Meat, Famine and starvation

[sirocco]

Sirocco, I think the argument is that the rich countries should eat less meat, not that the poor countries should. We really don't need to eat giant hunks of meat for every meal.

And yes, I am also very annoyed how any mention of "maybe we could eat a little less meat" gets turned into some all-or-nothing bullshit where people pretend there's no middle ground between eating several double cheeseburgers a day and going vegan and damned if they're going to give up their burgers.

So nothing to do with reducing world hunger?

[Mayabird]

You're missing the point. This discussion about reducing meat consumption is assumed to be focused on the wealthier countries which can very well afford (in fact, would be better off) having less meat in their diet, not people in third world countries who have to eat whatever the hell they can get to survive and really could use some extra calories.

[Samuel]

Ignoring first world food production going to poor countries, a drop in the required amount of fertilizer and pesticides means that it is cheaper and more farmers in poor countries can use it. Will the ones having famines won't be affected (because they are so poor), it makes helping them easier and makes agriculture in the moderately poor ones more effective, providing more nutrition which is good.

[ShadowOfMadness]

I'm curious....has anyone considered transportation costs?

Meat is more calories pound for pound...

[LaCroix]

Mayabird, the other argument is, that if the rich countries would eat less meat, they wouldn't give the excess food to the poor, they would probably just use the surplus of biomass available to make fuel, or build whatever they like on the new land. Maybe they plant forests to make money from the wood.

But it wouldn't help the poor countries a bit.

Actually, most people in rich countries (not on the American continent) already do live the middle ground, as most countries don't live that Burger/Ribs/Steak/Chicken-life that I witnessed in Toronto. (Seriously. Every single restaurant had two or three of the above, and the only real choices were "which sauce?" and "roast potatoes or fries". It was depressing - I went to eat Chinese all month, as there was at least a bit vegetable in there.)

[LaCroix]

Ignoring first world food production going to poor countries, a drop in the required amount of fertilizer and pesticides means that it is cheaper and more farmers in poor countries can use it. Will the ones having famines won't be affected (because they are so poor), it makes helping them easier and makes agriculture in the moderately poor ones more effective, providing more nutrition which is good.

There is a lot more to agriculture than fertilizer and pesticides. Countries like the Us are very fertile, and have the money to throw against nature to make even non-fertile areas arable. (Diverting rivers, pumping lakes dry, such stuff.)
The poor countries with famines - to be precise, we are talking mostly about central Africa - have the same problems, but not the money to subside farming or make it possible, at all.

Water - most countries with famines have them because of droughts, due to the global climate change. (Especially Ethiopia and surroundings is hit severely by that.) Fertilizer doesn't help if there simply is no water. (Without the rain season, even most of the wells are dry, so 'drill, baby, drill' is no solution. It's only enough to not let the people die of thirst.)

Also, when the demand for fertilizer drops significantly, and the prices drop accordingly - there isn't much to drop, as the prices are at about half an € per kg. You simply can't get much lower - the companies will probably rather produce other things, as they are already fighting tooth and nail over a few cents per kg to outbid each other. Only the huge demand makes this production viable.

Even if prices would drop, the main price for fertilizer imported into a poor country would be the transport. Imagine the cost to transport fertilizer into a small townlet somewhere in Africa - the fuel for the truck already exceeds the price of the fertilizer. (You need about 100-150 kg per hectare, just for info.) Just imagine the fertilizer price drops a huge 25%(can't see that happen, but I assume), and they take 100kg - that would mean they save a whopping 20€ per year... For a whole town...
Ops, I forgot, they don't save - they pay 40€ plus transport (which would be a multiple of this, easily) MORE than before, when they did without fertilizer. Do you know that this amount is more money than these people would earn in a year?

So the only viable way is to grow food in huge state-owned farms. At what price would they have to be sold? Imagine the transport, again - even at cost, people couldn't afford them, and if given away for free, who pays for it? And given the governments in those regions, I can't see distribution to be anything even approaching fair.

