Eliminating factory farmed meat from my diet is an aspirational thing for me; right now I don't have the available time or mental energy to commit to planning my diet to actually achieve that. Taking up deer hunting certainly helped me get closer to that goal, but mainly I just try to have no more than one serving of meat on any given day and go completely meatless several days a week.
You can go and buy free range chicken meat at plenty of grocery stores - they are still not ideal from a animal suffering point of view, but its just a change that requires money, and rarely more.
Otherwise, look at the farmer's market at your local community center. A lot of them have close to ethically grown chicken meat.
Just so you know, free range is an industry term that doesn’t mean anything:
> The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) requires that chickens raised for their meat have access to the outside in order to receive the free-range certification.[6] There is no requirement for access to pasture, and there may be access to only dirt or gravel . Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range . Basically “free range“ just means that the place where the chickens are housed has a door on it and that the chickens can use this door themselves. That’s it. There could be a fenced-in cement pad on the other side of the door, or it could be an open field, the standard doesn’t care.
One strange consequence of our food industry is that whole, uncooked chicken is more expensive than packages of just chicken breasts, and is the same price as a cooked rotisserie whole chicken all at the same store. Anything specialty, such as "organic" or free range, will add quite a bit on top of that.
Packages of uncooked chicken parts (breasts or thighs) at the grocery store in my experience vary a lot from day to day. I try to buy a large amount when it's on sale for under $2/lb, but depending on the day, brand, and size of package, you can easily spend double, maybe even triple without any particular benefit.
Yeah, my research (several years old at this point) is that free range is like 50% more expensive than "normal" chicken and organic + free range is like double the price of "normal" chicken. So, yes, way more expensive.
This does not match the experience of my friends and relatives who live in rural areas. It's not like this meat is coming from the city. It starts out in the country, and it can be found there. I think it's likely that there are more sources than you think nearby you, and not at any more of a distance than you already go for many other things.
What? I grew up in a small town in the country and you get to know the butchers and farmers.
Now I'm from Canada where we have less in the way of factory farms, but all of the farmers I'd known preferred to have their cattle graze and chickens run the lot... that's the default.
(I know: as kids we used to sneak around the farmer's grazing fields and mess with the cow fences—see who could take the [mild] electric shock the longest by holding onto the wire...)
Maybe in places where they raise no animals at all—but I imagine that's relatively sparse in much of the continent. I'd have to look that up, mind you.
??? I just go down to Bud's Meats, a locker in our small town. Get half a beef or a pig and put it in my freezer, raised on pasture by local farmers. Hand-raised lamb by Lois on her sheep farm.
it's an interesting way of contributing, but, the mathematics are clear: there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter so it's not realistic for the larger problem at hand: how consuming animals is contributing to environmental catastrophe and all it entails (factory farming leading to pumping animals full of pesticides, runoff ruining oceans, clearing rainforests to name some)
i think it's inevitable that lab grown meat and/or plant based alternatives get enough economic and environmental momentum to relegate "grass fed"/ethical whatever to a really high price niche forever, so i'd personally just focus efforts at arriving to that point ASAP, be it working for one of these companies, investing, or what have you.
> there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter
Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean?
I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year.
The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations.
Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point.
My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me.
If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.
There is a lot of environmental friendly food that is underutilized because it does not scale to current level of consumption. We have lakes that because of eutrophication is overpopulated. We have biodiversity important grass regions where nation use fossil fueled machines to keep open. We have regions where the only farming possible is animals that eat lichen. There is invasive species which nation pay hunters to kill and throw away the meat because its not economical to sell it.
We are no where near tapped out on unscaleable food sources that has a positive effect on the environment, and yet we put zero resources on it just because we consider it unscaleable. The result is that we do nothing and put all our hope that in the future some scaleable solution will fix everything. That does not sound rational approach when the problem of environmental catastrophe is already here.
