So, while the impact on eggs is interesting and all, a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning". In other words, if the place you're living has so much lead in the soil that it is unsafe to produce food there, it seems unlikely that it is safe to be living there at all.
> a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning".
As an Australian resident of one of the cities mentioned in the article who has three chooks we keep for eggs, my take would be a little different. I had trouble squaring these statements in the article:
> The average level of lead in eggs from the backyard chickens in our study was 301µg/kg. .... Some 51% of the eggs we analysed exceeded the 100µg/kg “food safety” threshold. To keep egg lead below 100μg/kg, our modelling of the relationship between lead in soil, chickens and eggs showed soil lead needs to be under 117mg/kg.
with the maps. How did they get an average of 301ug/kg when most of the area covered by the maps were below the safe level?
Naturally I looked very closely at the maps to see if my suburb was in a high lead area. It wasn't included by the maps at all, so I looked for a pattern I could extrapolate from. Only the inner suburbs were above the 117mg/kg level. My house is a long way away from an inner suburb.
Why the inner suburbs? The article hints at one reason - houses painted with lead paint. Another one sprang to mind - areas with high vehicle density when lead petrol was a thing, but the areas are so small the paint explanation seems a better fit. In Australia, most lead paint ceased to be sold in 1970.
In comparison, Wikipedia says the USA dropped lead paint in 1997, EU formally banned lead paint 2003 (but phase outs happened much earlier in most places, eg UK in 1980), India in 2016.
It's probably obvious to most Australian's, but those maps are misleading for another reason. Australian cities are huge and those maps only cover a small faction of where people live. If indeed it is only the very inner suburbs that are effected, it really is a small portion. Add to that backyards aren't a thing in the CBD, let alone backyard egg laying chooks, and I doubt too many people are effected. That said, I suspect the article has put all egg laying chooks in Mount Isa in mortal danger.
There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects. [1]
Fortunately, plants don't seem to generally absorb lead.[2] It may be in the soil, though, which means you should carefully wash your plants before eating them.
It does seem to be a big deal, though, that chickens absorb lead and that the lead ends up in their eggs. There are many people who have backyard chickens who likely aren't aware of this.
Plants can absorb lead. This is especially true in poor, acidic soils, and for root vegetables.
While there's no known safe level of lead, they do set action limits because effects under that level are not known or are negligible. It's also not practical to set a level of zero in many cases, such as soil levels for crops.
So again, why would it be unsafe to simply live there? Where else would they live? Is there anywhere that is lead free (since the argument is that any level is unacceptable)? What level do you consider safe to live around?
I live in a town that used to be a lead mining community. I know some folks around here who have backyard chickens.. in fact, I get eggs from one of them (though they live in a ways away from where I think the lead mining was, so hopefully we are safe..)
This is a very interesting news to me. I wonder if there is a cheap and easy way to test the eggs to see if they are absorbing lead from the soil?
You might be able to send two samples to a soil testing facility - one with just soil, the other with 50% soil and 50% soil with 50% eggs. Maybe want to let it compost so it doesn't stink too much in the mail/lab. Or ask the lab if they can test an egg. Other labs should be able to, but probably more expensive.
its more fair to say that food cultivated by professional farms who are held to strict safety standards is safer than food cultivated by you in your backyard that was never zoned for mass agriculture. IIRC, Michelle Obama even had some sort of community-garden project where she was growing vegetables on the White House lawn and giving it to local poor people but she had to quit after it was found out that they had toxic chemicals in them.
Seems pretty notable that everything is so polluted that people can't have chickens nor grow some backyard tubers without heavy lead ingestion.
I think it is news to most people that they should have to care about "zones" just to safely grow a garden. Almost seems like you're saying it's their fault.
I'm sorry, but why exactly should the production of food be professionalised? A far better outcome it seems, would be to make sure that everywhere people live is non-toxic enough that food can be grown safely.
Dumb question: is replacing the soil not an option? Too expensive? But surely that's amortized quickly over the term you use the garden? Or maybe you can't fully replace it because the soil is permeable and the lead comes from somewhere else (lower in the ground, rain, etc.)?
Replacing the top layer of soil is the most common method of soil remediation, but there are others. For most urban gardeners it's usually more cost-effective to put in raised beds.
I guess it is from leaded petrol and paint which are forbidden now so replacing the garden soil should work to some extent? Unless there is water coming downhill from some neighbour.
I highly doubt they're eating sufficient quantities to make any impact. They'd have to eat about 1/4 pound in the highest contaminated area to even hit the action level, assuming they fully absorb all the lead which isn't how it works.
