Who has money to pay for name brand anything these days. It also doesn’t help that their product sucks. Seriously I had to buy a bag of their chicken wings the other week and the product was mostly breadcrumbs and tiny little chicken drumsticks. These companies practice the worst sort of shrinkflation and then act surprised when people stop buying their product.
For some people they need a sufficient meat replacement to be able to give up meat. People with ARFID for example who already have very limited food options and have a preference for meat can find it very difficult to just have vegetarian meals
Many (probably most) vegetarians or vegans didn’t start that way, so having the option to have some familiar foods without the meat is nice, beyond stuff for example is not cheap where I live, so it’s a treat to have one, but sometimes you just feel like a greasy hamburger that tastes like beef
Because selfish humans love their fucking meat and they don’t care that animals are locked into prisons where they can barely move or clean themselves, generate massive acres of literal shit pools that pollute large areas, the impact that kind of farming has on the environment….
THAT is why there is motivation for replication. Without it how do you shut down these disgusting cow/pig/chicken torture facilities
Hard agree. People will call you an extemist like child free communities that hate kids, as if the state of the fucking world is reason enough to chill on the kids thing
If you had to choose between being vegan and the environment going to shit, or eating meat and the environment getting figured out, which would you pick?
I find a lot of vegans have a really inaccurate view of non-vegans wrt eating meat. It’s not that we selfishly choose to eat meat despite feeling animals dying is a bad thing. It’s that we don’t think it’s a bad thing that animals die in a farm for food.
And if you realize that, you might find you have things in common with non-vegans. I fight for free-range laws, anti-farm-cruelty laws, etc. I just think you’re morally in the wrong about everyone stopping eating meat. Oddly, a lot of us non-vegans see vegans to be selfish. But we try not to use that to be uncivil towards them.
One thing many vegans don’t get about non-vegans is that we’re frustrated at veganism for the same “reasonable if not valid” reasons. I’ve had some vegan family/friends have serious health issues directly related to their refusal to eat meat. Yes, there’s a lot to that, and it usually spawns from people easily prone to PTSD being made to watch some disgusting documentary about the meat packing industry and going full starvation on and off until all their hair fell out. Is it veganism’s fault? Not directly.
It’s kinda like the Catholic Church. There’s SO FEW pedophiles in the Catholic Church, but for anyone who has been touched by that, the Church itself is tainted far worse than the facts allow.
Agreed, meat serves a specific role within traditional dishes. I find well cooked mushrooms to be one of the better substitutes in most sauce based dishes, though it lacks in protein. If we are going full vegan I believe South Indian to be some of the best cuisine in the world.
There is so much flexibility in cooking. I got some beyond meat Jamaican patties this week and I just genuinely wasn’t impressed with the flavor and texture.
I’d argue that bad implementation of substitutes is generally the culprit here. Meshing well with the cuisine is a better move. I’d rather have a curry rice with herbs filled patty.
Anyway I guess my point is that making meat replacement options just taste “OK” isn’t doing a lot of favors.
I don't know why we don't make chicken nuggets out of plant protein regularly now. They don't taste like chicken, they don't have the texture of chicken, and I honestly don't think kids care as long as it's shaped like a dinosaur.
I think my favorite fake nuggets are "Simulate" brand, and the box always gives me a kick. I don't like the beyond meat nuggets, but I like their burger patties. Gardein stuff is also good. However, I've been a vegetarian so long I'm a bad judge of what tastes like meat.
I seriously stop and chuckle at the box art every time. I'm not really a "nugget" person whether they're chicken, chick'n, or otherwise, but I adore that box art.
I'm not a vegetarian (yet, I'm working on some food aversion stuff), but my girlfriend is. I've actually had the chance to try the Beyond nuggets, and I agree that they're not that great. The texture just wasn't right when I had them.
We do. Just buy wheat flour and wash out the starch. It has wayy more protein than dead animals, its cheaper, its hethier, and it doesn’t cause climate change.
