- cross-posted to:
- environment@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- environment@beehaw.org
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The problem with meat is not that we eat it, but that we eat too much of it. Most people eat a week’s worth of meat in a single day, and that results in the over production of meat, which is helping to destroy the environment.
The problem with meat is not that we eat it, but that we eat too much of it.
This isn’t how it works. Consuming meat and cheese and butter and other animal products has been made into a conspicuous consumption deal for a long time, it’s a status symbol, obviously important to pastoralist cultures and their industrial descendants (like The West).
You can’t do “low meat” without first attacking the status power of meat.
People would go crazy and riot over reducing it, as it would most likely manifest as:
- Rationing of meat (I’ve lived in this, in Romania, a long time ago) - possible, but hard, not really something that works in capitalist market economics.
- Raising the prices (which is something that the animal farmers would love) - which would cause all sorts of …“so meat is only for rich people? FUCK THAT!” reactions.
If you don’t do those, it’s just going to be imported.
If you ban imports, you’re going to get a meat mafia. Meat bootleggers. The “leather underground” mafia and terrorist organization.
You may actually get to see this, since the prices are destined to shoot up eventually, since it’s so unsustainable.
Solution to #2: Implement as a pigovian tax. Return the tax revenue to the population per capita.
The rich: dodges taxes like the Olympic gold medalists of dodging taxes
Yes, the most powerful will always have the most power. It still makes sense to set up some rules.
Pigovian taxes can still be beneficial for society, even if the super rich evade the system. They create incentives for everyone else to move in the desired direction. This includes consumers, producers, investors, researchers. For all those people in their different positions, it will be financial advantageous to consider other options.
But my main point was that you can raise prices without hurting the poor. By returning the tax revenue to the poor.
What is a weeks worth of Meat?
The actual problem is capitalism.
Most people only eat that much meat because of a combination of lobbying, advertising, education (or lack thereof, about where our food comes from, home ec, etc…) and so on which all influence and create social norms, all engineered and focused on making money for those at the top, not our health, not our well being, and definitely not those of the animals.
The horror that is factory farming only exists because of profit motives. Remove the profit motive and whole thing comes tumbling down (because it’s just unsustainable).
The horror that is factory farming only exists because of profit motives. Remove the profit motive and whole thing comes tumbling down (because it’s just unsustainable).
Nope. The horror of factory farming exists because herding/ranching exists. It’s the descendant, the result of the transition from extensive herding (which is also horrible) to intensive herding (which is obviously horrible). The CAFOs are the ones making profits by economies of scale. Most of the animal products are from CAFOs. End those and it’s going to get really surprising :)
Profits existed way before, with pastoralism. The “livestock” or “living capital” is a form of primitive accumulation, part of the formation of capitalism. The profit incentive and the GROWTH incentive goes deep in pastoralist culture. The notion that it’s in any sense non-profit is absolutely incorrect.
The truly climate friendly meat has been right in front of us since the dawn of time, but it is illegal in most places and taboo in most cultures except in emergencies.
Human meat is unsustainable even if it could be allowed like some muscle donation. Adding in capitalist incentives would make “human trafficking” reach new levels horror.
Human meat is unsustainable
That’s the neat part that makes it so environmentally friendly.
Roadkill? Or Soylent green?
The rich
Soylent Green requires processing for production and that is not climate friendly.
The thing I can never get behind is that this is always used as an argument for new technologies instead of returning to lower tech, pre-industrial solutions that are already well established and known to be safer.
The problem with this is lifestyle inflation.
Pre-industrial technologies will only get us pre-industrial amounts of meat, which has to be split between the current population.
There’s a lot of people who probably won’t be very happy with only being able to afford meat once or twice a week. That seems like a surefire way to trigger a backlash.
this is always used as an argument for new technologies instead of returning to lower tech, pre-industrial solutions that are already well established and known to be safer
Maybe because it’s about economical efficiency. The old ways were abandoned in favor of new methods, because the new approach was cheaper / yielded higher profits.
Yes, we could produce meat like we did in pre-industrial times, but that would mean higher prices or lower volume. Either way, it would mean less people could afford to eat meat. Like in pre-industrial times.
Maybe because it’s about economical efficiency
Exactly. It’s not about “saving the planet” at all. It is, once again, about making more money.
Oh, that’s not what I meant to describe. There are differences in ecological impact of various foods and production methods, obviously. Choosing the smaller options helps to do less harm, to “save the planet”.
I meant to point out that we moved from pre-industrial methods to modern methods because they make more sense in economic terms, in capitalism. And that just going back might lead to unwanted consequences like lots of people with much less access to meat.
Whereever there is need for something, some assholes come and create a new sector out of it to milk it as much as possible before moving onto the next thing. Pretty much the same story with responsibly sourced or net carbon zero emissions certificates etc. Some people are making shit loads of money out of it, while probably serving nothing (or barely anything) for the original purpose but just making it seem like they do. And worse they are probably delaying real solutions by at least a couple decades.
Lab-grown meat needs to become the norm, and cow-based meat needs to become a specialty food.
Though we also don’t have time to only wait for lab grown production to scale up, so in the mean time, there’s plenty of good plant-based meats and just general plant-based food as well. If we just wait, harm will continue to be done
The comforting lie of “climate friendly food.”
