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Vegetarians Who Turned into Butchers

61 points by simonsarris 7y ago

bashy 7y ago
Then read these comments https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancirclejerk/comments/cn4fya/after_careful_consideration_ive_decided_to_become/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancirclejerk/comments/cn4fya/aft... I'm vegan btw.
vzidex 7y ago
This reads like a hitpiece against vegetarianism/veganism to me, or a way to assure omnivores that their current diets are OK and not completely terrible for the environment. > she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment This is patently false, even though she might have believed it. Over 70% of soy grown in the US goes directly into animal feed [1], with some being used for biofuel as well [2] > After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one. The article does raise a good thought though, being the following: > The system’s advocates say it can regenerate vast swaths of grassland, which has the potential to sequester carbon rather than emitting it as factory farm operations do. I haven't yet seen good analysis on whether the grassland tended by grazing livestock does good than the livestock themselves (in the form of methane emissions), but it would be wonderful if it did. Finally, the article thankfully acknowledges the elephant in the room: > Critics of the alternative approach say that not all studies show improved carbon sequestration on grazed grassland, and that the system can’t produce enough meat to meet current demand Regardless of whether or not meat raised in this way is better for the environment and/or peoples' health, there is no way enough meat could ever be raised this way to meet the modern demand for it. The demand for meat worldwide is going _up_, and the typical Western diet that is heavy in meat will continue to be a hugely destructive force on our environment until we _all_ slash our consumption of animal products. [1] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexistence-soybeans-factsheet.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten... (PDF warning) [2] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  >> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” > It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one. I came here to post this. I mean it's quite obvious to me that if your diet consists mostly of junk food, whether you're vegetarian or not, you will feel like crap. I've stopped eating meat almost entirely(except at restaurants, where the "vegetarian" option is vegetables with more vegetables on the side on a platter made of vegetables), and I feel much better than I did when I was cooking meat.
- Theodores 7y ago
  There are those that are vegetarian and there are those that try it for a while. The article could be search/replaced and rewritten to describe an extreme minority of interestingly tattooed people that 'quit smoking for a few years' to go back to smoking, albeit only pipe tobacco, and to work in ethical tobacconists. In this alternate story they go on to sell only pure tobacco without the hundreds of additives, the goal being to help other smokers live healthier lives. A lot of people who try vegetarianism get a bee in their bonnet about it and go preachy on the rest of the world. The rest of the world just shuns them even if they are right, getting told what to eat is not what anyone wants to hear. Others are brought up vegetarian or have a partner who does all the cooking and happens to be vegetarian. In the article I didn't get the idea that any of the people featured were this more down to earth and less preachy crowd.
- maximente 7y ago
  agreed re: processed stuff. i've about had it with "vegetarians" who eat frozen pizza 3x a day whining about being unhealthy. also agreed that the framing about "rediscovering meat" is misleading as hell. > “It can be hard to balance your diet as a vegetarian, especially when you’re younger, and I wasn’t doing it right,” he said. i really don't understand this - there's no justification given, nor is there a reason why it's harder when younger.
situational87 7y ago
The current factory farm system and the nearly infinite levels of suffering we put animals through is a weird aberration we will look back on in hundreds of years as completely insane. It's like a macabre torture machine most people just avoid ever learning about because the don't want to know how dark it really gets while eating their nuggets.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  For cows at least, I’m not sure where this infinite level of suffering you mention comes in. They grow on a ranch well taken care of and have all the food and medical care they could want (more than most Americans can say!). Then they are taken to a feedlot and given all the fattening grain they could ever want (if you’ve ever owned an animal you know that unlimited food is their nirvana) before being humanely slaughtered in an approved and as painless as possible way. Something else to think of is if not for being grown for food they wouldn’t have existed at all. Is not existing better than that life they get? It’s an interesting question. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26669595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26669595/ That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
  - tashoecraft 7y ago
    Uh, I think your making it quite a bit more glamorous than it is. Feedlots are like if you were placed in a bathroom and given a buffet of a single food source that is designed to be both as cheap as possible whilst fattening you as fast as possible. Than having antibiotics given to you in order to survive the bacteria filled area.
    - rjf72 7y ago
      Antibiotics are not given to animals for health reasons (at least not primarily). The antibiotics somehow help the animals grow faster for reasons that are not well understood. As a not so fun fact the vast majority of all antibiotics in the US end up being given to animals.
undoware 7y ago
