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Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our g

Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap. I don't know why more people aren't trying to sell this to the "free market" crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat should cost more than it does, not just in the sense of "you're not paying for the true environmental cost", but also in the sense of, "you're not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product." The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein's growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren't determined just by the free market. That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things. And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I'm not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn't pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we've all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.

nemo44x 6y ago
Have you considered why we do this? How would our society be different if only well-to-do people could eat meat regularly? Would a regular guy be content with wealthy people eating steaks while jet-setting around the globe because of climate change? I think a populist uprising would occur almost immediately and we’d see heads on pikes with their decapitated mouths stuffed with cabbage for all to see. It would be super easy for a party to take advantage of this and they would. In short, it would be a miserable time.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things. I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap. We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics. But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight. The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    I just think it’s politically a non-starter. They tried to tax sugary drinks in the most liberal city in America and heads exploded.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      >I just think it’s politically a non-starter. That's a separate issue to whether we should value a free market. Or is it? If we're only going to support a "free market" in spots where it's politically convenient, but be enthusiastic about stripping any regulations that are politically viable, then what we'll see is a systemic stripping of regulations that protect people without power, without touching regulations of people with power. This ends in disaster.
- zionic 6y ago
  The rich: steak is only for us now, for the climate and stuff The poor: Time to eat the rich
- markdown 6y ago
  This is nonsense. People elsewhere in the world pay 50% to 100% more than what Americans pay for beef. Removing some subsidies and making beef slightly more expensive would save money and people would just eat beef one day less/week.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    And they'll replace their meat with what? More sugar? Bread? Sugary bread? I think you underestimate how big of a deal food is to people. I believe that any change will be towards food that's even worse for people.
    - dnhz 6y ago
      Hopefully with less food in this theoretical scenario because most people are overweight.
    - jamil7 6y ago
      Why would people replace meat with sugar?
      - thejynxed 6y ago
        Because of how much of it is added into every alternative meat replacement product, and it's a shockingly high amount if you read the labels on some "organic" and "plant-based" products.
        jamil7 6y ago
        I have a few issues with this. As far as I know health concerns related to meat replacements aren't to do with sugar levels, probably more likely with saturated fat and sodium (which exists in regular meat too). Also I don't know why you bothered to put organic in there as well since the we're talking about meat replacement. Finally I think you're making the assumption that if we don't eat meat we need meat replacements at all.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  If meat is the trigger to generate real social change then great! I don’t want to see heads on spikes, but if people are genuinely bought off by cheap meat that’s kind of sad.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    I’m not sure it’s the type of social change you’re anticipating. I think the fact everyone has access to the food they want and is part of their culture is a major reason we generally have a peaceful and free society. I can only imagine the resent from the middle and lower classes when “the elites” eat steaks on airplanes and they, the plebs they are, are forced to subside on processed alternatives while being forced to become a proselyte to a cause that those that can afford to ignore do.
- adrianN 6y ago
  The average US citizen eats around 100kg of meat per year. You could easily cut that in half and still eat meat every day.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
Do you have any links to sources or further reading material regarding this current state of affairs? It seems not entirely obvious, nor easily checked for a casual reader. (Maybe that's part of the issue of why this is not a more popular topic yet.)
- fsflover 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_subsidy
- rlaabs 6y ago
  I would highly recommend 'The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business' https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Business/dp/145164583X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+meat+racket&qid=1612652181&sr=8-1 https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Busin...
  - refurb 6y ago
    By that title it sounds like a very objective and unbiased source!
- danShumway 6y ago
