151–160 of 183 posts
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You have a funny definition of 'good news'.
Good news often comes in suppository form these days.
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I was in full agreement with your comment until... > We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically. Yes, at least some of us believe meat is very important for human flourishing. In strictly measurable…
> My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically. That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy. Most people's food subsisted on things you would go outside of your house and forage/barter for. Vegetables, grains, mushrooms, pulses and maybe some…
I am honestly not sure where this meme came from. That was sometimes true, for very poor people in places where the population was too high for the amount of land that was seeing agricultural output. For example, this would have been true in parts of the American South amongst the kind of people that were coming down with pellagra, or during the Great Depression. It was manifestly not true during most times and for most people. You can study local diets and records and see it was quite usual to eat meat every single day as the core of at least one meal.
> Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.
Of course people didn't have refrigeration, but that didn't mean that people threw all that meat they couldn't finish away! They used smokehouses (and other methods, of course.) Even in my parents generation, before electricity was common in some areas, everyone had a smokehouse, where meat could be preserved basically indefinitely.
One animal provides quite a lot of meat - for example, a single healthy bull can feed a family for about a year. Of course, it is true that people were not historically eating sirloin steaks every day - the most typical meat-centric dish was a long slow-cooking stew, and very little went to waste. Everyone was eating cuts most people have never touched today.
> Small game you would eat maybe once a month
This seems really uncommon. My friend for example used to eat squirrel every day for lunch. Without knowing anything, I would speculate they were from a country that went through some very hard times in their or their parents generation?
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If the price is saving the planet is turning it into the dystopia we seem to be zooming towards full speed, I will be happy to not pay it and suffer the consequences of our civilization collapsing. I’m not changing my behavior and I will fight vigorously for it. If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There…
Honestly, absolutely wild that you view “reduce meat intake to environmentally sustainable levels” as dystopian. Nobody’s saying you have to eat bugs for every meal.
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If the price is saving the planet is turning it into the dystopia we seem to be zooming towards full speed, I will be happy to not pay it and suffer the consequences of our civilization collapsing. I’m not changing my behavior and I will fight vigorously for it. If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There…
It's not a binary choice, it's a gradient and you decide to pick one of the extremes. Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.
I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.)
However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
> Red herrings were a staple of the working class diet throughout the year because they were easily cooked (e.g. Idylls of the Poor). Other favourites were cheap and easily obtainable varieties with better keeping qualities than the more vulnerable white fish, including sprats, eels, and shellfish (oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks).
> Consumption of meat was considered a mark of a good diet and its complete absence was rare: consuming only limited amounts was a poverty diet [23]. Joints of meat were, for the poor, likely to be an occasional treat. Yet only those with the least secure incomes and most limited housing, and so without either the cooking facilities or the funds, would be unlikely to have a weekly Sunday joint; even they might achieve that three or four times a year, cooked in a local cookhouse or bakery oven. Otherwise, meat on the bone (shin or cheek), stewed or fried, was the most economical form of meat, generally eked out with offal meats including brains, heart, sweetbreads, liver, kidneys and ‘pluck’, (the lungs and intestines of sheep).
pretty sure we have enough solar and batteries to power the world. Sure ok we could use nuclear in some places too. aerosols... that's from burning fossil fuels, no? fake meat will go a long way to reclaiming farmland. micro / nano plastics everywhere sucks. going to have to think hard about how to fix that one. can we take cell samples of all the species just in case we need to conjure them up again? (or is at least…
It’s satire right ?
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> majority of greenhouse gas emissions To be extra precise, human initiated greenhouse gas emissions. My understanding is about half of the emissions are natural and there's little we can do about their emission (but can do about their sequestration). Of course that doesn't/shouldn't stop us from addressing the half we can :)
What's the point of being "extra precise" here? Aren't you just giving deniers a talking point?
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I was in full agreement with your comment until... > We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically. Yes, at least some of us believe meat is very important for human flourishing. In strictly measurable…
Your peasant ancestors weren't with 8 billion. It doesn't scale.
What would be sustainable is returning grazing animals to the Great Plains en masse to regenerate the rapidly-depleting topsoil originally built up by the American bison, but virtually nobody is talking about that because the entire focus is on one thing, CO2.
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I recently came across a game theory term called "Moloch" in which individual incentives lead to negative outcomes for all parties involved. Nobody individually wants the negative outcome, but it's extremely difficult to break out of the cycle.
I've also just learned this recently. See "Meditations on Moloch" for the original essay. It explains so much but it's also very depressing -- it's hard to imagine how any ordinary person has a prayer of changing the system when so many elements of it are primed to both produce terrible outcomes and to resist change. It's possible that you could design a new system of government deliberately designed to counter some…
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
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It's not a binary choice, it's a gradient and you decide to pick one of the extremes. Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.
> Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy. I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.) However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:…
'Urbanites' were the exception, living on or near the land was the rule. If you were lucky enough to live inside the walls of a city you were already rich.
The idea that you could eat meat 7 days per week, whenever and whereever you wanted is a historical anomaly, so don't present it as normal, or even a right. It isn't.
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> Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy. I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.) However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:…
There is a reason there is a Van Gogh painting called 'the potato eaters' and it isn't called 'the sides of beef' eaters. Eating meat was a luxury simply because the vast majority of the people was poor. Poor beyond our present day imagination. In between the hunter gatherers (who had a diet that went from 'gluttony' to 'starvation' twice annually) and the industrialized production of meat (and chicken, and fish) the…