If you're horrified by animals dying on a farm during a disaster then consider why they are on the first place. It's not a kindness to breed them in to a life of suffering, cages forced breeding only to be slaughtered. The real solution here is to stop the cycle of harming an animal for human pleasure.
(which is also the same reason dog/cock fighting is wrong)
I think a much better question to ask is why should we reframe the topic at hand to not include its root origin? It’s kind of like asking why people want to talk about wealth Inequality when you talk about poverty: the two are intrinsicly linked together
To produce at scale, other animals will essentially have to be seen as solely a means. Factory farming is the inevitable outcome of mass meat consumption. There is not much way around that. Any system like that - rooted in the idea of minimizing other animals’ value as individuals - will consistently produce exceptionally cruel outcomes.
To go a bit into the why factory farming is the inevitable outcome.
Let’s look at just cattle for the moment. Many often trumpet grass-fed production, but in practice just doesn’t scale. For instance, the US would require a 75% reduction in beef consumption just for it to have enough grassland for it. That’s while increasing method emissions and also creating high deforestation pressure if we came anywhere close to that. Not to mention the legal and logistical headaches involved in getting all that land
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.
For instance, the US would require a 75% reduction in beef consumption just for it to have enough grassland for it.
Aren’t you looking from the wrong end here? Ban anything but grass-feeding, put high import taxes on beef (the latter should be easy to sell: protect domestic farmers!), and consumption will go down automatically, because the supply drops by 75%.
How can you think veganism isnt relevant to a discussion about the cruelties of animal agriculture. This type of thing is specifically part of what vegans are fighting against
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don’t bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it’s less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won’t even really miss meat after a few months.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Because the reality is that there’s more than two people in the world. Most people are neither vegans nor assholes who don’t care enough. There’s those of us who think vegans are wrong. It’s funny how many environmental scientists are not in support of a world exodus towards veganism and yet my choice are “stop eating meat or admit you just don’t care”
How about “having spent my life around cattle farms, I know more than the person talking to me on this topic so they can go fly a kite”? Or “I have cattle specialists with advanced degrees in my family and after long discussion with them, I see all the gaps that these half-ass arguments online are missing”
…no, you’re right. We just don’t care enough. Oh look, I just found a study that shows that eating vegetables might be bad for the climate. Stop eating vegetables too, or you “just don’t care enough”
My one rule on this topic is never getting into a gishgallop. Vegan advocates love to play the roulette of swapping topics every time they lose ground on one, until they manage to win the argument having lost every piece of it by just tiring the other side out. You pick one of those topics, and I will field that topic only with you. It might surprise you, I will agree with you on some of them (like saving the Amazon).
But if you make me choose, I will choose land use because it’s a slam-dunk. 2/3 of agriculture uses marginal land that cannot (and I believe should not) be made arable. If resources were spent changing that instead of vegans fighting with farmers, that number could approach 100%. There’s important asterisks about that (both crops and livestock become more environmentally friendly if done close to each other due to their symbiotic relationship) that need to be kept up. But reducing livestock population directly WRT marginal land is wasteful.
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific. What agriculture, where in the world, are feedlots used etc You’re obviously excluding aquaculture, and non grazing animals like pigs, I suspect you’re also excluding egg production since that is almost monolithically cage farming.
Like you can’t really say “oh these pigs are on non arable land” if that merely refers to their physical location and not where their food is grown.
So could you please drill down a bit? what specifically are you referencing?
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific
Which part of this? Marginal land? That’s a very specific topic. Why should we bring in 100 different variables unless you can show those variables matter to marginal land.
Or are you sayign there’s some prima facie point I’m missing where “nothing but wild animals on marginal land” will produce more sustainable food than “cattle on marginal land”?
Or are you just trying to get me to provide enough information to overspecialize my rebuttal so that your side need only say “ok, everything but that”?
I just need to know where you’re pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we’re just going “tis!” “tisn’t!” till one of us gets bored.
Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?
I can’t discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.
My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I’m referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.
If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I’ll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider “magic”
A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.
