Bad avocados, culinary standards, and knowable knowledge.
June 7, 2024 2:42 AM Subscribe
A study from the University of Copenhagen looks at "Culturally appropriate rejections of meat reduction". Reasoning by meat-eaters includes shaming vegans and claiming they are hypocritical; outsized estimations of the climate impact of vegan options vs. meat; and as the researchers put it, “not knowing is convenient”.
Abstract:
Cultural conventions are central to tackling unsustainable consumption. In the Global North food conventions are increasingly contested due to the political importance of climate change and the share of global greenhouse gas emissions tied to animal food production and consumption. Significant reductions in meat consumption are touted as pathways to adaptation, but most consumers remain committed to consuming meat-based meals and diets with meat. To explore how consumers handle these issues in today’s cultural context, this article examines culturally appropriate ways of rejecting meat reduction. The theoretical framework is based on interactionism and accounts. The empirical material is from focus group discussions with Danish consumers. We find that in discussions about using plant-based meat, norms of proper culinary conduct are held to be more pressing guides for normative assessment than climate impacts. We also show that the status and function of climate impact “knowledge” is complex and ambiguous. A shared social knowledge of the climate impacts of meat consumption appears to exist alongside “questionable knowledge” and “lack of knowledge”, both of which are referred to excuse, justify, and charge others in reasoning supporting continued meat consumption. Knowledge of climate impacts is accepted when it fits cultural conventions but appears less knowable if it poses challenges to contemporary consumer culture. The article contributes insights into the ways in which cultural conventions and complex knowledge negotiations help to preserve unsustainable consumption.
A summary of the publication is available at Vegconomist.
Abstract:
Cultural conventions are central to tackling unsustainable consumption. In the Global North food conventions are increasingly contested due to the political importance of climate change and the share of global greenhouse gas emissions tied to animal food production and consumption. Significant reductions in meat consumption are touted as pathways to adaptation, but most consumers remain committed to consuming meat-based meals and diets with meat. To explore how consumers handle these issues in today’s cultural context, this article examines culturally appropriate ways of rejecting meat reduction. The theoretical framework is based on interactionism and accounts. The empirical material is from focus group discussions with Danish consumers. We find that in discussions about using plant-based meat, norms of proper culinary conduct are held to be more pressing guides for normative assessment than climate impacts. We also show that the status and function of climate impact “knowledge” is complex and ambiguous. A shared social knowledge of the climate impacts of meat consumption appears to exist alongside “questionable knowledge” and “lack of knowledge”, both of which are referred to excuse, justify, and charge others in reasoning supporting continued meat consumption. Knowledge of climate impacts is accepted when it fits cultural conventions but appears less knowable if it poses challenges to contemporary consumer culture. The article contributes insights into the ways in which cultural conventions and complex knowledge negotiations help to preserve unsustainable consumption.
A summary of the publication is available at Vegconomist.
> Many study participants attempted to shame vegansor implied that adopting a vegan diet was ridiculous. When one participant said they would not go vegan, others laughed, “confirm[ing] to one another that veganism would be a ridiculous solution”. Vegans were accused of being hypocritical for eating processed foods and avocados, which participants claimed were damaging to the climate.
> “With this notion, the participants confirm to each other that their food practices are not more problematic than food practices among people who have cut out meat entirely — even though the truth is that red meat has a far greater climate footprint than both avocados and vegan products,
One of the problems with encouraging people to reduce meat in their diet is that it's generally done in shaming ways, but not acknowledged as shaming. See above: meat eaters shaming vegans is called out as shaming, but vegans (or people who want folks to reduce meat in their diet) shaming meat eaters is recognized only as reasoning based on "the truth". Well, yeah, it's factually true that red meat has a larger impact environmentally. AND pointing to this as a reason to change a person's eating habits is a shame-based effort.
Our diet is absolutely one of the most culture-bound habits we possess. It is personal, it is communal, it is bound up in so much meaning and history, and what we eat + how we eat it is one of the cornerstones of what connects us to our families and friends. In addition it is sustenance, the thing we need to stay alive. There are hardwired genetic impulses we have connected to eating, and deep seated psychological compulsions associated with food and its personal role in each of our psyches.
In a world where many people willingly poison ourselves and hasten the dates of our own personal deaths on a daily basis by choosing food that will kill us, it is the height of hubris, or perhaps holier-than-thou-ness, to act like shaming people is a great way to get people to make different dietary choices.
So yeah I have very little patience for people who shame the general public telling them to reduce meat intake because it's bad for the environment. Education helps, shaming does not: and in this particular area the line between the two can be very fine! Writeups like this one fall very clearly on the side of shaming, though. What I quoted above is one of several examples from this article of How Meat Eaters Are Bad People. I've got no sympathy and no patience for this, sorry. It makes the writers of such article seem sketchy and "bad" when they do this.
I've never eaten meat in my life and I've been shamed PLENTY of times to try and eat some. It simply doesn't code as "food" in my brain, though. I can't eat it, even though I've tried bites here and there all my life. Makes me gag. If nothing else this should tell your how strongly culture is bound to our food choices and what a terrible idea it is to shame people into changing how they eat (and how useless).
posted by MiraK at 3:13 AM on June 7 [29 favorites]
> “With this notion, the participants confirm to each other that their food practices are not more problematic than food practices among people who have cut out meat entirely — even though the truth is that red meat has a far greater climate footprint than both avocados and vegan products,
One of the problems with encouraging people to reduce meat in their diet is that it's generally done in shaming ways, but not acknowledged as shaming. See above: meat eaters shaming vegans is called out as shaming, but vegans (or people who want folks to reduce meat in their diet) shaming meat eaters is recognized only as reasoning based on "the truth". Well, yeah, it's factually true that red meat has a larger impact environmentally. AND pointing to this as a reason to change a person's eating habits is a shame-based effort.
Our diet is absolutely one of the most culture-bound habits we possess. It is personal, it is communal, it is bound up in so much meaning and history, and what we eat + how we eat it is one of the cornerstones of what connects us to our families and friends. In addition it is sustenance, the thing we need to stay alive. There are hardwired genetic impulses we have connected to eating, and deep seated psychological compulsions associated with food and its personal role in each of our psyches.
In a world where many people willingly poison ourselves and hasten the dates of our own personal deaths on a daily basis by choosing food that will kill us, it is the height of hubris, or perhaps holier-than-thou-ness, to act like shaming people is a great way to get people to make different dietary choices.
So yeah I have very little patience for people who shame the general public telling them to reduce meat intake because it's bad for the environment. Education helps, shaming does not: and in this particular area the line between the two can be very fine! Writeups like this one fall very clearly on the side of shaming, though. What I quoted above is one of several examples from this article of How Meat Eaters Are Bad People. I've got no sympathy and no patience for this, sorry. It makes the writers of such article seem sketchy and "bad" when they do this.
I've never eaten meat in my life and I've been shamed PLENTY of times to try and eat some. It simply doesn't code as "food" in my brain, though. I can't eat it, even though I've tried bites here and there all my life. Makes me gag. If nothing else this should tell your how strongly culture is bound to our food choices and what a terrible idea it is to shame people into changing how they eat (and how useless).
posted by MiraK at 3:13 AM on June 7 [29 favorites]
Argh a whole paragraph of my comment got eaten.
I had meant to write, the way this article dismisses (and even disparages) culture as a force influencing what people eat is so silly. In many places this article implies that if only people would just throw away their pesky and obviously "wrong" culture, like rational and responsible people should, then the earth could be saved. Can you imagine a more condescending way to frame this topic? Oof.
In addition it's rather a straw man of an argument overall to reduce veganism down to consumption of plant based meats. My entire family & extended family, and like half my friends, are all vegan or vegetarian and LITERALLY NONE of us have a favorable attitude towards plant based meats. Plant based meats taste disgusting AND they're a bad idea according to any health conscious person, because they are ultra processed and fake. They're not food, they are food-like substances. It's bone headed for anyone to draw general conclusions about attitudes towards veganism/vegetarianism by measuring attitudes towards plant based meat, when plant based meat is so controversial within the vegan community itself.
posted by MiraK at 3:30 AM on June 7 [20 favorites]
I had meant to write, the way this article dismisses (and even disparages) culture as a force influencing what people eat is so silly. In many places this article implies that if only people would just throw away their pesky and obviously "wrong" culture, like rational and responsible people should, then the earth could be saved. Can you imagine a more condescending way to frame this topic? Oof.
