Why our broken food system remains a climate disaster: ‘broiling the planet to stuff our faces’ | Climate crisis

8 comments

1. “Two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles, onions, obesity, heart attacks, litter everywhere, microplastics in our brains, tortured animals, deforestation, and extinction on a sesame seed bun.”

2. Look at any discussion on the obesity epidemic and you’ll see an endless variety of excuses to explain why people “can’t” make better food choices. From healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy (true based only on a single metric, calorie affordability), to food deserts (in a car-saturated culture like America that drives an average of 14,000 miles per year, it only impacts 1.7% of Americans who are car-less), to lack of time to cook (when people spend 5+ hours staring at screens every day).

   People are going to change their diets to save the planet when they won’t do so to save their own lives? Haha, no.

3. Supersize my meal, my body and the amount of heat and humidity that’s killing people.

4. Tax fat people more. Seriously routinely taki.g more than you need is greedy. Wasn’t this something that was frowned upon in society at one point ?

5. Coincidentally, it’s the same reason people will be starving to death.

   We are stuffing our faces now so other people in the future will starve to death. Literally stealing the future every day.

6. How is journalism on this so endlessly useless?

   > As so little funding and thought has gone into making our food climate-friendly, there is no obvious template for ramping up food production in a way that doesn’t eat more of the Earth.

   Yes their f-ing IS!! Dramatically cut animal ag.

   A vegan human population would use 76% less land agriculture. So let’s make it easy.

   Half animal ag production and replace it with plant ag and we can still return 37% of farmed land to nature. That’s about 150% the land area of the USA.

   The solution is right there.

   And no, it’s not dependent on fake meat companies FFS. Sure, they are useful but they are not at all necessary and they certainly don’t have to replace all the meat that is no longer produced.

   The answer is really remarkably straightforward. Stop squandering billions of hectares on animal ag!!!

   And if you want tust to happen at a macro level,
   – end all subsidies for animal ag and move them to plant ag
   – ban imports of animal products and feed for animals from land deforested in the last 50 years
   – run a widespread education program shoeing people the health, environment and ethical problems associated with animal ag*

   * if most people had to see what happens to animals on farms before they ate meat, dairy and eggs they would definitely buy much less.

   There are plenty of tools available to reverse the growth in animal ag. The problem, as usual is that governments are too captured by corporate interests to touch them.

7. What freaks me out even more than the food quality and growing/farming practices is that EVERYTHING is wrapped in plastic. The most fleeting material packed in a forever container. It’s truly insane to me.

8. You have to read all the way to the end of the article to get to something interesting:

   “Plant-based burgers could become cheaper, tastier and more convenient, much like solar panels are now far more efficient and economic than they were just a few years ago.”

   Plant meat failed mainly because of price. They thought plant milks worked so plant meat would as well, but plant milks are close to the same price as regular milk.

   We absolutely *can* get people to switch to plant based meats. Just make it much cheaper.

   Or make real meat much more expensive. Which is what will happen.

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