"A meat-eater with a bicycle is much more environmentally unfriendly than a vegetarian with a Hummer."
--Dr Mark Post
The world's largest food concern, Unilever, has opened a new research lab at the world's most prestigious agricultural university, the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). Unilever will locate all elements of its foods R&D there. A spokeswoman on Dutch radio stressed plant-based meat alternatives as an important research subject.
Wageningen University has strong credentials in that respect, with the development of shear cell technology.
Shear cell technology strings plant proteins together in tightly controlled fibers, resulting in a meat substitute where texture (fibrousness, bite, mouthfeel) can easily be controlled, and changed at will. This, combined with 3D food printing, offers the possibility of creating multiple meat (substitute) variations in future.
Unilever's food campus is open to startups, innovators and partners. One of the first to have build its own lab on the same grounds is Symrise, an industrial flavours and scents group.
About half of Dutch people call themselves 'flexitarians'. This means that they don't eat meat with their main meal at least three times a week. The proportion of vegetarians is stable, at just under five percent of the Dutch population.
Wageningen researchers believe, however, that feeding 9 billion people with animal meat will not be sustainable for the planet.
Related Stories
Impossible CEO says it can make a meat 'unlike anything that you've had before'
Plant-based meat products are bigger than ever, with the fast-food industry, grocery stores, and upscale restaurants coming on board. A recent Nielsen report found that plant-based meat alternative purchases went up 279.8 percent last week after Americans were instructed to stay home during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Impossible Foods, a company that develops plant-based meat products, says its mission is to someday replace the incumbent meat industry entirely, stating that, from a mission standpoint, a sale only has value if it comes at the expense of the sale of an animal-derived product.
But what if plant-based meat wasn't just a substitute for an already-existing marketplace, and instead, it started to make meat that has never existed?
On this week's Vergecast podcast, Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown talks to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about how this impossible meat could be a possibility in the future, even if it doesn't make sense for the company right now.
https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-04-08
Previously: Impossible Burger Lands in Some California Grocery Stores
Burger King Grilled by Vegan Over Impossible Burger "Meat Contamination"
Related: 'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist Mulls 'Taboo Against Cannibalism' Ending as Lab-Grown Meat Improves
Meatless "Beyond Burgers" Come to Fast Food Restaurants
Swedish Behavioral Scientist Suggests Eating Humans to 'Save the Planet'
Discriminating Diets Of Meat-Eating Dinosaurs
Meat Industry PR Campaign Bashes Plant-Based Meat Alternatives
Unilever Pushing for Plant-Based Meat
Judge Serves Up Sizzling Rebuke of Arkansas' Anti-Veggie-Meat Labeling Law
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:19PM (2 children)
I simply love industrial smells and tastes. Nothing beats the kombucha-like tang of a silicon valley startup, or the umani earthyness of a Detroit assembly line.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday December 07 2019, @01:12AM (1 child)
We already have plant-based meat. You get grass, feed it to a device known as a "cow" that converts it to meat, then eat the meat. Hey presto, plant-based meat!
Unilever, you can pay me my consulting fee now.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday December 07 2019, @04:34AM
We even have an isect based meat. You just take a device called chicken and send it where cow devices are and the chicken would pick all the worms and such from cow shit and produce delicious proteins.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday December 06 2019, @03:25PM (36 children)
I tried to find some concrete information on e.g. energy usage of meat versus veggie stuff and couldn't find much. Is there any good information out there?
"A meat-eater with a bicycle is much more environmentally unfriendly than a vegetarian with a Hummer." is a nice catchphrase, but is there any meat on the bone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:28PM
> "is there any meat on the bone?"
Not any more, Dr. Mark Post ate it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mer on Friday December 06 2019, @03:58PM
Giving up regular streaming of videos has about the same environmental impact as giving up meat says this source (pardon the french)
https://raphael-lemaire.com/2019/11/02/mise-en-perspective-impacts-numerique/ [raphael-lemaire.com]
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @04:26PM (12 children)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714101036.htm [sciencedaily.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/19/lab-grown-meat-could-exacerbate-climate-change-scientists-say.html [cnbc.com]
There's some perspectives on lab-grown meat.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/02/beyond-meat-uses-climate-change-to-market-fake-meat-substitutes-scientists-are-cautious.html [cnbc.com]
Notice that the %s quoted by Impossible Burger are very similar to those used to support lab-grown meat. Any of it could be wrong, but it could also point to absurdly high land and water requirements for raising livestock that will make other products look good by comparison.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday December 06 2019, @05:05PM (11 children)
The usual way in which the requirements are absurd is the assumption that all land is equal and all livestock raising methods are equal.
