The richer people get, the more meat they eat

https://spectrum.ieee.org/meat-eater

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

125 207 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

jacooper2• 4 years ago

Does anybody actually believe the world is about to turn vegan?

Because you got to be really delusional to believe so.

Edit: title was changed, it was "Ignore the hype that the world is about to turn vegan", and my comment was an answer to it.

oifjsidjf• 4 years ago

The billionares are investing massively in fake lab grown food, so they will obviously also pour billions into marketing and pushing fake "lab grown food is good for you" studies just like the tobacco industry did.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

It might not be real meat, but it is real food.

jacooper2• 4 years ago

The thing is, we all know that processed meat is bad to our health, and its the core of many health issues in the wealthy countries.

So what do you call fake meat?, super duper processed food? And why should it be called meat in the first place if it has no meat in it?,

It should be called manufactured meat-like... Thing.

Also is it more healthy than normal meat? Or will we discover it has some long term side a effect that nobody noticed until it was too late?

mrwnmonm7• 4 years ago

Are you saying the IEEE is delusional?

mrwnmonm7• 4 years ago

I am kidding btw, don't answer that.

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

Currently developing countries are enormous carnivores. Veganism is mostly SWPL hipster thing from my observations.

triyambakam3• 4 years ago

Veganism is growing in popularity in Thailand and India, two countries I'm familiar with, both which have a long Hindu and Buddhist history of vegetarianism. Actually traditionally vegetarian in Thailand meant vegan because cow milk was not popular and eggs are seen as meat in Buddhism and Hinduism.

throwaway0x7E64• 4 years ago

our young global elites do, rather insistently.

there's no sacrifice they aren't willing us to make.

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

This flamebait material does not belong to ieee.org and to HN

MrMan• 4 years ago

our household reduced meat and dairy by 95%, its not hard or a hardship.

googlryas• 4 years ago

The world will never go horseless. The richer one gets, the more horses one owns. And the whole world is getting richer. Therefore the world will be filled with horses soon.

gtsop• 4 years ago

The world is not getting richer, some few are getting richer. The vast majority is going light years away from getting a horse

towaway15463• 4 years ago

To each his own

marcodiego• 4 years ago

Ignore the hype that there is a hype that the world is about to turn vegan.

dan-robertson3• 4 years ago

I think this submission should take the title of the article rather than the more clickbaity subtitle. (Maybe the article changed since it was linked?)

dang13• 4 years ago

Ok, we've done that.

mrwnmonm7• 4 years ago

It doesn't change the fact that the IEEE made an article about a nonsensical "hype".

dang13• 4 years ago

Others will describe this better, but the author of this article, Vaclav Smil, is a Czech-Canadian academic known for hard-nosed data analysis on social and environmental issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil

You can like or dislike it, but please respond to the arguments in the article, not the baity title or the provocative topic. Otherwise we'll just end up with a bunch of shallow-indignant comments and that's not an interesting thread.

Past mentions of Smil on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

stormbrew5• 4 years ago

This article does not read like it came from someone who was doing a thoughtful analysis. It lacks a concrete point and makes contradictory arguments.

Is meat eating our evolutionary destiny or a recent trend driven by wealth? Is it something we are "built" to do or something that literally at least a fifth of the entire species does without?

Never mind correlating health outcomes with broad trends in meat eating while also pointing out increasing wealth and pretending that's not likely to be a confounding factor in itself.

Like, the conclusion could be right here but this article is a mess.

dang13• 4 years ago

Yes, that's why I posted my comment - one needs to consider this in the context of his larger body of work (edit: sorry, that's not really what I meant to say - see downthread). This isn't an internet flamethrower, or at least not just that.

It's a good test for HN. Must the community have a headless chicken reaction to every provocation, or can we sometimes remain organized enough for an interesting conversation?

Edit: I don't think your description of the article is fair. It may be right or wrong but it is far from vapid. If you've found fallacies in it, showing how they are fallacies would be a better contribution to an HN thread. You've done that with your point about wealth being a possibly confounding factor (good), but you broke the HN guidelines with your first and last sentences (bad). Your reaction to Smil as not-a-person-who-does-any-kind-of-serious-analysis is a classic shallow dismissal. That's something the HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Also: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wasabi991011• 4 years ago

My problem with this article is that there aren't many arguments used in the first place. It's mostly a loosely connected set of facts, with not much of a unifying thesis.

If the thesis is "meat consumption is growing", what's the relevance of chimpanzee's diet or health outcomes?

Those two side-points make me think the thesis is actually "it is normal and okay that meat consumption is growing", but if that is the case it is woefully underargued. I think the issues with comparing the diet of a different species is obvious, and another commenter already mentionned the correlation between wealth and health. But crucially the article itself doesn't engage at all with issues of climate change or animal rights.

I don't know who Smil is. I'm just responding to this article.

rasengan0• 4 years ago

I thought about adding the author wikipedia link with the article link to the email to my carnivore/omnivore friends but removed it because it does not matter, data don't lie.

