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World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

reuters.com

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Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#381

Post by cheese_goddess »

ornornor wrote: post #371
cheese_goddess wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle. I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese…

> how you know this https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empr%C3%A9surage “ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.” Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefor…

Yes, that agrees with what I said above: supermarket cheese is the vast majority of cheese that's produced and consumed worldwide, quite unfortunately I might add. PDO cheeses are a minority of all cheeses and only produced in the EU. French PDO cheeses are a minority within a minority, and only produced in France.

Even in EU and even in France, most cheese made and eaten is not PDO and PDO cheeses are made by few and small producers. Camembert de Normandie fermier is famously made by a handful of farmers (five, I think?) and regulators are constantly pressured by the dairy industry to loosen the standards of the PDO, for example to allow pasteurised milk to be used and to allow the "Camembert de Normandie" label to be applied to cheese made in Normandy but with cows other than the race Normande that the traditional producers make it with.

Even in the rest of the EU, outside France, there are bsically two kinds of PDO cheese. There's the kind that are made by few producers in limited amounts and have more stringent requirements like the use of animal rennet, or the use of traditional wooden implements to preserve artisanal bacterial cultures, and that sort of thing, like Camembert de Normandie and Mozzarella di Buffalla Campagna. Or they are made at a larger scale with modern equipment and materials allowed (but not required), of which bacterial rennet is one example, like Manchego or Feta.

The kind of PDO cheeses that must be made with traditional methods, materials and equipments and for which modern alternatives are not allowed are basically artisanal products and again very unfortunately, few and far between, because they tend to be the best cheeses one can have.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I recognise the supermarket cheese that most people eat as inferior quality, and I'm really worried that most people have forgotten what cheese should really be like.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#382

Post by atdrummond »

4ggr0 wrote: post #325
atdrummond wrote: post #218

I used to do research at the Shedd Aquarium. After watching a particularly clever octopus defeat every attempt to prevent him leaving his enclosure at night, I am absolutely confident that, just like certain aquatic mammals such as Orca whales, that we only devalue their intelligence because they were unfortunate enough to not be in a situation where they could develop significant tool use and the cultural artifacts…

I totally get where you are coming from, but I want to discuss one thing you mentioned. You decided to stop eating octopus, because they're very smart animals. Which is understandable to me. But why do you decide what animals to eat, based on how intelligent they seem to us? If we turn that argument around, it's okay to eat an animal if its 'dumb'. Why is that so? To show my perspective, I am becoming more vegetarian…

Apologies this wasn't more clear and I am sorry I didn't get back to you sooner; I have never been a consumer of octopus or cephalopods more broadly. I rarely eat meat in general - maybe once a year - and when I do, I only eat meat that has been raised on a small farm humanely and is likewise slaughtered humanely.

The closest I get to regular meat eating is consumption of eggs and dairy. I get both from small, local farms. The chickens are free range and the farmers avoid industrial egg farming mechanisms that result in unnecessary death of grown animals. The cattle are not pumped with grotesque amounts of hormones nor are they milked on factory-like rotating milk pumps that maximize output and ignore the unneeded stress placed on the animals.

Hope this makes sense, as I agree with all the concerns you raised.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#383

Post by cheese_goddess »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #379
cheese_goddess wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not right. You need much more than calories from food. You can take all the calories you need by eating sugar for example, or dietary fat. If you don't eat meat, or cut out any major food groups, you need to be vary careful to supplement your diet with the nutrients that are now missing from it and since we don't really understand nutrition and our needs for nutrients very well, there is a risk of messing up a…

That is why I specified “enough healthy calories”. What I meant was that as long as you have access to enough produce. Basically some people need to eat meat because it’s the only way to get enough nutrition. But if you live in California near a well stocked grocery store for example, then you just need to learn what a healthy vegan diet is and most people will do better on a vegan diet. At least according to Nutriti…

OK, thanks for explaining what you meant, I didn't understand you at first.

To be honest, I don't know what NutritionFacts.org is, exactly. I agree that most Californians, like most Americans (North and South) would do well to cut down on their meat consumption a bit, because it certainly looks like they eat way too much. But I don't think that needs to mean going vegan.

Traditional diets from places like the Mediterrannean or South-East Asia go a long way towards keeping people well-fed without excessive meat consumption, and there's no reason to not adopt, say, a vegetable- and pulses-heavy mediterrannean diet, rather than going vegan, if a healthy diet is the point. In fact, if that's the point, it's probably easier to eat healthy when _not_ going vegan, because of the missing nutrients that must be supplemented.