Where I am, most farmland is actually graded as unsuitable for arable, it's good for growing grass and sheep, or cattle (maybe, some of it) - but that's it. Stop growing meat on that land and it doesn't magically start to be able to produce plants to replace the meat, you just lose the meat production and gain er... nothing.
These sort of comparisons are typically done by saying you take prime arable land, put a large shed on it, fill the shed with cows, use other prime arable land to grow concentrated food for the cows and ship it to the shed, add the costs of shipping enough water into the shed and shipping the shit out and... basically no wonder you end up with same costs as lab-grown meat because that is more or less what you are doing.
If you do the comparison with "put cows on pasture land, collect cows when they've grown big enough" it doesn't come out as well for the plants, so they don't do that...
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @05:27PM (6 children)
All the land used for cows could be used for arcologies instead!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 06 2019, @07:22PM (5 children)
I like the idea of archologies, but we need to develop several technologies before they are really practical. And one of them is sociology. That, actually, was one of the points raise by "Oath of Fealty". Many other valid points were raised. He assumed tech a bit in advance of ours in several ways, and this still didn't solve the social problems, but each one of those assumed technologies needs to be looked at as "Do we need this before starting?". He doesn't really address the problems of keeping things repaired over normal wear and tear, but that also really needs to be looked at. An archology is expensive to build, so you don't want to even risk "planned obsolescence". And the economics was also raised as a problem, but the solutions were a bit hand-wavy.
Well, it was a story. I really liked it. But Niven/Pournelle raised a lot of valid questions about what's needed to make it work.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday December 07 2019, @04:54AM (4 children)
Many of the sociological problems with arcologies are solvable as long as they are a minority of total habitation, and they have an ejection mechanism. People who don't or can't fit in will leave. It won't be a freedom-loving frontier, more like a condo with the HOA turned up to 12, but some people would like that.
If they start getting built I would also expect deliberate differentiation à la The Diamond Age. Some will be almost hippie free-love communes, some more strait-jacketed than imperial China. Others might be neo-Victorian, or artist colonies. Pick the society you like and move there (if they will have you).
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday December 07 2019, @05:06PM (3 children)
They could be hippie "free-love" communes, if such really ever existed, but they would still need tight controls over actions...artificial structures are too fragile. Sex is, or at least appears to be, irrelevant to that, and perhaps loose controls over sex could allow tight controls over reproduction to be tolerable.
That you're talking about an "ejection" feasibility in a really hostile environment is equivalent to talking about making them walk the plank, i.e. killing them. And not necessarily slowly. If oxygen or a survivable temperature is hard to come by, then ejecting them is just killing them without admitting it.
P.S.: The groups I ever met that really seriously believed in "free love" didn't practice it. They just allowed informal polygamy or polyandry, which is a very different idea. I only met one person from Kerista, a group that actually practiced "free love", though they apparently thought of it more as a plural marriage that encompassed everyone. It kept going for decades, but was so minor that I only met one member (so my idea of their beliefs may be a bit skewed). So my expectation is that actual "free love" societies would be unsuccessful. But this might not be true in an artificial habitat without intrusive neighbors.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:14PM (2 children)
Don't get hung up on the hippie free love bit. It was just an example at the other extreme from a regimented society.
I used ejection because I meant removal from the group, which is a bit more than a simple eviction for not paying the rent. And we were discussing this in the context of Oath of Fealty, which was about an arcology near LA. This isn't a space ship, where did you get a really hostile oxygen-free environment from?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:08PM (1 child)
Oath of Fealty was the local context, but the larger context was habitats in extremely harsh environmental circumstances. Oath of Fealty was just an example of a fiction which detailed many of the problems inherent in ANY large ecology.
FWIW, I expect they'll be too expensive to justify except in extreme conditions. For reasons which are implicit in the story. But the social system depicted in the story would not function in such conditions...so my reiteration that part of what we need is much better sociology. Yes, it's got difficult feedback cycles in it, many of them instigated because those making decisions will tend to make decisions that favor themselves in the relatively short term even at the cost of social stability.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday December 07 2019, @09:31PM
At one point I lived for a few years in a smallish (but nice) apartment that was on top of a shopping centre. There were about 40 apartments, and even though there was no direct access to the shops it was very convenient (you had to go out on the street and back in a different keyed entry to the apartments). It was very different to living in a house in the suburbs, and I can see the appeal for living in an arcology. It's not for me long term, but there were aspects of it I liked.
You're right about the sociology, and the attitudes of the inhabitants being critical. A community with a guarded wall might be a sanctuary or a prison. It depends on the people, the guards, and the direction of the guarding. That was even in the book - the bit about the drunk businessman holding it together until he could get past the city cops who would arrest him, and into the arcology where the cops would help him get home.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 06 2019, @07:14PM (1 child)
Actually, the traditional use for that kind of land was wood lot. This assumes, of course, that you get enough rain for trees to grow without irrigation.
