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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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The meat and dairy industry receives vast amounts of subsidies which would be better allocated to plant based food sources. Meat is an inefficient way to feed the general population. I'm vocal about this because of two reasons: animal suffering and climate/pollution.
I'm not naive enough to say we should just cut subsidies to animal farming cold turkey, because I understand people's livelyhoods depend on it. But I would want to see a progressive public divestment from meat in favour of plant based whole food proteins (not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone).
At the same time, I'm also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it's more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
The soy that's fed to pigs is almost entirely the byproduct of pressing soy for soybean oil. about 85% of the soybean crop is pressed for oil. if we didn't feed the byproduct to livestock, it would just be industrial waste.
I'd challenge that. The whole bean is edible by humans. Tofu is literally just the protein of soy beans without the oil and the startch. I'm sure, if we wanted to, we could just make tofu or TVP out of soy meal.
I also just dislike this "it's a byproduct" argument. It's like how whey powder is a "byproduct" of of cheese making. It's not a good argument. We could also do with less soy oil in the world anyway.
but we DO make tofu and tvp. and they have higher profits per pound than animal feed. but we produce far too much soybean oil for the amount of byproduct people want to consume. giving it to livestock makes sense
It makes sense because we don't eat enough of the soy and TVP. And we also stuff soy oil is tons of shit. I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, but it all comes down to our over-consumption and refusal to do anything even mildly inconvenient. Eat more whole foods and less meat and a lot of that solves itself.
If lab grown meat becomes cheaper than "real" meat while keeping the taste and texture of it or even improve on that, I can totally see that replacing factory farmed meat rather quickly. It's like with electric cars; people don't switch if we force / shame them to do so but they will once those vehicles became better than the dirty alternative.
But my point is that we are keeping meat artificially cheap with lots of subsidies. Meat would be a luxury food if people paid the real cost of it, let alone if we paid the long term costs on the environment. I think maybe your analogy would be better with bicycles than electric cars. Bikes are more versatile and convenient than cars in short distances (10km), but most cities have been and continue being developed as car centric. If we used taxes to improve bike infrastructure, people would feel safer to ride bikes more often.
This exactly. I would say one of the main reasons a lot of people don't currently drink plant milk is that per unit volume, it tends to be more expensive. This is seemingly starting to even out as the plant milk industry expands, but the most dirt-cheap dairy milk and the most dirty-cheap plant milk are still nowhere near each other on price. I'm willing to bet that if all subsidies were taken away altogether, plant milk would be cheaper, and moreover, if it were flipped in such a way that existing dairy subsidies went to plant milk, it would be game over for dairy milk. Plant milk prices would be through the floor, and dairy milk would be seen as a luxury product. There are a ton of good reasons for this:
your BBC link actually just relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which abuses LCAs and myopically focuses on distilling other studies into discrete metrics without understanding the system holistically. in short, your claim about the environment may be true, but the source that you use to support it is incapable of providing that support.
Okay, link to the academic paper refuting it. Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called "Farmers Against Misinformation"? "your claim about the environment may be true" 💀 Don't muddy the waters here: it is true. This was the only error noted in the paper, and the erratum correcting it still comports with the authors' original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives.
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
your link doesn't seem to align with anything i've said. are you sure you used the right link?
this reads like pigeonholing. my "purpose" is to keep conversations honest and challenge bad science and reasoning.
seems like an appeal to authority, but i encourage you and anyone interested to look into how LCAs were abused, and how much cottonseed is weighed in the water use and land use of dairy milk, despite cotton being grown for textiles.
I'm sorry, I've read the paper, seen absolutely nothing wrong with it (and seemingly neither have other experts in the field, as I've yet to see any peer-reviewed rebuttal of its findings), and definitely trust an expert on food sustainability from Oxford and an agroecology expert from Agroscope as well as their publicly available and well-reasoned findings compared to some rando on the Internet who just whines with zero elaboration that LCAs are "abused" and can't seem to figure out that they could've said all this in one comment instead of four.
I bet Poore and Nemecek would've figured out how to use the "edit" button. (And yes, I did link to the correct article, as the only attempt I could find to debunk this paper was from, again, a disinformation outlet whose lies are explored in that AFP article.)
their objection had nothing to do with mine
I've read it too, and enough of it's references to understand that LCAs are not transferable between studies, and so all the LCA analysis must be disregarded.
I also have looked at enough of the source LCA data to understand that much of the water and land use (and GHG emissions) attributed to animal agriculture is actually a conservation of those same resources, as they come from second-and- third uses of crops.
your attack on my style does not address the substance of my objections. it is pure sophistry.
cannot be substantiated with the methodology used in this metastudy.
And vertical farms.
My understanding is that vertical farms have yet to prove more efficient except perhaps in land use. It's been pretty hard to scale.
Mmmm, I love cold turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving
I meant cold tofurky sorry.
Singapore has been struggling to subsidize them enough so that people can buy them at normal prices.