Well, let’s see. You collapse all decisions about what to eat into two categories: eat or don’t. Then you suggest that if someone has ethical qualms about eating certain things, but they don’t starve themselves to death, they must be hypocrites. You’ll see why I didn’t find that post deeply serious :).
Your later post is more serious.
There are at least three ethically relevant categories of food we can eat: plants, nonhuman animals, humans. It’s untrue that “we must eat plants and animals.” We can easily subsist on plants alone.
But you put all plants and all nonhuman animals in one category, and humans in another. What’s your rationale for putting the dividing line where you do?
Sure. But we’re not talking about starvation situations with most meat-eaters: we’re talking about people who eat meat because it’s delicious as fuck (I say with a belly full of steak). Presumably if someone eats babies because they find baby meat delicious, you won’t give them a pass. On what basis do you give someone a pass for eating pig meat?
Again, there are reasonable bases for doing so. But it’s a complex subject, and nobody in this thread (with the possible exception of Blake, who brings up the very real issue of animals killed by plant-based agriculture) has mentioned much of anything beyond the naturalistic fallacy.
Some possible defensible rational bases for eating animals:
-Nihilism/ethical relativism. If you believe ethics aren’t objectively real, it’s practically threadshitting even to post in a thread on whether killing animals for food is ethical; but your opinion on the subject will be consistent and, to the extent that nihilism/ethical relativism are defensible, defensible.
-Rational Egoism.
-Social contractarianism.
-A belief that plant-based agriculture kills a comparable number of animals to meat-based agriculture (I’m genuinely curious whether anyone has studied this issue for real).
-A belief that animals other than humans don’t give a crap about death itself, and that as long as they’re treated well then killed humanely, their interests are sufficiently satisfied.
-A supernatural belief that plants experience pain (pro-tip: the research on this subject tends to be vastly misinterpreted).
But saying “we evolved to eat meat, so we should do it,” or, “we have to eat something, therefore there’s no ethical qualms about whatever we eat” are not sound arguments.
Question: Can you walk out into a pasture, bend down, and start eating the grass?
Well maybe you could but its not in your nature however my cows can. They happily eat all the grass and vegetation out there and they refertilize as they go.
My point is animals convert many things humans cannot or will not eat into useful protein.
This is interesting, but not relevant to the discussion. There are plenty of things that we cannot convert to energy, but that other organisms can. That’s not the question. The question is, of those things that we can convert to energy, are there ethical ramifications as to which ones we choose to convert to energy?
Virtually everyone except nihilists and ethical relativists believe there is: very few of us think that converting some random dude on the street into your lunch is ethically acceptable, even though our digestive systems allow it.
The question then becomes, what criteria do we use for making these decisions, and why are they the best criteria?
Edit: also, your last word, “useful,” is pretty interesting. It presupposes that something not usable by humans is not useful. I’m not sure you’re wrong, but I don’t think that’s self-evident.
In its entire lifteime? That seems really low for the lifetime consumption of food by a meat-steer. Are you only counting feedlot grain, and leaving out all the other fodder – hay and alfalfa and prairie grass – for the whole of the beeve’s liftime?
First, it’s not at all an empirical observation. It might be a fine ethical conclusion, or a lovely metaphysical axiom, or even a bang-up religious first principle–but there’s nothing empirical about an observation that includes an ethical judgment like “<”.
Second, and more important, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that eating animals is okay. I’ve “observed” that Hillary Clinton<Bernie Sanders, but I wouldn’t recommend hunting Ms. Clinton down and having her with a nice bottle of Chianti.
To support your conclusion, even if we accept the metaphysical premise, we need to show that animals are so < humans that their interests may be ignored entirely. Failing that, we need to show that our interests in having delicious pepperoni on our pizza (like what I had for dinner) outweigh their interests in survival.
A mere claim that we’re better than they are doesn’t give us free reign to chow down.
Thank you, LHoD. I find this one of the most significant and interesting philosophical issues of our time, and I consistently find the level of discourse on the SDMB whenever this topic comes up to be abysmally low. I’m glad someone is willing to slog through all the patently fallacious arguments and point them out.
OP, it sounds like you’re more squicked out by *raising *animals for food. I think you may have touched on a fair point there. We have a bad habit of treating sentient creatures like so many tomato plants.
I agree. It’s fine with me if someone doesn’t care about this topic, but too many people do care, but don’t spend much time examining their own arguments to see if they make sense.
His link was to a site related to the Australian beef industry and even biased as it is, it doesn’t make any claim as ridiculous as his representations of what it says are. I’m not sure if he even read it or just skimmed for something that seemed to support his pre-existing opinion and posted it blind.
