Answer for question 4248.

[franklanguage]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Personally, I don't get vaccinations because the flu shot contains mercury and things that don't make sense. I know I've probably been spared numerous cases of preventable childhood diseases thanks to vaccines, but at this stage in my life, I'm willing to wing it.

A woman downstairs from me has never had her teenage daughter vaccinated, but apparently doesn't understand the reason her daughter has never been sick is that she's protected by other people's immunizations.

I can't say more than this here because several years ago I was kicked out of an LJ forum for stating my views on vaccines—the forum wasn't about vaccination, per se—and since then I've been extremely cautious as to what kind of opinions I express here.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes, in fact, it was merely the outcry of an uninformed public that caused that.

I definitely get the eggs thing, though. I'd say that being a vegan is an excellent reason to look for alternatives.

I don't think animal agriculture is the MAIN cause of climate change, not directly, anyway -- I'd say that fossil fuel-based power generation, going back to the 1880s is the main cause. That lists 5.3 billion tons of CO2 as the animal agriculture contribution, which is not at all trivial, but it is dwarfed by the 300 billion tons of CO2 which coal-fired power plants create.

But it definitely doesn't help, and it's got a whole lot of other issues as well. I'm a meat-eater myself, but I limit it, and, whenever possible, use organically-raised animal products. Mainly for ethical reasons, but also because, well, sustainable agriculture is sustainable.

On the other hand, culturing vaccines in eggs DOES make sense. Eggs have been perfectly evolved to be a culturing medium -- that's what they do. They have evolved to be a thing which nurtures living tissue to grow. While people have come up with alternatives, largely for the benefit of vegans and of people with egg allergies, they're not any better than eggs: we've been designing a medium for culturing vaccines for, oh, about sixty years, but nature has been working on designing them for at least four hundred million years... we humans are smart, but that's a BIG head start nature's got on us... :)

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

But it definitely doesn't help, and it's got a whole lot of other issues as well. I'm a meat-eater myself, but I limit it, and, whenever possible, use organically-raised animal products. Mainly for ethical reasons, but also because, well, sustainable agriculture is sustainable.

Do you honestly think it's possible to feed all 8 billion people in the world on organically-raised, sustainable meat?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, I don't. My hope is to see factory meat farming replaced with some sort of non-animal based "meat" substitute -- either a "vat-grown-meat" concept, or reworking plant proteins to have the qualities of meat. I can imagine that it would be possible to get something like that at least up to the quality of factory-farmed meat, with meat from actual animals, raised humanely, being a luxury item.

I don't have to tell YOU how insanely inefficient it is to raise animals for meat. However, I think that, so long as meat-animals are seen as a special-occasion luxury, consumed no more than a couple times a week, or on special occasions, we can afford to have that be part of our world.

However, it's also true that some people find themselves responding well to high-animal-protein diets. Not everybody, of course, but it IS a thing that happens. And I think that it should be possible to create a meat substitute which is digested and metabolized like meat, but which doesn't take much more energy to create than plants do.

I expect that that substitute will be rather bland and simplistic, with a fairly boring texture -- but that it will be better quality "meat" than what is served in fast food and mass-production settings. Our McNuggets and Chef Boyardee meatballs will be created in a process that doesn't actually involve any animals.

A steak, on the other hand, or a roast goose, or other flavorful meat, will have to involve animals. Actually replicating all the variables which go into a real animal will be beyond our skills for generations, I think (although that's not the same as "never"). But because steaks and things like that are basically luxury items -- I tend to only eat them on special occasions, anyway -- I think that most of those eight billion people would be willing to have them be a "sometimes food", as Cookie Monster has started to say, and, with that, I hope and expect that it should be possible to manage it.

What I think is absolutely clear, and I suspect you would agree, is that factory farming has no long-term place in a sustainable world. It worked okay to feed four or five billion people, but it's reached its limits, and, from here, we have to either give up meat as a primary source of calories, or come up with some way of creating meat without animals.