And not liking liberals don't change the truth about meat: Industrial agriculture is cruel, meat production is a huge contributor to global warming, and the market for meat contributes to world hunger in a substantial and direct way.

And liking liberals doesn't change this truth about meat: we evolved to eat the stuff. Modern homo sapiens is literally the evolutionary product of an omnivorous diet that included substantial quantities of animal flesh. I'm not about to entrust the optimization of my personal health (not to mention my personal dining pleasure) to the ramblings of Gwynneth Paltrow. Nor should you.

There are an awful lot of delicious foods (Thai, Ethiopian, Indian, etc.; veg meats like Morningstar Meal Starters, Gimme Lean, etc.) that don't involve such horrible brutality. I know Ezra needs to avoid recognizing the great cruelty and suffering, but turning a blind eye doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

www.meat.org

My 13-year-old lifelong vegan daughter, with an IQ of over 140, just finished a 35-mile running week for cross-country with a hilly 8 miles today. More. But you're surely right, Jasper, that you and your animal consumption are smarter and healthier.

We could certainly get into a discussion of the relative health merits of plant-based diets and flesh-based diets. But do you really want to? Because though I don't know what Gwyneth Paltrow says, I do know the scientific consensus is more plants, more fish, more whole grains, and way less meat.

Bacon is not a meat- it is a garnish.

Damn you Klein! You just got me really hungry for bacon-wrapped date tapas.

I dismiss calls for vegetarianism out of hand. If the complaint is cruelty, then the argument should be for more humane treatment, which I support. If the complaint is sustainability then the argument should be reducing consumption to sustainable levels, which I can't imagine is complete elimination of meat consumption. If the argument is health effects of over consumption of meat, then the argument is about what level of meat is healthy.

I think it's beyond argument that we need to eat less meat. Whether it's cruelty, sustainability, or health issues, Americans eat too much meat. So let's find the sweet spot for meat consumption rather than arguing for complete abstinence or unbridled...uh...carnivore... -ocity?

Thanks for the link, Ezra. For the record, I have no problem at all with complaining about excessive meat-eating, though with the caveat that pastured animals are far more ecologically friendly (and healthier!) than grain-fed ones from CAFOs. It's trying to artificially raise the cost of more essential and inescapable things than that - like gasoline or household energy use - that I'm objecting to.

I'm veg, but I don't really thinking telling people to not eat meat is going anywhere. I'd sure as hell like to stop subsidizing it though. Tax the negative externalities and get the prices right, and we'll see how much meat people want then.

It has to be a lifestyle and technology (tofu) issue, not a financial one. Last I checked cows still reproduce and if you make the animal worth more you will get even more deforestation for grassland. You have to decrease demand because they actually don't want it not because it is more expensive. Making it more profitable by making the animal worth more will only lead to further deforestation. I think you could open up the CRP program for grazing. Millions of acres of unused grassland and drive the prices so low you take all of the profit out of deforesting rain forest and the use of grain as well.

It is not polite to say so, but among the reasons why the non-meat/meat tradeoff is even discussed is that a more natural balance of animal populations (including us) to the world's resources (of the sustainable kind) is already behind us. The world is clearly overpopulated with humans in many areas. The Chinese ignored this too long and now are paying the price with a forced one-child policy. Nature on its own usually finds balance: too many wolves and the wolves starve, etc.

We are now evolved to be omnivores, although the mix of foods is our choice, up to the limits of our ability to buy/produce, the ethics of our obligation to sustain for our posterity, the health of our families, and similar considerations. There is nothing that mankind should feel regret about in eating naturally raised animals for food, but morality demands that we observe the larger picture now and for the future and make reasoned decisions how we should live.

But there very likely are limits to growth and we should seek a balance that doesn't force resource wars and widespread famine. Peak oil and peak water and peak food are realities, not suppositions.

Now, back to my BLT for lunch.

While mass produced grain certainly has a per-acre advantage over meat, the plant foods that are good for health have a far smaller advantage in per-acre, and also can't be grown in most of those north dakota acres except for 2 weeks in the summer.

we evolved to eat the stuff.

We evolved to eat the stuff rarely because, go figure, it was a lot easier to eat nuts and berries and leaves and stuff than it was to get our hands on some antelope steak, back in the day.

We evolved to eat meat because it was available on occasion and because on those occasions it provided more protein than anything else readily available, not because primitive humans were eating steak for dinner every night. Now we have options that we mostly did not, previously.

Isn't corn based ethanol helping contribute to hunger as well? Especially in the past few years.

we evolved to eat the stuff.

Cows didn't evolve to eat corn; nor did pigs evolve to live in such concentrations that their effluent fills a small lake.

Looking beyond evolution, the manipulation of animals through agriculture has always been based around the understanding that livestock represents a multi-part investment, rather than setting aside feed and land in exchange for lump o'meat.

only eat what you kill

if you want to get moral about food consumption you also need to include the carbon involved in transportation and packaging

"I dismiss calls for vegetarianism out of hand. If the complaint is cruelty, then the argument should be for more humane treatment, which I support."

Do you support it with your pocketbook or in some abstract way by having an opinion about it? Cause if you go out and buy an ordinary meat product, even rarely, you are actually supporting tortute and starvation with your pocket book.

Maybe if you listened to the arguments for vegetarianism instead of rejecting them "out of hand" this might have occurred to you.

John Schwenkler-

"...though with the caveat that pastured animals are far more ecologically friendly (and healthier!) than grain-fed ones from CAFOs."

I see this "caveat" tossed around a lot in this kind of discussion, but I'm not really convinced it's all that clear cut.

