Reminds me of the statistic I heard recently that something like 95% of soybeans grown in South America are used to feed livestock in Europe, even though soy is already a complete protein and could be used to satisfy the protein requirements of more people locally, than the protein harvested from the livestock.
You are correct that soy bean protein is complete and the protein is of high quality, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people talk about protein completeness, as it is essentially false dichotomy. There is a (multi-dimensional) continuum of protein completeness in the sense that the amino acid profile doesn't just have to contain every essential amino acid, but has to contain it in the right amount, as is required by the average human being.
Soy protein for example is particularly low in Methionine and Cystine. If your goal is to get enough of those, you might have to eat three times as much soy as for example egg whites (by weight). But similarly soy protein has more Tryptophan than beef. "Completeness" is a binary that is not quite sufficient to describe protein quality.
There is a reason whey and egg proteins are more popular among strength athletes for example, as they are richer in leucine, which seems to be the limiting amino acid in muscle building.
I still think we should eat way less meat and soy is a very high quality substitute for it.
My point is more that cows are great at taking inedible grasses and turning them into protein. Growing a rich protein and then feeding it to a cow to make slightly different tasting protein is dumb.
> My point is more that cows are great at taking inedible grasses and turning them into protein
Impossible to scale however. Not sure how it is in other EU nations, but Germany in particular loves to put animals as closely together as they can get away with, which is basically in enclosures in which the animals can't move whatsoever.
It's especially egregious because these factories get subventions by animal, so everyone is paying to create these factories from hell - including people that don't eat meat for moral reasons. And no political party sees any issues with that.
> Reminds me of the statistic I heard recently that something like 95% of soybeans grown in South America are used to feed livestock in Europe, even though soy is already a complete protein and could be used to satisfy the protein requirements of more people locally, than the protein harvested from the livestock.
Reminds me of a statistic that most people still like to eat food even though they could satisfy their protein requirements with a nutritional slurry at 34% of the cost with a 96% reduction in fueling times.
I did some fact checking on these figures and could not find a source for them. It seems that most of the soy goes to China.
The dynamics of global soybean trade remain heavily influenced by China, which accounts for about 60% of worldwide soybean imports. China’s soybean imports are driven by demand for animal protein and edible oils, two essential components of a diversifying Chinese diet that reflects rising living standards. China predominantly sources its soybean supplies from Brazil and the United States. For many years, the United States was the top supplier, but in the last 15 years China has depended more on imports from South America, especially from Brazil. From 2019-2023, 73% of Brazil’s exported soybeans have headed to China, versus a 51% average for the United States (see Figure 2).
Maybe but that is cultural and influenced by marketing, public awareness campaigns, and access to quality prepared meals. Certainly in just the past 5 years I went from a meat heavy diet to a meat-free diet with a lot of consumption of soybeans (tempeh, tofu, soymilk, and cooked soybeans).
We could encourage others to do the same with, as I said above, marketing, public awareness campaigns, and encouragement for meat-free restaurants. Not everyone would shift, but in aggregate we could change demand patterns and people would still be happy. I know I would much rather eat tempeh now than any kind of meat product.
Yes, it’s all about culture and influence. As more and more people switch to a vegetarian/vegan diet, they keep coming up with more dishes and preparations. Innovation is bound to happen where there’s an influx of interest.
I love food and I love eating. Some of the most interesting dishes are vegetarian because you have to work that much harder to bring a dish together. That really excites the chef/epicurean in me.
And then you can just get a good quality slab of meat, give it a good char and sprinkle some salt on it and it'll stand on its own as basically a whole meal.
I think meat could 10-50x in price and I'll still find a way to eat it or I'll venture off into the wilderness and hunt it myself. No one could convince me otherwise - there's really nothing like catching your fish and cooking it over an open fire to round a day spent in the outdoors...
Gathering some nuts and fruit and blending soybeans to make tofu just doesn't have the same appeal to me... Even though wild fruit really are delicious and my friends stories of eating wild durian really inspire me to brave the sweat (and creepy crawlies and snakes) and venture off into the jungle
We’re still talking about the culture. It’s not that vegetarian food is hard to make, or that it’s less tasty. You just haven’t been exposed to the culture, which is why you believe it’s not feasible but literally billions of people in India have been thriving on a vegetarian diet with thousands of dishes for thousands of years.
But yeah, in the end we all try to justify our actions. No argument will be convincing enough if one values their taste buds more than someone’s life or the planet.
India isn't so great an example insofar as there are plenty of sources detailing common deficiencies in the Indian vegetarian diet - namely B12 and protein.
But in any case I don't think turning consumption into something moral will ever scale. If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.
I don't think it is cultural - my point is that as someone who appreciates food for more than just sustenance you'll never convince me that tempeh/tofu/jack fruit/bugs will one day make me forget that meat is delicious.
I will gladly vote with my wallet or blood sweat & tears to continue eating meat especially if it becomes sustainable via price hikes. And I don't say this from a position of arrogance - I'm saying that I would cut many many many other things out of my life before I gave up meat due to affordability issues.
> If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.
I agree with the idea that a capitalist society should work harder than we do to price in externalities in order to fulfill the social value of a free market.
As a counter example to it being the only way though is how the modern world has drastically reduced and now culturally shuns (although we still have things to fix) human slavery without doing it via economic sanctions or price regulation.
I don't actually have any hope here though - politically in the US I see more of a slide away from free markets and toward techno-feudalism and culturally in the US I see a backslide in empathy and personal values people are willing to make sacrifices for.
You can't regulate people into having particular values (for good or for ill).
"Some of the most interesting dishes are vegetarian because you have to work that much harder to bring a dish together."
Yeah, this is the main reason why I mainly cook with meat. I am a lazy cook and I can cook vegetarian, but not with the same tasty resulty but I know it can be done..
It’s not a cultural thing, some people just like the taste of meat. Those people tend to eat their steaks rare and soybeans will never be a substitute for that.
I like some vegetarian and vegan dishes but they have to be meals where meat isn’t the “hero” of that dish. For example a good curry is about the flavour of the source rather than the flavour of the protein.
This is why I think lab grown meat is the way forward.
> It’s not a cultural thing, some people just like the taste of meat.
