[PrestonSturges]

Eating lean grass fed wild game would make all the difference. Fat used to be scarce.

[dohboi]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ ... the-boeuf-


How a Hard-Core Carnivore Fell in Love with Vegetable-Mad Paris

“Vegetables are more than a fashion in Paris. We are entering a new age,” says the chef, who runs 25 restaurants around the globe.... When members of the venerable Old World Gastronomic Societies came to sample his radical new menu at the Plaza Athénée, he announced to the startled group that, in this establishment, “red meat is over—red meat is finis!”

And as to your absurd claim that excessive fat intake is the only health threat from meat eating--there is an endless litany I could give you but let's just start with the opposite end from too much fat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation

[frankthetank]

I actually prefer to make tacos without meat...i just add a ton of lettuce (iceberg), tomatoes, taco sauce, cheese*, and avocado... they are very filling...the cheese is a must and adds that protein. In Wisconsin you must add cheese..its a law

Up here...when the meat gets too expensive, the deer population will be slaughtered... the deer numbers are already falling off a cliff and i can guess part of it is due to beef prices. I know guys that don't buy beef..all they eat is venison. I have a brother who shoots 5+ deer a year (private land/cheap bonus tags/hunts several states)..so its always nice when he throws me a big pack of back straps.

[ennui2]

Maybe the rabbit would benefit from a bacon cheeseburger.

Take it from me. Rabbits don't like that. And no, he's not going to wind up on my plate one day. He converts his food into garden fertilizer for me. If anyone wants to have a pet, an herbivore is far more ecological. (My rabbit even eats his share of "free" food in the form of clover and dandelions.) I don't know how much meat pets are responsible for consuming, but it's a lot, and dogs and cats are far more carnivorous than humans. The amount of diluting going on with adding vegetable matter in pet food and how it's being spun as "good" for pets is, IMHO, a warning-sign that meat can't remain so cheap forever.

[Ibon]

It is good sometimes to stop and really look at how we produce our food and the environmental impact. Check out this video on US pork production.

Do you really want to eat a piece of bacon from one of these factory farms?

Remember, you are what you eat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayGJ1YSfDXs

[Ibon]

Ibon, I know. The pig thing is wrong. I can get natural/humane pork at the food coop, from a california producer. It's probably still cruel.

I almost became a vegetarian around the time of the mad-cow scare a decade ago. I was totally disgusted then by regular feeding practices, especially mammal (even beef) protein in beef feed, antibiotics in feed (and human antibiotic resistance) in beef and chicken. I believe USDA and FDA outlawed the practices. Things got better. We can continue to push for better treatment of livestock, and healthier foods. But it does the body no good to ignore necessary nutrients.

My wife grew up eating pork in the Philippines where pigs were part of the back yard livestock and were fed a diverse amount of food. She cant eat pork in the US as she says it smells strange. Here in Panama we buy locally and she says it's just like in the Philippines and doesn't have this unpleasant smell. I am not as sensitive as she is but there seems to be a noticeable difference. We raise beef cattle in the lower pastures which we did not reforest. They are grass fed and have happy lives for the short 15 months before they get to about a 1000lbs when we sell them. We do not give them any antibiotics, growth hormones etc. Just vaccinations against two local diseases and vitamin injections. They get salt and molasses as well. We slaughtered a 600lb young calve that broke it's foot in a tree root. We butchered it on site and had the meat for several months that we kept in the floor freezer. It was delicious but some cuts were very tough. Our cattle walk up and down steep slopes, makes for tough lean meat.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Ibon, I know. The pig thing is wrong. I can get natural/humane pork at the food coop, from a california producer. It's probably still cruel.

I almost became a vegetarian around the time of the mad-cow scare a decade ago. I was totally disgusted then by regular feeding practices, especially mammal (even beef) protein in beef feed, antibiotics in feed (and human antibiotic resistance) in beef and chicken. I believe USDA and FDA outlawed the practices. Things got better. We can continue to push for better treatment of livestock, and healthier foods. But it does the body no good to ignore necessary nutrients.

