In response to the hypothetical grassfed beef carnivore

 

“One humanely dispatched animal will feed many people, but one vegan person kills thousands of creatures in inhumane ways with every bite they take.

So, if we go by ‘net murder rate by eating’, I would say that people who only eat grass fed beef are way ahead of everyone else.”

 

“So, you would prefer to kill 20 or so mice and small rodents, via slow painful liquification of internal organs, and/or many small animals by being torn apart and left for the carrion birds by plows, than eat one cows worth of beef, killed as humanely as you can afford to ensure? Why? “

Whenever you criticize the American dietary pattern of extreme amounts of meats, it always turns out of course that everyone who reads what you had to say only consumes the grass-fed beef cattle who live idyllic lives and sequester all the carbon by building up healthy topsoils and yadda yadda. No, it’s always the hoi polloi, it’s someone else somewhere, who eats the pigs fed plastic and cardboard. It’s definitely not you.

And so that immediately raises a seeming contradiction: If I say I reject animal cruelty, but eat grains that need pesticides that kill mice, am I not killing more animals than someone who merely eats his grassfed beef? Was I scammed all along? Should we all just be eating big fat cows? Or heck, should we transition to eating elephants perhaps? Would that be the most ethical option, grassfed elephant meat?

Well I’m glad to see you’re all so well off that you’re eating grassfed beef in today’s economy. Those who are worse off are eating pigs fed plastic:

And if you’re eating chickens, you’re eating some animal with pus-filled sores somewhere that can’t stand on its own feet, surrounded by dead specimens of its own kind:

But you’re one of the lucky few of course. You’re rich enough not to be dependent on this stuff, you get your grassfed beef directly from the local family farm where little blonde children hug the little calves in the grassy meadows. So what about you then?

Well, we can say one thing: The cows you eat have to eat something too. They generally end up eating the food that humans could have eaten. With beef cows, the cows need to eat 25 grams of protein, to produce 1 gram of protein you’re eating.

“Well the cows I eat are all grassfed animals.”

Alright, the same principle still applies. What do you think would be where the cow lives, if you didn’t eat the cow? It would be forest, but humans spray those pesticides you talk about, to kill off any other animals. We have plenty of mice plagues here in our Dutch farmland, where we kill all the mice running through the grass where the cows live:

They kill them by drowning them alive. And of course, geese are attracted to the grass as well, so we end up having to shoot the geese too.

After all, this is what grassfed beef generally means: It means you have a plot of land, where you spray a bunch of pesticides, to ensure that only one species of high protein grass can grow. This attracts geese as well, so my country now has millions of them, which will have to be killed somehow. They kill a quarter of a million of them here every year in this country.

Here is the real problem you’re dealing with:

Take a good look at that. The humans weigh as much as ten times all the wild animals put together! and the cattle that we humans eat, weigh about three times as much as us! In other words, you eating your “grassfed beef” leads to a planet with thirty times as many cows as wild animals! How do you think this is supposed to be sustainable exactly?

Grassfed beef kills animals, because the animals have to be killed to stop them from eating the grass that the cows need to eat. And, it turns entire forests like the Brazilian rain forest where animals used to live, into cattle pastures.


It’s ultimately all very very simple:

When you eat peanuts, one gram of plant protein becomes one gram of protein for you.

When you eat a cow. One gram of plant protein, becomes one gram of protein for the cow. But the cow now needs 25 grams of plant protein, to produce one gram of protein as food for you!

And so what should we expect? We would expect that we need roughly 25 times as much physical space to feed you your grassfed beef, as we would need to feed you plant protein directly!

Is it any wonder that basically 80% of human land use for agriculture is not for plants we eat ourselves, but for the animals that we eat? No, it is exactly what we would expect.


But wait. I already know what you’re going to say. You’re the rare exception of course, you’re the guy who doesn’t just eat grassfed beef, no, your grassfed beef comes from the handful of places on Earth that can’t be used to grow plants directly for humans beings!

