Looks like the guy from Jethro Tull....

hmmmm, from what i can remember from the back cover of Close to the Edge, i'd say that's Eddie Offord good sir!

 

Also, I never thought prog had much to do with vegetarianism. What I do know is that I would never give up on turkey bacon dang it! 

Let's just say he ended up in the same boat as Gary Glitter, if you get my drift.

Purely coincidental, nothing more.

 

Uh...I have no idea who 'Gary Glitter' is.

Back on topic, I assume the bulk of the protein that you would get from meat is replaced from stuff like beans? I'm not sure if I can live a vegetarian diet, but I could give living off several large cans of  BBQ beans every days for a few weeks a shot.

 

it depends whether you are vegetarian or vegan.  Vegetarians tend to consume a lot of dairy products (milk, yoghurt, cheese) for protein sources.  Vegans don't eat any animal-based proteins so it's a lot harder to get adequate protein.

 

I eat very little meat and am thinking of giving it up altogether, but life without cheese?  No way.

Non-crap-musicism!  My new philosophy. I'm embracing it here.

And a lot of people from all backgrounds are not uncomfortable with it. Since the sum total of both those is the entire population of the earth then only one really qualifies as "a lot" and I'll wager that even when counting those who are vegetarian/vegan due to religion or poverty (40% of the Indian population for example) the total number of people who are uncomfortable with the thought of eating "another being" is not a lot at all.

Being: existing, occurring. An emotive word used emotively. All living things "be", that is the nature of existence. Bacteria and other micro-organisms "be", as do fungi and plants. By that definition vegetarians and vegans are uncomfortable with the thought of eating any living entities that have the power of locomotion.

There are many good and positive things about vegetarianism, but morality isn't one of them.

It depends on whether you consider a lot to mean proportionally or just a large sum of people (I'd consider 0.001% of the world's population to still be a lot of people). None of this was the point I was making though. I know your stance on the morality of vegetarian/veganism, and I'd be happy to argue it, but that wasn't my intention.

Regarding what a being is, I'm sure you knew what I meant Dean, but as requested I'll change the wording to 'sentient being'.

For the record, my point was that the correlation between prog and a boycott of animal products is probably non-existent. And that Jon Anderson saying he 'grew out of' vegetarianism makes him out to be a bit of a t**t.

Hmm. "A lot [of]" when applied to a countable noun such as people is a comparative measure so does mean it is proportional, it only signifies a large volume when applied to a non-countable nouns such as water. Therefore since 0.001% of the population is a countable value (it's approximately 73,000 people) it can only be considered to be "a lot" when it is proportionally large compared to the whole, for example in Basingstoke [pop: 107,000], a town that has 0.00147% of the world's population then 73,000 people would be "a lot". More than 0.001% of the world's population own a copy of Porcupine Tree's In Absentia, [0.00164%] - that constitutes a lot of albums when compared to other Progressive Rock albums released in 2002 but it is not a lot compared to all the albums released that year or any of the top selling albums. When you state '0.001% of the world's population' you are explicitly comparing it with the whole population so can never be "a lot", similarly 'people of all backgrounds' implies all the world so again the comparison can never be "a lot".

Of course more that 0.001% of the world's population is vegetarian/vegan, exact figures are unknown but in the West (and China) a figure of 5% is often quoted, add to this  the 40% of the population of India that are vegetarian through religion, caste or poverty and a reasonable estimate would be 785 million people. That is a lot compared to the population of Basingstoke, and it would be a lot of lettuce and cucumber sandwiches to make compared to making none at all. But 785 million is not a lot compared to the 6.5 billion who are not vegetarian/vegan. (Next month we are planning a wedding for 120 guests, the exact number of vegetarian/vegans attending is three [2.5%], I would not call that "a lot" - one small cucumber and a baby gem lettuce should suffice.)

When considering sentience we are talking about the capacity for an organism to react to physical damage or touch and once again in the broadest definition of that research has shown that plants have a degree of sentience, we even use the word 'suffer' when referring to a plant that is suffering from drought or disease. Of course we could state that plants don't 'feel' in the same way that animals do, but the same applies to cold-bloodied animals that do not 'feel' in the same way that warm-bloodied animals do. So what then? Do we consider sapience, self-awareness, or consciousness? The one word that can be adequately substituted into your sentence is "meat" since many [the formal way of saying 'a lot of'] vegetarians [i.e. a significant proportion of a defined population] are uncomfortable with the thought of eating meat.

