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World’s Top Beef Supplier Approves Methane-Busting Cow Feed
- twoslide 5y ago55% reduction in methanse is good, but its still a destructive and inefficient way to produce protein. Wish people would give up on beef and look into alternatives.
- ben_w 5y agoMany people are already doing that. While various products are already on the consumer market and more are in the pipeline, and while I hope they collectively succeed in replacing it, this takes time and money.
- 6d6b73 5y agoThere are no healthy cheap and safe alternatives to meat.
- arglebarglegar 5y agoehh, I don’t eat meat and it only takes slightly more effort to get enough protein. There are entire cultures that do it
- Retric 5y agoThe issue here is cows and their digestive system. Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. > There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat. There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.
- 6d6b73 5y agoSteak vs chicken breast? That's not an alternative not only from the taste stand point but also nutrionally.
- timeon 5y agoNutritionally it is more than good enough.
- nindalf 5y agoPlease enlighten us, what’s missing nutritionally in chicken that you can find in steak?
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoLots of delicious saturated fat, for one.
- Retric 5y agoEating a Chicken drumstick is more nutritious and healthier than a steak. That connective tissue is good for you. Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. That said their both missing vitamin C [edit: after cooking], so you need a more diverse diet anyway.
- wyager 5y ago> Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. If your nutritional understanding is at the level of “fat and cholesterol are bad” you should not be giving dietary advice. You appear to be approaching this from a USDA-poster style of nutritional reasoning (please do not do this), so I’ll make two heuristic arguments: Why do you think, everywhere in the world except where there are social taboos on beef, poor people who eat chicken will preferentially switch to beef consumption when their standard of living improves enough to permit it? Is the peptide and vitamin distribution of human flesh closer to that of a cow, or that of a chicken?
- Retric 5y agoThe human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals. People may for example need on the order of μg/day of Bromine, Arsenic, Nickel, Fluorine, Boron, Lithium, Strontium, Silicon and Vanadium based on organic compounds containing them, but the need is slow low their plentiful in any reasonable diet. So sure, if you where building a food synthesizer from inorganic compounds then nutrition is quite complex, but in terms of diets people generally self regulate quite well with cravings often occurring should a deficiency develop. Start looking for what’s not either sufficiently plentiful in most foods or synthesized by the body and you end up with a rather short list. Vitamin C is mainly an issue because it’s destroyed by cooking, and even then people can literally go months without developing systems even with zero vitamin C. Thiamine is another one that became an issue when people started eating a lot of white rice, but again it’s food prep not the plant that’s the issue. Many arguments around optimal diets exist, but the original quote was safety not say Olympic athletes. So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, no there isn’t a significant nutritional benefit to beef over chicken. > switch to beef Because beef is tasty. It’s the same reason people don’t need to be convinced to eat chocolate.
- wyager 5y ago> Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable. > There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets “Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much. Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc. Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems. Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at-calorie-sources-in-the-american-diet https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...
- Retric 5y agoVegetarian populations have different deficiencies than other populations but overall they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds.
- wyager 5y ago> they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds Even if this is true, it’s tremendously misleading because (globally) vegetarian populations tend to be quite poor.
- ben_w 5y agoTo the extent that’s true, it also demonstrates the false causality in your own claim: poverty, not the absence of meat per se, is the cause of all the things you’re blaming vegetarian diets for.
- jcfrei 5y agoIt's not a luxury at all in some regions. In higher altitudes for example where warm weather cycles are too short to grow a lot of crops (other than some type of grass) keeping livestock (for meat, eggs, milk) is essential for survival.
- yboris 5y agoIt's frustrating to see arguments devolve into this kind of thing. It's almost surely the case we are discussing developed nations like the US (one of the largest consumers of meat), not some remote village in a developing nation. Sure there might be remote places with no access to the world market. Sure there might be some people whose health doesn't allow removal of meat. But on the grand-scale of the US and other developed economies, we can reduce meat consumption by 90% without any negative effects (in fact, we'll improve average health by a lot).
