food in the Arab world putting pressure on pre-existing fault lines.
> Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
You're not wrong about the destination...but the path to get there matters if you want to avoid making things worse. Also, there is a massive difference between freeing up the alfalfa fields of California and the grazing lands of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Because it became vastly cheaper. But you still called it a choice. So why do you keep referring to the opposite scenario (people eating less meat because it's more expensive) like it's not?
1. People making choices which feel unpleasant often consider themselves to be forced. Those people can be willing to use violence to avoid those choices.
2. I’m responding to someone who talked about forcing behavior change.
Humanity hasn't had 7 billion people before. It grew by 6 billion in said century. Is that sustainable, you think? Every extra person has a carbon footprint and consequently contributes to increase in land-use and resource exploitation, and by extension environmental destruction. Modifiers like fossil fuels exacerbate the rate of destruction but ultimately the scaling remains with whatever we replace with. The only sustainable course is for growth to stagnate entirely. This is popularly predicted on the horizon, but it seems too optimistic. So long as there is global poverty and inaccessibility to contraceptives there will be growth.
High meat consumption isn't exactly novel, it just hasn't been done to this scale. During Victorian period of inequality it may have been lower among workers, but that hasn't always been true. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_dining_in_the_Roman_E...
I'm with you for the most part. I'm vegetarian myself, chiefly for environmental reasons. And certainly we could change people's habits back, but there's an obvious reason this would be very hard: it's easy to give people something they want; it's hard to take it away. People feel loss more keenly than gain, so they will feel return to the status quo ante to be a greater loss in quality of life than leaving it was a gain.* And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social. They want to eat meat. They don't particularly care about the well being of others or their future selves. I think this is malleable, but most people would prefer not to change their attitudes. I'm not sure what the solution is.
* Also, we discount utility by distance. A gain one year ago or one year from now feels less important than the same gain today. And if we're talking about a gain felt by a previous generation, the utility drops down another notch. Someone else's imprisonment or freedom just doesn't matter as much to you as your own. Change is hard in part because you feel the pain now and the gain is sometime in the future.
As we've seen with COVID, a significant number of people aren't willing to wear a mask in Walmart to avoid killing grandmas; they certainly aren't giving up their McDonalds and BBQ steaks without some kind of squabble.
1) There is absolutely no shortage of arable land. None.
Even with the immense amount of "the best growing land ever" being covered with cities, for cities formed where the living / land was good, there is an incredible amount of farming land purposefully fallow.
In the EU, people are paid not to farm. In Canada, land use is restricted by quotas on who and how land can be used. Market pressures are used elsewhere.
I can't overstress how much land is just not being used.
This has a secondary benefit -- if times get "tough", environmental, or just many dry seasons, fallow land can be brought into use. This is vital, for this is what prevents wars!
2) We currently through away massive amounts of food, due to spoilage.
Many different discussions about this, but I've seen numbers from 33% to 50% lost in silos.
Again, this is what prevents war. Starvation. You don't plant crops, and decide "OK, I need $x food per person, I'll plant $y crops."
Pests are cyclical, and even with pesticides, take a toll. Water (rain) is random, and too much is just as bad as too little. How cool or hot, how sunny or cloudy, all effect output.
So, we must grow excess crops in order to keep people reliably fed.
3) Due to the above, and how much corn, and others are redirected into fuel manufacturing, the problem feeding people isn't food supply, it's "Will they pay us for our food".
Almost every year, the above spoiled food just rots. More is thrown away. Why? Pay me or I won't give you things."
Right or wrong, that's the reality of it. We could feed, if we really wanted to, 100 billion people, including meat, without even going to advanced farming methods. And population growth looks to be, soon, on a downward* trend. We've reached peak people.
4) But...!, I'll try to answer some 'buts'.
* crop rotation, and the science behind it, including soil testing is well understood. It often isn't done, because crop $x is worth good money, and $y is worth meh, but without fertilizer this is the way to go. And it works. Well. It's all about cost here.
* cattle can easily graze, and there is almost unlimited land here. The real issue with cattle is grain feed, combined with petro-chemicals (fertilizers) to grow that grain. That is where "cattle = bad".
Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here. If those cattle didn't exist, then wildlife would grow abundant, and feed instead.
Only through some false, artificial means, eg humans fencing off land, and then killing anything which intrudes, prevents everything from rabbits, to goats, deer, etc from eating that grass.