I literally can’t discuss this because I have no idea what it’s saying. It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production. In the heaviest meat eating/producing countries only a minority of calories produced are from pastured animals. Most cattle are from factory farms involving feed lots, pigs/chickens/fish are fed crops grown on arable land.
Like ~75% of the world’s soy is grown for animal feed ourworldindata.org/soy and soy is a massive crop so it’s hard to imagine where all this saved land comes from. What are you comparing against?
A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.
Which number is a magic number to you? I thought I was clear in asking that question.
It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Cattle and most livestock can graze on marginal land. What land would be used for food production? Here’s the land-use breakdown.
That’s not an accurate statement to the reference. 75% of soy crop is fed to animals. That’s a very different reality. It still jives with the 86% of feed that is human inedible. How? Because a high percent of the soybean crop is inedible to humans, and there’s been a huge influx (your link agrees) in demand for soy products in general. That soy waste a cheap option for feed. The alternative is burning… but we cannot continue down this line without dropping the land use topic. 100% of the marginal use livestock diet COULD come from the marginal land. If we didn’t need to get rid of this other stuff anyway.
I feel like you’re doing the thing you premptively accused me of wanting to do.
You’ve put forward an arbitrary unsourced number asserting that 2/3 of the land used for animal agriculture is otherwise useless for food production, with the implication that we would need to use more high quality land to meet human food needs. Thus losing out on any benefits we might get from freeing up this marginal land.
That number is undiscussable until you can actually demonstrate to me how you’re arriving at it. We can’t have a discussion if you’re asking me to work out the specifics of your claim and then disprove them, you have to actually make a specific claim.
Getting into the weeds on the details of soy and hashing over the whole by/co product and economics of various crops with and without animal ag is pointless until we know what it is you’re actually claiming.
So please, make that claim. If it is trivial to prove that animal ag uses less land than plant agriculture then do so.
I feel like you’re doing the thing you premptively accused me of wanting to do.
I disagree. You’re bringing up those same other issues “in the context of land use” and I’m trying to respond as best I can while sticking to land use.
You’ve put forward an arbitrary unsourced number asserting that 2/3 of the land used for animal agriculture is otherwise useless for food production
Are you saying you contest the 2/3 number straight out? Because your previous reply seemed to be trying to gather ammo to object to it with supplemental data.
with the implication that we would need to use more high quality land to meet human food needs
I actually didn’t make that implication. As “it’s ok to keep eating meat” is the defacto winner, I’m simply pointing out that anti-meat advocacy has not resolved the marginal land issue with their land use objections.
That number is undiscussable until you can actually demonstrate to me how you’re arriving at it
Alright. So is your position that there is no such thing as marginal use land, or that there exist no cows on it? If we “undiscuss” that number for a moment, are you willing to concede the only point I made - that livestock on marginal use land is perfectly fine from an environmental point of view?
We can’t have a discussion if you’re asking me to work out the specifics of your claim and then disprove them, you have to actually make a specific claim.
My claim is that the vegan argument on marginal land hasn’t defended their claim. I have argued that claim, and you’re harping on a number you both believe enough to try to argue around and disbelieve enough to pretend it’s impossible to discuss marginal land use without me somehow proving the number is exactly correct.
Does the 2/3 number matter to you, or doesn’t it? Do you believe it, or don’t you? If the former, maybe we can have a discussion on exactly how we can determine how much livestock is on marginal land. If the latter, perhaps we can focus on whether livestock on marginal land is horrible for the environment or not.
Getting into the weeds on the details of soy and hashing over the whole by/co product
I really didn’t. You made the claim that soy represents secondary land use, one I took seriously enough to reply while pointing out how the reply can lead to tangents, so we can stick to the argument. ANOTHER person, in response to me (and maybe you) provided far more tangential, but effective, an argument against you, but I am not that person.
So please, make that claim
Which claim are you asking me to make now? Can we finish the claim “vegans haven’t proven that livestock on marginal land is terrible for the environment” first?
I think the whole issue is that this is more complex than any discrete set of metrics because so many industries are interconnected. in a world without any animal agriculture, how much corn and soy would we raise? it is just unknowable.