I just spent 3 weeks driving the American Midwest. There is vast grasslands uninhabited by anything but cows, and plenty of space for a great many more thereof. The environmental impact is negligible, as they turn a small fraction of human-inedible natural foliage into nutrients/calories/proteins with practically no other effects.
Earth can bear a much larger livestock load than y'all give it credit for.
Is that a big impact? The biomass of cows in the USA is comparable to the biomass of Bison that we killed in the 1800's. Seems like a great methane-neutral substitution for feeding 300m people.
The current factory farm system and the nearly infinite levels of suffering we put animals through is a weird aberration we will look back on in hundreds of years as completely insane. It's like a macabre torture machine most people just avoid ever learning about because the don't want to know how dark it really gets while eating their nuggets.
For cows at least, I’m not sure where this infinite level of suffering you mention comes in. They grow on a ranch well taken care of and have all the food and medical care they could want (more than most Americans can say!). Then they are taken to a feedlot and given all the fattening grain they could ever want (if you’ve ever owned an animal you know that unlimited food is their nirvana) before being humanely slaughtered in an approved and as painless as possible way.
Something else to think of is if not for being grown for food they wouldn’t have existed at all. Is not existing better than that life they get? It’s an interesting question.
That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
This is a very hot take—the feed lots you describe are horrific! Not only are they in tiny, cramped pens, these pens are filled with mud and shit! The food they're eating is not nirvana, it's the barest possible nutrition to fatten them up according to their warped genetic urgency to get bigger at an unnaturally fast pace that trashes their natural health. This isn't an all you can eat buffet and a spa—getting pumped full of antibiotics because their environment is so toxic is hardly what I'd guess they "want."
This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different, that somehow cow suffering is unrelated to human suffering. But most of what we feel and do every day is not actually dictated by consciousness. If you were put into a tiny, roasting summer pen so tiny you couldn't even walk in circles, filled with drugs, covered in your own excrement, ravaged by hunger even though all you do is eat dirty grey hard food, I don't think you'd respond with some kind of elegant, mathematical, civilized emotion. You'd be out of your mind with terror, sadness and grief. Cows can feel all those things, and they do in factory farms. It's common sense, and I agree with those who say we will look back on this era as a disgusting, ignominious chapter in human society.
>That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
It seems like your opinion is not supported by the scientific evidence that reflects stress levels.
I'm not going to buy the whole paper, but this seems to be studying whether there is additional stress in humid, tropical climates, not whether feedlots affect stress levels. Note that there is no non-feedlot control. The fact that it says that stress indicators were in the "normal ranges for cattle" could mean simply that they are not more stressed than feedlot animals in non-humid, non-tropical climates.
>That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
Perhaps you have a different definition of what normal means?
I think you're willfully ignoring the main intent of this paper (effects of climate, not effects of feedlots) and instead replying with trite, condescending responses and nitpicks, so I highly doubt anything productive can come out of this thread.
I don't think that's normal. I think that's trolling. & I think I'm done here.
If you've got any evidence which would support the idea that they were stressed, I would imagine you'd provide it. As you haven't, we both know what the answer is.
This summary is certainly not scientific evidence of the experience of suffering in these animals! As a start, who decided what level of stress is "within normal limits?" If the idea is that this somehow "scientifically" proves that cows don't suffer when confined in abject squalor, well, good luck with that.
>That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
If you're not aware, that's not the title of the paper and is indeed the content.
>This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different
The argument that humans have any sort of ethical duty at all assumes that humans and animals are fundamentally different. Animals don't have any ethical duty to prevent their food from suffering.
EDIT: Furthermore, human suffering is categorically different from animal suffering because human suffering can be inter-generational and have very long-term consequences. Animals don't transfer their suffering and their morality between generations, and that fact does make human suffering much worse than animal suffering, because human suffering can lead to arbitrarily catastrophic consequences. A tiger biting a human can lead directly to the complete extinction of the tiger. The emotional content of the suffering my be similar, but the consequences are not.
