Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
Perhaps there have been times of famine where it kept people alive, but today and throughout most of human history, it’s simply killing people. Something like eight of the top ten causes of human death are consequences of diet. The leading cause of all human death goes away completely without consumption of a class of products that includes all dairy. Dairy is not healthy to consume, it is harmful.
Lol okay? I wasn’t arguing in favor of the dairy industry at all. I was providing historical context - essentially, I’m warning that we shouldn’t let AI go the way of the dairy industry. That is, we shouldn’t allow it to grow so massive that it starts having similar effects on the climate.
That being said,
This is just false. Most of human history was famine, compared to the modern day. Food lasted a couple days, at most. Dairy and grain were massive contributors to human flourishing.
It might not be healthy compared to other modern alternatives, but I invite you to find historical alternatives that were at all competitive. People were more likely to own a cow in the middle ages than they were to own land.
Grain lasts years. Starchy tubers (which we are uniquely evolved to consume and what was actually what supported the energy requirements of our large brain in pre-technological times) last all winter, or longer if you don’t dig them up. Salt preserves for years. So does pickling. Hell, even dogs are smart enough to preserve food by burying it in an anaerobic environment. A whole lot has to go wrong for the milk from an animal to be the margin by which a person survives, and by that point the animal has probably already been slaughtered. Exceptions like African bushmen who consume blood as a primary staple are quite rare.
Listen - I get it. Dairy is unhealthy in the modern day. The agricultural industry is devastating the planet. There are valid moral frameworks under which any and all animal exploitation is considered abbhorrent and shameful. I’m not arguing against any of that.
But if you want to talk about this, you need to accept that historically, dairy was huge. A whole lot has to go wrong in the modern day for milk to be the margin. But back then, human life was constantly in that margin.
You want to talk about salt? Salt started wars. Salt was such a valuable resource that humans literally killed each other over it, because it could preserve food. You can talk all you want about how easy it is to preserve food, but talk to me when your neighboring countries regularly invade to take it from you.
Every year - every year - humans struggled to survive through the winter. And most required nutrients simply cannot be consumed through grain and tubers alone. Certainly not pre-industrial, pre-enrichment, pre-GMO grains and tubers.
Humans in the modern day are significantly taller than historical humans. Why? Nutrition. Humans literally weren’t getting enough nutrition. Constantly.
What sustains through the winter? A cow. It turns those long-lasting grains - even grains we can’t eat - into milk and cheese. As a bonus, it also serves as a heat source. Humans would bring their cows into the house over the winter for both to survive.
That is how hard life was. That is how close pre-industrial humans were to death, that they would choose to sleep in a confined space with a giant bag of loud, hot methane.
Every last goddamn calorie, carbohydrate, protein, fat, and vitamin mattered. Dairy changed the course of human civilization. It’s silly how modern humans cling to it so tightly - lactose intolerance is so common that it should really be called lactose tolerance - but dairy had very real benefit and value. Animal husbandry was one of the first key technologies required to build stable human settlements.
Edit - not to mention, crops failed all the time. Harvest yields fluctuated significantly, especially before we understood nitrogen fixation, crop rotation, fertilizer quality, etc.
Pre-GMO (the old-school selective breeding kind), wheat was much harder to grow in large quantities, and since they required so much water, droughts were devastating. There were no massive irrigation systems - you literally depended on the rain to survive. Good luck preserving food that you just never had to begin with.