Animal, Vegetable, or Whatever

With the Climate Cult demanding we stop eating grazing animals, transitioning ourselves to fake meat (and bugs) instead of real beef, in the name of preventing the climate from getting a degree or three warmer, causing us all to die in a few years, let’s discuss tradeoffs between digesting animal protein and vegetable matter.

Those who have spent much time around horses and cows know that they almost never stop eating if grass is within reach. A horse walking across a meadow will reach out to bite off a mouthful of grass if the rider allows it. Cows will grab mouthfuls of grass and go lie down in the shade under a tree to chew their cud, moving it from one stomach to another for hours.  Until they get up and wander off to fill their bellies again with more grass.

Grazing animals eat so much grass because vegetable matter has very little protein. Protein is what makes mammal muscle. It’s why Genghis Khan hunted and herded ruminants along his travels, and why his men defeated the local vegetarians wherever they went; they never lacked for milk or meat – animal protein – that made them stronger and gave them more endurance than those lacking in animal protein. In pre-mechanical combat, individual strength was all.

Does he look like a vegan to you?

It surprises, in the 21st Century, particularly among the Greens demanding solar power, that so many remain unaware that ruminants are solar energy storage systems. Solar power causes plant matter to grow; as plants grow, they turn that solar energy into matter. Grazers eat that solar energy converted to and stored as plant matter, processing it into muscle they then store and use to move around to live, work for us, make more ruminants, and to fertilize the ground wherever they go, nurturing more grass which, powered by sunlight, grows tall, storing more solar energy for another ruminant to store and make use of.

Humans consume this stored solar energy when eating beef, venison, rabbit, etc., allowing us to move, think, live, create. Animal manure and composted animal carcasses provide fertile soil to begin the cycle again as the sun enables new vegetable matter to grow and store yet more solar energy. In essence, animals we raise for food are organic solar batteries storing energy from the sun that we eventually use to grow, to live our lives, invent, explore, create, and procreate.

Grazing animals have digestion systems evolved and specialized to digest plant matter and turn it into useful protein. Humans, as omnivores, have different digestive systems, systems less-specialized for digesting plants. We process plant matter less efficiently than do ruminants simply because we also digest and process animal protein. The more specialized a digestive system, the more efficiently the plant matter consumed as food – stored solar energy – is turned into useful muscle, bone, skin, organs, etc. The less specialized, the less efficient.

Eating vegetable matter has certain physiological consequences. Again, if you’ve been around horses or cows, or read all the “bad” things about bovine burps and farts, you know that processing vegetable matter produces methane. If, for health reasons, you have altered your diet to consume more vegetables and fruits, you understand these consequences. If you’ve spent much indoor-time with vegetarians or their more aromatic cousins, vegans, none of this is news. We are not evolved to consume only plants.

Hilarious, right?

Scientists are working on altering feed to cause cows to create less methane, which is a good thing. But that’s a long process just beginning, and runs counter to the globalists demanding we eat fake, plant-based meat, or no meat at all to stop cows from destroying our world. But is our switching to vegetable matter really changing anything for the better?

Americans consume about 70 percent of their approximately 2,500 calories per day from plant matter, and 30 percent from animal matter. If we transitioned from 70 percent to 100 percent plant matter, an increase of 43 percent, it is logical to assume our methane output also would increase by 43 percent. Moving to a plant-based/fake meat diet would increase the human-expelled methane output of the United States from 332,000,000, to over 480,000,000 liters per day.

Removing the beef industry in America also would mean putting over a million Americans out of jobs and altering our health in unknown ways of unknown magnitude as we all stop digesting the food our digestive systems have evolved to digest, switching to digestive requirements for which we have not evolved.

Mr. Olympia he ain't.

Activities involving strength and endurance – from sports to military service to jogging or walking to stay fit – would decrease, further reducing the health of Americans, as well as our entertainment opportunities and ability to defend ourselves or our allies. To say nothing of the impact on industries as diverse as shoes, coats, and car seats, industries consuming leather and producing leather goods.

Does the road to reducing methane really run through rejection of animal protein?

Where's the Beef?

