The true cost of meat
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
The true cost of meat
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
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
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 鈥� our own 鈥� 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 鈥� 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
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 拢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
Soleful exercise
I read with interest Laura Spinney’s article on the effect of shoes on our feet (24 January, p 40). I immediately thought how much an hour of t’ai chi each week could do to undo the damage done by shoes.
T’ai chi is done in soft slippers and uses “soft feet” 鈥� the step lands on the heel and rolls softly on to the ball of the foot. The exercise is sufficiently slow that the energy stored in sinews does not come into play; instead the muscles and joints of the foot and ankle are developed.
This results in a foot that is flexible but strong, and probably as close as we can get to its natural condition. Researchers could learn from this exercise form.
Telford, Shropshire, UK
Soleful exercise
An interesting extension of the ideas in Spinney’s article on feet might be to research people who take part in dance activities.
I’m involved in traditional dance, mainly Scottish country and highland dancing, which are high impact and involve dancing almost exclusively on the toes.
Both make use of constricting footwear with thin soles and very little ankle support. I frequently hear of people getting foot and ankle injuries 鈥� the accelerations and changes in direction are very similar to those in football and many other sports.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Raising the bar
Dan Jones reports a study showing that lawyers with more masculine voices are less likely to win a US Supreme Court case (3 January, p 12). He suggests that courts might have a bias against such voices, and that if so, this bias needs correcting.
This ignores a basic tenet of statistics 鈥� correlation does not imply causation. This may be the other side of the “glass ceiling” which prevents some women from being promoted despite having the ability: it may also favour less competent men with an authoritative presence.
Rather than showing a bias in the trial system, the objectivity of trials may be casting a light on flawed selection of lawyers.
Perhaps job interviews for lawyers should be conducted in writing, without any face-to-face meetings, by impartial judges who don’t know any of the applicants.
Politicians and CEOs with deep voices may be more successful in terms of winning votes, or earning money, but if there was an objective way to measure their competence, I wonder if their track record would be any better than the lawyers studied.
Macclesfield, South Australia
Roman wives
Roman soldiers defied the rules to house their wives in forts, writes Jeff Hecht (17 January, p 13).
In addition to the evidence he supplies, I would draw attention to the texts on the Vindolanda tablets, the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. These show that some women at least made their homes within the fort complex.
These postcard-like wooden tablets were the internet of their time, used to correspond with Roman sites around the country.
Notable is a message from Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, offering an invitation to a birthday party. This letter is written in perfect Latin in two different handwriting styles, indicating that some of it might have been dictated to a professional scribe.
The letter was found in a hoard of tablets alongside more regular administrative correspondence, which suggests that it was delivered via a Roman military courier system. This would be natural if the recipient Lepidina had a recognised status within Vindolanda fort.
The text tells us that some form of family life was established in Roman forts. If older generations of scholars have difficulty with this concept, as archaeologist Carol van Driel-Murray reports, I suggest they go back to the drawing board.
Brighton, UK
Roller coaster ride
Stuart Farrimond examines the radical treatments that could stop his brain cancer (10 January, p 10).
John Wardley, the man who designed many of the roller coasters in UK amusement parks, recounts in his autobiography the story of a girl who had a brain tumour the size of a satsuma. It was stopping fluid moving around her brain and would have killed her.
Suddenly and unexpectedly the fluid in her brain dispersed, relieving the pressure and allowing surgeons time to operate. The only explanation offered was that a few days earlier she had been on the Colossus roller coaster at Thorpe Park.
Did medical researchers ever follow this up? If I develop a brain tumour, could subjecting myself to significant g-forces on a theme park ride offer me hope?
Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK
In bad faith
Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson says religious faith is “dragging us down” (24 January, p 28). What a tremendous clarion call!
But if it is true, as he says, that humans have a strong tendency to wonder about whether they are being looked over by a god, and that practically every person ponders whether they are going to have another life, then there’s precious little hope that we’ll escape being dragged down.
These questions can be asked only by those who have not taken on board what biology and cosmology have taught us over the past two centuries, because they reveal an anthropocentric attitude 鈥� which is exactly what is allowing us to destroy biodiversity, and ultimately ourselves.
Howick, Quebec, Canada
Plane thinking
Hal Hodson writes about plans to launch networks of satellites that provide global internet access from orbit (31 January, p 18).
But why not use the thousands of aircraft flying around the world instead of turning to communications satellites? At any one time there are about 5000 planes over the US and 13,000 in the air worldwide. All of these could be tracked (if we wanted) and employed to relay laser communications.
Derby, UK
For the record
鈥� We wrote that plastic fibres were up to four times more abundant in deep-sea sediment than surface water (31 January, p 28). The true figure is four orders of magnitude greater (10,000 times more abundant).
鈥� Very thaw point: the lower blue line in our sea ice graphic (31 January, p 42) was the Antarctic summer minimum, not the winter one.