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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

A basic vegetarian argument is that meat is inefficient compared to grain, and there just isn't enough resource. But if this were true, then older cultures with far less resources would never have wasted food on raising meat. Clearly, they did.

Animals are a way of turning inedible things into edible things. Grass? Well, you could till it all, or just turn sheep and cattle loose on it. Grain hulls? Throw them away, or feed them to the chickens. Spoiled garbage? Pigs will eat it. For as long as we've farmed, animals have increased rather than decreased the food supply.

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Exactly. I grew up on cattle ranches in Montana and Wyoming. The short growing season, rocky soil, and dry conditions would make any attempt at farming laughable, but the cattle did just fine. Driving them into the high mountains for summer grazing allowed the mountain grass to also be converted to beef. None of that land was appropriate to farming, which means that any beef grown there is extra food for the planet.

What always amazes me about capitalism is how it often manages to allocate resources efficiently. Nobody is raising large cattle herds down in farm country. Land that can be farmed is generally farmed, because that provides the best return. Land that can't be farmed, is ranched. This idea that you have to give up farming to have meat doesn't take this into account.

This doesn't mean corn-fed meat isn't wasteful, of course. But it does mean that meat itself isn't the cause of hunger elsewhere.

If it is wasteful, I wonder how much is caused by corn subsidies.

Yes, it does. You just don't realize that we've used up all available pasture land.

Nonsense. There is pasture land that is not being used to capacity that would be used if beef prices increased. Go take a drive through rural America and Canada.

You and Malthus like to extrapolate, but extrapolation is rarely a smart idea, unless you're trying to scare people.

Just like there will never be a day when we go from having oil to not having oil, the same will occur with meat. As the demand for a commodity outpaces supply, the price will rise. Some people will find ways to use less of the commodity, some people will find ways to replace the commodity, and some people will find ways to increase the supply of the commodity, now that the higher price allows more expensive methods to be profitably used.

> But if this were true, then older cultures with far less resources would never have wasted food on raising meat. Clearly, they did.

Partly they didn't, they hunted the animal. Or the animal provided other stuff - milk, eggs, leather, bones. People need a source of protien that contains all the amino acids they need and for earlier societies meat is an easy way robust way to get that.

And earlier societies were not great anout effificent ise of land and animals. The near extinction of the Amercan bison is one examples.

Agricultural societies completely trounced hunting societies. Hunting has been mostly sport in all but far corners of humanity for thousands of years. Humans have been raising cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, llamas, and other animals for food (and other things) since even before plant agriculture.

And if you can't till the land efficiently, sheep and cattle are a very efficient use of it. If you can, having pigs and chickens eat the plant waste is also very efficient.

Your argument is wrong for obvious reasons. Of course you have to invest loads of resources into a single cow before you can eat it ... I mean that's not hard to grasp.

Furthermore it is completely pointless to compare economics of ancient cultures with a modern industrialized civilization.

What resources did older cultures have less of?

Energy, information, and complex machinery.

Try moving 500 bushels of stuff a quarter mile with a tractor, and without it.

This is only true when there is plenty of grass available. In fact, you're wholly incorrect because of the extent to which we've used up this planet as an input for meat production. We've essentially turned all of the available arable land into farmland, and all of the available grassland into pasture. There is nothing left but forest, and we are quickly replacing that to our great detriment.

We are tapped out. If the rest of the planet starts eating meat at the rate that the first world does (~150 kg of beef per person per year), we'll need another planet to feed them. There is literally not enough land to do it on.

I recommend this XKCD for an idea of the scale to which we've appropriated Earth for raising our livestock:

https://xkcd.com/1338/

And this UN FAO report, "Livestock's long shadow", on how much of Earth we've actually used for raising livestock, and the devastating environmental consequences:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

edit: adding this figure from the report about land usage just so you understand the situation clearly:

http://i.imgur.com/rvbCwA0.png

Historically, my argument is correct. There is a strong argument that Green Revolution agricultural techniques have changed the equation substantially, and our current meat consumption is without historical precedent. But that doesn't make my argument incorrect - just opens up the fact that we need to think differently now.

Green Revolution agriculture would be destructive even if it were 100% vegetarian.

No, it really wouldn't, not to the same extent. 90%, literally, of agriculture is used to feed animals for meat production. If we were all vegetarian, our impact on the planet would literally be 10 fold lower in these terms.

Historically, your argument is correct, but you're inferring that meat is efficient in the present, when it plainly is not. The planet is resource-strapped, and meat consumption is the main reason. And this is without a majority of earth eating a meat-heavy diet.

You're assuming a pound-for-pound, calorie-for-calorie equivalence - that humans could eat 100% of the biomass consumed by animals (and would, with other options available). This is obviously not true. Much of what we feed to animals - corncobs and wheat hulls, for example - is inedible to humans. Most of the rest requires extensive processing to be edible. Corn and soybeans are fed to humans mostly in the form of factory-processed junk food, not as fresh vegetables.

The human population has more than doubled since the 1960s. This is due to a massive increase in food supply. Increased meat consumption is a side effect of this luxury. The root problems, to address your concerns, are not meat - they're pump-driven irrigation, diesel-powered tractors, nitrogen fertilizers, chemical pesticides and herbicides, and all the other things that have both increased the arable land supply and increased the productivity of that arable land.

>> 90%, literally, of agriculture is used to feed animals for meat production.

How did you get that number?

>>but you're inferring that meat is efficient in the present

Apart from the first world countries, agriculture productivity in most poor and developing countries is still at where it was middle ages. In my own country(India) there are farmers that still plough the land with cattle, the remaining grain processing methods are super outdated. These sort of stone age farming practices, combined with stagnant government policies making it difficult for importing agriculture equipment, add to this no coherent thought or depth in making long term investments in irrigation infrastructure is what makes this whole process inefficient. Not Meat.

>>The planet is resource-strapped

The planet has plenty of resources we just need to know how to tap into them efficiently.

>The planet has plenty of resources we just need to know how to tap into them efficiently.

This is an empty phrase. Where is the arable land? Where is the pasture land? How are you going to raise meat in the future when there is nowhere left to raise it?

Part of this "efficiency" is to stop taking grain/roughage and running it through an animal's metabolism in order to produce protein for human consumption. There are better ways, like http://impossiblefoods.com/.

I don't understand. Are you saying that using arable land causes that land to stop existing? There will always be a place to raise both plants and animals, unless all the continents disappear into the sea.

As for "Impossible Foods", I don't understand the fixation on making fake meat and dairy products. To me, that's just encouraging the shift away from natural and minimally processed foods, toward a junk food diet of things manufactured in factories from raw resources of industrial agriculture - monocropped fields of soy and corn farmed with industrial poisons and lab engineering.

Factory junk food is our diet problem, not meat. It's also our environmental destruction problem.

150 kg of beef per person per year

Where the hell did you get this number from? I buy all my beef from a farmer who's a friend of a friend. A year's supply is purchased all at once, so I have a pretty good idea of how much of it we eat. My family of four goes through less than 250 lbs (about 110kg) of beef in a year, yet your statistic is that we should be eating roughly half a ton of it per year?

If you're going to make shit up, at least make it sound reasonable.

I imagine he's counting carcass weight rather than dressed weight.

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