Over several years of playing in the muck every day before maturing past the tendency to eat dirt / cram dirty hands in mouth, 1/4 pound is just not that much. There is no "safe" level of lead exposure.
And...? Do you think there's no exposure anywhere? This line, at least the way it's being used in arguments here, might as well be religion - used as a one line ideology that doesn't add anything to the discussion and ignores the realities.
How is 1/4 pound of dirt not that much? And remember, they would have to eat multiple times that much to actually absorb 100% of lead in that amount. If you're really that concerned, then you shouldn't be letting them eat any dirt due to other health concerns, like toxoplasmosis.
Spread over a childhood of say, 8 years, 1/4lb is only 28mg per day. That's a couple grains of rice. So, yeah, it's not much dirt.
I'm clearly not that concerned, as I don't keep my child in a bubble, but environmental lead is detrimental to society at large and something that we should make every reasonable effort to reduce.
8 years is a bit long, right? Newborns aren't playing in the dirt. By at least age 6 I would hope that most kids have basic hygiene to not be eating dirt. At such a low dose over such a long time, it's unlikely to accumulate. Plus, 28mg of dirt is still like eating a teaspoon of it.
"make every reasonable effort to reduce."
I agree. It's the reasonable part that comes up for debate. To me, it seems reasonable to live in an area that has elevated lead in the soil while not growing crops or raising chickens. It's more reasonable to replace the "lead free" plumbing components with truly lead free components, carefully select toys (eg no Chinese), and stay away from certain foods (carrots are a big one if I remember correctly).
And part of the reason kids are particularly susceptible to eating lead paint chips, is that lead acetate is sweet enough to be used as a sweetener in the olden days and called "sugar of lead".
It's not snark, it's a logical deduction. It's not that my kid "eats" dirt but his dirt-covered hands are in his mouth if they're otherwise unoccupied.
Melbourne's general aviation airport (i.e. light planes like Cessnas) is Moorabbin, in the south east. The map shows the City of Kingston which contains it with a dark green dot, meaning safe. Planes often do a circuit south and then turn and follow the coast (over my house...) and all those places are shown as safe.
The neighbouring City of Casey to the east is shown as unsafe, but this contains a "noxious industries area". Planes usually take off and land on a roughly north–south alignment because of the prevailing winds.
Only "avgas" which is basically the same stuff we used to put in cars and is running the same sort of engines, a piston engine, driving a propeller roughly the same way your car engine turns the wheels. Most little things, from smaller airports.
JetA, which is basically kerosene (still terrible, don't drink it - but at least it doesn't have lead in it) is used by all the jet engines. That includes lots of things a casual observer wouldn't think of that way. A King Air, or a C-130, they've got propellers, but that's a turboprop engine, the propeller is spinning because there's a turbine behind it, and instead of kicking hot fast air out the back (like an A320) it's using that energy for turning the propeller really fast.
True, but unless you live really close to a busy airport, I doubt it's an issue. I live fairly close to a rural grass strip that sees moderate use. I have about 40ppm which is 10x less than the allowed limit for crops.
It sounds like accumulation from lead based paint and leaded car gas is the issue in the article. Which makes sense since you generally can't fly low over cities anyways (disperses) and small planes are not huge emitters (low in numbers).
> We assessed trace metal contamination in backyard chickens and their eggs from garden soils across 55 Sydney homes. We also explored other possible sources of contamination such as animal drinking water and chicken feed.
I’m not surprised this would be the case with chickens foraging yards in cities. The title should probably reflect that as I doubt this would be the case in a less urban environment.
If you have an old farmhouse on your rural property, it's highly likely that it was painted with lead-based paint at some point in its history. Likely many times, in fact. A lot of the soil contamination comes from lead paint flaking off as it weathers. Fortunately(ish), this is mostly confined to the adjacent areas.
Given that you likely have more space in which to free range your chickens, the problem is now reduced to free ranging them away from the house. Arranging this is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
'Literally nothing' is of course hyperbole, but I'd like to point out that there are remediations short of removing and landfilling the topsoil available.
As I understand it, strategies for lead involve binding it into a mineral form with very low water solubility, such that plants won't accumulate it in the first place, it's not hard to find permaculture folks who will talk your ear off all day about this stuff.
My experience, after being big into permaculture some years ago before we bought our farm and for a couple years after is..
Permaculture people will talk your ear off all day about this stuff, but almost none of them have any clue on the actual application of said concepts beyond backyard urban gardens.
