Slashdot Mirror
Global Bacon Shortage 'Unavoidable'
New submitter The name is Dave. Ja debuts on the front page with the most dismal news of our time: "This is truly 'Stuff That Matters'. Where would civilization be today without bacon? I don't mean to be alarmist but ... sound the alarms! This is big — it could lead to civil unrest."
Yes, a bacon shortage. Hopefully what bacon there is will be more delicious after being fed with gummi worms.
Noooooooooooo!!
It just means bacon will be more expensive.
There will be less cheap bacon to go around, but there will always be bacon.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/165256/lab-grown-leather-could-be-a-reality-in-5-years
Who's gonna notice when the Earth becomes unliveable due to climate change?
* Tornadoes... Droughts... Floods...
* Bacon Shortage, like OMG???
. . . and now this. It's like a war on breakfast.
I am not a crackpot.
Venkman: Or you can accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff!
Venkman: Exactly.
Stanz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
Winston Zeddmore: The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!
Mayor: Enough! I get the point! And what if you're wrong?
Venkman: If we're wrong, then nothing happens. We go to jail, peacefully, quietly. We'll enjoy it. But if we're right, and we can stop this thing... Lenny, you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.
Find this man
God spoke to me
...please learn about the pork cycle.
So, if I understand this correctly, the price of feeding pigs is rising. However, despite their theoretically being a 'market' for pig products and demand for pig products holding steady, it has not been possible for the price of pork products to reflect the cost of producing them, causing pork production to start shutting down, thus setting us up for a price spike in the near future....
Could somebody summon the invisible hand? I have a beating that needs delivering...
you should read the original press releases, a nice little campaign preparing the masses that price increases are in order.
British supermarkets can protect consumers [..] if they pay Britain's loss-making pig farmers a fair price
In its Save Our Bacon campaign, NPA is asking shoppers to make a point of selecting pork and bacon with the British independent Red Tractor logo
Governments are becoming increasingly concerned
And I simply _love_ the phrase "Pig industry leaders" :)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/165256/lab-grown-leather-could-be-a-reality-in-5-years
Well, that covers footballs ... <rimshot>
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First they burn the White House and now this.
What's next, no hockey?
Do these scoundrels have no pity?
No brain, no pain.
The environmental toll of hog farming is massive.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
Yeah, but nobody gets the missing corn that started this whole mess in the first place. Neither you or the pigs. I guess we all get gummy worms.
"With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone."
The Norse will be alright - Sæhrímnir will be eaten (providing "the best of bacons") and brought back to life the next day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A6hr%C3%ADmnir
Look on the bright side- this also has to mean there will be less spam in the future!
I love it when vegetarians prove my favorite joke about them right...
'How can you tell a vegetarian... don't worry... they willl ALWAYS tell you.'
Oo Ooh! I know!
(Caveat, I live right next to drought stricken corn fields)
The problem with the drought, is three-fold, and soil dryness is only one of them.
1) soil dryness. Irrigation helps in mild drought conditions to alleviate this.
2) prolonged air and soil dryness changes the specific heat of the air and soil. This causes normal solar isolescence to stop being gently warming and beneficial, to being glaring, and root scorching. Hot, dry soil and hot, dry air wither the corn crop even under CONTINOUOUS irrigation.
3) the change in ambient temperatures associated with droughts causes localized fronts to form over agricultural areas, which discourages rain. Even if it does rain in the upper atmosphere, it can completely evaporate before hitting the ground. In addition to that, the cells themselves actively diminish conditions required for rainfall.
Even blasting the ground 24/7 in the most horrible, water-table depleting fashion imaginable would not have saved this year's corn crop.
Except that from the linked story: "But ruminant animals such as cattle can safely ingest a wide variety of feedstuffs that chickens and hogs can't." The gummi worms story was about feeding cows, not pigs.
Have gnu, will travel.
There's enough pork in Congress to carry us through these dire times.
Okay, gonna try and be nice, but I love how naiive people are about farming and ranching in the US (which for the rest of this post I will simply call farming, because I don't care if some rancher gets offended).
First lesson of farming:
Farmer's are the cheapest mother fuckers on the planet. Seriously, I am not kidding, if they can make a sixties tractor work by using bailing wire to "fix it" (no matter how fucking dangerous or inefficient the fix) they will. I'd bet you'll never find a group of Americans more consistantly willing to cheat on their taxes as well. As a sub lesson, they fucking hate the government, which can do no right, except when giving them free money, which they will bitch and moan about any whisper that something might change in the future.
Second lesson of farming:
A lot of farmers are terrible businessmen. They often don't take long term views, many are really bad at math and don't even know how to calculate costs. There's actually bankers that loan to farms (or there used to be), they used to send in consultants to save farms from defaulting on their loans. Seriously, this isn't all farmers, but the idea of calculating costs, risks, and returns is completely foreign to many of them. This is why they use inefficient machinery, because it never occurs to them that the total cost of operation exceeds the cost of replacement.
Third lesson of farming:
Farming has a vast infrastructure that requires massive amounts of energy input (10% or so of our energy in the US, daily, goes to agriculture). Part of that infrastructure, as stated, is old. Another part, for some insane reason lumped in with "capital" in modern economics, is land, and you cannot trade suddenly infertile land for "new land", complete with the infrastructure you need, just because we've fucked up our farm belt. A lot of infrastructure isn't even directly owned by the farmer (e.g. some farmers don't own any harvesters, they pay someone per acre to come do it for them). You'd have to move entire communities in order to move the location of production. As for irrigation, it couldn't have solved this (though the water supply is not nearly adequate), since it got too hot for the corn and it simply died. But we've depleted aquifers at alarming rates in the last couple of decades always gambling on that one "really good, wet year" to fill them back up. This gamble cannot always pay off. Supposing you could find a supply of water, how would you get it where it needs to go, suddenly? You have a few weeks at most, to solve most issues like this, you can't suddenly make new irrigation appear. Btw, the same thing goes for all the solar tractors or non-oil based fertilizer (laughable on its face, anyway) that people imagine will happen as oil prices drive up, that shit won't magically appear, people will go hungry first, for years in fact, and in some nations will actually starve to death.