It reminds me of the transition of eminence based medicine to evidence based medicine. Even the latter has had its troubles, just look at science publishing and questioning of the peer review framework.

Being vegan is a choice not a religion or cult. However much benefit I get from eating plants over animals and their products, I don't expect others to easily 'see the light'. Thankfully my eating behavior was influenced by others, slowly and with patience waay before the hype and this article.

Vegan promoters really need to work on their PR.

invalidname• 4 years ago

This is rehashing obvious information and complete nonsense. That's why companies like beyond meat, impossible foods, etc. exist. It's becoming "vegan" without giving up on "meat". Yes, I know it isn't the same. The goal is to get it "good enough" and affordable. Once it's there, a lot of meat eaters will reduce "actual meat" intake and that's "effectively vegan".

Veganism is a growing trend in most places I go. But it will probably not cross the chasm without fake meat. That's the story.

dang13• 4 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar on predictably divisive topics. It leads to predictably shallow-indignant threads—the opposite of the curious conversation we're trying for here.

Smil may be a provocateur but he's a smart and informed one and his arguments deserve specific responses, not generic dismissals.

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

Say that to the author of the flamebait article.

mrwnmonm7• 4 years ago

Serious question, can you see why people are angry here?

They actually like to see wisdom and well written articles from this kind of institutions.

People are angry here for good reason.

theshrike792• 4 years ago

Fake meat is the e-cigarette of the food world.

It's a tool that can be used to transition from a bad thing to a less bad thing or even a good thing.

Maybe in the future the Beyond Meats of the world are cheaper and clearly better for the environment than meat, but for now they are good tools to prove the doubters that not every meal needs to have a dead animal in it.

We are at the point where an average non-meat option in a burger is better than a bad meat burger. The alternative options can't beat a premium burger though - not yet.

bobkazamakis• 4 years ago

Fake meat is the e-cigarette of the food world. It's a tool that can be used to transition from a bad thing to a less bad thing or even a good thing. It works well as a transition, but I don't think the end result is going to be "okay now we drop fake meat" -- there's nothing inherently unhealthy about fake meat.

OrvalWintermute• 4 years ago

“When you look at Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, they have 21 or 22 highly processed ingredients. So processed, that you are hard pressed in identifying the difference between those items, versus let’s say, pet food.” [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/ghgguru & https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog

theshrike792• 4 years ago

Is "highly processed" always the same as "bad"?

DeWilde2• 4 years ago

Highly processed is almost always synonymous with the types of food that are considered bad for your health.

From WP [0]: "he term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping, hydrogenation, and hydrolysis. Ultra-processed foods generally also include additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, sensory enhancers, colourants, flavours, and processing aids, but little or no whole food."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food

mjevans• 4 years ago

I would argue for the position of 'not always'. In my opinion it is much the same as GMO plants. The intent and target of the modification matters. A plant that is modified to tolerate deadly chemicals is evil; it must be handled carefully if consumed at all so that the chemicals it tolerates do not poison us. A plant which is modified to have a higher or higher quality (more nutrition?) yield might be good.

Thus the highly processed foods. It depends on what the intent of the process is and how the results are used in the whole. Even if it might be less healthy I sure do love breads and noodles.

tomp4• 4 years ago

Capitalism doesn't optimise for health, it optimises for addiction, profit, and lower costs (a.k.a. lower quality).

So, yes, the more processed a food is, the more aligned it is to capitalistic motives, the less healthy it is.

kcplate5• 4 years ago

This alone makes me avoid these products like the plague. I honestly do not understand why if you desire and need “meat” enough to opt for a highly processed inferior meat analog, why you don’t just eat the real thing.

Is there really any highly processed foodstuff out there that is truly healthy? Doesn’t really seem to be.

turtlebits• 4 years ago

Not all people avoid meat for health reasons. If there’s a market for it, so be it.

CorrectHorseBat• 4 years ago

I honestly do not understand why if you desire and need “meat” enough to opt for a highly processed inferior meat analog, why you don’t just eat the real thing.

Many people would like to eat meat without the environmental impact/killing animals. What is hard to understand about that?

triyambakam3• 4 years ago

That's why I eat beans

roboticmind4• 4 years ago

This is a false dichotomy. Plenty of people do whole foods plant-based diets without those. Additionally, it's also often replacing highly processed meats

jzellis• 4 years ago

I think within a decade most of us will be eating whatever calories are in front of us and glad to have them. Especially as, like most of the cornerstones of modern civilization, the way we eat now is mathematically unsustainable.

collegeburner2• 4 years ago

actually it's very sustainable for ppl in America. we export a shitton of food (and through that water), we just gotta stop. were one of the less dense countries and have plenty of arable land etc.

i do feel for the rest of the world tho, they prolly gonna have to take a downgrade in they standard of living.

source: https://www.agfoundation.org/common-questions/view/does-the-...

were a net exporter by $ and a lot of what we import is expensive shit without much calories (cofee, chocolate) not actually calories.

