Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the cow.
You could say the same thing for plants right? They probably don't want to be eaten.
The Arrogant Worms had a good take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM
Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
541–550 of 947 posts
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because something is evolved behavior doesn't make it moral: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-traged... Natural selection doesn't have morality as a goal, only passing on genetic material. > "The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals." I think…
> I think it's possible to care about both and not eating meat is a relatively easy way to reduce one. The downsides make it considerably less than "easy". Easy is continuing with the status quo; and as that is certainly likely to be the case for billions of people who have no interest in your uber-rationalist argumentation, I can happily just continue as is, with zero impact to my life until some vociferous person t…
I did say “relatively” easy. Not just easy. It’s hard, I like eating and would rather eat meat than not.
Sometimes doing something you think is the right thing is harder than doing the status quo easy thing.
Humanity has changed over time though, and left behind other practices we now regret having done at all. I think that might be possible here too.
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raising cattle can easily become a net negative to carbon emissions if cows are given slightly more space to graze and moved around more often. If all cattle were raised in this way there would be slightly less cattle production but a far more positive environmental impact than if we all switched to vegan "meat". https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grass...
There needs to be a proper discussion, debate, to break apart ideologies that are perpetuating misinformation or just simply not taking into account the whole ecosystem; the documentary Sacred Cow seemed to do a good job to explain it.
Not sure why this was downvoted, sacred cow is actually a good unbiased take at regenerative agriculture (including both plants and animals)
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand. What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.
Field corn is hardly a byproduct. It's inedible to humans, yes, but a different crop could be grown instead.
This entire thread is hijacked by talking about "cow farts". Meat, the way it's farmed today, is far more intensive than what meets the eye. There's the land required to raise the crops that feed the animals, there's transportation of this feed and the raw material to grow the feed, there's the deforestation caused by the land requirement, and on and on.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
> large mammal farts going on now is probably not that much higher than it always has been I believe a big part of it has to do with the feedlot diet— when they're eating a high-calorie diet of mostly corn/grain instead of their natural diet of grass, it puts their digestive system into overdrive. EDIT: I looked into it a bit more after posting this, and it looks like it's not clear-cut— for example, it takes a cow a…
The corn consumed by cattle includes the corn stalks which are more or less the same as consuming grass. Corn is after all in the grass family. The actual kernels of corn increase the calories versus grass, but it’s not like cows are just eating corn off the cob all day long. They need to consume tons of roughage to help with their digestion. I think a good argument is that converting grain and grass to beef is ineff…
It is well documented that once cows are switched to the pure corn diets we now feed them, their health starts immediately declining and they start dying. Factory farms time it so that they grow up on grass and similar, then are switched to grain to fatten them, and are slaughtered before becoming too ill. There are many unhealthy modifications made to their diet and environment to force them to consume corn. This is detailed lots of places including the book The Omnivores Dilemma. The whole book is essentially about corn and what a horror show industrial agriculture/meat is.
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand. What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.
Field corn is hardly a byproduct. It's inedible to humans, yes, but a different crop could be grown instead.
Field corn is grown for the starch, which is turned into ethanol. The remaining bits are turned into animal feed. Those bits are the byproduct. The main product is ethanol, which the government has induced a huge demand for under the pretext of environmental protection.
It is not profitable to grow field corn solely for animal feed.
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#547No post body was provided.
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I eat a pig." This just isn't very strong reasoning to me. Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. A pig would also not keep you in a farm to eat later (among many other industrialized things we do to livestock). Just becau…
>> Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. Yes, but they also do this thing that I would do. This is why this debate exists in the first place, yes? Because some animals eat other animals and we're that kind of animal. It doesn't matter if some aninmals would, e.g., eat their own excreta, because that is not something that humans do anyway and so there is no reason to discuss whether we…
> By not eating them we are not reducing suffering
Yes we are. The problem is not just killing animals, it's condemning them to a life of torture.
We are doing to animals, on a gigantic scale, what the Nazis did to other humans. We think we are different than the Nazis. But the only way we are different in that we are worse.
The Nazis knew that what they were doing was wrong. They went to great lengths to try to hide their crimes, including digging up corpses and burning them when the allies were closing in on them (while they could have fled instead).
We, on the other hand, are mostly undisturbed by what we are doing.
> Because some animals eat other animals and we're that kind of animal.
Some humans do horrible things to other humans, and we are certainly "that kind of animal". So everything's okay, then? We can do anything to anyone because, presumably, they would do the same to us "if they could", if history is any proof.
I don't want to live in your world. Yet I know I do.
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
I truly don't understand the methane issue. Historically worldwide the # of ungulates is probably well below historical averages. It looks like today we have around 98 million head of cattle in the US. Historically we had bison in excess of conservatively 60 million. This doesn't even begin to count all the animals in Africa. Overall wide life is declining. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194297/total-number-of-c…
Think about it. Cows release carbon based green house gasses. Where does that carbon originally come from? Plants absorbing carbon based green house gasses. I'm not saying that they cancel out, but there must be some consumption of carbon from the atmosphere in order for cows to produce carbon. If you're an environmentalist trying to convince people to support your cause, you aren't going to talk about the carbon tha…
Note conversion of C02 into methane.
If methane has bigger effect than the same amount of coal within C02 then your argument fails.
> While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.
> In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
Re: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
#550I'm not asking this to rain on the parade - I love what these guys are doing but I have a question about their process and the ethics of it. So in order to grow the meat, they have to culture the cells in bovine fetal serum, which they get from cow fetuses on their way to slaughter. My question is how much meat is grown per fetus? > Cell-grown meat, I told him, would be spurred on by synthetic serums refined from the…
Wow, that does not sound like something I want to eat.