First of all, I don’t know how you get that stuff in your local supermarket. You’re not living in Mauritania. You’re not living in rural Tibet. Statistically speaking, you’re living in some big multimillion people metropolitan coastal settlement somewhere, just like me and every other dude on the Internet. Yes, even the guy in my comment section who claims he looks like Jesus. But alright, I’m going to play along with you.

Bear with me here. Do you think this plot of land you’re using doesn’t have value for nature? Do you think it’s normal to have basically thirty times as many cattle as wild animals? Of course it isn’t. In nature, you would get animals like wolves, bears and lions, that would keep the herd small.

Rather, all those cattle put together end up damaging the environment. They produce massive amounts of methane, which ends up poisoning our atmosphere. But saying this of course brings out all the people who think it’s perfectly fine to poison our atmosphere, who think that all this madness will somehow not have any harmful consequences to our future.

And that’s the general pattern I notice:

YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO KNOW

 

That’s really all there is to it. And I wish you would all just say this out loud, it would make it all a lot easier, it means we all know where we stand.

-You don’t want to know the chocolate you eat is harvest by child slaves. Well, neither do I. I never said I’m a saint.

-You don’t want to know the animal you’re eating was some deformed chicken with sores on its legs that spent a week of its life sitting next to the decomposing corpse of another chicken.

-You just don’t want to know that the pig you’re eating ate plastic.

-You just don’t want to know that eating meat gives you prostate cancer. Hey, I couldn’t get my dad to stop eating so much meat until he developed prostate cancer either. It’s human nature, we just don’t want to know.

-You just don’t want to know that food prices are skyrocketing and people in the Middle East and Africa will now start dying of hunger, which could have been prevented IF WE DIDN’T USE UP ALL OF THE WORLD’S SPACE TO GROW YOUR FRICKING GRASSFED BEEF. The Japanese eat seaweed. The Chinese eat shellfish. None of this stuff competes with fertile farmland. When you eat meat, it takes up physical space for fertile farmland.

-You just don’t want to know that it’s causing deforestation in Brazil.

That’s it. That’s really all there is to it. And I’m not blaming you. Do you think I want to be aware on a constant basis of all the suffering my existence requires? No, I can barely handle the part I am aware of.

Life is a lot of fun, when you’re not aware. I’m pretty sure the Gautama Buddha had a good time too, as long as they didn’t let him leave his house.

But I’m not just going to pretend that the problem is not real and come up with some far-fetched argument to pretend that it’s not true.

Americans have a choice:

Option A: They can start eating less meat and help keep the world’s poor from dying of hunger. In the process they will reduce global warming, they will reduce animal suffering, they will become less obese, they will free up room for nature, they will avoid running out of fresh water and they will live longer.

Option B: They can continue the way they’re living now and turn this planet into a mediocre copy of hell itself.

You’re choosing option B. And that’s fine. But do me a favor and stop pretending that option B is actually a grass-fed sustainable form of option A all along. It isn’t.

39 Comments

  1. Its growing beef that “uses up all the world’s space” and not large government facilities for useless things like NASA and fake space travel or the ginormous large hadron collider in Geneva that studies imaginary particles and needs jillions of mikes of land for it. Its people growing food that are wasting space. Vegans are a less evolved subhuman rac obviously with such logic as this.

  2. Its also the stupid vegans of India wasting land. They have all those cows roaming around and they won’t eat them because “the cow is my mother.” They starve while worshipping food and refusing to eat it! Talk about wasting land and food!

    • Hahahahaha I’m from the subcontinent and we get beef here.its quite complex often due to various religious practices.No pork in the Muslim side,no beef on the Hindu side the Christians enjoy the wine. People are starving a lot here.Its a dynamic place.fun stuff.

  3. Not to mention the Jains banning root vegetables from being eaten. So no carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets. Wasters of land and food these vegans are!