For sure it's not at all true that pasture raised animals are particularly environmentally friendly- they still require large acreages, and lots of fresh water. Manure can't be easily managed, and ends up distributed randomly, or leaching into waterways (in both cases producing GHGs).

You can make an argument that forage crops can be grown easily and with less intensive farming techniques, and animals can be grazed on rough land that would be difficult to cultivate otherwise. But that mostly falls down too, at least environmentally.

Lighter forage crops require even more land area to produce a pound of beef than richer crops like soybeans or corn. And from an environmental perspective, the latter can and should be farmed in less intensive, more sustainable ways anyway.

And while grazing on marginal land seems attractive, it is also hardly costless. Huge swathes of the American West have been denuded and polluted thanks to ridiculously cheap federal grazing rights. (And see the above about manure management.)

All that's not to say pasture raised meat would or should disappear, but I certainly think a full accounting of environmental costs would likely result in marked reductions in both CAFO and pasture raised meat production. (I might even guess that from an environmental perspective, some kind of truly environmentally conscious CAFO might actually be superior to grazing in many cases.)

It's trying to artificially raise the cost of more essential and inescapable things than that - like gasoline or household energy use - that I'm objecting to.

What's "artificial" about putting prices on carbon and congestion? The whole problem is that thanks to market failure, these externalities are unnaturally left out of our internal economic decisions in the first place.

You're basically arguing that "essentials" should be subsidized, at least for the poor. But of course gas and energy already make up a disproportionate share of the budget for low-income households. Why not take the argument all the way and call for explicit third-world style gasoline subsidies?

I'm sure even you can see that that would be an awful idea. But it's not fundamentally different from leaving in place the large implicit subsidies we already have.

The correct approach is of course to price all the externalities we can, then assist the poor directly with transfer payments and investments in transit and so forth.

As far as I can tell, this is exactly the policy advocated by economically literate progressives like Ezra.

I suppose you can argue that this 'correct approach' is too politically difficult - that the likely result will just be higher energy costs, with no offsetting transfers, so the poor are screwed.

I think that's lazy. For one thing, the poor are already screwed as far as transport and energy costs. It's a situation that needs political advocacy and attention either way. At least carbon taxes provide a new source of revenue to do something about it.

For another, "what about the poor" can easily be a pretty disingenuous argument used as cover by much wealthier people who just want to preserve the status quo. See the Manhattan congestion pricing fiasco, or all sorts of variations with regard to global warming and third world development. Pushing that line of argument--even sincerely--is totally counterproductive, and unlikely to result in any benefit for the environment OR the poor.

I think Jack is basically right about pasture-raised meat, although there's another, related problem and that's that Americans get consume more protein than we need and end up shedding the excess (i.e. we don't use it, store it, or anything it other than pee it away). I think that if Americans had more appropriate levels of consumption the impact would obviously be less.

But I don't think you can possibly argue that while pasture-raised meat has its problems it's in any way equivalent to CAFOs. Distributing the waste allows it to break down more thoroughly and more quickly, with much more going into the soil. CAFOs tend to dump the waste into reservoirs and those can be the source of environmental catastrophes (see, for example, the spill into the Black River in the Tug Hill area of NY a few years back). And then there's the animal welfare issue - CAFOs are unspeakable in their treatment of the animals.

There's been some interesting stuff lately, BTW, being done in waste management at larger livestock operations. See, for example, http://www.manuremanagement.cornell.edu/

And liking liberals doesn't change this truth about meat: we evolved to eat the stuff. Modern homo sapiens is literally the evolutionary product of an omnivorous diet that included substantial quantities of animal flesh.

I can't claim to live it out, but this is silly. Substantial amounts of meat meant when someone could catch something. It wasn't nearly the amount of meat we eat now.

On the other hand, I do wonder about the laws of unintended consequences when we talk about radically changing diets and animal husbandry in the United States. We have ridiculous amounts of livestock. What happens to it if we really get half or more of the population to quit eating it? It's not as if it's practical to just suddenly let all of it go. It seems pretty horrible to just kill all but a few of the current population and not even eat it. Do we have a big "no more raising meat" barbecue and reduce the herds/flocks/etc. to what we hope are sustainable levels? Do we then allow people to hunt to keep them so? (Hunting, to my way of thinking, being a more humane and fair way for humans to obtain meat.)

I always wonder about the logistics of a success.

The morally arrogant arguments for vegetarianism are always there; just the excuse changes.

Fundamentally it boils down to the question of whether or not one views eating as morally wrong. I don't. I'm an animal; unlike plants we eat other creatures, both animals and plants.

If we didn't feed animals corn, the corn farmers would probably switch to biofuels; there would be zero net impact on CO2. Health? A lot of obese people load up on fatty food, and only a small portion of that is meat. Meat is *expensive* for poor folks. Loads of carbohydrates are much cheaper. Animals can graze on land which isn't usable for crops. I could go on, but what's the point?

Prosletyzing vegetarianism is simply puritanism, differing from alcohol or drug prohibitionism, or sexual prudery, only in it's choice of targets. The laundry lists of the ills of meat eating could substitute effortlessly for the evils of the demon rum, or grotesque details of sexually transmitted diseases.

I should clarify that I would love to see an end to at least factory farming of animals. It just strikes me that there doesn't seem to be a plan as to what to do with the millions and millions of human-dependent animals that would be left when there was no profit margin in feeding them at all.

Americans 'get more protein than they need' only because they excercise insufficiently. Enough protein to properly feed someone who works out is at least a much as the average american gets.

