5 ms·

> [...] there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too. Could you provide some examples?

angry_moose 4y ago
As someone going on 5 years vegetarian: Environmental impact (both carbon and water), animal cruelty/welfare in factory farms, high cost of more sustainable/lower cruelty options, general distaste for most of it
halpmeh 4y ago
It’s energy intensive
consp 4y ago
I would argue carbon footprint (which is huge) or methane emissions.
- b112 4y ago
  Both are only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. For example, let's say we remove cattle from the rolling, rocky hills of Quebec. We let the land go fallow, back to nature. Ok, now endless deer, bison, moose, groundhogs, and endless other critters do a horrible thing. They eat, and they fart. When people complain about meat, and carbon, they are complaining about the worst part of it. Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle. It is very unfair to lump this all together, especially in a thread about people taking extreme positions.
  - s0rce 4y ago
    Is that representative, there are areas in California where grazing was eliminated and they are not overrun with other grazing animals and beautiful meadows and creeks have begun to recover.
  - danielbln 4y ago
    According to the National Council for Animal Protection, over 99% of beef farmed for meat comes from cows that live in horrific factory farm environments. Does the remaining 1% matter all that much in the conversation?
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      Would you expect the National Council for Animal Protection to give you an unbiased figure? I struggle with the concept of feedlot farming being morally acceptable at all. However, I've been on a number of beef farms in the UK and it's just not representative of how British beef is raised.
    - twobitshifter 4y ago
      does the national council for animal protection sound like they do independent research?
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      That number is probably true for the USA only. GP specifically said: > Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    > only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. What's the percentage of grass fed vs grain? From a shallow search it seems like it's low single digits yet I see this argument come up a lot. Do you have different numbers perhaps?
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > Both are only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. Plot twist: the average US/EU diet can't be sustained on free range only meat/animal products. In the US grass fed beef represent 4% of beef sold, and that's with a very loose definition of "grass fed" https://agfundernews.com/grass-fed-beef-survey-story https://agfundernews.com/grass-fed-beef-survey-story
Twirrim 4y ago
Environmental impact of meat production is one major one, but it depends on what meat we're talking about. Beef and similar are absolutely terrible from an environmental perspective. It takes significantly more water and space to produce comparable quantities of beef to other meat sources, or plants. Chicken and Turkey are usually better on that score.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  It's also helpful to note that slaughterhouses have broad, measured psychological impacts on the community. They are often pushed to butcher at unsafe speeds and the killing of animals for an entire work day has a negative impact on the mental health of the workers. The installation of a new slaughterhouse has been associated with increased crime, domestic violence, and drug abuse in the community, and isn't replicated in new factories for manufacturing, lumber processing, paper mills or other similarly sized factories.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Do you have some links for that?
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030243 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030... Animal Cruelty, Domestic Violence, and Social Disorganization in a Suburban Setting - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2018.1445442?journalCode=udbh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2018.14... As line speeds increase, meatpacking workers are in ever more danger - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/line-speeds-increase-meatpacking-workers-are-ever-more-danger https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/line-speeds-increase-mea... How safe are the workers who process our food? - https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/how-safe-are-the-workers-who-process-our-food.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/how-safe-are-the-w... Killing for a Living: Psychological and Physiological Effects of Alienation of Food Production on Slaughterhouse Workers - https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380 https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380 The Slaughterhouse, Social Disorganization, and Violent Crime in Rural Communities - https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/23/6/article-p594_4.xml https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/23/6/article-p594_4.xml American Slaughterhouses and the Need for Speed: An Examination of the Meatpacking-Methamphetamine Hypothesis - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086026617697038 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602661769703... Additionally, Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, which is largely attributed with launching public pressure to create federal reforms for more sanitary meat packing, originally created this to highlight how it fucked up the workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
neuronic 4y ago
