IceCream Wrote:If the problems with resource consumption were only about energy, i might agree here. Unfortunately, it's not. Whether we like it or not, the earth does have a carrying capacity, just like every other environment. Technical solutions are going to be absolutely crucial, just like they have been for the past 50 years. But they aren't even close to solving all our problems. (And even where they're doing a pretty good job, people still reject them, such as GM foods).

They really aren't close to solving the problems because no one has felt the pressure of the lack of resources yet. As this becomes more eminent you'll see more money poured into research to deal with it. To date, the research has been reactive, nothing has really been all that proactive.
On the example of GM foods though. Sure people can make a fuss about them now and make campaigns against them and push for "Back to Natural" solutions, but I'd bet large sums of money that once your fresh produce starts getting too expensive for you to justify paying, you'll switch back to cheaper GM food that can be produced in mass. This isn't just a question of "if" it'll happen, its a question of when.

You can see the same pressures occurring within personal transportation. In the US especially, which has always been about "The freedom of your car," you can see high gas prices putting pressure on people. They drive less, take more public trans., ride a bike, and in increasing instances have started to move back to the urban centers/closer where they work. Other solutions like hybrid cars are more popular now too and there are fewer SUVs and gas guzzling cars on the road. All it took was for the price of gas, a resource, to push past a point that they deemed too unreasonable to pay.

Water will be the same way, and I suspect it will actually be an even harder hit to people than gas prices. People think of water as something thats always there. You turn a faucet and you get fresh water. You still have to pay for it, but for most people its just "a few pence." Most of the reason for this is thanks to grey water reprocessing. Even in developed countries where water is scare (ex: Arizona/Nevada in US, desert regions), you still haven't seen water reach levels where its impossible to shower, get a drink, or flush the toilet. In the case of irrigation though, we'll see crops move toward GM crops that don't need much water (already happened/ing) and probably see production centers for these crops shift away from areas of drought to places with more rainfall.

Quote:For example, you can't engineer us more space. Space is a finite resource. We can use the space we have more or less efficiently, and technology is a big part of that. But choosing what we use the space for is equally important. The simple fact of it is that using it to grow meat is not a particularly efficient way of going about things, and we couldn't support the world's population eating meat to the extent that Americans do even now. We could continue to cut down rainforests to increase our capacity to grow meat (for a while anyway), but that endangers other systems that ultimately we are reliant on for our survival.

Space can be engineered to make use of that which we aren't using. But I will admit I was thinking about this in the sense of human issues and not "where are we going to put this cow." Of course when you are talking about "running out of space for livestock to graze on" you are basically sailing straight for "factory farming" as the solution to space. The enviromentalists and animal rights people don't want that...

Quote:I guess it's better to think of changing the way we use resources rather "cutting" resource consumption. In a lot of cases, it's just a matter of changing culture, which is definitely NOT impossible. Think how much attitudes have changed just in our lifetime. It's definitely doable, especially if we don't think of it as an all or nothing choice.

...so what you end up with is putting cows back in the field and resulting in an increased demand in meat on a lack of supply. In other words, cutting back. And while attitudes have changed in our lifetime, I don't think you can really compare that to this situation. A change in attitude is something like: "Gays are evil!!" -> "Gays are nasty, but I guess they deserve some rights." When you are talking about the meat issue though, this isn't the same, the meat issue is more like. "I think I'll cook 2 hamburgers (1/4lb/each over 100gs/each!) and a hot dog tonight with some potatoes and green peas. Then a chicken breast tomorrow with a salad." -> "Tonight I'll cook 1 hamburger (1/4lb) with some veggies on the side." This will probably even more
That's not an attitude change, that's a LIFESTYLE change, and depending on what part of a person's life you are changing, many people will buck it hard. This isn't something you change in a single person's life, this is something that takes generations. If you aren't poor and have had money for food all your life and are health minded, then you learned in school that part of the 5 food groups on the food pyramid (a US thing, maybe the UK has something similar) is meat. Additionally, there's a good chance your parents raised you to eat a certain way. In my family there was almost always a serving of meat on the table for dinner, be that chicken or beef (father was picky about fish). This is brain washing, its hard/nigh impossible to move from having lived most of your life feeling that "meat needs to be part of the meal" to "meat is maybe a thing you have once a week."

I agree that something needs to be done, but I think the big question is what course of action that is.

"IceCream Wrote:"Scientists agree that in order to keep GHG emissions to 2000 levels the projected 9 billion inhabitants of the world (in 2050) need to each consume no more than 70-90 grams (McMichael et al. 2007, Barclay 2011) of meat per day."

So, aiming for that level might be a good start. We can reassess again once more energy is produced from renewable sources.

70-90g a day haha. So basically asking people to eat half of what they do in a day, since people in the US, UK, and much of the EU consume about 200-250g of meat a day on average. It would definitely bring the daily caloric intake back down close to 2000 a day. US averages about 2700 a day now.

vix86 Wrote:Restaurants and stores love to carry these items because they can charge a premium on them. Usually people that are diehard vegetarians or vegans have a disposable income to support such lifestyles.

That vegetarianism and veganism are more expensive is just a myth. My monthly food bill went down when I went vegetarian, then went even more down when I went vegan. After all, why would animal products be more affordable when raising, slaughtering, and transporting animals requires vastly more natural and labor resources than producing plant-based foods does? Veg options at restaurants are in the same price, if not cheaper, than the meat options on the menu, and restaurants that are entirely veg cost the same as normal restaurants.

In the UK alone the meat-free market has grown by an astonishing 20% in just five years. The popularity of meat-free, and consumer awareness, of course depends on location, but as a whole it's been growing big time. I dunno what things are like in your area, but where I live consumer awareness is very high, and vegetarianism and veganism are popular. The two highest rated restaurants on Yelp in Berkeley are a vegetarian pizza parlor, and a vegan cinnamon roll shop. Every day that pizza parlor has a line of customers outside stretching for a block or more, it's crazy.

Aijin Wrote:That vegetarianism and veganism are more expensive is just a myth. My monthly food bill went down when I went vegetarian, then went even more down when I went vegan. After all, why would animal products be more affordable when raising, slaughtering, and transporting animals requires vastly more natural and labor resources than producing plant-based foods does? Veg options at restaurants are in the same price, if not cheaper, than the meat options on the menu, and restaurants that are entirely veg cost the same as normal restaurants.

