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We must face facts - meat is the problem
- Thread starter mspohr
- Start date
mspohr...your on a very hard road to changing peoples minds. Yes your facts show the harm but people don't care (many) unless the cost gets extremely high. Substitute meat won't cut it for most either. It is a dilemma..almost like people that refuse to give up their ICE vehicles. Habit and fear..maybe.
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
just finished some pepper salami..trying to cut down. Actually tried some dried grasshoppers...not a lot of taste. Enjoy.Steaks only for the megarich.
Eat ze bugs, plebs.
The Tony Seba talk on disruption of agriculture shows how precision fermentation will overtake very inefficient cows in just a few years.
The important point is that it won't require conscious changes in consumer behavior. Our food production system will adopt this new source of protein for meat and dairy because it will be much cheaper. These products will be incorporated into the food supply without a lot of fanfare. Your burger will be plant based/protein enhanced. Your dairy... the same. These products will just show up and you won't even notice taste, texture, etc. unless you read the fine print.
McDonald’s and Walmart beef suppliers criticised for ‘reckless’ antibiotics use
Suppliers of beef to McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Walmart are sourcing meat from US farms that use antibiotics linked to the spread of dangerous superbugs, an investigation has found. Unpublished US government records obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian show farms producing beef for meat packing firms Cargill, JBS, and Green Bay are risking public health by still using antibiotics classed as the “highest priority critically important” to human health (HP-CIAs)
Suppliers of beef to McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Walmart are sourcing meat from US farms that use antibiotics linked to the spread of dangerous superbugs, an investigation has found. Unpublished US government records obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian show farms producing beef for meat packing firms Cargill, JBS, and Green Bay are risking public health by still using antibiotics classed as the “highest priority critically important” to human health (HP-CIAs)
Agweb Powered by Farm Journal: Biggest Manure Pile in U.S. History Excreted Sweet Stink of Money. https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/beef/biggest-manure-pile-us-history-excreted-sweet-stink-money
Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all | George Monbiot
Never mind the yuck factor: precision fermentation could produce new staple foods, and end our reliance on farming, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
The Guardian: Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all. Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all | George Monbiot
Let’s focus for a moment on technology. Specifically, what might be the most important environmental technology ever developed: precision fermentation. Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods.
The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming
If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale. By rewilding the vast tracts now occupied by livestock (by far the greatest of all human land uses) or by the crops used to feed them – as well as the seas being trawled or gill-netted to destruction – and restoring forests, wetlands, savannahs, natural grasslands, mangroves, reefs and sea floors, we could both stop the sixth great extinction and draw down much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere.
From the Amazon to Australia, why is your money funding Earth’s destruction? | George Monbiot
The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming.
The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish. Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.
The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming.
The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish. Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.
Lobbyist for Saudi Alfalfa Company Desiccating Arizona Was Elected to Maricopa County Board of Supervisors
Thomas Galvin lobbied on behalf of a Saudi company soaking up Arizona’s groundwater. He is now mediating an ongoing water dispute in neighboring Maricopa County.
theintercept.com
State lobbying disclosures show that Galvin is a partner at Rose Law Group, which lobbied on behalf of a subsidiary of the Saudi corporation Almarai currently tapping U.S. groundwater in drought-stricken Arizona and California to grow alfalfa. The animal feed, which is grown in harsh desert environments, is shipped overseas to support livestock on Saudi dairy farms. In 2014, Almarai bought almost 10,000 acres of farmland in Vicksburg, Arizona, through its wholly owned subsidiary Fondomonte, spending nearly $50 million on the purchase. The near-nonexistent water regulations in La Paz County, where Vicksburg is located, mean that Fondomonte can pump vast amounts of water out of Arizona’s water table, which has declined by over 50 feet in the past two decades.
Caution: Tony Seba. He's a good watch to appreciate the potential disruption if the new technology is successful, but I find that he's very much on the optimistic side of probability and timeline of achieving the necessary cost reductions.
He is optimistic but he has a good track record. He correctly predicted the rise of EVs more than 10 years ago (along with the correct years that they would start adoption).
I have to second the problem with farming.
I just finished driving across the country and was impressed by the amount of forest which has been cleared (most of it). Most of the landscape is cleared fields with little carbon storage (and runoff, chemical problems, etc.). The small patches of forest which remain show the rich carbon storage which has been destroyed. 70% of the cleared land is used to raise animals for food (either as pasture or raising animal feed). If this was returned to forest, it would capture most of the CO2 that we have released in the Anthropocene.
We are rightly upset at the clearing of the Amazon jungle. We should also recognize the damage we have done to our own forests over the past few hundred years. (There is an interesting theory that the "little ice age" was caused by the decimation of the European population by the plague - 60% and the North American native population - 90%. The significant reduction in population allowed forests to recover, cooling the earth.)