No, Americans eat more protein than an Ironman athlete needs. We consume a ridiculous amount of protein. And it's not as if there aren't other, higher-quality sources of protein than beef.

Magenta, a couple of things about reducing the amount of livestock. First, as demand goes down farmers breed less. Second, frankly, I feel pretty strongly that animals that are raised in CAFOs are better off being killed humanely than they are having to live like that.

I've never understood why people are so defensive about eating less meat. There may be a few outliers demanding we give it up cold turkey (HAW HAW HAW) but basically it's really just as simple as a suggestion to eat less meat. Once or twice a week, instead of eating beef or pork, eat chicken or fish (there are problems there but both are lower impact). Once a week, instead of eating a cheese steak eat an eggplant parmagian sub. It's not a big deal and it certainly doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't involve turning your life upside and certainly not any inconvenience. Just give it a shot and see how it goes.

Melinda,

I'm not personally opposed to eating less meat, and I am not a "meat must be with every meal" type by a long shot. I totally agree that making better choices some of the time is better than just shrugging the whole thing off.

It's more an intellectual curiosity about what we would do if we really did cause a large shift away from meat. I agree farmers would breed fewer animals, but there would still be cows and pigs and chickens, etc., that were not profitable to support in the same way. And they would breed with or without our help.

It's more a puzzle that I'm pondering than something I expect people to justify. There's no doubt that our system of raising animals should be improved not just for the good of the animals but for our own good health. It just strikes me that there should be a good plan for what to do with the existing stock and descendants, and I don't think I've ever heard that discussed.

@marc - well said.

Why should the masses give up meat when DC socialites can just give up their Ipods and gourmet coffee? Delicious meat is one of the few delicacies that poor people have. You want them to give up meat and spend extra time figuring out how to eat a vegetarian diet? Last time I checked, soy milk costs more than cow milk, and vegetarian burgers cost more than hamburgers. Vegetables and fruit cost something like $2.50 a pound and either are frozen and taste horrible or are fresh and take forever to prepare. Vegetarianism is just another example of the excesses of counter culture. People should just concentrate on being good their families and not being mindless consumers of material goods or frivolous ideas.

You know, it's funny, I was just thinking about the kind of cookware I was going to have to get for my new place to effectively cook eggs, since they're such a "cheap source of protein". Ironically, people are going to react to calls like this as "liberal social engineering" but if there wasn't such huge subsidies for eggs and beef we'd be half-way there already.

People are starving because so many of us eat meat.

Clearly it is not as simple as that.

Calculating least harm:
http://www.jgmatheny.org/matheny%202003.pdf

Vegetables and fruit cost something like $2.50 a pound

You fail. Try again.

What amuses me about these posts is that they are mentions of simple facts which, never the less, get people so resentful and defensive about their dietary choices.

"Fundamentally it boils down to the question of whether or not one views eating as morally wrong. I don't. I'm an animal; unlike plants we eat other creatures, both animals and plants."

Animals have nervous systems; plants don't. Vegetarianism isn't a critique of eating, its a critique of torturing to death things with nervous systems.

"If we didn't feed animals corn, the corn farmers would probably switch to biofuels; there would be zero net impact on CO2."

In which case it would displace fossil fuels and they would at least be there for later. And the price of food would go down unless all of it, 1 for 1, is used for fuel instead of food. And if it were 1 for 1, we could use all of the land and water to transform it into the final product, instead of wastefully transforming it into cows that can only be partially utilized.

"Animals can graze on land which isn't usable for crops. I could go on, but what's the point?"

But they dont graze there, do they? So if you buy meat you are subsidizing an inefficient use of the land until that changes, arent you? I guess the point of going on is that you might stumble upon a plausible argument one day.

"Prosletyzing vegetarianism is simply puritanism, differing from alcohol or drug prohibitionism, or sexual prudery, only in it's choice of targets."

Unmitigated bullshit. Actions have consequences, and those consequences render them morally acceptable or unacceptable. Vegetarianism recognizes those consequences -- it is not self-denial for its own sake. Or is any "judgmental" philosohpy "target" unacceptable, however indefensible the target?

Eating meat or not eating meat have little to do with the problems of starvation. This is urban legend.

The starvation problem is NOT too little food. The problem is distribution and storage. In some locations at some times, there is not enough food and people starve.

Areas that have famines for extended periods typically are not capable of putting enough food in storage during good times to make it through the lean times. Famine prevention in these areas require greater food storage and ability of populations to relocate when environmental conditions change.

One way many traditional cultures store food is to grow animals. During times of surplus, the surplus is fed to the animals. During lean times the animals are eaten. Animals are actually insurance against starvation.

There is no shortage of food worldwide. There is a food distribution problem.

"The starvation problem is NOT too little food. The problem is distribution and storage. In some locations at some times, there is not enough food and people starve."

This certainly used to be the case -- indeed, it used to be arguable that low food prices produced more starvation than high, because it eliminated food entitlement by accelerating the dispossession of small scale farmers. But I dont think thats the case any more -- food prices have sharply increased this year and I think it is likely that they have begun to drive increases in hunger. And while reorganizing distribution schemes could solve the problem without altering first world dietary practices, neither of us (I am guessing) are policy makers. But we are consumers with an effect on the price of food. Reduced supply aggravates the problem.

"One way many traditional cultures store food is to grow animals. During times of surplus, the surplus is fed to the animals. During lean times the animals are eaten. Animals are actually insurance against starvation."

I dont think this is really the target of (much) vegetarian advocacy. Rather, its buying meat that comes from large, consolidated, agribusiness conglomorates in the first world.

woops, that was me. hit post before putting in my info.