OK. So why isn't this exposed to the public via widespread media like TV and radio? Let the public decide. They could prod their representives to legislate against this, or they could buy organic or refuse to eat pork.

Given how little people are willing to PAY to alleviate GW via legislation, somehow I don't think the public cares (if their pork prices must increase to fix this).

To me, the big thing is the inhumane treatment of the pigs. People could move, if they had any personal responsibility, and don't like the smell. Or legislation could mandate a buffer zone between the spraying and any neighboring land.

Oh, that's right. People shouldn't need to have ANY personal responsibility. And if legislation isn't forthcoming under a democratic administration, it must be Ronald Reagan's fault.

[dohboi]

And if you're NOT going to go vegan, it sounds like what kind of meat your eat can make a big difference in impact:

http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/19/livestoc ... te-change/

How Changing Livestock Feed Can Mitigate Climate Change

...According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector is the single largest anthropogenic user of land. It uses approximately 30 percent of the land surface on the planet, is responsible for between 14 and 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to some estimates and accounts for more than 8 percent of human water use.

... there is another strategy that could be a key piece in the global efforts to find a way to sustainably raise livestock: reducing the use of livestock feed that competes with direct human food crop production, which is called “food-competing feedstuffs” (FCF).

...the "consistency strategy" can produce sufficient quantities of food while significantly lessening environmental impacts as compared to a business-as-usual scenario. In the most extreme case, where animals are exclusively fed from grassland and by-products, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 18 percent, arable land occupation would be reduced by 26 percent and freshwater use would be reduced by 21 percent. This scenario would also result in reducing protein intake per capita from livestock products by 71 percent.

[dissident]

The premise of this thread is retarded. The CO2 and CH4 from livestock is negligible compared to transport, industry and heating. Shutting down all the coal power plants and moving to nuclear would be orders of magnitude more effective than removing all livestock farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

CO2 and not CH4 from anthropogenic sources is the main problem. We have not hit the CH4 bomb from the cryosphere just yet. Fretting over a 19% emission source of CH4 is the definition of a storm in a teacup. Any trend of CH4 from livestock farming is totally within the noise of the global CH4 budget. Also, warming results in a decrease in CH4 lifetime:

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/285/2 ... 5-2013.pdf

If you want to worry about CH4 then worry about it being released from the permafrost and clathrates. Getting rid of the cows will not save this planet from global warming.

[dohboi]

Ah, the usual knee-jerk defensive dismissiveness. Why am I utterly unsurprised!!

[dohboi]

oh p.

Nearly every syllable you utter on the subject, including that last flailing convulsion, simply oozes with defensiveness and knee-jerk rejection.

If you can't even recognize and acknowledge your own emotional state, there's not much use even trying to engage on more nuanced and intellectual matters and arguments.

Come back when you have calmed down a bit, and maybe we can have a nice little chat then, eh?

[Newfie]

Dohboi,

Stop please, just stop. At this point you just discredit yourself.

You pick up the patena of a street corner zealot. All transmit, no receive.

[Subjectivist]

What Newfie said.

Dohboi the smug self referential "Vegans are better than you" shtick is exactly why people don't listen to Vegan preaching evangelists.

[dohboi]

"Vegans are better than you"

Point out where I've said this.

I can't very well stop doing something I have not already done.

I'm saying something that you all don't want to hear on these kinds of threads, I get it.

So you all get angry, perhaps because you suspect I may be right.

And if I respond in kind or with snark, you recognize and chastise my attitude but not your own.

Can we return now to the topic at hand?

I intended by the link above to applaud people like pstarr who mostly, apparently, eat grass fed meat. I suppose this offended him so badly because the whole topic is now apparently just too emotional for him to deal with.

I have no such strong emotions about it, but I will continue to point out the overwhelming evidence that mostly most people will have to eat less meat (and yes, especially conventional, grain-fed or -finished bovines) if we even want some slight chance of having a world where: 1) everyone is adequately fed, and 2) we don't exacerbate already out of control global warming any more than we need to to accomplish #1.

If people can discuss such things without flying into wild accusations or without putting words in my mouth, I would appreciated it.