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comment by ButterflyEffect
ButterflyEffect  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: People Still Don't Get the Link between Meat Consumption and Climate Change

For you and bioemerl: What does that look like to you? What kind of major shift would need to happen for a change to occur, in your mind?





snoodog  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Im pretty price driven so for me it wouldn't take that much. If meat went much past the $10/lb range I would eat a lot less of it. At the current price of chicken that would mean 5-10X price increase.

If prices were to stay the same then its a much bigger hurdle. I would need to learn more easy/med difficulty meal recipes and change the my taste pallet. I don't think vegetarian meat substitutes are something I want to put in my body (Vegie dogs/burgers/tofurky) therefore I'd be looking for recipes for foods that have always been vegetarian and can be made outside a lab. If i knew more recipes that I like, were easy to cook, and were filling without loading up on carbs I think that would go a long way. It would help if someone wrote a cook book of Of this quality and covered techniques and science of vegetarian cooking.

Better availability would also help. Fresh veggies are really expensive at the supermarket , I know that they can be about 3x as cheap because that's what my local ethnic food shop sells them for but its kind of far away and is inconvenient to get to. Veggies are also very seasonal so when they are ripe I eat a lot but most of the year ripe vegetables are impossible to obtain. Interestingly enough even in peak season I often still cant get ripe vegetables at the grocery store. I have to either go to the Health food store or farmers market because having a local supply chain is too much work for chain grocery stores.

bioemerl  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I already mentioned what needs to happen for meat carbon neutrality to exist.

For society at large we need to move away from all forms of burning/reacting carbon-based resources for energy, production of materials, and so on. Where we do absolutely require carbon-based resources that carbon should be extracted from the air as much as it is from the ground, to ensure carbon neutrality in the long run.

This means solar power, alternate plastics, and a whole host of other things.

In the short term we need research on the engineering of the environment, things like blocking out part of the sun to cool the earth and offset the global warming that has happened. Using systems that exist purely to pull carbon out of the atmosphere paid for by taxes and damages from the companies/consumers that use things that release carbon.

Ultimately, I don't think we need to do anything, because I view human society as a very large, very intelligent, very quirky decision making system. I trust that, in the long run, the decisions society makes are far more reasonable than the decisions I can make, and are based on thousands and thousands of little systems, ideas, and thoughts all working together to form an emergent machine that spans our entire planet. In this way, society will solve the issues it faces as time passes, and we just have to do our best to do what we think is natural for that to happen. If you believe we should stop eating meat, do it. If you do not, don't. Society will take your decisions and actions and at the end of the day come to the decision that is correct even if we may not agree or see that for years to come.