Category Archives: food

Book review: Cuisine and Empire

[Header: Illustration of meal in 1500s Mexico from the Florentine Codex.]

People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish – we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all of this for good reason: Cooking makes food more calorically efficient and less dangerous. Other techniques contribute to this, or help preserve food over time. Also, it tastes good.

Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan is an overview of human history by major cuisines – the kind of things people cooked and ate. It is not trying to be a history of cultures, agriculture, or nutrition, although it touches on all of these things incidentally, as well as some histories of things you might not expect, like identity and technology and philosophy.

Grains (plant seeds) and roots were the staples of most cuisines. They’re relatively calorically dense, storeable, and grow within a season.

Remote islands really had to make do with whatever early colonists brought with them. Not only did pre-Columbian Hawaii not have metal, they didn’t have clay to make pots with! They cooked stuff in pits.

Running in the background throughout a lot of this is the clock of domestication – with enough time and enough breeding you can make some really naturally-digestible varieties out of something you’d initially have to process to within an inch of its life. It takes time, quantity, and ideally knowledge and the ability to experiment with different strains to get better breeds.

Potatoes came out of the Andes and were eaten alongside quinoa. Early potato cuisines didn’t seem to eat a lot of whole or cut-up potatoes – they processed the shit out of them, chopping, drying or freeze-drying them, soaking them, reconstituting them. They had to do a lot of these because the potatoes weren’t as consumer-friendly as modern breeds – less digestible composition, more phytotoxins, etc.

As cities and societies caught on, so did wealth. Wealthy people all around the world started making “high cuisines” of highly-processed, calorically dense, tasty, rare, and fancifully prepared ingredients. Meat and oil and sweeteners and spices and alcohol and sauces. Palace cooks came together and developed elaborate philosophical and nutritional theories to declare what was good to eat.

Things people nigh-universally like to eat:

Salt
Fat
Sugar
Starch
Sauces
Finely-ground or processed things
A variety of flavors, textures, options, etc
Meat
Drugs
- Alcohol
- Stimulants (chocolate, caffeine, tea, etc)
Things they believe are healthy
Things they believe are high-class
Pure or uncontaminated things (both morally and from, like, lead)

All people like these things, and low cuisines were not devoid of joy, but these properties showed up way more in high cuisines than low cuisines. Low cuisines tended to be a lot of grain or tubers and bits of whatever cooked or pickled vegetables or meat (often wild-caught, like fish or game) could be scrounged up.

In the classic way that oppressive social structures become self-reinforcing, rich people generally thought that rich people were better-off eating this kind of diet – carefully balanced – whereas it wasn’t just necessary, it was good for the poor to eat meager, boring foods. They were physically built for that. Eating a wealthy diet would harm them.

In lots of early civilizations, food and sacrifice of food was an important part of religion. Gods were attracted by offered meals or meat and good smells, and blessed harvests. There were gods of bread and corn and rice.

One thing I appreciate about this book is that it doesn’t just care about the intricate high cuisines, even if they were doing the most cooking, the most philosophizing about cooking, and the most recordkeeping. Laudan does her best to pay at least as much attention to what the 90+% of regular people were eating all of the time.

Here’s a great passage on feasts in Ancient Greece, at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, at the start of each Olympic games (~400 BCE):

On the altar, ash from years of sacrifice, held together with water from the nearby River Alpheus, towered twenty feet into the air. One by one, a hundred oxen, draped with garlands, raised especially for the event and without marks of the plow, were led to the altar. The priest washed his hands in clear water in special metal vessels, poured out libations of wide, and sprinkled the animals with cold water or with grain to make them shake their heads as if consenting to their death. The onlookers raised their right arms to the altar. Than the priest stunned the lead ox with a blow to the base to the neck, thrust in the knife, and let the blood spill into a bowl held by a second priest. The killing would have gone on all day, even if each act took only five minutes.

Assistants dragged each felled ox to one side to be skinned and butchered. For the assembled crowd, cooks began grilling strips of beef, boiling bones in cauldron, baking barley bannocks, and stacking up amphorae of wine. For the sacrifice, fat and leg and thigh bones rich in life-giving marrow were thrown on a fire of fragrant poplar branches, and the entrails were grilled. Symbolizing union, two or three priests bit together into each length of intestines. The bones whitened and crumbled; the fragrant smoke rose to the god.

Ancient Greek farmers had thin soil and couldn’t do much in the way of deliberate irrigation, so their food supply was more unpredictable than other places.

Country people kept a three-year supply of grain to protect against harvest failure and a four-year supply of oil.

That’s so much!

That poor soil is also why the olive tree was relied on for oil instead of grains, which had better yields and took way less time to reach producing age. You could grow olive trees in places you couldn’t farm grain. And now we all know and love the oil from this tree. A tree is a wild place to get oil from! Similar story for grapevines.

The Spartans really liked this specific pork and blood soup called “black broth”.

This book was a fun read, on top of the cool history. Laudan has a straightforward listful way of describing cuisines that really puts me in the mind of a Redwall or a George R. R. Martin feast description.

A royal meal in the Indian Mauryan Empire (circa 300 BCE or so):

For court meals, the meat was tempered with spices and condiments to correct its hot, dry nature and accompanied by the sauces of high cuisine. Buffalo calf spit-roasted over charcoal and basted with ghee was served with sour tamarind and pomegranate sauces. Haunch of venison was simmered with sour mango and pungent and aromatic spices. Buffalo calf steaks were fried in ghee and seasoned with sour fruit, rock salt, and fragrant leaves. Meat was ground, formed into patties, balls, or sausage shapes, and fried, or it was sliced, dried to jerky, and then toasted.

Or in around 600 CE, Mexican Teotihuacan eating:

To maize tamales or tortillas were added stews of domestic turkeys and dogs, and deer, rabbits, ducks, small birds, iguanas, fish, frog, and insects caught in the wild. Sauces were made with basalt pestles and mortars that were used to shear fresh green or dried and rehydrated red chiles, resulting in a vegetable puree that was thickened with tomatillos (Physalis philadelphica) or squash seeds. Beans, simply simmered in water, provided a tasty side dish. For the nobles, there were gourd bowls of foaming chocolate, seasoned with annatto and chili.

I’m a vegetarian who has no palette for spice and now all I can think about is eating dog stew made with sheared fresh green chiles and plain beans.

Be careful about reading this book while broke on an airplane. You will try to convince yourself this is all academic and that you’re not that curious about what iguana meat tastes like. You’ll lose that internal battle. Then, in desperation, your brain will start in on a new phase. You’ll tell yourself as you scrape the last of your bag of traveler’s food – walnut meat, dried grapes, and pieces of sweet chocolate – that you wait to be brought a complimentary snack of baked wheat crackers flavored with salt, and a cup of hot coffee with cow’s milk, sweetened with cane sugar, and also that this is happening while you are flying. In this moment, you will be enlightened.

Grindstones are very important throughout history. A lot of cultures used hand grindstones at first and worked into water or animal-driven mills later. You grind grain to get flour, but you also grind things to get oil, spices, a different consistency of root, etc. You spent a lot of time grinding grain. There are a million kinds of hand grindstone. Some are still used today. When Roman soldiers marched around continents, they brought with them a relatively efficient rotary grindstone. They used mules to carry one 60-pound grindstone per 8 people. Every day, a soldier would grind for an hour and a half to feed the eight people. The grain would be stolen from storehouses conquered along the way.

Chapter 3 on Buddhist cuisines throughout Asia was especially great. Buddhism spread as sort of a reaction to the high sacrificial meat-n-grain cuisine of the time – a religious asceticism that really caught on. Ashoka spread it in India in 250 BCE, and slowly over centuries seeped into China. Buddhists did not kill animals (mostly) nor drink alcohol, and ate a lot of rice. White rice, sugar, and dairy spread through Asia. In both China and India, as the rich got into it, Buddhism became its own new high cuisine: rare vegetables, sugar, ghee and other dairy, tea, and elaborate vegetarian dishes. So much for asceticism!

There is an extensive history of East Asian tofu and gluten-based meat substitutes that largely came out of vegetarian Buddhist influence. A couple 1100s and 1200s CE Chinese cookbooks are purely vegetarian and have recipes for things like mock lung (you know, like a mock hamburger or mock chicken, but if you’re missing the taste of lung.) (You might be interested in modern adaptations from Robban Toleno.)

Diets often go with religion. It’s a classic way to divide culture, and also, food and philosophy and ideas about health have always gone hand in hand in hand. Islamic empires spread cuisine over the middle east. Christian empires brought their own food with them to other parts of the world.

A lot of early cuisines in Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia, and Mesoamerica were based on correspondences between types of food and elements and metaphysical ideas. You would try to reach balance. In Europe in the 1500s, during the Enlightenment, these old incorrect ideas about nutrition were replaced with bold new incorrect ideas about nutrition. Instead of corresponding to four elements, food was actually made of three chemical elements: salt, oil, and vapor. The Dutch visionary Paracelsus who thought chemistry could be based on the bible and was a century later called a “master at murdering folk with chemistry”.

Fermenting took on its own magic:

Paracelsus suggested that “ferment” was spiritual, reinterpreting the links between the divine and bread in terms of his Protestant chemistry. When ferment combined with matter (massa in Latin, significantly also the word for bread dough), it multiplied. If this seems abstract, considered what happened in bread making. Bakers used a ferment or leaven[…] and kneaded it with flour and water. A few hours later, the risen dough was full of bubbles, or spirit. Ferment, close to the soul itself, turned lifeless stuff into vibrant, living bodies filled with spirit. The supreme example of ferment was Christ, described by the chemical physicians as fermentum, “the food of the soul.”

Again, cannot stress enough that the details of this food cosmology still got most things wrong. But I think they weren’t far off with this one.

There was an article I had bookmarked years ago about the very early days of microbiology and how many people interpreted this idea of tiny animalcules found in sexual fluid and sperm as literal demons. Does anyone know about this? I feel like these dovetail very nicely in a history of microbiological theology.

