You have a point here, yup. Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle. Replacing nature with monocultures is a problem. If we stop eating cattle for that, there is not moral room to keep eating chocolate, for example. Or coffee
>Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle
[Citation needed]
I'll assume you're arguing in good faith, but this argument is a common straw man made by people who are against plant-based diets. In fact, the only case where you have a point is that the worst case for chocolate produces more emissions than the best case for beef [1]. Odds are that if you're eating beef in North America it comes from a factory farm [2], while people who advocate for plant-based diets are often for more sustainable farming practices too, and will try to buy chocolate/coffee/avocados/whatever in sustainable ways.
Finally, the most important point is that it's not an either/or proposition - you can be _both_ for eating less meat, and producing plant products in more sustainable ways.
There are vast areas that are very, very poor for growing anything other than some grasses. These lands will not support growing plant based foods for people. However! They do produce plant based food for cattle. You end up with 0.5-2 acres of this land to feed a cow.
>The vast majority of beef is not grazed on lands incapable of naturally supporting more intensive forms of agriculture.
The vast majority of beef is grazed on lands incapable of supporting at a sustainable price point more value dense forms of agriculture. If those ranchers could sell you boutique sustainable tomatoes they would do so in a heartbeat (or as fast as they can given the fact that it's basically a career switch).
You get crops like soybeans and corn where the land will support that and less value dense crops (like beef and timber) in places it won't. You can grow other products on cattle grazing land but you won't be price competitive with the farmers on better land. The fact that this land is used for beef instead of some other crop is a reflection of how efficiently we use the better land. As vegetable product fillers make their way into lower and lower end beef products (as price, technology and consumer preference allows) the land used to farm beef will likely shrink from the least viable areas (the areas least suited for beef) with demand and/or be pushed out of the most viable areas (the areas most easily suited to other crops) by more value dense plant crops. Obviously there's some serious switching friction otherwise you'd see this play out with every little change in commodities prices.
Sure, everybody reducing their meat consumption to their share of what is produced on marginal land would be the optimum, even better than everybody going 100% meatless. How much of the typical meat consumption of a current-day nonvegetarian would that be? 5% perhaps?
And it wouldn't be the same 5% that we see with "almost vegans" today who argue "less but better" to only eat premium cuts while proudly announcing that they avoid all grinder meat. If you want to eat the steak, don't scoff at the sausage.
Back to grazing marginal lands, yeah, I'd also hate to see the animal species that have accompanied us throughout human history go extinct. But we're very far from that.
Some facts are so well stablished in human knowledge that there is not need to cite it. For example: "Some crops are more productive than other. Point".
We, humans know it since 10.000 years ago. Anybody can see it with their eyes. Not need to repeat what Aristotle would say about it.
Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook. Any Plant physiology handbook will explain the differences between CAM and C4 plants
If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason.
> So your statement is true because you say that it's common knowledge that it's true?
Not, my statement is true BECAUSE is has been proven extensively and is common knowledge that it's true. There is a difference. There are extensive databases, plots and tables about how many food you can expect to produce from each organism by unit of time and area. Is the basis of a main branch of ecology: Trophic chains and energy.
To say than growing Soy is more efficient than to breed Polar bears is a repeated lie, trying to make simple things that aren't simple. Not. It depends on the ecosystem, context, temperature range, soil, and climate. And is the same with breeding cattle.
If I eat seafood I rob from ocean species, illegal labor, the hungry poor, and the future. Sometimes, farmland represents the same problem, sometimes not. Seafood is an unsolved problem globally. It has no form of ethical consumption.
I don’t believe humans should operate as pure, replicators– doing any action for the chance to continue to exist. Fishing is global and global fishing runs on slave labor. I am doing them a favor. It’s called ethics for a reason. You are presented with 100 things you can eat. Seafood and cocaine are probably the most unethical. Why not skip them?
Not in the short run but in the long run everybody would win. If you lower demand I assume people would find another way of living that would be more sustainable.
I have lessened the demand by myself and five people I was able to convince. It’s a question of ethics. What ethical stands have you taken? How are they helping?
Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat.
Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.
> Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat.
Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat?
If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...
I did include the inputs, with the assumption of high efficiency feed for industrial meat production, i.e. a feed conversion rate of about 6.
This paper is about shifting animal corn to human corn, not about shifting animal corn to broccoli. Corn produces about 6 times as many calories per hectare as broccoli.
Not this again, why is it always broccoli that gets brought up in this argument? Nobody is eating kgs broccoli per day to get their calories. Compare industrial meat with beans or rice.
The point is that, as a source of calories, many vegetables are about as inefficient by land as industrial meat. Optimizing calories per unit land is an implicit or explicit goal of many of the comments throughout this thread. I think this is a poor optimization target and there are much better arguments against meat consumption that aren't also applicable to broccoli.
I chose broccoli because it is my favorite vegetable and I eat quite a lot of it.
Fair point! it was a bit of knee jerk reaction on my part as a previous thread I'd read on HN about climate an animal agriculture had the exact same broccoli point.
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, but yes, as a society if we find that we are over-using resources, we should cut out those foods. We seem to value a human population numbered in the billions. Some foods won’t work for that population.
I don’t really see us worrying about food scarcity any time soon. We still burn the bulk of our corn as gas until that changes I see no issue with calorie shortages
This is a thread about worrying about seafood scarcity already. Not-anytime-soon has arrived on a food-by-food basis. In the case of seafood, it’s an entire food group!
Tbf, seafood is a special category, as most of it can not be farmed (not efficiently, at least), so capturing it from the wild is the easiest, and often only, solution.
You know, it seems silly to me that the choice we seem to make is rather than controlling our population, we choose having worse lives for us and all future generations. Lack of self-control will truly be the end of humanity.
Generally as a nation builds wealth its birthrate slows. We cannot allow a state to control it though as the issue becomes how do you control population size, who gets to have kids and who gets to decide. This is pretty much the be all and end all of government power. Do we force sterilize people? Force abortions? If we fine them then the rich have as many kids as they want. Government mandated population control cannot be the answer.