Where IS the beef? Prices may very well be keeping it out of your refrigerator and inflation has something to do with that. But there’s another factor in play, involving where the beef was before it hit the grocer’s shelves. The meat packing industry has consolidated in recent decades to the point where four companies control about 85 percent of the market. Pretty much everyone agrees that’s a problem, but bipartisanship only goes so far. The difference between Republicans and Democrats on this issue involves what to do about it.

Republicans urge President Biden to use the tools he has and enforce existing anti-trust legislation like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Clayton Act. Unlike President Trump, whose Department of Justice did indeed investigate Big Beef, Biden has carefully limited himself to criticism while taking no substantive action. He, or whoever comes up his talking points, is smart enough to know that five dollars per pound for ground beef is a bit exorbitant for most Americans. Don’t let those crocodile tears fool you though. The climate change crowd is cheering the trend and if there is one constituency that Dems are careful never to offend, it’s climate change alarmists.

And, yes, I'd love a burger, thanks.

The big four meat packers in the United States are: Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS SA and the National Beef Packing Company. The first two are American-owned and the latter two are Brazilian. Consolidation in the industry started in the late seventies, when the big four controlled about twenty five percent of the market. The industry was robust and decentralized back then, including many small shops (plants that process less than 500 head per week) scattered about the country.

Today, the small meat packer has all but disappeared in the United States. In their place, the Big Four have relied upon mega packing plants that can process thousands of head per day. In most industries, larger plants benefit from economies of scale, driving prices down. In the weird world of meat packing, it hasn’t worked that way, prompting just about everyone to suspect that if it smells like price fixing, it probably is price fixing.

Weirder still is that the prices that the Big Four pay to American ranchers for cattle has and continues to drop. Increasing imports of cheap beef from countries like Canada and New Zealand drives cattle prices down and gives the American rancher with little choice but to accept contracts with the Big Four that ties the rancher to under-valued pricing. So we have the unique situation of an industry in which the price of the raw material (cattle) drops, but price of the product (beef) heads in the other direction. One doesn’t require a degree in economics to understand that the increasing spread is making somebody a lot of money.

Reacting to the President’s criticism of the meat-packing industry, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem agreed with the President’s view of the problem, but was critical of his unwillingness to take concrete action to address it. Appearing on Hannity, a visibly frustrated Noem said:

He's willing to go out there and spend more money and pursue other ideas and not just do the basic job of government, and that's to make sure you're implementing the laws correctly, you're making sure people are following the rules, and his Department of Justice has every single tool to make sure that people aren't attacked under the situation that they're in today.

What causes a politician like Biden to talk the talk, but refuse to walk the walk? These days the answers are almost always either “sexism," “racism,” or “global warming.” Since we are not yet aware of people who choose to identify as bovines (but we of course defend their right to do so) the answer, by default, is indeed global warming. Again.

More than twenty years ago I wrote a tongue in cheek column describing the EPA’s comprehensive catalog of data with respect to cow flatulence. They have data classifying the gas-passing abilities of cattle by breed, by diet, by location and God only Knows what else. I started to speculate on how that data was acquired and by whom, before deciding that some things are better off unknown. And I jokingly observed that if were classifying cow farts, what’s next? Are we going to start regulating them?

Cow farts: who wants the job?

It was all great fun, but it was all unwittingly prescient. If the Dems can’t quite bring themselves to pass a bill regulating bovine flatulence – probably out of fear that the ensuing Kamala Harris giggle fit would force the session into the wee hours – they do the next best thing. They look the other way as Big Beef happily makes their product more and more expensive, reducing consumption, but who really cares so long as those beautiful margins continue to grow? Dems get what they want, fewer cows cutting the cheese and the Big Four getting some very happy shareholders. It is, from the Democrat perspective, a win/win.

For the record, according to the latest EPA Greenhouse Gas report, methane emissions from American cows contribute about 6,800,000 tonnes per year of methane to the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to about 170,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Sounds like a lot, until one realizes that annual worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions average about 50,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gas per year. Thus, Bessie and Elsie and their pals on American farms account for a little more than 0.3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Does reducing that tiny fraction to a slightly tinier fraction justify five dollar plus per pound hamburger? Joe Biden seems to think so. But then when you regularly shake hands with invisible people, you can pretty much believe anything.

