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Factory To Make Biodiesel From Chicken Fat
telekon writes "Tyson foods has finally found a use for chicken fat and leftover food grease that isn't McNuggets — they've partnered with Syntroleum to produce biodiesel from the stuff. Their first plant in Louisiana will be able to churn out 75 million gallons a year. The question is, will the exhaust smell like fried chicken?"
Well at least, if it smells fried chicken, it will be better than actual truck exhaust!
One also wonders why they switched from the previous use... Where the expected higher oil prices and/or some sort of biofuel subsidy good enough to make it cost effective, or did feeding animals their own ground up con-specifics break some new health and sanitary regulation?
I suppose they could also have just taken advantage of some improvement in refining technology to change the point of combustion. I'd suspect that a coal-fired plant wouldn't even notice some chicken fat mixed in with the coal; but that the price per ton paid for the fat would be unexciting; while, with the right refining technology, you could turn those same lipids into a vehicle fuel, which is rather more valuable per ton....
This can be said to be:
1. just explaining nature
2. amoral
I'm not saying it is immoral: just that it is devoid of moral content.
Animals kill to eat. No big deal. But we don't expect animals to express any ethical thought.
When people kill, there may be reason to at least think for a moment about the consequences of our actions.
We have deliberately set up an infrastructure which kills billions of animals annually, just for our pleasure and convenience. It seems rational to give that industry a little ethical examination.
Extending it to fueling our autos just entrenches it further in our minds and our economy. The weird part is grinding up animals to move our inefficient vehicles around. Just seems twisted somehow.
I am sure we have more human fat...
That's all fine if we want to continue to be nothing more than animals. However, over-riding our natural impulses is also a key element of humanity.
There are plenty of advantages to not eating meat, health wise, environmentally, as well as ethically.
What's more, unless we start eating each other, eating meat isn't going to be viable for every much longer. It takes 100 cal of grain to make 1 cal of beef.
At current rates of environmental degradation and population growth, the mass of humanity will be vegetarian very soon of necessity.
We won't be able to continue wasting 99% of our food. (Though the ratio is 10/1 for pork, and 2/1 for chicken, which are better deals).
Also, ethanol-from-sugar should stop also for the same reason: do we really want the stomachs of the poor to have to compete with the gas tanks of the rich?
He never mentioned a specific ideal meat:plant ratio. He was wondering why this person's ratio was zero.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I'm not sure what I should go after first, the massive non-sequitur or the blatant naturalist fallacy. Perhaps I should start by asking you when was the last time you chased down, killed and ate an animal using nothing but your physical prowess and devilish cunning, since you seem to think that that's how modern humans acquire their animal products...not, you know, herding docile, tamed animals from the pens we keep them in their entire lives into narrow boxes where we can kill slaughter them without them ever having the opportunity to put up a fight.
Anyways, macho-man nonsense aside, whether or not we're physically capable of doing something has absolutely zero bearing on the morality of that action. I don't have any medical problem that keeps me from forcibly procreating, and my bifocal color vision, canine teeth, grasping hands, and mad endurance skills would certainly make it easy to hunt down, restrain and impregnate a woman to spread my superior predator genes, yet I'm pretty sure most of us would frown on that.
So now, if we may take a brief trip back to reality, we have no biological need to consume animal products (don't believe me, read the ADA's position paper on vegetarian diets), and producing them, any cruelty issues aside (since you clearly don't care about the feelings or pain of any creature too feeble to resist being hunted down and eaten by you), is grossly inefficient and utterly abominable for the environment (you'll want to read the UN report "Livestock's Long Shadow" for that one). But hey, if it makes you feel better to just put someone's lifestyle down with your super macho cave man fantasy, by all means go ahead, don't let silly things like facts get in your way.
tl;dr - If you think you can just dismiss a well-established philosophy or system of ethics with a single super-witty paragraph, you're not being clever, you're just being a douche. Trust me, you're not the first person to say "Umm we have pointy teeth so you should eat meat!"
Yeah, but given its price as pills, a pint of liquid Lipitor(tm) will cost like $6,000 in the U.S. (Or $4.95 in Canada/Mexico.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Yep, in a calorie-sparse hunter-gatherer existence, a taste for meat, fat, and sugar— all with a very high calorie density— is a Good Thing. In a calorie-rich sedentary society, not so much.
