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At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge

At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense. Fixing the corruption (both democratic and republican parties) in our our political would end up helping the environment a lot. That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system. It will never happen, the elites have won that war. One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy.

yifanl 7y ago
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. Beyond Meat is competing with freezer aisle foodstuff and there it handily wins out in just about every category (price, taste, nutrition), even if objectively it's unhealthy for you. There's a world of vegetarian options outside of the preprocessed fauxmeats (including the entire produce section).
the_gastropod 7y ago
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. I totally get this, and have similar feelings. But I try to remind my self what Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are competing with: meat. They have similar saturated fat profiles to their "real" alternatives. I look at these meat alternatives as mostly beneficial for: 1. Meat eaters looking to eat more sustainably, but continue eating burgers and sausages and whatnot occasionally 2. "Cook out" situations where you can bring a good veggie burger and not be a total social weirdo eating grilled corn by yourself. And it's a good conversation starter, and others are usually intrigued enough to try, and impressed after having done so.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  Why do you guys think saturated fat is bad for you? Certainly when fried it's much much healthier as it doesn't decompose into cancerous aldehydes. The science on this is very tainted so I would be very careful about assumptions here. Are there other things apart from saturated fat you are worried about? [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hVRFc1y/which-oils-are-best-to-cook-with https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hV...
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Literally first hit on Google: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5475232/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5475232/ "The science on this is very tainted" isn't a particularly strong argument.
    - andy_ppp 7y ago
      Your article supports my argument but your comment sounds like you disagree :-) which is it?
      - airstrike 7y ago
        It doesn't support your argument. "Replacing SAFA by cis-polyunsaturated fatty acids was associated with significant CHD risk reduction, which was confirmed by randomized controlled trials."
        andy_ppp 7y ago
        "In prospective observational studies and randomized controlled trials, higher total SAFA intakes were not associated with higher incident CHD events or mortality, but replacement nutrients were not taken into account." So I see the conclusion as a mixed bag: "Although higher SAFA intake might increase CHD risk by increasing plasma LDL-C [70], recent meta-analyses of prospective observational studies [1, 71, 72] reported that when compensating nutrients were not taken into account, SAFA intake was not associated with CHD or stroke mortality, all-cause mortality, or myocardial infarction. Two large, independent, prospective cohorts of US men and women confirmed this result [73]1. In a prospective Dutch cohort, higher total SAFA consumption was related to lower risk of ischemic heart disease, but not to CHD risk [74]. In another Dutch cohort, a positive association was observed between CHD risk and palmitic acid, but not total SAFA intake [75]." So the study you quote has lots of different outcomes as if the science is very difficult and under different conditions different results are found.
TheBeardKing 7y ago
We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can sometimes be filled with baked potato, corn on the cob, some quinoa thing, but it's not as satisfying and gets boring. We don't like buying processed foods, and soups without meat are nearly a no-go for me. But hey, I'm limiting consumption so I guess I'm doing my part.
- Pxtl 7y ago
  Yeah, as a vegetarian I can do some awesome things with lentils, but I remember the days when I could rub some spice on a pork chop and throw it on the grill and then have something boxed and starchy on the side and have a pretty decent meal. Meanwhile, a good lentil stew is a much more involved project. Much less home-made veggie burger patties which have dozens of ingredients and elaborate preparation processes. Going full vegan is even harder, because cheese is a pretty good shortcut to making hearty food.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    It's not as hard as you might imagine. Cheese is great because it's an umami bomb. However, there are other umami bombs out there (tomatoes being one!). As many people have said, though, it's all about the knowledge. A miso garlic sauce is insane, and easy to make, but very few people outside of Japan know about it. I'm not really sure exactly where the umami gets in, but fermented hot sauces are also amazing for filling out flavour (it could be the fermentation). To cook good vegan food it's not actually much harder, but you practically have to learn to cook all over again. (Was vegan for 10 years... hopes people enjoyed my cooking as much as I did... no guarantees ;-) ).
