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Bye bye MEAT! How will the post-meat future look?

How reluctant are you to give up your meat habit?

  • I’m already veggie or vegan as any right thinking person should be!

    Votes: 49 25.0%

  • I can take it or leave it, I won’t miss meat

    Votes: 31 15.8%

  • I’d give up meat if I could think what else to cook, but I can’t

    Votes: 7 3.6%

  • I’m reluctant to change, but I accept the need

    Votes: 34 17.3%

  • It’s unimaginable that I won’t have meat in most / all meals - I’ll probably starve

    Votes: 8 4.1%

  • Fuck the planet, I’ll be eating meat till I die or the planet explodes

    Votes: 6 3.1%

  • Poll fail, answer below

    Votes: 15 7.7%

  • Don’t believe the hype - meat will be available forever, nothing much will change

    Votes: 46 23.5%
  • Total voters
    196
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littlebabyjesus said:
As discussed before, sadly The Guardian is far from an unbiased source on this question. I have no idea who Steve Katasi is beyond what I could google - a nutritionist on a mission, it appears - but I fact-checked a couple of key points in this article and they bear out. The Guardian has received a shit-load of money from the OPP and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and that money has been given to push certain ideas about farming. The Guardian is not a trustworthy source on this, sadly. They like to paint themselves as fiercely independent, but they're not.

The Truth About The Guardian's Plant-Based 'Ethics' | AdapNation
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Bill Gates has invested substantially in major vegan meat companies, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods & Motif Ingredients (decoding animal nutrition for plant-based alternatives). He also has large investments in many grain and seed companies around the world.

With the plant-based meat market alone expected to grow significantly in the next few years at a CAGR of 14.8% to reach $30.92 billion USD by 2026, is there any surprise this market is getting a lot of media attention (likely funded)?
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Oops :facepalm:
 
It's not so much that we should ignore everything The Guardian says. You can get interesting information and fact-check for yourself any aspect of it. But if that paper is your only source of information on this subject, you are receiving a distorted view that sugggests a particular scientific consensus that doesn't actually exist.

It's similar with funding for research institutes, etc. That they receive funding from some industry or other doesn't automatically mean what they say is wrong. But it is a consideration in thinking about what other perspectives and scientific results may be out there. Always best to address the ideas and results directly. Never simply accept the idea as 'from authority'.

Regarding funding for individual meat-alternative companies, I think that is a different matter. A company owned by a multinational mega-business is locked into that business's way of doing things. It is supporting a particular system where, in the case of agriculture, that system is the problem.

Maybe we can stop talking past one another if we 1. stop claiming things from authority (this person is eminent therefore you should agree with them), and 2. address the particular issues themselves head-on. Even if we are not ourselves professionals in the field, as well-informed, intelligent people actively engaged in the subject, we can and should study the source materials ourselves in order to form an opinion about them.
 
Interesting discussion here about how the meat industry is trying to distort the facts about the clear environmental damage created by their business.

So for anyone to say that their research is not impacted by industry, when they’ve received millions of dollars from industry, that’s just to not be very well acquainted with the literature on corporate influence, or on the influence of funding at all.
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If lab-grown meat received the kind of subsidies/grants that the farming industry did, then it'd be much more widely available and competitively priced. Same goes for the price of current conventional livestock meat - if it were properly costed - i.e. it's environmental impact were priced - then it would be much more expensive.

In the long-term, meat substitutes will inevitably overtake real meat in terms of profitability, simply because they'll require far fewer inputs and overheads: and land which is already at a premium will become ever more so (due to climate change).

Good BBC climate podcast about this: BBC World Service - The Climate Question, Is lab-grown meat better for the planet?
 
New New Nothing said:
If lab-grown meat received the kind of subsidies/grants that the farming industry did, then it'd be much more widely available and competitively priced. Same goes for the price of current conventional livestock meat - if it were properly costed - i.e. it's environmental impact were priced - then it would be much more expensive.

In the long-term, meat substitutes will inevitably overtake real meat in terms of profitability, simply because they'll require far fewer inputs and overheads: and land which is already at a premium will become ever more so (due to climate change).

