[Ibon]

Most estimations of pre columbian indigenous populations in the Americas were grossly underestimated. The real numbers will never be known. Relevant to this thread is that even if some mega fauna went extinct during the Pleistocene when the first humans arrived the populations that did exist at the time of the first Europeans were within the carrying capacity of their environments. If they controlled burned and increased grasslands they were able to increase their carrying capacity. This was not at the wholesale expense of natural ecosystems. Isn't that the point.

I will predict that if we really do start seeing even a fifth of the draconian consequences coming true that climate scientists are predicting we are going to see serious declines in agricultural output in the decades ahead. Most likely this will automatically resolve the issue of this thread since everyone will be eating more grains and less meat.

Think of the chinese diet before and after the recent economic success of the country to get an idea of this. How many grams of meat per week was your average Chinese eating in 1965 vs 2017?

As climate change consequences eliminate marginal agricultural lands we will re calibrate our diets much the same way. Of course if vast boreal forest lands convert to grasslands then maybe not but I for one do not see a seamless transition of our overshot population by simply moving north with crops. Bottlenecks will happen. Sorely needed actually.

[pstarr]

I'm hungry for grass fed beef.

Had one yesterday, local grass fed, at the Sixth and E Neighborhood Eatery, Eureka. 1/2 price day. Yum, juicy with grilled onions. Yum.

Did I mention . . . yum! Also learned not to over-work the patty, leave it loose. Juicy. Yum!

[dohboi]

Thanks for the thoughtful post, Ibon.

I don't have the '65 figures a the tip of my fingers right now, but here's some stats for China and elsewhere from a bit earlier. I'm guessing the Chinese figures didn't change too dramatically before post-'65.

Buck’s (1930) detailed statistics gathered in several Chinese provinces during the early 1920s show annual meatintakes as low as 1.7 kg/family in today’s Hebei (i.e., less than 300 g a year per capita) and as high as just over 30 kg (or about 5 kg/capita) in Jiangsu.

His later (1929–33) surveys in 22 provinces of the country indicated average daily consumption of about 80 kcal of meat for adult males, all but 15 percent of it being pork (Buck 1937). This rate translates to about 8 kg of meat (including lard) per working adult male or to less than 3 kg/capita.

And note (these are annual figures):

...even in privileged Rome average per capita supply of meat fell from almost 40 kg during the late sixteenth century to around 30 kg by 1700 (Revel 1979), and in Naples the decline was even steeper, by two-thirds, between 1570 and 1770 (Flandrin 1999). Average German per capita meat consumption was less than 20 kg before 1820 (Abel 1980), and even as late as the 1860s meat consumption of the poorer half of the English population was barely above 10 kg (Fogel 1991)

(Smil, page 608) http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/up ... dr2003.pdf

Again, as I have said over and over and over...all the evidence points to the fact that throughout most of history, for most peoples, most meals were mostly or totally vegan. High meat consumption diets have been the anomaly for thousands of years for most of the human population.

But yes, various groups have chosen various kinds of meat to eat on occasion over the course of the millennia...doesn't mean we always have to emulate them!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... eddar-cave

[farmlad]

As a kid I got to go along a couple times to visit a group of recently contacted natives in S America. I can say they were expert archers. They had several diferent types of arrows. Some for bigger game and some for birds. During one visit one of the guys came back with an armadillo but his story was the remarkable part. The brush was to thick so he shot up into the air and got the armadillo on the way down. Was he just making It up - could be, but i know they practiced that method and were quite accurate. So they obviously had meat from time to time. They also ate lots of grubs from decaying trees and all sorts of tubers.

[farmlad]

Whats the big fuss about eating meat. Does it matter whether its the meat of a cow or a robin or a frog or a tiny microscopic animal?

I sometimes get some clueless looks when I tell folks that my 100% grassfed sheep are on a high fat low carb diet. That gets their attention so I can explain that the majority of the calories that my sheep get is not from sugars but from digesting the microbes that just got done eating the cellulose in the sheeps rumen. Whereas grainfed sheep are accually on a high sugar diet.

