Only Soylent Ketchup.
You’re thinking of catsup.
I hear cats are stringy.
Well, not all collective actions work the same way. While most of the time my vote, for instance, will be irrelevant, there actually have been times when elections come down close enough that an individual vote is relatively meaningful. So it is possible for my vote to have an effect, as sometimes, elections actually do come down to one vote.
Not so with climate change. It is not, in any way, possible for my individual choice to actually have that effect. There is no tipping point where my one individual choices will ever make a difference, for good or ill. If my behavior is to make a difference, it is likely to be mostly involuntary, as part of a larger societal movement including a comprehensive change of behavior and changes of regulations across the board.
You can have chickens in big cities, too. In fact, that used to be normal until after WWII (I think - haven’t studied the exact transition very much).
Not well documented, but when I lived in Chicago there was a certain amount of people eating pigeon, squirrel, and rabbit from the parks along with the occasional fish out of the big lake. At best a legal grey area, but every so often I’d see a gathering of people on the beach around a cooking fire/BBQ, and knew someone in Bridgeport who would go on at length at how to catch and prepare “city chicken” (pigeon) and so on. Probably more common during the Great Depression years. Had the double benefit of keeping certain animal populations from getting out of control and providing protein to people. Would not be sustainable if everyone tried to do it.
Which is the problem with hunting for meat - it’s fine if a minority does it, not sustainable if everyone does it because there are just too damn many people these days. On the other hand, hunting is not as easy as it might look from the outside, you are not guaranteed to get something on every given trip out into the woods and fields. Cleaning and dressing and butchering aren’t usually considered fun, either. I think if the only source of meat was getting your own - either raising it or hunting it - there’s be a lot less eating of meat. Having it neatly packaged at the store makes it a lot easier to consume.
So… either hike the price of commercially produced meat (either pricing it to reflect the real cost of production including effects on the environment) or you have to raise or hunt your own and you’ll see meat consumption drop. Getting the population to go along with that is another question, especially in nations full of self-entitled assholes
My daughter and her husband do not eat meat. We usually go to Indian restaurants when we meet for dinner.
Years ago, we got our first Indian cookbook. And my husband flipped through it and said, “now i could be a vegetarian”. We have a couple other vegetarian dishes (bean soups, roast root vegetables) but we almost always have at least one Indian dish on the table if we are hosting vegetarians.
But why would I care that I harmed them? If no one sees me and I get away with it, then why would I care? You have to add the societal component. If I can get away with doing something, then someone else can do that same thing to me. I don’t want that, so it’s good for society that no one be allowed to do that.
Still, yes, that is still fairly obvious. But that’s why it’s one of the more basic ones. The reasons behind other morals can get a lot more complicated. Yet, most of the time people don’t learn why the moral exists. I know plenty of people who have never even thought that far about it.
Oh, and @Mnemnosyne: I don’t really get your point. Voting also has no tipping point at the individual level, only the collective level. But there is a tipping point with environmental actions. You mention it becoming part of the culture. But that can’t happen unless there are enough individuals that culture changes.
A guy I follow on YouTube has a video about the concept. He’s not where I got the idea, but I think maybe he explains it better. There very much is a tipping point in a capitalist society.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with your assertion that moral codes first developed to prevent abstract future harm, or to encourage abstract positive behavior. The most basic moral actions are all about things which are obvious and immediate.
That’s not to say that we don’t have examples of collective action being encouraged in ancient times. The ancient Greeks, for example, had the concept of ritual hospitality. Some Amerindian groups integrated prohibitions against overhunting into their religious customs. But those are more complex ideas than “hurting somebody is bad,” so of course they came later.
Yeah I’m all about raising the price of grocery store meat or even just getting rid of subsidies for corn and soy. But then I’m 100% plant-based.
Ketchup is a fruit paste with added sugar*. It tastes so good on meatloaf there probably is a market for a meat version. We could call it “spaghetti sauce”. Whattaya say?
Quick! Think of a vegetable. Did you think ketchup? Me too. Your burger comes with the vegetables mustard, pickle, onion and relish too. So, that really counts as five servings.
