841–850 of 947 posts
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> You haven’t kill much, didn’t you? A few things. Mostly fish. Mostly from lack of opportunity. I'm all for humane killing where possible, of course!
>humane killing Please explain how taking away another living, breathing creatures life can be humane.
Hey you could even prepare your own dinner from a selection of fresh vegetables and fruit (and if you're feeling absolutely crazy you could add a few eggs, milk, meat, fish or grains).
This seems like it solves a couple of problems and ignores/creates a whole load more. People who are content eating all their meals from McDonalds etc have their own issues, most of which can't be fixed by meat substitues.
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The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us. Let's treat them as humanely as possible, while not pretending they're something they're not. If you want to help animals, let's tackle the issue of rewilding and reforestation more seriously.
> The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us. I hate this argument so much. For a start, animals are perfectly capable of breeding on their own. They don't need you. You are not their god. Who is pretending they are something they are not? They are sentient beings whether you like it or not. You might think you are superior, but your cat and your dog are certainly not. And who says that being alive is goo…
The beauty of being human is that we are not controlled by our instincts. We have meta-cognition, which therefore makes us distinct from all other animals. This is why the vast majority of the earth's population agrees that killing a human and killing an animal are very different things.
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Preface: I'm a hypocritical omnivore who likes animals. If meat alternatives and lab grown meat become cheap and indistinguishable from real sources, I predict that within the span of two generations our descendants are going to look back on us as immoral savages. I use cognitive dissonance and distance from how my food is made to get over how horrible industrial farming is and how brutal life can be for livestock. T…
I imagine this sentiment is often from seeing documentaries about the worst conditions in farming, and the general cosseting away from life and death that most of us have enjoyed. But the farms and ranches I grew up around, and that I buy most of my meat from, never seem that brutal when I’ve visited them, and the animals seem well cared for and mostly doing their own thing on the pasture most of the time. I wanted t…
In your last paragraph, you are making the case for eating crops directly instead of growing incredible excess to feed animals, especially if you're going to bring up crop monoculture.
https://www.beyondmeat.com/whats-new/is-meat-production-an-e...
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If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food? What then? I'm sure you h…
Watch the documentary Earthlings and tell me those animals are not suffering. Watch a slaughterhouse video, cows fighting for their life, pigs screaming and shivering out of fear. Animals have the same pain receptors as us. Carl Sagan was right... they are too much like us. If you take a completely logical and humanistic approach to this, then you’d realise that factory farming is barbaric and unnecessary. Most human…
Pain on its own is just a response to stimuli, which plants have too.
I enjoy eating meat and have no plans of going off of it completely. But we eat so much of it as a culture. And when you add up every hot pocket, frozen pizza, slider, hot dog, or chicken nugget, it's hard to argue that most of meat actually being consumed can't be easily substituted. For something healthier and cheaper too! And I know people blast tech companies for focusing too much on making things flashy and cool…
The price of Impossible and Beyond per pound is still higher than real beef, probably due to government subsidies artificially reducing the cost of beef. Once the equation flips I expect just about every fast food menu item, freezer food, and quick prep box to switch to these new vegetable meats.
There is a snowball effect happening. More and more places and products are offering a meat alternative because Impossible and Beyond are 1:1 recipe substitutes. This brings the cost down as manufacturing processes can scale up. Confidence is growing and taste isn't suffering. Toward a vegetarian future, economics will succeed where ethics and wellness have failed.
This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan "meat" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by average people and not just dedicated vegans. Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle. (see the docu…
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You could say the same thing for plants right? They probably don't want to be eaten.
The argument has never been that it's only ok for humans to live if we do zero harm. It's obvious that we can't do that. And that's fine. Human life is worth much more than anything else for us humans, so eating something to survive is necessary and ethical. Same logic applies also to vaccines that need animal products in production. I would prefer if they wouldn't, but I'm not judging anyone for taking it. What we'r…
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The same happens when humans switch to a largely corn diet. Corn and wheat (maybe just grains) just don't seam healthy. If I had to drop meat, I'd primarily eat beans/legumes.
That's why only Europe has its cuisine based on grains. All other regions base their cuisine on either potatoes or rice.
Most of European diets are very potato heavy.
This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan "meat" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by average people and not just dedicated vegans. Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle. (see the docu…
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…
You might want to read this https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#whe... and maybe this too https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#food-producti...
Highlights:
> there are massive differences in the GHG emissions of different foods: producing a kilogram of beef emits 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalents). While peas emits just 1 kilogram per kg.
> For most foods – and particularly the largest emitters – most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green), and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers – both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods.
> Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions.
> Livestock & fisheries account for 31% of food emissions ... This 31% of emissions relates to on-farm ‘production’ emissions only: it does not include land use change or supply chain emissions from the production of crops for animal feed: these figures are included separately in the other categories.
> 21% of food’s emissions comes from crop production for direct human consumption, and 6% comes from the production of animal feed.
> Land use accounts for 24% of food emissions. Twice as many emissions result from land use for livestock (16%) as for crops for human consumption (8%).
So including land use and crops production, livestock and fisheries account for ~15% of GHG emmissions