So how vegetarian are my sheep when they are digesting the bodies of all these microorganisms?
Or how vegetarian is someone eating sauwer kraut instead of plain cabbage?

[Tanada]

Most estimations of pre columbian indigenous populations in the Americas were grossly underestimated. The real numbers will never be known. Relevant to this thread is that even if some mega fauna went extinct during the Pleistocene when the first humans arrived the populations that did exist at the time of the first Europeans were within the carrying capacity of their environments. If they controlled burned and increased grasslands they were able to increase their carrying capacity. This was not at the wholesale expense of natural ecosystems. Isn't that the point.

I will predict that if we really do start seeing even a fifth of the draconian consequences coming true that climate scientists are predicting we are going to see serious declines in agricultural output in the decades ahead. Most likely this will automatically resolve the issue of this thread since everyone will be eating more grains and less meat.

Think of the chinese diet before and after the recent economic success of the country to get an idea of this. How many grams of meat per week was your average Chinese eating in 1965 vs 2017?

As climate change consequences eliminate marginal agricultural lands we will re calibrate our diets much the same way. Of course if vast boreal forest lands convert to grasslands then maybe not but I for one do not see a seamless transition of our overshot population by simply moving north with crops. Bottlenecks will happen. Sorely needed actually.

For some years I was researching Biochar/Terra Preata pretty heavily and I ran across some very high estimates for eastern Amazonian population levels. there were accounts from a Spanish explorer who had taken a river from the Andes mountains all the way to the Amazon which it eventually fed into and on to the Atlantic coast where he was picked up by a Portuguese ship. In his account he had traveled through many large villages and a couple substantial cities during his long trip but the natives had almost exclusively wood and bone tools and used clay pots for storage. Over the next two centuries waves of European diseases wiped out most of the people and when later explorers went back 75 or more years later looking for his native civilization the jungle had reclaimed all the Terra Preata farmlands and the wooden cities had rotted back into the soil. Apparently Brazil did an archeological study of the soil along the Amazon and its tributaries and discovered hundreds of Terra Preata areas which would correspond well with the account of the wood based civilization of the 1550's Amazon river valley. Some of the mapped deposits date back to at least 1000 AD based on radiocarbon dating of the biochar sifted out of the soil samples. Population estimates are all over the map because nobody really knows how extensive their culture was, but the Terra Preata allowed them to maintain soil fertility in the humid tropics in perpetuity instead of having to move on every two or three years like slash and burn agriculture has too.

Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida teamed with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of forest—an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. The larger towns boasted defensive ditches 10 feet (three meters) deep and 33 feet (10 meters) wide backed by a wooden palisade as well as large plazas, some reaching 490 feet (150 meters) across.

The remains of houses and ceramic cooking utensils show that humans occupied these cities for around 1,000 years, from roughly 1,500 years to as recently as 400 years ago. Satellite pictures reveal that during that time, the inhabitants carved roads through the jungle; all plaza villages had a major road that ran northeast to southwest along the summer solstice axis and linked to other settlements as much as three miles (five kilometers) away. There were bridges on some of the roads and others had canoe canals running alongside them.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... on-cities/

50,000 in an area the size of New Jersey, now ask yourself how many times would New Jersey fit in the Amazon rain forest? Potentially we are talking a population in the millions, and that doesn't take into account all the other lands in South America that exist outside the tropical zone itself.

[dohboi]

Just saw this and thought some here might enjoy it :

"You have a choice Houston, starve to death...or eat vegan."

(ENTIRE CITY OF HOUSTON TAKES A BIG SWIG OF WHISKY)
"I'll see you in hell."

https://mobile.twitter.com/mattoswaltva ... 7768324096

[pstarr]

I'll be roasting a local grass-fed veal roast this evening when the gall-durned sun goes down and the temperature drops in my kitchen (it's an unheard of 80 degrees out there ). These young steers have never been fed grain, spend their lives outdoors on pasture and so are an ultimately sustainable food source.

Unlike vegetable/grain production there is no disturbance of the soil structure and so soil health/tilth is maintained without the water loss. (Here on the northcoast irrigation is often unnecessary). The animals feed on pure cellulose, unavailable to the human digestive system and so requisite land need not to be cultivated and damaged. Little or no petroleum is burned in production/management, feed, slaughter/processing.