Telling Americans to ‘eat better’ doesn’t work. We must make healthier food | Mark Bittman
While eating meat itself isn’t necessarily unhealthy, producing 10 billion animals per year – in the US alone – for consumption has devastating effects on our health and environment. Negative effects abound: astronomical land and resource use, greenhouse gas generation, antibiotic exposure and resistance and the environmental damage and carcinogenic impact of factory farms themselves. Unprocessed food from the plant kingdom is less expensive, less damaging and in countless ways healthier than industrially produced meat. Although few are in favor of outlawing meat, it’s important to move beyond a fetishization of “animal protein” as critical to human health (it is not), and to acknowledge that meat consumption in industrial nations must be reduced. We can begin doing this by making production less damaging (Senator Cory Booker’s recent Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act would do this), which would reduce both yield and consumption. Good moves here include restricting the barely regulated use of antibiotics in animal production; reducing monopolistic practices and supporting small farms, as well as local and regional production and consumption; limiting the (currently almost unregulated) emissions produced by factory farms; and defining and penalizing the kind of animal cruelty accepted as “routine” in factory farms.
While eating meat itself isn’t necessarily unhealthy, producing 10 billion animals per year – in the US alone – for consumption has devastating effects on our health and environment. Negative effects abound: astronomical land and resource use, greenhouse gas generation, antibiotic exposure and resistance and the environmental damage and carcinogenic impact of factory farms themselves. Unprocessed food from the plant kingdom is less expensive, less damaging and in countless ways healthier than industrially produced meat. Although few are in favor of outlawing meat, it’s important to move beyond a fetishization of “animal protein” as critical to human health (it is not), and to acknowledge that meat consumption in industrial nations must be reduced. We can begin doing this by making production less damaging (Senator Cory Booker’s recent Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act would do this), which would reduce both yield and consumption. Good moves here include restricting the barely regulated use of antibiotics in animal production; reducing monopolistic practices and supporting small farms, as well as local and regional production and consumption; limiting the (currently almost unregulated) emissions produced by factory farms; and defining and penalizing the kind of animal cruelty accepted as “routine” in factory farms.
The food emissions ‘solutions’ alarming experts after Cop27
Methane is a short-lived but powerful heat-trapping gas that accounts for about a third of the rise in global temperature since the pre-industrial era. Livestock – through cattle burps, manure and the cultivation of feed crops – is responsible for nearly a third of global anthropogenic methane emissions, which is why scientists are clear that reducing meat and dairy consumption in the global north is essential to curbing global heating to 1.5C. But the focus at Cop27 was not on changing human diets but rather cows’ diets – to make their burps less gassy.
Methane is a short-lived but powerful heat-trapping gas that accounts for about a third of the rise in global temperature since the pre-industrial era. Livestock – through cattle burps, manure and the cultivation of feed crops – is responsible for nearly a third of global anthropogenic methane emissions, which is why scientists are clear that reducing meat and dairy consumption in the global north is essential to curbing global heating to 1.5C. But the focus at Cop27 was not on changing human diets but rather cows’ diets – to make their burps less gassy.
New Study Links Plant Protein To Healthy Muscle Mass in Older Adults
A new study of nearly 5,000 adults in China over the age of 60 links higher plant protein intake with higher muscle mass.
vegnews.com
In their analysis, researchers found that participants who consumed the total highest amount of protein and the highest amount of plant protein had an association with higher muscle mass. When it came to animal protein consumption, researchers did not find a significant association with muscle mass.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Yes, there has been an argument that plant proteins are not "complete", which is true in many cases, but if you eat a variety of plants you get all the different proteins required.
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
The concept of "protein complementing" has been around for a long time and has even intuitively been incorporated into traditional diets.
One good example is "rice and beans". The amino acids in these two combined make a complete protein.
In addition, recent research has discovered that you don't even need to consume the complementing proteins at the same time. Consumption within the same day is sufficient.
Here is a list of some food pairings that make a complete protein:
- Legumes with grains, nuts, seeds or dairy
- Grains with dairy
- Dairy with nuts
- Dairy with nuts/seeds and legumes
- Beans and rice or tortillas
- Peanut butter sandwich
- Macaroni and cheese
- Tofu with rice (or any grain)
- Hummus with pita bread
- Grilled cheese sandwich
- Yogurt with nuts
- Noodle stir-fry with peanut or sesame seed sauce
- Lentil soup or dairy-based soup with bread
- Whole grain cereal with milk
- Pizza
- Lasagna
- Tacos filled with beans or lentils
- Quinoa salad with black beans and feta
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I have to point out that "dairy" is not plant protein.