We can all draw a line over which we shall not cross when it comes to what we will and will not eat, and we all use emotional and moralistic criteria to determine where in the sand we will make our mark (there are many animals that omnivores will not eat just as there are many plants that a vegetarian and omnivore will not eat). 

The phrases 'another being', 'another sentient being' and even 'another animal' are emotional phrases because they are being equated to 'people' by use of the word 'another', and by coupling that with the negative 'uncomfortable' you are implying a morality (by the use of 'thought') whether you intended it or not. This sentence, after all, was presented as the 'in all seriousness' conclusion to your post and not as a direct (less serious?) reaction to Anderson's remark. 

Of course I purposely highlighted the 'but again I grew out of that' idiom because it amused me when I read it (and not because either Anderson or I think vegetarianism is an immature life-style choice or because I thought he was being a bit of a twonk) and I didn't quote the preceding http://www.classicbands.com/JonAndersonInterview.html" rel="nofollow - interview reply of Anderson's referred to by the "but again" in that quote, which was: "In the old days it was the band against the world! Live together, travel together, eat together. But, we all grew out of that." Is he talking about maturity here or just about moving on to another stage in the band's development? As we know, vegetarian Kate Bush stopped touring completely in 1979. 

/edit: edited for a silly maths error.

 

oops, my bad, mis-read this message first time

 

Was that garden on Solsbury Hill by any chance?

 

 

 

I saw it too.  Now I'm trying to unsee it.

Excuse me now I've got an endangered rhinoceros roast in the oven. Tomorow's menu consists of basted California Condor in a white wine sauce. 

We don't think we are saving anything. We just don't like the thought of consuming animals or animal products. The effectuality of it isn't really something that drives us to boycott these things. It's just like any other political belief, in which it is only really effectual when the majority of people endorse it. But I will digress slightly by saying that if you were to move your belligerent self out of this rut of stubborn and reactionary closed-mindedness that you seem to be in and do a touch of research, you will find that the meat industry (amongst other industries) really is criminal in its damaging of the environment, so our 'self-importance' isn't exactly just pulled out of the ether.

On a final note, anyone that eats poultry or fish is not vegetarian or vegan. Even if they tell you that they are

Everything mankind does in order to feed itself is damaging the environment. How bad this is depends on your interpretation of "criminal", in the informal sense I tend to regard this as any action that is deplorable and not just those that are shocking. It also depends on what environmental change you regard as being damaging. Whether the "meat industry" is more damaging than any other form of intensive farming is also debatable, pointing out the environmental damage caused by livestock farming while failing to point out the environmental damage caused by arable farming is a tad disingenuous, as is pointing out the methane produced by livestock while ignoring the methane produced by rotting vegetation (which is far more harmful than the carbon dioxide the plant absorbed) - it is a sad fact that we waste more vegetables than any other food product. 

The landscape of the country you currently reside in is entirely "man-made" - every hectare of it is as unnatural as it can possibly be. Over the past 15,000 years man has completely deforested the whole island group that makes up the British Isles, and this was solely for the purposes of food production (arable and livestock). 

The landscape you see when driving through the countryside is 100% unnatural and artificial. You may have a romantic notion that this is not a damaged environment but the bucolic idle of a Constable landscape painting is record of man's impact on the land we live on. When we decry the slash-and-burn deforestation of the rainforests of the world we have to remember that is exactly the methodology used to create the countryside we see around us. When we deforested the land its fauna and flora changed dramatically, whole species went extinct in the UK as a result of that, also soil erosion increased, the nutritional composition of the soil changed and even its very structure changed as root systems and leaf compost deposition ceased to naturally till the land. England's green and pleasant land is as environmentally damaged as any dark satanic mill. (note: ELP Prog reference).

To live without damaging the environment means a return to a hunter-gather existence (or for the vegetarian ... a gather existence).

The amount of land required to support one person without affecting the environment is 2,600 hectares (typical hunter/gatherer existence), which means that the UK can support a population of roughly 9,400 omnivorous people, and that was roughly the population it had 5000 years ago when we were nation of hunter-gatherers. As we learnt to cultivate the land (environmentally damaging it in the process) the amount of land required to support one person decreased and so the population increased. The agricultural revolution that preceded, and thus enabled, the industrial revolution enabled us to further reduce this land requirement per person and so the population of the country increased dramatically. (and another Prog reference: Jethro Tull and his seed drill and improved [i.e., industrialised] arable farming methods). The population grows in proportion to our ability to feed ourselves, that's how the ecology of a country works.

