> Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea
Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.
Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.
My point is that we need grazing cattle too, since we (as a species) took the liberty of wiping out most of the naturally occurring grazers and thereby wrecked the balance.
The "easy" way would be to limit the spread of humanity in order to reduce the load on the ecosystem, but that would result in numerous demographic issues instead. Fun times ahead!
Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees.
Imagine that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will always take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.
The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on.
If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.
Thanks for your reply!
Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.
If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.
So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.
At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.
Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes.
> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.
Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that.
You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop.
> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.
I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays.
That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?
We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect).
All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying.
Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.
I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?
For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.
I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to expensive.
And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem. Anywhere on earth.
Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.
All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.
Have fun!
Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The Rich". ;)
That said, I've seen some insects that are traditionally eaten. I seem to remember a kind of big, fat, white grub that is eaten in Mexico? Pictures I saw looked quite appetising.
But, crickets? Yew. They're like cockroaches with little violins. No thanks.
The day someone creates some kind of mince-meat substitute using insects will be the day insects end up on the menu of the general populace in developed countries. We do love our burgers! :)
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-we-should-star...
[1] http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vario...
[2] ((1/(6 inch)) * (1/ (2 foot)) plants/m^2) * (8 stalks / plant) * (64 grams / stalk) * (17kcal / 110 grams) = 3.448 million kcal / acre; planting guidelines from https://harvesttotable.com/vegetable_crop_yields_plants_p/ and nutrition information from https://recipeland.com/ingredients/celery-stalks-13931
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...
According to these numbers, soy beans produce about 16 times(!) as much protein for a given plot of land compared to beef. That's quite a difference.
Thanks for the reply!
Edit: I hope this doesn't sound condescending or suchalike. I'm really interested what the real numbers are, but the page you linked to (while honestly very intersting; permaculture! No-till-agriculture) is somewhat lacking in credibility. I hope we can find a tabulation that satisfies our curiosity and our purpose.
And thanks for the nice exchange - much appreciated!
For example, the way I understand it, how people used to eat where I'm from (Greece) in the past is that they fed themselves very well on pulses, legumes, vegetables, fruit, plenty of fish, metric shittons of olive oil, and then only ate red meat in religious feasts, where a lamb or an ox would be sacrificed in ancient times, or just roasted on a spit and eaten whole, offal and all, in more modern times.
"Plenty of fish" is a problematic addition to the diet you describe - that's meat, plain and simple, with all of the bioefficiency loss and ecosystem disruption that entails. It's just less visible because it's underwater.