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What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Retric 8y ago
A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue. Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  But it would be seen as a "tax" to the corn producers, beef eaters, sugar water drinkers, car owners, and probably a load of other groups who benefit from the artificially cheap price.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Out of that list, the corn producers can get lost. They are not entitled to our subsidy.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      Well sure, but there are a lot of lobbying groups relying on the subsidies. Beef, pork, ethanol, corn syrup, international food exporters. If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Until Iowa is not the first US primary, these corn producers will always have an an advantage in influencing American politics.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, We export roughly 40% of our corn in the US, it wouldn't increase beef prices prices much, it'd reduce exports though.
- randomdata 8y ago
  I farm outside of the US, so maybe I have misunderstood something, but did the 2014 farm bill not eliminate those subsidies that people used to talk about with respect to corn? As I understand it, since 2014, the system was brought in line with the system we use in my country. There is crop insurance available to corn farmers, where the government pays a portion (65%, if I recall correctly?) of the cost, but that is not limited to corn and not really an incentive to grow corn in particular. I would not be at all surprised if corn takes the largest share of claims simply due to how much of it is grown.
AdrianB1 8y ago
That is the wrong mindset, trying to fix the effect and not the cause.
- mac01021 8y ago
  What cause? The guy wants people to eat less meat. He's not saying that people eating meat is an effect of some other problem that he wants to solve.
  - AdrianB1 8y ago
    People eating meat is not a problem. Having meat for all the people is.
ghaff 8y ago
Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.
- alacombe 8y ago
  Artificial food will always lack the bio-availabilities of real food our bodies evolved to process. For example, vitamin C artificially synthesized from glucose is more difficult to assimilate by the guts than "natural" vitamin C, especially when consumed with carbs.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    But it’s easy to produce, consume and absorb enough vitamin C. Vitamin C also breaks down fairly easily when cooked (necessary or common with a lot of foods). Iron is a bigger issue where non-absorption of non-organic sources can cause some GI upset.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    That sounds surprising. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ suggests that there is no difference in bioabsorption in humans between synthetic and natural vitamin C, particularly in the cases where you're not taking straight vitamin C (i.e., supplemental vitamin C tablets).
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Huh? Vitamin C is L-ascorbic acid. It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.
- naravara 8y ago
  >Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality. You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals. But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Convince people that ground beef (and chicken for that matter) that's made up partially of plants (probably soy) is more upscale than just ground beef. People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
travisoneill1 8y ago
I'm not interested in eating less meat so we can grow the population more. It's not a cost issue. Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?
- madrasman 8y ago
  eating beef being higher quality of life may be less real and more perceived (because of habit and freedom), given that there are several similar substitutes.
  - travisoneill1 8y ago
    When it comes to quality of life perceived is real. The substitutes suck. I've tried them. If that changes then I will switch over.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kieranmaine 8y ago
  Would you eat more chicken instead of beef though? Is there a certain meat you couldn't do without and if so why? I'm not against anyone eating meat (although as an ethical - and hypocritical milk drinking vegetarian - I'd like to see animal suffering reduced) just interested in what meat eaters love about meat.
  - toast0 8y ago
    Chicken and beef have significantly different tastes, textures, and preparation options. They're substitute goods in the same was as a bicycle and a scooter; they provide the same kind of utility, but one may be preferred over the other for reasons that are hard to enumerate and don't really address the utility.
  - travisoneill1 8y ago
    I don't see stacking as many people as possible on Earth as a worthy goal and therefore I am not interested in changing my behavior for the purpose of achieving it. Your animal suffering point has merit. But what the article is talking about is simply growing enough food to feed more people, so that's what I am addressing. However, I think that this is just another symptom of the same thing. Factory farming is only necessary if we need to feed multiple billions.
ergothus 8y ago
As a vegetarian that actually doesn't like many vegetables (I don't like bell peppers, for example, which severely limits my options) and who was a huge carnivore before going veggie ( and with more than one hunter in the family): I see two groups of meat eaters. Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef). Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another. If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
kawsper 8y ago
Isn't the meat industry already heavily subsidised?
- moate 8y ago
  Just about every segment of food production is heavily subsidized at this point. We're VERY good at producing a tons of food, and we're also very good at transportation at this point, so the only way to keep those people in business is to buy up tons of milk and pour it down the drain or make excess crops into fertilizers to influence price.
dilap 8y ago
I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
- moate 8y ago
  Actual scientific data proving something that's actually scientifically untrue. Every nutritionist suddenly bribed by a the meat lobby to throw out years of data to the contrary. Proof that the animals being made into food are entirely incapable of thought or physical feeling. That would probably cover everyone.
  - alacombe 8y ago
    do you mean humans are designed to digest cellulose ? That's news to me...
    - moate 8y ago
