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It’s remarkable that we’ve setup a system of torture and murder to achieve: 1. Production of food that from all available evidence is worse for humans than alternatives 2. Worsening of our greenhouse gas problem 3. Massive waste of land resources because of the inefficiency in having animals predigest plants for us 4. Massively increase the risk of spread of novel pathogens 5. Devastation of our antibiotics stock where over 80% of antibiotics are used on animals rather than humans

All these downsides (and more) for little to no upsides.

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>Massive waste of land resources because of the inefficiency in having animals predigest plants for us

I'm not staunchly defending the beef industry or factory farming for that matter, but I believe much of the land used for cattle grazing out west is not arable land suitable for much else. At least not without a corresponding change in agricultural habits, like massive irrigation that further impact a stressed water resource.

These aren't happy cows grazing in sunset, but from factory farms. About ~36% of crops are fed to livestock.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

That's a good point, but I feel like the linked article does a disservice by treating grain and animal products as largely interchangeable from a diet perspective. They are equating in terms of calories, but that's a bit of a false equivalency, considering one is used largely as a protein source while the other is not. The article disregards that people eat those sources for very different purposes. (I say this even as someone who is an advocate for vegetarian and vegan diets).

You can use the land to grow beans and other plant protein as opposed to grain. There is another level of opportunity costs. Without the need to use land to produce animal products, we can use less land and grow a larger variety of crops.

That depends on what land you're talking about. Beans can only grow well in certain places. Ungulates such as cattle have a particular ability to convert low quality plant matter into high quality protein which almost exactly matches human needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...

Beans are great, but the amino acid ratios aren't ideal for humans and they are deficient in certain essential amino acids which we can't synthesize. It's certainly possible to get near optimal ratios and quantities with a mix of plants but this takes a bit of planning.

>It's certainly possible to get near optimal ratios and quantities with a mix of plants but this takes a bit of planning

This is true for any processed food. And I’m using “processed” liberally here. Meat must generally be butchered, and salted/smoked/cooked before consuming, but we’re just so used to it we don’t consider it “processing” or “planning” to do it.

I said beans and other plant proteins which includes soy, hemp, legumes, oats, nuts, amaranth, etc. which are already grown in the US regions where land is used to graze cattle. Not sure why you're singling out beans.

I'm not singling out beans, just using them as one example. All of the other plant proteins you listed have similar quality issues.

Soy is a complete protein. IF you need all the essential amino acids, you eat a variety of sources. https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/krnc/monthly-blog/plant-based...

So much planning! You have to eat beans AND rice to get all of your essential amino acids. That's two whole foods! Ah well, too complicated. Instead I'll grow alfalfa in the desert to raise and slaughter cattle. I'll eat just the meat by itself, and now I've got zero fiber but I don't have to think about all those complex amino acids with my feeble, plant-based mind.

"Can" for sure. However, I doubt the land use would change much without other systemic modifications, like changing farm subsidies (which tend to be very resistant to change).

Cattle farming is a huge contribution to deforestation though:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/7-commodities-forests...

I personally don't eat meat, but I don't think it is a good-faith argument to say that rainforest deforestation in south america is a particularly good argument against cattle farming elsewhere. Those people are just unscrupulous in a different dimension.

It's not just South America. It's even in places like the UK

>Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint

(and those "grass-fed" cattle are also fed crops too)

>Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass

https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-...

Worldwide, perhaps. But TFA is about Texas and Kansas. West TX where some of the largest cattle herding occurs, is largely semi-arid grassland.

In the Alpine regions of Europe, you see this a lot - areas in the valleys that can be used for crop farming, are farms (at least if they're not built up) and the cows graze in the summer on the higher-up slopes and meadows where you mostly couldn't grow wheat at all, and even if you could you wouldn't get a combine harvester up that kind of incline to harvest it efficiently.

And then emit higher methane in the process even in areas where it could theoretically work out largely due to lower slaughter weights and longer times to raise them

>If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

Your arguments, as legitimate as they may be, lose all credibility when you refer to the killing of livestock for food as "murder."