Final lesson of farming:
Most farmers know how to produce limited crops. I.E. they know hogs, or they know dairy, or they know corn, or soybeans. Not only will their set up be geared towards that one crop, you can't always convince them to switch products for a variety of reasons. If they have decided they want to grow corn, good luck getting a pig headed (har har) farmer to grow soybeans instead. You could show him a fucking spreadsheet that indicates double his profits and he's more likely to keep growing corn than switch. Now, if all his neighbors switch (especially if they think they're putting one over on the big, bad government), that might convince him, but you, based on public policy and/or good sense, will not. Even if you could convince one to switch, he might be little better at producing his new crop than you would be, knowing fuck all about any of it.
If I've sounded harsh to farmers, well seriously, there are a few decent ones, but fuck em, as a group. They are entitled, ignorant brats, by and large. Big ag is not much better, if more efficient. I do know some farmers I like, but I like them as they stand out as quiet a bit different from most farmers.
- A guy who grew up around farmers
... just stop eating meat.
I know, I know, you like meat, maybe even a lot. I get it, I'm not trying to convince you of some wacky dogma or spiritual doctrine. But based strictly on the economics of meat production, and its disastrous ecological effects, not to mention the fact that you probably don't need much meat in your diet, might you consider eating meat only a couple of times a week? If everyone in the U.S. did that, there would be far less animal waste, far less consumption of potable water, significant overall health improvements, and attractive cost savings for consumers. BTW, by meat I mean any kind of animal tissue, not just beef or pork. Just to spell it out, that would include fish, poultry, venison, animal flesh of any kind, and maybe eggs.
Certainly it would include bacon.
I have seen people lose great amount of weight, and I lose weight, when sugar and sugary snacks are cut out. For people I have seen who follow high protein diets that is really all this is involved. They stop eating candy and junk food and fill up on meat. Such a diet makes sense in a country where only two things are widely available, meat and junk.
OTOH, we need about 8 ounces of protein a day, On average in the US we eat maybe 50% more than that in meat alone, so lets call it 3 to 4 ounces at 300-500 (less for hamburgers, more for bacon), so that is an extra 300 calories a day, or an extra 100,000 calories a year. If this were all converted in mass, that would be a few hundred pounds of potential extra fat.
Which is to say the the simple carbohydrates one eats does contribute to weight gain(complex carbohydrates are a more complicated story), but eating too much meat significantly contributes. Taking the bun off a burger is not going to help nearly as much as replacing the burger with a good vegetable stew.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
the doctor told him "Bacon should come with a skull and crossbones on the label..."
Then his doctor is a retarded monkey.
Too much water will kill you, too much oxygen will kill you, too much sugar will kill you.
Anyone with more than half a brain knows that TOO MUCH (of anything) is enough to kill you.
Or perhaps the good doctor somehow believes that for millions of years the ancestors of mankind ate only fish and lean white meat?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
So the megafarms who're raising pig-meat in factories are finding their business unsustainable due to their (quite frankly bizarre) feeding practices?
I for one am not surprised.
You haven't lived till you've eaten dead pig which was once free-range.
I'll spell it out for the clueless: Eating Grain Fed pork is slightly beter than eating sawdust, if you want your pig-products to be truly tasty they need to have grown up on a varied diet.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
All the problems we are having with food production are directly related to factory farming.
We're not actually having any problems and the price fluctuations that are occurring are not caused by so-called 'factory' farming. The problem is that high yield agriculture is concentrated in too few places.
Consider hogs; 80.9% of all hog production comes from two places; the US and China. One is coping with an outlier drought and the other is dealing with a rapidly growing domestic demand for meat. That leaves the rest of the planet out in the cold.
The solution is rising prices. Nations and people that have complacently relied on a few "bread basket" sources of supply have discovered fresh motivation for producing commodities. There is a boom in S. American agriculture as a result. This phenomenon is planet wide.
This is ultimately a good thing. Less reliance on those few traditional "break basket" nations will create supply stability, to say nothing of the self sufficiency of new third world bread baskets.
You, being the rich, comfortable malcontent you've been trained to be, will see this as a tragedy, while you simultaneously accelerate the process with your ill considered policies. As with the evacuation of our industry, the evacuation of our agriculture to the third world has begun.
So go to work and dream up lots of new regulation for domestic agriculture in your home nation. Don't stop until anything more productive than a hobby farm has been eradicated. The rest of the world will take up the slack because people are going to feed themselves whether you like it or not.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Not all bacon is chocolate covered, so I don't see how those links apply to the topic at hand.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Boneless chicken wings" have none of that, using connective-tissue-free breast meat that overcooks if you so much as look at it funny and no skin.
It should be the law that if someone at a wing joint offers you boneless wings, you can legally stab them in the eye with an ice pick (or your fork) for even suggesting such a thing! Yes! I feel strongly on this subject!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, that covers footballs ...*rimshot*
Yeah, that had us in stitches.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
So you're a vegetarian and decided to go into a Slashdot story about bacon to brag about it? Don't you have a salad to toss?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The "Aporkalypse" (or possibly "Hamageddon")
Or the alternative hypothesis, that our primitive ape ancestors consumed pan-fried pig fat on a daily basis AND had a life expectancy of over 50?
Human meat tastes like pork, so I'm covered.
In a nice honey glaze?
Blank until