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    I think the trick to reducing food prep labor is larger batches. Maybe that means you eat the same thing 4 or more times in a week. Or maybe that means you freeze some of it for later. But it doesn't really take any more work to make a 3x batch of lentil stew than it does to make the regular sized batch.
ashelmire 7y ago
> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. Regular veggie burgers and other products (not trying to imitate meat) are usually really good. They should embrace the fact that they can include a vast array of vegetables and spices. Example: Morningstar farms has a chickpea burger I really like. Also it's much cheaper than Beyond products. I share your concern about the Beyond products (and other vegetarian products); if I want a ton of saturated fat, I'd just eat meat. Chicken and fish are healthier than Beyond. A society that eats less meat (or none) is inevitable given time, for both moral and practical reasons of health, scarcity and environmental impact. We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy. Just providing food options people enjoy without meat will reduce meat consumption without pushing a moral agenda that often receives hysterical responses. Disclaimer: I eat meat, though I've been eating less for the above reasons.
- magduf 7y ago
  >We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy. That just isn't realistic; you'll wind up with a lot of really unhealthy people eating food they hate. Not everyone is good at cooking, and one big reason veganism is so unpopular is because it's so hard to make anything that tastes good with it. Meat is easy to cook, even for people who aren't very good at cooking. And veganism is generally unhealthy, because most people aren't dedicated or good enough at it to get the proper nutrition, so they leave out critical nutrients, whereas with meat it's really easy to get everything you need (like iron). Expecting the whole populace to get good at cooking vegan food is like expecting the whole populace to become very skilled at C++ programming (including template metaprogramming). It isn't going to happen. If someone makes vegan pre-made meals that can just be microwaved, that would be different.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Your vision of the world is really quite dystopian. Cooking is a basic part of human life and has been for millenia. Comparing it to C++ programming is absurd. Once the true costs of meat are priced in, people will figure it out. They're not going to just starve, chucking a few things in a pot is not some great hardship. The viewpoint that cooking is some super difficult thing seems to be prevalent on Hacker News. If anything, cooking vegetables is far easier than cooking meat, because it's difficult to get it wrong. Meat can go bad far more easily, requires cooking properly, etc. By contrast most vegetables can be eaten raw, or 'chuck it in a pot and boil it and wait a bit'. Add spices and oil. Done.
cribbles 7y ago
Corporate welfare is one thing. I'd also like to direct readers to this thread from yesterday: https://twitter.com/unabanned/status/1159272783676891136 https://twitter.com/unabanned/status/1159272783676891136 - which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment. This shows that the problem is not simply corrupt legislation and lobbying, but a de facto symbiotic relationship between the meat industry, federal immigration authorities and border coyotes to maintain artificially low prices.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  It's also true for the agricultural industry in the US in general though.
- cronix 7y ago
  What will happen to veggie prices when we go to a $15 min wage? Do other farms not benefit from illegal labor?
  - frankbreetz 7y ago
    It takes considerably less labor to farm vegetables than to farm vegetables and feed those vegetables to animals and also take care of those animals. So vegetable prices may go up, but considerably less so when compared to meat.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      Got a source for that? I've never been involved in commercial vegetable farming or large-scale cattle raising, but small-scale ranching is really not that labor intensive in my experience.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        Scale seems to be exactly the problem. Industrial scale crop farming is highly automated. There aren't similar automations as you scale up cattle, and slaughterhouse work/butchering includes several skilled labor tasks with no similar skilled labor equivalents in vegetable farming.
ObscureMind 7y ago
> That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system We do have a chance. It's not going to be long until a critical mass of individuals understand that democracy is a system that legitimizes coercion, and that taxation is theft and generates poverty. We just need one more generation until that happens. When people reach that conclusion, they will move their money away from fiat currencies and they will move their information into distributed systems (eg. blockchains). By consequence they will make states and coercion not viable. Without the ability to control currencies, states go bankrupt and can't even pay for people to steal your money. Welcome to anarcho-capitalism, while I wait for the downvotes.