      OP asked what it would take to convince all vegetarians that a meat based diet is healthiest, and that animals can be raised humanely with low environmental impact. Just because you can't digest the straw man you threw together, doesn't make a "meat based" diet a thing these people are going to be convinced to move to. Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming). How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else. You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".
scythe 8y ago
>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.) I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower. Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken. Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above. On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
- kieranmaine 8y ago
  A significant portion of the the agricultural land is used to feed animals though - this page has a good diagram on how land is used - https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.
alacombe 8y ago
Perhaps because you can survive on beef alone (including organs meat), but can't survive on lettuce without some sort of supplementation ?
- firethief 8y ago
  That's an important consideration for people who don't want to eat more than one thing
bane 8y ago
Make it more expensive than other protein sources. That's it.
chadcmulligan 8y ago
Eating meat is way easier than eating balanced vegetarian imho. I've cut down on my meat lately and it does require more time and involvement to eat vegetarian. E.g. an easy dinner is bbq a steak and chuck out some salad, done. Our entire society is based on convenience of eating meat, to get the same from a vegetarian diet is a lot harder to learn, you really have to want to. I still eat fish and eggs for this reason, I'm not really sure how to go full vegetarian, I know its possible but its another level of work for me. There's probably a bit of FUD thrown around by the meat industry that you need protein and iron from red meat as well.
- vegasdew 8y ago
  It is not that difficult, just a matter of taste/preferences. There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients.
  - chadcmulligan 8y ago
    > There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients. I don't think thats true - I've known a number of strict vegetarians (vegans?) and they've often problems with low B12 and iron. Eggs/fish a bit of chicken and a bit of meat make it way easier, but the amount required is way less than the amount of meat most people eat. As in many things the answers in the middle imho.
virtuallynathan 8y ago
Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants. In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land. Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff). Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Kingdom#Arable_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2097.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/8s45q879d/9z903258h/qz20sw09p/USCatSup-06-24-2016.pdf https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainability_FactSheet_TopicBriefs/Beef_Sustainability_Facts_042718-07_041618-06.pdf https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-critical-role-as-upcycler-11fd32a3e85 https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...
- hinkley 8y ago
  As one particularly loud farmer I'm familiar with is fond of saying, there are certain foods that should only be eaten if you have a gizzard. Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap. The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  But how much of our meat is raised on pasture versus in meat factories?
ceras 8y ago
Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research. A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences. [0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/ https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/ https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Welfare/dp/0199551162 https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...
- ericd 8y ago
  You have to raise and kill more chickens per pound of meat, but aren't they much, much less intelligent than cows?
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Yes, but most meat chickens and egg chickens live out their lives in cages, without enough space to turn around with their beaks mutilated. Most cattle live the enormous majority of their lives in a kind of cattle paradise in comparison, with ever present adequate food, no predators and some modicum of medical care.
  - ceras 8y ago
    They are, but while intelligence does likely have a correlation with capacity for suffering, it isn't the same thing. For example, a human infant is much less intelligent than an adult, but we do not typically believe their capacity for suffering is lower than an adult. Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable capacity of suffering to mammals. This is considered likely true or at least plausibly true for fish as well, though their brains are sufficiently different from mammals and birds that there's still more research going on to understand it more. Animals that likely have no capacity for suffering are bivalves, for example. It'll take a lot more research to figure out the concrete answer for those in between (e.g. insects, where the latest I've heard is that the most they can suffer is similar to an annoyance or mild pain from a human perspective).
harimau777 8y ago
I think that it would help if more vegetarian advocates focused on finding ways that non-meat diets can fit with people's lifestyles and preferences. For example, I don't like the taste of many vegan dishes and (back when I was more series about working out) I was looking for a high protein, high calorie diet. When I looked into veganism, a lot of the resources came across as dismissive of my goals or felt like they came from a perspective of "we're morally right so we don't have to find a way to work with people's preferences". I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.
- cjrd 8y ago
  Totally understand your point, and the veg lifestyle is becoming much more mainstream in athletics. e.g. check out Nimai Delgado's (IFBB bodybuilder) instagram posts on simple, high protein, high calorie foods for bodybuilding: https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood
phil248 8y ago
Animal welfare standards are all it would take.
mLuby 8y ago
If enough of the global beef supply were tainted by a human-communicable disease, people might shy away from it. Could the plot of some eco-terrorist film, preferably starring Nicolas Cage. Working title: "The Meating"
metalrain 8y ago
Price, if supply keeps somewhat constant but demand raises I think many would (have to) choose otherwise.
deleted 8y ago
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Retric 8y ago

