Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth?
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 months agoWhatever their food is, they need 1kg of beef requires 24kg of grain's worth of energy. This is something they teach in high-school biology now. The higher the food chain, the more energy is lost.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 months ago
But as I pointed out, many cattle are ranched on land that cannot grow grain. They can't grow the sorts of crops that humans eat, only the sorts of crops that cattle eat. If cattle weren't being ranched on those lands they wouldn't be producing edible grain instead, or any other food that humans could eat. So the inefficiency is moot when it comes to the amount of nutrition produced, removing the cattle from that land would simply reduce the total amount of food we have available.
Sure, if you remove the cattle then wild animals could come in to replace them, but we should make sure that's not going to result in starvation and poverty if we do that. Many areas of the world have subsistence ranching by the locals.
Zorque@kbin.social 5 months ago
And of course the land couldn't be used for anything else... like natural ecosystems.
Just because land exists doesn't mean it needs to be pillaged to feed our desires.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 months ago
Most ranchland is, in fact, a "natural ecosystem." They just send cattle out to graze on it.
The point I'm making here is about food efficiency, though, not about land use.
spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Are we just going to ignore the millions of acres of vast grasslands that supported like 50 million buffalo in the US 200 year ago? Healthy grassland ecosystems and ruminants are a thing.
7heo@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Exactly. Nah, we just gotta have man made monoculture everywhere, or a desert, right? So that, in the end, it just amounts to deserts anyway. Yay. 😶
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 months ago
Interesting. However, a search says that feeding all the grass (or whatever) to cattle takes that food away from existing ecosystems in dry areas and potentially allow exotic weeds to take over land. So we probably don't want this to expand to the point where we intrude on dry ecosystems.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 months ago
It's just a matter of land management. Many of those grassland areas used to have other large grazing animals on them, so as long as the cattle herds aren't bigger than those old herds it should be sustainable.