In addition it's rather a straw man of an argument overall to reduce veganism down to consumption of plant based meats. My entire family & extended family, and like half my friends, are all vegan or vegetarian and LITERALLY NONE of us have a favorable attitude towards plant based meats. Plant based meats taste disgusting AND they're a bad idea according to any health conscious person, because they are ultra processed and fake. They're not food, they are food-like substances. It's bone headed for anyone to draw general conclusions about attitudes towards veganism/vegetarianism by measuring attitudes towards plant based meat, when plant based meat is so controversial within the vegan community itself.
posted by MiraK at 3:30 AM on June 7 [20 favorites]
I'm currently working on trying to reduce emissions from my university. Some of my colleagues suggested some reductions in meat availability as one part of cutting emissions from procurement (basically procurement is a large fraction of total emissions and most of it doesn't come with low carbon alternatives, food does). Not banning meat, more taking some food selling points vegetarian, increasing options at others) and the pushback was very strong - there is a real identity issue with meat eating that was a real surprise to me in terms of its scope and depth (as a meat eater who cut back about 7 years ago). I am hoping we can do something in the way of a citizen's council to assess and find some consensus as to what acceptable changes are in terms of food provision.
posted by biffa at 3:38 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
posted by biffa at 3:38 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
In many places this article implies that if only people would just throw away their pesky and obviously "wrong" culture, like rational and responsible people should, then the earth could be saved. Can you imagine a more condescending way to frame this topic? Oof.
There is also a slightly broader cultural divide in Denmark, here. The traditional Danish diet is very heavy on meat (especially pork) and/or fish. Being from where I am, it's very hard not to read this and eyeroll at the high-falutin Copenhageners suggesting everyone abandon the culture and identities of a lot of country folk. No great loss to them, I'm sure - their identities are tied up in a rejection of a lot of things that those of us who can speak dialect (of any kind) value.
posted by Dysk at 3:39 AM on June 7 [9 favorites]
There is also a slightly broader cultural divide in Denmark, here. The traditional Danish diet is very heavy on meat (especially pork) and/or fish. Being from where I am, it's very hard not to read this and eyeroll at the high-falutin Copenhageners suggesting everyone abandon the culture and identities of a lot of country folk. No great loss to them, I'm sure - their identities are tied up in a rejection of a lot of things that those of us who can speak dialect (of any kind) value.
posted by Dysk at 3:39 AM on June 7 [9 favorites]
there is a real identity issue with meat eating that was a real surprise to me in terms of its scope and depth (as a meat eater who cut back about 7 years ago). I am hoping we can do something in the way of a citizen's council to assess and find some consensus as to what acceptable changes are in terms of food provision.
Speaking for myself and virtually everyone I know in the UK - inflation and stagnating wages over the last decade (plus) has already had the effect of reducing meat consumption. I believe the statistics bear that out (warning: Guardian) here as well.
So the context of the interventions is going to often be that people are already being put in a position of eating less meat than they'd perhaps like to.
posted by Dysk at 3:48 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
Speaking for myself and virtually everyone I know in the UK - inflation and stagnating wages over the last decade (plus) has already had the effect of reducing meat consumption. I believe the statistics bear that out (warning: Guardian) here as well.
So the context of the interventions is going to often be that people are already being put in a position of eating less meat than they'd perhaps like to.
posted by Dysk at 3:48 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
> it's very hard not to read this and eyeroll at the high-falutin Copenhageners suggesting everyone abandon the culture and identities of a lot of country folk. No great loss to them, I'm sure - their identities are tied up in a rejection of a lot of things that those of us who can speak dialect (of any kind) value.
Right! And for me, I'm rolling my eyes at what I perceive as a upper-caste Hindu right wing asshole. There's people getting lynched (l.i.t.e.r.a.l.l.y. - by which I mean Muslims and lower caste people getting chased down and beaten to death and dragged away to get strung up on trees) for being suspected of eating meat in India. People in my upper caste hindu community who make excuses for these murderers often use western vegans' talking points - may not not to directly excuse the violence but at least to champion the right we all have to dictate what any individual chooses to eat, because the earth belongs to all of us and we must protect it.
Easy for vegan activists to say "well obviously we don't mean THAT" or "we weren't talking about India" but hey, if you're so concerned about the global impacts of meat eating, maybe consider the global impact on 1/6th of the world population of your moral argument for encroaching on people's most personal choices?
posted by MiraK at 3:49 AM on June 7 [13 favorites]
Right! And for me, I'm rolling my eyes at what I perceive as a upper-caste Hindu right wing asshole. There's people getting lynched (l.i.t.e.r.a.l.l.y. - by which I mean Muslims and lower caste people getting chased down and beaten to death and dragged away to get strung up on trees) for being suspected of eating meat in India. People in my upper caste hindu community who make excuses for these murderers often use western vegans' talking points - may not not to directly excuse the violence but at least to champion the right we all have to dictate what any individual chooses to eat, because the earth belongs to all of us and we must protect it.
Easy for vegan activists to say "well obviously we don't mean THAT" or "we weren't talking about India" but hey, if you're so concerned about the global impacts of meat eating, maybe consider the global impact on 1/6th of the world population of your moral argument for encroaching on people's most personal choices?
posted by MiraK at 3:49 AM on June 7 [13 favorites]
Wait, I'm confused, is everybody here just violently agreeing with the results of the study?
posted by ambrosen at 3:55 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 3:55 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
> Wait, I'm confused, is everybody here just violently agreeing with the results of the study?
We are questioning the premises and conclusions and the framing of the study, not its hard data such as is it.
But if you've bought this study's line wholesale that everything said here is just "excuses and justifications" to reject climate-based reasons for reducing meat consumption, and hellbent on characterizing disagreement as VIOLENCE, sigh, nothing will change your high falutin mind.
posted by MiraK at 4:02 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]
We are questioning the premises and conclusions and the framing of the study, not its hard data such as is it.
But if you've bought this study's line wholesale that everything said here is just "excuses and justifications" to reject climate-based reasons for reducing meat consumption, and hellbent on characterizing disagreement as VIOLENCE, sigh, nothing will change your high falutin mind.
posted by MiraK at 4:02 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]
We're saying that the way the study was reported on is tendentious as hell. The way the study was constructed (PhD student lead author, so this is probably someone's thesis project) is clearly with an agenda as well. The results are no doubt broadly valid. But the language in the paper is not magnificent, and in the summary reporting, well. That's probably what is being reacted to.
Personally, in fully prepared to acknowledge that my dietary choices are not climate optimal. It's not my only consideration when deciding what to eat, far from it. As an immigrant and third culture kid especially, there is a lot of identity tied into it.
But we also don't have sanctimonious studies about how people justify driving a car rather than taking the bus, because it just isn't an effective way to actually get societal changes made. Yet a lot of diet activism stuff seems to be very attached to the approach.
posted by Dysk at 4:02 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Personally, in fully prepared to acknowledge that my dietary choices are not climate optimal. It's not my only consideration when deciding what to eat, far from it. As an immigrant and third culture kid especially, there is a lot of identity tied into it.
But we also don't have sanctimonious studies about how people justify driving a car rather than taking the bus, because it just isn't an effective way to actually get societal changes made. Yet a lot of diet activism stuff seems to be very attached to the approach.
posted by Dysk at 4:02 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Hmm, I'm not the person who started talking about lynching.
posted by ambrosen at 4:09 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 4:09 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Well no, it's not a thing in your cultural context, or mine. Other people have different experiences!
posted by Dysk at 4:17 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 4:17 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
> Hmm, I'm not the person who started talking about lynching.
Wow. Real violence doesn't matter unless it's happening in your country, but if someone happens to mention the relevance of that violence or tries to bring it to your attention, that's "violence" towards you.
That western privilege is a hell of a drug, I congratulate you and your self satisfaction with it.
posted by MiraK at 4:18 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
Wow. Real violence doesn't matter unless it's happening in your country, but if someone happens to mention the relevance of that violence or tries to bring it to your attention, that's "violence" towards you.
That western privilege is a hell of a drug, I congratulate you and your self satisfaction with it.
posted by MiraK at 4:18 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
MiraK, ambrosen was probably referring to violent agreement, not actual violence
posted by ver at 4:23 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
posted by ver at 4:23 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
Picking up the fake-meat thread -- ironically, it's getting more difficult for me (non-vegan vegetarian) to eat while traveling in areas of the US that aren't vegetarian-friendly, because the black-bean and chickpea and similar burger patties I used to find reasonably broadly available are being replaced with Impossible and Beyond, which to me are absolutely revoltingly inedible.