I’m out doing grocery shopping so replies are flakey. I want to avoid confusion between inexact and unknowable.
We can establish the difference between plausible and implausible thing, and rule out the impossible.
We know that historically and contemporarily crops are favoured over animal ag (with the exception of a few things like chickens widely, and sometimes cows/goats/or camels in particular niches) by subsistence farmers and poor urban workers. That meat is expensive, and only recent developments (and subsidies) have really changed that in the global north/west/rich mc exploity whitey land whatever you want to call it.
So while it’s not impossible that modern developments have somehow dramatically changed things in terms of efficiency, or that poor people are idiots and don’t know what to grow to survive (highly unlikely, subsistence farming kills the idle or wrong), or that in some weird niche in Shenzhen farming the Peruvian fluffy marmoset is particularly efficient: there’s probably some sensible conclusions we can draw about what an optimally land efficient agriculture could and could not look like and it seems unlikely to be animal ag centric or even particularly heavy.
I always like fact backup in response to zealous vegan nonsense. I wonder if any of them will notice/read since you replied to me. I thikn they’re tunnel-vision on me at this point.
Though, you might or might not have realized that in your reply to me, you quoted things I had previously quoted from another person. You’re on my side (and I’m cool with that).
I think you overestimate many of the people fighting on the vegan side of arguments these days ;)
And I mean that only half tongue-in-cheek. Too often, people who should be smart enough to know better put on blinders because “I love animals and don’t want you eating them” mashes up with “what’s actually good or bad for the environment and climate”
We absolutely should be making improvements to farming to continue to scale. Unlimited amounts of chicken or pork are indefinitely sustainable at the low-low price of perhaps making animal treatment vs climate decisions that might be difficult for some. I swear they hold on to the whole vegan thing because sometimes the most climate-friendly choice is a little less humane-seeming to some people.
And some people will point at people individual choices rather than the corporations and states who promoted this lifestyle.
What pisses me the most about ecologists nowadays is how liberals they are. If you want to feel good about yourself, feel free, but don’t pretend all people are responsible for climate change by themselves because they’re eating meat.
Systems can be broken and incentivise poor behaviour while individual actions also make a difference.
Besides, where will your political change come from? people who wont even change their diet? Just like how all those environmental protections were brought into being by people who criticised the people chaining themselves to trees for thinking individual actions mattered?
The meat industry is terrified of vegans, they spend millions rewriting laws and producing propaganda to limit us. maybe they have reasons why.
One place individual action worked was when people started making a thing of divesting from coal power plants. It worked because the pension funds followed the popular lead. With investors fleeing it is hard for coal power plants to maintain themselves, jars to get loans. It shortened many power plants’ lives significantly
The industry loves vegans. It is an extremely profitable industry because those people are wealthier than average and already fanatised for their products. You’re a fool if you think you’re fighting the industry. You merely fight one industry for the benefit of another one.
The meat industry is fine. The terrified ones are the stupid conservative. But are they stupid or terrified? They’re merely using the vegan propaganda against them.
And oh boy is it easy to do! Vegans are already full fanatics about their ideology. It’s a full blown religion at this point : either you are vegan or a heretic causing the end of the world. If you’re not vegan, you are personally responsible for the climate change. Isn’t this the point of this article?
Conservative have nothing to do to make propaganda against this. Ecologists are as fascists as the fascists themselves, but in a green color.
Well I’m not gonna hold my breath waiting for whatever change you’re willing into being by tweeting about how nobody should do anything until somebody starts the glorious revolution.
Because eating meat and farming meat aren’t the same thing and the problem isn’t from eating it. I could stop eating meat today and it won’t make a lick of difference. Everyone would have to stop at the same time to make raising the animals no longer profitable. And getting everyone everywhere to agree to anything is fucking impossible.
Instead of giving shit to people who eat meat, attack the fucking industry that raises the animals and has all the fucking power.