DeWilde2• 4 years ago

Any source for this claim of unsustainability of current food production?

kitkat_new• 4 years ago

the rainforests are burned for our food production

amanaplanacanal2• 4 years ago

Current food production relies heavily on fossil fuels, so it’s inherently unsustainable. Which is not to say that it can’t be changed to become sustainable, I’d say the jury is still out on that question.

captainbland2• 4 years ago

I find the biology argument a little strange as it's quite clear that humans can happily survive whether they eat animal products or not. Whether somebody is vegan or not in the modern world is much more to do with the social situation that they find themselves in, along with the availability of vegan foods that appeal to their tastes than anything to do with chimpanzees.

It's also the case that there has been an explosion of choice in vegan foods, particularly meat substitutes, that has really only come around in the last few years. So looking at trends over a 50 year window isn't going to capture that.

I'm not even a vegan, for what it's worth. But this article basically seems to hold up historical trends as immutable facts and extrapolates from there which is not very convincing in the changing situation that we find ourselves in.

cassianoleal2• 4 years ago

it's quite clear that humans can happily survive whether they eat animal products or not

Perhaps, but survival is not the only point of eating and shouldn't be the ultimate measure of your success as a human being. A balanced meat-free diet is not easy. You need to be very aware of the compromises you're making and compensate for them either through much more thought put into your food choices or supplementation. The BBC published an interesting article a while ago on the topic [0].

Whether somebody is vegan or not in the modern world is much more to do with the social situation that they find themselves in, along with the availability of vegan foods that appeal to their tastes than anything to do with chimpanzees.

This seems to be a case of science and culture working around biology. It doesn't really contradict the biological argument.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200127-how-a-vegan-diet...

wszfahwbwbaha• 4 years ago

it's really not that hard that's just meat propaganda. Been vegan 10 years and still somehow manage to boulder at a high level without even thinking about my diet

captainbland2• 4 years ago

The point from the article that I'm really concerned with is:

It is well to keep this biological fact in mind when considering outlandish claims about the imminent victory of veganism.

And while 'victory' is loosely defined, appears to come from the idea that:

much of the world is trending towards plant-based eating

My point is exactly that if the "work around" (as you put it) works then the argument that biological history will necessarily prevent veganism from becoming more popular no longer really holds, precisely because we can "work around" it.

I don't really take issue with the idea that biology has to one degree or another helped to shape dietary habits today, just that the historical trend may not hold in the future in the face of social (which I take to include scientific) change.

someNameIG2• 4 years ago

A balanced meat-free diet is not easy.

I've been vegan for years and I haven't really found this to be the case^. B12 is really the only thing you need to supplement, and a lot of vegan products have it it also. You also read anything online about becoming vegan and they all recommend B12 supplements.

^I also used chronometer for years so I hade a decent understanding of my macron micro nutritional intake.

tartrate• 4 years ago

Debunked

https://www.vegansociety.com/get-involved/research/research-...

Cederfjard• 4 years ago

The thing is that you can’t look at evolution and sexual selection from the perspective of ”this particular thing makes the most sense or seems to be the optimum, and so of course nature has made things such”.

An urge can be very strong and provide just a little benefit, and still remain. It can be weak and enormously beneficial, and still just be prevalent in a small part of the population. It can even be not beneficial at all, and just be a remnant from when it was, or even a byproduct of something else.

So you can’t discount biology, especially when looking at the wider population, just because you think that for whatever reason whatever the thing that caused the evolutional pressure for the behavior you’re observing isn’t valid anymore. And even if that’s true, you’re probably lagging a few hundred, thousand or tens of thousands of years behind.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

I tried going almost meat free for a good decade (largely thanks to huel, which allow you to eat enough protein to workout).

Everything was fine until I hit 30s.

I started having serious stomach issues that doctors blamed on "stress" or the misteries of the gut. Over two years I dropped huel, gradually went back to meat, dairy and vegetables and grains.

I still had painful, bloody and explosive episodes.

I started eating a carnivore diet and all the symptoms disappeared in a week. I also lost 7kg.

This made me revaluate everything I believed in nutrition. I realised that the reasons for introducing a vegetarian diet as part of USDA was pretty much baseless and that USDA backpedaled on fat consumption being bad.

At this point I frankly doubt much of the research on nutrition and I'm not sure if I buy the reasons to avoid meat.

Is there really a link between meat and cancer and cardio diseases or are you just trying to sell me some preprocessed vegan crap?

HermanMartinus3• 4 years ago

You do realise you were eating a glorified protein powder and not a balanced diet? I think this is the problem you were experiencing, and has nothing to do with it being vegan or otherwise.