It’s really an order of magnitudes difference between any plant-based food and even best case meat production
Regardless of whether you compare the footprint of foods in terms of their weight (e.g. one kilogram of cheese versus one kilogram of peas); protein content ; or calories, the overall conclusion is the same: plant-based foods tend to have a lower carbon footprint than meat and dairy. In many cases a much smaller footprint.
[…]
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives?The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
these conclusions are largely based on poor nemecek 2018. the methodology in that study is suspect.
There is plenty of other research finding similar conclusions. Here’s a review looking at 34 different papers finding that:
there is no indication that a situation or condition may make beef burgers more environmentally friendly than these two plant-based alternatives, or that the addition of plant-based meats to vegan and vegetarian diets may reduce their environmental benefits.
[…]
This paper shows that plant-based diets and plant-based meat options are unambiguously better for the environment. This is true for modeled vegetarian and vegan diets as well as for observed diets that may include highly processed foods such as plant burgers
this paper is fucked in about as many ways as poore nemecek. The homogenized disparate studies about LCAs when they all use different methodologies. The LCA numbers that they’re using were never meant to be used in this context. it’s possible they’re even right but this methodology simply can’t support their conclusions.
If I’m reading the methodology correctly, the paper is mainly comparing the relative findings within each study. (They do have some other comparisons that don’t, yes, but they are mainly looking at relative numbers where each is computed with the same methodology)
Our focus on the percent change from a diet switch relative to the environmental impacts of the baseline omnivorous diet described in each study, makes the findings comparable across papers. Within each paper, the environmental impacts of one diet are comparable to those of another diet because these are expressed as a function of calories provided, taking as a benchmark a requirement of between 2000 and 2700 kcal/person/day
They then look at the distribution of the relative change figures. The entire range looked at here is lower emissions
We can also look at non-review studies as well. Here’s one comparing emissions of farming types more directly
The aim is to compare the environmental impacts of different diets with different levels of animal product consumption, while accounting for the type of farming systems (organic or conventional) of the food consumed.
A positive link between animal-sourced food consumption and total environmental impact was observed in this large sample of French adults. By far, omnivorous had the highest-level of greenhouse gas emissions, cumulative energy demand and land occupation while vegan diets had the lowest
We found that a 100% organic omnivorous diet exhibited higher environmental pressures, suggesting that following an organic diet without changing towards a more plant-based diet is of little help, at least as regards the studied indicators
the vegan diet, whatever the indicator considered, remained less resource-intensive and environmentally damaging than other diets
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352550919304920
wait til you hear about the plants that eat carbon dioxide
But do take into consideration the enormous amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous based fertilizers used to produce the plants, especially by greenhouses and industrial explorations.
Not the person you are replying to, but it should be noted that synthetic fertilizer usage is lower on plant-based diets even compared to maximal usage of manure. This is due to the fact that you don’t have to grow so much animal feed (which you lose most of the energy from by other creatures body functions using that energy themselves)
shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
While any food production is not going to be free of environmental effects, plant-based diets are substantially better on nearly all metrics
Wait till you learn about all the extra food we grow just to feed the animals we eat.
It takes up the majority of farmland in the US. more than we dedicate to growing for humans to consume directly.
If you actually want to use less farmland, and therefore fertilizer, I welcome you to veganism.
What I think is more likely though, is that you need to tell yourself this to feel better about eating animal products.
Ah, yes, that pillar of good practices, US, where corn is so heavily subsidized its by-products had to be force injected into the entire food chain to justify it, to the point all food is rendered sweet by default.
I know it’s popular but believe it or not, the US isn’t the cause of all the world’s problems.
Only 23% of ag land worldwide is used to grow crops for direct human consumption. That’s lower than the US number by the way.
The fact remains that if you actually care about reducing farmland and fertilizer use, you’d go vegan.
Or was I right and that was just a throwaway comment meant to make you feel better about your habits?
As opposed to the enormous amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous based fertilizers used to produce cattle feed.
Talking out of what I can see out of my window, hay and feed crops for cattle are sown in the same fields where animals are led to graze, with no added fertilizers besides the manure left behind that is tilled into the soil, in field rotation system.
The greenhouses and berry farms around here turn down the readily and locally available and cheap manures to instead consume huge amounts of synthetic fertilizers produced in far away factories that have to be trucked in.
That’s a cute fairy tale.
In the real world, over 5.6 million tons of nitrogen are applied to corn (40% of which is feedcorn, on top of 40% for ethanol. barely any for us vegans!) each year through chemical fertilizers, compared to a mere million tons of nitrogen from manure. A good amount is coming from cattle, like you said, but the reality is that the clear majority is artificial.
And regardless of whether it’s natural or artificial, nitrates then wash into the rivers and waterways causing algae blooms, fish die-offs in rivers and lakes, drinking water pollution, ocean dead zones, coral bleaching and other habitat destruction, that shit even gets into the groundwater. In the human body it causes cancers, thyroid disease, birth defects, and probably more we don’t know about.
Poison isn’t better for you just because it’s “natural” 🙄
states are outlawing it