But I don't think you can possibly argue that while pasture-raised meat has its problems it's in any way equivalent to CAFOs. Distributing the waste allows it to break down more thoroughly and more quickly, with much more going into the soil. CAFOs tend to dump the waste into reservoirs and those can be the source of environmental catastrophes (see, for example, the spill into the Black River in the Tug Hill area of NY a few years back). And then there's the animal welfare issue - CAFOs are unspeakable in their treatment of the animals.

This is exactly what's I'm not so sure about. Waste distributed in a pasture still (de)nitrifies as it is absorbed into the soil, and a lot of it still runs off into streams, etc. The pollution is more distributed, but it's still going somewhere.

Actually, there are places on federal land in the West where "wilderness" lakes and streams resemble manure ponds more than anything else. (Not to mention the probably very large net release of carbon/nitrogen caused by overgrazing.)

I'd definitely find it easy to believe that pasture-raising is (or could be) somewhat less polluting than current CAFOs, but I'd really have to see a balance sheet first - and I think it might be close. Pasture raised meat would definitely be heavily affected by any (comprehensive) GHG pricing scheme.

On the other hand, some kind of advanced CAFO might have an environmental advantage precisely because the waste is easily concentrated. It'd be expensive to treat/digest/compost it in sealed tanks and turn it into fertilizer/biofuel or whatever, but it could be done.

Of course, you still have to grow a lot of grain, and you've still got big problems with cruelty and antiobiotics...

Marc seems to be adopting the Aleister Crowley defence: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.'

Combining that with an accusation of moral arrogance really is Smithfield-grade pigshit.

Delicious meat is one of the few delicacies that poor people have.

'Delicious'? That's an interesting adjective. For the most part, Americans eat vast quantities of (literally) shitty meat. They like their meat in forms that don't remind them of the animal it came from, and the further away it gets, the more likely it is to be shitty factory meat product.

But, since the rest of your comment suggests that you can neither shop nor cook, I suppose that's to be expected. Keep munching on those Thickburgers and thinking it's a taste of the high life.

Sorry, Jack, but unless you've actually experienced a CAFO waste lagoon or have looked at actual data on waste management, you're relying on your intuitions, and we know how well that works when people do that in areas they don't have expertise.

And I'm not sure from which orifice you're pulling the "and you've still got big problems with cruelty and antibiotics."

Empire Farm Days is in about a month, and there will be a lot of exhibitors/vendors who can show you how farms deal with animal waste these days. C'mon up.

For illustration, let's consider the ubiquitous 'Bubba Burger', which I've seen on a few grills over the past couple of months.

Mmm. Five-month-frozen ground beef, bought at 10c/lb from a company that went bust when it had to recall the stock on the shelves for E. coli. contamination. Cook it to 160F to ensure you don't shit your guts out. Deee-licious.

Melinda-

My comment must have been poorly worded. I didn't mean offense.

You have no argument from me about how awful CAFOs are. I've seen waste lagoons. I am well aware that a few warehouses full of animals produces more effluent than a medium sized city. Not to mention a lot more suffering.

My point is only that just because damage is more diffuse, it doesn't mean it's less damaging. Taking that waste lagoon and smearing it over a few thousand acres of BLM land makes it a little harder to smell, and a lot harder to see, but it's still pumping the same nitrogen oxides into the air, and a lot of algae into the water. Meanwhile, cattle are turning stable grassland into hard-packed desert.

It's nicer for the cows (until they're killed...), but it isn't necessarily the idyllic alpine pasture that some people seem to be picturing when they say that "pasture raised meat is environmentally friendly".

oops- that was me.

No pseudowhatever, I've thought carefully about the morality of what I eat. And I reject vegetarianism, root and branch. I do not grant it moral superiority, and the practical claims for its advantages are inevitably overblown. Naturally this leads me to be likened to a Satanist (the Nazi accusations will presumably come later in the thread.)

I've heard it all before - it comes from growing up in progressive circles where arguments like the ones Ezra is presenting were considered fresh in, oh, the 1970s. I know that the net carbon reduction of biofuels is almost nil, and that vegetarian arguments almost always ignore replacement questions (e.g. what grow on the land that's freed up.) Having lived next to a cornfield, for instance, I know that a whole lot of small animals die when crops get harvested. Starvation is political, not resource limited (as noted above). And it's perfectly possible for a balanced diet to be healthy.

Mmmm. contaminated spinach. Surely this means all vegetables are bad!

If you eat meat you hate the earth. If you drive a SUV you hate the earth. I'm waiting for next thread to take on pet owners next. After all they serve no purpose other than to contribute to global warming as well. If you have a dog or cat you hate the earth as well. So in essence ride a bike to work, drink from a reusable bottle, don't eat meat, turn your thermostat to 80, change out your lightbulbs, go to the farmer's market instead of the supermarket and go have the family dog put to sleep. Any Questions?

If you eat meat you hate the earth. If you drive a SUV you hate the earth. I'm waiting for next thread to take on pet owners next

Yeah. Because god forbid someone should ask you to stop charging 5 percent of everything you buy to someone else's credit card. How dare they. They're OBVIOUSLY just self-loathing hippies or something.

There's (at minimum) tens of millions of acres of land that is only useful as pasture. Extensive raising of meat on that land seems (leaving aside the moral objections to meat eating and looking only at the economics of the matter) entirely reasonable.

There is one other point that I've seen noted with some joy. If we really stopped raising animals for their meat then we'd also have to give up organic farming. No animals means no animal poop and thus no fertiliser that accords with the organic rules.

