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Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

nature.com

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Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#261

Post by blisterpeanuts »

elktea wrote: post #92

There's a good case to be made for humans being primarily meat eaters for much of our history and only eating plants as an alternative to starving - we certainly haven't had time to evolve to eat a vegetarian diet. Agriculture has only been around for a small fraction of our history and the skeletal record clearly shows how disasterous it was for our health. The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are back…

Paleontologists believe that it was the shift from fruits and nuts to a high protein diet of meat that allowed our brains to grow dramatically compared to other primates. We are omnivorous, and our bodies require a certain amount of plant matter ideally, but clearly meat is an integral component of a healthy human diet.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#262

Post by ppseafield »

corodra wrote: post #243
nkozyra wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. Illuminating the moral quandary of meat consumption helps. It worked for me. Nobody had to ask me nicely, they just needed to help me to think about it and be self-reflective. Even if you believe there to be ethical meat consumption (a notion I find dubious in modern life), people can reduce consumption and have a big impact. Modern commercial me…

But most people don't see a general ethical issue with eating meat. We are omnivores after all. Hell, our hunter gatherer ancestors ate more meat than we do. Though, higher quality. It's the same with seeing a wolf eat a deer. Think they care? Same with a chimp finally catching a monkey and eating it (now those are horrifying videos to see, especially since chimps love eating monkeys). Snake to a mouse. Fox to a hare…

A lot of people have a problem with eating dog meat.

Wolves that eat deer don't also breed them to the point where they contribute to climate change. Hunter gatherer folk don't breed them to a point where they are a significant factor in climate change.

As carnivores wolves don't really have a choice to not eat meat. You do, though. With a couple of different choices at the supermarket or simply ordering different choices on the menu, you can help cut down our global emissions.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#263

Post by henryaj »

jnwatson wrote: post #206

If everyone stopped traveling for fun, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more. You’re not going to guilt people into changing their behavior. A carbon tax fixes this.

> If everyone stopped traveling for fun, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more

Animal agriculture is responsible for 14~18% of greenhouse gas emissions [0]; aviation only ~5% [1].

[0] - https://skepticalscience.com/how-much-meat-contribute-to-gw.... [1] - https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times...

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#264

Post by Nasrudith »

ccffph wrote: post #248
elorant wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone stopped traveling for fun the worldwide tourism economy would collapse. There are whole countries that rely on tourism to make it through.

Why is the tourism economy more important than the livestock economy?

Because the tourism economy makes keeping natural land viable strategically by selling its beauty to tourists while livestock economy requires land use.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#265

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pmlnr wrote: post #224
jnwatson wrote: post #206

If everyone stopped traveling for fun, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more. You’re not going to guilt people into changing their behavior. A carbon tax fixes this.

> stopped traveling for fun Uhm... how about stop travelling for business in the world of instant communication?

Imagine if every office worker worked remotely how much less driving would be necessary.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#266

Post by JoeAltmaier »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #256

In the early 1800s, there were an estimated 60 million bison in North America. They were hunted nearly to extinction, and today there are an estimated 31,000 (wikipedia). Meanwhile, there are about 120 million cattle in the U.S. and Canada (over a billion worldwide). It's possible that cattle therefore have a larger impact on the ecology than did the buffalo, but there were always large grazing herds in the world, an…

Neat for you, but probably not scalable. Hunting and gathering always had that problem. For the other 6 billion people on the planet, big Ag is all that's going to feed them.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#267

Post by matz1 »

nkozyra wrote: post #214
Nyandalized wrote: post #2

I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible. This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.

> I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. Illuminating the moral quandary of meat consumption helps. It worked for me. Nobody had to ask me nicely, they just needed to help me to think about it and be self-reflective. Even if you believe there to be ethical meat consumption (a notion I find dubious in modern life), people can reduce consumption and have a big impact. Modern commercial me…

>Even if you believe there to be ethical meat consumption (a notion I find dubious in modern life

Why is that dubious ? Ethics is personal. For me, consuming meat is ethical. Unless I'm forced to not eat meat then I won't stop.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#268

Post by corodra »

LegitShady wrote: post #229
diyseguy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its interesting to hear anecdotal stories like these because they contradict the conventional wisdom nowadays that says you have to eat meat as protein every day - clearly that wasn't the case in prior centuries.

what was the life expectancy? what was the standard of living? trying to call back to 1930s belarus as an example to live from is crazy. It doesn't even logically follow that we should avoid meat because poor farmers in belarus didn't each much. Where's the logical argument?

You and it sucks you're being downvoted.

You know that lifestyle where everyone was poor, sickly and died at a younger age, that's a totally better lifestyle!

Here's some stuff they conveniently left out that my Polish grandparents told me. In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions. People hunted a lot back then. Rabbit, deer, etc. So, they would supplement game for livestock. Because game meat is not considered desirable by civilized society.

Oh and fish. In eastern Europe, fish. Like always. It's cheap as shit and plentiful. It's also not considered meat because of Lent. Which is stupid. Fish is meat. Grow up. That's why people say they don't eat meat, but still eat fish. It's a catholic concept.

The idea that the old world ate less meat is misleading. They ate less prized meats. Today we consider top round off a cow as a cheap cut. That use to be a Christmas roast for many poor families.

Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you. Even when I did it with my then girlfriend for a year. My bloodwork went to total shit and I always felt like crap.

This whole article and crap is just a bunch of power hungry assholes in the UN appeasing to childish hippies who never picked up a book outside the metaphysical section.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#269

Post by dmux »

lol768 wrote: post #77
mytailorisrich wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to go from one extreme to the other. This is about eating "less" meat. People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited. This is still the case in poor countries. In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing. We now eat too much meat, and also co…

>adult don't need to drink any milk and many don't digest it well, by the way Never understood the obsession with drinking milk on its own (though I never liked the taste of it myself either). There's plenty of calcium to be found in other sources: kale, leafy greens, almonds, fortrified grains, beans/pulses etc.

>Never understood the obsession with drinking milk on its own

It's something that's been consumed for millennia. There are societies based on pastoralism where milk is a huge part of the diet. I'd hardly classify it as being an obsession.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#270

Post by blisterpeanuts »

Frondo wrote: post #249
elktea wrote: post #92

There's a good case to be made for humans being primarily meat eaters for much of our history and only eating plants as an alternative to starving - we certainly haven't had time to evolve to eat a vegetarian diet. Agriculture has only been around for a small fraction of our history and the skeletal record clearly shows how disasterous it was for our health. The current 'plant based' fad diet recommendations are back…

From an evolutionary perspective, we have evolved: we use tools and process nearly anything we eat anyway. Plants are the only thing we eat with minimal preparation, and only some of those. When was the last time you had raw beef? for me, it was beef tartare a few years ago... Raw grain? Nope, that's all processed, either by boiling, or grinding and turning into something else.

Sushi!

Homo Erectus was thought to have subsisted on raw meat. There's evidence of intestinal parasites that suggests such a diet.

Apparently, at some point, we decided to cook our meat, which reduced the parasite load and removed the need for low pH comparative to other carnivores.

But not too long ago, humans did eat some raw meats. Primitive hunters sometimes ate raw hearts, and drinking fresh blood was not unheard of. 1,000 years ago, the Mongols would sometimes nick their horses and drink blood to sustain them on long journeys.

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