But it's getting easier to find non-alcoholic cocktails. Win some, lose some, I guess, but while traveling I'd rather have edible veggie burgers available. I hope at the least it's a net gain for the environment?
posted by humbug at 4:43 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
But it's getting easier to find non-alcoholic cocktails. Win some, lose some, I guess, but while traveling I'd rather have edible veggie burgers available. I hope at the least it's a net gain for the environment?
posted by humbug at 4:43 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
"Would you rather be right or would you rather be effective?"
posted by lalochezia at 4:59 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]
Yeah, there's a whole missing middle here: the study seems to imply that you're either a carnivore or you eat vegan with lots of fake meat products. I love meat and hate preachy vegans, but eat less of it these days due to cost and don't mind the chill vegans. I have several friends who are "vegan/vegetarian except when it's not convenient": memorably, one of them was over when I'd made a big pot of soup from a ham hock, said it smelled delicious and went for a bowl, and I was like oh wait hang on there's meat in there, and she said "it's not a religion or something", which endeared me to her forever even though she believes in astrology.
People are real territorial about their diet and expecting them not to be or to be shamed into change is almost certainly going to be counterproductive. I absolutely agree with humbug that bean/chickpea burgers are delicious (so long as they're not made with mushrooms, to which I'm violently allergic) and so are non-alcoholic cocktails.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:01 AM on June 7 [14 favorites]
People are real territorial about their diet and expecting them not to be or to be shamed into change is almost certainly going to be counterproductive. I absolutely agree with humbug that bean/chickpea burgers are delicious (so long as they're not made with mushrooms, to which I'm violently allergic) and so are non-alcoholic cocktails.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:01 AM on June 7 [14 favorites]
I have several friends who are "vegan/vegetarian except when it's not convenient"
I've heard people describe this/themselves as flexitarian, which I love as a bit of wordplay.
(Also +1 for bean burgers, they can be bloody great!)
posted by Dysk at 5:15 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]
I've heard people describe this/themselves as flexitarian, which I love as a bit of wordplay.
(Also +1 for bean burgers, they can be bloody great!)
posted by Dysk at 5:15 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]
Right, it's not a bit of ham hock here and there that's destroying our ecosystems, it's things like dousing the entire Midwestern US in roundup (and now Dicamba!), several times per year, to extract the maximum amount of cattle feed possible.
Sure you won't change minds by browbeating, but hating on a study because it's not how you would do it is never a good look imo, unless you are a fellow scholar in that field who has spent years working on it. Like the authors have.
This work is not even about persuasion, it's about learning how people act and think about their food, and that's important even if you don't like their tone or wording.
As someone who went from typical US diet to mostly vegan flexitarian precisely due to ecological and climate impacts of my diet, I find the idea that this information cannot persuade anyone to be bafflingly ignorant.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:30 AM on June 7 [10 favorites]
Sure you won't change minds by browbeating, but hating on a study because it's not how you would do it is never a good look imo, unless you are a fellow scholar in that field who has spent years working on it. Like the authors have.
This work is not even about persuasion, it's about learning how people act and think about their food, and that's important even if you don't like their tone or wording.
As someone who went from typical US diet to mostly vegan flexitarian precisely due to ecological and climate impacts of my diet, I find the idea that this information cannot persuade anyone to be bafflingly ignorant.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:30 AM on June 7 [10 favorites]
I've heard people describe this/themselves as flexitarian, which I love as a bit of wordplay.
I'm like this but the other way. I'm a meat eater, but as more veg options are readily available I'm happy to have a more varied diet. Particularly as vegan food seems to be getting better* and more readily available I'm happy to mix it up.
*It's possible vegan food was always delicious and I just didn't have easy access to the good stuff, so this is not intended as a slight, just my experience.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:51 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
I'm like this but the other way. I'm a meat eater, but as more veg options are readily available I'm happy to have a more varied diet. Particularly as vegan food seems to be getting better* and more readily available I'm happy to mix it up.
*It's possible vegan food was always delicious and I just didn't have easy access to the good stuff, so this is not intended as a slight, just my experience.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:51 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
It's possible vegan food was always delicious and I just didn't have easy access to the good stuff, so this is not intended as a slight, just my experience.This is a really important point depending on the culture you’re starting from. Someone from India is going to say it was always good without the cultural context of American religious nuts who thought that strong flavors or even satiation were a failure to control your base instincts and would lead to other moral hazards like teenagers wanting to have sex. There was also the weaker but more widely shared problem of not using much spice and relying on a pile of meat to make the meal appealing.
That’s thankfully been fading away for decades but it’s not gone and it inspired a lot of the backlash against vegetarian cuisine because for many white Americans eating vegetables was something poor people or aesthetics did. I think it’d be an easier pitch now given how much more common use of spice has become but there’s a lot of lingering baggage from the post-Depression “you know you’ve made it when you can eat meat twice a day” attitude which colored the previous century.
posted by adamsc at 6:05 AM on June 7 [8 favorites]
Meanwhile I am out here wondering how we can sustain agriculture at all if and when we move away from fossil fuels. Soil fertility is heavily linked to fertilizer, and for many decades now the main fertilizer we have been using is fossil fuel based ammonium nitrate. What are we replacing that with?
Historically, way back we did inefficient rotations of pasture, nitrogen fixing crops and food crops. Nitrogen fixing crops could be legumes and might actually produce some food, but as likely as not they planted a fodder crop so the land in fact might be using 2/3rds of its resources to support farm animals and only 1/3 to produce food. They didn't do this because they prized meat, the did this because when they reduced the quantity of manure going into the soil the soil fertility dropped and the land couldn't produce enough food to sustain the community. Manure is how we sustained centuries of farming. And when the manure wasn't available we got huge large scale emigration.
People have, many times in history, made the decision to cut back on the quantity of livestock they supported to make immediate short term gains in human food production. One such time was nearly 85 years ago when Britain drastically reduced the amount of livestock they pastured at the beginning of World War Two so that pasture land could be devoted to raising more food domestically. The amount of land devoted to grain and potatoes shot up - and by the end of the war the potato crop was failing. Some portion of this was due to weather conditions but another part remains that you cannot - cannot - grow crops on the same land year after year after year without adding massive amounts of fertilizer. For the food to be nutritious, the land has to be fertile. If you take out nutrients, you have to put them back. During and at the end of World War Two we had some pretty major famines. Part of how we recovered with the introduction of ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer.
Yes, our ancestors definitely used plant based compost. Manure wasn't the only thing they used. There are other options than animal manure and chemical fertilizers. That nitrogen fixing second year crop was usually grazed and then ploughed under. They made it work by growing plants people couldn't eat a good hefty proportion of the time to fertilize the soil in lieu of growing food. Reverting to the practice of growing to plant compost will mean we will have to grow that plant compost a lot more often than we grow crops. Adding a pasture cycle to our farming means that we get to grow food crops more frequently and get the benefit of having animal products not just their manure.
After the medieval period, the Georgian era experimental farms did systematic research in building the soil by adding ash and lime and other minerals, and calculating the difference in yield between green manure and marl, and what made the land capable of supporting more sheep per acre. They compared everything. When we stopped being able to raise or sustain soil fertility using systematic agriculture, we dealt with it by importing food and fertilizer and by sending our farmers out to find soil that was not exhausted from over producing.
So much of the colonization of North America was driven by a search for fertile soil - we looked for soil that had never been farmed, reduced the trees and other biomass there to nutrient rich ash and got a few good generations of farming in, before moving ever westward because the soil was now exhausted, burning and ploughing as we went. It was slash and burn. I am not denying that the population was rising so we had millions of more mouths to feed and colonialism was driven by having a surplus population, but part of the reason the population was rising was because when the soil fertility drops you get into more intensive farming, which requires more workers, so rural people had large families, and it created a vicious circle.
Even with systematic managed farming and massive emigration they still hit a soil fertility crisis after soil fertility crisis. They found a solution in importing guano in the 1800's. We managed to stave off major famines in several nations by diligently bringing in the excrement of sea birds and anything else we could find, and putting that on our fields. Guano kept us going but ammonium nitrate and still more systematic farming saved our bacon.
Russia used to export unbelievable quantities of ammonium nitrate per year. The current war has resulted in them limiting their exports and repurposing it for domestic uses, both agricultural and industrial-military. They may want foreign currency, but they need the ammonium nitrate at home now even more. Their old buyers are in trouble. That's Brazil and Peru and Kazakhstan, and many more nations, but in 2020 the US alone imported 95,946,000 tons of the Russian stuff. Where is Brazil going to get 1,099,710,000 tons of fertilizer per year from if not from imported ammonium nitrate? What are we going to put on the fields?
