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Meat the Food of the Future
Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that rising food prices, the growing population, and environmental concerns are just a few issues that have food futurologists thinking about what we will eat in the future and how we will eat it. In the UK, meat prices are anticipated to have a huge impact on our diets as some in the food industry prognosticate meat prices could double in the next five to seven years, making meat a luxury item. 'In the West many of us have grown up with cheap, abundant meat,' says Morgaine Gaye. 'Rising prices mean we are now starting to see the return of meat as a luxury. As a result we are looking for new ways to fill the meat gap.' Insects will become a staple of our diet. They cost less to raise than cattle, consume less water and do not have much of a carbon footprint. Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man. 'Things like crickets and grasshoppers will be ground down and used as an ingredient in things like burgers.' But insects will need an image overhaul if they are to become more palatable to the squeamish Europeans and North Americans, says Gaye. 'They will become popular when we get away from the word insects and use something like mini-livestock (PDF).' Another alternative would be lab grown meat as a recent study by Oxford University found growing meat in a lab rather than slaughtering animals would significantly reduce greenhouse gases, energy consumption and water use. Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University that grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, says he wants to make lab meat "indistinguishable" from the real stuff, but it could potentially look very different. Finally algae could provide a solution to some the world's most complex problems, including food shortages as some in the sustainable food industry predict algae farming could become the world's biggest cropping industry. Like insects, algae could be worked into our diet without us really knowing by using seaweed granules to replace salt in bread and processed foods. 'The great thing about seaweed is it grows at a phenomenal rate,' says Dr Craig Rose, executive director of the Seaweed Health Foundation. 'It's the fastest growing plant on earth.'"
Land Lobsters.(They're both arthropods) Then you can charge a premium for them.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
No lab grown meat or bugs for me. I'll just stick with good ol' Soylent Green!
Under-abundance of meat
Over-abundance of humans
If you convert the over-abundance into the under-abundance, they balance themselves out.
Our population just topped 7 billion; if you ask me, there is already too much meat.
... Krabby Patties are going to become VERY real!
http://en.spongepedia.org/index.php?title=Krabby_Patty
Why stop there? Why not use human muscular stem cells? Then it could be branded as Ambrosia Plus.
--
BMO
'Things like crickets and grasshoppers will be ground down and used as an ingredient in things like burgers.'
Um, yeah, you just go on thinking thats a "future tense" activity. Maybe not intentionally, maybe a lower percentage...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You dont have to eat meat and if it became a smaller portion of peoples diets all the better. The grass lands that these animals use are enourmous for your return in meat. I would say chickens and goats are a better option for people than cows. If sanitation was a top priority for towns they could focus on making sure families all were feed from a small local farm with no polution into the water or soil like the estrogen issues of large farm runoffs were have today.
I thought we'll 3D print our food powered by (private) space-based solar arrays?
It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
there are lots of way to dress up vegetables to make even meat eaters drool all over. Just look outside of the western culture for some recipes. Unfortunately for some its too much work/time to cook up some Curry or Thai so they'll just stick to SPAM.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
...because a bunch of foolish politicians decided making fuel from corn would be a good idea. Once that stops we'll go back to raising beef on non-tillable rangeland and pasture and finishing it with a small amount of inexpensive corn.
It's PEOPLE!!!! :-)
Soylent Green
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
The EU has a deliberate policy of remaining self sufficient for food. Euro haters love to rage about the huge grain mountains and heavy farm animal subsidies, but the whole point of them is to make sure the EU will always have enough farming capacity to feed itself should the need arise.
We will never allow ourselves to get to the stage where we don't have enough meat. Yeah, India's population will keep on increasing, but it won't matter much to us. The population of Europe is stabilising and even falling in some places. The third world will carry on starving until they have enough education to limit the number of children they have, but the EU will just keep transferring money from the rich to subsidy for farm animal meat for the rest of us.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Meat the Food of the Future
Maybe I'm getting old, but I just cannot fathom 'meating' my future food. Well.. maybe if it's apple pie.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
and the over/under of future food overlords jokes at 12.
So long as we in the US continue to subsidize corn and raise livestock on it, meat will remain in easy reach of residents of the united states. That's not even considering how an entire huge segment of the population would take the news that they can't do big barbecues anymore. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm saying this is what I anticipate will happen.
You should turn signatures off.
Hungry? Get some grub.
Anybody want a peanut?
Seriously? When did /. begin copying idiotic and arbitrary predictions from mass media mediums?
We could say "Meet the Food of the Future".
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
If people only eat as much food as they need there will be enough for everyone.
Seriously? They would rather eat crickets than raise fish?
they want you to be more stupid and less evolved because they want you to eat less meat....
as to rising prices well just buy Canadian farms on mass now that the wheat board is done with and give out wheat to your nation freely....screw canada our illegal treasonous govt sold us out.
I need some cheese once in awhile on my veggie burrito.
The marketing problem with insect consumption for Western audiences could probably be addressed by focusing a non-objectionable label on one particular kind of insect, much in the way that "beef", "pork", "chicken" and "fish" are labels for specific kinds of animal. The relatively innocuous term "cultured grasshopper meat" sounds a lot better than the generic term "squashed, processed bugs", for example. Once the idea of eating bugs ... pardon me, "cultured insect meat" gains traction, acceptance for this new food will naturally expand over time to other insects.
Admittedly, I expect the idea of eating yucky wormies will catch on very, very slowly indeed with Americans, no matter how enthusiasts try to make them sound appetizing by frying them up or making delicious-looking meat pies out of them. Personally, worms will always make me think of the squishy, nasty messes on the sidewalk after a hard rain, and I'll smack anyone who tries to get me to actually eat them.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
"Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man."
Edible doesn't mean tasty. I am open to the idea as I eat spiders in my sleep, but there are some that don't look to tempting and I would most likely get very hungry before eating one.
I like that term as well: 'mini-livestock' I think it will stick hahaha
I think we can make the switch, but I am sure it will be the pussy switch just like Vegetarians. Open up there freezer and what do you see? Veggie-BURGER, meat substituted STEAK and all other kinds of crap that are vegetable based, but looks and tastes like meat. And the therapist said "I" was in denial?
"That's right...I said it."
Anyone else here old enough to remember the panic when an urban legend spread that McDonalds was using ground earthworms in their burgers?
Well, multiply that by a hundred and guess why no food company or restaurant in their right mind is going to be jumping on this bandwagon anytime soon.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So, interestingly enough... I caught an episode of Morgan Spurloch's new docu/experiment.
In the episode I saw 2 people leave, and one essentially go crazy from lack of protein. What happened first was the smallest thinnest woman probed to be the most incapable of dealing with the extreme lack of meat protein and fat. She voluntarily left when the "tribe" failed twice to kill an elk. Strangely enough the supposed semi-pro hunter of the group voluntarily left second. He couldn't deal with the frustration of failing to kill an elk with a spear and atlatl. Morgan kept trying to kill a muskrat, but also couldn't remain patient enough to land a killing blow.
The weirdest thing was how the sanity of the vegetarian played out. She consistently tried to brainwash the other tribe members by constantly complaining about animal meat. IIRC she successfully swayed the tiny girl that left to not eat any of the fish they caught because none of the other tribe members would remove the head... Yes. She refused dire nutrients because it had a face on it and the vegetarian brain-washed here into essentially starving until she volunteered to leave from lack of food and partial dehydration.
The next morning after the semi-pro hunter left, a few of the tribe members (including the woman that got her feet wet and complained about being cold while intentionally avoiding huddling around the campfire) set out early to stalk the elk herd. Back at camp, the vegetarian did literally nothing for the tribe; however she made herself a nice salad of grass and leaves... ROFL. The other members at camp started building a drying rack in the hopes the hunters brought back some meat to preserve.
The first atlatl strike missed the target and almost startled the herd into fleeing, however the second guy landed a beautiful shot to the neck of a large buck. They waited a few moments until it collapsed then went in for the kill. I was proud to see the woman (I think her name was Manu) make the kill shot by puncturing the elk's lung. All 4 members of the hunting party became extremely emotional about killing the large majestic mammal.
They performed a small ritual, thanking the animal for its sacrifice, then proceeded to draw and quarter it. They hauled over 200lbs of fresh elk meat back to camp for all of the tribe to share... except the vegetarian.
The vegetarian immediately began complaining that they had murdered an animal to consume. She began gagging in what I believe was an attempt at spreading a mass hysteric type social reflex (think of a yawn and how it seems to spread). Then came the complaints about how gross it was to butcher it in the field, and she wasn't going to eat any it because it was against her beliefs.
Here is where they pan to the actual scientists running the show. They began to discuss the ramifications of tribe members that refuse to contribute to the tribe, and how in ancient times there were rules to compensate for the lazy and belligerent. Next they began to discuss how if the "experiment" continued how she would rapidly become emaciated and essentially starve to death from lack of edible plant proteins in the wild.
So, the moral is that animals need to die for homo sapien sapiens to survive in our modern bodies as they evolved. Over the last 3 years I have been cutting out plant protein/sugar as my staple and replacing it with animal protein/fat. I feel 100x healthier and happier than I have in over a decade. As long as there are ungulates I will never return to plants as my staple diet. If that means poaching, so be it. Humans require animal protein/fat to be healthy. It's scientifically proven.
We have to put Texas out of business? It would get rid of the Eastern Texas courts too!
Is the BBC turning into The Onion? Or is the author just plain daft to start with?
Substituting the words "mini-livestock" in place of "dead insects"? What the fuck are these Brits smoking?
I know crushed-up insects may pass for a semi-decent gourmet meal by British culinary standards, but here in America I'll stick to my 97% lean ground beef and REAL pork chops, thanks.
In the future, people will eat essentially the same things we eat now. Rising prices for meat will cause meat producers to make more money, which will cause more people to raise more livestock for meat, which will cause meat prices to stabilize at a supply/demand equilibrium.
Environmental concerns will become less and less important to people as people learn that human concerns are less and less important to environmentalists. Practical conservation efforts will regain the environmental mainstream, overthrowing the hairshirt doomsday environmentalism that peaked in about 2005.
Futurists and futurologists (?) will continue to predict "interesting" futures, because no one writes an article about you when you say things will stay about the same.
I AM NOT EATING ANY GODDAMNED FUCKING BUGS, YOU LIMEY COCKSUCKERS!!!
I think I speak for everyone. (By which I mean everyone in 'Merica, or Amercia as Romney calls it... which is the only nation that matters to me, as I am an American...) We fought a fucking war, (two actually) against these assholes so we wouldn't have to listen to them or do what they say. Let THEM eat bugs, I'm fine with that. We can ship them all the cockroaches they can eat.
I'm not eating that shit, and if I had to kill each and every last Limey piece of shit on the planet to ensure I can still enjoy a 100% pure beef hamburger, and that my Chicken McNuggets were still 100% pure McChicken, I think I'd be fine with it, so long as I, myself don't have to do any of the icky, actual killing since, once again, I'm an American. I don't like to get my hands dirty with actual... work, especially something likely to involve... ew... blood...
That's what DRONES are for. :^) Remote-control semi-autonomous head-shot... BOOM! 2 points!
To be fair though, if people in the UK are considering adding bugs to their diet, that'd probably represent an improvement on the typical British food, from what I've heard.
Meat is easy.
If you dump animal proteins then you actually have to know what you are doing. Otherwise you can do permanent damage to yourselves. If you're going to be a vegetarian then you need the tribal knowledge to back it up and most Westerners simply don't have that.
Also, if we let all of corn fields go fallow, the cows could live off of that. We can't. That's an important detail that's missed here.
Cattle used to be semi-wild animals that just wandered around and mostly fended for themslves. It's the same for grazing animals in general.
A lot of effort and fossil fuel goes into turning grasslands into something that a human might be able to eat. Even if we repurpose the American midwest to direct human feed crops, a lot of high tech effort has to go into it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm really looking forward to the ethical discussion surrounding the consumption of lab-grown or 3D-printed human flesh.
If you can clone your own muscle tissue and grow it in your basement under heat lamps, is there any reason why you shouldn't put it on the grill with a little gorgonzola?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
"The human body does not require meat."
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
"For example, we could just be eating more carrots."
If you thing you can exchange the protein needs of a growing human being out of carrots, you are beyond salvation.
"If less meat gets consumed, there will be more food available to humans overall"
Fat American standard is not "humans overall". About 90% of human population eats meat in quite a reasonable proportion.
Well as it stands now, with current food production there's enough room for another 3 billion people. With africa effectively producing nothing, the same still stands. If Africa ever fixes it's problems it would turn into the bread basket of the world again. But that would require a few thing, first among them getting over their petty squabbles. Second environuts and their anti-green revolution agenda will have to get off their high horses, and third will probably require world wide intervention to stop all the damned wars(see the first point).