* meat is the most environmentally friendly way to transport energy, due to its density. Trains space, boat space, is often not about weight, but space. Grain takes a lot more than just meat.
* the problems which are cited in this article are really simply put.
A cow, sheep, goat, etc does all the work for you, of collecting energy. Grow your own meat, and you must supply all that energy!
When it comes to free-range cattle, nothing could be more energy efficient for making meat.
In Brazil huge tracts of the Amazon are converted into grassland every year for cattle grazing. This is not environmentally free. This has turned the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon source. And the density of ruminants on grasslands is vastly different if those ruminants are raised for meat instead of fending for themselves. And, of course, ruminants emit methane. Just burning the grass every year would be better for the environment than feeding it to cattle.
That replacement does sound like something that could reasonably described as a cost. To the environment.
It's also far less cruel than more sensitive people here imagine it to be.
Animals die in the end, true, but eventually everyone dies. They live a decent life, walk in the pastures, play with their kin, get treated if injured. This is better than life of animals in the wild by a huge margin. Some of them also get to have a long life; many cows that are used for milk usually are not slaughtered until they get old.
Factory farmed meat is fucking genocide and should be banned forever.
From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
Exceptions that prove the rule. Also nomadic hunters will not pay higher taxes on food in stores, because they're hunting it themselves, limiting the amount to what they can hunt, and limiting their fertility to the amount of calories they can get from the land. We have had unlimited growth of the human population elsewhere, which is what's worrysome, not the minuscule amount of leftover hunter-gatherers.
>If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
Forcing humanity to march into inhostiptable environments because a portion of humanity doesn't care is I would say more disgusting than telling somebody, you have to eat food that's better for you and the environment.
I guess places that would implement these policies (taxing meat consuption for environmental reasons) are exactly regions that get older, are shrinking or are likely to shrink in the future (EU, USA). While in places like India, China, Africa, such a regulation is unlikely and increase of the living standard there will compensate (more likely overcompensate) for eliminated meat consumption in Europe and the US.
> because a portion of humanity doesn't care
People care. I doubt there is even one adult in this world who has never heard about vegetarianism, climate, emissions. They do care. But their values are complex and their influence on the climate is just part of the decision making process. It is not their fault they would decide differently from you.
> to eat food that's better for you and the environment
If they are adults, they can decide for themselves. How could you be so sure that switching over to vegetarianism would make their life longer, more satisfying and environment significantly better?
This is a strange way to describe moving towards a more sustainable [cheaper and healthier] diet.
Greek diet is healthy, still they eat fish, seafood and meatballs.
Japanese cuisine is healthy, still they eat fish and seafood.
Korean cuisine is healthy, still they eat pork, fish.
Mediterrean diet is healthy, still they eat all types of meat.
Speaking of sustainability, there are regions where animal product is better (Mongolia, nordic regions). Besides that, sustainability is one of measures in the equation. People want sustainable diet, but not by all costs.
1. Persuasion-based
2. Adapted to local cultures -- Such as the startup/industrial culture of California and much of the US.
We can significantly reduce the environmental impact without sparking large conflicts.
Talking about enforcing a change on the world is so large as to be counterproductive. Talking about influencing an area the size of California, Texas, or the UK has a chance to improve things.
It is a pretty normal way to describe trying to force dietary change on entire nations who are very attached to their cultures and traditions. https://www.palaisamani.com/eid-al-adha-el-rituals-in-morocc...
The strongest interpretation I was able to come up with is "Meat has enough environmental impact that it is worth public interventions to raise the prices of meat in enough communities around the world that billions of people notice the increased cost and feel forced to give up meat"
Is there a more charitable interpretation that I am missing?
Does anything in my words indicate that I think carlmr desires the deaths of people? (I don't think he wants that. I hope we all know we're talking about unintended consequences here).
That said, as an adult I do strive to heavily reduce meat and fish consumption and to adhere to a vegetarian diet 80% of the time but it's easier to manage for adults than for young children.
Veganism is a different beast and requires much more care (and probably advice from a dietician). Vegan children not getting the nutrition they need seems to be a point of concern for many health care professionals.
I would wager that most national nutrition centres provide useful guidance on vegetarianism or even veganism by now based on up-to-date research — the Dutch Voedingscentrum does¹.
1: https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/vraag-en-antwoord/...
Define fish as meat or not, that is, in my understanding, a currently unsustainable model.
If you can complement with fish, then it's obviously a lot easier.
