I’d be down for some algae burgers if it helps the planet 🌿🍔
The potential is great but I think it’s better to rethink our current choices and be more conscious with the food that we now have. If we lessen our consumption of animal meat then we can focus on feeding supposed animal feed crops to humans. The use of land and water would be less alongside lower carbon emissions.
But animal meat is tasty 😣. Maybe plant based alternatives or lab grown meat will fill that gap and we can start using the farmland more efficiently
Humans need some meat in their ration, and lab grown replacements etc are now too expensive for most of the planet.
However, “some” doesn’t mean a burger or two every day, so yes, there’s space for improvement. Meat is really expensive in terms of carbon emissions.
Frankly I’m not sure how one would notably reduce emissions of anything without actual control (like by force) over most of the world, where green stuff is less relevant than hunger and illiteracy.
But maybe it’s best that USA and EU and similar developed countries don’t have that control. I mean, green energy etc sometimes seem more important than actual lives being saved for many.
No, humans do not need meat. This is plain false! You can greatly decrease emissions by cutting out animal consumption and the FAO has been pleading for a global plant based diet for ages…
How much more expensive would such a diet be? Some plant-based foods can cost a lot depending on place and logistics.
That’s the question, and it’s an important one - it’s the same reason as why, say, WWW which started decentralized has become what it is now for most people. People do what’s easier and cheaper for them.
I’m not calling people “soy boys”, but people for whom you have to make such a diet not even plausible, but cheaper or as cheap as the existing ones, do not live in developed countries. Talk about the environment is not worth anything else for them.
I think you are confusing something. Sure, the vegan diet in rich countries is pretty expensive because it is specialized and produced in comparatively tiny quantities. Meanwhile, in the same countries the meat & dairy industry is heavily subsidised and can produce much cheaper. So cheap in fact, that there are incredibly high numbers of milk farmers committing suicide (e.g. see France).
However, look at poorer countries and you see that the cheapest is actually plant based food and meat is actually a luxury. This will additionally lead to more problems because these poorer countries are starting to consume more and more meat because they catch up to the richer countries.
In general, what is expensive and not is often determined by economy, production capacities etc. But if you compare plants vs meats, keeping animals is nearly always inefficient because they use roughly about 80-95% of the invested energy for respiration and their metabolism. Eating the plants directly would cut out the middle man (middle animal if you will). Btw the vast majority of soy, wheat and corn is for animal agriculture, and not for direct human consumption or for biofuels.
But you are definitely correct about vegan food as it is produced in rich countries is not the way to go. But you could say the same for pretty much anything we consume over here. Scaled up to global dimensions, it would be simply impossible for everyone in the world to eat the same amount of meat and dairy as in the US. There is just not enough available land on our planet.
Anyone here read Artemis by Andy Weir? Yeah…
I have it’s a great book!
I feel like this kinda thing is a bit of a trope in sci-fi and cyberpunk, where one staple crop is used to cheaply feed a large number of people. In some works the staple crop is algae, in some it’s soy, etc. Arguably, in the real world US it’s corn.
