Another thing about veganism being a religion... Vegans often argue that carnism is a religion. For one thing, belief that eating meat is ethical and healthy makes people reject science on quite a few issues. Many anti-vegetarians reject the scientific consensus that animals we eat are sentient and conscious. And many anti-vegetarians reject the scientific consensus that saturated fat intake leads to heart disease. In fact, it makes some people, most notably Nina Teicholz, openly reject the entire nutritional science. Eating meat is a fertile ground for such beliefs, much like Christianity or Islam are for creationism.

(November 1, 2019 at 9:55 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: Famines have little or nothing to do with our ability to produce food. In Venezuela, food production is record high now, yet people are starving. It's just epic economic mismanagement by incompetent politicians. Even during the Great Chinese Famine, the food production did decrease due to the poor weather and the Four Pests Policy, but only slightly. Over-reportings of the amounts of food people actually had, that's what played a major role there.

Politicians don't control the flow of food (or..rather, the lack thereof)..they aren't wizards.  Private citizens do, making sound financial decisions..and those sound financial decisions often starve people.  I know that it might seem like this is an easy argument to rebut, but it isn't..since those private citizens could also starve if they made poor financial decisions.  We can hardly criticize a person for looking out for their own first on this topic of having something to eat.  

This is why it makes no sense to say we "produce enough grain" and letting it hang as an unqualified statement.  If the metric is eating, we don't produce enough grain until everyone is eating - full stop.  

In any competent plan, loss, mismanagement, and inefficiency are realities that have to be accounted for...not things we can wish away.

Quote:What makes you think that most of the grain that's produced isn't fit for human consumption? How can it be determined which grain is fit for humans and which isn't? Do you have some statistics that show that most of the grain that's fed to farmed animals isn't fit for humans?
My grandfather used to keep chickens, and the food he way buying for them was mostly grains of maize, apparently those same grains of maize that we cook and eat.
I realize it may sound unfair to ask for references for such claims, but you need to understand that the amount of effort needed to produce nonsense is way lower than the amount of effort needed to refute it.

"Those same grains of maize" are not actually the same grains of maize - there are numerous cultivars, some specifically bred as feed..but if your dad was feeding chickens canned corn then your dad was overpaying.  That would make your dads chickens pets, not livestock...and an drain on the system. Bit like a dog.

What makes me think things like this..is that I do it for a living and advocate for these issues on my own time and dime. Specifically, I'm looking to increase the amount of livestock we keep..and to position that industry in economically depressed areas - for the dual purposes of addressing rural poverty and so that we don't have to collapse our wild stock. Its just a side benefit/hustle that the methods available are greener and more productive than conventional ag.

Quote:Well, yes, some plants, such as tomatoes and lettuce, have special needs from the ground to grow successfully. But, if I am not mistaken, trefoil and pea have about the same needs, and wherever trefoil grows, pea can also be grown. And wheat and corn generally require even less nutrients and water to grow, except that they, unlike trefoil and pea, can't grow where the soil is very low in ammonia.

-ALL- crops have "special needs"...and different cultivars of the same crop have different needs, and different characteristics as far as their edibility.  Crops fit for human consumption have an immense irrigation requirement, in addition to safety measures not relevant to the production of feed not fit for human consumption.  All of this costs, and farmers aren't a rich demographic.  

Quote:And we can't get out of that hole by digging.

.......what hole?  The hole of breeding animals so that people don't starve? WTF?

Quote:As far as I know, nearly all economists are against subsidies and price controls, except perhaps in the cases of emergencies (most economists think price controls aren't useful even in emergencies, but it's not like you can't find an economist who would argue they are useful then).

Isn't that nice, economists are against price controls.  Well, to rebut, all humans are for eating.   I..personally, have the benefit of deferring to the for eating camp before I worry about the economist's commodity trading on grain.  OFC they're for instability, instability creates profit opportunities. I mean, ideally..the holy grail of alt ag, is to make those two motivations align, but were not even remotely near there yet, since the economic motivation is very literally the thing starving people. The system I'm using, for example, is hundreds of times more productive than a field.....but it costs about 1.6mil per acre as opposed to a couple grand. This immediately brings back what we opened with above. Productivity is moot in the face of many other realities of ag.