TheDong• 4 years ago

Yet even in those rich countries in which the consumption of meat has reached new heights [...] it has led to no demonstrable ill effects on health

The article doesn't mention environmental pressures: as we grapple with climate change, we'll necessarily have to reduce CO2 emissions, and meat is a huge contributor to global CO2 emissions. The health consequences of meat are hard to argue with certainty, we really have only a rudimentary understanding of health science.

We have a far better understanding of global warming, and we can say with certainty that eating less meat will reduce global CO2 emission. Whether that means the price of meat goes up over time (i.e. due to a carbon tax), or laws curb it, that's a factor which may overwhelm the article's thesis that "more global wealth = more meat eaten"

kvgr• 4 years ago

It is not, it is only recycling plants into methane that changed to co2 and that is then captured by plants again. Ffs

greatpostman• 4 years ago

Dude India and China are the biggest contributors. I’ll take these comments seriously when people start pointing at real root causes

nicbou3• 4 years ago

The most populous countries which are also the world's factory? Yes.

But if you look at emissions per capita, it's not China we should look at. It's a country that outsources most of its manufacturing and still manages to top the chart.

I feel like people say "but China" to avoid taking any responsibility.

tomp4• 4 years ago

Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.

Maybe meat faming methods contribute CO2 emissions, but that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.

Similar to people who hate aircon, people who argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).

(Some people argue that beef contribute methane emissions, which is true however methane is a cycle and contributes nothing to the long-term anthropogenic carbon emissions, the entirety of which is coming from fossil fuels; yet still, the correct response is improving agricultural practices, not banning meat.)

Btw I fully support a carbon tax, as long as it's non-discriminatory (i.e. taxes all fossil fuel usage equally, not meat and/or other "sinful" activities more).

chasil• 4 years ago

I haven't read the article yet (and I will), but it would be a great gift to the future of humanity if we could develop sustenance that was devoid of suffering and murder.

I am no partisan for the cause (and will order anything from a menu that strikes my fancy), but there is a certain mark of savagery in what and who we eat that (I feel) it is our destiny to overcome.

For us to solve as many problems as we can now will give our progeny more focus on what they are tasked to do, and they will thank us for it.

roboticmind4• 4 years ago

If you keep emitting that methane, then it continues to persist and leads to problems with climate change. Unfortunately this can only reduced a bit with changes to farming practices in the meat industry

people that argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).

How does saying the meat industry is a problem "hating human civilization"? It certainly does not mean regression and mass death as it would decrease the amount of land, cropland, and resources to grow food since we wouldn't need to grow so much feed nor clear so much land for pastures

"If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland"

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

nicoburns• 4 years ago

that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.

Presumably it would also be a reason to stop eating meat grown using those farming methods. Which would be the majority of meat consumed as it stands.

megaman821• 4 years ago

Meat contributes zero new CO2 IF the crops they are eating weren't grown with fertilizer ultimately made from natural gas. Do you know a country where this is true?

Ma8ee• 4 years ago

I can directly influence what I buy in the supermarket. I have very little influence on what methods a farmer on the other side of earth uses, whether he lets his cows graze on land that used to be rain forest, or just uses many times more fuel to produce the crop needed to feed his pigs than would be required to produce the same amount of calories as vegan food. So for now, I’m very selective in any meat I buy, and most often abstain.

And methane stays in the atmosphere only a decade or so, so the day we stop release huge amount of it the effect will disappear much faster. But as long as we continue to let methane out in the atmosphere, it will have disproportionate effect on the climate disaster. Which happens right now! Not in some unspecified remote future.

teaearlgraycold• 4 years ago

The only carbon tax that makes sense would be one that targets fossil fuel production. Extracting oil from the ground? Hella taxed. Extracting natural gas? Super taxed.

If people can find a good way to create fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2 then they shouldn't have any fossil fuel punishments in their way.

overcast2• 4 years ago

Yeh sure, matter is neither created nor destroyed. The problem here is that massive amounts of carbon sequestered over millions of years, is being released, just to create the feed for these livestock. This isn't like a small group of cattle, grazing on natural prairies.

tpush3• 4 years ago

Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.

Do you genuinely not understand that these animals are bred for humans consumption? They wouldn't exist otherwise.

If you can nurture a human with X amount of plant food, but instead use X+Y amount of plant food (and extra water, fertilizer, fossils fuels etc.) to raise cattle to nurture the same amount of humans, you've absolutely increased carbon emissions as compared to the first option.

I sincerely do not get how one can miss this point??

legulere• 4 years ago

I agree that there's potential for sustainable husbandry in grasslands you cannot use otherwise. But it's very small and could not sustain today's mean consumption at all. Meat production relies heavily on farmed feed, with very low efficiency (25kg of feed for 1kg of beef). For growing that feed you need a lot of farmland which is a driving factor for the destruction of carbon sinks like the rain forest. Here in Europe for instance we are not able to produce enough feed for our animals, so we heavily import from the Americas.