Tim, we've got some local people who sell "veganically-grown" produce, which doesn't rely on composted animal waste for soil development. It's expensive, but mostly because they've got a monopoly, I think. Certainly it's common to compost vegetation and to use till in cover crops like winter rye to add organic material to soil. Also, lots of people keep dairy animals or raise meat for their own consumption, so there's no reason to think that manure won't be available. And for small-scale operations there's always the chicken tractor (Why do people think that meat animals are going away? Do you really think that?)

Jack, breaking down waste (manure) is an aerobic process. Waste ponds are concentrated anaerobic environments, which is much of the problem. Spreading manure allows it to break down more quickly and it builds soil, not degrades it. A good way to frame it, I think, is in terms of crop requirements for nutrients. For example, alfalfa uses about two cows per acre's worth of poop.

I am personnaly opposed to raising animals for food..therefore I am eating them all up as fast as I can.
---------------------------
Comedy central: ""I am a vegan, except for eggs,...and veal...its sooo tender...""
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Apparently most here get their meats from farm raised sources and not free range like venison. You can find animal sources not raised on
farm sourced grains.

. Modern homo sapiens is literally the evolutionary product of an omnivorous diet that included substantial quantities of animal flesh. - Jasper

IIRC the latest research on this, we didn't evolve to eat meat so much as to eat bone marrow (which we got at with primative tools -- and the driving force for evolution was that, with bigger brains we could make better tools so we could get more and more yummy bone marrow -- a source of nutrition for which our only competitors were hyenas) -- which is why we love sweet, fatty foods.

But then we also probably only evolved to live long enough to see our grandchildren past toddlerhood (human infants are too demanding to raise alone). Even with a later onset of puberty due to poorer diet in the past (say 20), that still means we've only evolved to live 45-50 years.

Nu? Let's eat only what we've evolved to eat -- high fat, high sugar foods (nuts, fruits, marrow) and live only as long as we've evolved to live? This is an argument?

Part of being human is that we have "ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil" and now there is no going back (the real lesson of the so-called "fall") to our purely animal selves ... we may have evolved one way, but because of our evolution, we have to take other things -- morality, longevity, etc. -- into account ... about which amoral evolution doesn't, at some level, care.

I've been getting a lot of links along the lines of, "if meat becomes more expensive, everyone will starve! Is that what liberals want!?"

Nu? Maybe? Maybe not?

But it certainly is what a free market conservative would want. If markets work (and gummint gets out of the way), then meat being more resource expensive would translate to meat costing more.

So either the conservatives' precious market don't work so well, or conservatives must "want" (or view as inevitable) the price of meat to go up ...

*

BTW -- lifestyle liberalism is horrible politics: it paints liberalism as something too expensive for Joe Sixpack and opens liberals up to hypocrisy charges ("Al Gore uses a lot of energy"). There is a reason why the GOP always tries to frame liberalism in terms of life-style liberalism ... we must resist this frame rather than embracing it.

There is hypocrisy in this argument as well. I have a vegetarian couple that I am friends with. They have two labradors and three cats. They tell me all of the time, that we shouldn't eat meat. I'll stop as soon they go out back and pop a cap in Fido, Rusty and the three cats. Its OK for a pet that has no purpose other than companionship to eat fancy feast and contribute to global warming, but not humans.

Melinda-

AFAIK, the aerobic processes involved in integrating the chemicals in the waste into the soil include nitrification and denitrification. Those both leak various nitrogen oxides into the air - very potent GHGs. There are also some aerobic processes that release CO2, I think, but the nitrogen oxides are worse.

And this is ongoing, as the nitrogen load in the soil changes, or its structure is disturbed - as I would think is very likely to happen on areas frequently (over)grazed by cattle.

(And that's all if it doesn't make it into a waterway, and eutrophy and anaerobically decompose anyway. Again, an ongoing risk, with more nutrients likely to leach out the more they build up in the soil.)

Anaerobic (and aerobic) digesters produce some nasty gases too, but at least the reactions take place in a more-or-less controlled factory setting where everything can (in theory) be contained. (I gather the methane often already is.)

Is there any technical reason the end products of waste treatment can't be biofuel and stabilized, homogeneous fertilizers, with everything else sequestered or re-used?

A good way to frame it, I think, is in terms of crop requirements for nutrients. For example, alfalfa uses about two cows per acre's worth of poop.

That may be true, but there's a lot of work done by the "about". If the cows are grazing, the waste isn't being evenly distributed or precisely metered.

Too much nitrogen or phosphorous here or there and it is going to run off into waterways and/or stimulate excessive activity by GHG generating bacteria.

One of my vegetarian friends openly said she was a vegetarian for her own personal ethical reasons. When I mentioned the "waste of grain" issue, she pointed out that, as a native of South Dakota, she saw that the farmers were able to produce much more grain than they knew what to do with or could make money with, so the "Wastefulness" of meat didn't play into her reasoning.

If we stopped wasting our time with ethanol and grain-based biofuels, we'd do a lot more to stop wasting grain than if we stopped eating meat.

However, your children care about you and what you to be at their weddings, so you should probably reduce your intake of cholesterol, stop eating eggs for breakfast every day, and save the bacon and steak for special occasions. Also, if you can't go a few meals without meat, it's a sign that you can't control your diet, but rather that your diet is controlling you.

Because though I don't know what Gwyneth Paltrow says, I do know the scientific consensus is more plants, more fish, more whole grains, and way less meat.

Fair enough. Most Americans (and most Westerners) eat a diet that is surely balanced toward too much meat. But you're talking about going meatless, Ezra, right? Good luck trying to get a substantial portion of the human race to go against their own genes. And what kind of a vegetarian eats fish? Eeeewww!