- DiseasedBadger 7y ago
  If putting your money in crypto prevents you from paying taxes, it's you who'd go to jail. If any government saw a dip in taxes, they'd just pass a law requiring an "internet driver's license". Then require your wallet number. Such licenses are already common, outside the US. So, less anarcho anything. More jail time, and then forced labor, and then one again paying taxes. Sorry.
  - ObscureMind 7y ago
    Wages must be paid to people in order for those taxes to be collected, and in order for jails to be built and operated. "The government" is highly inefficient at doing whatever it proposes itself to do. All the work it performs doesn't provide actual value. So much so it can only make its own accounting "work" by the means of printing money. Without that ability it wouldn't be able to honor the debts it acquired while it emitted currency, potentially leading to a default. If it manages to get out of that, it would have to be significantly downsized, with many of its functions migrating into the free market. "The government" is composed by individuals, such as politicians and public workers, plus corporations associated with them. All of those people have financial incentives. Once fiat currencies start losing too much of their purchase power, even those people won't want to keep using them, feeding into an ever decreasing size of the state. Those people would have no financial incentive for creating an "internet tax", or using guns to steal other people's money in the presence of a market that is now more free, growing fast and making people wealthier. They'll just leave "the government" to be paid better, or even to get paid in the first place, as "the government" might become bankrupt. Of course "the government" will try to collect taxes by all means imaginable. Fat chance. With less and less ability to pay its officers, it will progressively lose its power to enforce taxation. Keep an eye on the financial crisis that is overdue, and what's going to happen after it, so that you understand how short the life of the state is. But if you really think that's bollocks, do yourself a favor and don't accumulate crypto currencies.
hanniabu 7y ago
> At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense. Unfortunately, in my experience when I bring this up the typical response us that I must be a socialist.
- magduf 7y ago
  In America, saying anything unAmerican is "socialist". So advocating things like much stricter gun laws, more public transit, or ending tax breaks and other giveaways to large politically-connected corporations are unAmerican and therefore "socialist" in American parlance.
jackewiehose 7y ago
> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients No, why? Not at all... My cooking skill level is knowing how to use a stove. What good ingredients do you mean? In my experience cooking meat is always the hardest part.
ulises314 7y ago
Yeah, survival is more important that you having comfort food.
asdfman123 7y ago
You want to find a rare issue with bipartisan support? Try raising the price of food and seeing how people like it.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You want to find a rare issue with bipartisan support? Try raising the price of food and seeing how people like it. Food stamps are designed to raise the market clearing price of food as a subsidy to agriculture (they’ve since become a means-tested welfare program as well, while retaining the original purpose); they have fairly strong political support, which definitely shows a partisan divide. The Dairy Price Support Program and other agricultural price support programs likely continue to exist despite having the sole purpose of raising the price of food; were raising the price of food the kind of third-rail you are trying to imply, there would be a bipartisan consensus against such programs that would make it impossible to retain them.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    Actually, we started subsidizing farms to compete against the Soviet Union during the cold war, to demonstrate the superiority of "capitalism." They served their purpose well, but now they're almost impossible to remove. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Farm subsidies started during the New Deal. I believe one effect of those subsidies was to maintain a reserve of farm capacity that was used in WWII to provide needed food aid to our allies, including the Soviets.
johnisgood 7y ago
> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. What? I make stew of any legumes and it does not require more skills than cooking meat.
- qkls 7y ago
  Good vegetarian food can be easy but some ingredients like tofu require seasoning. Almost all meat dishes can be made with only salt and pepper.
gingabriska 7y ago
I read some study somewhere, which says eating meat makes you more sexually attractive and your features are developed better if you eat meat. If there the case, I don't think you can convince people to not eat meat because it's like telling them to stop using makeup or stop making efforts to become mor handsome/beautiful

