Thoughts?
where’s the debate? this is a straight forward and proveable ascertation
I for one strongly suspect that meat will become more and more of a luxury product as environmental pressures reduce production (or at least, doesn’t let production keep pace with the population). In time, after an entire generation is raised with having only eaten meat on special occasions, they’ll turn a necessity into a virtue, and moral vegetarianism will stomp out the rest.
Cite?
First of all, some animals are fed on plant products left over after the “humna food” is taken out. Then again, feed corn has a yeild of 10X what sweet corn, on worse land. Much land that is used for feed corn and such is marginal for human produce." *While most meat production in western countries, especially the United States, currently utilizes inefficient grain feeding methods, not all meat production is inherently a poor use of land. A proportion of all grain crops produced is not suitable for human consumption. This can be fed to animals to turn into meat, thus improving efficiency and providing the most food from a certain land area."
*
Next- cattle are only fattened on corn. They are grazed on grass in areas where you can not grow anything with any gain. Some cattle are never fed corn, either. (True, most US Cattle are fattened that way). Up to half the weight gain is at the feedlot, sure but that means the other half takes effectively no water or grain at all. (sure graze needs water to grow, but we call that “rain”).
That Wiki article is what happens when you get a very controversial subject like this be “Wikied”. The facts and figures are either false, falsely conflated, un-cited or exaggerated. Where’s the cite for this: "The use of large industrial monoculture that is common in industrialised agriculture, typically for feed crops such as corn and soy is more damaging to ecosystems than more sustainable farming practices such as organic farming, permaculture, arable, pastoral, and rain-fed agriculture." or this "According to the USDA, growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land."? This is technically true “According to the vegetarian author John Robbins, it takes roughly takes 60, 108, 168, 229 pounds of water to produce a pound of potatoes, wheat, corn and rice respectively. A pound of beef however, requires 12,000 gallons of water.” But the true part is “According to the vegetarian author John Robbins…” Note lack of any cite for that whopper. (I suppose if one makes certain assumptions, one could figure with bad math that at *maximum *that’s how much water it could take.) :rolleyes:
But let us say you stopped feeding cattle with all those tonnes of feed corn.* What are you going to do with it all? *How much feed corn do you want to eat? (We do eat a fair amount in the form of HFCS and cornoil, in fact hwaaaay too much fucking HFCS.).
The USA already has a food surplus, and so does China. In fact the World has a surplus. True, there are many parts of the world where there is a serious food deficiency, but that is mainly due to logistics, costs and politics. In reality we could feed everyone and still have enough left over for Americans to eat steak. Of course, in order for there to be enough for everyone, we’d have to kill a LOT of 3rd world dictators and keep doing it. Mostly, other than one shot droughts, most dudes starve due to politics- dictators use food as a weapon.
Some dudes here might be OK with installing US Marines in the Capitals of 3/4 of the worlds 3rd and 4th world nations, but most wouldn’t, I’d guess. So, people will continue to starve- not because there isn’t enough food, but because we can’t get the food to them.
I’ll wager some the food your typical vegetarian eats is just as unsustainably grown, unless they’re only buying organic/permaculture foods. Monsanto et al produce product for fruit and veggie farmers just like they do for grain and soy farmers.
What percentage of a typical organic, no pesticide crop, can be expected to be lost because of insects and other pest damage that makes it unsuitable for human consumption?
You are way underestimating human desire to eat tasty food.
You won’t find anyone who loves’em a steak more than I do, but there are a lot of Vegetarian dishes that are really tasty. Besides most things taste like something. ;p
Sounds like BS to me. Why would meat production use more fossil fuels than industrial farming? Why would it use more water? I guess I can see the use more land objection…but so what? At least out here in the west, cattle are left free to wander on land that no one uses for anything anyway. Maybe out east its a problem, I’m not sure how they raise cattle there.
This sounds to me like vegatarian propaganda. Having failed in the whole ‘humans are naturally vegatarians and shouldn’t eat meat’ meme (my sister and her husband are die hard vegatarians and have been going at me with this for years), I think they are trying to get in step with the times. Folks are worried about the environment and global warming…so the veggies have shifted the battle in their never ending struggle to save us from ourselves. 
-XT
Because you have to farm the crop AND feed it to the animal. Not feeding the animal removes one layer in the chain of production, thus reducing fuel consumption. You are not consuming fuel by transporting the crop to the animals, and not using fuel by transporting the meat to the supermarket. Instead you are simply transporting the crop to the supermarket.
This was sent to me by a vegan friend of mine. It is incidentally the most persuasive argument I have ever found for the issue. Obviously not persuasive enough to get me to put down my steak. 
Well, you have to burn the fuel to till and prepare the fields, to tend and harvest the crops, to ship the crops to the processing plants, process the crops for human consumption (sort and package), then to ship them to the distribution centers and finally to the supermarkets.
Not all meat animals are fed grown crops…at least not all the time. Also, there is a lot less processing that goes into crops grown for animal consumption than for those for human consumption…no?
