I am personally very defensive about eating animal products, which is funny since I used to be vegan. With current developments it seems like the endgame will be that only extremely rich people will be able to afford meat and other animal products.
I find it dishonest to compare animal product eating to very unhealthy things such as smoking and alcohol, with standard SJW angles of 'toxic masculinity' thrown in and what not. The myth of 'low fat = healthy, fat=bad', pushed for decades starting with Ancel Keys, is slowly disintegrating, and suddenly there's another convenient bogeyman to keep animal products stuck with negative image - climate change.
My life has become so much better since I've turned from vegan to a keto diet based on animal products. I don't eat more meat than a regular person, but most of my calories are animal and milk fats - butter, heavy cream etc. This made all my health issues, some of them pretty severe and incurable autoimmune issues, pretty much disappear.
That's why I would hate to see animal products banned/highly taxed as result of vegan zealots' lobbying, hidden behind the guise of 'helping the planet'.
You know, I'm not the biggest capitalist in the world, far from it, but this is a situation where I'd say...let the market do its job.
I'd say, let's stop subsidizing the meat industry. Let the prices rise to whatever their market cost without government intervention would be. Let people decide when they're not paying a hidden cost to make meat cheap at the market.
Yes, I am fine with that idea. I do not like the subsidies either.
However I think that the subsidies game is even deeper, and that it's responsible for many more negative things than just making for cheap meat - most processed food today is just high fructose corn syrup in disguise.
So yeah, I would like to see prices of low-quality food stop being artificially low, because I believe that would affect the prices of higher quality food (quality meat and quality vegetables) in a positive way.
I absolutely agree with you whenever I can I like to stay in a Paleo Diet because it makes me feel a lot better than any other diet I have tried.
However, whenever I read comments about the environment on HN I always get this Malthusian feeling from them. Their story always revolves around the fact that we are consuming resources today that future generations won't get and that we are essentially dooming the future of humanity by polluting with CO2 and consuming meat. It's essentially Malthus' argument in disguise.
I always approach these kinds of arguments with extreme caution because you are essentially betting against humanity's ability to innovate. And before anyone jumps at me yes, global warming is real and it will have a real cost on society. But before you advocate for one radical policy or another consider whether the actual cost of global warming from that activity actually justifies it economically.
Yes, that's why I mention dishonesty in my original post. Most people who argue hard for not eating meat because of climate change actually have deeper motives (animal welfare/not causing animals suffering), and will use whichever argument, no matter how flawed, to push their agenda. I know this because I used to belong to these circles.
By methane production (a comon bogeyman for animal rights activists to push for banning meat use), all of agriculture together makes for only 1/4 of total methane production, the rest is transportation, manufacture and such. Of that 1/4, cows are responsible for cca 1/3-1/2 of it.
As an interesting side note, rice production also generates large amounts of methane (because of anaerobic conditions in rice paddies): cows generated 189 tons of it from 1996 to 2001, while rice production has generated 112 tons in the same period. So rice productions generates 2/3 as much methane as cows:
I agree with you about the Malthusian argument, it's similar to how gloomy people were about our ability to feed ourselves before we invented artificial fertilizer - I believe that the best improvement for future of our planet will be some clean energy revolution - most likely working fusion. Once we'll have that, most of problematic emissions will be taken care of.
Also, considering the rapid progress in genetic science, I wouldn't be surprised if we will be able to create biological machines such as a standalone chicken's digestive and reproductive tract - you would have it in your kitchen, and feed it scraps; from them it would produce eggs. And you could optimize your nutrition by adding specific nutrients to scraps, such as omega3 fat acids.
Big oil drives development in emerging economies, that's a better justification than eating animals than some blind progress one.
I think the best argument for veganism is simply what right do we have to take another creatures life purely for our matter of taste. I wasn't directly talking abkut veganism though in the parent.
I am mostly vegan. I think the solution is to make it easier to consume plants. I don't think taxes or bans are necessary.
I also think you can decide you want to be a rich person who eats a 10x share of meat while the poorest get a 0.1x share. I'm not being facetious, I don't think you're really harming anyone by choosing that.
But I do think you need to admit that you are taking that choice away from future generations. You believe you are more important than future generations, so you want to use a 10x share of resources.
Again, I don't think that's immoral, but I think you have a moral duty to be honest about your values and that you don't place value on future generations' use of those resources.
I do not want to be a rich person, nor live a rich lifestyle. I lead a simple life, have simple and inexpensive hobies, and don't really spend money on things. Eating animal products is one of rare things where I cannot accept a compromise, simply because I believe it is very unhealthy to do so.