Can you explain why 20-39% of Indians, or 276 million Indians, are vegetarian while in China, Chile, Colombia, and France (to pick a few) it is 5%? [1]
Because it is either cultural, or it is genetic. And I doubt Indians have a genetic mutation that makes them vegetarian, I think it is cultural. If a good curry is what makes more people vegetarian, then we can cook good curries anywhere.
In a meat-heavy culture, a lot of people might not realize how much they would like vegetarian meals!
> I like some vegetarian and vegan dishes but they have to be meals where meat isn’t the “hero” of that dish.
Not to be snarky, but that is the definition of a vegetarian dish. But I know what you mean, and you are right, meat substitutes do not make for very good vegan meals. A good vegan meal is one where it's not just trying to emulate meat based foods, but building a flavor profile that celebrates the actual vegetables and other ingredients in harmony.
Go to any of these Michelin rated vegan restaurants [2] for example, and you will find absolutely incredible tasting vegan meals. It takes culture to spread this kind of thing to chefs and patrons, and that is something we have influence over. I have been to Millennium [3], and it is incredible. If more meals like this were available, people "liking the taste of meat" would not really matter that much, because they would LOVE the taste of this stuff.
> Because it is either cultural, or it is genetic. And I doubt Indians have a genetic mutation that makes them vegetarian, I think it is cultural. If a good curry is what makes more people vegetarian, then we can cook good curries anywhere.
You’ve completely ignored what I said.
1. Some people like the taste of meat. Saying they shouldn’t and it’s just a cultural thing misses the point that the flavour is desirable. This is why I suggested other means of sourcing that protein which is ethical is a better path forward than simply saying we need to change culture.
2. I’d already said in curries the meat isn’t the hero of the dish.
> In a meat-heavy culture, a lot of people might not realize how much they would like vegetarian meals!
“You shouldn’t like X, you should learn to love a completely different thing instead” is, frankly, a silly argument. What needs to happen instead is X is replaced with an ethical alternative. In this case, lab grown meat.
As I’ve said already, most meat eaters will enjoy a lot of vegetarian meals too. The problem is they also like the taste of meat. So there needs to be an ethical alternative and soybeans sadly isn’t it.
> Not to be snarky, but that is the definition of a vegetarian dish.
The fact you’ve commented saying that proves you’ve not been reading my comment properly.
> A good vegan meal is one where it's not just trying to emulate meat based foods, but building a flavor profile that celebrates the actual vegetables and other ingredients in harmony.
That’s literally the point I was making that you knee jerk argued against!
What is cultural is how much meat eating seems reasonable. I love meat, but both my own ethics and those of my social group basically tell me not to eat too much of it. Same for say, something like drinking beer. People like beer. But drinking too much of it too often isn't socially acceptable.
I'm from a family where one of my grandfathers was a cattle rancher and the other one a butcher, still I only eat about 1 kg of meat a month. I was terrified recently to learn that that's 10% of average American consumption. But I go in for the good shit. A little smoked meat goes a long way in altering the flavor profile of a dish. I love cooking myself a €20 steak, but I only do that every couple months. I save my fat caps and off-cuts to make sausage every few months. I only buy organic or meat with another animal welfare certification. It's expensive. As it should be.
I think it's more likely to expect the changes to be largely generational. That's how most dietary trends change. I give my kids less meat than my parents did, and they'll probably give their kids even less.
The other piece is that meat should have its externalities priced in. We shouldn't be doing to animals the things we do in factory farming. Not being shitty to animals makes animal products a lot more expensive, which generally means people consume less of them. A carbon tax also wouldn't be crazy.
People eat a lot more meat than they used to because it's cheap now. Eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the west. Making it not cheap again would put us back to where we were a few generations back.
People liked cigarettes as much as they liked meat, but social norms, policy changes and price hikes have made it to where people smoke now a lot less than they used to. Having a cheap / enjoyable alternative is a nice route, but it's not the only one.
Prof. Frederick Starr’s comment from 1936 about Roman cooking:
“Many of the Apician dishes will not appeal to the beef eaters. It is worthy of note that much criticism was heaped upon Apicius some 200 years ago in England when beef eating became fashionable in that country. The art of Apicius requires practitioners of superior intellect. Indeed, it requires a superior clientèle to appreciate Apician dishes. But practitioners that would pass the requirements of the Apician school are scarce in the kitchens of the beef eaters. We cannot blame meat eaters for rejecting the average chef d’œuvre set before them by a mediocre cook who has learned little besides the roasting or broiling of meats. Once the average man has acquired a taste for the refined compositions made by a talented and experienced cook, say, a composition of meats, vegetables or cereals, properly “balanced” by that intuition that never fails the real artist, the fortunate diner will eventually curtail the preponderant meat diet. A glance at some Chinese and Japanese methods of cookery may perhaps convince us of the probability of these remarks.
Nothing is more perplexing and more alarming than a new dish, but we can see in a reversion to Apician cookery methods only a dietetic benefit accruing to this so-called white race of beef eaters.
…
One has but to study the methods of ancient and intelligent people who have suffered for thousands of years under the perennial shortage of food supplies in order to understand and to appreciate Apician methods. Be it far from us to advocate their methods, or to wish upon us the conditions that engendered such methods; for such practices have been pounded into these people by dire necessity. They have graduated from the merciless school of hunger.
Food materials, we repeat, were never as cheap and as abundant as they are today. But who can say that they always will be so in the future?”
No I could not. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m bad at business (I’ve tried) and probably worse at marketing.
Also, soy bean based products are abundant. Tofu, tempeh, and soy milk are everywhere. Soy beans are one of the most significant crops in the world. The deliciousness of soy beans is present in the existing simple foods. I don’t personally believe the thing missing is some new kind of soy-based food. One thing we can do is encourage individuals all over the world to eat more vegan meals, and dine out at vegan restaurants. This will encourage more restaurant owners to offer more vegan options. I really don’t think this is a problem that can be solved by one big company. Soy is not some secret. We just need meat-focused cultures to understand both the problems of meat based diets and the deliciousness of vegan options. And as a vegan of five years now, the tastiest vegan meals are not some heavily processed product made from extracts of soy. It’s the basics that have existed for thousands of years, cooked well and paired with delicious vegetables, legumes, grains, and beans.
I've spent enough time in Indonesia to like tempeh more than most people (it was invented there and they've figured out how to cook with it), but convincing the average meat eater to switch to soybeans is going to be an uphill fight.
