18 ms·

>So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too. The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. It's

• cinntaile 5y ago
  What's thermodynamically efficient? Do you mean energy efficient?
  • carlmr 5y ago
    Yes, animals waste most of the calories we feed them. By huge factors. We could feet a lot more people with the current energy and land-use, or feed the current number of people with a lot less effort.
    • koheripbal 5y ago
      It's not a waste if you value their life. They get to live. The end of animal agriculture would mean their genocide.
      • carlmr 5y ago
        I don't know how you can think that the animals we eat have a good enough life than that it's better than if they weren't born. Imagine being only into cages without social interaction, fed horrible junk, only to be killed a few months later for food. I'd definitely choose not be born over being born as cattle.
        • nec4b 5y ago
          By that logic it would be better no animals would exist at all. If you think cattle suffers, you should watch a live dear being torn by wolves.
    • baremetal 5y ago
      how about everyone convert their lawns into gardens. have a few chickens too for eggs, feeding them with kitchen and garden waste then you dont have to truck everything around, or use huge amounts of fuel to work the land. oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
      • zardo 5y ago
        Don't the vast majority of people live in apartments?
        • baremetal 5y ago
          and perhaps that is why we are having sustainability issues?
    • jiriknesl 5y ago
      People buy what they want to buy. Given the most efficient would be for example peas. Does it mean eating peas should be allowed but eating grains forbidden? Or are we going to do artificial cutoff by the divide meat/plants? Why? To make 10% of vegetarians happier?
      • asoneth 5y ago
        I think everything should be allowed, but we should do a better job of making people pay for what they use by pricing the externalities into the consumption of a product. Once those price signals are in place then you let people make their own decisions.
        • jiriknesl 5y ago
          Ok, so let's say the lowest externality food will be a baseline. For example peas. Grains are higher, so we would also tax grains? And we would grow this until the highest - beef. Or is there going to be "accepted externality"? If so, why those who suggest taxing meat more suggest the cutoff right between plants and meat?
          • asoneth 5y ago
            For the reason you give, a Pigovian tax on the externalities themselves is a better approach than specific regulations or pre-defined taxes on each class of consumer product. Another benefit of this approach is that it provides price signals to the product's producers as well as consumers -- after all, if a company comes up with a way to produce beef with fewer externalities, they should be able to capture some of the value! There is certainly disagreement with regard to how to handle some of the more difficult-to-assess externalities, but even taxing a handful of externalities still helps push product prices slightly closer to their true cost.
            • jiriknesl 5y ago
              Another problem is that taxing negative externalities is often used for another things than eliminating given externality. I will buy beef (or corn). It will emit CO2. Capturing given CO2 would cost $5. So the tax will be $5. But politician will not use these $5 for capturing the CO2 emissions. He will buy votes instead. $1 for a symfonic orchestra. $1 for police department. $1 to subsidies to a company of a friend lobbyist. $1 for a new playground... Most often, negative externality taxes are just proxy for taxing people more without using money to fix the externality. So even if you believe the externality exists, but you are not supporting given politicians' program, it is a rational choice not to pay the tax.
• chmod775 5y ago
  > The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. Since "lab grown meat" lacks characteristics that would make it an animal (both by biological definition and also according to popular opinion), i.e. it's not motile, it too should be considered a vegan option. Because it's not coming from an animal, it's not even "meat" - it's technically just flesh.
  • ireadfaces 5y ago
    Yes, I think so too. Previous comment I think meant that if making cultured 'flesh' is infeasible, we can switch to a diet that is vegetarian and feasible at scale.
  • Slippery_John 5y ago
    Veganism as an ethical principle is very simple - the use of any products created from or by animals is unethical. Since you still have to get your stem cells and fetal serum from somewhere, cultured meat isn't vegan. Even if you managed to get self-renewing stem cells and a different growth medium, you still have that initial gathering of stem cells making it non-vegan.
    • jokowueu 5y ago
      So getting cultured meat from a human who agreed to it is ethical and therefore vegan ?
      • garydevenay 5y ago
        Implying that because you satisfy the criteria of one moral principal means that all other moral principals are void is nonsense-think.
      • Slippery_John 5y ago
        Vegan doesn't follow from ethical. While this would technically qualify as vegan, most people also have a pretty strong stance against cannibalism even if voluntary.