fascinatingly, I have done this! Was vegetarian, went so far as to take a job as a clerk at an ethical butchery. I eventually went vegan (and returned to engineering again) but I have the deepest respect for those who work with meat but treat the taking of a life with reverence. It is excellent harm reduction. Asking folks, especially indigenous folks, to abstain from a traditional food lifeway is a hard conversation not to be an asshole in unless you are offering something equivalent (in taste and cultural position) that does not involve mega-scale mutilation and trauma to sentient beings. Beyond-Meat-style precise simulation helps. Careful, farm-driven husbandry and ethical slaughter helps enormously too, but obviously scales less well. It's important to me to as cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible, and to treat the taking of a life with great solemnity. Ethical butchery does these things.
- markstos 7y ago
  What does returning to engineering have to do with veganism?
  - jmull 7y ago
    The previous poster is just pointing out that they are no longer an ethical butcher.
  - undoware 7y ago
    As it happens, there kind of is a non-coincidental connection, apart from the obvious 'I was no longer a butchery clerk and needed to make money'. As an engineer I can afford to buy meat substitutes. I can afford veganism, or at least the kind that is comfortable to someone who grew up loving meat and cheese. One day, these substitutes will be more broadly available, but that day isn't today. Also, I am re-inspired by the careful meat/egg/dairy simulation work that has been done by Beyond Meat and similar innovators, and now regard engineering as the correct approach for solving this and other ecological crises at scale. I once again think that my technical training can help save the world, rather than just provide me with savings. I believe in the high-science approach again. This might seem like the obvious solution to the HN audience, but I assure you, lots of folks are drawn to traditional bodies of knowledge and lifeways, and regard them as known-good, and regard the food difficulties the world faces as symptoms of a hasty rush into the embrace of high technology, which in turn entails finance and markets, which in turn entails global capitalism or something like it (e.g. whatever the appropriate term is for the hybrid approach pursued by China.) I myself found this position alluring for quite some time -- "just keep the old ways!" -- but it's a dead end. Artisanal & heirloom approaches to food production have a lot to teach us, but none of those lessons are 'ok great now let's feed a couple billion new folks'. Instead, they are best at teaching us what we've already lost. That in turn might help us avoid the next loss -- or pursue the next restoration.
conjectures 7y ago
TL&DR: a few vegans became meat hipsters. The author thinks being a meat hipster is a very good thing.
- shhshahassa 7y ago
  This should be the title.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
I'm a vegetarian butcher, but in a different vein. These days I only eat meat I personally catch and then kill, having sworn off farmed meat entirely.
- PeanutNore 7y ago
  When I have a freezer full of venison backstrap I don't really want to eat anything else anyway
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    By far the nicest thing I have ever eaten was impala. This was from a restaurant, before I started restricting my diet, but I would love to go and hunt me some of those.
- trax 7y ago
  Do you also talk about chimps and smoke DMT?
- yig 7y ago
  I thought you were going to say that you only butcher vegetables.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    No, but I have heard vegetarianism being described as extremely unsporting, given that vegetables do not have the opportunity to run away.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      Some might fight back, however! https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/carnivorous-plant-that-consumes-baby-salamanders-found-in-ontario-park-1.4462089?cache=yes%3Fot%3DAjaxLayout https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/carnivorous-plant-that-consu...
pmfgpmfg 7y ago
let's not take any life at all, with reverence or otherwise. we're not savages. don't have to pretend like it's the only way to survive, obviously it's not. it might have been in pre-civilized times, but surely we're past that. anecdotally, i feel healthier not eating meat and my 5 times/week lifting and rowing workouts have not suffered.
PeanutNore 7y ago
Eliminating factory farmed meat from my diet is an aspirational thing for me; right now I don't have the available time or mental energy to commit to planning my diet to actually achieve that. Taking up deer hunting certainly helped me get closer to that goal, but mainly I just try to have no more than one serving of meat on any given day and go completely meatless several days a week.
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  You can go and buy free range chicken meat at plenty of grocery stores - they are still not ideal from a animal suffering point of view, but its just a change that requires money, and rarely more. Otherwise, look at the farmer's market at your local community center. A lot of them have close to ethically grown chicken meat.
  - mattcaldwell 7y ago
    While most city-dwellers can get free range meat easily, it can be near impossible in the country without driving long distances.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      ??? I just go down to Bud's Meats, a locker in our small town. Get half a beef or a pig and put it in my freezer, raised on pasture by local farmers. Hand-raised lamb by Lois on her sheep farm.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      What? I grew up in a small town in the country and you get to know the butchers and farmers. Now I'm from Canada where we have less in the way of factory farms, but all of the farmers I'd known preferred to have their cattle graze and chickens run the lot... that's the default. (I know: as kids we used to sneak around the farmer's grazing fields and mess with the cow fences—see who could take the [mild] electric shock the longest by holding onto the wire...) Maybe in places where they raise no animals at all—but I imagine that's relatively sparse in much of the continent. I'd have to look that up, mind you.
paulluuk 7y ago
