This is extremely important. Most people have a very skewed perspective on what it means to be in the global 10% or 1%. I think this paper would be much more impactful if the authors listed the calculations used for defining these groups in the Methods section. Ideally the cutoff for each group should even be in the abstract so people can understand what 1% or 10% even means.
The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut informed his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
Heller responded – “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . enough.”
where I'm from the drive them down the highway on horseback and load them up on trains and drive them to the slaughterhouse. the land is kept similar to when however many thousands of bison roamed on it. as opposed to the nearby cities whose parks are overgrown with invasive brush or trimmed with petrol tractors.
Even if this is true (and I've never been able to find credible evidence it is), what we're seeing now is just the upper bound of sustainable plant-based food production. As they scale it up and take advantage of technologies like precision fermentation, all evidence suggests this will continue to improve even further. Compare that to animal agriculture, where thermodynamic limitations on increased efficiency are strong, and most of the options to increase sustainability come at the cost of terribly inhumane practices.
If you did a blind taste test between Impossible and Beyond (or the McPlant), I suspect people would pick Impossible nine times out of ten. Writing off all plant-based meat at this point feels a bit like saying the Internet is a failure in 2002 because Yahoo is losing steam.
The seaweed diet is just the result from a single study that has yet to be widely replicated. I'd caution against putting the fate of the planet into the hands of miracle cures until the scientific process can do its thing.
Even if the seaweed diet does help, the fundamentals of thermodynamics dictate that eating animals will never come close to the efficiency of eating plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Cows, chicken, and fish spend most of their energy living (to whatever extent spending every hour of your day in a windowless cage can be called living).
You do understand that's because it's not meant to - and it's not actually a valid comparison?
That's the point: the animals do the work of the processing and concentrating protein, fat, and nutrients/amino acids into a source that is arguably a perfect single food source for human consumption (high fat red meat, in this case); yes, your gut biome has to adapt for it, and yes, some lineages of humans will not have evolved with access to meat or benefit the same from having some or mostly meat in their diet like some other lineages of evolution.
It'd be more efficient to just consume sunlight, if possible, rather than waste it to the plants too - if maximizing for pure efficiency is the answer.
And let's also not be blindly virtuous about plants when looking at the primary and harmful method of agriculture also of monocultures. The Sacred Cow documentary also presents a good case for the benefit and need of cows, not in factory farms, for being a necessary part of the ecosystem/life cycle for soil health - healthy soil that is needed for plants; or do we ignore some facts and wait 50-200 years to see what disastrous problems we encounter because we don't include all arguments, perspectives, to manage from an all encompassing holistic view point?
You can get them from the same place the fish get them from, algae! Like many micronutrients, fish don't actually produce them, they just accumulate them from non-animal sources. Unfortunately they also accumulate heavy metals, so they're not the cleanest source. Much better and more sustainable to go straight to the source.