Of course it's possible they would have been gigantic, athletic super-geniuses if we'd fed them meat. I can't disprove that, except to say I ate meat as a kid and I'm decidedly average.
Since "lab grown meat" lacks characteristics that would make it an animal (both by biological definition and also according to popular opinion), i.e. it's not motile, it too should be considered a vegan option.
Because it's not coming from an animal, it's not even "meat" - it's technically just flesh.
It depends. In India for example, vegetarians also have a learnt aversion towards meat (for religious/caste reasons). Even now, in colleges, many vegetarian students demand to have their own separate hostels and canteens, so that they don't have to use the same utensils that have once been contaminated with meat (even though they have been washed thoroughly with soap after).
For someone like this, anything meat like is disgust-inducing and not even remotely an option.
There are no doubt vegan purists who consider my friends to be "bad vegans", I'm just bringing it up to refute the notion that the vegan community is as fanatical or monolithic as some make them out to be.
But I suppose that's more of a "cow" thing, than a "vegan/vegetarian" thing.
It was me. Shame on me. I quoted someone talking about vegetarianism, and wrote veganism while talking about vegetarianism.
then you dont have to truck everything around, or use huge amounts of fuel to work the land.
oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
Another benefit of this approach is that it provides price signals to the product's producers as well as consumers -- after all, if a company comes up with a way to produce beef with fewer externalities, they should be able to capture some of the value!
There is certainly disagreement with regard to how to handle some of the more difficult-to-assess externalities, but even taxing a handful of externalities still helps push product prices slightly closer to their true cost.
I will buy beef (or corn). It will emit CO2. Capturing given CO2 would cost $5. So the tax will be $5. But politician will not use these $5 for capturing the CO2 emissions.
He will buy votes instead. $1 for a symfonic orchestra. $1 for police department. $1 to subsidies to a company of a friend lobbyist. $1 for a new playground... Most often, negative externality taxes are just proxy for taxing people more without using money to fix the externality. So even if you believe the externality exists, but you are not supporting given politicians' program, it is a rational choice not to pay the tax.
If you object to using tax policy to shape public behavior because politicians cannot be trusted to efficiently allocate the resultant revenues then perhaps you'd be in favor of returning the revenue as a dividend[1], which is an option that has become more popular lately.
The end of animal agriculture would mean their genocide.
I'd definitely choose not be born over being born as cattle.
Vegan alternatives in materials depend on oil production.
So in some way, I think, animal production and animal industry is inevitable for us.
As somebody, who has been half half vegetarian (16 years), I would be strongly against making meat even 1 % more expensive. What people eat is their decision, not mine.
We can't solve collective issues with individualist extremism like this. We're all living on the same planet. So as long as we all share this one resource for our collective survival, other people's food decisions aren't "theirs", if they're not carbon neutral or low-emission.
If the food you eat has global externalities you should pay for them.
That's what innovation is for. Case in point: seaweed-additive feed that is set to be adopted for production in Brazil, and Australia. Boom, no more methane.
A measure such as forcing people to avoid meat has to be justifiable for the public to concede to it. As it stands, it isn't, though some will be receptive to the idea of either reducing consumption or forgoing it altogether for a variety of reasons. What people aren't receptive to authoritarian rhetoric.
Unless practically everything (food, transport, education)... becomes a collective issue and no space for individual liberty is left.
Honestly, I'd rather live on 1 degree warmer Earth with 1/100 of regulations/subsidies than the opposite. And this is my vote, yours is yours.
> If the food you eat has global externalities
Everything has externalities. Pesticides have externalities. Mining base materials to do just anything (a tractor to farm land, materials to build a house) decrease amount of nonrenewable materials, which is externality. Many meat substitutes are packaged in plastic materials made from oil.
There just must be acceptable level of negative externalities.
What you're really saying, though, is that you'd rather everyone live (or die, as the case will be for a lot of people) on a 1 degree warmer Earth.
Make no mistake about it, you want other people to suffer and die as a result of climate change because you want don't want to be told what to do. Yay for individual liberty.
Yes, this is exactly what I say. I would rather everyone live in the World with cons of underregulations then in the World with cons of overregulations.
For me, overregulation is suffering too.
And honestly, even when people don't realize it explicitly, their acts are very much the same (90% of people know that meat increases emissions, still they eat meat; 90% of people know that petrol cars increase emissions, still they...; 90% of people know plastics pollute oceans, still they buy plastic things even when non-plastic alternatives are available).