As we transition away from fossil fuels, we are going to have to either find a substitute for all that chemical fertilizer, or we won't be able to grow anything but a tiny fraction of the food we have been producing. People smarter than me in agri-business have already been looking for solutions, and they haven't all worked out well. Extensive harvesting of biomass from the ocean kind of destroys their ecology so it's a pretty much a one time solution for the farmer and the total loss of the fishery. Highly processed urban sewage was promising, but unfortunately has exposed the soil to PFAS so that cows grazed on such land produce milk too high in carcinogens to be viable...
How do you create top soil? The fastest most efficient way is to grow pasture crops in whatever little soil you've got and graze animals on it. Every time the animals graze the grass they cut it short to near ground level, where upon underground the roots of the grass die back to be proportion to the grass above ground. Those dead roots, and the manure that the animals leave behind is where top soil comes from. You can certainly do the same thing, on a much, much slower time scale by letting scrub and then trees grow and decay for a few hundred years, but if you want to produce farmland out of marginal land, pasture crops and grazing animals are the way to go, because you can get viable farm soil within a single human lifetime. Simply cutting the grass doesn't work, as anyone who has a lawn will know, because you also need all the bacteria and such that you get in the manure.
I feel like I don't know anything about this. I'm just flailing around trying to connect the various bits of things I've learned while studying the history of agriculture. I've been trying to learn it and figure out how it all works and what the future holds. But from what I can see we will have to return to locally produced fertilizers, which means going back to the medieval system of using locally produced manure and plant based organic fertilizer. No large scale animal husbandry? No manure.
I don't care if we eat the animals we produce or not, but to say that we don't need them and should stop raising them so that we only produce food just for people seems to me to be ignoring the realities of soil fertility. Pasture land is often pasture land because it's not suitable to become crop land, and the way to convert it to crop land is to keep using it for pasture land. My concern is that we may first slaughter or abandon all the animals PETA style and then discover that we need them to successfully continue practicing agriculture at all.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:20 AM on June 7 [26 favorites]
Historically, way back we did inefficient rotations of pasture, nitrogen fixing crops and food crops. Nitrogen fixing crops could be legumes and might actually produce some food, but as likely as not they planted a fodder crop so the land in fact might be using 2/3rds of its resources to support farm animals and only 1/3 to produce food. They didn't do this because they prized meat, the did this because when they reduced the quantity of manure going into the soil the soil fertility dropped and the land couldn't produce enough food to sustain the community. Manure is how we sustained centuries of farming. And when the manure wasn't available we got huge large scale emigration.
People have, many times in history, made the decision to cut back on the quantity of livestock they supported to make immediate short term gains in human food production. One such time was nearly 85 years ago when Britain drastically reduced the amount of livestock they pastured at the beginning of World War Two so that pasture land could be devoted to raising more food domestically. The amount of land devoted to grain and potatoes shot up - and by the end of the war the potato crop was failing. Some portion of this was due to weather conditions but another part remains that you cannot - cannot - grow crops on the same land year after year after year without adding massive amounts of fertilizer. For the food to be nutritious, the land has to be fertile. If you take out nutrients, you have to put them back. During and at the end of World War Two we had some pretty major famines. Part of how we recovered with the introduction of ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer.
Yes, our ancestors definitely used plant based compost. Manure wasn't the only thing they used. There are other options than animal manure and chemical fertilizers. That nitrogen fixing second year crop was usually grazed and then ploughed under. They made it work by growing plants people couldn't eat a good hefty proportion of the time to fertilize the soil in lieu of growing food. Reverting to the practice of growing to plant compost will mean we will have to grow that plant compost a lot more often than we grow crops. Adding a pasture cycle to our farming means that we get to grow food crops more frequently and get the benefit of having animal products not just their manure.
After the medieval period, the Georgian era experimental farms did systematic research in building the soil by adding ash and lime and other minerals, and calculating the difference in yield between green manure and marl, and what made the land capable of supporting more sheep per acre. They compared everything. When we stopped being able to raise or sustain soil fertility using systematic agriculture, we dealt with it by importing food and fertilizer and by sending our farmers out to find soil that was not exhausted from over producing.
So much of the colonization of North America was driven by a search for fertile soil - we looked for soil that had never been farmed, reduced the trees and other biomass there to nutrient rich ash and got a few good generations of farming in, before moving ever westward because the soil was now exhausted, burning and ploughing as we went. It was slash and burn. I am not denying that the population was rising so we had millions of more mouths to feed and colonialism was driven by having a surplus population, but part of the reason the population was rising was because when the soil fertility drops you get into more intensive farming, which requires more workers, so rural people had large families, and it created a vicious circle.
Even with systematic managed farming and massive emigration they still hit a soil fertility crisis after soil fertility crisis. They found a solution in importing guano in the 1800's. We managed to stave off major famines in several nations by diligently bringing in the excrement of sea birds and anything else we could find, and putting that on our fields. Guano kept us going but ammonium nitrate and still more systematic farming saved our bacon.
Russia used to export unbelievable quantities of ammonium nitrate per year. The current war has resulted in them limiting their exports and repurposing it for domestic uses, both agricultural and industrial-military. They may want foreign currency, but they need the ammonium nitrate at home now even more. Their old buyers are in trouble. That's Brazil and Peru and Kazakhstan, and many more nations, but in 2020 the US alone imported 95,946,000 tons of the Russian stuff. Where is Brazil going to get 1,099,710,000 tons of fertilizer per year from if not from imported ammonium nitrate? What are we going to put on the fields?
As we transition away from fossil fuels, we are going to have to either find a substitute for all that chemical fertilizer, or we won't be able to grow anything but a tiny fraction of the food we have been producing. People smarter than me in agri-business have already been looking for solutions, and they haven't all worked out well. Extensive harvesting of biomass from the ocean kind of destroys their ecology so it's a pretty much a one time solution for the farmer and the total loss of the fishery. Highly processed urban sewage was promising, but unfortunately has exposed the soil to PFAS so that cows grazed on such land produce milk too high in carcinogens to be viable...
How do you create top soil? The fastest most efficient way is to grow pasture crops in whatever little soil you've got and graze animals on it. Every time the animals graze the grass they cut it short to near ground level, where upon underground the roots of the grass die back to be proportion to the grass above ground. Those dead roots, and the manure that the animals leave behind is where top soil comes from. You can certainly do the same thing, on a much, much slower time scale by letting scrub and then trees grow and decay for a few hundred years, but if you want to produce farmland out of marginal land, pasture crops and grazing animals are the way to go, because you can get viable farm soil within a single human lifetime. Simply cutting the grass doesn't work, as anyone who has a lawn will know, because you also need all the bacteria and such that you get in the manure.
I feel like I don't know anything about this. I'm just flailing around trying to connect the various bits of things I've learned while studying the history of agriculture. I've been trying to learn it and figure out how it all works and what the future holds. But from what I can see we will have to return to locally produced fertilizers, which means going back to the medieval system of using locally produced manure and plant based organic fertilizer. No large scale animal husbandry? No manure.
I don't care if we eat the animals we produce or not, but to say that we don't need them and should stop raising them so that we only produce food just for people seems to me to be ignoring the realities of soil fertility. Pasture land is often pasture land because it's not suitable to become crop land, and the way to convert it to crop land is to keep using it for pasture land. My concern is that we may first slaughter or abandon all the animals PETA style and then discover that we need them to successfully continue practicing agriculture at all.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:20 AM on June 7 [26 favorites]
except we don’t raise animals as part of a fertilization cycle, we raise billions of them just to eat and they require far more food than could be produced by the yield from their manure. i’m not vegan, and have no objection to using animals as part of a sustainable farming system, but to even do that we’d have to reduce our meat consumption because that’s where most of our ammonium nitrate fertilized corn and soy goes, into animal feed to support mass animal farming
posted by dis_integration at 6:33 AM on June 7 [14 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:33 AM on June 7 [14 favorites]
I don't think climate activists are opposed to free range pasture animals raised for meat and for the benefit of the whole ecosystem? (which is something that doesn't actually exist on a large scale today, but should, as you say!) People who oppose all farming of animals, even in the best ways, are vegan activists and PETA etc., who are opposed to meat due to animal cruelty rather than climate. There's a big overlap between the two groups but they're not exactly the same.
posted by MiraK at 6:34 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
posted by MiraK at 6:34 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
Right, it's not a bit of ham hock here and there that's destroying our ecosystems, it's things like dousing the entire Midwestern US in roundup (and now Dicamba!), several times per year, to extract the maximum amount of cattle feed possible.