A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue. Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.

jermaustin1 8y ago
But it would be seen as a "tax" to the corn producers, beef eaters, sugar water drinkers, car owners, and probably a load of other groups who benefit from the artificially cheap price.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Out of that list, the corn producers can get lost. They are not entitled to our subsidy.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    Well sure, but there are a lot of lobbying groups relying on the subsidies. Beef, pork, ethanol, corn syrup, international food exporters. If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    Until Iowa is not the first US primary, these corn producers will always have an an advantage in influencing American politics.
ryanmercer 8y ago
>A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, We export roughly 40% of our corn in the US, it wouldn't increase beef prices prices much, it'd reduce exports though.
randomdata 8y ago
I farm outside of the US, so maybe I have misunderstood something, but did the 2014 farm bill not eliminate those subsidies that people used to talk about with respect to corn? As I understand it, since 2014, the system was brought in line with the system we use in my country. There is crop insurance available to corn farmers, where the government pays a portion (65%, if I recall correctly?) of the cost, but that is not limited to corn and not really an incentive to grow corn in particular. I would not be at all surprised if corn takes the largest share of claims simply due to how much of it is grown.

AdrianB1 8y ago

That is the wrong mindset, trying to fix the effect and not the cause.

mac01021 8y ago
What cause? The guy wants people to eat less meat. He's not saying that people eating meat is an effect of some other problem that he wants to solve.
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  People eating meat is not a problem. Having meat for all the people is.

ghaff 8y ago

Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.

alacombe 8y ago
Artificial food will always lack the bio-availabilities of real food our bodies evolved to process. For example, vitamin C artificially synthesized from glucose is more difficult to assimilate by the guts than "natural" vitamin C, especially when consumed with carbs.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  But it’s easy to produce, consume and absorb enough vitamin C. Vitamin C also breaks down fairly easily when cooked (necessary or common with a lot of foods). Iron is a bigger issue where non-absorption of non-organic sources can cause some GI upset.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  That sounds surprising. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ suggests that there is no difference in bioabsorption in humans between synthetic and natural vitamin C, particularly in the cases where you're not taking straight vitamin C (i.e., supplemental vitamin C tablets).
- mirimir 8y ago
  Huh? Vitamin C is L-ascorbic acid. It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.
naravara 8y ago
>Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality. You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals. But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Convince people that ground beef (and chicken for that matter) that's made up partially of plants (probably soy) is more upscale than just ground beef. People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.

travisoneill1 8y ago

I'm not interested in eating less meat so we can grow the population more. It's not a cost issue. Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?

madrasman 8y ago
eating beef being higher quality of life may be less real and more perceived (because of habit and freedom), given that there are several similar substitutes.
- travisoneill1 8y ago
  When it comes to quality of life perceived is real. The substitutes suck. I've tried them. If that changes then I will switch over.
deleted 8y ago
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kieranmaine 8y ago
Would you eat more chicken instead of beef though? Is there a certain meat you couldn't do without and if so why? I'm not against anyone eating meat (although as an ethical - and hypocritical milk drinking vegetarian - I'd like to see animal suffering reduced) just interested in what meat eaters love about meat.
- toast0 8y ago
  Chicken and beef have significantly different tastes, textures, and preparation options. They're substitute goods in the same was as a bicycle and a scooter; they provide the same kind of utility, but one may be preferred over the other for reasons that are hard to enumerate and don't really address the utility.
- travisoneill1 8y ago
  I don't see stacking as many people as possible on Earth as a worthy goal and therefore I am not interested in changing my behavior for the purpose of achieving it. Your animal suffering point has merit. But what the article is talking about is simply growing enough food to feed more people, so that's what I am addressing. However, I think that this is just another symptom of the same thing. Factory farming is only necessary if we need to feed multiple billions.

ergothus 8y ago

As a vegetarian that actually doesn't like many vegetables (I don't like bell peppers, for example, which severely limits my options) and who was a huge carnivore before going veggie ( and with more than one hunter in the family): I see two groups of meat eaters. Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef). Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another. If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.

kawsper 8y ago

Isn't the meat industry already heavily subsidised?

moate 8y ago
Just about every segment of food production is heavily subsidized at this point. We're VERY good at producing a tons of food, and we're also very good at transportation at this point, so the only way to keep those people in business is to buy up tons of milk and pour it down the drain or make excess crops into fertilizers to influence price.

