"Buxqi" > wrote in message
...

There is a way to make Google Groups insert carats in your replies, maybe
you could look for it.

On Mar 3, 3:53 pm, Rudy Canoza > wrote:
> The "vegan" pseudo-argument on "inefficiency" is that
> the resources used to produce a given amount of meat
> could produce a much greater amount of vegetable food
> for direct human consumption, due to the loss of energy
> that results from feeding grain and other feeds to
> livestock.

Yes. A vegan diet will generally have a smaller ecological
footprint than a meat based one.

Negro men "generally", according to statistics, commit more crime and
abandon their families more often than white men. Does that make negro men
less moral by definition? That in fact is a very common perception, and
wrong. People, like diets, must be judged on their actual merits, not the
characteristics of a larger group to which they may belong. My diet,
although not a vegetarian one, probably has more positive attributes on most
relevant criteria you can name than most vegan diets.


> In order to examine the efficiency of some process,
> there must be agreement on what the end product is
> whose efficiency of production you are examining. If
> you're looking at the production of consumer
> electronics, for example, then the output is
> televisions, stereo receivers, DVD players, etc.
> Rather obviously, you need to get specific. No
> sensible person is going to suggest that we ought to
> discontinue the production of television sets, because
> they require more resources to produce (which they do),
> and produce more DVD players instead. (For the
> cave-dwellers, an extremely high quality DVD player may
> be bought for under US$100, while a comparable quality
> television set is going to cost several hundred
> dollars. $500 for a DVD player is astronomical - I'm
> not even sure there are any that expensive - while you
> can easily pay $3000 or more for large plasma TV
> monitor, which will require a separate TV receiver.)

Yes. Meat and grain are not the same product with regard
to their value to the consumer but in terms of the resources
that need to be used to keep a population adequately fed,
they are comparable.

Averting starvation is not the only goal of eating, it's arguably not even
the primary one. If it were your argument might have some legs, but in fact
almost everyone looks at food in a far richer context than that.

> What are the "vegans" doing with their misuse of
> "inefficiency"?

There is no misuse. The meaning of efficiency depends
on context. They are not using the definition employed
by economists. That's all.

It is a thinly veiled attempt to pass off a moral judgment as an economic
argument.

If everyone in the world followed Christianty there would be far less
conflict and destruction in the world. Does that make non-Christians
immoral? No, in fact the real problem is the very narrow-minded attitude
which perceives that either you think as I do or you are misguided.


> They're clearly saying that the end
> product whose efficiency of production we want to
> consider is "food", i.e., undifferentiated food
> calories. Just as clearly, they are wrong. Humans
> don't consider all foods equal, and hence equally
> substitutable. As in debunking so much of "veganism",
> we can see this easily - laughably easily - by
> restricting our view to a strictly vegetarian diet,
> without introducing meat into the discussion at all.
> If "vegans" REALLY were interested in food production
> efficiency, they would be advocating the production of
> only a very small number of vegetable crops, as it is
> obvious that some crops are more efficient to produce -
> use less resources per nutritional unit of output -
> than others.

Information on the relative ecological efficiency of those
foods is not so widely available.

Nobody is even looking, because efficiency is not their real concern, it's
simply a club to use against people who aren't following the same
restrictive lifestyle they are.

>
> But how do "vegans" actually behave? Why, they buy
> some fruits and vegetables that are resource-efficient,
> and they buy some fruits and vegetables that are
> relatively resource-INefficient. You know this by
> looking at retail prices: higher priced goods ARE
> higher priced because they use more resources to
> produce.

Actually the prices are merely an approximation to the
actual costs of production since we do not live in a
completely free market with perfect information.

Some of the most expensive food pound for pound is organic produce, which
vegans should approve of, however it often contains hidden environmental
costs, like transportation.


> If "vegans" REALLY were interested in food
> production efficiency, they would only be buying the
> absolutely cheapest fruit or vegetable for any given
> nutritional requirement. This would necessarily mean
> there would be ONLY one kind of leafy green vegetable,
> one kind of grain, one variety of fruit, and so on.
>
> If "vegans" were to extend this misuse of "efficiency"
> into other consumer goods, say clothing, then there
> would be only one kind of shoe produced (and thus only
> one brand). The same would hold for every conceivable
> garment. A button-front shirt with collars costs more
> to produce - uses more resources - than does a T-shirt,
> so everyone "ought" to wear only T-shirts, if we're
> going to focus on the efficiency of shirt production.
> You don't "need" any button front shirts, just as you
> don't "need" meat. But look in any "vegan's" wardrobe,
> and you'll see a variety of different kinds of clothing
> (all natural fiber, of course.) "vegans" aren't
> advocating that only the most "efficient" clothing be
> produced, as their own behavior clearly indicates.
>
> The correct way to analyze efficiency of production is
> to focus as narrowly as possible on the end product,
> then see if that product can be produced using fewer
> resources. It is important to note that the consumer's
> view of products as distinct things is crucial. A
> radio can be produced far more "efficiently", in terms
> of resource use, than a television; but consumers don't
> view radios and televisions as generic entertainment
> devices.
>
> The critical mistake, the UNBELIEVABLY stupid mistake,
> that "vegans" who misconceive of "inefficiency" are
> making, is to see "food" as some undifferentiated lump
> of calories and other nutritional requirements. Once
> one realizes that this is not how ANYONE, including the
> "vegans" themselves, views food, then the
> "inefficiency" argument against using resources for
> meat production falls to the ground.
>
> I hope this helps.

Not at all. You have pointed out that many people prefer
non-vegan diets and are prepared to pay market price for
meat. You have also pointed out that most vegans don't
always make the least resource-intensive choice either
with food or anything else.

So where do they get off pointing fingers ?

However you have not succesfully refuted the point that
going vegan almost always reduces one's ecological footprint
and that is all vegans mean when they make the efficiency
argument.

If that is all vegans were saying there would be no argument, but it's not.
There is a carload of judgmentmentalism that invariably comes along with
that observation.