Also your argument against methane emissions is not very well thought through. You could argue the same against any CO2 emissions, by arguing that at some point they will be stored by CCS again.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-...

ravenstine3• 4 years ago

There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that meat production at present doesn't add something to the system, but CO2 and methane emitted by the process isn't exactly new. Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten. While inevitably some carbon is going to be consumed from the ground, it is minuscule compared to all the other minerals that the plants need to consume. Why would they need to get carbon from the ground when photosynthesis already necessitates using atmospheric carbon? And yes, methane eventually degrades into carbon over around a decade or so.

Also, there were far more large grass eating ruminants on planes like the North American continent, before humans killed the vast majority of them, than there are cows being raised as livestock now. We don't even have more cows being raised than a decade ago. So trying to reduce meat consumption is not only fighting against the atmosphere's own carbon cycle, but the same cycle that was occurring in nature at a greater abundance before man showed up.

We're better off just not releasing carbon that's trapped in the earth's crust, which is what we're doing when we're burning fossil fuels, because that wouldn't really be happening at such a rapid rate in nature. But no one wants to talk about that. We have nuclear, but the hand waving never stops. I don't really know what to tell people who think that we need to stop eating meat because of global warming when they refuse to advocate for nuclear energy.

danielbln3• 4 years ago

We are omnivores, we can subsist on many things, meat being one of them. If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one.

bobthepanda3• 4 years ago

One thing we’re ignoring here is all the fertilizer used to grow animal feed, which is generated from fossil fuels. So it’s not quite all fresh carbon.

roboticmind4• 4 years ago

There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on.

As long as that gas continues to go into the atmosphere, it's going to keep causing problems for climate change. It accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions[1] and a phase out presents a massive opportunity to sequester carbon.

We show that, even in the absence of any other emission reductions, persistent drops in atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels, and slower carbon dioxide accumulation, following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C. The magnitude and rapidity of these potential effects should place the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture at the forefront of strategies for averting disastrous climate change.

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/20-meat-...

FooBarWidget• 4 years ago

Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten.

I think the main problem is that said plants are grown using fossil fuel-derived fertilizers.

Why they don't use cow dungs to fertilize said plants, I don't know. Maybe a farming specialist can enlighten me why chemical fertilizers are so much more abundanly used than animal waste fertilizers.

Another problem is local buildup of carbon or nitrogen. The Netherlands suffers from a nitrogen crisis: an EU court has ruled that the Netherlands' nitrogen emissions are higher than allowed by treaties, and so we must cut emissions. Emissions are caused for a large part by farming activities. These emissions are a problem because the nitrogen in farm waste products originate from a non-local source. So the nitrogen builds up locally and harms nature.

The Dutch government ordered farmers to cut back on their stock. Now farmers are protesting, blocking roads and setting hay balls on fire.

tootie• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how you can say there's no science to back this up. Livestock are accounted for as contributing nearly 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. And since so much pasture is cleared by razing old growth forest the cost may be even higher. And aside from their primary contribution, livestock place a lot of strain on water resources which are dwindling due to climate change. I'm not anyone has bothered computing the result of a world without livestock because it's so improbable but it would certainly be very significant.

pawsforthought3• 4 years ago

Besides fossil fuel derived fertilizers used for feed, as sibling commenters have mentioned, you’re neglecting the impact animal agriculture has on forests.

2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) of tropical forest is destroyed every year to make way for beef herds [1]. That’s 41% of all tropical deforestation (which is where 95% of the deforestation occurs).

This is a disaster both in terms of the vast stores of carbon being released, and the destruction of habitat in the world’s most precious and biodiverse ecosystems.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation

dan-robertson3• 4 years ago

I think the claim is more that raising cattle leads to higher methane levels and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. There are other environmental or social issues with raising animals for meat however (eg inefficient land use, animal welfare, deforestation, zoonotic diseases, etc).

I don’t buy your argument because I think people are just not going to significantly change their behaviours because they are scared by some predicted global warming apocalypse, and carbon taxes seem unlikely to be supported in democracies for the same reason. It seems to me that the only way we will significantly curb CO2 emissions is by the environmentally better option being cheaper than keeping the worse option, possibly with some subsidies to help. It seems this is happening with electricity generation now in the US, which is good.

Personally, I find environmental arguments to be stronger but I expect any declining meat consumption to be driven by animal welfare concerns, cultural changes, availability of alternatives, and possibly vegetarian/vegan food becoming cheaper or meat becoming more expensive (though that feels a bit unlikely currently).

lumost• 4 years ago

Are there any references covering how much CO2 is generated by a realistic vegan/vegetarian diet?

It would be easy to identify a theoretically low CO2 diet of rice and beans which does not require refrigeration, can be dehydrated for transport, grown easily and dense in calories. However this is not the diet that I generally see vegetarians/vegans eating - or the diet I go for when I eat vegetarian.

