okay, sorry shakey, I was misremembering the article. but here's the article that says that it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:43 (twelve years ago) link
Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.
the point is more that it doesn't matter if you're buying backyard chicken or outside chicken, the transportation costs is still gonna be a small % of the total GHG emissions of raising that chicken
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:44 (twelve years ago) link
*high fives self for working 'outside chicken' into a serious discussion*
it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.
there's no disputing that. there are a shit ton of variables involved in determining when locally sourced meat consumption is going to result in less GHG emissions than factory farmed meat, I would stay away from drawing any definitive conclusions.
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:46 (twelve years ago) link
here's the money quote, shakey
It is clear that even with the unrealistic assumption of zero food-miles, only relatively small shifts in the average household diet could achieve GHG reductions similar to that of localization. For instance, only 21−24% reduction in red meat consumption, shifted to chicken, fish, or an average vegetarian diet lacking dairy, would achieve the same reduction as total localization. Large reductions are more difficult in shifting away from only dairy products (at least on a calorie basis) but making some shifts in both red meat and dairy, on the order of 13−15% of expenditure or 11−19% of calories, would achieve the same GHG reduction as total localization.
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:47 (twelve years ago) link
like you're right that transportation is small portion of it, but meat factories emit a SHIT TON of GHGs just by virtue of their operations and their size and scale. Saying that factory farmed meat results in less GHG than locally sourced meat is specious reasoning.
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:47 (twelve years ago) link
I mean yeah, there are a shit ton of variables, and that's why those guys spent a lot of time studying those variables so that they could draw those conclusions...?
shakey it's gonna take 10 pounds of grain to get 1 pound of red meat no matter if you're feeding cows in a factory farm or a cow in a pasture
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:48 (twelve years ago) link
er left out an ALWAYS there
like a lot of it depends on how the locally sourced meat is actually raised/processed. Someone raising a chicken in their backyard, they're GHG emissions aren't gonna be increased very much - it doesn't take much (if any electricity) to keep a chicken coop, and the other major factor is feed (and where does that come from, etc.)
xp
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:48 (twelve years ago) link
and then yeah cows are not chickens etc
I don't really eat beef, why do I care...
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:49 (twelve years ago) link
1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory
this... just... waht this doesn't make any sense.
that report only talks about transportation, as far as I can tell...?
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:50 (twelve years ago) link
i don't know, shakey - a chicken is still an animal that's gonna need to eat probably at least 5 times its weight over the course of its lifetime
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:51 (twelve years ago) link
backyards = houses and cars and roads
if everyone in a city has a backyard to grow vegetables in, you have an environment that's less ghg-efficient in other manners!
― iatee, Friday, 4 November 2011 23:51 (twelve years ago) link
since when are we talking about cities only?
you can live in my city without a car? (I did for years...?)
you guys are throwing around all sorts of variables like they're certainties or givens when they are um... not
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:53 (twelve years ago) link
you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)
why do I bother
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:54 (twelve years ago) link
otm
― iatee, Friday, 4 November 2011 23:54 (twelve years ago) link
it just seems weird to see smart people arguing for industrial-scale factory farming. like wtf guys. it's a disaster.
everybody's got a roof, amirite
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:55 (twelve years ago) link
lol shakey, from my perspective it's not the factory farming that's the disaster, it's the fact that we've systematically built our food culture around animal protein
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:56 (twelve years ago) link
but locally grown vegetables ought to have a lower carbon footprint than produce shipped from south america, because the growing of vegetables doesn't really produce that big of a carbon footprint!
I think you have to look at this from the bigger perspective - like, the individual carrot I buy that was grown in brooklyn* might have a lower carbon footprint than the argentina carrot but could every city grow every vegetable that it wants to eat within X miles? no, there's gonna be economies of scale and better places to grow certain foods. w/ more transportation-externality type taxes certain things might actually become more economic to grow closer, but individual people 'buying local' is never gonna be enough of a thing to cause meaningful change. at the end of the day consuming less is still a million times more the answer.
*I do not eat brooklyn carrots fwiw
― iatee, Friday, 4 November 2011 23:56 (twelve years ago) link
yeah, that's true - another tragedy of modern food culture is the expectation that every vegetable/fruit is gonna be in season 365 days a year
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:57 (twelve years ago) link
idk, how hard is it to plan for winter? can some tomatoes and stuff during the summer. potatoes and onions last a long time in proper, nonrefrigerated storage. properly hulled grains last a long time too. preserve stuff, pickle it. apples last for months! canned sardines! guess people aren't too thrilled that they can't have yellowfin tuna 365 days a year though.
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, 4 November 2011 23:59 (twelve years ago) link
also shakey at least for cows I'm willing to entertain the idea that a cow or a chicken is going to eat the same amount of food/emit the same amount of GHG no matter if it's raised in someone's back yard or in a factory farm. if you're talking about 1000 cows, I don't think it's crazy to think that it might be cheaper to heat one giant cow containment unit than it is to heat 1000 individual barns.
I realize that factory farming is as inhumane and cruel and invidious as almost anything else that humans have done in history - hey, I've read fast food nation! but there's enough factors involved, like you say, that I'm not going to automatically assume that a locally grown animal is going to automatically have a lower carbon footprint than a factory farmed animal.