I can already hear the cries of "but over-population and all those families having large numbers of children" guess what? In europe, and asia the same thing happened too. The same still happens in parts of asia, because death at childhood due to disease/accident/birth is still the number one killer. But it's more so true for the middle east, and Africa. You raise people up, you reduce the number of children people need to have to "help out on the farm" as it was. Isn't industrialization a grand thing?
Om, nomnomnom...
I am Dutch but am living in Mexico right now, and have been living there since early 2004. In Oaxaca, Mexico, one can eat grasshoppers. I've done so on a few occasions, and it's not bad on a taco with guacamole. So it's certainly not in all of NA that people are squeamish about eating insects..
Perl Programmer for hire
Companies hire ethicists when they want to do something unethical, and people call in futurists, to come up with ideas that have no future.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
We have already too much meat locally. The only way meat price could rise, is by stopping intentionally cattle growing, the dream of some of the green, but there is no reason really. in EU/US many surface are available for cattle growing and we are subsidising farmer to NOT grow wheat and other stapple food (to maintain price). The reality is that if there was no subsidy in EU for example, the price of wheat, milk, and meat would crash down because of surplus.
What is this meat gap?
The human body does not require meat. There are some amino acids that humans have to consume from animal sources, which include milk or eggs.
If this is talking about what to replace meat with, then this is somewhat of a moot point, since there is a dietary change required anyway (i.e. there is no thing to replace meat with that is not just as thinkable as another). For example, we could just be eating more carrots.
If less meat gets consumed, there will be more food available to humans overall, since the ratio of food used to food gained (by converting plants etc. to meat via e.g. feeding a cow) is about 10.
Humans are omnivores. We need meat to survive - to be accurate, we need a balanced diet of meat and plant matter (veg/fruit) to survive.
Remember when Starbucks had to admit they were using crushed, ground-up bugs in their "drinks"? Maybe it wasn't actually for the "coloring" but actually contributed to the nutritional content of the "beverage", in the hopes that they can sneak that in there, and that when they start telling people, sorry, cows have too great an environmental impact, you have to start eating bugs now, and we cry "NEVER!!!" they then reply, do you eat this, this, or this? Do you drink this, that, or the other, (where the "this" is Starbucks Frapacrapos, or whatever)? and we answer, "well, of course, they're yummy" they'll reply "well, you've already been eating bugs for years, what's the big deal?"
So the real question is, how many of the "natural flavors" in our various foods are actually being used to "beef up," as it were, the nutritional content, rather than as flavorings, hiding behind their ability to disguise whatever it is they're putting in our food as just harmless "natural flavors"? How disgusted will we be when we learn that so many of the things we've been happily scarfing down for years, maybe even decades, once crawled on 6+ legs, and/or had gossamer-like wings?
So gross!
I've been vegetarian for over two decades with following no real special diet. I hope people are buying the bullshit you're shoveling.
The poor cannot afford to pay double for meat so they will starve. That will lead to civil unrest. If we can't afford to feed the poor then society will break down.
Lab grown meat is probably in our future, but I have seen these insect eating predictions a few times before since the middle of the last century and somehow we are still producing enough proper food for everybody. OK, except India and north east Africa. They still don't produce enough food for everybody and probably never will, since they refuse to reduce their populations to sustainable levels. Well, I suppose their populations are at sustainable levels, just not the kind of sustainable that the rest of us would consider sustainable...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You're a short-sighted fool. Here's the huge problem with your tunnel vision: Humans need far more than energy to survive.
Besides, that energy that you think gets "lost" doesn't simply disappear. It feeds into an entire ecosystem that supports more than humans.
The 'waste' factor depends on the terrain you're working with. Trying to grow any kind of a food crop on fairly steep hills is pretty futile, while cows or sheep are happy to graze there.
Nope, I eat cows fed specially-engineered seafloor vent Archae. Stuff costs more than osmium per ounce, but it's worth it just to have a counterexample to this claim.
We will find a way to continue to produce food efficiently, mostly for the reason that it is very profitable to do so.
Yet satisfying!
It's not bullshit. If you ate nothing but salad every day, you're not going to get the same nutrition that you would from eating a lot of meats.
The vegetarian/vegan forums are all full of people who go on a fad vegan diet and end up not feeling well or having other issues because they did not adjust their diet properly.
While most people eat terribly, meat is a very easy source of calories and protein. To get the same from veggies you need to pick out the right stuff. A lot of people don't understand that.
I've always wondered why we use cows to generate milk. Given that most of milk is relatively simple (water, sugars, chalk, oil), why can't we have bioreactor into which we put grass-clippings, and get out something roughly similar to milk?
The need for adding protein, and some kinds of vitamins might be moderately tricky, but I should think that this wouldn't matter for many applications. The only thing that would require the full complexity of real milk would be in making (good quality) cheese. This would also appeal to vegans, some vegetarians, and many people with lactose intolerance.
So, what you're saying is that, if I want to consume conspicuously, I should consume the meat of lions who feed only on humans who ate beef?
As for the fast food... I don't see how high meat prices would kill it. The need fast food fills isn't for meat products per se, but for food that is a) cheap and b) doesn't take a lot of time for the purchaser to purchase, obtain, and consume. That need doesn't go away sans meat, it just gets filled in a different way.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
How about putting in some effort to vertical farming "lands"?
It will be pretty expensive at first, but the methane production from all the crap would be able to power a massive proportion of any electrical needs in it.
And to be honest, most of the sunlight needed could be done by simple reflection towers in the right proportions coming straight through the entire structure.
2 floors would be more than enough to feed us to 10 billion. More would likely need UV lighting or expensive mirror tubes.
Of course, the biggest problem is holding back the meat industry in general. Farmers are told to cut down on meat production, some meat is completely not even wanted because of a tainted image by abusers back in the day. (veal)
Hell, I remember a rather depressing documentary on all those poor little animals put down literally at birth with a bullet straight to the head because they simply can't do anything with the meat since there was no place for them in the farm and nobody likes the image veal has anymore because of the awful abuse stories that tainted it. Some people have been trying to get Britain back in to eating Veal again because at LEAST it has some sense of a life instead of having a bullet straight through its head.
Insect farming will certainly be a better filler to foods than what is currently happening, cellulose fillers. All that is going to do is make people want to eat more because they are having less intake of nutrients.
Insects are stupidly efficient food sources and it is pretty shocking how it has just been held off because "eww its icky" morons.
Nobody can even tell the difference with an insect burger and meat burger when it is done right, just for one example. Not only that, insect products are far more flexible than standard meat products. And it is easier to get the most out of the insects as opposed to animals who have to have their bones crushed down to produce other products.
Insects could be insanely cheaper if mass-produced.
It will happen. Eventually.
Aquaponics will also need to replace fish farming.
Aquaponics has the potential to feed the human race several times over in a space less than a third the size of all the farms we have now. (including, technically, the ocean areas all these fish live in)
Some of the experimental mass-scale buildings I have seen look absolutely fantastic. When these things are in full swing, the produce coming out of them will be amazing.
The biggest thing that will need to change, however, is food waste.
Biomass is a very important resource. So much of it goes to waste, quite literally, by ending up in land fills.
It also works very well as adding nutrients back in to the lands we are farming. We can't just farm the land forever, if we do, we will end up with another Africa.
And that also includes the crap that comes out the back end of you. (and sometimes the front in a bad day)
With all of these, we could easily feed the human race quite happily without high prices or even high energy needs.
The only problems will be the initial cost, which will be FAR less if we do it right NOW than if we leave it to crunching points in the future.
It would be irresponsible to leave it to the last minute when everybody is poor and prices are higher.
Nothing like an Black angus Buggalo steak. Mmmm. I'll take another piece of Thorax, I like how it has a stingy taste.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh, that's okay. I make lamb.
Meat? That's disgusting. Gave that nasty habit up years ago. Dairy too. But not because I didn't like the taste. I gave it up because it's the right thing to do. For my health. For the animals. For the planet. For my fellow citizens. And finally, for my finances.
I'm a geek who doesn't eat pizza. How weird is that? Oh, wait -- I just said I was a geek.
The US uses 58% of its corn crop for feed, *exports* 25% of its corn crop and only the remaining 17% is used for food, seed or ethanol production.
http://www.soyatech.com/corn_facts.htm
It ain't ethanol that's made corn prices skyrocket lately...
A delicacy among Oaxacans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapulines
Though I would note the following:
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Has anyone tried the beyond meat fake chicken? It allegedly looks, feels, and tastes like chicken.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There is no global overpopulation. Some places (such as Japan) are already experiencing population aging and decline, which is bad in many ways. Other places (such as the USA and specially Europe) already have sub-replacement fertility rates, and their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted the the European Union population (now at 503M) will reach zero natural population increase by 2015 and zero total population increase in 2035 (at 520M), then start declining.
The USA will grow from 310M in 2010 to 403M in 2050. [1]
Asia will increase from 4.2B in 2010 to 5.1B in 2050, then start declining. [2]
The only region that is really growing is Africa. It will increase from 1B in 2010 to 2.2B in 2050. [2] Then its population density will be 73/km2. [3] Compare that to the current population density in Portugal (115/km2), in South Korea (487/km2) and in Taiwan (641/km2). [4]
Global population is predicted to grow from 7B in 2011 to 9B in 2050 and 10B in 2100 [5] and start falling soon after [6].
And according to [7], 40-50% of America-produced food is thrown away. According to [8], 1/3 of the world food is thrown away.
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity. And much arable land is wasted on subsidized inefficient corn-based ethanol. You can lobby your government to stop that.
Plus, there does not seem to be a negative correlation between population density and GDP per capita. [9]
African hunger is not caused by overpopulation. It is caused by corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, theocractic Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed.
Overpopulation fear-mongering is very old - at least as old as Malthus. One of its more recent incarnations was the 1968 book "The Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation to occur in the 1970s.
Anyway, for better or for worse, there is already strong action taken by individuals, foundations, and Western governments, to restrict fertility in Africa.
1 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm
3 : According to [2], Africa will have 2.2B people in 2050, and according to Google[10] and Wikipedia [11], the area of Africa is 30,221,532 km2
4 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
5 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_6.htm
7 : http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half
8 : http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/
9 : http://sanamagan.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/population-population-density-gdp-per-capita-ppp/
10 : https://www.google.com.br/search?q=africa+area
11 :
Punctuation saves lives.
No we don't. There are life long vegetarians/vegans who are still not dead - must be surprising for you.
You are just accustomed and used to eat meat. It's like a bad habit or maybe even like cold turkey symptoms.
And like any drug addict you try to defend your drug.
For now, while animals still dwell in all their mightiness -- I mean meatiness -- and stand high above their future insect saviors, there's Meat-Glue, aka, transglutaminase, or Activa! Such things could have one more open to a bug in the mouth.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Yeah, and I also didn't get the bit about replacing salt with seaweed... wtf? Oh well.
And IIRC, that is true for every layer. Plants to cow, cow to humans = 100 times less effective than, say, humans doing photosynthesis directly :D
Soylent Green
We don't all have to eat insects to solve the food problem. I do agree seaweed is part of the solution and insects can play a major role. Cattle simply aren't practical to based a large portion of our diet on as many Americans do. They have an extremely poor conversion rate. Sheep are terrible too. Both produce massive amounts of greenhouse gases and require ridiculous amounts of land and water. Bison were a better solution and before we turned the Great Plains into the great grain belt there were 60 million of them that required no care. Bison can't replace cattle but they are an example of a low impact animal. Fish are the best at food conversion. Birds like chickens and game birds are also very good. Where we got into trouble was the focus on grain based diets. It seemed the logical way to industrialize domestic animals but it left us using the bulk of the land to grow grains. Also the over use of grains is part of the weight problem. Our animals are unhealthy and we eat heavily processes grains for the bulk of our diet. I started researching the problem many years ago. One of the things that got me started was reading that young birds especially turkeys had to be fed a special processed feed that was high in protein. Given wild birds don't have access to store bought feed it lead me to the fact most young birds survive on an insect based diet. Even adult birds like chickens and turkeys eat a lot of insects when they are free ranged. Factory animals eat no insects only grain. Insects like crickets are easy to raise in volume and could replace a lot of the processed feed. Also millet and grain sorghum make more sense than corn. Both grow on poor land with little water or fertilizer. Fish have a similar issue. Tilapia are farm raised and one of the easiest to raise. On a natural diet they are healthy food but by forcing them to eat a grain based diet they get the nickname bacon with fins. Guess what they eat in the wild? Duckweed, it's pest weed that grows on top of the water. They love it, it's easy to grow and it can form a 100% of their diet. Similar with farm raised trout. In the wild insects make up a lot of their diet with small bait fish, frogs and crayfish the rest. In farm raised trout they aren't fed any of their natural diet. Bait fish eat algae and insects are once again easy to raise so there's no need to force game fish being farm raised onto a grain diet. For us it's a myth grains are the best food. Fruits and vegetables are best for us. Right now it takes around an acre of land per person when you factor in everything including meat. By shifting to a more traditional approach and throwing out monoculture which was a disastrous idea the number can be raised to four people per acre. With vertical growing hydroponic systems the numbers can be a lot higher. Traditional systems also have the added benefit of restoring the land rather than depleting it. They use less fertilizer and far less water. One thing on hydroponics. The premade solutions are ridiculously expensive. FYI, you can mix up the dry powers for around a $1 a pound. A pound of powder will make a lot of gallons of solution and only a small amount of solution is added to your water. No petroleum based fertilizers are needed. Hydroponics has one major advantage, extremely low water usage. Also it's easy to add back the trace elements that are lacking in most farmland. One clever idea I read was to use expired vitamins to grind up for trace minerals. Long winded but the point is there are options but they are ones farmers can do themselves that don't rely on corporate America so don't expect the government to champion the approach. We don't have to eat insects to fix the food problem but we can feed our domestic animals insects the way nature intended.