Definitely true. I'm not and have never been a vegetarian, but since I was poor in college I ended up eating vegetarian food 70% of the time just based on cost. Of course, mostly I was cooking for myself rather than going out.

vileru Wrote:I didn't make the claim that animals don't feel pain. I explicitly, and quite carefully, stated that only animals capable of self-awareness feel pain (e.g. great apes, dolphins, elephants, etc.). And while pigs may be smarter than young children in certain respects, such measurements are not sufficient for self-awareness. In addition, emotional appeals to the stronger empathy we feel towards animals than plants do not settle the question whether non-self-aware animals experience pain the same way we do.

Self-awareness is a topic that I was very interested in before I abandoned majoring in neuroscience, and have kept pretty up to date on it. Self-awareness is still a concept that needs many, many more decades of research before we can come to any decent conclusions on, especially in regards to animals. But self-awareness has nothing to do with the ability to feel pain, so I don't get how it's relevant. Mammals like pigs and cows have very complex, highly developed central nervous systems, just like humans do, and they experience biological pain in the same manner. I'll try to outline just the key points, because I tend to rant and go way overboard when I talk about topics that interest me.

* Pain exists in species as a survival device, a sort of warning system that motivates the species to avoid stimuli that are causing tissue damage. These types of stimuli are generally either thermal, chemical, or mechanical. Nociceptors (a type of sensory neuron) respond when either of those three types of stimuli pass a certain threshold that signifies a risk, which in turn begins all the neural processes that result in pain. For example, if a knife blade is just resting on your finger there is no threat of tissue damage, so the threshold isn't passed and pain responses won't begin. However, if the blade starts to sink in, that mechanical stimuli then represents a danger to your tissues, and the nociceptors' threshold will be passed and begin the pain response.

* Mammals with developed central nervous systems, such as the cows, pigs, and sheep used in the livestock industry, not only possess nociceptors just like humans do, they possess the same types of tracts and brain structures that create these pain responses.

Mammalian central nervous systems are so similar that in undergrad labs (where human brains are simply too expensive to use) we would use the brains of sheep and other mammals in order to study the human brain.

As a culture we place human beings not only on top of the biological pyramid, but so high up in the clouds above that pyramid that I think that in many ways we forget that we are a species just like the others on this earth. Sure we are unique in many ways (but what species isn't?) and have accomplished incredible feats with those unique features, but we still remain mammals, and it's good to remember how similar we are to other species. Other mammals also have the same neurochemicals creating emotions of love, fear, anger, lust, happiness, sorrow, pain, and pleasure that we human beings do.

We all are the products of evolution, and it's pretty to silly to think that we're the only ones that can experience these things.

A detailed discussion of "intelligence" I'll save for another post, but I just want to say that intelligence is also pretty irrelevant to the experience of pain and suffering. Intelligence is not only a man-made concept, but even among our own species it is incredibly vague and subjective, so trying to rate other animals, and how we should treat them, based upon how they fit into some silly human notion of intelligence, is about as strange as other species deciding us humans are worthless since we can't do what they do. Imagine a bunch of sharks sitting around going, "Let's go eat that surfer. Humans don't feel pain, I mean after all they don't even possess the power of electroreception like we do, what an inferior species, dudes."

Anyone else enjoy shows like Planet Earth or Frozen Planet? Blows my mind what crazy things other species can do. But back to the topic:

To use my friend's more depressing example: It's like treating people with severe mental retardation like crap for our own benefit simply because they don't fit our definition of intelligence. Intelligence is irrelevant to their sensation of pain and suffering. A person with severe retardation may not be out there landing on the moon, solving calculus problems, and composing War and Peace, but they possess the same neurological processes of pain and suffering as you and me. Abuse is just as painful for them as it is for geniuses. In that same vein, mammals like cows and pigs experience suffering just as vividly as they would if they were capable of painting the Sistine Chapel.

Aijin Wrote:That vegetarianism and veganism are more expensive is just a myth. My monthly food bill went down when I went vegetarian, then went even more down when I went vegan. After all, why would animal products be more affordable when raising, slaughtering, and transporting animals requires vastly more natural and labor resources than producing plant-based foods does? Veg options at restaurants are in the same price, if not cheaper, than the meat options on the menu, and restaurants that are entirely veg cost the same as normal restaurants.

In the UK alone the meat-free market has grown by an astonishing 20% in just five years. The popularity of meat-free, and consumer awareness, of course depends on location, but as a whole it's been growing big time. I dunno what things are like in your area, but where I live consumer awareness is very high, and vegetarianism and veganism are popular. The two highest rated restaurants on Yelp in Berkeley are a vegetarian pizza parlor, and a vegan cinnamon roll shop. Every day that pizza parlor has a line of customers outside stretching for a block or more, it's crazy.

When I was in the US, vegan foods were definitely slightly more pricey than non-vegan foods (vegan friendly eggs, etc). If you went full vegetarian, then I think you could save some money depending on your servings of meat and such. At my stores here in Japan though I would probably only save my self 20%. A stalk of broccoli for instance costs me about ~200 yen where as a chicken breast is maybe 200-300yen. I get a bit more use out of the broccoli (2-3 meals) compared to the breast which is 1-2 meals. Ground beef is practically non-existent and I don't like pork much so I can't comment on relative cost to that. Fish though, like salmon is 180-250 yen for 2 fillets and that's one meal.

In Japan, vegetarianism is practically unheard of, though one of my students is actually some vegetarian in her eating habits. I'm pretty sure almost no one knows about veganism. Japanese in the rural areas seem to be pretty vegetarian in their eating habits though. If you live in Japan, most of what you eat is vegetables, or so it seems to me.

What is a vegan friendly egg? An egg made out of tofu? Yeah, I think I know what you're getting at: animal products that are labeled as being more ethical, such as cage-free eggs, or grass-fed beef, tend to be more expensive than the factory farm products. And I definitely agree that it's entirely for the money, at least in the US. I dunno about the standards for those labels in other countries, but in the US "cage free" means nothing, the only thing a company has to do to get that label is give the birds any type of outside access, which amounts to them giving a tiny strip of filthy land hardly any better than their factory farm environment. Those products in grocery stores are all by huge companies that just do it for the extra $ since most people don't know that the animals aren't actually treated any better.

But, buying REAL cage-free eggs, or milk from cows that live on actual farms, at farmers markets isn't all that expensive. Grass-fed beefs, and other animals are sold at pretty competitive prices now a days too. A bit more expensive than the super cheap products, yeah, but not so expensive that it's not feasible for the average consumer.

