I mean that’s entirely subjective. I can make some goddamn great BBQ-flavored lentils. And if you really want to get something meaty, you can use lentils and mushrooms to make a patty-type thing that you can grill up.
Sure cheesecake is delicious, but you aren’t getting the bulk of your nutrition from cheesecake anyway. You can get 95% of your calories from plant sources and eat the remaining 5% in cheesecake, and that would take several steps towards reducing excessive animal agriculture.
Don’t waste water is another example. Industry pollutes or wastes orders of magnitude more fresh water than consumers but it’s put on consumers to take navy showers in their own homes.
What I’m saying is, there’s no reason that oh… celery can’t taste like cheesecake. Taste is entirely a construct of the brain. If our brains were just better, celery could taste like cheesecake. If we had the power, we could make it so that celery tastes like cheesecake only by changing ourselves, and not changing celery or cheesecake.
That’s an interesting idea but we’d have to fight a billion years of genetics trying to keep us from starving by making the most calorie dense substances the most appealing.
I’m just saying, imagine a world where kids are eating vegetables like it’s candy because it tastes like candy, but actually it’s vegetables. People drinking water, but it tastes like milkshakes or soda.
Oh hell yeah I’m not saying it wouldn’t be an awesome situation and great for human health just saying it would be hard to pull off. I for one would miss my veggies tasting like veggies though.
You can make cheesecake test like vegetables also. The world of flavors can be yours.
The answer is clear for Scott to become a Reverse Willy Wonka.
I think we’ve finally found a use for the Patreon money. 
Lentil soup is amazing.
If true, you’ve done the most a single person can do in a single act in terms of reducing emissions.
The difference between chickens and bees? Is this a serious question?
My opinion on animal agriculture is the same as pet ownership: treat them well and don’t buy from breeders. No forced insemination. No artificially selecting for massive wool or milk production if it causes harm to the animal. No slaughtering when they stop producing, only at end of life or when suffering from disease or injury. Antibiotics only as a treatment.
It’s not quite total abolition, but it’s pretty close.
These are both great arguments against animal agriculture.
We give 36% of our crops to livestock, and “a strong positive relationship between the level of income and the consumption of animal protein”. Animal agriculture is a way of amplifying the food consumption of the rich and depriving the poor
Surgery to make sure I can’t makes it about as true as it can be.
I feel like having one or two “Woke” kids probably has a better effect than not breeding and hoping that by chance one of the extremely large conservative families that doesn’t care at all about the issues has a kid that rebels and somehow helps the issue :-p
It’s absolutely a serious question. What is the ethical difference between keeping bees and keeping chickens? You said straight up “I don’t give a shit about individual bees,” and I’m asking why you consider one to be of greater ethical concern than the other.
Or do you object to the manner in which they are typically kept? Because if we want to go that route, I can talk a lot about industrial beekeeping and the problems it causes for hive health, and the problems that creates in local wildlife.
That’s the goal I want to see more people work towards, although that’s a difficult thing to get people to do when they’re bound by capitalism. Like, I have enough resources that I can do part-time homesteading and focus on building a sustainable life - but I live in a town of 30k people and have 3 acres of land, so I can do that. All of that is rendered meaningless by the mere existence of, say, Beijing (although city living is generally more environmentally sustainable than country living).
This is primarily true of grain-dependent ruminant agriculture. From your article:
“Shifting grain-fed
beef production equally to pork and chicken production could
increase feed conversion efficiencies from 12% to 23%, which
would increase global calorie delivery by 6% (or 3.52 × 1014
calories), representing 357 million additional people fed on
a 2700 calorie per day diet. Alternatively, shifting all feed
directed to meat production to the production of milk and eggs
(or a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet) could increase feed conversion
efficiencies to 35%, which would increase calorie delivery
by 14% (or 8.04 × 1014 calories), representing 815 million
additional people fed.”
You can make a dramatic difference simply by shifting the nature of the end products of those feed crops, as an accessible step in the right direction.
And, of course, grazed animals as opposed to grain-fed animals, which gets us back to dismantling the beef industry as the top priority in global dietary reform.
In the interim, I’d really like to see a push for the addition of seaweed to ruminant diets, because it cuts GHG emissions dramatically while not affecting consumption patterns at all.
I’m just sad that apparently nobody else has watched The Young Ones.
Hopefully a prequel to The Old Ones.
I always thought there was something a bit off about Adrian Edmondson…
Why do you care about humans more than chickens? Do you believe in a soul, some kind of non-physical substance that makes humans unique?
Unlike bees, chickens feel pain. They’re more complex organisms and are closer to humans. I think they’re well past the level of cognizance where they deserve rights.
Actually, now that I’m doing a little research, my lack of concern for bees was based on facts that may be erroneous. When I gave up eggs and dairy, I also gave up honey so I could call myself vegan, because I think increasing our numbers is important politically. I never bothered researching because it was already a non-issue.
Regardless, bees are certainly less deserving of rights than chickens, and chickens less than humans. But any system that denies chickens the right to freedom from arbitrary suffering is either biologically unsound or morally abhorrent.
This model is unrealistic at scale due to land use. I don’t see a way to solve both food supply and animal ethics without the near-elimination of animal product consumption.
If you think animals deserve rights you’re nuts. Welfare and well-being sure but not rights. Rights also implies responsibilities which animals cannot comprehend.