I love red meat .. I think we could designate a few countries as 'alternative meat sources' and use them for burgers and steaks. The idea is disgusting but its less offensive than eating insects.
http://interserver.net/
The only reason why most cattlemen feed corn (exclusively) to their cattle is because it's cheap - thanks to those government subsides. And all those corn subsidies (and every other farm subsidy) just goes into the pockets of Monsanto, Cargil, Tyson, Purdue, and every other big food and meat packing corporation.
You can subsitute meat with a variety of vegetable, which will cover your protein needs. The trick is that you have to be careful to make your choice complement each other or indeed you can go into some amino acid carrency.
So yeah, a steak or a semi hard choice of complement vegetable. Most people will take the easy way out and the meat. I certainly do. And there is a GOOD reason that for the average humain vegetable taste not as tasty as meat. A very good reason. Most vegetarian with their propaganda never really stops thinking too much about it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
... the skin and even some legs getting stuck between my teeth. If they would just butcher this mini-livestock to remove these parts, I'd go for it. And also remove the stinger from scorpions.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Thing that concerns me would be allergies.
Far fewer people are allergic to fish, chicken, beef than they are to shrimp, crab, lobsters. Or even dust mites. So I wouldn't be surprised if many are also allergic to these "popular" arthropods.
http://www.hollowtop.com/finl_html/allergies.htm
Soylent green :-)
...we could eat less meat.
No we don't. There are life long vegetarians/vegans who are still not dead - must be surprising for you.
You are just accustomed and used to eat meat. It's like a bad habit or maybe even like cold turkey symptoms.
And like any drug addict you try to defend your drug.
You are able to be lifelong vegetarians because of supplements added to your foods.
It's not a "bad habit" to eat meat. Being a pure vegetarian is unnatural, but sustainable with supplements that you don't get from pure vegetables.
That said, my parents raise grass-fed cattle so I could get beef for cheap if I cared to.
So what? That doesn't (and couldn't) apply to most people on the planet, so adds nothing to the discussion beyond "Cool story, bro" pointlessness.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Land Lobsters.(They're both arthropods) Then you can charge a premium for them.
I think that would complete the circle. Lobsters used to be called the cockroaches of the sea. They were considered just barely good enough to give to your slaves.
IIRC ...
There were actually laws in the Massachusetts Bay colony limiting how often you could feed your servants lobster. Are they still on the books?
Lobsters were heavily harvested but were often used as fertilizer for the fields.
At some point someone applied butter heavily, served it to the queen, she said she liked it and things changed virtually overnight. The trash food of the lowest "class" became gourmet.
This still happens today. My grandfather grew up in Italy poor and hungry. He laughs a little when looking at the menu in Italian restaurants in the U.S. today. Some of the featured and expensive dishes offered are quite literally the meals he was mocked for eating as a child by the kids from wealthier families.
> "The human body does not require meat."
> Yes it does.
I guess the 1.5 billion Indians are not humans then, right? Seem to be able to survive just fine without meat!
Yet, veggie meals are more environmental friendly, more healthy, easier to digest, cheaper, more energy efficient.
Veggies may be more efficient to grow but they are less efficient as fuel for the human body and mind. It was meat that enabled our brains to grow and to become the species we are today.
Eating habits need to change but lets not pretend that meat is not a very important food source for our species.
I'll take the Over for $200, Alex...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
They add supplements to meat and animal-food. Think about that. A piece of pork can be considered a supplement aswell. And of course killing animals is bad. It's better to not eat them and care about them.
I've been a vegetarian for 18 years now, for 6 years I was a strict vegan actually. Though I didn't grow up on this diet, millions of people in the world have.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Counterpoint: Quinoa.
They add supplements to meat and animal-food. Think about that. A piece of pork can be considered a supplement aswell. And of course killing animals is bad. It's better to not eat them and care about them.
Of course they do, I didn't suggest otherwise. My point is that if civilisation were to end tomorrow, or you decided to go off and live off the land with no processed foods you would not survive solely on vegetables. You need meat too.
How about some long-term plans to reduce the human population instead of just continuously ignoring it or acting like any attempt to even discuss it rationally is some kind of sociopathic heresy?
Been there. Done that. Luckily the damage wasn't permanent.
The simple fact of the matter is that WE ARE NOT HERBIVORES. We simply don't have the enzymes for it. This is why cows and sheep can survive on stuff we can't.
Mass starvation has occured with people trying to eat like herbivores and dying anyways.
You don't need a "special diet", but you need to exploit a regional food culture that accounts for the lack of meat. Vegans that try to claim otherwise are going to hurt people and their own "cause".
The fact is that it does take some work. This turns off lazy people. So people with an agenda try to deny the facts.
Animal protein is an easy shortcut.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Back in my college days 1969+, we had Arthur C Clark as a featured speaker one year for the Science Fiction series. Yes it was a long time ago when he did such things.
One of his comments at a time when oil costs were rising, OPEC was rising, and the idea of global warming was just being introduced...
He mentioned that then new research suggested that oil could be used to make proteins and therefore it was a possible food or meat substitute. Hence he suggested we should be eating oil and not burning it. That is all I remember form his talk. So, now we are going to eat bugs. Maybe we fry them in petroleum?
That is all I remember from the speech. Leonard Nimoy also spoke one year and told us how he created the Vulcan greeting hand gesture. Another event featured Gene Roddenberry who told us why he hated Tucson, Az and had bad guys come from it in a Star Trek episode. Good memories all. Fast forward 40+ years and they still make Star Trek movies, Star Trek is on MeTV, and Leonard Nimoy is on Fringe. Some how it all fits together.
What is this meat gap?
The human body does not require meat.
It doesn't need vegetables either. Inuits are remarkably healthy - more so than your typical pasty health food fanatic.
And the human body sure as hell doesn't need the poisonous crops like soya, which can't even be safely eaten unless cooked or chemically processed to break down the serpins.
Suckling long pig seems to me to be a near ideal food source, but too expensive. I think we need more rapid gestation research to provide cheap, nutritional meats.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QokSZixYbI
The vegetarian/vegan forums are all full of people who go on a fad vegan diet and end up not feeling well or having other issues because they did not adjust their diet properly
I have a vegetarian friend who goes that path for health reasons, not religion, politics nor philosophy. Once every month or two he "surprises" us (coworkers) by eating meat at lunch. He explained that when he feels his body is a little off he understands that there may be a nutritional imbalance. He understands that a meat free lifestyle is not natural for our species, its not the environment we evolved in. So he does the practical and natural thing. On extremely rare occasions he may try a meat dish out of curiosity. For example when working in the US Gulf Coast region he tried alligator with the rest of us.
Another friend is purely vegetarian. However he comes from a society that has a long history of vegetarianism and as another poster mentioned, such "tribal wisdom" is of great benefit when planning/implementing a vegetarian diet. This friend is strong and healthy, healthy as in he is a marathon runner.
Careful and well informed planning seems to be absolutely necessary for a purely vegetarian lifestyle.
What supplements? Could you elaborate?
citation needed
How about numerous Discovery and Science channel programs where medical doctors and evolutionary biologist discuss human evolution?
Why do so many recent postings remind me of Burgess' "The Wanting Seed"?
I hope you're not trolling. The stuff that is earth is made of came from the belly of some star too. You can't go up far enough to avoid the energy coming from either our sun, or someone elses.
actually it is not very important. being a vegitarian the human dosen't have any need to consume animal products.
consumption of animal products is a tradeoff. you can consume more callories in less time by shortening your life and worsening health thus gaining more time
to spend on other activities. in any case the human must consume some fresh fruits or vegetables to keep living. humans can survive on vegetables and fruits indefinetly but can't do the same with animal products.
Thanks, but I think I'll just eat more beans...
Non-militant vegetarians that I know say otherwise. They occasionally eat meat when their bodies feel a little "off", they expect a nutritional imbalance. A steak every month or two gets them feeling "right". As others have pointed out a vegetarian lifestyle requires a very carefully researched and planned diet. This is because it is not the lifestyle we evolved under.
..we could use more condoms, especially in those dirt-poor countries run by brutal tyrants. That would reduce the need for more nastily produced food.
That probably requires the removal of shitty tyranny. Here's a tool to that end: https://alkindicipher.wordpress.com/
You are not correct.
The family owns 15 acres of grassland. I'll grow my own if I have to.
Primarily certain vitamins and amino acids that you don't get from vegetables in sufficient quantities. Without access to these supplements (either in the form of additional taken supplements, or via fortified foods), living as a pure vegetarian is very difficult - if you were to "live off the land" as a veggie with no access to society, for example. You'd need to grow a specific set of plants to be able to get some of the amino acids that are plentiful in meat.
It's likely not totally impossible to survive with no meat, but practically it is very hard - we are omnivorous mammals and it really works best if we eat a balanced diet that includes meat and vegetables. (This doesn't address the issue that as a culture we do tend to eat *too much* meat, and too much of everything really).
obesity becomes a thing of the past
The foods of the future will have one defining characteristic in common with foods of the last century: they must be profitable to the mass-producers that sell them. Other characteristics are almost irrelevant, since unless people are willing and able to grow all their own food - which they aren't - then they will be forced to accept whatever is made available to them. Competition will of course ensure that there is some variety and a bit of quality to challenge quantity, as now, but that quality may increasingly only be available to a shrinking minority. The majority may wind up with soylent green, whether the raw material is insects or dead people hardly matters.
Of course that characterization could wind up completely wrong if we have an Apocalypse.
I've been vegetarian for over three decades. The only problem is the stupid questions and reactions from meat eaters.
These guys think that you can't live without cadavers like you can't live without oxygen.
Every vegan I have ever met is either chronically unhealthy, (either too fat or too skinny thanks to carbohydrate-poisoning and related insulin diseases, and in either case are always getting sick while valiantly insisting that they're healthier than before), or they're ravenous energy vampires; if you can't get enough energy from food, people take it from those around them. I've seen vegan moms bullying their skinny vegan daughters relentlessly to suck their energy. Or corner people into draining conversations to do the same. It's easy to spot when you know what to look for. Makes me sick.
To satisfy your energy requirements, to remain healthy and non-predatory, animal products are the only way.
But denial is sweet, and very few will ever admit to any of this. Too bad. I for one am pleased to remain healthy and hale on the other side of the food fence.
People will eat their veggies LONG before they eat insects.
Seriously, non-starchy plants are packed with nutrition, and (contrary to the amazingly-successful propaganda from the meat industry) have more than enough protein for humans (including growing children).
When it comes down to a roach or an avocado, which do YOU think people will find more palatable?
Whenever articles like this come out, I laugh. It reminds me of the "House of the Future!" stuff from the 50s, the sort of bizarre futurism that the Fallout series lampoons so well. The idea that people will start eating mealworms because hamburgers go up to $20 a pop in five years is just silly. You'll just see what we're seeing now, which is a combination of subtle changes in diet caused by everything from socioeconomics to health concerns.
Look at the trends today: buying local, aquaculture, sustainable agriculture, "alternative" meats such as goat, eating more varied proteins (swapping meat out for legumes). Collectively, these factors are pretty significant, and help avoid the alarmist dystopia the BBC is predicting.
I think population, particularly settlement patterns, is a more significant problem.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
africans, to stop breeding like insects, thus preventing the plant overpopulation. Look at the charts, they are the only ones breeding like rats in this, now making up the majority of this planet's population, while at the same time contributing the least ammount to research and technology (only replicating and copying what people in Europe and USA have made and invented). How about chemically castrating them, thus preventing the overpopulation, and all the other things that come with it, including meat as a luxury problems.
Lab meat is the worst of all possibilities. It's worst than factory farming, CAFOs, etc. Pour on the chemicals!
The beauty of meat is that pastured livestock can turn foods we can't eat into high quality protein and lipids, e.g., meat and fat. This has a far greater nutritional density than vegetables, grains or fruit.
