The redneck strike again.

[bennyboy]

Our system is exceedingly well organized btw. A veritable modern marvel. Our issues aren't ones of organization, it's fundamental. We turn oil into food, then we use oil to ship that food. That favors food that can be shipped, meat and corn.

And yet it has people becoming obese on Family-Pac boxes of breakfast waffles with corn syrup, because they can't afford to eat meat. And then these 400-lb people end up in the health care system being a drain on the society's resources. . . again.

If we wanted to stop using oil, we'd need more nutrients. Livestock are the traditional (and also most sustainable) source of those nutrients. Even if we wanted to feed people more veggies we'd need to get those nutrients from -somewhere-....and if we take livestock off the table that leaves us with options that would make you cringe for the amount of suffering it causes animals (including human animals). Even solving the problem listed above would leave us with equally difficult problems...we do it this way for a reason, after all.

The problem is that we don't have a family or small village of relatively fully-functioning humans and their few cows a year that they feed grass to. We have millions of (essentially) useless people, who contribute nothing to the food production but constantly act as a drain on it. We don't need that many people for species survival. We don't need them for the full range of human abilities and experiences to manifest. There's just no reason for them to exist except that we are eating, shitting, fucking machines.

Anyway, I think if you are going to go artificial, there are other ways to do it. For example, brainless cow research. Or research with algae, lichen, mushrooms, etc. Massive GM research or the ability to lay down programmed DNA sequences could give viable systems in the future.

But we are fundamentally dishonest. We eat meat thinking it's decent, natural food. But it's not. It's as artificial as all the things I mentioned, with the added bonus of causing a lot of suffering, and of wasting viable food crops to maximize profits.