run from it, dread it, beans arrive all the same
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I swear you can have the worst takes and if you say "material conditions," then hexbear will upvote you 50 times.
You want materialism? The current level of meat consumption in the US is propped up by exploitation of migrant labor and an extractive mode of agriculture which is unsustainable and relies on external inputs like fertilizer which are themselves the product of other extractive industries.
We could dramatically reduce meat consumption without any technological changes by:
--Paying meat packers a living wage
--Organize Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, driving up meat cutters' wages
--Stop subsidizing meat
--Stop subsidizing feed crops
--Switch to permacultural farming practices
Banking on a tech breakthrough is ideological in the sense that it protects the status quo and marshals venture capital into mostly speculative assets.
Additionally, convincing people to go vegetarian is not idealist. Mass media has a huge effect, and using it to encourage vegetarianism is a material process. So either, we can take material measures to encourage vegetarianism, or you don't believe we'll ever wield power. Based on your defense of lab meat (a vc grift similar to tech start-ups), I think it's the latter.
Theres a lot to break down here, but no, people like eating meat and that is a material fact. If you're hoping to exterminate the meat industry as it exists today, then you need enhancements in technology. No one really uses horses and buggies for transporting goods anymore, that has been replaced by trains, cars, and trucks. Technological change is one of the greatest examples of material conditions being altered. And as time goes on, tech generally makes us less reliant on animals for labor. And as it stands, meat consumption is rising despite the increase in vegans.
And I'm not 'banking on tech breakthrough'. Graphs show the price is going down and you can buy a dish of cultivated chicken in China for 15-25 USD. Its very reasonable to assume the ~2030 estimate for mass produced cultivated eggs by the CPC to be genuine. The 5 year plan even suggests the amount of cultivated meat produced will increase by 50% by 2025.
Hey, I think you might want to read my post a little bit closer.
If you're just gonna post zingers, I'm done here.
I don't think you've ever met someone from a nomadic-pastoralist culture before if you think veganism/vegetarianism can be encouraged through mass media. Mongols for example have been following a version of buddhism that discourages eating meat for almost a millennial now and their modern diet still consists largely of meat. The only thing that has decreased meat consumption for them is 20th century modernization of agriculture.
Even the biggest proponents of permaculture maintain that it's very difficult to do at scale, and that no such large scale solution exists at the moment. Hoping for large scale switchover to permaculture is just as idealistic as hoping for lab grown meat to become economical.
Getting your average suburbanite to eat less meat is different from asking someone whose whole life centers around stock animals. I dont expect everyone to go vegan after an ad campaign, but the UK, where the mass media approach has been tried, has more than twice as many vegetarians per capita than the US.
I agree with the problem of permaculture at scale. Right now the bleak reality is that there is no scalable alternative to extractive agriculture. that said, grain and vegetable farming is far more efficient than meat farming in most cases. The exception is where you're using animals as part of a grasslands management regime (where the grassland is either yeilding meat or nothing), and i actually do want to see an expansion of Bison farming to that end. I agree with you that that was an idealistic take on my part tho. I think my point about changing farming policy to encourage more efficient crops still stands though, do you agree?
Tangent related to bisonposting:
I have a cousin whose entire job is to count Bison. He’s like the most zen person I know and I think it’s because he has such a chill job. Like he just chills in nature and keeps the government up to date on how many bison are there. It rules.
"hello mr us government, there are 20 bison"
I wonder how much of this is due to immigration from South Asia, where the rates of vegetarianism are higher.
this is a really good question, and I think one that is both necessary to a proper materialist understanding of the issue, as well as a good example of how culture is a material process.
The Communist Party of China is by far the biggest funder of this research, are you saying they are a VC grift?
No, they're the funders, they're the mark.
If you think you’ve outsmarted the CPC I would think again