To begin with he appears to be considering the entire weight of the animal to be converted into protein. As you noted it obviously isn’t. When you toss out the bones and skin and connective tissue and various other inedible products you aren’t left with anything close to the entire weight of the animal as food. What you’re left with after that still isn’t pure protein either. Whatever percentage of that meat is converted into edible protein is the number we were discussing before that hijack. Nothing in his cite contradicts any of the well known numbers that are relevant to this discussion and closer to the cite you linked.
Beyond that though, the statistics of one country’s cattle industry wouldn’t be evidence of anything relevant to the discussion anyway. The cite I provided clearly shows that the efficiency with which beef is produced in, say, Australia, is not representative of the entire world. In some countries it takes much more or less grain to produce a kg of meat protein.
The bottom line is that annually around the world 1.3 billion tons of grain are consumed by livestock. That isn’t even counting grass, hay, and other dry feeds.
And annually around the world the livestock industry produces 285 million tons of meat.
With those 285 million tons of meat, we produce enough meat in the world for each person - every man woman and child on earth, to be able to eat 36kg (80 lb) of meat per year. But that isn’t what we do. North Americans average 270 lbs of meat, more than 3x our share in terms of equal division with the hungry masses of the world, while many countries average 1/10 that. And many people starve and don’t eat any of it.
Any environmental damage, or animal cruelty, or any other ill effect that you want to measure as downsides of this massive production of livestock (which is estimated to use 40% of all available land on earth and 1/3 of the world’s entire water supply) is not just a cost of doing business to feed the masses as Blake seems to want us to believe. The huge majority of it is used primarily to feed the indulgences of a very small minority that only constitutes a tiny portion of the world population.
That excess consumption doesn’t need to be replaced by anything if it were reduced by conscientious consumers. The fact that a huge, ridiculous portion of what we buy at the grocery store winds up in the trash makes that all the more true.
And I suppose there’s supposed to be an obvious connection to this being a bad thing? I’m not seeing it. Humans eat a lot of meat. Some groups of humans eat a lot more meat. Hamburgers are delicious.
Only if you’re concerned about the environment or animals or, you know, any of the things we are discussing in this thread.
If you had been following along though, that was a reply to someone claiming that reducing this excess meat production would require some replacement, like agriculture, which would then spell certain doom for up to 5,000 field mice, or something. The post you are replying to just points out that stopping an ‘excess’ of something doesn’t require that it be replaced by anything and that it is an excess, not a necessity. What you choose to make of that as it applies to you and your tastes is honestly of very little importance to me either way.
It’s probably no coincidence that the same continent that eats most of the world’s supply of meat is also running at a 40% obesity rate. But if that formula of environmental destruction, gluttony and poor health is working out well for you by all means carry on.
I’m mostly on your side here. Beef is a very inefficient food-source, especially in a world that’s suffering from ecological degradation and severe overpopulation. We could benefit from eating lower on the food-chain: more chicken and pork, less beef. (Elephant is right out.)
(And I say this as the descendant of a long line of cattlemen.)
Cattle, at least in the Western US, are raised on rangeland, browsing the grasses, which may be supplemented with forage (farmed hay). After about two years or so, they are usually “finished”, by feeding them grain to increase the fat content, and then slaughtered. They do not feast on grain for more than a month or two (which I think is in addition to forage), so the ton and a half of grain sounds to me like an upper bound. They are often run on land that is not suitable for farming crops (the effects of cattle on otherwise sensitive areas, including downstream impacts, is a matter of vigorous debate).
The two most important environmental issues surrounding beef production are farts and water. The methane that issues from the asses of cattle is a nontrivial GHG – much more serious than CO[sub]2[/sub] – and the more beef we eat (raise), the more problematic the herds are to BGW. Water, though, is pretty huge. A bovine drinks 10~20 gallons of water a day, to which we must add the large amounts of water that go into fodder and grain production. Water is the sleeper issue that not nearly enough people are giving thought to: we can find substitutes for oil, but water is water, and we need it (oil itself is the third issue: if we look at how much petroleum goes into agriculture, it looks a lot like we are eating dinosaurs).
Given the obesity epidemic in the US, it looks like we could easily halve beef production and not even replace it with an increase in other food production. Americans simply eat too much, and the figure I last saw was that we waste something like 40% of what food is produced. If food was overall scarcer/pricier, perhaps we would treat it with respect.
I do not personally believe that vegetarianism is a viable or particularly moral answer, but Americans most assuredly could have much better balance in their diets. Industrial food production/marketing is a major problem here, that makes me perceive that the “free market” ought not be what governs how we eat.