I realize that most people will read this and go "haha, see that triggered vegan", but please take a moment to honestly consider how horribly bad this article is. The article (besides being about vegetarians and vegans who turned butcher, for some self-contradictory reasons) is about the benefits of grass-fed, expensive meat versus soy- and corn- fed meat. The main benefit is that it's healthier for the animal, and therefore "nicer" for the animal, and also more environmentally friendly. However, it is not at all more environmentally friendly. The impact on the environment is actually a lot higher, because now you need to dedicate large portions of land to grass-fed animals. And yes, there are plenty of areas that don't seem to grow any proper food but do grow grass, which makes it sound like it's a perfectly valid plan. But even if you cut down every forest on earth and use every arible piece of land for grass-fed animals, you would still not have enough space on earth to support our current demand for meat in such a way. They hint towards this a little bit, and suggest that people can counterbalance this by only eating a little piece of meat. But then that is the "real" solution here: to severely reduce your meat consumption. The whole part about grass-fed vs corn-fed is not at all relevant to the story after this point, it's all about reducing consumption. After all, if you only ate a little bit of meat, it would STILL be more sustainable to eat corn/soy-fed meat instead of grass-fed meat. Of course, that's exactly what vegetarians and vegans are doing: they're reducing the amount of meat they eat.. but instead of stopping at, say, 10% of what the average person eats normally, they stop at 0%. And they are often demonized because of that last 10%, whereas stopping at 10% apparently makes you some kind of noble hero. Also, there are some pretty insane lines in this article: > [...] a vegan for five years <attended a> “Kill Your Own Thanksgiving Dinner” event at a local farm. > “It was really morbid. I was the only one who signed up,” she said. If you're a vegan, and you care about animals, why were you signing up for a "kill your own turkey" event? That sounds like one of the least vegan thing you could do. > After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in, she began eating meat again in Europe, where she worked on farms for a few years. >“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. So she stopped eating junkfood and her health improved. This is framed as if it's somehow bad to be vegetarian/vegan for your health, but I hope any skeptical reader will see her problem was a horrible junkfood diet, not that she was vegetarians. How many meat-eaters can be healthy on only eating pizzapockets, yoghurt and hamburgers? > “I have a business based on the fact that I’m sad about the way animals are being treated,” he said. No, you have a business making a profit from the death of animals. > “Since I became a butcher I’ve been called some horrible things on the internet, and it doesn’t seem right,” [...] “There’s a larger problem here: the problem with concentrated feedlots, and with animals being commodities. That’s what we should be attacking, not each other. ” That's like saying "Hey, I treat my slaves really well! We should be fighting the bad slave-holders, not the good ones." No, (ethical) vegans are against using animals as products, and that's what they're commenting on. Not whether or not your meat is healthy.
maximente 7y ago
it's an interesting way of contributing, but, the mathematics are clear: there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter so it's not realistic for the larger problem at hand: how consuming animals is contributing to environmental catastrophe and all it entails (factory farming leading to pumping animals full of pesticides, runoff ruining oceans, clearing rainforests to name some) i think it's inevitable that lab grown meat and/or plant based alternatives get enough economic and environmental momentum to relegate "grass fed"/ethical whatever to a really high price niche forever, so i'd personally just focus efforts at arriving to that point ASAP, be it working for one of these companies, investing, or what have you.
- wildduck 7y ago
  any reference on the math by any chance? Really like to know about these things. Tks.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  > there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean? I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year. The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations. Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point. My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me. If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.
jdietrich 7y ago
Grass-fed beef is worse for the environment than feedlot beef, which is already pretty damned terrible. You need more cows to produce the same amount of beef, which means more methane emissions. There isn't enough pasture land available to meet our demand for beef; cattle farming is already the primary cause of deforestation, which would only be exacerbated by a shift away from feedlots. There is no ethical way to eat beef. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401 https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/whats-driving-deforestation https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/wha... https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...
- nerdile 7y ago
  The higher cost of grass-fed, free-range, etc. meat and poultry serves to internalize the externalities and disincentivizes frequent consumption. So no, it's not worse in and of itself, if it replaced feedlot farming, then we'd see prices spike, consumption plummet, and ideally we'd also see antibiotic and feed corn use sharply drop as well. We could all wish for such a world.
RandomInteger4 7y ago
I ate 4 mcdoubles today and have been ordering 4 mcdoubles consistently recently. They're delicious. I have no intention of abstaining from meat, factory farmed or otherwise any time soon. This comment will likely be downvoted into oblivion and possibly flagged, which will demonstrate the absurdly one-sided nature of these conversations and why this particular thread is filled will virtue signaling about how ethical everyone is, either as a militant anti-omnivore or those who feel guilty about eating meat. Many others either are like me and don't care enough to comment, or they know the inevitable outcome of commenting in such an environment. We just don't care. We're hungry, we're tired from work, and we like meat. EDIT: If it pleases the court, I'm currently cooking broccoli at the moment.

