Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet

Phil the Brit said:
Reading all about lovely juicy steaks on here has just spurred me on to nip off to the supermarket this morning and buy a couple of nice fillet steaks for my tea tonight. Might even go extra large and skip the veg.
Yummy!
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We need a decent local butcher, Phil. I want to know that my lovely rare fillet came from a local beast which had a happy life.

I'm always a fan of restaurants which tell you which farm or fisherman the produce comes from.
 
Felonious Crud said:
We need a decent local butcher, Phil. I want to know that my lovely rare fillet came from a local beast which had a happy life.

I'm always a fan of restaurants which tell you which farm or fisherman the produce comes from.
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I'm sure their woudln't be too many people lining up to be fishermen if they were going to be turned into rare filet ;)

Lamb Armistan, anyone?

C
 
Felonious Crud said:
We need a decent local butcher, Phil. I want to know that my lovely rare fillet came from a local beast which had a happy life.

I'm always a fan of restaurants which tell you which farm or fisherman the produce comes from.
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I’m a big fan of that. A lot of the restaurants near me will tell you which local farm the meat was from and Rocksalt in Folkestone will actually tell you the name of the boat the fish was landed from if you ask.
 
Though this thread has suffered the expected drift, ( subtexts being, man eat meat, I’m a man, more meat I eat more manly I am, only puffs eat vegetables, etc etc)..
I just watched the program in question, it was really good. I’d never heard of monrobot before but he put his case well. Some real eye openers... We eat 2 million chickens a day in the uk... wow.
51% of the UK covered by animal agriculture, compared to just 5% covered by human homes, roads, industry, airports basically everywhere that we ‘are’ (I’ll think about that next time I’m told we can’t have a new bypass or motorway due to us covering everywhere in concrete and ruining the place) - Another wow moment.
Agriculture rather than industry (which we seem to have got a grip on) causing more pollution of rivers and land... And I’d never thought before about vast tracts of countryside, such as the lake district as green deserts, a completely artificial environment once covered in trees but now just short grass and scrubland due to all the sheep eating everything that tries to grow. And 20 million sheep in the uk? Wow again.
The UN claiming we only have 60 harvests left before our soil is no longer capable of growing anything?
Also very interesting about the possibility of lab grown meat from cells (and it really is true meat, not a soya burger) that can be created using tiny bits of land and energy compared to rearing animals. Microbot didn’t even mention, I don’t think, the plus side of not rearing animals that live short miserable lives.
I’m not sure about his claim that 4kilos of beef has the same carbon footprint as a return flight to New York (too hard to quantify?)
But the fact that most of the worlds soya and other crops that is grown, goes to feed animals for meat after being flown all over the place gives the the lie really to anyone claiming we’d have to clear more land (rainforests etc) to eat more crops, if we ate less meat - it’s clearly the opposite. Just eat the crops and cut out the middle man. (Middle cow?)
 
Yes Delmonte, agreed.

I'm usually a climate change sceptic, but thread on here led me to watch the programme and was thought provoking to say the least. So if we created lab meat cheaply with all the satutrated fat removed, we could eat that instead of the animals, replant trees on the 50% of UK land used for animal farming and these would remove the Co2 generated by the animals and soak up more ogf the Co2 we are generating via transport etc, so we can forget Greta and electric cars? If so, I'm sold on that!
 
Doctor Houx said:
Yes Delmonte, agreed.

I'm usually a climate change sceptic, but thread on here led me to watch the programme and was thought provoking to say the least. So if we created lab meat cheaply with all the satutrated fat removed, we could eat that instead of the animals, replant trees on the 50% of UK land used for animal farming and these would remove the Co2 generated by the animals and soak up more ogf the Co2 we are generating via transport etc, so we can forget Greta and electric cars? If so, I'm sold on that!
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And then use chemicals to fertilise those crops because we don't have any manure to put on them instead.
Chemicals aren't particularly great from the environment.
So although the idea is good, the reality just moves the problem to something else.
 
GeoffCapes said:
And then use chemicals to fertilise those crops because we don't have any manure to put on them instead.
Chemicals aren't particularly great from the environment.
So although the idea is good, the reality just moves the problem to something else.
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Ok, this this is the other thing I have read and watched. We don't need fertilisers any more either. There are some cutting edge but actually old farmers who have developed natural/organic techniques to create healthy fertile soil, to grow healthy plants/vegetables with zero artificial fertilizers and no compost either.
 
Science and technology is there today to solve many problems. We just don't use it or govt/commerce/consumers are not exploring it, embracing it or supporting it.
 
Contigo said:
This is the Facebook post I referred to.

