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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

No it's not. Monocropping is far worse for the environment and entails mowing entire states down, repeatedly tilling and saturating soil with herbicide and pesticide, destroying millions of acres of former prairie land, and genetically engineering crops for glyphosate.

Ruminants like cattle, sheep, etc have existed naturally for over 50 million years. They are an essential component of prairie land ecosystems. And much of the land that they occupy is non-arable for crops.

Red meat is the closest thing to a natural human diet there is.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate...

For 2 million years, your ancestors basically ate the diet from this article. Our biology is highly evolved for it, with agriculture being < 500 generations old.

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> Monocropping is far worse for the environment

The "monocrops" in the United States are largely corn and soy, which are used as food additives, instead of being eaten as food, and as food for (you-guessed-it) animals we use as meat.

If you want to avoid monocropping, eat vegetables.

But if the demand for meat drops, and demand for veggies goes up, do you think farms will all of a sudden abandon monocrop practice? Of course not, because that’s how farming-at-scale system is designed. They want to use fewer tools, ultra specialize in one crop, offload it in bulk at the end of the season.

In the end you’ll get a huge selection of bland and tasteless vegetables, engineered to grow fast and large with a thick skin to prevent pests from eating it.

Not following the logic here - because monocropping is bad, it's ok to adopt a practice (growing cattle) that uses 10 times the monocropping per unit of food? Isn't that the opposite of what you want to do?

That’s not the logic at all.

The logic is what I said. If you start growing more plants it will not fix monocropping issue. It will only make it worse.

If you don’t want to eat beef that has been fed monocropped feed then vote with your wallet and buy sustainable meat that was pasture raised (on non-arable land).

You can't just claim that switching from corn and soy to a wide range of other vegetables would make things worse with no argument. If nothing else this goes against basic common sense because (1) we eat more than two vegetables, and (2) people eating vegetables directly instead of feeding those vegetables to animals is a vastly more efficient way to feed a population.

The absolute best case scenario for your argument is that monocropping turns out to be just as bad under a shift-to-vegetables model, but in that case we still end up reaping enormous environmental wins. Just because vegetables might not (?) solve the monocropping problem doesn't mean that we don't have good reasons to switch to them, as was originally argued. I'm not really sure how you avoid that, and frankly, the number of large scale climate change studies urging a shift to our diets seems to bode poorly for attempts to push this line.

It's not remotely scalable to convert the entire beef supply to pasture raised. With that out of the way, and with an understanding that monocrop fed beef uses a lot more land that monocrop plants per calorie, assuming that people won't eat more calories on plant based diets vs meat based diets, it's simple math that plants will reduce monocropping. I don't get how you can't see this.

Almost all cows are fed with monocultured crops, and the amount of crops used to feed the animals is an order of magnitude more calories than if you just ate the crops directly.

> Almost all cows are fed with monocultured crops

Then there is grass fed cattle.

> and the amount of crops used to feed the animals is an order of magnitude more calories than if you just ate the crops directly.

Cows naturally eat grass, cows convert grass into protein and fat that humans can consume. Humans can’t consume grass directly.

Grassfed livestock uses 15-20 times more land than CAFOs at an estimate of 91.9 million heads (us stock as of jan 2022 according to USDA census) you’ll quickly realize that meat consumption at current rates its impossible.

Total land usage isn’t the only consideration, in fact it’s probably the most immaterial.

Cattle grazing on open grass lands is generally healthy for the land, the cattle and the end consumer. It’s actually a great trade off to destroying land with monocrop agriculture used to fatten up cattle which makes them sick and contributes to chronic conditions/metabolic diseases of the end consumers.

> Total land usage isn’t the only consideration, in fact it’s probably the most immaterial.

I don’t want to sound insulting but I don’t think you thought very well what it means to grow 91 million heads of cattle on grass alone, remember grass takes time to grow and it doesn’t do it during winter.

There are about 30M beef cattle and 10M dairy cattle.

The US once supported as many as 75M Buffalo, I don’t want to sound insulting but any guesses what they ate?