Today 60% of all available land area in the UK is farmland, this equates to roughly 183,000 square kilometres (18.3 million hectares). The remaining 40% comprises of habitation and land otherwise unfit for farming. It would be reasonable to say that this percentage of farmland cannot get any larger, it can only get smaller. It is also reasonable to say that some of this farm-able area is pasture (another man-made landscape) and that is the only viable use it can be put to (for example poor soil, moorlands, hillsides, highlands etc.) since it is too poor for arable farming. If we wanted to abandon livestock farming completely then the amount of viable land for arable farming is considerably less than 18.3 million hectares. Current estimates put the ratio of potentially arable land at somewhere around 25% of the total UK land mass, which results in a total of 7.63 million hectares that can be arable farmland, or roughly 40% of all farmland. 

The UK cannot produce enough food to feed its 62 million population. 

According to recent DEFRA statistics we currently import 41% of all our food. Or to put it another way, we can only feed 60% of the population with home-produced food. That imported food (whether it be lamb from New Zealand, rice from China, oranges from Israel, or wherever the hell tofu comes from) has food-miles and every tonne of it pollutes the environment regardless of what food-group it belong to. Tofu is as much an environment damaging food as any other. These imports have other effects that we often fail to consider - they even-out the seasonality of home-grown produce and make up the short-fall in crop failures, the variability of crop yields and other natural wastages. 75% of the food we import is fruit and vegetables. It's one of those uncomfortable realities that imported food sustains a vegetarian diet, and that is detrimental to the environment of the country of origin and the country of the end user. 

How does this stack up with the available UK farmland? Let's do some "research" and grab data willy-nilly from the interwebs:

The area of land required to feed one person the "western diet" is estimated at 0.5 hectares/person, or 2 people/hectare. The population density of the UK is 255 people per square kilometre, or 2.55 people per hectare. However, as only 60% of the land is given over to farming the population density per hectare of farmland is actually 3.4 people/hectare, this means that (again) we can only produce enough food to feed 60% of the population. That we are achieving this figure (60% home-grown food vs. 40% imports) means that farming in the UK is currently using the land pretty efficiently. How damaging that level of intensive farming is to the environment is another matter. We cannot achieve these figures without chemical enhancement (fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides) - "organic" farming (either arable or livestock) cannot produce the required yields to sustain this figure of 60%.

The "western diet" involves meat so we can improve on that people/hectare ratio by reducing the amount of land given over to pasture and/or growing animal feed crops. There is a trade off here, as I said earlier not all farmland is suitable for arable farming and studies suggest (I know - a weasel phrase but the data is out there, look it up - it is also logical common sense) that a reduced meat diet can feed more people per hectare than a zero meat diet. Yes, in a perfect world with good fertile soil you can feed more people per hectare by just growing vegetables but when it is impossible to grow crops on 60% of your farmland then you have reduced the total amount of food you can possibly produce by not grazing animals on that land.

However, if we just consider feeding 62 million people on a vegetarian diet using 7.63 million hectares of arable-able land then that is 8.125 people/hectare ... which is a lot and a huge "ask". The absolute maximum number of people you can feed from one hectare is 14¼ (again, this isn't a made-up number - it's a Food and Agriculture Organisation [FAO] number gleaned from the interweb) that assumes absolutely perfect growing conditions, perfect agriculture, zero land degradation, zero waste, zero crop failure, an unlimited supply of good water and a perfect harvest, (i.e., not in the UK or anywhere else in Europe). So what we would be looking for is a 57% (8.125/14.25) efficiency in arable land usage - given the assumptions I listed for 100% efficiency this is a also tall order. To get even close to those conditions in the UK would inevitably result in the increased use of soil enrichment, pest and disease control, and other intensive farming practices that ultimately damage the environment. The net result of this is that food imports would have to increase to support a 100% vegetarian population, and that means more food-miles, more pollution, more environmental damage. The bottom line is that in the UK we cannot sustain a 100% vegetarian population, a proportion of the the population will have to eat meat in order for the remainder to enjoy their life-style diet.