There is demand for behaviors that have negative externalities. And it is massive, I doubt I even know a single person who doesn't cause any negative externalities.
What a weird thing to say, when there is an order of magnitude more people dying from cold than from heat today. You seem to be the one wanting people to suffer and die.
then you dont have to truck everything around, or use huge amounts of fuel to work the land.
oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
This is what I can see is the problem in any of these conversations. Vegetarianism is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much! Lab grown meat is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much!
When did conversations about sustainability just completely drop the 'your life will have to be different' approach?
Also, lawn chickens are a good idea, but only as part of a concerted neighborhood effort.
If Mr. Jones has chickens, and Mrs. Smith has a milk goat, and Mr. Lee has an exceptional vegetable garden, and Mrs. Brown has apple and pear trees, then everyone can get what they need within their own neighborhood. Extrapolate out across the entire suburb, and you really have something.
(now I'm going to get really, really cynical) The problem is now that most people are selfish, self-centered, and short-sighted. There is no sense of community, and no sense of immediate gratification for working as a co-op to help the neighborhood succeed.
This should be obvious, but I'm astonished that it's not. I think people are afraid of being called racist, but it's a very simple concept. Is it easier to organize a high school party in a group made up of 15 jocks, or a group made up of 3 nerds, 3 jocks, 3 skaters, 3 gangsters, and 3 choir kids? Or, a less "immature" version of the same question--which is a higher-trust environment, a big group of recent immigrants from the same country speaking the same language and worshipping the same god, or an equal-sized set of random people taking a bus in New York?
The reason that I mention this is that I desperately want to change my and everyone else's life to be sustainable, as you describe in your example, and participate in a mutually beneficial exchange of value with people in my community, but the people in my community share very little common ground with me and will not go out of their way to help me (which is completely not the case for my friends and family, who are scattered across the world). This is not the case for me; I often go out of my way to help people that are not like me, but the favor is rarely returned.
Arbitrary borders make it harder for people to get to know each other. My experience is that one the easiest things to bond over is 'difference' between cultures. Whether that's food, holidays, religion, whatever. Easy, seamless immigration helps people move around, easing the process of getting to know each other.
Further, building community of place is all about knowing each other. (Source; my life). Knowing your neighbors, and where they come from, helps build empathy for others, in general, in my opinion.
I find it fascinating that we both come at the same problem, with wildly different conclusions. Human brains, what weird things.
People inside the same culture don't bond over differences, so why would people from other cultures do so? I had a many differences with the recently-immigrated Mexican kitchen staff in the restaurant I worked in, many with the dirt-poor kids at my high school who fought each other daily, and many with the rich kids from the mansion district, and not one of those groups was friendly or desirous of "bonding" with me. Their contextual social power and sway was immense, and their loyalty to each other was far stronger than any voluntary community of differences I've ever belonged to.
> My experience is that one the easiest things to bond over is 'difference' between cultures.
Are you talking about "people who behave and think like Western progressives, but happen to speak different languages and hail from different locales"? That isn't real diversity. I get along very well with highly-educated immigrants from China, Singapore, India, Nigeria, etc. because we all had nearly exactly the same life: a lot of studying, reading, and close ties with our family. It's very fun to bond over differences then, but the only reason the differences arise is because we're already almost the same. When we laugh over how our holidays and food are different, we are constantly reinforcing our similarities; we speak at the same volume, we let one another talk at similar rates, we ask questions of a matching intimacy, and we have the same desires of each other, namely to allow the other peacefully prosper. I can bond easily with an engineering student from Thailand, but not so with a career thief from the same country.
> I find it fascinating that we both come at the same problem, with wildly different conclusions. Human brains, what weird things.
Beware of ignoring certain patterns in order to come to fashionable conclusions, although perhaps you really have never experienced anything like what I've experienced.
Yes, that has been my experience. Talking with people and learning about how and why they do things is the easiest way to become neighbors. Taking an honest interest in the people around me has been the easiest social lubricant that I have found. It has helped me build a community in the past, present, and I assume in the future.
>Are you talking about "people who behave and think like Western progressives, but happen to speak different languages and hail from different locales"?
No. I have lived in the same house/apartment and/or in the same neighborhood as individuals from other cultures, including those relatively similar to mine and wildly different; from folks who were fabulously wealthy and well-connected, and those that had just the clothes on their backs when they came here. In my experience the only individuals who I have been unable to actually interact with positively are those who regardless of where they're from I wouldn't have been able to anyway. Religious extremists, that's one. Bigots, that's another. These are people who I would not get along with, even if they were from my own family.
