Disclaimer: I’m not vegan. I’m not even vegetarian. I eat meat all the time. I’ve been a firm critic of efforts to objectively quantify the difference in suffering across very different species. That said, I cannot help but agree that eating meat is probably the morally worst thing I do, and I also have to agree that eating different kinds of meat are different levels of bad. Eating 1 kg of chicken basically entails eating an entire chicken, which most likely lived in truly awful conditions, while 1 kg of beef is less than 1% of a cow, and which probably did not live in quite as awful conditions.

That said, let's talk Alpha-Gal. Suppose you get bitten by this unsavoury little bugger:

Via Wikimedia

It's a Lone Star Tick. This tick has recently ingested some animal blood, containing galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal). The tick's bite spits a little bit of alpha-gal into you, and your immune system freaks out about it. The mechanism is a little hazy, but the result is well-documented: you can’t eat anything with the alpha-gal molecule in it. This includes beef, pork, venison, basically any mammalian meat source, even cows’ milk.

While [...]

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Outline:

(02:04) The Ethics

(03:49) Can We Do Anything?

(05:35) How Much Should We Care?

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First published:

Source:

Linkpost URL:
https://jbostock.substack.com/p/alpha-gal-is-bad-especially-for-farmed

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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