61 points by simonsarris 7y ago

Then read these comments https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancirclejerk/comments/cn4fya/after_careful_consideration_ive_decided_to_become/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancirclejerk/comments/cn4fya/aft... I'm vegan btw.

vzidex 7y ago

This reads like a hitpiece against vegetarianism/veganism to me, or a way to assure omnivores that their current diets are OK and not completely terrible for the environment. > she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment This is patently false, even though she might have believed it. Over 70% of soy grown in the US goes directly into animal feed [1], with some being used for biofuel as well [2] > After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one. The article does raise a good thought though, being the following: > The system’s advocates say it can regenerate vast swaths of grassland, which has the potential to sequester carbon rather than emitting it as factory farm operations do. I haven't yet seen good analysis on whether the grassland tended by grazing livestock does good than the livestock themselves (in the form of methane emissions), but it would be wonderful if it did. Finally, the article thankfully acknowledges the elephant in the room: > Critics of the alternative approach say that not all studies show improved carbon sequestration on grazed grassland, and that the system can’t produce enough meat to meet current demand Regardless of whether or not meat raised in this way is better for the environment and/or peoples' health, there is no way enough meat could ever be raised this way to meet the modern demand for it. The demand for meat worldwide is going _up_, and the typical Western diet that is heavy in meat will continue to be a hugely destructive force on our environment until we _all_ slash our consumption of animal products. [1] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexistence-soybeans-factsheet.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten... (PDF warning) [2] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go