"that is cultural" is a shorthand for "it took us thousands of years of trial and error to achieve status quo and I want to change things right now because I think I can do better"
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I'm aware that modern life is different from our ancestors who depended on meat, but I want you to be aware of the magnitude of the force you're fighting against, and not say "it's just cultural, so easy to change". Imagine saying "the fact that most Americans speak English instead of Mandarin is just cultural, we could literally change it overnight if we wanted to".
Nowhere in my comment did I say it was easy to change, or that "we could literally change it overnight".
What I said was that with education, outreach, and other nudges, we could, over time, affect the statistical distribution of meat consumption. Which is correct. I did not say it was easy, in fact I did not comment on how hard it would be, I just said it is possible.
In fact, fixing humanity's over-consumption of resources will be very hard. But we have no choice. We will perish if we do not. So, idk about you, but I think we had better try.
By the way, and I want to say this as a genuine bit of feedback, but it is not very interesting conversation if you are going to take what I said, turn it in to hyperbole, and then point out that the hyperbole you made up is unrealistic. I would encourage you to read comments carefully, and make sure you have really understood what the person has said. Cheers, and nice username.
I use hyperboles to highlight certain issues. I see that I could give off vibes along "here's my hyperbole, I defeat it, so I defeat your argument", but what I wanted to say is "I agree with the core idea, but I think your argument is missing something very important, but it's a problem to be solved rather than a complete failure". Next time I'll try to be clearer
Soyboy came from the misconception that some plant based estrogen lookalike is turning all the male SJWs into femboys. I don't remember any direct racial connotations.
Though the crowd that created the term sure doesn't mind being racist so who knows.
I don’t think Europeans should stop eating meat but I think we should stop using protein rich food suitable for humans to feed livestock. Livestock are good for taking inedible grass and turning it into protein.
Deforesting South America to grow protein rich cow food for Europeans is absurd.
The environmental effects go further too. New Zealand has done huge damage to its waterways with cattle farming. It’s primarily dairy rather than beef though. Different end product, same beast.
Fun fact: coffee with cow's milk tastes disgusting to me now. I'm a total soy milk convert, and that about does it for dairy. I rarely eat cheese. Eliminating dairy was trivial. I still eat meat though, but I live in Australia so we have relatively inexpensive grass fed stuff that is produced domestically (for now).
Vegetarians visceral don't like meat the same way they like soybeans. It's somewhat trainable preference. IMO easier to get entrenched meat eaters to eat some more plants than convert plant eaters (especially religious) to meat.
I would say they eat a smaller proportion of meat. Many Asian dishes do have meat but it's just one out of many ingredients, including rice/noodles, vegs, spices, etc. While in the West sometimes we just eat meat with a side of potatoes or whatever, maybe some spices but the majority of the dish by mass is meat.
I agree that it's not necessarily easy to find dishes with no meat at all in Asian countries, though.
It's probably a better strategy to try to convince people to eat less meat per dish (as in many Asian preparations) than to go vegetarian, anyway. At least it would be easier to convince me, that's for sure... if my country had the hawker stalls that they have in Singapore, I would already be eating less meat.
Beef and tofu go very well together. As an ex-vegetarian (from my childhood) it took me a while to get used to seeing tofu (successfully) mixed with meat.
I've had no issues avoiding meat/dairy in when living in Japan[1]/Taiwan/Singapore, and these are all cases where you can find a vegetarian or vegan version of a local dish so you're not missing out on the culture. I know many over there who make it work without issue too.
Korea and the Philippines though... for sure an example of higher difficulty.
[1] Okinawa is slightly harder than mainline Japan due to regional cuisine differences, but even then it's not the end of the world.
Yeah we eat less meat solely because of economical reasons. If we have the means we absolutely add lots of meat on top of those delicious vegetable dishes. We even cook some animal organs because it's cheap and delicious.
Probably a more realistic approach would be to convince people to eat less meat. I significantly reduced my meat consumption, but when I eat it I am looking for really high quality meat, such as locally grass fed beef.
Yes, if you look at actual impact instead of at moral judgement, then getting someone to reduce their consumption by x% gets you x% towards the same goal as complete abstinence.
Similar, if you can get a population to reduce their consumption by x%, it doesn't matter if that's because x% went totally without (and the rest didn't change anything), or whether you could a more uniform, mild change.
Convincing people to give up some meat is pretty straightforward: one proven way is for meat to become more expensive. People react to economic incentives on the margin after all. Other ways might be to make the alternatives more appealing.
(About the margins: meat would have to get extremely expensive for many people to completely give up on it. But if sometimes you are deciding between going to a steak place and a pasta place, and then price can sway your decision fairly easily. The meal at the pasta place can still have meat in it for this example to work, just less of it.)
Well, I'm sure you can see that other people might eat pasta (as evidenced by pasta still being produced by profit-oriented companies), and I'm sure you also have some other opportunities in your life where you are deciding between different amounts of meat you could eat?
> But we don't eat out, that's more wasteful and expensive than anything else. fires up the grill
That might be true for you. But there are also people who eg want to eat stuff from the grill perhaps once a year, and storing their own idle grill the other 364 days would be wasteful.
Btw, if you want to keep your habits, but for some reason feel guilty about your resource consumption, you could just pay two other people to go vegan (or four other people to cut back their meat consumption by half), and you would achieve twice as much as by changing your own diet.
In terms of overall utilitarian impact, I mean. Not in terms of some moral systems.
It seems like you envision paying Americans to eat less meat?
In the grand scheme of things, Americans are very expensive people. For example, Argentinians both eat a lot of meat, and are currently in dire need for some hard currency.
I don't know if there's an app for this. However, you could do the next best thing and find a charity that works on promoting eating-less-meat in Argentina.
(Argentina is just an example, I have no clue whether it's the best value for money for this very specific. I'm just fairly sure that they are better value for money than spending money in the US.)
i am not denying their existence. I am denying that there's a way forward for combatting climate change in having people unvoluntarily forced to be vegetarians.
This is exactly the sort of "argument" which makes talking with Americans (I'm assuming here, but you sound like an American to me) such an unenjoyable pastime.
This is the level of strawman we show to small children as examples of terrible strawman arguments. I haven't seen anyone in this thread asking for involuntarily forcing people to give up meat. There isn't a single significant politician in the USA or Europe who is talking about forcing people to give up meat.
I can only hope you were deliberately trying to make a shitty argument for some reason, otherwise it seems likely that the BGH, HFC and antibiotics in your diet have addled your brain.
