# I don't understand otherwise well-meaning liberals who continue to eat meat
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [August 5, 2022, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149 "2022-08-05T15:45:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 4
### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/61 "2022-08-06T00:32:05Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#):
>
> You are allowing for zero respiration in the life of the plant.
The plant respires into the air. That moisture is recoverable. The air gets humid, you condense the excess, and use the resulting liquid water for further irrigation.
The farm is just a black box where food comes out on one end. Everything else is recycled. It needs energy, water, air, and some trace elements as input. That’s all.
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### Author:  [@gnarator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnarator)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/62 "2022-08-06T00:44:55Z")
> [@steronz](#):
>
> And unlike biking more or giving up creature comforts, going meatless is _easy_.
I’d say biking is easy.
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### Author:  [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/63 "2022-08-06T00:50:37Z")
We are just trying to refute your statement that " Food production shouldn’t require more water than the _mass_ of the final product".
If you can’t see that from the example of a leafy vegetable, surely you can accept the notion that more water is used by the plant to produce a seed than is in that final product. And if the only part of the plant which humans can eat is the seed (indeed that vegetative body is of negligible calorific value to monogastrics) then 1000s of times more water is required to produce a seed than is in the mass of the seed.
“The farm is just a black box where food comes out on one end.”
And because of recycling, and imported water, the whole bloody hydrological cycle more water is used in the production of the final product than is in the mass of the final product. For every final food product.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/64 "2022-08-06T00:57:28Z")
I think you’re arguing a strawman or something. I was speaking exclusively of indoor farming, not farming as it exists today, which is incredibly wasteful. The entire point is to capture all the losses (of water, fertilizer, etc.) that currently just gets dumped into the environment.
Again, this technology exists _today_. It’s not fully perfected, so it doesn’t achieve the entire potential benefit, but it is much better than normal outdoor farming. And the price needs to come down, but ultimately we may not have much choice.
As a side benefit, it is much more dense than normal farming, so we’d no longer have to dedicate an insane 40% of the US landmass to farming. Because it’s so compact, farms can be much closer to cities, reducing transportation costs, reducing waste, and increasing quality.
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/65 "2022-08-06T01:10:15Z")
> [@steronz](#):
>
> I guess I’ve written off conservatives as a lost cause, because of the whole death cult and not even believing in climate change things. But I don’t understand how liberals can rationalize eating any meat at all when the evidence is this clear.
Why pick on _this_ issue? If the fundamental question is “why don’t good people do more”, it costs a few thousand dollars to save a life in the developing world. Most of us could subsist on far less. Why don’t we all give away 90% of our wealth to save untold lives?
You’re not wrong about eating meat, but I think your approach to the issue from the perspective of “how could well-meaning people not be doing this” could be applied to any number of things, some of which seem more fundamental to me.
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### Author:  [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/66 "2022-08-06T01:18:58Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> You’re not wrong about eating meat, but I think your approach to the issue from the perspective of “how could well-meaning people not be doing this” could be applied to any number of things, some of which seem more fundamental to me.
Yes, this.
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### Author:  [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/67 "2022-08-06T01:27:58Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Food production shouldn’t require more water than the _mass_ of the final product.
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Again, this technology exists _today_ .
This is, and can only ever be, technically possible with one foodstuff … water.
It should only take 1kg of water to produce 1 kg of water.
You put any living organism into the equation then the very process of life requires additional water be it outside, inside or in a petri dish.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/68 "2022-08-06T01:36:41Z")
You seem to have a mystical view of life, but it’s just a chemical process. The input water may be split into hydrogen and oxygen, temporarily repurposed into sugars or other materials, but ultimately it all winds up as water again.
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### Author:  [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/69 "2022-08-06T01:58:48Z")
I do a lot of things that I KNOW are bad for me. Like eating things with lots of processed sugar. That’s just human nature.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/70 "2022-08-06T03:56:24Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#):
>
> I’m trying to say that if you just price it out, tangible resources consumed per chicken, you will not be able to see how growing food can heal land rather than impoverish it, can empower communities rather than separating them from the non-human-made world.
IANA economist, but I think this is largely about what economists call “externalities”. Pricing out direct inputs versus direct outputs does not capture all the negative externalities of industrial agriculture (the toxic runoff, the excess antibiotic use, the pollution of local waterways, the loss of wildlife habitat corridors, the community impacts, etc.) or all the positive externalities of sustainable agriculture (the habitat restoration, the improved soil and livestock health, the reduction in toxic pesticides and antibiotics, the increased biodiversity, etc.). Leaving all those factors out skews the comparison.
(Note that this is not to claim that industrial agriculture has no benefits or sustainable agriculture has no disadvantages. Just that the net benefit/harm ratio is not correctly represented by merely answering the question “How much of what resources were applied directly to this particular chicken to get it from egg to market?”
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### Author:  [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/71 "2022-08-06T05:21:11Z")
> [@TriPolar](#):
>
> I think I missed the part where the only solutions to the problems caused by consumption of meat required people to stop eating all meat altogether.
