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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?

This was not a tweet I expected to see today:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

-Senator John Fetterman

Lol. LMAO even.

I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.

I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.

Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades.

And a staple of SF for longer than that... but in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior.

in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior

It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.

It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario. In most soypunk the farmland is all poisoned nuclear waste, not that scifi writers have enough understanding of economics to make the alternatives realistic.

Meat might be the most capital+labor/calorie efficient food ever. Vegan nerd fantasies of vertical soy farms powered by millions of acres of solar panels can't match up to species that turn sunlight and rain into steak all by themselves.

It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario.

Makes a ton of sense once you're in space. Delivering cow chunks from the surface of the earth could be extremely expensive (not to mention time-consuming) while assembling cow chunk analogues on site from available raw materials could be quite cheap given the right technology.

Around a decade ago I saw a report that some research group had produced vat-grown ground beef, and made a burger. At the time, the theoretical cost was $50 per burger, and it apparently tasted mediocre. But I have hope that America's engine of innovation (given time and effort and lack of government regulation) will improve quality and bring down prices until it's competitive. One of these decades. crosses fingers

Animals don't turn sunlight and rain into meat. You need to feed them plants. Which you have to grow first. Possibly on vertical farms run by hippy vegans.

Some animals can graze but I think this could sustain only than a small fraction of current meat production (after a quick googling, I saw the figures of 10% of beef production and 30% of sheep and goat meat production being sustained by grazing).

Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.

Is that actually true? The cows in the fields by the side of the highways of middle America, yes. sure. But what percentage of our meat comes from them and what percentage comes from the shoulder to shoulder cows in factory farms?

The US department of agriculture tends to be biased in a pro farming direction right? So this should be a reasonable source.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance/

Cattle feeding operations are concentrated in the Great Plains region but are also located in parts of the Corn Belt, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest regions. Feedlots with less than 1,000-head capacity comprise most of U.S. feedlot operations, but they market a relatively small share of the fed cattle. Conversely, although feedlots with 1,000-head-or-greater capacity are less than 5 percent of total feedlots, they market 80–85 percent of fed cattle. Feedlots with a capacity of 32,000 head or more market around 40 percent of fed cattle. The industry continues to shift toward a small number of very large, specialized feedlots focused on raising high-quality cattle for a particular market, such as markets requiring cattle not treated with hormones and not fed beta agonists. USDA, NASS provides monthly Cattle on Feed reports.

Now... you may be wondering- what's a specialized feedlot? Do these cows really never graze? My searches indicate that feedlots generally aim to rapidly fatten cows on cultivated grains, but sometimes, cows are started in their youth on grazing, before being moved to concentrated feed lots for grain-finishing.

I'm not quite invested enough to do a full research essay quantifying the number of calories that come from "free" grass. But it seems safe to say that-

Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.

Is just false or misleading... At least in the United States. If your country's industry is a pastoral utopia then power to you.

Ok yes. The grain finished ones are starting on grasslands, you may well be the best kind of correct (technically correct). But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor. In fact... the 'free' grasslands also have opportunity costs, since land is a finite and often fungible resource for farming.

But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor.

No, we don't, not really. We don't have a food shortage in the US, nor a lack of land (we have a lack of land in some spots desirable for humans to live, but there aren't many cattle in SF or NYC. Some in Newark, NJ but that's much less desirable. Nor are there cornfields there.) Worrying overmuch about those is optimizing for something that is, at this time, not much of a constraint.

Artificially-grown meat isn't free either. Sure, you eliminate the labor of some number of cowhands and slaughterhouse workers (and they won't thank you for it), but you're going to need meat factory workers, some of whom are probably more expensive labor than the cowhands and slaughterhouse workers. And all those calories which went into the cow in the form of grain to fatten it? You still need them; there's no free lunch here. Either you're still getting the energy from grain (which means you need to process the grain further, since the ruminant won't be doing it for you), or you're getting it from some other source such as natural gas.

Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.

This was my primary point. That most cows use mediocre land for much of their lives. Some probably do not. Its a big country. There are weird rents all over the place. But pure grain fed beef is way above average market price by 2-3x from what I see.

Factory farms for beef basically do not exist, especially not in the united states -- the feedlots that you mention take cows that have lived on grasslands their entire lives and fatten them up a bit. This makes them, well, fattier which humans prefer, and finishes them a little faster, but you could absolutely feed the demand for beef on grass alone with minimal cost impact. (particularly compared to artificial meat)

In fact... the 'free' grasslands also have opportunity costs, since land is a finite and often fungible resource for farming.

The free grasslands look like forest/scrub -- farming other things there is not economically viable, otherwise they wouldn't be free grasslands.

You have been grievously, grievously misinformed -- please don't spread it here.

Um. Ok. I've updated.

Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.

But as for factory farms, clearly you have a much stricter definition. I acknowledge that most cattle are not factory farmed their whole lives, and that the cattle in feedlots have more elbow room than in chicken factory farms.

but whatever you want to call these things: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Five+Rivers+Cattle+Feeding-+Interstate+Feeders/@42.2862795,-113.3138525,1875m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x80aaf6984afed193:0x249cafeffb8a8530!8m2!3d42.2831921!4d-113.3150227!16s%2Fg%2F1thkxj9_?entry=ttu

definitely exist, and are representative of the largest cattle finishing operations. In fact this is one of them. Now. the number of months spent here vary.

This company for instance claims that their cattle spend spring and summer grazing, then they spend 120 days in the feed lot. https://www.lazyt.com/the-story-of-your-beef

That's still over a third of their lives. And these numbers are fairly standard. 97% of cattle are grain finished, and that typically means something in the range of 6-15 months grazing followed by 4-6 months finishing. Depending on breed and operation.

Not all feed lots are the same, but the highest volume ones do look like this.

There. Is that accurate?

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Can you link a study on that from any group that isn't openly pushing to abolish meat? Because I'm familiar with the propaganda tricks: classifying all rain that falls on grazing lands as "water used for animals", etc.

I know what my inputs and outputs are, and the inputs are extremely minimal. It's likely that the US wastes a lot of grain fattening up cows and even sheep (US carcass weights for "lambs" are double the UK's, which hurts quality for zero benefit), but those are inefficiencies due to our historically cheap feed prices and lack of innovation in decaying markets.

If you have specific counterfactuals that you want considered, I think we'll be better off doing the study ourselves. We should be able to get numbers on acreage and on gross industry input and output and run napkin math.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Reports_By_Date/

Hmm. Yep ok. I can see why most people just let someone else do the several days of data science this is going to take. I still think gwerning it yourself is going to be your best bet at coming to a reasoned opinion you can trust though.

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