Today, instead of making it a wood lot we could make it an "ecological reserve" and allow limited tree culling. But to satisfy the "ecological reserve" status you'd really need to limit the tree culling, and prohibit clear cutting and "purning". Perhaps allow seasonal hunting of large animals...though again that would need to be strictly limited to prevent overuse.
If you need irrigation for trees to grow, then this approach won't work, of course.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @07:22PM
So basically we would release the CO2 in random forest fires like they do in California rather than in a useful fashion.
(Score: 2) by Gault.Drakkor on Friday December 06 2019, @08:28PM (1 child)
While your statement is true. I believe you are missing the point.
I suspect the percent of all livestock(or at least cattle) that is raised primarily on forage is low.
There is a significant percentage of livestock that whose primary diet is crops that are grown explicitly for feeding livestock. That i would expect is gp post's point.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf [iop.org]
Says that 36% of the worlds crops are used for feed. I would expect many of these crops are most definitely grown on prime arable land.
This has a pretty picture showing regions where crops are for food vs feed/fuel.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed [vox.com]
More or less comparing to feed lot is viable comparison, so as long as it is clear that is what is being used for comparison.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:42PM
That pretty picture is exactly my point.
Over 80% of agricultural land in Scotland (similar in Wales) is actually classed as "less favoured area" which means "poor land" "suitable for extensive livestock farming" (that's the opposite of intensive livestock farming btw.). Scotland is shown as basically "feed and fuel", no food.
Your pretty picture is quite clearly showing poor land _only_ suitable for growing livestock (and not intensively either) as "feed and fuel". The picture, and article, gives the less astute reader the (incorrect) impression that you can change "feed and fuel" land to "food" land, no distinction is made between the land which you could do that and the land where this is physically impossible (almost all of Scotland). For figuring out what the optimum land use is for food production either world wide or in any particular place, the picture is therefore precisely completely and utterly useless.
People without the knowledge and understanding of what actually happens on the ground as it were, will, nevertheless, continue to make flawed land-use arguments from your picture (and other similar maps and data).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday December 06 2019, @04:43PM (15 children)
I tried to find some concrete information on e.g. energy usage of meat versus veggie stuff and couldn't find much. Is there any good information out there?
Not really. There is plenty of disinformation though. One of the biggest fallacies, one which Mark Post falls for and promotes, and common on the left in general, is that the meat and the petrochemicals are in the same carbon cycle. The petrochemicals have been out of the loop for aeons. Bringing even a single gram out of the ground and into the atmosphere is harmful. So the assertion that "A meat-eater with a bicycle is much more environmentally unfriendly than a vegetarian with a Hummer", is 100% bullshit. So are all the vegans that fly often whether for work or vacation because they are adding carbon back into the system, rather than just moving it around like meat eaters. Work flights are probably the easiest to cut back on and even a small reduction will have a large positive impact.
However, food is not carbon neutral. Not counting the petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides, the inability to get locally sourced food any more means that even the food networks, from farm to table, are maintained by releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Also, some countries are infamous for lack of passenger rail and other viable options. Many countries which are still good have sadly cut back. Others are going forward, but we all have to go forward to make a solution to the crisis.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:55PM (6 children)
> "Bringing even a single gram out of the ground and into the atmosphere is harmful"
It's not harmful, it is natural. Beavers do it all the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/climate/arctic-beavers-alaska.html [nytimes.com]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 06 2019, @05:40PM (5 children)
Beavers are just speeding up the carbon release, not causing it. They're following the treeline as it moves north or up. Even if there weren't beavers, the effect they are worsening would make the permafrost melt anyway, just a bit more slowly.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:47PM (4 children)
>"Beavers are just speeding up the carbon release, not causing it."
No, without the beavers the dams would not be built, the water would not accumulate, and the permafrost would remain frozen.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 06 2019, @06:38PM (3 children)
Re-read it. The treeline is moving as the permafrost disappears. The beavers are just following that and speeding up the melting along some of the edges.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:50PM (2 children)
You quoted it yourself, the beavers are directing warm water into the permafrost, which melts it and releases hydrocarbons. As a result, the get a more pleasant home.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 06 2019, @06:56PM (1 child)
The beavers are sending water short distances not 100s of kilometers. The permafrost they are melting is just melting a little sooner from their activities than it would without them. However, don't pretend that it would not melt without their activities.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @07:25PM
An "agent of arctic destruction" is not causing the destruction?
So if a nuclear bomb is dropped on a city, it is not the bomb that destroyed it. It isn't the plane that dropped it, the pilot flying the plane, the general who gave the order, the first monkey to climb out of a tree and stand upright, etc.
