why would someone who loves meat stop eating it?

[earthminor]

You may be interested to read an article I wrote explaining why a Christian would consider vegetarianism, published in an online student blogazine.
Serving the Lord at SupperIn other news I am doing a development course at work to help work out what I want from my job and how to improve my personal life and so on. It sounded a bit dumb when I first

Comments

[earthminor]

Firstly I would point to Jesus' tale of the good Samaritan. The parable wasn't about how wrong it was that the man was robbed; Jesus focuses the responsibility on those who walked past and did nothing. When someone is hurting we are told to do something (see also the parable of the sheep and the goats). Walking past on the other side of the road is not the Christian response. I think the Bible's perspective is the first one we should consider.

On the calorie issue; meat vs plants provides a very different combination of nutrients so calling them 'vegetable concentrators' is more incorrect than correct as there is more to food than energy. Anywho, by plugging a kilo of fresh legumes vs a kilo of raw beef in calorieking.com.au it quotes the legumes at being 3410 calories a kilo and kilo of beef steak fillet at 1460.

I think you're also massively oversimplfying the water cycle. It's not a closed system. Water can be easily tainted so that it can't re-enter the cycle; it certainly is not a self-replenishing resource. Anyway, that's the word from the farmer we were stayin with at Bendigo when I first read your comment.

The carbon emissions can be argued with a lot and I think this article in the New Yorker makes many valid points. But their last paragraph is basically the point I was driving at in my article; a reduction of meat rather than its elimination from all diets is a good outcome.

But I am seriously struggling with your last long paragraph. Basically you're saying that it's their own fault they're hungry, and our response should be agitating for political change without taking on any responsibility? Clearly that is a very blunt summary but that is about what you're saying.

Secondly it isn't as if crops are eaten where they are produced. Countries export food to those who pay the most while locals go without. Thailand exports rice (look at your packet of Jasmine rice in the cupboard) but my sponsor child is a Thai girl whose family goes without.

First world countries aren't reliably producing the most food per capita either. On this table generated from FAO data we see that in 2007 Australia generated 70 units per person while Zimbabwe produced 80 and India 106. Basically I think your arguement that the first world gets to eat more because it produces more wholly unconvincing unless you can provide me with some data that says otherwise.

Whatever you think we are responsible for it remains that we are responsible and that should call us to action in the private and the public sphere.

[lordlucless]

Firstly I would point to Jesus' tale of the good Samaritan...

That's largely a straw-man. I'm not advocating doing nothing. I'm questioning whether what is being done is necessarily helpful. If you want to use the Good Samaritan as an anology, then you might insert a passerby who stopped, wiped some of the blood off the victim's face, then continued on their way. Did they do something? Yes. Was it helpful? Well, somewhat. But it scarcely addressed the root of the problem.

On the calorie issue...

Yes, there's more to food than energy. But energy is the one thing all foods have in common, and, in comparison to every other nutrient, it's what we need the most of out of our food. We need to have some benchmark when comparing foods, and energy, while not perfect, is probably the simplest, most accurate.

Anywho, by plugging a kilo of fresh legumes vs a kilo of raw beef in calorieking.com.au
I couldn't duplicate your results - the only legumes I could find on there were "Vegetables, canned: Legumes, Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, canned", and a kilo of baked beans yielded 780 calories, a large proportion of which was sugar, which I assume to be in the sauce. The other problem with that site, is that it's seems to be targetted at weight loss. When I tried entering beef weight, almost every entry was "lean" or "low-fat". Then too, cows are not homogenous. Various cuts of meat yield far different results. A kilo of lean sirloin is about half the calories of 85% fat free mince, for example.

Even then, that's not exactly an apt comparison. Cattle are generally not fed on legumes (except in the US, where a large proportion are fed soya beans). The majority of Australian cattle are pastured, and even the feedlot industry generally uses grain rather than legumes.

Also consider that vegetables we eat (and that are measured by that site) are generally "concentrated" by their processing. The low-calorific husks and chaff are separated, meaning that what remains is not an accurate representation of the energy of the whole plant. Food animals are also processed, of course, but their processing removes a lot of high-calorie components (fat, organs) as well as low (bone, hide).

I think you're also massively oversimplfying the water cycle. It's not a closed system...

