Not to put too fine a point on it, but the next best thing to not going vegetarian is to cut way down on the amount of meat eaten, both in portion size and times / week.

We shared a back porch grill last night with neighbors, featuring very high end steak (organic, no hormones, grassfed, all that). I get that there are downsides with each, but here's the point; the net amount of steak consumed per person was about 1/3 of what serving a "cut of meat" would have involved. There was probably not enough meat to equal one 'slab' that you'd get at a traditional steak house in one serving. That will be one of the maybe 2 times this week that meat of any kind will hit the plates in our house.

Everyone left filled to the brim, and the meal was astoundingly good, beyond high end restaurant quality.

Making that switch is way easier than going vegetarian, as good as that can be. It's similar to the 'great beer switch', where some years ago I switched completely to microbrews, at least doubling the average dollar per beer. Did that double how much I spend on beer? Hardly, it lowered it. You can't exactly slug down a Dogfish 90 Minute Pale Ale or a Breckenridge Vanilla Porter, just to name a couple of recent purchases. So instead of having 'several', I have one or 2 that call for slow imbibing. More beer enjoyment, less actual beer (and bottles, and waste, and total alcohol), less actual dollars. Everybody wins.

Or you could just impose a carbon tax, rebate the money per capita, and let folks eat whatever the fuck they please.

But Ezra isn't writing a policy blog. He's writing a Stuff The Donor Class Likes blog.

And the donor class likes personal rectitude, not universal solutions.

I highly doubt you could produce 1kg of pork from 1kg of grain. Seems like someone's messed up the units.

Well, yeah, but was the cost of producing beef always relevant in terms of grain? Cows don't "naturally" eat grain. They eat grass, right?

The peculiar cost of producing meat has something to do with

1) the way that Americans either like their beef(grain-fed), or

2) producers who think they can sell more meat to consumers/Americans at lower marginal cost by feeding grain to their cows.

The high carbon cost of meat has some basis in how (and at what volume) we produce it as well as which meat we choose to consume.

But I like fish best anyway.

What about lamb?

The figures from the USDA appear to be 7kg of grain per kg of protein for beef, 4kg per kg of protein for pork, 2.2 kg for chicken, and 2kg for catfish. Grass-fed beef eat a lot of grass, though comparing directly is tricky since cattle can be pastured on land that's not suitable for growing grain. (Not to say it always is.)

Honestly Petey, you're better off just calling me a trust fund baby. That may be a lie, but at least it's a tougher lie to disprove.

Or we could just choose not to eat our fellow creatures, and live a truly progressive life.

I've heard high-end shellfish like lobster is the worst of all (agony, I LOVE lobster!). The problem is the amount of oil it takes for the fishermen to harvest the lobster. By the way, Ezra, you've helped persuade me to go almost completely vegetarian (I'd long since cut out almost all red meat). Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has also contributed, and has a lot of information on how to eat more locally.

Choosing vegetarian foods has never been easier. Check out the Humane Society of the United States' free recipes at:

www.HumaneSociety.org/recipes

But I like fish best anyway.

Except there's no basis to feel high and mighty about that: fish stocks are quickly being fished to exhaustion. Replacing meat with fish (even farmed fish - hell, *especially* farmed fish) is not a solution.

I'll email you the graphic in question as well as a copy of the article, Ezra.

In addition to using more grain,ruminants like cattle (and sheep, but not pigs or chickens) produce methane in their digestive tracts. Methane is about 21 times as strong a greenhouse gas as CO2, and ruminants are a major source. Eating less beef and dairy => fewer cattle => lower methane emissions.

Cattle can eat grass from land that's not suitable for growing crops, but they usually degrade the land by promoting erosion, etc. Growing non-food energy crops like jatropha or switchgrass is a better and less-damaging use of marginal land

Petey, do you believe that there are any human beings in existence other than yourself who are not corrupt, plutocratic scum?

Just askin'.

Putting his rhetoric to the side, I think that Petey's idea for imposing a carbon tax on meat is an excellent idea. But there's no reason to forgo other avenues of decreasing meat consumption. Markets are a tool, not a magical panacea. Why not do them both?

I don't know about 1 kg for a kg of pork, but pigs are great at eating "garbage", i.e., old food that's cooked in a slop cooker. Pig farms are integrated into waste stream processing in towns like Las Vegas where a huge amount of uneaten food is produced by hotel and casino buffets. That's something ruminants can't do.