  4. And then vegans won’t eat honey either. Nor milk! Then they complain they are starving because an American eats beef. While a cow, a honey comb, a block of cheese, a glass of milk, a potatoe, and a beet sit in front of their face—yet the starve!

  5. I have listened to some interviews with David Sinclair and what I got from it is that switching to more leafy green stuff and eating less overall is best to increase longevity. For him meat is a short term strategy which does increase muscle mass, power output and fertility but only for a limited amount of time before it starts to backfire.

    I think it is possible to eat only limited amount of meat and keep some of the benefits of meat with the right supplements.

    • I can get the same power and strength from milk and eggs. Meat’s unnecessary, animal products (which can be obtained in an ideal world with the chickens and cows living out their natural lives mostly happy) in general definitely are.

  6. If a human believes eating meat is wrong they should be celibate like Buddha and not breed. If you have such a problem with animals suffering (and even worse with potatoe plants and root vegetables sufferring as in Jainism)—if you are massively concerning with bugs suffering—then take Buddha’s path and end your genetic line by not having sex! Then you won’t contribute to animal and plants suffering by bringing more people to the earth to eat them! But if you insist on having sex with these beliefs then you are hypocritical scum! And nobody should listen to you. An non-celibate vegan is a liar—period!

    • id tou don’t like how the world works why you still having sex? I’m a celibate monk you whore. Are you? No, your legs are open 24/7. Then its everyone else’s fault animals suffer, while you fill the world with eaters.

  7. climate change to the extent it exists is caused by govw
    ernment weather manipilation experiments stupid. the very people telling you its your fault for eating are the ones using mad science to alter the weather with electromagnetic weapons in the stratosphere and such. And the hole in the ozone layer in the 90s was from the space shuttle, not cars or hair spray.

  8. “I belong to a religion about celibate monkhood to escape the cycle of reincatnation. And it teaches that eating meat and even root vegetables is sin. So I’m gonna have 7 kids and tell people of other religions who only have 1 kid that they are the problem! that they are causing animal suffering!” — Hindus, Buddhists, Jains. What losers. They can’t even use logic. Follow your religion to its logical conclusion and stop having sex. Be celibate.

  9. “People are starving in my country because we have cows everywhere but our religion bans eating them. Its clearly Americas fault. I better breed and make more kids to starve. Even though my religion iltimately teaches celibacy as the path to salvation.”

  10. “We also have no sanitation in my country because we are so concerned with bugs suffering that we don’t like to dig in the ground. We might kill a bug! Oh no! So instead of making sewers and installing toilets we poop in the streets and wipe with our butts with our bare left hand. Then we wonder why we have dysentery. It must be that Americans eating meat causes us dysentery. It can’t be our stupid Hindu, Buddhist, Jain superstitions that we refuse to follow completely because they say celibacy is how to achieve moksha but we just keep breeding like rabbits.”

  11. I eat fish and produce and starches. I think both vegans and carnidorks are critically retarded for different reasons.

    Carnitards fuck up because they wage their health on the properties of things they don’t eat. “But wild game is healthy,” they say as they grill 20% fat ground rat-i-mean-hamburger from the discount section in the Walmart meat aisle. I literally never saw a carnivore or paleo advocate who actually ate the expensive hipster meat they advocated. It’s apparently so rare and expensive it might as well not even exist, and store meat has a hideous fatty acid profile so it’s retarded equating the two or pretending that the existence of venison somehow undoes this reality.

    Vegans on the other hand, do not seem to realise that deficiency is real and that no healthy vegan population exists. You throw in with the vegans by choosing to frame your diet ideas as “plant based” etc. You could devise a more nuanced explanatory model, but instead choose to affirm the vegan narrative of things while making hard breaks from it through, say, advocating the eating of mussels.

    Really what you advocate that I’ve seen is some variant of pescetarianism, assuming your views haven’t changed and assuming we’re being honest. Choosing to slant your interpretation in the way that you do, is not honest.