I’m suspicious that we look at extremely high quality vegetarian foods when we want to claim health benefits, and then low quality foods when we want to claim environmental efficiency.

pkphilip2• 4 years ago

I suggest that those who are campaigning for livestock reduction should first ask for the complete reduction of household pets as they also emit methane and perform less of a productive function in society than livestock which produces meat, eggs, milk and a host of other products.

2Gkashmiri3• 4 years ago

our society has historically been poor, for centuries at end but only recently in the past 30 odd years, "wealth" has seen our doors and that has somehow changed the whole scenario.

in the past, when no one had any money, cooking oil was a luxury and having oily food was a public display of your "considerable wealth so many generations grew around the notion of "oily food is a status symbol". fast forward it to today coming from the last 30 years, when everyone could now afford cooking oil, the idea in the minds of old people stuck around.

we still find the old generation in offices and shops eat "oily food" because their wives at home who prepare the food still imagine if "someone sees non-oily food that they would think they are poor".

i personally know people who have become obese and developed related diseases because of being fed "extra oily food" during their lunch-tiffin.

selimthegrim3• 4 years ago

Are haakh, lotus root, kohlrabi (sorry forgot words for the last two) still considered poor people food?

2Gkashmiri3• 4 years ago

Nope. Haakh has historically been associated with good income because it was never cheap. Haakh-batte is sign of good fortunes even if people might indicate they are not.

Lotus roots are like 300-350 inr /kg. That is more expensive than chicken which is around 200 and cottage cheese (pander) which is also at around 250.

Lotus roots is called nadru (nadur) while the last one I can't place.

Potatoes are very cheap, food for the masses. Like 20/kg. And it has been there for ever. Onions and tomatoes get seasonal price hikes but they are also generally affordable.

I am talking about a time when Kashmiris used to have meat once a year and that was not some 200 year old story but just 50 short years ago. The oil was being bought at the quantity of 50-100ml on a daily/weekly basis because no one could afford a litre or 5 of it at once. (Til veain) or oil sellers used to sell oil like currently our milk retailers do.

im3w1l• 4 years ago

When people say biology causes x, what's usually happening is

    biology -> a -> b -> c -> x

Break any of those links, and biology will cease causing x. In other words, the biological causation is conditional on the environment.

Another commenter mentioned fake-meat, and I think this indeed will be what breaks the chains. But I want to take it one step further. Not just imitation but rather superstimuli[0]. Something that is more meat than meat itself. If we can create superstimuli in so many other categories, then why not meat?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

paulpauper• 4 years ago

I wonder how much this accounts for obesity

bicijay• 4 years ago

Yeah... i doubt it. My bet would still go to carb rich diets with sugar and processed foods...

pravus2• 4 years ago

This probably explains the obesity crisis too Meat is much more calorie dense compared to vegetable
I wonder how much this accounts for obesity

From my experience, probably very little. I've been hard-core keto for almost 10 years now. I initially lost 100lbs and I've easily maintained a healthy weight ever since. The vast majority of my diet is meat and fat and I do not count calories.

flembat2• 4 years ago

I agree it would be quite hard to get obese from eating a diet rich in meat, because protein is very satiating and expensive to digest. If you are obese, eating more protein (including meat) is a good idea, and doing a lot of strength training, to get your metabolism working. It is very easy to become obese from eating bread, pasta, dairy, and sugar in processed foods, I have done that.

dominotw• 4 years ago

that has opposite correlation with wealth, atleast in the west.

dan-robertson3• 4 years ago

I thought the article did a reasonably good job of addressing most of the confounding factors I thought of. My first guess was that this would be like population growth which is low when countries are poor (due to high infant mortality or things that correlate with being poor like civil wars), high as countries are getting richer (combining high fertility with lower infant mortality), and lower in developed countries (apart from immigration; fertility may be below replacement rate). But then we see the US continuing to eat more meat per capita into recent times. My other guess would then be that the US is consuming more food per capita (obesity and suchlike) but this doesn’t really line up with the relatively poorer Spain eating similar amounts of meat.

It may still be possible that the peak was recent (the data given isn’t so fine-grained) and so we don’t see a decline from 1970 levels or that there are other confounding factors, eg maybe Spain’s statistics are including meat consumed by tourists. Tourism has increased a lot since 1970, I think, and tourists seem likely to eat a lot of meat.

But it certainly doesn’t seem that falling meat consumption is anywhere near as universal as falling fertility as countries get/remain rich.

wooque• 4 years ago

Not surprised. Meat tastes good and bio-availability of animal protein is unmatched by any plant protein.

Apart from minor vegan delusion in the Western nations, meat eating is not going away and it's not even reached its peak.

karol• 4 years ago

Fully agreed. Also I have a feeling the opposite might also be true - the more meat a person eats the bigger their chances to get good levels of energy and cognitive skills required to increase earning potential.

sarsway• 4 years ago

Vegan delusions? Meat eating is overrated, most people have never even tried to stop eating meat for just a month. Most dairy things are pretty gross. You can easily live of a 90% plant based diet and eat as little as 12/kg meat a year.