The whole greenhouse gasses argument is fictious and specious. The FAO/UN retracted their claims and study due to all the flaws in the paper. Buy locally raised pasture meat and enjoy it.
It's not bullshit. If you ate nothing but salad every day, you're not going to get the same nutrition that you would from eating a lot of meats.
False dichotomy. If you ate nothing but steak every day then you'd also be dead in short order. If you eat a moderately balanced diet then you'll be fine. For a vegetarian, the big issue is making sure that you get the full set of amino acids. If you eat cheese, that's done. If you're a vegan it's a bit harder, but eating both rice and lentils will give you them all, as will several other well-known pairs. You have to have a pretty monotonous diet as a vegetarian to avoid getting all of the nutrients that you need.
Mind you, the same is true for omnivores, and in the USA a lot of them seem to manage to suffer from malnutrition (and obesity at the same time), so perhaps it is too much to expect...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm glad I have access to society, just like any meat eater has access to butchers.
I think cioppino started that way.
"The name comes from ciuppin, a word in the Ligurian dialect of the port city of Genoa, meaning "to chop" or "chopped" which described the process of making the stew by chopping up various leftovers of the day's catch."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cioppino
now it's $30 a bowl (and delicious)
hungry? https://www.google.com/search?q=cioppino&aq=f&sugexp=chrome,mod%3D19&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=Js4eUO6jJ43jigKowIGwAg&biw=1413&bih=728&sei=Y88eUM2vKMqhiALXiYCABw
You need to check your facts, buddy.
Are you aware of the numerous communities that live their entire lives, cradle-to-grave, without ever eating meat? Some of them live right here in America! Like the Seventh day Adventist sect of Christianity.
Their children are not stupid or weak or sickly or any different than anyone else's children.
Communities like this, all over the world, have empirically demonstrated that plants give us all the nutrients we need, with plenty to spare.
Lobbyists for the meat and dairy industry have spent quite a bit of money to convince western culture otherwise, with good success. Looks like they convinced you too. But the facts suggest otherwise.
Well, at least 500 million of them are. 30% of Indians consume meat regularly (for some self-identified definition of 'regularly'). Somewhere between 20-42% (depending on whose study you trust) Indians are vegetarian. There are, however, almost certainly more vegetarians in India than there are people in the USA.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is a term for growing up on a vegan diet. Malnutrition.
What is survivable (if carefully planned) for adults is lethal to children.
'Nuff said!
Perhaps the broader point is that it should apply to more people. People should be more inclined to grow or raise their own food. People should be inclined to eat more vegetables and less meat. People should stop breeding (and eating) at a pace that is beyond our sustainability. We shouldn't be wasting the majority of our food crops to feed livestock, just so we can eat beef three times per day.
The idea that a big slab of beef should be the center piece of a meal is insane, and almost exclusive to the Western World. It accounts for not only a lot of waste, but also a lot of health problems. Instead of having a 20lbs. steak and a volleyball-sized potato with an entire stick of butter melted across it, why not try some fresh fish with steamed vegetables or strips of grilled chicken with rice? Not only will it taste better, but your body will feel better in the long run.
The problem is that the meat industry receives so many subsidies that most people think it's impossible to dine affordably without stuffing their guts with red meat. Try growing your own vegetables. Raise some livestock to treat yourself throughout the year. Not only will the quality of your food go up dramatically, but you won't have to worry about ingesting all of the bizarre hormones and antibiotics that you get with commercial foods.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
It's not a "bad habit" to eat meat. Being a pure vegetarian is unnatural, but sustainable with supplements that you don't get from pure vegetables.
This is not true.
Of the various nutrients and such needed by the human body, most can be found from sources other than meat. Vitamin B12 is found in yeast extract (but alas not much else); every protein you need can be found in a varied ovo-lacto vegetarian diet.
A vegan diet (no animal products of any description) is possible but it's rather harder - there's a few proteins don't have very many vegetable sources. Unless you actively go out and learn precisely what it is you need and make efforts to ensure you include it in your diet, you can do yourself serious harm.
A diet with meat in doesn't need anything like the same level of care and understanding.
Veggies may be more efficient to grow but they are less efficient as fuel for the human body and mind. It was meat that enabled our brains to grow and to become the species we are today.
Eating habits need to change but lets not pretend that meat is not a very important food source for our species.
This is complete misinformation. You don't NEED meat and our ancestors certainly ate far far less than we do today- look at the trend over the last 100 years. We haven't gotten smarter- just sicker.
I have a friend who's veg but allows for dairy products, which is where I believe she gets a lot of her protein. That might be an interesting question, is whether or not cows as dairy machines could provide the same protein/fat requirements as meat on using less energy or space.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Predators tend to be smarter than herbivores because their prey is smarter, it doesn't take brains to catch a plant. This does not imply a causative effect between meat and intelligence however - apes and monkeys, arguably the smartest non-human animals, are technically omnivores but with the exception of a few species that eat insects, they eat plants almost exclusively.
If you've got any information that suggests that meat was or is essential to brain development I'd like to see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sljSf7KVlQ
Have gnu, will travel.
Are you aware of the numerous communities that live their entire lives, cradle-to-grave, without ever eating meat? Some of them live right here in America! Like the Seventh day Adventist sect of Christianity.
Their children are not stupid or weak or sickly or any different than anyone else's children.
Are you sure? I mean, they are religious... Seriously though, there are no indigenous vegetarians. None. There may have been some, but they were probably eaten by whoever lives now where they used to live.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You need to check your facts, buddy. Are you aware of the numerous communities that live their entire lives, cradle-to-grave, without ever eating meat? Some of them live right here in America! Like the Seventh day Adventist sect of Christianity.
Guess again. One of my grandfathers is Seventh Day Adventist and I've spent many a weekend at his house enjoying vegetarian food. I will confess that I think Indian culture offers the best vegetarian dishes.
That said, a purely vegetarian lifestyle is contrary to human evolution. It takes very careful research and planning to go that route. As others have pointed out it helps when coming from a "tribal knowledge/culture" environment. However that does not change the fact that it is an unnatural act, biologically speaking, that takes careful planning to accommodate.
This does not imply a causative effect between meat and intelligence however - apes and monkeys, arguably the smartest non-human animals, are technically omnivores but with the exception of a few species that eat insects, they eat plants almost exclusively.
Bullshit.
If you've got any information that suggests that meat was or is essential to brain development I'd like to see it.
How about that I eat meat, and I can use Google?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrace_%28agriculture%29
There are a lot of rice grown on Terrace as not everywhere is as lucky to have flat land.
You don't NEED meat
No, you can just eat vegetables all goddamn day like a cow.
and our ancestors certainly ate far far less than we do today- look at the trend over the last 100 years. We haven't gotten smarter- just sicker.
Some of our ancestors ate just as much meat or more. But they didn't eat the processed foods and they didn't eat such a large percentage of carbohydrates. Grains were developed into the varieties we know and nom today at the same time we developed civilization.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you've got any information that suggests that meat was or is essential to brain development I'd like to see it.
The argument is that meat was key to the brain's evolution, its increase in size and capability during the evolution of our species. I am not discussing the growth/development of a particular brain. Its certainly possible to develop a healthy brain with a vegetarian lifestyle, its just more difficult to do so since one is fighting biology to a degree.
Perhaps the broader point is that it should apply to more people. People should be more inclined to grow or raise their own food. People should be inclined to eat more vegetables and less meat. People should stop breeding (and eating) at a pace that is beyond our sustainability. We shouldn't be wasting the majority of our food crops to feed livestock, just so we can eat beef three times per day.
I have a very small garden (maybe 5 metres by 5 metres, including the very small patio. I'm not going to be raising many livestock if that's what I've got to work with; it's barely big enough to fit a rabbit hutch. It's big enough to grow a few veggies and fruits, but I'm not exactly going to manage subsistence living any time soon.
A lot of people I know grow a few edibles (tomato plants, gooseberry bushes, etc.) and that's no bad thing from a sustainability point of view. But once you factor in just how little space most people have, plus gardening incompetence (most of what I grow gets murdered by aphids or harvested by the magpies before I can get my teeth into it), you're not exactly going to save the world.
To all of you that modded him down. Romney is bat shit crazy. you guys had someone that was normal and had sound ideas and you all ignored him.
Fricking Ron Paul would have fixed it all and honestly even grabbed some democrat voters. but no you all went for the rich guy that is so out of touch it's funny.
Lumpy IS spot on. the republican party is full of fricking nutjobs. The Dems are not much better, but the one HONEST guy comes along and you all ignore him.
It really speaks volumes about how dumb the republican party voters are.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Please don't treat vegans and vegetarians the same. It's a broad brush and suggests you're not actually thinking about what you're saying.
There are many vegetarians (who eat animal products) who aren't vegans. We're fine. We're not sick, we feel great, and have been living this way for years.
You *don't need meat* to get protein. If you add it up, it's totally doable (and I do it every day without thinking about it). Yes, you give up a certain variety, but you gain some others too.
Maybe it requires a certain amount of civilization to achieve, but we've been there for at least 2000 years.
Also, while it's true in theory that meat is an easy source of protein, what I realized after becoming vegetarian is that most sources of meat actually don't have as much protein as you think. That sausage you ate probably doesn't have as much protein as a bowl of yogurt, cottage cheese, or serving of firm tofu. Neither do many of the luncheon meats that you might eat. I'm not saying this to shame you--I'm just saying this to point out that the need for a meat diet is no less of a scam than a vegetarian diet.
If you want to eat meat because it's easier for you, or you like it, or whatever, fine. I don't care. But don't spread lies about vegetarianism just to avoid facing moral questions about your diet. Face the decision and make it. You could live without meat, you just choose not to.
This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity.
Or we could use it to buy things.
Things we like.
Veggies may be more efficient to grow but they are less efficient as fuel for the human body and mind
citation needed.
It was meat that enabled our brains to grow and to become the species we are today.
citation needed
(and seems doubtful to me since farming is associated with the growth of society.)
Omnivores like humans can usually survive without meat for long periods of time, but it's an extreme way of handling your organism, and certainly not "just fine". In the case of India, it is partly alleviated by vegetarian culture having ancient roots, which implies at least some natural selection taking place to reduce the most egregious effects of leaving on plants alone. But I wonder if you've noticed how your average vegetarian Indian (and especially Jains) is shorter and more skinny than your average European.
No, we do not require meat. This is simply not true. We require some animal amino acids, but they don't have to come from meat. You have to be very careful to eat only plants, but if you are a vegetarian, you are 100% fine.
http://beyondmeat.com/
Am I the only one who thinks the food of the future will be plants that are genetically engineered to contain high amounts of the nutrients that humans need? Wouldn't probably be possible for all nutrients so the rest would have to be synthesized and supplemented.
But seeing so many people here who believe you have to eat meat to stay healthy, well...
Find a way to get out the meat, and I'll be the first to eat it. If you expect me to eat everything inside, even the poop, no thanks.
"The human body does not require meat."
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
Unless I'm much mistaken, many Buddhist sects mandate vegetarianism. Buddhism is about 2500 years old. Jainism is even stricter, and that's 3000 or so years old. I'm guessing the followers of those religions figured out a way of substituting meat decently enough without modern technology.
If you're not a vegan, the only super-high-tech meat substitute you really need is eggs. Eggs contain almost exactly the same protein, amino acids, vitamin B12, and other nutrients as meat. Basically, they are meat (an unfertilised egg has exactly the same composition as a fertilised egg, much the same as the animal it grows in to). That plus the same mix of vegetables and nuts that meat eaters should be eating anyway and you're nutritionally good to go.
I'm no vegetarian, but I think that if I had to reduce my meat intake to one portion a month or something (which $30 a cut would probably imply) I'd survive happily enough. As an enthusiastic cook I'd be very sad about it, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
I'm already allergic to a major component of food cuisines the world around. Specifically, I am allergic to milk proteins. Want to give it a try? Go for a week without eating any dairy. No milk, no pizza, no ice cream and no cheese. Read every label, don't eat anything with whey or casein in it. Your mind will be expanded. You have literally no idea how many things on supermarket shelves have milk byproducts in them.
I have a few notes to share with you if you want to try this: 1. The less processed the food, the less likely it has milk byproducts in it. 2. Real sourdough has no dairy. 3. The only labels you don't need to read are the ones that say "vegan" on them. 4. Most soy cheeses have milk proteins in them anyways. 5. Soy is your friend.
Optionally, you may try my other food allergy at the same time: Shellfish.
You should turn signatures off.
We haven't gotten smarter- just fatter. FTFY
Veggies are more energy efficient indeed, but humans need animal protein, too.
It is 50x more efficient to get the same amount of protein from insects than it is from cattle.
http://highefficiency.blogspot.de/2012/08/environmental-impact-meat-consumption.html
Another obligatory bit of irrelevance:
Terry Bisson's story on film...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE
Yeah because it is oh so hard to make sure you get enough b vitamins and omega fatty acids.