To be very clear, I think that your being aware of these issues is a good thing..but it's also evident that your awareness of these issues has been tainted by other, completely irrelevant and demonstrably untrue ideological commitments. If we're going to be serious about the issue of getting people fed, piggybacking that shit into the arena is counterproductive. Go, feed people if starving people bother you...stop bitching about the livestock required to feed them because some moonie fed you a line of bullshit. That's all I ask, lol.

(October 30, 2019 at 10:30 am)FlatAssembler Wrote:

LastPoet Wrote:Why do you care about what other people eat?

Well, because slaughterhouses don't have glass walls, and there is a lot of propaganda out there preventing people from making informed decisions. And what people eat can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Well, I know the insides and out of the slaughterhouse i work in. I can tell you those pigs don't feel a thing. ISO 22000 has rules.

Can't speak for other slaughterhouses.

Ironically, slaughter houses are one of the few places on earth in which the welfare of animals is transformed into enforceable laws and best practices.

Largely through the work of just one person. Temple Grandin.

Gae Bolga Wrote:Private citizens do, making sound financial decisions..and those sound financial decisions often starve people.

I don't really understand what you mean.
Do you mean that there are poor people because people are making horrible life decisions, and thereby sabotaging themselves and people around themselves? Vojko recently made a song in which he expressed that idea, it's called "Kako to", it's quite popular in Croatia now. Though it sounds humorous and smart, I don't agree with the basic message.
It's just hard to deny that famines are caused by epic government failures. No substantial famine has ever occured in a country that values free speech, that allows public criticism of the government.
For people to make sound financial decisions, they need to have access to the real prices. Prices are a way to communicate what the society needs more and what it needs less. They aren't perfect, but, when the government intervenes, they almost always make things worse. In Venezuela, people see apparent prices, but they don't see the actual prices, the prices they see, and thus the information prices convey, are very distorted because of the inflation and price controls. During the Great Chinese Famine, they basically tried to abolish prices, and came up with a system of communication about what the society needs which is based on bureaucracy, which, of course, failed spectacularly.

Gae Bolga Wrote:"Those same grains of maize" are not actually the same grains of maize - there are numerous cultivars, some specifically bred as feed

Well, like I've said, I haven't really studied it that much. I just assumed that "Most of the grain we can eat is given to the animals." is a well-known and uncontroversial statement. And it's a little hard to argue about what's moral to do and what isn't when people don't agree about the facts.
Why do the estimates abot what percentage of grain is being fed to farmed animals vary so widely? Some studies show it's close to 90%, and some show it's around 60%. Do those studies that show it's around 60% control for the fact that some grain that's given to the farmed animals can't be eaten by humans? I haven't looked much into it.

Gae Bolga Wrote:-ALL- crops have "special needs"

Well, as far I understand, cows also have special needs about which grass they can eat. The grass they eat has to contain the nutrients they need, although it's much less nutrient-dense than grain is. The best pastures are ones with many trefloils, and if trefoils can grow there, so can peas.
I think the right questions to ask here is why is the meat of grass-fed animals more expensive than meat of grain-fed animals, and why is meat significantly more expensive than most of the plant food? Meat has always beeen more expensive than grains and most of the plant food, it's not because of the government interventions. In the 3rd century, emperor Hui of Jin showed his exceptional incompetence when, upon learning that people had no rice to eat, he wondered why people don't eat meat instead.

Gae Bolga Wrote:Crops fit for human consumption have an immense irrigation requirement, in addition to safety measures not relevant to the production of feed not fit for human consumption.

As far as I understand it, the safety measures are mostly useless, it's just that the big corporations are lobbying for them because it hurts the competition more than it hurts them.

