I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this and I hope in this comment I don’t discourage this sort of investigation. I think it is laudable and valuable, and I hope you continue doing research on potential cause areas. That said, there are several assumptions this works off of that I think are at best questionable, if not outright incorrect. Some of these were noted in the comments of your earlier post, but do not seem to be addressed in this updated version. I am concerned by this given the potential significant harm of EAs adopting bivalve farming as something to champion, as well as the inaccurate claims this post perpetuates. I won’t address all of these issues in this comment, but I’ll try to go through a few of them:
The question of substitution goes largely unaddressed here, e.g. which animals are bivalves most likely to replace and what portion of that replacement would plants not also potentially replace. You consistently compare bivalves to other animals instead of animal-free options.
The case for bivalves over plant foods is based on assumptions with misleading citations.
Many of the non-consumption benefits of creating more bivalves (e.g. environmental benefits) could be accomplished without those bivalves also being killed.
I don’t think the potential suffering scaling bivalve farming may cause is adequately noted or accounted for.
From your writeup:
Bivalves are the most preferred protein source
You appear to be comparing different animal menu items against each other, rather than sources of protein. Globally, looking at consumption by grams of protein, plants continue to comprise the largest category in people’s diets (Our World In Data). From your writeup, I don’t see evidence that bivalves are the most preferred protein source; I see some indication that bivalves are sometimes viewed as a luxury food.
For most people, the alternative to eating bivalves is to eat meat
Is there a citation for this? And if this is correct, what animals are the primary alternative and what plant foods were presented as alternatives?
most people are receptive to a proposal to substitute bivalves for other meat, but are not receptive to proposals to go vegetarian/vegan.
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source. The linked source shows that people are going vegetarian/vegan, but retention is the issue. What is the source behind the claim that people are receptive to substituting bivalves for other animals? And is there data on what portion of people would substitute e.g. chickens or cows for bivalves but not also substitute chickens or cows for one of many plant options?
Bivalves are far healthier than current plant-based meat alternatives, which have minimal health benefits: “Diets based on novel plant-based substitutes were below daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, zinc and Vitamin B12 and exceeded the reference diet for saturated fat, sodium and sugar.”
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source and appears to be directly contradicted by the linked source. The linked study appears to be referencing diets with “novel” plant-based ingredients (e.g. vegan junk food) in contrast to diets that use “traditional” plant-based ingredients (e.g. “pulses, legumes and vegetables”) and the study directly states that “all diets with traditional plant-based substitutes met daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, iron and Vitamin B12 and were lower in saturated fat, sodium and sugar than the reference diet.”
Commercial farming involves a “depuration” stage, where bivalves are held for a minimum of 48 hours after harvest in clean water, but farmers might be tempted to skip this step, depending on the incentives involved.
I don’t feel as informed on this point, but I do think the human health risks associated with bivalve consumption were not given adequate consideration here, especially because some of the purported advantages pertain to survival scenarios. In addition to the heavy metal concerns, bivalves are also potentially one of the greatest sources of food poisoning, a concern that may be even more relevant in a catastrophe with increased environmental pollution and decreased access to both medical care and decontamination information. It seems unlikely that depuration will be carried out successfully in many of the places or times where failure will be the most harmful.
Other concerns:
I remain concerned that bivalves may be able to suffer and that given the number of bivalves involved, if they do suffer then promoting their consumption is among the greatest harms we could cause. This was raised by several comments on your earlier post. It was linked in the earlier comments, but I’ll link again here to this piece by Brian Tomasik:
While bivalves are probably less sentient than most animals of their size, they still sense their environments, show altered morphine levels in response to trauma, and adjust to changing environmental conditions.
Bivalves are typically boiled alive or eaten alive. If they have some experience of consciousness and some associated experience of pain, it seems possible this could lead to an even more intense form of suffering than a more complex species would experience.
Many other animal species prey on bivalves. I do not know how this is commonly dealt with by bivalve farmers, but it seems likely there are many (wild) animal suffering issues this opens up and expansion of bivalve farming to new areas and new ecosystems could lead to new and/or increased types of suffering in species we are confident are sentient.
It seems plausible that promoting increased consumption of bivalves could inadvertently promote increased consumption of other animals, including the species we should be most concerned about, e.g. crustaceans, insects, and/or finfishes, because many people will not differentiate “less sentient oyster” from “clearly sentient lobster.”
Overall, I think this is a risky proposition and I worry about EAs getting excited about it based on weak assumptions.