Not!.
Bear in mind that the real issue here is not what our ancestors ate or how "natural" the diet may be for humans. The issue is whether a vegetarian diet is a sufficient substitute to meat if/when meat becomes unavailable. And also whether such a diet is preferable to bugs.
The evidence at hand suggests that the answer is "yes" in both cases.
Did you eat grasshoppers whole, or only their meat? I'm squeamish about eating brains, intestines, and so on. I wouldn't mind eating insect meat if it can be separated.
I am not talking about dumping animal proteins - this is actually really hard to do right, I'm talking about not eating meat. Another easy source of animal proteins are milk (with related products like yoghurt) or eggs.
Couldn't apply to most people on the planet
Really? You think there are 3.5 billion people in the world who are in a position not to be able to transition away from meat if they wanted to? How do you come to that conclusion?
In most places, meat is the most expensive and least abundant food commodity. Grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits, (some of the cheapest food commodities, except in frigid regions) in the right combination can very easily replace nutritional value of meat. With dairy, that replacement becomes nearly trivial. Pretty much anywhere you can have meat, you can have dairy and its more sustainable because you keep the animals alive.
There are select communities of people (i.e those living in polar or mountainous regions) who genuinely rely on meat nutritionally. I would be shocked if this is most of the planet.
I have to second this.
And ask any ecologist if there is enough land to grow the plants to feed all humans.
Vegans can only exist because the majority of us aren't.
There's a reason why people are looking at farming algae and seaweed, not banana trees and carrots.
We haven't gotten smarter- just fatter. FTFY
You can't fix that for me because I didn't say it. And we are sicker in some ways. Yes, we have cures for a variety of diseases that we didn't have then, but that's orthogonal to the point. Eating a bunch of carbs including lots of sugar feeds bacteria that are harmful. Eating sugar supresses the immune system. And people are getting diseases of excess more today, like gout. So we're probably not sicker, and we have more life expectancy, but we are more prone to certain sicknesses.
I do think the AC's post was full of lameness but that wasn't one of the lame parts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Veggies may be more efficient to grow but they are less efficient as fuel for the human body and mind. It was meat that enabled our brains to grow and to become the species we are today.
That's just a common misrepresentation of the "Expensive Tissue Hypothesis", which itself has been dispelled by now. Cf. http://paleovegan.blogspot.de/2011/11/its-curtains-for-expensive-tissue.html
[citation needed]
T. Colin Cambpell, a Ph.D. studied the matter in depth for decades alongside other researchers and revealed, among many other things, that a) our bodies require far less protein than many believe, and b) plants provide an abundance of all required nutrients. Check out the China Study, a spectacular read. Also, a quick look at the vegan wiki entry verifies this ad nauseum. I'm not a hardliner, but there's a *lot* of misinformation floating around this thread, not the least of which revolves around meat being the only viable source of human protein.
Bullshit.
Um. Well, the headline is: "First Proof Gorillas Eat Monkeys?" but like all headlines that end in a question mark, the answer is no:
"There's plenty of opportunities" for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. "I don't really think they're eating meat."
That said, the article does say that chimps and bonobos have been known to eat mammals. Something of which I was not aware. So that's interesting.
And this article:
How about that I eat meat, and I can use Google?
Starts with the headline "Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter" and then goes on to say that what really did it was learning how to cook:
Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern human.
Although it does say the the meat was important as well, sorta. Point for you there I guess. I appreciate the links, at any rate.
You cannot eat *random* vegetable and be healthy. It is a scientific fact that not all vegetable have all amino acid and oligo element and you have to combine some. Meat as a *single source* cover it all. Vegetable do not. Sure you might be healthy because you took the habit , conscious or not, to feed from various vegetable source. But don't pretend that it is as easy as eating from a single source. That would be foolish. Sure it is not rocket science to mix vegetable source, but it is definitively harder than eating meat/fish.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I realise when I eat hot dogs the contents of the hot dog is probably far more disgusting than any bug but I'm not eating bugs. I don't eat *that* much meat anyway. I'll pay the premium and mostly each veg. I suspect it won't be that different given that I don't buy cheap meat anyway. There's something wrong if the meat you're buying is cheaper than cat food.
What evidence do you have for it being not natural? It is true that without some extra care you will probably have low levels of B12, but if they didn't fortify salt with iodine everybody would be deficient in that too. The "normal" diet is culturally based around meat, but that doesn't mean that you can't survive fine without it. Besides, lots of things we do and consider normal are unnatural. Wearing clothes, shaving, drinking the milk of other mammals, those are not natural things.
Although it does say the the meat was important as well, sorta. Point for you there I guess. I appreciate the links, at any rate.
You're lucky, you caught me on a day when I felt like doing the googling that other people should be doing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here's another interesting link for you. I wouldn't be surprised if Gorillas do eat monkeys, cos chimps do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZhsM9OzeEo
it's mostly the gov't that allows you to have meat, specifically farm subsidies that a) make grain cheaper than the market would normally allow and b) stabilize the market so that people don't just grow one really profitable crop and fsck up the soil. You owe most of your stable food supply to the government programs. This isn't to say a sufficiently corrupt gov't can't screw it up, but it usually takes a dictatorship (e.g. China), which at that point isn't so much government as it is everyone doing what a one mad man says because they're expecting the be the ones that profit by it. I think we're calling it Kleptocracy these days.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If salt wasn't iodized meat eaters would be deficient in that too. How is this any different?
The only problem with vegetarians I've had is acting like I'm doing something wrong when I don't do what they do.
I have lived, in the past, a vegetarian food style for a couple years, and no one knew. That's how I want it from you, as well.
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Yay, muttons not a meat!
Rejoice, vegetarians!
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Picking the right stuff is pretty easy, just include a mix of legumes (beans) , corn, and wheat and that keeps your essential amino acids provided; if your mix in some dairy and eggs it's pretty much trivial. Just don't expect me to give up my meat.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We have canine teeth. Our first tools were for killing and skinning animals.
Q.E.D.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The "normal" diet is culturally based around meat ...
I'd say the opposite is true. A diet including meat is consistent with our biology. The vegetarian diet would seem to be culturally based.
Wearing clothes, shaving, drinking the milk of other mammals, those are not natural things.
The farming necessary to sustain a vegetarian lifestyle is as unnatural as those things.
We haven't gotten smarter- just sicker.
And yet we live much, much, longer....
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Are dumbfucks like you trying to turn me vegan by being such idiots?
Man can survive on a variety of diets, inclusive of meat or not. We can be herbivores if we wish to be. We can subsist on a purely vegan diets. You are a twenty first century man. Man didn't evolve in an environment that featured shoelaces and bank accounts and refrigeration and flying on airplanes and math, but we do just fine. Past societies had arcane dietary rules that they had to learn as well, and so did you, but you already learned them so it doesn't occur to you that you did. I am unfamiliar with the mass vegan starvations. I am familiar with food security being constant theme throughout history and that there have been many mass starvations that have occurred, and they have nothing to do with "people trying to eat like herbivores". Climate induced reductions in food production coupled with an expanding human population is a much more relevant concern for our civilization, in which case increasing the potential carrying capacity of our food production through diet adaptation is a relevant thing to consider. Personal responsibility in food consumption is independent of diet type: how many of those who are obese and suffer from diabetes are vegans? Few I would imagine. The stereotype in your head of an anemic vegan hippie trying to shove vegetables down your throat is just a stereotype.
Vikings on Greenland wouldn't eat fish so they died. Veganism is your fish, something you culturally oppose because you're a red blood meat eater and that is how you were raised and identify with and questing your diet now is tantamount to questioning your entire foundation of belief. Grow up and stop being so insecure.
That is my whole point! We shouldn't be looking to what is "natural" we should do what makes us happy. I am not saying you shouldn't eat meat if that is what you want, but don't tell people that it is necessary to be healthy then deride them for their personal choices.
Horses have incisors too and they are most definitely herbivores. We have lots of vestigial parts which do not serve a purpose any more.
Humans need far more than energy to survive.
Uh .. err... hrm.
No, no they don't.
Everything is energy, it's just transference of it in different methods.
The energy in food is transferred through metabolic methods into muscles, and other tissues in your body. It's basic science...
Your movements transfer that energy into other methods of transfer. (e.g. heat, chemical recomposition, cellular construction, etc)
Your thoughts transfer that energy into other methods through electrical impulses, hormonal creation/dispersion, etc.
Literally everything you do is energy.
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You need to check your facts, buddy. Are you aware of the numerous communities that live their entire lives, cradle-to-grave, without ever eating meat? Some of them live right here in America! Like the Seventh day Adventist sect of Christianity.
Sorry for this second post but I forgot to mention previously that my mother was raised in that church and its vegetarian lifestyle. However when pregnant she indulged in the dietary cravings that she was experiencing and had some steaks and burgers. According to her this is not uncommon, although done very discretely to avoid the social stigma. She and other women of the church decided to trust their "god-given instincts" over a "man's interpretation of scripture". Vegetarianism is after all only recommended by the church.
Cradle-to-grave may not be as common as you think.
I'd like to see a Meat Tree. With enough genetic engineering, we can have a mammalian tree with bones for branches and skin for bark. It would grow "fruit" which are bundles of meat. Its mind would be connected among several trees, and hopefully wouldn't evolve into a Zerg hivemind.
Though I wouldn't touch it with a 1000 foot pole, it'd be cool. A complete monstrosity and affront to nature, and possibly the purest expression of evil, but might solve our food problems, nonetheless.
Nope, I eat cows fed specially-engineered seafloor vent Archae.
Again, that came from the sun.
Just a LONG LONG time ago.
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This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity.
I only take issue with this one statement.
Hopefully that charity is not in the form of free food. That way leads to more poverty, suffering and starvation [1].
(There's also a whole argument on how population will always rise to a limiting cap and how education and Women's rights is creating a cap lower than breeding-until-we-starve or war-ourselves-out. I'd rather focus on the free food fallacy.)
How? Once farmers can afford a better future for themselves and their children then can afford some labor saving devices, those huge populations to till the soil disappear. They can't when their livelihood is undermined by 'charity.'
Let's use the out of date first/second/third world country model, since it fits closest to the breakdown in your argument [2].
It is not the relatively wealthy people living in cities who are staving, but the poor farmers who cannot farm competitively with free food given in terms of 'charity.'
Compared to every other labor-intensive industry, farming sucks:
Even in the "first world" the farmers are heavily subsidized to protect their non-competitive industry [3].
The only real reason to farm (or ranch) is that you cannot get food any other way. (Queue meme about "Star Trek replicators and the post-farming society.")
The only African countries with first-world type wages have barred these 'charity' food dumps and have protectionism for their farmers. Food is expensive there, but then people are not starving due to collapsed local farming industry. (This excludes countries like the Republic of Congo which has incredible wage disparity and a Petroleum based economy.) The old story of an American farmer's child going to the big city to make their fortune seems to work in Africa as well.
The key to bringing a "third world" country out of the third world is to first not destroy its indigenous markets [4]. Then the population curve works out like other industrialized nations as farming efficiency improves and farming becomes a marginalized industry. (Unless you somehow think Africans are different from all other people.)
Dumping McDonald's leftovers onto people never solved anyone's problems yesterday and it won't start solving them tomorrow either [5].
How about scholarships to improve the education of ex-farmers and get them out of what is a dead-end career so they can feed their families?
That need doesn't go away sans meat, it just gets filled in a different way.
Agreed, and it's not terribly hard to emulate the taste/texture/protein potency of a hamburger with soy and other plant structures.
To do it right, it's expensive today since it's a very niche market. Honestly, I could care less as long as I'm able to get an avacado burger. Be it a plant-based burger or not, as long as the taste/texture/nutritional values are within tolerances.
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Wait, please don't eat the ants like me. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That is my whole point! We shouldn't be looking to what is "natural" we should do what makes us happy. I am not saying you shouldn't eat meat if that is what you want, but don't tell people that it is necessary to be healthy then deride them for their personal choices.
That would be no problem since I am not saying that. What I am saying is that (1) Lets not pretend that meat is not a very important food source for our species and (2) Careful and well informed planning seems to be absolutely necessary for a purely vegetarian lifestyle. This lifestyle runs contrary to our biology and takes some care to accommodate.
One of the benefits of meat is a B vitamin. I forget exactly which is it, but it is difficult to get it strictly through vegan foods.
I used to run around with a vegan who about once a year or so went to get a b12 shot at the doctors. You could see a noticeable difference in how perky she was, how energetic and so on after getting the shot. I guess vegan foods have this vitamin but it either isn't in a high enough concentration or if in a form that is difficult for the body to take advantage of.