While I would be willing to concede that there might be more of an expenditure in raising (some) meat animals than in growing (some) crops, I doubt whether its going to make a huge environmental difference. As I said, it sounds like vegan propaganda to me.
BTW, the most convincing argument I’VE heard is that an average American’s meat rich diet is bad for your health and you should cut back to something like 20-30% meat and the rest veg., fruit and grains. The other arguments (like the one I gave which claim humans are naturally vegatarians, blah blah blah) are bullshit IMHO.
-XT
I’m guessing that the average American’s quality of meat is pretty poor (fast food and the like), and I wonder if that’s just an aspect of the type of meat we eat and not meat itself.
BUT:
Again, some food animals graze.
Some are fed the “waste” from human food.
Meat is far more concentrated food, thus it takes less fuel to move it.
Historically, we have had hunting cultures where meat was the dominant staple, buffalo or whatever. And others vegan or practically so. The nice thing about being an omnivore is that flexibility.
Oddly, that flexibility is my issue with the claim that we could somehow survive on plant crops. What’s fed to ruminant livestock is high-cellulose. They can metabolize the roughage, we can’t. So I think it’s misleading to say that we could just eat what the cattle are eating.
And veganism is a great way to miss certain amino acids the human body can’t synthesize itself.
Now, we could eat less red meat, turn land growing corn into land growing fruit, & have a more French-style diet. That would be more healthful, sure.
Yes, but you’d have to do that IN ADDITION to doing it with meat. The point is energy efficiency. You could feed a lot more people on a single cow’s feed than you could on a single cow.
There is also Methane emission to contend with, and erosion caused by grazing in pasturelands.
Less processing is a good argument, but again the sheer volume of land dedicated to growing land for livestock dwarfs that of growing land for human consumption.
It is vegan propaganda, that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not it is factually correct. It’s pretty simple, draw up a logistical supply chain in your mind. Just think of trucks and locations. How many trucks have to drive between how many locations over how many miles to accomplish each goal. Which causes more trucks to be driven?
I agree, and I don’t think humans are naturally vegetarians, but you can get what you need from a balanced diet. Nutrition is being studied on a more and more scientific level these days, it’s a huge industry. You need the building blocks of your food, you don’t need a particular conveyance. I have had some very good all-vegan meals, and then it made the meat that much tastier when it came around. Go to a festival, camp with the vegans for a week, and then when someone from another camp invites you over for a Bar-B-Que you’ll see how good the meat tastes then.
For my taste I usually argue reduction of the things you don’t want from your levels of consumption. Continue following what you ‘want’ but go after what you ‘really’ want, and cut out some of the waste. Like I don’t take grocery bags for under three items if I can avoid it. Reducing the footprint where possible is the way to do it IMO. This is one way to do it.
Eroding the soil.
Good argument.
Not sure i buy it. Cows get moved around more during their lifecycle than corn.
Well…that depends, doesn’t it? As I said, it some cases you may have a point…but in others not. I’d say, on balance, it all works out roughly even when you factor in free ranging meat animals, or animals fed on agricultural left overs.
And decaying plant matter gives off CO2. If you’ve ever seen a field after harvest (especially for something like corn), there is a LOT of scraps left over. As for erosion…I was under the impression that large scale industrial farming caused a LOT more errosion of land than grazing cattle.
BTW, the ‘pasturelands’, at least out here, are basically just huge swaths of BLM land that we locals commonly refer to as ‘desert’. And for my part, I haven’t seen a lot of errosion from this kind of grazing.
Ok. Then consider those huge tractors turning the soil. Then the big combines harvesting. And all the water (and fertilizers) during the growing part. Oh, and there is some maintenance…I’ve seen farmers out and about in trucks and such in the fields when they aren’t harvesting. Then, after the harvest, all that stuff needs to be shipped off for processing somewhere…then packaging…then shipped to stores and such. Seems to me to be pretty much a wash as to what uses more energy to do. Granted, I’m more familiar with the farming side (my family were farmers before coming to this country) than the ranching side…but out here in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, etc, you can’t throw a rock in some places without hitting a cow…and they pretty much seem to manage themselves except during the round up. And they usually WALK to the round up place (well, herded by guys on horses and such from what I’ve seen)…where they are slaughtered, usually near a processing plant.
Cows walk…corn, not so much. Also, as a food, meat has a lot more energy by weight than plants do. Thats probably what made the difference to our species and why we went from vegetarian’s to omnivours in our distant past.
-XT
xtisme Your argument about industrial farming is countered by the fact that you have to do industrial farming to feed the cows. Yes, there is free range beef out of New Mexico and Texas, it’s scrumptuous, particularly with the fresh Green Chili that’s being roasted on the side of the street in October and sold by the hefty bag. However, every cow represents the yields of a number of years’ crops. Not to mention Free Range beef is some insignificant percentage of total beef production, most is done in big factories that are nasty and disgusting like something out of Upton Sinclair mixed with computers. Sure, people might have it better there, but the cows don’t much because real estate is at a premium.
Corn doesn’t like to walk.
It has corns.
Anyhoo, if the price of meat was to gradually climb, I’d still buy it up to the point it became inconvenient, switching over to substitutes as needed.