- CyanBird 5y agoI mean, there are, but what's even more important than going vegan bc that's not feasible for everybody right now, is to reduce total meat consumption as much as possible, rather than these token "1 day a week without meat" it ought to be the other way around, 1 or 2 days a week with meat, other days eating tasty well cooked and seasoned food, lentils different types of beans, rice, soups, maybe add these small cubes of "chicken flavorant" in there too which are made with left overs of poultry production and don't directly contribute that much to the agro industry
- yboris 5y agoBeans and rice, for example, are cheaper and healthier than meat. Just about any vegetable you can pick up is healthier than meat.
- lucidguppy 5y agoLooking at plants and beans... ... you sure about that? What did the Okinawans get most of their calories from? Sweet potatoes.. how much animal protein in their diet? 3 percent https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living-100/# https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living... If you eat enough calories per day from real plant foods - getting protein deficiency is impossible.
- yummybear 5y agoMitigating climate change is not solved by a single action. This is great news - it's something that is immediately actionable. Changing peoples diets can take years and years of campaigning, and some will never change.
- while1fork 5y agoIt's not "great news," it's a drop in the bucket. Only the end of FF extraction and large-scale bio oceanic carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) (phytoplankton and/or kelp, GMO possibly) can bring about a net negative carbon budget to get back to preindustrial levels soon enough before human civilization collapses. Another example is Iceland's direct air capture plant. It is immensely expensive, power-hungry, and unable to scale. Such approaches are doomed to fail because they are big engineering solutions that don't utilize life to do more of the work for us. If we don't solve the problem at scale, soon enough, in a cost-effective manner, then we die.
- yboris 5y agoHave you stopped eating meat? Or are you saying "my contribution is just a drop in the bucket, so I may as well continue eating meat?" Of course government action is better than individual action. But why not both? Signal your discontent by removing yourself from the meat market.
- anonymoushermit 5y ago> Have you stopped eating meat? No. > Or are you saying "my contribution is just a drop in the bucket, so I may as well continue eating meat?" Compared to, say, global shipping, meat itself is a drop in the bucket. > Of course government action is better than individual action. I wish this were sarcasm. > But why not both? Because the promoted alternative (soy) makes people docile and easier to control. No, thank you.
- yboris 5y ago> Because the promoted alternative (soy) makes people docile and easier to control. This is a bold empirical claim. Do you have any credible reasons to believe this that you could share?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- EvilEy3 5y agoSee, thus is what's wrong with you people. Some of us want to enjoy food, not to treat it like some necessary evil and stuff whatever amount of crap we need.
- twoslide 5y agoI don't eat any animal products and still enjoy food immensely. Enjoyment of food is based on circumstance and is relative: I lived in Nepal for a few years and saw farmers enjoy plates of rice and lentils more than most Westerners would enjoy a steak. It is entirely possible to enjoy food without destructive livestock such as cows.
- EvilEy3 5y ago> It is entirely possible to enjoy food without destructive livestock such as cows. Sure, as is living without washing machine, electricity and any modern advancements. I'd rather die though than live like that, so to each his own.
- betwixthewires 5y agoWhat sort of alternatives? Chicken, sheep and goats? Personally I want to stop buying meat. I'll probably start hunting once or twice a year and fill a freezer.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Nitrooxypropanol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Nitrooxypropanol Wish the article had included this info about what exactly it is, but it seems like most articles these days are written for someone with a kindergarten level understanding of science. Interestingly if you do this to a young calf it seems to change the microflora that develop in the digestive system, perhaps permanently even. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82084-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82084-9
- ben_w 5y ago> it seems like most articles these days are written for someone with a kindergarten level understanding of science. The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect may have only been coined 19 years ago, but this type of problem has been with us basically forever.
- 6d6b73 5y agoCan someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals roamed our planet before? How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the sky?
- stjo 5y ago> How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the sky. Sorry, what?
- 6d6b73 5y agoPigeons poop. If there is a lot of them there is a lot of poop. Lota of pigeons-> lots of poop-> lots of methane
- 0xfaded 5y agoCows have bacteria in their rumen which produce methane. As a curiosity, I ddg’d “do pigeons fart”, and according to pigeonpedia they do not because they have short digestive tracts lacking gas producing bacteria. https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/ https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/
- pfdietz 5y agoBird poop tends to be dispersed (with some exceptions), and so will tend to decompose aerobically, which does not produce methane.
