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The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting. It's better to fix incentives such a

The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting. It's better to fix incentives such as making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). Or making vegetables cheaper. I could see a serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) and eat local planet variety combined with fulfilling recipes or even tax breaks for fast food items that are vegetarian. To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you.

haswell 3y ago
This isn’t an either/or proposition. Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns. To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure. Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum. Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.
- robinson7d 3y ago
  The comment they were replying to didn’t sound long term. It specified “now” in the first sentence, so at best short-medium term. The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)
  - haswell 3y ago
    Both comments were essentially endorsing a binary position. My point was that reality must be some combination of both. I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc. This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here. We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress. But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire. > Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad. I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure. Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.
beebeepka 3y ago
[flagged]
- estebank 3y ago
  Being performatively abrasive is no way of convincing anyone. I happen to agree with some of the underlying points you're making, and I still find myself shaking my head. Being off-putting is not a personality.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Dear estebank, even the nicest words cannot convince anyone to eat less, drive less or anything of sorts. I am venting. The things I complain about have been bugging me for decades and I am under no illusion that my occasional rants can change anything, nicely worded or abrasive.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  Yeah, I think you come from a different group of people than me for sure. Throwing away meat? No, I can't do that on the regular. I don't get to eat it anywhere near as much as I want to because it's so expensive compared to everything else. This is in the US and in an area that produces a lot of meat.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). But how is that any less dime a dozen? In theory, I agree with you. But the reality is, we don't have the politicians with the backbone or the will to say "I'm going to make your food more expensive." People lost it when eggs shot up in price. Imagine that across the entire diary and meats section at the supermarket? Incentive work, but this Fed gov solution is DOA.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  Why don't we make greenhouse gas release in general more expensive. Why focus on a specific form of greenhouse gas release?
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Because that too is going to spike prices somewhere somehow. And no "leaders" wants to be on the hook for that. The longer we kick the can waiting for a less pain solution the more we need that solution to be even more effective. No one steps up to be accountable for waiting. No one steps up to be accountable for a painful solution. What could go wrong? We're living it.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Salads carry a huge profit margin at restaurants. Everyone loves to eat healthy or at least believe that they're doing so. A salad is a great healthy choice (until you slather it with dressing, which is nutritionally awful stuff.) But a house salad is composed of the cheapest ingredients ever: you've got tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, a little shredded cheese and croutons. But you can charge at least $7.99 for something that simple. And you can offer a protein to go on top for extra profit. And truthfully there's very little nutrition of any kind in that ingredients list. When you've grown your lettuce in impoverished soil, and your tomatoes are picked green and "ripen on the vine" or artificially induced, there's not much they can offer. Someone once said to me, "How do you kill an iguana? Feed it nothing but iceberg lettuce." Now don't get me wrong, salads are a great part of anyone's diet and we should never neglect salads, because they're certainly preferable to a burger and fries every day. But vegetables, being cheap to produce and profitably marked up, are hindering many a plan to stay healthy. Developed countries do not build food plans based on the good nutrition of the populace, they're based on maximizing shareholder value for the agribusiness conglomerates, and subsidizing the most strategically important crops. We could eat corn until we are literally blue in the face. As long as your corner convenience store is jammed with corn chips, beef jerky, and beer, Americans will never eat healthy, even if the Food Pyramid is rehabilitated. I have seen some good progress made on bringing fresh produce to food desert areas. I hope those initiatives succeed and continue.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  I don't understand talking about salads for 50% of your comment unless you think iceberg lettuce salads are the one alternative to meat or that you think restaurant vegetarian food is just salad rather than any combo of things like beans and grains. Also, https://www.myplate.gov https://www.myplate.gov is very reasonable. The problem with food guidelines aren't that they're wrong. It's that nobody adheres to them the same way they don't adhere to a guideline like "get daily exercise".
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    USDA guidelines are designed to benefit those who produce processed food. My source here is 10 years old, so it does not have up-to-date information on whatever MyPlate is pushing. But it says: "[the pyramid] no longer gives any clear recommendations whatsoever. It is fairly open to artistic interpretation." Previous food pyramids were demonstrably "perverted", such as one where a major food group component consists of sugars and fats. Carbohydrates were the base of that pyramid. Luise Light, Ed.D., explained that "3-4 daily servings of whole grains were changed to 6-11 at the base" as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. The processed white-flour, low-nutrient products which she had placed at the peak, were moved to the base, encouraging a foundation of sugars, fats, and highly-processed sweets. The wording was changed from "eat less" to "avoid too much". The food industries and their allies in Congress were pissed because they said the USDA shouldn't be telling citizens to "eat less" of anything! Many health guides are written by pharmaceutical companies, and therefore everyone in hospitals here gets Jell-O. Cool stuff.
goodpoint 3y ago
> To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you. The free market created and continues the problem.
daneel_w 3y ago
>"The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting." As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.
- Izkata 3y ago
  Only if they were forced, is the point. For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose.
  - theobromananda 3y ago
    Is a little bit of umami taste really a significant part of your quality of life? When other parts go or die (health, friends, meaning), one can easily realize how little that actually matters for one's happiness.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    >"For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose." I'm convinced that it takes a very special consumer (minority) to actually suffer a significant reduction of quality of life from being forced to give up meat.
mrguyorama 3y ago
>serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) This has not worked for a long time in the US. Conservatives have repeatedly cut their nose to spite their face. Plenty of states have still refused to expand medicare simply because it's a liberal policy, and the conservatives in these states have not wavered in their support of those politicians despite directly suffering as a result of poor access to healthcare. They will simply boot up a GoFundMe and muse about "why can't we just set up one big GoFundMe for everyone?" without an ounce of self reflection. Consider Florida: Thousands of conservative voters died from covid needlessly, while cheering on Desantis as he made it a crime to not allow someone in your private business who didn't take precautions.
myshpa 3y ago
Subsidies (for fossil fuels and animal agriculture) are not free market. And "free market" got us where we're now.