Beyond a carbon tax, simply stop subsidizing meat. Corn is massively subsidized, and more than half of the corn crop goes to animal feed (which is not natural for, say, cows -- but since corn was so cheap, they figured out how to make cows digest it), and so meat is artificially cheap. We're paying for it on the tax end. It's absurd.

Unfortunately, pork is treif.

Or we could just choose not to eat our fellow creatures, and live a truly progressive life.

It's true, some people can engorge themselves so ravenously with self-righteousness that they don't need any meat.

More pigshit lakes in Virginia and the Carolinas? Woohoo.

Here's something akin to a weekend request: if you stripped off all agricultural subsidies, what would be the cheapest sections of the grocery store?

You are also not looking at the CARBON OFFSET that meat eaters produce.

For instance a lumberjack meat eater may plant 20,000 trees in a single harvests season by far off-setting the carbon cost of eating the meat that gave him the energy to plant the trees.

Don't see many Vegans out putting in 12 hour back breaking, high energy work that actually provides the energy and the carbon offsets for the rest of society.

Klein for better and worse is a faculty offspring who went through the UC system. He hasn't spent a lot of time among poor and working class people but he isn't a corporate stooge. Maybe he can do one of those AFL-CIO union summer internships.

Unless allowed (or forced) to overgraze, cattle improve pasture. It takes around 2 acres to feed a cow for a year. But they congregate. So if you own thousands (and you care about the pasture), you spend all your time moving them around.

We feed em grain for the same reason we let kids have chocolate covered sugar bombs for breakfast - it's easier.

Or we could just choose not to eat our fellow creatures, and live a truly progressive life.

Animals, including the kind that walk on two of our legs and use the other two to manipulate computer keyboards and other objects, *have* to eat our fellow creatures - in fact, relatives. Most other species just eat whomever their instincts tell them to eat, but we large-brained freaks can choose precisely how close a relative we will or won't eat (almost all of us would refuse to eat a member of the same species except in extremely unusual situations, for example).

But there's lots of places to draw that line, and no particular reason to believe that one such division is better than another. Personally, I wouldn't eat an ape (perhaps not any primate) unless the alternative was immediate starvation, but I don't mistake my own preferences for some kind of universal moral law.

Very creative troll, Anonymous. Especially considering the quality you usually associate with the weekend shift. Are you one of those lumberjacks?

Chris: You are some sort of moral relativist. Presumably you refrain from robbing banks or abusing children (if you do refrain) out of personal preference, and not because you believe that universal morality requires everyone to refrain from such actions.

But for those who do believe that morality is more than simply personal preference, and more than simply a convenient temporary contract of self-interest, moral standards must be applied consistently. In other words, individuals must be treated the same unless there is some morally relevant, logically defensible difference between them. Is there a morally relevant difference between a cow and a cabbage? Yes, the cow is sentient (has the capacity of perception by means of the senses, hence can experience pain and pleasure) and has an emotional and social life, while the cabbage doesn't care (there's no one home). Is there a morally relevant difference between a cow and a mentally handicapped human orphan? It's very doubtful that there is. Unless a morally relevant difference can be found and rationally defended, there is no justification for treating one differently from the other when it comes to their basic interests (i.e., staying alive and not being made to suffer).

Lesli Bisgould, an animal-rights lawyer, has written:
"We have tried so hard for so long to identify the magic feature that qualitatively distinguishes the human from the nonhuman animals so as to justify the treatment we accord them. While the old favourites have been dismissed by science in the many decades since Darwin first said 'evolution' (they can’t reason, they don’t think, they can’t communicate, they don’t feel pain …) perhaps we have found one after all: let us never underestimate the unique power of the human mind to rationalize – and even make ourselves feel good about – behaviour that is harmful to others."

I think she's nailed it.

Nice straw man you built for yourself there, mijnheer. "Some sort of moral relativism"? Sheesh, that's a pretty unconvincing rebuttal, and you set it up without even proving its truth. People have been trying to discern universal moral truths for millenia and everyone from Plato to the Pope who has tried has looked like an idiot. Until you can account for cultures different from your own (and your own culture's morality is typically as far as the "universe" goes for seekers of "absolute" truth), you are just blowing smoke.

Or you could get a chicken tractor for your backyard.

industrial pig farms are horrible for the environment in terms of waste-creation and are incredibly inhumane. They are now raised like veal - in cages so small they can't move. and this for one of the most intelligent and social mammals.

Chris - in terms of an argument against vegetarianism, "animals eat other animals, so we can too" is a really bad one. We do not take moral guidance from the animal world for about a million obvious reasons.

