The way chickens are raised today, you'd be insane to raise chickens.
Chickens of the old, roamed the grass, picking little shits that no one could find or eat, growing slowly but steadily, surviving and mating.
Today, they gorge on soybean-B12 juice that was raised on ex-rainforest area.
It's highly unsustainable and ridiculously bad investment.
Bill Gates has previously written about meat and its sustainability and has shown serious lack of understanding of how it all works on a global scale.
Yes, chickens being raised on a field filled with little nutrients only chickens can see is exactly the same as cows being raised in an environment where grass grows around them and climate is pretty stable.
That's not the way Africa or India will get its dosage of meat, and it cannot be done in any way other than massive soybean way (the best source of protein and growth for all living animals).
When we get Africans or Indians on the luxurious flesh, we'll never get them off the bandwagon and the unsustainability of the process will ruin more rainforests, more oceans, more living species and more life.
Absolutely disappointed with Bill.
I guess he's totally oblivious to the dead oceans zones that are caused primarily by animal agriculture.
Or that 90% of the rainforest is being cut primarily for soybean, that is primarily given to the animals in the animal agriculture.
Can't believe a guy was solving a problem this huge and he seems to still be on the meat bandwagon.
I'm not sure you followed the article. He's arguing for small scale, not large scale investment. Raising chickens primarily for their eggs, and secondarily for their meat. Indeed, he appears to be advocating "chickens of old" as you call them, rather than industrial operations to increase self-sufficiency.
Because they continually produce food, are largely self-sufficient, living off calories otherwise rejected and because they are small and inexpensive, chicken's are an excellent investment on a small scale.
But that is a hundred year old story. I can't see what is so insightful about that. (small scale is efficient for local needs)
What he's not mentioning at all is that the Africans and Indians will get conditioned by meat. Their cultures will grow on meat.
I saw it happen to my native country. When meat was just a once in a month occasion, after just 50 years, everything else is considered food for the poor and flesh is in every meal.
Why would we want to repeat the same mistake? Condition new 2+ billion people on meat, increase their desire for luxury and let the capitalism meet the demand?
It's absolutely impossible that small scale chicken farms meet the demand of 2 billion people and we all know that Brazil will start cutting more of the Amazon (it's already doing that) to raise more soybean to get that newly discovered stream of money. One can do the calculation for cattle, and you'll see that grass-fed cattle barely meets 10% of the current demand.
I'm quite baffled by the lack of mention of the long-term consequences in the article.
Not only will they get richer, but shifting their culture from mainly plant-based to meat-based will have a huge impact on the world.
Just look at China and what happened in the last 60 years. From a country that had only 4kg of meat per person per year, they now have 50kg - just recently their government organization urged their people to eat less meat. (Chinese ocean floor is practically dead)
Well, aside from the cultural elitism here (don't "teach" them about this), I think what you are arguing will happen is almost unavoidable in a globalized world. Withholding out of concern for the environment is simply entrenching the existing social order. It's a very "white mans burden" thing to argue.
Additionally, the best response is not to withhold meat, which they will no doubt come to anyway, but to offer a sustainable and realistic alternative. You can't stop the flow of global food, but you can make it cheaper and more sustainable. And cheaper will generally win.
Finally, you simply made a huge jump from "let's get them a chicken to live on" to "it's a terrible investment because commercial meat production is bad". This is not an obvious jump or foregone conclusion.
> This is not an obvious jump or foregone conclusion.
You said it yourself it's unavoidable. I'm not advocating for withholding, I'm just baffled by the call for sustainability when it isn't.
You can't grow 50kg of continuous meat consumption in your backyard - that's something only industry can do. One has to wait for the chickens to grown and then at one moment in time consume them.
"white mans burden" - is this the main argument for everything? from white guilt to whatever?
I just commented on how it won't lead to long-term sustainability. It is experimentally proven in China and plenty of federal countries of India.
This is a clear troll. Absolutely nothing said by this poster has anything to do with the actual article. Additionally, the user account is only 13 days old. Moderators, please kill this account and postings.
I don't see the troll on it. He expressed his points of view, related to the article. I agree that meat isn't a long lasting solution (I eat meat, by the way). I think plants agriculture is. Chickens for short term? Yes.
Cognitive dissonance is everywhere. It was massive during the slavery period of the USA. Or now, when billions of non-human animals pollute the planet and trillions dying every year.
Cognitive dissonance makes life bearable. If I were to know that the flesh I'm eating is dog flesh, I'd probably puke. Or if my mind always had burden of how much I contribute to the environmental destruction with my life choices, I'd probably commit suicide.
But with cognitive dissonance I can live a life worth living.