Thanks so much for your response Rockwell, really appreciate it. The detailed inspection of the supporting evidence is really valuable for me, because it helps improve the quality of the thesis and so that we all have a more accurate understanding of the benefits and drawbacks. I’d also like to share my thoughts in more detail on some of the points you raised.
You appear to be comparing different animal menu items against each other, rather than sources of protein. Globally, looking at consumption by grams of protein, plants continue to comprise the largest category in people’s diets (Our World In Data). From your writeup, I don’t see evidence that bivalves are the most preferred protein source; I see some indication that bivalves are sometimes viewed as a luxury food.
I believe that plants comprise the largest category of protein because they are much cheaper than meat or seafood. They are an inferior good in an economic sense, compared with meat as a normal good, and seafood as a luxury good. As incomes rise, people consume a higher proportion of meat. (This is also why asking people to substitute plants for meat generates resistance)
For a less technical viewpoint, evidence comes from a poll of people’s food preferences of their most liked foods. Going through the list and excluding the items that don’t contain significant amounts of protein, it looks like almost all of the most liked foods are entirely meat, or mostly meat. There are one or two exceptions such as Bibimbap or Fajitas, which have only a small amount of meat. Generally, plant foods are not the favorite foods unless they are made into sweet desserts.
Is there a citation for this? And if this is correct, what animals are the primary alternative and what plant foods were presented as alternatives?
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source. The linked source shows that people are going vegetarian/vegan, but retention is the issue. What is the source behind the claim that people are receptive to substituting bivalves for other animals? And is there data on what portion of people would substitute e.g. chickens or cows for bivalves but not also substitute chickens or cows for one of many plant options?
It seems intuitively obvious to me that bivalves substitute for meat, since if you want to substitute for a normal good, you’d be willing to do so with a luxury good but not with an inferior good. But I don’t have a citation for that.
“A recent meta-analysis and systematic review reviewed the available research on this subject (both peer-reviewed and conducted by advocacy organizations to inform their decision-making). So what have we learned? Trying to convince people to eat less meat works—but with some very serious caveats.
Almost no one is turned off by being told about how bad eating meat is, and many people do decide they want to eat less meat. Some of those people actually eat less meat, while others don’t but rationalize that they ate less when filling out surveys. But it’s hard to stick to any major dietary change, and within a few weeks or months they’re off the wagon for good.
Ultimately, the solution is good meat substitutes that make it easy for people to become vegetarian.”
Plants are not a good meat substitute. Bivalves are a good meat substitute. If people think this is not completely obvious, and is something that needs additional evidence, I could pay for a Mechanical Turk survey. Maybe a question like “If you were to stop eating chicken/beef/pork, which would you prefer to substitute it with: vegetables or bivalves?”
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source and appears to be directly contradicted by the linked source. The linked study appears to be referencing diets with “novel” plant-based ingredients (e.g. vegan junk food) in contrast to diets that use “traditional” plant-based ingredients (e.g. “pulses, legumes and vegetables”) and the study directly states that “all diets with traditional plant-based substitutes met daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, iron and Vitamin B12 and were lower in saturated fat, sodium and sugar than the reference diet.”
I wrote that “Another potential substitute for meat is plant-based meat. Bivalves are far healthier than current plant-based meat alternatives, which have minimal health benefits”. The source refers to “novel plant-based ingredients”, which is their term for plant-based meat.
It’s possible that you thought I was comparing bivalves with traditional vegetarian/vegan diets? I’m not sure how to phrase it any clearer than what I wrote. If you have a suggestion for clearer phrasing to indicate that I am comparing bivalves to plant-based meat as potential substitutes for meat, and not to traditional vegetarian/vegan diets, that would be great.
I was initially upset because you accused me of quoting a source that directly contradicts my claim, but it looks like it was likely a misunderstanding. Please let me know if this is the case. Thank you!
I don’t feel as informed on this point, but I do think the human health risks associated with bivalve consumption were not given adequate consideration here, especially because some of the purported advantages pertain to survival scenarios. In addition to the heavy metal concerns, bivalves are also potentially one of the greatest sources of food poisoning, a concern that may be even more relevant in a catastrophe with increased environmental pollution and decreased access to both medical care and decontamination information. It seems unlikely that depuration will be carried out successfully in many of the places or times where failure will be the most harmful.
