Cheap and well cared for meat? Can we have it all?

Gingham_Ribbon

The ethics of buying cheap meat are probably best discussed in the ethical money saving board so I'll move this over now. Thanks.

morg_monster

frogga just wanted to point out - not all primates are vegetarian. A few species are entirely vegetarian ("frugivores"), most eat insects (some eat only insects) and a few eat meat, although it forms only a tiny minority of their diet (1.4% for chimpanzees, smaller mammals who they kill and eat, according to Jane Goodall).
Would you eat a free range termite?!

Also you may have read this, if not you may be interested http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm , published in a veggie journal in the 90s.

I would really like to be a vegetarian but I don't think I could give up sausages... everything else, yes, but sausages, no...

LuciferTDark

What seems to escape the notice of the veggies is the animals I eat are only alive in the first place because I want to eat them, Cows & Chickens have no other purposes other than to provide me milk, cheese, eggs, & MEAT.

If everyone on the planet turns Veggie or Vegan then there'll be no reason to keep breeding Cows & Chickens & the entire population of them will have to be wiped off the face of the planet as they're no use for anything else.

maypole

Primates are veggies? I watched a programme where some primates caught and tore apart a baby primate then ate it.

Pandora123_2

LuciferTDark wrote: »

What seems to escape the notice of the veggies is the animals I eat are only alive in the first place because I want to eat them,

I am not sure why you think veggies don't know or haven't noticed this? It seems a rather odd statement to make.

LuciferTDark wrote: »

If everyone on the planet turns Veggie or Vegan then there'll be no reason to keep breeding Cows & Chickens & the entire population of them will have to be wiped off the face of the planet as they're no use for anything else.

To say that the entire population of cows & chickens would "have to be wiped off the face of the planet" is bit melodramatic. Do you envision some kind of overnight conversion of the entire world's population to vegetarianism/veganism and imagine some mass slaughter of these animals would have to be carried out? (wait now, there's already a mass slaughter of food animals... 10.4 billion annually in just the US alone).

I see a more gradual shift away from animal protein and towards plant protein, not just because of economics, but because this world is so very overpopulated and there is simply not enough land available to produce meat for everyone (not even when the last of the Amazon rainforest has disappeared).

boo81

Im not for or against veggies or vegans but you cant use the arguement of there isnt enough land to graze the animals as there is also not enough land to grow the crops to feed a whole population that doesnt eat meat. I think thats why we are onmivores by nature as we need to have both.

The world is in a pretty fine balance, an increas in population means more housing and amenities and therefore the good farming declines and we use areas not designed for the purpose and therefore the quality goes down and we need more chemicals to make the most of it, the chemicals enter the food chain and we are the ones that suffer. No significant change would be for the better concerning mans diet as a whole.

Pandora123_2

~Chameleon~ wrote: »

We also tend to eat more fish than we used to do but again I'm now questioning whether buying the 2 for £5 packs of salmon steaks at Tesco is no more ethical than the 2 for £5 chickens they sell

Hi Chameleon,

You are right to question the cheap salmon. Unless the packaging states that it is wild salmon, it is likely farmed.

Farmed salmon is contaminated with dangerous chemicals

Farmed salmon threat to Antarctic krill (and penguins and other marine animals)

Farmed salmon are fed the dye Canthaxanthin to make their flesh pink like wild salmon, otherwise it would be gray in color. The direct addition of Canthaxanthin to food is prohibited in the EU for health reasons, but the salmon farmers get around this restriction by feeding the dye to the salmon before they are killed. (link)

Farmed salmon commonly requires three pounds of wild fish as feed for every pound of salmon raised... a net loss of protein. (link)

More food for thought...

:A

Pandora123_2

boo81 wrote: »

Im not for or against veggies or vegans but you cant use the arguement of there isnt enough land to graze the animals as there is also not enough land to grow the crops to feed a whole population that doesnt eat meat. I think thats why we are onmivores by nature as we need to have both.

World's population: 6,602,224,175 (July 2007 estimate)

Irrigated arable land: 276,719,000 hectares (2002 figures)

Irrigated arable land per person: 0.0419 hectares

1 Hectare = 107,639 square feet, therefore 0.0419 hectares is:

4511 square feet of irrigated arable land per person.

It's true there isn't enough irrigated arable land to grow a vegan diet for the world's population using conventional farming, but there is enough using something called Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farming.

"With Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farming, as little as 4,000 square feet (about 1/10th of an acre) is needed to produce a complete diet to feed one person annually and enough compost to maintain and even improve the health of the soil... It becomes possible for one person to grow all of his or her family's food using truly sustainable methods that maintain the fertility of the soil without relying on nonrenewable resources like petrochemicals or imported organic matter." (link)

Of course, this would require a massive shift away from big farms towards smaller family & community farms.

But theoretically it is possible.
:A

HariboJunkie

Pandora123 wrote: »

Hi Chameleon,

You are right to question the cheap salmon. Unless the packaging states that it is wild salmon, it is likely farmed.

Farmed salmon is contaminated with dangerous chemicals

Farmed salmon threat to Antarctic krill (and penguins and other marine animals)

Farmed salmon are fed the dye Canthaxanthin to make their flesh pink like wild salmon, otherwise it would be gray in color. The direct addition of Canthaxanthin to food is prohibited in the EU for health reasons, but the salmon farmers get around this restriction by feeding the dye to the salmon before they are killed. (link)

Farmed salmon commonly requires three pounds of wild fish as feed for every pound of salmon raised... a net loss of protein. (link)

More food for thought...

:A

And just as with chicken there ARE salmon fisheries which are organic and have sustainable ethics and fish welfare in mind. LINK

geordie_joe

Pandora123 wrote: »

Of course, this would require a massive shift away from big farms towards smaller family & community farms.

But theoretically it is possible.
:A

Sounds like we'd all have to give up work and go work on the land to feed our selves. Sounds nice but who's going to make all the other stuff we need?

The theory doesn't take in the fact that the population doubles about every 30 years, but the size of the planet remains the same. We may have enough land to do that now, but in a couple of generations we will need twice as much land.

We'd run out a land long before we run out of people who peddle silly ideas that sound good at first glance, but don't stand up to close scrutiny.

They only make the figures work by taking the land we had in 2002 and the population of 2007 and hope you don't realise we've built on a lot of that land in the last five years.

The bigger the population gets, the more land we have to build on.