Actually, we kill and eat animals because we are hungry, and we need to eat. The world does not have enough resources for everyone to be a vegetarian, or even a vegan. If you think you can grow arable crops on all farmland, you're welcome to come to the north-west of Scotland and try your hand at raising crops on a hill farm. Sheep and cows do just fine on it. Give me a shout once you've worked out how to plough a peat bog on a one-in-five slope.
You post is rationalization at best. Your claims for vegetarianism are easily refuted and shown as the ramblings of someone who gets halfway through a problem and assumes they have the answer.
1) health wise
Wrong. Vegetarian diet is so unhealthy that you can frequently spot vegetarians by sight. They tend to be gaunt. Low in muscle mass and low in muscle tone. When vegetarian from childhood, they tend to be shorter due to malnutrition.
2) environmentally - At current rates of environmental degradation and population growth, the mass of humanity will be vegetarian very soon of necessity. We won't be able to continue wasting 99% of our food.
The problem you are describing is overpopulation. Humans overbreeding for their food source. If populations continue to grow as you suggest, being vegetarian will not stop starvation. At best it will only delay it. I suppose eating as vegetarians COULD reduce the populations health enough that the population drops off, but humans are biologically pretty robust. I doubt the poor health of being a vegetarian is going to be enough to reduce our population.
3) ethically
Eating meat is not unethical. If we are going start playing the "killing lower life forms is unethical" game, then it is vegetarians that are unethical. They kill the most helpless life forms on the planet. They line them up and force them to live unnatural lives in unnatural environments. They genetically manipulate them to suit their needs, and consume them while they are still alive.
Life includes killing. It is unavoidable.
4) the stomachs of the poor to have to compete with the gas tanks of the rich
There is not one single person on the planet that is going hungry due to ethanol-from-sugar. World hunger is a byproduct of corrupt governments, (to a lesser extent) parental irresponsibility and the inherent difficulties in distribution. Here in the US, my aunt is actually paid NOT to grow corn. She is not alone. As long as there are thousands of farmers who are paid not to grow corn, any claim of people going hunger because there isn't enough is at best misinformed. At worst an outright lie.
"Most cases" being where you've got lots of nice flat arable land. As I say, if you can figure out how to efficiently grow crops on a hill farm, you might be onto something. You haven't got long, though, because the oil is running out and cheap vegetables will be *gone* - back to an omnivorous diet when that happens!
No, I don't. I'm sure there are animal products used in the production of some of the things I rely on for survival, but there's nothing I can do about that. Vegans avoid animal products to the greatest extent possible. Obviously we can't effect any change in society if we refuse to be a part of it at all.
As for the scarcity argument, are you kidding? You do realize that like 80% of the grain we grow is being consumed by animals that humans will eat later, right? There's plenty of room to grow plant food for everyone, it's the animals that we can't afford to keep growing grain for. Producing animal products is massively inefficient.
Of course, that "blubbery malnourished backside" nonsense (because it's not like vegans can be world-class athletes, or enjoy generally lower rates of heart disease and cancer) makes it obvious enough that you're just trolling, so I won't expect an intelligent response...
Given the logic of your argument, being a vegetarian and eating plants is "just for pleasure and convenience".
After all, "It tastes good (pleasure) and it's an easy way to get a nice packet of nutrients (convenience)."
Claiming that eating a meal that gives you a "nice packet of nutrients" is "just for pleasure and convenience" is at best a lie, but could also be explained through mental illness.
I can't comment on what your particular doctors were thinking, but there is now a general consensus that a low-meat or no-meat diet is best.
I'm sorry, but there is not - unless you intentionally seek out specialists who are biased towards your point of view. Which is very likely if you follow the references in various vegetarian/vegan literature.
The consensus is that humans are omnivores, and their digestive system is tuned towards a mix of meat and plant food. It is possible to go plant-only with a variety of artificial supplements, but definitely isn't natural or superior.
Okay, then, no non-procreational sex for you!
See? When you ban it just because there's no use for it but fun, we get to ban all sorts of things. Log off and parcel your computer for shipment to me, too. I have a strong feeling you're not using it for survival, because you didn't get paid to make that post. Or did you?