Definitely—food poisoning is quite common with bivalves when they are eaten raw. For example, in the Western cultural context, oysters are typically eaten raw soon after being shucked. Parasites can easily enter the body this way.
In developing countries, this is less common because bivalves are generally eaten cooked. So for developing country consumption, I am more concerned with heavy metals. Assuming that bivalves substitute for meat/seafood consumption, they would have slightly more than meat, and much less than most seafood. So it would be a negligible harm compared to the benefits.
Regarding bivalve suffering—I am personally not as interested in this point because I see it as a type of “nirvana fallacy”. For example, potential insect suffering is much more pertinent. There are 10 quintillion insects in the world, which is 8-9 orders of magnitude more than farmed bivalves. Insects also have an order of magnitude shorter lifespan than farmed bivalves. Insects are more sentient and experience more suffering than bivalves. They have a central nervous system and bivalves do not.
Any increase in bivalve suffering, multiplied by the very small chance that they suffer, multiplied by the small amount of suffering in the case they do suffer, means that it’s not a material consideration. The entire suffering could be ameliorated by humanely destroying less than 1 hectare of termite nests, like “carbon credits” but for suffering. This is just my opinion of course, and different people will have different ethical weights.
I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this and I hope in this comment I don’t discourage this sort of investigation. I think it is laudable and valuable, and I hope you continue doing research on potential cause areas. That said, there are several assumptions this works off of that I think are at best questionable, if not outright incorrect. Some of these were noted in the comments of your earlier post, but do not seem to be addressed in this updated version. I am concerned by this given the potential significant harm of EAs adopting bivalve farming as something to champion, as well as the inaccurate claims this post perpetuates. I won’t address all of these issues in this comment, but I’ll try to go through a few of them:
The question of substitution goes largely unaddressed here, e.g. which animals are bivalves most likely to replace and what portion of that replacement would plants not also potentially replace. You consistently compare bivalves to other animals instead of animal-free options.
The case for bivalves over plant foods is based on assumptions with misleading citations.
Many of the non-consumption benefits of creating more bivalves (e.g. environmental benefits) could be accomplished without those bivalves also being killed.
I don’t think the potential suffering scaling bivalve farming may cause is adequately noted or accounted for.
From your writeup:
You appear to be comparing different animal menu items against each other, rather than sources of protein. Globally, looking at consumption by grams of protein, plants continue to comprise the largest category in people’s diets (Our World In Data). From your writeup, I don’t see evidence that bivalves are the most preferred protein source; I see some indication that bivalves are sometimes viewed as a luxury food.
Is there a citation for this? And if this is correct, what animals are the primary alternative and what plant foods were presented as alternatives?
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source. The linked source shows that people are going vegetarian/vegan, but retention is the issue. What is the source behind the claim that people are receptive to substituting bivalves for other animals? And is there data on what portion of people would substitute e.g. chickens or cows for bivalves but not also substitute chickens or cows for one of many plant options?
The claim you are making here is not backed by the linked source and appears to be directly contradicted by the linked source. The linked study appears to be referencing diets with “novel” plant-based ingredients (e.g. vegan junk food) in contrast to diets that use “traditional” plant-based ingredients (e.g. “pulses, legumes and vegetables”) and the study directly states that “all diets with traditional plant-based substitutes met daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, iron and Vitamin B12 and were lower in saturated fat, sodium and sugar than the reference diet.”
I don’t feel as informed on this point, but I do think the human health risks associated with bivalve consumption were not given adequate consideration here, especially because some of the purported advantages pertain to survival scenarios. In addition to the heavy metal concerns, bivalves are also potentially one of the greatest sources of food poisoning, a concern that may be even more relevant in a catastrophe with increased environmental pollution and decreased access to both medical care and decontamination information. It seems unlikely that depuration will be carried out successfully in many of the places or times where failure will be the most harmful.
Other concerns:
I remain concerned that bivalves may be able to suffer and that given the number of bivalves involved, if they do suffer then promoting their consumption is among the greatest harms we could cause. This was raised by several comments on your earlier post. It was linked in the earlier comments, but I’ll link again here to this piece by Brian Tomasik:
Bivalves are typically boiled alive or eaten alive. If they have some experience of consciousness and some associated experience of pain, it seems possible this could lead to an even more intense form of suffering than a more complex species would experience.
Many other animal species prey on bivalves. I do not know how this is commonly dealt with by bivalve farmers, but it seems likely there are many (wild) animal suffering issues this opens up and expansion of bivalve farming to new areas and new ecosystems could lead to new and/or increased types of suffering in species we are confident are sentient.