Good BBC climate podcast about this: BBC World Service - The Climate Question, Is lab-grown meat better for the planet?
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Investors are pumping millions into it - both Cargill and APB are developing meat substitutes. These are both massive meat processors.
Of course they think it'll be profitable, it's a scalable, industrial process that doesn't actually involve land, farming it or paying farmers for their produce and it will give huge multinationals even more control over the food supply chain.
Highly processed foods exist to make money for the processors at the expense of quality and human health.

The only positive for people concerned about the ever tightening stranglehold that massive corporations have over food supply is that the consumer continues to reject synthetic meat alternatives and the likes of Beyond Meat have seen their share price tank.
 
I was thinking more about lack of government investment.

I'm much more worried about food shortages induced by climate change than I am about monopolies within the solutions to those shortages.

There simply isn't enough space on the planet for meat consumption the way it is now. Meat consumption is going to have to end eventually - beef and lamb consumption, being the worst offenders, will definitely have to go - the only question is how well that end is managed and what replaces meat as a source of protein.

The monopolies/health-and-safety concerns you raise are a political issues and can be solved by regulation: they are not an inherent flaw with synthetic meat production itself. That kind of regulation is itself very difficult - of course -but so is every single climate-change-related issue. That's like saying we should give up on the idea of electric vehicles cos Elon Musk is a dickhead. Like everything, it's gonna need proper government intervention in order to work.

I'm a vegan and can get along fine without Beyond Meat or similar, but I acknowledge that lots of the world wants to eat things that look and taste like burgers, nuggets, steaks, chunks of meat in stir-fries etc etc.
And "highly processed" lab meat versus the intensively farmed animal meat industry of today seems very "tomayto tomato" to me. The vast majority of people today can't afford organic free-range beef anyway (which isn't scalable and is highly unsustainable).

Nationalised meat labs: I'd vote for that.
 
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New New Nothing said:
There simply isn't enough space on the planet for meat consumption the way it is now. Meat consumption is going to have to end eventually - beef and lamb consumption, being the worst offenders, will definitely have to go
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You do realise that most of the land used for growing meat isn't fit to grow crops, don't you? What are you going to grow on the rocks you remove the sheep from?
 
New New Nothing said:
The monopolies/health-and-safety concerns you raise are a political issues and can be solved by regulation: they are not an inherent flaw with synthetic meat production itself.
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There are health concerns over all synthetic, highly processed food, particularly those like most synthetic meats that have to have nutrition added in artificially. We have evolved over many millions of years, going back to long before humans existed, to eat certain kinds of food with certain kinds of structures. With whole foods, we don't have too much of an problem regarding issues such as the absorption of nutrients or maintenance of gut flora. With highly processed foods, we do, and we need to be humble enough to acknowledge that we're unlikely to produce synthetic food that is as well suited for human consumption as whole foods are. Whenever humans think we're wiser than evolution, we normally go badly wrong.

That's not to say that it shouldn't be done, but the issues surrounding this stuff are complex and only partially understood. We now have an odd situation in which whole foods are being lambasted and synthetic foods promoted by people who in most other situations would be advocating forcefully the other way.
 
Saul Goodman said:
You do realise that most of the land used for growing meat isn't fit to grow crops, don't you? What are you going to grow on the rocks you remove the sheep from?
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Wasn't actually thinking of growing anything on it! Given the methane emissions of livestock, it could just be left to recover. Once ruminants aren't constantly eating it, they'll become more effective carbon sinks. The sheep won't be emitting methane.
You forgot to mention cows, which graze in farmland that could also be rewilded, but which in many cases could actually be converted into arable pastures. I say if needed because of course less farmed animals would free up so many arable fields currently producing livestock feeds.

The idea that we'd have land we wouldn't know what to do with is daft: we need all the carbon sinks we can get, especially given how much of the world is going to become uninhabitable and uncultivable over the next century.

This page breaks down the imbalance and inefficiency of land for grazing within land use: Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
 
New New Nothing said:
Wasn't actually thinking of growing anything on it! Given the methane emissions of livestock, it could just be left to recover. Once ruminants aren't constantly eating it, they'll become more effective carbon sinks. The sheep won't be emitting methane.
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This is wrong on all kinds of levels. It's been dealt with amply on this thread already, but I'll just point out one thing.

Depending on where we're talking about, if the land was grassland or shrubland pre-human intervention, there will likely have been lots of ruminants grazing on it. They were a part of the ecosystem, belching out methane as they went, as ruminants always have done as part of an existing carbon cycle.