  > Maybe that's part of the issue of why this is not a more popular topic yet I do think it's kind of under-discussed (it's not the only thing, a lot of niche topics like this, especially around food, don't really get covered much unless they're popular). The thing is that the people who do talk about it are usually in opposition to the meat industry, so most of the articles you find online are going to be written with a pretty obvious bias. As someone just looking for more information, that might bother you or it might not. The EWG has decent stats online that are presented neutrally and that you can parse through if you're trying to dig into some of the details of how all of this works: https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total The vast majority of subsidies are towards "feed" products like corn and soy. In a lot of ways, corn's impact in particular has been a lot bigger than just on meat -- we saw a big shift towards corn-based products (including ethanol) that came as a result of this massive increase in resources towards both producing corn and researching uses for it. You can also see the impact in products like soy, which, coincidentally with being one of the second-most subsidized foods in the US, is pretty cheap in the US. If you're looking for a meat "substitute" that is actually easy to find at much cheaper prices than meat, tofu can be a very cheap replacement, at least in my experience. I'm being a little bit deceptive there, because most soy is used for animal feed, it's not like we're just throwing funds into tofu. Even there, the primary reason we're subsidizing soy is to make it easier to raise meat. But it does still have some impact outside of the meat/dairy industry. In comparison, our subsidies towards vegetables and fruits are basically nonexistant (I think ~50 million a year for "specialty crops", but I might have my numbers wrong). It's actually kind of startling how cheap fruits and veggies in the US are given how few resources our government puts into encouraging their production. If you're curious, you can also look into checkoff programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program) that basically boil down to a mandatory tax on commodities like beef/dairy that is then redistributed to organizations that promote those commodities wholesale, rather than specific brands. Checkoff programs are not a direct subsidy, but they raise their own set of concerns about free speech and government involvement in advertising and direct promotion of commodities that might not be in the public's best interest to be so heavily advertised. Sorry, I know that's not the same thing as just listing an easy-read casual resource, but there aren't many neutral casual resources online, at least not that I'm aware of. Because it's a niche topic, most of the explainers are being written by people who specifically want to draw attention to the problem and are writing from a vegetarian/vegan perspective. Which is what you would expect from a topic that doesn't get brought up very often, but it does mean that if you don't want to rely on those sources, you have to do a bit of digging.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ascar 6y ago
It's a reasonable argument that government subsidies for farmers reduce prices for the consumer, but I don't think it's necessarily a correct assumption. Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant. So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don't mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)
- adrianN 6y ago
  Meat subsidies in Germany are so successful at helping farmers compete with low cost countries that Germany is one of the biggest exporters of pork.
  - thejynxed 6y ago
    To be fair, Germany provides some really high-quality pork products to the world market in exchange for those subsidies.
- danShumway 6y ago
  Taking your argument at face value and assuming you're right, I still want to point out that those subsidies are applied primarily to a subset of foods, especially feed crops for animals. Our government isn't spending nearly the same amount of time and money trying to subsidize fruits and vegetables. Shouldn't we be just as worried about those products being sourced from other countries? Why are we treating animal feed so specially over other crops? If you take the point of view that we're just trying to keep food production domestic, then it's still pretty clear that we care mostly about keeping some foods domestic -- primarily the ones that are necessary for a thriving beef and dairy industry.
  - ahartman00 6y ago
    Calories per acre. "That means corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre" "wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million" "Other vegetables, while much more nutritious than corn, wheat or potatoes, are far less energy-dense. Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million" https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-corn-the-worlds-most-important-food-crop/2015/07/12/78d86530-25a8-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...
georgeplusplus 6y ago
If you wanna go down that route selling this to the “free market” crowd, than Id love to let the free market settle itself out in healthcare too and pretty much everything else that the government controls pricing on.
biztos 6y ago
I wonder, aren’t there some countries where this isn’t the case? We might look at them to see how diet relates to agriculture subsidies.
- tomstoms 6y ago
  India
  - paulluuk 6y ago
    I'm not sure if I understand your comment correctly, but India does subsidize meat production, especially for fish, pig and chicken.
    - tomstoms 6y ago
      Yeah I was just guessing really...
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap. The same applies to plant based subsides, by the way. I'm in favour of doing away with them entirely in a gradual phase, and offering new farmers low interest loans (lock these current historical rates for first generation farmers) on land and equipment and help much of the dienfranchised and under/unemployed youth into sustainable, organic Agriculture and its ancillary businesses and let them set and the make the market for their products. Not hedge funds and wall street speculators! This at scale could help make environmentalism profitable like nothing else. Crop insurance could be offered privately and locally by a series of brokers and established companies and a resurgence of farmers markets as a hub of local communities could do so much good given how destroyed the food Industry is after COVID which would be ideal to ensure we don't repeat the same mitakes. I'm a 'free market guy,' and also did horticulture Ag and focused on the 'Rolls Royce' of food (Biodynamic) in the EU and then in the US that commanded a significant premium on price and exclusivity. I understand this topic very well and has been focus of most of my adult life. By the way: Free Markets are entirely incompatible when coupled to Central Bank based fiat currencies, and impossible when the very unit of account is manipulated by centralized entities. I could break down your entire post, but I won't, but suffice it to say your argument is missing that it's not just distorting the market and sweeping the externatlities of livestock (meat) raising but also crop and specific commodities--corn and cotton being the highest culprit on that list that use the most pesticides and poison the soil and water which should be regarded as the crime that it is: Ecocide. Which is done to feed a growing populace, which also includes vegetarians and vegans.