It seems plausible that promoting increased consumption of bivalves could inadvertently promote increased consumption of other animals, including the species we should be most concerned about, e.g. crustaceans, insects, and/or finfishes, because many people will not differentiate “less sentient oyster” from “clearly sentient lobster.”
Overall, I think this is a risky proposition and I worry about EAs getting excited about it based on weak assumptions.
Thanks so much for your response Rockwell, really appreciate it. The detailed inspection of the supporting evidence is really valuable for me, because it helps improve the quality of the thesis and so that we all have a more accurate understanding of the benefits and drawbacks. I’d also like to share my thoughts in more detail on some of the points you raised.
I believe that plants comprise the largest category of protein because they are much cheaper than meat or seafood. They are an inferior good in an economic sense, compared with meat as a normal good, and seafood as a luxury good. As incomes rise, people consume a higher proportion of meat. (This is also why asking people to substitute plants for meat generates resistance)
For a less technical viewpoint, evidence comes from a poll of people’s food preferences of their most liked foods. Going through the list and excluding the items that don’t contain significant amounts of protein, it looks like almost all of the most liked foods are entirely meat, or mostly meat. There are one or two exceptions such as Bibimbap or Fajitas, which have only a small amount of meat. Generally, plant foods are not the favorite foods unless they are made into sweet desserts.
It seems intuitively obvious to me that bivalves substitute for meat, since if you want to substitute for a normal good, you’d be willing to do so with a luxury good but not with an inferior good. But I don’t have a citation for that.
A blogpost about this says:
“A recent meta-analysis and systematic review reviewed the available research on this subject (both peer-reviewed and conducted by advocacy organizations to inform their decision-making). So what have we learned? Trying to convince people to eat less meat works—but with some very serious caveats.
Almost no one is turned off by being told about how bad eating meat is, and many people do decide they want to eat less meat. Some of those people actually eat less meat, while others don’t but rationalize that they ate less when filling out surveys. But it’s hard to stick to any major dietary change, and within a few weeks or months they’re off the wagon for good.
Ultimately, the solution is good meat substitutes that make it easy for people to become vegetarian.”
Plants are not a good meat substitute. Bivalves are a good meat substitute. If people think this is not completely obvious, and is something that needs additional evidence, I could pay for a Mechanical Turk survey. Maybe a question like “If you were to stop eating chicken/beef/pork, which would you prefer to substitute it with: vegetables or bivalves?”
I wrote that “Another potential substitute for meat is plant-based meat. Bivalves are far healthier than current plant-based meat alternatives, which have minimal health benefits”. The source refers to “novel plant-based ingredients”, which is their term for plant-based meat.
It’s possible that you thought I was comparing bivalves with traditional vegetarian/vegan diets? I’m not sure how to phrase it any clearer than what I wrote. If you have a suggestion for clearer phrasing to indicate that I am comparing bivalves to plant-based meat as potential substitutes for meat, and not to traditional vegetarian/vegan diets, that would be great.
I was initially upset because you accused me of quoting a source that directly contradicts my claim, but it looks like it was likely a misunderstanding. Please let me know if this is the case. Thank you!
Definitely—food poisoning is quite common with bivalves when they are eaten raw. For example, in the Western cultural context, oysters are typically eaten raw soon after being shucked. Parasites can easily enter the body this way.
In developing countries, this is less common because bivalves are generally eaten cooked. So for developing country consumption, I am more concerned with heavy metals. Assuming that bivalves substitute for meat/seafood consumption, they would have slightly more than meat, and much less than most seafood. So it would be a negligible harm compared to the benefits.
Regarding bivalve suffering—I am personally not as interested in this point because I see it as a type of “nirvana fallacy”. For example, potential insect suffering is much more pertinent. There are 10 quintillion insects in the world, which is 8-9 orders of magnitude more than farmed bivalves. Insects also have an order of magnitude shorter lifespan than farmed bivalves. Insects are more sentient and experience more suffering than bivalves. They have a central nervous system and bivalves do not.
Any increase in bivalve suffering, multiplied by the very small chance that they suffer, multiplied by the small amount of suffering in the case they do suffer, means that it’s not a material consideration. The entire suffering could be ameliorated by humanely destroying less than 1 hectare of termite nests, like “carbon credits” but for suffering. This is just my opinion of course, and different people will have different ethical weights.