yifanl 7y ago

> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. Beyond Meat is competing with freezer aisle foodstuff and there it handily wins out in just about every category (price, taste, nutrition), even if objectively it's unhealthy for you. There's a world of vegetarian options outside of the preprocessed fauxmeats (including the entire produce section).

the_gastropod 7y ago

> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. I totally get this, and have similar feelings. But I try to remind my self what Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are competing with: meat. They have similar saturated fat profiles to their "real" alternatives. I look at these meat alternatives as mostly beneficial for: 1. Meat eaters looking to eat more sustainably, but continue eating burgers and sausages and whatnot occasionally 2. "Cook out" situations where you can bring a good veggie burger and not be a total social weirdo eating grilled corn by yourself. And it's a good conversation starter, and others are usually intrigued enough to try, and impressed after having done so.

andy_ppp 7y ago
Why do you guys think saturated fat is bad for you? Certainly when fried it's much much healthier as it doesn't decompose into cancerous aldehydes. The science on this is very tainted so I would be very careful about assumptions here. Are there other things apart from saturated fat you are worried about? [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hVRFc1y/which-oils-are-best-to-cook-with https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hV...
- airstrike 7y ago
  Literally first hit on Google: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5475232/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5475232/ "The science on this is very tainted" isn't a particularly strong argument.
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    Your article supports my argument but your comment sounds like you disagree :-) which is it?
    - airstrike 7y ago
      It doesn't support your argument. "Replacing SAFA by cis-polyunsaturated fatty acids was associated with significant CHD risk reduction, which was confirmed by randomized controlled trials."
      - andy_ppp 7y ago
        "In prospective observational studies and randomized controlled trials, higher total SAFA intakes were not associated with higher incident CHD events or mortality, but replacement nutrients were not taken into account." So I see the conclusion as a mixed bag: "Although higher SAFA intake might increase CHD risk by increasing plasma LDL-C [70], recent meta-analyses of prospective observational studies [1, 71, 72] reported that when compensating nutrients were not taken into account, SAFA intake was not associated with CHD or stroke mortality, all-cause mortality, or myocardial infarction. Two large, independent, prospective cohorts of US men and women confirmed this result [73]1. In a prospective Dutch cohort, higher total SAFA consumption was related to lower risk of ischemic heart disease, but not to CHD risk [74]. In another Dutch cohort, a positive association was observed between CHD risk and palmitic acid, but not total SAFA intake [75]." So the study you quote has lots of different outcomes as if the science is very difficult and under different conditions different results are found.

TheBeardKing 7y ago

We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can sometimes be filled with baked potato, corn on the cob, some quinoa thing, but it's not as satisfying and gets boring. We don't like buying processed foods, and soups without meat are nearly a no-go for me. But hey, I'm limiting consumption so I guess I'm doing my part.

Pxtl 7y ago
Yeah, as a vegetarian I can do some awesome things with lentils, but I remember the days when I could rub some spice on a pork chop and throw it on the grill and then have something boxed and starchy on the side and have a pretty decent meal. Meanwhile, a good lentil stew is a much more involved project. Much less home-made veggie burger patties which have dozens of ingredients and elaborate preparation processes. Going full vegan is even harder, because cheese is a pretty good shortcut to making hearty food.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  It's not as hard as you might imagine. Cheese is great because it's an umami bomb. However, there are other umami bombs out there (tomatoes being one!). As many people have said, though, it's all about the knowledge. A miso garlic sauce is insane, and easy to make, but very few people outside of Japan know about it. I'm not really sure exactly where the umami gets in, but fermented hot sauces are also amazing for filling out flavour (it could be the fermentation). To cook good vegan food it's not actually much harder, but you practically have to learn to cook all over again. (Was vegan for 10 years... hopes people enjoyed my cooking as much as I did... no guarantees ;-) ).
- LargeWu 7y ago
  I think the trick to reducing food prep labor is larger batches. Maybe that means you eat the same thing 4 or more times in a week. Or maybe that means you freeze some of it for later. But it doesn't really take any more work to make a 3x batch of lentil stew than it does to make the regular sized batch.