It could be that she wasn't smart enough to get a complete diet. You should have seen the look on her face when I explained what Jell-O really was. But my understanding is that a lot of strict vegans has that issue too.
lol, yes we do. Energy is a component that is consumed in every process, but there are other materials to all of them. What do you think is the purpose of all those vitamins and minerals we eat? The body needs energy and the raw materials to go on replacing what it consumed (the remains of which it left behind in excrement).
Some of it came from a sun, but not OUR sun. Earth's internal heat is part residual heat from planet formation, part radioactive decay of elements produced in old supernovae.
7th day Adventist aren't completely vegan. They allow dairy products and fish.
Their health probably is more related to inclusions in and other factors of their diet rather then their limits on meat. For instance, the bread needs to be made from whole grain flour, not just wheat flower. Instead of drinking fruit juices, they encourage it's consumption of the whole fruit instead. They limit fats and oils and attempt to get it from nuts instead. They shy away from fried foods, eat a lot in the morning. less at lunch, and even less at dinner. They avoid alcohol, sweets, and stimulants like caffeine.
Probably the biggest load of BS ever posted on /.
If you need a citation for this, I have nothing to say to you.
I really don't think we'll ever worry too much about not meeting our fat requirements...
Protein in cow milk is 30–35 grams of protein per liter. That's about 8 grams of protein per 8 oz cup.
Using myself as an example, the below calculation has me at 91 grams/daily. That's 3 liters of milk.
How to Calculate Your Protein Needs:
1. Weight in pounds divided by 2.2 = weight in kg
2. Weight in kg x 0.8-1.8 gm/kg = protein gm.
Use a lower number if you are in good health and are sedentary (i.e., 0.8). Use a higher number (between 1 and 1.8) if you are under stress, are pregnant, are recovering from an illness, or if you are involved in consistent and intense weight or endurance training.
Example: 154 lb male who is a regular exerciser and lifts weights
154 lbs/2.2 = 70kg
70kg x 1.5 = 105 gm protein/day
source: http://exercise.about.com/cs/nutrition/a/protein_2.htm
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Non-militant vegetarians that I know say otherwise. They occasionally eat meat when their bodies feel a little "off", they expect a nutritional imbalance. A steak every month or two gets them feeling "right".
With all due respect (actually no: all due scorn), this is nonsense. I'm a "non-militant" vegetarian & know many others, & none of us does this. We simply don't regard those steaks as food, any more than (say) the computer I'm typing this on. But I suspect that you know that, and are just trolling.
I'm raising rabbits through the simple expedient of not weeding my lawn. (rabbits love crabgrass). My wife would be upset if I trapped and ate them, though.
A potato that big will require at least two sticks of butter.
Why don't you try not telling me what will taste good? I dislike both fish and steamed vegetables. Grilled chicken is typically dry and often tasteless.
Remember the rabbits? Any attempt on my part to grow vegetables is just going to result in more and fatter rabbits.
An interesting idea, but I don't think I can raise a cow on less than an acre. Subsistence farming is dead in the US, and it _always_ sucked.
The plural of anecdote is not "evidence." I know several non-militant vegetarians who have been so most of their lives with no ill-effects whatsoever. Do you feel proven wrong now?
And anyway, a few vegetarians that sometimes eat meat does not mean a vegetarian diet is lacking in nutrition or requires lots of planning.
Hint: it requires next to zero planning. You just need to get something from the major groups (fruits, greens, beans, and grains) over the course of a week and you are good.
The only risks are deprivation of a few vitamins and omega 6. That is what makes people freak out and think they have to plan things out perfectly. Seriously, that is stupid overkill. Buy a simple algae-based dietary supplement and you are good to go.
No we don't. Been a vegetarian for 20 years now and I'm surviving quite well thank you very much.
Ok, thanks. I was aware of this, but given some of your posts, wondered if you were.
Years back, did a crash six-month no-meat diet. Used "Diet for a Small Planet" as initial resource (great section on amino-acid requirements and balance, improved in the second edition), abetted by further reading at university libes, and help from several people I knew in town. I allowed grains, nuts, legumes, vegetables, fruit, and a bit of seaweed.
Worked fine, felt good, but I continued taking vitamins. (It's been said that Westerners have the most expensive urine in the world. Given my peripatetic diet over the years I figure it's just a good practice.)
Yup, we're omnivores - adapted to eat whatever we can hunt, catch, pick or grow. Finding reasonable balance, not so easy.
In my family from south india we were all vegetarians from many generations. I am not sure how long ago in my lineage did we switch to a veggie diet. I dont think our brains are/were any inferior compared to meat eaters. The vegetarian diet has not been given enough attention to understand that protein and all other bodily needs are available among veggies and grains.
If you say eating meat enabled our brains to grow, and understanding that we have been eating meat since 85 million years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution) from the time we separated from primates, then why is it that only in than the last 500 years have we advanced so much, why not earlier ?
The environmental impact of raising meat, almost as much if not more than automobiles, has been written about so widely in nytimes and other leading publications that it is hard to ignore. There are deeply entrenched notions about the need for meat in our diet. Our race needs to slow down on our meat intake and research the vegetarian alternatives.
Non-militant vegetarians that I know say otherwise. They occasionally eat meat when their bodies feel a little "off", they expect a nutritional imbalance. A steak every month or two gets them feeling "right".
With all due respect (actually no: all due scorn), this is nonsense. I'm a "non-militant" vegetarian & know many others, & none of us does this. We simply don't regard those steaks as food, any more than (say) the computer I'm typing this on. But I suspect that you know that, and are just trolling.
So you deny steaks are food and claim to be non-militant. Talk about being in denial ... Militant does not mean you are some sort of eco-warrior freeing caged animals, rather it means you are not exactly open minded. Deny that steaks are food seems closed minded.
We haven't gotten smarter- just sicker.
And yet we live much, much, longer....
Medical science has outpaced our bad habits.
7th day Adventist aren't completely vegan. They allow dairy products and fish.
Oh yeah? Well, I've heard of people being vegan except for goat cheese and bacon, so I guess it takes all kinds.
Kidding aside, all of that seems pretty sound to me. Not that I'm going to live that way, because I have an abiding love for both [well-marbled] red meat and beer. Not to mention pork products, thank you powers-that-be for pork.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Free birth control for everybody!!!!!
There are no real vegetarians... they may try and be vegetarian eating only vegetables...
but here in the U.S. all store bought vegetables come from Monsanto.
All Monsanto backed crops (ALL U.S. commercial crops) are genetically modified and labeled "Round up Ready"
The way they made these plants round up ready was they used porcine genes (pig genes) spliced into the seeds so the plants resist Round Up.
Monsanto owns hundreds of slaughter houses around the U.S. and over 20 Horse slaughter plants in Mexico for genetic testing and manipulation of all Monsanto agriculture in the U.S.
So if you are a vegetarian and you bought your corn, green beans, baked beans, rice, tomatoes, etc in a U.S. grocery store, then you have eaten meat based products since they are all come from monsanto round up ready seed which was created using porcine dna to modify the seeds.
Trying to grow any kind of a food crop on fairly steep hills is pretty futile, while cows or sheep are happy to graze there.
And if one of the big ones should happen to fall, cow-sheep-cow pie will then roll to us all.
... I dont think our brains are/were any inferior compared to meat eaters ...
The original post was not suggesting that. It speaks to the evolution of our species not the development of any particular modern person's brain. No one is saying that vegetarianism is not doable, just that it takes more care and planning. Furthermore it is pointed out by other posters that some groups have embedded such care and planning into their culture.
... then why is it that only in than the last 500 years have we advanced so much, why not earlier ...
We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors and only "recently" have we attained the critical mass of knowledge necessary.
Would escargot be one of them? Who in the hell thought it was a great idea to eat slugs in a shell?! It must have been out of desperation would be my guess.
Life is not for the lazy.
There's a special term for vegetarians who have a steak every month or two - liars. Vegetarians don't eat meat. It's a simple concept.
If you're going to be a vegetarian then you need the tribal knowledge to back it up and most Westerners simply don't have that.
There's a middle ground that most people don't consider that doesn't require any of that tribal knowledge...simply drastically scaling back the amount of meat we eat. I'm what I term a considerate vegetarian. I eat meat just often enough that my digestive system knows how to handle it...usually once a week or so. I do it because I don't want to be that guy that forces people to cook special dishes when I visit for dinner or order special dishes when we eat out...I like eating family style and I don't want to inconvenience people.
I'm an athlete and apart from the fact that I now struggle to keep weight on instead of taking weight off, I've noticed no ill effects. I eat what I like and, unless I've stumbled upon that "tribal wisdom" you mentioned, the limited amounts of meat I eat are covering any nutrient deficiencies I get from my vegetarian diet. People seem to talk about the issue as if there's nothing between daily double bacon cheeseburgers and a completely vegetarian diet, but the reality is that it's a continuum and almost all the benefits of a vegetarian diet can be had by eating vegetarian the majority of the time and splurging on meat every now and then. This diet becomes even more sensible in a world where meat prices make it a luxury...you splurge on 1-2 meals a week and eat vegetarian the rest of the time. Healthy, sensible and you're not the jackass using a disproportionate amount of the resources on this planet. What's not to like about that?
So what? What we used to eat is not the only thing we can eat. Evolution is a process of changing. Our diets can change too.
Today, the evidence at hand makes it quite clear that a vegetarian diet is suitable. That doesn't make it required or anything, though I am sure plenty of people will find it preferable to a diet of bugs. Ick!
I am amused by the vehemence with which people insist that vegetarian diets are insufficient, or require so much planning as to be impractical. This just is not true. That doesn't make vegetarianism obligatory or anything. Jeez.
This. I'm a picky eater who grew up eating almost exclusively peanut butter sandwiches and orange juice. The peanut butter was more or less my sole source of protein and fat, the bread constituted most of my starch and fibre, and the orange juice consisted most of my sugars and since it was calcium-fortified, my calcium. I got my vitamins (esp. B-12) from multivitamin tablets. I'm no less healthy than anyone else I know, and as a child doctors would pronounce me healthy at all my check-ups. Sure, I was a bit shorter and skinnier than my friends, but the former runs in the family and the latter I consider to be a good thing.
Of course, the above situation would be utterly impossible 10,000 years ago, but I don't live 10,000 years ago, do I?
Perhaps... But I'd probably always pick quality of life over quantity of life. Sure, I'd shave a couple years off to have a nice monthly steak, with a decent red, washed down with a tasty bit of aged port. Or lamb... wonderful lamb... Damn, now I'm hungry... Perhaps tomorrow I'll be having some nice simple Irish stew.
I also doubt we're much sicker. Or at least I haven't seen any credible evidence of it. I further doubt that if we have, its attributable to meat in general. We have a lot of nasty chemicals floating around, we eat pretty much garbage food. I'd more attribute this, if, again, true, to McDonalds and Cheetos, than to meat in general. Also Americans completely lack portion control...
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Well, I've always said it is hard to hate hog. Especially when it's slow smoke roasted until it pulls apart with ease and put in a sandwich bun smothered with creamy coleslaw with some sweet pork and beans on the side.
Evolution is a process of changing. Our diets can change too.
Evolution is the process of adaptation to the environment, so you can have more children.
I am amused by the vehemence with which people insist that vegetarian diets are insufficient, or require so much planning as to be impractical. This just is not true. That doesn't make vegetarianism obligatory or anything. Jeez.
I get annoyed because many vegans/vegetarians are almost evangelical in their fervor, and have to tell everyone that they are vegetarians, and how everyone in the universe should also be. If you don't want to eat meat, fine, I don't care. If you keep telling me not to, then I'll get a bit pissy at you. Also, the fact that many of the veggies in this discussion are idiots, and don't know much about human history ("we never ate meat!"), or saying that a diet with meat in it is somehow detrimental.
I am amused by the vehemence with which people insist that vegetarian diets are insufficient, or require so much planning as to be impractical. This just is not true. That doesn't make vegetarianism obligatory or anything. Jeez.
I'm sure they are perfectly sufficient (I went to school with several vegetarians and pescetarians who were fine), and they do require a fair bit of planning... But it is possible. Sadly in the west it is not a diet for poor people, though. It is doable other places, but here it isn't. Or at least it isn't enough variety to keep it nice. I had a girlfriend who quit a 10 year vegitarian binge because she moved down in income a bit and got sick of the monotony (and being forced to order pilaf at restaurants). She also got sick of me eating better looking food with meat in it. She did wind up at the hospital after trying meat though, since he system stopped being able to break it down as well as an omnivore like me.
Some vegetarians (not the majority, but the loud idiotic ones, who really think anyone should give two shits about what they like eating) do think it should be obligatory. Or think that dietary choices somehow make them superior.. I think its probably just cognitive dissonance rearing its ugly head again.. You made a major life-style choice, and sacrificed a lot of dietary variety, so obviously it must be the best possible choice, and everyone else who chose different is inferior.