Pakdef• 4 years ago

Most dairy things are pretty gross

cheese?

dennis_jeeves13• 4 years ago

most people have never even tried to stop eating meat for just a month.

Few people (so you are correct) have done it for decades and learned it the hard way:

https://www.beyondveg.com/

Vegans are IMHO are a deluded lot, while idealism is admirable it does not square up with reality.

dennis_jeeves13• 4 years ago

most people have never even tried to stop eating meat for just a month.

There are few admitting people who have done it for decades and learned it the hard way:

https://www.beyondveg.com/

Vegan are IMHO are a deluded lot, while idealism is admirable it contends with reality.

pkphilip2• 4 years ago

Why would you assume that everyone shares your tastes? If Dairy is gross it won't be a multibillion dollar business in pretty much any medium sized country

philipkglass• 4 years ago

The global trend in meat consumption is clearly upward, as the article says. I presume that global economic development is going to continue along with more meat-eating. There isn't enough land for everyone to consume meat like 20th century Americans if we stick to 20th century meat production techniques.

What remains?

I personally believe that cultivation of hydrogen oxidizing bacteria, and using them as a food chain base for animal feed, may constitute a second Green Revolution [1] for the 21st century. One early company in this space is Solar Foods [2]. Even though Solar Foods is promoting direct use of microbial cultured protein as a human food ingredient, I think that as costs go down and scales go up it will become common for microbial protein to be used in aquaculture and agriculture for feeding traditional food animals which will then be consumed by people.

Hydrogen oxidizing bacteria can convert nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide to protein and other biological macromolecules without relying on photosynthesis. This constitutes a potential revolution in food production because any source of electricity can be used to generate hydrogen from water via electrolysis, and then biomass can be grown using that hydrogen plus carbon dioxide and nitrogen (plus small amounts of other mineral inputs).

Photosynthesis has a very low sunlight-to-food energy conversion ratio. A solar farm feeding hydrogen to microbial synthesis tanks could achieve more than an order of magnitude more food production per hectare than growing crops. Further, microbial synthesis tanks do not require weed control, insect control, or plowing (soil disruption). They require a minute fraction of the water needed to irrigate crops. They could operate on land that is too rocky, dry, hot, cold, or contaminated for farming. They could operate in windy places with little sun if powered by wind farms.

Here's an article focusing on the use of solar power for protein production:

"Solar-powered large scale microbial food production"

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/03/solar-powered-large-s...

Also consider this astonishing recent research report:

"Microbial Protein out of Thin Air: Fixation of Nitrogen Gas by an Autotrophic Hydrogen-Oxidizing Bacterial Enrichment"

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/322827781.pdf

The authors use selection pressure to develop a population of hydrogen oxidizing bacteria that assimilate nitrogen from the air. It potentially renders the Haber-Bosch process [3] unneeded for protein production, replacing a high-pressure, high-temperature industrial process with a room temperature, atmospheric pressure biological process. That would be the greatest sea change in agriculture since the original invention of the Haber-Bosch process more than 100 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[2] https://solarfoods.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

ianai• 4 years ago

Past is not indicative of the future when dealing with hugely Complicated systems. Empirical models are only as good as the data under them. The pricing models used in the infamous mortgage backed securities that brought the world the 2008 Great Recession were trained on data before the SL crisis. Further, fully all of human pollutions until the mid 90s were subsequently surpassed in the emissions from then until now. There just is no reason to argue about these topics with simple graphs and lazy “theories”.

This article is just slightly better than middlebrow drizzle in data. But worse because it promulgates bad ideas.

auganov2• 4 years ago

When people go to a grocery store does it really make sense to think about evolution and natural selection? Every part of the modern food shopping experience has been designed by humans. Even the food itself. It's strange to consider a chimp's hunting instinct somehow relates to, say, a human's evaluation of what's a good deal in dollar terms.

Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance. by George Gilder

https://www.discovery.org/a/3631/

"These evolutionary sex wars were mostly unresolvable because, at its root, Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives. While such tautologies ensure the consistency of any arguments based on them, they could contribute little to an analysis of what patterns of behavior and what ideals and aspirations were conducive to a good and productive society. Almost by definition, Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture."

ajdegol• 4 years ago

I don’t agree it’s tautological. His theory had predictive power.

SnowHill99023• 4 years ago

That’s because Darwin’s is an observation of self-replicating systems in general and not an abstract idea or new concept. It’s tautological that the most successful self-replicating systems are the ones most successful at self-replicating. Fitness is by definition being successful at dealing with the environment in regards to self-replication. Darwin’s in the general sense is in my opinion not a theory but a fundamental observation of what is. The only theory is that there’s a continuous lineage of living systems that evolved one into one other. But that’s more of a teleological issue and can be understood as a theory subject to rejection.

zmgsabst• 4 years ago

Darwin’s theory is that the diversity of life, the nested hierarchy of traits noted by taxonomists before him, can be explained by that fact about replicating systems — and doesn’t require more than that and mutation.