[madd0ct0r]

page 2 News Review:
(Page 3 is reserved for boobies, but that's another story)

Vegetarianism here is proposed as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Thus, a low meat diet is probably the best average solution - avoiding the more difficult aspects of pure vege or vegan while giving 90% of the resource reduction desired.
General consensus is that yes, the rich can afford to eat less meat. The world's poor are already on low meat diets.
Obvious exception here being those with low income in rich countries, who tend to eat a lot of poor quality meat as it's cheaper then good veg. Given recent obesity drives in the UK and USA, I assume we're all happy with them eating less meat too?

PROBLEMS:

1 - Prove a direct link between rich eating less meat, and the poor eating more grain.

sub problems:

1.1 - Where is the grain fed to animals currently grown?
1.2 - Where are the animals currently 'grown'?
1.3 - Where are the malnourished people this is aimed at helping?
1.4 - How will transport cost to them differ?
1.5 - What is to stop farmers switching to other land uses? eg luxury veg, biofuels ect.
1.6 - If an excess of grain results, why will it end up going to the poor? Can they suddenly afford it?

I'm of to do some data hunting

[Axiomatic]

If you have a viable means of transporting all the excess grain from where meat currently is to where malnourished people are...why not just use to to transport some steaks?

[Akhlut]

If you have a viable means of transporting all the excess grain from where meat currently is to where malnourished people are...why not just use to to transport some steaks?

Plant products, especially stuff like wheat, flour, corn, and soy, are very easy to keep. Meat is expensive to ship across oceans and keep it fresh, and requires a great deal of refrigeration. By contrast, an equivalent amount of grain could just be dumped in a ships hull and requires mainly just a dry environment to keep.

[Zixinus]

If the West really sunk its heart into it, it could easily feed people malnurished or starving populations in any aspect of the world. The real question is, why should it? And how would vegetarianism help that, when available foods is already a non-issue?

[madd0ct0r]

preliminery research is suggesting that the majority of animal feed used in Europe is imported.

UK for example, seems to be taking it almost entirely from Argentia and Brazil.

So reduction in meat eating in UK = grain surplus in South America, potentially solving the transport issue.

these imports are considered by the EU feed industry as unavoidable because the EU is not self-sufficient in protein-rich feed. FEMAC estimates that the EU livestock industry as a whole imports 77% of its protein requirements; 98% of the soya bean meal imported by the EU is sourced from Brazil and Argentina, which are major producers of GM soya. Brazil and Argentina also supply the EU with significant quantities of maize for starch manufacture, the by-products of which go for feed use; much of this will be GM. The UK imports cotton meal from Brazil, India and China, which are major producers of GM cotton.

http://www.food.gov.uk/gmfoods/gm/gmanimal
(please don't laugh at my country's panic over GM. After BSE any new food ideas are treated carefully)

Barkin and his colleagues concluded that, at least where data were available--Brazil, Columbia, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela--the demand for meat among the rich was squeezing out staple production for the poor. (Barkin et al. 1990)

http://www.thevegetariansite.com/feedandfood.htm
although obviously biased, it does a pretty good run down of several case studies.

Human consequences of the shift from food to feed were dramatically illustrated during the Ethiopian famine in 1984. While people starved, Ethiopia was growing linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock. Millions of acres of land in the developing world are used for this purpose. Tragically, 80 per cent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses which are fed to animals for consumption by the affluent.

http://www.viva.org.uk/guides/feedtheworld.htm
even more biased, yet detailed and thorough. not too happy with the standard of referencing, but it's not bad.

and several further papers as pdfs.

one of them takes an intresting posistion that rather undermines my arguement:

Cheap food causes hunger.
On its face, the statement makes no sense. If food is cheaper it’s more affordable and
more people should be able to get an adequate diet. That is true for people who buy food,
such as those living in cities. But it is quite obviously not true if you’re the one growing
the food. You’re getting less for your crops, less for your work, less for your family to
live on. That is as true for Vermont dairy farmers as it is for rice farmers in the
Philippines. Dairy farmers today are getting prices for their milk that are well below their
costs of production. They are putting less food on their own tables. And they are going
out of business at an alarming rate. When the economic dust settles, this will leave us
with fewer family farmers producing the dairy products most of us depend on.
This is the central contradiction of cheap food. Low agricultural prices cause hunger in
the short term among farmers. And they cause food insecurity in the long term because
they reduce both the number of farmers and the money they have to invest in producing
more food.