Corn really caught on in the 1800s as a food for the poor in East and Central Africa, Italy, Japan, India, and China. I don’t really know how this happened. I assume it grew better in some climates than native grains, like potatoes did in Europe?

Corn cuisine in the Americas knew to treat the corn with lye to release more of its nutrients, kill toxins, and make it taste better. This is called nixtamalization. When corn spread to Eurasia, it was grown widely, but nixtamalization didn’t make it over. The Eurasian eaters had to get those nutrients from elsewhere. They still ate corn, but it was a worse time!

In Iceland, where no crops would grow, people would use dried fish called “stockfish” and spread sheep butter on it and eat it instead of bread.

Caloric efficiency was a fun recurring theme. See again, the slow adoption of the potato into Europe. Cuisine has never been about maximizing efficiency. Once bare survival is assured, people want to eat what they know and what has high status in their minds.

I think this is a statement about the feedback cycles of individual people, for instance, subsistence farmers. Suppose you’re a Polish peasant in 1700 and you struggle by year by year growing wheat and rye. But this year you have access to potatoes, a food you somewhat mistrust. You might trust it enough to eat a cooked potato handed to you if you were starving – but when you make decisions about what to plant for a year, you will be reluctant to commit to you and your family to a diet of a possibly-poisonous food (or to a failed crop – you don’t know growing potatoes either). Even if it’s looking like a dry year – especially if it’s looking like a dry year! – you know wheat and rye. You trust wheat and rye. You’ve made it through a lean year of wheat and rye before. You’ll do it again.

People are reluctant to give up their staple crops but they will supplant them. Barley was solidly replaced by the somewhat-more-efficient wheat throughout Europe, millet by rice and wheat in China. But we settled on some ones we like:

The staples that humans had picked out centuries before 1000 B.C.E. still provide most of the world’s human food calories. Only sugarcane, in the form of sugar, was to join them as a major food source.

Around 1650 in Europe, protestant-derived French cuisine overtook high Catholic cuisine as the main food of the European aristocracy.

Catholic cuisine	French cuisine
Roasts Fancy pies Pottage Cold foods are bad for you Fasting dishes Lard	Pastry Fancy sauces Boullions and extracts Raw salads Focus on vegetables Butter

Slowly coming up in more recent times, say the 1700s, was a very slow equalizing in society:

As more nations followed the Dutch and British in locating the source of rulers’ legitimacy not in hereditary or divine rights but in some form of consent or expression of the will of the people, it became increasingly difficult to deny to all citizens the right to eat the same kind of food.

After the French revolution, high French cuisine was almost canceled in France. Everyone should eat as equals, even if the food was potatoes! ~~Fortunately~~ ~~Unfortunately~~ As it happened, Napoleon came in after not too long and imperial high cuisine was back on a very small number of menus.

Speaking of potatoes and self-governance:

The only place where potatoes were adopted with enthusiasm was in distant [from Europe] New Zealand. The Maoris, accustomed to the subtropical roots that they had introduced to the North Island, welcomed them when introduced by Europeans in the 1770s because they grew in the colder South Island. Trading potatoes for muskets with European whalers and sealers enabled the Maoris to resist the British army from the 1840s to the 1870s.

Meanwhile, in Europe: Hey, we’re back to meat and grain! Britain really prized itself on beef and attributed the strength of its empire to beef. Even colonized peoples were like “whoa, maybe that beef and bread they’re eating really is making them that strong, we should try that.” Here’s a 1900 ad for beef extract that aged poorly:

[Source of this version. The brand of beef extract is spelled out of British colonies.]

That said, I did enjoy Laudan’s defense of British food. Starting in 1800, the British Empire was well underway, and what we now think of as stereotypical British cuisine was developing. It was heavy in sugar and sweets, white bread, beef, and prepared food. During the early industrial revolution, food and nutrition and the standard of living went down, but by the 1850s, all of it really came back.

It is worth noting that few cuisines have been so roundly condemned as nutritional and gastronomical disasters as British cuisine.

But Laudan points out that this food was not the aristocrat food (they were still eating French cuisine). It was the food of the working city poor. This is the rise of the “middling cuisines”, a true alternative between fancy high cuisine of a truly tiny percent of society and humble cuisine of peasants who often faced starvation. For once, they had enough to eat. This was new.

After discussing the various ways in which the diet may have been bland or unappealing compared to neighboring cuisines –

Nonetheless, from the perspective of the urban salaried and working classes, the cuisine was just what they had wished for over the centuries: white bread, white sugar, meat, and tea. A century earlier, not only were these luxuries for much of the British population, but the humble were being encouraged to depend on potatoes, not bread, a real comedown in a society in which some kind of bread, albeit a coarse one, had been central to well-being for centuries. Now all could enjoy foodstuffs that had been the privilege of the aristocracy just a few generations earlier. Indeed, the meal called tea came close to being a true national cuisine. Even though tea retained traces of class distinctions, with snobberies about how teacups should be held, or whether milk or tea should be put into the cup first, everyone in the country, from the royal family, who were painted taking tea, to the family of a textile worker in the industrial north of the country, could sit down to white bread sandwiches or toast, jam, small cakes, and an iced sponge cake as a centerpiece. They could afford the tea that accompanied the meal. Set out on the table, tea echoed the grand buffets of eighteenth-century French high cuisine. [...] What seemed like culinary decline to those Britons who had always dined on high or bourgeois cuisine was a vast improvement to those enjoying those ampler and more varied cuisines for the first time.

[...]

Although to this day food continues to be used to reinforce minor differences in status, the hierarchical culinary philosophy of ancient and traditional cuisines was giving way to the more egalitarian culinary philosophy of modern cuisines.

A lot of this was facilitated by imperialism and/or outright slavery. The tea itself, for instance. But Britain was also deeply industrialized. Increased crop productivity, urbanization, and industrial processing were also making Britain’s home-grown food – wheat, meat – cheaper too. Or bringing these processes home. At the start of this period, sugar had been grown and harvested by slaves to feed Europe’s appetites, but in 1800, Prussian inventors figured out how to make sugar at scale from beets.

The work was done by men paid salaries or wages, not by slaves or indentured laborers. The sugar was produced in northern Europe, not in tropical colonies. And the price was one all Europeans could afford.

This was the sugar the British were eating then. Industrialization offered factory production of foods, canning, wildly cheap salt, and refrigeration.

We’re reaching the modern age, where the empires have shrunk and most people get enough calories and have access to industrially-cheap food and the fruits of global trade. Laudan discusses at length the hamburger and instant ramen – wheat flour, fat, meat or meat flavor, low price, and convenience. New theories of nutrition developed and we definitely got them right this time. The empires break up and worldwide leaders take pride in local cuisines, manufacturing a sense of identity through food if needed. Most people have the option of some dietary diversity and a middling cuisine. Go back to that list of things people like to eat. Most of us have that now! Nice!

Nigeria is the biggest importer of Norwegian stockfish. It caught on as a relief food delivered during Nigeria’s Biafran civil war. Here’s a 1960s photo of a Nigerian guy posing in a Bergen stockfish warehouse.

Aw, wait, is this a book review? Book review: Great stuff. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff not included in this summary. I wish it had more on Africa but I did like all the stuff about Eurasia that was in there. I feel like there are a few cultures with really really meat heavy cuisines – like Saami or Inuit cuisine – that could have been at least touched on. But also those aren’t like major cuisines and I can just learn about those on my own. Overall I appreciated the unwavering sense of compassion and evenhandedness – discussing cuisines and falsified theories of nutrition without casting judgment. Everyone’s just trying to eat dinner.

Rachel Laudan also has a blog. It looks really cool.

The book is “Cuisine and Empire” by Rachel Laudan, 2012. h/t my friend A for the recommendation.

More food history from Eukaryote Writes Blog: Triptych in Global Agriculture.

If you want to support my work by chucking me a few bucks per post, check out my Patreon!

Eukaryote in Asterisk Magazine + New Patreon Per-post setup

Eukaryote elsewhere

I have an article in the latest issue of Asterisk Magazine. After you get really deep into the weeds of invertebrate sentience and fish welfare and the scale of factory farming, what do you do with that information vis-a-vis what you feel comfortable eating? Here’s what I’ve landed on and why. Read the piece that Scott Alexander characterized as making me sound more annoying to eat with than I really am.

(Also check out the full piece of delightful accompanying art from Karol Banach.)

Check out the rest of the issue as well. Favorites include:

Friend of the blog Ozy on Martha Nussbaum on the importance of wonder in approaching animal welfare.
Matt Reynolds on the history of literal lifesaver and unappreciated hero, oral rehydration solution.
George Stiffman shares how there are more and stranger kinds of tofu out there than you know. I’ve read an entire book on tofu and still learned cool stuff about tofu from this.

A new better Patreon has landed

This blog has a Patreon! Again! I’m switching from the old per month payment model to a new pay per post system, since this blog has not been emitting regular monthly updates in quite some time. So if you get excited when you see Eukaryote Writes Blog in your feed, and you want to incentivize more of that kind of thing, try this new and improved system for giving me money.

Here’s the link. Consider a small donation per post. Direct incentives: Lots of people are fans. I’m no effective charity but the consistent revenue does have a concrete and pleasant impact on my life right now, so I do really appreciate it.

It’s important to me that the things I write here are freely available. This will continue to be true! I might think of some short bits of content that will be patron-exclusive down the line, but anything major? Your local eukaryote is here to write a blog, not a subscription service. It’s in the name.

Helpful notes

To be clear, the payment will trigger per substantial new post. Updates of content elsewhere, metablogging like this, short corrections, etc, won’t count.
You can set a monthly limit in Patreon, even with the per-post model. For the record, I think it’s unlikely I’d put out more than 1-2 posts per month even in the long term future.
And of course, you can change your payment or unsubscribe at any old time you please.

Woodblock print of swimming prawns — Excerpt of Horse Mackerel (Aji) with Shrimp or Prawn, by Utagawa Hiroshige, ~1822-23. Public Domain.

There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)

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So you’ve heard about how fish aren’t a monophyletic group? You’ve heard about carcinization, the process by which ocean arthropods convergently evolve into crabs? You say you get it now? Sit down. Sit down. Shut up. Listen. You don’t know nothing yet.

