this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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I went vegetarian this year (vegan when it’s possible) mostly because of the horrors of factory farming. I could not continue to participate in such a horrific system anymore.
We don’t eat cats or dogs, so why is it okay to eat other animals? They all have thoughts and feelings.
I'm also returning to a more plant based diet in part because of animal cruelty but also because creating demand for plant based meat alternatives could potentially reduce the need for agricultural land use by ~70%. But not all animal production has the same impact on climate change: just cutting out beef and eating more nuts will help.
Ideally, pasture-raised and kosher or halal meats would be more (at all) prevalent. That's what ethical meat consumption looks like.
Alternately, lab grown.
Grass-fed production doesn't really scale, so there's not much way around consumption changes here. It also comes with a side effect of raising methane emissions
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
To be fair, pasture raised is more expensive, so people would eat less beef. I don't think it's fair to talk about scaling current consumption.
You say that, but it's not really just about grass-feeding. Cows are already fed almost 90% inedible crop materials that would be getting disposed of anyway. We could be doing better, but cattle's food source is sorta the wrong focus.
And as much methane is in manure, it's better for the environment (including GHG) than synthetic fertilizers.
The real answer is changing our meat/vegetable balance AND improve the process AND continue to improve humane regulations (and those 3 goals often synergize with each other).
The % that's edible is not as relevant as the fact that it still takes much more human-edible feed
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Synthetic fertilizer usage is greatly reduced by eating plants directly even compared to the best-case use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
Not really. Definitely not if you consider the nutritional quality of the meat. And that's beef, the worst example. (Feed to meat conversion from 6x to 25x, the higher number generally for free-range). Chickens are only x2 in ideal situations (closer to 5x when free-range since their calorie intake is not as well-managed). And from a health viewpoint, 100kcal of chicken is a better-balanced calorie than 200kcal of feed
But that is before accounting for the fact that about 165 of those feed kcals are inedible, meaning you're trading around 35 edible kcals of corn for 100 edible kcals of chicken. Would you agree from a purely health and efficiency point of view (leaving out ethics), that 35 edible calories of a "non-nutritional grain" for 100 edible calories of a protein superfood is a pretty fair trade?
Missed this one, so jumping back. It's hard for me to respond because I don't have access to the whole paper. There seem to be fairly significant issues with it, however. For one, I can't find any corroboration that isn't merely citing this paper. For another, I can't find any critical responses either (the lack of them is worse than a half-decent one IMO). Nonetheless, there's a few things I find interesting from the summary the seem to make it hard to just accept an argument using it
And your second link... I'm not sure why you cited it. It appears to be arguing for my side, defending the figures I used. Thank you?
Cropland usage is still lower when looking at the nutrition of it all
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Further, we can plant other crops on that land growing feed crops. The greatly lower cropland usage offers quite a bit of flexibility to shift around production
I disagree with you and that paper's abstract. They're comparing worst-case current aggriculture with a hypothetical improved horticulture.
Also, I extended my previous post; you might have missed it.
How do you intend to kill off the demand for those crops? Or do you intend to forbid people and businesses from consuming crops with a lot of feed-waste like corn or soy?
You don't eat dogs and cats, other cultures absolutely do and billions of people are 100% ok with eating animals. Don't be a cultural imperialist.
Quite the thing to claim someone else being an imperialist for not supporting this:
I hate to be "that guy", but I feel like none of your references are really properly rebutting his valid point. "We don't eat cats and dogs" is a common anti-balanced-diet dogwhistle that tries to touch on heartstrings instead of logic or even ethical behavior. You might not have meant it that way, but he was justified in pointing out the cultural bias of it.
And "cultural imperialism" is different from "literal imperialism", but that also means your rebuttal was a gishgallop, changing the topic. I'm ASSUMING you didn't mean to secretly change the topic to prevent losing on that previous point, but that's what the reply looks like anyway.
The original point they made talking about how people commonly hold contradictory beliefs regarding dogs and cats compared to other animals is pointing out cultural bias. It is an appeal for logical consistency in ethical beliefs
Actually, their original point was "We don't eat cats and dogs". You seem to be drawing a lot of foundation they did not lay. We cannot presume that foundation, or its solidity, because they are controversial and MIGHT have been rebuttable.
Ultimately, it was a meme-worthy throw out of one sentence trying to pull at heartstrings. If he intended more or something defensible, he failed to prove it.
At this point, I'm pretty sure you're a vegan from your replies to me. Even if you were on the right side of ethics by some agreeable system, that doesn't make his original point more than it actually was. You can argue for the right thing with a bad or lacking argument, and you can (and should) be called on that.