The most radically environmentalist thing people are arguing for is for you to take a modicum of responsibility for the negative impacts of your choices. If you love beef for some reason then just plant a couple of trees when you eat it or do some other actions that offset the carbon.
Maybe but in the early 1800s there was a guy similarly saying “The idea that people would voluntarily stop enslaving people and switch to paying wages is just wishful thinking” and yet we seemed to have changed that one.
I hate to bring the cynical take, but it has often been argued that slavery ended to a great extent due to economic factors (slavery simply not being so profitable anymore due to the rise of industrial capitalism, need of more skilled labor, decline of the profitability of plantations, cost of maintaining the system and stopping revolts, etc.).
Not saying that it was 100% economic and moral/ethical awakening didn't play an important role, but the economic changes definitely helped. And this kind of favorable factors aren't apparent in the case of convincing everyone to go vegetarian.
I've switched to eating meat on four festivals during the year. The rest of the time I'm pescatarian with dairy. I've not done it for any ethical reasons besides my own health, but I do feel healthier for it. Without the fish it'd be bloody depressing, quite frankly.
The link above is responding to the "no it doesn't" by providing evidence that it does.
But to answer your question (it's in the link, but I'll save you a click), the next biggest cause is "oil seeds", which includes a large hunk of soy. Most of the soy goes to animal feed, 13% goes to oil for human consumption, some goes to industrial uses, and about 7% goes to human consumption of what would usually be considered alternative to animal products (tofu, tempeh, soy milk, etc).
Yes, eating anything is going to contribute to resource depletion, but what we eat makes a huge difference!
Hmm, I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure UK feeds soy to livestock (e.g. chickens).
But, I was just answering the question. And 70% of soy grown globally goes to feeding animals.
And while I agree that some (I doubt it's most, but happy to see numbers) cattle is raised on marginal lands, that isn't the point being made. Animal agriculture is still the leading cause of deforestation.
Also, just because land can't grow crops doesn't mean it has to be cleared of it's native flora and fauna to grow meat. It's still deforestation.
We could do a lot better than farming meat, by planting legumes instead. Not only would we relieve the pressure on arable land, we would also be improving the local soil quality as legumes are good nitrogen fixers.
Yes, it is well known that beef and reconstituted processed soybean products have exactly the same nutritional content, eating experience, flavour, texture and satiating ability for the consumer.
People enjoying this experience are clearly morally corrupt lumpenproletariat deserving to be shamed and cowed by the self flagellating self appointed protectors of the summum bonum.
I mean I just skimmed through the thread you replied in and I don't see anyone making any of the arguments you're arguing against.
No one is claiming that beef and tofu are identical in flavour or whatever. No one (as far as I can tell) is particularly shaming people for eating meat. I see people mostly making pretty sensible and measured arguments.
Your comment is just arguing against a couple of strawmen you've cooked up. You aren't really engaging in the debate you're replying to.
Here in BC, Canada, another problem with the farmed salmon is that diseases and parasites (e.g. parasitic sea lice) from the fish farms, which are in the ocean (surrounded by nets), get to the native population.
My family avoids farmed salmon. I think as long as it's fished sustainably in the ocean (and we take care of the rivers) that's a better option.
I know you might have not meant it this way but the way I read your last sentence makes it sound like fishing in the ocean is per definition sustainable, which is far from the truth.
Is a fact that marine cages boost biodiversity or, being more precise, alter biodiversity. There are clear visible benefits on the fish schools and damages on the bottom invertebrate communities.
I had seen tuna cages at the sea ant there are small breams everywhere under the cage.
Young fishes used their surrounding areas as a sort of sanctuaries with plenty of food scraps and no fishing. The cage acts as a protecting physical structure that big predators avoid to no get entangled. Wild fishes living near salmon cages learn soon also that in this places it rains tasty fatty food every few days at exactly the same hour.
The cons is that the overlooked pellets falling in the bottom attract invertebrates able to stand the pollution that multiply exponentially and conquer the whole community.
You have an enormous amount of salmon in tiny pens in various sheltered bays and this artificial closeness breeds disease and parasites rapidly. The lice and diseases are then passed onto the wild salmon that pass through these bays on their migratory lifecycle routes. Thus wild salmon become dramatically more impacted from parasites and disease than they otherwise would be and thus the farmed salmon start to drag down the health and viability of the wild population.
The effects are not just the ton of fish, or even the job lost, it's equivalent to scorching the earth and polluting the groundwater of land based farming affecting generations into the future.
We also leave the future with all the infrastructure we build, and you may provide your children with some direct inheritance if you manage to save instead of wasting capital on trinkets.
It does not look like our numbers are increasing anymore, so I don't see how the latter is applicable. Middle East and Africa are booming and this is not ending well, but I just don't see what can be done about it.
You misunderstand population momentum. While fertility rates are rapidly declining, the global population still increases, and is projected to peak at ~10-11B people around 2100 (up from ~8B today). India will surpass China in total population around 2027, while already experiencing wet bulb temperatures beyond what the human body can survive.
Wet bulb temperatures are about as relevant as hypothermia temperatures. We just invented the technology for heating long before air conditioning so uninformed people like to trot it out like it’s some relevant barrier where people will die in mass.
They will just move to colder climates or generate some electricity to use air conditioning.
Global expert on heat stress indicates wet bulb temperatures are relevant as recently as August of 2023. Please feel free to share data your assertion is based on, and how you’re going to relocate or provide AC for billions of people in the developing world.
How did people in Europe and North America avoid dying from the cold?
I’m not saying it’s not a problem people need to deal with. I’m saying it’s a problem there is already a solution for.
Elderly people die in temperatures down in 90F as well. For some reason it’s considered acceptable to “chalk it up to climate” when we allow that to happen but we go to pretty great lengths to provide shelters to prevent people from freezing to death in completely inhospitable places like New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, etc.
Billions of people in the developing world will need food and water. They will also need shelter. News at 10
What is not sustainable about it? I hope you know that international trade in food is a thing? As long as they can make stuff that the people who can make food want, it's all fine.
(And you also know that Egypt is just about the oldest country on the planet? They always had their population concentrated in a narrow strip along the Nile; even if, like in the rest of the world, population numbers have obviously gone up a lot since eg the industrial revolution.)
I love the idea of leaving infrastructure to our kids. But that doesn't even exist anymore. We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids.