On that report I posted a couple pages ago, Japan was actually the developed country with the lowest consumption of meat. Kinda' surprised me since McDonalds and such have become so popular. But that article doesn't discuss fish consumption, and Japan is certainly a culprit in the issue of the world's collapsing fisheries. Thanks to the popularity of sushi, bluefin tuna is on the brink of extinction right now.

Aijin Wrote:Kinda' surprised me since McDonalds and such have become so popular. But that article doesn't discuss fish consumption, and Japan is certainly a culprit in the issue of the world's collapsing fisheries. Thanks to the popularity of sushi, bluefin tuna is on the brink of extinction right now.

McDs is kind of a blip. It is at fault for many things but the chain has been localized for Japan and there aren't nearly as many beef products as there is in the US. While it is growing, its also not as prominent as it is in the US. My town actually doesn't have a McDs. I have to drive 30-50 minutes to get to the closet McDs. Where as every town in the US has at least 2 McDs probably.

On the tuna thing. Yep. I can attest to it, マグロ is dam good. Poor tuna should have evolved "not tasting as good" as a trait.

Hyperborea Wrote:Sorry, but that's like trumpeting that the two most popular restaurants in Riyadh are halal. I bet that the Berkeley places are also nuclear free.

Haha. Just giving an example of the popularity/consumer awareness in my neck of the woods, but most other metropolitan areas have quickly growing markets too. Vegan restaurants have been spreading a lot in LA lately, and NY, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and DC are pretty much vegan meccas. In NY there's actually a vegan Japanese restaurant that has 2 Michelin Stars, I've always wanted to check it out.

Speaking of McDonald's, they're opening a vegetarian restaurant in India now, will be interesting to see how that does. Subway (world's largest fast food chain) test ran a vegan menu at a bunch of branches this year and it was so popular they sold out of products, so I think veg options in fast food will start cropping up more in the next few years.

@Aijin and thecite

The point of my sleep walker thought experiment is to show that pain without self-awareness is not referring to the pain in the sense that we usually mean it. Pain is a sloppy term that seems to refer to any survival response to injury or danger. However, a survival response to injury or danger is not sufficient for pain to be morally relevant. If it were the case that a survival response to injury or danger is sufficient for pain to be morally relevant, then it follows that a wilting plant experiences morally relevant pain. To avoid this absurd conclusion, the thought experiment draws a clear distinction between the morally relevant sense of pain, self-aware pain, and pain that is not morally relevant, non-self-aware pain.

Furthermore, the neurological similarities between self-aware-animals and non-self-aware animals only further supports my view that we arbitrarily empathize more with animals that possess similar sensory systems, and thus similar pain responses, as us. If we view pain in an entirely mechanical fashion, as a response to injury or danger, then it follows that plants also feel pain. Like us and other animals, plants respond to injury and danger when deprived of sunlight, adequate soil and nutrients, etc. To argue that plants do not feel pain assumes that inflicting injury upon or threatening organisms is only morally relevant when those organisms respond to injury and danger in the same way as certain animals, i.e. this view assumes that the experience of morally relevant pain is only possible with a neurological setup "x" that includes n-sufficient variables. This kind of narrow-minded thinking is what prompted me to use self-aware response to injury and danger (i.e. pain) as the touchstone for morally relevant pain. Otherwise, the argument succumbs to a neurological strain of speciesism. This is why self-awareness has everything to do with pain and why I consider the response to injury and danger of non-self-aware animals and plants as morally irrelevant.

thecite Wrote:Even if the pain non-self-aware animals experience were comparable with that of a sleep walker (or a baby, or a severely mentally disabled person for that matter), which may well be true, would that make it any more acceptable to inflict pain on them?

This question is the number one threat to my theory and it is the reason why I mentioned that capacity for self-awareness may be relevant for whether inflicting pain on a non-self-aware life form is morally permissible or not; a baby eventually will develop self-awareness whereas a chicken will not. Alternatively, we can argue that inflicting pain on a non-self-aware life form is morally impermissible when it indirectly causes pain to a self-aware life form. However, this claim entails that it is morally impermissible to cut some flowers if it causes mental anguish to someone. Although a strong case can be made for this view, it is obviously controversial. The final alternative is simply to admit that it is morally permissible to inflict pain on an organism that lacks, and never will have, self-awareness. Of course, the undesirable consequence of this is that it is all right to beat up a brain-dead patient. Nonetheless, however we deal with the issue of inflicting pain on non-self-aware animals, using self-awareness as the benchmark for morally relevant pain is the only way to avoid the neurological speciesism I mentioned earlier.

P.S. Are you attending grad school at Cal now, Aijin? I noticed that your location has changed.

vix86 Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:If the problems with resource consumption were only about energy, i might agree here. Unfortunately, it's not. Whether we like it or not, the earth does have a carrying capacity, just like every other environment. Technical solutions are going to be absolutely crucial, just like they have been for the past 50 years. But they aren't even close to solving all our problems. (And even where they're doing a pretty good job, people still reject them, such as GM foods).

They really aren't close to solving the problems because no one has felt the pressure of the lack of resources yet. As this becomes more eminent you'll see more money poured into research to deal with it. To date, the research has been reactive, nothing has really been all that proactive.
On the example of GM foods though. Sure people can make a fuss about them now and make campaigns against them and push for "Back to Natural" solutions, but I'd bet large sums of money that once your fresh produce starts getting too expensive for you to justify paying, you'll switch back to cheaper GM food that can be produced in mass. This isn't just a question of "if" it'll happen, its a question of when.

I'm not sure about this. Like, i can see how it could work that way in theory, but i'm not sure it would actually work like that in practice. Take the USA for example. The people that starve won't be Americans, they'll be other people somewhere else. So, as long as the USA can secure it's own food supply i'm not sure they'll actually care about anything else. The USA has tons of land per person, so really, it would only show itself as a smaller trade surplus anyway, right? And American budgets can stretch a whole lot further than those living on less than $1 a day. Basically, there's no guarantee that the price at which Americans are no longer interested in buying non GM foods is going to be that same price which is going to make sure nobody in the world starves (as a result... obviously people are starving even now).

This is exactly the same as with the resources used to grow meat. And it's going to become more of a problem as food insecurity rises due to more extremes in weather due to climate change.

And again, with water. You only need to look at the middle east to see a pattern of wars over the ownership of the water table. Israel especially have aggressively pushed to secure their own water supply at the expense of others. It doesn't have to be through war though, if you have the cash and the person you're buying from doesn't know the big picture. The danger is that the developed countries will do whatever they can to secure the access to water and bottled water and ensure the supply doesn't drop for their own citizens (and their own wallets) at the expense of the developing countries.