jschwartzi 7y ago
>> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” > It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one. I came here to post this. I mean it's quite obvious to me that if your diet consists mostly of junk food, whether you're vegetarian or not, you will feel like crap. I've stopped eating meat almost entirely(except at restaurants, where the "vegetarian" option is vegetables with more vegetables on the side on a platter made of vegetables), and I feel much better than I did when I was cooking meat.
Theodores 7y ago
There are those that are vegetarian and there are those that try it for a while. The article could be search/replaced and rewritten to describe an extreme minority of interestingly tattooed people that 'quit smoking for a few years' to go back to smoking, albeit only pipe tobacco, and to work in ethical tobacconists. In this alternate story they go on to sell only pure tobacco without the hundreds of additives, the goal being to help other smokers live healthier lives. A lot of people who try vegetarianism get a bee in their bonnet about it and go preachy on the rest of the world. The rest of the world just shuns them even if they are right, getting told what to eat is not what anyone wants to hear. Others are brought up vegetarian or have a partner who does all the cooking and happens to be vegetarian. In the article I didn't get the idea that any of the people featured were this more down to earth and less preachy crowd.
maximente 7y ago
agreed re: processed stuff. i've about had it with "vegetarians" who eat frozen pizza 3x a day whining about being unhealthy. also agreed that the framing about "rediscovering meat" is misleading as hell. > “It can be hard to balance your diet as a vegetarian, especially when you’re younger, and I wasn’t doing it right,” he said. i really don't understand this - there's no justification given, nor is there a reason why it's harder when younger.

situational87 7y ago

The current factory farm system and the nearly infinite levels of suffering we put animals through is a weird aberration we will look back on in hundreds of years as completely insane. It's like a macabre torture machine most people just avoid ever learning about because the don't want to know how dark it really gets while eating their nuggets.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
For cows at least, I’m not sure where this infinite level of suffering you mention comes in. They grow on a ranch well taken care of and have all the food and medical care they could want (more than most Americans can say!). Then they are taken to a feedlot and given all the fattening grain they could ever want (if you’ve ever owned an animal you know that unlimited food is their nirvana) before being humanely slaughtered in an approved and as painless as possible way. Something else to think of is if not for being grown for food they wouldn’t have existed at all. Is not existing better than that life they get? It’s an interesting question. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26669595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26669595/ That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
- tashoecraft 7y ago
  Uh, I think your making it quite a bit more glamorous than it is. Feedlots are like if you were placed in a bathroom and given a buffet of a single food source that is designed to be both as cheap as possible whilst fattening you as fast as possible. Than having antibiotics given to you in order to survive the bacteria filled area.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    Antibiotics are not given to animals for health reasons (at least not primarily). The antibiotics somehow help the animals grow faster for reasons that are not well understood. As a not so fun fact the vast majority of all antibiotics in the US end up being given to animals.

undoware 7y ago

fascinatingly, I have done this! Was vegetarian, went so far as to take a job as a clerk at an ethical butchery. I eventually went vegan (and returned to engineering again) but I have the deepest respect for those who work with meat but treat the taking of a life with reverence. It is excellent harm reduction. Asking folks, especially indigenous folks, to abstain from a traditional food lifeway is a hard conversation not to be an asshole in unless you are offering something equivalent (in taste and cultural position) that does not involve mega-scale mutilation and trauma to sentient beings. Beyond-Meat-style precise simulation helps. Careful, farm-driven husbandry and ethical slaughter helps enormously too, but obviously scales less well. It's important to me to as cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible, and to treat the taking of a life with great solemnity. Ethical butchery does these things.

markstos 7y ago
What does returning to engineering have to do with veganism?
- jmull 7y ago
  The previous poster is just pointing out that they are no longer an ethical butcher.
- undoware 7y ago
  As it happens, there kind of is a non-coincidental connection, apart from the obvious 'I was no longer a butchery clerk and needed to make money'. As an engineer I can afford to buy meat substitutes. I can afford veganism, or at least the kind that is comfortable to someone who grew up loving meat and cheese. One day, these substitutes will be more broadly available, but that day isn't today. Also, I am re-inspired by the careful meat/egg/dairy simulation work that has been done by Beyond Meat and similar innovators, and now regard engineering as the correct approach for solving this and other ecological crises at scale. I once again think that my technical training can help save the world, rather than just provide me with savings. I believe in the high-science approach again. This might seem like the obvious solution to the HN audience, but I assure you, lots of folks are drawn to traditional bodies of knowledge and lifeways, and regard them as known-good, and regard the food difficulties the world faces as symptoms of a hasty rush into the embrace of high technology, which in turn entails finance and markets, which in turn entails global capitalism or something like it (e.g. whatever the appropriate term is for the hybrid approach pursued by China.) I myself found this position alluring for quite some time -- "just keep the old ways!" -- but it's a dead end. Artisanal & heirloom approaches to food production have a lot to teach us, but none of those lessons are 'ok great now let's feed a couple billion new folks'. Instead, they are best at teaching us what we've already lost. That in turn might help us avoid the next loss -- or pursue the next restoration.

