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The Guiding Principles and New Rules
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A diet to feed the planet while not destroying it that you could persuade people to eat
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While at the same time increasing the price (initially by removing subsidies, later by adding effectively a carbon tax) of unsustainable products.
The issue with this plan is that having a small amount of meat isn't intrinsic to making the dishes work. Like if you popularize nasi uduk, and if becomes a huge craze; it doesn't taste worse(and is probably improved by) using 60g of chicken in it instead of the 30g ration. Look at American-Chinese or British-Indian take out foods and how meat heavy they are versus the dishes they are based off of.
I find that annoying as a consumer who likes vegetables. I have always wondered if meat is cheaper than vegetables for restaurants because of how reluctant they are to use vegetables. Presumably vegetables need prep chefs to peel and chop them, but meat can just be chunked up and cooked quickly.
technological solutions>>>bloody strife and suffering>>>>>>literal divine intervention>>>>>voluntary/government mandated shift to a sustainable diet.
Animals need people to peel and chop them too, we just usually do that ahead of time and call it a butcher instead of a chef.
It's already meaningfully 'too late'. Our task now is to mitigate the catastrophe. "Lel bacon" was par for the course in 1999; in 2019 it's tantamount to a call for genocide by indifference.
So we shift subsidies, in a generation or so people who grew up during the shift to a more moderate diet normalize it to another generation and it stops being seen as a punishment or limitation.
Humanity isn't capable. We do what we want until we die. It's a party bus driving at a cliff with no one willing to even tap the brakes.
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I mean yeah but at least if you popularize dishes where less meat is still ok then you can scale back without people starving. There’s no way to scale back a big fat steak while leaving nutrition and satiation the same.
It's because meat in those times/places is expensive as hell and therefore you stretch and you use less. Look at rationing during World Wars or any wars really.
Fundamentally you're trying to get people to do less of the thing they like to do.
I think there are only 3 ways to make this happen
a) technological innovation - Make more of what people like with less environmental impact
b) Legislation & cost - Enact strict controls on livestock farming, eliminate subsidies, reduce imports, etc.
c) Culture - Make eating meat like smoking. You might not get everyone but enough to make an impact.
My own personal opinion is that the only option with any chance of success in my lifetime is A). Option C) is unlikely to work even in my grandchildren's lifetime as you have to do this for the whole world.
One last thing, I think the conversation with China and India or other developing nations regarding this isn't going to go the way environmentalists hope. It'll be rich ass countries who have had the "good life" for a hundred years telling newly rich nations "Sorry, we fucked it all up, you guys have to sacrifice now".
Actually, what this is saying to most poor nations is...
"Good news! You get 33% more total animal protein! And 50% more fruit! And 50% more nuts! And you can have all this stuff and nobody has to go hungry, and we can feed all 10 billion of us with existing technology! AND we can limit land use for agriculture"
The only people being asked to make actual changes to their diet which might be hard are...
1) Wealthier East asians, who are being asked to eat less fish, but a similar amount of total animal protein (and they can't really swop, because we want to minimize food shipments, especially of chilled food)
2) Europeans and Americans, who are being asked to eat MUCH less meat and less dairy (and just less in general)
3) Some other wealthy nations, who are being asked to eat less meat, but a similar amount of total animal protein (and they can't really swop, because we want to minimize food shipments, especially of chilled food)
3) Africans, who are being asked to eat less starchy vegetables and more green vegetables (however, I think this is just an averaging effect, I see no reason why they couldn't have more of the starchy veg they like as their carbs, and europeans get more grain)
In my opinion the most likely path to something like this diet is....
1) Effective elimination of beef from peoples diets as price rises. Raising cows is stupid. Beef is indeed delicious, but goats and sheep are a strictly better option with limited resources and also give you milk etc.
2) Other meats also see price increases, which drive people to other dietary choices for protein, or again to environmentally/land/water cheaper proteins Beef -> Pork -> Goat -> Chicken
3) Improvement in fish farming techniques, espescially land based ones, see fish competing with land meat
4) Familiarity with cooking with more vegetables leads people to eat less meat, because once you know how to cook with vegetables, you no longer need meat at the heart of every dish. 4 rashers of bacon weighs 3 oz, but you can produce a VERY meaty tasting meal with them.