    Whatever exactly you believe these days on these topics, if it’s either of the mainstream positions, that is retarded and you owe it to yourself to do better.

    As a general rule of life, if you find yourself agreeing with any commonly espoused idea, that should set off alarm bells in your head and cause you to step back and re-evaluate your entire view of life.

    • >Carnitards fuck up because they wage their health on the properties of things they don’t eat. “But wild game is healthy,” they say as they grill 20% fat ground rat-i-mean-hamburger from the discount section in the Walmart meat aisle. I literally never saw a carnivore or paleo advocate who actually ate the expensive hipster meat they advocated. It’s apparently so rare and expensive it might as well not even exist, and store meat has a hideous fatty acid profile so it’s retarded equating the two or pretending that the existence of venison somehow undoes this reality.

      Good point.

      >Really what you advocate that I’ve seen is some variant of pescetarianism, assuming your views haven’t changed and assuming we’re being honest. Choosing to slant your interpretation in the way that you do, is not honest.

      The vegans have my sympathy because their heart is in the right place. I personally do think pescetarianism is healthier however. I’ll also just honestly admit that I can’t envision a life without blue cheese. I tried making vegan blue cheese, it went about as well as you would expect.

      I have nothing but hate for the carnitards however.

      • “The heart of vegans is in the right place”

        Here it is, friends. The ultimate proof that the author’s opinion is vastly based on ideology, not facts. This means that any discussion is completely futile. The argument once again is that vegans are the master race, ethically superior to everybody else because of the products they consume.

        I much prefer the viewpoint of Fucko. Fucko sees that both sides are retarded. This is the sign of a true visionary.

        Indeed, militant vegans are like devout voters who think that their 50% of the crooked politicians will finally fix all the issues. Meanwhile they’re getting ripped off by the system through cheap ideology. They’re useful idiots. The louder they are, the more useful and the more idiotic.

        I’ll tell it to you straight: vegans who advocate for veganism are complete morons 9 out of 10 times. Why? Because they usually don’t know the first thing about nutrition and health. They’re driven by ideology. People who live vegan or plant-based or whatever for their health don’t have to argue with atmospheric gases or the birth rate. They argue with their being, their presence. And they give hints if people want them. They tell personal anecdotes. And they accept it if somebody has improved their health with a low carb diet.

        People who get triggered by somebody eating a paleo or low carb diet are just immature little creatures that have no idea how to hold a balanced conversation.

        Ideology and hate will eat you from within. Doesn’t matter which diet you are on. Remember that.

        Oh and could you delete all of jorgen’s comments maybe except one or two? I’m not asking for censorship, those are very obviously just spam.

      • I don’t blame you for hating them. I just hope to help you realize that there are more people worthy of hatred than there are time in the day to hate properly, so it’d be more valuable to your cause to actually clarify what you believe works. There are too many tards to take out, so your time is imo better used on self refinement. Just a thought

        • Very true indeed, o wise clown.

          I mean just think about it for a second: what does feeling hatred achieve? In the worst case it can ruin your life. But even in the best (!) case, it still makes you feel bad. Actions motivated by hatred are usually (self-)destructive and near impossible to control. Indeed, hatred is the fire that burns – and if you try to harness it, you will get consumed.

  12. Lol Radagast, what a sad article for someone as intelligent as yourself. You’re blaming the dietary preferences of westerners for the atrocities caused by large scale commercial feed operations, and for the global food shortage caused by certain countries where the locals breed like locusts.

    If you had at least proposed a solution where we aim to live in reasonable balance with the land and natural capabilities of the world, I’d have agreed, but no you pose vegetarianism as the solution. Ok, let’s say we do that. The world population will explode as the price of our food goes down, and we will be back in the precise same place where even a vegetarian diet becomes unsustainable because the earth’s population has increased so much. What do we eat then buddy? Slime molds? LOL. Your solution where we dilute the quality of our dietary preferences is endlessly moronic because it doesn’t address the real cause of the food and natural habitat destruction: unchecked population growth.