“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either:

The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree.
The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree.
And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.

I thought I had a pretty good guess at this, but the situation is far worse than I could have imagined.

CLICK TO EXPAND. Partial phylogenetic tree of various plants. TL;DR: Tan is definitely, 100% trees. Yellow is tree-like. Green is 100% not a tree. Sourced mostly from Wikipedia.

I learned after making this chart that tree ferns exist (h/t seebs), which I think just emphasizes my point further. Also, h/t kithpendragon on LW for suggestions on increasing accessibility of the graph.

Why do trees keep happening?

First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.

Also of interest to us are the non-tree “woody plants”, like lianas (thick woody vines) and shrubs. They’re not trees, but at least to me, it’s relatively apparent how a tree could evolve into a shrub, or vice-versa. The confusing part is a tree evolving into a dandelion. (Or vice-versa.)

Wood, as you may have guessed by now, is also not a clear phyletic category. But it’s a reasonable category – a lignin-dense structure, usually that grows from the exterior and that forms a pretty readily identifiable material when separated from the tree. (…Okay, not the most explainable, but you know wood? You know when you hold something in your hand, and it’s made of wood, and you can tell that? Yeah, that thing.)

All plants have lignin and cellulose as structural elements – wood is plant matter that is dense with both of these.

Botanists don’t seem to think it only could have gone one way – for instance, the common ancestor of flowering plants is theorized to have been woody. But we also have pretty clear evidence of recent evolution of woodiness – say, a new plant arrives on a relatively barren island, and some of the offspring of that plant becomes treelike. Of plants native to the Canary Islands, wood independently evolved at least 38 times!

One relevant factor is that all woody plants do, in a sense, begin life as herbaceous plants – by and large, a tree sprout shares a lot of properties with any herbaceous plant. Indeed, botanists call this kind of fleshy, soft growth from the center that elongates a plant “primary growth”, and the later growth from towards the outside which causes a plant to thicken is “secondary growth.” In a woody plant, secondary growth also means growing wood and bark – but other plants sometimes do secondary growth as well, like potatoes in their roots.

This paper addresses the question. I don’t understand a lot of the closely genetic details, but my impression of its thesis is that: Analysis of convergently-evolved woody plants show that the genes for secondary woody growth are similar to primary growth in plants that don’t do any secondary growth – even in unrelated plants. And woody growth is an adaption of secondary growth. To abstract a little more, there is a common and useful structure in herbaceous plants that, when slightly tweaked, “dendronizes” them into woody plants.

Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization“.) From ‘dendro‘, the ancient Greek root for tree.

Can this be tested? Yep – knock out a couple of genes that control flower development and change the light levels to mimic summer, and researchers found that Arabidopsis – rock cress, a distinctly herbaceous plant used as a model organism – grows a woody stem never otherwise seen in the species.

The tree-like woody stem (e) and morphology (f, left) of the gene-altered *Aridopsis*, compared to its distinctly non-tree-like normal form (f, right.) Images from Melzer, Siegbert, et al. “Flowering-time genes modulate meristem determinacy and growth form in Arabidopsis thaliana.” *Nature genetics* 40.12 (2008): 1489-1492.

So not only can wood develop relatively easily in an herbal plant, it can come from messing with some of the genes that regulate annual behavior – an herby plant’s usual lifecycle of reproducing in warm weather, dying off in cool weather. So that gets us two properties of trees at once: woodiness, and being long-lived. It’s still a far cry from turning a plant into a tree, but also, it’s really not that far.

To look at it another way, as Andrew T. Groover put it:

“Obviously, in the search for which genes make a tree versus a herbaceous plant, it would be folly to look for genes present in poplar and absent in Arabidopsis. More likely, tree forms reflect differences in expression of a similar suite of genes to those found in herbaceous relatives.”

So: There are no unique “tree” genes. It’s just a different expression of genes that plants already use. Analogously, you can make a cake with flour, sugar, eggs, sugar, butter, and vanilla. You can also make frosting with sugar, butter, and vanilla – a subset of the ingredients you already have, but in different ratios and use.

But again, the reverse also happens – a tree needs to do both primary and secondary growth, so it’s relatively easy for a tree lineage to drop the “secondary” growth stage and remain an herb for its whole lifespan, thus “poaizating.” As stated above, it’s hypothesized that the earliest angiosperms were woody, some of which would have lost that in become the most familiar herbaceous plants today. There are also some plants like cassytha and mistletoe, herbaceous plants from tree-heavy lineages, who are both parasitic plants that grow on a host tree. Knowing absolutely nothing about the evolution of these lineages, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that they each came from a tree-like ancestor but poaized to become parasites. (Evolution is very fond of parasites.)

Poaization: Evolving into an herbaceous morphology. From ‘poai‘, ancient Greek term from Theophrastus defining herbaceous plants (“Theophrastus on Herbals and Herbal Remedies”).

(I apologize to anyone I’ve ever complained to about jargon proliferation in rationalist-diaspora blog posts.)

The trend of staying in an earlier stage of development is also called neotenizing. Axolotls are an example in animals – they resemble the juvenile stages of the closely-related tiger salamander. Did you know very rarely, or when exposed to hormone-affecting substances, axolotls “grow up” into something that looks a lot like a tiger salamander? Not unlike the gene-altered Arabidopsis.

A normal axolotl (left) vs. a spontaneously-metamorphosed “adult” axolotl (right.)

[Photo of normal axolotl from By th1098 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30918973. Photo of metamorphosed axolotl from deleted reddit user, via this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eyebleach/comments/etg7i6/this_is_itzi_he_is_a_morphed_axolotl_no_thats_not/ ]

Does this mean anything?

A friend asked why I was so interested in this finding about trees evolving convergently. To me, it’s that a tree is such a familiar, everyday thing. You know birds? Imagine if actually there were amphibian birds and mammal birds and insect birds flying all around, and they all looked pretty much the same – feathers, beaks, little claw feet, the lot. You had to be a real bird expert to be able to tell an insect bird from a mammal bird. Also, most people don’t know that there isn’t just one kind of “bird”. That’s what’s going on with trees.

I was also interested in culinary applications of this knowledge. You know people who get all excited about “don’t you know a tomato is a fruit?” or “a blueberry isn’t really a berry?” I was one once, it’s okay. Listen, forget all of that.

There is a kind of botanical definition of a fruit and a berry, talking about which parts of common plant anatomy and reproduction the structure in question is derived from, but they’re definitely not related to the culinary or common understandings. (An apple, arguably the most central fruit of all to many people, is not truly a botanical fruit either).

Let me be very clear here – mostly, this is not what biologists like to say. When we say a bird is a dinosaur, we mean that a bird and a T. rex share a common ancestor that had recognizably dinosaur-ish properties, and that we can generally point to some of those properties in the bird as well – feathers, bone structure, whatever. You can analogize this to similar statements you may have heard – “a whale is a mammal”, “a spider is not an insect”, “a hyena is a feline”…

But this is not what’s happening with fruit. Most “fruits” or “berries” are not descended from a common “fruit” or “berry” ancestor. Citrus fruits are all derived from a common fruit, and so are apples and pears, and plums and apricots – but an apple and an orange, or a fig and a peach, do not share a fruit ancestor.

Instead of trying to get uppity about this, may I recommend the following:

Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary
Look wistfully of pictures of Welwitschia
Send a fruit basket to your local botanist/plant evolutionary biologist for putting up with this, or become one yourself

While natural selection is commonly thought to simply be an ongoing process with no “goals” or “end points”, most scientists believe that life peaked at *Welwitschia.*

[Photo from By Sara&Joachim on Flickr – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6342924 ]

Some more interesting findings:

A mulberry (left) is not related to a blackberry (right). They just… both did that.

[ Mulberry photo by Cwambier – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63402150. Blackberry photo by By Ragesoss – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4496657. ]

Avocado and cinnamon are from fairly closely-related tree species.
It’s possible that the last common ancestor between an apple and a peach was not even a tree.
Of special interest to my Pacific Northwest readers, the Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia is misnamed after the local madrona tree, which Europeans confused with the (similar-looking) magnolia. In reality, these two species are only very distantly related. (You can find them both on the chart to see exactly how far apart they are.)
None of [cactuses, aloe vera, jade plants, snake plants, and the succulent I grew up knowing as “hens and chicks”] are related to each other.
Rubus is the genus that contains raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, salmonberries… that kind of thing. (Remember, a genus is the category just above a species – which is kind of a made-up distinction, but suffice to say, this is a closely-related groups of plants.) Some of its members have 14 chromosomes. Some of its members have 98 chromosomes.
Seriously, I’m going to hand $20 in cash to the next plant taxonomy expert I meet in person. God knows bacteriologists and zoologists don’t have to deal with this.

And I have one more unanswered question. There doesn’t seem to be a strong tend of plants evolving into grasses, despite the fact that grasses are quite successful and seem kind of like the most anatomically simple plant there could be – root, big leaf, little flower, you’re good to go. But most grass-like plants are in the same group. Why don’t more plants evolve towards the “grass” strategy?

Let’s get personal for a moment. One of my philosophical takeaways from this project is, of course, “convergent evolution is a hell of a drug.” A second is something like “taxonomy is not automatically a great category for regular usage.” Phylogenetics are absolutely fascinating, and I do wish people understood them better, and probably “there’s no such thing as a fish” is a good meme to have around because most people do not realize that they’re genetically closer to a tuna than a tuna is to a shark – and “no such thing as a fish” invites that inquiry.

(You can, at least, say that a tree is a strategy. Wood is a strategy. Fruit is a strategy. A fish is also a strategy.)

At the same time, I have this vision in my mind of a clever person who takes this meandering essay of mine and goes around saying “did you know there’s no such thing as wood?” And they’d be kind of right.

But at the same time, insisting that “wood” is not a useful or comprehensible category would be the most fascinatingly obnoxious rhetorical move. Just the pinnacle of choosing the interestingly abstract over the practical whole. A perfect instance of missing the forest for – uh, the forest for …

…

… Forget it.

