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Depends on what sort of meat you're talking about.

If it's salted, dried and/or smoked on-site, it will keep for long enough to be transported by ship, which is not terribly energy-intensive. Good sausage or properly smoked and dried ham (not the kind of watery crap we get in Scandinavia) will easily stay both tasty and healthy for a month or two without refrigeration, as long as it is kept dry. Add vacuum-packing and a sterile processing environment, and you could easily push unrefrigerated lifetime into the range you need for intercontinental transportation.

And as long as it's produced on the same continent, there's the option of running an electric rail line out there and refrigerating it for transport using sustainable electricity production. Trivial? No. Cheap? No. But at this point in time, nothing about creating a sustainable industrial society is going to be easy and cheap - the window of opportunity for easy closed a decade ago, and the window of opportunity for cheap closed a decade before that, at least.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Sep 8th, 2010 at 01:45:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Good point. But if we do not limit ourselves based on distance to production that just means that we can divide the different foodstuffs on more persons.

And with a reasonably fair division (sustainable meat production on the planet/capita), I guess the resulting diet would have much less meat then average consumption in the western world.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

by A swedish kind of death on Thu Sep 9th, 2010 at 11:26:06 AM EST
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