Again, some, not all. A smart omnivorous diet is just as healthy as a smart vegetarian diet. A stupid one is just as bad, no matter what dietary road you want to take.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
"The human body does not require meat."
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
You should say that to 31% of India's population who have been vegetarians for many centuries. I usually don't criticise other people's diet but idiots like you, who try to pose as an expert about a subject you don't really know, are really annoying.
Here's a little heads-up for people who are flapping their arms and screaming about meat, meat prices, and all the rest of it.
First, basics:
Is meat a big industry? Yes.
Is a lot of arable land going to feed, hay, bedding and all the rest of it? Yes.
However:
As fuel becomes more expensive (natural gas, diesel, whatever you like), artificial fertilisers, pesticides and so on become more expensive. This is already happening. Using the tractors and all that good stuff becomes more expensive too (because it takes a lot of diesel to run your 400hp tractor, you see).
Oh dear. What a calamity. Now we can't keep up with where we are today, let along Borlaug's productivity curve of improvements. We're all doomed.
Wait a moment, we can still get fertiliser from some traditional sources. Like manure.
We can also get some animals to eat pests. Like, say, chickens and ducks.
We can even get some animals to clear land, like sheep and goats.
We can even (hold onto your hats, I'm about to get radical here) use animals for power. Horse power. (Get it? What a far-out coincidence. Horse power. With actual horses.)
Whaddya know, there are now all these animals around, serving our purposes. But they don't live forever, and if we kill and cut them up the right way, we end up with meat!
Yup, I think meat will still be on the menu for a while to come. Why? Because farmers are businessmen, and because when I see the possibility of an additional revenue stream aside from the wonderful effects of manure on my land, I jump at it. Meat turns out to be a pretty easy sell.
You know, I love how there's this cultural assumption that farmers are all congenital idiots owing to massive inbreeding and aggressive isolation from all forms of education.
Many farmers in this country actually have degrees (not even all of them in agriculture) and quite a few have postgraduate qualifications. Pick up an agricultural weekly - there's a lot in there about the chemistry of nutrition, for example. But there I go, rambling again. Must be early onset Alzheimer's playing with my synapses.
Take a deep, slow breath, and repeat after me:
Not all farmland is created equal.
Not all crops can be grown everywhere, and especially not sustainably.
Many lands currently in use for grazing are used for grazing because they're essentially useless for much else (unless you want to blanket, say, Montana in pressurised greenhouses, in which case you'd better be getting federal support along the lines of the defence budget).
Many animals have a synergistic relationship with plant agriculture, and consequently would be produced anyhow because they are intrinsically valuable on their own terms.
Oh, but of course, mister oh-so-brilliant vegetarian booster, I'm sure you've already figured out the exact blend of plants which will give you the particular amino acids which will give you an adequate diet. I'm sure that you have studied in detail the diets of, for instance, followers of the Jain religion. Perhaps your ethno-culinary studies also led you to understand the agronomy of the areas of India which support a relatively useful, relatively balanced vegetarian diet?
Oh, you skipped that bit, in your hurry to declare agronomic omniscience?
Go back, and do your research so that you stop being so ridiculously wrong.
Because I'm a generous individual who actually would like people to improve themselves, here are a few hot topics for you to study:
the effects of rainfall patterns (not mere total rainfall) on crops
the effects of altitude on crops
the effects of animal activity, including predation, fertilisation and manure distribution on crops
yield curves
micronutrient availability in different soils and the effect of that on crops
the cost/yield/price relationship of various crops in various locations
There'll be a test next Wednesday.
Yes, you are right. Horses have incisors.
Why, I hear you cry, could a hooved herbivore possibly need incisors?
Watch a horse eating, and you will see: it uses the incisors to bite off bits of plants, which it then masticates with its other teeth.
Sheep have incisors in their lower jaws, by way of contrast, but only a hard palate above. They still use their incisors to bite off plant parts and swallow to get them into their rumens.
For the advanced class: if a sheep loses an incisor, it is called broken-mouthed. If it loses enough, it can't eat enough to maintain condition, and gradually starves.
Human dentition is another topic, and frequently a religious one for ideological veg(etari)ans, but if you're going to make bald statements about the uses of the dentition of other species, for pity's sake at least scan wikipedia first?
If any of you are dumb enough to buy this shit (both the global warming lies andthe soy-insect burgers that go with it),
you can't be helped and deserve it.
Al Gore and all the other little shits will be eating steak while you waste away from the toxic chemicals laden GMO
tofu-cricket burgers and icecream made from maggots. Me I still got about I reckon 30 years to "serve" in this shithole
of a world before my "sentence" is up. Sorry to break it to you but this place is really a dump once your eyes are
open as mine are. I'm not going to put up with this, food around here is already bad enough unfit really for consumption
at this point. I know I'm going to kick the bucket in time but I'm not going to put up with the disease and pain this would
bring.
None of these retards have heard of vegetables or grains? Quinoa is a complete protein food source, so it's not like anyone can whine about not "gettin' yer protains". Also, two little cups of cooked quinoa contain the entirety of an adult's daily iron needs. Vegetables cover everything else you need, by far.
PS: Get some sun, it's good for you.
Perhaps you have heard that present-day mankind consumes the resources of 2 earths -- if you take into account that raising kettle wastes 10x more water and pollutes the environment dramatically compared to crops, at the same time reducing the protein content per kg by another factor of 10 you can easily see what you have to do. [if you find the above numbers vague --> go here: http://www.vegetarismus.ch/info/eoeko.htm ]
Raising cattle (I assume that's what you meant) doesn't have to be substantially polluting at all. In fact, cattle can be actively beneficial to other agriculture, including arable agriculture. If we run out of oil, we might even use them again for pulling harrows and carts, just as our ancestors did.
What you're really objecting to, whether you have done the analysis to understand this or not, is feedlot beef, possibly with a concentrated feeding operation backdrop.
I'm constantly amazed how many people think cattle are the bovine devil, just waiting to starve us off the planet, and are ready to leap into mass greenhouse farming with a merry cry, regardless of the actual energy it might take to do so. Why greenhouses? Because much of the otherwise arable land surface of this planet is actively hostile to our usual crop selections.
To put it another way: be careful what you wish for in agricultural terms. It might not work out quite the way you imagine.
It gets worse, to actually do the math for your linked site:
On the same amount of land needed to produce one kilo of meat, 200 kg of tomatoes or 160 kg of potatoes could be harvested in the same time span.
All right, this is just plain incorrect, unless you are juicing those plants with huge quantities of industrial nutrients. The per acre yield of a reasonably productive tomato variety is barely ten times (I can feel my nose growing because ten times is way too high) that of a fairly productive variety of pig, let alone chicken. And I'm talking about a single season, here, not aging your chickens for additional years (broilers, not layers). 1/200? You are doing something radically wrong. Even assuming you squeeze out three seasons of ultraproductive tomato, and you're running beef on the same land, you're not getting 1/200.
See, this is why people can't take vegetarian propaganda seriously: its flatly outlandish numbers fall in the face of reality. Please, please, please stop hurting your own cause with nonsense. Give us real numbers we can take seriously.
B12. It's not difficult to get through "vegan foods", it's impossible to get unless you're eating animals or their byproducts.
Was she a good lay after the shot? :P My guess is that her skin pallor, complexion, and sexuality was all fairly improved immediately following said shot. Naturally, all other organs were behaving in a better fashion after said shot as well.
Veganism is a mental disorder, much like extreme social political preference. There is no explicable reason why a person - a higher order mammal - would avoid eating any animal, but prefer plants instead, when it has been repeatedly shown scientifically that it's an unsustainable diet - much akin to things like starvation.
It's a real shame to see a beautiful person destroy their mind and body through a vegan or fruitarian diet. Truly a shame.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Short of animal byproducts, where is someone going to get B12? Inquisitive minds want to know.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A couple of nitpicks:
There are various reasons to farm or ranch. Perhaps it fits one's preferred way of life. Perhaps one prefers not being reliant on others for food. Perhaps there are reasons of culture or tradition.
Aside from that, the other point is the difficulty of shipping the products. If you're a farmer and you can't get your products to market because of logistical problems, you need to dry/smoke/can/pickle/ferment/otherwise preserve your products and then ship them. There isn't a culture in the world that doesn't have knowledge of some form of preservation, above a few relict strictly tribal ones (and most of them have a few tricks, too).
Nope. Don't use statement like these as facts.
Lentils and grains have anti-nutrients that block absorption of nutrients.
This is because of poor information and misconceptions like you have about food that exists. People are told to exercise and eat plants and fat-free to reduce weight which then leads to a starch heavy diet full of anti-nutrients that lead to the opposite effect of weight gain.
It's not just the conversion rate, it's what else the animals do for you - meat is a byproduct of many other farming purposes. But moving on from that:
Vertical growing systems are efficient in space terms, but very bad in energy terms. You also can't go very high before you run out of insolation (the amount of sun hitting a given area) and the plants at the bottom don't grow well. The sunk cost is also vast, and the risks of plagues in your hydroponic greenhouse is serious as well. In bad cases you have to empty it all out, sterilise everything, and start afresh. It's not as easy as you might think.
Kelp actually makes pretty good micronutrient supplement, the problem is all the sunk energy in harvesting it, drying it, grinding it, shipping it and applying it.
Most of what you describe would be better done with simple permaculture forest gardens, with land efficiency very close to a vertical system and much lower costs.
I used to live in Argentina and knew a lot of Italian immigrants. Perchance are you referring to polenta and gnocchi?
"Waiter, my soup has a ..."
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
What the hell, no mention of Quorn....
Krusty: The animal we used to make the Ribwich has gone extinct.
Homer: The pig?
Lenny: The cow?
Krusty: You're *way* off! Think smaller. Think more legs.
I have not eaten meat since early 2005 and I am very healthy.
You get tonnes of protein from vegetables, nuts, beans, grains.
Protein is a non-issue. Much more tricky are things like B12, calcium, iron, etc.
When one uses the word "vegetarian", isn't it assumed that one means "ovo-lacto vegetarian" (allowing for dairy products)? That is the case in most places of Europe, but considering all the rubbish in this thread about vegetarians not consuming enough protein, I wonder if "vegetarian" means "vegan" in the US.
Dairy products provide you with all the protein you need. Of course there's a higher risk that a vegetarian will not consume enough of them and lack protein, but it's also easy to eat meat to have a crappy nutrition.
And I say it nonsense, I've never eaten meat in my life, and I'm perfectly healthy (as in, I've never had more than slight skin rash, never been hospitalized for anything, have a proper body weight and no metabolic abnormalities). See, my anecdotal evidence against yours. You can bet I wont get a score of 5 though, justifications for eating meat are very popular.
How about questioning the bullshit you've been fed all your life (no pun intended) by everybody else in society, and the media, and big business, and QUESTION what you are eating and WHY?
As for the fool above - there are no 'tricky' vitamins or minerals for vegans, because we aren't supposed to eat meat, milk or eggs in the first place.
How many human beings can chase down a rabbit and catch him with their bare hands? How many normal, sane human beings can catch a sheep and then kill him with their bare hands and teeth? You'll soon see that human beings are not designed to eat animals, unlike tigers, wolves, etc. who have evolved to be good at killing. How will you bite a wild pig apart and eat his body, without catching potentially fatal diseases, food poisoning, worms, etc.?
Would you go up to a pregnant cow and suck her udders? How is that natural? You think it's 'natural' because you've been brainwashed all your life.
This entire article is a joke, because there are already tens of millions of vegans who prove that we don't need insects, or any other such filth, to live MORE healthy lives than non-vegans. Just look at the statistics on cancer, heart disease, etc. among vegans versus non-vegans.
Strangely, nobody brought up this novel idea so far: http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video If this hoax can be realized in future, then human race can be saved.
Fuck Beta
Reminds me of something my father used to tell me.
He grew up mostly in the depression. What he told me was that they only had meat on Sundays, and just vegetables the rest of the time. Including lots of potatoes. He claimed that during this time, he actually DID NOT LIKE MEAT.
But, from what i could tell, he did grow out of that over time.
p.s. -- Until grandma fell and became housebound, she still tried to grow part of her food in the back yard. Because she wanted to.
Nonsense, you can get B12 from bacteria, in fact, all B12 comes from (gut) bacteria. It's a shame to see a person with a brain not use it properly.
To clarify: our own gut bacteria most likely can not create B12 that can enter the bloodstream. It is however perfectly possible to culture these bacteria outside of the body of an animal and produce B12, this is how many B12 supplements are made.
Seriously, I've been trying (albeit not very hard) to find a good source for it in quantities that matters but I've come up dry.
So, anyone knows where to get edible insects in more than "novelty quanities"?
Are we really so stubborn and stuck on eating meat of other animals? Insects, really ?
Humans can survive with raw food only if we just let go of our programming of eating meat. Raw food is unprocessed, contains more nutrients than any cooked food, and is 100% more energy efficient than any processed or heated food, as it requires less energy from the body to process, taking less time to stay in the stomach and the raw nutrients are easily absolved into pure energy.