ashelmire 7y ago

> I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. Regular veggie burgers and other products (not trying to imitate meat) are usually really good. They should embrace the fact that they can include a vast array of vegetables and spices. Example: Morningstar farms has a chickpea burger I really like. Also it's much cheaper than Beyond products. I share your concern about the Beyond products (and other vegetarian products); if I want a ton of saturated fat, I'd just eat meat. Chicken and fish are healthier than Beyond. A society that eats less meat (or none) is inevitable given time, for both moral and practical reasons of health, scarcity and environmental impact. We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy. Just providing food options people enjoy without meat will reduce meat consumption without pushing a moral agenda that often receives hysterical responses. Disclaimer: I eat meat, though I've been eating less for the above reasons.

magduf 7y ago
>We should teach people to cook healthy vegan food that they enjoy. That just isn't realistic; you'll wind up with a lot of really unhealthy people eating food they hate. Not everyone is good at cooking, and one big reason veganism is so unpopular is because it's so hard to make anything that tastes good with it. Meat is easy to cook, even for people who aren't very good at cooking. And veganism is generally unhealthy, because most people aren't dedicated or good enough at it to get the proper nutrition, so they leave out critical nutrients, whereas with meat it's really easy to get everything you need (like iron). Expecting the whole populace to get good at cooking vegan food is like expecting the whole populace to become very skilled at C++ programming (including template metaprogramming). It isn't going to happen. If someone makes vegan pre-made meals that can just be microwaved, that would be different.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Your vision of the world is really quite dystopian. Cooking is a basic part of human life and has been for millenia. Comparing it to C++ programming is absurd. Once the true costs of meat are priced in, people will figure it out. They're not going to just starve, chucking a few things in a pot is not some great hardship. The viewpoint that cooking is some super difficult thing seems to be prevalent on Hacker News. If anything, cooking vegetables is far easier than cooking meat, because it's difficult to get it wrong. Meat can go bad far more easily, requires cooking properly, etc. By contrast most vegetables can be eaten raw, or 'chuck it in a pot and boil it and wait a bit'. Add spices and oil. Done.

cribbles 7y ago

Corporate welfare is one thing. I'd also like to direct readers to this thread from yesterday: https://twitter.com/unabanned/status/1159272783676891136 https://twitter.com/unabanned/status/1159272783676891136 - which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment. This shows that the problem is not simply corrupt legislation and lobbying, but a de facto symbiotic relationship between the meat industry, federal immigration authorities and border coyotes to maintain artificially low prices.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago
It's also true for the agricultural industry in the US in general though.
cronix 7y ago
What will happen to veggie prices when we go to a $15 min wage? Do other farms not benefit from illegal labor?
- frankbreetz 7y ago
  It takes considerably less labor to farm vegetables than to farm vegetables and feed those vegetables to animals and also take care of those animals. So vegetable prices may go up, but considerably less so when compared to meat.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    Got a source for that? I've never been involved in commercial vegetable farming or large-scale cattle raising, but small-scale ranching is really not that labor intensive in my experience.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Scale seems to be exactly the problem. Industrial scale crop farming is highly automated. There aren't similar automations as you scale up cattle, and slaughterhouse work/butchering includes several skilled labor tasks with no similar skilled labor equivalents in vegetable farming.

