321–330 of 577 posts
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>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.
> Ethics is personal You may want to consider the broader implications of using this reasoning.
produce less meat Eating less meat just means more waste. We need to stop talking about climate change as a problem individuals can solve with ecological lifestyle choices. We need international economic planning and the seizure of carbon extracting industry.
Temporarily maybe, but consumption pulls production, production follows consumption, not the opposite Producing less will make it more expensive at least
Also demand is not the same as consumption. You can manufacture demand.
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>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.
> Ethics is personal You may want to consider the broader implications of using this reasoning.
At least in the USA, this could in principle be fixed by ending the corporate welfare state. Old news, but All major industries like the beef industry get huge tax breaks, free water and other giveaways at the general taxpayer’s expense. Fixing the corruption (both democratic and republican parties) in our our political would end up helping the environment a lot. That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt p…
We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can some…
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My grandmother told me that before the second world war for a typical peasant family in Belarus the meat meant a single chicken 2-4 times in a month for the whole family. Only on big celebrations few times in a year people could afford to slaughter a pig or a caw. Even eggs were considered expensive. Milk was more available as most families had a cow. The real staple food was potato and bread. In cities meat was more…
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.
However, slaughtering a pig or two once a year in the autumn also doesn't imply eating pork once a year, for a single family a single pig provides a quite large amount of various cured/smoked/dried meat products that are consumed over the winter, so you still have some meat products (not in large quantities though) on most days.
The UN doesn't have the guts to target the task issue: too many humans. And recommend the only solution: one child per couple until we get down to about half the current population.
Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway. Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in developing countries along with improving medical services to cut infant mortality (so that parents can be sure their young will reach old age and don't need to play it safe and have many young). We are getting there slowly, but we could do more.
This is incoherent. You can’t converge on extinction. Any population that doesn’t even replace itself will die out rapidly.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
> The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
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>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.
This is a very niche reason, but one of the classic diets for beginner weight lifters who want to gain weight is to add a gallon of whole milk a day to their existing diet. For people that are trying to consume more calories and protein, I don't know of an alternative that combines comparable calorie & protein density, low cost, ease of consumption, and zero preparation time. More generally, I think that one of the b…
Dairy in particular can be source of inflammation. One of the benefits of the vegan diets for athletes cited is a fast recovery time after workouts.
Have they taken meat off the menu at UN offices and HQ? Or is this for « everyone else »?
And in any case, it's likely the scientists putting out climate reports aren't the people running the cafeteria.
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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 unhear…
It's also usually prepared in some way, whether it's flash frozen or treated with vinegar.
But, I guess my point is that the evolutionary argument doesn't really make sense in a world where we evolved tools and have been eating processed food for a long, long time.
Also, evolution happens a lot faster than people give it credit for. Something I read somewhere is that the genes for lactose digestion only started remaining "switched on" in adults like 8,000 years ago, and yet a third of the world now has this gene.
That's a really short time! That's not far from when we develop writing (around 6,000 years ago).
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>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.
You're missing one solid reason to drink milk: some people like it. Most of the stuff we eat today is actually not about nutritional needs. And your argument can always be reshuffled. Swap milk with any one of the items you listed and one by one you can disqualify all of them from consumption. Variety is a good thing, meaning something should be eliminated because it's no good, not because there are alternatives. The…
In the early days soy milk was about the only alternative. Now there are so many dairy-free milk alternatives to try. The proliferation of grocery shelves is a testament to their growing popularity.