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:03 (twelve years ago) link
lol delete the "at least for cows" part
right but 'industrial-scale factory farming' is a bad thing but 'large farms that produce massive amounts of cheap food via economies of scale and allow most of our population to be arguing on the internet instead of working in the fields' is not a bad thing. that's not a defense of every aspect of how they operate, or even most of them.
― iatee, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:07 (twelve years ago) link
― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier)
yeah it's this kinda stuff that's just like, okay fine, but you know what else you could put on a roof in san francisco? 10 more stories so people could live there. and maybe one day a million people will live in san francisco. or even two million. until then the nimby-environmentalist rich people imagining sf as some garden-city dreamland is pretty tragic cause it's one of the only places people can live in semi-density in the country and there's plenty of farmland in the metro area.
― iatee, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:13 (twelve years ago) link
anyway I tried to do some more research but got tired and lazy so I just found this nyt article inside
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html
To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
also just rummaging around on the internet the lowest energy input to protein output ratio I could find was 4:1, which was for chickens, but that's still pretty inefficient, you could use that feed and feed people with it instead
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:21 (twelve years ago) link
inside = instead
what is happening to my brayne, too much meat probably
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:23 (twelve years ago) link
fwiw I used to drive to work past a home that had two potbellied pigs and they'd always be out in the front yard grazing and oinking their way across the grass. I'd imagine those people never had to mow their yards! I doubt there's a net gain, but maybe we could hire out some artisanal goats to wander the yards during the day and their owners could make some awesome goat cheese.
I'm just spitballing but really, the factory farms vs other farms thing is pretty much a question of factory farms being pretty fucking braindead at this point in the game. Really, there are innovations and ideas every fucking year that would make large-scale farming more ecologically feasible without really economically compromising the operations.
Not sure how we got here from products of dubious quality being created by "craftsmen" but whatevs
― mh, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:26 (twelve years ago) link
DAYO STOP EATING MEAT YOU'RE KILLING THE PLANET AND YOUR CHILDREN AND THE PLANET'S CHILDREN
― mh, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:27 (twelve years ago) link
rip planet's children ;_;
I eat a tin of sardines every week, I have cream cheese too, I guess that's about it
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:31 (twelve years ago) link
if we all switched TO a standard sedan
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/2100/2112/sedan_1_lg.gif
― mark s, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:38 (twelve years ago) link
I guess we are talking about this in a craftsmanship thread because it's pretty convenient to convince yourself that you're doing good for the environment by eating a grass-fed beef burger with artisanal american cheese or locally smoked hickory bacon when really you would do a lot more good for the environment if you refrained from eating that grass-fed beef burger and had a carrot some hipster grew on a rooftop in Brooklyn instead
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:39 (twelve years ago) link
fwiw there are areas where grass is everywhere and I think a handful of cows grazing over a few square acres really isn't what's blowing the planet's resources. If you're just eating those items, and mostly refraining from meat products otherwise, you're probably fine
― mh, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:41 (twelve years ago) link
yeah but how often does that kind of situation exist irl. are you the guy who butchers the cow?
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:47 (twelve years ago) link
if so, what kinda axe do you use?
― iatee, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:53 (twelve years ago) link
1000s of people with animals in their backyard are unlikely to create the lakes of shit that factory farming tend to produce.
― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:55 (twelve years ago) link
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, November 4, 2011 11:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark
my man
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:55 (twelve years ago) link
that is true, but I was only talking about GHG. xp
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 00:57 (twelve years ago) link
Let's have some good locally-sourced vodka and discuss this into the evening.
― your way better (Eazy), Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:01 (twelve years ago) link
that's not because of some inherent flaw that a larger farm has, it's due to the fact that we poorly regulate these things and large farms don't have to pay for their pollution.
but my main point is that if you incorporate every single increase in ghg that comes w/ living somewhere w/ a backyard large enough to sustain you (your commute every day, the path of *every single thing you consume*, etc. etc.) the marginal environmental gain of that chicken in your backyard doesn't seem so impressive anymore. this is different if you're, idk, some old man in the middle of nowhere who leaves his self-sustaining farm once a year. anyway if you already have a backyard then yeah, why not, it's not like what you're doing within that limited context is *bad*, I was mostly talking about the 'let's turn cities into farms' fad.
― iatee, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:16 (twelve years ago) link
"yeah, that's true - another tragedy of modern food culture is the expectation that every vegetable/fruit is gonna be in season 365 days a year"
thanks to global warming though you will probably be able to buy canadian pineapples in 20 years or so. brooklyn banana farms! we must have faith in the future.
― scott seward, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:22 (twelve years ago) link
and hepcats in brooklyn will totally be reviving long-forgotten heirloom banana varieties! the kind you could get before dole came along.
― scott seward, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:23 (twelve years ago) link
you'll have to dodge all the lunatics wielding artisanal axes during the 130 degree summers, but it will be worth it for that old world banana flavor.
― scott seward, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:24 (twelve years ago) link
Skot you are a national treat.
― WE DO NOT HAVE "SECRET" "MEETINGS." I DO NOT HAVE A SECOND (Laurel), Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:28 (twelve years ago) link
i'm kinda freaked by the weather.
― scott seward, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:30 (twelve years ago) link
was etsy the seventh sign in the bible? did not read too long.
― scott seward, Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:31 (twelve years ago) link
q: does anybody know where I can find a locally hand fermented boombox, I need one for this look I'm putting together
― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Saturday, 5 November 2011 01:37 (twelve years ago) link