We, and our kids will only reap reward from the infrastructure created over 100 years ago. The rest they will reap the maintenance required on the current stuff.
Old things were built for us and our future, now we build for ourselves (barely).
> We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids
That's standard practice by the book though.
No generation has ever left anything better than that to the future ones. [1]
Also: future does not exist, it's been invented by old men thinking of themselves as future reborn children (or whatever their beliefs told them to believe).
But the future generations, not knowing better, will assume that whatever we are leaving behind it's how it is supposed to be.
A trivial example: young people now don't complain about the ad infested internet or the addiction driven social networks, it's how it is supposed to work for them.
But also: if you don't give them something, they won't (can't) miss it.
Will they miss the rotary phone or the walkman? No, they won't.
In the same way I never missed washing clothes in a river, like my grandma did. I was born with the washing machine and I'm thankful for that.
[1] imagine that the Colosseum's name comes from people seeing a colossal statue in front of it, the statue was nicknamed "The Colossus" (nobody knew who that was) so obviously the building in front of it became "The Colosseum".
Little did they know the statue was of Nero, the Roman Emperor, and the building was an amphitheatre built in a different period.
They did not know about Nero, about Vespasian, the Flavian dynasty, the gladiators or the naumachia, but they thought it was good enough to use it as a market...
>No generation has ever left anything better than that to the future ones.
???
We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s (for some parts of the world).
I think you're misunderstanding the point of tech fading but infrastructure staying.
For innovation, sure, it's going to fade, but there are thousands of things we know that do not fade that we could be building today to leave our next generations. That is what they did. We do not do it, not even slightly... AND it's easier for us to do so, yet still we don't.
> We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s
And also all of the mistakes of the industrial revolution...
Including pollution, horrible living and working conditions, deadly workplaces, child labour, exploitation and oppression of the workers, unfair distribution of wealth etc etc
See the construction of the Paris underground or the grim consequences of using asbestos in buildings.
> I think you're misunderstanding the point of tech fading but infrastructure staying.
I think you are moving the goalpost
"We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids" like we always did.
Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers, only a handful of them survived to this day.
Because they were poorly built and even worse maintained.
> Do you know the difference between infrastructure and ideas?
Do you?
Can you make an example of "We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s"?
Have you ever read Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution?
Are you aware of the Williams Thesis?
I would like to discuss the matter and not read your ad hominem, because it's honestly the least interesting thing in the World and you are not even good at it.
Anyway, what you really don't understand is how much the context changed.
Nowadays "leaving it to the kids" means grandparents living something to their grandkids.
In the past it meant a 30 year old man leaving something behind for their 12 years old children.
Some of the infrastructures we are leaving behind was already in place when my mother was being born (in the late 1940s). It is still functioning. I wouldn't call it poor built, it is probably poorly maintained, but it's understandable when the only people willing to maintain it are old folks or immigrants with no other option and the knowledge about the inner workings are lost or degraded.
But my generation and the generation before me are leaving to our descendants the f*ing internet which is an unprecedented marvel if you ask me, comparable to the agricultural revolution, the steam engine, the printing press and the electricity.
This seems to be an issue with USA where the only infrastructural things seems to be mounting debt.
China was building roads, rail and metros like crazy in the last 20 years. Moscow has got second metro ring and some highways are finally materializing. India probably has it all in the future as it is not satiated capital-wise.
Buying a spare apartment for your children does not seem out of reach for many people, so their children do not have to ever cope with debt trap or face possibility of eviction.
The West does indeed seem to be in a spending ideology crisis but it is not that relevant anymore.
Singapore for example is doing just fine in that regard, and is definitely part of the 'west'.
Russia is currently in a big war that destroys a lot of accumulated capital. So I wouldn't exactly take them as a prime example of good stewardship.
And even the much maligned US is doing just fine. It's just that their public infrastructure isn't doing as well as they should (for various governance reasons), but most private investment is holding up well. Their private sector is still the envy of the world; their public stock markets are still about as valuable as the rest of the world's combined.
Singapore is firmly embedded in global markets, follows western models of rule of law and market economics, western culture, etc. The whole point of Singapore's model is to be a deliberate outpost of the west in South East Asia.
(And if you want to talk about geography: Australia is further east and south than Singapore, but is typically counted as part of 'the west', too.)
Because they are a country of majority non-European decent and proliferation? Their population is made up of Chinese, Malay, Indian and other. None of these are Western nations by the definition.
Japan isn't Western either, although it is probably the most "the West" nation in all of Asia.
>The whole point of Singapore's model is to be a deliberate outpost of the west in South East Asia.
Not since handover from the British... The whole point of Singapore is to be a country founded on good execution with little resources and amazing cohesion.
> Because they are a country of majority non-European decent and proliferation? Their population is made up of Chinese, Malay, Indian and other. None of these are Western nations by the definition.
Hmm, ok.. But then your earlier comment seemed to count Russia as no-western, despite them being European?
Yeah I think there is some problem with the scaling of democratic processes combined with capitalism.
Either that or we just all lost our sense of belonging through something like globalisation and it's showing by our lack of incentive to build for each other.
It's a real shame but it's definitely, like you said, something that seems to only be affecting the new me-first culture of the West.
We are humans. We are the smartest and most capable things on the planet. As far as we know we're the smartest and most capable things in the universe. That capability affords us a lot of privileges, including a much more comfortable life than we would otherwise have. I believe it also comes with some responsibilities, not particularly onerous ones, but just to do our best to leave the world in a not-worse state than we found it.
The weird thing about salmon (and other fish farms) is that the fish they produce aren't necessarily more tasty than the fish they consume. I live in Denmark, we have some really delicious small fish but they are hard to sell, so they are generally used to feed fish farms instead. With the soybeans mentioned earlier I at least get why it's fed to livestock that are then fed to people. I'm not going to say it's the right thing to do but at least there is a difference between soy and pork. With fish it's literally taking one delicious fish and putting it into another (objectively less delicious) fish.
You can eat salmon in sushi rolls or just cut it into pieces and put on the bread.
With other fish, you typically have to fry them first, which is a complex affair. The result is also much less predictable. There are also bones and fish skin which doesn't contribute to overall experience positively.
I can eat salmon several times a week whereas cooking fish would be an once per month affair best case. Perhaps once a week if I didn't have to work for a living.
