So that's the thing!

Basically as soon as Anglo colonizers rolled into a place, they actively destroyed wild protein sources... because they didn't own them.

So we literally have no idea how much well-managed wild game/fisheries can produce other than "a fucking lot."

. @joshspecht's Red Meat Republic does a really good job of laying out how bison hunting could have supplied the US with meat through the railroad era instead of beef.

But settlers didn't "own" the bison so that just wasn't a business model they could roll with

The Klamath River was the 3rd largest salmon run in the world until shortly after WW2.

The US dammed it up to irrigate farmland that can never, ever possibly make as much food as that salmon run did.

Before industrial meat, US cities used to get most of their protein from fisheries.

This whole "food comes from farms" thing? The "cities depend on the countryside for food"?

That's actually kind of a recent development.

The modern western food system still leaned heavily on hunt/gather until the last few decades.

Cod banks. The bison hunt. NYC's oyster reefs that fed much of the city until they were destroyed in the early 20th century.

We've lost SO MUCH wild protein we don't even remember.

Cities used to dump a lot of sewage & industrial waste into their estuaries.

But the main source of pollution now is … agriculture.

Between nutrient dumping & sucking up all the water, farming is the single biggest obstacle to bringing back coastal fisheries.

So we're in a really interesting situation where not only is agriculture in some areas probably causing a net *loss* of food.

It's also done in such a way to keep cities 100% dependent on rural areas for protein

WHEN THEY DIDN'T USED TO BE.

To swivel it back to terrestrial ecosystems for a second. Game species like deer, bison, etc have 1-2 offspring per year, and half those offspring are males which can be hunted without affecting next year's herd size very much.

Healthy, functioning game herds can sustainably yield way more meat than most folks are probably used to thinking about.

We just haven't ever bothered because ... well our society runs on ownership & nobody "owns" game.

"But wouldn't that just lead to overhunting?"

There's a reason I keep saying "Indigenous folks should be in charge of the game part of the game/lab meat system." They've been managing herds as a food source for thousands of years and

-get this-

are still doing it right now.

There's a really great case study where European traders started contracting with tribes in the Ohio Valley/Great Lakes to provide furs for the fur trade.

The Miami, Huron, Ojibwe, etc said "Oh you want more beaver do you? Sure we can arrange that"

And they started managing landscapes to have a little more wetland. And for the beaver in those wetlands to be fat, happy, & have a lot of babies.

Within a couple decades they dropped the fucking bottom out of the European fur markets.

The way we talk about colonialism is all about the ravenous, uncontrollable, destructive greed of the West.

We don't talk about how the land management skills of Indigenous communities are even bigger than that greed.

The French & British empires literally started closing down trading posts in a desperate attempt to shut off the flood of furs surging into their ports. It was messing up their delicate little system of trade monopolies.

This state of affairs continued, basically until the early US sent in the Army to seize the Ohio Valley for homesteaders.

They cut down the forests, drained the wetlands, and replaced it all with feedlots. (Yup, in the early 1800s. Feedlots are a lot older than folks think LOL.)

TL;DR, we're used to thinking of wild protein as a tiny little niche thing that's incapable of actually supporting lots of people.

That's because we beat the shit out of the ecosystem & never let it recover. Let's take our boot off its neck & see what happens.

Cultured meat can be a way to let the ecosystem recover. Return land that had been used for Big Meat to the original management team and learn, FROM THEM, how to move forward.

It's not a toolkit the West has ever really used. We can learn! But only from good teachers.

ps. If you want to learn more about how Indigenous wetlands skilz demolished European fur markets, check out "Indigenous Prosperity & American Conquest."

https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Prosperity-American-Conquest-University/dp/1469640589

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1273338428453728262

*should say "cities in rich countries"- a lot of cities are still very early on in their waste management journey.

But rich cities still cover key global estuaries like the Chesapeake, Everglades, the Sacramento Delta, Puget Sound, NYC harbor, etc.

BTW the destruction of wild protein is usually characterized as a "tragedy of the commons" problem.

I don't think that's accurate. A lot of these wild protein sources weren't "hunted to extinction."

They were exterminated, on purpose, to create dependency.

That's why I tend to lean on "colonialism" as a root cause of our food system problems more than "capitalism" per se.

Yes, yes, they're intertwined.

But calling it "capitalism" makes it sound like these could have been sound financial decisions, and they fucking weren't.

These were political tactics used to manage, consolidate power, & thwart insurgencies after an invasion.

Full stop.

That's not "tragedy of the commons." It's just colonialism.