I'm not trying to be glib or intentionally controversial, but: is this a "market correction" for beef not really being as sustainable at recent consumption levels? Is it a bad thing if beef becomes significantly more expensive?
My father has worked in the meat industry his entire life and said that over the decades, he was shocked how unnaturally cheap meat has become.
I'm in no way anti-meat, but a lot of people have normalized eating a huge amount of meat per day at ultra low cost, and internalized this as some basic right. Natural consumption of meat is to eat meat sporadically, not 3 times per day.
I'm not questioning whether one likes meat, I do too. I'm saying you don't need it in these amounts nor should you expect it to be this cheap forever.
> Natural consumption of meat is to eat meat sporadically, not 3 times per day.
This is just an appeal to the way things were 70 years ago in the US. Much further back you had Native Americans absolutely eating tons of bison meat in the western US. Other tribes easily got fish for every meal. Others have been heavily vegetarian.
Natural and cultural are not the same thing. Culture is made up, nature is not.
Overconsumption of meat can lead to bodily issues as does a lack of particular plant foods. Particular meats are processed/digested in different ways, and have different pros and cons on what it does to your body and health.
So there very much is a "natural" way to consume meat that is most compatible with the capabilities and constraints of our body.
What is recommended/natural is an entirely different concept from what people actually do, which was entirely my point.
I'm imagining a farm household hundreds of years ago, growing their own crops and having a herd of 4 cows, killing one or two a year for lots and lots of meat.
Google says hunter-gatherers got most of their food from meat.
And are crops not unnaturally cheap with modern mechanized farms?
I'd say a good definition for a "natural amount" is the average amount you get in a hunter-gatherer setting. That's what most of our evolution has prepared us for.
Not judging on the value of thaat diet though. "Natural" doesn't necessarily mean "good"
Production of beef is at sustainable levels, provided cheap energy.
But increase fertilizer 3-10x and fuel 3-5x and you’re going to adjust in prices. And you’re going to get a new sustainable level.
Btw when I say “sustainable” I mean market conditions, not environment. The environment can likely handle far more cattle, but it requires input (fuel, fertilizer, etc) for us to produce said cattle.
Recall, there used to be millions (probably tens of millions) of bison roaming the Americas. We basically replaced them with cattle. Cattle are constrained to a region and fed food from farms. Environmental wise, I don’t see much issue with cattle (when comparing to other pollutants)
The difference between the bison and beef cows is that the bison lived longer lives than the beef cows today. Growing new animals vs. maintaining a population has significantly different energy requirements.
Insects are being promoted as a way to hit UN’s sustainable development goals [1]
There’s also an industry emerging, with big pushes from organizations like WEF, to normalize eating bugs [2]. Investors are getting in on this trend too [3]
Yea insects typically have a high amount of allergens to humans.
It's why bioreactors for things like insulin, igb, etc avoid insects cells if they can.
Are you kidding?
Insect cells used in bioreactors would be an order of magnitude safer than possible insect food ( medical grade is much much higher standard than food grade), and people still avoid it as much as possible .
That should tell you "food grade" insects have enormous risk associated with them.
Well if I look at peanuts again, an order of magnitude safer would still be something to avoid very strongly in bioreactors.
At this point I'll keep an eye out but insects are such a broad and mostly unexplored category that I'm not convinced there's an unavoidable and crippling allergen risk.
in what world will people eat bugs instead of beef, do bugs taste anywhere as good as beef? all the push from the supply side doesn't fix the demand problem.
"Eat the bugs", "Woke", "Socialist" can all be used in a positive way it's just that they are also often used by the US right wing in a negative way. You'll understand that when Alex Jones is calling a democrat "woke" he is using it in implying being woke is a bad thing. "Eat the bugs" is similar and is more common in the anti globalist conspiracist circles.
> The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).
Simply put, you have an animal who eats a bunch of veggies. It’s gathering the calories for you. Then when you kill it, you harvest those calories. There are other means of collecting calories (farming grains, milk & honey, etc) but for most of human history (even now) meat was necessary as it contained the calories to survive.
“The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis,” says Lambert. “These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”
Leggett adds,: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that. The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”
The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.
Agreed, and a great alternative is chicken. Delicious, very versatile to cook with and an ecological foot print that is 4 times smaller compared to beef.
Not to pull the "facts don't care about feelings" card... but markets don't care about long-term sustainability so long as medium-term growth can be expected. Such a correction for unsustainable markets will eventually come, but not on a timescale relevant to current events.
I don't personally think rising beef prices are an issue, though. Nobody is going to starve because they're being priced out of a steak. I will be more concerned if we eventually begin to run short of beef-alternatives, though.
I was more thinking about how subsidized beef consumption is, at least in America. I was thinking less about sustainability from an environmental standpoint, though I think the environmental cost of beef is one of the things that is hidden by the way we subsidize the industry.
