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Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

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Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#121

Post by whywhywhywhy »

virtue3 wrote: post #22
Qem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle" Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation. Now chopping and burning…

They're gonna chop and burn it down either way, it'll either be for cattle or if you make eating meat illegal they'll chop and burn it for something else like palm oil.

Like it's obvious the people who own and control that land don't care about it anywhere near as much as you do so if you want them to stop chopping it down essentially you're gonna need to start paying them not to. Just seems naive to think stopping specifically poor people from eating meat is the solution to this.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#122

Post by sandworm101 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #116
sandworm101 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Hunting is something our species has done for over a billion years by this point. Sustenance hunting yes, but the rules about selling wild meat are to prevent market hunting. There are more humans by weight than any other land animal. If the general population started eating hunted meat, any wild population would be wiped out. So we have careful rules to ensure hunters do not hunt simply to sell the meat.

I agree that there is a difference, but a very small difference. Even animals share their prey with those who didn't participate in the hunt. If the general population started eating hunted meat, vast agricultural areas would be returned to nature, giving a slight offset to that problem. But jumping back to reality, those people who actually hunt and purchase hunted meat right now are people who care about nature and…

The selling of hunted meet to the general population for profit is a very very slippery slope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#123

Post by notesinthefield »

merpnderp wrote: post #88
cogman10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up similarly and it's part of the reason I've cut back on my meat. Shoving 100 cattle into a 1 acre feed lot for their entire lives is unfortunately how a lot of beef is produced. They spend their lives covered in shit, sleeping in shit, and trapped with no where to roam. And instead of addressing this problem, my state (Idaho) made it illegal to take photos of the issue. [1] [1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/…

I keep seeing people make this claim that cattle spend their entire lives on feed lots, but I've never seen this anywhere and I've been all over cattle country. Where do they do this? Because around here feedlots are only for finishing cattle and typically only spend about 2-3 months there after having very happy lives as calves on a ranch.

[flagged]

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#124

Post by nolverostae »

virtue3 wrote: post #22
Qem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle" Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation. Now chopping and burning…

Yes, but now give out the statistics on how much of the calories fed to cows in total in the US or worldwide is actually grazing and how much is from crops that need extra area apart from where the animals graze. Even cattle that grazes is often supplemented with grain, and the grain is of course much more calorie-dense.

The world wide land area for farming would reduce from 4 to 1 billion hectares if we didn't use livestock to feed humans. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#125

Post by masfuerte »

carlosjobim wrote: post #58
chasd00 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t selling venison against the law?

That should be the last concern of any decent human being. If they outlaw breathing, will you stop? Hunting is something our species has done for over a billion years by this point.

There weren't any plants, let alone animals, a billion years ago.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#126

Post by jareklupinski »

swayvil wrote: post #106

[flagged]

> You are locked in a cell with a kitten. You must punch the kitten in the face every day or else you will not be fed.

in my head, i already died the moment i became locked in a cell

everything I do after that just determines where i'm going next

i guess dont hang around people who have the habit of keeping jail cells and kittens around?

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#128

Post by hollywood_court »

cogman10 wrote: post #61
ljf wrote: post #34

I grew up on a (very) small farm - so I knew where all the meat we ate (and eggs, apple, plums and jam) came from. One of the things I find most disconcerting as an adult is the disconnect with the food I eat. Even the local 'farmer butcher' - I don't actually know if the meat they sell me is what they say it is. I buy a lot of deer from a friend of a friend as it feels slightly more known to me - even if I have no i…

I grew up similarly and it's part of the reason I've cut back on my meat. Shoving 100 cattle into a 1 acre feed lot for their entire lives is unfortunately how a lot of beef is produced. They spend their lives covered in shit, sleeping in shit, and trapped with no where to roam. And instead of addressing this problem, my state (Idaho) made it illegal to take photos of the issue. [1] [1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/…

So that's the 'small government' I see so many folks talking about online.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#129

Post by Marsymars »

carlosjobim wrote: post #116
sandworm101 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Hunting is something our species has done for over a billion years by this point. Sustenance hunting yes, but the rules about selling wild meat are to prevent market hunting. There are more humans by weight than any other land animal. If the general population started eating hunted meat, any wild population would be wiped out. So we have careful rules to ensure hunters do not hunt simply to sell the meat.

I agree that there is a difference, but a very small difference. Even animals share their prey with those who didn't participate in the hunt. If the general population started eating hunted meat, vast agricultural areas would be returned to nature, giving a slight offset to that problem. But jumping back to reality, those people who actually hunt and purchase hunted meat right now are people who care about nature and…

> If the general population started eating hunted meat, vast agricultural areas would be returned to nature, giving a slight offset to that problem.

I don't think the math works here. There isn't enough agricultural area on the planet to sustainably generate enough hunted Calories for the general population.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#130

Post by adrian_b »

cogman10 wrote: post #74
jonahbenton wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your genetic predecessors.

Turns out the model of the primarily meat eating ancestors may be wrong. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Which sort of makes sense when you consider our closest relatives are primarily plant eaters.

Those are extremely recent ancestors, from less than ten thousand years ago. Moreover they were located in a place (the Andean highlands) where it is likely that there were not enough animals to allow them to sustain themselves by hunting.

Our ancestors have shifted to a diet with a large percentage of animal fat and meat, which has lead to a simplification of our digestive system, for more than a million years.

Only during a little more than the last ten thousand years there has been a reverse shift towards a lower percentage of animal food, most likely after we had exterminated most suitable wild animals, which forced us to become creative and discover agriculture, otherwise we might have become extinct, like our prey.

Now, with our reduced digestive system, we could not live eating the kind of plants eaten by a gorilla or even by a chimpanzee. We need much more nutritious food, which can be provided only by plant seeds, the only parts of plants that are rich in proteins.

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