this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Science Memes
15752 readers
319 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nearly 8,000,000,000 humans require a lot of food. And it’s better that we eat livestock then depleting the local wildlife for nourishment. That’s a whole point of farming.
It’s still baffles me that anyone, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly thinks that this is a barbaric practice that must immediately end, despite the fact that this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years.
Because a bunch of pretentious, condescending jerks with some sort of food fanaticism should be able to bully everyone into their way of thinking.
Only that we waste a ton of space that we could grow crops for humans to eat instead of feeding it to animals and wasting 90% of the energy. So saying 8 billion people need a lot of food while arguing for animal agriculture is very contradicting. Not even talking about all the greenhouse gases and the way we treat animals.
Maybe you should engage with some of the arguments these pretentious, condescending jerks are having because your comment has the same energy but none of the arguments.
The problem is, as you describe, poor resource and logistics management. Not what we actually eat. But you don’t care about that. You have a quasi, religious viewpoint, and you hate everyone who disagrees with you just because they disagree with you.
I’m sorry, you’re religious food fanaticism has blinded you to more rational options for dealing with greenhouse gases and animal cruelty. Your black-and-white approach is, clearly, not convincing me enough people to make a difference. So maybe you should focus on something that will make an actual difference: stop being a domineering, asshole, and lecturing people on how they should live their lives.
Exactly. Vegans promote a false dichotomy due to their religious fanaticism, intentionally ignoring all of the ways we can already mitigate the vast majority of the problems of meat production through legislation and existing technology.
They're basically pro-lifers, pushing an extremist view of which lives people are or are not allowed to end.
Equating people not being all good with the mass suffering and slaughter of sentient beings with religious fanaticism sure is a take, sure is interesting how hot it is it is so many places though wonder what a big cause of that might be?
collapsed inline media
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4372775/ - keep on with your god given right to boil the planet though!
Blindly promoting the false dichotomy just like I mentioned, ignoring all of the research on the ways that technology and legislation can reduce the vast majority of the effects mentioned in the data you cite, while also clearly revealing your religious, dogmatic reasons for ignoring all of that research in the first sentence of your non sequitur screed.
Just like my crazy aunt in her anti-abortion Facebook rants. But do you have the self-awareness to realize that?
Nope.
Watch you don't eat too much of your false dichotomy, you gotta leave room in your stomach for all that animal slurry :)
Don't worry, I always leave plenty of room for my animal slurry. ^_^
This is the thing - all you need to do is suggest that everyone eating less meat would be good for the environment, and people like you utterly lose their minds. It's weird.
What are these "rational choices" you are speaking of?
I’m not a university professor, and you aren’t paying me for my time.
Do your own research. Don’t blame me for your ignorance.
So you don‘t have any arguments, then why are you complaining?
This would be the same logical contruction like: „There are rational choices to better the killing of kids, but I won‘t tell you, because you have to do your own research. My viewpoint is universally right, because I say so.“
It is interestingly funny to read something you are trying to attach to me, but instead is applying more to your messages.
I don‘t know how much hate you need to compensate conitive dissonance, but I wish you the best.
If you want to check for conginitve dissonance, here is the Wikipedia Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
How frightening this world must be for you when there’s not someone to spoon-feed your beliefs to you.
I would pity people like you, but you’re not worth it.
What is
5+4?lol
Go reread their comment and try to find where they are being rude. Your second paragraph is just an odd projection.
your* religious food...
Comment disregarded due to spelling error.
Try again.
That resource and logistics management problem is a direct result of people eating so much meat, the production of which is inherently inefficient for the purposes of feeding people. Of all the resources that we spend on maintaining and growing an animal, we only get back what goes into growing its muscles. The vast majority is wasted in maintaining the animal so that it doesn't shrivel up and die before slaughter. Scale back meat production and you get a lot more food for a lot less resources, energy and land. You can't get that efficiency otherwise. It's precisely about what we eat.
I'm almost impressed by how much completely unsubstantiated ad hominem you managed to cram in there. Personally I couldn't have guessed any of that from the comment you replied to. But if you wish to be taken seriously, maybe focus instead on the actual arguments next time.
That’s not really arguing against my point. YES, people should eat less meat, and part of the logistics problem is that too much is currently required. The obvious answer to that isn’t veganism, it’s ramping up the production of lab grown meat. We have an answer, and this is it. T-Totaling meat is just a religious zealot view of how to solve a problem that has better, more rational solutions.
I don't think that anyone in this chain of replies has argued for flat out ending all animal meat production. Sure, plenty of vegans are motivated primarily by animal ethics and thus want to categorically ban growing animals for food, but here almost everyone seems to be talking about the sustainability aspect of modern mass animal agriculture, myself included. Although less ethical scruples is a welcome byproduct in my opinion.
I'll take lab grown meat seriously when it's been proven to be financially competetive and most importantly scalable. Technofixes have a bad track record of turning out to be mostly just investor bait. Kinda like all the bullshit high-flying transportation concepts as solutions to problems where just slightly better urban planning and prioritizing public transit, cycling etc. would work wonders.
Plant based food on the other hand has been most of what we have been eating for most of history. It wasn't that long ago when meat was still considered a relative delicacy, back when scarcity necessitated efficiency. That's the kind of efficient, sustainable, healthy and local (so logistically simple) food production system we should try to strive for in my opinion.