Timeless Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten piece: The categories were made for man, not man for the categories.

Towards the end of writing this piece, I found that actual botanist Dan Ridley-Ellis made a tweet thread about this topic in 2019. See that for more like this from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

For more outraged plant content, I really enjoy both Botany Shitposts (tumblr) and Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t (youtube.)

[Crossposted to Lesswrong.]

Male dairy calves, male chicks, and relative suffering from animal foods

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Or: Do “byproduct” animals of food animal production significantly affect estimates of comparative suffering caused by those foods? No.

[Image adapted from this image by Flickr user Sadie_Girl, under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.]

See, relatedly: What happens to cows in the US?

Short version

There’s a shared belief in animal-welfare-oriented effective altruism that eggs and chicken meat cause a great deal more suffering than beef or dairy (1). You can make big strides towards reducing the amount of suffering caused in your diet by eating fewer eggs and chicken, even if you don’t go fully vegetarian or vegan.

Julia Galef, Brian Tomasik, and William MacAskill have made different versions of this calculation, with different metrics, and have come to the same conclusion. These three calculations include only the animal used directly for production. (Details about the calculations and my modifications are in the long version below.) But the production of several kinds of animal product require bringing into existence animals that aren’t used for that product – like male calves born to lactating dairy cows, or male chicks born when producing egg-laying hens. I wondered if including these animals would significantly change the amount of suffering in various animal foods.

It turns out that even accounting for these other animals indirectly created during production, the amount of suffering relative to other animal foods doesn’t change very much. If you buy the premises of these quantitative ethical comparisons, beef and dairy make so much product using so few animals that they’re still 1-3 orders of magnitude better than eggs or chicken. Or rather, the message of “eat less chicken” and “if you’re going to eat animal products, eat dairy and beef” still makes sense even if we account for the maximum number of other animals created incidental to production of each food animal. I’m going to call these the “direct and incidental animals” (DIA) involved in a single animal’s worth of product.

The question is complicated by the fact that “incidental” animals still go into another part of the system. Day-old male chicks are used for pet and livestock food, and male dairy calves are raised for meat.

Given that these male calves are tied to dairy production, it seems unlikely that production of dairy and meat is what it would be if they weren’t connected. For instance, if there is less demand for dairy and thus fewer male dairy calves, it seems like one of the following should happen:

No change to meat calf supply, less meat will be produced (DIA estimates seem correct)
Proportionally more meat calves will be raised (original estimates seem correct)
Something between the above (more likely)

Reframed: It depends whether demand for dairy increases the meat supply and makes it less profitable to raise meat cows, or whether demand for meat makes it more profitable to raise dairy cows, or both. I’m not an economist and don’t go into which one of these is the case. (I tried to figure this out and didn’t make much headway.) That said, it seems likely that the actual expected number of animal lives or days of suffering is somewhere between the initial numbers and my altered values for each source.

The most significant change I find from the original findings suggest that meat cows cause a fair bit more suffering over a longer period of time than the original calculations predict, only if demand for meat is significantly propping up the dairy industry. But even if that’s true, the suffering caused by beef is a little smaller than that caused by pork, and nowhere near as much as smaller animals.

Modifications to other estimates including direct and incidental animals (DIA)

	Tomasik’s original estimate	DIA Tomasik’s estimate	Galef’s orginal estimate	DIA Galef’s estimate
Milk	0.12 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.14 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.000057 max lives per 1000 calories of milk	0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
Beef	1.9 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.002469 max lives per 1000 calories	0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories
Eggs	110 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	125 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.048485 lives per 1000 calories	0.048485 lives per 1000 calories

That’s basically it. For a little more info and how I came to these conclusions, read on.

Longer version

On the topic of effectively helping animals, one thing I’ve heard a few times is that eating dairy and beef aren’t terribly harmful, since they come from such large animals that a serving of beef or milk is a very small part of the output of the animal. On the other hand, chickens are very small – an egg is a day’s output of an animal, and a family can eat an entire chicken in one dinner. Compare that with the fact that most chickens are raised in extremely unnatural and unpleasant conditions, and you have a framework for directly comparing the suffering that goes into different animal products.

This calculation has been made by three people I’m aware of – Brian Tomasik on his website, William MacAskill in his book Doing Good Better, and Julia Galef on her blog. The organization One Step for the Animals also recommends people stop eating chickens, on these grounds, but I didn’t find a similar breakdown on their website after a few minutes of looking. It’s still worth checking out, though. (Did you know chicken consumption, in pounds/year, has surpassed beef consumption and is still climbing, but only over the last 20 years?)

Galef compares calories per life. She includes the male chicks killed for each egg-laying hen.

Tomasik looks at “days of suffering caused per kg demanded”.

Macaskill briefly examines three factors: the number of animal years and lives that go into a year of eating in the average omnivorous American diet, and also numerical “quality of life” estimates from Bailey Norwood. (He doesn’t combine these factors numerically so much as use them to establish a basis for recommending people avoid chicken. I didn’t do an in-depth analysis of his, but safe to say that like the others, adding in other animal lives doesn’t seem to change his conclusions significantly.)

With pigs and meat chickens, the case is straightforward – both sexes are raised for meat, and suppliers breed animals to sell them and retain enough to continue breeding. The aged animals are eventually slaughtered as meat as well.

But only female hens lay eggs. Meat chickens and egg chickens raised at scale in the USA are two different breeds, so when a breeder produces laying hens, they wind up with more male chicks than are needed for breeding. Similarly, dairy cows have to give birth to a calf every season they produce milk. The average dairy cow gives 2.4 calves in her lifetime, and slightly less than 1.2 of those are male. The male egg chicks and male dairy calves are used for meat.

Aged dairy cows and egg-laying chickens are also sold as meat. “Spent hens” that are no longer commercially profitable, at 72 weeks old, are sold for ‘processed chicken meat’. (Other sources claim pet food or possibly just going to landfills. Pet food sounds reasonable, but landfills seem unlikely to me, at least for large operations.) There aren’t as many of these as either cows or chickens raised directly for meat, so they’re a comparatively small fraction, but they’re clearly still feeding into the meat system.

🐔

When talking about this, we quickly run into some economic questions, like “perhaps if the demand for dairy dropped, the meat industry would start raising more calves for meat instead?”

My intuition says it ought to shake out one way or the other – either decreasing demand for dairy cows results in the price of meat going up, or decreasing demand for meat results in demand for dairy cows going down.

In the egg case, male chicks aren’t literally put in a landfill, they’re ground and sold for pet food. Without this otherwise unused source of protein, would pet food manufacturers increase demand for some other kind of meat? It seems possible that both this would happen and that the price of pet food would increase. Then, maybe less would be bought to make up for the difference, at least in the long term – cheap pet food must be somewhat inelastic, at least in the short term?

My supply and demand curves suggest that both demand should decline and price should increase. That said, we’re leaving the sphere of my knowledge and I don’t know how to advise you here. For the moment, I’m comfortable folding in both animals produced in the supply chain for a product, and animals directly killed or used for a product. But based on the economic factors above, these still don’t equate to “how many animal lives / days are expected to be reduced in the long term by avoiding consumption of a given product.”

At the most, though, dairy cows bring an extra 1.2 meat cow into existence, meat cows bring an extra .167 dairy cow, and each egg-laying hen brings an extra 1 male chicken that is killed around the first day. These are the “direct and incidental animals” created for each animal directly used during productive.

Some notes on the estimates below:

I ignored things like fish and krill meal that go into production. Tomasik notes that 37% of the global fish harvest (by mass) is ground and used for animal feed for farmed fish, chickens, and pigs. But this seems to be mostly from wild forage fish, not farmed fish, and wild populations are governed by a different kind of population optimum – niches. We’d guess that each fish removed from the environment frees up resources that will be eaten by, on average, one new fish. (Of course, populations we’re fishing seem to be declining, so something is happening, but it’s certainly not one-to-one.)

I also only looked at egg-laying chickens, meat cows, and dairy cows. This is because pork and other industries aren’t sex-segregated – all babies born are raised for the same thing. A few will be kept aside and used to produce more babies, but even the breeding ones will eventually be turned into meat. The amount of days these animals live probably affect Tomasik’s calculations somewhat, but the breeding animals are still the minority.

I also didn’t include a detailed analysis because if you’re concerned about animal welfare, you probably already don’t eat veal. (I’m going to assert that if you want to eat ethically treated food, avoid a meat whose distinguishing preparation characteristic is “force-feed a baby”.) Veal is a byproduct of the dairy industry, but a minority of the calves. Foie gras does have a multiplier effect because female geese don’t fatten up as much, and are killed early, so for each goose turned into foie gras, another goose is killed young.

Old dairy cows and laying hens are used for meat, but it’s a minority of the meat production. I didn’t factor this in. See What happens to cows in the US for more on cows.

Modifications to other estimates including direct and incidental animals (DIA)

	Tomasik’s original estimate	DIA Tomasik’s estimate	Galef’s orginal estimate	DIA Galef’s estimate
Milk	0.12 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.14 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.000057 max lives per 1000 calories of milk	0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
Beef	1.9 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.002469 max lives per 1000 calories	0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories
Eggs	110 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	125 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded	0.048485 lives per 1000 calories	0.048485 lives per 1000 calories

DIA modifications to Tomasik’s estimate

(Days of equivalent suffering / kg)

To adjust this estimate, I added the extra “equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded” for the other animals:

Egg-laying chickens
(4 suffering per day of life in egg-laying chickens * 501 days of life) + 1 * (3 suffering per days of life in meat chickens * 1 day of life) / 16 kg of edible product over life of egg-laying chicken = 125 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 110)

Dairy cows
(2 suffering per day of life in milk cows * 1825 days of life) + 1.2 * (1 suffering per day of life in meat cows * 395 days of life) / 30000 kg of edible product over life of dairy cow = 0.14 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 0.12)

Meat cows
(1 suffering per day of life in meat cows * 395 days of life) + 0.167 * (2 suffering per day of life in dairy cows * 1825 days of life) / 212 kg of edible product over life of meat cow = 4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 1.9)

The meat cow number is the only very different one here.

