So i just finished watching the documentary "Cowspiracy" on netflix, and as usual after a documentary like that, you're always interested in how I can make a change..
I know that we are a lot of different people in this forum, and I think that I know that Food and veganism etc isn't really at the top of list of priorities for the most people in here..
But I would love to hear if anyone of you have seen it, and how you feel about this issue?
Also, are there any Vegans/vegetarians in here?
I'm a vegetarian myself mostly <-- LOL, but are trying to improve on my eating habits in general, I was a fulltime vegan once, but with a girlfriend that isn't eating vegan, it's kinda hard to keep up the lifestyle.
Thanks in advance for the responses that I might get.. And thank you mighty leaders of tek syndicate for making a cool forum/community as this possible..
was a bit moo preachy for me. the moore I watched, the moore aggrivated I became. Seemed like if had a beef with things that were not really things. Just seemed like a load of BS. I mean, I haven't curd what other people have put in their mouths, nobody should have a moopinion what I put in mine. ...moo
I know some vegans. Personally, I care more about people. They are always going to be first on my list of priorities. We don't know for sure that animals have emotions like we do, we don't know for sure that they can think like we do. We have a pretty good idea of it, but at the end of the day, we aren't that animal, so we don't know what it is like in their brain. But we are human. Humans are the easiest to relate to because we are human. While there are atrocities going on for humans, I don't really care about what is happening to the animals. Obviously, there shouldn't be unnecessary hurt and all of that, but I'm not going to stop eating meat because cows are treated badly.
And before anyone says it, I know that vegetarians (in my experience at least) are more willing to relate to animals than people because "people are bad" or whatever. But if people are mean, selfish, etc, then why aren't animals? People always think of animals as some sort of sinless angel. They are organisms, just like us. Living, breathing, thinking about themselves and how to pass on their genes, just like us. People will always outrank animals in my book. No matter what.
I haven't watched the documentary, but based on wikipedia it's about the environmental/non-sustainability of cattle? I would've expected the solution to this was cleaner farming methods at the expense of higher meat costs.
I'd pay extra for meat that was farmed in a more environmentally friendly method - I already do a similar thing with buying free range eggs / chickens. But I'm never going to give up meat itself.
Growing it in a lab would be a much more human and energy efficient way to go about it (once it got up and running). Consider all the nutrients and energy that go into the grass that they eat (or whatever feed). Only ~10% of the energy that they eat can be passed on to the things that eat them. We remove that from teh equation, and grow it directly in a lab instead of indirectly via grass and you have a much better energy yield. Wendell has been saying it for a while now. I've been hailing more lab environments for plants and artificial things for a while now. Too bad that the public is dumb. Too bad they think that isn't "natural" and "organic" is bad. "It came from a lab so it has to be bad." sigh I don't think that we will ever get to the point of a centicow, unfortunately.
3d printing chemicals is what you are thinking of. It exists, just super expensive in comparison. People have been talking about using it to make drugs and shit that can't be produced any other way.
Many, feels great to be such a buzzkill. That is what you get for talking about biology to someone with a degree in it.
I consume a mostly whole foods plant based diet. Despite Eating mostly vegan, I would put human health as a higher priority. I'm one of those heartless people who ate lunch straight through the entire documentary. It just didn't resonate with me as I'm more concerned with human health. 3d printing meat sounds like it would potentially make meat a lot safer but I don't know if it's practical. It probably would taste different as well?
The part of the documentary that I enjoyed was the analysis of the water usage, land usage, pollutant byproducts, and cost of meat for and in the US. He basically looked at the numbers and came to the realization that livestock was one of the biggest contributors to global warming and pollutants and that no one knew about it or was really interested in talking about it. The land used for it was massive, the water consumption was huge, and it was a really inefficient way of meeting the daily food consumption of a large population. If the world continues to demand more beef it will eventually become impracticable to produce it via any kind of livestock raising and butchering model. Open grazing used more land and water and really didn’t change anything as far as pollutants or global warming goes. In the second half of the doc he goes on to say that the only way to keep up with demand is to reduce consumption hence the vegan ending. Not really the most logical conclusion but the first half is worth watching before he goes down the vegan road.
True that, I guess that many would be thrown off by the "go vegan plz" ending.. I'm not sure that everybody eating vegan is the answer to all the environmental problems, however, there is a lot of human benefits to be gained if one ate more vegetables..
And once you learn to cook awesomly with vegetables, you really don't care about meat anymore.. Eggs and cheese however, are more difficult for me to put away and not eat. (It just tastes too damn good)
I like the idea of using bio-technology for growing new kinds of plants that essentially grow eggs, meat and milk.. Because it doesn't seem to be realistic to get everybody to stop eating those kinds of things..
Yes meat in general is very much not a resource efficient way of providing calories/nutrients, beef is just about the worst you can get, chickens on the other hand is way more efficient and has a much better Edible-meat/feed ratio, but by nature is going to be less efficent, as you have to grow the food, and then the animal eats it and converts only some of it into body mass because of inefficiencies and energy it consumes.
Actually not sure if it is your thing or not, but there was a torchwood episode where they did basically this. Personally I think the idea of synthetic meat where you are just growing the meat is a potentially much more efficent approach, and I hope we get there at some point, I guess one of the biggest reasons (apart from cost) is because it would just suck to not have meet in space, and well uhm.. . Well it would be quiet uneconomical to grow cows and pigs and whatnot in space...
And yeah, people shouldn't feel guilty for that, y'know we are the supperior predator, there is a natural order to things, and the other animals exist for our benefit, just as there is a natural heirachy in how our societies are ran. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, I am like 'man that used to be part of something alive, and now I am eating it'. But those are just useless emotions getting in the way of the truth.
Also I like the idea of that, everyone has their own 'meat slab' that they grow in an incubator, like a house plant, it is one of those things which just sounds cool to have, like a washing machine that also dries, or a anti-microwave that freezes things, sure you can live without them, but hell it is cool.
Five minutes in and you can clearly see that these hardcore "Death to humanity" environmentalists are just mentally ill psychotic OCD bi-polar nut cases. The narrator even admits to being OCD 4 minutes in and announces it with pride because he tagged the word environmentalists along with it. If you want to keep fresh water in your lakes quit buying bottled water, This is the root cause to droughts.
Just to clarify because obviously children are incapable of thinking for themselves, The reason why these "Scientists" don't care for agriculture consumption is because it's already been set in stone that people should die to bring down CO2.
P.S
You can take my steak from my cold dead hands. Strive to be independent and off the grid and this discussion wouldn't even matter.
here in Denmark we have a Facts controlling tv program, they check facts presented by politicians, TV shows and other things, they checked the facts presented in Cowspircay and they are somwhat build on "old" and disproved by other scientists, so its no way as bad as told in the movie.. Best Regards Otto
I'd say that the future of the human diet, I think, is going to be vegetarian. The fact of the matter that the rearing of cattle and other livestock for food cannot meet the world's demand, while being ethical and sustainable. Organic cow farming worked great in a village of a couple hundred who only ate meat once or twice a week. But with modern food being as meat focused as it is, the demand cannot be met (unless we go back to the abominations of battery farming we're only just leaving behind now). Honestly (and somewhat obviously now), I am vegetarian, not a preaching veggie nazi, but I am staunch. For the sake of the world environment and food production we either have to start switching to a veggie diet, or begin the industrial manufacturing of lab grown meat (my personal preference).