Quote:That's not an attitude change, that's a LIFESTYLE change, and depending on what part of a person's life you are changing, many people will buck it hard. This isn't something you change in a single person's life, this is something that takes generations. If you aren't poor and have had money for food all your life and are health minded, then you learned in school that part of the 5 food groups on the food pyramid (a US thing, maybe the UK has something similar) is meat. Additionally, there's a good chance your parents raised you to eat a certain way. In my family there was almost always a serving of meat on the table for dinner, be that chicken or beef (father was picky about fish). This is brain washing, its hard/nigh impossible to move from having lived most of your life feeling that "meat needs to be part of the meal" to "meat is maybe a thing you have once a week."

I agree that something needs to be done, but I think the big question is what course of action that is.

Well, i was more thinking of the psychological impact of using "changing" rather than "cutting", lol.

i think you're underestimating how easy it is to convince a mass of people to do something. You don't order them to do it, or tell them to do it. You simply brainwash them into something else. Manufacturing demand for something is the whole point of advertising. It certainly doesn't take generations to get people to become consumers, let alone just consume something different. It's only taken a couple of generations to convince most Americans that tax is evil... back in the "golden era" of the 50's the top rate of tax was over 90%, which would be utterly unthinkable as a tax strategy today, because people have been constantly battered with the message that "tax is bad" from those with an interest in reducing tax. Culture is very malleable, especially if you can get the media on your side.

I grew up on processed crap just like every other 80's kid. I never even knew what an avocado was, and certainly never tasted one until i was about 20!!! But culture has changed quite a lot in that time, and now we're bombarded with healthy eating messages and advertising from all directions, so that's what my family tends to cook nowadays. Remember that even 12 years ago or so there were very few healthy fast food alternatives; now even Mcdonalds has had to adapt to that market. Jamie Oliver pretty much single handedly changed people's attitudes towards school dinners in the UK.

The idea that people just choose what they want to buy is really outdated.

I think we should use lots of different strategies... although i definitely think that technology will bring the biggest advances, i don't want to give up personal responsibility for my choices and just leave it to engineers to solve either. If my freedom comes at the expense of other people's, i'd rather have slightly less freedom.

Quote:

"IceCream Wrote:"Scientists agree that in order to keep GHG emissions to 2000 levels the projected 9 billion inhabitants of the world (in 2050) need to each consume no more than 70-90 grams (McMichael et al. 2007, Barclay 2011) of meat per day."

So, aiming for that level might be a good start. We can reassess again once more energy is produced from renewable sources.

70-90g a day haha. So basically asking people to eat half of what they do in a day, since people in the US, UK, and much of the EU consume about 200-250g of meat a day on average. It would definitely bring the daily caloric intake back down close to 2000 a day. US averages about 2700 a day now.

Yeah, my grandparents have been to the USA a few times, and they say the portion sizing (at least in restaurants) is just insane there. It's impossible to stay thin eating out... so yeah, it'd probably be good for them to cut their intake to that level anyway...

I'm not at all understanding how plants are entering the discussion here. If you simply define pain as "a response of an organism to stimuli that threaten the organism's physical structure" then okay, sure, but that is not the widely used definition of pain, and not the one I was talking about.

Plants do not have nociceptors. They do not have sensory neurons period. They do not have central nervous systems. All of these things are the fundamental basis of pain as we know it, so why plants, an organism with no nervous system, are being brought into the discussion is beyond me. That mammals with central nervous systems experience physical pain is as basic of a fact as it gets in biology; arguing that point is like trying to argue neurons don't exist or something.

Is it possible that plants feel pain, and unbeknownst to science are suffering indescribably with each clip of the rose cutters? I guess, but since there's not a shred of research hinting at anything of the sort, I think discussing it is about as meaningless to the discussion of pain as talking about how we shouldn't inhale oxygen because the oxygen molecules are secretly writhing in agony.

Self-awareness has nothing to do with how an organism experiences pain, so it seems weird to me to try and use it as a moral compass for which organisms it's okay to inflict pain on. Especially when like I said, we have no idea what organisms are self aware. All the tests we've done have been way too crude to draw any conclusions from. You can't simply stick a mirror in a cage then empirically determine that the entire species your test subject is to represent isn't aware that it's distinct from its environment simply because it doesn't respond to your testing procedure, for example.

Or are we talking about self consciousness as in the distinction between primary and secondary consciousness? If that's the case, then it's even more irrelevant to pain since sensory perception--including pain--belongs to primary consciousness, so whether or not a species doesn't have secondary consciousness (abstract thinking and all that jazz) doesn't matter.

When it comes down to it things like primary consciousness/secondary consciousness, or self awareness, are just theoretical concepts currently. That animals with developed central nervous systems experience pain, however, is a fact. I'd much rather let biological fact be my moral compass rather than psychological theory.

That leads us to whether or not one is morally okay with inflicting suffering on other animals for their own benefit, and to what extent. That's an entirely personal decision, but I for one am definitely not okay with forcing animals to endure horrific living conditions on factory farms. Especially not for culturally-created taste preferences that can be changed. For me personally, a pig suffering so much from the second it's born to the second it's killed, all to give me a couple minutes of satisfaction as I eat sausage for breakfast, is messed up. But other people think very differently on the matter, and that's up to them.

My grad school plans are on hold currently, but I have a few good friends from Stanford that are now doing their PhD work at Cal, so I go to Berkeley pretty often. I was planning on just getting an MA in teaching JP as a second language from SF state, but I decided I don't want to just be a language class lecturer, I want to teach literature classes and grad seminars too, so I have to go for the doctorate. I'll probably just go wherever I get the most financial aid

@Aijin

I'm not disputing that animals do not experience physical pain, and I admit several times that they do, just not in a morally relevant sense. Rather than a factual argument regarding whether animals have the neurological components necessary for experiencing pain, my argument is an epistemological and moral one concerning, first, what it would be like to experience pain without self-awareness and, second, the moral relevance of such experience.

The sleep walker thought experiment is meant to show what it would be like to experience pain while conscious but not self-aware. From the experiment, I conclude that non-self-aware animals experience pain in a different way than self-aware animals, that is, non-self-aware animals are like the sleep walker. I then make the moral claim that non-self-aware pain is morally irrelevant since there is clear qualitative difference between the sleepwalker's pain and self-aware pain.

