Beyond Meat S-1

From talking the to farmers I have, it seems so? It's the day the animal is taken to be slaughtered.

It is controversial though. Vegans have higher rates of depression and anxiety than the general cheeseburger eating population which has terrible rates of depression and anxiety. They also have higher rates of auto-immune disorders. The major benefit of their diet comes from toxicity reduction from eating optimised daily calories.

A plant sits in one spot thinking how to poison anything that eats too much of it. An animal moves about consuming as little poison as possible.

Once you're assured of enough calories (which used to limit population growth) the primary solution is to eat some calories from animals that evolved systems for processing plant toxins to minimise your toxic load.

I used pea goo in the comment because I went to the beyond meat website and looked at the ingredients in the impossible burger. The impossible burger consists of about 15 chemical compounds, combined by people highly financially motivated to optimise flavour, texture and colour and the primary component is pea protein. If you can think of a more concise name I'm all ears but it's definitely not a iphone or macbook air.

Vegan's choose pea goo over lamb. That's their choice and some vegan's will have the genetic biochemistry to live healthily on a plant based diet. The general population doesn't share that biochemistry. Veganism is the most environmentally sound option if one's health optimises from the diet. Unfortunately this is not the case for the majority of the population. The average vegan should be admired for their sacrifice, not their logic.

How much did that animal weigh?

In talking shop with the rancher we deal with, he gets a lot less per cow at wholesale auctions than in individual sales. On the other hand, wholesale auctions cost him less to do. Per cow, it costs him a lot more time and effort to sell one cow at a time rather than 100.

That said, he did say that his highest profit margins are with individual sales rather than wholesale. And, like any professional in their field, he really enjoys the chance to educate ordinary people (particularly us city-slickers) about his business.

>since animal non-existence is "preferable" to animal suffering, the ethical choice is to euthanize / sterilize as many animals as possible.

The article isn't seriously suggesting to euthanize /sterilize as many animals as possible; I would suggest you reread it. It's using that as an example to point out the moral conundrum that vegetarians undertake when they become vegetarian rather than just "anti-factory farm".

Regardless, I don't claim to align with the article in its entirety - just the idea that animals which have much better lives than their wild counterparts are morally suitable for eating. But yes in continuation of this we should strive for the best lives possible for said animals.

If there was free trade and corn wasn't fed to animals there would be enough meat and health and wealth for everyone.

Humans need 250grams of protein a day, some can come from plants, some from eggs, some from animals.

Currently what happens is that corporations lobby governments to protect local food markets under the guise of food security so that grass fed meat cannot be imported from sparse populations with lots of pasture into dense populations short of pasture.

The dense population then gets obese and mentally ill on corn-fed local beef while the corporations profit from the margin between feeding an animal corn or feeding it grass while sidestepping the cost of negative externalities. A hectare (10,000 sq m) of corn will grow 30 tonne of corn in a year, a hectare of pasture will grow 16 tonne of grass in year on the same land. The corn progressively wrecks the land and needs to be replanted every year. The pasture is perrennial and preserves the carbon content of the soil which is a massive and under reported component of the carbon cycle. 10kgs of grass or corn make 1KG of meat. Humans already have a surplus of corn, they are currently turning it into biofuel.

If you factor in the soil preservation then pasture plus grazing animal is the most economically viable sustainable option because double yield of corn comes at the price of the health of the soil and the humans and the animals that it's fed to. Look at the skeletal record around the time of it's invention for the associated decline in health despite the calorific surplus. Look at why corn fattens cattle.

If land is put to it's best economic use the problem slowly corrects itself as the human population naturally declines with improved standards of living.

If you were able to buy grass-fed hormone free argentinian or south african or russian mince in Walmart at true cost the world and the US would be healthier and wealthier. The invisible hand works as long as negative externalities are acknowledged truthfully but there is a lot of profit in obscuring them.

There is also lot of room for trees around pastured land to offset the methane and sheep produce less methane than beef plus non inflammatory milk plus wool.