Farm scale permaculture is mostly a fantasy, almost nobody is doing it, except maybe Mark Shepard but in his case the actual profitable business on his farm is an organic market gardening operation and the 'regenerative agriculture', keyline design, permaculture stuff is frankly a side show.
It's one thing to lay down piles of sheet mulch and make nice "food forests" in your urban reclaimed vacant lot or whatever. It's another to do anything similar to that across many many acres. Too much of what they talk about is hand labour focused and not automation friendly.
Also a lot just doesn't work. Like, doesn't produce a crop. Just sounds nice. A whole sub-culture full of opinionated dudes (almost always) regurgitating a lot of pop philosophy and "natural wisdom" without a lot of effective science to show.
That's fine since we're discussing backyard gardens.
I've had just enough experience with larger permaculture projects to recognize the issues you're describing, but they aren't relevant to remediating 10m^2 of topsoil.
Yikes, never heard of spraying lead as an insecticide! Even more eye opening is that according to Wikipedia it was a "less toxic alternative to then-used Paris Green, which is about 10x more toxic." [1] Makes you wonder what common practices today will frighten future generations.
Complete noob question, but if it never goes away how does it get into chickens? It sounds like your point and this article combined are implying that having chickens (whose eggs you don't eat but who do eat the bugs) would actually be a method of removing lead from the land?
Some companies are looking at this for nickel mining: grow trees that leech metals out of the soil and end up with metal concentrations that are competitive with ore!
Back of the envelope calculation using the data from article.
To take soil from the Australian residential guideline for soils of 300mg/kg to the article recommended 117mg/kg, you need to remove 183mg/kg from the soil.
The average lead content in the eggs was 301µg/kg, so 183mg/301µg = 608. Meaning, for every kg of soil in your backyard, you need the chickens to lay 608 kg of eggs.
It isn't literally true that it never goes away, or you would be right that the eggs couldn't have lead in them, but my understanding is the amount removed by chickens is pretty minimal as a fraction of what's there
Yes all of this is possible. But incredibly costly and pointless on a large (farm) scale. I was (as another poster pointed out) being hyberbolic. But realistically there's no way we'd do what you're saying for hundreds of acres.
You can actually grow edible things, though. Carefully. My understanding is that the metals accumulate in the tissues of the plant but not in its fruits. Depending on the kind of fruit. So actually orchard crops can ironically be safer in these old orchards, as the metals should not accumulate into the fruits. Instead they accumulate in the vascular tissues of the plant (stems, leaves, etc.)
So:
* Avoid bare soil, as the metals would be more exposed this way.
* Don't eat or be exposed much to the plant tissues growin there (which includes things like making hay or straw)
* Could maybe grow fruits, but carefully.
* Even mowing could be dangerous, maybe.
There's people who talk about cleanup using fungus, to accumulate then dispose. But I truly wonder about if this would ever be effective.
If people have dumped engine oil as a weed suppressant or just poured it out on the ground, youll get a lot of heavy metals including lead.
Also leaded gasoline used to be popular, and would likely have been used for all sorts of things like an accelerant or a degreaser. It doesnt take many incidents like that over 50 years to spread lead all over the place.
yeah, my understanding is that a significant portion of the urban lead contamination is from automobile exhaust. This is a much better explanation than some paint chips.
I do wonder about the contribution from leaded piping. If you imagine many decades of garden irrigation, it seems that some accumulation would be expected.
Another consideration is if there were ever any coal plants in the area.
Looking at the maps, the worst levels are in the city centre, not in the suburbs, which is a weird result because it hints at pollution being a cause, but there would be less chickens being raised there than in the suburbs.
Mushrooms found growing anywhere near cities or suburbs should also never be consumed, as they specialize in concentrating heavy metals from soils. The most well-known example is the radioactive mushrooms of Chernobyl, which end up eaten by wild boars in the region (and boars don't stay in one place):
In cities and suburbs the main problem is likely due to the use of tetraethyl lead additives in gasoline for many decades (~1930s to ~1990s). Downwind of coal plants the mercury and arsenic are more problematic. Add both and some more industry and you end up with heavy metal cocktails that just recirculate endlessly.
If you want to grow foods in cities, there is a solution - raised beds that are separate from the underlying dirt, filled with soil trucked in from rural farms that aren't adjacent to industrial pollution sources. Note also that some 'natural environments' have quite a bit of heavy metals and toxic elements, due to natural weathering from geological outcrops, and some plants in these environments accumulate such metals (nickel, arsenic, etc.).
If you're concerned, sending a sample of your local soil to a testing lab is relatively inexpensive.
Mushrooms (to be more specific, only certain species) can be used to clean up dirty sites, since they absorb heavy metals so well.
