To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs, so this isn’t necessarily an outsized contribution.
Why isn’t this stat fair?
And ~40% of methane emissions as far as I can tell
And no, while agriculture certainly tends to be physically demanding, it is not unreasonably so, even when done at small scale and with smaller machines. Small scale agriculture has been mechanized to a large degree and mechanized solutions have even been developed for very sustainable approaches to agriculture like agroforestry and syntropic agriculture.
Not sure if it is possible to count factory farming properly- that takes really good farmland and sends the production to animals.
For example, New Zealand: ~55% is being used for sheep and cattle, and only ~2% of NZ is arable (see https://youtu.be/F_g6-4swJ_s at 14:45) with a major part of the reason why explained near the 10:00 mark (weather in South Island).
Yes, cattle emissions are largely from the food. No, this is not just grass that was already there and would decompose anyway - the majority of agricultural production is to feed cattle and would not be necessary without (the efficiency of raising an animal for years to get a few steaks is horrible), and even if fed naturally it significantly increases the rate of plant turnover.
Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. Both have diets ranging from super healthy to obesity inducing. Being carnivorous or vegetarian is itself not a significant health factor - chips and crisps are often vegan, and Big Macs contain meat.
It’s not magic, but the protein from animal sources is just scientifically better than protein from plant sources. If you want to compare the nutritional benefits of different protein sources you need to account for how bioavailable they are. Some plant sources aren’t bad, but none are as good as animal sources, and some of the them aren’t very good at all.
Incidentally, that’s why it is possible to eat a healthy plant based diet if you’re very active. If you burn 2000 active calories a day, then it matters less if you’re eating nutritionally inefficient food, because you can make up for it in volume.
I am stating that it seems inarguable to me that the benefits of meaningfully reducing or even eliminating animal consumption far outweigh the negatives (note: I'm not a vegetarian). The concerns about protein completeness are real, but they have to stand in the sunlight of the full picture, and when viewed that way it doesn't appear to be some unsolveable riddle.
So I'm not arguing the point, I'm arguing against the implicit takeaway that comments like yours can appear to make: that meaningfully reducing or eliminating animals from our diets isn't a goal worth pursuing.
> Vegetable proteins, when combined to provide for all of the essential amino acids, provide an excellent source for protein considering that they will likely result in a reduction in the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol.
> [..] When the more accurate PDCAAS scale is used, soy protein was reported to be equivalent to animal protein with a score of 1.0, the highest possible rating (Hasler, 2002).
> Soy is a complete protein with a high concentration of BCAA’s.
So not only does the paper say that soy protein is a "complete" protein like beef, it scores soy higher than beef in Table 1 (which only gets a score of 0.92!), and states that it has associated health benefits (several mentioned throughout the paper).
Whey also scores a 1.0 for the curious, suggesting we do not have to eat the cow to get its protein.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the paper studies protein uptake efficiency and coverage ("quality") in the context of elite athletes and their very high protein requirements that range from difficult to dangerous to maintain (the paper mentions concerns of cardiovascular issues and bone loss risk when using beef protein for example). These concerns do not apply to those without extreme dietary needs.
Even if you cannot eat soy, the concerns of coverage or quality of individual protein sources are largely irrelevant when combined with a varied diet that contains more than one source - arguably a requirement to discussing dietary health, and suggested by the paper as a solution.
So while the reference to the paper is good, it is important to read it - thoroughly - in its intended context.
Even then, if you were to get all or a majority of your protein requirements from soy, then that's a lot of soy. You'd have to eat 1-2 pounds or more of boiled soy beans per day. Which aside from being a very atypical diet, would also be above the level of isoflavone consumption that has been studied to be safe (incidentally, consuming large quantities of whey protein also has some unpleasant side-effects in most people, like extreme flatulence, constipation and the associated discomfort).
Implementing a highly restrictive diet, that eliminates entire food groups that you've evolved to rely on, is unsurprisingly complicated. It also unsurprisingly puts you at risk of deficiencies in the nutrients that your new diet is deficient in. Which is why vegans are unsurprisingly at an increased risk of negative health outcomes associated with those deficiencies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...
Your claim that vegetable protein is just as good as animal protein is honestly just misinformation, as well as being dangerous health advice. You can eat a healthy vegan diet if you put the effort into planning it properly, which anybody following your erroneous advice would not be doing.
And yet again, basic dietary advice is that you should eat varied. Suggesting that you should cover your entire nutritional requirements from a single source - steak, soy or anything else - or in a single serving is objectively bad advice.
As a proud carnivore who has difficulty finding comfort in vegetarian diets, I find this sort of backwards justification for our environmental load highly disappointing. Eating meat is one thing - as a steak lover, I would be a hypocrite to fault you for that - but trying to make it sound like a necessity or a sensible choice is just... Wrong.
My SO and I reverted to omnivore for health reasons. Basically Dr Wahls' "Minding You Mitochondria" thesis. Still eat a lot of rice and beans. But now make sure to get a minimum amount of meat too.
