
Will We Ever Stop Eating Animal Meat? - HBlix
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/will-we-ever-stop-eating-animal-meat/570874/?single_page=true
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sbinthree
Yes. As the price goes up, people switch to non-meat protein. Similar to what
is hopefully going to happen with fossil fuels and renewable energy.

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mtgx
We'll need a way to get the vitamins and minerals that we currently get from
animal meat, too. And people are already skeptical of pill vitamins (which is
likely what will be included with these new type of non-meat foods to make
them look just as healthy).

A lot of the foods have already had these nutrients destroyed through
processing (to resist more time on the shelf) or genetic modification (to
increase yield, etc). It's part of what's leading us to higher and higher
numbers people with chronic diseases, cancers, etc.

We'll see more of that as we give up "natural meat", too.

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DoreenMichele
Your remarks sound fairly _woo_ , yet not.

Most of the folks who are, say, antivaxxers firmly believe that metals,
pesticides and other chemicals are a primary cause of chronic illness. The
reality is that chemicals of that sort concentrate in fat stores in animals
and get worse the further up the food chain you go.

It is one of the better arguments for eating vegetarian.

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newscracker
(This comment is a reply to two comments here, just to make it easier for me)

The woo part in the GP’s comment seems to be a hidden implication that animal
meat is not processed or hasn’t had its nutrition destroyed or not been
genetically modified or not been fed “pills that people are skeptical of”.
There’s almost nothing “natural” about animal meat that’s sold in stores. And
hence the conclusion that some disorders would increase solely because of this
is false.

The technical term for your description of the concentration of certain things
increasing up the food chain is “biomagnification”. [1]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification)

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newscracker
I was amused that the article didn’t actually answer the title question
directly. The implication seemed to follow Betteridge’s law of headlines
though. [1]

The article does rightly note that people don’t care — “the moral and
environmental costs of meat register as real, yet ignorable; snowflake static
on the radar” — but this is not an American issue alone by any measure. I’ve
seen people from other countries with a similar mindset.

I also don’t think humankind will ever stop, wholesale or on an absolute
basis, doing anything that’s considered harmful in any way to anyone.

In the current scheme of things, it would probably be a combination of
capitalism, consumerism, and some environmental catastrophes that would create
some kind of a significant dent in animal meat consumption. That’s quite
unfortunate at many levels while having a significant negative impact on those
who’re usually helpless (human or nonhuman).

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