Isn't it really simple ? Why route the food through different animals, when we could live directly on the foods those animals eat ?
All it takes is letting go of our habit of eating other thinking, conscious living beings. My educated guess is that the body can adapt to this new diet in about 3 months, if you just stick to this diet.
Check out this girls excellent youtube channel for more information about eating raw: http://www.youtube.com/user/Freelea
GeoKone.NET
"The human body does not require meat."
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
This is a myth that needs to be broken. We do not absolutely need meat to survive. This is just like a habit, like addiction do drugs, sex, fear. Meat is actually very addictive. To actually evolve as a human race, we need to break this habit. We need to stop eating other CONSCIOUS BEINGS, feeling, thinking, emotional beings. Would you like if someone ate you ?
We are being FED this image of that we need to eat meat everywhere, it is to keep us unevolved and to keep us resonating with the energies of fear. Most meat on the market is full of Fear. Fear and stress of the animal that was slaughtered, kept in stressfull and fearful environments through it's life time. This fear is then passed on to us as we eat these animals. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. Want to be a frightful animal? Then keep eating those cows, bulls and so on.
There are people who live on only sunlight. There are people who live on only eating raw. It is all in our minds, in our thinking, in our collective consciousness that THINKS that it needs meat. In reality, our bodies and spirits are much greater beings than we can even imagine, and we can manifest matter out of pure consciousness if choose so. Yogis and gurus all over the world know this. See beyond your cultural programming, if you can, and see the TRUTH.
GeoKone.NET
People...the food of the future.
Are you aware of the numerous communities that live their entire lives, cradle-to-grave, without ever eating meat? Some of them live right here in America! Like the Seventh day Adventist sect of Christianity.
Their children are not stupid or weak or sickly or any different than anyone else's children.
That, right there, is what is known as a contradiction.
abba zabba
yabba dabba
doo doo
http://design.cca.edu/graduate/uploads/pdf/yau_prospectus.pdf pg.127
Not quite true. I ate absolutely nothing but steak and eggs for nearly two months, and I was fine. Dropped a ton of weight and felt fantastic. Steak, particularly good quality grass fed beef, covers nearly all nutritional needs. The only notable nutrient lacking is vitamin C, which isn't strictly necessary.
You don't need a "special diet", but you need to exploit a regional food culture that accounts for the lack of meat. Vegans that try to claim otherwise are going to hurt people and their own "cause".
That last part is probably good thing. The environmental impact from people being vegan is not something the world needs. Unless you're also eating primarily fresh foods, the amount of processed goods you consume is going to greatly outpace the impact from meats through packaging, processing, and transportation.
Tell me, where do you get your B12?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A diet that includes as much meat as the Western world consumes also is unnatural.
Yes, we appear to be meant to eat some meat. But our diets aren't meant to be centered around meat consumption, as often is the case in the West.
Chile raises them for meat, and supposedly they have a flavor similar to chicken dark meat. The non-emotion inducing name for them is Cavys. 2 males and 3 females are enough to produce meat for a family of 4 supposedly. They eat grass too.
i am so very tired....
Not many people know that Vegetarian is an old Indian word.. It translates to "Bad Hunter"........
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
No It does not require meat.
We are vegetarian family (not vegan). My kids never ate any meat and my daughter is tallest and youngest in her class (2nd grade). My grandmother (life long vegetarian) just died at the age of 85. My dad (68) still rides bi-cycle.
A balanced vegetarian diet is good enough, if you know what to eat. Lentils, Chickpeas, wheat and rice have good enough. Don't fall for meat industry propaganda and be kind to the defenseless animals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla#Food
Fast growing (doubles in mass 2-3 days), "rich in proteins, essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals." Requires minimal inputs for growth.
Your friends aren't vegetarian if they eat meat.
Your friends aren't very good at being "vegetarian" if they have to eat meat occasionally. It's not difficult to consume a vegetarian diet without nutritional supplements. It doesn't really involve more research than a healthy, balanced diet containing meat either, which most people don't do. If you look at studies, the average diet of a person in the US (aka the average diet that involves meat) is deficient in seven nutrients. Meanwhile, vegans in Germany are, on average, deficient in only three.
As an Omega male, I'm always looking to "fill the meat gap".
http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/how-cuba-survived-peak-oil/ http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/a-farm-for-the-future-una-fattoria-per-il-futuro/
It's not bullshit. If you ate nothing but salad every day, you're not going to get the same nutrition that you would from eating a lot of meats.
The vegetarian/vegan forums are all full of people who go on a fad vegan diet and end up not feeling well or having other issues because they did not adjust their diet properly.
While most people eat terribly, meat is a very easy source of calories and protein. To get the same from veggies you need to pick out the right stuff. A lot of people don't understand that.
It can be very hard to get vitamin B12 from a strictly vegan diet. You pretty much need supplements to get the vitamin B12 you need when you don't eat meat or at least eggs and dairy. Of course most people are deficient in other necessary vitamins also, so it seems to be a typical problem with our modern diets. The fear of the sun hasn't helped either as vitamin D deficiency is rampant and a likely cause of many major diseases.
reference
Vitamin B12, also called cobalamin, is a vitamin that is necessary for body functions, according to Dr. James Balch and Phyllis Balch, authors of "Prescription for Nutritional Healing." This vitamin is found in meats, eggs, milk and cheeses, but does not occur naturally in plant-based foods. Strict vegetarians who do not consume vitamin B12 fortified foods or take B12 supplements may be at risk for vitamin B12 deficiency.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
just loves givin ideas to Alan Moore innit?
Take control of your food. We have a tiny (1/3 acre) farm/homestead and raise over 200lbs of our own poulty per year for less than $1.25/lb and that is without the ability to own a rooster due to noise ordinances [we do have a drake and a gander] - so we also get a huge number of eggs [amazingly also a protein source]. A good laying hen will lay 200-300 eggs per year, but without a rooster you get no chicks. Now we are adding rabbits, and with a very small herd and a small amount of space, you can raise a significant amount of them per year. A good breeding rabbit can have 6-10 kits [babies] per litter, 3 litters per year. Harvesting age is ~12 weeks and gives a 3lb finished product. Rabbits are also one of the best food->meat conversion animals. You also get a pelt per rabbit you harvest.
Food does not come from the supermarket, it comes from farms - vegetable, meat, fish, etcetera. You just buy it in the supermarket - and pay them for the priviledge. You can make a huge impact in your food supply with very little effort. You might not get beef unless you have a lot of land, but you can do many other things in fairly small confines. Look into raising tilapia if you like fish. Grow one edible food. Plant a fruit tree.
I doubt anyone who uses pesticides to de-insect their homes would allow the idea of bugs in their food to pass their lips. What ever happened to the sci-fi like food source of yeast as staple?
"A balanced vegetarian diet is good enough, if you know what to eat."
Which was exactly my point. I don't "need to know what to eat" to have a ballanced diet if I add meat to it.
"Don't fall for meat industry propaganda "
Don't fall in the fallacy of thinking everybody is from US of A. Hint: I'm not. There's no "meat industry propaganda" over here as there's no 35,7% obesity over here.
A vegetarian diet is a one-way ticket to the cancer ward. All the starches you eat are like living on sugar. Deadly.
Social Credit would solve everything...
You could stop your rutting until we figure out this whole air/food/water thing...
A steak every month or two gets them feeling "right".... it is not the lifestyle we evolved under.
This is exactly what we evolved under and our modern high meat diets bring all sorts of health issues with them. Your ancestors did not eat chicken daily, and having steak every month or two sounds very typical of how we evolved.
That said, my parents raise grass-fed cattle so I could get beef for cheap if I cared to.
So what? That doesn't (and couldn't) apply to most people on the planet, so adds nothing to the discussion beyond "Cool story, bro" pointlessness.
Really? You think there are 3.5 billion people in the world who are in a position not to be able to transition away from meat if they wanted to?
Wrong. I didn't say (nor think) that at *all*.
If you'd read what I posted instead of just skimming it, you'd have realised I specifically quoted- and was replying to- only the second sentence ("That said, my parents raise grass-fed cattle so I could get beef for cheap if I cared to.")
His or her first sentence ("[Easier solution]. I just don't eat meat.")- the one you wrongly *assumed* I was replying to- is reasonable if simplistic. The second is pointless.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Here in the year 2147 we have lose the battle against the insects. They eat our corn, our oats, and every thing we plant. After years of fighting them with pesticides, they have been developed resistance to every chemical we use. So, now we take another approach, now they have become out main source of food. We "plant" and "harvest" spiders, grashoppers, cochineals, and another selected insects.
With this big change, new franchises emerged... enter Starbugs the proteic-delicious beverage franchise.
Using advanced techniques(aka "big shoes") we extract the proteic juices from selected species of healthy and nutritive insects, adding some colorant, flavor and our "secret recipe" we have developed one of the most succesfull insect-based business in the world.
Delight your mouth and energize your body with this delicious and higly proteic beverages: Spider Blend, Grashopper tea, and our higly demanded cochineal special.
A new opening very soon in your city!
Customer to waiter; there's a fly in my soup! Waiter to customer; Don't worry, flies are the new "meat"!!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Last Friday's dinner was lamb cutlets marinaded in teriyaki, ginger and garlic, grilled. Served with new potatoes smashed with butter and fresh chives and green beans steamed with crumbled goat cheese feta, chopped walnuts and a dash of extra virgin olive oil. I thickened up the left over marinade into a gravy adding corn flour and lemon juice.
Still hungry?
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
If you really want to try delicious vegan food then go to a Krishna temple. They often have ones that feed the public on a weekly/monthly basis and it is absolutely yummy.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Wearing clothes,
I think this might be fairly natural, since we've obviously evolved to lose most of our body hair. I don't think we'd last long 'in the wild' without wearing clothes.
In any case, the whole natural vs. artificial debate is doomed to failure, since humans are natural creatures and therefore anything they do is, by definition, just as natural as a bird building a nest.
Yes, vegans NEED to take a vitamin B12 supplement. It's very important and is well worth re-stating for anyone who reads this and is thinking of going vegan.
You can tell your inquisitive minds that vegan B12 is industrially produced by bacteria. In particular, Propionibacterium shermanii and Pseudomonas denitrificans are commonly used to make vitamin B12 in manufacturing. Many animals get their B12 from bacteria in their gut so the source is actually very similar (except that no animals need to be harmed for the industrially manufactured B12).
Excuse me, but I am NOT a troll (reacting to how my post got modded). My point about cooked food is an important one. I've not seen any serious (scientific) argument that we evolved as we did because meat has magical properties, but there are scientific papers arguing that cooked food allowed us to extract more nutrients from our food. This is the main argument against eating a 100% raw diet. As to my point about healthy vegan children, its factual basis is surely self-evident.
As the development of the morden transport technology,more and more people are willing to buy cars,so it is necessary to find a good diagnostic tool for own cars,Therefore there are many professional tools supplied in the auto field.i meet the vag tacho usb 25 version
,and indeed it is very good!
Yes I know, the inuits of Greenland are known for their great import of Egyptian fruits in the 16-th century... or wait, is it perhaps possible to live on an all meat diet?
Life isn't black and white. It is more environmentally sound for all to eat vegetarian, but it's also much harder to get a healthy diet when eating only vegetarian. Creatine is just one example of why vegetarians should consider eating meat once in a while.
The best food for most individuals is a mixed diet, and the best food for society as a whole is probably a mixed diet with a low meatcontent.
I have an Uncle to refuses to eat them. Calls them bait. Apparently as a kid, used to bait his dads hooks with it to catch real fish.
So rather than solving the global food distrabution issues, we just need to solve:
"corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, theocractic Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed."
Sounds easy!
Does that mean that burgers will be marketed at buggers?
e
Grass tastes like grass. Strange, that.
Gotta love the stuff... and good for you. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_Was_the_End
If it was good enough for Mark Mothersbaugh.....
If there's enough fat in the steaks you should get everything you need. Iniuts eat 6-9 months only meat.
Gorillas have far larger canines than we do. They don't eat meat. They use them for crunching bamboo and piercing fruit.
That's ok, you only need to eat them
I once had a huge wild duck pig-out with a hunter friend of mine.
So you were out with a friend of yours who is a hunter and you had wild duck pig. I've never seen a duck pig, does that mean that 'when pigs fly' isn't far off?
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand...
Why would that be a good thing? If demand for meats is decreased, production will decrease, and prices will rise. It's not like there's going to suddenly be a surplus amount of food to be given to the less fortunate. There might be temporarily, until the production decreases, at which point prices will temporarily plummet and the extra food is just going to be thrown away. Nobody is going to pay to transport it and give it to people who can't pay for it.
Cold realities of economics might suck, but you can't escape it by ignoring it.