Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
~~AI slop summarizing generic pro and anti vegan talking points. Cool cool cool. This is the state of journalism in the year of our Lord 2025.
Do better, BBC.~~
Edit: My bad. This article was actually from 2017, predating the AI boom - so it's human constructed generic pro and anti vegan talking points. Still sucks tho.
This article is from 2017.
Wow. I didn't catch that. It looked so much like AI slop I didn't check the date 😆
Possibly AI-generated but then it's presented as a summary of the linked article, which is decentish quality. (Assuming that the content is accurate and informative, personally I don't much care if it's written by a human or non-human intelligence, that seems to me like a religious distinction.)
That said, there's a complete blooper in the original (also summarized in the "AI slop"):
Some farmers could also be paid to keep livestock for environmental purposes. “I’m sitting here in Scotland where the Highlands environment is very manmade and based largely on grazing by sheep,” says Peter Alexander, a researcher in socio-ecological systems modelling at the University of Edinburgh. “If we took all the sheep away, the environment would look different and there would be a potential negative impact on biodiversity.”
This is just balderdash. It's precisely the sheep farming that's preventing the natural regeneration of the Scottish uplands into more biodiverse forests. It's become a classic polemic issue, pitting urban greens against conservative rural types. Disappointing that the Beeb should take sides so egregiously like this.
imagine the world going capitalism-free
Carnism and capitalism rise and fall together.
Just want to mention to anyone reading that plant-based meats have come such a long way, and if you haven't tried them, please do!
Impossible meat is astonishingly good. All of it. I haven't tried something from them I haven't liked. The meatballs, chicken nuggets, burger, steak bites, it's all almost indistinguishable from the real thing, even though it's soy based.
Quorn is an older vegetarian alternative made from a mushroom/fungus, and is usually quite a bit cheaper than Impossible meat, sometimes half the price. If you cook the ground beef or chicken cubes with a Beef or Chicken flavored stock (Marmite is a great vegan alternative for beef stock), is also tastes extremely good (basically no flavor of their own, they'll just absorb what you put in it).
Seitan is a really good affordable option, even cheaper than Quorn if you make it yourself from wheat gluten flour (lots of good recipes on youtube, even for a ham-like style!)
Using these alternatives makes it so much easier to switch away from real meat while still being able to use all of your existing meat based recipes. I've been able to make chili, lasagna, goulash, beef lo mein, beef stroganoff, burgers, and more with these alternatives, and I genuinely couldn't tell they weren't real meat. My family were heavy meat eaters their entire life, but after finding those 3 alternatives, I've been able to switch them entirely off real meat, which I never would've thought possible, that's how good these things are.
Full agree - meat substitutions make this transition extremely easy, you can find a drop-in replacement for almost anything and essentially eat the same stuff you did before. I wrote a list of favorites a couple years ago, it's pretty specific to local stores and I'll admit I forgot some of these existed, maybe my local shops stopped carrying them? https://slrpnk.net/post/1614342. Some local restaurants make absolutely amazing fake meat in-house with seitan (can you tell I live in a big city?) and I've been meaning to find some good recipes for that.
Around here the grocery stores often split meat substitutes between the vegetables section and the freezer section. So if you can't find something and it doesn't have to be frozen, check if they jammed it in between bags of lettuce or something.
I'm not even vegetarien but sometimes I buy these as a treat for myself.
Instead of this soporific (possibly AI-generated) summary, the article that should have been posted is the one it links to. Which IMO is mostly a fair and accurate overview of the subject (except for the line about sheep farming somehow being good for biodiversity, which is a farmers' talking point and outright rubbish).
What a shallow article
Yeah.
If vegetarianism was adopted by everyone by 2050, the world would have about seven million fewer deaths every year – and veganism would bring that up to eight million.
I guess this counts only health issues caused by meat consumption. And only human deaths ;)
What I mean is of course there will be health benefits, disruptions to established food networks, environmental benefits.... Cool, I feel a High schooler could have come up with a similar article, especially with the thumb sucked scenarios it feels like.
Where is the juicy bits, like let's take cigarettes, could have written a similar article. Just now the end of cigarettes is in the horizon, maybe not fully but clearly in a terminal death spiral.
What alternatives are proposed and is the global supply chain able to change. Will we achieve meat free through taxation, like cigarettes, and what will be the effects not only on the poor, but the cost benefits for the poor through health gains outweigh the extra costs?
They touched cultural and religious meals, but will religions adapt and seize these practices just like slavery, or would there be an unintended radicalisation effect.
Like I said these are just questions I thought of within 5 minutes. I believe the writer of the article could even have prompted ChatGPT for interesting angles. My opinion, which I believe everyone is entitled to, is that the article is shallow and leaves a lot of potential left on the table