4 ms·

> I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true! Yeah, let's all do that and see how many degrees we can tickle out of this whol

• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  The science is not all sorted out and I can't find anything that's a nice succinct summary, but locally grown, grass-fed beef is very likely much better for the environment than the way beef is typically produced these days. Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster.
  • hh3k0 6y ago
    > Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster. I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it: > Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      One of my all time favorite books is called "How to lie with statistics." Your source in no way rebuts my comment. First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all. Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed. This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans. In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved. If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef. Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it. Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation. But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals. If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs. This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid. I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on. No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for. I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix. The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging. Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger. Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a patty and la la la not listening on that detail of "garbage in, garbage out."
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      It would be fair to point out that a lot of land suitable for grazing is unusable for producing wheat or other staple products. Grass grows almost anywhere, including places too rocky, uneven etc. for mechanisation to move over. But beasts can walk where machines won't be able to. There is a reason why transhumance (moving cattle to high places for the summer to eat mountain grass and grow fat on it) has been practised since before civilization. Ötzi, the famous dead from the Tyrolean glacier, was probably a transhumanc-practicing pastoralist, 4000 years ago.
  • simiones 6y ago
    That's true, but you certainly can't feed 7 billion people on an all-beef diet from locally grown, grass-fed beef. With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      No one in their right mind anywhere in the universe would, in all seriousness, actually advocate for all humans everywhere to eat an all beef diet. That's so ridiculous on the face of it I didn't feel I needed to say that.
      • jcims 6y ago
        There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. It's usually done by way of extrapolating to the limit as a counter-example, as if there is anything that is perfectly good or bad. I guess faulty generalization? I've certainly been guilty of it in the past but I do try to catch myself and talk more about where tradeoffs intersect or how one might extrapolate. In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
        • DoreenMichele 6y ago
          There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. If there isn't a word or phrase for it, we should make one up.
      • simiones 6y ago
        Most people who advocate for a healthier diet actually intend for a vast majority of the population to adopt their recommendation - vegetarians and vegans and people who recommend the food pyramid or the balanced plate and so on intend for, ideally, the entire population to follow this recommendation. So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation. To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it. So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
• YinglingLight 6y ago
  Good call, let's perpetually starve our evolutionary meat brains with quinoa and soy. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.