Gae Bolga Wrote:The hole of breeding animals so that people don't starve?

Don't you think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, and is thus wrong even if we think the consequences will be good?

LastPoet Wrote:Well, I know the insides and out of the slaughterhouse i work in. I can tell you those pigs don't feel a thing. ISO 22000 has rules.

So, as far as I know, the usual way of killing pigs today in slaughterhouse is to suffocate them with CO2. I want an honest answer, why?
First of all, why CO2? CO2 in blood directly activates the nociceptors, thus leading to extreme pain. Why not nitrogen? Nitrogen poisoning is at least known to be painless in humans. I don't know how certain we are that it's painless for pigs, since we know nitrogen poisoning isn't painless for moles (moles, unlike humans, can detect lack of oxygen in their blood), but we know for certain CO2 poisoning is painful.
Second, if people actually care about painlessly killing the farmed animals, why not simply behead them? Nearly all neuroscientists would agree beheading is, if properly done, a painless way to die. So why not do that?

No, I don't mean that there are poor people because they make horrible life decisions. I was commenting on how good financial decisions made by producers are not equivalent to decisions that feed starving people, and, in fact, those good financial decisions made by producers actively starve people. The other side of that is that if those producers made some other choice, there's a very real possibility that -they- would then be counted among the starving. Take as an example a producer here in the bluegrass. Half a million USD can pass through their hands in a season. Their chunk of that half a mil, though, can be below poverty wages. We might imagine that they could just switch crops, but it's not that simple. You could grow beans out here until you were buried in a pile of them..The Kentucky Wonder Pole Bean is famous, a garden favorite.....but there's no infrastructure to store, buy or distribute them, and if you're growing beans commercially, you're growing bush beans with a more compact habit and definite maturation period, amenable to mechanical labor rather than a rolling handpick. Blaming this on politicians is lazy and uninformed.

No, I don't think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, not even remotely. Whether the consequences are good..whatever metric were using for good, is a moot point. Livestock is a non negotiable requirement of feeding people....a job that we're not fully accomplishing yet, no less. The consequences could be terrible..and it would still be a requirement. This may change in the future, though at present there isn't the foggiest idea as to how that may change. You may read things about lab grown meat, for example..but that's ad copy. More fundamentally, even if we stopped eating meat entirely, that still wouldn't remove the necessity of livestock.

We use CO2 to anesthetize animals -before- we do anything like behead them. No one...anywhere..thinks that grabbing an animal out of the yard and chopping it's head off is ethical. I don't know why you think that. It's fucking gruesome. I use dry ice and a cooler, myself - obviously this won't work for cattle, they don't fit in a cooler like my fish, lol. It's that simple...plus, I couldn't afford a legit gassing setup and the whole point of what I do is to come up with ways to cut costs so that poor people can afford to do this for food and profit.

As far as safety measures being useless.....yeah, sure. Go ahead and wolf down a big handful on non rei-d veggies and die from a lethal dose of systemic pesticide. Be my guest. Season your food with e-coli, or any number of other things that would be in your food if you ate fodder. Not that you could even chew it if you tried..since it wasn't bred or grown with you or your teeth or your stomach in mind. The simplest way to put this, is that livestock can process things that we can't, and that can be produced more economically and on more meager land than anything for human consumption can be - other than livestock. This is even more pronounced in what I do...since no human being can so much as breathe in water, let alone subsist on fish food. Think of them as nutrient processing fridges with a slow spool up time. I have serious, fact based reservations on the state of cattle production, as an example...but I do understand that cattle production doesn't have to go the way it currently does and that cattle are a useful tool in combating poverty and hunger.

I'd suggest some of Michael Pollans books and essays to you, as a primer, for a consumer interested in figuring out why (and how) we do what we do. You could get more specific information from extension production manuals...but those guys aren't quite as good at writing as he is, lol..so they won't hold a non producers attention. The short version of a long story is that it's damned near magic..and doesn't work anything even remotely near to the way that people imagine it does.