What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.
In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.
I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.
You are very wrong here by orders of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over.
This doesn't even begin to touch the amount of food you can make from the byproduct of tofu, soy pulp which is itself a food in some countries.
I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.
To your first point about the small animals in the fields that are harmed by agriculture, I think that's worth having concern about overall, certainly. But many of the animals that people currently consume are fed large quantities of crops that incur that same cost. The average beef cattle is eating such things for 18 months prior to being slaughtered, breeding sows do the same for 3-5 years, and their offspring 5-6 months on average.
If there are advances in things like cultured meat that can be produced in a sort of industrial setting at a competitive price it might be possible to drastically limit both the conscious and inadvertent harm to animals.
It's much more efficient to use land to grow food crops for people to eat directly than it is to grow food for livestock and then have people eating the livestock.
It's one of the reasons that I've been pescetarian for a few decades - it's unsustainable for everyone to eat substantial amounts of meat and there's a lot of deforestation just to sate people's desire for burgers.