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Hotdogs and burgers are about as disgusting as you can imagine, and yes, beef and pork consumption is unsustainable. Protein is overrated.

Cultural and religious mores, etiquette etc are as much about controlling disease and infection in society as anything.

Cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough, wash your hands after you use the lavatory, don't eat with your mouth open, don't spit in public, wipe your shoes, don't eat carnivores, scavengers, bugs, snakes, bats, brains etc. None of which the Chinese etc care about and why asian culture is abhorrent to most westerners.

People in the west aren't eating dogs and bats though are they, or throwing live animals into boiling oil. That bit of the 'cuisine' has not been transferred, and it is abhorrent to westerners.

There is something wrong with eating animals which carry lethal pathogens, as we seem to be discovering, same for gross animal cruelty.

they have a rigid culture of 'saving face', where they are extremely slow to admit any wrongdoing, firstly for the deep-seated social reflex, and secondly and more obviously because it quickly delegitimises the whole fucking state

Its already been pinned on 'illegal meat markets' nothing to see here.

as i said above, the videos showing those practices have been completely divorced from their context. the people of wuhan do not eat bats. bats are not on the cuisine just as dogs aren't an option on restaurant menus in korea. these are niche, local 'specialties' and, yes, as i also acknowledged above, sometimes a 'prestige' food amongst elites. the 'wild meat' craze in china is just such a trend of people trying to find different, 'rarer' meat dishes to distinguish themselves.

people in the west don't eat dogs or bats, but we do bury and let meat rot and ferment for 12 weeks before eating it, similarly viewed as a 'local delicacy', i.e. something 0.001% of people ever eat. the penis and testicles of many animals are frequently served in spain or germany, for example, traditionally because of their tenuous links to 'virility' and vigour. on the less extreme end of the spectrum, you've spoken yourself about hot dogs and other 'meat products' that barely qualify as food, essentially abattoir slurry mopped up from the floor and packed with breadcrumbs and sawdust. this isn't even a delicacy, it's considered normal food and is widely celebrated as 'ur-american' or 'classic dishes'. frankly i don't know what's worse.

the average asian diet consists of foods that are grown more locally and less industrially and are healthier than western diets. the staple diets of china, japan, korea, etc are a helluva lot better nutritionally than australia or the UK/america. they eat less meat, not more. their life expectancy and obesity stats can attest to that. but you'll go on about how their food culture is 'abhorrent', as if your average chinese person is eating shark fin soup, baby foetuses and bats. O K.

i've spoken separately about food standards and how animals are killed. there are many arguments for this and it's not a black/white issue. we don't throw animals into boiling oil but we boil lobsters in water, sometimes as a spectacle in front of paying diners? are we really less barbarous because we prefer to only see our meat wrapped in cellophane and divorced from its slaughter? the western attitude to animals is full of paradoxes and conflicts, anthropomorphism and bad faith -- is it really so much worse that china doesn't burden itself with lots of befuddled thinking on the matter?

again, you're doing nothing but advertising your usual racism. you're literally spinning a niche practice into 'this is why westerners abhor asian culture'.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-26 01:03:09)

yep, that was more my original point. it's an interesting case study because it's one of the most surveilled and repressive states in the world at the moment. and they've had a recent practice run with SARS. if they don't have the means to contain it, then it's very sobering indeed.

Jay would be upset about the government giving away the vaccine before going to the local VA and getting the whole family free shots.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay would be upset about the government giving away the vaccine before going to the local VA and getting the whole family free shots.

there was a great piece in the NYRB recently that put me in mind of jay, really gave an insight into that anti-federal, benefit-taking rugged individualist.

it was about the militia land seizure in wyoming or something, the one that had a giant media circus and ended up with some dingbat mormon getting shot.

turns out the guy leading the thing wasn't even a rancher, none of the cowboy-hat-wearing, pistol-toting individualists were, he actually owned some sort of medium-sized manufacturing business that he'd taken $600,000 in federal assistance money to start-up. lol. and in the end, after protesting against the government's control of large swathes of land in the name of the enterprising, pioneer-spirit individualist, he got thrown into a jail and badly mistreated ... a private jail.

you just can't make it up.

it's one option among many alternatives, which all have to be implemented in some way multi-laterally. no one is saying the human race should pivot to eating bugs.

factory farming of animals for meat and dairy produce is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse emissions. methane, more than CO2, by the way. this has all been covered to death.

uziq wrote:

again, you're doing nothing but advertising your usual racism. you're literally spinning a niche practice into 'this is why westerners abhor asian culture'.

Lately seems to be asian countries repeatedly delivering pandemics to the world thanks to their food consumption practices.

Africa is a basket case obviously, but we expect that.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I am aware of the negative environmental effects of factory farming. And I have heard proposals to solve world hunger by getting people to eat processed incest foods.

I am criticizing trying to sell the idea with taglines about CO2 emissions. The only people who are going to advocate eating garden meat are people who want to work on climate change too. Putting in a line about CO2 only helps promote hysteria regarding everything about climate science.

no one talks about CO2 emissions when discussing factory farming because factory farming contributes methane to the atmosphere (which is far worse though a fraction of the CO2 amount). can you at least line up your basic facts?

This is fun.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps … 7b48e9ecf6

Its a bit more than one province though.

I work for a Taiwanese manufacturer, and we routinely have visitors come from China. We had a mandatory all hands meeting/party on Friday to celebrate CNY. Most of the C-suite execs are in China once a month at the very least. Our Wuhan office already shut down for the month as a precaution, and one person was screened out and told to go home due to fever-like symptoms.

One person in OC has been confirmed to have 2019-nCoV. My morning was spent looking in to the feasibility of installing thermal scanners in our lobby, along with coming up with a mitigation/basic screening plan for our building. Very basic stuff like putting in hand sanitizers and coming up with a verbal screening process for any guests.

Next course of action is locating some surgical masks.

The virus is not highly contagious. Both sanitatizer/washing hands and wearing masks limit the spread of bodily fluid and are recommended actions to take to limit the spread of viruses by world health bodies.

Not sure what you're on about, but it sounds like you must have woke up on the grumpy side of the bed today, so here, have a cookie

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