The water system is practically the definition of a closed system. No water leaves the system (barring an infinitesimal amount that we probably eject during space launches), and an equally infinitesimal amount enters (meteoric events).

What ways are there to permanently taint water so that it is no longer part of the water cycle? There's plenty of ways to taint water so that it's unsuitable for human consumption, and for agricultural use, but those are generally temporary conditions; as the water evaporates and precipitates elsewhere, it's purified. Now, if you contaminate part of your catchment area, that can produce an ongoing effect, but even that's not removing water from the water cycle - it simply means you're catching the fresh rain in a dirty cup. It means you need to clean your cup (or use a different one), not that the rain has been permanently affected.

If we had the ability to "use up" water, then the amount of water on earth would have been shrinking for all of human history (or from whenever our ability to "use up" water arose). Earth would be a desert by now.

[lordlucless]

Basically you're saying that it's their own fault they're hungry, and our response should be agitating for political change

For certain definitions of "their", yes, it is "their" fault. Not on an individual level - a starving subsistence farmer is unlikely to have many options to improve their lot - but at a national level, that changes.

Look at famines throughout history. Almost without exception, they're caused by two things: natural disaster (blight, flood, drought) and war. Natural disasters can be prepared for, to some extent, through stock-piling - unless your government is continually selling your food to fund it's own interests. And most people generally don't start wars - it's their governments that do. Wars strip people away from engaging in agriculture, they require food they don't grow to support their armies, and they divert industry into weapon manufacture.

And I don't suggest that we should consider nothing but "political agitation". I think that stopping eating ourselves because other people don't have enough to eat, while it may have symbolic power, has little practical value. If you want to help people eat, you need to "teach them to fish", not "give them a fish" - although they made need to be given food to sustain them as they learn how to produce it themselves.

They need a calm and settled political state, so all their manpower isn't pulled out to die in battles instead of bring in the harvest. They need a government either controlled by the people, or concerned for the people, so that their resources aren't stripped from them to fund the excesses of the upper class. They need access modern agricultural techniques. They need to be educated, so they can built and maintain agricultural machinery.

There's not a fixed amount of food that the world produces, and the fact that the western world consumes more doesn't mean it's stealing it out of the mouths of the "third world". Most of the world's starving nations are producing food in a very inefficient fashion, and it's that which needs correcting more than our own consumption (although our own consumption could do with adjusting for reasons other than world starvation).

Thailand exports rice (look at your packet of Jasmine rice in the cupboard) but my sponsor child is a Thai girl whose family goes without.

Which doesn't really support the notion of going vegetarian to ease starvation. It argues for supporting local product (meat or vegetable), which I'd definitely agree with - aside from anything else, the lower transportation cost makes local much more efficient. If imported is cheaper, then it's probably a result of exploitative practices in the country of origin.

It also reinforces what I was saying earlier, about some countries' upper classes lining their own pockets at the expense of their lower classes.

[lordlucless]

On this table generated from FAO data we see that in 2007 Australia generated 70 units per person while Zimbabwe produced 80 and India 106.

First let me say that production isn't limited to food. Modern industrialized nations are the most productive. That's why they have the strongest economies. They produce more of what people want.

Aside from that, the units in your chart are economic, not agricultural. That throws those statistics way out when talking about food production. It means that countries that produce large amounts of expensive, low-nutritional food (like cocoa, for instance, or spices) with a low population are going to be over-represented compared to countries that produce bulk commodities (wheat, rice, etc) with a high population. I mean, according to that chart, the most productive nation is Marshall Islands, and their booming coconut industry.

And yes, western (or should I say modern industrial) nations produce (or can produce) far more than they consume. That's why the US pays people not to grow food, and why they dump food into the ocean to prevent the cost of food growing too low (note that I'm not defending those behaviors, simply citing them as examples of gross western over production.

Whatever you think we are responsible for it remains that we are responsible and that should call us to action in the private and the public sphere.

True, but you first need to identify what you are responsible for. Our impact on third world countries hasn't been eating too much. It's been providing them with weapons to promulgate their wars instead of diplomats to settle them. It's been exploiting their poor labour conditions to gain access to cheap imports rather than trying to raise them to our standard of living. It's been selling them seeds that produce sterile crops to increase their dependance on us, rather than giving them access to scientific methods of soil management so they can increase their yields themselves.