* Order vegetarian when eating out. Non-western cuisines do incredible food that doesn't have any meat in it.
* Only buy meat + eggs from a local farm that effectively does things "small batch". Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.
* Try to eat less in general.
I don't know if I'll ever personally break from eating meat. But I do think that paying prices that are actually related to the cost of raising the animals, and doing so from a place that actually lets them live a pleasant life before slaughter feels better.
That reminded me of a childhood memory. We didn't have a farm, but we had few animals (sheeps, chickens, rabbits). One year my father decided to buy a piglet from a spring fair. Me and my brothers were thrilled, it was playfull and curious (not like sheep, who were rather booring), kinda like a dog. My father also really liked to take care of it. I remember that he even applied some soothing cream on it after a rather bad sunburn. But in the end it was still bought and raised for meat. My father had always been a guy that slaughtered animals for other people in the neighborhoud, pigs also. But this one really got under his skin. He did still slaughter it, but sweared to never raise and kill a pig himself. It reportedly was kinda like killing a puppy.
After a few years we had a bad slaughter day in which one pig survived a bullet to the head and started making some of the most horrifying movements and screams I’ve ever heard.
We were all aware that we’d killed a sentient creature that we cared for. Not much unlike killing our dogs. We talked about it several times over days and weeks, here and there over months, then not much from then on. We never got pigs again.
Somehow it took me another 15 years to stop eating animals. It blows my mind that I was able to keep it up after that day – it was so gory and brutal, and simultaneously entirely unnecessary. We ate those pigs because we liked it, not because we needed it.
I've been pretty successful with the opposite, only getting meat when I eat out / special occasion and not stocking it in the house.
Where I live it’s not better. The average piece of meat comes from a slice of hell in some feedlot or crowded enclosure, labelling laws make it look okay, and people carry on and eat it. Butchers selling nicer meat have variable suppliers and, when I was eating meat, I’d notice over time that supplier quality was gradually decreasing and never increasing. Like they started with these great ideals and eventually had to give in and be able to reliably get a product and a decent margin off of it. Meat is a major casualty of the race to the bottom.
If you're willing to use freezers you can even stock up for quite a long time (some places will even let you pick the cow and process it for you and give you all the meat).
For example:
> Grass-fed beef seems like the environmentally-friendly option. Hormone-free chickens do too. Yet intensive livestock farming in feedlots often has a lower environmental cost, despite a higher price when it comes to animal welfare.
I'm not an expert in this space, but I do know that terms like "organic", "grass fed", "free range", and others can have wildly different meanings depending on the farm and how they're regulated. For example, "free range" doesn't necessarily mean that chickens are able to walk around a farm; it just means that there is "access" to an outdoor space. The links I clicked on in that article didn't seem to really account for any of this and set up a comparison. The one about feed seems to compare the environmental impact of mass feeding with "organic" feed compared to industrial feed. But that's not applicable to my situation.
I understand this as an ethical argument, but are you assuming any "small batch" operation is more sustainable?
If I care about their experience it seems really bizarre to kill them unless I absolutely need to. So far I’ve found no evidence that I do need to, and I’ve actually come to enjoy not eating them. I’ve become far better at cooking and it’s way easier to afford high quality ingredients.
I genuinely believe it’s great that you prefer to source food from places that at least make an effort to provide better experiences to the animals. That alone is a huge step forward for animals as well as people. I hope more and more people make the same effort.
As for our happiness, why does eating meat bring anyone happiness? If it's simple, fleeting pleasure at the cost of a sentient creature's life, it doesn't seem worth it. Pleasure is nice too, but there are better things and better ways to find pleasure than through consumption. Really, the world is filled with countless ways to enjoy myself that don't require the suffering or killing of sentient creatures.
Eating all kinds of foods brings me happiness. They also nourish me better than meat, so meat isn't even necessary. Meat is one small group of foods, and everything else is this massive world of other foods to enjoy. They almost all come at a smaller cost than meat does, financially, environmentally, and psychologically speaking.
