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October 23, 2022
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I don't, I'm afraid that the video stuff is outside my skillset, although I've considered looking at that area.

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Thanks Melanie for the very interesting read, I find this stuff fascinating and terrifying in equal parts. It's so hard to know what the best thing to do is.

One thing I have been trying to do more recently is to eat wild game meat. A quick search will reveal various companies selling it, and we could buy it in our local supermarket when we lived in Nelson - it's been harder to find in Christchurch, but we can buy it online. As I see it, it's basically a complete win - the animals live a normal life before they're hunted so there aren't the animal welfare concerns, there are no intensive agriculture concerns and it's essentially making an industry out of hunting pest species in New Zealand. The meat isn't the same as what you would buy in the supermarket, but it's easier to adjust to than going completely vegetarian, at least for us.

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Thanks Colin, I agree. It's really hard to figure out where that balance sits. I admit that I'm a fan of wild game meat when it is available (although in Wellington it's not common to find it). It's certainly an ecological win in New Zealand.

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Wow, fascinating stuff about how most of the global soy crop is fed to animals (especially chicken - which was my default if I really want to eat meat but want to avoid red meats for emissions reasons), and therefore eating soy instead of meat would actually reduce global demand for soy!

Thank you once again for the well researched article.

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Thanks Jenny. I eat more chicken than any other meat too, and I eat eggs, but hadn't given so much thought to what the chickens were eating. I hadn't realised their link with soy.

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Fascinating article! I agree it's a bad idea to engineer crops for pesticide resistance, for the reasons you point out as well as for human health. Soybeans can be drenched in glyphosate since they're engineered to resist it, but... humans are not. WHO's IARC rates glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic", and a 2019 University of Washington study supports that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1383574218300887. The US EPA disagrees so far, but I don't trust Bayer/Monsanto, and I've been avoiding Roundup-resistant food products since back when I looked like a weirdo for doing so.

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Stephanie, that was my question - what effects does the Roundup have on humans? I vaguely remember reading about Roundup being processed through cattle and their manure still having weed-killing properties once it's "deposited" in fields. What does that mean for us? Thank you for the link to the article above. Melanie, thank you for a thought-provoking article as usual!

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Good point. I hadn't gone into that as it's a really complex question and so much information on the subject comes from sources which have vested interests or biases. But it's on my list for things that I should be looking at.

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