I compare plants to non-self-aware animals because the sleep walker example implies that the only feature that distinguishes the response to injury or danger of non-self-aware animals from plants is that non-self-aware animals respond to injuries or danger via similar neural structures and mechanisms as self-aware animals. However, the thought experiment shows that, qualitatively, conscious experience that lacks self-awareness only amounts to outward physical and inward biological responses to sensory input. From the qualitative standpoint of such experience, we are not justified in claiming any more. Thus, given that plants also have sensory systems and react to sensory input through outward physical movement and various internal chemical processes, we have no justification to consider animal response to certain sensory input as pain while denying the same for plant response to similar sensory input.

As for self-awareness, my argument is not impaired by our current lack of knowledge regarding what self-awareness exactly is and which animals are self-aware. For the sake of the argument, only the thought experiment that shows the qualitative difference between self-aware and non-self-aware pain is necessary. After all, the moral argument for the suffering of animals is based on qualitative experience, i.e. inducing the experience of pain is morally wrong. In terms of which animals are self-aware or not, determining self-awareness is not a threat to my argument but a practical issue. However, a theory that cannot be practically implemented is only an intellectual phantom structure. Nonetheless, there are crude, but surefire ways to determine if an animal is self-aware or not. For example, we would hesitate to regard as self-aware any animal that chases its own tail. This test and others, such as the mirror test you alluded to earlier, can be used in the meantime. There certainly is the possibility that, due to test advances, we will later discover self-awareness in a species we regularly consumed. However, such an outcome is comparable to false imprisonments. Although false imprisonments occur, they do not entail abandoning the justice system. The same goes for undetected self-aware species and abandoning animal consumption.

Anyway, I'm not at all opposed to vegetarianism or veganism; compared to the typical Western diet, they're both great for our health and environment. However, my sympathies do not change the flaws in various arguments for animal suffering. My goal is not to infuriate people, but to hold them accountable to their views and challenge them to better support those views. I have many vegetarian and vegan friends with sophisticated views on their diets and who feel an overwhelming moral responsibility to avoid animal products. On the other hand, I know plenty of other people who eat meat and do not think they should be morally persecuted for doing so. I extend my skepticism to both parties, and I am happy for having done so. Doubt is the death of dogmatism.

vileru Wrote:I'm not disputing that animals do not experience physical pain, and I admit several times that they do, just not in a morally relevant sense. Rather than a factual argument regarding whether animals have the neurological components necessary for experiencing pain, my argument is an epistemological and moral one concerning, first, what it would be like to experience pain without self-awareness and, second, the moral relevance of such experience.

I'm just not getting what you think the relationship is. Why is the moral component hinging upon self awareness? Why does it matter if a species is supposedly self aware or not? You need to establish:
A) a direct relationship between self awareness and the experience of pain
B) how this relationship changes the experience of pain
C) how and why this change is defining whether or not the pain is then "morally relevant"
D) that all of the above, once proven, is then also relevant to the species at hand

None of those things can be established based upon any current research, so I think the argument is pretty void except as a philosophical theory.

vileru Wrote:The sleep walker thought experiment is meant to show what it would be like to experience pain while conscious but not self-aware. From the experiment, I conclude that non-self-aware animals experience pain in a different way than self-aware animals, that is, non-self-aware animals are like the sleep walker. I then make the moral claim that non-self-aware pain is morally irrelevant since there is clear qualitative difference between the sleepwalker's pain and self-aware pain.

This entire comparison is based on the assumption that consciousness of animals that are fully awake is remotely similar to that of sleep walking humans, and that any comparisons can be made between the two. An assumption that has no scientific backing, so the argument isn't working for me. Sleep walking is a completely distinct neurological phenomenon, arising during slow wave NREM. It has absolutely no neurological resemblances to that of animals that are awake.

vileru Wrote:Thus, given that plants also have sensory systems and react to sensory input through outward physical movement and various internal chemical processes, we have no justification to consider animal response to certain sensory input as pain while denying the same for plant response to similar sensory input.

This is just getting into a broader, more abstract and philosophical concept of pain, which I don't find useful or relevant for the situation at hand. I'm talking about pain in the sense that it is used in every day conversation, and as it is understood by science: a phenomenon that requires a nervous system. If you want to extend your definition to include any protective response of an organism in response to stimuli regardless of if they have a nervous system or not, that's fine, but then "pain" becomes a completely different word, and not the one I'm talking about.

vileru Wrote:Nonetheless, there are crude, but surefire ways to determine if an animal is self-aware or not. For example, we would hesitate to regard as self-aware any animal that chases its own tail. This test and others, such as the mirror test you alluded to earlier, can be used in the meantime.

Self awareness is just an abstract theory at the moment, not some physical object that can be empirically proven. You can't run a blood test, put the blood under the microscope and find a self-awareness-cell and go, "AHA! This species is self aware!" for example.
I dunno if the tail bit is a joke, but animals that chase their tails don't do it because they think it's someone else's tail. That's like a dog seeing a boxer doing shadow boxing and going, "Stupid human, thinks his shadow is someone else and is trying to fight it."

It might be best for us to agree to disagree on this one, though, since I feel it's just becoming a discussion of philosophical concepts, and ethical theories are just too subjective to reach consensus on. I enjoy philosophy, but for the issues of factory farming--and exploitation of the oceans, which I think there remains a lot to be said about--I think the practical issues are the important ones to talk about.

Aijin Wrote:I'm just not getting what you think the relationship is. Why is the moral component hinging upon self awareness? Why does it matter if a species is supposedly self aware or not? You need to establish:
A) a direct relationship between self awareness and the experience of pain
B) how this relationship changes the experience of pain
C) how and why this change is defining whether or not the pain is then "morally relevant"
D) that all of the above, once proven, is then also relevant to the species at hand

None of those things can be established based upon any current research, so I think the argument is pretty void except as a philosophical theory.

The cornerstone of my argument is that neurological similarities and physical and biological responses are irrelevant to any argument that claims it is wrong to cause animals to experience pain. Such arguments are based on experience, not neurology, hence why I switch the emphasis to experience and the sleep walker example. I then conclude that self-aware experience is qualitatively different in a morally relevant way, i.e. we can know what it is like for a self-aware animal to experience pain, but all we can know about a non-self-aware animal that experiences pain is that it has similar sensory systems and similar physical and biological responses to us and other self-aware animals. The sleep walker is our only model of non-self-aware but conscious experience, so it is pure speculation to imagine another form of such experience. Therefore, self-awareness must be the touchstone for distinguishing between morally relevant and irrelevant "pain" because it's our only assurance that our sense of pain is different from that of a plant.