Bugs: They're What's for Dinner

A billowing concern of some on the left is the exhalation of CO2 and the expelling of methane by cows. The Klimate Kult is concerned by the effect of cow burps and farts on the oft-disproved “greenhouse” effect and the warming of the planet. Keep in mind that even if the planet is warming (and no uncorrupted global temperature data supports this), scientists are looking for a planet about five degrees C warmer than earth for future human habitation because a warmer planet has more food, less extreme weather and is a better home for humanity.

The solution to cow flatulence by some, including Bill Gates, the owner of more privately-owned farmland in the United States than anyone else, is for us to eat insects instead of food. Let’s say we replace food with bugs. To appease the Klimate Kult. To pretend against all evidence that Anthropogenic Global Warming exists. To signal our virtue to the universe. How many insects would we need to eat to replace beef... real food?

We would need to slaughter around 363,000 crickets to get the same number of calories that comes from one slaughtered cow. But we slaughter 1.5 billion cows every single year, meaning that to get the same number of calories that we get from all the cows we slaughter would mean around 550 trillion crickets would need to be slaughtered instead.

[I]t would be basically impossible to quantify how many insects would need to be killed to replace the other 70 billion land animals, and around 1.2 trillion marine animals, that are currently killed for animal products every single year.

But there's a problem. Something of which many are unaware, evidently, is that insects feel pain. Those same folks asking (demanding?) we reduce the human population of the planet to save it, are worried about the moral considerations of killing bugs. Oh, the humanity:

[I]n the case of crickets, they have been shown to react to receiving morphine, staying in a box that was getting progressively hotter for a longer period than the crickets who were not given morphine. After five days of being given morphine, they even started exhibiting signs of addiction when they were no longer given the opiate.

So whilst scientific knowledge on insect sentience is still in its early days, what we already know about these animals makes their lives morally valuable, and makes creating a system that would end up slaughtering an entirely incomprehensible number of them, a serious moral concern that we are ethically obligated to avoid.

Hmm… And how do we feed and water 550,000,000,000,000 crickets? And house them in such a way that they are healthy and that they successfully reproduce? And care for their pupae? And dispose of the waste of half-a-quadrillion crickets? How many concrete (which releases CO2) buildings would need to be built for housing and nurseries and abattoirs for these bugs? What would be the impact to waterways of this huge amount of concentrated waste?

Bon Appétit!

What would be the electrical cost of maintaining an insect habitat for hundreds of trillions of insects? Would the carbon footprint of these huge bugatoriums be larger than that of the food they are “replacing?” Does anyone know? It’s vanishingly rare for the left to do a cost-benefit calculation on their various emotional cults.

How would we consume these trillions of bugs?

Now, you can order insect protein bars and cricket flour on Amazon. For those with a sweet tooth, there are cricket flour chocolate chip cookies.

The beef industry in America, calf-to-table, employs about 900,000 Americans, is the 47th-largest industry in the U.S., producing $30.2 billion of fresh beef, $4.8 billion of ground beef, $11.6 billion of sirloin steak, at a growth rate of 3.2 percent annually in 2022.

As someone who has worked in the birthing of calves, who has herded, roped, cut, thrown and branded calves and yearlings, has milked cows and slaughtered beeves, I have a bias toward steaks and burgers. The iconic American cowboy never will be replaced in the mind of a boy or girl, or on a Hollywood screen, by a cricket wrangler. And, no, that independent lifestyle that much of the world admires and which those who have tried it find hard to give up, cannot be replaced by cricket ranches. But mine will be deemed an emotional and adolescent response to a global crisis…. that does not exist.

Will Bill Gates and his pals at the WEF get their tyrannical way, destroying the beef industry? Here’s an interesting thought: Elon Musk just offered a significant portion, 16 percent, of his billions to change an industry. Makes one think of Bill Gates and his desire for us to eat insects and fake meat.

Did somebody say "fake meat"?

In America in January of 2019, we had about 94,000,000 cattle. The average price In April, 2022, for a 750-lb steer was $1,150. Assuming about one-third of those 94 million cows are three-year-old, 750-lb steers, Gates could buy the entire 2022 American beef production for $35 billion, or about 27 percent of his wealth, leaving himself a paltry $100 billion to live on. If he also bought the entire crop of yearlings and 2-year-olds at half that price, he would spend a total of $61 billion, just under half of his wealth of $132 billion.

