Bill Gates and his endeavors

#21

Is the issue the availability of grass or simply not enough space to be profitable? Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, by their definition, are profitable because they jam as many animals as possible into a small space. So, I think this has more to do with the economics and profit margins desired by the conventional producers/investors, not necessarily the supply of grass. I think you’d lose all your economies of scale and efficiencies by trying to turn CAFOs into pastured operations (i.e., no one would do it).

(jketoscribe) #22

I do not get this thing for fake food! If you’re vegan or vegetarian eat vegetables (the funny thing is, a lot of people I know who consider themselves vegans or vegetarians DON’T eat many vegetables. They eat grains and fruit mostly). What’s the point in making fake meat? It must have an incredible environmental impact in terms of getting all the ingredients, energy and water to produce. How does that help the environment? How will our bodies that evolved to eat REAL food respond in the long run? Didn’t we learn our lesson with margarine and Crisco?

(Chris) #23

My argument is that basic needs and things like food and healthcare shouldn’t be retail, but I might just be dirty commy.

And when I say healthcare shouldn’t be retail, I do not mean I think docs shouldn’t be well-paid. The hospital itself is a business and generates revenue in order to grow their top line. It’s a drivethrough of patient services, get them in, get them out, charge the shit out of them. Feed them expensive drugs.

(Duncan Kerridge) #24

It’s speed, it takes less than a year to feed up a cow on corn to be big enough for market, two years if they’re pastured on grass.

(Carpe salata!) #25

Meat grown in a dish? Who would know if you had genetically modified the cr@p out of it. A real animal would have two heads by then.

Do not want.

(Doug) #26

Damn it, Bill…

#27

I think we can see the effects of that now, which is destroying forest, ecosystem and running out of land as the grass area become stripped, lost of soil health and biodiversity overtime, the stuff going on in Brazil right now for example. This is especially because the pasture method used is wrong and poorly managed. Where as regenerative farming technique that employ controlled intensive grazing with alternating the feeding patches, cover crops, and alternating animals in the same area (pigs, goat, chicken all have their own functions) can improve the soil and grow more foods in a smaller area.

I read a while back that the USDA wanted to introduce a law to ban farmers of certain operating size from having animals along with vegetables growing. This only increases reliance on synthetic fertilizer and negate sustainability.

And yes you can fatten up the animal a lot with antibiotics and grain, you can argue you can produce more (unhealthy) biomass from it as well, but there is also cost, from the way these grain are grown and resulting pollution from confined feeding operation.

#28

Because that wouldn’t cull the population which is the ultimate aim of the food industry. Make you sick, and sell you a cure that makes you sicker. Seriously, the end result of Frankenstein food, is Soylent Green!

#29

And his test tube meat will be as awesome as his terrible operating system. I’ll pass.

(Hagen) #30

He’s got that great big house. If I was Bill Gates, I’d have a bunch of fine cows eating my grass.

(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #31

The meat is going to have about half the environmental impact compared to our current factory farming methods. The energy required comes from the same sources (that is, crops) but you only need half as much. This assumes, of course, that the demand for meat stays the same.

Be careful about not falling into the naturalistic fallacy. Also, even though this meat is grown in a lab it is still real meat. You could put the cells back in the animal the original cells were harvested from and from there you couldn’t tell the difference. You could make a good argument that this meat is much closer to the food we evolved eating than our modern vegetables, including the ones we eat on a low carb diet.

(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #32

You can’t just think of the space the animals themselves take, you also have to include the area used to farm feed for the animals, so while a factory farm might be really small compared to a pasture farm the factory farm still requires some amount of area to grow its feed. Still, on some level you could say that sure, pastured animals require more space, but the real issue is that grass is much less energy efficient. It “wastes” more energy on creating cellulose while corn, grain and soy put more of their energy into sugar, starch, fat and protein which is much easier for us breathers (both human and animal) to recover energy from. This also has the added on effect that the cows grow much slower which means they have to live longer and therefore waste more energy being cows, further reducing efficiency.

#33

Branson, as in Sir Richard Branson?

#34

Sorry, just spotted it in the post. A bit rich coming from someone who burns millions of gallons of jet fuel each year!

(Doug) #35

Branson and Gates should enlist Elon Musk and make a cattle farm in space!

#36

Read Pollin’s “An Omnivore’s Dilemma” for a better understanding than you ever wanted. They’re pastured for part of their life, then force-fed corn (and huge amounts of antibiotics to they don’t die) to fatten before slaughter.

#37

Except he’s by far the single greatest philanthropist who has ever existed. Other billionaires build ostentatious palaces and battle-ship yachts. He literally retired from Microsoft because he realized that giving away his fortune in a responsible way had to be a full time job. He’s saved and improved millions of lives in underdeveloped countries over the past twenty years through malaria research, vaccines and other grants. I’m not a fan of his politics, but you can’t say he’s not a philanthropist.

(ianrobo) #38

he has done great stuff with Malaria and I get where he is coming from on fake food to feed people cheaply but he is not in facts of how we got where we did because of drive for cheap crap food.

#39

You mean they only try to play God?

“Melinda: Saving children’s lives is the goal that launched our global work. It’s an end in itself. But then we learned it has all these other benefits as well. If parents believe their children will survive—and if they have the power to time and space their pregnancies—they choose to have fewer children.”

#40

If you actually quote her in context, then context of extreme poverty, where people have multiple children to increase the odds that one will survive, that makes sense. They’re not advocating population control, they’re advocating a reduction in childhood starvation. Why twist words?

This thread started out about a weird way to make meat, then turned into a way to bash the only multi-billionaire in history who has chosen to give away his fortune to help humanity in whatever way possible.