So it turns out I didn’t miss that part, it isn’t here. Yet surely there’s some reason we can’t just eat less meat isn’t there? It couldn’t be that simple could it? Instead of everyone becoming vegetarians we just eat less meat? Nah, there must be some reason why we can’t eat more vegetables and less meat. Even if we ate 10% of the meat we do now it might not help because there might not be any more vegetarians than we have now.
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/72 "2022-08-06T08:58:11Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Personally, I think we have to eventually switch to indoor farming. Food production shouldn’t require more water than what’s physically in the final product. Farming is just rearranging atoms. But traditional farming of all kinds is absurdly wasteful and 99+% of the water simply evaporates or sinks into the ground or ends up in waste that’s thrown away. Indoor farming can capture all of that (except what exits the facility as food).
Indoor farming is great at conserving water but it requires a LOT of power to run all the bits and pieces. If the electricity is generated by green sources that’s fine, but if it comes from petroleum/coal/other fossil fuel then you’re back to destroying the planet.
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### Author:  [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/73 "2022-08-06T09:30:15Z")
> [@Kimstu](#):
>
> IANA economist, but I think this is largely about what economists call “externalities”. Pricing out direct inputs versus direct outputs does not capture all the negative externalities of industrial agriculture (the toxic runoff, the excess antibiotic use, the pollution of local waterways, the loss of wildlife habitat corridors, the community impacts, etc.) or all the positive externalities of sustainable agriculture (the habitat restoration, the improved soil and livestock health, the reduction in toxic pesticides and antibiotics, the increased biodiversity, etc.). Leaving all those factors out skews the comparison.
Thank you. Much more clearly said.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/74 "2022-08-06T10:54:57Z")
> [@Broomstick](#):
>
> Indoor farming is great at conserving water but it requires a LOT of power to run all the bits and pieces. If the electricity is generated by green sources that’s fine
Agreed. Most of my suggestions about how stuff “should” work depend on abundant green energy.
However, I don’t think this is an unreasonable assumption. Renewables dominated new energy installations in the US in 2021 with \>75% of the total, depending on how you count it. Zero new coal, and even natural gas seems on its way out. I don’t see much sign of this stopping; renewables keep getting cheaper while fossil plants keep getting more expensive.
Indoor farms have an advantage that will be important for renewables: they’re compatible with load shedding. If there’s a day of particularly high residential demand, or the renewables aren’t producing as much due to some weather event, you can just dim the lights on the farm. The plants will take a little longer to grow but they won’t die. They have to survive through ordinary cloudy days, after all. Better to lose a percent or two of farm productivity than have blackouts where people lose their heating or A/C. The farm benefits by getting super cheap energy the rest of the time.
We’ll want energy storage as well, but these kind of smart grid features give you many of the same benefits for cheaper.
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/75 "2022-08-06T11:47:32Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#):
>
> There are a number of things you haven’t considered. [For example](https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/is-veganism-really-better-for-the-environment):
>
> … If everyone decided to go vegan, then a lot of the land now used for grazing animals would have to be converted to cropland and we would significantly reduce the amount of livestock on this planet. That means there will be more crop waste, but less animals to consume it, leaving farms with [few options but to burn the waste](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/07/1707322114), releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."
>
> "Then we have to consider fertilizer: if we cut our population of livestock, we have less manure to use as fertilizer. This means that we would have to manufacture a lot more artificial (read: not organic) fertilizer.
I guess composting the crop waste to produce fertilizer is out of the question.
> [@gnarator](#):
>
> > [@steronz](#):
> >
> > And unlike biking more or giving up creature comforts, going meatless is _easy_.
>
> I’d say biking is easy.
Personally, both biking _and_ going meatless are easy.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/76 "2022-08-06T14:01:35Z")
There is much to be said for vegetarianism.
I am at a loss to know why vegetarians cannot be content simply to say it, without taking the argument over a cliff.
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/77 "2022-08-06T14:36:07Z")
[I thought I recognized that quote.](https://www.straightdope.com/21341850/are-humans-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-by-nature)
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### Author:  [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/78 "2022-08-06T16:06:36Z")
> [@Kimstu](#):
>
> Pricing out direct inputs versus direct outputs does not capture all the negative externalities of industrial agriculture (the toxic runoff, the excess antibiotic use, the pollution of local waterways, the loss of wildlife habitat corridors, the community impacts, etc.) or all the positive externalities of sustainable agriculture (the habitat restoration, the improved soil and livestock health, the reduction in toxic pesticides and antibiotics, the increased biodiversity, etc.).
And some of the externalities of my meat production are beneficial. The pastures are lightly managed, and increase the local biodiversity, as they are home to a wide variety of local plants and insects. The employees, including those who slaughter the animals, are paid a decent wage and have decent working conditions. Neither of those are true of the mass-produced vegetables i buy in the supermarket.
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### Author:  [@ekedolphin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ekedolphin)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/79 "2022-08-06T16:30:06Z")
It’s because bacon tastes _good;_ pork chops taste _good_.
Everybody is a little inconsistent with their values.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2022, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-otherwise-well-meaning-liberals-who-continue-to-eat-meat/969149/80 "2022-08-06T17:55:56Z")
Glad it was caught.
🧑🎓
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