Well, an argument of taste comes into mind. If my life is based on daily enjoyment in my meals then giving up flesh is lowering my happiness.
The enjoyment, the participation in a carnivorous human culture is integral to my existence. Food being a major part of it. Dogs in China, chickens in the rest of the world, calves, lambs and other babies. Factory farming makes their life miserable (or maybe the fact that dog flesh is "magically better" if you torture it before harvest, absolutely disgusting practice) and if I am aware of that I might not enjoy it anymore. Therefore I participate in cognitive dissonance, provide arguments which make no sense but soothe my conflicted mind.
Organic farming, humane slaughter, cage free, all lovely cognitive dissonance. It's always there. When slavery was actual, we tried to give them better rights, just like we do for animals - instead of abolishing the practices that make our minds conflicted.
Of course I can live without meat, dairy and eggs - I've been doing that for more than 20 years.
It's just that our reactions to the cognitive dissonance are the same.
For example, you had attempts at laws of humane handling of slaves during the US slavery period. Slaves were disposable creatures, just like animals.
Our handling of the cognitive dissonance was attributing inferior characteristics to slaves (intelligence, different skin, can't learn to read etc.). Same thing is done with animals to argument their handling and disposability.
Then you try to add "humane" into your reasoning. Which is filled with oxymoron terms like "humane slaughter", "humane rape", "humane electrocution".
Justification of having the right to a slave's life because you feed him and give him the right to live is absolutely mirrored in the argumentation when it comes to non-human animals.
Nice thought experiment to confirm your cognitive dissonance is to think of what you would do with homo neanderthals or homo erectus or maybe australopithecus genus? Would you keep them in zoos? Have them as disposable servants? Of course you wouldn't.
Cognitive dissonance is present because you've been raised in a certain environment that starts to have (or you start to recognize it having) characteristics that go against your moral stands.
If you try to have thought experiments similar to the one above (the environment in which you didn't grow) you can think more in line with your true positions, and leave the faulty argumentation behind.
Of course, you might try to skew the argumentation for the homo/australopithecus case to be consistent with your actions in your non-human animals case, but that wouldn't come natural, that would come through cognitive dissonance (you spot the connection between the two, it distrubs you, and instead of admitting that environment conditioned you - cognitive dissonance comes to play).
Slavery, nationalism, fascism, heterosexual supremacy, male dominance, all are ideologies spawned from existing environments whose supporters suffer from cognitive dissonance. All of these ideologies share the same characteristics as those of enslaving animals, massively killing them, poisoning the environment etc. In that particular way, these ideologies are the same.
usda when measuring cooked or raw beans, for example, measures them differently.
for example cooking 100g of beans in 500g of water would result in, let's say, 450g of beanwater (beans + water). usda takes 100g of that beanwater and says it's 100g of cooked beans (water content of cooked beans is way higher than in raw beans [their tables say]).
I was worried there's not enough protein in 100g of cooked beans, but there is, it's just not 100g of cooked beans, it's 450g of beanwater.
same thing is for protein present in grass but indigestible for humans.
cows can extract "enormous" amounts of protein from foods that humans wouldn't ever.
it's very hard measuring how much digestible protein something has, such as beans, or lentils, or soybeans. it depends if you eat the shell, did you blend the shell like a mad man, even if you blended beans into a homogenous phlegm
Cows are not extracting protein from grass (well not much), they are converting the cellulose in the grass into microorganisms and then extracting the proteins from the microorganisms. The ruminant digestive system is an amazing system [1].
Cows actually can't digest cellulose at all - what they can do is harbour the microorganisms that can. These microorganisms are then eaten by the cow and provide most of the protein in a cows diet.
"not fit for human consumption" is not a synonym for "unfancy". It describes the processes involved to arrive at the final food. Filet mignon can be unfit for human consumption, while pigs' feet can be processed correctly and be fit for consumption.
Animals that are sick or unhealthy are separated from the herd and slaughtered independently, then sold for pet food and livestock feed. This was partly what fostered the mad cow issue.
There is higher risk for illness with non-human grade food. If you don't want higher risk for your pet than child, you shouldn't feed the off-the-shelf non-human grade food.
> if you care about your pet like you do your child, you shouldn't feed the off-the-shelf non-human grade food.
This is... an interesting generational thing, I think. To most older people, the idea of caring as much for your pet as you would for a child seems viscerally wrong. They even economize on pet healthcare. but... among those younger than me, your view, as far as I can tell, seems to be the norm. The very idea that you might be unwilling to go bankrupt paying for medical care for your pets seems abhorrent.
