> We don't need meat. We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential. Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat. Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor…
Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.
The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet.
It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.
What explains the abundance of trucks that I see here in suburbia? Or in places like the Bay Area, where there's never, ever any snow.
Outdoor activities? Labor jobs? I don't think you can judge without knowing their lifestyle. Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it. I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
> I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it.
I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want.
> I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
Sorry, it has not.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_chip
Thanks for the clarification. FWIW I was interpreting "corn chip" to mean a tortilla chip, but yep, you're right.
I think it's the lack of nixtamalization that makes cornbread so nice and gritty and corn chips so nice and crunchy. Try Ottofile dent, if you can find it or grow it.
These are good points, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. That said, I think it still makes sense for western countries to sanction Russia. Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians) killed, and Ukraine would not…
I think that's fair enough. The issue with sanctions and poorer countries is that commodities are liquid markets. If rich countries raise prices internally by sanctioning some sources then the higher prices draw supplies away from poorer countries. Or put another way, if you reduce supply whilst keeping demand constant then prices rise, and they rise everywhere. That's what China seems to be trying to wall itself off…
Makes sense. Once we're talking about liquidity, though, there's a wide variety of rich country behaviour that raises food prices: Eating large amounts of grain-fed meat, turning food (or crops grown on land that could have been used to grow food) into ethanol, etc. Maybe the message should be: "Support Ukraine by eating less meat and planting a victory garden." In terms of a concrete government policy, that might look like fixing food and fertilizer imports at last year's levels (from non-Russia countries, imports from Russia would be fixed at 0 due to sanctions), and then figuring out how to feed the country on that plus whatever can be produced internally. That should more or less zero-out the effect of sanctions on global food prices. (Rich countries still contain poor people, so internally they would need to work out a subsidy for plant-based foods.) It should still be easy to feed everyone in a rich country where there's high meat-consumption, high food wastage, and only 1% of the population are farmers. Just stop eating so much meat, and have a few more people start being farmers. The government could hire a bunch of patriotic chemists and engineers to quickly spin up more Haber-Bosch reactors. Rich countries have lots of chemists and engineers. All this will cost money, sure, but think about it as just another kind of military spending. If someone came to me tomorrow saying: "we're building a bunch of Haber-Bosch reactors so we can maintain our sanctions against Russia, the pay is minimum wage, are you in?", I'd quit my current job the very same day. For some reason, our current governments aren't doing these things. Maybe they don't realize the severity of the situation. Maybe they don't care about the world's poor people. Maybe they're smarter than me, and have an even better plan. Still, it's insane to me that getting our butts in gear and making some relatively minor sacrifices in order to cover the shortfall is not being discussed as an option.
Stop eating cows & dairy. Immediately you've reduced the scale by 75%. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares [ https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets ]. Stop employing people in bullshit jobs. Immediately you've got 75% workforce on basic income, and I think some of them would like to work on small scale local farms. [ https://en.wikipedia…
Cows make fertilizer through manure. > https://www.finegardening.com/project-guides/gardening-basic...
We have to learn how to use what we have (atmosphere, rhizosphere, pigs, poultry, humans), that what does not destroy forests and wildlife (cows), and avoid that that kills and poisons the nature (pesticides & herbicides). Then we have a chance.
Nope. Go after ethanol if you want wasted corn. We like/need meat, and there is plenty of corn production or grazing land to accommodate that production. Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
We don't need meat. And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.
> We don't need meat.
But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.
The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.
We've been eating meat _far_ longer than houses, phones, tech, etc. Will be _much_ harder to give that up. Been eating meat for hundreds of millennia
You don't have to give up all meat, just temporarily eat less of it.
Yeah but thirty years ago they were all little 2WD Nissans and Toyotas with a few bales of hay in the back. The trucks you're talking about were kind of family tractors and would rarely be used for distance. They all got like 9mpg and just needed to run when something got stuck.
Huh? 30 years ago Nissans and Toyotas had negligible pickup marketshare (at least in the US, not sure about Canada?). Anyway, the average retail price of gas back then was ~$1/gallon, so 9mpg wasn't a major deal (considerably cheaper than a 30mpg sedan today).
This was soon enough after the oil embargo that mpg was still on everyone's mind, and people didn't really use 4WD vehicles for general transportation at that point.
Just big, uncomfortable, expensive to maintain and operate vehicles that you'd generally use for a specific purpose.
> There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could utilize them.
Microbiome needs to be a more commonly known word. I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space. Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate…
Can you share the before/after, and your strategy?