+1 for raised beds.
+1 for testing. Here in the US, almost every college has a Cooperative Extension, and does soil testing. At Rutgers [1], it's just an extra $18 for lead testing.
Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings. I’m sure there is still lead at lower concentrations pretty much everywhere considering it was in our gasoline for so long. But the title should probably be more like the eggs of free range hens in urban setting contain 40x lead than chickens confined to a tiny box.
Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings.
While that's true, what they determined to be dangerous levels are still low enough to be in the "zero to low" category for most other classifiers like universities. I wouldn't assume your soil is safe unless you have an actual measurement done.
I wondered how much the chickens may have been concentrating the lead and if it was significant compared with the extra lead the owners of those chickens are being exposed to from their city home environment.
But this article suggests that air lead pollution is not an issue:
Its almost as if...there is a bias in the media in favor of the egg and gas industry. No...don't raise your own eggs. Buy OUR eggs! They are safer, and don't contain lead like yours! Oh, the lead in the air is more dangerous? No, you are being paranoid.
For almost 100 years, the Asarco Company operated a copper smelter in Tacoma. Air pollution from the smelter settled on the surface soil of more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound basin. Arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals are still in the soil as a result of this pollution.
I mean, even local farms are usually in rural areas, where the lead contamination is probably much less than in the inner cities studied by this article. Still, I wonder where the lead originally came from? Old deposits from leaded gasoline fumes? Or does it come from lead paint, lead roofing, lead pipes or similar?
Looking at the actual numbers it seems like the suburbs are a safe enough place to raise the chickens compared to the older inner core of these Australian cities.
I wonder if this can be remediated by covering the chickens run in a deep layer of mulch and shredded leaves, letting that compost over time as the chickens poop and scratch in it. Over time the layer of contaminated soil could be buried deeper under fresh compost. I also wonder if you could innoculate the wood chips with a fungus whose mycelium could filter out the soil a bit.
That is always going to depend on the context. Sometimes a small number makes a difference, sometimes not.
40 times greater chance of a comet hitting you on the head? Still gonna be negligible and you probably shouldn't be too concerned.
40 times more lead in your eggs? Well, you should really be aiming for zero lead in your eggs and lead poisoning can happen over time (My cousins got lead poisoning from old plates and bowls). If you have chickens, you are probably being fed a consistent diet of eggs. So yeah, it might very well be a concern.
You didn't answer the question, you just reiterated that lead is bad.
Is this 40x the chance of getting hit by a comet, or 40 games of Russian roulette.
The study talks about increased blood lead levels ~1 to 1.4 μg/dL. Now how risky is that? The CDC has alert levels for children of 5 ug/dL, recently revised from 10 ug/uL.
What the measurable impact is from 5ug, let alone 1 ug is hotly debated because it is so difficult to asses.
Here is the study they cross reference:
>Our IEUBK model predictions suggested that consuming one egg per day with a lead concentration less than 100 μg/kg, in addition to the model’s default lead exposure from diet and all other sources, would result in estimated GM blood-lead concentration increases of less than 1 μg/dL in children. However, daily consumption of one egg with the highest lead concentration we found in eggs from NYC community gardens (167 μg/kg) would increase GM blood-lead concentrations by 1 to 1.4 μg/dL, and daily consumption of one egg with 300 μg/kg lead would increase GM blood-lead concentrations by as much as 2.4 μg/dL, well above the 1 μg/dL guideline.
The IEUBK model output was also used to estimate the number of eggs children could consume without excessively increasing blood-lead concentrations. Among children 1 – 6 years of age, the model output suggested that an increase in dietary lead intake of up to 5.6 μg/day for 1 to 2 year olds (and slightly larger increases – as much as 7.6 μg/day – for older children), would raise GM blood-lead concentrations by less than 1 μg/dL. This intake translates into the consumption of about 6 medium eggs/day at 20 μg/kg lead, 2.5 eggs/day at 50 μg/kg, or 1.2 eggs/day at 100 μg/kg.
These evaluations implied that, overall, the lead concentrations we found in eggs from NYC community gardens were not likely to significantly increase lead exposure or to pose a significant health risk. However, frequent consumption of eggs with the highest lead concentration we found could significantly increase lead exposure, and chickens exposed to higher concentrations of lead in soil are likely to produce eggs with higher concentrations of lead. This exposure pathway could potentially be significant in some gardens, and it should not be ignored
The medical limit for lead is zero (you can find that statement in various forms on all the major - official, main stream, government, education - sites that have something to say about the subject).