Great point, I have definitely noticed this in my own family. The elders are not only against "wasting" money above the minimum required for sustenance, but they get openly and visibly angry about it when someone else does. For some reason, this particular issue crosses over from "well I wouldn't do it, but to each his own", to seeing it as a fundamentally immoral act. It surprised me in the beginning.
Personally I can't understand the logic. Who cares what species something is, it's just a question of level of consciousness. A dog is pretty much a 2 yr old child. Why have no concern for such a consciousness, whether it's an animal, android, human, or whatever.
So is a pig, so this logic really only applies to vegetarians. There is still something else that motivates meat eating people to care more for their pets.
> So is a pig, so this logic really only applies to vegetarians.
The quality of life of farm animals should also be respected. If they live their lives in suffering, that shouldn't be taken lightly.
At the same time all animals will die at some point, with or without human intervention. If that death happens at a slightly different time for the reality of the way nature works, that's not inconsistent.
Keep in mind that wild animals don't generally die of old age gracefully on a golf course. More often than not they're ripped apart by some other animal, or starve to death from injury, or are consumed by disease, etc. Death by human hands is probably one of the less cruel fates.
A free-range animal on a cruelty-free farm (if that really exists), with the benefits of human medicine, and a precisely implemented death, is probably one of the happier existences an animal can have.
Only if you put down any pet immediately when it becomes sick with something non trivial (what we do with farm animals). However, that's not the case when people spend thousands on a pet to keep it alive with complex treatments.
It's pretty clear that the mental abilities or atributes of the animal is not the primary differentiation between 'something like family' and 'something like food.' The differentiation is in the emotional attachment a person has to other animals that belong to the same class as the animal in question.
I mean, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that this is how most people see the matter.
To provide the devil's advocate position, why does mere ownership suddenly imply a much higher duty of care? It would be morally abhorrent if we started euthanizing millions of toddlers who we couldn't find homes for yet we're fine doing the same to pets. What, morally, should be the difference between "pets we can find a home for" and "pets we can't find a home for"?
I think most people would be more repulsed if a child's own parents mis-treated them, rather than if an orphanage did. The whole scale is just shifted up for humans. Bias towards "ownership" still exists.
> This is... an interesting generational thing, I think.
Totally. Not too long ago, pets, and livestock, would be fed table scraps and glad of it.
Like we've been taught - actually shamed - into using soap, deodorant and sundry other 'essentials' to the soap manufacturers well-being, so with pet care.
Curious about what else they'll come up with next to mop up wealth and productivity. It's bound to be amusing.
Are dogs able to safely digest some foods that humans aren't? I mean, does it really need to be pointed out that dogs have different nutritional and hygiene requirements than human children?
> does it really need to be pointed out that dogs have different nutritional and hygiene requirements than human children
The most common dangers are onions (or things cooked in onions) and chocolate. They contain chemicals that are toxic to dogs and should always be avoided.
Similarly, many humans are allergic to many foods, and not every human can eat all "human-grade" food.
"human-grade" is only a measure of risk of unexpected contents (disease) in the food - not a recommendation that all humans should always eat it.
Biggest problem is animal agriculture. The use of extremely aggressive antibiotics increases muscle growth, improves health and eventually leads to larger profit.
150 billion land animals raised yearly are a big evolutionary pool of bacteria. To become resistant to antibiotics takes much less time when you run the experiment in parallel 150 billion times per year, than a couple hundred million in humans.
One strain, isolated in one of the 150 billion animals can become resistant and spread around the farm. If it goes unnoticed it can quickly spread over the country.
Chickens of the old, roamed the grass, picking little shits that no one could find or eat, growing slowly but steadily, surviving and mating.
Today, they gorge on soybean-B12 juice that was raised on ex-rainforest area.
It's highly unsustainable and ridiculously bad investment.
Bill Gates has previously written about meat and its sustainability and has shown serious lack of understanding of how it all works on a global scale.
Yes, chickens being raised on a field filled with little nutrients only chickens can see is exactly the same as cows being raised in an environment where grass grows around them and climate is pretty stable.
That's not the way Africa or India will get its dosage of meat, and it cannot be done in any way other than massive soybean way (the best source of protein and growth for all living animals).
When we get Africans or Indians on the luxurious flesh, we'll never get them off the bandwagon and the unsustainability of the process will ruin more rainforests, more oceans, more living species and more life.
Absolutely disappointed with Bill.
I guess he's totally oblivious to the dead oceans zones that are caused primarily by animal agriculture.
Or that 90% of the rainforest is being cut primarily for soybean, that is primarily given to the animals in the animal agriculture.
Can't believe a guy was solving a problem this huge and he seems to still be on the meat bandwagon.