An estimated 70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend either directly or
indirectly on agriculture. Cheap food has made them hungry and kept them in poverty. It
has also starved the countryside in the developing world of much-needed agricultural
investment. Farmers have nothing to invest if they are losing money on their crops.

Timothy A. Wise
Resurgence
Issue 259, March/April 2010

[Eddie Van Helsing]

IDEA 0 - We have a moral duty to help.

I recognize no such obligation.

idea 1: Meat is now not required for a healthy diet, therefore meat is a luxury item consumed for it's taste (like wine)

Are you shitting me? I'd like you to consider my own case, which is strictly anecdotal. I am probably an anomaly: I cannot eat most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting. In fact, the only vegetable I can tolerate is celery. The only fruit I can tolerate is the tomato. Perforce, my diet consists mostly of lean meats, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and celery. I also take supplements. If a vegan diet didn't kill me, I'd probably kill myself rather than spend the next 40-60 years eating vegan.

[Akhlut]

IDEA 0 - We have a moral duty to help.

I recognize no such obligation.

So, you're pro-suffering?

idea 1: Meat is now not required for a healthy diet, therefore meat is a luxury item consumed for it's taste (like wine)

Are you shitting me? I'd like you to consider my own case, which is strictly anecdotal. I am probably an anomaly: I cannot eat most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting. In fact, the only vegetable I can tolerate is celery. The only fruit I can tolerate is the tomato. Perforce, my diet consists mostly of lean meats, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and celery. I also take supplements. If a vegan diet didn't kill me, I'd probably kill myself rather than spend the next 40-60 years eating vegan.

And, yet, millions of Indians live without eating meat, oddly enough.

[Simon_Jester]

idea 1: Meat is now not required for a healthy diet, therefore meat is a luxury item consumed for it's taste (like wine)

Are you shitting me? I'd like you to consider my own case, which is strictly anecdotal. I am probably an anomaly: I cannot eat most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting. In fact, the only vegetable I can tolerate is celery. The only fruit I can tolerate is the tomato. Perforce, my diet consists mostly of lean meats, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and celery. I also take supplements. If a vegan diet didn't kill me, I'd probably kill myself rather than spend the next 40-60 years eating vegan.

And, yet, millions of Indians live without eating meat, oddly enough.

Come on, Akhlut, you're smarter than this.

If Eddie, has some kind of bizarre problem of the digestive tract that makes it impossible for him to eat "most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting..." the fact that millions of other people don't have the same problem is completely irrelevant.

For Eddie, meats are not a luxury item consumed purely for flavor, because without them his diet would be so limited that he'd probably keel over from vitamin deficiencies (or spend the rest of his life relying on supplements). Assuming he managed to strike a balance he could live on, it would still be a truly bad diet from the point of view of happiness and well-being: monotonous and often flavorless.

So for Eddie, it is totally beside the point that millions of Indians live without eating meat. Eddie is not attacking the notion that people can choose not to eat meat. He is attacking the notion that he can choose not to eat meat, that meat is a luxury for him. It isn't, any more than, say, sunlight is: you can live without sunlight, but that doesn't mean you should be expected to.

There's a gap between "absolutely essential for life" and "luxury good that we should all be willing to stop using the moment it causes problems." For Eddie, meat falls somewhere in that gap at best.

[Eddie Van Helsing]

So, you're pro-suffering?

My position concerning suffering is threefold:

• I do not want my friends to suffer.
• I am willing to alleviate the suffering of strangers if I can do so without harming myself or acting against my own interests.
• I fucking love it when my enemies suffer.

You will not guilt-trip me so easily. Fuck you and the false dichotomy you rode in on!

And, yet, millions of Indians live without eating meat, oddly enough.

I am not one of those millions of Indians. Perhaps I am defective; my dietary requirements are certainly anomalous, but they are requirements. As Simon_Jester was kind enough to explain, while I could give up eating meat in order to help alleviate the suffering of millions of strangers on the other side of the world, the personal cost to me would outweigh any conceivable good I might do. As I said before, I will not sacrifice myself.