The reason we have non-zero "official" threshold values is for practical reasons: In our times and on this earth right now it simply is not possible. The values are set so that medical people are kind of okay with it - any damages are too subtle and not too obvious (e.g. less IQ as well as most small issues nicely also correlate with age so it can always be attributed to aging, and proving for an individual (and not just statistically for a lot of people without being able to say anything about each individual) that some issue was caused by or was contributed to by e.g. lead is impossible (we can't tag all the atoms and follow them around and see what they do, and even if we could do the first part perfectly, the following those atoms, we still would not know what they actually do just from knowing where they've been, even less so how the local bio-chemistry deals with consequences longer term than we can observe). So we need to have a limit that is low enough to not cause medical alarm bells to go off, but high enough to not bankrupt government and industry if they were told they had to clean it all up. Which, quite frankly, they can't at this point.
Oh and by the way, please nobody blame "capitalism". I grew up in East Germany, near ash mountains and a river clearly unsuitable to even be touched by a human, everything was dirty and gray. I did not even live in one of the known polluted places (e.g. Bitterfeld). After reunification everything was cleaned up with Western money and methods - ash mountains gone, the river is clear and has nice water plants showing it's really healthy, etc. East Germany under capitalism is A LOT cleaner than under socialism. I say this because in sooo many discussions about the environment always somebody blames capitalism, but it's deeper and orthogonal to whatever system is used I think. People do or don't care about their environment, if it was just about economic pressure, you have them in all systems, because all systems need to produce something.
Thank you for that last paragraph. It is so tiresome to read other people saying that "capitalism" is to blame for everything. You make an excellent point that it's neither socialism nor capitalism per se that's to blame.
All, large cities are filthy, contaminated places. You shouldn't be growing food in random soil you find lying around in them and you shouldn't be raising animals in that soil unless you are carefully managing the sources and exposure of everything.
In old neighborhoods in the US (anything over a century is old in the US) you find the craziest things in the soil. The sheer amount of glass and plastic and metal is staggering. Just digging the holes for ornamental plants was enough to make me realize all food gardening would need to be in raised beds with liners and known soil.
In parts of the world with longer periods of habitation (all of them) what do you find in the soil?
Does anybody know whether fruit & vegetables can contain lead if all external matter is 100% removed or peeled off? i.e do plants suck this stuff up? my parents grow fruit and vegges at home and we live next to a road in a fairly old neighborhood..
Plants don't typically pull lead out of the soil through their roots. Your main concern should be surface contamination from soil getting splashed onto the plant when it's watered / rains
Are there any known examples where evolution has produced a solution to a problem like this? I've heard of humans adapting to Malaria and lactose consumption in adulthood.
Also, are there any organisms that don't experience lead as a toxic substance, at least in the way that humans do? That might point to adaptation plausibility.
1. Lead is known to cause certain illnesses, for example cancer / kidney... ?
2. Now wow does the statistic looks like on a massive dataset for group of people eating more eggs than a median, have they got these diseases ???
yes: study has a valid point
no: ignore the study, nobody keeps hens in the suburbs & small yard
The study isn't saying that this is a reason to avoid eggs in general, they're saying this is a reason to consider stopping eating eggs from urban backyard chickens.
God forbid the authors spend 60sec to transform the unit into something that is easily visualize-able to the general public. That should be SOP when writing and editing these kinds of press releases.
Density of typical soil is around 1250kg/m^3 so 117mg/kg is ~146g/m^3. Density of lead is 1.34g/cm&^3 so ~146g/m^3 is 110cm^3 or roughly the size of a small container of cough syrup or 3-4 decent sized fishing weights per cubic meter of soil. That's a lot of lead but probably readily attainable under certain circumstances.
Maybe take a break from the conspiracy theory blogs?
You have everything here so completely backwards it's going to be tricky to unwind. Meat production has been massively subsidized in America for decades, resulting in terrible outcomes in every way- massive emissions contributing to climate change, polluted rivers and lakes, antibiotic resistant bacteria development, obesity, heart disease, colon cancer. As people have become aware of all these negatives, more people are choosing to eat less meat. There have been no meaningful regulatory changes to feed crops, although the world would surely be a better place if some of the existing subsidies were removed.
The meat industry has long relied on (often illegal) immigrants to work in butchering and meat packing plants, under unsafe conditions for low pay. Covid and increased border patrolling have disrupted this labor supply, making them cut back even further on safety, resulting in a couple plants experiencing predictable problems from years of cutting-corners.