I know this will vary a lot based on where you live, but here in Denmark you can get sushi with a lot of our local smaller fish. Mackerel, herring and smelt are quite popular. I think a lot of it is because "sustainability" as a "brand" is just good market value here, but it's also just as good as salmon or tuna. Very few places actually use farmed salmon, though I'm not sure the Alaskan salmon are really that much better than Norwegian farmed salmon from a sustainability point of view.
This must be cultural because for me it's much easier to buy e.g. some mackerels and fry them than to make sushi.
In fact, in my family grilling fish is literally one of the things we do when it's near dinner time and we haven't anything prepared (go to supermarket, buy some fish, grill it, eat). While sushi is something I haven't even tried to make because it seems to take a lot of time and effort (I do love to order it when I eat out).
This is so lazy. How many tons of wild fish are farmed each year? How many tons of fish does this feed produce?
This is very much word salad:
“ In the report, Feedback calculated that the Norwegian salmon farming industry’s "feed footprint" is equivalent to 2.5 percent of global marine fisheries catch. The report also estimated that Norway’s annual output of farmed salmon is 27 percent lower than the volume of wild fish required to produce the fish oil used in Norwegian farmed salmon feed. The Norwegian industry’s plan to more than triple farmed salmon production to 5 million metric tons by 2050 would create demand for over three times as much wild-caught fish compared to 2020”
? 2M tons of wild fish used to produce 27% less farmed salmon ...
The issue is not the absolute number but that you are using more to produce less. Off course as someone else mentionned not all those fish might be ready for consumption.
But at the same time Norway toot Salmon farming as efficient but are all externalities really taken into account ?
This 83% is just for the oil which I'm quite certain is only part of the diet.
But it's quite certain it will stay more efficient than a cow (But efficiency is not everything since I can't eat grass; and yes I'm aware that quite a number of cow has never seen a blade of grass).
The case of grass-fed beef is less clear-cut than you seem to imply.
We cannot directly eat grass or grass products, grassy lands depend on big ruminants to thrive, and are often unsuitable for intense agriculture.
Grass is one of the most efficient ways of nature to turn sunlight and water into biomass. Feeding animals on it and using animals products for humans is a great way to use resources.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily imply eating their meat. In India, cows are holy and only their milk and milk products are used to feed people.
Yes! You are right, my question was more target towards animal that we eat, producing milk and eggs have probably a better environmental impact/protein
> The issue is not the absolute number but that you are using more to produce less
I was under the impression that's how it is with all animals, they always need to eat more than what you get from them in terms of calories which usually will also equate to more weight (the comparison used here) in than out.
Otherwise we'd have found some feeding process that's over 100% efficient which doesn't seem possible.
In other words, they poop while they grow, unlike plants where the efficiency looks better.
In this case they are feeding the fish really tiny fish. You wouldn't really be able to eat the fish they are feeding the fish with practically and it wouldn't be good.
At least some of them are. Among other species, farmed fish are being fed sardines, mackerel, and a tasty fish that doesn't seem to have an English translation (it's "jurel" in Spanish).
Sources (sorry, in Spanish... it's rather difficult to find info about fish in English if you're Spanish, because we don't eat the same species, we don't even name the same species, and when we do, there is not necessarily an one-to-one map between Spanish and English names).
I seriously question this report. If you listen VHF radio at Alaskan Coast there is active market going on all the time. If the "Cannery" does not want the lot, the "Fish Plant" will. So it is not like they destroy valuable wild fish to feed less valuable farmed fish.
Some fish species are actually harmful to the environment. In the Nordic countries they often try to get rid of the roach, which muddies the water and destroys the habitat of more worthy fishkind.
Thou knoweth nuffing. The lake turns into smelly soup harboring poisonous algae, which kills indigenous species, like easter bunnies and red-nosed reindeers.
- Larger vessels can only fish <increased distance> off shore?
- Increase 'no fishing' zones which has shown great success in studies creating nursery locations
Even if there is a solution would it be enforced off the coast of Africa? Some nations fishing fleets dont have the best reputation for following rules.
Calculate the maximum sustainable amount of fish that can be caught/harvested, limit the world-wide production to that and let the market handle the rest.
Those limits would have to be enforced useing armed boats however - else I don't know if there would be an effective way for those huge swimming fish factories to just catch everything until the ecosystem collapses.
Then you'd also need a mechanism so make it socially balanced, or we'd pretty much ban low-incoming fishing societies from consuming their own product.
This is almost up there with "people shouldn't have kids they can't afford to take care of". The world's appetite for such drastic measures is not anywhere close to being there yet. As evidenced with how barely-able we are to get people to kinda pretend and kinda do something but not really about something as simple as dirty-coal burning, or throwing plastic trash into rivers.
You could try to privatise ocean fishing populations; people are typically more careful with their property.
> Even if there is a solution would it be enforced off the coast of Africa?
I guess look into whatever we are doing to deter poachers of farm animals (especially for open grass land farming, the strategies used to protect barn animals might not work)?
Au contraire, what has actually been quite successful in the North Atlantic for the past four decades is the extension of territorial water limits out to 200 nautical miles and beyond. This is coupled with coast guard-enforced fishing quotas set by an independent panel of biologists. The fishermen complain loudly of course, which is a very good sign.
Salmon farms need to go. They are a plague to the wild salmon populations.
Here in BC Canada, our local area wild salmon populations are finally recovering after the closure of the local salmon farms.
They crowd fish in biologically hazardous conditions, then pump them with antibiotics and chemicals to keep them alive. All this in open water pens shared with the rest of the ecosystem.
One better solution seem to be inland salmon farms.
Wild salmon are too critical to many food chains both in the water and on land.
It's a damn shame that British people typically won't/don't eat mackerel or sardines. They are both delicious and they basically grow on trees around here.
I make a sardine equivalent of a classic British bacon sandwich with salty crispy skin, lots of butter and soft white bread. My dad, as typical an Englishman as you might find, loves it.
There is also an epidemic of farmed fish being passed off as wild fish, especially at restaurants. There are many videos that cover fraud in the seafood industry, because it is very hard to verify what you're eating or how it was sourced without a lab.
I always get severely downvoted on social medias when I say it but the most impactful way we have to impact the planet on the single scale is with food.
Obviously a full vegan diet is the greenest, but I can't do it.