    • 5y ago
• sersi 5y ago
  When I last researched, most studies studying vegetarian diets for toddlers and young children showed clear deficiencies when it came to certain nutrients and delayed development due to this. So I'm not entirely sure I'd call it unhealthy. That said, as an adult I do strive to heavily reduce meat and fish consumption and to adhere to a vegetarian diet 80% of the time but it's easier to manage for adults than for young children.
  • scandox 5y ago
    My kids are 100% vegetarian from birth and I can't say we have observed any issue whatsoever. We do ensure they eat a very varied diet. We do get their bloods checked from time to time and nothing notable there either. Of course it's possible they would have been gigantic, athletic super-geniuses if we'd fed them meat. I can't disprove that, except to say I ate meat as a kid and I'm decidedly average.
    • Sammi 5y ago
      N=1
      • DFHippie 5y ago
        This is an existence proof that deficiency is not inevitable.
        • twofornone 5y ago
          How can you be so sure that whatever blood test is being done would detect a deficiency? Humans evolved to eat meat. The energy density is what gave us large enough brains to eventually develop civilization. Which is why a "healthy" vegetarian diet (one which does not result in malnutrition) comes with a laundry list of necessary foods and supplements, all of which could simply be replaced by eating meat as nature clearly intended.
  • Freak_NL 5y ago
    Children can fairly easily have a vegetarian diet without any issues. There are a few things to look out for (enough vitamin B1, B12, iron and protein), but if you provide fish, eggs, tofu, tempeh, and legumes this is not generally a problem. Most store-bought meat replacements (vegetarian meat balls etc.) have those added already. Veganism is a different beast and requires much more care (and probably advice from a dietician). Vegan children not getting the nutrition they need seems to be a point of concern for many health care professionals. I would wager that most national nutrition centres provide useful guidance on vegetarianism or even veganism by now based on up-to-date research — the Dutch Voedingscentrum does¹. 1: https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/vraag-en-antwoord/kinderen-en-jongeren/kan-mijn-kind-vegetarisch-eten-.aspx https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/vraag-en-antwoord/...
• afarrell 5y ago
  > We just need to The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something. > We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian. If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine. When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people. Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#Total_dead_and_missing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#Tot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...
  • carlmr 5y ago
    >Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine. War and famine is what we currently get with the current dietary trend. Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world. >In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people. Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • DFHippie 5y ago
      > There's no reason we couldn't change them back. I'm with you for the most part. I'm vegetarian myself, chiefly for environmental reasons. And certainly we could change people's habits back, but there's an obvious reason this would be very hard: it's easy to give people something they want; it's hard to take it away. People feel loss more keenly than gain, so they will feel return to the status quo ante to be a greater loss in quality of life than leaving it was a gain.* And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social. They want to eat meat. They don't particularly care about the well being of others or their future selves. I think this is malleable, but most people would prefer not to change their attitudes. I'm not sure what the solution is. * Also, we discount utility by distance. A gain one year ago or one year from now feels less important than the same gain today. And if we're talking about a gain felt by a previous generation, the utility drops down another notch. Someone else's imprisonment or freedom just doesn't matter as much to you as your own. Change is hard in part because you feel the pain now and the gain is sometime in the future.
• belorn 5y ago
  The other major alternative is diet from aquaculture, which has better fresh water and land use than vegetarianism. What we need to do is make the externalities created by farming part of the food price, including the pollution they create. The artificial fertilizers, the fossil fuels, the energy costs, water pollution, eutrophication, the destruction of biodiversity and land usage. All of it need to be part of the price so that it incentivize a change in the dietary culture towards more sustainable production. Getting people to change their culture is the hard part. Convincing people to eat less meat is like convincing a vegetarian to eat more molluscs. Almost impossible.
  • biztos 5y ago
    > The other major alternative is diet from aquaculture If push ever actually comes to shove, bugs are way more efficient than fish. The fact you can’t buy a soldier-fly larva burger even if you want to, makes me think we’re far from peak meat.
    • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Bugs are currently used to create feed for animals. It's small scale but worth bearing in mind if a gradual phase out is desired.
    • YinglingLight 5y ago
      You will eat ze bugs
    • belorn 5y ago
      I am not totally convinced with insect farms. Creating food in the ocean has a unique aspect of not using land, which would allow for more of those carbon binding trees. With 71% of earth being covered in water there is a lot of unused space. Promising technology from aquaculture are algefarming which can be used for carbon capture or ecological alternative for animal feed, seaweed farming which can either be used directly in human diet or as animal feed, molluscs, shellfish and fish farms. Some shellfish are already heavily involved in water treatment and water quality control. Insect farms in comparison seems more limit in use, and harder in terms of cultural change. There has already existed plenty of cultures that have depended on the ocean for their diet, similar to cultures in the past which primarily depends on vegetarian diet. All that might be required for a cultural shift is a nudge in the right direction with economical incentives.
