Cowspiracy

[Angrboda]

Mmmmmmm... cow.

[robvalue]

Everything in Cowspiracy has been well know in the vegan community for years and years. Similarly to "Earthlings" a lot of people who used to just write off this stuff as "conspiracy nut/vegan extremist bullshit" actually had to confront rather compelling evidence their own thinking may be flawed after watching these types of documentaries. The question becomes, how far has the truth been stretched and what to do about it as an individual? 

Though I am a long time vegan, I am also a realist and recognize the world won't stop consuming flesh, non-human lactation or poultry menstruation overnight or even in my lifetime. I think sometimes the most realistic option to convince the masses to try (which is reduction in consumption, not elimination from their diets entirely) is overshadowed by extremism, shock value and stretching the truth by overly-zealous vegans. I do hope whomever has seen this at least took away from it that modern factory farming is not sustainable and that reducing consumption is an option for those too scared to give up animal products completely. My thought is, every small step in the right direction is better than the status quo.

There is a possible revolution on the horizon. A new form of "fake meat" is being developed. It's quite astonishing, and should be pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.

A biochemistry professor has invented a meat-free burger that looks and bleeds juice just like the beef you cook on your grill.

Check out the full story.

[Fake Messiah]

1.  We -do not- compete with livestock for veggies.  Livestock eats grain, and the grain livestock eats isn't fit for human consumption.  It's grown on more marginal land, with less input and labor.  

Then there must be a lot of marginal land out there since according to a 2011 analysis, 75% of all agricultural land (including crop and pasture land) is dedicated to animal production. Also recent studies find that global crop demands will likely increase by 60–120% by the year 2050 (from baseline year 2005)
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108...ld.iop.org

2. Livestock -are not- inefficient.  We've put them to inefficient use.  We've done so as a consequence of working a miracle over the last half-century with corn yields - but cattle, for example...can eat something that we simply can't.  Grass.  Most cattle are pastured, ofc, and that's why.  

Not for a long time anymore. Take chickens for instance. For the first 99.9925 percent of their domesticated careers, chickens ate all sorts of stuff: blades of grass, leaves, seeds, bugs, mice, frogs, meat scraps, dead rabbits, even snakes. Their human keepers carried the barest understanding of a chicken’s dietary needs. BUT by the turn of the last century, poultrymen knew you could fatten chickens by feeding them things like ground-up corn. But they also knew that if all you gave chickens was corn, they’d get sick. So they sent chickens out to forage, and their beaks would find the foodstuffs that kept them healthy. In the winter, chickens would get milk, cabbage, green onions, bran, and table scraps. Without green treats and outdoor foraging, chickens got sick and died. No one knew why. BUT then it was dicovered that vitamin B1 is tha factor.

SO chickens didn’t need to go outside anymore. They didn’t need to eat cabbage and table scraps or a dead toad to get a “complete” diet. And with those pesky essential nutrients out of the way, it was at last possible to concentrate on the stuff that really made chickens get big fast: carbs. In the late 1940s, a new and important feed was unleashed upon poultrydom: the “high-energy diet.” For chickens to grow twice as fast as their recent ancestors, they needed to mainline carbs.

SO there is another problem. The feed is typically a blend of seeds and while some seeds (nutmeg, for example) are flavorful, the seeds we feed chickens are not. Therefore chicken doesn’t make its own flavor. The taste of animal flesh is strongly influenced by what an animal eats. Scientists refer to this as biodistribution—it’s the same reason a dairy cow that eats onion grass produces milk that tastes like onions.
Modern chickens suffer from a flavor brownout. Also high-energy diet, with its dusting of essential vitamins and minerals, enabled the production of giant babies. And meat from babies is bland. Veal is blander than beef. Lamb is blander than mutton. Suckling pig is blander than mature pork (which most people today have never tasted).
In the old cookbooks recepies for chickens used to be just salt & pepper not due to failed herb crops, a trade embargo on spices. Herbs and spices were there if you needed them. But fried chicken didn’t need them. Now since chickens taste like cardboard we deep-fry it. Now we dip it in buttermilk before dredging it through flour so that it becomes encased in a savory Dorito-like shell.
Celebrity chef Thomas Keller’s recipe for buttermilk fried chicken for brine alone calls for twelve bay leaves, a head of garlic, black pepper, thyme, honey, rosemary, parsley, and five lemons.
Chef John Currence soaks his chicken for four hours in Coca-Cola mixed with liquid smoke, Tabasco sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and then flavors the batter with cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.
Most people don’t bother. It’s easier to buy chicken that’s been preflavored.