We eat meat, all kinds of it. But we have seriously reduced the amount of red meat we eat. My GF says she doesn't even like red-meat all that much. I think she's crazy. I have a filet last night that was just delicious. But in any case, I've almost stopped eating ground meat and we eat mostly ground turkey instead. With few additions, a turkey burger can be REALLY, REALLY good.

As Darwin hypothesized, and as science has increasingly confirmed, morality has its roots in natural selection within social species, human and non-human. Mutual aid tends to promote survival. Despite obvious cultural variations, all human societies have certain moral rules in common, such as generally telling the truth and generally protecting children and fostering their development - for the simple reason that without such rules no society could survive. Extreme cultural or personal relativism with regard to morality is simply false. So in that respect, Plato and the Pope got it right, even if we can disagree with them about the details.

That still leaves room for debate about the best ethical theory. But whatever theory one subscribes to, one has to apply it consistently or simply be irrational. If even severely mentally handicapped humans have a moral right to life or a moral right not to be tortured, because they have a life that matters to them or because they can feel pain and frustration, then any individual, human or non-human, that meets that standard must logically be accorded similar rights. You can come up with a moral theory that excludes all animals from the moral community, but then consistency will exclude many humans as well.

In terms of an argument against vegetarianism, "animals eat other animals, so we can too" is a really bad one. We do not take moral guidance from the animal world for about a million obvious reasons.

In any case, if cows can have moral rights, why can't wolves have moral responsibilities? Or alternatively, why can the cows claim their moral right against some predators but not against others? Any extension of morality outside our own species is fraught with uncertainty (even more than the uncertainty that we already have when moralizing within our species).

Is there a morally relevant difference between a cow and a cabbage? Yes, the cow is sentient (has the capacity of perception by means of the senses, hence can experience pain and pleasure) and has an emotional and social life, while the cabbage doesn't care (there's no one home). Is there a morally relevant difference between a cow and a mentally handicapped human orphan? It's very doubtful that there is.

"If cows can have moral rights, why can't wolves have moral responsibilities?"
Because wolves are not moral agents. Neither are young children, or the insane or many of the mentally handicapped -- but most people would ascribe moral rights to them. They are what has been called "moral patients". We have duties to them, even though they have no duties to us.

What is the morally relevant difference between two individuals who have the same cognitive faculties -- e.g., a cow and a mentally handicapped human? It may well be that we moral agents have an extra duty -- what's called an acquired duty -- to those we are responsible for bringing into the world (that's why I threw in "orphan") or those with whom we live (e.g., family members). We may even have an acquired duty to help the mentally handicapped human orphan before we help the cow. But we also have "unacquired" duties of non-interference to all who meet a basic minimum criterion (whatever we may decide that is). If the human orphan qualifies not to be killed or tortured simply because of her cognitive level, them so does the cow.

Chris,
The issue that most morally-driven vegetarians have with meat-eating is that the beef and pork and whatnot that we generally eat has been raised for that express purpose, most often in inhumane conditions. While I'm not a vegetarian myself, it seems to me that they're issue is not with the predatory consumption of meat. They don't so much mind the idea of eating meat as animals do and as our distant ancestors did - by hunting for it out of necessity. If you still had to go out and hunt for meant (though cow hunting probably wouldn't be that hard), I don't think there'd be as much of a backlash against it. What we do now isn't predatory, it's industrial. So at this point, since since raising animals for their meat requires so many resources and often involves inhumane practices, and since it's now easy to replace meat in one's diet, it seems a rational and reasonable moral decision to avoid meat. People would rather avoid meat because of its adverse environmental, moral, and economic aspects, and I admire them for it (though I don't think I could pull it off haha)

Anonymous, I almost forgot to respond to you too!
I have to say, I'm usually pretty in-the-middle about things, but your carbon offset argument is inane. While there may be a few lumberjacks out there who plant some trees (though most likely after cutting just as many down) after eating meat for their energy, what about the rest of the population, your desk clerks, your construction workers, your pig farmers, and your guys sitting at work not working (hi!)? Those people all eat meat, but they're not producing any carbon offset, and I don't think your lumberjack friend is quite making up for all of us, even if he does sleep all night and work all day. (Oh Monty Python, what would we do without you?)

You are also not looking at the CARBON OFFSET that meat eaters produce.
For instance a lumberjack meat eater may plant 20,000 trees in a single harvests season by far off-setting the carbon cost of eating the meat that gave him the energy to plant the trees.
Don't see many Vegans out putting in 12 hour back breaking, high energy work that actually provides the energy and the carbon offsets for the rest of society.

(ps folks, that second paragraph on my last post was quoting what Mr. Anonymous said)