dilap 8y ago

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

moate 8y ago
Actual scientific data proving something that's actually scientifically untrue. Every nutritionist suddenly bribed by a the meat lobby to throw out years of data to the contrary. Proof that the animals being made into food are entirely incapable of thought or physical feeling. That would probably cover everyone.
- alacombe 8y ago
  do you mean humans are designed to digest cellulose ? That's news to me...
  - moate 8y ago
    OP asked what it would take to convince all vegetarians that a meat based diet is healthiest, and that animals can be raised humanely with low environmental impact. Just because you can't digest the straw man you threw together, doesn't make a "meat based" diet a thing these people are going to be convinced to move to. Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming). How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else. You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".

scythe 8y ago

>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.) I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower. Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken. Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above. On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.

kieranmaine 8y ago
A significant portion of the the agricultural land is used to feed animals though - this page has a good diagram on how land is used - https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.

alacombe 8y ago

Perhaps because you can survive on beef alone (including organs meat), but can't survive on lettuce without some sort of supplementation ?

firethief 8y ago
That's an important consideration for people who don't want to eat more than one thing

bane 8y ago

Make it more expensive than other protein sources. That's it.

chadcmulligan 8y ago

Eating meat is way easier than eating balanced vegetarian imho. I've cut down on my meat lately and it does require more time and involvement to eat vegetarian. E.g. an easy dinner is bbq a steak and chuck out some salad, done. Our entire society is based on convenience of eating meat, to get the same from a vegetarian diet is a lot harder to learn, you really have to want to. I still eat fish and eggs for this reason, I'm not really sure how to go full vegetarian, I know its possible but its another level of work for me. There's probably a bit of FUD thrown around by the meat industry that you need protein and iron from red meat as well.

vegasdew 8y ago
It is not that difficult, just a matter of taste/preferences. There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients.
- chadcmulligan 8y ago
  > There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients. I don't think thats true - I've known a number of strict vegetarians (vegans?) and they've often problems with low B12 and iron. Eggs/fish a bit of chicken and a bit of meat make it way easier, but the amount required is way less than the amount of meat most people eat. As in many things the answers in the middle imho.

virtuallynathan 8y ago

Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants. In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land. Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff). Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Kingdom#Arable_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2097.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/8s45q879d/9z903258h/qz20sw09p/USCatSup-06-24-2016.pdf https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainability_FactSheet_TopicBriefs/Beef_Sustainability_Facts_042718-07_041618-06.pdf https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-critical-role-as-upcycler-11fd32a3e85 https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...

hinkley 8y ago
As one particularly loud farmer I'm familiar with is fond of saying, there are certain foods that should only be eaten if you have a gizzard. Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap. The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.
acjohnson55 8y ago
But how much of our meat is raised on pasture versus in meat factories?

ceras 8y ago

Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research. A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences. [0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/ https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/ https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Welfare/dp/0199551162 https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...

ericd 8y ago
You have to raise and kill more chickens per pound of meat, but aren't they much, much less intelligent than cows?
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Yes, but most meat chickens and egg chickens live out their lives in cages, without enough space to turn around with their beaks mutilated. Most cattle live the enormous majority of their lives in a kind of cattle paradise in comparison, with ever present adequate food, no predators and some modicum of medical care.
- ceras 8y ago
  They are, but while intelligence does likely have a correlation with capacity for suffering, it isn't the same thing. For example, a human infant is much less intelligent than an adult, but we do not typically believe their capacity for suffering is lower than an adult. Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable capacity of suffering to mammals. This is considered likely true or at least plausibly true for fish as well, though their brains are sufficiently different from mammals and birds that there's still more research going on to understand it more. Animals that likely have no capacity for suffering are bivalves, for example. It'll take a lot more research to figure out the concrete answer for those in between (e.g. insects, where the latest I've heard is that the most they can suffer is similar to an annoyance or mild pain from a human perspective).

harimau777 8y ago

I think that it would help if more vegetarian advocates focused on finding ways that non-meat diets can fit with people's lifestyles and preferences. For example, I don't like the taste of many vegan dishes and (back when I was more series about working out) I was looking for a high protein, high calorie diet. When I looked into veganism, a lot of the resources came across as dismissive of my goals or felt like they came from a perspective of "we're morally right so we don't have to find a way to work with people's preferences". I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.

cjrd 8y ago
Totally understand your point, and the veg lifestyle is becoming much more mainstream in athletics. e.g. check out Nimai Delgado's (IFBB bodybuilder) instagram posts on simple, high protein, high calorie foods for bodybuilding: https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood

phil248 8y ago

Animal welfare standards are all it would take.

mLuby 8y ago

If enough of the global beef supply were tainted by a human-communicable disease, people might shy away from it. Could the plot of some eco-terrorist film, preferably starring Nicolas Cage. Working title: "The Meating"

metalrain 8y ago

Price, if supply keeps somewhat constant but demand raises I think many would (have to) choose otherwise.

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