Environmental impact has been mentioned a few times but personally (!) I have reduced (not yet eliminated) my meat consumption mostly due to the fact that my short term unnecessary enjoyment is not justified in the face of the insane cruelty connected to mass animal farming. There is plenty of well-established documentation about this industry you can find online and subjectively I find it psychopathic. I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident. I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  Yes - you raise some good points. It's not really about health. In this day and age you can be healthy with or without consuming animal products. It's really about cruelty towards sentient beings and is the biosphere destruction really worth having a strip of bacon or a steak? Are culinary pleasures more important than not inflicting all this cruelty and damage? Pigs pass the mirror test and can be compared to small 2-3 year children when it comes to intelligence. Cows are such gentle and curious animals. And yet we treat animals as inanimate objects. As Carl Sagan said 'They are too much like us' If we ever achieve a Star Trek like society - those future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at the times when slavery was fully accepted by society.
lm28469 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 This one did it for me. I have no problem with eating meat in principle, but it's hard/expensive to find ethically raised/killed meat
fsflover 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643838
monopoliessuck 4y ago
It really depends on what you want to maximize in your life, health and environment. Not everyone will agree, but here are some things to chew on. * Animal products require an inordinate amount of water to produce compared to plant-based products. * Animal breeding and grazing at scale creates a bunch of environmental issues. - Methane production - Dust bowl effect due to over-grazing - Manure runoff and associated effects - Crazy abuse and proliferation of antibiotics and the resulting antibiotic resistant bacteria * Ocean dredging for seafood is horribly destructive to marine environments. * Fish, due to other human-origin environmental issues, are loaded with methyl-mercury and arsenic. This trend is only getting worse. * Animals have brains and the associated emotion, pain and fear responses to trauma. * Outside of chickens, most animals we like to eat are higher order mammals that are arguably more susceptible to the kinds of pain and distress we feel ourselves. * Animal rights standards for slaughterhouses, especially in the US, are abysmal. * Food and food handling standards for meat, especially in the US, are abysmal. * Meat production creates a lot of secondary waste products that wouldn't be market competitive if they weren't subsidized by super-high meat production. Used as fillers in all kinds of things from pet food to cosmetics. - eg. Animal tallow, gelatin, organ meat, animal bone-meal - some of these are inherently useful, but as meat consumption rises to meet demand, so do these byproducts' supply and they show up all over as they now compete with vegetable based options. * Risks of parasites, improper cooking, spoilage, etc. * Nutritional benefits exist, but there are nutritional issues with red meat, organ meat and associated fats as well. * A lot of food "certifications" are industry-managed and opaque to consumers, pushing a lot of negative externalities under the rug and making these things worse, not better. - "Grass-fed" is a "best-effort" thing and most companies that claim this are still only seasonally feeding their animals grass while also supplementing with diets molasses. - Free-range, prairie raised, farm-fresh, cage-free... What this means depends largely on who you ask. - etc. etc. There are more bullets I'm sure too, I'll stop listing though. Hope this helps. Just given the above, animal foods aren't required for adequate human sustenance and yet there are a lot of issues with them. There are of course nutritional benefits to consuming meat and negative externalities from modern agricultural practices, but I think animal production has high costs for its benefits. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing either. Everyone reducing their meat consumption by a little has an outsized impact compared to some zealots doing so. No one benefits if we treat this as some kind of morality food fight or religious crusade.
latchkey 4y ago
Not all countries have standards for handling meat. Have you ever been to a developing nation? I spent 4 years living and traveling all over Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos by motorbike. "Street food" sounds awesome until you realize that you have no idea where the meat you're eating came from, how it was raised, handled, prepared. It is cheap for a reason. It could have easily been the stuff you saw by the side of the road sitting out in the sun with flies all over it. Ever been to a wet market? I was once in a super remote town in northern Vietnam staying at a small hotel. They were having a festival of some sort and someone had left a 300+ lbs pig in the parking lot sitting there in the sun. Alive, barely. It was so abused, it could barely lift its head. That was going to be the delight of the festival. How do you even know the meat is the meat they say it is? I've seen my share of dog/cat restaurants. Other than those being generally more expensive... who knows... maybe they ran out of pig that day (swine flu was in full effect when I was there). Certainly, veggies also have their share of issues... sprayed with who knows what sorts of chemicals smuggled in from China... grown next to polluted rivers... in polluted air. Now, back in the US, we have it so good here...
- docandrew 4y ago
  Feedlots aren’t pretty, but there are many places in the world with much much less agricultural oversight or concern for animal welfare than the US.