'You are taking choice away from future generations' is a very meaningless statement that can be applied to everyone, and comes off simply as a concern troll. Most of us Westerners can improve the future in many more significant ways than not eating meat. You are taking choice away from future generations simply by existing and spending resources; by living a cushy western urbanite life and participating in online forums instead of living an isolated rural subsistence life without modern life comforts.
Another poster here wrote that just 5 minutes of driving daily is worse for environment/climate than any possible diet style one might be following. So a vegan that drives 5 min daily affects the environment and climate worse than a meat eater who cycles to work.
As for me, no, I do not have a moral duty to be honest about my values, and your concern troll did not work. I feel I have a moral value to take care of myself and my health primarily, and that's why I switched from ideology I followed (veganism based on ethical issues - resource use and animal abuse/suffering) when the ideology proved to be supported by lies about how veganism is healthy and meat-eating is unhealthy. Instead of an ideology, I went with what proved itself to be correct. And I am glad I did.
> You are taking choice away from future generations simply by existing and spending resources; by living a cushy western urbanite life and participating in online forums instead of living an isolated rural subsistence life without modern life comforts.
You are right that by existing we are consuming precious resources. In fact, life (i believe) feeds off of some other death, somewhere, in the grand scheme of things. That said, i don't think we'll convince many people to stop existing for environmentalist causes. We'll have to find a compromise. One of those, i believe, is living a life with a small footprint (cycle don't drive, avoid air travel, go veggie where possible, eat local produce as much as possible). However, and i can't go into as much detail here as i'd like, it's not always practical to convince people to become vegos, only cycle, etc. I suggest interested people read the 98% Environmentalist [1], an essay i thought quite insightful.
However, regarding your second point, i think it is a misconception that an urbanite lifestyle is more wasteful of resources than a rural one. In fact, if we as a species are to become less environmentally impactful, i believe (perhaps mistakenly) that we should live in cities as much as possible: this allows us to use public transport (as opposed to wasteful single occupancy ICE cars), work from home or cycle to work, live more densely (= easier to centralise recycling, insulation and heating of buildings is more efficient in apartment buildings, etc.). As opposed to the rural existence where one is probably forced to drive to a nearby city for supplies one cannot grow (building materials perhaps).
Of course, i may be completely wrong. I encourage everyone to live as mindfully of the environment as possible, in their own way, without claiming to have a one-size-fits-all answer. I hope we don't, however, stick our heads into the sand and hammer the final nail into the climate's coffin during our lifetimes – i worry it may already be a lost battle [2].
I made a slight mistake in the post, in
"I feel I have a moral value to take care of myself and my health primarily"
It should be 'moral obligation' instead of 'moral value'.
I also feel deeply about helping to preserve our planet - I don't drive, I don't buy useless stuff that has traveled thousands of km on a container ship burning terribly dirty bunker oil, I don't support wasteful services. Like I said before, the only thing where I won't compromise is eating animal fats, because of health reasons. I also felt very, very cheated after realizing I've been lied to about how veganism is healthier than 'meat eating', when it was making me ill instead.
I'd like to clarify that I wrote 'rural subsistence lifestyle', not 'rural lifestyle', so I don't mean what is considered a typical rural lifestyle these days - commute to work for an hour or more, have a large farm operated with gas-powered machinery and such. That is equally wasteful as urban life.
What I meant was a simple rural life - having a small home that is optimally designed to need a minimum amount of heating and cooling, raising your own food on a couple acres without help of machinery (vegetables, chicken/ducks and a small flock of sheep or goats, possibly also fish with recently popular aquaponics). And with the rest of necessary income coming from working online, remotely. Not easy to pull off, but I know a couple people that managed to do it, and I hope that I'll manage to do it soon too.
PCs have come a long way, and a modern ultrabook spends so little power that it can easily be recharged from a solar panel/battery combo, and won't need to be replaced for quite a few years because the CPU development mostly stagnated these days. So an internet router + an ultrabook is the extent of 'modern luxuries' in the 'rural life' I talked about.
I do not know what SJW is nor that the toxic masculinity angle is standard. I never thought about it much until I wrote about it here. I cannot help it is not very original; it is what I see around me ( I own a meat serving restaurant for instance ).
A lot of people believe 1-2 glasses of alcohol a day save your life while there is more and more proof it is actually very bad (which is what you call it outright); I see the same kind of thing happening for meat. That was what I was commenting on.
Well, a meat serving restaurant would teach you more about people's obsession with status than with meat, in my opinion (which fits in line with the rest of your observations), so it might not give you 100% correct insight on this. I do not eat out if I can help it.
As for the alcohol, it puts a significant workload on liver, without any benefits I know of; however, funny thing is that metabolization pathway in liver for sugar is very similar to that of alcohol, so I consider sugar to be as unhealthy as alcohol is.
