Here’s hoping they can meet demand without clearing yet more forest in order to grow monocropped soybeans.
Environmental effects get complicated. Yes, if you feed those monocropped soybeans (and/or corn) to cattle, you need even more acres of them to feed humans than if you feed them directly to the humans (and you also screw up the cattle, who aren’t actually well designed to eat a diet high in grains and beans.) But if you feed the cattle primarily on rainfall watered multispecies pasture at a proper stocking rate, you’re mimicking a natural system and providing habitat for quite a few species which can’t survive in that soybean field.
Plus which, including livestock pasture and/or hay fields in a crop rotation benefits the land, not only by improving the nutrients, but by improving the tilth and the soil life.
That’s not how most of what people are currently eating is raised, of course; and it’s likely not possible to raise as much meat in that fashion as in feedlot systems. But the issue’s commonly discussed as if there were only two possibilities: feedlot/confinement livestock, or total vegetarianism; and also commonly discussed as if raising all those soybeans does no environmental damage.
There’s a study by Cornell showing that, at least in NY State, the least environmentally damaging diet for humans includes some meat and dairy, though not as much as is commonly eaten.
It’s complicated, isn’t it? All forms of farming have environmental impacts, from land use to greenhouse gasses; and then different diets have different public health consequences, from obesity to nutrient deficiencies. (To say nothing about livestock welfare.)
At a bigger-picture level, while it’s true that there are environmental differences between “100% vegan” and “80% vegetarian, 20% meat”, those are completely dwarfed by the sheer horrors of the current industrial US food system. The take-home message of most of these studies should be that we need to eat less meat (maybe not eliminate it altogether) and replace it primarily with vegetable proteins, only optionally supplementing it with milk and eggs.
It compares different diets ranging from the status quo to balanced USDA diets to completely vegan diets, examining their land use patterns and carrying capacities.
The land use side is straightforward: the less animal products you use, the less land you need. The differences between the various vegan/vegetarian diets might as well be rounding errors, and they’re all a lot lower than any meat-based diet.
However, the carrying capacity question is more interesting: we could feed the most people by switching to lacto-vegetarian diets (only milk, no eggs or fish or meat), providing twice the food efficiency of the current American diet. But – this is the interesting part – an all-vegan diet is actually worse than ovo-lacto vegetarian and balanced diets consisting of up to 40% meat. Yet any of these would be better than what we have now, both in terms of land use and public health.
Those are pie-in-the-sky numbers (good luck convincing most of the country to go lacto-vegetarian, or even to cut their meat consumption in half). The take-home here is that decreasing our meat intake is the environmentally preferable outcome, even as we argue the specific technicalities by just how much meat. I quote the authors’ own conclusion: "The findings of this study support the idea that dietary change towards plant-based diets has significant potential to reduce the agricultural land requirements of U.S. consumers and increase the carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural resources.
[…]
nder a range of land use conditions, diets with low to modest amounts of meat outperform a vegan diet, and vegetarian diets including dairy products performed best overall."
There is also the question of how to balance land use with climate change, but I’ll save that for later…
Also, the land use considerations can be very different in other climates/biomes, with the different relative worth (in terms of both climate and biodiversity) of a tropical rainforest vs some grassy meadows in the USA. And then there’s the different levels of industrialization, social safety nets, export/import industries, blah blah blah…
On thinking about this some more, one of the sources (though not the only one) of heme in real meat would be blood, which wouldn’t be found in kosher beef. So the real meat that gonzoron is using as the basis of comparison presumably has lower heme levels than non-kosher meat. Would this be significant, or am I overestimating the amount of heme in blood vs. in myoglobin?
Thanks; I downloaded that, but haven’t had time to read it yet. Looks interesting.
I’d add that, to the extent that people have the option (not everyone’s finances or access to such choices allows it), trying to get one’s food as much as possible from sources that have raised it in less damaging fashions is a good idea; and that, although the price difference is likely to be much more for animal products than for produce and grains, it’s also likely to be more important for animal products.
For what it’s worth I have my doubts about the level of blood in kosher meat being much different from that of nonkosher meat. With a quick google, it seems most sites say that there isn’t much, if any, blood in meat by the time it reaches the consumer, and that’s not talking about kosher meat specifically. I’m kind of skeptical that the centuries old kosher soaking and salting process removes much blood at all, or any more so than modern meat processing does.