Your example of the Thai career thief is a prime example. Someone coming here specifically to undercut and sociopathically 'get ahead' is not someone I would want to interact with. There are those people who already live here, though. That's not an immigration issue.
>although perhaps you really have never experienced anything like what I've experienced.
I feel like that's obvious; we're two different people.
What I was saying is that it is fascinating to me that two people with the same conclusion 'society is fragmented' have two wildly different conclusions about the reason for it.
In addition we tend to use lawn mowers to cut grass, and chickens are quite effective at keep grass down. Replacing mechanical means that (often) run on fossil fuels with animals would be a boon to the environment and air quality. Chickens also keeps out most pests which reduces the need for toxic chemicals.
There are downsides, but on the whole I suspect it has a net-positive for the environment.
It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.
But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.
There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.
I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...
The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.
And as the big bag of calories they are, they need to be raised with huge calories intake, which is not exactly commercial TV ad grass.
So you need to raise food for your cows alongside your cows anyway.
You are just transforming energy from a medium to another and thermodynamics says that it’s totally inefficient.
We can/could raise mountain goats too.
If all meat were raised only this way the lab grown would be probably cheaper.
Solving that would require complex carbon cap & trade regulations to be enforced.
You'd get more by turning it into a tree farm, converting trees to charcoal and burying that.
https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbo...
Arguably that's a value judgement not everyone shares. For example, if you placed value on the carbon storage capacity and biodiversity contribution of the Forrest then replacing it with cows may not be an increase in efficiency of useful use of the land.
Arguably broad acre farming is currently getting a free ride on a number of external costs, if the math of that were to change meat grown on a small footprint would be much more competitive.
As I said, land use issues where you replace forest with cows is a problem (though not in the US, it is a problem in the developing world).
1% of US cows are grass-finished, the rest eat grain.
These grain-eating cows may be located in a place that has grass, couldn't be forest, and couldn't be agricultural land. And yet they eat grain nonetheless, from another place, that could be agricultural land, forest or otherwise nature that creates biodiversity.
The grain comes from somewhere. That creates land use issues. Not because of replacing forest with cows, but because 99% of cows sold in US stores are eating grain which must come from somewhere that is obviously not only useable for growing just grass.
Yes, in theory it's possible to have cows eat grass only, that's quite obvious. But if you were to limit beef in US stores to only those type of situations, you'd have to reduce the supply by 99% today and radically shift the way beef is produced worldwide.
And even that 1% / 99% isn't the entire story. That only tells you what is grass-finished vs cows that eat grain. An even smaller portion of that 1% are cows that are eating grass from a place that could solely grow grass and could not be used for other purposes such as forest.
As someone who lived in a subsistence farm, that's absolutely not true, not on a large scale.
That is true in some places where the soil is not suitable for agriculture and the cows only eat grass, but that would be a minority of cows that exist today.
If that was even remotely true, there would be no cows raised by eating grain.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/the-eco-...
This is completely false. Animal farming is entirely based on crop farming for fodder.
Farming crop for animal fodder, for human consumption and for biofuel are in direct competition with each other.
Though a farmer in the area (an old neighbor actually) recently converted a good portion of his maize fields into a solar energy facility. I'm not sure exactly what his motivations were, but farmers are for the most part not stupid people, especially when it comes to maximizing the productivity of their land.
I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil).
Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.
Also Pantanal (a kind of swampland of sorts) create some awesome natural pastures, although raising cattle there is harder because of the floods.
Amazon Rainforest destruction has much to do with stupidity (the land there is sand actually, destroying the forest to plant ANYTHING there, even soybeans, is stupid idea), logging, illegal land grabbing, and issues related to certain US companies (Cargill in particular is a big offender).
Also there a lot of conflict is going on there, including political, that made the destruction faster, including destruction being sped up in name of conservation, for example worldwide media was all happy when a particular logger got arrested, only for the destruction to speed up after his arrest, because the people that kept calling the police on him were actually trying to use the police to push him out so they could squat the land, and indeed they did so, as soon he was kicked out, illegal loggers and miners moved in, and fortified, now THOSE people can't be kicked out because they are heavily armed and the police fears the political fallout of that. Meanwhile the area they squatted had logging sped-up a lot, and trees that previously were being preserved as seed stock got cut down, ruining the management work being done there.
http://www7.nau.edu/mpcer/direnet/publications/publications_...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...