Aijin Wrote:This entire comparison is based on the assumption that consciousness of animals that are fully awake is remotely similar to that of sleep walking humans, and that any comparisons can be made between the two. An assumption that has no scientific backing, so the argument isn't working for me. Sleep walking is a completely distinct neurological phenomenon, arising during slow wave NREM. It has absolutely no neurological resemblances to that of animals that are awake.

It's not necessary to show that the experience of a non-self-aware animal is exactly the same as a sleep walker. The thought experiment is only meant to help us conceptualize what non-self-aware experience may be like: fully functioning sensory systems sans self-awareness. The quality of the experience is what's crucial, not what neural structures and mechanisms catalyze it.

vileru Wrote:Thus, given that plants also have sensory systems and react to sensory input through outward physical movement and various internal chemical processes, we have no justification to consider animal response to certain sensory input as pain while denying the same for plant response to similar sensory input.

Aijin Wrote:I'm talking about pain in the sense that it is used in every day conversation, and as it is understood by science: a phenomenon that requires a nervous system.

This definition of pain is precisely that with which I take issue. If we define pain in the mechanistic terms of science, a neurological process, then it follows that we arbitrarily assume that plants do not suffer pain because their physical responses to injuries and threats occur in a non-neurological way. To avoid this issue, the debate needs to be about qualitative experience, which then requires us to use self-awareness as the quality that makes an organism's response to an injury morally relevant or not.

Aijin Wrote:Self awareness is just an abstract theory at the moment, not some physical object that can be empirically proven. You can't run a blood test, put the blood under the microscope and find a self-awareness-cell and go, "AHA! This species is self aware!" for example.
I dunno if the tail bit is a joke, but animals that chase their tails don't do it because they think it's someone else's tail. That's like a dog seeing a boxer doing shadow boxing and going, "Stupid human, thinks his shadow is someone else and is trying to fight it."

I doubt whether self-awareness can ever be empirically proven, but its existence is certainly indisputable by virtue of our experience. Of course, we don't have access to others' experiences, but that doesn't mean there are no reliable indicators of self-awareness.

As for the tail anecdote, it was half serious and half in jest. I don't know whether animals that chase their tails are doing so due to lack of self-awareness, to amuse themselves, or some other purpose. I just wanted to suggest a possible test for self-awareness.

Aijin Wrote:It might be best for us to agree to disagree on this one, though, since I feel it's just becoming a discussion of philosophical concepts, and ethical theories are just too subjective to reach consensus on. I enjoy philosophy, but for the issues of factory farming--and exploitation of the oceans, which I think there remains a lot to be said about--I think the practical issues are the important ones to talk about.

If you're convinced that similarities in neurological structures and mechanisms are the crux of the debate, then I agree that our discussion won't make more progress unless you convince me that, rather than experience, neurological similarities constitute the fulcrum of the debate.

I view all experiences in animals with central nervous systems as being entirely neurological in basis, since it's the central nervous system that produces all experiences. Sensory experience, emotional experience, all of it is produced by neurons and so the entire debate for me is based entirely on neurology.

Can you explain in detail what you're defining "self awareness" as, so I know what I'm even specifically debating?

@vileru:

Well, i'm totally with Aijin here, i think that neuroscience works much better as a moral compass than philosophy in this instance. This is very much the same as the problem of solipsism... in fact, you can apply a very similar philosophical argument to show that other people don't really experience in a self aware fashion, there's no way you can know they are not zombies or automatons, because naturally they would behave exactly like a human would. Of course, i have never seen my own brain either, so i cannot say for sure that it is neurologically similar to other brains. It is a valid philosophical problem, but (i hope) nobody really acts morally on that basis.

I also find that this is also a bit like me saying that the universe is made out of one giant duck and then asking you to disprove it with thought and not science. Given all the neurological and behavioural evidence we have, the onus should be on the person who wants to convince someone that animals do not experience pain in the same way humans do rather than the person whose belief is inline with the current evidence. A single thought experiment showing that they could doesn't do that.

So, with that as a warning, let's turn to your arguments.

1stly, i don't think the sleepwalker example succeeds in establishing what it would be to have pain without self awareness. It seems like you are asking us to imagine a situation in which hitting your head did not result in any pain rather than simply did not result in the awareness of that pain. In real life when sleepwalkers do harm themselves badly they do generally experience pain, just the causal correlates of that pain are imagined to be in the dream rather than real life. This is slightly irrelevent to the example, but in order to establish whether that pain is self aware pain or not, we do need to know what really constitutes self aware pain as distinct from pain on it's own.

You mentioned memory of the pain, but i'm not sure that is a good definition. Certainly i'm not going to go around sticking pins in Alzheimers patients just because they won't remember that i did it. So memory of pain alone doesn't change my intuitions about what is ethical.

Perhaps a better example of non self aware pain would be when i accidentally burn myself on the stove. My hand has moved away before i even experience any pain. This is simply a neurological response. Perhaps animal's pain responses are all like this, just a knee jerk reaction that takes them away from the thing causing damage. Except, when you look at the pain that follows afterwards in humans, you see it has other benefits. It allows you to nurse it and to make sure you keep it safe and prevent further damage. Animals will similarly nurse their wounds long after the thing causing immediate damage has been removed.
But again, this is not a distinction between pain and self aware pain, this is a distinction between pain and a neurological safety mechanism.

So, basically, the arguments purporting to show that self aware pain is different to pain itself simply make self aware pain equivalent to what we generally take to be pain itself, or pain into something that is not experienced at all, which doesn't go any way to telling us what pain without self awareness would be like to experience, or how it could be morally relevant.

Indeed, i don't find it particularly relevant, even if it could be established that self awareness was relevant in some way to the experience of pain. Like you said before, most people's intuitions would still say that it is wrong to rape sedated patients or cut up babies. So perhaps self-awareness isn't even something we do find particularly morally relevant when deciding whether it is ok to cause pain.

The stove example is just an example of a somatic reflex arc, where the body is creating a localized motor response without having to use the brain to process the sensory neuron input,so that you can respond to the dangerous stimuli as fast as possible. But the experience of pain still hits you, just after the motor neurons have already acted since it takes longer for the brain to process the pain. It's not what's going on when most animals experiences pain, since mammals (birds too) also have somatic reflex arcs like we do. Their experience of pain is occurring just like ours.