Those are all just agents, the cause is something else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:49PM (5 children)
You're totally ignoring that meat needs feed which is plant based, grasses and occasionally grains. They're shipped out, beef steers to feedlots specifically, where they're fed copious amounts of grain including corn and soy both of which must be moved by some means (train, then tractor trailer/dumptruck). Then they're sent to slaughter which could be the feedlot or it could be 100 miles away. Then their processed bodies are shipped the world over. They will require freezing and refrigeration from here on out, using electricity that is probably generated with fossil fuels.
This as opposed to fertilizer shipment, pesticide shipment, and then watering for a crop season. Then shipping. I'd posit you're cutting out one or two shipment cycles, and a 70% conversion loss. Shelf life on a lot of plant products supersedes animal proteins. A good deal of staples like onions, potatoes, many fruits can all be held at room temp. There's also nuts which have a very long room temp shelf life. I can't speak for dehydration, but considering the cost of jerky meat is much more difficult to process compared to fruits, which also lends itself to plant based shelf life efficiency arguments.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 06 2019, @07:29PM (1 child)
I think the problem with jerky is tradition. That's also why it's high in salt. It could probably be vacuum dried at just above freezing to jerky dry and then pressure cooked with hot dry air and then sealed. I think this would keep as well as jerky does as long as the seal was kept. But it's not traditional, it would take preparation to taste better than jerky, and there's not already a market for it. You might check hiking supplies, as it might already be available, but high in cost because it's only for a specialty market.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:01PM
People who eat higher salt diets have lower blood pressure:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170425124909.htm [sciencedaily.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 06 2019, @11:45PM (2 children)
You assume that cattle require feed to be trucked in from other places. In the West, cows eat grass on the plains.
Second, you assume that veg transported from farm to market require no refrigeration or treatment. You are wrong. They require inspection and climate control.
Then when it comes time to transport a ton of beef to market, vs. a ton of, say, cucumbers, the fossil fuel cost is the same.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 07 2019, @03:43AM (1 child)
"Then when it comes time to transport a ton of beef to market, vs. a ton of, say, cucumbers, the fossil fuel cost is the same."
However, the per-unit cost to truck veggies is a lot higher if you count not gross tons, but protein and calories. Counted that way, only wheat and corn come anywhere close to the per-ton nutritional density of meat.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 07 2019, @01:22PM
That's a good point.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 07 2019, @12:20AM (1 child)
Nonsense. You do realize that even in the absence of humanity, coal seams are exposed, eroded, and sometimes even burn. Yet where was the harm in that (particularly, when one considers that there's a great deal of harm in too little CO2 in the atmosphere to support photosynthesis)?
And it's not the gram of carbon going into the atmosphere that is harmful. It's the gram's estimated 10 quadrillion friends per year that are causing the harm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @05:08AM
Don't forget shellfish. They sequester 200 megatonnes of carbon per year as limestone. Without carbon release, give it 10,000 years and the biosphere is dead.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @07:43PM (2 children)
Yes, it’s a quote attributed to the founder of a meat substitute company who stands to make a great deal of money off that catchphrase, a fact which subby somehow managed to miss in that rather notably long summary.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday December 06 2019, @07:54PM (1 child)
*WOOSH*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @05:07PM
You weren’t making a sarcastic point of it, you were just lazy. The wooshing sound is just your farts traveling up your own nose
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday December 06 2019, @07:52PM
I'm an enviro-vegetarian who has studied some of this stuff, so here's the short skinny on the subject:
It's possible to raise meat in an environmentally friendly way. Not only that, it's what a lot of people did for millennia prior to the advent of industrial agriculture. There are 3 main ways to do it:
1. Mixed agriculture: Farms were generally mixed between a variety of crops and animals, the animals got to eat some of the crop, and produced meat, leather, wool, hair, eggs, milk, and manure, all of which were used. This worked well from an environmental standpoint because this was an integrated system, with every organism feeding other organisms. If you hang around with "back-to-the-land", Whole Earth Catalog hippie types, they'll be happy to talk your ear off about doing this kind of thing. This is also what many third-world farmers are doing, and what intentionally low-tech people like the Amish do.
2. Pastoralism: The animals are grazed on land that produces stuff that they can eat but humans can't. This works just fine as long as you don't do it so heavily that the grasses or other plants can't regrow before you bring the herd around again. This is only a slightly-human-influenced version of what herd animals will do anyways. In theory at least, this is one use of BLM land on the east side of the Rockies, and there are supposed to be scientific types making sure that there isn't overgrazing.
3. Hunting / Fishing: The animals are in the wild until they get slaughtered and eaten. This also works out fine as long as you don't do it too heavily, and can be extremely useful in environments where there are animals lacking natural predators. In modern times, this translates to people with hunting licenses going out and getting their deer for the year, and that's something I wholeheartedly approve of doing.
