Isn’t this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable?
If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them, how many people could we feed?
What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies?
The link between this to global warming and climate change is undeniable.
The recent book Clean Meat covers the field in detail. Steaks will be a while, but for ground meat we're a lot closer than I'd expected. Dairy is even easier: no cells, just fats, sugars, and proteins that can be produced by engineered yeast.
(The book also has a chapter on just going vegan, but points out that despite decades of advocacy, people's behavior has barely changed. When people can afford meat, they eat it, and it's been that way for pretty much all of human history.)
-the government should decree beef and pork illegal
-or implement some sort of high tax or cap and trade measure for livestock and meat
-and perform a massive propoganda campaign to teach people that they should raise their own chickens, eat more beans, and eat less meat/protein overall.
The problem of people not starving to death around the world is not an issue of food supply, it is an issue of food distribution.
The water isn't destroyed. It goes right back into the ecosystem. The planet surface is 70% water. We aren't running out of water.
> how many people could we feed? The US could probably feed the entire world with meat, with unlimited energy / $$. People going hungry is not a food production problem, it's an economic and logistic problem. If we use plant based food, we could probably feed 3X the world problem (or use 1/3rd the land). World hunger isn't caused by lack of productive land.
Your other point on meat requires more land use and energy than plant food is correct.
also, all water requires money / energy to process before we drink it or use it on crops. It's just a matter of much money / energy you use depending on the source.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.
I mean, isn't not being good stewards of the land what gave us the dust bowl?
http://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/the-future-pr...
The one that we use is already causing massive environmental problems.
Grasing is not an inocous activity, there are the methane emissions that are very impactful.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.