I’m not, for medical reasons I’ve mentioned before, but that doesn’t mean I can’t cut down on my animal-product consumption, which I have. I am healthier as a result, and my food budget hasn’t been as impacted by price fluctuations (yet - we’re going to have agricultural problems in the near future due to drought and the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
I don’t think we’re going to get to 100% vegan for generations, if ever. We are omnivores and meat/animal origin is very much an option for us from a biological standpoint. We can still have a major effect if we can just move people towards more sustainable food production which IS possible. But it does require a critical mass people getting on board with it.
Does one person cutting meat consumption down to 2-3 times per week instead of 2-3 times per day have an effect? Not really. Does one billion people doing that have an effect? Yes, in fact they do. Just like one drop of water doesn’t create visible erosion but a river most certainly can cause it (see any canyon), often quite rapidly given the right confluence of circumstances. But you’re not going to convince your neighbor to make changes unless you make some yourself first.
On a menu, though, an icon or asterisk indicating that an option is “vegetarian” is pretty straightforward – no animals were killed to make this menu item. An icon or asterisk indicating that an option is “vegan” is likewise mostly straightforward – no animals were directly involved in the making of this menu item. This has worked for decades but I guess words can always evolve.
I agree that humans are the biggest cause, and it’s damn hard to change people’s behavior. The easiest solution is to reduce the human population by at least 1/3.
It can all be a joke, but if meat were unavailable people would still be ruining their vegetables by pouring gallons of ketchup on it. Ketchup is a processed vegetable, so are potato chips and corn chips. Just eating vegetables isn’t magically healthier than eating meat. You might have noticed the most snack foods are made of vegetables, vegetable cost less than meat and keep better.
I like to eat meat and I make a point about getting enough vegetables, which is sometimes work. I buy and eat the ones I like best. Both meat and plants are healthy. But less processed vegetables are usually healthier than snack foods. In places like school cafeterias, providing good nutrition and promoting good habits is more important than providing the most popular foods, all the time, if they are unhealthy. From your brain’s perspective, ketchup is a nearly perfect food. I like fries and salty snack foods made from oiled plants too. Smaller portions less often. People benefit from a variety of foods.
I’m gravitating towards that diet because of my personal feelings of empathy, and not to save the planet. But…
There are so many existential risks at hand right now that if you are going to chart a lifestyle to impact the future of the planet (or mankind), pick a cause that might actually matter. There are many doom-makers that will get us long before meat eating will.
It’s not as if you can choose only one action, though. Today (like the last two days), I ate mostly plants, mostly from local farms or our small garden. I also put plant scraps in the composter, re-used some cardboard boxes, and ran a fan rather than the whole-house air conditioning. Yesterday I had a medical appointment and plotted the shortest route to include dropping off $500 in book donations and taking cans to the bottle return. Tomorrow I’ll spend some time in the garden harvesting, weeding, and spot-watering, then do a load of laundry on a fast cold water cycle and hang it to dry. None of this represents more than a normal day plus an occasional inconvenience. I won’t save the planet on my own, but I’m working not to hasten its/our demise.
PLAGUE! PLAGUE! PLAGUE!! WOOOO!!!
(Adding this phrase because they won’t allow me to post incomplete sentences)
Is it okay if we agree to some definitions?
Botanists do not use the word “vegetable”. Parts of plants which are reproductive containers are botanical fruits. We eat those and all the other botanical parts of plants.
Cooks don’t use these definitions. Plant foods are categorized more by how you prepare them, and how your body uses them. Let’s not get bogged down in long-well-defined semantics. It doesn’t matter to your body whether you call a potato or ketchup a vegetable, one is still a starch and the other is still a sweet-and-sour sauce.
When I think about how to change a whole society’s damaging habits, I always think of smoking. What happened to cigarettes in the US? In 1965, over 40% of adults smoked, and now it’s a little over 12%. This didn’t happen naturally. It happened because of a concerted, multi-pronged government-created and funded campaign and an ever-increasing flow of anti-smoking prohibitions at every organizational level public and private, as the message slowly took hold and then took over.
At this time, beef eating is much like smoking before government intervention – most people do it, most people know it’s bad for them medically, some people are aware of the collateral damage (environmental in this case, second-hand smoke in the case of cigarettes).
There are a lot of differences – beef isn’t actually poison, like nicotine, for one thing. And culture wars will make a core group feel a campaign to minimize factory beef consumption as a call to armed terrorism. But I still think it could work, if it was accompanied by diverting beef production subsidies into programs supporting small local farms and markets.