The problem is that the way most meat is produced for the US market has little if anything to do with any of that. What's happening instead is:
1. Petroleum is drilled out, and converted into chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which are shipped to the crop farmers. There are of course all kinds of pollution problems from this stage.
2. Major agribusiness companies produce large quantities of GMO seeds for crops that can handle having large quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides dumped on them. These are also shipped to crop farmers. There are also lots of pollution problems from this stage, and also patent problems because it's generally illegal to save the seeds from these crops.
3. Crop farmers plant those GMO seeds and spread those chemical fertilizers and pesticides in as large a quantity as they can get away with to maximize output, to grow feed crops such as field corn. In addition to the pollution created by running their tractors and such, there are major problems with runoff from the field leading to such fun as Lake Erie turning fluorescent green during the summer due to algae blooms.
4. The feed crops are shipped to what the industry calls "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations", but used to be called "feed lots". Basically, thousands of animals of the same species crammed into as small a space as possible. Which, if you think this is a recipe for disease spreading very quickly, you're right, so most animals are heavily drugged with antibiotics (leading to resistant bacteria that can infect humans) and all sorts of other interesting treatments. When the animals are done, they'll go to a meatpacking plant to be butchered by illegal immigrants working in incredibly dangerous conditions, and from there make their way to McDonald's and the like.
5. Remember all that poo that the old-school integrated farmers were composting into fertilizer for the next year, which represents most of the substance of what that animal ate? For example, each pound of beef = 26 pounds of dry cow pies. In these operations, that poo is siphoned off into giant lagoons of poo, where it's combined with anaerobic bacteria to try to break it down a bit, but this also produces all kinds of environmental problems including nasty gasses that give nearby people asthma, as well as large quantities of methane (one of the worst greenhouse gasses around) and CO2. Some of that processed poo turns into fertilizer for the crop farmers, but a lot of it just kinda sits there. And if there are floods or hurricanes or similar problems, guess where that poo goes?
The problem isn't meat per se, it's switching from integrated cyclical food production, where "waste" isn't waste at all but food for something else, to industrial linear food production, where inputs come from outside the system in the form of petroleum and chemical processes and much of the output is "waste" and sent off into the environment. A vegetarian diet cuts out steps 4 and 5 of the industrial system above, and it's far more efficient to grow, say, 3 pounds of crops for 1 pound of plant food than it is to grow 27 pounds of crops for 1 pound of meat and 26 pounds of poo.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Friday December 06 2019, @09:33PM
"A meat-eater with a bicycle is much more environmentally unfriendly than a vegetarian with a Hummer."
--Dr Mark Post
So would an omnivore with a Corvette fall somewhere in the middle? Or an insectivore with a semi truck? These are questions we demand answers to!
/s because somewhere, someone always takes me seriously...
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:26PM (23 children)
Are these the same researchers that believed there would be snowless winters in NY by year 2000, when actually sea ice is at record maximums in 2019? http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum [nasa.gov]
It is time for the general public to accept that the US academic community is simply no longer good at their jobs, for whatever reason.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:34PM (6 children)
> "Antarctic sea-ice extent has been slowly increasing in the satellite record that began in 19791,2. Since the late 1990s, the increase has accelerated, but the average of all climate models shows a decline3."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2751 [nature.com]
When the models predict the opposite of reality, that means you should not rely on their other as yet untested predictions. It means they are derived using at least one drastically wrong assumption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:13PM (5 children)
No, it just means that you do not understand the point of that paper. Please reread it (or actually, read it for the first time) and don't cherry pick a sentence out and claim it means what it doesn't. Here's a hint: it has to do with convection.
I'll give you another hint (because I'm a nice guy that way), but it would apparently VERY much surprise you that when you put a pot of water on the burner, there are regions in that water that are not all the same temperature!! Even when it is boiling! I know, crazy shit. And you'd completely lose your shit if I described how a thunderstorm forms, but I don't want to ruin your weekend so check back here on Monday.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:19PM (4 children)
I understood the paper just fine, they came up with a post hoc explanation for why all the models predict the opposite of reality. Coming up with plausible post hoc mechanisms is not something impressive or hard to do. Wake me up when the models predict reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:38PM (1 child)
RING RING!!
This is your wake up call [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:45PM
They clearly are not accurate since they predict shrinking Antarctic sea ice. So your link is just a lie or weasel use of the term "accurate". If you measure dozens of things any model will happen to be accurate on a few that you can cherry-pick.