That's the gist of it. I get a lot of pleasure from caring for animals. I take time out on my morning walk to pet cats, watch the birds, so on. I dive in the ocean to see what the marine life is doing, record footage to share with people. These things bring me far more joy than a pork chop or a steak. So why choose the steak? If I'm to do that, I have to pretend that it doesn't carry the environmental and external costs of suffering and death. I have to tell myself that I wouldn't rather care for that cow. That's not true of any animal. I'd rather it had a chance to live and thrive, just like I want to.
Some people believe animals don't have the capacity to suffer and that they're lower beings than humans. I see no evidence to support that, other than the very weak "we can't possibly know" or "they aren't as intelligent". These are irrelevant to me. They are more like us than they are different in the vast majority of ways. Hell, we can live with pig lungs in our bodies. An octopus can solve puzzles, as can a raven. Cows mourn when their calfs are taken away. Dogs develop rich relationship with their families, human or otherwise.
You can say no, none of this is evidence that animals are like humans, or that they're sentient. But again, I don't see much evidence suggesting they aren't.
So, the logic is that animals suffering and dying to get on my plate doesn't make me happy. It brings me a lot of sadness. I enjoy other foods just as much, so that then is the logical path forward for me.
I don't criticize others for eating animals. I did for a long time. I raised animals, I hunted them, I fished for them, all of that. It took me almost 40 years to arrive here. If you eat meat and you don't care if animals live or die, suffer or otherwise, that's your call and I'm not for a moment condemning anyone's choices or beliefs.
It's part of the disconnect that industrialization and urbanization has brought. People don't really understand agriculture or agriculture policy anymore.
Things like adding iodine to salt; iron, thiamin, and niacin to bread; extra vitamin D to milk. Federal stockpiles of various types of food from grain to cheese. All done to improve the general health and wellbeing, and as a measure of insurance in the event of war or disaster.
The only thing most people on the internet seem to know about today is the old politician's cry of "We're paying farmers not to grow food!" Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. When the farmers go out of business, you have no food.
It's not ideal. It's not perfect. But it's worked, and has kept America fat and happy for almost a century. Try to understand more than what's right in front of you.
"Frustrating" is by itself vague, so I agree with your point. I meant: frustrating for having an informed conversation about how a changing world and a changing climate suggest a changing diet. Past subsidies to animal agriculture make it easier for people to now dismiss new plant-based foods as fringe and not for them, because of their cost.
Plants high in protein are easier to preserve, cheaper to grow, cheaper to transport, can be stored with less energy, the list goes on.
It seems like we do this entirely because most of us think it tastes good. There’s no reason we couldn’t sustain ourselves on a fraction of the meat, dairy, and eggs that we have now.
I do wonder what I’m missing. There must be more to it.
Or to assure a minimum well being for the population. A good economy is just a means for the goal of providing well being the citizens.
Even if keeping people fed increased labor cost over letting them starve, we should still keep people fed.
> contrast of energy and resource expense between plants and animals is staggering, even if you’re comparing a less demanding animal like chicken.
I would like to see this study[0][1] repeated for various types of beans and legumes:
> Pork, chicken, eggs, and dairy were all pretty similar, but beef was a different story. Compared to the average of the other four, beef required 28 times the area of land per calorie, 11 times the water for irrigation, six times the nitrogen fertilizer, and it resulted in five times the greenhouse gas emissions For reference, they calculated similar impacts for potatoes, wheat, and rice. Compared to the average of those, beef’s footprint ballooned to 160 times the land, eight times the water, 19 times the nitrogen fertilizer, and 11 times the greenhouse gas emissions. Per gram of protein, the story is largely the same except that potatoes, wheat, and rice have less of an advantage due to their lower protein content.