DIA modifications to Galef’s estimate

I adjusted this by adding other lives to Galef’s estimate of lives per 1000 calories:

Egg-laying chicken
Galef included this in her calculation of 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories of eggs.

Dairy cows
[0.000057 lives per 1000 calories of milk] * 2.2 = 0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
[0.000075 lives per 1000 calories of cheese] * 2.2 = 0.00017 max lives per 1000 calories of cheese

Meat cows
[0.002469 lives per 1000 calories of beef] * 1.167 = 0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories of beef

Other economic notes

I’m hoping someone who knows more here will be able to make use of the information I found.

The number of meat cows in the US has been broadly decreasing since 1970. The number of dairy cows has also been decreasing since at least 1965, but dairy consumption is increasing, because those cows are giving far more milk.

When dairy prices drop, dairy farmers are known to kill some of their herds and sell them for meat, leading to a drop in meat prices.

We would also expect dairies and beef farms to compete with each other for some of the same resources, like land and feed.

A friend wondered whether dairy steers are much smaller than beef cows, so if shifting the same volume of meat production to these steers would mean more animal lives. It turns out that dairy steers and beef cows are about the same weight at slaughter.

(1) With fish perhaps representing much more suffering than eggs or chickens, and other large meat sources like pigs somewhere in the middle.)

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What happens to cows in the US?

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(Larger version. Image released under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.)

There are 92,000,000 cattle in the USA. Where do they come from, what are they used for, and what are their ultimate fates?

I started this as part of another project, and was mostly interested in what happens to the calves of dairy cows. As I worked, though, I was astonished that I couldn’t easily find this information laid out elsewhere, and decided to publish it on its own to start.

Note: Numbers are not exactly precise, and come from a combination of raw data from 2014-2016 and guesswork. Also, the relative sizes on the graph (of arrows and boxes) are not accurate – they’re hand-sized based on eyeballing the numbers and the available settings in yEd. I’m a microbiologist, not a graphic designer, what do you expect? If that upsets you, try this version, which is also under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license. If you want to make a prettier or more accurate version, knock yourself out.

There are some changes from year to year, which might account for small (<5%) discrepancies. I also tried to generalize from practices used on larger farms (e.g. <1,000 cow operations), which make up a minority of the farms, but house a majority of the cattle.

In the write-up, I try to clearly label “male cattle” and “female cattle” or “female cows” when relevant, because this confused me to no end when I was gathering data.

Let’s start with dairy cows. There are 9,267,000 female cows actively giving milk this season (“milk cows”) in the USA. For a cow to give milk, it has to be pregnant and give birth. That means that 9,267,000 calves are born to milk cows every year.

Almost half of these are female. Most milk cows are impregnated at around 2 years with artificial insemination. There’s a huge market in bull sperm, and 5% of the sperm sold in the US is sex-selected, meaning that 90% of the sperm in a given application is one sex. Dairies are mostly interested in having more female cows, so it seems like 2.25% of the milk cow calves that would have been male (because of chance) are instead female (because of this technology).

The female calves almost all go back into being milk cows. The average dairy cow has 2.4 lactation periods before she’s culled, so she breeds at a little over her replacement rate. I’m actually still not 100% certain where that 0.2-nd female calf goes, but dairies might sell extra females to be beef cattle along with the males.

The 2,755,000 milk cows that are culled each year are generally turned into lean hamburger. They’re culled because of infection or health problems, or age and declining milk volume. They’re on average around 4 years old. (Cows can live to 10 years old.)

Male calves are, contrary to some claims, almost never just left to die. The veal industry exists, in which calves are kept in conditions ranging from “not that different from your average cow’s environment” to “absolutely terrible”, and are killed young for their meat. It seems like between 450,000 and 1,000,000 calves are killed for veal each year, although that industry is shrinking. I used the 450,000 number.

Some of the male calves are kept and raised, and their sperm is used to impregnate dairy cows. This article describes an artificial insemination company, which owns “1,700 dairy and beef bulls, which produce 15 million breeding units of semen each year.” That’s about 1 in 1,000, a minuscule fraction of the male calves.

The rest of those male calves, the dairy steers, are sold as beef cattle. After veal calves, we have 3,952,000 remaining male calves to account for. They make up 14% of the beef supply of the 30,578,000 cattle slaughtered annually. From those numbers, we’d guess that 4,060,000 dairy steers are killed yearly – and that’s close enough to the above estimate that I think we’ve found all of our male calves. That’s only a fraction of the beef supply, though – we’ll now turn our attention to the beef industry.

We imported 1,980,000 cattle from Canada and Mexico in 2015, mostly for beef. We also export a few, but it’s under 100,000, so I left if off the chart.

Most beef cows are bred on calf-cow operations, which either sell the calves to feedlots or raises calves for meat directly. To replace their stock, they either keep some calves to breed more cows, or buy them from seedstock operations (which sell purebred or other specialty cattle.) Based on the fact that 30,578,000 cattle are slaughtered annually (and we know how some of them are already killed), and that cattle are being bred at the replacement rate, it seems like each year, calf-cow operations generate 21,783,000 new calves. There’s a lot of variation in how beef cattle are raised, which I’m mowing over in this simplified graph. In general, though, they seem to be killed at between 1.5 and 3 years old.

Of course, calf-cow operations also need breeding cattle to keep the operation running, so while some of those cows are raised only for meat, some are also returned to the breeding pool. (Seedstock operations must be fairly small – under 3% of cattle in the US are purebred – so I think calf-cow operations are the majority worth examining.) Once they’re no longer productive breeders, breeding animals are also culled for beef.

This article suggests that 14-15% of cows are culled annually, I think on cow-calf operations that raise cows for slaughter themselves (although possibly only on smaller farms). If that’s the case, then each year, they must create about 14.5% more calves than are used raised only for meat. This suggests that 21,783,000 cattle born to calf-cow operations are raised for meat, and the remaining 2,759,000 calves which will go back into breeding each year. These will mostly be females – there seems to be a 1:15-25 ratio of males to females on calf-cow operations – so disproportionately more males will go directly to beef.

By adding up the bottom numbers, we get ~30,600,000 cattle slaughtered per year. In terms of doing math, this is fortunate, because we also used that number to derive some of the fractions therein. We can also add up the top numbers to get 33,030,000 born, which is confusing. If we take out the 450,000 veal calves and the 1,980,000 imported calves, it drops back to the expected value, which I think means I added something together incorrectly. While I’m going to claim this chart and these figures are mostly right, please do let me know if you see holes in the math. I’m sure they’re there.

“Wow, Georgia, I’m surprised, I really thought this was going to veer off into the ethics of the dairy industry or something.”

Ha ha. Wait for Part 2.

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Beespotting on I-5 and the animal welfare approach to honey

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The drive from Seattle to San Francisco along I-5 is a 720-mile panorama of changing biomes. Forest, farmland, and the occasional big city get very gradually drier, sparser, flatter. You pass a sign for the 45th parallel, marking equidistance between the equator and the North Pole. Then the road clogs with semis chugging their way up big craggy hills, up and up, and then you switch your foot from the gas to the brake and drop down the hills into more swathes of farmland, and more intense desert, with only the very occasional tiny town to get gas and bottles of cold water. Eventually, amid the dry hills, you see the first alien tower of a palm tree, and you know the desert is going to break soon.

Of course, I like the narrative arc on the drive back even better. Leaving Berkeley in the morning, you hit the desert in its element – bright and dry – without being too hot. That comes later, amid the rows and rows of fruit and nut trees, which turns into the mountains again, and into the land on the side of the mountains, now dominated by lower bushy produce crops and acres of flat grain land. You pass a sign for Lynn County, the Grass Seed Capital of the US. Finally, well into dusk, you hit the Washington border, and the first rain you’ve seen on the entire trip starts falling right on cue. Then you meet some friends in your old college town for a quick sandwich and tomato soup at 11:30 PM, and everything is set right with the world, letting you arrive back home by an exhausted but satisfied 1:30 AM.

I like this drive for giving a city kid a slice of agriculture. I’ve written about the temporal scale of developments in agriculture, but the spatial scale is just as incredible. About 50% of land in the US is agricultural. Growing the calorie-dense organisms that end up on my plate, or fueling someone’s car, or exported onto someone else’s plate, or someone else’s feedbag, is the result of an extraordinary amount of work and effort.

I talked about the plants – there’s trees for fruit and nuts, vines, grain, corn, a million kinds of produce. I only assume this gets more impressive when you go south from San Francisco. (In recent memory, I’ve only visited as far south as Palo Alto, and was shocked to discover a lemon tree. With lemons on it! In December! Who knew? Probably a lot of you.)

There’s also animals – aside from a half dozen alpacas and a few dozen horses, you spot many sheep and many, many cows from the highway. The cattle ranches were quite pretty and spacious – I wonder if this is luck, or if there’s some kind of effort to put the most attractive ranches close to the highway. Apparently there are actual feedlots along I-5 if you keep going south. I certainly didn’t notice any happy chicken farms along the way.

And then there are the bees.

I.

Bees are humanity’s most numerous domesticated animal. You don’t see them, per se, since they are, well, bees. What you can see are the hives – stacks of white boxes like lost dresser drawers congregating in fields. Each box contains the life’s work of a colony of about 19,200 bees.

I forgot to start taking photos until it was already dark out, so here are some Wikimedia photos instead. If you want me to take more photos, feel free to ask for my paypal to fund me making the drive again. 😛 | Photo by Fahih Sahiner, CC BY-SA 4.0

The boxes look like this. The bees look like this.

Photo by Waugsberg, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Bees are enormously complicated and fascinating insects. They live in the densely packed hives described above, receiving chemical instructions by one breeding queen, and eusocially supporting her eggs that become the next generation of the hive. In the morning, individual bees leave the hive, fly around, and search for pollen sources, which they shove into pouches on their legs. Returning, if they’ve located a juicy pollen source, they describe it to other bees using an intricate physical code known as the waggle dance.