Finally, Americans drastically overestimate their need for protein, due to decades of marketing campaigns, going back to steroid-injecting bodybuilders & athletes claiming that their muscles were due to "eating protein" because they couldn't publicly admit it was due to injecting anabolic drugs.
So you put down OP saying their post is conspiracy theory nonsense, then support pretty much the premise of their post by outlining that you hope US gov't regulations change to point that meat becomes harder to access and consume.
There is pretty clearly a desire to cut overall consumption X% among the proles to fight climate change, meat and transportation in particular. There's some effort to come up with technological substitutes but at the end of the day, this desire is strong enough that a "war" is being fought culturally, politically, economically with subsidies, whatever it takes to make it happen without causing a revolt among the working class, cause as of today the substitutes are too expensive or inadequate and quality of life will take a hit as a result.
The question in my mind is should we restrict quality of life, or restrict population to allow for individuals to live the quality of live they desire? We have limited resources and I think we're overpopulated. I wonder what the morality/ethics are of bringing more people into the world while restricting their quality of life and freedom to make choices.
That wasn't the implication. Limiting birth rates would be a reduction in quality of life. However, there's a trade off. If there are multiple daily quality of life restrictions, then those could outweigh the singular restriction on reproduction. Also, the reproductive choice has consequences, potentially negative ones, on the others who are already living. If we want to discuss limiting diets, vehicles, housing, and all other things that are tied to consumption, then perhaps reasonable limits on reproduction should be discussed as well.
The areas with highest quality of life have declining population, so your premise is flawed.
Obviously the solution is to increase our resource usage. If we had abundant clean energy (e.g. nuclear, maybe even wind/solar) none of this would be a problem.
"The areas with highest quality of life have declining population, so your premise is flawed."
Which premise, and how so?
"Obviously the solution is to increase our resource usage. If we had abundant clean energy (e.g. nuclear, maybe even wind/solar) none of this would be a problem."
I fail to see how this solves all our problems. How does this replace things like metals, plastics, all agricultural products, over fishing, deforestation, etc?
One of the worst things about subsidies is that once they have been around for long enough, they become invisible and get perceived as normal, while trying to get rid of them and restore actual fairness and market functioning is seen as an attack. Multiple people on this thread are demonstrating exactly this.
But isn't "war on protein" different from "let's change up the meat sector"?
Maybe I'm missing something, but the former sounds far more like a conspiracy theory to me, while the latter can be stated pretty matter-of-fact-ly, like your links prove. "War on protein" sounds so dramatic, like there are people in the background scheming, wanting to deprive us of certain nutrition and subsequently rule over us.
But perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Personally, protein-deprivation is not really that far up on my list of fears. And for the record, I'm not against eating meat (or animal based protein, for that matter) per se. We're just eating far too much of it.
It does seem like several major organizations are trying to push people towards alternative protein sources. There might be something good about that, but honestly, it's going to lead in a decline of quality of life. The reality is simply that the quality of life the average person has come to expect in the West is not sustainable to be achieved for the entire global population while meeting the realities of climate change. So only one of two outcomes is possible if we don't want to make our species extinct: 1. reduce quality of life or 2. further segment society and increase exploitation. A whole lot of people think #2 is bad, so are choosing #1 as the only viable option.
I sometimes compare Climate Change to the US Civil War, in terms of a few rich people owning the slaves/fossil fuels and not being ready to give that up, and while I'm less worried about it now than I have been in the past, I did think a really big war was a real possibility and I still wouldn't totally rule it out.
This kind of thinking, is exactly the propaganda you'd use if you personally had a big incentive for an inefficient system to continue, but needed a lot of other people to fight and die in order to have any slim chance of coming out ahead of the future changes.
To get less melodramatic and more boringly factual: a carbon tax would increase our quality of life, spur economic growth and generally be good for everyone who hasn't put their life savings into fossil fuels.
The fact that people are so worried about quality of life, but refuse to absorb that simple fact is a worry.
> To get less melodramatic and more boringly factual: a carbon tax would increase our quality of life, spur economic growth and generally be good for everyone who hasn't put their life savings into fossil fuels.
Sure, but there's a difference between a carbon tax and food policies that restrict naturally produced meats from being available to the average person. I think a carbon tax is a great path forward, personally, and I'd like to see us figure out national laws that allow for rooftop solar to be viable without allowing utilities and municipalities to ruin it. Point solar, EVs/Ebikes, and other ways to reduce or offset the needs to use fossil fuels for energy are huge boons that people are already economically incentivized to pursue (and would be even more incentivized by a carbon tax), but other policies often prevent them.