But predicting the giant ice sheet at the south pole should be shrinking when actually its growth is accelerating? Seems like eency weency itty bitty little problem there.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 06 2019, @06:52PM (1 child)
Show us where the model predicts snowfall in specific areas. (hint: it doesn't)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:03PM
Show us where on the climate model the bad CO2 molecule touched you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:37PM (4 children)
> US academic community is simply no longer good at their jobs
Climate science is not a US-only thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:45PM
The US government is by far the biggest funder of "science", so whatever conventions and customs are supported by it get applied all around the (flat?) globe. For a bit the USSR was largely independent, but as we saw that government mucked up science even worse.
Really what we want is a return to pre WWII state where science was funded by competing universities. Progress occurs in a diverse environment, not a monoculture.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 06 2019, @06:58PM (2 children)
Pretending its fake is, though!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 06 2019, @07:56PM
Not entirely, though: Brazil seems to also be pretending it's fake, for instance.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 06 2019, @11:52PM
Yes. Right. Let's pretend that other societies base their policies on facts instead of feelings. They don't, though.
Travel to any country in the world. Any. Then absorb a local paper and then ask yourself how independent they are.
We should all do this. Then we can quickly dispel the illusion that one place is remarkably better than another.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:06PM (6 children)
Hey Sean, I know you are the master of misrepresenting things, but from that very damning link YOU provided:
Not to mention that you provided a link that is almost 6 years old, so we have the benefit of that many more years of data. Hey, look, the story still holds up: Arctic [nasa.gov] and Antarctic [nasa.gov]. You're either an outright liar, or a useful idiot. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and figure you for the idiot, but if that is the case, you really need to realize that you are far from being the smartest guy in the room, particularly on this issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:23PM (5 children)
Sean?
And obviously you have never been in academia, every publication needs to include phrases like that to toe the line. In fact someone who didn't say that probably couldn't get funding.
But anyway, I moved to the coast, waiting for people to sell all their coastfront property out of fear of "climate change". There is at least a 50% chance that the opposite of what these models predict happens so its a good bet against people who are 100% certain like you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:41PM (4 children)
Good luck with that. Maybe you can turn it into oyster farms or something. Just do us all a favor and show some integrity by not clamoring for FEMA assistance when you get flooded out. You're going in with fair warning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:01PM
The federal government you are waiting for to save you from climate change literally encouraged me to move to a flood plain. So you are subsidizing the risk!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:17PM (2 children)
Also, btw... Where I live the water level already rose 6 meters since ~1900. During that time the area thrived and flourished. So when the most extreme climate models predict a rise of 3 meters per century, that would mean a halving in the rate of rise.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 06 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
You didn't say where you live, so quite plausibly. The sea level rise isn't evenly distributed, and, IIUC, in the Northern Atlantic it will go down as Greenland melts due to the decreasing gravitational attraction. In other places it's rising more than the average. And the more detailed a model you want the more expensive it is to compute (and the more likely it will be in error in some places).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:13PM
Its just due to people building dams and levees upstream, that raises the water level downstream:
https://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/levees/Evolution%20of%20the%20Levee%20System%20Along%20the%20Mississippi.pdf [mst.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:57PM (3 children)
Nice cherry picking you have there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @11:08PM
What cherry picking? The climate models predict the antartic ice sheet should be shrinking, the opposite is happening. It is growing, and faster every year. It takes some time for the H20 frozen on the opposite pole to traverse the globe apparently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @05:18AM (1 child)
Lying with % statistics is fun isn't it. Size matters.
If the Antarctic ice grew at 0.1% it would outweigh a 10% reduction in the Arctic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @02:45PM
No, it's just irrelevant to the point. Basically it comes down to people like you not understanding how science works, and yeah most people trained in science these days are in the same boat.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 06 2019, @03:31PM
I expect that it might be sustainable to feed animal meat to 3 billion humans, supplemented by a little vegetarian long pig here and there. Eloiburger, for the win! You heard it here first, on Soylent News!
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @03:44PM (24 children)
Plant based meat.
Now there is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:08PM (18 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @04:17PM (3 children)
If it is the unpleasant truth, then how about truth in advertising. But then there is Subway Chicken. Also I don't think "the general public" is who is demanding this. As you say this is to satisfy a minority moral superiority complex.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday December 06 2019, @07:52PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @06:51AM (1 child)
I ask why I am paying for meat to be halal certified.
Because 2% of the population is angry about not being able to eat outside their home country unless the process is approved by their religion?
Sounds insane, doesn't it.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Saturday December 07 2019, @10:04AM
Retail (supermarkets) run at very low profits, around 3 - 6 percent. Missing 2% of your potential market means a lot, while the general consumer doesn't notice (or care).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @04:19PM (11 children)
Another thought: that such a ridiculous oxymoron is necessary to even market this goop should send a loud and clear message about it.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:26PM (9 children)
You literally harvest the pain and suffering of innocents and feed off it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @04:37PM (2 children)
I was unaware. I'm interested in how that is so.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:43PM (1 child)
Wait, do you even know where meat comes from? Please don't say the store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:30PM
Where the hell can I get me some LSD beef?