That doesn't logically follow. My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer. If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
EDIT: So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
>My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer.
I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
>If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
>So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
> I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
I'm making a claim about what humans should and shouldn't do to cows, namely that we shouldn't torture them. The behavior of some kind of predator does towards its prey is not relevant.
> If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
You found a loophole in thousands of years of logical reasoning! Hypotheticals aren't real or useful in thinking and communicating, who knew!!
> What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
By your reasoning, then, it's actually the torture victims writing about it who are causing the reverberating suffering. If they didn't opt to communicate and teach, their suffering would be fine. Maybe after you've finished convincing everyone to torture animals you can start to shame the writing of memoirs by torture victims?
I don't think you've honestly tried to understand what I'm saying, and I don't think your attitude reflects the maturity I expect of someone seriously attempting to discuss ethics.
Cramped pens are awful and should be illegal, but farm animals normally and quite nonchalantly shit right were they eat without a care about bacteria and parasites (which many parasites exploit readily) . Mud is really not a problem. Pigs actually wallow in it. Literally. That is were the word "wallow" comes from.
Perhaps human sensitivities are in need of adjustment, just as much as our in sensitivities.
Uh, I think your making it quite a bit more glamorous than it is. Feedlots are like if you were placed in a bathroom and given a buffet of a single food source that is designed to be both as cheap as possible whilst fattening you as fast as possible. Than having antibiotics given to you in order to survive the bacteria filled area.
Antibiotics are not given to animals for health reasons (at least not primarily). The antibiotics somehow help the animals grow faster for reasons that are not well understood. As a not so fun fact the vast majority of all antibiotics in the US end up being given to animals.
They are given for health reasons. It’s no longer legal in the US to give cattle antibiotics to encourage faster growth. It is legal to give them antibiotics to prevent/treat the liver abscesses they frequently develop as a result of their diet in the feed lot.
The FDA rules left a number of loopholes. Overall usage has declined and in some cases quite substantially, but they're still being misused. For instance animals can still be given antibiotics as a 'preventative measure.' In 2017, there were still 2.3 million kg of antibiotics sold for usage in cattle alone. [1] To try to give that number some context there are about 95 million head of cattle in the US, so that works out 24g per cow per year even at the current reduced rate.
Actually creates quite a sick motivation system if the FDA does close the loopholes. Growers would have an incentive for their animals to develop conditions requiring antibiotics, so long as it did not significantly risk the animal's health.
Hm relatively similar? A chicken has the awareness of a bug. Conditions for a higher mammal vs a chicken might reasonably be very different for the same level of stress.
I strongly disagree. We treat chickens quite poor.
Laying hens for example, we throw most male chicks into a shredder because they can't produce eggs. That's beyond cruel regardless of their mental capacity.
Another example. Chicken debeaking is a practice used to prevent chickens self mutilating or destroying their eggs or each other.
> we throw most male chicks into a shredder because they can't produce eggs
They also fight viciously amongst each other. You can only have up to a specific ratio of males and females if you want to avoid outright carnage.
Most debeaking is just taking the point off the top of the beak. This is so when they peck, it simultaneously jolts their jaw. They learn to stop doing that, and every time they try, they get that jab reminder. The amount removed isn't even deep enough to hit any nerves.
Maybe some farmers overdo it, but I haven't witnessed that around any farms I've been to.
You must know some smart bugs. Birds tend to be surprisingly bright for their brain capacity.
"Research has shown that chickens have some sense of numbers. Experiments with newly hatched domestic chicks showed they can discriminate between quantities. They also have an idea about ordinality, which refers to the ability to place quantities in a series. Five-day-old domestic chicks presented with two sets of objects of different quantities disappearing behind two screens were able to successfully track which one hid the larger number by apparently performing simple arithmetic in the form of addition and subtraction.