We evolved to eat the stuff rarely because, go figure, it was a lot easier to eat nuts and berries and leaves and stuff than it was to get our hands on some antelope steak...

All you have to do is look at the body of a healthy, fit human -- and compare him to his primate cousins -- to know we most certainly didn't eat animals rarely in our evolutionary history, but in fact did so with great frequency. And even a cursory glance at the skeletal remains of ancient humans shows a marked decrease in health that coincides with that plunge in animal consumption and increase in plant consumption called that advent of agriculture.

IIRC the latest research on this, we didn't evolve to eat meat so much as to eat bone marrow....

Eating the bone marrow of animals constitutes eating animals.

There is hypocrisy in this argument as well. I have a vegetarian couple that I am friends with. They have two labradors and three cats. They tell me all of the time, that we shouldn't eat meat. I'll stop as soon they go out back and pop a cap in Fido, Rusty and the three cats. Its OK for a pet that has no purpose other than companionship to eat fancy feast and contribute to global warming, but not humans.

Jenga- In case you missed it, this post is about pricing externalities, not feeling guilty about anything.

Once the full price of meat production is reflected on the price tag--so you're not passing half of the bill on to all the rest of us--you and your friends can bathe daily in liquefied Spam for all I care.

But you're talking about going meatless, Ezra, right?

No, I don't believe he was. It's about pricing, period.

All you have to do is look at the body of a healthy, fit human -- and compare him to his primate cousins -- to know we most certainly didn't eat animals rarely in our evolutionary history, but in fact did so with great frequency. And even a cursory glance at the skeletal remains of ancient humans shows a marked decrease in health that coincides with that plunge in animal consumption and increase in plant consumption called that advent of agriculture.

Humans can thrive on a sufficiently varied all-vegetable diet.

On the other hand, try eating nothing but meat for a year. I dare you.

Humans are equipped for eating meat as a portion of our diet, but not at all well-suited for eating it all the time. We are not carnivores.

(Evolution, incidentally, doesn't have an end stage. There's no reason to believe humans were ever perfectly suited to any particular historical diet.)

Fixing waste disposal is not the only piece that needs to be fixed to make raising cattle more sustainable, I think. Part of the issue that Jack is raising (which is a real problem) is that the number of cattle on a farm needs to be brought into better alignment with what can be supported by the land. We've got a sheep farm up the road that uses rotational grazing and his fields are in beautiful shape and to my knowledge have never had to be fertilized or had weedkiller applied. But it is a heck of a lot of work to move the sheep and the fencing every day.

Similarly, it's common around here to spread raw (uncomposted) manure on fallow fields and let it rot for a year before putting crops in. If done properly it's a net benefit, although obviously they're burning diesel to pull the spreaders (which do a nice job of distributing it evenly).

Cornell Ag is looking at recovering as much usable stuff as possible from lagoons, and who knows, if they're able to deal with some of the safety issues and recover things like methane from it (which you can't with normal composting), maybe I won't find it so objectionable. I'm not sure that it would ever be an option for smaller operations, given both the economics of it (the capital costs for the recovery equipment) and that it really does take a pretty large amount of poop to get it cooking on its own. And my bias is that if you're producing that much manure it's likely that your operation isn't otherwise very sustainable.

I've heard that Humans aren't Omnivores, Carnivores, or Herbivores. We are actually Frugivores. We have hands to pick fruit and vegetables off of trees/plants and to peel them. Our teeth are perfectly suited to biting into fruit/vegatables. And our intestines are not like those of herbavores, nor like that of carnivores. Interesting.

I also heard that early man didn't eat the meat of the animals they killed, but the stomach contents of grain eating animals. We can't eat grains ourselves, but if we let the animal do the digesting for us, then the partially digested grain is then edible for us.

Another interesting thing. Why do we only eat animals that eat grains? We don't eat carnivores. (well, not most of us). We don't put lions in cages, then slaughter them for steaks. Why not? I think it's because we need more grain/vegetable matter. So we only eat meat that's been raised on that, and not on other meat.

Uh, John, it's a lot easier to derive your meat from prey animals than from hunter animals. It's not any inherent difference in the meat, it's more about "why risk your life trying to kill a lion for food when a cow is so much easier to harvest?".

Why do we only eat animals that eat grains? We don't eat carnivores. (well, not most of us). We don't put lions in cages, then slaughter them for steaks. Why not? I think it's because we need more grain/vegetable matter. So we only eat meat that's been raised on that, and not on other meat.

As lux points out, that seems to be for the same sorts of reasons that lions prey on grain-eating animals rather than tigers or hawks eat field mice rather than owls. As predators, we're going to take the easiest route to the maximum amount of food output. That doesn't seem surprising. Hunting lions might be a neat psychological game for some people, but it's not a reliable food source.

I've heard that Humans aren't Omnivores, Carnivores, or Herbivores. We are actually Frugivores. We have hands to pick fruit and vegetables off of trees/plants and to peel them. Our teeth are perfectly suited to biting into fruit/vegatables. And our intestines are not like those of herbavores, nor like that of carnivores. Interesting.

I don't know if this is tongue in cheek or not, but if so, congratulations, because it is an almost perfect parody of the genre. "X group of Perfect Ancient Stone Age Men ate Y, using anatomical feature Z, therefore humans are Perfectly Evolved and Y is the Perfect Food."

Another interesting thing. Why do we only eat animals that eat grains? We don't eat carnivores. (well, not most of us). We don't put lions in cages, then slaughter them for steaks. Why not? I think it's because we need more grain/vegetable matter. So we only eat meat that's been raised on that, and not on other meat.

