The true cost of meat
From Gregory Sams
As the creator of the original veggie burger in 1982, I read Linda Geddes's story on the cost of meat consumption with interest (24 January, p 30), but I could not ignore the inherent bias towards animal protein being superior.
Much is made in the article of meat being a "one-stop shop" for the essential amino acids, as if eating rice and beans is a big hassle for those billions across the world whose diets are based on pulses and cereals.
In combination, these foods provide all the essential amino acids plus slow-burning carbohydrate energy. People supplement them with vegetables, oil seeds, fruits and, sometimes, animal products.
For millennia we have raised animals on non-arable land and fed them indigestible waste from our food production, either harvesting their milk or their meat in return. Eating meat was occasional.
Government intervention in the food chain aimed to put meat on our plates every day through subsidy and regulation. The result of this policy was factory farms, agribusiness, a reduction in quality and consequences for human health.
Were government to exit the food chain, meat would be left to the mechanics of the marketplace and prices would rise to a level that would temper the amount consumed. We do not need to tax meat, just to stop subsidising it.
London, UK
From Dan Conine
Geddes's article echoes previous ones in suggesting that we must reduce our consumption of meat through a combination of education and policy change.
The consensus seems to be that scientists can only see the human animal as a mindless consumer of resources. This fits the common urban model of civilisation that increasingly isolates humans from the world we evolved in.
I submit that everyone needs to stop and think that perhaps the problem is not meat or money, but that humans are living as though everything on the planet is supposed to serve us, rather than the other way around.
The opposite of consuming Earth through unfettered rapacity is not frugal rapacity; it is unfettered generosity to Earth.
Belgium, Wisconsin, US
Banking on friends
From Carl Zetie
Reading Chris Baraniuk's article on group investing in the housing market, I was reminded that this is not the first time individuals have banded together to finance houses, bypassing the banks (24 January, p 21).
The British building society movement, which began in Birmingham in the late 18th century, enabled newly prosperous citizens to pool their resources to build their own homes.
These building societies remained a distinctive element of the British housing ownership landscape until the 1980s, when many of them demutualised, in the process becoming indistinguishable from banks.
The original building societies were inherently local, forming among people who knew one another well, meeting in bars and coffee houses rather than websites and forums. So perhaps we should think of crowdfunded mortgages as as the reinvention of the building society for the digital age.
Waterford, Virginia, US
Universal principles
From Ed Prior
I have great respect for Lee Smolin's work in cosmology and physics, but I cannot accept his "first principle" that there is just one universe (17 January, p 24).
In ancient times, our ancestors believed there was only one sun – our own – and worshipped it as a deity, not realising that stars were really suns like our own.
At the beginning of the last century, astronomers believed that there was only one galaxy in the universe, our own Milky Way, until Edwin Hubble's measurements showed otherwise.
More recently, virtually all astronomers believed that the universe was still expanding after the big bang, although this expansion was gradually decelerating due to the pull of gravity.
Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt and their teams found that the expansion rate was increasing – a result that remains unexplained.
Smolin and his colleague Roberto Mangabeira Unger may be right that there is only one universe, but that is a conclusion that can only be reached after further research, not by an assumption.
Poquoson, Virginia, US
Sellafield danger
From Douglas Cross
Fred Pearce highlights only a few of the problems posed by the UK's Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant (24 January, p 8).
While he mentions the new generating station being built at Hinckley Point in Somerset, he appears not to have noticed that there is to be another less well-publicised project, literally on the other side of the fence at Sellafield.
The decision to build the new Moorside station immediately next to what Pearce rightly refers to as one of "the world's most dangerous radioactive waste stores" indicates how far from rationality the government's energy planning has wandered.
While new-generation nuclear power plants may indeed be far safer than those now being decommissioned, any major discharge from Sellafield next door would require an immediate and possibly permanent shutdown of this idiotic £10 billion project.
If this is an indication of the shape of things to come, then those responsible for this parody of risk awareness need to be moved somewhere where they can do no harm.
Lowick Bridge, Cumbria, UK
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