Worse than that. We could ban beef, have all the cows killed and the farms turned to national parks, but then deer would replace them and have exactly the same emissions
Cattle where I live aren’t on bare fields. Driving across three states over Christmas break out was wonderful moving out of wheat, barley, and hay growing areas to cattle and sheep raising areas.
It went from fields of monoculture, to fields with various grasses, trees, shrubs
It was fun trying to pick whether a distant field was spotted with sheep or shrubs (it was a long drive)
It was usually both. Sheep are remarkably well camouflaged in a fairly natural grasslands
The cows were usually resting in the shade of a tree, though one field the cows were lined up feeding on the grass in the straight shadow of the tower for a wind turbine
Grazing is terrible for local ecosystems and does harm the environment more than native populations of animals do. One of the reasons why is because humans ensure that a grazing herd faces as little predation as possible as well as providing cattle with care that native animals do not have
If eating meat is wrong and I should be punished for it, bury me with a few sides of beef because all the open flames in hell should be perfect for grilling.
It’s more accurate to say that I reject that commenter’s asinine notion that eating meat and being concerned about the environment are mutually exclusive, when there are plenty of sources that aren’t entirely in the corporate machine. Most of my meat comes from the local Maui Cattle Company, which is all grassfed on our hillsides and processed locally. The last few chickens I’ve had were also raised by neighbors, then hand plucked and cooked the same day. This does happen in the world, just some of you need a reminder.
edit: further, this island is overrun with invasive axis deer that need frequent culling so they don’t decimate fields of crops, so venison is a regular thing here if you know hunters willing to share, and vegans/vegetarians should be happy we’re helping to save the veggies.
They kinda are mutually exclusive? Weird how everyone gets their meat locally when climate comes into the discussion, yet 99.99% of the meat we eat isn’t actually local.
Hey, I can’t speak for everyone here, but I’m eating locally sourced meat raised on an isolated island, and you chose to question that, as if you actually have any idea what goes on here.
edit: we also locally source invasive pigs that otherwise would be tearing up the landscape. And there’s a population of people that love going after the invasive feral chickens.
These guys imagine that if the cows were exterminated the emissions would go away. It’s like they haven’t heard of nature. The cows’ niche will quickly be filled by feral deer which are exactly as bad as cows for methane
If you kill all the deer and leave the land empty of animals you still get the emissions as the grass rots in the open air (rotted by the same bacteria the cows and sheep use)
You can’t save emissions by reducing cattle numbers, you can just move the emissions from “farming” to “nature”
Ikr? Like, what do they expect from us here? I’m in favor of finding ways to reduce aspects of cruel commercial industry practices in general, but they also don’t want us to humanely kill any cows, invasive deer, wild pigs and feral chickens for any reason at all? They’ll just completely overgraze the available grassland, decimate crops and orchards, tear up native tree roots in the forests, and/or shit on literally everything while causing property damage. Or just not eat them when we have to cull the population? Seems like a waste. These people just haven’t thought it all through as well as they give themselves credit for.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve read all day, congrats. Somehow eliminating cows would lead to exploding deer populations? And even if it did, deer don’t produce methane at the rate that cows do lol. One of the biggest reasons cows emit so much methane is their shitty feed.
Cows, deer, sheep all make as much methane per unit mass. If they didn’t we could simply inoculate whichever is the worst with the gut bacteria of the best, since they are all ungulates, they all rely on bacteria to break down grass to something they can digest directly
Or do you imagine there’s is something else we could grow on that land that was judged only good enough for cattle
People on lemmy are more likely to be left wing. More likely than average to be vegan.
Can’t you believe that a meat eater might be at the ethical end of meat eaters? I eat local, I care about food miles, permaculture, grass fed beef and lamb.
What do you drive? A bicycle, or do you want climate change?
Remember you can’t grow crops on the land we run most cattle on, it’s marginal or steep.
If we remove cows from the marginal land, and sheep from the steep land deer and goats move in
Deer and goats are ruminants like sheep and cows. They will have the same emissions
Presumably we won’t be farming the land, it’ll be national parks or similar
So with cows and sheep we have a chance of improving their emissions, because we can inoculate them with specific methane eating bacteria, we can feed them supplements that let the existing bacteria crack methane.