Also brilliant, if you're pointing out a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the contra-Ezra argument:

If it takes an acre of grain to feed a human, and ten acres of grain to grow a cow to feed a human, then maybe it takes a hundred acres of grain to feed ten cows to feed a lion to feed a human.

Imagine the luxury! Those damn dirty hippies would probably object for some reason, though. Always trying to make us feel guilty about our government-subsidized lion steaks.

(More seriously: Lions and other big mammalian predators are at the apex of the pyramid so there are just fewer of them than there are, say, antelope. It's sort of a no brainer to decide which one is easier to hunt. Humans do eat plenty of the various more numerous carnivores and omnivores - smaller mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish...)

It's been stated above in various ways, but to summarize, you can raise cows in a lot of places where nothing else will grow. Not every place is the Salinas Valley. My own prejudice is that we should eat whatever can be grown locally without excessive irrigation or chemical application. In suburban Houston, I can easily grow okra, peppers, and onions in my back yard. Shrimp and oysters are produced locally. So, gumbo. Zucchini, not so much without extensive fungicide use.

eat more vegetarians

It's been stated above in various ways, but to summarize, you can raise cows in a lot of places where nothing else will grow.

As has also been pointed out above, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

In a world with comprehensive pricing of environmental externalities, there are a lot of new places where raising cows is more expensive than it's worth.

All you have to do is look at the body of a healthy, fit human -- and compare him to his primate cousins -- to know we most certainly didn't eat animals rarely in our evolutionary history, but in fact did so with great frequency.

How so?

I mean, I could understand if humans had obvious adaptations to meat eating lacked by our primate cousins like sharp fangs or claws, but since that's obviously not the case, what is it about a casual glance at a healthy, fit human's body that so obviously leads you to believe that humans evolutionarily ate lots of meat that you don't even think that the argument is worth mentioning?

"But people have always eaten people,
What else is there to eat?
If the Juju had meant us not to eat people,
He wouldn't have made us of meat!"

http://members.optushome.com.au/pennywyatt/Interests/FlandersSwann/DropOfaHat/At%20the%20Drop%20of%20a%20Hat09.html

The chart is missing fish.

Jack makes the point about GhG emissions from cattle. Rice production is also a major emitter of methane, and it's not easy to capture that (see http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/asian_rice_a_source.php for example). Which raises whole new issues about how to satisfy food needs in Asia and anywhere else that people eat a lot of rice. Like in my mostly-vegetarian hosuehold.

Jack makes the point about GhG emissions from cattle. Rice production is also a major emitter of methane, and it's not easy to capture that (see http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/asian_rice_a_source.php for example). Which raises whole new issues about how to satisfy food needs in Asia and anywhere else that people eat a lot of rice. Like in my mostly-vegetarian hosuehold.

I feel like I may have muddied the water some with all the talk of manure management.

Just to be clear,
it is N20 from crops that is the biggest source of greenhouse gases from agriculture. The EPA estimates US 2006 emissions (in Tg CO2 equivalent) at:

Nitrous oxide from "agricultural soil": 280; Methane from cow farts: 126; Methane and N2O from manure management: 56; Methane from rice cultivation: 6.

(Unfortunately, emissions from farm equipment are not separated out in the EPA reports - but assuming it's about 13% of "Transportation" energy use, it's about 250 Tg.)

Obviously the major reason overproduction of meat is a problem is that not only does meat production produce gas directly, it requires a lot more cropland.

This is also why spreading manure on a field isn't necessarily an improvement over fermentation. (Especially if you can catch the methane with fermentation.) Excess fertilizer application and disturbing the soil with tilling are major causes for the N20 soil emissions.

I think estimates put rice paddy methane emissions in China in the neighborhood of 120 Tg CO2 equivalent, so even wordwide rice paddy emissions probably doesn't rival N20 emissions from US field crops alone. (Though, depending on the style of rice paddy, there may be some low hanging fruit in terms of mitigation there.)

A more relevant metric would be deliciousness per acre. Of course this would be hard to quantify, but I get the feeling that beef would kick soybeans ass.

And before we start crowing about "more fish" let's read Bottomfeeder [http://www.amazon.com/Bottomfeeder-Ethically-World-Vanishing-Seafood/dp/1596912251] by Taras Grescoe. If this book doesn't get you hyperventillating nothing will. The fact is, there are very few foods left that are both ethical and healthy, much less sustainable. We need to change the way we think about producing food entirely.

For heaven's sake! What a load of garbage passes for an argument when one's meat eating is on the line! Truths are truths, even when they're inconvenient. Here are a few (pardon the length):

When I drive my car, I'm burning fossil fuels that contain carbon that hasn't been in our atmosphere for a long, long time. The result of that re-introduction may (and probably does) contribute to climate change with potentially significant negative impact. The fuel I use probably came from the US or Canada, but my demand for it props up global oil prices that have kept backward and socially repressive regimes afloat in the Middle East. The corn that's in the ethanol that's in that fuel could be in the mouth of a Mexican whose tortillas are so expensive that he's thinking about risking his life to cross the Rio Grande and earn more money to feed his family. I can be an adult about it and make my choice, but I'd be a sniveling loser if I funded some hack of a scientist to confuse the issue in order to assuage my conscience and/or duck taxes, wouldn't I? I do drive, and I drive a sportscar, but I drive it sparingly and I'd support the additional imposition of a pigovian externality tax/surcharge whatever. I deserve to pay monetarily for the consequences of my choices. If I were to make my decisions by arrogantly dismissing plain consequences, well, that'd pretty much make me a coward, wouldn't it?

