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aelephant comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Just because many animals are living on factory farms doesn't mean that they have to. I would rather use my money to encourage things like free ranging chickens, grass fed cattle, etc. than to be someone proudly paying others to "Do as I say, not as I do."
How about non-proudly paying people to do it?
Admittedly, since it's not an efficient way to purchase fuzzies, you probably shouldn't do it unless you think it's the most efficient way to purchase utilons, which is not a conclusion I personally endorse, but you'd still probably be getting a significantly better rate per dollar on reduction in harm to animals and the environment.
I think we're thinking about it differently. The rate per dollar calculation is so linear. I'm thinking of things more like an ecosystem. Yes, at this moment in time you would get a better return on your investment, but there are costs to that decision that aren't taken into account in the equation. There are also benefits to the other path (investing in local, sustainable, ethical farming) that show up down the line as the movement picks up momentum. There are also potential harms to vegetarianism, such as vegetarian parents starving their children to death.
That's a pretty fringe harm.
Increasing the number of vegetarians is also effectively an investment in sustainable, ethical farming. You can only make the raising of live animals for their flesh so resource efficient, the floor on resource consumption is still going to be above that for farming produce.
You could invest in the research on vat meat, which could bring the floor down a lot lower than is possible with live animals, but it'll probably be decades before it reaches a point where anyone would want to eat it.
If you want to take about resource efficiency, we should probably start by eating what we produce. A quick Google turned up this report that 40% of the food produced in the US is thrown out as waste.
You know, I read that back in college, was properly outraged, resolved to eat all the food I served myself for every meal and never serve myself more than I would eat from then on, have done so ever since, and then proceeded to forget my original reason for doing so? That figure had passed out of my mind until you brought it up just now.
That said, the efficiency gap, while large, is still considerably less than that between raising meat and produce, so a person would actually be wasting fewer resources if they were eating only produce and served themselves a 40% excess beyond what they could eat and then threw it way than if they were eating a meal where meat constituted a significant proportion of the serving, and took only as much as they could finish.