conjectures 7y ago

TL&DR: a few vegans became meat hipsters. The author thinks being a meat hipster is a very good thing.

shhshahassa 7y ago
This should be the title.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

I'm a vegetarian butcher, but in a different vein. These days I only eat meat I personally catch and then kill, having sworn off farmed meat entirely.

PeanutNore 7y ago
When I have a freezer full of venison backstrap I don't really want to eat anything else anyway
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  By far the nicest thing I have ever eaten was impala. This was from a restaurant, before I started restricting my diet, but I would love to go and hunt me some of those.
trax 7y ago
Do you also talk about chimps and smoke DMT?
yig 7y ago
I thought you were going to say that you only butcher vegetables.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  No, but I have heard vegetarianism being described as extremely unsporting, given that vegetables do not have the opportunity to run away.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    Some might fight back, however! https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/carnivorous-plant-that-consumes-baby-salamanders-found-in-ontario-park-1.4462089?cache=yes%3Fot%3DAjaxLayout https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/carnivorous-plant-that-consu...

pmfgpmfg 7y ago

let's not take any life at all, with reverence or otherwise. we're not savages. don't have to pretend like it's the only way to survive, obviously it's not. it might have been in pre-civilized times, but surely we're past that. anecdotally, i feel healthier not eating meat and my 5 times/week lifting and rowing workouts have not suffered.

PeanutNore 7y ago

Eliminating factory farmed meat from my diet is an aspirational thing for me; right now I don't have the available time or mental energy to commit to planning my diet to actually achieve that. Taking up deer hunting certainly helped me get closer to that goal, but mainly I just try to have no more than one serving of meat on any given day and go completely meatless several days a week.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
You can go and buy free range chicken meat at plenty of grocery stores - they are still not ideal from a animal suffering point of view, but its just a change that requires money, and rarely more. Otherwise, look at the farmer's market at your local community center. A lot of them have close to ethically grown chicken meat.
- mattcaldwell 7y ago
  While most city-dwellers can get free range meat easily, it can be near impossible in the country without driving long distances.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    ??? I just go down to Bud's Meats, a locker in our small town. Get half a beef or a pig and put it in my freezer, raised on pasture by local farmers. Hand-raised lamb by Lois on her sheep farm.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    What? I grew up in a small town in the country and you get to know the butchers and farmers. Now I'm from Canada where we have less in the way of factory farms, but all of the farmers I'd known preferred to have their cattle graze and chickens run the lot... that's the default. (I know: as kids we used to sneak around the farmer's grazing fields and mess with the cow fences—see who could take the [mild] electric shock the longest by holding onto the wire...) Maybe in places where they raise no animals at all—but I imagine that's relatively sparse in much of the continent. I'd have to look that up, mind you.