I'm so eager for vat grown protein. But only if it has the same macronutrients as real meat.
True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%.
> nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12)
Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body. Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with Vitamin C. Parsley contains both.
Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12, for them to stay healthy and their meat to contain any. The B12 producing bacteria in the soil get killed by pesticides.
The 83% of farmland which is used to feed and raise animals taken together is the size of Africa.
Source: Game Changers, the movie [0]. Highly recommended, stopped cooking wirh organic meat, i take B12 directly instead. If someone else cooks for me, i still eat meat and enjoy it. Knowing full well that it damages my body, like alcohol and sugar. Completly banning fun sounds awful.
Big claim. Can you provide a source for this? [Updated, if your source is a movie, is not a real source and is useless. People fly in the movies]
In any case to avoid falling in a tunnel vision spot we would need a comparison with the effect of vegetable pesticides on inflammation markers also.
We humans, eat meat since... forever in our history. After that idea ancient people should have inflammation markers skyrocketing so could be easy to check it. Have you consider the possibility that the problem could be other than the meat like for example diesel contamination or plastic wrappings?
I'm going out on a limb here, but I would think that the average vegetarian is going to be much more health conscious than the person buying a steak and 24 pack of Bud Light every Friday. I haven't watched the doc - is this mentioned?
It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?
Not the same user but I will argue for deforestation any day. Humans are grassland creatures and trees are our enemy. Trees shadow the grass and affect our natural habitat. Even elephants know this and get rid of trees when they see them. [1]
In fact, when the wooly mammoths went extinct, Pleistocene Park turned from a grassland to a forest, and now an ecological disaster [2].
As are humans, by the way. Plenty of human civilizations have historically specialized to live in heavily forested biomes, ranging from the rain forests of the tropics to the boreal forests in northern Europe, the North America and Asia. Agroforestry as a practice goes back thousands of years in both the old and the new world.
Because trees are invasive plants and elephants keep them out of the grassland ecosystems.
>especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling.
Yes, trees did win that battle... potentially because of sudden drop in elephant population because of disease or famine... but it doesn't have to be the case everywhere.
>Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants.
This is a cause for concern and it is a direct result of the drop in African elephant population from several million to around half a million now.
This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to make the connection. This is all just completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make.
"Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question, the context they were operating in, the global population size, and their farming practices are so far removed from what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but neither of those things are relevant to the modern situation, at all.
"every statistic you will ever encounter online or from coworkers"
This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a miniscule percent of livestock production represents no land use tradeoff whatsoever.
a) 40% of cereal crops go toward animal feed [1] and most modern animal agriculture would be impossible without this. Arable land that could be feeding humans is being used to feed animals which then feed humans. That represents roughly a 90% loss of potential biological productivity [2].
b) Despite the US having some of the largest natural pasture, only 4% of retail beef in the US is grass-fed--meaning only a tiny percent are fed exclusively from pasture [3]. Additionally, most pasture land has been converted from forest. 40% of deforestation overall is due to animal agriculture [4]. This is only a little less than plant-based agriculture which provides sinificantly more food.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level
[3] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr...
[4] https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expan...
Is there a shortage of food for humans? I dont think there is a supply issue, rather where famines occur it seems political?
I'd imagine a lot of the US' livestock needs could be handled by just re-wilding pasture lands with native plant and animal species (including bison). And just as a guess I'd imagine it'd be more sustainable than trying to raise cows.
The answer is that the system is complex and there are no easy fixes.
Pasture doesn't really sequester carbon either, and grazing is still a big net GHG emitter because of methane (more potent than C02).
Forest, on the other hand, sequesters carbon, produces oxygen, and creates microclimates that are more hospitable to humans and which buffer against extreme weather changes.
> Pasture doesn't really sequester carbon either
Simply untrue. In the UK if I had pasture land I could even get paid for the carbon I had added to the soil. Here is a nice quote that says the complete opposite of your unreferenced comment:
"Prairies have the ability to store as much carbon below the ground as forests can store above the ground. When carbon is stored below ground it will remain locked there and be unable to enter the atmosphere."
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ageconugensc/73/#:~:text=Prai....
I think you are making the same mistake as everyone else by pretending there is a simple solution. Special interest groups, like those who are dogmatically opposed to meat production, are twisting the science just as much as their opposition is.
I don't know about other countries, but the percentage of meat in the U.S. that comes from cattle roaming pastures and eating grass is very small (because it costs so much more).
Unfortunately, plant foods do not provide us the necessary nutrients. ALL human civilizations and tribes had animal foods as a part of their diet. There is not a single tribe that survived on plants alone.
So, even if 99.99% of "farm land" was required for animal agriculture, we'd have to keep it that way.
FYI, India contains about 280 million vegetarians.
A more useful number might discount the grazing/fodder lands which are not useful for other agriculture.