COWS don't spent its days outside eating grass and dropping turd on the good green earth, and during winter eat plenty of hay. Today, the average cow lives the broiler chicken life, packed into a barn of airplane hangar proportions eating an unending supply of corn, soybeans, and roughage.

OP said "Meat, in moderation, is healthy" but what is moderation? 1-2 times a week? Who has that moderation? People indulge themselves all the time and of course there is the fast food. We saw in documentary "Supersize me" that majority of doctors say that it's never good for health to go to McDonald's. It's toxic, it eats your liver cells, clogs your veins.
But that is processed meat, what about regular? I said in previous topic that meat today contains about 50% fat, compared to wild animals that have 5% tops. Indeed if you go to the store and look at the meat label of the fattest meat approved by the USDA will read: “70 percent lean, 30 percent fat.” the lean-fat labeling causes shoppers to think the meat has less fat than it really does—if they are looking at the label at all. The more fat that meat has, the less it costs.
Lean meat would mean 10% fat so add that to that 30%, but also meat industry has freedom around what is considered lean.
On top of that cows are frequently given steroids like Zilmax, which is a drug that can be mixed into cattle feed during the last month of the animal’s life, after it has already been well fattened on corn. The results, by all accounts, are astounding. The animals blow up like muscled balloons. And Zilmax doesn’t just make the cattle bigger, it makes them yield far more beef per animal than their peers. But the downsides of Zilmax are also beyond dispute: The amazing growth comes at a cost, and that cost is the quality of the taste.

[The Grand Nudger]

There -is- alot of marginal land.  More of that than land suitable for mixed veggie production, or production of grain for human consumption, by far, yes.  Once you realize how little land it takes to grow people food, and how quickly said people food devalues, against how much land there is that -isn't- suitable for mixed veggies which -is- suitable for feed grain or livestock, the picture becomes much clearer.  One acre of tomatoes left to trail on the ground will produce an average of 36k lbs of tomatoes in roughly 90 days.  Cage em (or florida tie),  58k lbs per acre.  Cattle don't begin to devalue after 90 days and two weeks.  @110 days, your acre of tomatoes is worth 0$ if not sold (or in whatever portion remains) meanwhile the value of the cattle, both monetarily and nutritionally, continues to increase.  Now, it does take about an acre per cow, if you manage -the grass- intensively and move their confinement daily. Feedlots are good for getting rid of overproduction (and even if we migrate to a full pasture model we'll likely still use feedlots for finishing, we've been finishing cattle (and pigs) on scraps and surplus grain for over 1k years). Basically, what youre looking at .w livestock production, is a lower risk, lower management model compared to vegetable (or even grain) production. It -seems- as though 25 tons of tomatoes ought to make you more cash than a single cow, but the difference in net is marginal while the risk is much, much higher. After all costs have been tallied an acre of farmland under feed grain production might net you 14$, mixed veggies 1.5k$ *. The cow gets you approx 200$ per head. See how it falls on the spectrum between producing feedlot corn for pennies, and risking assets on mixed veggies?

Cattle are indeed still pastured, I'm surrounded by them.  They finish off at feedlots.  That's the whole point of feed lots, fatten them up for a couple of months, till they're very near death - then kill em, lol.  It would be far too expensive for them to sit at the feedlot from birth, and they probably wouldn't survive.  This isn't true of every model.  Chickens, as you've hit on, notoriously shut in**.  They don't have to be.  Pigs, also shut ins, also don't have to be.  TBT, none of the shut in models are the bleeding edge of modern factory farming, but producers have so much invested into the models they can't afford to take the initial hit from switching over to a new model. As their profit allows, and as the market demands, they transition, as usual.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people think farmers are a bunch of good ole boys scratching at the dirt, in awe and ignorance of the wonder of it all. We aren't. We've thought this through better than a social activist could imagine, it's our bread and butter. That's what we're discussing here, social activists with ideas about farming about as divorced from reality as they could be. OFC their solutions to fantasy problems...will be further fantasy. "Just grow people food where you grow livestock feed", they say. Guess what, can't. Any more suggestions? "Stop producing livestock to save the planet", they say. Guess what, can't. Any more suggestions?

*Assuming all goes well from seed to sale, which never happens. One cold snap and you lose 50%, then maybe 10% to disease, and another 10-20% to product standards (not pretty enough), and a further 10-20% due to failure to sell. A bad year you might make 100$ or lose money on any given acre (if you haven't paid off your model requirements and/or the property value is increasing). This is what caused the rise of the megafarm. If you only have a few acres, firstly, you can;t buy in to the conventional market, but more importantly, you can't spread your risk effectively. Buh-bye mom and pop. The model I use asks the consumer to assume all risk in the form of a pre-season lump payment.