But if you are at least aware of the insane cost for the planet of fishing (regardless of farmed/non farmed) and raising animals (beef especially) I invite you to try to limit your intake. Maybe by eating less of it you can also afford to also raise the quality.
If every time you eat you're at least aware of this scale, you may decide to switch some of your meals. Hamburger? Maybe eat some pulled pork. Pulled pork? You can replace it with lamb. Etc, etc down to vegetables. And if you really want that hamburger, enjoy it without any guilt!
Do what you want, but know that changing your diet habits and sharing this information with others will have a more positive impact than buying an electric car (which will put some hundreds tons of CO2 in the atmosphere during production alone)
> Hamburger? Maybe eat some pulled pork. Pulled pork? You can replace it with lamb.
I don't understand this. Is this based on CO2? Because I feel worse about pigs being killed, they are smarter than cows, and so subject to even more psychological horror in the factory farm. And lamb is horrible because a lamb is just a baby sheep. Sheep naturally live something like 8 years, but a lamb is a sheep that was killed at less than one year old.
Seriously, vegetables, soy beans, and lentils are suuuper tasty.
> Veganism in the form of religion that thou must not deviate from is entirely counterproductive, IMO
Do whatever you want but what’s actually counterproductive is attempting to the blame the small percentage of the world’s population that are vegan or follow a vegan diet.
That was not in their comment though, there wasn’t any mention of people telling others what they can eat. The comment just states that the existence of vegans is counterproductive somehow.
No, the critic was only that "Veganism in the form of religion that thou must not deviate from" is counterproductive in getting people to eat less meat.
To me it reads veganism in the form that the individual practicing it does not deviate from it, nothing about telling others how to eat. How is the existence of those people counterproductive to people eating less meat?
"Veganism in the form of religion that thou must not deviate from" is entirely counterproductive because it tries to get people to completely stop eating meat. Large majority of the population doesn't want that so they continue with the same meat consumption, while we could eat less meat that we currently do without giving up on some BBQ/steaks here and there.
It creates a false dichotomy, putting people on the defensive because they don't want to give up meat.
If most of us just limit our meat intake, that will have a huge impact. Going from 7 days meat per week to 3 or 4, and maybe reducing the portions can easily halve your impact.
My wife is vegan and we eat a lot of plant-based food. The kids and I still have some meat, and some milk and eggs. As a whole, we've probably halved our animal based food intake without giving up a lot.
There's plenty of great tasting vegetarian/vegan dishes out there.
I actually made some veggie burgers instead of using meat recently, they turned out fine: https://imgur.com/a/9KA78TQ (a bit dry, but that's what the sauce was for)
I don't think I could do a fully vegan diet easily, but I lean more heavily into plant based food, I still think that Michael Pollan's advice holds true:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
That said, it feels like the governments around the world are subsidizing the production of meat perhaps a bit too much, which is why people don't have to deal with the true cost of meat production and therefore opt for it disproportionately often, alongside cultural habits.
Meat is tasty, yes, but to me feels like something that should be enjoyed maybe once or twice a week, instead of every day. I say that as someone who has helped my dad hunt wild animals, remove the guts from the carcasses, bring them home, skin them, de-bone the meat and perhaps has a bit more understanding of what it takes to get to a tasty meat meal than the average person. Very humbling experience, presumably a little bit similar to working on a farm.
That said, chicken meat feels way better than something like beef when it comes to the environmental effect and is both versatile in what you can put it in, as well as is really tasty, so for many that would be a workable option too, for more frequent consumption!
it's worth noting: meat production is only resource-intensive because of the amount that we produce. In smaller quantities, cows / sheep / goats can graze on land that isn't useful for anything else. Pigs and chickens can eat garbage.
Pigs especially were a significant urban technological advance, good at turning most kinds of organic matter into usable food. They played a big role in the rise of many civilizations.
If we ate less meat overall, we could absolutely produce it in ways that were environmentally friendly.
> I always get severely downvoted on social medias when I say...
There's some irony that the proud meat eater that often replies to such comments feels more prevalent these days the pushy vegan/vegetarian straw man they'll often rant about.
> Maybe by eating less of it you can also afford to also raise the quality.
Economics makes that easy, Here in Australia "cheap" beef in particular just leaves me feeling so cheated I avoid it out of that principle alone, why bother when it actively detracts from the meal. Would much rather get the good cut occasionally and actually enjoy it.
Also worth checking for sustainable local sources; I often eat Kangaroo instead which hits the same itch and dramatically better for the environment (in fact it's a net positive removing them).
Near me is a conservation area where agriculture is not allowed, but cattle grazes there all year round. It is sold locally. Plant-based food is often farmed on an industrial scale which pollutes the environment with glyphosate for example.
It is not about food type, it is about how it's produced.
> And if you really want that hamburger, enjoy it without any guilt!
> It is not about food type, it is about how it's produced.
It absolutely is!
A single cow produces around 220 pounds of methane and around 200 pounds of ammonia per year. That's equivalent to 5ish gigatons of CO2, again per cow per year, so this really makes no sense.
Why not compare to how much food you can produce on the same land with some sustainable cereal?
I bet you, there's no less than 30 times more food at a fraction of the emissions.
> That's very gracious of you, to allow this.
I am not vegan myself and I don't feel guilty eating meat at all, but I'm aware enough to limit the intake and spread this to my family which is the point I'm trying to make.
> A single cow produces around 220 pounds of methane and around 200 pounds of ammonia per year. That's equivalent to 5ish gigatons of CO2, again per cow per year, so this really makes no sense.
Ignoring the myth of harmful CO2 for a moment - Ammonia is an important nutrient, maybe one of the most important chemicals that make it possible to feed humanity. Another example of environmentalist ideology trying to destroy the foundation of modern civilization. Ammonia is so important that it's produced synthetically in large amounts.
Your ammonia calculation is also merely copy-pasted and comes from factory farming and can't even be used to judge freely grazing cattle. Additionally, the naturally present ammonia goes right back into the soil as fertilizer for the gras. There is no "CO2 equivalency", this is another naive fallacy of the environmentalists. It's just theoretical statistics used for political propaganda purposes.
Because of very basic human nature: we don't like to be told something we do is "wrong", and nobody likes the idea of eating a steak with some sense of guilt.
