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Ratbag Media <ratbagra...@gmail.com> (Dave Riley) writes (I am bringing seleted passages from Dave's email with my responses in the paragraph after his passages): > Hang on! 'Meat' is a commodity like everything else. I disagree. If we are talking of leaner lifestyles, different use-values must be treated differently. We don't want to restrict things that make us more educated or healthier. We want to restrict those things which we can do without without living a too impoverished life, and which allow us to reduce our footprint a lot. Meat consumption and air travel are rightly in the cross hairs as the main things which we must learn to use only sparingly. Further down you write: > That's a basic principle of human evolution: we eat what we can get. > Whether we kill or harvest it isn't the point. In rangelands the norm > has been to grow meat and eat it BECAUSE horticulture is not an easy > fit there. They are brittle landscapes. You are changing the subject here. I did not say that nomads in Mongolia should not eat meat. Of course they should, as long as they maintain their traditional lifestyles. But the masses in megacities in Africa or Asia cannot eat much meat. There are not enough Mongolias or Australias or Argentinas on this planet to feed them. Further down you write: > Every landscape needs animals. It is a ecological fact. And landscapes > have evolved in tandem with animals -- even our human farms. There is a reason why we differentiate humans from other animals: humans are too smart, we overwhelm the slow process of natural selection and trial-and-error equilibria. We cannot just satiate our hunger with the thing that tastes best or even that is traditional. We have to use our brains so that we don't disturb the balance which we have evolved even more than we already have. > As it happens, here in Australia the homo sapiens currently share a > continental space where there are 74 million sheep to 23.5 million > people with a further beef herd of 13.4 million head. > > Is that too much grazing? I have no idea how much cattle the Australian ecosystem can tolerate. I am sure it depends on how this cattle is being managed. But this is not my point. Even if you double the meat production in Australia, you will not produce enough meat for the billions in the emerging countries who can afford meat now. They must restrict their meat diet. The Chinese government has realized this. The next quote is not from Dave but from https://thinkprogress.org/united-states-meat-consumption-historic-increase-fccc1ebbf3aa#.2b2ddukl0 > This year, the Chinese government released dietary guidelines urging > citizens to limit their meat and egg intake to 200 grams — or around > 0.4 pounds — a day. (By contrast, the average American eats about 419 > grams of meat and eggs daily.) I am arguing that not only the Chinese but also the Americans should be satisfied with 200 grams of meat per day or less. This is a simple matter of equity, we all live on the same planet and must share what it can give. And if Australians produce 1000 grams of meat per day per person (only as a matter of argument), they should also content themselves with 200 grams and export the rest to those countries which so far have not been able to import meat because their populations were too poor. This is my idea of an equitable distribution of the limited resources of this planet. > So I don't get you point at all. That's why I just re-formulated it. I hope I made it clearer this time. Hans. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
