craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

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

yeah but how often does that kind of situation exist irl. are you the guy who butchers the cow?

if so, what kinda axe do you use?

1000s of people with animals in their backyard are unlikely to create the lakes of shit that factory farming tend to produce.

*high fives self for working 'outside chicken' into a serious discussion*

― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, November 4, 2011 11:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my man

that is true, but I was only talking about GHG. xp

Let's have some good locally-sourced vodka and discuss this into the evening.

1000s of people with animals in their backyard are unlikely to create the lakes of shit that factory farming tend to produce.

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.

"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.

and hepcats in brooklyn will totally be reviving long-forgotten heirloom banana varieties! the kind you could get before dole came along.

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.

Skot you are a national treat.

i'm kinda freaked by the weather.

was etsy the seventh sign in the bible? did not read too long.

q: does anybody know where I can find a locally hand fermented boombox, I need one for this look I'm putting together

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), Friday, November 4, 2011 8:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah I didn't bring up food in the first place because people think of food choices as an ethical issue I think even more than they do with local artisan axe choices, and there's the whole extra valence of you actually want to be healthy and feel satisfied when you eat. Also eating is required or you die. It feels like a related but distinct issue to me.

For my own part I forget to eat all the time and never know what to eat and then I get grouchy. I also like going out to nice restaurants and eating animals.

dayo otm all over this thread

meat is so delicious, think it might get better the further it travels

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.

WE HAVE A WINNER

Or more accurately, they only get slapped with a large fine when they fuck up so badly that they kill entire creeks/rivers.

dayo somewhat otm, but the "everyone stops eating meat and the system is fixed" solution is so obvious and irrelevant to what will ever happen in most countries that currently eat meat, let alone the US. Getting people to eat a lot less beef, more sustainably farmed chicken & some pork, and getting this whole fish mess sorted is going to knock out a good third of the prob

the glut of awful, pointless "white whiskies" that you can get now

whatever the fuck this is referring to it made me very glad I live far away from the Big City

The fifteen minute designer "moonshine" fad.

I think I missed my chance to make a mint on designer Mason jars.

this is my answer to everything but we should just make meat really expensive. and if all environmental costs were accounted for it already would be. we don't have to force people to be vegetarians and the idea that that could happen worldwide in the next 100 years is pretty lol. we just need mcdonalds hamburgers to be $20. voila. xp

Probably someone should post that times article about the death of authentic unique specialness or w/e

this is my answer to everything but we should just make meat really expensive. and if all environmental costs were accounted for it already would be. we don't have to force people to be vegetarians and the idea that that could happen worldwide in the next 100 years is pretty lol. we just need mcdonalds hamburgers to be $20. voila. xp

― iatee, Friday, November 4, 2011 11:18 PM Bookmark

Well we could start by not subsidizing corn, which is a lot of the feed for that hamburger.

btw those extinct bananas scott refers to make me get all misty-eyed, I will pay top dollar for artisanal banana

xp oh lol moonshine, yes I've seen the designer moonshine and had a lol from that

I said this on another thread, but I get annoyed with stuff where the handcraftedness is marketed as novel when it really isn't, like "Hey, let's take something ordinary like ICE CREAM but make an HIGH QUALITY VERSION with GOOD DAIRY" um that already exists and costs like half as much as your version of it.

sometimes they make weird flavors I guess

that's true. I was pretty ecstatic from momofuku's cerealmilk ice cream tbh

The Haagen Dazs (so authentic it has a made up ethnic-looking name!) "five" series is pretty good and about as mainstream commercial as it gets

They really need to bring back their green tea one

never mind, their website claims that this flavor is still made!

bbl, off to the grocer