I regularly compost vegetable scraps to use as a soil amendment in my garden. I would hazard a guess that if all the spoiled or otherwise wasted food landfilled(estimated at somewhere around 100 billion pounds of food annually in the US) were composted instead, it would provide plenty of fertilizer.

You are also overlooking the potential for reusing human manure as fertilizer. If it were sourced separated from everything else that goes into the sewage stream and then composted, it would be an excellent soil amendment.

The argument about using cow manure as a soil amendment only really makes sense if you’re already committed to eating meat.

Dude, if you’re not being sarcastic, I feel REALLY sorry for you right now.

I’m sure he’s joking. As for me, I just say no to any form of liver and always have.

And dolphins. Dolphins are bastards…

Wow, they really are!

To clear up an apparent contradiction in what I said yesterday, I’m currently not buying any meat free range or otherwise (unless you count wild caught salmon as rewarding somebody who doesn’t farm animals). But when I said MGK made a good point about buying meat from animals that had been treated ethically in order to give people an incentive to treat them ethically I did think it was a good point.

I mean, I’m buying eggs from free run hens these days (different from free range hens; both can run around and roost and so forth, but free run birds are kept inside they’re raised in one of those provinces where it’s too cold to keep them outside). Costs a little more, but I hope that I’m sending a message, and I am getting a decent amount of protein from them. I bring that up because I contacted this animal rights group before I started buying the eggs and asked whether the chickens were really all right or whether President’s Choice was just making that claim, was told not to worry, and that was good enough for me. So if I learned that a particular seller of free range turkey was treating the birds decently instead of, say, like what’s described here, I’d want to buy some. Not just because turkey is good but because I’d want to reward the producer like MGK said.

You can say that everyone should just *reduce* their consumption and yes, I definitely agree, but people are lazy fucks. My vegetarian urban hippie lifestyle balances out that of one SUV-driving dude who correlates eating a giant steak with his dick size.

(Unless, of course, you have a pollution-belching factory process it into “Ano-Wheets” first…)

And I’m pretty sure those synthetic fertilizers you mention are used largely on corn and soybeans to increase yields (which creates a paradox–the farmers need to buy those chemicals to produce enough bushels to make a profit, but the more bushels they produce, the greater the supply and the lower the price they can demand for the product). At any rate, my point is that those fertilizers are only “necessary” for a culture that demands the cheapest foods possible, and that the corn and soybeans those fertilizers are used on are fed livestock–so it’s the demand for cheap meat that drives the “need” for synthetic fertilizers.

This. This right here. Very well put.

you know, I’ve had people argue that cows would totally drop bombs on each other if they had the ability to, but I just don’t see it. Cats, though – I can believe that cats would be capable of genocide.

And dolphins. Dolphins are bastards:

Thirteen-foot male Bottlenose Dolphins were hunting down porpoises, beating to death and then playing with their corpses, all for no readily apparent reason. At the time of this writing, the majority opinion of the marine science community was that this breathtakingly savage interspecies homicide is for–and this is Science, here–shits ‘n’ giggles.