nemo44x 6y ago

Have you considered why we do this? How would our society be different if only well-to-do people could eat meat regularly? Would a regular guy be content with wealthy people eating steaks while jet-setting around the globe because of climate change? I think a populist uprising would occur almost immediately and we’d see heads on pikes with their decapitated mouths stuffed with cabbage for all to see. It would be super easy for a party to take advantage of this and they would. In short, it would be a miserable time.

danShumway 6y ago
> That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things. I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap. We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics. But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight. The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  I just think it’s politically a non-starter. They tried to tax sugary drinks in the most liberal city in America and heads exploded.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    >I just think it’s politically a non-starter. That's a separate issue to whether we should value a free market. Or is it? If we're only going to support a "free market" in spots where it's politically convenient, but be enthusiastic about stripping any regulations that are politically viable, then what we'll see is a systemic stripping of regulations that protect people without power, without touching regulations of people with power. This ends in disaster.
zionic 6y ago
The rich: steak is only for us now, for the climate and stuff The poor: Time to eat the rich
markdown 6y ago
This is nonsense. People elsewhere in the world pay 50% to 100% more than what Americans pay for beef. Removing some subsidies and making beef slightly more expensive would save money and people would just eat beef one day less/week.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Aerroon 6y ago
  And they'll replace their meat with what? More sugar? Bread? Sugary bread? I think you underestimate how big of a deal food is to people. I believe that any change will be towards food that's even worse for people.
  - dnhz 6y ago
    Hopefully with less food in this theoretical scenario because most people are overweight.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    Why would people replace meat with sugar?
    - thejynxed 6y ago
      Because of how much of it is added into every alternative meat replacement product, and it's a shockingly high amount if you read the labels on some "organic" and "plant-based" products.
      - jamil7 6y ago
        I have a few issues with this. As far as I know health concerns related to meat replacements aren't to do with sugar levels, probably more likely with saturated fat and sodium (which exists in regular meat too). Also I don't know why you bothered to put organic in there as well since the we're talking about meat replacement. Finally I think you're making the assumption that if we don't eat meat we need meat replacements at all.
bigfudge 6y ago
If meat is the trigger to generate real social change then great! I don’t want to see heads on spikes, but if people are genuinely bought off by cheap meat that’s kind of sad.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  I’m not sure it’s the type of social change you’re anticipating. I think the fact everyone has access to the food they want and is part of their culture is a major reason we generally have a peaceful and free society. I can only imagine the resent from the middle and lower classes when “the elites” eat steaks on airplanes and they, the plebs they are, are forced to subside on processed alternatives while being forced to become a proselyte to a cause that those that can afford to ignore do.
adrianN 6y ago
The average US citizen eats around 100kg of meat per year. You could easily cut that in half and still eat meat every day.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

Do you have any links to sources or further reading material regarding this current state of affairs? It seems not entirely obvious, nor easily checked for a casual reader. (Maybe that's part of the issue of why this is not a more popular topic yet.)

fsflover 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_subsidy
rlaabs 6y ago
I would highly recommend 'The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business' https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Business/dp/145164583X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+meat+racket&qid=1612652181&sr=8-1 https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Busin...
- refurb 6y ago
  By that title it sounds like a very objective and unbiased source!
danShumway 6y ago
> Maybe that's part of the issue of why this is not a more popular topic yet I do think it's kind of under-discussed (it's not the only thing, a lot of niche topics like this, especially around food, don't really get covered much unless they're popular). The thing is that the people who do talk about it are usually in opposition to the meat industry, so most of the articles you find online are going to be written with a pretty obvious bias. As someone just looking for more information, that might bother you or it might not. The EWG has decent stats online that are presented neutrally and that you can parse through if you're trying to dig into some of the details of how all of this works: https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total The vast majority of subsidies are towards "feed" products like corn and soy. In a lot of ways, corn's impact in particular has been a lot bigger than just on meat -- we saw a big shift towards corn-based products (including ethanol) that came as a result of this massive increase in resources towards both producing corn and researching uses for it. You can also see the impact in products like soy, which, coincidentally with being one of the second-most subsidized foods in the US, is pretty cheap in the US. If you're looking for a meat "substitute" that is actually easy to find at much cheaper prices than meat, tofu can be a very cheap replacement, at least in my experience. I'm being a little bit deceptive there, because most soy is used for animal feed, it's not like we're just throwing funds into tofu. Even there, the primary reason we're subsidizing soy is to make it easier to raise meat. But it does still have some impact outside of the meat/dairy industry. In comparison, our subsidies towards vegetables and fruits are basically nonexistant (I think ~50 million a year for "specialty crops", but I might have my numbers wrong). It's actually kind of startling how cheap fruits and veggies in the US are given how few resources our government puts into encouraging their production. If you're curious, you can also look into checkoff programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program) that basically boil down to a mandatory tax on commodities like beef/dairy that is then redistributed to organizations that promote those commodities wholesale, rather than specific brands. Checkoff programs are not a direct subsidy, but they raise their own set of concerns about free speech and government involvement in advertising and direct promotion of commodities that might not be in the public's best interest to be so heavily advertised. Sorry, I know that's not the same thing as just listing an easy-read casual resource, but there aren't many neutral casual resources online, at least not that I'm aware of. Because it's a niche topic, most of the explainers are being written by people who specifically want to draw attention to the problem and are writing from a vegetarian/vegan perspective. Which is what you would expect from a topic that doesn't get brought up very often, but it does mean that if you don't want to rely on those sources, you have to do a bit of digging.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ascar 6y ago