As someone going on 5 years vegetarian: Environmental impact (both carbon and water), animal cruelty/welfare in factory farms, high cost of more sustainable/lower cruelty options, general distaste for most of it

halpmeh 4y ago

It’s energy intensive

consp 4y ago

I would argue carbon footprint (which is huge) or methane emissions.

b112 4y ago
Both are only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. For example, let's say we remove cattle from the rolling, rocky hills of Quebec. We let the land go fallow, back to nature. Ok, now endless deer, bison, moose, groundhogs, and endless other critters do a horrible thing. They eat, and they fart. When people complain about meat, and carbon, they are complaining about the worst part of it. Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle. It is very unfair to lump this all together, especially in a thread about people taking extreme positions.
- s0rce 4y ago
  Is that representative, there are areas in California where grazing was eliminated and they are not overrun with other grazing animals and beautiful meadows and creeks have begun to recover.
- danielbln 4y ago
  According to the National Council for Animal Protection, over 99% of beef farmed for meat comes from cows that live in horrific factory farm environments. Does the remaining 1% matter all that much in the conversation?
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Would you expect the National Council for Animal Protection to give you an unbiased figure? I struggle with the concept of feedlot farming being morally acceptable at all. However, I've been on a number of beef farms in the UK and it's just not representative of how British beef is raised.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    does the national council for animal protection sound like they do independent research?
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    That number is probably true for the USA only. GP specifically said: > Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  > only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. What's the percentage of grass fed vs grain? From a shallow search it seems like it's low single digits yet I see this argument come up a lot. Do you have different numbers perhaps?
- lm28469 4y ago
  > Both are only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass. Plot twist: the average US/EU diet can't be sustained on free range only meat/animal products. In the US grass fed beef represent 4% of beef sold, and that's with a very loose definition of "grass fed" https://agfundernews.com/grass-fed-beef-survey-story https://agfundernews.com/grass-fed-beef-survey-story

Twirrim 4y ago

Environmental impact of meat production is one major one, but it depends on what meat we're talking about. Beef and similar are absolutely terrible from an environmental perspective. It takes significantly more water and space to produce comparable quantities of beef to other meat sources, or plants. Chicken and Turkey are usually better on that score.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
It's also helpful to note that slaughterhouses have broad, measured psychological impacts on the community. They are often pushed to butcher at unsafe speeds and the killing of animals for an entire work day has a negative impact on the mental health of the workers. The installation of a new slaughterhouse has been associated with increased crime, domestic violence, and drug abuse in the community, and isn't replicated in new factories for manufacturing, lumber processing, paper mills or other similarly sized factories.
- oblio 4y ago
  Do you have some links for that?
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030243 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030... Animal Cruelty, Domestic Violence, and Social Disorganization in a Suburban Setting - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2018.1445442?journalCode=udbh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2018.14... As line speeds increase, meatpacking workers are in ever more danger - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/line-speeds-increase-meatpacking-workers-are-ever-more-danger https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/line-speeds-increase-mea... How safe are the workers who process our food? - https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/how-safe-are-the-workers-who-process-our-food.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/how-safe-are-the-w... Killing for a Living: Psychological and Physiological Effects of Alienation of Food Production on Slaughterhouse Workers - https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380 https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380 The Slaughterhouse, Social Disorganization, and Violent Crime in Rural Communities - https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/23/6/article-p594_4.xml https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/23/6/article-p594_4.xml American Slaughterhouses and the Need for Speed: An Examination of the Meatpacking-Methamphetamine Hypothesis - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086026617697038 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602661769703... Additionally, Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, which is largely attributed with launching public pressure to create federal reforms for more sanitary meat packing, originally created this to highlight how it fucked up the workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

neuronic 4y ago

Environmental impact has been mentioned a few times but personally (!) I have reduced (not yet eliminated) my meat consumption mostly due to the fact that my short term unnecessary enjoyment is not justified in the face of the insane cruelty connected to mass animal farming. There is plenty of well-established documentation about this industry you can find online and subjectively I find it psychopathic. I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident. I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
Yes - you raise some good points. It's not really about health. In this day and age you can be healthy with or without consuming animal products. It's really about cruelty towards sentient beings and is the biosphere destruction really worth having a strip of bacon or a steak? Are culinary pleasures more important than not inflicting all this cruelty and damage? Pigs pass the mirror test and can be compared to small 2-3 year children when it comes to intelligence. Cows are such gentle and curious animals. And yet we treat animals as inanimate objects. As Carl Sagan said 'They are too much like us' If we ever achieve a Star Trek like society - those future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at the times when slavery was fully accepted by society.

