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We don't need meat. And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSI

We don't need meat. And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.

qiskit 4y ago
> We don't need meat. We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential. Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat. Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.
- merry_flame 4y ago
  Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.
  - qiskit 4y ago
    The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet. It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.
    - merry_flame 4y ago
      Meiji leadership Buddhist? You seriously need to remove your blinkers. The "Meiji Buddhist Reform" was sweeping and extremely violent and 40,000 Buddhist temples were lost to riots or repression over the period. The new syncretic state-sponsored religion of Shinto was made to replace Buddhist and cut Japan from its Chinese cultural ties and demonstrate to the West that Japan could belong to their club. Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-edo-tokyo-navy-beriberi https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.
credit_guy 4y ago
> We don't need meat. But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.
goatlover 4y ago
We don't need coffee, tea, spices and a thousand other things you can buy at the store. But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  >But people want them, and that's unlikely to change. This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production). As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> We don't need meat. We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.
- mauflows 4y ago
  > We do if we want everyone to eat This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if we put all resources we currently feed livestock into feeding humans.
  - usrn 4y ago
    God dammit humans can't eat grass. How hard is that for you people to get?
    - mauflows 4y ago
      I never said humans can eat grass. The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land
      - ellopoppit 4y ago
        Pigs can eat garbage, feces even
- riversflow 4y ago
  You know that we share the earth with every other species right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food for wild animals?
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    What do we eat? Food grown at tremendous ecological expense and shipped halfway round the world? Vegans are boiling the oceans. Eat what's on your doorstep.
kickout 4y ago
We don't need programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc. But we like them.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.
  - kickout 4y ago
    We've been eating meat _far_ longer than houses, phones, tech, etc. Will be _much_ harder to give that up. Been eating meat for hundreds of millennia
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      I for one have been eating meat for less than 20 years. Lots of people (not only individually, but culturally) live mostly vegetarian. There is no problem with it.
      - kickout 4y ago
        True, but again, carnivore diets seem to be more popular historically speaking. Rightly or wrongly
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      You don't have to give up all meat, just temporarily eat less of it.
samatman 4y ago
You don't get to make decisions for me on the basis of what is necessary from your perspective.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  What is meat necessary for, other than proteins and iron? Taste? Tradition? Also, what decisions are you talking about? OP said one does not need meat. Isn't that a provable fact?
  - Diederich 4y ago
    My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low iron levels. Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all. All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week. Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it. But some people do effectively need red meat.
    - mauflows 4y ago
      Fair point! Thanks for the perspective
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
hedora 4y ago
Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline. Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error. The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change. That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.
- r00fus 4y ago
  Ethanol is a straw man argument. The option is a) not to produce so much corn and b) not to feed it to animals for slaughter. We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.

qiskit 4y ago

> We don't need meat. We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential. Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat. Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.

merry_flame 4y ago
Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.
- qiskit 4y ago
  The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet. It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.
  - merry_flame 4y ago
    Meiji leadership Buddhist? You seriously need to remove your blinkers. The "Meiji Buddhist Reform" was sweeping and extremely violent and 40,000 Buddhist temples were lost to riots or repression over the period. The new syncretic state-sponsored religion of Shinto was made to replace Buddhist and cut Japan from its Chinese cultural ties and demonstrate to the West that Japan could belong to their club. Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-edo-tokyo-navy-beriberi https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.

credit_guy 4y ago

> We don't need meat. But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.

goatlover 4y ago

We don't need coffee, tea, spices and a thousand other things you can buy at the store. But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
>But people want them, and that's unlikely to change. This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production). As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> We don't need meat. We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.

mauflows 4y ago
> We do if we want everyone to eat This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if we put all resources we currently feed livestock into feeding humans.
- usrn 4y ago
  God dammit humans can't eat grass. How hard is that for you people to get?
  - mauflows 4y ago
    I never said humans can eat grass. The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land
    - ellopoppit 4y ago
      Pigs can eat garbage, feces even
riversflow 4y ago
You know that we share the earth with every other species right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food for wild animals?
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  What do we eat? Food grown at tremendous ecological expense and shipped halfway round the world? Vegans are boiling the oceans. Eat what's on your doorstep.

kickout 4y ago

We don't need programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc. But we like them.

CydeWeys 4y ago
The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.
- kickout 4y ago
  We've been eating meat _far_ longer than houses, phones, tech, etc. Will be _much_ harder to give that up. Been eating meat for hundreds of millennia
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I for one have been eating meat for less than 20 years. Lots of people (not only individually, but culturally) live mostly vegetarian. There is no problem with it.
    - kickout 4y ago
      True, but again, carnivore diets seem to be more popular historically speaking. Rightly or wrongly
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    You don't have to give up all meat, just temporarily eat less of it.

samatman 4y ago

You don't get to make decisions for me on the basis of what is necessary from your perspective.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
What is meat necessary for, other than proteins and iron? Taste? Tradition? Also, what decisions are you talking about? OP said one does not need meat. Isn't that a provable fact?
- Diederich 4y ago
  My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low iron levels. Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all. All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week. Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it. But some people do effectively need red meat.
  - mauflows 4y ago
    Fair point! Thanks for the perspective

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

hedora 4y ago

Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline. Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error. The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change. That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.

r00fus 4y ago
Ethanol is a straw man argument. The option is a) not to produce so much corn and b) not to feed it to animals for slaughter. We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.