I also think murder is too strong a word to use when it comes to livestock. Murder is really a human concept with legal implications involving premeditation (or not) and various other legal mumbo jumbo.

Killing is what some animals do to one another in the wild, maybe even their own species. Killing animals is something humans do for sport and as a food source.

Obviously they weren’t using the word “murder” in a legal sense but rather in an informal sense. The OP is conveying the idea that they find the killings to be morally wrong.

Each animal is another being. Humans taste like bacon too.

Can we prove that plants and fungi are not beings? They grow, reproduce, move, and communicate.

have you heard of neurons?

Fungi communicate using chemical and/or bioelectric signals underground, seemingly sometimes even understanding what nutritions non-fungus plants need and supplying them with those. How do you know that's so different to our neurons?

I’ll be the first to stop once we discover consciousness and self awareness in mushrooms. Until then, fucking stop with this stupid ass argument.

I was asking a question on a subject that seems interesting in response to you seeming to think neurons were relevant to the topic of fungi not having consciousness, you're the only one being argumentative. I wasn't calling you an evil mushroom murderer or anything, any negativity you read into my comment was imagined on your part. And if you can't handle someone asking a question about an opinion you have then maybe don't share your opinions on a social website?

You seem to be more offended by the words than the content. That’s the guilt making you defensive.

Can you take the snappy one liners back to Twitter? Or at least try to have them make sense.

Guilt isn't necessary to be annoyed at someone's word choice. The chosen words are presenting an implication that eating animals is morally wrong, and if someone doesn't believe that and eats animals then they are right to be annoyed by the implication that they are acting immorally. No guilt necessary.

> Can you take the snappy one liners back to Twitter? Or at least try to have them make sense.

Or make them snappier two-liners, like you?

> they are right to be annoyed

Annoyed is an emotion. Someone's words triggered that emotion. Annoyance typically comes from someone's boundaries being crossed. One person might say, "Eh, murder/kill, whatever," but for some reason it triggered a deeper response in you. What do you think is behind that? You probably won't reply, but if you're a fan of metacognition, try tracing that emotion back by asking yourself why? every time you think you're done. Annoyance isn't a primary emotion, it is a response to one ore more. You have to be conditioned to be annoyed by words, unlike, say, mosquito bites. What makes you annoyed by it?

I don't think that this is the calculation that is made at the grocery store. Immense profit for the companies that supply the meat and flavor for the purchasers of it. The only people that actively know they are getting fucked is the farmers themselves. In terms of health, I'd rather someone in the west eat steak than potato chips and candy.

Just to play devil's advocate

1. Livestock is a really good energy storage. In case of war, natural disaster crops diseases there is a backup. Most people that survived Holodomor, because the had cows.

2. No animal protein maybe bad for your health (meat is a different story)

3. Crops need a lot of herbicide

Your #1 is false.

Grain crops store really well on their own, as in decades, cows on the other hand need to eat constantly.

What they are good for is eating indigestible cellulose like corn stalks, but modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

>modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

In cattle at least, they spend much of their life grazing before going to feedlots.

>1 kg of meat requires *2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants* and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

That's true for many, yes, but it's only true in terms of time, not number of calories needed.

Yes. If the argument is about energy efficiency, I agree. Any system that is less than 100% efficient at turning calories into calories will result in, well, fewer calories.

However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input. Even conceding that beef isn't a particularly good choice for human health given it's saturated fat content, I don't know that replacing beef in the diet with corn would necessarily result in better health outcomes.

You don't need to 1:1 plant corn for human consumption on that farmland due to increased efficiency.

Options range from other crops, parks, leaving it fallow, solar, growing bio fuels, etc.

Realistically we aren't going to replace beef any time soon, but who knows what happens in the future.

I was referring to 1:1 calorie replacement, not land use.

Ahh ok, but even then I doubt we would stick with corn.

