[prongletown]

I've been a vegetarian for a few years. Part of the impetus for my choice was the lack of regulation and health code standards in this country.

Recent news that the federal government is reducing inspection of meat really does scare me. How many people need to die (like in the early 1900s) before we re-realize the importance of these regulations on public life? When will the next Upton Sinclair come along?

[ddeck]

Unfortunately even fruit and vegetables aren't safe.

Syphilis and TB antibiotics are being used to combat disease on orange trees in Florida:

The E.P.A. has proposed allowing as much as 650,000 pounds of streptomycin to be sprayed on citrus crops each year. By comparison, Americans annually use 14,000 pounds of aminoglycosides, the class of antibiotics that includes streptomycin

In its decision to approve two drugs for orange and grapefruit trees, the E.P.A. largely ignored objections from the C.D.C. and the F.D.A., which fear that expanding their use in cash crops could fuel antibiotic resistance in humans.

scientists are especially worried that the drugs will cause pathogenic bacteria in the soil to become resistant to the compounds and then find their way to people through groundwater or contaminated food.[1]

Several lawmakers wrote to the EPA last month to urge a rethink of the policy given legitimate scientific concerns around the issue of antimicrobial resistance. To quote the letter:

Antibiotics are life-saving medicines and, except in extraordinary circumstances, should only be used to treat specific illnesses in people and animals," the lawmakers wrote. "EPA's assessments appear to ignore scientific evidence, violate the principle of judicious antibiotic use, and could create unnecessary harm to human health by authorizing an unprecedented amount of medically important antibiotics to be used for plant agriculture.[2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/health/antibiotics-orange...

[2] http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/08/lawmakers...

[cwkoss]

The most terrifying thing about antibiotic resistance is that bacterial will readily take up DNA fragments from dead neighbors (or via sex pillus).

This means that if a benign bacteria develops resistance, that gene can easily find its way into a pathogenic one if they are both in the same environment.

[flmontpetit]

Upton Sinclair lamented the fact that nobody really got the point of The Jungle.

I think after all this time he is about to be proven right.

[nitwit005]

You're correct that he complained about that, but the point was supposed to be about the exploitation and abuse of laborers.

[flmontpetit]

That's true, but "exploitation and abuse of laborers" and "tubercular beef" were ultimately caused by the same thing.

[jacobolus]

Upton Sinclair’s complaint was that everyone cared about the health implications but didn’t care about the workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Reception

[moate]

Yes. And people sought to address the specific causes of tubercular beef while leaving the rest untouched because they weren't cared about the exploitation and abuse of laborers as much as their own health.

[moate]

I mean the same thing happened to Orwell. He was a democratic socialist who literally went to war with the fascists in Spain but people think Animal Farm is meant to be a rebuke of communism generally (and not Stalinism specifically).

[prongletown]

Well, the point of the jungle is that we need to form a socialist worker's state. Instead, everyone freaked out about sausages.

He had a quote along the lines of "I aimed for the heart and hit the stomach"

edit: > "I aimed for the public's heart," Sinclair later wrote, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."

[zosterops]

That point being, to promote socialism.

[whenchamenia]

Its simple to get to know your local rancher. You can even voice your concerns and have them heard by the person raising your beef, while walking the ranch on a nkce day. Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.

[cowmoo728]

This isn't practical because it requires so much effort from the consumer. It's a lot of time and coordination and it's relatively expensive. Farmers markets are one opportunity but high quality organic ranchers are breaking their backs processing meat and driving it to all the farmers markets, and are barely turning a profit off $16/lb meat.

I'm working in this space for a tiny company that delivers high quality, low antibiotic use, low environmental impact, pasture raised single-source meat products in California. We're going to run farm education "meet the rancher" events to get people out to where the meat is actually produced, but we have to be realistic: that's more for the instagram photo ops to convince people that we're legitimate instead of to truly change consumer behavior.

The ugly truth is Americans eat too much meat, and we expect it to be dirt cheap. Meat has been heavily subsidized, and all the externalities from industrial meat production have been ignored, for the past 60 years at least. Turning back the clock on those consumer expectations is going to be very painful.

I'm also extremely worried about the rise of industrial meat production in the developing world, but it seems elitist of wealthy Americans to complain about Chinese agriculture standards when we can't even fix it in our own backyard.

[kryogen1c]

> Its simple to get to know your local rancher.

>Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.

Not just meat farms! One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over is the death per calorie involved in crop fields. Those thousands of acres have animals in them, and the machines sure dont stop for every varmit that gets in the way.

It is not clear what the right answer is (assuming all you care about is number of animal lives, which is an inadequate measure anyway). The best advice i know of is to only eat well raised cow meat because 1 cow provides a lot of calories, and vegetables, chickens, and pigs etc do not and kill lots of animals.

[prongletown]

>eat well raised cow meat

It takes significantly more feed to raise a cow. The calories extracted from cow meat is extremely inefficient considering the high number of calories in (feed) and water. So, you could not use feed (vegetable death-per-calorie!) because it's something like a 8:1 calorie ratio for feed to a pound of beef. You'd have to pasture raise the cows.

There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.

There is currently no cruelty free-way to have cheap, accessible calories. If you really wanted the lowest death-per-calorie, one of the most feasible approaches would be consuming large amounts of rice.

I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

[Mikeb85]

> There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.

Maybe Americans (westerners in general actually) should simply eat less? 3 oz of meat per day is enough (5 oz of protein is recommended, but part of that can easily be filled by grains, legumes, cheese, milk, etc...). No one needs 10 oz of meat per day (current average consumption for Americans).

[jdironman]

Not only that, the long lost art of growing it yourself. Both animals and produce. Then you have complete control over the process

[labawi]

> I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

I think this is a part of the problem in dominantly meat-eating cultures: they don't realize how diverse and nutritious plant life is. Treating meat and perhaps milk/eggs as real food and the rest as mostly fillers and in-betweens (I know I did).

Even without meat/milk/eggs/animal products, rice and beans, even barring all legumes and cereal grains, probably even barring all grains (e.g. amaranth, buckwheat, chia, quinoa, also sunflower, poppy, hemp..) there would still be enough plants life to have a diverse diet and probably even fully nutritiously sufficient diet without artificial supplements (a couple of micronutrients can be tricky, e.g. B₁₂).

Many, perhaps even most of the remaining diverse crops are currently notably more work to grow, but they should still have significantly less ecological impact than eating excessive amounts of meat.

[cwkoss]

If a cow is not raised in pasture, it's not a well raised cow.

Ruminant holon systems like those used by Polyface Farms (Joel Salatin of Omnivore Dilemma fame) are incredibly efficient at both producing calories and utilizing waste products.

[johnisgood]

> I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

Hmm? I am enjoying the wide variety of legumes, for one. :D I make stews out of them. :)

[petre]

What do you propose? That we start eating crickets? Actually I would try some, maybe they taste like shrimp. Shrimp are another quickly reproducing species, but they're also sensitive to pollution.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

I've had a dish of lemon grass stir-fried cricket. It was at a restaurant that served lots of bug based dishes. It was one of the few that we had that I'd regularly order.

They didn't taste like shrimp though. They also have a lot of chitin.

[kevinmgranger]

Those crop fields are also harvested to feed farm animals. Eating meat requires more crops (and thus acreage) per calorie to the human consumer than eating the crops directly.

Eating meat will always have a higher death per calorie. An informed vegan knows that there is no such thing as a cruelty-free diet, only one that minimizes it.

[ajdegol]

"One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over" how very scientific of you.