A once in a while ham hock, no. But the sum of the carbon that arises from the whole process of raising and consuming cattle, yes, that is destroying our global environment just as assuredly as pouring chemicals all over it.
posted by biffa at 6:35 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
A once in a while ham hock, no. But the sum of the carbon that arises from the whole process of raising and consuming cattle, yes, that is destroying our global environment just as assuredly as pouring chemicals all over it.
posted by biffa at 6:35 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Jane the Brown, it seems unlikely that we will somehow magically eliminate all farm animals in one fell swoop, ruining our agricultural base, especially given the different levels and ways of pasturing animals around the world.
Even if that were the case, we could still get rid of all battery chickens/factory-farmed hogs/etc and not impact agriculture at all.
posted by sagc at 6:36 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Even if that were the case, we could still get rid of all battery chickens/factory-farmed hogs/etc and not impact agriculture at all.
posted by sagc at 6:36 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
I don't have the time right now to read the whole thing, but I do think from the bit I read that the authors acknowledge that the false dichotomy between meat-eating and veganisme based on fake food perhaps isn't optimal. They went with it anyway.
I agree with MiraK and Dysk that a humanities (cultural) approach to this is much more relevant than a social sciences perspective. And this has been proven, in Denmark, within the last 20 years!
In the beginning of the 00s, Claus Meyer launched his food revolution. His agenda was not so much the climate or even sustainability, but he and several others wanted to bring taste and quality back into Danish food culture. A key word here is back. There had been an interesting food culture in Denmark, but it was almost erased by a coalition of government, agricultural and industry interests during the 20th century.
Within the last 20 years, food culture in Denmark has changed completely, what is available in stores is completely different and the recipes home cooks use are different, much tastier and also healthier. Even out in the far corners of the nation. Of course it can change more via persuasion.
I (also a Dane) can recognize the language of some meat-eaters in Denmark, I can almost hear them. BUT, when I shared my apartment with a couple of younger guys who had grown up in that culture, they were surprised at how much they enjoyed our mostly vegetarian diet. (There was one vegan and gluten-free dish they couldn't believe was vegan). The thing is that their parents, like many Westerners, have never learnt to cook and mainly served industrial foods as they grew up. One young man said he didn't know lasagne could be made from scratch in a home kitchen until he saw my daughter make one. These guys all come from middle class families, so their processed food may have come from Meyer's or other quality producers. My personal experience is that processed food with meat is better than vegan processed food, and I think it's because the MSG or yeast extract used in many processed foods work better with meats and fish. But that's just me guessing.
The part where a group of cooks, chefs and entrepreneurs got together and changed the food landscape is not guessing, it is a fact that happened.
Another cultural aspect is about macho posturing, sort of like Anthony Bourdain but with specifically Danish foods. It's getting a lot better, but ten years ago it would be hard for a man outside of academia or the art world to admit he was vegan.
A third aspect points back at the food alliance between the government and the industry. Many people who do cook from scratch have learnt it from free or almost free cookbooks provided by the dairy industry (the Mathilde series), the pork industry (Gris på gaflen) or COOP, which is closely allied with agriculture. The recipes are not bad, but these books are written to promote Danish agriculture. For instance our PM has recently been going on about how a single mother has the right to be able to cook spaghetti with meat sauce using 500 grams of beef. Hence we can't tax the farmers' CO2 emissions too much.
But a personal pet-peeve is the assumption that Danes "traditionally" ate a lot of meat. Today, we have a huge meat consumption. But just 50 years ago, the portions were far smaller, and often there was a first course of soup with dumplings, porridge or similar stuff to fill up the bellies before the meat-based main, specially in the countryside. At my grandparents' farm, there would typically be one chicken for four adults and three children. And potatoes and vegetables and salad, and always a fruit-based dessert. So the bulk of the meal was vegetable-based. (I mean we had chicken at most once a week, in season, it's just to give an image of the scale).
When we went to country fairs, we indulged in all the treats from the dairy and meat providers, but they were exactly treats, not everyday food.
My mother served vegetarian food once a week, and the other days looked much as at the farm, perhaps with a little less vegetable bounty. Our family of five would perhaps share a sausage of 4-500 grams of meat days during the 1970s, and there might even be leftovers for our lunch boxes if our dad was in meal planning mode.
I don't feel you can call a habit of consumption that is less than 50 years old a tradition. And again, changing that habit is a cultural and political issue. Sometimes the social sciences affirm existing conventions and make them seem fixed in stone.
posted by mumimor at 6:36 AM on June 7 [19 favorites]
I agree with MiraK and Dysk that a humanities (cultural) approach to this is much more relevant than a social sciences perspective. And this has been proven, in Denmark, within the last 20 years!
In the beginning of the 00s, Claus Meyer launched his food revolution. His agenda was not so much the climate or even sustainability, but he and several others wanted to bring taste and quality back into Danish food culture. A key word here is back. There had been an interesting food culture in Denmark, but it was almost erased by a coalition of government, agricultural and industry interests during the 20th century.
Within the last 20 years, food culture in Denmark has changed completely, what is available in stores is completely different and the recipes home cooks use are different, much tastier and also healthier. Even out in the far corners of the nation. Of course it can change more via persuasion.
I (also a Dane) can recognize the language of some meat-eaters in Denmark, I can almost hear them. BUT, when I shared my apartment with a couple of younger guys who had grown up in that culture, they were surprised at how much they enjoyed our mostly vegetarian diet. (There was one vegan and gluten-free dish they couldn't believe was vegan). The thing is that their parents, like many Westerners, have never learnt to cook and mainly served industrial foods as they grew up. One young man said he didn't know lasagne could be made from scratch in a home kitchen until he saw my daughter make one. These guys all come from middle class families, so their processed food may have come from Meyer's or other quality producers. My personal experience is that processed food with meat is better than vegan processed food, and I think it's because the MSG or yeast extract used in many processed foods work better with meats and fish. But that's just me guessing.
The part where a group of cooks, chefs and entrepreneurs got together and changed the food landscape is not guessing, it is a fact that happened.
Another cultural aspect is about macho posturing, sort of like Anthony Bourdain but with specifically Danish foods. It's getting a lot better, but ten years ago it would be hard for a man outside of academia or the art world to admit he was vegan.
A third aspect points back at the food alliance between the government and the industry. Many people who do cook from scratch have learnt it from free or almost free cookbooks provided by the dairy industry (the Mathilde series), the pork industry (Gris på gaflen) or COOP, which is closely allied with agriculture. The recipes are not bad, but these books are written to promote Danish agriculture. For instance our PM has recently been going on about how a single mother has the right to be able to cook spaghetti with meat sauce using 500 grams of beef. Hence we can't tax the farmers' CO2 emissions too much.
But a personal pet-peeve is the assumption that Danes "traditionally" ate a lot of meat. Today, we have a huge meat consumption. But just 50 years ago, the portions were far smaller, and often there was a first course of soup with dumplings, porridge or similar stuff to fill up the bellies before the meat-based main, specially in the countryside. At my grandparents' farm, there would typically be one chicken for four adults and three children. And potatoes and vegetables and salad, and always a fruit-based dessert. So the bulk of the meal was vegetable-based. (I mean we had chicken at most once a week, in season, it's just to give an image of the scale).
When we went to country fairs, we indulged in all the treats from the dairy and meat providers, but they were exactly treats, not everyday food.
My mother served vegetarian food once a week, and the other days looked much as at the farm, perhaps with a little less vegetable bounty. Our family of five would perhaps share a sausage of 4-500 grams of meat days during the 1970s, and there might even be leftovers for our lunch boxes if our dad was in meal planning mode.
I don't feel you can call a habit of consumption that is less than 50 years old a tradition. And again, changing that habit is a cultural and political issue. Sometimes the social sciences affirm existing conventions and make them seem fixed in stone.
posted by mumimor at 6:36 AM on June 7 [19 favorites]
I’m an omnivore. I think what has stopped me from working closer to vegetarian has been mainly logistics surrounding how much of my time I want to spend in the kitchen. I can find a ton of cookbooks and recipes online with meals that are fast, flavorful and tasty, but of these, I find that solely vegetarian cookbooks like this are substantially fewer in number. Of the many vegetarian cookbooks that I have gotten out of the library, most include either difficult to find ingredients, a ton of chopping, significantly more prep time (I’m lookin’ at you tofu pressing), challenging clean up (hello, lentils), or meals that the author waxes poetic about but that I find completely unappetizing taste wise. I am also pretty set on the 3 meals a day rather than smaller more frequent meals, and my kitchen is too small to hold all that I would need for real variety in vegetarian cooking. Maybe these all seem like shoddy excuses, but for what it’s worth we don’t eat meat more than once or twice a week. A third of the meat we do eat in our house is hunted rather than raised in an agricultural setting and another third of the meat we eat is pasture raised so I feel like that mitigates our impact quite a bit.