The easiest example of this to put numbers to, because the changes happened relatively recently, is North America. Up to the 19th century, the vast prairies were grazed by tens of millions of bison, plus there were tens of millions more deer.

ETA:

And to touch on one other issue, grasslands that aren't being grazed don't become more effective carbon sinks as a result. The grazing helps to promote biodiversity and improve the soils, thus increasing the carbon sink potential. Properly managed grazing increases grass growth, while the methane emitted by the animals forms part of a cycle that repeats every few years and does not add new carbon into the atmosphere (which is what burning fossil fuels does):

1. carbon dioxide in the air is fixed by plants
2. plants are eaten by animals
3. some carbon is released into the air as methane during digestion (most returns directly as carbon dioxide through respiration or dead bodies decaying)
4. methane in the air turns back into carbon dioxide

...and repeat
 
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New New Nothing said:
Wasn't actually thinking of growing anything on it! Given the methane emissions of livestock, it could just be left to recover. Once ruminants aren't constantly eating it, they'll become more effective carbon sinks. The sheep won't be emitting methane.
You forgot to mention cows, which graze in farmland that could also be rewilded, but which in many cases could actually be converted into arable pastures. I say if needed because of course less farmed animals would free up so many arable fields currently producing livestock feeds.

The idea that we'd have land we wouldn't know what to do with is daft: we need all the carbon sinks we can get, especially given how much of the world is going to become uninhabitable and uncultivable over the next century.

This page breaks down the imbalance and inefficiency of land for grazing within land use: Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
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But you said:
There simply isn't enough space on the planet for meat consumption the way it is now.
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So your answer is to remove that source of food and replace it with nothing?
I may be wrong but I don't think you've given this much thought, but in case I'm wrong, what will you be using to fertilise these crops you mention? Is your plan to asset strip the land and let (not too distant) future generations worry about living in a desert?
 
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"Depending on where we're talking about": I'm talking about all spaces where the 154.2 million cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are bred for human food production in the UK.
 
True, it's only 0.7 billion hectares of global cow-grazing land that could be converted to arable, but that's still 0.7 billion hectares. The point is it wouldn't all need to be converted to arable anyway.
 
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Saul Goodman said:
But you said:

So your answer is to remove that source of food and replace it with nothing?
I may be wrong but I don't think you've given this much thought, but in case I'm wrong, what will you be using to fertilise these crops you mention? Is your plan to asset strip the land and let (not too distant) future generations worry about living in a desert?
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In terms of fertiliser, protein crops such as peas and beans don't require as much - they capture nitrogen from the air, fertilising themselves and raising nitrate levels in soil (which in turn improves it for cereal crops). There'll probably always be a need for artificial fertiliser, but there are veganic organic growers out there who use only plant-based composts. Like most climate-crisis solutions, governments aren't taking it seriously and not dedicating the fuckloads of research money that the solution deserves.
 
New New Nothing said:
It doesn't have to. Half the world's croplands are used to grow animal feed.
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Not for sheep. And sheep generally graze land that is not very suitable for crops. Why have you lumped sheep in there?

Then there is the issue of crop rotation as part of mixed farming systems that need fewer artificial fertilisers, where fields are grazed some years, fallow other years and used to grow crops in other years. Where does this kind of farming practice fit in now that we are in a position where we need to move away from petrol-based fertilisers?
 
New New Nothing said:
It doesn't have to. Half the world's croplands are used to grow animal feed.
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New New Nothing said:
In terms of fertiliser, protein crops such as peas and beans don't require as much - they capture nitrogen from the air, fertilising themselves and raising nitrate levels in soil (which in turn improves it for cereal crops). There'll probably always be a need for artificial fertiliser, but there are veganic organic growers out there who use only plant-based composts. Like most climate-crisis solutions, governments aren't taking it seriously and not dedicating the fuckloads of research money that the solution deserves.
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Round and round in circles. All this has been covered many times before on this very thread. :hmm:
 
It'd be nice if someone came along occasionally with something better than the usual regurgitated nonsense from Sentient Bunnies Weekly... "Get rid of teh livestocks!" That's not a solution, it's a possible consequence, but not one that makes even the slightest bit of sense.


This very short video might go some way to helping those who seem to believe the nonsense they read from people with agendas.
 
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