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/11/lsd-find-way-familys-walmart-steaks/ [modernfarmer.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @04:47PM (5 children)
I am dents enough to have taken a few minutes to suddenly 'get it' what you mean. You're not talking about what I write, but about the fact that I eat meat. Even in my breakfast this morning.
People are adapted to eat meat as well as plants. People have eaten meat for as long as recorded history. I'm all for reducing our overall consumption of meat, but eliminating all meat consumption (A) is not going to happen, and (B) sounds very dystopian. Soylent Green is made of all natural ingredients -- so it must be good.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:06PM (4 children)
Yes people have been eating meat for all of recorded history. How about before the fall from grace when they lived an utopic existence.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday December 06 2019, @06:06PM (3 children)
Before the fall we don't really know, that is the problem of "before recorded history", there are few records to go on...
Archaeology, carbon dating and the like, shows that we (or rather our evolutionary ancestors) have been eating meat since before we were homo-sapiens (2 or 3 millions years), by some theories meat-eating is one of the changes that made us homo-sapiens.
On the other hand if you don't believe all that claptrap about the earth being millions of years old, Genesis does give some clues from before the fall in that (at least in some translations) the animals are described as "livestock" and "wild animals" separately. I don't read ancient Hebrew well enough to determine if those are good translations, but there is no Vegan-acceptable reason for keeping livestock...
After the fall of course we have much more information about what God wanted us to do, Leviticus 11:2 is pretty damned clear for instance: "These are the living things that you may eat...".
We can't go back to before the fall, so I guess we just do what God instructed after the fall, right? This is only a temporary situation after all, since in the next life or after the second coming everything will eat grass (dunno what the grass did to deserve that, must be worse than the serpent or it'd be everything will eat snake), and the lion will lie down with the lamb and all that ****.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @06:21PM
I'm not sure the AC's question about "what about" before the fall. We are now after the fall from perfection ("... and it was good"). We can't go back until the time comes God lifts the curse.
In the actual here and now, people eat meat.
I get the impression from things in Isaiah that maybe there won't be carnivores when the curse is lifted. I'm all for not causing unnecessary suffering for animals. But we live in a world where suffering and pain abound for all.
I would also point out for the AC that the fallen world required the sacrifices of animals in the O.T. Just sayin'
It's a tough world. I (we) had to take a beloved dog to the vet to say goodbye some weeks back because he was dying of liver failure, and it was clearly time to say goodbye. That's nothing compared to things that happen on this planet this very day. Things people do to other people.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:26PM
Pretty sketchy honestly. No germ theory and a poor understanding of the world at large and you're telling me that the divergent monkey fuckers that bred out humanity figured out that if you cook meat it doesn't kill you? You think we constantly went into smackdowns with mammoths and had good enough odds that we didn't endanger the whole of the species? I don't, we opportunistically chased some off of cliffs, maybe a handful of real hard motherfuckers speared some down a couple of times. Most were probably scavenged. This is a time when a scratch could be a mortal threat, dysentery or e.coli and you may as well be dead. Compatible parasites crawling in the skin of every member of the community. The whole model really doesn't read well to me. It was a slow and accidental process that lead us to where we are, which is maladapted for meat consumption, frankly; this is reflected in current medical literature and the massively increased incidence of disease as meat (especially red) consumption has increased, and this despite stringent rules in meat processing and retail hygiene.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:40PM
You can strive to perfect your bloodline, which means returning humans to the state humans enjoyed before the fall.
Also, carbon dating, etc was calibrated to dating of Egyptian artifacts that were dated based on chronologies based on the Bible, primarily determined by Joseph Scaliger*. Besides the Bible, the other source was documents that somehow survived 1500 years before discovery by Poggio Brocciolini in out of the way damp monastaries. Interestingly, none managed to survive the next 500 years when their value was recognized to today (at least none are publicly known, perhaps there is a "collector" out there hoarding the more accurate details of history). May as well rely on the Bible directly, as flawed as it is, if you are going to do that.
* Whos father was a famous man named Julius Caesar who had a good friend named Marc Antony and was accused of making up a false history for his family and trained his son Joseph from a young age to devise "declamations" (elaborate accounts of made up historical events)
More sources and quotes here: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=31526&page=1&cid=842162#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 06 2019, @07:37PM
No. That such a ridiculous oxymoron is necessary to even market this tells you only about current prejudices are. It doesn't say anything about whether those prejudices are valid.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday December 06 2019, @05:38PM (1 child)
Those staunch vegans have, IMO, do have a moral (and health and...) superiority over the people who will eat plant and chemical goop processed way more than an inch beyond its life into something not quite entirely unlike meat just so they can say "see I can have bacon (well almost) without the guilt and so could you". Why spend a bunch of time energy and money to make vegetables look vaguely like meat if you don't want to eat meat, just eat the feckin vegetables?