This attitude is why meat eaters will tell you to shut the fuck up when you bring up the subject. Your statement is reductive, dismissive, and pretentious to the point that you would be more convincing by not saying anything at all.
It does say that but if you can’t add some additional context or express it in a way that will be better received by others then you’re making things worse by being an elitist prick about it. No one wants to team up with that guy. However, if stroking your ego is more important to you than solving the actual problem then by all means, carry on.
You don’t know anything about how I live my life and I don’t know much about you but I do know that if you’re anything like this to people in real life then most fucking hate listening to you talk. You latched on to one thing you were probably already doing for other reasons and are now acting like the savior of the planet over it despite the fact that even being in a position to respond to my messages puts your carbon footprint in the top 80% globally. Abstaining from meat isn’t going to save the world, which is something you would know if you actually cared about the environment beyond the issue’s ability to let you virtue signal at strangers on the internet, but it’s probably hard to see much of anything from so far up your own ass. Oh well, I’m sure that smugness will sustain you when the power shuts off and the grocery stores are empty.
we could power the planet with your cognitive dissonance. the article is right there. but you wanna talk about my personality and how your feelings are making you cry a little bit.
Whats wrong with what they said? Eating meat is disproportionately more environmentally damaging than a plant based diet. Going vegan absolutely has a positive environmental impact so if you do want to help, go vegan. The fault is absolutely not on them if people read it and get annoyed because they don’t actually want to make a sacrifice they just want things to get better without any personal change on their part.
The article did a decent job of explaining that fact without giving off a holier-than-thou, savior complex vibe. Surely you can see why that is a better approach than shaming people, especially when it’s so easy to point out other ways in which a vegan might have a larger than necessary carbon footprint. The person I responded to is only interested in being smug, not educating people or genuine change. That’s not environmentalism it’s just a prime example of virtue signaling.
I am not a vegetarian, but I buy the Impossible Burger meat sometimes. It’s close enough that you would have a difficult time telling it apart from real meat. Not perfect, of course but I don’t mind eating it.
I find it personally difficult to eat a meal without meat at all, and I enjoy some of the plant based meats. They aren’t all great, but beyond chicken is better than some chicken nuggets, and I forget which brand it was but one of them does better brats than most grocery stores.
Edit: Hard agree on hoping for lab grown meat to progress. That feels like the actual future of meat consumption to me.
It won’t. At least, it probably won’t. Here’s a good high level explanation as to why. I’ve worked on software used by some of these pharm industries and have some understanding of the scale of these types of operations. Everyone who talks about carbon footprints of animal farms will have to accept the carbon footprint of a synethic meat calorie is going to be a LOT higher due to dozens of factors. If you care about the environment, even 50 years from now it’s probably cheaper to have cows AND spend margins to become carbon neutral than it would be to do lab meats.
If it’s about saving animal lives, that’s an ethical issue and where I’m learning to stop getting involved. I have enough knowledge in ethics to stand my own on that topic, and enough experience arguing ethics with vegans to know it’s time to stop trying to discuss that with them.
Now that’s just incorrect. The people who enjoy the taste of plant based meat probably liked the taste of meat a lot, that’s why they’re seeking to replace it, but environmental and/or ethical considerations are important enough to them to justify a small loss or simply change in flavor.
I love the taste of meat. There are very few things in world that taste as good as raw beew strips or or raw venison with a dash of salt and pepper.
Still, about 10 years ago I started eating less red meat for health reasons (both sides of my family have long history with high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases). I’ve always loved vegetables as well, so the change wasn’t so hard.
Maybe 5 years ago a lot of plant based protein products started to show up in the supermarkets here, so I decided to give them a try. And I found out they were pretty good. I actually now prefer plant based burger steaks over the real ones, and my spaghetti bolognese is far better when I make it with the fake minced meat.
My dad used to work in the dairy industry in the early 80’s and he told me thst he got to taste the early fake meat products while visiting some production plant in Denmark or Sweden. All the guests were served two minced meat steaks, of which the other one was plant or dairy based. None of them could tell the difference even back then.