I grew up on a plant-based diet. Not "vegan" or "vegetarian" but "plant-based", meaning that most food I ate was made of plants: rice, pasta, potatoes, beans, chickpeas and lentils, green beans, okra and peas, tomatoes, aubergines and zucchini, tons of olive oil everywhere, garlic, onions, celery and carrots as the base of sauces and soups, liberal amounts of good cheese and yogurt, plenty of fish in the summer, and some meat once or twice a week as I was growing up, primarily chicken and pork (I don't like beef). I don't think there's anyone that can fault this way of eating for being either excessive or unhealthy and I still cook and eat that way today, the way my grandmothers cooked.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#384

Post by seanmcdirmid »

kuhewa wrote: post #307
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Americans are largely people who consider seafood to start and stop at canned tuna so... That isn’t very accurate. Coastal Americans have had plenty of seafood to choose from, consider when they would serve lobsters to prisoners. Alaska is full of seafood to the point that it is a staple (and considering many of the Inuit communities who have been on that diet for thousands of years). Just because the customs a…

> Just because the customs are different from other coastal communities in other countries doesn’t make America’s any less sophisticated. On average it is less sophisticated though. Most coastal Americans (US) only consume a subset of the breadth of diversity of seafood available to them relative to many other regions of the world.

80% of America's seafood is imported, so it is not like Americans are producing. a lot of seafood along their coasts. The frozen tilapia we ate last night I think was from Chile. See: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/aquaculture/us-aquac...

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#385

Post by kuhewa »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #384
kuhewa wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because the customs are different from other coastal communities in other countries doesn’t make America’s any less sophisticated. On average it is less sophisticated though. Most coastal Americans (US) only consume a subset of the breadth of diversity of seafood available to them relative to many other regions of the world.

80% of America's seafood is imported, so it is not like Americans are producing. a lot of seafood along their coasts. The frozen tilapia we ate last night I think was from Chile. See: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/aquaculture/us-aquac...

Thats true, partially because of economics, but also because Americans' seafood palette involves farmed salmon, farmed tilapia and swai (not coastal seafood btw), etc. doesn't mean more diversity isn't available.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#386

Post by kuhewa »

sweetheart wrote: post #339
shanusmagnus wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greater intelligence allows greater introspection, prediction, rumination; allows one to build a model of self and environment not possible at lower intelligence. The suffering that is possible when you can anticipate your death, or imagine a hopeless future, turns otherwise neutral situations into hells.

This is a double edged sword: an animal that is incapable of imagining a hopeless future may also be incapable of understanding that certain terrors it faces are temporary, and thus may live in anguish much more as it has a poorer mental model of its own situation.

This is true, for example I've handled both captive and wild animals naive to humans from the same species (for conservation related research). The captive ones are a bit feisty, but the wild ones are so terrified they are basically in shock and won't move.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#388

Post by quitit »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #269
atdrummond wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of it but he had an ability to break locks and dismantle constructs with ease. I realized after a while he paid immense attention to how we installed every new addition to his habitat and then would seemingly aim to deconstruct our creations using the knowledge he picked up from our installation work. I truly am in awe of these creatures, especially after one of the long time Shedd workers told me that th…

This is fabulous. It's clear from just watching video clips of them that it's not just about being able to squeeze through gaps. They evidently experience puzzles with an enthusiasm that is unusual even in puzzle-solving birds, can seemingly understand quite complex things like how to non-destructively unscrew bottle tops, and from what I can gather they are kind of obsessed with jars and containers? As an untrained…

>a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.

Watching an Octopus effortlessly change colour, size and texture to camouflage themselves might lend to this.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#389

Post by Azek »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #377
sweetheart wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether a wolf would kill a cow before its 25 years old doesn’t affect our moral duty to not kill animals unnecessarily and prematurely.

We generally don't kill animals "unnecessarily". We kill them to eat them. If we could eat them without killing them, we wouldn't kill them. We also don't kill them "prematurely". We kill them when it's time to eat them, or else to relieve them of pain. Also, since we're onto wolves, wolves will kill animals and not eat them (see "surplus killing" article on wikipedia). Conversely, wolves will often eat animals witho…

Is eating them 'necessary' if we can sustain ourselves without killing them?
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