This is a future desired by Gates and his WEF cronies. Making us eat fake meat and insects instead of food. For no reason other than they can, we’d have no more beef.

Bill Gates Says He Will Force You to Eat Fake Meat

Bill Gates states that rich countries should give up all beef in favor of synthetic fake meat, a transition that can be supported by changing people's behaviors or enacting regulations to shift demand.

Think about that.

"... or enacting regulations" to make us eat bugs....

Then ask yourself this: Who or what is going to stop him?

One Reduced Methane Emissions Burger, Please!

One solution to the "climate crisis," courtesy of a climatologically woke company that wants to disgust its customers and put itself out of business:

In case you think this is a joke, read on:

Burger King announced Tuesday that it has made a shift in its operations to ensure its cows fart and burp less to fight climate change.

The company — the second-largest fast-food hamburger chain in the world — said it added 100 grams of lemongrass leaves to its cows’ prescribed diet during the animals’ last four months of life to help them release less of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, according to a news release.

The new diet is said to reduce up to 33% of methane emissions per day, on average, in the months before they are turned into the company’s famous Whopper burger.

Think about that the next time you're in the mood for a Whopper and fries:

According to NASA, cows release more of the gas when they burp rather than when they fart. A methane-filled belch is the product of the conversion of sugars into simpler molecules for absorption into the bloodstream. A smaller percentage comes from the cow’s large intestine when released via fart, NASA said.

The “reduced methane emissions beef Whopper sandwich” is available in select locations in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, as of July 14.

NASA? What have cow farts got to do with outer space? Here's the real science, and from a "green" source to boot:

Ruminants, and particularly cattle, are habitually cast as climate villains, responsible for large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. According to a much quoted United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) figure, livestock are responsible for 14.5 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions.1 Eighty percent of these emissions come from ruminants, half being methane, and a quarter nitrous oxide.

As a result, there are innumerable scientific papers comparing the environmental impact of dairy and beef unfavorably with pork and poultry, with vegetarian diets, with milk substitutes, with test-tube meat and so on. Virtually all of these papers and the FAO’s figure of 14.5 percent are flawed because they employ a formula for equating the climate impact of methane emissions with that of carbon dioxide—through the unit known as “CO2 equivalent”—which is highly misleading.

Read the whole thing. In the meantime, this Burger King campaign sounds like BS to us.

Covid-19 Will Save the Planet!

Once you understand that the modern Left hates every single thing about your lifestyle and would be happier if you'd just stop driving your cars, heating your houses, cease eating yummy roast beef, and just die already, then you're ready to handle the American mainstream media, led by such publications as the The New York Times. Once a newspaper of repute, it's gradually mutated from a center-left, socialism-sympathetic daily bible for those who don't practice a real religion into a full-throated woke manifesto of craziness. Case in point, this precious PC essay by the poetaster novelist and food crank Jonathan Safran Foer, who teaches creative writing at NYU:

Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.

After some bien-pensant blather about conditions in the slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants that socialist agitator Upton Sinclair breathlessly reported in his novel, The Jungle, 114 years ago, we get this:

Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential?

And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change.

This is where you BS meter ought to hit the red zone. "An increasing number of people." Who? Where?

Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming. According to The Economist, a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based “meats” have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle.

Interesting that the vegans are always having to hide the icky stuff they eat and want to shove down our throats by disguising it as "meat." But here comes the kicker:

Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.

By this he means, of course, a panoply of Leftist prescriptions, including "climate change," animal rights, the working poor, the usefulness of pandemics to effect social change, the comparison of big American "factory farms" to Chinese "wet markets," our "broken relationship with animals," and our lack of physical need for animal protein, among other things.

With the horror of pandemic pressing from behind, and the new questioning of what is essential, we can now see the door that was always there. As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values. On the other side is not something new, but something that calls from the past — a world in which farmers were not myths, tortured bodies were not food and the planet was not the bill at the end of the meal.

One meal in front of the other, it’s time to cross the threshold. On the other side is home.

Unfortunately, that way also lies serfdom, lunacy and death.