And at the same time, I also feel that while individual consumer choices can have an important impact, at the end of the day I feel like it's nothing compared to the impact that could be created with more corporate responsibility, significantly more telework, more sustainable supply chains, affordable long range electric vehicles, and less business travel/private jets.
posted by donut_princess at 6:50 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]
And at the same time, I also feel that while individual consumer choices can have an important impact, at the end of the day I feel like it's nothing compared to the impact that could be created with more corporate responsibility, significantly more telework, more sustainable supply chains, affordable long range electric vehicles, and less business travel/private jets.
posted by donut_princess at 6:50 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]
For a while, people didn't consider vegetable cooking as "real" cooking, so the kind of cookbooks that got published were either marketed directly to vegan or were dramatic and difficult like donut_princess describes, in order to add respectability to vegetarian recipes. Now we have a lot more options!
Cookbooks that contain a lot of quick-ish vegetarian and vegan recipes:
* I dream of dinner - Ali Slagle
* Isa Does It and I Can Cook Vegan
* Smitten Kitchen's books
* Julia Turshen's books
* The Minimalist Vegan
* Tenderheart by Hetty McKinnon
McKinnon and Slagle both write for NYT Cooking, so there are many recipes there that fit the bill too.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:01 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
Cookbooks that contain a lot of quick-ish vegetarian and vegan recipes:
* I dream of dinner - Ali Slagle
* Isa Does It and I Can Cook Vegan
* Smitten Kitchen's books
* Julia Turshen's books
* The Minimalist Vegan
* Tenderheart by Hetty McKinnon
McKinnon and Slagle both write for NYT Cooking, so there are many recipes there that fit the bill too.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:01 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
donut_princess, I think those types of challenges are where culture comes in. For those of us who were raised in vegetarian cultures, we define a fully stocked kitchen as one that contains all the tools and ingredients to do what needs to happen to make vegetarian food. And you're right, there's a lot more chopping when I make vegetarian meals than when I throw chicken breast into the oven for my kids (who are omnivores) but for me, that extra chopping is no different from the extra work required to cook at home vs. purchase takeout. I accept it as part of the deal of making my food, it is what it is. ---> that's 100% culture.
That's why I think for anyone who wants to encourage reduced meat eating, it's culture they (we) need to focus on. What mumimor describes is great! We need a positive movement that works with human creativity to gradually shift food culture through joy and experimentation and love for the earth, rather than scolding hectoring "fact-based approach"consisting of sharing studies that go wellll beyond simply presenting evidence for climate change due to livestock breeding, into finger wagging at and making mean caricatures of meat eaters. And nope, I don't need to be a scientist to have this opinion. I just need to be a human being who is exasperated by this.
posted by MiraK at 7:13 AM on June 7 [8 favorites]
That's why I think for anyone who wants to encourage reduced meat eating, it's culture they (we) need to focus on. What mumimor describes is great! We need a positive movement that works with human creativity to gradually shift food culture through joy and experimentation and love for the earth, rather than scolding hectoring "fact-based approach"consisting of sharing studies that go wellll beyond simply presenting evidence for climate change due to livestock breeding, into finger wagging at and making mean caricatures of meat eaters. And nope, I don't need to be a scientist to have this opinion. I just need to be a human being who is exasperated by this.
posted by MiraK at 7:13 AM on June 7 [8 favorites]
And at the same time, I also feel that while individual consumer choices can have an important impact, at the end of the day I feel like it's nothing compared to the impact that could be created with more corporate responsibility, significantly more telework, more sustainable supply chains, affordable long range electric vehicles, and less business travel/private jets.In general, that's true, but I guess I do think that animal agriculture is unsustainable as it's currently practiced (at least in the US, where I live), and it's going to be really difficult to regulate the industry appropriately until people's diets change significantly. Appropriate regulation would lead to animal products being a lot more expensive, and voters aren't going to accept that if it would mean that they were paying a huge amount more for food. So basically, we need a cultural shift in order to facilitate a regulatory shift. And I think the cultural shift is happening, albeit slowly and unevenly.
I went vegan in late 2020, mostly because I was really disgusted by the way that the meat industry was treating workers during the worst of the pandemic, and I ultimately decided it was unsustainable for me. I've settled on calling myself "mostly plant-based." I'm vegetarian, although I don't read labels carefully so I may occasionally eat some hidden meat ingredients, and I don't routinely eat other animal products. But if I'm at a birthday party I'm not going to turn down a slice of cake because there's butter in it, and if I'm really craving cheese than I'll have some cheese.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:15 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
But a personal pet-peeve is the assumption that Danes "traditionally" ate a lot of meat.
It depends where you are. Grød and potatoes was certainly a large component of most meals, alongside dense bread, but on island communities fish was also very abundant. When butchery did occur, you did eat a lot of meat for a while, and then rationed out the parts you could salt or smoke over the rest of the year.
(There also doesn't seem to be a huge tradition or history of eating greens, or vegetables other than root veg and legumes at all where I'm from. Further south you get into cabbage territory though. I think a lot of it is tied to soil quality being extremely poor in large parts of midt-and nordjylland.)
And I think it's worth noting that the things which were liked, looked forward to, valued, well it wasn't the potatoes and grød. Sometimes that's all your meal was, but those were not happy times.
I'm not arguing for meat every meal, or every day, or in vast quantity (lord knows I don't eat that way) but I am very much arguing against giving it up being an easy or reasonable ask for a lot of people.
posted by Dysk at 7:26 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
It depends where you are. Grød and potatoes was certainly a large component of most meals, alongside dense bread, but on island communities fish was also very abundant. When butchery did occur, you did eat a lot of meat for a while, and then rationed out the parts you could salt or smoke over the rest of the year.
(There also doesn't seem to be a huge tradition or history of eating greens, or vegetables other than root veg and legumes at all where I'm from. Further south you get into cabbage territory though. I think a lot of it is tied to soil quality being extremely poor in large parts of midt-and nordjylland.)
And I think it's worth noting that the things which were liked, looked forward to, valued, well it wasn't the potatoes and grød. Sometimes that's all your meal was, but those were not happy times.
I'm not arguing for meat every meal, or every day, or in vast quantity (lord knows I don't eat that way) but I am very much arguing against giving it up being an easy or reasonable ask for a lot of people.
posted by Dysk at 7:26 AM on June 7 [4 favorites]
Discussions about climate impact knowledge occasionally manifest in processes we call “collective derailments”. In navigating complex information about climate change and challenges to current lifestyles, consumers gravitate towards the highlighting of “facts” that pose little threat to cultural conventions.
I think these 2 sentences from the conclusion are some of the most interesting. I found it a very useful article, in part because it was very much about discussions such as are being had here, and analysis of how people have them.
posted by ambrosen at 7:27 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
I think these 2 sentences from the conclusion are some of the most interesting. I found it a very useful article, in part because it was very much about discussions such as are being had here, and analysis of how people have them.
posted by ambrosen at 7:27 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
"Would you rather be right or would you rather be effective?"
can we cast this in bronze and mount it atop every MetaTalk thread pls
posted by elkevelvet at 7:38 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
can we cast this in bronze and mount it atop every MetaTalk thread pls
posted by elkevelvet at 7:38 AM on June 7 [5 favorites]
Speaking as a farmer I just want to say that Jane the Brown's long comment is absolutely fantastic and if I could promote it to front page I would.
posted by Rhedyn at 8:58 AM on June 7 [8 favorites]
posted by Rhedyn at 8:58 AM on June 7 [8 favorites]
Jane the Brown, it seems unlikely that we will somehow magically eliminate all farm animals in one fell swoop, ruining our agricultural base, especially given the different levels and ways of pasturing animals around the world.
Even if that were the case, we could still get rid of all battery chickens/factory-farmed hogs/etc and not impact agriculture at all.
My basic thesis is that I think that the argument that we need to keep producing ammonium nitrate in order to support the agriculture that keeps us alive is far more likely to doom us to runaway climate change than continuing the practice of growing animals for meat. I think our economic priority should be figuring out a replacement fertilizer for ammonium nitrate.
Until we do so, we have nothing better than the old standbys. Without ammonium nitrate manure becomes black gold. Black gold is an expression farmers used to use for manure, because a load of black gold was often the difference between a failed crop and a successful one. The minute we decrease the production of ammonium nitrate we are going to be desperate for fertilizer - and the only alternative I can think of is manure.
We definitely DO have unsustainable consumption and I am not at all suggesting switching to manure will magically replace ammonium nitrate. The manure being produced in all those feed lots and battery farms is a by product that already gets sold and put back into the soil. More animals would no more help our situation than more people would. Dispersing the ones we have, would perhaps save us from some of the future supply chain problems that we appear to be facing in future.