**This one is, to me, truly mystifying. The folks who battery farm chickens don;t seem thrilled about it, and the equipment is actually mandated to them from on high by the retailing body (and specific -to- the retailing body). Perdue, for example, makes almost as much money charging farmers for "new" equipment and techniques yearly as they do from selling chickens. It's a scam, plain and simple, a beautiful scam, but a scam nevertheless. That's not to say the equipment and techniques don't work. They do, those chickens are delicious. I grew up wringing their necks and plucking them, old school. They don't taste the same, and they're tiny, so I prefer store-bought (and so does John Q Consumer). The"old cookbooks" btw, don;t call for ingredients they had spotty access too. You might think that fresh herb/spice (and citrus, no less, lol) was widely available then because it is now, but you'd be thinking wrong. You're welcome for that, btw, lol. Old cookbooks and new cookbook recipes are the damning case against livestock production..based upon the moving goalpost of flavor, btw? I brine my chicken as well, it allows for thicker, and therefore juicier, chunks to be fried without overcooking the coating. You're partially curing the meat before applying heat - that's all that's going on there. Used to be you could hang your chickens out for prep, but that's not exactly safe. You know they turn jet black before they're really ready to eat?

[MentalGiant]

Everything in Cowspiracy has been well know in the vegan community for years and years. Similarly to "Earthlings" a lot of people who used to just write off this stuff as "conspiracy nut/vegan extremist bullshit" actually had to confront rather compelling evidence their own thinking may be flawed after watching these types of documentaries. The question becomes, how far has the truth been stretched and what to do about it as an individual? 

Though I am a long time vegan, I am also a realist and recognize the world won't stop consuming flesh, non-human lactation or poultry menstruation overnight or even in my lifetime. I think sometimes the most realistic option to convince the masses to try (which is reduction in consumption, not elimination from their diets entirely) is overshadowed by extremism, shock value and stretching the truth by overly-zealous vegans. I do hope whomever has seen this at least took away from it that modern factory farming is not sustainable and that reducing consumption is an option for those too scared to give up animal products completely. My thought is, every small step in the right direction is better than the status quo.

There is a possible revolution on the horizon. A new form of "fake meat" is being developed. It's quite astonishing, and should be pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.

A biochemistry professor has invented a meat-free burger that looks and bleeds juice just like the beef you cook on your grill.

Check out the full story.

I have seen a lot recently about the lab grown meat lately, but not this. Interesting that they have identified what compound gives meat it's taste and texture now. This could be a good option for those who miss the taste and texture of flesh to have something this similar. I have been veg so long I don't really recall what actual flesh tasted like or the texture, but some of the more recent faux meat products seem to be getting closer (according to my husband). If this reached the market, I might have to have him try it to see just how close it gets! 

Though I must say, it kind of grosses me out the whole thought of it being that close to real meat. I don't know if I'd personally try it. I kind of fall into the category of vegans who likes plant-based dishes that aren't imitating meat. I find real meat utterly revolting, faux meat is not all that appealing either and I very rarely eat faux-meat products. It's still good to see new, more realistic plant based alternatives coming out though as the sole hangup many would-be vegetarians and vegans have is they would miss the flavor/texture of animal flesh too much to make a long term commitment to plant-based.

[robvalue]

Wow, I thought I was the only one! Sadly there's no way I'm going to be able to eat this stuff either. I can't even eat egg anymore. The texture and taste of it all makes me feel ill.

It will be fantastic for people who have been fed blood from an early age and want to give it up. Once they can get the price competitive, or perhaps even lower, this could take off.

It could be a massive reduction in intensive animal farming that I never dreamed could happen in my lifetime. It seems to have everything going for it!

[The Grand Nudger]

It could be a massive reduction in intensive animal farming that I never dreamed could happen in my lifetime. It seems to have everything going for it!

Everything except cost and sustainability, sure.  If we believe the taste claims......

[Silver]

 If we believe the taste claims......

I was vegan for two and a half years just to see if I could do it.

I enjoyed being vegan, it did not harm my health in any way.

I only went back to eating meat because I missed it.

Honestly, though, even to this day I still enjoy eating tofu. I still eat meat, though rather moderately. For me, the taste of tofu and other meat substitutes are quite yummy. That relates to my taste buds, however, and I cannot expect any others to relate.

[ignoramus]

But I like cows - mostly a bit at a time.

Mmmmmmm...  cow.

You girls are nothing but a bunch of carnivorous cow munchers! Ya hear me!
What I eat doesn't come from anything living!
Mmmmmmm...   hotdogs!

[dyresand]

Sure blame the cows and their shits and farts it's not like burning gasoline is the problem.

And that way of thinking fucking stupid we are cause of global warming.