I do not have much of a particular opinion on meat itself tho - it's animal and dairy fats that I consider important. However, I feel that most of arguments about meat being unhealthy should be targeting unhealthy meat raising practices instead - loading the animals full of antibiotics, having them on an unvaried grain-only diet and such.
I would agree with what you say here. The problem is that it is quite hard for most people to get animal product without all the chemicals right? I live on a mountain far from cities so for me it is far easier but for most people it would be hard. Another positive about the meat from the mountain is that the animals basically do not suffer (much) but that is not the unhealthy for human factor we were talking about anyway.
I agree with you as well. I dream of living a rural life and raising my own food, both because then I would know that my animals weren't injected/fed with anything unhealthy, and because I could make sure they lived a nice life and died a quick, painless death.
What would you call it though? This thread is about killing life because rich folks want meat?
Define "life". Because last I heard, plants count as "alive" too?
One of the possible alternatives I'm aware of is ground up insects. Those are the same kind of "alive" as other animals, and yet AFAICT the "don't kill anything" people seem to things it's at least less bad. Even tho it takes a lot more of them to get the same amount of nutrition.
Are you aware of things called "obligate carnivores"? How do they fit in to your moral framework?
Have you played with evolutionary algorithms? Systems that have appropriate sensors / feedback loops to avoid harm to themselves (could even be as simple as a speed governor on an engine)? It can really be... odd to try to think of "life" (or even whatever term we're currently using to assign moral weight to anything capable of feeling pain) in general as being all that unique and special, when I can build something that meets most parts of most definitions in an afternoon.
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Humans are omnivores, and I have the teeth to prove it. Stop demanding that I forsake my heritage, especially over some half-baked philosophy that isn't even compatible with my experiences.
I think this comes from vastly underestimating the value humans bring to other life. I would argue that without humans there is no life. We are the only species in the planet that has, in the next couple million years, the ability to allow life to expand throughout the universe. We are literally the only species alive that can do this. Without us life is frail and subject to the whims of cosmic events on our planet that could whipe it out. Humans bring a lot of value to the world and I think we play a critical role in the history of life. I find that people who argue against humans using earths resources forget that we have a very important role in the ecosystem. So important in fact, that a the extinction of a couple thousand of species and habitats is probably a small price to pay for us to learn how to use our incredible ability to control the environment.
I think you're overly optimistic. Our technology does and will explore space at large.
Humans in space (beside the few scientific missions and maybe a Mars trip) make about as much sense as motorized fishbowls on highways. Humans won't leave the solar system, and we may destroy the ecosystem that feeds us before we can start a serious space expansion program.
Beside the CO2 problems (warming and ocean acidification), we've also destroyed a third of arable land in the last 40 years. The presence of biodiversity is needed for resilient ecosystems too.
But I am not; I think I used a word wrong somehow that means something stronger than I meant to say. I serve meat in my restaurant (as much as possible and allowed actual free range and with limited chemicals as allowed) and I think a lot about it but I am not of that school you put me in.
I just do not get the obsession with having to have meat every day multiple times or the 'entitlement' (that might be the wrong word I used?) for people feeling they can demand it like that. But that was more of a discussion topic attempt than getting people angry or something like it.
But I am not; I think I used a word wrong somehow that means something stronger than I meant to say. I serve meat in my restaurant (as much as possible and allowed actual free range and with limited chemicals as allowed) and I think a lot about it but I am not of that school you put me in.
Cool. And given the general tone-deafness of plain text I should probably note that I wasn't trying to go off on you either. I was more going for putting out a variety of thoughts on what seemed to be the topic to see if any interesting discussions might come out of it.
I just do not get the obsession with having to have meat every day multiple times or the 'entitlement' (that might be the wrong word I used?) for people feeling they can demand it like that.
That's probably it, yes. Not sure what the right word would be, tho...
Is it that strong a word? I looked up the meaning and it seems to mean what I intented but seeing the reactions to it, it carries much more weight than I meant.
Yeah, it's actually quite charged -- saying someone is behaving "entitled" is suggesting that they are being extremely childish and bullying on the subject. That word has been used as a weapon by far-left political pundits as well to dismiss people's objections instead of debating them.
I am not telling anyone what to eat or not... I was just commenting that guys get very wound up by touching on the subject. This thread does not point the other way now does it?
That's pretty disingenuous. "Touching the subject" of restricting what other people eat naturally will make them angry. Particularly the way you do it.
English is not my first language; what did I exactly say 'that way'? As I am not sure: by people (guys) getting angry I mean things like blokes shouting at a Thai waiter because they wanted "f*cking serious meat" and there was hardly any in the soup.
Are sure you arent confusing culture and gender? I have many japanese friends who love meat(steak) but cant afford it in japan, and so go a little overboard when they visit me in america.