paulluuk 7y ago

I realize that most people will read this and go "haha, see that triggered vegan", but please take a moment to honestly consider how horribly bad this article is. The article (besides being about vegetarians and vegans who turned butcher, for some self-contradictory reasons) is about the benefits of grass-fed, expensive meat versus soy- and corn- fed meat. The main benefit is that it's healthier for the animal, and therefore "nicer" for the animal, and also more environmentally friendly. However, it is not at all more environmentally friendly. The impact on the environment is actually a lot higher, because now you need to dedicate large portions of land to grass-fed animals. And yes, there are plenty of areas that don't seem to grow any proper food but do grow grass, which makes it sound like it's a perfectly valid plan. But even if you cut down every forest on earth and use every arible piece of land for grass-fed animals, you would still not have enough space on earth to support our current demand for meat in such a way. They hint towards this a little bit, and suggest that people can counterbalance this by only eating a little piece of meat. But then that is the "real" solution here: to severely reduce your meat consumption. The whole part about grass-fed vs corn-fed is not at all relevant to the story after this point, it's all about reducing consumption. After all, if you only ate a little bit of meat, it would STILL be more sustainable to eat corn/soy-fed meat instead of grass-fed meat. Of course, that's exactly what vegetarians and vegans are doing: they're reducing the amount of meat they eat.. but instead of stopping at, say, 10% of what the average person eats normally, they stop at 0%. And they are often demonized because of that last 10%, whereas stopping at 10% apparently makes you some kind of noble hero. Also, there are some pretty insane lines in this article: > [...] a vegan for five years <attended a> “Kill Your Own Thanksgiving Dinner” event at a local farm. > “It was really morbid. I was the only one who signed up,” she said. If you're a vegan, and you care about animals, why were you signing up for a "kill your own turkey" event? That sounds like one of the least vegan thing you could do. > After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in, she began eating meat again in Europe, where she worked on farms for a few years. >“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. So she stopped eating junkfood and her health improved. This is framed as if it's somehow bad to be vegetarian/vegan for your health, but I hope any skeptical reader will see her problem was a horrible junkfood diet, not that she was vegetarians. How many meat-eaters can be healthy on only eating pizzapockets, yoghurt and hamburgers? > “I have a business based on the fact that I’m sad about the way animals are being treated,” he said. No, you have a business making a profit from the death of animals. > “Since I became a butcher I’ve been called some horrible things on the internet, and it doesn’t seem right,” [...] “There’s a larger problem here: the problem with concentrated feedlots, and with animals being commodities. That’s what we should be attacking, not each other. ” That's like saying "Hey, I treat my slaves really well! We should be fighting the bad slave-holders, not the good ones." No, (ethical) vegans are against using animals as products, and that's what they're commenting on. Not whether or not your meat is healthy.

maximente 7y ago

it's an interesting way of contributing, but, the mathematics are clear: there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter so it's not realistic for the larger problem at hand: how consuming animals is contributing to environmental catastrophe and all it entails (factory farming leading to pumping animals full of pesticides, runoff ruining oceans, clearing rainforests to name some) i think it's inevitable that lab grown meat and/or plant based alternatives get enough economic and environmental momentum to relegate "grass fed"/ethical whatever to a really high price niche forever, so i'd personally just focus efforts at arriving to that point ASAP, be it working for one of these companies, investing, or what have you.

wildduck 7y ago
any reference on the math by any chance? Really like to know about these things. Tks.
wool_gather 7y ago
> there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean? I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year. The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations. Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point. My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me. If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.

jdietrich 7y ago

Grass-fed beef is worse for the environment than feedlot beef, which is already pretty damned terrible. You need more cows to produce the same amount of beef, which means more methane emissions. There isn't enough pasture land available to meet our demand for beef; cattle farming is already the primary cause of deforestation, which would only be exacerbated by a shift away from feedlots. There is no ethical way to eat beef. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401 https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/whats-driving-deforestation https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/wha... https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...

nerdile 7y ago
The higher cost of grass-fed, free-range, etc. meat and poultry serves to internalize the externalities and disincentivizes frequent consumption. So no, it's not worse in and of itself, if it replaced feedlot farming, then we'd see prices spike, consumption plummet, and ideally we'd also see antibiotic and feed corn use sharply drop as well. We could all wish for such a world.

RandomInteger4 7y ago

I ate 4 mcdoubles today and have been ordering 4 mcdoubles consistently recently. They're delicious. I have no intention of abstaining from meat, factory farmed or otherwise any time soon. This comment will likely be downvoted into oblivion and possibly flagged, which will demonstrate the absurdly one-sided nature of these conversations and why this particular thread is filled will virtue signaling about how ethical everyone is, either as a militant anti-omnivore or those who feel guilty about eating meat. Many others either are like me and don't care enough to comment, or they know the inevitable outcome of commenting in such an environment. We just don't care. We're hungry, we're tired from work, and we like meat. EDIT: If it pleases the court, I'm currently cooking broccoli at the moment.