I cannot fault anyone for looking for a least bad solution to over-consumption. Suggesting that once the current batch of animals is inevitably slaughtered we had better not replace them is a lot more ethical than some suggestions we could be making. I wish I could offer one I thought was better. But all I can do is suggest is that if we start having to attempt to grow food in areas where we have not done it before, in marginal land, or farther north, animals have always had a place in small localized agriculture for good reasons.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:23 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
Even if that were the case, we could still get rid of all battery chickens/factory-farmed hogs/etc and not impact agriculture at all.
My basic thesis is that I think that the argument that we need to keep producing ammonium nitrate in order to support the agriculture that keeps us alive is far more likely to doom us to runaway climate change than continuing the practice of growing animals for meat. I think our economic priority should be figuring out a replacement fertilizer for ammonium nitrate.
Until we do so, we have nothing better than the old standbys. Without ammonium nitrate manure becomes black gold. Black gold is an expression farmers used to use for manure, because a load of black gold was often the difference between a failed crop and a successful one. The minute we decrease the production of ammonium nitrate we are going to be desperate for fertilizer - and the only alternative I can think of is manure.
We definitely DO have unsustainable consumption and I am not at all suggesting switching to manure will magically replace ammonium nitrate. The manure being produced in all those feed lots and battery farms is a by product that already gets sold and put back into the soil. More animals would no more help our situation than more people would. Dispersing the ones we have, would perhaps save us from some of the future supply chain problems that we appear to be facing in future.
I cannot fault anyone for looking for a least bad solution to over-consumption. Suggesting that once the current batch of animals is inevitably slaughtered we had better not replace them is a lot more ethical than some suggestions we could be making. I wish I could offer one I thought was better. But all I can do is suggest is that if we start having to attempt to grow food in areas where we have not done it before, in marginal land, or farther north, animals have always had a place in small localized agriculture for good reasons.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:23 AM on June 7 [6 favorites]
Someone from India is going to say it was always good without the cultural context of American religious nuts who thought that strong flavors or even satiation were a failure to control your base instincts and would lead to other moral hazards like teenagers wanting to have sex.
I call this the "lentils are God's protein!" approach and, I'll be honest, my attitude towards legumes as formed in a childhood home dominated by this approach has never been healthy.
posted by praemunire at 11:35 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
I call this the "lentils are God's protein!" approach and, I'll be honest, my attitude towards legumes as formed in a childhood home dominated by this approach has never been healthy.
posted by praemunire at 11:35 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]
replacement fertilizer for ammonium nitrate
Is it an issue of replacing it, or decarbonising its manufacture? That's still a big deal but it is at least theoretically doable in terms of driving the process.
I think there is a potentially big issue of having a lot of different sectors thinking they will decarbonise with the 'spare' electricity from offpeak wind energy. So many I'm going to set working out how many as a student project next year.
posted by biffa at 12:42 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]
Is it an issue of replacing it, or decarbonising its manufacture? That's still a big deal but it is at least theoretically doable in terms of driving the process.
I think there is a potentially big issue of having a lot of different sectors thinking they will decarbonise with the 'spare' electricity from offpeak wind energy. So many I'm going to set working out how many as a student project next year.
posted by biffa at 12:42 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]
My basic thesis is that I think that the argument that we need to keep producing ammonium nitrate in order to support the agriculture that keeps us alive is far more likely to doom us to runaway climate change than continuing the practice of growing animals for meat.
The reason the Haber-Bosch process emits a lot of carbon is because it uses natural gas to produce the hydrogen that is used to fix the nitrogen. The nitrogen just comes from the air!
We can, of course, produce hydrogen from electricity and water. The impediment here is cost, as it always is.
But when it comes to livestock versus ammonium nitrate from natural gas the reality is that livestock produce a lot of methane and methane is a very powerful GHG, especially on shorter timescales (which we need to be concerned about more and more). Total GHGs from livestock are much higher than GHGs from ammonium nitrate production, so even if you assume every reduction in livestock is met with an equal increase in ammonium nitrate production, we'll still reduce our overall carbon emissions by reducing livestock numbers.
posted by ssg at 1:25 PM on June 7 [4 favorites]
The reason the Haber-Bosch process emits a lot of carbon is because it uses natural gas to produce the hydrogen that is used to fix the nitrogen. The nitrogen just comes from the air!
We can, of course, produce hydrogen from electricity and water. The impediment here is cost, as it always is.
But when it comes to livestock versus ammonium nitrate from natural gas the reality is that livestock produce a lot of methane and methane is a very powerful GHG, especially on shorter timescales (which we need to be concerned about more and more). Total GHGs from livestock are much higher than GHGs from ammonium nitrate production, so even if you assume every reduction in livestock is met with an equal increase in ammonium nitrate production, we'll still reduce our overall carbon emissions by reducing livestock numbers.
posted by ssg at 1:25 PM on June 7 [4 favorites]
We'll need to stop eating so many animals obviously. If the meat subsidies ended, then meat production shrinks dramatically, like 5% of meat remains viable without subsidies. Add some taxes could reduce this even further.
We'll need to stop most fertilizer usage anyways: At present, the planetary boundaries report suggests the biogeochemical flows maybe in a more dangerous state than climate change, which presumably means our current usage of nitrogen and phosphorus shall cause us more harm than our CO2 emissions. And climate change looks much worse than everything people usually fear.
If meat becomes a luxury first, then we'll have way more farmland, so maybe the fertilizer becomes less concernning. At some point, carrying capacity shrinks dramatically though, maybe like 1 billion human by around +4°C, but it's better if this happens slower.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:37 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]
We'll need to stop most fertilizer usage anyways: At present, the planetary boundaries report suggests the biogeochemical flows maybe in a more dangerous state than climate change, which presumably means our current usage of nitrogen and phosphorus shall cause us more harm than our CO2 emissions. And climate change looks much worse than everything people usually fear.
If meat becomes a luxury first, then we'll have way more farmland, so maybe the fertilizer becomes less concernning. At some point, carrying capacity shrinks dramatically though, maybe like 1 billion human by around +4°C, but it's better if this happens slower.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:37 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]
Agriculture entirely based on fertiliser (because the soil is dead) has a whole lot of other disadvantages besides the carbon intensity of the fertiliser manufacture.
Living soil can store an enormous amount of water, meaning it buffers storm water, reduces flooding in inhabited areas downstream, reduces erosion and eventual desertification, and reduces the need for irrigation.
Dead soil (or rather, dirt) that has to be covered in fertiliser absorbs almost no water. This means that fertiliser-filled runoff gets into streams, with really bad results for the health of those streams. The runoff is gradually taking the soil with it.
posted by quacks like a duck at 1:38 PM on June 7 [9 favorites]
Living soil can store an enormous amount of water, meaning it buffers storm water, reduces flooding in inhabited areas downstream, reduces erosion and eventual desertification, and reduces the need for irrigation.
Dead soil (or rather, dirt) that has to be covered in fertiliser absorbs almost no water. This means that fertiliser-filled runoff gets into streams, with really bad results for the health of those streams. The runoff is gradually taking the soil with it.
posted by quacks like a duck at 1:38 PM on June 7 [9 favorites]
There is some very promising work on producing ammonia electrochemically from a group at Monash University who are spinning it off for commercialisation. It uses an organolithium electrolyte and operates at close to standard temperature and pressure, with very high Faradic efficiency for the main part of the process.
So there is reasonable hope that small scale ammonia production will be viable in the reasonably near term future.
posted by ambrosen at 1:49 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]
So there is reasonable hope that small scale ammonia production will be viable in the reasonably near term future.
posted by ambrosen at 1:49 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]
Now that the clean energy revolution is finally arriving, you could plausibly produce carbon-free fertilizer.
