Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury, and arguably a step in the food chain that's a waste.
If the entire industrial meat sector evaporated today, my guess is the biggest impact would be an economic disruption from large number of suddenly unemployed and businesses no longer buying services/products, rather than any kind of food shortage per se.
But if we're talking about an antibiotic ban, the impacts wouldn't even reach that far. ABX don't enable production, they enable cheaper production. The most likely outcome isn't a serious collapse in supply, it's some combination of an increase in costs and modest reduction in supply.
Currently, meat serves the important function of regulating the supply of cereals. When there is overproduction, the grain producers can still sell for meat producers, not going out of business. Where the production reduces, meat producers sell thiner (and sometimes younger) animals, freeing more grains for human consumption.
Left alone, grain consumption is extremely inelastic, and production is extremely variable - not a good combination. But yes, it's not that hard to create other mechanisms for regulating that market, even world wide.
> Currently, meat serves the important function of regulating the supply of cereals.
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat.
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog.
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly.
Perhaps she'll use a combination of market forces and
warehouses to accomplish the same thing much more
simply next time around.
You don't think biofuels could take up an appreciable portion of that slack? I'd expect that buying up grain in bulk at surplus prices, and converting it into ethanol to be pretty profitable.
If you live in Tibet or any other 4000+ meter environment where growing things is quite a bit more difficult, and you don't eat meat, you die. Say whatever you want about the Chinese, but the Tibetans do very much welcome the fresh vegetables that they can now get via better transport links and internal trade.
I visited north Xinjiang once, and was quite over-exposed to meat so much that I was happy to get back to lower elevation lands where I could actually get some vegetables again.
So what about medical treatments that save lives but have yet to be invented? How is humanity possibly surviving now when there are still medical conditions that lead to death?
What a massive load of shit. Even if we're going to get on the train that eating meat vicariously results in antibiotics being rendered useless, the two are not any more directly related than watching Netflix destroys the environment (Netflix runs on computers, producing computers causes pollution, pollution destroys the environment).
Hold on, tiger. There appears to be some interesting research that supports this indirectly. It's not the meat, it's the methionine. It's highest in animal products (eggs are #1).
Methionine is an essential amino acid that is one of 2 that is used for the start codon for DNA transcription. It follows that if cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, that restricting the resource it needs would limit it's growth.
Appeal to authority: my wife, the molecular biologist pointed out the codon angle. It seems reasonable enough to me to have become a pseudo vegan (without the self-righteousness (at least in regards to that)).
Whoa whoa whoa, this is a huge huge huge stretch in terms of causing cancer, and is not consistent with any current beliefs and thoughts on oncogenesis. Methionine availability is much more like the Warburg Effect [1], an effect where cells mostly perform anaerobic instead of aerobic metabolism.
Changing one's diet based on this speculation would be absolute quackery.
A cell's addiction to methionine is an effect of cancer, and restricting methionine can be potentially be used to treat cells that are already cancerous, but there's no thought on how this could possible cause cancer. Dump a bunch of methionine in cells and they're not going to develop cancer, as far as anything I've ever seen. Interestingly enough, diabetes patients that use metformin to treat their diabetes seem to have slightly lower cancer rates than diabetes patients that don't use metformin, which has triggered interest in insulin receptors as possible treatment targets or causes, which are vaguely related to metabolism, but such work is extremely early and no conclusions should be drawn. And that's on far far more solid ground than methionine as a cancer risk.
We understand caloric restriction far better than methionine restriction in terms of extending lifespans of lab animals, so if one wants to speculate on dietary changes, this seems like a far better speculative, pre-knowledge, gamble than methionine restriction.
I don't think I said (and know that I didn't mean to imply) that excess methionine causes cancer.
Methionine restriction by avoiding methionine rich foods doesn't strike me as harmful at all, since there's still plenty in even a vegan diet. And in my case, I said pseudo-vegan -- it's more a mindset than dogma.
Can you explain a bit more? I'm interested, but I'm interpreting your post as "helps with DNA copying so its good for cell reproduction means it causes cancer". I'm sure I have it wrong. I mean.... loads of things we eat are good for cell reproduction. It's almost like saying "living makes you more likely to die"
Note the reference to methionine. My understanding is that the body recycles methionine as well. So give your body just enough to let it do it's thing but don't pour gasoline on the cancer fire by supply a surplus of a critical component.
I'm still slowly doing the research on this. It was spurred by my daughter telling me about "the Blue Zone healing cancer". Googled that, and checked out the dietary element, and that led to the topic we're discussing now.
It seems reasonable enough. And simple enough. And you don't have to be vegan, but mindful of intake.
Just trying to share a recent discovery that seems like a possible life changer.
I eat at least a dozen per week, and plan to continue. This is non-sense. The "seems to make sense" part especially. You can take any thread from human biology and spin to extremes using inductive reasoning. Fortunately the body has myriad checks and balances.