• jiriknesl 5y ago
  Vegetarians eat eggs, drink milk, eat cheese and use leather (and other materials sourced from animals) so the scale of animal production could be lower but cannot be eliminated. Vegan alternatives in materials depend on oil production. So in some way, I think, animal production and animal industry is inevitable for us. As somebody, who has been half half vegetarian (16 years), I would be strongly against making meat even 1 % more expensive. What people eat is their decision, not mine.
  • carlmr 5y ago
    >I would be strongly against making meat even 1 % more expensive. What people eat is their decision, not mine. We can't solve collective issues with individualist extremism like this. We're all living on the same planet. So as long as we all share this one resource for our collective survival, other people's food decisions aren't "theirs", if they're not carbon neutral or low-emission. If the food you eat has global externalities you should pay for them.
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      > We can't solve collective issues with individualist extremism like this That's what innovation is for. Case in point: seaweed-additive feed that is set to be adopted for production in Brazil, and Australia. Boom, no more methane. A measure such as forcing people to avoid meat has to be justifiable for the public to concede to it. As it stands, it isn't, though some will be receptive to the idea of either reducing consumption or forgoing it altogether for a variety of reasons. What people aren't receptive to authoritarian rhetoric.
    • jiriknesl 5y ago
      > We can't solve collective issues Unless practically everything (food, transport, education)... becomes a collective issue and no space for individual liberty is left. Honestly, I'd rather live on 1 degree warmer Earth with 1/100 of regulations/subsidies than the opposite. And this is my vote, yours is yours. > If the food you eat has global externalities Everything has externalities. Pesticides have externalities. Mining base materials to do just anything (a tractor to farm land, materials to build a house) decrease amount of nonrenewable materials, which is externality. Many meat substitutes are packaged in plastic materials made from oil. There just must be acceptable level of negative externalities.
• baremetal 5y ago
  how about everyone convert their lawns into gardens. have a few chickens too, feeding them with kitchen and garden waste then you dont have to truck everything around, or use huge amounts of fuel to work the land. oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
  • Loughla 5y ago
    >oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem. This is what I can see is the problem in any of these conversations. Vegetarianism is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much! Lab grown meat is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much! When did conversations about sustainability just completely drop the 'your life will have to be different' approach? Also, lawn chickens are a good idea, but only as part of a concerted neighborhood effort. If Mr. Jones has chickens, and Mrs. Smith has a milk goat, and Mr. Lee has an exceptional vegetable garden, and Mrs. Brown has apple and pear trees, then everyone can get what they need within their own neighborhood. Extrapolate out across the entire suburb, and you really have something. (now I'm going to get really, really cynical) The problem is now that most people are selfish, self-centered, and short-sighted. There is no sense of community, and no sense of immediate gratification for working as a co-op to help the neighborhood succeed.
    • quacked 5y ago
      I agree with your sense that most people have completely lost their sense of community; this is the primary reason that I oppose widespread immigration. Increased diversity of class, race, culture, religion, values, etc. makes it extremely difficult to organize along non-financial lines. People withdraw into their sub-communities as a result of living near people who don't think like them. This should be obvious, but I'm astonished that it's not. I think people are afraid of being called racist, but it's a very simple concept. Is it easier to organize a high school party in a group made up of 15 jocks, or a group made up of 3 nerds, 3 jocks, 3 skaters, 3 gangsters, and 3 choir kids? Or, a less "immature" version of the same question--which is a higher-trust environment, a big group of recent immigrants from the same country speaking the same language and worshipping the same god, or an equal-sized set of random people taking a bus in New York? The reason that I mention this is that I desperately want to change my and everyone else's life to be sustainable, as you describe in your example, and participate in a mutually beneficial exchange of value with people in my community, but the people in my community share very little common ground with me and will not go out of their way to help me (which is completely not the case for my friends and family, who are scattered across the world). This is not the case for me; I often go out of my way to help people that are not like me, but the favor is rarely returned.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• foxrider 5y ago
  It's not an alternative. It's like saying that having no email is an alternative to having a GMail account, it isn't. Sure some people get by just fine, but it's not realistic to suggest it to people.