I'll say as a meat-eating dude I've never had a vegetarian try to shame me for my diet but I have seen a ton of memes and discussions about how annoying vegetarians are. Particularly in right-wing spaces it's an expression of masculinity, so they interpret suggestions that maybe people should eat less meat as an attack on their manhood. While acknowledging that it might be a very different dynamic among the high caste Hindu community, it's a little funny to see handwringing over approaches to normalizing veganism but little acknowledgement of movements valorizing the consumption of meat that are even more guilty of reinforcing it as a culture war issue.
posted by ndr at 1:01 AM on June 8 [7 favorites]
I'll say as a meat-eating dude I've never had a vegetarian try to shame me for my diet but I have seen a ton of memes and discussions about how annoying vegetarians are. Particularly in right-wing spaces it's an expression of masculinity, so they interpret suggestions that maybe people should eat less meat as an attack on their manhood. While acknowledging that it might be a very different dynamic among the high caste Hindu community, it's a little funny to see handwringing over approaches to normalizing veganism but little acknowledgement of movements valorizing the consumption of meat that are even more guilty of reinforcing it as a culture war issue.
posted by ndr at 1:01 AM on June 8 [7 favorites]
We already have carbon-negative fertilizer, mix crops so the different ones put & take different useful things from the soil, and invigorate the diverse life forms that inhabit the soil. This is more labor intensive and/or requires more subtle machines.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:58 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 2:58 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]
It's not just the ammonia that's needed for fertilizers - most fertilizers are ammonium sulphate and all of that sulphur is currently extracted from crude oil where it's a effectively a waste product of the refining process.
I've linked this article in The Geographic Journal before but it highlights a very serious problem with decarbonization efforts:
"Sulfur, in the form of sulfuric acid, is a vital ingredient for many industries. The acid is used in producing phosphorus fertiliser (Cordell et al., 2009), lightweight electric motors, and lithium-ion batteries (Childers et al., 2011; IEA, 2021a; Ober, 2002). It is vital for extracting metals from ores and manufacturing polymers."
Decarbonization (which is essential of course) means a return to sulphur mining on a vast scale - environmentally damaging and expensive to the extent that fertilizer manufacturers will be priced out of the market.
There are workarounds but they require coordinated efforts at recycling (of both sulphates and green tech elements) and technologies that need rapid scaling up (and are themselves hideously polluting) - the numbers in the paper suggest that even with those efforts fertilizer prices are going to rise by a huge amount.
(or the free hand of the market could be allowed to fix the problem in the traditional way of allowing huge numbers of people to die - fantasies about using pre C19th agricultural methods will have the same effect)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:24 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]
I've linked this article in The Geographic Journal before but it highlights a very serious problem with decarbonization efforts:
"Sulfur, in the form of sulfuric acid, is a vital ingredient for many industries. The acid is used in producing phosphorus fertiliser (Cordell et al., 2009), lightweight electric motors, and lithium-ion batteries (Childers et al., 2011; IEA, 2021a; Ober, 2002). It is vital for extracting metals from ores and manufacturing polymers."
Decarbonization (which is essential of course) means a return to sulphur mining on a vast scale - environmentally damaging and expensive to the extent that fertilizer manufacturers will be priced out of the market.
There are workarounds but they require coordinated efforts at recycling (of both sulphates and green tech elements) and technologies that need rapid scaling up (and are themselves hideously polluting) - the numbers in the paper suggest that even with those efforts fertilizer prices are going to rise by a huge amount.
(or the free hand of the market could be allowed to fix the problem in the traditional way of allowing huge numbers of people to die - fantasies about using pre C19th agricultural methods will have the same effect)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:24 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]
How much energy does it take to fix a single N₂ molecule?
–46 kJ/mol, same as in town
posted by mubba at 7:29 AM on June 8 [5 favorites]
–46 kJ/mol, same as in town
posted by mubba at 7:29 AM on June 8 [5 favorites]
N2 + 3H2 -> 2NH3 is actually exothermic (as mubba points out), it's getting the H2 that uses the energy, either by steam methane reforming or electrolysis. SMR is a big CO2 producer so cutting back on it is a big deal.
posted by biffa at 11:35 AM on June 8
posted by biffa at 11:35 AM on June 8
The imagined extreme vegan diet consisting only of highly processed plant-based foods and avocados enables non-vegans to deflect blame
I don't think trying to shame people into veganism is an effective approach to reducing meat consumption, but this is a real and hilarious thing that happens, where people forget the many, many accidentally vegan things they eat on the regular when meat consumption comes up.
Anyway I accidentally exited the article shortly after the above-quoted section and decided that was enough of it for me. (I am an omnivore, but I absolutely have impossible burgers in my freezer and an avocado ripening on the counter, and I am quite tempted to shift dinner plans to highly processed plant based food and avocado now...)
posted by the primroses were over at 12:12 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
I don't think trying to shame people into veganism is an effective approach to reducing meat consumption, but this is a real and hilarious thing that happens, where people forget the many, many accidentally vegan things they eat on the regular when meat consumption comes up.
Anyway I accidentally exited the article shortly after the above-quoted section and decided that was enough of it for me. (I am an omnivore, but I absolutely have impossible burgers in my freezer and an avocado ripening on the counter, and I am quite tempted to shift dinner plans to highly processed plant based food and avocado now...)
posted by the primroses were over at 12:12 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
Just so we're clear, avocados aren't particularly bad CO2 emitters. Slightly higher than peas, way, way below any of the farmed meats.
posted by biffa at 1:06 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
posted by biffa at 1:06 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
I'm not vegetarian, but I'm de facto vegan except when travelling. It's not even a sacrifice..
Almost all the interesting flavors come from plants or fungi or bacteria anyways. Stir fried morning glory is one of my favorite Thai dishes btw.
Among the domesticated land animals I've eaten: Chicken has no flavor, often just detracts from dishes. Beef & similar are not boring, but only a narrow range of flavors. The really flavorful birds (turkey) and mammals (pork) are fairly intelegent, so eating them should give us pause, and again not many different flavors there.
Almost everyone winds up lactose intolerant eventually, including me, so not much point making cheese from anything besides nuts.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:26 PM on June 8
Almost all the interesting flavors come from plants or fungi or bacteria anyways. Stir fried morning glory is one of my favorite Thai dishes btw.
Among the domesticated land animals I've eaten: Chicken has no flavor, often just detracts from dishes. Beef & similar are not boring, but only a narrow range of flavors. The really flavorful birds (turkey) and mammals (pork) are fairly intelegent, so eating them should give us pause, and again not many different flavors there.
Almost everyone winds up lactose intolerant eventually, including me, so not much point making cheese from anything besides nuts.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:26 PM on June 8
Almost everyone winds up lactose intolerant eventually
What's that now?
posted by biffa at 2:29 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
What's that now?
posted by biffa at 2:29 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
"Approximately 75% of the world’s population loses this ability at some point"
It's hereditary with estimates as high at 100% in many parts of Asia, 74% even in India, and under 3-8% in Scandinavia, but eastern & southern Europeans have high lactose intolerance rates too, including numbers like 71% for Sicily.
It worsens as you age too, so lifetime rates are higher, and just because you didn't have lactose problems 5 years ago, does not mean lactose problems have not developed by now.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:23 PM on June 8 [4 favorites]
It's hereditary with estimates as high at 100% in many parts of Asia, 74% even in India, and under 3-8% in Scandinavia, but eastern & southern Europeans have high lactose intolerance rates too, including numbers like 71% for Sicily.
It worsens as you age too, so lifetime rates are higher, and just because you didn't have lactose problems 5 years ago, does not mean lactose problems have not developed by now.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:23 PM on June 8 [4 favorites]
It's 20 years since I asked on Ask Me what other surprises getting old had in store for me, and still getting surprised by this sort of info.
posted by biffa at 3:29 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 3:29 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
Almost all discussion online quotes instant rates, hence my quoting those in the second paragraph on geography, but yeah the higher lifetime rates are imho what matters here: It sucks to loose a food you like. We'd improve overall gut health, even in Europe, if we removed dairy subsidies and added some nut cheese subsidies.
As an aside, casein intolerance is somewhat worse than lactose. We mostly only study casein issues in young children, and claim it sometimes goes away, but it's remarkably under studied in adults, and anecdotally seems fairly prevelant, but maybe that's the comorbidity with autism spectrum.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:39 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
As an aside, casein intolerance is somewhat worse than lactose. We mostly only study casein issues in young children, and claim it sometimes goes away, but it's remarkably under studied in adults, and anecdotally seems fairly prevelant, but maybe that's the comorbidity with autism spectrum.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:39 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]
(With regard to traditional Danish diets, it is perhaps also worth noting what I mean by "a lot" - pork and fish feature heavily in frequency in the old-fashioned way of eating, but in nothing like that quantity that is common today. It's not that people were gorging themselves on meat out in the country a century ago, it's that a small amount of meat was involved in a lot of traditional dishes, including a lot of grød, often as a flavouring (e.g. salt pork boiled with your split peas). We absolutely have different norms now for how much eat it is typical or reasonable to eat at any one given meal.)
posted by Dysk at 5:20 PM on June 9 [3 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 5:20 PM on June 9 [3 favorites]
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and seem to have skipped right over "vegetarians who eat eggs and cheese but zero meat or fish."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:11 AM on June 7 [18 favorites]