haswell 3y ago

This isn’t an either/or proposition. Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns. To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure. Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum. Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.

robinson7d 3y ago
The comment they were replying to didn’t sound long term. It specified “now” in the first sentence, so at best short-medium term. The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)
- haswell 3y ago
  Both comments were essentially endorsing a binary position. My point was that reality must be some combination of both. I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.
idopmstuff 3y ago
> To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc. This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
- haswell 3y ago
  > There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here. We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress. But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire. > Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad. I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure. Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.

beebeepka 3y ago

[flagged]

estebank 3y ago
Being performatively abrasive is no way of convincing anyone. I happen to agree with some of the underlying points you're making, and I still find myself shaking my head. Being off-putting is not a personality.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Dear estebank, even the nicest words cannot convince anyone to eat less, drive less or anything of sorts. I am venting. The things I complain about have been bugging me for decades and I am under no illusion that my occasional rants can change anything, nicely worded or abrasive.
earthling8118 3y ago
Yeah, I think you come from a different group of people than me for sure. Throwing away meat? No, I can't do that on the regular. I don't get to eat it anywhere near as much as I want to because it's so expensive compared to everything else. This is in the US and in an area that produces a lot of meat.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

> making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). But how is that any less dime a dozen? In theory, I agree with you. But the reality is, we don't have the politicians with the backbone or the will to say "I'm going to make your food more expensive." People lost it when eggs shot up in price. Imagine that across the entire diary and meats section at the supermarket? Incentive work, but this Fed gov solution is DOA.