<drama>In fact, if I was told that I had to die to save the world, I would sooner put the world to the sword with my own hands. A world that demands self-sacrifice is not a world worth saving.</drama>

[Simon_Jester]

<drama>In fact, if I was told that I had to die to save the world, I would sooner put the world to the sword with my own hands. A world that demands self-sacrifice is not a world worth saving.</drama>

[takes Eddie seriously]

OK, that's... kind of retarded. And evil. I mean, I was with you up through the whole "I have a rare digestive disorder that limits my consumption of non-meats!" That's understandable. But the whole self-righteous "fuck people who aren't in my monkeysphere" thing... I think I'll pass on that one.

I mean, that's just you falling in love with the hardware limitations on your own brain. It's like making a fetish out of the unit caps in strategy games. [shudders]

[Eddie Van Helsing]

<drama>In fact, if I was told that I had to die to save the world, I would sooner put the world to the sword with my own hands. A world that demands self-sacrifice is not a world worth saving.</drama>

[takes Eddie seriously]

OK, that's... kind of retarded. And evil. I mean, I was with you up through the whole "I have a rare digestive disorder that limits my consumption of non-meats!" That's understandable.

I wasn't going to mention that I'm also a recovering Randroid, but as you can see, every once in a while I fall off the wagon. Sorry about that.

[Akhlut]

Are you shitting me? I'd like you to consider my own case, which is strictly anecdotal. I am probably an anomaly: I cannot eat most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting. In fact, the only vegetable I can tolerate is celery. The only fruit I can tolerate is the tomato. Perforce, my diet consists mostly of lean meats, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and celery. I also take supplements. If a vegan diet didn't kill me, I'd probably kill myself rather than spend the next 40-60 years eating vegan.

And, yet, millions of Indians live without eating meat, oddly enough.

Come on, Akhlut, you're smarter than this.

If Eddie, has some kind of bizarre problem of the digestive tract that makes it impossible for him to eat "most fruits, vegetables, or legumes without becoming nauseous and vomiting..." the fact that millions of other people don't have the same problem is completely irrelevant.

Similarly, for millions of Indians, eating meat would cause stomach upsets of that kind. Part of the problem may lie with his intestinal flora, which do the bulk of work in digesting plant materials. For those Indians, their intestinal flora cannot handle the burdern of digesting meat because they're optimized for plant material, as are the enzymes the people naturally produce. However, that is entirely due to environmental concerns (ie, because their diets are made up almost entirely of plant products); when they move to America and their children eat more meat, they can digest it. So, it is not something hereditary, but environmental in cause. It could entirely be Eddie's own fault that he can't eat plants if he simply didn't like them and never ate them before, and now he has trouble eating them because his enzyme production and intestinal flora aren't well adapted for digesting plants.

The main point I was getting at, however, was disagreeing with his implied point that there would be a large enough population of people who simply cannot sustain themselves on a low-meat/no-meat diet. Just because Eddie might be unable to digest plant products does not imply that the rest of the world should not reduce meat consumption.

As for why I am considering it an implied point (just to counter this before it is brought up), he said madd0ct0r's point that meat is not required for a healthy diet to be shit; Eddie doesn't say a variation of "yes, we need to reduce meat consumption in general, but there might be people who need meat, as I do, because of blah blah blah," rather, he immediately gets pissy ("Are you shitting me?...If a vegan diet didn't kill me, I'd probably kill myself rather than spend the next 40-60 years eating vegan.") on the implication that people in general need to eat less meat.

There's a gap between "absolutely essential for life" and "luxury good that we should all be willing to stop using the moment it causes problems." For Eddie, meat falls somewhere in that gap at best.

Potentially; we have no actual idea of any medical condition preventing him from eating plants or if it just that his intestinal flora is so adjusted to meat that it will take a few days or weeks or adjustment for his intestinal flora to switch over to plant consumption. We have no idea, and given that even people who are lactose intolerant can consume milk in small quantities, we cannot automatically assume that his body is so fucked up that he cannot eat plants properly. It might just be that the bacteria in his gut are so unused to plant material that they immediately produce tons of gas upon digesting it and his body can't handle it.