Darwin explained an open question (“why do taxonomies look like this?”) by relating it to fitness and to trait changes via artificial selection (eg, breeding horses and dogs). That’s why it’s about how finches developed traits in nature — because repeated fitness selection in nature like farmers breeding lineages could account for differences in animals.

That the “fit survive” isn’t the theory — just a fact about the world.

allturtles• 4 years ago

If Darwinian theory is tautological, why was it so controversial? Indeed Darwin knew it would be, and so kept it secret for decades after conceiving it. Why does it continue to be controversial to this day in some places, such as the U.S., to the degree that organizations like the one you cited (the Discovery Institute) are dedicated to dismantling it?

The core of Darwinian theory is not "what survives is fit; what is fits survives." The core of it is: 1) Life can multiply extremely rapidly, outstripping the available resources to live on, meaning that only some offspring can survive (this comes from Malthus) 2) There is random variation in the characteristics of offspring, some of which will prove more successful at survival and reproduction than others. 3) The action of (1) and (2), starting from some unknown point of origin of life, can explain all the variation in types of life that we see around us today, from fungi to humans.

None of these are tautologies.

heckerhut• 4 years ago

I think you misunderstood the person you’re responding to. They are saying that the way we take in calories is so far removed from the environment we evolved in that any Darwin comparison is smoke and mirrors. IMHO they are spot on.

auganov2• 4 years ago

Gilder co-founded Discovery so you'd have to assume this essay is somewhat representative of the kind of thinking that inspired its creation. I've read plenty of Gilder and I honestly don't know what his exact views on the origin of life are. I'm sure he has his problems, but doubt they have much to do with whatever the original opposition to Darwin was. The point is very much that it doesn't matter. A purely deterministic and materialistic theory of evolution could be perfectly true, yet one has to concede it cannot possibly give us much of an edge in solving today's problems. The meat article made me think of Gilder's essay because it's a perfect example of trying to employ Darwinian thinking when it cannot possibly help.

AlbertCory• 4 years ago

In a sense, it's true that it's tautological, but only in that we often don't know for certain what was fit, or why. And we often can't.

For Darwin's finches, we can make a good guess, but some animal appearances or behaviors (e.g. the most beautiful snakes [1]) we just have to shake our heads. We know the snake's beauty (in our eyes) must have increased fitness since it was conserved, but how?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+most+beautiful+snake&t=brave&i...

bobthepanda3• 4 years ago

Meat is a status thing. In many countries meat was more expensive than veggies pound for pound, so rich people ate more meat.

Poor people ate very plant heavy diets but that was because they had to.

There isn’t really an equivalent reversal of status at the ultra-rich level to dial it back down.

dllthomas2• 4 years ago

Status things that are comfortably within the reach of everyone often cease to be status things.

bobthepanda3• 4 years ago

There are still plenty of poor people who can't afford meat in every meal, even in rich countries. And even with mass meat consumption there is still further delineation like grades of meat that is plenty for rich consumers to differentiate themselves from (most people certainly cannot afford to cook Kobe/Wagyu with every meal)

pohl• 4 years ago

Fresh vegetables too, though, I bet. Money gives people access, film at eleven.

olivermarks• 4 years ago

'Ignore the hype that the world is about to turn vegan'

I have never heard any of this 'hype' anywhere except from evangelizing vegetarians.

The IEEE is becoming a pretty weird organization with dystopian undertones these days. https://www.ieee.org/about/ieee-strategic-plan.html

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

there's no way this function from wealth to amount of meat is differentiable

HFguy• 4 years ago

I don’t understand the scope of research and topics the IEEE publishes. I would think it would be electrical engineering topics and things tangential to that.

Anybody have any insight?

HermanMartinus3• 4 years ago

The evolutionary argument falls short here. We know that you can eat a purely vegan diet and operate at the highest achievable level for humans (see vegan Olympians). So it comes down to personal choice, not what our Neolithic ancestors did.

And if that is a rational argument, then there should be a push to eating the unsavoury bits of the animal as well, generally not consumed in the west, as well as a push to eat other things (tortoise, dog, etc) and not just steak.

HermanMartinus3• 4 years ago

There are decades of research that show that it is entirely possible to live a healthy and extended life on a plant based diet. It then comes down to personal choice and is not an evolutionary argument.

If this is the case, then it makes sense to choose a diet with less embedded violence and which is more globally sustainable.

hnburnsy• 4 years ago

In my house growing up as we ascended to lower middle class we progressed from grape jelly, to strawberry spread, to strawberry preserves and buttery spread, to vegetable oil sticks, to real butter sticks.

winrid• 4 years ago

Not surprising. Carbs are a cheap way to feed the masses.

The richer people get, the more meat they eat

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