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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Ideally, pasture-raised and kosher or halal meats would be more (at all) prevalent. That's what ethical meat consumption looks like.
Alternately, lab grown.
Grass-fed production doesn't really scale, so there's not much way around consumption changes here. It also comes with a side effect of raising methane emissions
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
To be fair, pasture raised is more expensive, so people would eat less beef. I don't think it's fair to talk about scaling current consumption.
You say that, but it's not really just about grass-feeding. Cows are already fed almost 90% inedible crop materials that would be getting disposed of anyway. We could be doing better, but cattle's food source is sorta the wrong focus.
And as much methane is in manure, it's better for the environment (including GHG) than synthetic fertilizers.
The real answer is changing our meat/vegetable balance AND improve the process AND continue to improve humane regulations (and those 3 goals often synergize with each other).
The % that's edible is not as relevant as the fact that it still takes much more human-edible feed
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Synthetic fertilizer usage is greatly reduced by eating plants directly even compared to the best-case use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
Not really. Definitely not if you consider the nutritional quality of the meat. And that's beef, the worst example. (Feed to meat conversion from 6x to 25x, the higher number generally for free-range). Chickens are only x2 in ideal situations (closer to 5x when free-range since their calorie intake is not as well-managed). And from a health viewpoint, 100kcal of chicken is a better-balanced calorie than 200kcal of feed
But that is before accounting for the fact that about 165 of those feed kcals are inedible, meaning you're trading around 35 edible kcals of corn for 100 edible kcals of chicken. Would you agree from a purely health and efficiency point of view (leaving out ethics), that 35 edible calories of a "non-nutritional grain" for 100 edible calories of a protein superfood is a pretty fair trade?
Missed this one, so jumping back. It's hard for me to respond because I don't have access to the whole paper. There seem to be fairly significant issues with it, however. For one, I can't find any corroboration that isn't merely citing this paper. For another, I can't find any critical responses either (the lack of them is worse than a half-decent one IMO). Nonetheless, there's a few things I find interesting from the summary the seem to make it hard to just accept an argument using it
And your second link... I'm not sure why you cited it. It appears to be arguing for my side, defending the figures I used. Thank you?
Cropland usage is still lower when looking at the nutrition of it all
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Further, we can plant other crops on that land growing feed crops. The greatly lower cropland usage offers quite a bit of flexibility to shift around production
I disagree with you and that paper's abstract. They're comparing worst-case current aggriculture with a hypothetical improved horticulture.
Also, I extended my previous post; you might have missed it.
How do you intend to kill off the demand for those crops? Or do you intend to forbid people and businesses from consuming crops with a lot of feed-waste like corn or soy?
Why is it ideal or even ethical to kill others "kosher or halal" when we don't have to kill in any way? How does this relate to them living in cages before?
Both kosher and halal require you to kill the animal quickly and painlessly. I'd say the pasture raised is more important, since that's every other day of the animal's life, but I'd like the last day to also not suck.
Is the act of killing someone who does not want to die and does not need to die ethical if painless?
Have you seen non human animals that want to die for humans to be consumed by them? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmIqdlomtuSsJEoFi_L_pfEAPIxDRo4DB
I mean, if you're coming at it from the point of "there is no ethical meat consumption," then you're right, none of this means anything. It's a simple "don't ever eat meat."
In which case, kosher and halal are irrelevant. Pasture raised is still relevant because we need to discuss what ethical production of things like eggs and milk looks like.
I come from the point that if we don't have to kill or abuse others we should not. That is the case for most of us. You can't ethical impregnate a cow, steal the baby and drink their milk. Raising chicken breeds which can't stand on their own feet or get infections and tumors and just live to be exploited is not justifiable with taste.