- reubenswartz 5y agoThere are actually far more domestic livestock now than there were bison back in the day. Just a lot less roaming. Pigeons don’t produce methane the way ruminants do AFAIK. And, methane from livestock is only part of humanity’s climate altering activity.
- guerby 5y ago
- jacknews 5y agoApproved for use, but will farmers use it? What incentive do they have? Perhaps they should get 'methane credits', or 'methane fines'.
- 14 5y agoProbably the same incentives as a farmer doing organic farming. If you can make a brand that is significantly more eco friendly that may be a selling point in itself. Then if it is significant in the amount of carbon it reduces some governments may start insisting it be used as part of their greenhouse gas reduction plan.
- gilrain 5y agoThey and their progeny might get a livable planet. It’s really time to stop treating climate as something to profit from and start treating it as bare survival.
- jacknews 5y agoSorry but this is an argument from a lofty position. Much of the planet lives hand to mouth, and while they of course care about the state of planet in the relatively distant future, they care more that they or their progeny will actually get there at all.
- ben_w 5y ago> It’s really time to stop treating climate as something to profit from and start treating it as bare survival. While this is true, the scale and duration of the problem means we need the “right” choices to make short-economic sense at every level from individual farmers up to economic superpowers, and for that to be maintained. If the Nash equilibrium is bad, we get a tragedy of the commons.
- echopurity 5y agoThe pseudo-science is strong with this one.
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- the8472 5y ago"as much as 55%" seems low since recent studies with seaweed have shown "over 80%" reduction in vivo. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247820 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- echopurity 5y agoTBH a study with 21 subjects isn't worth much.
- goohle 5y agoHumaninty must control everything, even what cow eats, and how cow farts. The next step will be to control what cow thinks about all that.
- dekken_ 5y agothey like music if you're curious
- while1fork 5y agoHow about reducing beef production for all of the other problems it causes besides climate change? Antibiotic resistance, pandemics, supply-chain fossil fuel demands, deforestation, resource waste (water and calories), animal cruelty, and air/water/soil pollution.
- diego_moita 5y ago1.Sorry for the cynicism, but this approval is by Jair Bolsonaro's government, perhaps the most relevant Global Warming denier today. If it were meaningful it wouldn't be approved. 2. The overwhelming majority of beef production in Brazil is done by small producers that just don't care and are Bolsonaro's main supporters. The main problem with them is not even methane cow flatulence, is deforestation of the rain forest for making pastures. 3. The beef importers that could put some pressure on Brazil (e.g.: European Union) already gave up on importing Brazilian beef (since Bolsonaro began insulting Angela Merkel an Macron's wife). 4. JBS, the main beef processing company in the world, might use this as window dressing and to present a polished image overseas. But they're powerless to inspect how ranchers handle their cattle.
- yboris 5y agoConsumers can also have a 100% reduction in methane production in cows by abstaining from purchasing cow products. We have an ongoing tragedy of animal abuse, groundwater and air pollution, and various health problems -- all because of people's addiction to meat.
- eplanit 5y agoIt'll take a couple of generations. Starting raising your kids on only Soylent Green type modern foods, and no meats; then, they'll grow up to find real meat disgusting.
- dylan604 5y agoOr the first time they have real meat, they actually enjoy it. Similar to all of those parents that regulate their kid's sugar content by not allowing sodas/candy/etc. Once they go to a friend's house or school and get a taste, they do not spit it out in disgust.
- yboris 5y agoMeat is rather different. Just about no kid in America would want to eat a dog. And there's nothing significantly different between a dog and a pig, other than our cultural attitudes towards them.