Same deal here. Absent heat in the core and nuclear, all the energy we get here on earth comes from the energy in the light from the sun hitting earth. There's WAY more than enough energy in that initial input. It's a fundamental law of physics that ANY conversion of that energy entails waste. There's waste in every step of the evaporate => cloud => rain => river => hydropower path, in the sun => plant => person path, and in the sun => plant => animal => person path. The loss from plant => person to plant => cow => person is very significant. On top of that, there's added "use" of that energy by the animals actually moving around, etc, and so on. My understanding is that feed animals eat more of the world's edible crops than humans do, and I think it's far more. The concentrated manure is an environmental problem no doubt. So is cows turning CO2 into methane (carbon "neutral," but methane apparently worse from a GHG standpoint). Working in a slaughterhouse is one of the more dangerous jobs a person can have in our country, day and age. Meat, that while okay in modest and/or lean quantities, contributes to obesity, heart disease, and other negative externalities. My body can process meat, but it's hard to argue with the fact that a gorilla is way bigger and stronger than me, shares 98% of my genetic code, and eats basically no animals other than the occasional insect. It's also hard to argue with the fact that Carl Lewis pwned the world as a vegan and my vegan buddy is a significantly better marathon runner than I am.

Now, I like my burgers, with cheese and sautéed mushrooms, just like I like my Honda S2000. I like a Bratwurst with a fresh German beer. Heck, I like "Chicken Fiesta Burritos" from Taco Bell. But those are my preferences. Preferences don't change facts, and the facts above are pretty much the way things are.

But can we afford our meat habits and if so, what are the tradeoffs? All that food they eat could be burned as fuel or consumed by humans directly. Eating a cow which meandered around eating corn and producing methane for it's entire life doesn't seem functionally different from filling my car up with ethanol-supplemented fossil fuels and driving it in circles producing CO2 (no offense to NASCAR fans). Is there "waste" here? Definitely, just like in any other luxury item.

So the real question is: which do we prefer? Eating way more meat than necessary or lower fuel/food prices? If fuel and food are cheap enough right now that we have extra energy to spare, what's the harm in spending that excess in the form of burgers (absent of course the harm to the animals themselves)? What however would we do if we lived in a country where fuel and food were spiraling costs that were beginning to threaten the livelihood of our poor, or in a country where heart disease kills more than pretty much anything else, or where some insane percentage of our teenagers are obese (not high-BMI weightlifter "obese", but the real, gasping-on-the-steps, flab-all-around, kind of obese).

Well, if we were in a situation like that, maybe it'd be time to look around at the situation and make some hard choices. Choices like cutting corn subsidies in order to relieve the scourge of High Fructose Corn Syrup and cheap cow food. Choices like cutting meat and dairy subsidies so that we can spend that money on things like health care for all our new young fatties. The kind of choices we might make if we quit hiding from the facts like little cowards who just need our bacon fix.

What it isn't time to do is to start pulling all the same crap the Republicans do when it comes to global warming. Mumbling about our organic, grass fed cows as if they're more than an insignificant drop in the global beef supply. Quipping about needing "protein" while Carl Lewis laughs at us from the finish line. Whining about how hard it is to eat a nutritious diet as a vegetarian when it's apparently way harder to eat a healthy in a meat-heavy diet, a fact to which millions of morbidly obese Americans can attest.

Meat is awesome, but it's a luxury. Like my roadster, like my ipod, like my air conditioning and my house full of non-biodegradable crap that I don't need. Like it or not, becoming a vegan is probably the single biggest thing I or any of us could do for the environment and for the world's poor. Do what you want to do, eat what you want to eat, but don't sell your intellectual honesty down the river just to avoid making yourself feel bad about some taste preferences. It's just unbecoming.

As the game is set to be released on September 18th many players will be pushing hard to level their characters as fast as possible as well as farming as much gold as they can on the process. Warhammer gold is valued the highest during the start of the game when every player is striving to get as much of it as possible into their own hands.

绣花布

Why do we only eat animals that eat grains? We don't eat carnivores. (well, not most of us). We don't put lions in cages, then slaughter them for steaks. Why not? I think it's because we need more grain/vegetable matter. So we only eat meat that's been raised on that, and not on other meat.

And liking liberals doesn't change this truth about meat: we evolved to eat the stuff. Modern homo sapiens is literally the evolutionary product of an omnivorous diet that included substantial quantities of animal flesh.

If you drive a SUV you hate the earth. I'm waiting for next thread to take on pet owners next. After all they serve no purpose other than to contribute to global warming as well. If you have a dog or cat you hate the earth as well. So in essence ride a bike to work, drink from a reusable bottle, don't eat meat, turn your thermostat to 80, change out your lightbulbs, go to the farmer's market instead of the supermarket and go have the family dog put to sleep.

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A more relevant metric would be deliciousness per acre.

If we didn't feed animals corn, the corn farmers would probably switch to biofuels; there would be zero net impact on CO2. Health? A lot of obese people load up on fatty food, and only a small portion of that is meat. Meat is *expensive* for poor folks. Loads of carbohydrates are much cheaper. Animals can graze on land which isn't usable for crops. I could go on, but what's the point?

We are now evolved to be omnivores, although the mix of foods is our choice, up to the limits of our ability to buy/produce, the ethics of our obligation to sustain for our posterity, the health of our families, and similar considerations. There is nothing that mankind should feel regret about in eating naturally raised animals for food, but morality demands that we observe the larger picture now and for the future and make reasoned decisions how we should live.