It's not adding an alternative source that feels bad. It's the removal (by becoming too expensive) of the customary source, that is, cows (and sheep, and even pigs).
Terrestrial bugs feel gross to many people. Water bugs, such as shrimp, are commonly accepted by most Western and South Asian population. I bet on that.
Beef should remain, the way truffles remain: as a delicious feast food, not as everyday staple. At least until growing bovine muscle tissue in vats becomes mainstream, I mean.
Sure, shrimp and "land bugs" look similar if you squint at them. There is an obvious, massive difference though: crustaceans have meat.
Most people don't just eat a crustacean whole like you would have to with "land bugs". They harvest the meat from the shrimp / crab / lobster and eat the meat.
The key part here that both groups are cold-blooded herbivores, so can be fed much more efficiently than both warm-blooded cattle and cold-blooded fish.
You can extract some meat from large beetles, locusts, etc, much like you can from crabs. But even locusts are much smaller than crabs, which makes that onerous.
You can eat larvae which are mostly meat, and some grow large enough, comparable to shrimps. Actually, some people in Africa already eat them for a long time. Would be a harder sell for Europeans, though.
"Bug" commonly refers to terrestrial arthropods in general (e.g. spiders, centipedes, and other non-insects) and can sometimes even extend to earthworms and other small invertebrates. It is not a synonym for insect.
Crustaceans fill a similar niche in marine environments to insects on land. It is common to call crustaceans sea bugs in jest. We don't need to always be taxanomically correct. Have some fun with your words.
"and how any sort of quality life choice marks you as an extremist of some kind,"
In a society of limited resources and competition, anything that is seen as noncompliance with the greater good could mark an individual as extreme. There's a herd mentality, and anyone outside of the herd's "normal" will be targeted. We already see it (right or wrong) with smokers, fur coats, etc.
"People are living longer and longer, but I worry that given what one has to do to get there will make them so insufferable,"
I personally think this is mostly a myth. I feel that much of the improvements are due to healthcare improvements in drugs, treatment options, etc. Society level life expectancy is most heavily improved by reducing mortality of younger people. We continually see better treatments for childhood illnesses, better safety equipment (car seats and such), even things like narcan for drug OD in young adults. Midlife care for things like strokes and heart attacks are better now too. The main point is, there are a lot of people around today who wouldn't be if it weren't for medicine or the recent improvements in medicine. The natural lifespan has been long (70+ yr) for a very long time. Due to medicine and technology/machine improvements more people are getting there now. And I'm highly skeptical of the studies claiming stuff like "a soda cuts a day off your life". Have an occasional soda... who cares! Drink 3 day... well, that's not good, but I don't think we can quantify it (especially due to genetic variances, like how many smokers never get lung cancer).
IMO I think fake meat is a fad. The lab grown stuff that is technically real meat isn't economically viable and "Beyond Meat" has a real uncanny valley taste. A few years ago I was at the airport and decided to get a "Beyond Whopper" at burger king. It was a wired thing to eat because it almost tasted real, but you could tell it wasn't the real thing, since then I've never bought one.
And I use this example because I think in end, it's really the consumer that decides, and they won't buy it. Beyond meat sounds fantastic on paper, trust me I was hyped for it back when it first announced. But that first burger just killed it for me, and I think it will for many consumers.
My experience is the polar opposite. I quit eating meat a few years ago for ethical reasons after learning more about the industry (fun fact, when widespread animal abuse and unsafe, unsanitary conditions were revealed to be common across the meat processing industry, rather than crack down on the companies or introduce reforms, many midwestern states instead created laws making it a felony for employees to record their working conditions, the treatment of animals or the handling of meat. Literally protecting the abusers by outlawing whistleblowing).
Ordering a classic "veggie" burger at a restaurant, often some sort of bean/mushroom/lentil/whatever amalgam was clearly a massively different product than a beef burger. I thought of it less as a true "substitute" and more of just an acceptable thing to eat. The introduction of beyond meat has been a huge game changer for me. I probably eat 4+ servings of beyond meat products per week now and don't miss meat from my diet at all.
Thankfully, some of these anti-whistleblower laws been overturned by the courts, under the 1st Amendment. I've also heard of some folks being arrested for animal cruelty once the videos got out, but unfortunately it's been the minimal wage workers instead of the owners. It's kinda ironic: you beat your dog and your neighbor sees you, you're gonna get arrested (I think every state/county in the country has anti-animal cruelty laws).
But if millions of cows/pigs/chickens get punched, castrated, thrown, etc., it's ok, because it's not on video and people just don't wanna know. Interesting how the "local" and "organic" labels have become super popular and charge a premium, but Raised Humanely isn't, at least not yet. IMHO, people just don't wanna know.
