The Unmentioned Alternative?

If you’ll recall, two weeks ago our featured  article dubbed Chicken Poop with Your Beef, Anyone?, discussed feed content in feed rations fed to beef, which in turn becomes the food we eat, indirectly. Although I find the thought of feeding chicken poop to herbivores downright disgusting, as most of us likely do, to me the thought of plant-based meat mockup is nearly as perturbing. While advocates of meatless “meat” spout off on all sorts of stats comparing beef to their beef alternative, with many folks in our sheeple society swallowing it (literally) at face value, it bear picking apart to be check for accuracy.

This crowd keeps repeating the silliest statistic in the world:  each pound of beef takes 1,847 gallons of water.  Most people don’t realize that this figure includes the water used in mining the steel to make the tractor to plant the corn to feed the cow.  They think this is what a cow drinks in a lifetime.  Grass-finished changes everything.

The misleading data plus the duplicitous consumer make for incredibly misinformed, foolish decisions.  Let’s assume a beef animal lives for 3 years prior to slaughter. That’s 1,095 days. Each animal yields about 400 pounds of edible beef. If we multiply that by the alleged 1,847 gallons of water per pound, that’s 738,800 gallons of water in a lifetime, or 674 gallons per day.  If the average weight of the animal over its 3 years is about 674 pounds, that’s a gallon per pound per day. An equivalent consumption for a person would be a gallon per pound per day; a 150 pound person would drink 150 gallons per day. Truth really is stranger than fiction, folks.  You can’t make this stuff up.

In debate, a favorite argument is to withhold alternatives.  If I want you to agree with me, withholding options gives me a leg up on winning the argument.  If you have to choose between only two things I can paint one side beautifully and the other side horribly.  As long as only two options exist, you’ll tend to side with me.

This is exactly the tactic the fake meat crowd is using.  Don’t fall for it.  It’s a debate technique as old as argumentation.  The fake meat crowd compares itself only to industrial chemical feedlot beef, for example.  Or factory chickens.  It does not compare itself to pastured models or grass finishing.

This creates a skewed option portfolio and pushes people toward accepting fake meat.  Don’t fall for it.  A third option exists and that’s the one that makes more nutritional and ecological sense.  It’s silly to get caught up and invest emotional energy in debating just the two options.  It’s the proverbial devil or the witch question.

But the third option of grass-finished –and of course grass-fed their entire life—changes the debate entirely.  That’s the option not mentioned, but of course neither the fake meat nor factory farmed meat  crowd wants that option discussed.  The factory meat folks want to argue straight up with fake meat.  And vice versa.

So when we step into the debate with a third option, it throws a monkey wrench in everyone’s strategy.  How fun. And that’s the View from the Country.