Chickens are also able to remember the trajectory of a hidden ball for up to 180 seconds if they see the ball moving and up to one minute if the displacement of the ball is invisible to them. Their performance is similar to that of most primates under similar conditions.
The birds possess self-control when it comes to holding out for a better food reward. They are able to self-assess their position in the pecking order. These two characteristics are indicative of self-awareness.
Chicken communication is also quite complex, and consists of a large repertoire of different visual displays and at least 24 distinct vocalizations. The birds possess the complex ability of referential communication, which involves signals such as calls, displays and whistles to convey information. They may use this to sound the alarm when there is danger, for instance. This ability requires some level of self-awareness and being able to take the perspective of another animal, and is also possessed by highly intelligent and social species, including primates.
Chickens perceive time intervals and can anticipate future events. Like many other animals, they demonstrate their cognitive complexity when placed in social situations requiring them to solve problems.
The birds are able to experience a range of complex negative and positive emotions, including fear, anticipation and anxiety. They make decisions based on what is best for them. They also possess a simple form of empathy called emotional contagion. Not only do individual chickens have distinct personalities, but mother hens also show a range of individual maternal personality traits which appear to affect the behavior of their chicks. The birds can deceive one another, and they watch and learn from each other."
Not the OP, and I disagree with their assertion that chickens and bugs are of similar intelligence, but there ARE some very intelligent spiders. (which I know aren't technically "bugs")
>Besides having the capacity to make plans, act on the basis of object permanence, represent specific goals and solve novel problems, Portia often has to confront more than one other spider at the same time. [0]
>Our findings suggest that Portia represents 1 and 2 as discrete number categories, but categorizes 3 or more as a single category that we call ‘many’. [1]
We seem to naturally have a strong tendency to disregard the intelligence and emotional lives of animals. (which if you think about it, was probably strongly selected for at some point in the past)
“We seem to naturally have a strong tendency to disregard the intelligence and emotional lives of animals. “
It makes ethics much simpler if you deny that an animal can suffer.
To a degree this also happens on conflicts between humans. It’s much easier to kill others if you deny that they may have reasons for doing what they are doing but instead just call them mindless fanatics that can’t be helped.
I think the OP's comment is just right. Some "bugs" (spiders are "bugs" but they are not insects) have surprisingly complex behavior, and chickens can be surprisingly stupid for animals with actual brains. For instance, they will stay in their coop and drown in a flood, even if they can easily jump over its fence to evade you in other times. It's really incomprehensible.
Sure, I was speaking hyperbole. But the differences between chicken awareness and higher mammals is profound. Blurring that is just anthropomorphizing chickens.
The critique of anthropomorphisis, doesn't really make a hell of a lot of sense, if you are comparing chickens and higher mammal's relative awareness. And what about it being blurry don't you like? I mean, it is a bit blurry if you start looking for a very smart chicken and a particularly stupid monkey.
>A chicken has the awareness of a bug
I this true? I thought that all birds were highly intelligents. Although they don't have any pack instinct, chicken still have a peck order, that mean that they recognize individuality. Thus they probably have a sense of self. If consiousness is an illusion created by senses, they probably have a conscience too then.
All my young life. They have very marginal responses to their environment. They see a threat, they respond. They turn their backs on the threat, seconds later they are back to pecking at the dirt.
I spent a lot of time with chickens when I was a kid. The ones I dealt with had quite distinct personalities, some were friendly, some fearful, some brave and they also seemed to respond to stress. Obviously they are different from humans but I thought they had quite a range of behaviors.
I don’t know much about chickens but look after some bees. The awareness and organisation of a colony is striking. The bar is perhaps a little higher than the OP intended it to be.
Isn't that anthropomorphizing right there? Maybe more correct to say "The evolved stimulus reactions in individuals resulting in complex group behaviors is striking"?
Bees are a great example of mindless creatures with no awareness. They die a horrible death when they sting someone (their internal organs ripped out of their bodies with the stinger) with no obvious awareness of what they're doing.