ObscureMind 7y ago

> That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system We do have a chance. It's not going to be long until a critical mass of individuals understand that democracy is a system that legitimizes coercion, and that taxation is theft and generates poverty. We just need one more generation until that happens. When people reach that conclusion, they will move their money away from fiat currencies and they will move their information into distributed systems (eg. blockchains). By consequence they will make states and coercion not viable. Without the ability to control currencies, states go bankrupt and can't even pay for people to steal your money. Welcome to anarcho-capitalism, while I wait for the downvotes.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago
If putting your money in crypto prevents you from paying taxes, it's you who'd go to jail. If any government saw a dip in taxes, they'd just pass a law requiring an "internet driver's license". Then require your wallet number. Such licenses are already common, outside the US. So, less anarcho anything. More jail time, and then forced labor, and then one again paying taxes. Sorry.
- ObscureMind 7y ago
  Wages must be paid to people in order for those taxes to be collected, and in order for jails to be built and operated. "The government" is highly inefficient at doing whatever it proposes itself to do. All the work it performs doesn't provide actual value. So much so it can only make its own accounting "work" by the means of printing money. Without that ability it wouldn't be able to honor the debts it acquired while it emitted currency, potentially leading to a default. If it manages to get out of that, it would have to be significantly downsized, with many of its functions migrating into the free market. "The government" is composed by individuals, such as politicians and public workers, plus corporations associated with them. All of those people have financial incentives. Once fiat currencies start losing too much of their purchase power, even those people won't want to keep using them, feeding into an ever decreasing size of the state. Those people would have no financial incentive for creating an "internet tax", or using guns to steal other people's money in the presence of a market that is now more free, growing fast and making people wealthier. They'll just leave "the government" to be paid better, or even to get paid in the first place, as "the government" might become bankrupt. Of course "the government" will try to collect taxes by all means imaginable. Fat chance. With less and less ability to pay its officers, it will progressively lose its power to enforce taxation. Keep an eye on the financial crisis that is overdue, and what's going to happen after it, so that you understand how short the life of the state is. But if you really think that's bollocks, do yourself a favor and don't accumulate crypto currencies.

hanniabu 7y ago

> At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense. Unfortunately, in my experience when I bring this up the typical response us that I must be a socialist.

magduf 7y ago
In America, saying anything unAmerican is "socialist". So advocating things like much stricter gun laws, more public transit, or ending tax breaks and other giveaways to large politically-connected corporations are unAmerican and therefore "socialist" in American parlance.

jackewiehose 7y ago

> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients No, why? Not at all... My cooking skill level is knowing how to use a stove. What good ingredients do you mean? In my experience cooking meat is always the hardest part.

ulises314 7y ago

Yeah, survival is more important that you having comfort food.

asdfman123 7y ago

You want to find a rare issue with bipartisan support? Try raising the price of food and seeing how people like it.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> You want to find a rare issue with bipartisan support? Try raising the price of food and seeing how people like it. Food stamps are designed to raise the market clearing price of food as a subsidy to agriculture (they’ve since become a means-tested welfare program as well, while retaining the original purpose); they have fairly strong political support, which definitely shows a partisan divide. The Dairy Price Support Program and other agricultural price support programs likely continue to exist despite having the sole purpose of raising the price of food; were raising the price of food the kind of third-rail you are trying to imply, there would be a bipartisan consensus against such programs that would make it impossible to retain them.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Actually, we started subsidizing farms to compete against the Soviet Union during the cold war, to demonstrate the superiority of "capitalism." They served their purpose well, but now they're almost impossible to remove. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Farm subsidies started during the New Deal. I believe one effect of those subsidies was to maintain a reserve of farm capacity that was used in WWII to provide needed food aid to our allies, including the Soviets.

johnisgood 7y ago

> One problem with reducing meat consumption is the general low skill level for cooking. Vegetarian food can taste better than meat dishes but you need skill and good ingredients. I have mixed feelings about Beyond Meat: my wife and I love the hot Italian sausage and burgers, but it is really not that healthy. What? I make stew of any legumes and it does not require more skills than cooking meat.

qkls 7y ago
Good vegetarian food can be easy but some ingredients like tofu require seasoning. Almost all meat dishes can be made with only salt and pepper.

gingabriska 7y ago

I read some study somewhere, which says eating meat makes you more sexually attractive and your features are developed better if you eat meat. If there the case, I don't think you can convince people to not eat meat because it's like telling them to stop using makeup or stop making efforts to become mor handsome/beautiful