• _cnt0@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Prion diseases. Accumulation of different substances, like mercury, lead, strontium-90, and, a new contender to the list: micro plastics. And you’ll want to have a look at a person’s medication and likely want to make sure they’ve been off of it for a few days before consuming their flesh.

    • amzd@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Farm animals are legally allowed to eat actual plastic, not only microplastics. If you’re afraid of microplastics or accumulation of substances maybe don’t eat meat.

      Legal limit of plastic in animal feed is 0.15% in the EU

      A cow eats 25kg of dry food a day

      25/100*0.15 = 0.0375kg = 37.5grams
      

      A plastic bag weighs 6-8grams.

      You are legally allowed to feed your cow 5 plastic bags a day (as a snack)

      • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Bioaccumulation concentrates more pollutants the higher up the food chain you go. It is part of why most meat we eat comes from vegetarian animals. The fish we eat are often predatory so common advice is the keep the smaller and younger ones that are still big enough to be worth filleting. You don’t actually want to eat a trophy sized fish because they’ve accumulated more pollutants. Trophy sized fish are better off being realsed, they are often good breeders and help keep healthy population numbers.

        • F04118F@feddit.nl
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          4 months ago

          Of course, something that eats cows that eat a shitton of plastic, will have even more plastic in it.

          But that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to eat an animal that has been fed (assuming they are slaughtered at 3 years, and ignoring the climate impact, the ethics of slaughtering an animal in its youth, etc)…

          41 kg of plastic

          • amzd@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I think if you don’t count the culling of baby calves the average age is ~6years so like 82kg of plastic.

            • F04118F@feddit.nl
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              4 months ago

              Thanks for your feedback, I was guesstimating off the top of my head. On doing some research, I see meat cows are usually slaughtered at 18 months - 2 years old in the Netherlands.

              5-6 years is the number I see for dairy cows.

  • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    When the German cannibal Armin Meiwes was on trial, it was actually a legal conundrum. Meiwes’ victim had explicitly consented to being killed and eaten, even dictating how he wanted to have it done to himself. So was it murder or more of a convoluted version of assisted suicide (“killing on demand” is the legal term in Germany)? He was eventually convicted of manslaughter and got a prison sentence of eight and a half years, a few years later changed to a sentence for life.

  • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
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    4 months ago

    idk man I think the mental gymnastics go the other way around here. You have to make a shit load of assumptions to consume human flesh safely and ethically:

    • the person being eaten consents to their body being eaten
    • the person has no family or each and every one of their relatives consents and is totally ok with their loved one’s body ending up in a casserole
    • the person has no diseases that can be transmitted by consuming some or all parts of their body: prion disease (brain), AIDS, hepatitis and loads other blood-transmitted illnesses, to name a few obvious ones
    • there are no drugs or medications in the person’s body that could be absorbed into your system (regurgitated meth, yummy!)
    • you have the means to effectively and safely process or cook the body yourself or we set up an entire new industry around mass human body consumption which sounds like the plot of a Stephen King novel tbh

    As some have pointed out here, if eating human meat is your only available choice in an extreme life-or-death survival situation, it would have to do, but unless you also have the means to carve up and cook the body, you’re actually going to consume more energy digesting the raw flesh than what you’re getting in return. Humans make for rather poor food overall, that’s a fact. I would back this up with some evidence but I don’t feel like being put on a list for looking up the nutritional contents of human bodies lol