Some people (my mother-in-law) actually prefers Beyond Burgers to real burgers. I bet it depends on the cooking: you always grill my Beyond Burgers and everyone always loves 'em.
I still remember during the early days of the internet when I watched a 320x240 video of a live pig, tied down and being burned alive by a blow torch. Still remember it, 20 years later.
Note, I actually support fishing and hunting. Especially here in the northeast USA, where there's too many deer because we killed all their predators (bears, coyotes, wolves, etc.). And now they're eating entire forests and getting struck by cars.
And US government bans selling hunted deer meat (venison). I don't understand...
It’s wild that you’re saying it’s a fad when the impediments to it are cost, flavor, and texture, all of which have been improving at breakneck pace over the last few years. Meanwhile the impediments to actual animal meat are things like: running out of arable land. Running out of water. Antibiotic resistance. Climate awareness. Animal welfare awareness. Etc, all becoming worse problems at similarly breakneck speeds.
I see these two trend lines and arrive at the opposite conclusion: animal meat is certainly on its way out.
Edit: Also, Beyond Meat is really not great, in my opinion. Impossible however is quite good! I really enjoy meat and one of the best burgers I've ever had (incl. beef burgers) was Impossible from now defunct NYC restaurant Saxon + Parole. If you haven't, I'd also recommend trying seitan. It's not new and flashy and doesn't really try to be mistaken for meat so much as just be a pretty good substitute for it. The nutrition profile on seitan is outrageously good and the price, texture, flavor are all very palatable these days, especially in the right dishes.
The trick (and this remains to be seen), is that lab meat is expected to become cheaper than animal meat eventually, and consumers will then prefer a $5 beyond burger to a $10 cow burger.
Did you even read the article? It’s about chickens in certain parts of Australia where there is high concentrations of lead in the soil. Nothing about all eggs being contaminated or all proteins are bad, just that if you have lead in your soil, maybe don’t farm there.
Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse, and stuff like this:
I did read it, and the intent of the article is to discourage people everywhere from using non-industrial food sources. I will take my chances with farmed eggs because the balance of probabilities are that this will not be the dangerous part of my life, and the alternative is accepting the admonitions of people with insincere agendas.
Further, I like how it is on skeptics to maintain the high quality tone of a discussion, but the hegemons are somehow not accountable to conventions around civility, wit, and clarity. It's like some people have some kind of luxury-stupidity whereby someone whose opinions aren't officially protected can't afford to be that petulant.
Another commenter here observed it's a war on nitrogen with protein as a casualty, which is pretty consistent given aligned climate change initiatives.
> the intent of the article is to discourage people everywhere from using non-industrial food sources
Not at all, It's clearly pretty straight science reporting typical of Ars Technica. That nearly half a million Australians keep backyard chickens is in and of itself interesting, and those people probably want and need to know about lead risk. It may also be worth other urban chicken owners checking their soil and eggs for lead. People who live in cities and keep chickens are likely to read Ars, so it's a natural story for them to run. No conspiracy needed. The call to action is to just get your soil tested.
Its the headline that I personally take issue with. It is about Australia, but the title implies that backyard eggs all over are more likely to contain lead.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's true: is there any reason to expect Australia to have higher than average lead levels? My understanding is that it's mostly from paint and gasoline, in which case it should be similar to the US and other countries.
I don’t think it’s an austrain problem. I know in the US it’s also an issue.
Leaded gasoline is one of the drivers of all this lead in soil. When I was younger fuel was labeled “unleaded” when they took the anti-engine knock chemicals out.
There is some lead naturally in soil but it’s generally low levels
“The US EPA has set a safe soil lead threshold limit of 400 ppm total lead using this method. The US EPA also recommends that soils used for gardening fall below 100 ppm total lead. In Massachusetts, the regulatory safety threshold is 200 ppm total lead….To reduce your risk of lead poisoning, the following is advised:
Good Gardening Practices to Reduce Lead Exposure
-Locate gardens away from old painted structures and heavily travelled roads.
On HN users are in fact expected to modify titles which are misleading or clickbaity, without resorting to editorialization.
This would include for example, changing an article from a Florida news source saying "diabetes epidemic out of control" to "Florida reports highest level of diabetes in its history" (these are completely made up).
You know, you can just eat lentils, beans, peas, rice, wheat, fresh vegetables, olive oil, and so on? Like, right now. It's very affordable, and you don't need to shop from Amazon or install an app for it.
Your comment is such a hot take that it could heat up a hot air balloon.