    No thanks my friend, beef it is. MMMMM.

    Oh and by the way, since you whine about methane. Please, where is your article about slaughtering the ~330 million cattle that live in India. This is about 20 to 30% OF ALL CATTLE IN THE WORLD. Do those ruminants not produce methane? Oh that’s right, you don’t mention that because you’re full of shit, but instead focus on Americans because they actually eat the cattle in question.

    Sorry buddy, you’re completely full of it, and your quoted leftist vegan site is full of it too.

  13. I think a significant reduction in the amount of beef Americans eat is not unreasonable, but to give it up entirely? Nah bro

  14. Alright, if eating this way works for you and your health, show us what your body looks like. Are you ripped? Do other men want to look and be like you?

  15. criticized your embrace of climate change but 100 pct agree on this as the only logical solution. govt caps and controls on industry are a ruse to gain more power, individual choice on diet after understanding the consequences on their bodies and the planet is the only way

  16. What’s missing from this heavily intellectualised discussion is the notion that one might actually listen to one’s own body, and be guided by that. It’s all very well and good trotting out graphs and statistics but at the end of the day if, let’s say, a keto diet makes you feel significantly healthier than vegan, then it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got iron clad arguments saying keto is the root of all evil. It’s as Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: better to murder a baby in its cradle than to leave a single desire unnurtured. The body is sovereign.

    I say this as somebody who was rigorously vegan for 6 months and vegetarian for years before that. I have found that introducing a bit of meat into my diet has improved my health so much. But that’s just me; I know others thrive on things like beans and pulses, but in my case, they really screw with my gut.

    Another thing is this whole ‘gotcha’ about how most Paleo people don’t actually live up to their ideal of eating predominantly wild meat. What strikes me is that most vegans are the same. How many vegans you know rely on highly processed Frankenstein’s-monster fake meat-type stuff, and avocados flown in from halfway across the world? Doesn’t that seriously undermine the ecological virtues they always claim their diet has? It’s the same thing. Any diet based on ideology, is always going to involve compromise and falling short, the world is just like that. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t have ideals, mind, only that it takes work to approach them. In the real world, things like geographical location, budgetary and time constraints and again, one’s own body, can stand in the way.

    i will pay Radagast his dues for staying true to his own beliefs and putting this out there when it’s clearly alienating most of his audience. Having said that, this type of shrill puritanical lecturing is not a good look on anybody, in my opinion. Personally, I will always listen to my body ahead of what some guy says on the Internet, even if he has graphs and bold font.

  17. “Saving the planet from burning” yeah sure, a few hundred parts per million of CO2 is going to turn the planet into an infernal hellscape. Because that’s how Physics works, folks!

  18. As always the cry for veganism misses critical points. What about the human non-edible part of say, soybeans, that cattle get as feed? It’s not like they get predominantly what you would or could have eaten. That wouldn’t even be possible. Cows get the fibrous waste first and foremost. And they turn it into meat, fat – calories – and cow dung – fertilizer. Fetilizer for what, you ask? Vegan food!

    Not even speaking of the soil regeneration practice that involves ruminants. We will absolutely need cattle even if everybody in the world went vegan. That’s a reality you can’t change because of morals. There are areas that are dedicated grasslands, and can’t be farmed. Furthermore, food waste can be fed to pigs and chicken. The future isn’t vegan. It may have a smaller meat consumption, and more high quality meat. I certainly hope for that, as animal factories are a disgrace.

    Realize that by trying to evoke emotions, you move the debate away from a rational point of view. People will immediately become defensive, and understandably so. You’re a vegan, yes? Well imagine somebody criticized your habit of eating exotic foods from far away, like coconut oil, avocado, soybean, palm fat. Would you react defensively? I know I would.