It's a reasonable argument that government subsidies for farmers reduce prices for the consumer, but I don't think it's necessarily a correct assumption. Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant. So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don't mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)

adrianN 6y ago
Meat subsidies in Germany are so successful at helping farmers compete with low cost countries that Germany is one of the biggest exporters of pork.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  To be fair, Germany provides some really high-quality pork products to the world market in exchange for those subsidies.
danShumway 6y ago
Taking your argument at face value and assuming you're right, I still want to point out that those subsidies are applied primarily to a subset of foods, especially feed crops for animals. Our government isn't spending nearly the same amount of time and money trying to subsidize fruits and vegetables. Shouldn't we be just as worried about those products being sourced from other countries? Why are we treating animal feed so specially over other crops? If you take the point of view that we're just trying to keep food production domestic, then it's still pretty clear that we care mostly about keeping some foods domestic -- primarily the ones that are necessary for a thriving beef and dairy industry.
- ahartman00 6y ago
  Calories per acre. "That means corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre" "wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million" "Other vegetables, while much more nutritious than corn, wheat or potatoes, are far less energy-dense. Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million" https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-corn-the-worlds-most-important-food-crop/2015/07/12/78d86530-25a8-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...

georgeplusplus 6y ago

If you wanna go down that route selling this to the “free market” crowd, than Id love to let the free market settle itself out in healthcare too and pretty much everything else that the government controls pricing on.

biztos 6y ago

I wonder, aren’t there some countries where this isn’t the case? We might look at them to see how diet relates to agriculture subsidies.

tomstoms 6y ago
India
- paulluuk 6y ago
  I'm not sure if I understand your comment correctly, but India does subsidize meat production, especially for fish, pig and chicken.
  - tomstoms 6y ago
    Yeah I was just guessing really...

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap. The same applies to plant based subsides, by the way. I'm in favour of doing away with them entirely in a gradual phase, and offering new farmers low interest loans (lock these current historical rates for first generation farmers) on land and equipment and help much of the dienfranchised and under/unemployed youth into sustainable, organic Agriculture and its ancillary businesses and let them set and the make the market for their products. Not hedge funds and wall street speculators! This at scale could help make environmentalism profitable like nothing else. Crop insurance could be offered privately and locally by a series of brokers and established companies and a resurgence of farmers markets as a hub of local communities could do so much good given how destroyed the food Industry is after COVID which would be ideal to ensure we don't repeat the same mitakes. I'm a 'free market guy,' and also did horticulture Ag and focused on the 'Rolls Royce' of food (Biodynamic) in the EU and then in the US that commanded a significant premium on price and exclusivity. I understand this topic very well and has been focus of most of my adult life. By the way: Free Markets are entirely incompatible when coupled to Central Bank based fiat currencies, and impossible when the very unit of account is manipulated by centralized entities. I could break down your entire post, but I won't, but suffice it to say your argument is missing that it's not just distorting the market and sweeping the externatlities of livestock (meat) raising but also crop and specific commodities--corn and cotton being the highest culprit on that list that use the most pesticides and poison the soil and water which should be regarded as the crime that it is: Ecocide. Which is done to feed a growing populace, which also includes vegetarians and vegans.