<drama>In fact, if I was told that I had to die to save the world, I would sooner put the world to the sword with my own hands. A world that demands self-sacrifice is not a world worth saving.</drama>

Oh, woe is you. How old are you, by the way? In your teens? Because if you've somehow reached adulthood without noticing the need and requirement to make personal sacrifices to live in greater society, you're either retarded or a Randroid, but I repeat myself.

[Eddie Van Helsing]

It might just be that the bacteria in his gut are so unused to plant material that they immediately produce tons of gas upon digesting it and his body can't handle it.

I'm not a doctor, but if I'm vomiting up a salad ten minutes after I've eaten it, does it really make sense to blame intestinal bacteria if only the smallest portion of my meal has gotten past the duodenum?

Oh, woe is you. How old are you, by the way? In your teens? Because if you've somehow reached adulthood without noticing the need and requirement to make personal sacrifices to live in greater society, you're either retarded or a Randroid, but I repeat myself.

You might have noticed that I already covered that.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, as long as there's a portion of your brain that realizes how retarded the "fuck the universe" attitude is, there's hope.

[Plekhanov]

Producing meat from livestock uses more land than growing the same amount of calories in vegetables and fruit and has more inefficiencies. I assume he means if that land was used not for meat but for vegetables and fruit there would be more food available.

This is pie in the sky madness, treating meat like a simple luxury item. I know most vegetarians assume people like meat simply because they are socialised to and could be weened off it but why do chimps eat meat? Simply because the other chimps do? Doubtful.

How do you "know" this? I'm a vegetarian and I think people like meat because it tastes good to them, I know a lot of vegetarians and none of those I've spoken to share the opinion you imagine most vegetarians have.

Vegetarian diets are much harder to follow properly than vegies make it out to be, as stated above some people simply dislike some vegetables and fruit that you really have to eat if you don't want to eat meat. What are they do to?

I dislike some vegetables and fruit (who doesn't? I don't think I've ever met anyone who likes all foods) but find a vege diet easy to thrive off, the only times I've had any difficulty are when living in a very small village in France and a month I spent working in North East England when I was forced to eat out the whole time. Going vege is only difficult if you're an imbecile with no ability to cook or unfortunate enough to live somewhere with a narrow range of vege friendly food available. Obviously if the whole world went vege, vege friendly food woudl be available everywhere so being a vegetarian would be extremely easy.

[Korto]

We must also remember that just as "oils ain't oils" (a referance that Australians "above a certain age" will get), meats ain't meats. Specifically, different animals require different amounts of vegetable mass to create meat (this is referred to as the Feed Conversion Ratio).
Cattle are bloody awful, at 8:1, ie 8kg of vegetable mass for 1kg of meat. US farmers claim pork at about 3.5:1, and poultry has 2 - 4 :1. Farm raised atlantic salmon is apparently 1.2:1!
Wiki link, unfortunately
There's mention there how the "interplay" between wet and dry food and meat queers the thing, but I would believe the actual relative ratios between different animals would still remain (ie, cattle is 4x poultry)

It should also be considered that certain animals are much better at co-existing within a more vegetarian-oriented farm. Poultry in particular can eat scraps, clean up windfall in an orchard, and keep down pests. A more poultry-oriented diet would be a more reasonable inbetween than all-or-nothing.

[Plekhanov]

I know most vegetarians assume people like meat simply because they are socialised to and could be weened off it but why do chimps eat meat? Simply because the other chimps do? Doubtful

Or more importantly, why do primitive (yes, not PC word but it is an accurate one in this case) societies, that have been isolated until only a few decades or centuries ago, still have extensive hunting experiences? Why do the African Bushmen hunt for meat, if its a luxury item?

Because meat is an essential foodstuff, especially if you live a very active lifestlye because it is very difficult to make up the energy with plants. I recall a Ray Mears show with Siberian natives, where he showed that you need to eat several bagfulls of (to be fair, local) plants to get the same energy you can get from a big-sized stake they got from their herd.