    How about this argument: animal factories are cruel. Meat is cheap but the quality is low and the cheap meat is packed with substances nobody should eat. A plant-based diet offers fewer calories with good satiety, antioxidants, secondary plant metabolites, and if you eat high-quality animal products you don’t even need to worry about certain nutrients. More plants, less meat, but a higher quality. How does that sound? Do you think that argument will make people defensive?

    But vegans can’t do that, because meat = bad, end of story. So the discussion ends before it began. That’s not going to progress us anywhere. It’s going to end with government mandates, that will lead to violent pushback.

    I say, do it slowly. Make use of the studies of meat and cancer, but STOP calling it a carcinogen. STOP phrasing it like meat is bad and it’s going to kill us all through tumors and hellfire. That’s for low IQ children. Instead, speak about the benefits of plants. Win their hearts. Realize that people want to improve their lives. But they don’t react well to fearmongering. Lead by example, or don’t lead at all.

  19. So you just avoid my argument, erect a strawman and attack that? Bit disingenious

    I live on a farm with cattle.
    No spraying. No mice (well, like one or two in the house each year). Grass fed beef, which is the *norm* here in Australia and most of the world, that isn’t america and stupid bits of europe, is easy to get and was the ONLY beef for most of human history
    You got an issue with factory farming? attack *that*, it fucking sucks…as does monoculture crop farming. And yes, I do in fact only eat organic free range the majority of the time, not because I’m rich, been homeless for 20% of the last 3 years, but because I *prioritise* it.

    You are full of shit on this one, eating grains kills way more animals than just eating pastured beef, and your 20g of protein nonsense is just that, nonsense, I don’t eat grass, and this land would be pretty hard to grow crops on, other than smaller patches which we can anyway, alongside the cows.

    As to “why not elephants”: because elephants are much smarter than cows, or mice, whereas mice seem to me smarter than cows, or at least similar level (literally made friends with a smart ass house mouse and hand fed it 2 weeks ago, I like cows too, but no way are they much smarter than mice).

    Long story short: You are virtue signalling, while poisoning yourself, because you can’t handle the truth: Eating anything you didn’t grow yourself almost undoubtedly kills many animals, in horrible ways, so make the best choice YOU know how to, with YOUR knowledge, but stop judging others who aren’t burying their heads in the sand, ignoring the larger death toll they are causing, while they starve themselves of nutrients.

  20. the upholding of individuated selfhood is in practicality manifested and maintained in the belief and ensuing action that other things are separative from one’s self and must die or be sacrificed in order for one to continue to uphold one’s own individuated existence

  21. All our local farms in rural Somerset have grass fed livestock. I’m thinking we should be travelling miles to eat meat fed on grain and soya no? Even tho’ such meat is far less nutritious, and as carnivores, almost ALL our food is local with no air miles whatsoever. The only foods I regularly by in a supermarket are butter (have a fancy for French President) and coffee. All the rest comes without barcodes, and add to that, rotational farming with livestock and arable has shown to be carbon neutral (not that I give a shit about CO2 in the atmosphere, the more the better so far).

    Breakfast. Local venison sausages, local smoked streaky bacon, local golden yolked eggs. All from the same farm.

    Not to mention my wife and I shed pounds without trying when going Carnivore and dumping carbs and vegetables, feel better, and have had a palpable mood uplift.

    Why not try it?

    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-meat-diet

  22. Right. Let’s eat grass, soy and carbs so we all become soyboys and cucks. Then the governments can lock us down and jab even harder and we won’t resist.

  23. The few times I tried Keto or carnivore I felt very very stressed and angry. I remember caving in after less than a week on keto with a large bowl of spaghetti and feeling like I’d just injected smack. My whole nervous system completely relaxed. I get the impression a lot of these carnivore/keto guys on Twitter have fairly high stress levels. They seem to have a strange obsession with mocking bald men while obsessively researching the subject themselves which kind of makes me wonder…

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