The energy conversion ratio gives it in calories. About 1.9% for beef.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#efficiency-of-mea...

This assumes humans could turn 100% of the feed into usable calories. Considering 1) the link defines feed to include grazing and 2) humans are 0% efficient at turning cellulose into calories, the quoted number probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

We have many ways of turning cellulose into useful calories. Fire being perhaps the oldest.

If we could eat fire to sustain ourselves, then that would be a cogent point.

Even if you’re just talking about biological calories rather than as a unit of energy, fire reduces energy expenditure to stay warm. Thus acting as a significant food supplement both historically and currently.

This is still a bit of a stretch to make a relevant point given the context of the discussion. I don’t think many are promoting getting rid of cattle to make room for biomass fuel.

I've seen that argument made several times. EV's are great on land, boats have several options, but for mid to long range air travel biofules have a lot going for them. Unfortunately they need a lot of land.

The underlying numbers seem reasonable with US airlines use ~10 billion gallons of fuel per year while the US produces ~15 billion gallons of ethanol being freed up by the rise in EV's.

Globally things aren't as rosy, but freeing even 1/5 of the land devoted to grazing, alfalfa, and feed corn would go a long way. Reducing US beef consumption would have positive health impacts. So from a policy standpoint shifting the specific subsides seems like a good idea.

Even if we can't get net zero the more we can cut quickly the longer we have to finish the job.

I don’t think that premise holds. With the exception of sugar beets, crops are largely net negative in terms of energy production. You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

> You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities. $4 gets you ~200/kWh from solar enough to drive ~800 miles, or enough premium gas that to send an equivalent car less than 1/10th as far. Similarly, people happily pay 30c/kWh for 300kW fast charging because waiting around is it's own cost.

In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen is wildly energy negative wasting ~80% of input energy and you need to completely redesign all passenger aircraft.

>We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities.

Yes, I've already mentioned this:

>However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input.

In the context of the discussion, it's an error IMO to compare energy as if they are interchangable. People aren't just consuming beef just for it's caloric value. The "form" of energy (protein & fat) is an important consideration too.

>In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen

The constant digression of a topic focused on nutrition into one merely about energy makes for a tiresome conversation and largely misses the point. Just because you can make a loose connection with the topic at hand doesn't mean that discussion is relevant.

I'm not seeing 1.9% and that sounds way off.

US produces about 27 billion pounds of beef, roughly half of that weight comes from feedlots where they eat ~80% of feedlot calories comes from grains.

There's a bunch of numbers tossed around but it's something like 60-70 billion pounds of grain to get those 27 billion pounds of beef.

I should rephrase that. Beef is bad in terms of efficiency - about %2. But cows are magic devices that can turn grass into milk and beef.

1. The Holodomor wasn't a natural famine. People starved because the food was physically taken away from them and distributed elsewhere (like cities), starting with the grain. Once they ran out of grain and couldn't fill the (unreasonable from the start) quotas, they started taking away livestock also.

Yep, I'd fall under war against Ukrainians. Cows can turn grass into milk and beef. Most families that had livestock survived. Those that lost it died. Source: Standford lecture on Youtube about Holodomor

One of the main reasons why Mongols were so effective was use of livestock en mass. It gives you food, cavalry, transportation and clothes from grass. You get the shortest logistical supply chains in northern Eurasian plane.

But if we wouldn't feed those crops to animals first to convert them to protein, but instead consumed them directly, we would need just a fraction of them and the herbicides required by them.

We can’t eat grass and hay. Cows do. They have multiple stomachs just to digest it.

The majority of cattle feed isn't hay or grass, but instead crops like Alfalfa or Soy. And in the end, it doesn't really matter, it's the underlying land use and it's impact that's relevant.

The feed conversion ratio for beef has the worst efficiency of all kinds of meat of 1:25.