Not if you farm Joel Salatin style. He has a great sustainable system.

No, but we can consume crops grown with the land, water and fertilizer used to grow grass.

Just switching to chicken from red meat drops that resource usage by a factor of TEN.

Growing cattle for food is incredibly wasteful.

> Then there is grass fed cattle.

Sure. Which is significantly more expensive. If only grass fed beef was available, beef consumption would automatically decrease.

More than a third of the grains produced by monocropping is used for animal feed. Beef is probably the worst kind of meat in terms of environmental impact.

Suggesting red meat is a more sustainable alternative is disingenous.

Arguing against meat is like arguing against cars.

Can society live without cars? Probably. We did before.

Will it be an interesting and convenient future? Probably not.

But we have alternatives (electric cars)! And we keep looking for more ways to propel. We don’t stop looking for solutions, just because gas is bad.

Same for beef. We have sustainable alternatives. Just vote with your dollar. Don’t buy factory meat. And help subsidize further research.

Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water!

Naw, my family and I, including two young children, have not eaten any animal products for a year. We've had a variety of really tasty food, and no nutritional deficiencies. Cost is no more than meat, in fact less. Other than "mmm, but bacon tho", there is no material difference from before we quite meat. To compare with cars, which have undeniable utility, especially in a place like LA where we live, is disingenuous.

I was a vegan for 2 years in the past. First year I also didn’t have any deficiencies. But then it all caught up and ruined my health after two years. Low iron, low B12, constant fatigue, low libido (in 20s), muscle mass loss (people who haven’t seen me for a while thought I was either sick or on heavy drugs), no drive, bloating, constant gas (has to take anti gas pills), constant canker sores (turned out b12 related), etc.

> I was a vegan for 2 years in the past. First year I also didn’t have any deficiencies. But then it all caught up and ruined my health after two years.

I was a vegan for more that 2 years, but also ruined my health including my teeth.

When hearing from other ex-vegans, it's mind-blowing how many things we have in common regarding our health. When active in the movement, no one would talk about the problems.

Did you bother to do any research on nutrition when you went vegan? Or did you just stop eating meat without any thought to your diet? The scientific and medical consensus is that a vegan diet is perfectly healthy and perhaps even healthier than a meat diet as long as you don't have nutritional deficiencies. And it's pretty easy to avoid deficiencies if you spend a couple hours educating yourself. I'm not being sarcastic, it literally only takes 2 hours at most.

> Naw, my family and I, including two young children...

One of your arguments against red meat is that it's devastating to the environment. You know what is also devastating to the environment? having children. It's not a necessity to have children, I have none.

Why is your need for breeding more acceptable than my need for eating red meat?

Giving up cars has a real cost in terms of time and productivity. If one lives in a place without usable alternatives, it might even be impossible. Giving up beef has no such cost and is something that any individual can do.

You believe beef has no cost. But you can’t be sure.

I believe beef provides superior, and evolutionary-compatible nutrition for my body. And lack of that nutrition will have a negative effect on my health, and thus associated costs with it. Maybe not tomorrow, but in 10 or 20 years.

I’ve been both a vegan for 2 years and pure carnivore for 8 weeks. I’m eating everything at the moment. But I have my own conclusions what works for me.

> I believe

You can believe and eat whatever you like. But if you make disingenous faith based arguments in a public forum, expect to be called out.

So it gives more sense to compare eating beef with having children. Not having children has no cost and something that any individual can do.

> agriculture being < 500 generations old

Evolution works in as few as two generations. This is established.

> Stone Age humans were apex predators, only moved to more plant-based diet 85,000 years ago

We’ve evolved since then. We are the same species but claim we are genetically the same as humans 85,000 years ago is crazy.

However your physiology doesn't change in two generations. We can easily adapt our microbiome to get access to new sources of calories. But our erect posture, tool crafting and use abilities, and our guts structure are all evolutions we gained from our hunting/scavenging times. We are what we are because of meat and fat, not green leafy vegetables.

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