Waggle dance patterns performed by the worker bees. | North Carolina State Extension publications.

What images of this don’t clearly show is that in normal circumstances, this is done inside the hive, under complete darkness, surrounded by other bees who follow it with their antennae.

The gathered pollen is used to sustain the existing bees, and, of course, create honey – the sugar-rich substance that feeds the young bee larvae and the hive through winter. Each “drawer” of the modern Langstroth beehive – seen above – contains ten wooden frames, each filled in by the bees with a wax comb dripping with honey. At harvesting time, each frame is removed from the hive, the carefully placed wax caps covering each honey-filled comb are broken off, and the honey is extracted via centrifuge. (More on the harvesting practice.)

Each beehive makes about 25 pounds of harvestable honey in a season, and each pound of honey represents 55,000 miles flown by bees. Given the immense amount of animal labor put into this food, I want to investigate the claim that purchasing honey is a good thing from an animal welfare perspective.

I’m not about to say that people who care about animal welfare should be fine eating honey because bees don’t have moral worth, because I suspect that’s not true. I suspect that bees can and do suffer, and at the very least, that we should consider that they might. The capacity to suffer is evolutionary – it’s an incentive to flee from danger, learn from mistakes, and keep yourself safe when damaged. Bees have a large capacity to learn, remember, and exhibit altered behavior when distressed.

Like other social insects, however, bees also do a few things that contraindicate suffering in most senses, like voluntarily stinging invaders in a way that tears out some internal organs and leaves them at high risk of death. In addition, insects possibly don’t feel pain at the site of an injury (though I’m not sure how well studied this is over all insects) (more details). They may feel some kind of negative affect distinct from typical human pain. In any case, it seems like bee welfare is possibly important, and since there are 344,000,000,000,000 of them under our direct care, I’m inclined to err on the side of “being nice to them” lest we ignore an ongoing moral catastrophe just because we didn’t think we had incontrovertible proof at the time.

This is harder than it sounds, because of the almonds.

II.

The beehives I saw on on I-5 don’t live there full-time. They’re there because of migratory beekeepers, who load hives into trucks and drive them all over the country to different fields of different crops. As we were all told in 3rd grade, bees are important pollinators, and while the fields of old were pollinated with a mix of wild insects and individually-managed hives, like other animal agriculture, the bees of today are managed on an industrial scale.

(We passed at least one truck that was mostly covered with a tarp, but had distinctive white boxes visible in the corners. I’m pretty sure that truck was full of bees.)

60-75% of the US’s commercial hives congregate around Valentine’s Day in the middle of California to pollinate almonds. When we say bees are important pollinators, one instance of this is that almonds are entirely dependent on bees – every single almond is the result of an almond tree flower pollinated by a bee. California grows 82% of the world’s almonds.

According to this Cornell University report, honeybees in the US provide:

100% of almond pollination.
90% of apple, avocado, blueberry, cranberry, asparagus, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, onion, vegetable seed, legume seed, rapeseed, and sunflower pollination.
80%+ of cherry, kiwifruit, macadamia nut, celery, and cucumber pollination
70%+ of grapefruit, cantaloupe, and honeydew pollination.
60%+ of pear, plum, apricot, watermelon, and alfalfa seed and hay (a major food source for cattle) pollination.
40%+ of tangerine, nectarine, and peach pollination.
5-40% of pollination for quite a few other crops.

Our agricultural system, and by extension, the food you eat is, in huge part, powered by those 344 trillion bees. Much of this bee power is provided by migratory beekeepers. In total, beekeepers in the US make about 30% of their money from honey, and 70% from renting out their bees for pollination.

Sidenote: All of the honey bees kept in the US are one species. (There are also 3000 wild bee species, as well as wild honey bees.) So we’re putting all of our faith in them. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last decade, you may have heard of colony collapse disorder, which I’d wager is the kind of thing that becomes both more likely and more catastrophic when your system is built on an overburdened monoculture.

III.

Does this mean you actively should eat honey? I really don’t know enough about economics to say that or not. If you’re averse to using animal products, I don’t believe you’re obligated to eat honey – there are many delicious products that do what honey does, from plain sugar to maple syrup to agave to vegan honey.

But if you don’t eat honey and tell other people not to eat honey, I imagine you’re doing that because of a belief that this will lead to fewer bees being brought into existence and used by humans. And if you have this belief that it’s better to have fewer bees used by humans, I’m very curious what you think they’ll be replaced with.

What if you want to reduce the amount of suffering comprised by honeybees in your diet, or in agriculture in general?

One thing people have thought of is encouraging pollination by wild bees and other insects. When thinking about the volume of honeybees you’d need to replace, though, you start to encounter real ethical questions about the welfare of those wild bees. Living in the wild as an insect is plausibly pretty nasty. (I don’t have the evidence either way on whether honey bees or wild bees have better lives – but that if you care about honey bees anyway, it bears considering that this would require humans replacing the huge number of honey bees with other life forms, and that the fact that they’d be living on their own in hedges next to a field, rather than in a wooden hive, doesn’t automatically mean they’ll be happier.)

In addition, scaling up wild pollinators to the scale that would be needed by commercial agriculture would be difficult. Possible, but a very hard problem.

You could eat crops that aren’t mostly pollinated by honeybees. This page lists some – a lot of vegetables make the list. Grains, cereals, and grasses also tend be wind-pollinated.

Beekeeping seems like it might be better than increasing the number of wild pollinators, but migratory beekeeping as a practice reduces bee lifespans, and increases stress markers and parasites compared to stationary hives. Reducing the amount of travel modern hives do might be helpful. Maybe we could just stop growing almonds?

(Although that still leaves us with the problem of apple, asparagus, avocado, blueberry, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cranberry, carrot, onions, rapeseed, sunflowers, vegetable seeds, legume seeds, rapeseed, sunflowers…)

It also seems completely possible to raise beehives that are only used for pollination and not honey. This still requires animal labor and more individual bees, but the bees would have less stressful lives.

Or look into robot pollinators.

None of these ideas feel satisfactory, though. I feel like we’ve made our nest of bees and now we have to sleep in it. Any ideas?

Truck full of beehives. | Photo by Wendy Seltzer. CC BY 2.0.

(Note: I’m aware that this piece is very US-centric. I’m not sure what the bee situation is other countries is like.)

Triptych in Global Agriculture

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As I write this, it’s 4:24 PM in 2016, twelve days before the darkest day of the year. The sun has just set, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell behind the heavy layer of marbled gray cloud. There’s a dusting of snow on the lawns and the trees, and clumps on roofs, already melted off the roads by a day of rain. From my window, I can see lights glimmering in Seattle’s International District, and buildings of downtown are starting to glow with flashing reds, neon bands on the Colombia Tower, and soft yellow on a thousand office windows. I’m starting to wonder what to eat for dinner.

It’s the eve before Seattle Effective Altruism’s Secular Solstice, a somewhat magical humanist celebration of our dark universe and the light in it. This year, our theme is global agriculture – our age-old answer to the question of “what are we, as a civilization, collectively going to eat for dinner?” We have not always had good answers to this question.

Civilization, culture, and the super-colony of humanity, the city, started getting really big when agriculture was invented, when we could concentrate a bunch of people in one place and specialize. It wasn’t much specialization, at first. Farmers or hunter-gatherers were the vast majority of the population and the population of Ur, the largest city on earth, was around 65,000 people in 3000 BC. Today, farmers are 40% of the global population, and 2% in the US. In the 1890’s, the city of Shanghai had half a million people. Today, it’s the world’s largest city, with 34 million residents.

What happened in those 120 years, or even the last 5000?

Progress, motherfuckers.

I’m a scientist, so the people I know of are scientists, and science is what’s shaped a lot of our agriculture in the last hundred years. When I think of the legacy of science and global agriculture, of people trying to figure out how we feed everyone, I think of three people, and I’ll talk about them here. I’ll go in chronological order, because it’s the order things go in already.

Fritz Haber, 1868-1934

Fritz Haber in his laboratory.

Haber was raised in a Jewish family in Prussia, but converted to Lutheranism after getting his doctorate in chemistry – possibly to improve his odds of getting high-ranking academic or military careers. At the University of Kulroch in Germany, Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignol did the work that won them a Nobel prize: they invented the Haber-Bosch process.

The chemistry of this reaction is pretty simple – it was a fact of chemistry at the time that if you added ammonia to a nickel catalyst, the ammonia decomposed into hydrogen and nitrogen. Haber’s twist was to reverse it – by adding enough hydrogen and nitrogen gas at a high pressure and temperature, the catalyst operates in reverse and combines the two into ammonia. Hydrogen is made from natural gas (CH4, or methane), and nitrogen gas is already 80% of the atmosphere.

Here’s the thing – plants love nitrogen. Nitrogen is, largely, the limiting factor in land plants’ growth – when you see that plants aren’t growing like mad, it’s because they don’t have sufficient nitrogen to make new proteins. When you give a plant nitrogen in a form it can assimilate, like ammonia, it grows like mad. The world’s natural solid ammonia deposits were being stripped away to nothing, applied to crops to feed a growing population.

When Haber invented his process in 1909, ammonia became cheap. A tide was turning. The limiting factor of the world’s agriculture was suddenly no longer limiting.

Other tides were turning too. In 1914, Germany went to war, and Haber went to work on chemical weapons.

During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country. – Fritz Haber

He studied deploying chlorine gas, thinking that it would shorten the war. Its effect is described as “drowning on dry land”. After its first use on the battlefield, he received a promotion on the same night his wife killed herself. Clara Immerwahr, a fellow chemist, was a pacifist, and had shot herself with Haber’s military pistol. Haber continued his work. Scientists in his employ also eventually invented Zykkon B. First designed as a pesticide, after his death, the gas would be used to murder his extended family (along with many others) in the Nazi gas chambers.

Anti-Jewish sentiment was growing in the last few years of his life. In 1933, he wasn’t allowed through the doors of his institute. The same year, his friend, and fellow German Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein, went to the German Consulate in Belgium and gave them back his passport – renouncing his citizenship of the Nazi-controlled government. Haber left the country, and then died of a heart attack, in the next year.

