Submitted 4 days ago by Talonflame@lemmy.cafe to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Ive looked into this a little bit before, and while insects have theoretical advantages, its actually really difficult to beat chickens for turning feed into protein. Beef is extremely inefficient by nature, but theres a lot of technical hurdles between us from an insect meat world.
The optimization in mass production should meet chickens at least roughly for this to work out. Though also interesting would be the health of the insects. I know nothing about that, but maybe we wouldn’t need that much antibiotica as with meat mass production.
Anything that gets reduced, banned, restricted or anything like that, will be available for the rich as it always has been. So most definitely the rich will be eating beef and endangered species like before. You can get anything with money and influence in this world.
One has to imagine a future where one of sevetal things happen. Two possibilities come to mind.
Unlikely - a vast majority of landscapes in Europe, Asia and the Americas are defined by grazing and so far we are not even remotely close to producing a milk alternative for cheesemaking, which is a cultural staple in a lot of countries.
So there will likely be some meat. BUT: That wouldn’t mean that we as a planet need to reduce our consumption massively, increase prices in a way that it is unfeasible for most people to consume actual beef a few times a year and supplement it with lab grown meat and insect protein as well as vegan alternatives.
That would still lead to super rich being able to eat beef every day,yes.
But that is absolutely not our problem - the problem is that people are super rich…the beef consumption of them is a mere drop in the bucket of their bad footprint on our planet and society. ELMO alone has a larger CO2 flight footprint per year than his meat consumption will ever cause,even if he eats half a cow every day for his whole life.
That’s nuts.
I mean nuts are a good alternative.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Insects are a more eco friendly source of protein than cattle, and cattle might become more expensive due to the effects global warming and the potential taxes that could be placed on emissions, but there are plenty of other protein sources and there isn’t some big plan.
The government. That’s where taxes go. You can, in turn, look up your country’s budget breakdown to see where it goes from there.
I don’t know where you are from, but usually, taxes are a way to put money for the community and to redistribute it. In France, it happens with our social safety (health, unemployment, allocations) and to help companies (there is a lot to discuss about this specific point, but it is outside of scope).
Within a liberal economy, you don’t want to forbid abruptely, so you increase the price of something polluting to finance a greener economy.
Now, why this does not work is because capitalism is broken and sending us all to death in war and global warming and because we have corruption problems be it in France or the USA or wherever.
The german government had an interesting idea for that. Collecting all the emission taxes into a common fund (like sales tax on each item) and then paying that back to the citizens, the same amount to everyone. If you get the emission pricing right, then rich people (who emit more through their life) will pay more tham they get, while poor people will profit from it.
Though the system is not yet active (because of shit financing tricks that got stopped by the courts and the current inability of the government to actually pay that money out to the citizens)
By definition if it is “banned” then no one gets to eat it, not even the rich.
What might cause that scenario is if meat is very expensive. This was the case for much of human history anyway.
Legally, yes. But laws get broken all the time.
You’re getting a lot of flak, but this is sort of the plot of Soilent Green, without the twist. With explosive population growth, it’s not an impossible scenario.
What’s the question, though? Is it possible? Sure, anything is. Why insects, though? There are plenty of other sources of protein, and today vegans (for whom eating even insects is streng verboten) can build healthy diets, even if they have to work a little harder and be more conscious about it. Insects would be yet another level of inefficiency in the system: it’s nearly always most efficient to get nutrients from the most base layer, plants (or fungus, whatever). If all you’re going for is pure efficiency, plants do it all. You may want to kill yourself just to end the culinary misery, but we’re not taking about pleasure or quality of life, only efficiency and base dietary needs.
To Vegan pioneers: Let them cook! Already tasted good vegan burgers and sausage.
I don’t think banning meat will ever happen. Thats not really how that usually works. Though it will get more expensive. And actually currently the meat industry is heavily supported by governments to keep meat cheap enough for poorer people.
And we won’t solve climate change just with eating insects in the same way we won’t solve social justice issues just with keeping meat prices low.
We need to do multiple things at the same time. Finding and developing good food options, that are not as taxing at the climate as meat (especially cattle) is one good step, while doing other things against climate change. And we can work towards social justice by heavily taxing the rich, using that money to fund public goods and services mostly used by the workers.
Eating meat vs insect based products is not the socialist hill to die on, I think. There are better ones.
As a vegan it just feels like people will do anything to not stop eating meat. It’s literally not hard—it’s beyond me why anyone would switch to insects to own the vegans.
The price of meat is currently artificially lowered by several factors, including government subsidies and lax regulations. Correcting that would be good for everyone, even if it made meat a “sometimes” food for everyone but the rich.
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You are asking a question no one can’t answer since it is in the future.
You are taking it as a given that the government will ban meat.
I don’t feel like this is a good faith question.