The math listed in the article doesn't completely check out, e.g. they imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] require 160x (beef:plants) / 28x (beef:chicken) = 5.3x times (chicken:plants) as much land as [potatoes, wheat, rice], which makes sense, but also imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] 8x (beef:plants) / 11x (beef:chicken) = 0.72x times (chicken:plants) as much water as [potatoes, wheat, rice]. It's not thermodynamically possible for chickens to use less water per calorie than their feedstock. I never opened the actual study[1] though, I'm assuming they have reasonable results inside the study.
I also think that analysis vs. protein is more relevant than vs. calories -- which is why I think they should be compared against high-protein plants like beans and legumes.
0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef-has...
Thanks, this was the question I came to ask about the why is my fake meat more expensive than ground beef at the grocery store.
As a meat eater, this has been my philosophy. If you’re gonna go vegetarian, just go for it. Vegeterian food is delicious and there’s so much choice! Entire cultures of amazing natively vegetarian foods with no need for weird meat substitutes.
Personally, legumes don’t have the right macros. Neither do fake meats. Cottage cheese and greek yogurt make better meat substitutes imo.
No need to go full vegetarian. No need to eat cows every day. Balance
Macros are an interesting thing. I’m far more interested in micros though, and various plants have them more than any animal foods. The balance of macros I get is reliably sufficient to stay healthy, I almost never need to think about it.
I suppose if you’re a body builder it might be appealing to eat animal products, but you can still swing it with plants.
I never understood this meme. What exactly is the philosophy? A philosophy of how others should partake in a lifestyle that you don’t?
It's odd enough to tell others what to prefer, but it's not clear what the impact of "As a meat eater" is supposed to have.
"As a straight man, my philosophy is if you're gonna be gay, just be gay this certain way." —It's nonsensical to me.
The “as a meat eater” part signifies that I’m not vegetarian which seems like an important distinction in this context.
Sounds like how the vegan people at work would comment on other people's lunches.
In other words, if you're telling people which foods to prefer, and you don't even have an ethical angle on it, what exactly are you doing?
Personally I often have vegetarian dishes in eateries or when ordering take-out, when available - it is probably just me, but none of those really feel "worse" than meat, nor do I find myself feeling like I'm missing out on it. Even when having fast food, a pea/bean based burger patty feels good enough to me and is a similarly enjoyable experience to a meat based one.
That said, I still sometimes have meat (and other animal products) as well, given that I'm not educated enough or don't feel competent enough to nail down what exactly my dietary requirements might be, though talking with a GP and getting blood work done every now and then can be at least a bit helpful in that regard. Still, there is a certain comfort in having fried eggs or something like that once a week, although some suggest that many of the oils used in cooking might also be worse than olive oil.
For the majority of people, the quote by Michael Pollan is probably decent advice:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
(note: adjacently to this topic, carnivorous pets also still enjoy a diet with lots of meat in it, currently no good "compromise" there, their dietary requirements have to be taken into account as well and messing about with those feels unwise)
> I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.
I've heard that Dominion from 2018 can be rather eye opening, though viewer discretion is advised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(2018_film)
Personally, I've also gone hunting with my father and have helped dispose of the guts, carry game back home, skin the carcass, cut/snap the bones and so on. I'm not saying that everyone needs to do that, but partaking in the process of preparing meat (even in a farm setting) is a humbling experience. Maybe not enough to "scare" one away from eating meat, but definitely enough to make one reconsider how much meat they consume.
What are your protein/calorie goals, and how are you meeting them with grains and legumes? I have to take pea protein and on top of that eat a lot of eggs because otherwise I can't imagine getting enough protein just from beans and oats. If you avoid oxalates, it becomes even more difficult.
Source; grew up in a hog-raising family in big-ag country.
We’re also not seeing a clear economic picture in Canada and the USA because subsidies/tax breaks/etc can significantly transform the final costs of something like milk or beef in a grocery store.
My kids like the fake meats, but I’m pretty content with whole grains and legumes covering most of my protein requirements. Once you get over meat, you almost never think about it and the substitutes seem unnecessarily unhealthy (they’re kind of like savoury junk food with a ton of salt and saturated fat).
I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.