OP's implications were in the context of a modern factory farm. You are describing the life of a cow on an old fashioned farm. Not existing is objectively better than being raised for veal. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with factory farming, I honestly don't recommend going down the animal lib rabbit hole it's incredibly depressing. It's a water slide of cognitive dissonance until you hit rock bottom and realize there needs to be reform.
“Something else to think of is if not for being grown for food they wouldn’t have existed at all. Is not existing better than that life they get? It’s an interesting question.”
By that logic we could grow humans in concentration camps and make them perform slave labor for their whole life. Their lives are miserable but at least they have existed.
You seem to have a very rose colored impression of how life is for most animals is on farms or feed lots. Their whole life is miserable and stressful.
> a weird aberration we will look back on in hundreds of years as completely insane
I am hopeful that by then the concept of us eating animals will also be gone by us synthesizing all our meat instead.
At that point, everything to do with animal consumption and animal production for consumption will seem like a weird aberration; a mere blink of an eye that was part of the process of us transitioning from animals into a civilized intelligent species.
I would switch to a synthesized alternative tomorrow if we could figure out diet today.
But it's still regularly promoted that the best way to see to a full diet is a natural diet along with any necessary supplementation because [from my limited memory] we don't have a full grasp on the complex interactions/delivery of nutrients.
A predisposition to a B12 deficiency runs in my family. In other family members it's more severe than others (for instance a B12 shot has been not enough to bring my mother back from near physical collapse and has required emergency blood transfusions).
I've often thought I had a handle on it—take a daily oral or sublingual tablet of 5000mcg (usually urinate most of it out pretty quickly) and added more red meat to my diet (per my doctor) but still I've noticed advancing effects occasionally. One more physically apparent one is slowly advancing Vitiligo—I'd had some spots for years but notice a new or expanding one every so often. It's a [physically] harmless symptom, mind.
Worse are some of the others I experienced in my earlier years that persisted before I was diagnosed. I still have bouts where I thought I was looking after myself and those periods of sensation loss/global pins and needles, nausea. It can be frightening, and quality of life plummets. It's no joke.
So solve the diet thing and I'm on board. Until then, I think it's a bit of hubris. I'm sure there are other incremental improvements we can make until then, however.
Completely dissociating our lives from the natural processes that we evolved with for millenia and which we don't yet fully understand is very likely to create many more, and much more serious issues than it is supposed to address.
Synthetic meat (or any kind of food) in particular sounds like a really awful idea. It sounds like some kind of progressive, rational choice but it is really only an extreme of the abuses of technology that make our lives miserable and drive people to seek a "natural" way of life (which never existed).
If I may be so bold, that is not how we resolve the ethical issues of industrial meat production. It's how we turn into the Borg.
"synthesizing meat" is transitional, coming from the mindset that meat is necessary. Once adaptation to eating plants happens, eating things which simulate animals can seem strange and cravings for animal meat and meat-like products may fade.
If you don't enjoy the thought of a eating a slaughtered cow patty, eating a healthier, plant-based version of a slaughtered cow patty that looks and tastes roughly the same may still not be that appealing.
fascinatingly, I have done this! Was vegetarian, went so far as to take a job as a clerk at an ethical butchery.
I eventually went vegan (and returned to engineering again) but I have the deepest respect for those who work with meat but treat the taking of a life with reverence. It is excellent harm reduction.
Asking folks, especially indigenous folks, to abstain from a traditional food lifeway is a hard conversation not to be an asshole in unless you are offering something equivalent (in taste and cultural position) that does not involve mega-scale mutilation and trauma to sentient beings. Beyond-Meat-style precise simulation helps. Careful, farm-driven husbandry and ethical slaughter helps enormously too, but obviously scales less well.
It's important to me to as cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible, and to treat the taking of a life with great solemnity. Ethical butchery does these things.