If they weren't cutting it down for beef, they'd be cutting it down for something else, like the palm oil mentioned.
These people were cutting and burning these forests just for timber and firewood, and have been for decades.
Even in places where it's banned to do so, and they risk jail.
A smaller profit margin isn't going to prevent them from utilizing the one resource at their disposal.
The fake meat story is a fraud - if you care about pollution, like every other industry yu can regulate how they handle waste products and other operational practices.
Fake meat is just a consolidation play, which happens to be the factor that made meat production a horror show in the first place. Instead of cutting down rain forests for pasture, we’ll cut them down for more protein sources to manufacture fake meat. Ditto with palm oil, which will drive some apes to extinction because there is a marketing problem with selling lard and a health problem associated with selling hydrogenated oils.
This is blatantly false. It might have been true 70 years ago, but not since the rise of CAFOs or a large international beef market.
* ~70% of US beef comes from a CAFO (where the primary feedstock is corn) [0].
* In the US alone the amount of corn diverted to livestock feed (predominantly beef) could feed 800 million humans [1].
* Brazil produces ~15% of the world's beef (2013) and much of this land (65 Mha) was reclaimed from the Amazon [2].
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS...
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771...
The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone.
The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption.
Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose.
That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.
We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.
Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air.
Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable.
We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame. /doomer-rant
This is pretty well documented:
http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/
Also, whether one is a vegan or not is irrelevant to the question. These are systemic issues based on, as you yourself say, the lack of price put on CO2 emissions to account for their externalities.
However, the lack of political will to do so up to this point doesn't mean we can or should end industrial society and return to the land. There are less dramatic solution paths, but they will need time to acculturate.
Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.
> I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.
I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.
Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.
Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s
Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,"
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.
But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.
> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.
I'm aware that you linked the Allan Savory TED talk, but that's been heavily controversial and many of the studies on it find limited effects beyond any other reasonable strategy.
Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.
California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa + irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and commercial uses combined.
It's basically all farms and cities now. Several of the forests left are mere tree plantations.
Perhaps one day the yearly reminder that our forests are dying will stop because there's none left.
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-l...
Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food,
> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan,
They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas.
[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/def...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.
https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-m...
Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.
Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.
If Jews can grow tomatoes in the desert, then what land could possibly not used for agriculture?
Besides, the majority of the land use that is used for growing animals or growing animal feed is in the lather category.
So as it is a statement that is always asserted without evidence, it can also be dismissed without evidence.
If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case.
The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.
Also, the DFW area is the 4th largest region in the country - proving that you CAN put people and cows on the same land
That looks like prime wind turbine power generation country.
My dad is a veterinarian and i went to some of the places where cattle is grown for meat.
I can assure you, it's not optimized except the species.
( We have "Belgisch witblauw" everywhere, that has been bred with great success since 1770. )
The conversion from feed to useable meat may be more efficient but we would still need to grow animal feed and to actually process it more than we do now: A cow can eat hay, but lab-grown meat will need that to have been digested to ready to use at cellular level.
I can imagine than lab-grown meat will always be more expensive than 'normal' meat because of the tech involved and because animals grow themselves but I don't think the aim of lab-grown meat is to be cheaper.
Since we humans always overestimate what happens in 2-3 years and underestimate what happens in 10 (because we are so poor with exponential functions), you're saying it will be about 10 years then ;)
If those stats include wild areas double-used as grazing land, then "dedicated" is too strong of a word.
I raise cows for myself and "F&F" consumption. In our case, they are sustainable: I own the land they graze on and the economics of raising them is quite simple. It's no more complex than balancing one's checkbook to show this.
Most other things are far less sustainable when you consider the industrial supply chains and the environmental impact of those. E.g. ANYTHING coming from manufacturing in China is already far, far worse.
More land is used to raise animals for consumption in the UK than exists in the UK. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6XE2_qVUAAPuOg?format=png&name=...
The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it - and its scale is just as unfathomable. A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed.
So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too.
And bearing in mind, the technology to grow meat is essentially an exercise in recreating eons of evolution in a factory. It's an enormous challenge, but that alone doesn't mean it's impossible. Current meat production is also incredibly inefficient from a thermodynamic perspective.
I have no idea whether lab meat will ever come to pass. I suspect it will eventually, but probably take longer than expected.