Eat bacon, enjoy bacon, know that a pig died so you could eat bacon, and be happy and thankful for it.
OR
Don't eat bacon, eat plants, know that a pig didn't die so you could eat, and be happy and thankful for it.
Either of those is way ahead of:
Don't eat bacon, miss eating bacon, be unhappy you "can't" eat bacon, jump at the opportunity of eating something that pretends to be bacon but is actually mushed up plant goop and factory made chemical flavouring _just_ so you can try and kid yourself that you can eat bacon while not killing a pig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:15PM
That's not how it works. Meat is more or less a universal staple most recipes call directly for some form of animal protein, it's difficult to reproduce the features of a lot of meals without some form of largely flavorless protein blob synthesized by a bio-accumulator. That's what drives the meat analogue market, not a moral superiority complex. Those who have moral superiority complexes won't eat the shit because it is labeled as analogous to meat. And compounding that they probably take issue with the fact that Kellogg and Monsanto produce some of the major "meatless" brands, and then you've got others like Tyson considering entering the market which is a whole new ball game, where a supermassive international meat distributor is putting its fingers in what would otherwise be ethical markets.
And if you're going to whinge about goop, let's not be disingenuous, meat and meat processing is fucking disgusting. The livestock are filthy and abused, coating a veneer of communal shit while having a mystery concoction of antibiotics and odd grains and hormones injected into every facet of their development at high volumes isn't hot. Neither is the fact that the meat is bleached in ammonia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @05:55PM (1 child)
That's not an oxymoron.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @06:26PM
It seems an oxymoron to me. Or a euphemism to disguise the truth. It's not meat. It's plants.
"Plant based meat" is the type of oxymoron that I would have been proud to invent myself and post here on SN.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 06 2019, @05:56PM
All meat is plant based. Animals eat plants.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:30PM (1 child)
If they used the Pitcher plant would that make it meat based plant based meat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:34PM
A hipsters best friend is ironic psuedo-veganism.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Mer on Friday December 06 2019, @03:52PM (1 child)
That's three food related submissions in a row.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 06 2019, @04:23PM
Three dystopian food submissions in a row. With a dystopian article about Egyptian government using RFID tags to track everyone only a couple more articles behind that. Yet an AC recently told me that the dystopia is getting stupid. Just sayin'
(Yes, "plant based meat" is dystopian when you need such an oxymoronic newspeak to market it." That's my opinion, and I'll proudly run away and hide from it!)
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday December 06 2019, @04:06PM (5 children)
Plant-based meat is a vague term. I'm vegetarian and I prefer my meat substitute to be clearly marked. There's no need to say you can't call a vegetarian sausage, a sausage. But, I'd really not like for you to label something as plant-based chicken. When in fact what you have is something that you want to taste or have the consistency of chicken, but is actually plant matter.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:28PM
They should market it as REAL (tm) chicken. With REAL in big letters and tm the tiniest possible while remaining legible.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday December 06 2019, @05:31PM (3 children)
Particularly because in the context it's clear they mean 'meat substitute.'
I often eat vegetarian, and there are some good vegetarian meals that don't need meat in them. I'm a fan of that sort of cooking. I don't see why I would be a fan of this though.
The 'meat substitute' idea seems to be to somehow concoct some strange brew of vegetables and chemicals that will *fool* people into thinking it's beef. Which is just such a strange thing to be seeking, so odd. Why?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday December 06 2019, @07:31PM (1 child)
Think about sausage: a hull around processed meat i.e. proteins. If you can replace part of that protein with this kind of manufactured meat, based on (far) cheaper plant protein, you've got a double win. Your profit increases, and you're seemingly doing something for the environment.
That's just sausage, an obvious example: but note also the 3D food printing stuff, and the focus on bite and mouth feel. It is not very hard to see upcoming regulation stating that something like your steak can still be sold as 'beef' as long as it contains a certain percentage of animal meat, is it?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday December 06 2019, @11:23PM
People have been doing that for centuries if not millenia. That's not what we're talking about here.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 07 2019, @03:54AM
Perhaps because it's actually about deception.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:36PM (1 child)
"The world's largest food concern, Unilever"
Unilever was pretty low on my list of food concerns, thanks for bringing this into the light OP!
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday December 06 2019, @07:36PM
Apologies. In my native language, a concern is another term for a big company (typically with its fingers in several pies at once).