I submit to you "free radicals". Oh-my-god-theyre-awful-help. Enter anti-oxidants, oh-my-god-theyre-great-yay. Let's supplement them right? Ouch, turns out, those dietary anti-oxidants were the bees knees, but supplementation to extremes might be a bad idea, and we might need some free radicals to prevent cancerous cell growth.
My moral here is, natural whole foods, mostly, will keep you pretty near balance. Eat your berries, whole grains, eggs, and proteins because the one thing we know is bad for us is a lack of balance.
Umm, I think he was referring to the (purported) health benefits of a meat-free diet. The ideal amount of meat in one's diet is perhaps debatable, but I wouldn't call the claim "a massive load of shit" (both because it overstates and because I would come up with something more civil).
After figuring low-carb on my own (I never had heard of it before), and making my nutrition person (forgot the name in english for that profession) cringe, it worked wonder.
First, I started to lose 1kg a week, until I was in a healthy weight (when the weight stabilized instead, without much adjustments to diet), and my choleterol that I was fighting for years, dropped to healthy levels in 4 months, also several other broken blood levels got fixed.
Also my sleep got better, and for the first time in my life going to the gym made a difference (before that, I could go to the gym all I wanted, and I would never get stronger, and I was very weak, sedentary 14 year old girls could lift more weight than me in the upper body).
But that is just a anecdote, it happened to me, I did no research to see WHY it happened, it just did, and now I stick with that diet.
There is a very wide range of low-carb sources of food that are well-rounded and excellent -- avocados, tomatoes, almonds/almond milk, spinach, cheeses, high-fat yoghurt, tofu, blueberries, raspberries.
That wasn't my point. What if there was a cancer treatment that costs literally billions of dollars, so that only a few people in the world could afford it? Would that cancer treatment be a "luxury," or would you consider it a basic need for all humans?
I'd say it (the expensive treatment) was a basic need. A need that was not being met. You could tell it was a need because those who needed it but didn't get it would die.
So, which would you rather have, a lot less livestock to eat, or no way to treat bacterial infections?
Oh, but guess what, you don't get to choose that trade-off -- you'll have a lot less livestock to eat either way. You can do it with or without entering the post-antibiotic era. (Or at any rate, a lot more expensive meat, which will likely result in a lot less of it, sure.)
Fortunately, a lot less livestock to eat does not mean a global food shortage. People are quite capable of living with a lot less meat. It may be a global deliciousness shortage, because meat is delicious; but most people on the planet don't eat much meat already (cause they can't afford it).
The OP is odd in suggesting "We have a few chances left to turn back the tide of resistance — but only a few, and not much room for mistakes. I hope we take them." -- without any hints as to what these chances are -- and then suggesting that if we don't take them, what we'll 'lose' is cheap meat from routine antibiotic use in livestock! But in fact, ceasing the use of routine antibiotics in livestock production -- before they become useless, because it'll be stopped when they become useless anyhow -- seems like the #1. What else you got?
If even some of the land that was freed up by a fall-off in livestock production was instead used to grow plants, we'd actually have a food surplus, and a significant one.
Many places which are unsuitable to crop production can be used for livestock production with very wide grazing.
Most livestock production is done in hyper-concentrated confinement operations which take up negligible land space. For the wellbeing of the animals, the quality of the environment surrounding these sites, and the quality of the meat -- these confinement operations should be done away with. The space, though, is irrelevant.
Eliminating livestock production increases food availability because the feed-conversion-ratio is between 4 and 40 (how many pounds of feed turn into 1 pound of cow,pig,chicken, etc).
Livestock can utilize food sources that we can't (pigs are the greatest food recyclers ever created), and they can graze in wastelands that we otherwise find difficult to make productive.
India is primarily vegetarian ONLY because they have lots of land in which to grow things. Most other regions do not have so much grow-worthy land, and require a mix of farming and livestock to sustain their populations.
That doesn't mean those 80 million acres are able to grow food humans can eat though. Not every year.
For instance, on my farm, while our soil and climate is quite good for growing beans of many varieties, which are great for human consumption, you still need to maintain a rotation to maintain a viable farm. We've had to push cereals out of some of our land because it simply won't grow on their soils. That basically leaves corn as our only real rotation option.
To add to that, corn is essentially worthless right now. Its market price is below what it costs to grow. I'd rather grow something I can make money from, but I don't know what that is. You just have to roll the dice and hope the price improves before you have to sell it.
As an interesting aside, a neighbour of mine actually did try growing beans year after year, but he soon found himself out of business completely when disease started running rampant and his yields dropped to nothing. It was kind of sad to watch, and frightening to think what could be if we lose the animal markets.
We can eat corn! I certainly don't want to shift my diet over to consume so much of it (I do realize that the quality of the harvest varies and different varieties, etc., but we can eat it).