My main issue with the sleep walker analogy is simply that the pain experienced by a sleep walker has no relationship with the pain experienced by awake mammals. All the reactions of an awake animal to pain are identical to the human reactions. If you kick a cow or a pig in the face they're going to have an immediate, direct response to that input. Their nociceptors are going to produce pain just like a human's would if we were kicked in the face. They're going to make a physical response to that pain, a response which is going to be based upon their surroundings, physical condition, and past experiences (aka they're utilizing memory in their response). They will form new memories of this pain experience, and create associations using classical conditioning just like we humans do. For example, if the pain comes in the form of a shock collar when they walk outside of a certain radius, they eventually associate this pain with their action, and have the process of learning where they then learn to modify their action (i.e. not going outside that radius) to not produce the pain response. They also experience emotions in response to the pain, be it stress, fear, depression, etc. As Icecream stated, they also nurse and try to treat their pain.

To clarify what I mean about how animals use memory, and thoughts to determine their reaction to pain, here's an example: If a human causes a dog pain, the dog's reaction is based upon many different variables. Who is causing them the pain? Is it their owner, that they have a loving and trusting bond with? Is it a stranger? Is it someone they have less trust in? What is the environment of the pain? Is it an environment they know well, and feel comfortable in? Is it an unfamiliar, or stressful environment? What has happened in the past when they respond a certain way to that pain? If they growled in the past, or tried to bite, did the person simply inflict more pain on them, or did the person stop hurting them?

All of these variables, and many more, can be taken into account during pain. As far as I'm aware, however, a sleep walker has little, and very delayed, responses to any stimuli period. They do not fully assess their environments like an awake animal does (sleep walkers might jump out of a third story window, but you won't find any cows choosing to jump off cliffs), they do not use past memories in determining their response to the pain, they do not then have a process of learning, where their future actions and views are influenced by the pain they experience, they don't modify their behaviors in a way so as to avoid the pain, and don't have long lasting memories of the pain.

These things are simply completely different. Which makes sense, since once again slow wave sleep is a completely different brain state than wakefulness, so comparing a human being in slow wave sleep to an animal that's awake is just too far out there.

Watch these two videos, and tell me if you really think the so called "self aware" animals are experiencing pain differently between one you don't consider self aware.

Dolphin slaughter scene from "The Cove," where fishermen use hammers to bang on poles inserted underwater, to create a wall of sound to produce high levels of stress and fear in the dolphins to manipulate where they move, then slaughter them with repeated stabbings with spears:

Undercover footage of the pork supplier for Walmart, one of the biggest in the nation:

Seeing piglets thrash and squeal violently as they're crudely castrated, and have their tails cut off with dulled clippers, all with zero painkillers, or sows that are going crazy from the mental pain of being so tightly confined they can't even move, and just begin bashing their head against the metal bars nonstop, and chewing on metal for hours, or seeing the animals suffering from horrible bleeding wounds and infections....

I don't see how it's possible to watch things like that and say that the animals aren't experiencing the pain in a "morally relevant" way.

I think we need a good definition of what vileru is meaning by "self-aware." I think once that is clarified then arguing from there will be possible. I think I see where vileru is coming from in his argument though.

Despite the controversial nature of the topic, this is a great discussion. I'm glad to have received such broad and detailed feedback, and I've certainly learned more about my position and of others. Unfortunately, I've been spending excessive amounts of time thinking and writing responses, so I'll have to be brief.

Experience is entirely neurological in basis, and I cannot dispute that point. Nonetheless, the starting point for the moral argument against animal suffering is not the basis of experience, but experience itself. We start from a moral condemnation of inducing the experience of pain, and then we seek out which neural structures and processes cause such an experience. Therefore, in a particular species, if we find the neural structures that cause the pain response, it does not necessarily follow that the species experiences pain in the way we have in mind. To deal with this, we have to be more precise about what experience of pain we have in mind, and hence my stubborn emphasis on self-awareness.

Unfortunately, I doubt I can give a satisfying definition of self-awareness that clearly states necessary and sufficient conditions. The best I can do is an approximation, i.e. the sleep walker thought experiment. The thought experiment is meant to give an intuitive, self-evident understanding of the difference between self-aware and non-self-aware consciousness. Although there are obvious differences between the sleep walker and awake but non-self-aware animals, the point of the sleep walker example is not to show exact, one-to-one correspondence, but rather only to show that non-self-aware animals lack the self-aware quality of experience in the same way as the sleep walker. They may have the exact same responses, but not the exact same experience.

I wrote this in a flurry, but I'll come back later and edit if necessary.

I ignored discussing the health risks of diets so high in meats in dairy products earlier, since I wanted to focus on the environmental issues, but since that ran it's course let's look at how animal foods might be killing us instead of just how they're killing the environment.

imabi Wrote:Steak every meal would be heaven. I still think saying meat is unhealthy is pretty dumb. All things in moderation.

The problem is that this moderation simply does not exist in the standard American diet, and that since consumption of animal products in America is so abnormally high even compared to the rest of the Western world, most Americans' ideas of moderation for dairy and meat is still unhealthily high.

In the past century Americans' consumption of animal products has risen dramatically with the advent of fast food. 100 years ago an average American consumed a little over 100lbs of meat per year, whereas now an American consumes over 250lbs of meat. Americans used to consume about 300lbs of dairy products a year, where now it has doubled to over 600lbs a year.

With this dramatically rising intake, incidents of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and certain types of cancer have skyrocketed. Heart disease is now the number #1 killer in America, killing over 600,000 people each year, and accounting for more than a quarter of US deaths. Heart disease costs the nation nearly $500 billion dollars each year, and has a very strong relationship with this increased intake of meat and dairy in America. Meat consumption's role in heart disease is as well accepted in the medical and nutritional communities at this point as cigarettes and lung cancer are in the public mind, I'm pretty sure. We just haven't made that culture shift yet, where we would tell a friend, "Hey, don't eat that, you're gonna kill yourself," when they're eating BigMacs all the time, even though most people are very open about criticizing people for habits like smoking.

Here's a recent study using over 121,000 people for the study group, just as an example. Just search "heart disease and meat" or "heart disease and dairy" in a database of clinical literature, or on Google for laymen's articles, and you'll find innumerable more studies linking heart disease to animal products.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/health...sease.html

Quote:Eating red meat is associated with a sharply increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease, according to a new study, and the more of it you eat, the greater the risk.