- spijdar 5y agoAs disgusting as I've been raised to find the idea, I suspect GP's point might hold have a grain of truth to dog meat, too. Some cultures eat dog -- I suspect if I ate dog meat, especially if I didn't know it was dog meat, I'd probably find it an okay meat. (that said, I don't believe the physiology of domestic dogs really lends itself to "good meat", certainly not as efficient as domestic pigs, so raising dogs as food doesn't really make sense)
- Ekaros 5y ago
- lcam84 5y agoIs on this kind of measures where jevons paradox or the rebound effect kicks in. We will inclined to eat more meat because is more sustainable, and with that we neutralize the gains. Also meat from Brazil is many times dependent on Amazon deforestation, so although I love picanha, I will not eat it anymore. For those in Europe please press your government not to ratify the EU-Mercosul agreement that will increase the trade of soy meat and ethanol in exchange for Europe export more cars to America Latina. We should avoid meat and individual transports and try to invest in the local economy so this agreement doesn't make any sense
- pindab0ter 5y agoI doubt this will cause people to eat more meat. I’m just guessing, but it has to be a very small group of people that limit the amount of meat they eat out of purely environmental reasons. The group that’s limited by either cost or because they’re saturated has to be orders of magnitude larger. So I see this as an awesome bit of progress. Please do correct me of my assumptions are wrong, though.
- pricecomstock 5y agoI don't have any numbers or sources, but I'll chime in as someone who limits beef intake solely because of environmental reasons. I don't cut it out completely, I just stay mindful and only eat beef when it's meaningful. So trying something new and interesting, special occasions, or when I otherwise will really savor it. If I'm getting fast food or just eating to eat, I steer towards chicken, eggs, or vegetarian options.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoYet, but you are also probably the sort of person who would browse this article and conversation. No offense intended, but not representative of the general population.
- afarrell 5y agoLong-term changes in habits and culture take a long time — if they happen at all. The effect of this decision is that we can decrease the beef-related methane production by spending mere years changing mere hundreds of supply chains instead of spending spending fruitless decades trying decades to enforce new dietary habits on millions of defiant Texans or Pakistanis.
- Haga 5y agoAgri culture is the car industries scape goat. I blame the peasants for the gluttony.
- PrinceRichard 5y agoMass murder of non-humans is not environmentally friendly. Nor is it healthful.
- Zababa 5y agoIn that case beef is probably the best choice compared to most other mammals. You can feed way more people on one cow than on one chicken.
- Borrible 5y agoWhich is some fine news for World's Top Beef Supplier on Bloomberg. What share of world wide greenhouse gas emissions by cow burbs is it again? Around four percent? So Brazil maybe two percent? And they reduce them by what? Let's say, by half? That is one percent. Well Okay... It's a start.
- gandalfian 5y agoOn the plus side beef is an original superfood not only a complete protein with a full set of amino acids but also a highly compact dense efficiently transportable protein. Plus a byproduct is ice cream! Moderation required certainly. But for the good of my health and food transport carbon emissions I for one am prepared to fall on the occasional steak...
- irrational 5y agoI think beef and dairy cows are different, right? I wonder what percentage are dairy versus beef?
- tengbretson 5y agoThey don't end up grading good enough for a high end steak, but when they're done with their milk producing days, they all go to the same place.
- purplerabbit 5y agoDepends. Cheap meat (think: McDonalds) is made from dairy cows that are too old to keep producing milk.
- humaniania 5y agoProbably because cows are mammals and are very similar to humans. For example they have families and feelings and think and play. How would you feel if a more advanced species decided to treat humans how many humans treat cows?
- inportb 5y agoThe same way a captive vegetable feels, I imagine. Intermittently amputated. Never fully allowed to heal. You grow as much you could, only to be cut down again at the next harvest.
- bagacrap 5y agoIt's entirely possible this is happening, just in a way that we're not aware of, a la The Matrix. So I guess I feel ambivalent about it. Ignorance is bliss.
- rastafang 5y agoWould be a lot better to reduce the number of cows... I'm doing my part, I'm eating less meat. It reminds me of people that work out to loose weight... much easier to reduce the amount of calories you take in.
- ShrigmaMale 5y agoHow does it affect taste? Cattle feed has a big effect on how meat tastes and, to a lesser extent, milk.
- betwixthewires 5y agoI do not understand this focus on methane. It is very short lived in the atmosphere, it cannot accumulate like carbon dioxide can.
- telotortium 5y agohttps://archive.ph/wfqIe https://archive.ph/wfqIe
- egberts 5y agoWith the lesser methane production of the largest cattle pen, this Kettleman City, California, the land of millions of shit, can smell a bit better and that its nearby city of Los Banos (The Toilet) will be less of a wry joke.