Consumption of vast amounts of meat (steak for dinner every night! Burgers for lunch every day!) is a social status symbol, not something you need for delicious food. I predict it will remain that, but the level of wealth required for vast consumption will skyrocket.
I think that Americans and Europeans will be driven closer to this diet by endlessly rising meat prices. This diet actually is sustainable for meat use. The meat, eggs etc are a byproduct of the needed levels of vegetable and grain production. You can effectively have these animals for eating, or feed bacteria for not eating.
Honestly when I look at this diet the main problem I see for persuading Americans to adopt it (and I have been working on a 'weeks menu' to try and make these abstract numbers seem a bit more real) is the amount of sugar you need to cut, and the fact that we just eat a lot of food in the USA. 2000 calories a day (which this menu provides) just doesn't look like a hell of a lot once you consider that say, '1 7 oz bag of jelly beans' contains 800 calories and to make (from beet sugar) requires you to use 35 oz (more than 2 lbs) of your vegetable budget for the week. 1 cup of butter requires 21 cups of milk (3 weeks budget) and so on. There's enough here to make a lot of foods which are appealing to Americans for every meal, you just start running into troubles when you ask questions like...
"And what about some chips and dip for the game?"
And you realize that that bag of doritos is like 1500 calories and the dip uses 3 days dairy budget.
I rarely get burgers, especially since turkey burgers taste just as good.
I probably eat too much fish...but damn if I don't love me some seafood.
I want to second Kamar's question. How bad is chicken?
Discussed this a few pages back
The numbers seem to come out (for the same amount of input food)...
0.333 lb beef
0.7 lb pork
1 lb lamb or goat (goat is easier to feed)
2 lb chicken
2.2 lb shrimp
3 lb salmon
4 lb cricket
The low hanging fruit in our diet is beef. Cows are SHIT at turning vegetable calories into meat protein and calories. Lamb and goat are vastly superior red meat choices. Chicken is fine, and will eat things that goats can't easily be fed and also provide eggs. Low level chicken production can also be sustained by scavenging for debris and bugs on waste ground.
Cricket IS better than everything else, but, I'm still of the opinion I'd rather eat less shrimp than more cricket, because shrimp is more compatible with recipes which are familiar to me.
"hey poor people,here's what you're allow to have now that we ruined it! Isn't that great!?" Isn't different from
"fuck you, you can't live like we did"
It's again, not an American thing. It's a humanity thing.
Edit: I'd like to read more about raising your own chickens for eggs and slaughter and how your own food scraps can work as feed. Anyone have a good article?
This isn't a 'ruined it' situation. While there is a something in this calculation in regards to managing CO2 emissions (mainly trying to reduce C02 from farming while increasing calorie output), this is mainly to do with managing land use, water use, price and feeding everyone with 10 billion people on the planet. This is literally a year on year 'What can the planet produce to feed us all' calculation.
This isn't CO2 where Europeans and Americans have used up 70% of the planets 'buffer' of CO2 storage in the environment. This is a point year on year limit. If there was NO regulation on CO2 you could probably use huge amounts of fertilizer to boost meat production a little bit more, but not much. This diet helps with C02, but its mainly about feeding the 10 billion.
The planets options are...
1) Status quo, Europe and America eat all the meat. Rich east asia eats all the fish. Screw everyone else, you all can starve until there are only 6 billion of us again.
2) Minor change, everyone gets a little bit less meat and fish than they have now, Europe, America and Wealthy East Asia still get plenty. Other countries become almost wholly vegetarian (if not vegan) but there are enough calories to go round. No mass starvation
3) We do this, and everyone other than Europe, America and Wealthy East Asia gets more. No mass starvation
4) Titanic war, where the poor nations attempt to take back the meat and fish from Europe, America and East Asia. Mass casualties render limits on farmland unimportant! Hooray?
I'm pointing out that when you say "minor change" you're VASTLY underestimating the scale of the lift. So far underestimating it in fact that I can't even begin to describe the scale.
You're also missing option 5 which is a Borlaug style change in how we grow/produce meat.