For me it is the texture far more than the flavor that makes most plant based "meat" less than fun. Like how turkey bacon is a mockery of actual bacon.
That said there are a couple chicken nugget subs that are good and the impossible burger is decent with strong condiments. But most are just sad pretenders like turkey bacon.
Dishes that are not pretending to be meat are the best vegetarian dishes.
I eat meat and whitecastles impossible sliders are better than their meat ones. The impossible whopper is about as good as a whopper. Of course some of this is due to the quality of the meat burgers to begin with.
This is /c/vegan – I think you can take it as read that we have already had that conversation many many many times, and it is safe to consider other aspects of the effects of carnism.
I mean I guess? I don’t see a world where humans are eaten to extinction by other humans and since humans aren’t really that special, nothing about us would make us unsustainable via farming/husbandry. It seems like you are using a different definition of sustainable then what is commonly understood.
It’s not about being eaten to extinction, obviously, but nice.
If you consider cultivating new zoonotic diseases and pandemics into existence and wasting energy and resources on feeding animals the nutrients that humans can more efficiently benefit from directly to be “sustainable”, then I think it’s you that is using a definition of sustainable that is different from what is commonly understood.
Sustainability isn’t about absolute energy usage or energy usage per capita, or anything like that. It’s about ensuring that the activity at it’s current level of energy consumption can continue. So if it takes a 1000 acres of land to have a genetically diverse herd of animals that can feed a village of a given size forever, then the fact that 1000 times more calories in the form of anything else could be used on that land instead doesn’t mean the herd of animals are unsustainable.
Diseases are a non-sequitur for sustainability discussions as is “wasted” energy. Efficiency is nice, but not necessary for sustainability.
Wild hunting vs Domestication. Hunting has to be done very specifically in order to make it sustainable meaning the animals going extinct otherwise. Domestication on the other hand can be expanded as needed to feed an ever growing population.* The end problems of domestication of animals isn’t that the animals went extinct.
Tuna aren’t hunted they are fished, as are lots of other versions of sea fauna. Fishing isn’t really analogous to per-historic hunting for the simple reason that commercial fishing requires a level of sophistication that simply didn’t exist back then.
Sustainable fishing absolutely Can, and Does exist in some areas of the world today. But not for all species, and not for all nations and of course under capitalism the rewards for cheating will always threaten sustainability.
But to your original point, tuna could be sustainably harvested, but enforcement is basically impossible.
In this case, fishing is very much comparable to hunting. Only we use much cruder and more destructive hunting methods underwater because we are not at home in the ecosystem.
As predators, tuna are involved in the regulation of numerous other species, migrate almost all over the world throughout the year and dive for miles depending on the time of day. Fishing them is like normalizing the hunting of tigers. Maybe even worse. After we have already wiped out some tiger species. And all for a cheap pizza topping.
I didn’t consider that they’d have to bring in the fish from elsewhere to feed them, that’s not sustainable at all.
Really we should be letting the free market do free market things and stop supplying as much fish, even if it does drive up prices. If you want the unsustainable fish, fine. Pay for it. Demand has to meet supply at some point.
I’ve actually run a computer model for this exact problem (overfishing in general, not tuna in particular).
The problem with a market based solution is that the feedback loop is too delayed. By the time the catches start to drop enough to affect prices, you’re already driven the ecosystem to the point of collapse. The same is true for many natural resources and systemic effects like climate change. And all of the market dynamics that come into play push the players to maximize resource extraction/profits in the short term. That’s why we need to limit harvests and pollution via taxes and other regulations. It’s not a problem that a market can solve - it’s a problem that a market creates.
That’s really cool! I wish I had more time to respond but it’s late. I wasn’t arguing that it’s a good way to fix things, it’s really a last ditch effort. There’s a reason regulations exist and should continue to exist (part of my many issues with the right-wing politics in the USA if not elsewhere… but that’s off topic).
That’s some really interesting insight into the issue at hand though, thank you!
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