Meat has stuff in it that vegetable sources don't. (B12 and D3 vitamins, most notably. DHA and taurine...) Nutritionally indistinguishable from real meat is going to have to include those, which gets us into serious genetic engineering. (Which raises the question of who would be happy about salmon genes in their kale! Or the concept of arboriculture with beefnut trees.)
Anything you do to capture ecological productivity for your purposes kills whatever else would have used it, directly or indirectly. It doesn't matter if you're growing carrots or raising beef, something with nerves, eyes, and a spine ceased to exist for your dinner. It's possible to be bothered by the direct version more than the indirect version, but I'm generally with the pastoralists about this; there's a lot more ecological responsibility, especially in dry land (where water is the primary productivity constraint) in pastoralism and meat-eating than there is in irrigated crops or the kind of nothing-lives cropland we're increasingly seeing now. (The entire ecological guild of aerial insectivores, birds, bats, and bugs, are going extinct because there aren't enough bugs for them to eat. Not the only bad thing happening from agricultural practices.)
(My take on the "can't afford" is that wages are too low, not that sustainable farming is too expensive. Which I acknowledge is no immediate help to anyone.)
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Date: 2018-06-16 11:03 pm (UTC)Anything you do to capture ecological productivity for your purposes kills whatever else would have used it, directly or indirectly. It doesn't matter if you're growing carrots or raising beef, something with nerves, eyes, and a spine ceased to exist for your dinner. It's possible to be bothered by the direct version more than the indirect version, but I'm generally with the pastoralists about this; there's a lot more ecological responsibility, especially in dry land (where water is the primary productivity constraint) in pastoralism and meat-eating than there is in irrigated crops or the kind of nothing-lives cropland we're increasingly seeing now. (The entire ecological guild of aerial insectivores, birds, bats, and bugs, are going extinct because there aren't enough bugs for them to eat. Not the only bad thing happening from agricultural practices.)
(My take on the "can't afford" is that wages are too low, not that sustainable farming is too expensive. Which I acknowledge is no immediate help to anyone.)