As it happens, there kind of is a non-coincidental connection, apart from the obvious 'I was no longer a butchery clerk and needed to make money'.
As an engineer I can afford to buy meat substitutes. I can afford veganism, or at least the kind that is comfortable to someone who grew up loving meat and cheese. One day, these substitutes will be more broadly available, but that day isn't today.
Also, I am re-inspired by the careful meat/egg/dairy simulation work that has been done by Beyond Meat and similar innovators, and now regard engineering as the correct approach for solving this and other ecological crises at scale.
I once again think that my technical training can help save the world, rather than just provide me with savings. I believe in the high-science approach again. This might seem like the obvious solution to the HN audience, but I assure you, lots of folks are drawn to traditional bodies of knowledge and lifeways, and regard them as known-good, and regard the food difficulties the world faces as symptoms of a hasty rush into the embrace of high technology, which in turn entails finance and markets, which in turn entails global capitalism or something like it (e.g. whatever the appropriate term is for the hybrid approach pursued by China.) I myself found this position alluring for quite some time -- "just keep the old ways!" -- but it's a dead end.
Artisanal & heirloom approaches to food production have a lot to teach us, but none of those lessons are 'ok great now let's feed a couple billion new folks'. Instead, they are best at teaching us what we've already lost. That in turn might help us avoid the next loss -- or pursue the next restoration.
The idea that being vegetarian or vegan is more expensive than eating meat seems utterly absurd to me.
Meat, excepting processed barely-food bollocks like frozen chicken nuggets or whatever, is substantially more expensive than any food item I regularly buy.
Dried pulses are like 1-2 USD per kilogram. You're eating stuff like lettuce, cucumber etc anyway unless you're a savant, same for pasta, rice, etc.
The only place I can think of in which it's potentially more expensive is stuff like McDonalds not having a vegan option.
I'm guessing this is either an American market distortion, or one of those "but I work 80 hours a week so can't do anything other than the most convenient thing ever" weird might-as-well-end-yourself-because-you-are-a-cog things.
This reads like a hitpiece against vegetarianism/veganism to me, or a way to assure omnivores that their current diets are OK and not completely terrible for the environment.
> she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment
This is patently false, even though she might have believed it. Over 70% of soy grown in the US goes directly into animal feed [1], with some being used for biofuel as well [2]
> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”
It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one.
The article does raise a good thought though, being the following:
> The system’s advocates say it can regenerate vast swaths of grassland, which has the potential to sequester carbon rather than emitting it as factory farm operations do.
I haven't yet seen good analysis on whether the grassland tended by grazing livestock does good than the livestock themselves (in the form of methane emissions), but it would be wonderful if it did.
Finally, the article thankfully acknowledges the elephant in the room:
> Critics of the alternative approach say that not all studies show improved carbon sequestration on grazed grassland, and that the system can’t produce enough meat to meet current demand
Regardless of whether or not meat raised in this way is better for the environment and/or peoples' health, there is no way enough meat could ever be raised this way to meet the modern demand for it. The demand for meat worldwide is going _up_, and the typical Western diet that is heavy in meat will continue to be a hugely destructive force on our environment until we _all_ slash our consumption of animal products.
>> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in ... “As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”
> It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one.
I came here to post this. I mean it's quite obvious to me that if your diet consists mostly of junk food, whether you're vegetarian or not, you will feel like crap. I've stopped eating meat almost entirely(except at restaurants, where the "vegetarian" option is vegetables with more vegetables on the side on a platter made of vegetables), and I feel much better than I did when I was cooking meat.
>> It should be obvious that if you go from a diet heavy in processed foods to one based on whole foods (plant-based or otherwise) your health will improve, but this wording makes me feel like it's trying to show that an omnivorous diet is healthier than a vegetarian/vegan one.