I don’t know if Fritz Haber’s story has a moral. Einstein wrote about his colleague that “Haber’s life was the tragedy of the German Jew – the tragedy of unrequited love.” Haber was said to ‘make bread from air’ and said to be the father of chemical weapons. He certainly created horrors. What I might take from it more generally is that the future isn’t determined by whether people are good or bad, or altruistic or not, but by what they do, as well as what happens to the work that they do.

Nikolai Vavilov – 1887-1943

Vavilov in 1935.

We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn… But we shall not abandon our convictions. – Nikolai Vavilov

As a young but wildly talented agronomist in Russia, the director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences for over a decade, the shrewd and charismatic Nikolai Vavilov, wanted to make Russia unprecedented experts in agriculture. He went on a series of trips to travel the globe and retrieve samples. He observed that in certain parts of the world, one would find a much greater variety of a given crop species, with a wider range of characteristics and traits not seen elsewhere. This lead to his breakthrough theory, his Vavilov centers of diversity, that the greatest genetic diversity could be found where a species originated.

What has this told us about agriculture? This morning for breakfast, I had coffee (originally from Ethiopia) with soy milk (soybeans originally from China), toast (wheat from the Middle East) with margarine (soy oil, China, palm oil, West and Southwest Africa), and chickpeas (Central Asia) with black bean sauce (central or possibly South America) and pepper (India). One fairly typical vegan breakfast, seven centers of diversity.

He traveled to twelve Vavilov centers, regions where the world’s food species were originally cultivated. He traveled in remote regions of the world, gathering unique wheat and rye in the Hindu Kush, Spain, and Portugal, teff in Somalia, sugar beet and flax in the Mediterranean, potatoes in Peru, fava beans and pomegranates and hemp in Herat. He was robbed by bandits in Eritrea, and nearly died riding horseback along deep ravines in the Pamirs. The seeds he gathered were studied carefully back in Russia, tested in fields, and most importantly, cataloged and stored – by gathering a library of genetic diversity, Vavilov knew he was creating a resource that could be used to grow plants that would suit the country’s needs for decades to come. If a pest decimates one crop, you can find a resistant crop and plant it instead. If drought kills your rice, all you need to do is find a drought-tolerant strain of rice. At the Pavlovsk Experimental Research Station, Vavilov was building the world’s first seed bank.

Vavilov Centers of the world. Image from Humanity Development Library of the NZDL.

In Afghanistan, he saw wild rye intermingled with wheat in the fields, and used this as evidence of the origin of cultivated rye: that it wasn’t originally grown intentionally the way wheat or barley had been, but that it was a wheat mimic that had slipped into farms and taken advantage of the nurturing protection of human farmers, and had, almost accidentally, become popular food plants at the same time. Other Vavilovian mimics are oats and Camelina sativa.

While he travelled the world and became famous around the burgeoning global scientific community, Russia was changing. Stalin had taken over the government. He was collectivizing the farms of the country, and in the scientific academies, were dismissing staff based on bourgeois origin and increasing the focus on practical importance of work for the good of the people. A former peasant was working his way up through agricultural institutions: Trofim Lysenko, whose claimed that his theory of ‘vernalization’, or adapting winter crops to behave more like summer crops by treating the seeds with heat, would grow impossible quantities of food and solve hunger in Russia. Agricultural science was politicized in a way that it never had been – Mendelian genetics and the existence of chromosomes were seen as unacceptably reactionary and foreign. Instead, a sort of bastardized Lamarckism was popular – aside from being used by Lysenko to justify outrageous promises of future harvests that never quite came in, it said that every organism could improve its own position – a politically popular implication, but one which failed to hold up to experimental evidence.

Vavilov’s requests to leave the country were denied. His fervent Mendelianism and the way he fraternized with Western scientists were deeply suspicious to the ruling party. As his more resistant colleagues were arrested around him, his institute filled up with Lysenkoists, and his work was gutted. Vavilov refused to denounce Darwinism. Crops around Russia were failing under the new farming plans, and people starved as Germany invaded.

Vavilov’s devoted colleagues and students kept up his work. In 1941, the German Army reached the Pavlovsk Experimental Research Station, interested in seizing the valuable samples within – only to find it barren.

Vavilov’s colleagues had taken all 250,000 seeds in the collection by train into Leningrad. There, they hid them in the basement of an art museum and watched them in shifts all throughout the Siege of Leningrad. They saw themselves as protecting Russia’s future in agriculture. When the siege lifted in 1944, twelve of Vavilov’s scientists had starved to death rather than eat the edible seeds they guarded. Vavilov’s collection survived the war.

Gardening has many saints, but few martyrs. – T. Kingfisher

In 1940, Vavilov was arrested, and tortured in prison until he confessed to a variety of crimes against the state that he certainly never committed.

He survived for three years in the gulag. The German army advanced on Russia and terrorized the state. Vavilov, the man who had dreamed of feeding Russia, starved to death in prison in the spring of 1943. His seed bank still exists.

Vavilov’s moral, to me, is this: Science can’t be allowed to become politicized. Whatever the facts are, we have to build our beliefs around them, never the other way around.

Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009

Norman Borlaug in 1996. From Bill Meeks, AP Photo.

Borlaug was raised on a family farm to Norwegian immigrants in Iowa. He studied crop pests, and had to take regular breaks from his education to work: He worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the dustbowl alongside starving men, and for the Forest Service in remote parts of the country. In World War 2, he worked on adhesives and other compounds for the US MIlitary. In 1944, he worked on a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture to improve Mexico’s wheat yields and stop it from having to import most of its grain. The project faced opposition from local farmers, mostly because wheat rust had been killing their crops. This wasn’t an entirely unique problem – populations were growing globally. Biologist Paul Erlich wrote in 1968, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Borlaug realized that by harvesting seeds in one part of the country and quickly moving them to another, the government could take advantage of the country’s two growing seasons and double the harvest.

By breeding many wheat strains together, farmers could make crops resistant to many more diseases.

He spread the use of Haber’s ammonia fertilizers, and bred special semi-dwarf strains of wheat that held up to heavy wheat heads without bending, and grew better in nitrogen fertilizers.

Nine years later, Mexico’s wheat harvest was six times larger than it had been in 1944, and it had enough wheat to export.

Borlaug was sent to India in 1962, and along with Mankombu S. Swaminathan, they did it again. India was at war, dealing with famine and starvation, and was importing necessary grain for survival. They used Borlaug’s strains, and by 1968, were growing so much wheat that the infrastructure couldn’t handle it. Schoolhouses were converted into granaries.

His techniques spread. Wheat yields doubled in Pakistan. Wheat yields in the world’s least developed countries doubled. Borlaug’s colleagues used the same process on rice, and created cultivars that were used all over Asia. Borlaug saw a world devastated by starvation, recognized it for what it was, and treated it as a solvable problem. He took Haber’s mixed legacy and put it to work for humanity. Today, he’s known as the father of the Green Revolution, and his work is estimated to have saved a billion lives.

We would like his life to be a model for making a difference in the lives of others and to bring about efforts to end human misery for all mankind. – Statement from Borlaug’s children following his death

What’s next?

When I think of modern global agriculture, this is who I think of. I’ve been trying to find something connecting Vavilov and the Green Revolution, and haven’t turned up much – although it’s quite conceivable there is, given Vavilov’s inspirational presence and the way he shared his samples throughout the globe. Borlaug’s prize wheat strain that saved those billion lives, Norin 10-Brevor 14, was a cross between Japanese and Washingtonian wheat. Past that, who knows?

One of the organizations protecting crop diversity today is the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which was founded in 1971 by the Rockefeller Foundation as the Green Revolution was in full swing. They operate a variety of research stations worldwide, mostly at Vavilov Centers in the global south where crop diversity is highest. Their mission is to reduce global poverty, improve health, manage natural resources, and increase food security.

They must have been inspired by Vavilov’s conviction that crop diversity is essential for a secure food supply. If a legacy that’s saved literally a billion human lives can be said to have a downside, it’s that diets were probably more diverse before, and now 12 species make up 75% of our food plant supply. Monocultures are fragile, and if conditions change, a single disease is more likely to take out all of a crop.

The Svalbard Seed Bank. Image from Glamox.

In 2008, CGIAR brought the first seed samples into the Svalbard Seed Vault – a concrete structure buried in the permafrost. It’s constructed as a refuge against whatever the world might throw. If electricity goes out, the permafrost will keep the seeds cool. If sea levels rise, the vault is built on a hill. The land it’s on is geologically stable and very remote. And it stores 1,500,000 seeds – six times more than Vavilov’s 250,000 – at no cost to countries that use it.

Let it be known: starvation is on its last legs. We have a good thing going here. Still, with global warming and worse things still looming over the shoulder of this tentative victory, let’s give thanks to the movers and shakers of global agriculture for tomorrow: the people ensuring that whatever happens next, we are going to be fed.

We are going to be eating dinner, dammit.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

So You’re Not Ready To Go Vegetarian

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[Content warning: Moralizing about what food you should eat, descriptions of bad things happening to animals, eating bugs. Also, lots of people can’t go vegetarian or significantly alter their diet at all due to health, cost, time, sensory issues, strong preferences, lack of options, inability to pick your own diet, etc. Most of the ‘alternatives’ posed here take money, time, or majorly changing your habits. If reading this post is likely to make you feel guilty or bad in an unproductive way, feel free to skip it.]

This is a rather utilitarian list of approaches to improving the lives of animals even if you still eat meat. I’ll start with some general strategies, ranked roughly in order from “least to most weird”. See what works with your diet, resources, and preferences.

Basic ideas:

Eat less meat in general.
Eat less chicken, eggs, beef, and farmed fish.
For other animal products, eat Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, or 100% Grass-Fed meat, or buy from a source where you know how the animals are treated.
Eat species that suffer less, either in farms or at all.
Pay other people to go vegan for you.
Support animal welfare by donating money effectively.

I suspect that some people will object to the notion that it’s ever alright to kill or use an animal, and that encouraging people to do this in a “less bad” way is just making compromises with the devil. (As opposed to veganism, which is merely selling your soul to Seitan.) If you’re one of these people, you’re probably already a vegan and this essay isn’t for you.

