Marxist Animalism
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Whether its health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is that meat-free diets are best. Eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories. The evidence is clear that consuming less meat and more plants is good for both our health and the planet’s The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.
18 meat-eating claims debunked
An interesting interview
“…Human beings are not prepared to protect nature in any sense. Because in all our history as a species, our deepest conviction always was that we are the ones who have to be protected by the powers of nature. And we are not really prepared for this inversion. Just as a baby cannot carry his or her mother, human beings are not prepared — or not able — to carry nature…”
I live in a provincial capital which claim to fame is the annual Elephant Festival. I never go to the events.
I have seen elephants in all their aspects…wild, working, temple, tourist…and it never makes me happy. They have such sad soulful eyes,
Modern Buddhism is depressingly indifferent to animal suffering. The elephant is the symbol of Gautama, yet often the worst treated.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/24/plant-based-diet-our-planet-urgently-needs
The gulf between what people say they understand is necessary and what their actions continue to prove otherwise is alarming. It is nowhere more evident than their dietary choices…
Producing 1kg of beef, for example, uses 163 times more land than producing rice, beans or potatoes. To put things into stark context, 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon is being used to graze cattle and most of the rest is being used to grow soy beans for animals living in the perfect breeding ground for new epidemics, factory farms. In total, around 80% of available arable land is used for livestock farming, yet animal products provide less than 20% of our calories. As much as we try to ignore the voices of the experts, it is getting increasingly difficult. You have to drive your head further and further into the sand with each and every passing day. But, that is what people continue to do. Even those who consider themselves to be open minded liberals. They are anything but when it comes to their dietary choices…
For every kilogram of chicken flesh we consume, we have wasted between 2-5kg of edible food. When it comes to pig flesh, that rises to between 4-9kg and for cows it rises to a staggering 6-25kg of feed. This is hugely inefficient and completely unsustainable.
https://www.dw.com/en/award-winning-german-docufilm-gets-to-the-heart-of-meat-processing/a-53959266
Regeln am Band, bei hoher Geschwindigkeit (“Rules on the assembly line, at high speed”)
Almost one hundred years after Brecht’s drama that describes abuses in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, Lokshina’s film also criticizes capitalism. Temporary, subcontracting work in the meat industry keeps workers isolated and stops them from organizing. “They cannot rebel against the deplorable conditions,” Lokshina says.
https://countercurrents.org/2020/06/its-not-just-meat-all-farm-and-food-workers-are-in-peril/
COVID-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time.
The current public-health crisis in food production and processing has grown directly out of the drive for profit. In recent decades, the overriding goal of the agriculture and food industry—a sector whose pace and production were once strictly dictated by the seasons and the weather—has been to turbocharge profits by maximizing output per hour per worker.
It doesn’t have to be like that. In a system motivated by nutritional goals rather than profit, a much more widely dispersed workforce producing at non-exploitative rates of output could easily produce enough food to meet this country’s needs.
China consumes more pork per capita than any other nation.
Half of the world’s pork is eaten in China, and the acceleration has been rapid. In the 1960s China annually consumed less than 5kg per capita. By the late 1980s this was 20kg and has since tripled to over 60kg,
Zhenmeat is throwing its marketing behind one product in particular, created with the Institute of Alternative Protein in Beijing, a meat-free alternative to pork tenderloin, which is popular in hot pot.
Matilda Ho is the founder of Bits x Bites, China’s first food technology venture capital group. She has backed four different protein companies, from plant-based to cell-based.
She says it is easy to overstate climate worries as a reason for Chinese consumers to switch from animal protein.
“Taste will always be the driver for consumers to convert their behaviour. It won’t be environmental concerns.”
David Yeung of OmniPork says, “This isn’t just about consumer trends, it’s about climate change, the pandemic, swine fever. Governments will have to look at this, not just as consumer choice or a trend – but about sustainability of the planet.”
Bruce Friedrich is the co-founder of the Good Food Institute, which researches and promotes meat alternatives, explains, “… if you can make crops which mimic the way meat tastes and smells and looks, and scale that up, it will become cheaper than animal meat. Then it becomes not just for vegetarians and ‘flexitarians’ (those who cut meat consumption by going meat-free on certain days) but for everybody.”
Some of these, still too few, are good. The better ones are still too expensive for me. But I tried a sausage recently, made by a local real sausage company based in Broxburn, which was indistinguishable from its regular ones. I’ll check out its Lorne sausage and black pudding. Most of them (Quorn, McCartneys) are rubbish.
On a ‘meat free’ day I invariably feel hungry and dissatisfied later on and have to open a tin of sardines or mackerel or steal some of the cat food my partner has bought in for a vicious feline visitor. (Beef or ham slices no less Jeez, ridiculous.)
“This is the biggest problem we face today as humanity and this is the best way to fight climate change, to deliver healthier solutions and food to the entire population of the planet.”
https://www.france24.com/en/20200701-3d-printed-fake-meat-the-healthier-greener-future-of-food
“Our technology can create whole-muscle cuts just as a cow can produce that but in a much more efficient way, with a lower cost and, of course, it’s much better for the environment,” Redefine Meat CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters. “We can do the entire cow, not only one part of the cow. Steaks, roast, slow-cooking, grilling, everything that an animal can do we want to do the same or even better,” said Ben-Shitrit.
“On a ‘meat free’ day I invariably feel hungry and dissatisfied later on and have to open a tin of sardines or mackerel or steal some of the cat food my partner has bought in for a vicious feline visitor. (Beef or ham slices no less Jeez, ridiculous.)”
Why is it ridiculous? Good for your partner, I say.
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