This dataset by OWI is very enlightening when it comes to the types of our food and what kinds of different impact (landuse, animal feed, transport, ...) they have:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

Your point by itself is valid. But in a practical sense, that is not the diet of the cattle that comprise most of the American beef supply. https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/what-do-co... has data and citations. To summarize, 70% of dairy cattle feed is not hay or grass (soy, corn, distilling industry byproduct). That figure is 80% for beef cattle.

That's because the US government heavily subsidizes corn and soy production for...reasons, not because it's even the most efficient way to go beef in an undistorted market.

2) Not true.

3) More livestock => more crops => more herbicide

i was a vegitarian for 16 years

The diet is more carb rich and less nutrious than if meat was included.

If meat was never sold that would be the best option. And that is Buddhist Pali Cannon advice on Right Livlihood btw.

My gums receeded and my teeth were in the worse shape of my life. Although i was able to perform strong physical acts i got tired faster, had more emotional issues and sex/fight drive was diminished slightly.

"We" didnt set the system up so stop blaming me and others whoo didnt you hatefull person. "Greenhouse gases" are recycled by plants and nature. We have Climate instability and the planets tempature changes over the years. Instead of spewing that to people you shold say, "We have a polution problem" or "We have an industrial chemical problem" both which cause more death of the planet largely. You have been scammed. Global Warming has been an alarm bell since long before 2000. I was told as a child i would see the consequences and i really havent. Ive seen climate changes.

you cant raise a baby into a man without meat. It has been tried by vegans and what we see is that you need doctors and blood tests and a rich pleathora of bacterial-processed foods and fats and prteins. And all these things are alive too.

A cow can live a long happy life and then its body not 'fed right back to the ground' but instead feed us.

also the phytoestrogens in plants like almonds, soy, pistacios are not good, the lectins in beans Limit the absorpsion of food, grains have gluten which binds the gut..

Phytoestrogens have little or no effect in the human body. Animal hormones and antibiotics however do have adverse affects. Vegans tend to have a bigger issue with the larger organizations of the animal agriculture industry, not the whole - mechanizing the production of meat means that animals are treated with cruelty for profit. Slaughterhouse workers are also affected physically and mentally. Factory farming is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change. It is a pollution problem and industrial chemical problem and we can make those changes on an individual level by making choices on what we put on our plates. We all eat after all. I have to say, your view of advocates for vegetarianism and veganism is very misguided, your experiences on the other hand I can not comment on, but personally I have been vegan for over 8 years now and I've never felt better - I've completed many marathons ever since I started eating plant-based foods. At the beginning of my journey, I was obese/overweight.

Thanks for sharing your experience. There’s a huge narrative bias because most people giving up vegetarian/vegan diets don’t talk about it (but it does happen).

The other items can be debated (although I don't agree with some of them) but this point "Production of food that from all available evidence is worse for humans than alternatives" is just flat out wrong.

How could a species that evolved as omnivores suddenly find meat unhealthy?

Not all meat even, it's mostly red meats (and generally ruminants) that are found to be generally unhealthy. And one of the large reasons is that over time, we have started breeding these meats to be extremely fatty, because it tastes better. No cows 200 years ago would have the same fat -> protein profiles as what we see today, and all of those fats are saturated fats, which tend to have large negative health effects. All of the leaner meats and some fish (ones without pollution issues, harder to come by as time goes on) are generally measured with improved health effects when consumed in moderate quantities in diets like the Mediterranean diet or Okinawan diet.

For a long time the excuse (in the European context) was that animals weren't christians.

To clarify: "a long time" means from roughly 500 to roughly 1800.

(You all may not like it, but people really did distinguish between "beasts" and "christians" in this time period. Animal Farm is a much more thorough allegory than it appears to people with no farm experience, as all the animals behave much as their real life counterparts do [I understand that in the US the police even identify themselves as "sheepdogs"; compare the Animal Farm use], and on a farm the farmers do take care to act for the immediate benefit of all the stock, just as long as they're the ultimate beneficiaries: a farm being an economic unit composed of multiple living beings but organised for the benefit of a few)

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