That is why people are hard-wired to enjoy meat: energy-dense food. Humans evolved to store food and last for several days just on it. Plants were more plentiful as well as grub-food (small stuff) but meat supplied much more raw energy.

What complete nonsense, just because it's next to impossible for hunter-gatherers to follow a vege diet it doesn't follow that it's difficult for people in urban societies to do so. We have easy access to all manner of extremely energy dense vegetarian foodstuffs that mean you can easily lead an extremely active lifestyle without eating meat. I myself have been a vegetarian for over a decade, on a vege diet I've had manual labour jobs & been a very keen cyclist at times clocking up several thousand miles a year.

Once we went agrarian humans for millennia subsisted largely off plants bred to be much richer energy sources than hunter gathers had access to. Only the nobles could afford substantial quantities of meat whilst the peasants who worked the land (and life doesn't get any more gruellingly "active" than that) were forced to subsist largely off plants with meat as a much sort after luxury.

That said, people eating less meat and eating less would produce more healthier people: people eat too much meat (and thus become fat, something that our evolution views as a good thing but isn't in our lifestlye), myself included. However, meat is not a luxury at all and I cannot imagine how the hell could we safely replace lifestock farms with regular, plant-producing farms, giving the same amount of calories out or even more.

Especially when you consider that lifestock are fed on plants that usually cannot be used for human consumption,ie grass. Humans cannot digest grass.

You could hardly be more wrong if you tried.
Wheat which western society was largely built upon is a grass & we digest it very well.
Animals raised for meat tend not to freely roam about in the wild eating things humans couldn't, they're all too often factory farmed & fed crops humans can eat. For an example look at this breakdown of corn usage in the USA:

U.S. Usage Breakdown
The breakdown of usage of the 12.1 billion bushel 2008 U.S. corn crop was as follows, according to the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates Report by the USDA.[43]
5.25 billion bu. - Livestock feed
3.65 billion bu. - Ethanol production
1.85 billion bu. - Exports
943 million bu. - Production of Starch, Corn Oil, Sweeteners (HFCS,etc.)
327 million bu. - Human consumption - grits, corn flower, corn meal, beverage alcohol

[Formless]

You're a fucking moron, Plekhanov. First of all, do you know why people find meat tasty? It not because meat is high in energy, its because its got lots of protein which one of the five basic flavors the tongue is able to detect. Furthermore, the kind of protein we're talking about is not found in plants at all.

Second:

You could hardly be more wrong if you tried.
Wheat which western society was largely built upon is a grass & we digest it very well.

Bzzzt, wrong. In fact, wheat is horrible on your teeth. Just ask all those guys archeologists keep finding in early agrarian societies that died of dental problems. You know why? Its filled with fucktons of glucose. You know, that stuff that makes you fat in a hurry?

Have you done any research on this subject at all? Or are you just another morally righteous prick who thinks meat is murder?

[Plekhanov]

You're a fucking moron, Plekhanov. First of all, do you know why people find meat tasty? It not because meat is high in energy, its because its got lots of protein which one of the five basic flavors the tongue is able to detect. Furthermore, the kind of protein we're talking about is not found in plants at all.

Strawman. Where did I claim that people find meat tasty "because meat is high in energy"? Too rebut the claim that "meat is an essential foodstuff, especially if you live a very active lifestlye because it is very difficult to make up the energy with plants" is not the same thing as claiming that people find meat tasty purely because it's energy dense.

I'm well aware that meat is high in protein, unlike you I'm also aware that people can easily meat their protein needs through non animal flesh sources.

You could hardly be more wrong if you tried.
Wheat which western society was largely built upon is a grass & we digest it very well.

Bzzzt, wrong. In fact, wheat is horrible on your teeth. Just ask all those guys archeologists keep finding in early agrarian societies that died of dental problems. You know why? Its filled with fucktons of glucose. You know, that stuff that makes you fat in a hurry?

Have you done any research on this subject at all? Or are you just another morally righteous prick who thinks meat is murder?

Really so in your world if a foodstuff causes tooth decay that means we can't digest it