"It’s hilarious, all these school kids preaching to us oldies that we ruined the planet! Back in the 60’s and 70’s and 80's not a plastic bottle to be seen it was all glass that were reused, pop bottles taken back to the shop. No plastic bags, loose food was brown paper bags, all sweets were bought in 1/4lb put in a paper bag. Mothers used shopping trolleys to carry heavy stuff or used a linen bag. You walked to school from 5yrs to 16yrs not jumping into mummy’s or daddy’s 4+4. No McDonald’s or Burger King plastic toys, no polystyrene food boxes for you to litter the streets with, we used newspapers to wrap our hot food in. Our milk was delivered at 5 am 6 days a week in glass bottles by a milkman who drove an electric vehicle! Holidays were in a caravan in Britain not an aeroplane to far off destinations. So I think these youngsters need to take a look in a recycled mirror and think was it my wasteful generation who are ruining the planet.

View attachment 64393
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Sounds nice, but most of that doesn’t bear up to any scrutiny. I was there in the 70s and 80s and there were plenty of plastic bottles appearing. Rola cola anyone? Tetra packs were everywhere ( composites with plastics) Glass pop bottles taken back to shop were a minority of glass bottles around. ‘All’ sweets were not sold in paper bags, only the minority of old style jar sweets, well on their way out by late 70s (Spangles came in waxy plastic treated wrappers, as did all chocolate). McDonalds appeared in the north around 1982, their burgers WERE in polystyrene, and before that was Wimpy. Only fish & chips came in newspaper, and that was in huge decline by the mid 80s. Milk was delivered, but vast majority of it in non catalyst equipped diesel,or petrol vans doing sub 20mpg. Only the co op used electric. I was a milk boy but never went on an electric float. Same applies to your vaunted caravan holidays. How much fuel did your caravan pulling Mk2 cortina use? European jet holidays booming by 1980; most people didn’t walk to senior school, it being too far away; etc etc

This sort of thing is the reason I hate social media so much. This stuff gains legs, gets millions more reads than a printed newspaper article ever got, closed minds who wanted to think this already read it, then think: end of debate. I’m right. It’s an echo chamber.

Generations arguing about who is greenest using cheap sound bites does no one any favours. That said, each generation is less green than the last, clearly. This comes from consumerism, which comes from our endless need for economic growth. Until the world gets a grip on that nothing will change
 
Science and technology are generally driven for profit, they invest in research to develop ideas to drive the profit without the latter there would be less of the former. Yes an altruistic patron could come along and invest in the research to drive benefits for all but they are few and far between.

Back in the industrial revolution there were many who got rich on new ideas but lots of them reinvested in the people and their environment, the concept of one of those factory supported towns like P{ort Sunlight or Bournville today would be unthinkable.
 
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GeoffCapes said:
And then use chemicals to fertilise those crops because we don't have any manure to put on them instead.
Chemicals aren't particularly great from the environment.
So although the idea is good, the reality just moves the problem to something else.
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Which crops? You don’t need fertiliser for trees. The remaining crops, you would have less of, due to not having to grow animal feed, as demonstrated. And I don’t see why you’d need chemicals to fertilise them?
 
Delmonte said:
Sounds nice, but most of that doesn’t bear up to any scrutiny. I was there in the 70s and 80s and there were plenty of plastic bottles appearing. Rola cola anyone? Tetra packs were everywhere ( composites with plastics) Glass pop bottles taken back to shop were a minority of glass bottles around. ‘All’ sweets were not sold in paper bags, only the minority of old style jar sweets, well on their way out by late 70s (Spangles came in waxy plastic treated wrappers, as did all chocolate). McDonalds appeared in the north around 1982, their burgers WERE in polystyrene, and before that was Wimpy. Only fish & chips came in newspaper, and that was in huge decline by the mid 80s. Milk was delivered, but vast majority of it in non catalyst equipped diesel,or petrol vans doing sub 20mpg. Only the co op used electric. I was a milk boy but never went on an electric float. Same applies to your vaunted caravan holidays. How much fuel did your caravan pulling Mk2 cortina use? European jet holidays booming by 1980; most people didn’t walk to senior school, it being too far away; etc etc

This sort of thing is the reason I hate social media so much. This stuff gains legs, gets millions more reads than a printed newspaper article ever got, closed minds who wanted to think this already read it, then think: end of debate. I’m right. It’s an echo chamber.

Generations arguing about who is greenest using cheap sound bites does no one any favours. That said, each generation is less green than the last, clearly. This comes from consumerism, which comes from our endless need for economic growth. Until the world gets a grip on that nothing will change
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I don't disagree with all your points especially ref social media and the last Sentence is what I said in my first rant and is down to materialism and consumerism. I still think we have gone backwards in the last 30 years in so many way rather than moving forwards.
 
By the way, if anyone’s interested in this stuff, there’s another doc I saw a while back, called Food Inc, it was on Netflix. About US food industry and GM food. Terrifying. Especially if post Brexit we go in that direction...
 
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