Schr?dinger's meal

Schr?dinger's meal


To save the world, we need to eat less meat.

To save the world, we need to eat more meat.

Both statements are true. At the same time.

Here's why.

We all agree that feeding pork and chicken with soy grown in the Amazon is a lousy idea, right? Well, if we stop that, then consumption of pork and chicken in Europe and China would have to drop quite substantially. Good.

We all agree that feeding cereals to cattle is a lousy idea, right? Well, if we stop that, then a lot of the industrially produced milk and beef around the world would not be available anymore and so their consumption would drop too. Good.

We all agree that ploughing up pastures every three years in order to seed new short-rooted grasses and dousing them with fertilizers and pesticides is a bad idea, right ? Well, that's the way an awful lot of ruminant raising is done. If that stops, those cows, goats and lambs won't be consumed. Good.

We all agree that ruminants is the best way of using low rainfall grasslands, right? And that multi strata polycultures are the best way of using high rainfall areas (yes, including animals such as pigs, poultry, snails and bees), right? Then consumption of ruminants raised in high-rainfall areas would have to drop. Good.

We all agree that regenerative grazing is the way to go, right? And, better yet, we have evidence that when it is done well, like at White Oak Pastures - a beef/poultry/goats/sheep operation in Georgia, USA - it grows a huge amount of high quality, healthy meat with few inputs in gorgeous ecosystems. So we need to consume more of that kind of meat. And if farming moves the right way, consumption of that kind of meat would rise. Good.

So we need to eat less meat, but we also need to eat more meat. Schr?dinger's food system.

Of course, when we open the box, only one of these answers can be true, just like when you open the box containing Schr?dinger's cat, it stops being alive and dead at the same time and very much becomes one or the other.

We just don't know which, in the utopian future where petrochemical agriculture has joined phlogiston in the dustbin of history.

We don't have the data to know whether, assuming most farmers can convert to the kind of production pioneered by White Oaks, we would produce the same, more or less meat than the biosphere-destroying industrial system produces today. We just don't know.

So, by all means let us salute the fact that meat produced the best way is carbon negative (yes, despite ruminant's methane burps), massively boosts biodiversity compared to cropping, and can even welcome wild megafauna right back onto the farm. Bravo!

But let us also mourn the fact that 90% of the milk, eggs and meat sold today are an absolute disaster from any perspective you care to mention - carbon, biodiversity, resilience or animal welfare. The argument that we need to radically cut our consumption of those animal products is sound, and very much so.

And let us mourn, too, the fact that the products of the petrochemical agriculture that is destroying the planet are not just used to feed animals destined to produce bad meat, but are also used as biofuels, as industrial inputs, and as human food. It is not just 90% of the milk, eggs and meat sold today that are destroying our world, but also 90% of the plant food we eat.

So just as we salute White Oaks and their ilk, let us also salute the world's agroforesters, polycroppers and permaculturalists. They, too, produce superlative, nutritious food while sucking down vast amounts of carbon from the air.

" It's not the cow, it's the how".

Brilliant slogan. It also works with the words "corn", "wheat", "apples", "oil palm", "almonds", "potatoes" or "carrots" replacing the word "cow".

It's always, always, about the How.

Consumers and governments too often fail to make a distinction between industrial and regenerative practices. We regenerators have to help them see this point, always.

Badly raised herbivores, being higher up the trophic chain, can do a lot more damage per unit of protein or per calorie they supply as food than badly raised plants can. A consumer will therefore do less damage by being a vegan eating glyphosate-drenched maize than by being a carnivore eating pork that was fed glyphosate-drenched maize.

Until most meat found in your average supermarket is regenerative, the right thing for the average consumer to do is therefore to avoid meat. If regenerative meat is available to you, enjoy! But sadly, it very rarely is - we regenerative meat lovers whisper the contacts of our suppliers only to our close friends, since supply is so tight.

The enemy is monocropping. The enemy is petrochemical agriculture.

That is why all land regenerators need to unite their forces: the carnivores, the omnivores and the vegans. Every time we take our gazes off the enemy to fight each other, we lose and they win.

Regenerators of the world, unite!

There are many issues to deal with and change. In the 19th century, food contained 30 times more energy than was used to produce it. By 1970, it was parity, and now, it takes over 30 times more energy to produce food than it contains in it. We can't keep this trend up for very long! Another issue is that if people ate according to their blood type it would have a significant effect on food use, and health. If all the 'O' blood types ate more meat and less grains or dairy, and the 'A' blood types ate predominantly grains and less meat or dairy, and the 'B's ate meat and dairy and less grains etc., [excessively simplified!] then it would make a difference. Most people eat too much meat of low quality and too much wheat etc. A lot of health issues are linked to blood type, due to eating the wrong things for your type. [ www.dadamo.com ] We would all be healthier eating less food of better quality. 80% of food sold in supermarkets isn't really food at all and is just a chemical product in fancy packaging that keeps the medical system in business. Even the best of foodstuffs merely looks like food on the outside but is grown on soil so depleted in minerals etc that it has next to no real food value. However, good food is costly!

Shen Ming Lee

AgriFood Fighter. Author. Human Being.

2 年
David Whitewood

Proven solutions to protect and clean pollution and harmful algae blooms from lakes, rivers and waterways

2 年

The world fuel crisis was already pushing up the price of nitrogen fertilizer to uneconomical levels. Andy, the traditional dairy farmer in the pub said that he had bought all he could afford. Ukraine is one of the largest ammonia producers in the world and Europe's bread basket and biggest sunflower oil producer (expect massive price rises of potato chips (PepsiCo)). Strange times necessitate change in the status-quo. Will I see an end to the 3 year sileage cycle and the end of glyphosate use as the norm. I wonder.

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Xenia Trier

Associate Professor in Environmental Analytical Chemistry at University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Section of Environmental Chemistry and Physics

2 年
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Robert Christie

Book Author: Holding It Together: Social Control in an Age of Great Transformation, first in the At the Edge of Illusion series

2 年

This essay cuts right to the heart of the matter. Regenerative agriculture is the answer to the destruction wrought by petrochemical agribusiness. So, get off your soap boxes and stop the speeches on individual behavior, and ORGANIZE to transform agriculture to harmonize with Nature. Then, eat whatever you choose of whatever is the product of ecologically sound practices that results from regenerative agriculture.

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