animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Comment on Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad
4lan@lemmy.world 10 months agoWhich applies even more to meat production. You have to grow massive amounts to feed livestock, more than if we just grew and ate the food directly.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
4lan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not arguing that we should eat animal feed, but rather use that land to grow food for humans
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
we already do that. for instance, soybeans. over 80% of the global soy crop is pressed for oil for human use, but then the industrial waste is fed to livestock.
4lan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s funny how nowadays when a cow eats what is naturally supposed to eat we charge double price for it and consider it some specialty. It’s no wonder they have to jack them up with hormones.
Coreidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Exactly my point. We can’t just look at the meat. We have to look at the entire process.
Even if we stopped eating meat agriculture in its own right is a big problem.
If we stopped eating meat we’d have to grow a lot more crops to make up for it which will only cause other problems instead of fixing the root cause.
4lan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If we stopped eating meat we would have 50% more land for farming human food than we currently do (we currently use 33% of cropland for feed alone). Raising cattle is not efficient at all, it is a waste of energy and land and water.
It’s not like the land we used to grow the feed we’ll just evaporate. This is why so much lobbying has gone into pushing the narrative that we all need to eat a ton of red meat.
Coreidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I am not disagreeing. My whole point is that agriculture in itself is a problem. Simply getting off meat doesn’t solve the problem.
We need a way to make agriculture not so wasteful and damaging to the environment. Cutting out meat reduces the need for agriculture but doesn’t eliminate it. As long as agriculture is around we will be destroying our environment.
Downvote me all you want.
4lan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So we shouldn’t reduce the problem on one front because we can’t get rid of it completely?
Without agriculture we would all starve, you can’t say the same for beef.
Why not reduce the damage that agriculture causes AND reduce the impact and scale of beef production?