One of the main problems is the commoditization of salmon and race toward cheapest feed ingredients just like the other animal proteins such as cattle, poultry and pork. Its just that Salomon need marine epa and dha omega-3 oils and proteins while not being able to process carbs that well. There are promising alternatives but they have a hard time to compete since you cant carry the cost to the consumers. Ie few are willing to pay extra to get a Salomon fed with insect protein and gmo oil from plants or algae. Switching feed ingredients also have their own impacts that need to be taken into account.
Can anyone knowledgeable comment on if farming insects, like grasshoppers that are apparently very efficient in turning feed to protein, will become a viable alternative for salmon and tuna farms?
Insects are efficient, but not significantly more efficient than chicken.
Of the currently known methods for producing proteins, the one that has the potential to be significantly more efficient than raising chicken or insects is the culture of genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce either ovalbumin (the main protein of egg white) or beta-lactoglobulin (the main protein of whey).
These egg-white proteins or whey proteins are identical to those of chicken eggs or cow milk and they have an excellent amino acid profile.
They could easily satisfy all the protein needs of a human. Such proteins are water-soluble powders, looking the same as the whey protein concentrates that can be bought now.
Used alone, they would be bland, but they can be an essential ingredient for cooking various kinds of tasty food, from savory dishes based on various vegetables to sweet creams, e.g. with cocoa or vanilla.
I am currently using whey protein concentrate for cooking and I would like very much if a fungus-produced alternative would become available at a decent price. I prefer very much such a protein powder, which can be used to enhance both the taste and the nutritional value of any food, instead of fake meat.
Yes, this is being seriously investigated. It was already approved for commercial use by the EU in 2017. Specifically the industry is looking at places where there is both waste biomass and low-grade waste heat available nearby, and close proximity to fish farms, in order to produce fish feed from farmed insects.
AFAIK the black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and the yellow mealworm are the two species which are in focus. For BSF larvae I believe they have some extremely convenient biological urge to migrate once they have reached maximum size, so it's possible to set up systems where they "collect themselves" at the optimum size for processing into meal.
Insects aren't any more efficient than chickens though, especially American chicken. Some insects, for example, mealworms can be more efficient than chickens on certain diets, but I think the complications, i.e. that they're so small and thus harder to deal with mean that it's not going to be worth it.
But I don't want to characterise myself as knowledgeable on this topic, so this isn't the answer you and instead something which you can hope will provoke somebody to give you the real answer.
Yes there are large farmers in Norway that are using black soldier fly protein meal and its being produced in large scale in e.g. NL and France. But so far only a fraction of the feed has been replaced due to cost and availability of the meal. Consumers typically think insects are icky and would rather not have their food eating insects even if its their natural diet. There are also great progress on terrestrial epa and dha omega-3 in plant oils but its gmo so again people dont want it
We eat an extraordinary amount of the fish and seafood in the world from the ocean: “The global per capita consumption footprint in 2011 is estimated at 27 kg. [That figure also includes] the indirect use of capture fisheries production by the fishmeal sector.” “the conversion of wild-capture fish that would not be used for human consumption into fishmeal and subsequent use as aquafeed, results in an overall increase in human consumption of fish”.
Figures do seem to show that most ocean fishing is for human consumption, but 16Mt of forage fishing (non-edible) is still greater than 10% of our total ocean fishing.
About 75% of fish meal is used for farm fisheries (aquaculture), the other 25% for animal farming on land. Fish meal is ~3/4 made up of non-edible fish (forage fisheries) and at most 1/4 trimmings (in 2017).
Finding good information needs persistance - but the above quotes use some of the keywords.
We convert cheap fish to expensive fish with a small loss. We also incur energy losses when we convert fuel to forward momentum or electricity to light.
They placed farms right in front of my house on a pristine part of bantry bay. Nobody wanted them and now the water on the shore is covered in orange scum. I don't dare swim anymore. They never should have been allowed because the flow of water is inadequate to clean the waste out into the open ocean, but they're very influential with the politicians. It's a disgrace.
> I have never eaten a farmed fish and I do not intend to, ever.
The probably is accurately knowing in order to make an informed choice.
Naively I assumed certain species were likely to be farmed. But nowadays the advancements in aquaculture mean that more and more species can be farmed. Even Tuna and Cod can be captured small and grown to a larger size in captivity.
My main concern is the health unknowns around feeding incenerated fish carcasses to fish that should be eating bottom of the ocean sealife and vegetation. It intuitevely takes me back to the 'mad cow disease' epidemic, with cow feed made out of slaughter house carcasses.
Terrible that people have this attitude. Depleting natural wild salmon stocks is way, way worse than eating farmed salmon. For all it's faults, farmed salmon is a miracle.
I don't think I know a single person who's never eaten fish nor I think it is possible at all.
Even if you think you do, fish is actually added to a very large amount of processed food even if it has nothing do to with fish at all.
Worchester sauce, salad dressing, protein bars, gummy candies, margarins, anything that contains omega 3, vitamins and an infinitely larger amount of fish and fish oil/paste is added to virtually anything you can find in the supermarket.
Pork-derived collagen is the industry standard when it comes to clarification (e.g. people don't like to see wine that isn't transparent and has no sediments) so they are surprised there's pork used in a gargantuan amount of food. Same happens with fish.
It's extremely unlikely people haven't eaten fish, even if they don't know it.
The worst health advice and most conspiratorial food theories usually come from other tech folks in my workplace. The comments here seem to reinforce that.
Firstly, it doesn’t matter if humans wouldn’t want to eat them because they form a part of a food hierarchy that’s disruption ultimately damages humans. It also causes a cycle in which less wild fish is available and more must be farmed. Secondly, if you read the article you’d note that people do rely on those fish as a food source.
It’s clearly a zero sum system. Every farmed fish consumed by humans is one less wild fish caught and taken out of the food chain.
Would you also be concerned if there were more whales in the ocean? Because they eat literal tons of phytoplankton which is also a food source for other fish. I think you’re just refusing to see things logically.
The idea that you can reduce the complexity of global fishing, farming and marine ecosystems to a zero sum system is flawed. Whales cycle nutrients when they eat phytoplankton and aren’t comparable to human activity, you’re just trying to divert the argument to something unrelated.
I don't believe the African situation is stable or sustainable hence we will see large scale tragedies on that continent in this century, that will make everything happened in the century XX a cake walk.
I enjoy farmed salmon so I can't blame its growers for providing me food. If they are catching feed where it is harmful, some marine regulation should solve it.