A 100% vegetarian population would also see a reduction in food variety as low yielding, low nutrition crops would be a no-no, as would most soft fruit and all "exotics", we would also have to look to crops that harvest at different times in the year and crops that can be stored or preserved. The idea of living off a continuous supply of fresh food would be untenable. I also suspect that this revised vegetarian diet would be unappetising and unappealing to most modern vegetarians. It is another of those uncomfortable realities that the modern vegetarian diet is a product of the modern world. How attractive that would be without imported fruit and vegetables remains to be seen.

So yeah, by all means do your research.

Erm... EU wide laws prohibiting battery cages for egg production were introduced at the beginning of 2012. Because were British (godammit) we enforced these laws while many of our European neighbours ignore them. Just look at the shelves of any supermarket and you'll see free-range eggs and the less popular barn eggs but no battery eggs. There are other strictly enforced laws regarding pen-sizes and animal density restrictions for other livestock designed specifically to improve animal husbandry practices. Admittedly there is still a lot of room for improvement but using emotive words such as cruelty and battery farming in a blanket fashion is not painting a true picture. 

The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change http://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/407432/20150203_2013_Final_Emissions_statistics.pdf" rel="nofollow - published figures in 2013 that state that Agriculture (arable and livestock) is 5th behind Energy Supply, Transport, Business and Residential when calculated over the period between 1990 and 2013 and accounts for 9% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Basically 5% is from livestock and 4% from arable - a report published in 2010 from the Food Climate Research Network stated that 57% of agricultural emissions were from livestock farming which supports DoECC's findings (5%/9% = 55%). Now stop me if I'm wrong here but if we switch from mixed farming to 100% arable farming then the increased in arable farming to account for the loss in animal protein would result in an increase in arable emissions for a decrease in livestock emissions, so we cannot simply say that stopping livestock farming will reduce emissions by 4%.

They include something that the UK does not have and that's emissions from Forestry - while admitting that CO2 sequestration by the trees themselves is not accounted for (and they state it is hard to measure and estimate), its stated source of greenhouse gas emissions is from deforestation and soil decay (more of this later). But here Agriculture, (arable and livestock) is 4th behind Energy Supply, Industry and Forestry and just nips ahead of transport. The USA has a lower population density than the UK and they export more food products, which explains why residential and transport are lower than agriculture. But even then, since only a proportion of that 14% is for livestock farming reaching a global figure of 18% all by itself looks mighty optimistic.

We all know about CO2, that's the one released by burning fossil fuels and makes up 82% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, 20% of which are attributed to transport, 11% specifically to cars and only 1.5% to agriculture. CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for 100 years or more.

Methane is created by the anaerobic breakdown of plant matter makes up 10% of emissions in the UK of which 5% is due to agriculture and sure enough this agricultural contribution would disappear over night if we stopped eating meat.... the landfill figure could increase of course as the food waste that is currently fed to animals would now have to be disposed of by other methods. Methane hangs around in the atmosphere for less than 10 years as it is a volatile gas.

Nitrous oxide (N2O), otherwise known as laughing gas, is produced by soil bacteria in cultivated soil so while N2O accounts for 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, all of which is attributed to agriculture... and since it is wholly produced by soil bacteria it can only be caused by arable farming. Of course, growing crops for livestock feed and using animal manure for fertilizer contributes to that figure but stopping meat production would not reduce it as the land would now be used to grow human feed - it would even increase as we are forced to cultivate more land to grow more crops.

So - 11% greenhouse gas emissions by cars and 5% by cattle. Even a grauniad reader can see which of those two numbers is the larger.

You can't guilt-trip me, I've lived most of my life in a rural environment, my paternal grandparents worked the land and my father-in-law was a pig farmer. To imply that meat-eaters are not empathetic or that arguing the broader, balanced view infers a lack of empathy is unfair. Not all farms are battery farms, not all livestock is subjected to cruelty and bad husbandry. All the livestock farmers I have met have cared more for their animals than they do for the rest of the human race. They know that a healthy, unstressed animal is beneficial to the animal and the farmer, livestock farmers are not devoid of empathy or uncaring for the animals. The empathy you cite as being the reason for being a vegetarian is the same empathetic trait that enables mankind to domesticate and care for animals. There are laws and regulations in the UK governing the transportation and slaughtering of animals designed to minimise suffering. I deplore intensive farming of all varieties including intensive arable farming with its over-use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, when I eat a tomato I want it to taste of tomato not water.