• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Cowspiracy documentary: factually accurate?

freedy said:
Farming is bad. Livestock or cropping.

By removing the need for a nomadic life, humans can sit around and think, and make fires, and melt rocks, and make swords and nuclear weapons. Farming has allowed humans to be more destructive than ever.

Hunter gatherers did not have the time to make weapons of mass destruction.

Conversely, farming has allowed the human population to go from 2 to 7,000,000,000
Click to expand...

Actually, early nomad/hunter/gatherer groups probably had a lot more free time than we do. Gathering or hunting food that is laying or wandering around is far easier and less time consuming than farming for food start to finish. They only really had to worry about living in an area where food was available, and moving to avoid overuse of an area.

The shift to farming probably came around not out of a desire for less work, but out of a desire for predictability. Spending your entire life not knowing if you were going to be starving to death six months from now can be somewhat unnerving.
 
Random said:
Actually, early nomad/hunter/gatherer groups probably had a lot more free time than we do. Gathering or hunting food that is laying or wandering around is far easier and less time consuming than farming for food start to finish. They only really had to worry about living in an area where food was available, and moving to avoid overuse of an area.

The shift to farming probably came around not out of a desire for less work, but out of a desire for predictability. Spending your entire life not knowing if you were going to be starving to death six months from now can be somewhat unnerving.
Click to expand...

With farming, a few people can work to provide food for a lot of other people. Those people, in turn, may have other jobs to support the community. Maintaining a "farm" may be less overall work than walking around everyday looking for food, especially once the farm is established.

Hunting and gathering doesn't guarantee always having food (of course farms can fail as well). There may be days where you hunt looking to replenish your supply and find nothing. That's a time killer and physically tiring.

Well we have no proof either way.
 
To summarize

There were some facts (mostly scientifically based best-guesstimates) presented in the film. None have been convincingly refuted.

There have been suggestions that:
  1. veganism is a religion
  2. humans can't be healthy without meat
  3. only rich first-world citizens can afford to not eat meat.
...for which, no evidence what so ever has been provided. The last two being complete nonsense. And...if a religion said we should breath air, would that be a reason not to?

If the film is 50% correct, we can reduce our greenhouse footprint by 25% (as well as mitigating other related environmental damage) - the single most doable contribution anyone can make - today - and save money doing it.
 
Is it 50% correct? Does that stand by itself or are the issues so interrelated that the poorly done cripples the ok stuff?

But the huge elephant in the room comes by way of unexpected consequences. You want to be careful when setting out to modify the biosphere.
 
Googie said:
There were some facts (mostly scientifically based best-guesstimates) presented in the film. None have been convincingly refuted.

There have been suggestions that:
  1. veganism is a religion
  2. humans can't be healthy without meat
  3. only rich first-world citizens can afford to not eat meat.
...for which, no evidence what so ever has been provided. The last two being complete nonsense. And...if a religion said we should breath air, would that be a reason not to?

If the film is 50% correct, we can reduce our greenhouse footprint by 25% (as well as mitigating other related environmental damage) - the single most doable contribution anyone can make - today - and save money doing it.
Click to expand...

Don't care. I'm eating a cheeseburger tonight.
 
Jrrarglblarg said:
Veganism is a bourgeois diet only sustainable with wealth and access to a global marketplace of alternative protein/amino sources.
Click to expand...


This is one of the greatest sentences I've ever read. Thank you for that. :thumbsup:
 
Maybe a crazy idea, but bear with me.

Whether the facts in the film are accurate or not, everyone in this thread agrees that livestock releases a significant amount of methane into the atmosphere.

At the same time, we're pumping up natural gas (aka as methane) made from 300 million year old critters for our heating and production of electricity, and in the foreseeable future this use of methane will not be eliminated.

Why don't we capture all that methane from livestock and use it instead of the natural gas we pump up? That would eliminate a lot of unnecessary methane release into the atmosphere.

Dairy cattle over here is for a large part holed up 24/7 in their stables, with computerized automatic feeding and automatic milking machines. Additionally capturing their farts shouldn't be too difficult, I'd think. Let's not even go into how pigs and chickens in the intensive bio industry is holed up.
 
Ambrosia said:
You are conflating the whole sandwich with the actual burger. A McDonalds hamburger patty is 100% beef.

How they define "beef" exactly is open to interpretation. Technically if it comes from a cow you can call it "beef" and different countries have different standards.

Writing it as you have makes it sound that McDonalds put filler into their burgers (where else would the carbohydrates come from?) They don't. They can be very sketchy about the fat content of the burgers they use, or which exact parts of the cow get minced, but it is all cow.

From a nutritional standpoint it's the other crap that comes in the sandwich (white bread, very sugary sauces, high salt etc etc) that's bad for you. Then if you add on a sugary fizzy drink/fries on top it gets a lot worse, the actual burgers themselves are pretty good, nutritionally. A little less than 50% of a USA Big Mac by weight is meat.

It's takes roughly 760 litres of water and 12kg of feed to raise 450g (1lb) of beef. [wikipedia]

A McDonalds 'Big Mac' burger patty weighs ~70g uncooked, a 'quarterpounder' is 112g.

[seriously, when are you going to start using the freaking metric system, it's infuriating]

How they worked out the 1 burger = 3000litres of water claim is a mystery.
Click to expand...

Cough. Technically is is still beef I suppose, but gross man

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092127/Jamie-Oliver-Victory-McDonalds-stops-using-pink-slime-burger-recipe.html

McDonald's have altered the ingredients after the Naked Chef forced them to remove a processed food type that he labelled 'pink slime'.
The food activist was shocked when he learned that ammonium hydroxide was being used by McDonald's to convert fatty beef offcuts into a beef filler for its burgers in the USA.

The filler product made headlines after he denounced it on his show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

'Basically, we’re taking a product that would be sold at the cheapest form for dogs and after this process we can give it to humans' said the TV chef.
Click to expand...
 
ddt said:
Maybe a crazy idea, but bear with me.

Whether the facts in the film are accurate or not, everyone in this thread agrees that livestock releases a significant amount of methane into the atmosphere.

At the same time, we're pumping up natural gas (aka as methane) made from 300 million year old critters for our heating and production of electricity, and in the foreseeable future this use of methane will not be eliminated.

Why don't we capture all that methane from livestock and use it instead of the natural gas we pump up? That would eliminate a lot of unnecessary methane release into the atmosphere.

Dairy cattle over here is for a large part holed up 24/7 in their stables, with computerized automatic feeding and automatic milking machines. Additionally capturing their farts shouldn't be too difficult, I'd think. Let's not even go into how pigs and chickens in the intensive bio industry is holed up.
Click to expand...

I did think about that once. You would need to keep the cattle indoors. Then somehow separate the methane from the air. I think that is the hard part. Maybe they need to compress the air, then cool it. This would liquefy the methane. Problem is that takes energy...

And it is not their farts you need to capture. It is their burps.
 
Much easier to "extract" methane from the poo using anaerobic digestion of course.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom