871–879 of 879 posts
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It takes 20 to 40 plant calories to raise one calorie of beef. So slaughtering a cow kills 20 to 40 times the number of lives as eating plants directly.
Number of calories !== number of lives
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Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed). If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based,…
What makes my wife and I fail every time is protein intake. We are both active and require a lot of protein. We drink whey protein 1x a day, have quinoa for salads and occasionally eat eggs. The problem is come dinnertime, we have few options. We can't eat: - beans: Yes, I rolled my eyes too. My wife gets bloated painfully and it's happened so many times that I've stopped preparing bean-primary dishes - beyond meat:…
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
Saying all of that, I would rather eat eggs from chickens that had a half-decent life than those kept in horrible conditions.
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It's probably best not to get specific instructions. They constrain you too much. The cheapest way to build a chicken coop is to go to the local rubbish tip, or tip shop if the top doesn't let you fossick. Be a little imaginative with your design. For example, you can build them out of PVC water pipes. They are light, don't rot, wire can be pop riveted to them, and they are very easy to glue. I also turned a 80 litre…
This guy knows. If you're building a chicken coop out of materials you didn't find lying around on the ground, you're doing it wrong.
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> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different. That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something els…
That is pretty much just fruit. Vegetables are typically either the whole body of the plant (like carrots) or a vital part.
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What makes my wife and I fail every time is protein intake. We are both active and require a lot of protein. We drink whey protein 1x a day, have quinoa for salads and occasionally eat eggs. The problem is come dinnertime, we have few options. We can't eat: - beans: Yes, I rolled my eyes too. My wife gets bloated painfully and it's happened so many times that I've stopped preparing bean-primary dishes - beyond meat:…
Perhaps have a look of tempeh, it’s more digestible that beans (because pre disgusted by shroom) and already comes with a slight nutty flavor but that stuff is a songe (shroom…) and get impregnated sigh any marinade very quickly. The tvp are tasteless by design, my way is to use them to mimic sliced beef recipes therefore 1) they get different flavors depending on what I cook 2) they trigger my memories and those mak…
[1] I especially like grinding up the tempeh to turn it into a plant based burger substitute, and making "Perkedel Tempeh" (tempeh fritters)
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> We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens Where?
Purportedly the Netherlands, but the research was badly performed. KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.
Dutch source for the thing about rain worms: https://nos.nl/artikel/2539934-hoge-concentraties-pfas-via-r...
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Farming changed radically after the 1950s, so pretty recently. It's pretty reasonable to believe it will. If you've been anywhere near mega livestock operations of any kind then you would know.
Why?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to directly compare the development of bacterial antibiotics resistance with the adaptation of viruses to be able to infect other kinds of hosts. Surely these disease vectors follow different developments.
It wouldn't surprise me though if intensive animal farming [3] has the capacity to exacerbate these problems, if only based on the high concentration of animals kept together and the generally poor health of these animals (poorly functioning immune systems, which is the whole reason for the overuse of antibiotics).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock
Sadly, because the soil are too polluted by PFAS, it is adviced against to eat your own eggs (by medical authorities) where I live (larger paris aera) https://www.iledefrance.ars.sante.fr/polluants-organiques-pe...
There are ways to remediate your backyard enough to make it safe, but only if you really want chickens. You can do most (all?) of the labor yourself but the cost of materials will probably dwarf any savings from the eggs - especially since you probably already have better quality eggs available locally than what we Americans are used to, which I think is the real impetus for most people rearing chickens here. The fir…
Meanwhile most indicators I've seen imply that PFAS contamination is -in some ways- getting worse, and is not only from historical sources.
Also, earthworms will mix up deeper and more shallow layers of earth and plant roots will extract PFAS from deeper layers and deposit them on or near the surface when the plants leaf matter dies off (in fact I know of several types of plants including hemp being successfully used for this exact purpose).
I'd love to find definitive proof that PFAS can be remediated on a hobby garden scale (in one's own backyard) but I'm skeptical of the success rate and longevity of the endeavor...