ImHereToVote 3y ago
Why don't we make greenhouse gas release in general more expensive. Why focus on a specific form of greenhouse gas release?
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Because that too is going to spike prices somewhere somehow. And no "leaders" wants to be on the hook for that. The longer we kick the can waiting for a less pain solution the more we need that solution to be even more effective. No one steps up to be accountable for waiting. No one steps up to be accountable for a painful solution. What could go wrong? We're living it.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Salads carry a huge profit margin at restaurants. Everyone loves to eat healthy or at least believe that they're doing so. A salad is a great healthy choice (until you slather it with dressing, which is nutritionally awful stuff.) But a house salad is composed of the cheapest ingredients ever: you've got tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, a little shredded cheese and croutons. But you can charge at least $7.99 for something that simple. And you can offer a protein to go on top for extra profit. And truthfully there's very little nutrition of any kind in that ingredients list. When you've grown your lettuce in impoverished soil, and your tomatoes are picked green and "ripen on the vine" or artificially induced, there's not much they can offer. Someone once said to me, "How do you kill an iguana? Feed it nothing but iceberg lettuce." Now don't get me wrong, salads are a great part of anyone's diet and we should never neglect salads, because they're certainly preferable to a burger and fries every day. But vegetables, being cheap to produce and profitably marked up, are hindering many a plan to stay healthy. Developed countries do not build food plans based on the good nutrition of the populace, they're based on maximizing shareholder value for the agribusiness conglomerates, and subsidizing the most strategically important crops. We could eat corn until we are literally blue in the face. As long as your corner convenience store is jammed with corn chips, beef jerky, and beer, Americans will never eat healthy, even if the Food Pyramid is rehabilitated. I have seen some good progress made on bringing fresh produce to food desert areas. I hope those initiatives succeed and continue.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
I don't understand talking about salads for 50% of your comment unless you think iceberg lettuce salads are the one alternative to meat or that you think restaurant vegetarian food is just salad rather than any combo of things like beans and grains. Also, https://www.myplate.gov https://www.myplate.gov is very reasonable. The problem with food guidelines aren't that they're wrong. It's that nobody adheres to them the same way they don't adhere to a guideline like "get daily exercise".
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  USDA guidelines are designed to benefit those who produce processed food. My source here is 10 years old, so it does not have up-to-date information on whatever MyPlate is pushing. But it says: "[the pyramid] no longer gives any clear recommendations whatsoever. It is fairly open to artistic interpretation." Previous food pyramids were demonstrably "perverted", such as one where a major food group component consists of sugars and fats. Carbohydrates were the base of that pyramid. Luise Light, Ed.D., explained that "3-4 daily servings of whole grains were changed to 6-11 at the base" as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. The processed white-flour, low-nutrient products which she had placed at the peak, were moved to the base, encouraging a foundation of sugars, fats, and highly-processed sweets. The wording was changed from "eat less" to "avoid too much". The food industries and their allies in Congress were pissed because they said the USDA shouldn't be telling citizens to "eat less" of anything! Many health guides are written by pharmaceutical companies, and therefore everyone in hospitals here gets Jell-O. Cool stuff.

goodpoint 3y ago

> To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you. The free market created and continues the problem.

daneel_w 3y ago

>"The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting." As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.

Izkata 3y ago
Only if they were forced, is the point. For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose.
- theobromananda 3y ago
  Is a little bit of umami taste really a significant part of your quality of life? When other parts go or die (health, friends, meaning), one can easily realize how little that actually matters for one's happiness.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  >"For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose." I'm convinced that it takes a very special consumer (minority) to actually suffer a significant reduction of quality of life from being forced to give up meat.

mrguyorama 3y ago

>serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) This has not worked for a long time in the US. Conservatives have repeatedly cut their nose to spite their face. Plenty of states have still refused to expand medicare simply because it's a liberal policy, and the conservatives in these states have not wavered in their support of those politicians despite directly suffering as a result of poor access to healthcare. They will simply boot up a GoFundMe and muse about "why can't we just set up one big GoFundMe for everyone?" without an ounce of self reflection. Consider Florida: Thousands of conservative voters died from covid needlessly, while cheering on Desantis as he made it a crime to not allow someone in your private business who didn't take precautions.

myshpa 3y ago

Subsidies (for fossil fuels and animal agriculture) are not free market. And "free market" got us where we're now.