Not that I entirely disagree- many more people should be vegetarian. That’s not the point, though. Many people are Vegetarian Sympathizers, as I once was. As a young person, for instance, I knew that I had moral issues with the idea of eating animals- that a cow’s brain wasn’t very different from a cat’s, which also wasn’t very different from a human’s. I also knew that meat had unfortunate impacts on the environment and that global warming was a serious problem. But my developmental environment had lots of meat. And also, I had a very strong objection- cheeseburgers.

Pictured: The Seattle restaurant that was the source of my conflict. The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak. | By Jmabel (CC BY-SA)

This wasn’t a rational objection. But we’re not rational creatures, and the Cheeseburger Objection was the actual thing standing in between me and vegetarianism. And if I’m going to eat cheeseburgers anyways, why not eat steak, chicken, fish, etc.?

Honestly, the Cheeseburger Objection is a pretty good one. One cow makes a lot of cheeseburgers. One cheeseburger might make you very happy. Acknowledging that isn’t a reason to stop caring about animal welfare entirely. And Cheeseburger Objectionists can still make extremely meaningful contributions to animal welfare without depriving themselves of that cheesey goodness.

1. Only go vegetarian sometimes.

Meatless Mondays are a thing- don’t eat meat just one day a week. That’s 1/7 fewer animals you’re eating, and gaining valuable practice in cooking and eating vegetarian. If that’s too easy, up it to two days a week. Repeat.

Some other strategies that have worked for people: eat vegan before 5 o’clock (IE, meals before dinner), only eat meat outside the house, only eat meat inside the house.

Or, if you’re inclined towards vegetarianism- except for cheeseburgers- (or orange chicken, shrimp, your uncle’s venison, baseball stadium hotdogs, etc.-) consider just being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian. I think there’s this tendency to think that if you’re not doing something 100% all the way and identify as that, any tendency you have towards it doesn’t count at all. But that’s completely untrue. Given that we live in a world where most people do eat meat, conspicuously eating less meat both saves animals, and is a talking point that puts vegetarianism on people’s radars.

(Of course, if you’re being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian and hoping to talk to other people about it, people might take you less seriously. This might be a problem. You could either keep your cheeseburger habit private and secretive, hoarding McDonald’s in the dark like the world’s most gluttonous dragon – or you could acknowledge that if someone’s going think that plant-based diets are a joke and not important, they can already find whatever reason they want to do that.)

If you don’t know how to cook food or eat meals without meat, maybe the problem is educational. Look for recipes that contain tofu, beans, lentils, TVP, or vegetables. If you only know one kind of cuisine, broaden your horizons- Indian, Ethiopian, Mexican, Chinese, etcetera, all have lots of opportunities for low meat dishes.

We live in a golden age of easily available recipes. PETA, Vegetarian Times, and Leanne Brown’s free cookbooks are a few good resources. Google it. Also, if you want to make a favorite Food X vegan or vegetarian, look up “Vegan Food X” and you will instantly get 4,000 hits including step-by-step photographs and people’s life stories as told through salad dressing recipes. The internet is a magical place.

2. Eat humanely sourced meat.

This is way harder than it sounds. The good news is that meat is given labels which reflect how it was raised. The bad news is that some of these labels are regulated, and some aren’t, and it’s difficult to determine which labels actually correspond to good living environments and which are symbolic or easily falsified.

Look for the following words on packages:

Certified Organic animals may still be subject to a variety of inhumane conditions. The label means that hormones, antibiotics, and some other treatments are not allowed, and that the animal must be allowed to “exhibit natural behaviors.” I suspect that organic animals are somewhat harder to mistreat, because farmers are incentivized to raise animals in low-disease environments, so organic may be better than conventional if those are your only two options. *

Animal Welfare Approved is an independently-verified certification that has very high welfare standards, including for slaughter. Certified Humane is a less strong but similar certification. There are probably other good ones- look for what they require and how they’ve verified.

Hoofed animals: Look for 100% Grass-Fed, a legally-defined term in which all animals must be raised entirely on pasture (grass, etc) and not fed harvested grain. It seems much harder to mistreat a cow raised this way, since it can’t be confined. This is different from grass-finished, pastured, or normal grass-fed, since all cows eat some grass before they arrive at feedlots.

3. Be careful with chicken.

Chickens are extremely common and live extremely bad lives in factory farms, probably moreso than any other animal.

Cage-free or free-range eggs are better than alternatives, but I don’t think they’re humane. A cage-free chicken may have a somewhat better and more natural life than a non-caged chicken, though they’re newly at risk of fighting with other chickens, which caged chickens aren’t. They may still be subject to having their beaks cut off, slaughter of male chicks (half of all egg-laying chickens are killed shortly after hatching), bird flu, crowded environments, being raised in darkness, starvation-based forced molting, etc.

A couple examples:

Free-range – the amount of time or space required for “outdoor access” isn’t legally defined, and varies from facility to facility.
A cage-free chicken is still raised in barns or warehouses. They may have no outdoor access, or have their beaks cut or burned off without anesthesia.
Organic eggs still aren’t treated with antibiotics but can still be raised in factory farms.
More info on labels.

Putting a picture of happy chickens here seemed disingenuous, so here’s some eggs, I guess. | The Home Front In Britain, 1935-1945.

Any given egg source may well not do some or all of these- for instance, I’ve heard that there are some egg producers that don’t slaughter male chicks, and the cost of raising them is passed to the consumer as a higher price. The key here is to do your research. If you buy based on label X or Y without further investigation, even at a “nice” natural foods store or co-op, your chicken will probably have been raised in painful, inhumane conditions.

I think your best chance at getting humanely raised chickens or eggs is to buy from a home farmer or very small permaculture farm, ideally where you can see the chickens. These are likely to be significantly more expensive than other options. Farms may still slaughter male chicks.

4. Eat species that suffer less.

Quantification of animal suffering is a new field, and practices for calculating it are general estimates. That said, its numbers come from easily understandable ideas- that it’s worse to be a factory-farmed chicken than a feedlot cow, for instance. Some other ideas include that being killed is painful, so an animal that produces more food over a long period means less suffering per food unit (assuming said animal’s day-to-day existence isn’t terrible.) Also, that having a more complex brain probably means you can suffer more. It’s not an exact science, but it’s what we’ve got.

Brian Tomasik, who has studied animal suffering extensively, suggests using this metric that by eliminating chicken, chicken products, and farmed fish from your diet, you reduce the suffering you inflict on animals by an enormous amount.

Clams and mussels have very simple nervous systems and probably do not feel much pain, while full of nutrients comparable to other animal foods. Ozymandias at Thing of Things suggests that eating bivalves and dairy, and otherwise being vegan, can be a good trade-off between health, enjoyment, and helping animals. Also, you still get to eat clam chowder (if it doesn’t have bacon.)

The jury is still out on whether insects experience suffering. On one hand, insects are pretty simple critters; on the other hand, to produce any significant amount of food, you need a lot of insects, so however much moral weight they do have gets multiplied by a lot. On the third hand, about a quintillion die every year, so your own contribution is pretty marginal. (That number is extrapolation- I suspect most insects live less than a year, so the number is probably higher.)

Chingrit thot by Takeaway (CC BY-SA)

What is known is that insects are nutritious and environmentally friendly. Sourcing insects is difficult and pricey, so try raising your own.

Exotic meats. I suspect that exotic meats (deer/venison, buffalo, ostrich, etc.) are more likely to be raised in more ethical environments, because as species they’re less domesticated, and therefore harder to mistreat as in a factory farm. However, I have no evidence for this.

5. Eat environmentally sound meat.

Most of this list comes from a moral argument, but the negative environmental impacts of standard meat is so well-established that it’s worth discussing. 30% of the world’s non-frozen dry land is currently devoted to feeding or raising animals, and 18% of human-produced greenhouse gases came from agriculture. Lamb and beef have disproportionately high greenhouse gas emissions. You’ll note that chicken is rather low on this ranking, but as in the above section, there are other reasons to avoid it.

“Don’t non-animal-product foods also have carbon emissions?” Not that much.

Source and more info.

Fish is extremely nutritious, but many species are overfished. Eat conscientiously to avoid making the problem worse- the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch has detailed recommendations for the consumer based on your location, sorted into handy “okay to eat” and “avoid this” categories. Bycatch ratios are another thing to beware: shrimp fisheries are the worst, trawling up an average 6 times more non-shrimp than shrimp.

6. Convince someone else to go vegan.

A review (again by Tomasik) of organizations that run ads promoting vegetarianism suggest that the cost of converting a someone to be vegan for a year is, conservatively, about $100. Do you have the money to spare, and think there should be more vegans, but eating meat is worth more than a hundred dollars to you?

Utilitarianism: it works.

Utilitarianism: It’s this cool. And the ends justify the memes.

This approach won’t work forever, of course – if everybody decided that they individually would eat meat but convince others not to, the cost of getting anyone to go vegan would skyrocket. But not everybody is, and for the time, it’s still low-hanging fruit.

7. Donate to effective charities.

Can we do even better? The average vegetarian saves ~25 land animals per year (and perhaps 371-582 animals per year including fish and shellfish) according to the blog Counting Animals.

The Effective Altruism movement, which is near and dear to my heart, has produced several lovely projects, including Animal Charity Evaluators– a highly evidence-based group that researches which animal welfare organizations have the most bang for your buck. (Sort of the Givewell of the greater biosphere.) An $100 donation to any of their top three charities is estimated to indirectly save or spare the lives of 7,597 animals. (Via outreach, undercover video filming, corporate outreach, and more.)

A final note: People sometimes get annoyed at vegetarians or vegans because they think they’re being smug or morally uppity. This always seemed to me like a strange criticism – the problem is that they’re doing something good? – but if you think it has merit, imagine how smug you can feel in the knowledge that every year, you donate $100 to a certain charity, and that has the same effects as going vegetarian for thirteen years, every year.**

Updated 4/14/2017.

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