Comments on: Vegetarian Diets vs. Meat

By: Wow

Wow — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:51:57 +0000

Welsh hillsides. No way you can till, sow and reap edible foodplants.

Bang a load of sheep on them, and they go and turn that hillside into food production. Cutting out meat entirely reduces the farmable land.

If you want a more extreme version, ask the small villages in central Africa. Goats turn ten acres of bugger all but very sparse scrub grass into something they can eat. Irrigation won’t work.

Cutting down? Certainly, understood. Cutting out entirely?

And why not cut down on everything? We tend to be eating more than we burn up because we have fewer and fewer hard physical jobs and more indoor white collar work (cruddy wages).

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:36:46 +0000

Justiceforall: Absolutely.

By: justiceforall

justiceforall — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:31:20 +0000

The argument for the “naturalness” of vegetarianism is one I very rarely hear, and many of my friends are vegetarians, or more precisely, vegan. Far more often, it is those consuming a meat diet who appeal to naturalness and even to biological necessity. No doubt people and pops. vary somewhat in how well they thrive on a particular diet. But we can agree that eating less rather than more meat, where feasible, is best for all humans concerned. Moreover, since we also are moral beings, we cannot and should not ridicule or otherwise try to suppress the well-founded moral concerns that meat eating raises.

By: natepolean

natepolean — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 06:14:12 +0000

I’m not a vegetarian, but I agree that meat production and eating has a tremendous cost that is not apparent in the most consumers mind. When meat is too cheap and doesnâ??t reflect the true cost of its production, it encourages waste and overeating. I donâ??t think we should condemn heavy meat eaters or price control meat because itâ??s not possible to legislate good behaviour. Iâ??m a true believer in the power of economics which really drives behaviour. If we can just factor the true cost of meat into the price that we pay for, then peopleâ??s eating behavior would also adjust.

Nathan
http://www.imperfecteconomy.com/?p=477

By: DDeden

DDeden — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Ok.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:53:18 +0000

Oh that. Right. I can’t say what that is on the internet. But maybe you said it. I’m not sayin’

By: DDeden

DDeden — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:49:08 +0000

Oh, I thought those had been published. You’d mentioned ‘not been published yet’ so I figured you meant a very recent paper. Oh, I forgot to include crayfish & crab.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:43:19 +0000

Most of that is true, of course.

By: Jason Thibeault

Jason Thibeault — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:40:45 +0000

Papers, by you!? Butbutbut I thought you were a blogger because you weren’t doing any academia, and were instead living in your mom’s basement staining the keyboard with Cheetos! I thought you were a nobody whose opinions mattered for nothing and your liberal ideologies proved that you were shiftless and probably on the dole, looking for government handouts for health care and other such socialist services, which real, good red-blooded Americans would pay triple the rest of the world for, just to prove how good of capitalists they are!

My worldview is shattered.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:09:46 +0000

No, the paper I was referring to was probably either Laden and Wrangham 2005 (http://gregladen.com/wordpress/wp-content/pdf/Laden_Wrangham_Roots.pdf) or Wrangham, Jones, Laden, Pilbeam and Conklin-Britain (http://gregladen.com/wordpress/wp-content/pdf/WranghamEtAl.pdf) or both.