Quote:Still, after controlling for those and other variables, they found that each daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with a 12 percent greater risk of dying over all, including a 16 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death and a 10 percent greater risk of cancer death.

The increased risks linked to processed meat, like bacon, were even greater: 20 percent over all, 21 percent for cardiovascular disease and 16 percent for cancer.

If people in the study had eaten half as much meat, the researchers estimated, deaths in the group would have declined 9.3 percent in men and 7.6 percent in women.

Are you familiar with the China-Cornell-Oxford Project, or maybe the documentary Forks Over Knives? The China Study is one of the most comprehensive studies ever done on diet and disease, by world renowned biochemist T. Colin Campbell. Campbell doesn't consider himself vegetarian, or vegan, and has no interests in the environmental or ethical aspects of eating meat. His only interest was in the way he saw diets high in animal proteins causing disease, and how those diseases could be prevented, and even reversed, by following a diet of what he calls "whole, plant-based foods."

The China-Cornell-Oxford Project was a huge study by Oxford University, Cornell University, and the government of China. After over a decade studying nearly 7,000 people in over 60 counties in China, the study linked countless diseases to consumptions of meat and dairy. Autoimmune diseases, brain diseases, diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease, kidney stones, osteoporosis, you name it and the study found a link between consumption of animal foods, even after accounting for over 300 possible other variables.

One study I found particularly terrifying, was done on mice giving them a diet of 20% casein, versus 5% casein (casein is the protein in dairy). Simply by altering the amount of casein, the researcher was able to turn on and off the growth of cancer.

Another famous study is by the physician who influenced Bill Clinton going vegan to treat his heart issues. It was a smaller scale, but much more intensive and long term study. Over 20 years, 17 patients who had pretty severe heart disease were treated with a plant based diet. 5 of these people had it so badly that originally cardiologists had expected them to die within a year. After over a decade following the diet, their cholesterol dropped dramatically, their coronary arteries widened as the disease reversed, and they had no further cardiac problems or symptoms.

And even just looking at this from a basic nutrition standpoint, it makes complete sense. Plant foods have 0 cholesterol, are much lower in saturated fats, are far more nutrient dense, rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants which protect our bodies from free radical, as well as phytochemicals which a lot of research shows plays a role in preventing cancer and stroke.

I think this photo of Dr. Joseph Crowe, comparing what his diseased artery looked like after a nearly fatal heart attack, and then after he reduced meats and dairy from his diet, says it all.



Honestly, I think meat and dairy are perfectly fine in moderation. But the average American's idea of moderation is, what, cutting back from 600lbs of dairy a year to 500lbs, and 260lbs of meat to 230lbs? Not exactly a big change.

Most people disregard the health risks of their diet since they figure they feel fine, they don't have any diagnosed diseases, and they're still pretty young. But the same thing can be said of smokers earlier on. The effects build up slowly over the decades, and symptoms of disease don't start manifesting until you're already reaching the point of no return. You might feel perfectly fine in the years leading up to a heart attack, but once that heart attack hits it's too late.

Bill Clinton is a pretty good example of this. He was notorious for his love of McDonald's and junk food, and then one day he had to have a quadruple bypass surgery and coronary implants. But after changing his diet, and going vegan, he has lost a lot of weight, and has never felt healthier. In his own words, he was playing "Russian roulette" with his diet before he cut down consumption of meat and dairy.

Personally I'm not a vegetarian but this is basically how I plan my meals in the US:

1. A high fiber breakfast cereal with orange juice and coffee (milk on the cereal)
2. Red meat only once a week
3. Meat only at one meal a day (max)
4. Whole grains instead of white bread/rice/pasta

I don't always follow these 100% religiously but I find that even just being aware of what you're eating can make a big difference.

(I feel like I eat more meat but significantly less dairy in Japan. This may not be accurate because I do eat a lot of fish or tofu meals too. I eat almost no dairy products here, though. EDIT: I forgot about ice cream; that's probably my biggest dairy intake here although I still only have ice cream once every 1-2 weeks. That plus my monthly-or-so visit to McDonalds is about it.)

I find that my diet is primarily composed of noodles. I particularly like ramyun. I really don't eat meat a lot either. On rare occasions do I truly get to have a nice meat meal. For example, this weekend I got to eat roast. The portions of meat I eat in my food throughout the week is relatively little.

yudantaiteki Wrote:(I feel like I eat more meat but significantly less dairy in Japan. This may not be accurate because I do eat a lot of fish or tofu meals too. I eat almost no dairy products here, though.)

I've always assumed the dairy issue is because Japan does not have a lot of cows. This is why trying to get a large pizza at Pizza Hut or Dominoes here will cost you $30-50. Anytime cheese gets involved in something the price skyrockets. You can't really find block cheese in supermarkets to the degree you can in the US, though if you got to Costco you can. Ice cream is also pretty rare as a result too. There is stuff like haugendauz but no giant gallon tubs of ice cream like in the US. I guess most diary goes into milk supplies.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Personally I'm not a vegetarian but this is basically how I plan my meals in the US:

1. A high fiber breakfast cereal with orange juice and coffee (milk on the cereal)
2. Red meat only once a week
3. Meat only at one meal a day (max)
4. Whole grains instead of white bread/rice/pasta

I don't always follow these 100% religiously but I find that even just being aware of what you're eating can make a big difference.

I think this is a perfect example of moderation

Dairy products are tricky in the US, since dairy crops up in so many products you wouldn't think it'd be in. It wasn't until I turned vegan and started reading ingredient labels before buying things that it really hit me how much food the US puts milk into. Breakfast cereals, crackers, breads, energy bars, candy and sweets, baked goods, etc. It's kinda like how corn products pop up in so many foods.

One big hurdle with getting people to consume less dairy and meat is that the dairy industry's marketing campaigns for convincing people that milk is necessary for health have been so successful. For decades they've taught the public that if they don't have milk then they won't grow up to be big and healthy, and it's gotten to the point where a lot of people even believe milk is the only thing that has calcium. Likewise for the meat industry, many people believe you have to have meat to be strong, and that people who don't eat tons of meat are frail and weak. The marketing campaigns for creating these images in the cultural mindset have been so successful that it's hard to get people to open their eyes.

Honestly though, the people that are eating enormous amounts of meat/dairy probably aren't paying attention to health information anyway. The people I knew who would constantly go to buffets and eat quadruple cheeseburgers and large pizzas weren't doing that because they had been taught that dairy/meat were good for them. They just didn't care.