I think everyone's on the same side regarding the impact to the planet from the way things are today and no one's happy with it. We just disagree on the way it will all play out.
is this the next logical step? to focus on subsidies that enable unsustainable diets and get rid of them?
i feel like we need an action plan here guys.
Thanks for providing this list, it makes it very clear why beef in particular is a problem.
I think the whole concept of getting wildly different amounts of animal product for the same amount of feed is going to be a big point of educational friction for people.
It's just not intuitive at all that for the same amount of "feed" you can get literally three times the amount of goats or SIX times the chicken vs. raising cows.
And that's not heads, that's volume!
The numbers also sound outlandish when you talk about heads, by the way.
For example, one cow costs about as much as 1,700 chickens (assuming averages weights of 1,400lb for cow and 5lb for chicken).
I think that there's just not the demand for it. I am not a vegetarian, but eating meat only once a week or so would be fine for me. I wish there was more vegan and vegetarian food out there, because I like it so much.
Beanburgers can be better than beefburgers if they are done right, but they so rarely are. I love beans.
I already don't eat as much meat or seafood as suggested. I'll have to actually increase that amount.
The main issue is salt. Most 'vegetarian' meals are made for the health conscious, because people like to feel they are being healthy when they are vegetarian. People have been falsely persuaded that salt is bad for them (its not, its a correlation with the fact that prepared junk food has high salt. Its the carbs and easy to eat fats which are bad, not the salt. Unless you have a medical condition which precludes it, salt is neutral for health) and so a large fraction of customers, when they look at vegetarian meals will check for low levels of sugar (relatively smart) or salt (stupid). Sufficient people expect vegetarian food to taste bad, that when they eat their beanburger and it is bland and awful, they wont care. They are just trying to chow it down for 'health reasons'. But this creates a feedback loop where they...
1) Decide to try something vegetarian because they want to be healthy
2) Remember that salt is 'bad for them'
3) Choose a meal with little to no added salt
4) Eat the meal, and think it sucks
5) Repeat step 3 and 4 until morale fades, then, GOTO 6
6) Decide that vegetarian food is crap, and return to eating meat
7) Pick something properly seasoned, which will now taste ASTOUNDING because of how excited their taste buds are to get salt
8) Eat whatever they want till they feel unhealthy again, then GOTO 1
These consumers (those who continually adopt and quit healthy eating) create a huge pressure on all vegetarian/vegan food companies to also be low salt for health reasons. Some aren't, but those tend to be ultra low budget ones. Proper amounts of fat and spices are also a problem. A beanburger should not be a diet product. Its just food. But its hard to find brands which don't crumble to the demands of people who want them to be lower salt and fat.
They would not, you have both underestimated the amount of beans and nuts this is (because this is dry weight of whole grains), and underestimated the amount of bioavailable protein in whole grains, beans, and nuts.
Literally any level of laziness can be made vegetarian, once you’ve made the switch. I guarantee there are closer veg options than 20 minutes away unless you live in tractor country.
Indeed, one of the interesting parts of this diet is that the calculations indicate that everyone going wholly vegetarian would probably be bad for the environment, because we could no longer convert plant by products we can't eat into animal and animal products we could,
That doesn't mean YOU have to eat more meat, the existance of vegetarians and those who eat very little meat and dairy actually make this diet easier for everyone else (If 10% of the population are vegan, they get extra vegetable sources and fruit, and those around them get more meat and dairy)
Lunch - chipotle burrito with guacamole - 26 grams of protein
This isn’t rocket surgery, it’s 2019 and you live in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity
Pb&j on wheat, QED
You mean...
Breakfast - 1 Everything Bagel with 3 oz Hummus -> Protein - 6 g hummus + 10 g bagel
Lunch - 1 Chipotle bowl with black beans, sofritas and guacamole, no cheese -> Protein 23 g
You could probably fit a tortilla wrap into your food budget, but you spent a LOT of grains on that morning bagel (~100 g of your 232). I think you'd be better off saving it for snacks and dinner.
That would really blow the diet on p1 which allows 1 egg per week.
Its 1 and a bit XL eggs. 2 L eggs.
Which just shoots by the target in other ways. By more than just eating meat I think.