lm28469 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 This one did it for me. I have no problem with eating meat in principle, but it's hard/expensive to find ethically raised/killed meat

fsflover 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643838

monopoliessuck 4y ago

It really depends on what you want to maximize in your life, health and environment. Not everyone will agree, but here are some things to chew on. * Animal products require an inordinate amount of water to produce compared to plant-based products. * Animal breeding and grazing at scale creates a bunch of environmental issues. - Methane production - Dust bowl effect due to over-grazing - Manure runoff and associated effects - Crazy abuse and proliferation of antibiotics and the resulting antibiotic resistant bacteria * Ocean dredging for seafood is horribly destructive to marine environments. * Fish, due to other human-origin environmental issues, are loaded with methyl-mercury and arsenic. This trend is only getting worse. * Animals have brains and the associated emotion, pain and fear responses to trauma. * Outside of chickens, most animals we like to eat are higher order mammals that are arguably more susceptible to the kinds of pain and distress we feel ourselves. * Animal rights standards for slaughterhouses, especially in the US, are abysmal. * Food and food handling standards for meat, especially in the US, are abysmal. * Meat production creates a lot of secondary waste products that wouldn't be market competitive if they weren't subsidized by super-high meat production. Used as fillers in all kinds of things from pet food to cosmetics. - eg. Animal tallow, gelatin, organ meat, animal bone-meal - some of these are inherently useful, but as meat consumption rises to meet demand, so do these byproducts' supply and they show up all over as they now compete with vegetable based options. * Risks of parasites, improper cooking, spoilage, etc. * Nutritional benefits exist, but there are nutritional issues with red meat, organ meat and associated fats as well. * A lot of food "certifications" are industry-managed and opaque to consumers, pushing a lot of negative externalities under the rug and making these things worse, not better. - "Grass-fed" is a "best-effort" thing and most companies that claim this are still only seasonally feeding their animals grass while also supplementing with diets molasses. - Free-range, prairie raised, farm-fresh, cage-free... What this means depends largely on who you ask. - etc. etc. There are more bullets I'm sure too, I'll stop listing though. Hope this helps. Just given the above, animal foods aren't required for adequate human sustenance and yet there are a lot of issues with them. There are of course nutritional benefits to consuming meat and negative externalities from modern agricultural practices, but I think animal production has high costs for its benefits. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing either. Everyone reducing their meat consumption by a little has an outsized impact compared to some zealots doing so. No one benefits if we treat this as some kind of morality food fight or religious crusade.

latchkey 4y ago

Not all countries have standards for handling meat. Have you ever been to a developing nation? I spent 4 years living and traveling all over Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos by motorbike. "Street food" sounds awesome until you realize that you have no idea where the meat you're eating came from, how it was raised, handled, prepared. It is cheap for a reason. It could have easily been the stuff you saw by the side of the road sitting out in the sun with flies all over it. Ever been to a wet market? I was once in a super remote town in northern Vietnam staying at a small hotel. They were having a festival of some sort and someone had left a 300+ lbs pig in the parking lot sitting there in the sun. Alive, barely. It was so abused, it could barely lift its head. That was going to be the delight of the festival. How do you even know the meat is the meat they say it is? I've seen my share of dog/cat restaurants. Other than those being generally more expensive... who knows... maybe they ran out of pig that day (swine flu was in full effect when I was there). Certainly, veggies also have their share of issues... sprayed with who knows what sorts of chemicals smuggled in from China... grown next to polluted rivers... in polluted air. Now, back in the US, we have it so good here...

docandrew 4y ago
Feedlots aren’t pretty, but there are many places in the world with much much less agricultural oversight or concern for animal welfare than the US.