craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

i was kidding abt silicon if that wasn't clear

lol

I being this up a lot but it's not even nec environmentally friendly to consume the same shit just ~local~

it is environmentally friendly to just consume less shit tho

bring

is that just based on that food article about locally sourced meat?

well food is where it comes up for discussion most often (esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad) but it's gonna be generally true w/ lots of things. 100,000 local axe-makers aren't necessarily better for the world than one big axe factory in china. not buying axes is!

tbf axes are surely one of the things people only buy when actually needed

Not necessarily
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/garden/01peter.html?_r=2&src=twr&pagewanted=all

(esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad)

not so sure about urban agriculture - I think the thing with locally sourced meat is that protein sources like animals are going to consume a lot of resources and emit a lot of greenhouse gases, such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale, and that the savings in fuel and transport didn't necessarily outweigh the initial carbon emissions.

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!

where's an axe murderer when you need one amirite

xp

such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale

um this is not how this works

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

patrick bateman totally owns one of those axes

lol

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory

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

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

*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.

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.

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.

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

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

and then yeah cows are not chickens etc

I don't really eat beef, why do I care...

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...?

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

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!

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

you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)

why do I bother

otm

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

lol delete the "at least for cows" part

it just seems weird to see smart people arguing for industrial-scale factory farming. like wtf guys. it's a disaster.

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.

you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)

why do I bother

― 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.

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

inside = instead

what is happening to my brayne, too much meat probably

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

DAYO STOP EATING MEAT YOU'RE KILLING THE PLANET AND YOUR CHILDREN AND THE PLANET'S CHILDREN

rip planet's children ;_;

I eat a tin of sardines every week, I have cream cheese too, I guess that's about it

if we all switched TO a standard sedan

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/2100/2112/sedan_1_lg.gif

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

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