Humans are omnivores and while historically most societies took most of their calories from plants, they also ate meat and, in Europe, dairy. For people who lived near the sea, "meat" meant fish and seafood, some cultures have restrictions on the type of meat that can be eaten (Hindus don't eat cows, Jews and Muslims don't eat pigs, Northern Europeans don't eat offal, etc) but most people have always eaten a significant amount of meat (and people in the Arctic ate almost exclusively meat diets) .
Even traditional vegetarian societies consume plenty of animal products (eggs, fat, dairy, etc) and there are no vegan cultures.
So either historically humans have eaten unhealthy diets, or omnivorous diets are at least as healthy as vegetarian and vegan diets. And probably more, knowing how evolution tends to sort such things out.
agreed re: processed stuff. i've about had it with "vegetarians" who eat frozen pizza 3x a day whining about being unhealthy. also agreed that the framing about "rediscovering meat" is misleading as hell.
> “It can be hard to balance your diet as a vegetarian, especially when you’re younger, and I wasn’t doing it right,” he said.
i really don't understand this - there's no justification given, nor is there a reason why it's harder when younger.
1. Changing your diet is not so easy when the society around you has optimised for something else.
2. Culture - if your family has historically relied on meat for sustenance, you can't exactly go vegetarian with the flip of a switch. It requires a shit ton of planning, asking questions, identifying what you like, resetting your taste palate and expectations meanwhile still entailing a fair bit of confusion. OTOH, Grandma taught Mom who taught her children on how to cook meat.
3. Younger ages are tough since you would probably be living with family and decisions regarding what is bought and cooked are probably being made by parents who might not exactly share your inclinations to go meat-free.
There are those that are vegetarian and there are those that try it for a while.
The article could be search/replaced and rewritten to describe an extreme minority of interestingly tattooed people that 'quit smoking for a few years' to go back to smoking, albeit only pipe tobacco, and to work in ethical tobacconists. In this alternate story they go on to sell only pure tobacco without the hundreds of additives, the goal being to help other smokers live healthier lives.
A lot of people who try vegetarianism get a bee in their bonnet about it and go preachy on the rest of the world. The rest of the world just shuns them even if they are right, getting told what to eat is not what anyone wants to hear.
Others are brought up vegetarian or have a partner who does all the cooking and happens to be vegetarian. In the article I didn't get the idea that any of the people featured were this more down to earth and less preachy crowd.
By far the nicest thing I have ever eaten was impala. This was from a restaurant, before I started restricting my diet, but I would love to go and hunt me some of those.
I realize that most people will read this and go "haha, see that triggered vegan", but please take a moment to honestly consider how horribly bad this article is.
The article (besides being about vegetarians and vegans who turned butcher, for some self-contradictory reasons) is about the benefits of grass-fed, expensive meat versus soy- and corn- fed meat. The main benefit is that it's healthier for the animal, and therefore "nicer" for the animal, and also more environmentally friendly.
However, it is not at all more environmentally friendly. The impact on the environment is actually a lot higher, because now you need to dedicate large portions of land to grass-fed animals. And yes, there are plenty of areas that don't seem to grow any proper food but do grow grass, which makes it sound like it's a perfectly valid plan. But even if you cut down every forest on earth and use every arible piece of land for grass-fed animals, you would still not have enough space on earth to support our current demand for meat in such a way.
They hint towards this a little bit, and suggest that people can counterbalance this by only eating a little piece of meat. But then that is the "real" solution here: to severely reduce your meat consumption. The whole part about grass-fed vs corn-fed is not at all relevant to the story after this point, it's all about reducing consumption. After all, if you only ate a little bit of meat, it would STILL be more sustainable to eat corn/soy-fed meat instead of grass-fed meat.
Of course, that's exactly what vegetarians and vegans are doing: they're reducing the amount of meat they eat.. but instead of stopping at, say, 10% of what the average person eats normally, they stop at 0%. And they are often demonized because of that last 10%, whereas stopping at 10% apparently makes you some kind of noble hero.
