Saturated Fat Controversy

[The Grand Nudger]

The developed world imports food, and the products required to produce food, from the developing world. What we call "LDCs", or "least developed countries" are dependent on their agricultural capacity for the lions share of their exports..as they have little to no capacity in any other sector (beyond extraction industries, where there's a resource to extract, ofc). Meanwhile, their consumer sector is dominated by imports due to that very same lack of capacity. This means that food and money are both leaving LDCs, where the majority of people already depend on livestock operations for their very existence. In the absence of a market for that product, just as in the case of feed grain, it simply would not be produced.

So, you tell me...understanding that... what does that have to do with the conjecture that veganism would help to feed people in the developing world?

We don't have to contain ourselves to ldcs or the developing world at all, though. Some developed countries are also livestock exporters..and here too, if there were no market or a reduced market for the product, it simply would not be produced - even if somebody, somewhere, might buy it. Domestically, that's why cattle operations turn into real estate developments, here, when they get edged out. It makes more financial sense to the land owners than continuing to crank out a comparatively less valuable product even as world and local demand for livestock increases...and...ofc...people starve. That's the plight of rural america in a nutshell. They were pushed out of farming, first..by countries with lower wage labor and battery farm conglomerates, and then, out of the factories and extraction industries and retail centers those farms were so often turned into...by the same, and then, out of the housing developments they bought into by their poverty. In many places, the best use of an otherwise productive patch of land has become.....a predatory trailer park. Talk about a coup de grace.

It's really no surprise that meth and opioids have a stranglehold on those same areas. They lost their culture, their livelihoods, their land, the respect of their peers, and any reasonable expectation of future success uncoupled with the production or distribution of illicit substances.....which they then export to other communities, along with the paraphernalia of angst and frustration..including but not limited to uncontrolled firearms, and the politics of spite. It's a self reinforcing cycle of degradation, poverty, malnourishment, abuse, and institutional dependency. The short version of a long and complicated story is that there's no place in the world where the reduction or elimination of a food item and the jobs that sector provides will help, or help to feed anyone, anywhere. The really sad part, in the case of land development (and running for pride of place in the giant shit sandwich described) is that this process is effectively irreversible. Once we lay down the concrete, the productive capacity of a main-crop field is gone, and it takes centuries to rebuild a single inch of topsoil.

-and that's where alt ag comes in. Finding ways to grow a marketable product in a parking lot, or an abandoned big box, or a failed suburb, and doing so in such a way that the money made from the enterprise stays within those communities. It's already a problem, and this... in the worlds largest economy, a fully developed country. The only way out, by some metrics, is through, with more people abandoning those places and that productive land to even larger battery farms and clusters McMansions to feed and pay the ever growing population of the urban center which is increasingly incapable of maintaining anything even remotely close to food security and in which more and more people are dependent on shelf stable subsidized industries and their beneficiaries up the chain. There's a reason that so much of the shit on a public assistance program and at food pantries is grain and dairy and processed product..and it aint the nutritional value, lol.