It isn't a zealot view to want to cause less suffering. When you have a choice to not eat meat and you choose to eat meat you're the problem.
It is definitely a religious zealot of view that the only way to prevent animal suffering is to be vegan. Also, an extraordinary lack of imagination.
It seems unlikely that eating lab-grown meat, for example, will be as efficient, in terms of CO2 emissions, as simply being vegan in a reasonable time frame. And it is currently not something that exists in a reasonable scale, so it's not a "religious zealot view" to advance the current most practical, efficient, and easiest solution.
And some people who are vegan would not necessarily be against lab-grown meat, but it depends on who you ask
It is really telling how YOU tell ME what i believe, how I feel and how there is no sense in talking to me. Who really is the fanatic?
I really think you are just upset about all the downvotes (when i engaged there were none btw). Not my fault and i do not hate you or other people simply because they continue doing what they grew up with. I can however hate animal cruelty and i can call out bs when i see it.
yup we need to eat food. It does not have to be meat centric or involve meat.
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it's still valid to bring up as an argument, "X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years" is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and "waste" from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably ... but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.
The only people who believe that animals cannot be raised as livestock in a sustainable fashion are the closed minded food, fanatics known as vegans.
It can be done, but not with your limited imagination and viewpoint on the world.
The problem is that people like you don’t want a solution. You want to be able to simultaneously claim victimhood while also lecturing and condescending to the entire world. Veganism is nothing more than an addiction to the sense of superiority over others.
If you actually cared about greenhouse gases, or animal cruelty, you’d be willing to explore other options. But vegans are extremists. It’s their way or no way.
I (and most people), on the other hand, care about greenhouse, gases, and animal, cruelty, and all of the other downsides to factory farming, but I’m not so stupid, I don’t have a big chunk of my brain, scooped out by religious fanaticism, so I can actually see alternatives.
Dude.... you are literally claiming A) that I am vegan when I explicitly wrote that I am not, and B) that I am "not open to alternatives", when I myself mentioned two aspects concerning how animal raising can be done sustainably, only that that is not what our current system favours due to reasons of maximising profitability.
This subject is very clearly a sore point for you. It might behove you to figure out why that is, rather than spontaneously attacking people that are essentially siding with you.
Oh yes, your food-bad religious extremism is somehow my fault. Just another thing that vegans love about being vegan: false victimhood.
Go get your own identity. This one is boring.
You keep thinking these people have this as a religious view when they have told you they are not vegans.
Are you willing to reduce your consumption on meat to better all these negative things of traditional livestock farming, which you mentioned?
Are you willing to give up your false sense of moral superiority and stop judging people?
Didn’t think so
I mean, if you want to give livestock better living conditions, then you also must pay obviously more. This would reduce your consumption on meat, if you don‘t want to pay more. That‘s why I'm asking.
The amount of available meat to buy would also be reduced, because if livestock gets more room and freedom to live, there would be less livestock inside the farms and therefore less meat in the stores.
And look at that. It only took you two days to work out the answer for yourself.
I'm sorry, but you wrote your comment only one day ago, so it didn't took me two days.
I don't know If I can still assume that you are a rational being. So I wish you the best.
people need to eat, but do they need to eat THAT?
Its not as easy to go eat the wild ones, and people frown at eating from the human population. Those are all the options in the graphic.
well damn, i guess ill have to eat a shoe since there's only a picture of a shoe in my pantry
Good luck! Some of the soles can be a real challenging chew.
Or I guess if you want to be extra literal you could eat the picture?
Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don't need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they're somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.
Our economic systems only work with infinite growth because otherwise what would be the point of lending money if it won't grow interest. It's essentially a giant pyramid scheme. And that requires new blood to provide labour and consumers. This is incredibly dumb on a finite planet with limited resources, but that's mainstream economics for you.
Also if the population shrinks too fast, then the pyramid becomes unstable with not enough younger people to take care of all the old people (while also maintaining the economy).
The only reason that governments keep pushing for us to breed is because it feeds the capitalist engine which relies on a never-ending supply of laborers.
And, yes, all economies require laborers, capitalism is unique in how it consumes everything, even workers, as a resource rather than simply utilizing them.
Just because things are the way they have been for ages, does not mean they are correct.
It is a brutal, awful practice and completely unnecessary.
I am not being condescending or pretentious when I say these things. I understand that it is very, very hard to alter what you've done your entire life, and harder still to see the issues with those things.
Those 8bn humans could be sustained by a fraction of the environmental impact, suffering to life, and land usage if they were on a plant based diet.
lol
Excellent retort. Please share more of your insight.
This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, so believe me when I say that I'm only talking about myself here. Yes, humans have included meat in their diets for thousands of years, but the recent changes that I feel shift the paradigm are: the scope and scale of industrial farming, the brutal conditions animals now face, and the fact that we have a good enough concept of human dietary requirements that people can finally make the choice to remove animal products from their diets in a healthy way.
Human population needed to be fed 10+k years ago:
> 1,000,000vs now
10,000,000,000Which just means it has never been the way it is now. Those two numbers on a finite planet are represented by the pic perfectly.