Mostly, this thread seems a bit wishy-washy on how we feed livestock in the U.S...
Well, I like corn bread. And corn tortillas. I don't mind corn flakes. I don't like corn dogs. There's lots of ways to utilize field corn for human consumption.
But sure, it's unlikely humans would keep growing that much corn if it wasn't going to ethanol or livestock.
Fair enough, but still a drop in the bucket compared to what is being grown. You said yourself that the vast majority was consumed by other animals.
> But sure, it's unlikely humans would keep growing that much corn if it wasn't going to ethanol or livestock.
Which is likely, and in line with what I was suggesting earlier. However, unless some unforeseen markets open up, that means leaving the land fallow every few years rather than growing corn, not growing more food for humans.
That is where I was going with my original post. If we stopped growing corn completely, that doesn't necessarily mean we gain 80 million acres to grow something else, you just lose the meat out of the nation's diet, putting more pressure on the land that is already growing other foods.
I'm not saying it is impossible to see such a transition through, but our agriculture system grew up with animals being a large part of it. To stop that over a short period of time would be a huge transition, and I could see it being an incredibly painful time for farmers and consumers alike. It won't simply be a matter of stopping the consumption of animals and starting to eat a vegetarian diet like small groups of people are able to do today.
> Eliminating livestock production increases food availability because the feed-conversion-ratio is between 4 and 40 (how many pounds of feed turn into 1 pound of cow,pig,chicken, etc).
pumping them full of antibiotics under factory farm conditions seems like an awful hack anyway.
it's like running eighty concurrent webserver processes and killing them 100 times per second round-robin because if you don't kill them constantly they will bring down the whole system.
I mean maybe this setup "works" but aren't we really stretching the definition of that word?
> it's like running eighty concurrent webserver processes and killing them 100 times per second round-robin because if you don't kill them constantly they will bring down the whole system
A significant portion of the drugs used in feed are used to tip the digestive chemistry so that the feed is processed more efficiently. It isn't that big an effect, but it isn't really wildly crazy. There's a bunch of studies on feeding ionophores to graze animals (which I take as a demonstration of intent).
It's pretty doubtful that a reduction in livestock would lead to a food shortage. The amount of resources it takes to produce a calorie of meat is vastly larger than to produce a calorie of plant-based food.
Erm. People have been eating meat on a regular, frequent basis only very recently in History. 60 years ago it was meat just one a month or something. And people didn't just die off because they couldn't eat meat anymore.
That's simply not true. Inuit have almost exclusively eaten meat for centuries. And there are parts of the world where agriculture and irrigation don't work and animals which can feed on scrub are the staple.
Well, I was talking about Europe, mainly, and I assume in most countries of the developed word this was very much the same. I don't think Inuits have very much to do with the industrial production of meat we have nowadays, do they ?
Almost two centuries ago, he says, meat was one reason why immigrants found America so amazing. "When the Irish come in the 1840s, they write letters back saying 'I eat meat every day,'" Horowitz says. "And they get letters back saying, 'You must be kidding. It can't be true.'"
Back in Europe, says Horowitz, the growing of livestock was often organized and regulated in a way that funneled meat straight to the wealthy or the landed aristocracy. In the new world, though, meat was much easier to find. Grazing lands were close to cities; sometimes . Farmers quickly realized that raising animals was a good business. Cities set up markets for them. "And the result is a flourishing of the livestock industry, very early in American history."
As a result, when new technology came along, like railroads and refrigeration, American entrepreneurs were able to jump right in and use it to turn beef into a centralized, national industry.
"Why could they sell chilled beef in New York in the 1880s? Because New Yorkers had been getting beef in their markets and butcher shops for at least a hundred years. So we have this new meat coming in? It's a little cheaper, let's give it a try!" Horowitz says.
That's been the story ever since: , more efficient meat production, and Americans kept saying — "Hey, it's a little cheaper, let's give it a try!"
It all seems like a vicious cycle of us discovering better ways to fight bacteria and feeding more and more people at the same time at the same price or less. Everything adapts bla bla bla.
This could all be alleviated if we just took a step back as a society and took control of our own lives, food included. Maybe spending 20-30 minutes a day on growing your own supply (where applicable) isn't the worst thing in the world if it came down to it.
Absolutely, but maybe there is more then one wrong here. Plus the nutrition you get from mass farming these days is less then desirable. It's not about quantity ,but quality as the cliche says.
I understand this is not possible everywhere but I grew up on a pretty small suburban home that grew maybe 50% of its own vegetables outside of winter. Having moved to a heavy industrialized nation and moving that down to 0% I can see the difference in quality when eating mass produced food.
Again, not everyone if willing or able to do this, but where applicable it should be encouraged and promoted instead of looked down upon as another hippy mentality blabedibla...
The house of cards is stacked very, very high.