Also, there are some pretty insane lines in this article:
> [...] a vegan for five years <attended a> “Kill Your Own Thanksgiving Dinner” event at a local farm.
> “It was really morbid. I was the only one who signed up,” she said.
If you're a vegan, and you care about animals, why were you signing up for a "kill your own turkey" event? That sounds like one of the least vegan thing you could do.
> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in, she began eating meat again in Europe, where she worked on farms for a few years.
>“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said.
So she stopped eating junkfood and her health improved. This is framed as if it's somehow bad to be vegetarian/vegan for your health, but I hope any skeptical reader will see her problem was a horrible junkfood diet, not that she was vegetarians. How many meat-eaters can be healthy on only eating pizzapockets, yoghurt and hamburgers?
> “I have a business based on the fact that I’m sad about the way animals are being treated,” he said.
No, you have a business making a profit from the death of animals.
> “Since I became a butcher I’ve been called some horrible things on the internet, and it doesn’t seem right,” [...] “There’s a larger problem here: the problem with concentrated feedlots, and with animals being commodities. That’s what we should be attacking, not each other. ”
That's like saying "Hey, I treat my slaves really well! We should be fighting the bad slave-holders, not the good ones."
No, (ethical) vegans are against using animals as products, and that's what they're commenting on. Not whether or not your meat is healthy.
> After all, if you only ate a little bit of meat, it would STILL be more sustainable to eat corn/soy-fed meat instead of grass-fed meat.
Absolutely no. A small amount of corn/soy fed meat where the corn and soy could have gone to human consumption (often with rain forests being burned down) is significant worse than a large amount of grass-fed meat in areas where farming is unsuitable and the need for biodiversity is higher than forestation.
The whole point of the push for environmentally friendly farming is that the food should not do harm to the environment. That it does not scale is a massive problem, but that does not make environment harming food better. Harm is harm.
It is a massive simplification to as saying that environmentally friendly farming has a higher impact on the environment because it take up too much land. Burning down rain forests is worse than using up a lot of land. Since we are currently not out of grass land but we are desperately running out of rain forests, getting people out of the market of meat and vegetables that come from areas that burn down rain forests for farming is a net-positive for the environment.
Regarding grass feeding: There are a lot of areas were cattle are raised naturally on a grass diet for milk production and meat (think Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland). In those areas growing corn or soy beans would be impossible. There are humane and sustainable ways of raising cattle for slaughter / milk production and people have been practicing them for a long time in such regions. Apart from the moral question whether killing animals for food is ok, I see nothing objectionable to consuming such locally produced products. At the same time there are plenty of ways that parts of the current western lifestyle could not be scaled up to the whole planet (meat eating habits being just one of them).
In terms of environmental impact vegans / vegetarians avidly consume coconut oil, soy beans, nuts etc. All things that are typically produced far away and sometimes not sustainably produced at all (think the meat ersatz burger being rolled out right now). If you stick to regionally produced products, you are much more likely to have a positive environmental impact.
I think the moral question of whether raising and killing animals for slaughter is a bit too hard for me to just set aside, to be honest.
And saying vegans are not being sustainable for eating "exotic" food seems absurd to me, hardly any meat eater eats local food, especially if you consider animal feed of the meat, milk and leather you use. That's not an argument against vegans or vegetarians, but an argument against people who don't eat locally produced products (on both sides).
Grass-fed beef is worse for the environment than feedlot beef, which is already pretty damned terrible. You need more cows to produce the same amount of beef, which means more methane emissions. There isn't enough pasture land available to meet our demand for beef; cattle farming is already the primary cause of deforestation, which would only be exacerbated by a shift away from feedlots.
The higher cost of grass-fed, free-range, etc. meat and poultry serves to internalize the externalities and disincentivizes frequent consumption. So no, it's not worse in and of itself, if it replaced feedlot farming, then we'd see prices spike, consumption plummet, and ideally we'd also see antibiotic and feed corn use sharply drop as well. We could all wish for such a world.
