Democrats are understandably eager to stick it to Trump over his unmet campaign promise to reduce prices. But society’s fixation with cheaply produced eggs is precisely what got us into this mess.
Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption
we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
I’m sure the alex jones crew bring it up all the time when talking about the secret global conspiracy or whatever, but I bring it up because bugs are a legitimate food source. One that is extremely efficient in terms of both resources and space, but just because eating bugs is more “efficient” then eating beef, doesn’t mean that we should all eat bugs. Generally this is uncontroversial, but some environmentalists dismiss food culture and variety of diets amongst humans in pursuit of maximizing some other metric but they aren’t very clear on what their goals are, let alone the why.
This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we’re talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It’s enough to change the entire environment of our planet
I think that deserves far more weight than “culture”. Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
The land usage itself isn’t free either. It comes with costs
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
And that’s not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target
since fossil fuel emissions are unlikely to be eliminated entirely, the food system isn’t exactly the issue. it’s still fossil fuels.
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
We can look at other modeling studies. Here’s a review of modeling studies
Our review showed that reductions above 70% of GHG emissions and land use, and 50% of water use, could be achieved by shifting typical Western diets to more environmentally sustainable dietary patterns. Medians of these impacts across all studies [Including studies with just partial changes in consumption] suggest possible reductions of between 20–30%.
We can also look at some specific modeling studies in specific countries. Numbers will slightly different from global picture since it is going to vary based on how much animal products are consumed there
For instance, here’s one looking at France in particular
Vegans’ diet emitted 78% less GHG, required 53% less energy and 67% less land occupation than omnivorous’ diet. These results are in line with several recent works documenting associations between dietary patterns and a set of environmental impacts (GHG emissions, land occupation, and water use) in modelled and observed data (8,10,20)
Here’s another study modeling for Romania in particular (though does indirectly use some from numbers from Poore, Nemecek). Romania consumes roughly half per capita as somewhere like the US and still sees quite high reductions with removing all animal products
With the reduction of 100% [of animal products in diets], the largest decrease is observed, equaling a total of 11,131,127 ha, reducing land use by 733,898 ha compared to the 50% scenario and by a total of 1,067,443 ha compared to the baseline. This represents almost the cumulative UAA of two large-sized counties in Romania, Arad and Timis
Environmental impact data using life cycle analysis (LCA) often do not include measures of variance, and therefore the reviewed studies did not provide confidence intervals for environmental impacts.
this is exactly my problem with poore-nemecek 2018. this analysis, unlike poore-nemecek, admits that it’s a major gap in the methodology, but still suffers from this gap.
Primary source data were collected and applied to commodity production statistics to calculate the indices required to compare the environmental impact of producing 1 kg of edible protein from kidney beans, almonds, eggs, chicken and beef. Inputs included land and water for raising animals and growing animal feed, total fuel, and total fertilizer and pesticide for growing the plant commodities and animal feed. Animal waste generated was computed for the animal commodities.
the actual data isn’t exposed in this link. do you have the full paper?
Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
Or we could just stop eating animals and burning fossil fuels? Its not hard to stop these endemic diseases and climate change
Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
I’m sure the alex jones crew bring it up all the time when talking about the secret global conspiracy or whatever, but I bring it up because bugs are a legitimate food source. One that is extremely efficient in terms of both resources and space, but just because eating bugs is more “efficient” then eating beef, doesn’t mean that we should all eat bugs. Generally this is uncontroversial, but some environmentalists dismiss food culture and variety of diets amongst humans in pursuit of maximizing some other metric but they aren’t very clear on what their goals are, let alone the why.
This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we’re talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It’s enough to change the entire environment of our planet
I think that deserves far more weight than “culture”. Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/unsustainable_cattle_ranching/
Forbid food exports, problem solved. Americans can grow their own food and enjoy their own burgers on their own land just fine.
This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-global-habitable-land-needed-for-agriculture-if-everyone-had-the-diet-of
The land usage itself isn’t free either. It comes with costs
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
And that’s not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
since fossil fuel emissions are unlikely to be eliminated entirely, the food system isn’t exactly the issue. it’s still fossil fuels.
your ourworldindata link relies heavily on poore-nemecek, a paper I don’t trust at all. do you have another source?
We can look at individual foods themselves
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
We can look at other modeling studies. Here’s a review of modeling studies
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0165797&emulatemode=2
We can also look at some specific modeling studies in specific countries. Numbers will slightly different from global picture since it is going to vary based on how much animal products are consumed there
For instance, here’s one looking at France in particular
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352550919304920
Here’s another study modeling for Romania in particular (though does indirectly use some from numbers from Poore, Nemecek). Romania consumes roughly half per capita as somewhere like the US and still sees quite high reductions with removing all animal products
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11722955/
this is exactly my problem with poore-nemecek 2018. this analysis, unlike poore-nemecek, admits that it’s a major gap in the methodology, but still suffers from this gap.
i don’t have acces to the full text of your third paper. can you provide it?
the actual data isn’t exposed in this link. do you have the full paper?