Meat eaters save the planet. Thank Gaia

[dohboi]

ya, ya...

Tell me, I am hearing rumors on line that there is conspicuous absence of moths in NoCal, moths that are usually quite thick there this time of years, esp. at night.

Are you seeing that in your neck of the redwoods?

(And just to make it a bit less OT, how do you like to grill your favorite moth? )

[dohboi]

Cows produce more methane than previously thought

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -estimated

[pstarr]

ya, ya...

Tell me, I am hearing rumors on line that there is conspicuous absence of moths in NoCal, moths that are usually quite thick there this time of years, esp. at night.

Are you seeing that in your neck of the redwoods?

(And just to make it a bit less OT, how do you like to grill your favorite moth? )

Yikes! Carnivore Moths Maybe the cows are eating the moths. Folks all over the world eat insects.

Stir Fried Grubs with Thai Basil, Green onions and Red Peppers. yum!

[aldente]

Ibon, soundly done!

correct !

[vox_mundi]

Kill two birds with one stone ...

Russian 'Cannibal Couple' Confess to Eating 30 People, Sold 'Meat Pieces' at Army Base

Russian investigators believe a couple arrested for murder in the city of Krasnodar may have practiced cannibalism for nearly 20 years and hidden victims' remains in their freezer and saline-filled jars occasionally used to supply "frozen meat pieces" to soldiers at a nearby military academy.

Police detained Natalia Baksheev, 42, and her husband Dmitry Baksheev, 35, earlier this month after the discovery of a series of grisly selfies on a cell phone showed graphic images of dismembered body parts. In one photo published in Russia media, Dmitry Baksheev appears to pose with what Russia's interior ministry described as "different parts" of a human body in his mouth.

Bon Appétit, Pete

[pstarr]

'Our Secret Ingredient is People' LOL

To Serve Man (The Twilight Zone)

To Serve Man" is episode 89 of the anthology series The Twilight Zone.[1][2][3][excessive citations] It originally aired on March 2, 1962 on CBS.
The story is based on the 1950 short story "To Serve Man", written by Damon Knight.[4] The title is a play on the verb serve, which has a dual meaning of "to assist" and "to provide as a meal". The episode is one of the few instances in the series wherein an actor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewing audience at the episode's end. The episode, along with the line "It's a cookbook!" have become elements in pop culture.

It's a cookbook!

[dohboi]

[dohboi]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ing-planet

Vast animal-feed crops to satisfy our meat needs are destroying planet

WWF report finds 60% of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets which put huge strain on Earth’s resources

...factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to all life on the planet

[pstarr]

YOU CAN'T KEEP REPEATING THE SAME CRAPPY PSEUDO SCIENCE TO JUSTIFY YOUR PERSONAL AGENDA!

I did download the report. It is replete with crazy good graphics and brilliant headlines but says nothing new. The sexy pandas are awfully tempting though

[dohboi]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ry-animals

Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming

[pstarr]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/04/livestock-farming-artificial-meat-industry-animals

Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming

I followed the links to both the articles. This is what the sallow vegan had to say:

So approximate annual average calorie intake from lamb is 14,700kcal. Annual average total calorie intake per person in the UK is approximately 1,250,000 kcal. Therefore lamb provides roughly 1.18% of our calories.

So the lamb supplies few calories for lots of land used. That is supposed to be a problem?

Folks don't eat lamb for the calories They eat lamb for amino acids, protein and saturated fats. If they tried to get their protein from spinach or bean sprouts, a lot more land would be used up.

Notice where the sheep are grazed (the light green in the center of the island). That is the moors. The least productive soil. The sheep are grazed there is because the best lands on the coast has been used up for people and your salad greens.

Sheep eat weeds and turn that into people food. Without burning fuel in diesel tractors. And you call yourself an environmentalist? I am shocked!!!!! And disappointed dohboi. Let dooown

[pstarr]

Anyway, More than half of UK's food sourced from abroad, study finds ...