Friday, August 16, 2019

Yay for science thwarting vegans

Have I mentioned before that I'm pretty dismayed how veganism has seemingly completely trumped vegetarianism in the alt. normal diet marketplace of ideas?    I mean, really:  the idea of giving up cheese, or eggs, is a huge ask for many people, me included.   And besides, I would be pretty sure that it is much, much easier to get a load of essential vitamins from your food if you include dairy, eggs, and the occasional not-very-sentient source of protein.   (Say, prawns and oysters - I am never going to worry too much about upsetting their farmed friends by taking them out of the sea.)  

But I can see why vegans argue about not wanting to support the egg industry, which involves killing huge numbers of day old rooster chicks.   (Why they wouldn't eat ones from their own backyard, though - that seems way too purist to me.)

So I am happy to read about the big effort to find a way to deal with the problem, by not even allowing the rooster eggs to hatch:
Modern laying hens have been bred to produce huge numbers of eggs, but their brothers are useless. They don't put on weight fast enough to be raised for meat. So hatchery workers—specialized "sexers"—sort day-old chicks by hand, squeezing open their anal vents for a sign of their sex. Females are sold to farms. Males—roughly 7 billion per year worldwide, according to industry estimates—are fed into a shredder or gassed.

Sorting males from females before chicks hatch at 21 days wouldn't just avoid the massacre. Hatcheries would no longer need to employ sexers, they wouldn't waste space and energy incubating male eggs, and they could sell those eggs as a raw material for animal feed producers, the cosmetics industry, or vaccine manufacturers. The United Egg Producers, a U.S. cooperative, says it wants to be cull-free by 2020, and the German government has said it will outlaw the practice. "Everyone wants the same thing, and the right piece of technology could solve this right now," says Timothy Kurt, scientific program director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) in Washington, D.C.

Look at how hi-tech one method of achieving this is:
One contender is the technology behind the respeggt eggs, which sorts them based on sex hormones. Funding from governments and industry has prompted an abundance of other ideas—from laser spectroscopy to MRI scans to genetic engineering. And next month, FFAR will announce seed funding for six finalists—selected from 21 entries from 10 countries—for an Egg-Tech Prize competing for up to $6 million for a workable method.

Almuth Einspanier, a veterinary endocrinologist at Leipzig University in Germany, and her colleagues laid the groundwork for the respeggt brand. They found that by day 9 of development, female embryos produce a hormone called estrone sulfate that can be detected reliably in fluid that builds up in the egg—"essentially the embryo's pee," Einspanier says. The German grocery chain Rewe and HatchTech, a Dutch hatchery equipment supplier, founded Seleggt, a spin-off based in Cologne, Germany, to market the technique. The company built a robot that fires a laser to open a hole in the shell much smaller than a pinhead. It sucks out a minuscule drop of the fluid and adds it to a solution that turns blue in the presence of the female hormone. Female eggs go to the incubator and male eggs are sent off to be frozen and processed into powder for animal feed.
Next thing we need work on - how to make milk other than from an udder.  What happened to this artificial cow's milk that is made from GM yeast?   Deserves another post, probably.

3 comments:

GMB said...

Good call. near-Vegetarianism can be justified on moral grounds. But Veganism is pure lunacy. Its taking a few good idea and making them extreme. In this sense the Vegans are like the communists used to be. Communists have a few good ideas and observations and then they decide to go extreme on them. The difference is that most of the communists could live to a ripe old age whereas only a handful of Vegans will live long on that horrific diet.

If you aren't an extremist about it you should be able to honour your anti-killing ethic by eating many pastured eggs, bone broth, shellfish, some organ meats and the rest might be from the plant Kingdom. You won't be measurably killing more animals that way than otherwise, except for the tiny brained shellfish. Of course women aspiring to pregnancy, or in danger of getting pregnant, simply need to throw these considerations out the door and eat all the fatty meats they can get her hands on.

See the aboriginal girl. Look at that bovine steer. If that girl is going to get pregnant in the next six months, and the babies future might be compromised through lack of nutrients, with all due apologies, as far as I'm concerned, that steer is going down.

Even if we wanted to be vegetarian from this ethical point of view, we are relying on our herbivores to rebuild our soils. Without good soils we will fail as a civilisation. So for now red meat needs to be part of someones diet to keep the beef industry growing as we turn it into a carbon-enriched soil production vehicle. But Veganism is evil. And its evil simply by way of taking valid things too far.

GMB said...

"Next thing we need work on - how to make milk other than from an udder. "

Good Lord man where is this coming from? If we want good carbon-infused soil, and good food, we need camels cows, sheep and goats, mobbed up and moving through a silvopasture landscape, turning vegetation into carbon and nitrogen-rich fertiliser. 3-5 days later we need the chickens coming over the same ground and giving us high K2 egg yolks. The whites are for pounding into earthern floors so as to make great animal shelters. Holy smokes where does yeast-milk fit into this story? Yeast is for making alcohol and raising bread. Cows are for milk and yeast is for beer. You don't want to mix these things up or you'll end up wasting money trying to get Cows making beer and yeast making milk.

Steve said...

Cows making beer? There's an idea. College/university parties would never be the same.